Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 31st, 2003
I just learned from the latest issue of Parabola magazine (Chaos and Order, Fall 2003) that the word for monster has the same root as admonish, taking its meaning from the Latin monere, to warn. Monsters, like the dragons that inhabit the vague and unpeopled borders of old maps, do not exist for the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 29th, 2003
When I was in junior high, I saw a documentary about plants that utterly amazed me. The show was an episode of Nova on PBS called The Green Machine, and it used a lot of time-lapse photography to illustrate how “alive” plants are. They move like animals do, only much more slowly. They can coordinate [...]
Posted in Autism & Jay on Oct 23rd, 2003
It’s been extremely gratifying to hear from so many people about my Red Sox essay. Thanks to everyone who has left a comment or mailed in a kind word. I’m off for a vacation for the next few days (20th high school reunion), but I thought before I left I would post links to two [...]
Posted in Autism & Jay on Oct 20th, 2003
All across New York City, baseball fans are pinching themselves and wondering: Is this the year? Is this the magical season when it all comes together and maybe, just maybe, the Yankees finally win that coveted twenty-seventh world championship, their first in over two and a half years?
As a Red Sox fan, I have [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 16th, 2003
SIGNALS Magazine is a good biotech trade “online magazine,” although it publishes new content relatively infrequently. But what do you expect for that paltry online revenue model? The articles I have worked through have been interesting (I particularly enjoyed the systems biology piece), but more than that, I was impressed with a little Flash application [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 14th, 2003
I should have seen this coming: comment spam. A bot posts a meaningless comment to your blog and leaves behind a link that points to their porn or e-business site. I got hit by it a few times, though at least (so far) the comments themselves have been dumb but innocuous. In a larger sense, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 13th, 2003
Last week there was a piece of glass in my foot. It hurt. I could actually see it sticking out of the arch of my left foot an eighth of an inch or so. In fact, it had been lodged in my foot for almost thirty years and only in the last month or so [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 10th, 2003
Once on a business trip from Boston to Stockholm, I had a brief morning layover in Amsterdam’s Schiphol International Airport after an all-night flight over the Atlantic. Bleary-eyed and sleep-greasy, I stepped into the men’s lounge to freshen up a bit and lounge. While I was in the process of lounging, I was surprised to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 8th, 2003
If you had to catch a roadrunner somewhere in the Great American Southwest, where would you turn for quality roadrunner-catching equipment? Where else but the Original Illustrated Catalog Of Acme Products. Someone has spent a lot of time grabbing images off video to put together a catalog of every Acme product placement across many years [...]
Posted in Jay Cz on Oct 6th, 2003
The war correspondent for the Rambles weblog is good friend and Renaissance man Jay Czarnecki. Almost exactly a year ago he filed a report from the front lines of the Washington D.C. metropolitan area just as the snipers were being put behind bars. He’s back this week with a timely report on developments in Mesopotamia, [...]
