The quest for the perfect blog

Well, here I am again, procrastinating. I really should be reading or writing or doing something which promotes the furthering of my dissertation. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to do that until the deadline is 5 minutes away. Since I tend to be a phase person, I fill my procrastination time with whatever activity I deem fashionable at the time. This week, it seems, the activity is blogging. If you are actually bored enough to read all of my previous blogs, you’ve noticed that they have ranged from naively philosophical to irritatingly unhumorous. This one will be the former.

So I’ve been thinking again: what would it take to make the perfect blog? There are many blog themes out there, from the professionally made slate.com, the satirical 412sciencehall.blogspot.com. There’s even a weather blog at weather.com. Seriously, what can a person write about the weather? “Dear diary, it rained today. Woodruff’s perfectly groomed man mane was ruined.”

In the quest for the perfect blog, there should be two criteria (attributes for you GIS techies). First, a standard must be created or at least conceived of to judge all other blogs by. This could be very difficult, and may well be out of the realm of human abilities. The ultimate blog will be so complex and intricate that it would require thousands of hours of computation time on the world’s most advanced supercomputers. This may be hard to fathom, since we’re talking about trillions of calculations…for the text alone. I like to compare the perfect blog to a recent attempt to create a an 8D object that stands as a root of the 57D object called E8, and its 248D symmetries. You can read the article here: http://www.nature.com/news/index.html.

Second, someone or something will need to pass judgment on blogs which are under consideration for perfection. Since these blogs will be so complex and minutely detailed, like a phytolith, they will undoubtedly require thousands of hours of study time. This would be the equivalent knowledge of receiving a PhD and two years of post-doctoral research. Thus, we may need to rely upon computers again. The world’s smartest people, such as T. Beauchaine, would be employed to check or “calibrate” the computer programs.

So are there any candidates for the perfect blog? None that I can see at the moment. Certainly not mine, as I’ve been nominated several times for the Razzie blog award. 412sciencehall is certainly on the right track, with their beautiful mix of graphics and text. However, that blog ultimately gets a thumbs-down for fronting an onion.com-esque theme of satirical reporting. There have been rumors floating that the Science Hall ghost has a blog. Of course, it has thus far eluded searchers. With over one hundred years of blogging time and a plethora of grad student stories to write about, the Science Hall ghost undoubtedly would be a front-runner for the perfect blog.