Dear Reader,
This is a sort of milestone for us, as it happens to be the 1000th post at 3 Quarks Daily. Our first post, a poem by Constantine Cavafy, was on July 31, 2004, so it has been a little over seven months since we started up. This means we have been averaging about five posts per day. I am happy to report that for such a young site, we have quickly developed quite a loyal, and steadily growing, readership. Among our regular readers, we are pleased to count such eminent thinkers as Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, John Allen Paulos, and, of course, you.
Once, when I was ranting about how people don’t know enough basic math, the victim of my tirade asked me, “Don’t you believe in the left brain/right brain theory?” to which I replied, “I believe in the big brain/small brain theory.” What I meant is that human beings have big enough brains that we can, and should, take an interest in all intellectual fields of endeavor. We started this blog because we felt that while there are great sites which cover particular areas, like literature, or science, no one does it all. And so we decided we would start a blog where we post everything we could find in whatever field, as long as it was intellectually serious, stimulating, and well-written. We have attempted to do this. We have also tried to keep our design as simple as possible, with a single column of posts and nothing else. We have no advertising or other distractions, and each of the editors volunteers his or her time and effort.
We realize that you may not find everything that we post on a given day interesting, but we hope that if you come everyday and skim the titles of the posts, you will find at least one or two things that you end up reading in full. We keep the number of daily posts between five and ten most of the time. If you think we should have fewer or more, let us know. Also, it would be good to know if the posts themselves are too long or too short. What do you think?
The number of sites that link to us has grown steadily and is now some hard-to-pin-down three-digit number, but our audience is not as large as we think we deserve. And we believe that this is because not enough people know that we exist. Dear Reader, if you like what we do, and visit us regularly, we have a favor to ask: help spread the word about us. Maybe you could email your friends, family, and other like-minded people recommending us. If you have a blog or website of your own, please link to us, and/or write about us there. Do what you can, will you?
We are very eager for feedback, so please leave comments or email us with suggestions, criticisms, etc. I would like to thank all the editors at 3 Quarks for their always wonderfully fascinating (at least to me) posts. And last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank you for coming here and for supporting us. Looking forward to hearing from you, I remain,
Respectfully yours,
Abbas
P.S. If you haven’t done so already, for more information about the site and about each of the editors, you should look at our “About Us” page here (or at the top of this page).