Just dropping this note with two quick updates before the fifth installment of my “Top arXiv papers of the week” will be out (most likely on Friday).
The first update is that, as you might have noticed, I have now come up with a (hopefully nice!) name for this blog, which is “His Dark CMBlog”. This blog name gives away at least three (not-so-hidden) messages. The first one is that the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is a major part of my research work. The second one is that a significant fraction of my research work has to do with stuff which is either dark (e.g. dark matter and dark energy) or effectively dark (such as neutrinos and black holes). And the third message is that one of my favorite books, if not my favorite altogether, is the His Dark Materials trilogy (of which I’ll probably write more at some point in the near future). In fact, as a child I first heard of Dark Matter not through popular science books or magazines as most children do, but through The Subtle Knife (the second book of the trilogy, which incidentally I happen to be reading for the Nth time at the time of writing). In fact, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that His Dark Materials played an important role in my choosing to work on cosmology. I will probably write more at some point about how the writings of Philip Pullman and Lewis Carroll strongly influenced certain research directions I voluntarily undertook.
The second update is that from this week I will only be reviewing my top 3 instead of 5 papers. I have been forced to recognize that I had initially underestimated the time it would take to review 5 papers per week, and the task was eating more of my time than I could afford. Since I do not like to compromise on quality, I could only compromise on quantity. Reviewing 3 papers instead of 5 every week is the only way I can actually still do justice to these papers (or at least try to), and deliver (or at least try to deliver) quality reviews. Hopefully my regular readers won’t be disappointed, and will still find the column useful. I can promise that the number 3 will not further decrease in the future (well, so long as I don’t get a faculty position which would eat up all my time - so, most likely, never :P).