Wednesday, April 20, 2022

A pole star becomes invisible

That Lubos Motl's famous blog, "The Reference Frame", is now closed to the public, deserves comment, since it is the best physics blog there is; the only place you see a physicist of his level, offering frank, intuitive, technical commentary on topics from the perennial (e.g. what is quantum spin) to the misguided (whether that's fads among his peers, or among fans of alternative physics) to the truly new and promising. 

Apparently he had monetized the blog with Google's AdSense; just before he closed it, AdSense kept telling him that various posts on climate, Covid, etc, were no longer acceptable. So it seems he's taken the whole thing private while he decides what to do, and/or has a break from the stresses of maintaining it. 

Maybe he'll be back, maybe not, but the disappearance of such a valuable resource needs to be recorded.