Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 23rd, 2002
Greetings from scenic North Carolina, a-blogging from my father-in-law’s computer. Yesterday we took the opportunity to visit Fort Fisher just south of Wilmington, where one of the last meaningful battles of the Civil War was fought. In fact, my great great grandfather, Jay Whittington Lewis, fought there (in a gray uniform) and was later injured [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 20th, 2002
I have had flights cancelled before, sometimes mere minutes before the plane was scheduled to take off, but this is the first time an entire airline has vanished from existence just as I was about to step on the plane. They cancelled my entire airline. So my wife got up early this morning and stood [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 19th, 2002
I don’t see 21C Magazine on the newstands around me anymore; I had assumed they went out of business, but they have a web site and appear to be thriving. Their latest issue, all of which appears to be available online, has some good stuff in it. Most compelling to me was the piece about [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 19th, 2002
Nanotubes and other assorted things nano are shaping up to be the next big hype bubble to burst, but it’s fun to surf the wave of unreasonable expectations while it lasts. These nanotubes do have a touch of the alchemical philosopher’s stone about them, bringing magical transformations everywhere they land. As Feynman said, there’s plenty [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 18th, 2002
I’ll be on vacation for the next week, so no bloggo mucho till July 29th. I’m flying down to North Carolina on Midway Airlines.
Hey! Wait a second… as of Thursday, July 18th (that’s today) Midway has ceased to exist. The timing is perfect. Midway vanished (it was swallowed up by U.S. Airways, hardly a paragon [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 18th, 2002
There was a time when R.U. Sirius and his wacky crew at Mondo 2000 were on top of the world. I was a Mondo 2000 reader, squarely in the middle of their young-geek-yearning-to-make-tech-cool demographic. After a few issues, Mondo began to smell of too much sweaty enthusiasm untempered by any graphical restraint or even genuine [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 15th, 2002
This just in: good friend Matthew J. Simoneau has started a weblog, despite the fact that he feels, as he says in his first entry, “a little embarassed to be jumping on the weblogging bandwagon so late.” Nevertheless, he jumps off to a good start with a report of his visit to the museum of [...]
A bookstore, a weblog, a magazine, all these things take on the personality of their proprietor, and if that personality resonates sufficiently with your own, you find yourself coming back again and again, chuckling that someone should be able so consistently to amuse you, sight unseen. So it is for me, I find, with The [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 10th, 2002
The BBC sez: Replace your mouse with your eye. It’s a premise with promise, but what do you think? Could you accurately move things around your screen with your flickering eye movements? It just might replace aching wrists with strained eyes. I can just imagine the cursor twitching back and forth across the screen until [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 8th, 2002
I am interested in how computers are used to extend our senses, such that algorithms effectively become eyes, seeing a picture that would not otherwise exist in the streams of ones and zeros returning from, say, an orbiter around Mars. So I was intrigued to hear that Mt. Everest was actually discovered by a computer. [...]
