RHIC: string-bashing beats child pornography

Imagine that it is 2006, you are a very big guy and a boring blogger who has nothing interesting or insightful to say. The only virtue of your blog is that it is one of the thousands of uninformative worthless and colorness negativistic far left-wing activist anti-Bush anti-capitalist anti-American anti-religious pseudoscience blogs - and you want to increase the traffic on your particular blog by 500 visits a day. Moreover, you have virtually no moral constraints and all principles you might have are uncertain principles. What do you do?

Many readers might think that you transform your blog into a source of child pornography. But one blogger has found a better solution of the situation described above:

• As for the comment about string theorists, that was not entirely serious - it was some linear combination of an oblique reference to the antics of a certain individual theorist, and a cynical attempt to drive traffic (because I almost always get a bump in traffic when I talk tabout string theory - think I could pick up an extra 500 visits/day by posting one piece daily with the title "String Theory Is a Bunch of Crap").

This is what he did and it apparently worked. He wrote a complete nonsense about the relation between RHIC and string theory, proving that he not only misunderstands how this relation works but he is not even aware of it. We discussed related topics seriously in these articles:

• Horatiu Nastase and RHIC
• Bounds on viscosity divided by entropy density

Musings have discussed similar exciting links in these texts:

• AdS / quark gluon plasma I, II

Chad's recipe is easy, and it is being used by a dozen of other bloggers - one blog at Manhattan is actually entirely dedicated to this activity. You write a complete bullshit about a topic that you have no chance to understand - such as the relation of RHIC and string theory - and you squeeze a huge amount of irrational hatred against theoretical physics and string theory into such a text. If you want additional 200 hits, you include some Goebbelsian lies about the owner of The Reference Frame, too.

The overall result is that you increase the traffic to your blog by hundreds or thousands of visitors a day. Moreover, most of these visitors will be idiots who won't even be able to guess that what you write is a complete nonsense and that you have no idea what you're talking about - which is actually a composition of readers that some bloggers deliberately look for. Of course, another step in their algorithm is to paint the hundreds of idiots and crackpots as smart people.

Your humble correspondent would be happier if there were a tool to reduce the traffic by 500 visitors a day from this category.

If you're actually interested in the physics, a recent (May 2006) instantly well-known article about the AdS description of the quark-gluon plasma was written by Steve Gubser. You may also be interested in the December 2005 paper by Janik and Peschanski and a paper by Shuryak, Sin, and Zahed from November 2005. The dual description of strongly interacting physics provided by string theory is a rather exciting set of insights. On the other hand, it is extremely far from being the only physically exciting insight in string theory.

Via Musings.