Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 29th, 2003
I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of time at the mall this Christmas season, and I’ve been amazed to see how many little knickknack stands, kiosks, and wagons there are in the main concourse these days. There seem to be at least five different cellphone booths (do they all make money?), several devoted [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 28th, 2003
According to an Advertising Age piece called 10 ADS AMERICA WON’T SEE, the Philippines edition of FHM magazine really did run this ad. It’s a refreshingly direct presentation of the true nature of things. You will have points deducted from your score if it takes you more than 30 seconds to figure out what is [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 22nd, 2003
NOVA recently did a show on the Earth’s magnetic field that is pretty sensationalistic, as science reporting goes. It turns out that the field is plummeting like a figurative rock, and that given present rates of decline it could drop away to zero within a dozen centuries or so. Zero magnetic field… is that a [...]
Posted in Language on Dec 18th, 2003
Ever wonder where the word mondo comes from? As used in a phrase like “a mondo party” or the old magazine title Mondo 2000, it has connotations of bigness and hipness and weirdness. It gets used precisely because of its imprecise implication of coolness. Brandish it with a swagger and nobody will challenge you, being [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 14th, 2003
Webcams are now passé. Anybody can install a camera pointing at a ski slope or a bored coed (or a bored naked ersatz coed). But if a picture is worth a thousand words, we can agree at least that more work is required to paint a prose picture of what’s going on in front of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 11th, 2003
Do you have an emotional response to your car keys?
A few years ago I bought a new car with one of those nifty keychains that magically unlocks the car when you push a button. Everybody has them now; I was just a late adopter. I assumed that it would be an added convenience, and it [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Dec 9th, 2003
Living at 42 degrees north latitude (Boston, Massachusetts) I am jealous of the winter sunshine. I am sorry to see it depart and I am happy to see it return. If you’re like me and you live at a similar latitude, you’ll be glad to know that today is the earliest sunset. In Boston on [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 8th, 2003
I like sundials. There’s something primal about how they turn time back into a personal relationship between you and the sun. Everything has been so thoroughly digitized and stylized these days, it’s easy to forget where our basic notions of time come from. So it is both cool and oddly disturbing to see that someone [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 5th, 2003
Here’s one that’s been around for a while, but I only heard about it this week: NaNoWriMo. What is it? NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, of course, but it’s already over. Every November 1st since 1999, a bunch of well-intentioned would-be writers give themselves 30 days to write a 50,000 word minimum (around 175 [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 3rd, 2003
What does an artist owe you? Bill Watterson spent ten years drawing the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and then he abruptly stopped. Do you deserve more from him? What does it mean for someone to sell out? Watterson steadfastly refuses to cash in his creation with anything other than sales of books of the [...]
