About blog etiquette

For me blog is one of the very few communication channels that I have in the harsh academic world suffering of ethical and moral decline. I have no intention to serve as a popularizer of science: these kind of activities are for the retired professors who have a lot of spare time. I do my best to communicate the development of a theory which has a very high level of conceptualization. The reader willing to understand what I am really talking about must have a strong background in mathematics and physics. In absence of this background my text might look like random sequences of strange scientific sounding words. This could encourage some readers to what I would call free science- babble. This is not my purpose but I have however sometimes the unpleasant feeling that exactly this is what happens. This troubles me. Really.

My blog policy has been quite liberal. I have censored out only personal insults and have been forced to do this only a couple of times. There was also a systematic attempt to fill the blog with trash after the discovery of super-luminal neutrinos - maybe some colleague lost the health of his mind - but otherwise I have avoided blog terror.

I am not alone with my problem. In non-moderated blogs the discussions usually tend to transform to a total cacophony. Only few comments are needed before practically complete cognitive thermalization is achieved. There are too many participants who only want to demonstrate their cleverness. There are also those who just happened to enter the blog and - like dogs- want to leave some signature about their presence. Most participants probably have no intention to act as blog terrorists but as a rule they seem to forget completely what the topic was. Sometimes it seems that they do not even have idea about the notion of "topic".

Moderation is the manner to avoid this but it takes time and my personal problem is that deleting a post is for me like stealing a lollipop from a 5-year old: I always tend to think that the commentator is like an innocent 5-year old with good intentions even if he/she is talking about something not even remotely related to the contents of the posting. With a healthy dose of paranoia I might think that the sole goal of the commentator is to find the limits of the blogger's patience.

So: my personal humble request is that those who make comments would try to remember two simple instructive basic rules.

• If you have nothing to say, no-one demands you to say it!
• Posting is always about some topic. Why not to stay in that topic!

Thank you!

Addition (off-topic):. Sascha Vongehr has a nice posting about the latest rumor about evidence for Higgs with mass about 125 GeV. This mass is near to the mass causing the instability of Higgs vacuum. This opens up the possibility for a catastrophic cosmic event in which vacuum- carrying the energy of Higgs field - explodes releasing huge amounts of energy. This event would be analogous to the formation of bubble of radiation in inflationary scenario. This sounds strange. Is the problem with the Universe or with the theory? Usually it is with the theory. Who still remembers the mini blackholes at LHC predicted by some string theorists?

If no Higgs exists, the cosmic problem disappears and we can concentrate worrying about much smaller catastrophes like the fate of euro and the climate change. Remember also that the mass range around 125 GeV corresponds to the most difficult portion of the mass range concerning the discovery of the Higgs (decays to ZZ pairs are not possible). Around 125 GeV the exclusion of Higgs requires the hardest effort. Maybe Kea and this TGD guy will be remembered as saviors of the world from the gloomy fate in hands of nasty fairies;-).