Geoff Arnold

Merry's website is now up

We just finished uploading Merry's website. Just one page, for now; we put the effort into the CSS, the visuals, and the content. It will grow....

Carnivals Galore!

Now here's an interesting trend: blog carnivals. Here's the intro from one of them: the Philosophers' Carnival: "This site is the homepage for the Philosophers' Carnival project, which aims to provide a forum to showcase philosophical posts from a wide range of weblogs. We are modelled upon Carnival of the Vanities and Tangled Bank. (See also Carnivalesque, a new carnival about the 'early modern' period in history.) Unlike those other carnivals, however, this one is restricted to philosophy-related blog posts." The rest of the page describes the process of creating a carnival, and provides links to the previous Philosophers' Carnivals, each of which was hosted by a different blog. There have been four so far; the fifth is in preparation. It looks like a promising collaboration model which avoids the usual dependence on one overworked editor.

Contact

FYI, there's now a new way to contact me: first.last@gmail.com. Make the appropriate substitutions.

"And in last place we have...."

Doug (who needs to get his own blog!) just sent me a link to a page which captures the strangeness of the blogosphere to a T. It's a celebration of last place finishers in the Athens Olympics.

dive into mark

At the suggestion of my colleague Doug, I'm adding dive into mark to my blogroll. Reading his piece on corporate blogging, including all the comments, was delightfully reminiscent of chats with Tim Bray... and then I pop over to Tim's blog only to find him citing Mark. So if Tim's a connector, is Mark a maven? We'll see. Exit humming.....

Self-perpetuating stereotypes

Reading Terry's blog (which everyone should do, not least to get an Iraq veteran's perspective of some of the unbelievable stuff which is going down these days), I came across a link to this thought-provoking essay by Dawn Taylor on the other side of sexism: the "men are jerks, and they can't help it" nonsense that you encounter every day. And I was reminded of the strange story on Yahoo! Oddly Enough about how blondes do worse on intelligence tests after they've been exposed to "dumb blonde" jokes. This stuff is not innocuous: it changes the way people think and act.

Disused London underground stations

Speaking of visualizing complex systems (as I was), here's a delightful site about disused London tube stations. A recent addition shows a map of the system in 1929 - you can see why Harry Beck's classic map caught on when it came out four years later.

Mornington Crescent, anybody?

Mary, Mary

Mary Smaragdis has the distinction of running the most frequently visited blog at blogs.sun.com, due mostly to the irrepressible energy she puts into it. (That's her with John Gage at the Sun Network event.) Anyway, she ran a little competition to win a Sun Shanghai T-shirt, and when she announced the results my entry was the second runner up... except that the first runner-up was anonymous, and I wasn't eligible to win anyway. But I was glad to be able to work in a reference to Al Stewart's music.

The day Reagan was shot

I just posted a piece on my Sun blog about the day Reagan was shot. Hmmm... should I have posted that here, or there? Duplication seems undesirable.

Java and Jini

I just added the first real content to my new blogs.sun.com blog. I found myself getting a little carried away on the subject of Java and Jini...