It's about time that I started a blog. My website had been hosted for years at angband.org, a computer that we once had in the dorm rooms at Georgia Tech and has since kept on going. With angband near retirement and some free time on my hands, the time is now.
Choosing a blog name is nowhere near as difficult as choosing a company name or brand name, where potentially millions of dollars of revenue could be tied to a few words, but still many of the same issues arise. What do I want the blog title to mean? What does it say about me? What types of titles are cliche and overused? Is it too grandiose, arrogant, or narcissistic? (well, I suppose blog and narcissistic go together like peanut butter and jelly) Too broad or too specific? Cute or clever is good.. too subtle? After several hours of brainstorming, I had a few ideas. And most were already taken.
I wanted something that captured who I am and what I would write about. I could post something on computing, math, mountains, food, bicycling, music, etc., and I wanted the title to have sufficient breadth. "Renaissance Man" seemed overly arrogant -- more like "Myriadly Mediocre." Something along the theme of Godel, Escher, Bach would be appropriate, but I couldn't think of anything novel. "Yellow Pig" came to mind, along with references to the number 17. The pattern "[color] [animal]" seemed interesting -- white elephant, purple squirrel, pink panther.. I have a special fondness in me for mountain goats, and some of my other friends have claimed other animals, e.g., the marmot. However, most shades of goat had already been played, according to Google. I was on the right track when I came up with "irrational/transcendental goat." The adjective satisfies the mathematical part of me, and goat the nature part of me.
Back to Google.. Which are already blogs or companies or domain names? Googlewhack? There were a surprising amount of goat variations out there. "Gaussian goat" pulled up results of statistics on goat populations. Someone had already drawn a "fractal" goat. I didn't necessarily want the alternate meanings of irrational or transcendental, but I guess I was ok with the other meaning of goat. I flipped through a mathematical dictionary seeing if anything would stick. I didn't just want any word in front of goat: logarithmic, hyperbolic, homeomorphic, differentiable, Lebesgue-measurable... While thinking about this and pondering the prolific amount of goat websites, I decided to narrow goat to mountain goat, but to use the genus to keep it as one word, hence "Oreamnos." And then I settled on the relatively approachable adjective "Spherical."
What does "Spherical Oreamnos" mean then? It could be a whole bunch of things. It is a little reminiscent of "squeamish ossifrage." And goats certainly aren't spherical (just as ossifrages aren't squeamish), whether you look at it more from the geometric point of view (spindly legs, horns) or the topologic point of view (alimentary canal). There's a reference to physics problem sets of the proverbial spherical cow. But above all, the phrase is meant to mean "me," and that's what this blog will be about.
