The Political Physicist

For awhile now I’ve been meaning to create a new theme for my blog. Previously I was using a modified version of the Gum theme, but I wanted one which was all my own. I also decided that I wanted a distinctly different look for my blog, using serif fonts and darker colours. Years of procrastination finally came to an end when I knew that I would need to design such a theme for a professional website (I’ll post more on that once it’s finished) and thought I might as well design a similar blog theme while I was at it. You can find the theme on GitHub. You may also notice that I have a new favicon (shown here at higher resolution). This is the silhouette of one of Oxford’s many “dreaming spires.” For those of you who don’t know, I’ll be starting my graduate studies at Oxford this fall. As I quite like Oxford’s nickname as “the city of dreaming spires,” I decided that this would be a nice symbol for my blog. Incidentally, that silhouette was traced from the image to the right (or on the bottom, depending on your screen size).

While I was at it, I got around to updating various pages on this website. I have added a more detailed About page, provided an up-to-date listing of software that I have written, and changed the Technical page to more accurately represent how the blog now works. I have also reorganized the categories I give articles, eliminating the two which had the fewest articles. As a note, those articles were not deleted—simply folded into other categories. The main motivation for this was simply to ensure that everything fit well on the navigation bar. Next year I will be moving back into residence for grad school and thus won’t be able to run a server on which to host my blog. In preparation for this, I decided to move it to GitHub pages. This will likely also be (at least temporarily) the host of my professional website, once it is completed.

Most importantly, I decided to change the name of my blog from Red Shades of Green. I had originally chosen that title in order to reflect that I was concerned about the environment, but that I was a bit of a pinko. Since then, I feel that I have become much more stridently left-wing and, at the same time, have lost a certain amount of patience with the environmental movement and the behaviour of ecosocialists. Not to say that I care about the environment any less; I simply take a different approach to the issue than I used to¹. One which is more firmly pro-technology. And one which integrates environmental issues into socialism, rather than the other way around. I suppose these days a more accurate title would be Green Shades of Red.

Instead I went with The Political Physicist. At risk of explaining the obvious, this is a play on political science. As a scientist (well, a student scientist) who cares deeply about politics, you might say that I’m a political scientist. However, this makes it sound like I study political science, rather than physics. And the rest, as they say, is history.

But while the appearance, location, and name of my blog has changed, none of the content has really. I will still write my extremely biased political articles. I will still complain about petty things, like the use of the phrase “growing exponentially,” and I’ll still write in great detail about programming and software despite the fact that most of my audience can’t understand a thing I say about it. Even as I prepare to travel across the ocean to spend the next three years in grad school, studying a totally different branch of physics from what I have so far, I am still essentially the same person and that fact is reflected here. As I enter this new chapter of my life, I invite you all to share the adventure with me, knowing that, in all probability, at the end of it I will be just as neurotic, pedantic, and idealistic as I am today.