For lack of interesting topics to blog about, I refer you to a short list of bloggers who have produced readable material in the last few days:

• The always witty Resonaances has produced an informative post on Quirks.
• My friend David Orban describes the recently-instituted singularity University
• Stefan explains other types of singularities, those you can find in your kitchen!
• Dmitry has an outstanding post out today about the physics of turbulence, with four mini-pieces on the Reynolds number, viscosity, universality and intermittency. Worth a visit, if even just for the pics!
• Marco discusses the long winter of LHC. Sorry, in italian.
• Peter discusses the same issue in English.
• Marni points out a direct explanation of the Pioneer anomaly with the difference between atomic clock time and astronomical time. Or, if you will, a change of the speed of light with time!

Being too lazy to generate content while relaxing after a day on the ski slopes in Padola, I am offering you a few selected links that are worth a visit. Not all about physics, and not all recent -that’s what you get from a very erratic web surfer.

• Tim Krabbé, the dutch novelist and chessplayer, has a very interesting piece on the very peculiar chess problem stipulation called the worst possible move. It now appears that, while the game of chess is virtually unexhaustible -at least for us humans-, we now have an answer to what is the worst possible move you can make in a chess game. Or, at least, we get very close to the best of the worst, with Sampsa Lahtonen’s 1.Qxc4+, a move by white that forces black to administer mate in one, when all the other 52 possible moves by white would have mated black.
• David Orban, my futurologist friend, spoke at the italian parliament on December 12th on internet and new technologies and their use. He offers a report (which includes two video clips), but it is currently only in the italian version of his blog. You can easily translate the text using the web’s http://translate.google.com powerful tools, while for the video… hehm. Maybe in the web 3.0.
• Michael Schmitt, a professor at Northwestern University and a colleague in CMS and CDF, is back in blogging mood, hopefully to stay. He has started back with momentum with a few very interesting posts, the last of which is about Dark Matter as a Quantum Liquid. Welcome back Michael!
• The always excellent Resonaances has yet another post on the Pamela/Atic anomalies out, and this one can’t be missed any more than could the previous ones. Highly recommended.

Here are a few links that you might be interested to follow. They lead to posts in blogs I read and you should too:

• Louise has news of the appearance of a new puzzling “ghost” green galaxy.
• Marco explains the disappearing of a ghost propagator instead.
• Jester unexplains the unhiggs in an undeniably understandable, yet unserious way.
• Alex challenges you to pilot a submarine -and to find a windows bug while you’re at it.
• Bee explains the equivalence principle and why general relativity is sexy.
• Roberto offers some astounding pictures of the most astounding thing ever built.

Just a short note to mention that I have decided to switch from a random to an alphabetically ordered list in the column of links to relevant other blogs -those I read and those I advise users of my site to give a peek at now and then (the two categories only partly intersect).

The reason is simple: despite the wide offer of blog feeds, collections, and other means by which one may get updated on what is being written in a collection of sites one wants to keep an eye on, I have never brought myself to using those tools. Maybe because I am fundamentally lazy -an old dog who wouldn’t learn a new trick- or maybe because I still enjoy going after information rather than having it showered on me on a regular basis.

Now, my blogroll column currently contains about fifty entries, and it grows sporadically -that is, whenever I have enough stamina to adjourn it. I have the habit of using that list to access the blogs, rather than my “blogs” folder in the preferites tab of my web browser (Mozilla), and a random list often causes me to scroll up and down in search for the link I need. That is stupid, and it has become a sufficient reason for abandoning my original idea of a “democratic” randomly compiled list which changes every time one accesses the main page of my blog.

So, I am sorry for Zerocold, or even worse for those links that get buried in the middle and never get a chance of a spot in the sunlight atop the list, but I am switching to an alphabetically ordered list today. There is an added bonus in the process: by making it easier for me to access the blogs I am linking, I make it easier for you too, in the hope that you, too, will use this blog as a default entry point for your visits to other sites. Or am I really the only one who still doesn’t uses blog feeds ?

UPDATE: Shoot! I just found out why I had been unable to change the order earlier on, when I gave it a try: as the WordPress FAQ explains, the theme I am using does not allow one to change the order of links!

Now I’m stuck to having to decide for a change of theme (which I really want to avoid), a frustrating retreat, or a bold advance into the new territory of a privately managed blog. If you know me, you’re likely to imagine what I will do.

Today I have important business to attend so I only point you to three recent additions to my blogroll column, which call for your attention, if you so please.

• The Gauge Connection, by Marco Frasca. Marco is a theoretical physicist and he works on perturbative QCD. He just started writing about physics, to a level suitable for undergraduates and above. I hope he will lower the bar a little, with the aim of discussing complicated theory constructions as one could do in a bar. That would be some achievement! In any case, his blog is worth visiting.
• Dialogos of Eide, by Plato. This is a blog devoted to science in general, with attention to cosmology, quantum gravity, and experimental developments. Also worth visiting, although if you have a slow internet connection you might find yourself cursing at the heavy images.
• Se me lo dicevi prima, by Marco Schwarz. This is a blog in italian but hey, not all visitors here are anglophones anyways. Marco writes about a bit of everything, and I like his style.