I’ve occasionally posted here about my involvement with Physics Stack Exchange — in fact, don’t be too surprised to see more posts of that nature in the upcoming weeks. But today I would like to bring your attention to another potential Stack Exchange site that will be of interest to many physicists and others: Scientific Computing.

As some of my regular readers (let us assume for the moment that these “regular readers” exist) will know, Stack Exchange is a network of question and answer websites on various topics. It started with Stack Overflow for computer programming, then expanded to Server Fault and Super User for sysadmins and power users respectively, and based on the success of that model, the people in charge have created about 70 more based on proposals from community members. The proposal for a scientific computing site came about because the topic occupies a niche between general-purpose programming and the specific science. To take computational physics as an example, these sorts of questions don’t quite fit on Physics Stack Exchange, which is about physical principles, but they don’t get a particularly good response on Stack Overflow, because they get swamped by all the questions …