Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 30th, 2002
We’ve all seen the same set of basic graphical illusions over and over since grade school, chestnuts like the Wife or Mother-in-Law image. After a while they seem lame and worn out; you’ve seen them all. But don’t give up yet. What you are about to see is, I feel safe in saying, the coolest [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 28th, 2002
Dean Acheson, who was the second Secretary of State under Harry Truman (George Marshall of Marshall Plan fame was the first), wrote a book called Present at the Creation in which he describes how, in the aftermath of World War II, one world order crumbled and a new one, largely defined by the Cold War, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 25th, 2002
This is Jay Whittington Lewis, my great great grandfather (my mother’s mother’s mother’s dad). This image reaches me because a very nice gentleman named Mike Kelly purchased it and wanted to know more about it. As he said: “Back on 2 Feb 1995 I purchased a
framed 8×10 photograph of man in a UCV uniform wearing [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 18th, 2002
Happy Birthday, Mom!
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 18th, 2002
I once heard an interview with a labor organizer who said that the three most effective words for getting people to organize were “You’re being robbed!” Why are we so compelled to believe that we’re being jerked around whenever we go shopping? Does the fact that we have access to so much free product information [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 17th, 2002
My September 11th post generated a fair amount of email, which is always gratifying. Matt mentioned, after seeing my little cartoon of Osama bin Laden’s notebook, that you can see the real thing at the Smoking Gun. The manual on display concerns “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants.” A lot of it is [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 11th, 2002
It is a worthwhile thing to mark this day (“altogether fitting and proper,” as George Pataki says), but there’s not much new to say. When the newscasters have bleated themselves hoarse saying the same thing over and over, it’s time to listen to the poets. It takes the poets a while to digest the newspaper, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 10th, 2002
The New York Times magazine has an in-depth report on the World Trade Center, past and future. It starts with The Height of Ambition: Part One. But there is also some multimedia and video material worth looking at. I find the file footage of the towers going up in the early 70s to be enthralling. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 4th, 2002
I see that Stefan Fatsis is doing the book circuit again now that the paperback version of his book about competitive Scrabble, Word Freak, is out. I heard Fatsis do a good piece on NPR about the origins of Scrabble. It was part of NPR’s Present at the Creation series (which is itself worth a [...]
