The nerve of n-category - with Michael Johnson 1987

I see a recent post on n-category cafe explaining higher dimensional associativities. There is no reference to Ross Street's orientals (Ross Street, The algebra of oriented simplexes , J. Pure Appl. Algebra 49 (1987) 283-335; MR89a:18019) of twenty odd years ago. An old paper of mine with Michael Johnson might also be of some interest.

One of the effects of blogging is a certain loss of history, which is also a loss of content. Formal papers have always made some attempt at recording the history of ideas. I think blogging might well benefit from some increased formalism, since it seems inevitably to be taking over dissemination of research.