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The Eloquent Peasant
The weblogs that I like most seem to combine two elements. Firstly, the writer is an expert on some field and the weblog is focused to some degree on that field. Secondly, the factual content is leavened with personality and opinion. (I suppose by these criteria I must dislike my own weblog, as I'm not an expert on anything much and I've been ( Read more... ) -
Rome and Assyria: Contrasting Imperialisms
Over at Gene Expression there's a discussion about ancient Rome, one aspect of which is a sub-thread on Roman imperialism. Someone towards the beginning of the thread asserted that the Romans dominated the ancient Mediterranean because they eschewed diplomacy or "realism" in favour of brutal military subjugation and extortion of resources. I'd like ( Read more... ) -
The Prehistory of Sharp Blue, part two
Here is another batch of posts I made to the Culture Mailing List that would have been Sharp Blue articles if I'd had a weblog back then:
- "Newtonian Spacetime", Part 1 of my old Very Brief History of Time. This is about the structure of space and time in classical physics, which closely conforms to our intuitive notions of absolute space and time.
- ( Read more... )
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The Carnival of Software Development, number 1
As this is the first edition of the Carnival of Software Development and I didn't give much notice to allow time for submissions, there were only two entries. To pad the Carnival out to a less dismal length, I'll add a little bit more commentary than usual and conclude with a round-up of other articles on software development that I've found ( Read more... ) -
The prehistory of Sharp Blue, part one
Before Sharp Blue existed as a weblog, I used to write many more long posts for the Culture Mailing List on similar topics to the ones I write about here. I've decided that I really ought to fill in the "prehistory" of Sharp Blue by adding these posts retroactively to my archive. I'll move them over in small batches so as not to swamp anybody who ( Read more... ) -
Population filters; or The Wine Bar Drake Equation
A post by Razib on the weblog Gene Expression about meeting a pretty sf fan[1] who was working in a wine bar seems to have created quite a storm in the science blogosphere in the last day or so. Shelley Batts, Suzanne Franks, Jennifer Ouellette, Tara Smith and PZ Myers all have interesting comments threads that are worth reading. However, I think ( Read more... ) -
Heraclius, Persia and the Arab Conquests
In my recent articles "Fundamentalist Islam's Cargo Cult" and "Conversions", I mentioned the devastation caused by the final war between Rome and Persia as the key precondition that enabled the explosive military expansion of Islam. In a discussion that followed on Brin-L, somebody expressed the opinion that it was bureaucracy and religious ( Read more... ) -
Ancient Egypt in ten paragraphs
This is the first of what I hope will be an occasional series of "Histories in Ten Paragraphs". In this installment, my aim is simply to provide the basic chronological framework for the history of Egypt for readers who have only a passing familiarity with that civilisation; I make no claims of originality of interpretation. Of necessity I have ( Read more... ) -
Six languages
For several years now, I've had a computer science study programme aimed at learning all the major fields of computer science to approximately the level of a first year graduate student in the field. As part of this project, I've decided that 2007 will be the year of programming languages. During the year I intend to learn six (mostly) conceptually ( Read more... ) -
Redecoration
As you have probably noticed, Sharp Blue and most of its associated pages have been given an entirely new style over the last few days. There are still some rendering glitches in Internet Explorer 6 - I would strongly advise anyone still using it to switch to Firefox, Safari, Camino or at least Internet Explorer 7 as the CSS/DOM support in IE6 is ( Read more... )