Casting Out Nines

If you’re a college student with a blog, and you want some exposure with rather a lot more financial incentive than putting your URL here, then you might consider the College Blogger Contest 2008 sponsored by the America’s Future Foundation. The contest is open to all undergraduate and graduate students 25 years old or younger and carries a prize of $10,000 for the winner. The deadline for submissions is December 31. It appears that submitted blogs need to have a conservative or libertarian slant.

If you’re a blogger and fit this description, go to the link above and check out the full list of rules and sign up. Sounds like a good opportunity.

The comment on yesterday’s post from Matt, an undergrad in math and computer science at Carnegie-Mellon and blogger at Relatively Speaking, reminded me of just how much I appreciate blogs written by students. As a professor, my job on the “micro” scale is to design and teach mathematics courses and do stuff to help the college operate. But my vocation on the “macro” scale is to help students to think well and to chart their course through life. I like to think that blogging is an extension of that vocation beyond my everyday campus role, and it always excites me to be able to interact with students like Matt who are working hard at the business of learning.

So I’d like to ask any student blogger — especially undergraduates but also high school/homeschool students and graduate students — who is actively maintaining a blog that seriously reflects on their studies and their lives to leave your URL in the comments to this post. I don’t have a blogroll around here — maybe I should? — but I would certainly like to add you to my RSS feeds and keep up with what you’re doing.

And perhaps other readers who are similarly interested might like to glean those URL’s from the comments as well. Who knows, perhaps we can one day have some kind of “Carnival of Undergraduates” or something.

I’ve just created a “tumblelog“, which is like a blog only much more freeform and less oriented towards articles. You can find it here. I’m just messing around with this idea, using the tumblelog (I already dislike that term) to gather snippets of stuff that I find interesting but not quite worthy of a blog post — raw links to articles and web sites, videos, audio, and so on which I just want to gather and share but not comment on.

There’s an RSS feed at the tumblelog to which you can subscribe if you’re interested, and right now I have it set so that the RSS feed for Casting Out Nines gets sent automatically to the tumblelog, making the tumblelog a one-stop shop for all the stuff I post. (You still have to come here for comments, though.)

Enjoy.

I’ve just made a major discovery: WordPress.com blogs, like this one, allow you to typeset LaTeX directly in your blog posts. For example:

You can put in LaTeX in the comment fields, too. Here’s the FAQ entry that explains it all.  I’m appreciating my switch to WordPress.com more and more each day.

I found this fact out in a comment left by  Terence Tao on the blog of Timothy Gowers, both of whom are not only Fields Medal-winning mathematicians but also WordPress.com bloggers.