Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 28th, 2003
As a child, I was never a fan of Mr. Rogers and his strangely calm neighborhood, and as an adult I never thought about him much, but a few years ago my sister-in-law sent me a profile about him that was in Esquire magazine, of all places. It was a special issue on heroes, and [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 25th, 2003
I don’t know how I missed this for so long. Mindjack is a digital magazine (megablog? website? I don’t what to call these things anymore) backed up by a talented cast of writers. It’s really the usual suspects from the old Wired magazine: Mark Frauenfelder (also of BoingBoing), Gareth Branwyn, Howard Rheingold, Jon Lebkowsky, and [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 23rd, 2003
I’ve been away on vacation to New Orleans for the past week. While doing the museum circuit, I went to the excellent D-Day museum and then took a stroll around the corner to the Memorial Hall Confederate Museum. The Confederate Museum is mostly a context-free collection of miscellaneous gear: uniforms of famous men like Gen. [...]
Posted in Stories on Feb 18th, 2003
“where does desire come from?” she asked. he made no reply, but she knew he was still awake. it was not an idle question. sometimes desire came on her like a hot wind, a hurricane, sweeping her violently along in its wicked vortex. it made her do strange impractical things, lose sleep, drive long distances, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 14th, 2003
From the Star Chamber archives, here is a Valentine’s Day story I wrote two years ago. The premise is that there is not a man in the world who loves Valentine’s day.
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 14th, 2003
I recently watched (delayed by the magic of TiVo) a two-hour special on NOVA called the Battle of the X-Planes. The show concerned the recent defense industry showdown for who is going to build the next (and probably last) manned jet fighter for the United States, the so-called Joint Strike Fighter. The stakes were extraordinary: [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 10th, 2003
The Economist has a good opinion piece about the space shuttle this week (The Magnificent Seven) which says, more or less, after we mourn the astronauts, we do them no disrespect by questioning the program in which they were employed. Here is one line pulled from the article.
“The American space programme must go on,” said [...]
Posted in Biology on Feb 9th, 2003
I have been a fan of David Goodsell’s biology illustrations ever since I came across an article of his in American Scientist a few years ago. Drawings in molecular biology tend to be schematic and reductionist in the extreme, simple diagrams depicting only a few things. But there’s nothing clean and schematic inside a real [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 4th, 2003
Here’s an article from the Guardian by Ben Hammersley about the ever-growing Wikipedia: Guardian Unlimited | Common knowledge. The Wikipedia, you will recall, is an experiment from the wild edges of the informational commons. Change any page you want. Add any section you want. I fixed a typo on the Guy Fawkes page. It was [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 2nd, 2003
I don’t know what your weather was like today, but it was overcast and bleak here. No shadows were cast by man or beast. If the marmot’s prognostications are to be believed, winter is thereby curtailed. Whether or not the predictions are correct, I have a peculiar fondness for Groundhog Day. It is an occasion [...]
