I got a spot of nice news yesterday:  the finalists for Open Lab 2011 were announced, and one of my posts will be included!

For those who are unfamiliar, The Open Laboratory is a collection of the “best” science writing online over the past year.  I put “best” in quotation marks because there is a ton of good science writing that is submitted — some 700 submissions were whittled down to a mere 51 — and there were certainly lots of Open Lab-worthy posts that simply couldn’t be fit in!  With that in mind, I’m honored that my post on the Mpemba effect made the cut.  This is the second year that I’ve made it into Open Lab, which gives me some reassurance that I’m doing something right!

The complete list of finalists is posted on Cocktail Party Physics.  It is a wonderful collection of posts, and major credit should be giving to Jennifer Ouellette as the guest editor for this year’s edition (she even removed one of her own worthy posts from consideration to allow someone else to be recognized in the collection).