When this blog opened here on scientopia, it already had the archives from my stint at scienceblogs. I've now imported the archive from the blog between the scienceblogs era and the scientopia era.

I fear that the posts from the pre-scienceblogs era are lost to the mists of history. Other than those, however, this site now has the full archives of my blog.

At some point, I'll probably try to clean up the categories. As a result of the multiple imports, there are redundant categories, and the hierarchy is rather disjointed.

Welcome to the scientopia iteration of Galactic Interactions! At the moment, I'm deep in the process of unpacking after moving from the USA to Canada, having arrived just there days ago, so there's no meaty post just yet. The archives from when this blog was at ScienceBlogs have been imported-- those go through 2007. The more recent archives at the blog's last location aren't imported yet, and I'm working on it.

Stay tuned; if I get a chance amongst all of the unpacking I'm doing, later today I will post the history of the entire Universe....

My Seed overlords have let me know that as I have decided to no longer continue this blog, I won't be able to keep the backlogs here indefinitely. Sometime in the next couple of months, the archives will disappear from this site.

I also plan to take down the archives from the blog's former site, in part of an ongoing effort to make it so that people at Vanderbilt don't have to depend on me to maintain computers there.

I have not decided yet if it is going to be worth the effort to try to set up archives on an independent site for posterity. Likely this will not happen. If there is anything you've ever read here that you think you want archived— either because you thought it was worth reading, or because you think you might want to send me abuse about it later— you will want to make copies of it now.

I am going to take a break from astronomy blogging for an indefinite period of time.

I'm finding that as I'm involved in my new job, while I still do get a charge out of posts like the Big Bang post I did the other day, my heart isn't 100% in this.

Also, after the deleted post yesterday, I'm just too digusted with the nature of academia at our forefront research institutions (and with Vanderbilt in particular-- as anybody who reads this knows, I already bore a fair amount of bitterness towards that institution, and now I have a huge amount of disgust with Vanderbilt's Physics department). Yes, in the past I got a lot of mileage out of echoing those complaints, and I know that I hit something of a chord because of the response I received. Heck, even to this day news stories get generated in part by my own meta-issues with academia. But the fact is that I'm out of it now, and I'm finding myself really wanting to move on and not remain so mired in the issues that drove me into clinical depression and eventually drove me out of the field. They are not my problem now, and I'm not enough of the crusader type to want to fix the world even though I've been booted from it.

I truly do regret having to give up teaching college. Ironically, yesterday when I visited Vanderbilt, I also dropped by the Society of Physics Students meeting, and really enjoyed meeting and saying "hello" to the students. I loved the science, I loved the teaching, and I loved interacting with the students... but the academic politics and the nutty standards of "rigor" that Universities think they are applying wrecked it all. And learning what I learned about the academic politics reminded me that, yes, however wistful I may have been in the interactions with students, I made the right decision by fleeing that environment.

The fact is that my heart just is not in this astronomy blogging gig right now. I have moved on, and I really want to move on. I will make myself unhappy if I continued to be mired in what I was mired in before. And, the fact is that I don't have enough left over cognitive energy to be making the kinds of astronomy breaking news and pedagogical posts that composed what I think were the best of Galactic Interactions. Astronomy and teaching remain two of my passions, and some day I may try to come back to it. In the the mean time, however, farewell.

It is possible at some point in the future I may change my mind, and want to start blogging again— about astronomy, or about something else. I can't predict if I'll ever be able to re-join the scienceblogs.com family, but in any event I'll link to it from my personal home page. If for whatever reason you may have some interest in that possibility, periodically check that page, as I'll assuredly drop a link there to any public blog that I'm doing.

I"m sorry the blog's been so quiet recently. With my new job, and my trip out to SF getting started at Linden these last two weeks, I've been quite busy! Things won't settle down until next week, as I'm off to the UK for the next for days for the Gruber Prize award ceremony. I'll be back next week and trying to settle into a routine, after which hopefully I'll be getting to some of my mentally queued posts including one on the Coriolis Effect, one answering common criticisms you may see about the Big Bang, and hopefully one on the bigass void that some of you have read about.

I realized that I had several comments that hadn't been flagged as "junk," but which had been flagged for moderation. I don't see those much, so I haven't been looking for them. As such, several of them have been sitting there for as much as 3 weeks.

I apologize to those of you whose comments languished.

Hey, all of y'all's, go head forth to Wikpedia's Scienceblogs.com entry, and make it as good as you can.

Please say nice things about me. PZ just announced on his blog that people should go and edit the site, and I hate to think what it will say about me if his primary readership is all that contribute....

Well, OK, you can say mean things about me if they're true. No flamewars, though! That's not appropriate on Wikipedia. More important, though, is to get accurate stuff about the whole site and the whole collection of bloggers there. There's a bunch of stuff in the "discussion" page that was written previously. (My entry in the discussion page is blank, by the way.).

I will be on the road for the next 3 days, so you are unlikely to hear from me.