Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 26th, 2003
JungleScan is nifty service chronicled in Amazon Hacks that tracks over time the sales rank of many thousands of Amazon items. Add any item you want, and it will automatically go on the list. You can easily imagine that any author who knows about this service would be a regular, even neurotic, visitor to the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 23rd, 2003
As a kid, one of my favorite parts of Sesame Street was when they’d do a segment on how bottles get made or candy bars get wrapped. To this day, I’m fascinated by the machines that turn raw or partially completed materials into the consumer goods we see in the store. These days we’re absolutely [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 21st, 2003
What’s the dang deal with these cheap Canadian drugs? Will they poison you? Are we idiots to pay so much here in the US? Is the Canadian government subsidizing the medical expenses American senior citizens? There’s a lot of trash talk going on, but when you look at the macroeconomics of it, there are some [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 20th, 2003
Last fall my group from work went on an outing to Six Flags of New England. The Superman rollercoaster (they’re named after superheroes) was a real monster: you accelerate to 77 miles per hour going (what feels like) straight down and spend a mile worth of track looping and twisting before you decelerate enough to [...]
Posted in Biology on Nov 17th, 2003
Sure you sequenced the human genome, Craig Venter, but what have you done for us lately? Plenty, as it turns out. Venter (and some of his close friends) have figured out how to assemble (relatively) long sequences of wholly synthesized DNA, enough to make a complete virus, in fact. This is one step closer to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 16th, 2003
Bose was the first company to introduce noise cancellation headsets on a big scale. But they’re still very expensive tech toys, priced at either $200 or $300 depending on the model. My friend Roy found a much much cheaper version from Maxell, the HP-NC1 Noisebuster, but sadly it’s been taken off the market. But other [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 13th, 2003
Long time Star Chamber associate the CoffeeCzar has got his blog back on line after a long child-induced hiatus. He kicks off with a friendly link to yours truly and a link to a video of a performance art piece in which the artist “paints” in real time with a sand table. It’s a long [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 11th, 2003
So DARPA had to trash their innovative terrorism markets program because Congress got their collective panties in a proverbial twist. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if just the opposite is true. When congressmen all start thumping on the national bible, it’s time to buy whatever [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 9th, 2003
This is a damn good article by Clay Shirky about why micropayment systems don’t work and won’t work: Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content. The gist of it is that, while the monetary cost of acquiring content can get vanishingly small, the mental cost does not. There is a significant mental expense even to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 6th, 2003
Amazon has been doing this search-the-entire-book search for a few weeks now. Here is what the New York Times has to say about it: In Amazon’s Text-Search, a Field Day for Book Browsers
It sounded cool, so I tried it and discovered it really was cool. Here’s my example: for a long time I was trying [...]
