Thematic threads in PopulScience

Just now, without counting this one, the blog PopulScience contains 267 posts. Some time ago, one of my readers pointed out a problem that can be paraphrased with the following words:

This blog contains many posts, published without following a plot line, so they form a chronological string where it’s difficult to get one's bearings. Therefore, I suggest you should prepare a set of basic threads that would allow the reader to classify the posts and follow them in a more orderly way than is now possible.

I found this an excellent idea. Of course, preparing those thematic threads that make it possible to follow posts associated with a topic from the beginning of the thread to the end, is a lot of work, since it was necessary to modify every post previously published in the blog, by adding at the end information about the thread or threads to which the post belongs, with links to the previous and the next posts in the threads.

All things considered, I have prepared twenty four thematic threads. Unless stated otherwise, the order of the posts in a thread follows more or less the chronology of their publication. The link associated with the title leads to the first post in the thread. Several posts belong simultaneously to two different threads. From now on, as I’ve been doing since last November, I’ll try to place new posts in the corresponding thematic threads.

The threads are the following:

Thematic Thread	Nr. of posts	Comments
What is man?	10	One of these posts, Is man just an animal?, is the most visited post in the blog, having been read above 40.000 times. Another frequently visited post (fourth in the number of visits) is also in this thread: This is what science says about human life.
What is inmortality?	7	This thread was hot news several years ago, when the media predicted the imminent attainment of human immortality. It seems that this topic is no longer so hot.
Science and History	12	The order of this thread is not chronological, but logical, following the chronology of the characters and the periods considered.
Standard cosmology	14	The universe, the Big Bang, General Relativity, the Microwave Background Radiation and the problems presented by the standard cosmological model, such as dark matter and dark energy. Its order is not chronological, but thematic.
Multiverse and fine tuning	14	Theories of multiverses. Are they science?
Time	13	The first posts deal with the scientific-philosophical concept of time and related issues, while the latter deal with the time travel problem. Therefore, its order is not chronological.
Evolution	14	Issues related to the theory of evolution, excluding those that refer to the origin and evolution of primitive life, which are in the next thread, and those referring to man, which are in the first thread.
Primitive life	10
Life in other worlds	5
Science and atheism	17
Natural&artificial intelligence	17
Space exploration	5
Futurology	17	Scientific predictions. Are they fulfilled? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In what respect are we doing science? Or are we just opening lines of research that never close?
Mathematics	11	Questions related to pure mathematics. One of these posts, The Problem of Achilles and the Tortoise, is one of the most frequently read in the blog.
Statistics	10	Uses and abuses of statistics.
Particle Physics	7	Issues related to the very small. Do we know all that can be known? Obviously not, and we’ll never get there.
Scientific popularization	10	How is science popularized in the media and the specialized press? Usually badly, because there are many mistakes.
Philosophy and logic	17	Logic is the basis of science, but many people don’t know how to use it correctly. Many scientists confuse science with philosophy, and philosophize without knowing what they do. The trouble is, when they try to pass their philosophical imaginations as science.
Science and religion	10	Some scientific questions related in some way with faith.
Politics and economy	22	Politicians and public opinion suffer from a huge scientific ignorance, and what is worse, they try to hide what science says, when it opposes their ideology.
Literature and cinema	19	Scientific issues related to fiction, in the novel and the cinema.
Science in general	20	Posts not related to a specific science, but to the scientific method and its problems.
Linguistics and Medicine	9	This thread contains posts that do not fit easily in other threads.
Anniversaries&organization	4

The same post in Spanish: Link1 Link2
Thematic Thread on Anniversaries and Organization: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca