Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Language on Nov 25th, 2002
Good friend, long-time Rambles reader, and former Minnesotan JMike emails with this message.
I grew up in Minnesota and learned a bunch of local-isms:
“ish” (general expression of disgust, see also “ishy”)
“doy” (local variation of “duh”, i.e. what is said to mock someone who is
acting in a way the mocker associates with stupidity)
“skitch” (to grab onto [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 24th, 2002
Dialect maps have been a standard research tool for linguists and philologists for a long time, but it’s becoming much easier to compile them. Now you can build yourself a nice website and let other people do the work for you. Of course you need some people to visit your site, so it helps if [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 21st, 2002
I’m very happy with my nifty little
Palm Zire PDA. It cost me $90, and that’s only because I didn’ know about the Amazon promotion that gets it down to $75. The conventional wisdom in the reviews is that this is a good PDA for non-geek first-time PDA buyers. It’s cheap, lightweight, and unambitious. But it’s [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Nov 18th, 2002
About this time every year, as the sun sets well before 4:30 PM (I live near Boston), I start to pine for the days to get longer again. Which is too bad, because they won’t actually get longer, as every school child knows, until after December 21st, or thereabouts. But I have an ace in [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 18th, 2002
What comes to mind when you see the phrase “Viagra helps save endangered species”? You may be picturing a toothless but newly inspired panda mounting his world-weary zoomate, thereby expanding rather than ex-panda-ing the population. But that’s not where this story is headed. Follow this logic: endangered species get slaughtered with horrific regularity because there [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 13th, 2002
The cosmological conundrum of the missing mass is one of the great riddles of modern science. Imagine watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance in a movie. Then remove Fred from the movie frame by frame. What remains doesn’t make sense according to your intuition about how things should behave. You can tell that something [...]
Posted in Autism & Jay on Nov 12th, 2002
Vaccinations stop kids from getting sick, right? So more vaccines means more healthy kids, right? Maybe not. As the number of vaccines mandated for American children before age two climbs and climbs and climbs, we may well be playing a very dangerous game. As reported in the New York Times Magazine (The Not-So-Crackpot Autism Theory), [...]
Posted in MATLAB on Nov 11th, 2002
Since this is my baby, I can’t possibly not link to it: We’re running another online MATLAB programming contest this week. It started last Wednesday and will end this Wednesday. There are a zillion programming contests out there, but this one is special because your answer is evaluated and posted in real time. It’s sort [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 6th, 2002
Mikey O., denizen of Missouri and molecular biologist extraordinaire took issue with our most recent post. He writes:
Dearest Paracelsus,
I was reading through your weblog today with my wife and our au pair, and
was upset to see an erroneous message regarding the Isle of Capri in
Kansas. I would direct you to the Missouri Gaming Commissions [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 5th, 2002
My friend Nabeel works with money professionally, making software for financial types. So it’s no surprise that when he went to Kansas City on a business trip that he ended up in a casino. Casinos in Kansas City? you may ask. But keep in mind that, although gambling used to be considered a vice, we [...]
