Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Biology on Apr 29th, 2004
Synthetic biology is the subject of a feature story in Scientific American. Happily, it’s being made available for free on their website: Synthetic Life. They get up close and personal with synthetic biology rock stars Ron Weiss (Princeton) and Drew Endy (MIT). The article has a good summary quote about synthetic biology.
This nascent field has [...]
Posted in MATLAB on Apr 27th, 2004
Our latest MATLAB Programming Contest is nearing completion. Since this is an election year, the puzzle this time (”Gerrymander”) is to divide a state into electoral districts of equal population. If you want to see real gerrymandering in action, look at this: 107th Congressional Districts. Dallas/Ft. Worth is particularly interesting.
Matt has done almost all the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 25th, 2004
Your body evolved in an environment that was vastly filthier than the one you now inhabit. As a result, living with all this good hygiene can actually cause real problems in cases where your body has come to depend on filth. Your gut expects to manage large numbers of parasitic whipworms, for example, and, for [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 23rd, 2004
Francis found this one a while back. A digital artist named Greg Apodaca is not only a talented photo manipulation artist, he also happens to be great at putting together a site that effectively gives away his magic tricks. Like any good magician, however, he can confidently show you what he does, but that doesn’t [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 22nd, 2004
I commented on this back in March, but the woman behind the site has since revisited it and added a lot of stuff. Whether or not you saw it the first time around, go back and look at it again. GHOST TOWN is a first person account of what it’s like to drive through (on [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 20th, 2004
Let us say, speaking speculatively, that the Earl of Withington (who is also Viscount Munthorpe and has the family name of Grisham) is coming over to your place for beer and poker night Tuesday next. You grab the nearest Mont Blanc pen and your best cotton bond stationery to begin an invitation… but how to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 19th, 2004
The Guardian has a good article on the up-and-coming science of Happy Studies… or rather the study of happiness. It’s easy to make fun of, but it sure seems like important work. The sub-head for the article sums up the modern happiness paradox well:
Most of us are healthier and wealthier than ever before, yet an [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 13th, 2004
Geoffrey Ballard is getting the hero treatment these days for his pioneering work on the hydrogen fuel cell. His eponymous company is leading the world in practical solutions to fuel cell power generation. More recently, Ballard has joined an outfit called General Hydrogen “to fulfill his vision of a hydrogen economy,” according to the company’s [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 7th, 2004
Want a quick and anonymous email address at no hassle? Send a note to fizzbin@mailinator.com. Now go to the Mailinator site and enter the email address fizzbin and you’ll see the email you just sent. No password, no privacy, no problem. Any account name will work. Try it!
Mailinator was invented as a sort of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 6th, 2004
If you haven’t seen it yet, take a spin past newsmap, a news visualization program. It’s designed to take advantage of the space-dividing treemap algorithm made popular by SmartMoney’s Map of the Market. The big idea is that the amount of ink a story is getting in the national press is reflected by the amount [...]
