I thought I’d put up a short post letting people know that the 2012 edition of the “Best Science Writing Online” has been published — and I’m in it!  You can see my name in the right-most red column on the cover.

For those who are unfamiliar, this book is a part of a series that collects the “best” science writing of the year that was published on the internet.  I always put “best” in quotes because there is so much good stuff written every year that it is impossible to speak in absolutes — I prefer to say “some of the best”!

This volume is a continuation of a series that used to be called “The Open Laboratory”, and I was fortunate enough to have one of my pieces included in last year’s volume as well.  The 2012 edition is somewhat special, in that it is published by Scientific American and can be found in brick-and-mortar bookstores, as I verified in my local Barnes & Noble:

Even though I’ve written a textbook, this marks the first time that my writing has appeared on a regular bookstore shelf, so I’m rather excited about it!  I’ve already submitted a number of posts as candidates for next year’s volume, though the competition gets tougher every year so we’ll have to see what happens.  In any case, cheers to editors Bora Zivkovic and Jennifer Ouellette for putting together another great edition.

My contribution is based on my blog post on the curious Mpemba effect, officially discovered in 1969.  One of the nice side-effects of this book being published is that I’m actually sending a copy to Erasto Mpemba himself!  I’ll blog more details when I learn what he thinks of my writing…