Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 27th, 2003
My niece Sarah is in town for the week. While we were out eating dinner, her friend Paul mentioned the deranged and wonderfully cranky Maddox site, The Best Page in the Universe. Specifically, we talked about the page I am better than your kids, in which he criticizes the bad artwork of children. Because, you [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 26th, 2003
A few years ago, my friend Rob (who works at Microsoft) pointed me to the work of Scott Berkun. Up until very recently, Berkun was a sort of in-house evangelist for good UI design at Microsoft. He has lots to say about design at his UIWEB.COM site. There are many web sites out there about [...]
Posted in Autism & Jay on Aug 25th, 2003
This is my son Jay. Jay is four years old. He’s very handsome and good-natured. He’s also autistic. He can’t talk, he doesn’t know how to wave goodbye or point, and he pays no attention to the comings and goings of his parents or his little sister. Autism is a brutal disease, and it costs [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 20th, 2003
Scientists working with Strain 121, a heat-loving bacterium that lives deep in the ocean, recently revealed that it can not just live but thrive at 121 degrees Celsius. That’s 250 degrees Fahrenheit to you and me, or the temperature of a working autoclave that’s designed to sterilize medical equipment. These little guys don’t even break [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 18th, 2003
My friend Rhon has been working on his web site for a year or more, I think. He’s a graphic designer at our company, and a serious perfectionist, so I guess that’s to be expected. Check out his new site: Rhon Porter Studio Design. A lot of it is STILL under construction, but the illustrations [...]
Posted in Elvish on Aug 14th, 2003
I was a serious Tolkien geek as a boy. Around sixth grade I taught myself the Elvish writing that Tolkien invented for the Lord of the Rings. In fact, he created both a language and a character set; these characters, you may recall, decorate the One Ring.
If you don’t mess with the actual Elvish language, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 13th, 2003
Some months ago I described an unusual museum in England put together originally by the slightly mad Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter. Potter’s strange Museum of Curiosities apparently is in grave danger of being liquidated and may go under the gavel this fall if nothing is done. Apparently the inn needs more space for rooms. A [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 8th, 2003
Making vaccines is a bad business. If you do your job well, your healthy customers may suspect that they didn’t really need that shot in the first place. And there are multiple ways to screw up: the vaccine might be ineffective, or it might cause an adverse reaction, opening you up to expensive legal attack. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 7th, 2003
Hey, check it out: blog fever is running rampant at work. With increased media coverage about how Google and AOL are taking blogging to the masses, now even the people who have zero interest in blogs at least know what the word means (more or less). Kristin and Mike now have blogs (Snowboard Girl and [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 5th, 2003
I’ve been working my way through Howard Rheingold’s timely book Smart Mobs, wherein he talks about the new and transformative properties of crowds that are in constant communication by mobile phones and other such devices. This new technology gives heretofore amorphous crowds a robust nervous system, allowing them to precipitate from the clear blue sky, [...]
