Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Books on May 28th, 2004
The amount of activity undertaken by the U.S. military in World War II is truly staggering to contemplate. Germany had to fight on both eastern and western fronts, but America fought on eastern and western fronts each separated by thousands of miles of ocean from the homeland. This meant mastery of the seas was imperative. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 26th, 2004
Very simple and nicely designed, 300 Images From 1800 Sites has a clip-art-ish collection of icons gathered from sites all over the web. The juxtaposition of, say, 87 shopping carts makes a lovely little magpie shell collection… so many designers struggling to be original in a tiny 16-by-16 pixel space! You can almost hear the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 25th, 2004
The Trixie Update is an obsessive baby blog about a little nine month old named Trixie. They (it seems to be mostly the dad who’s doing all the posting) record all kinds of data, things you might wonder about as a parent, but when on earth would you bother to collect the data? For instance: [...]
Posted in Books on May 21st, 2004
One of the better books on alchemy. It contains one of my favorite quotes of all time. The eighteenth century Dutch chemist Boerhaave, who on being asked his opinion of alchemy replied:
Wherever I understand the alchemists, I find them describe the truth in the most simple and naked terms, without deceiving us, or being deceived [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 19th, 2004
Suppose it was your job to label pictures with descriptive tags. You’d type in things like PICNIC, LIGHTNING for a picture. Then it would be easy for someone who needs pictures of a stormy picnic to find what they needed. Labeling pictures is very hard to automate, but very useful. So suppose it was your [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 18th, 2004
I asked Kristin how her cool “what I’m reading now” display works. The magic behind the scenes is based on two nifty adaptations of Amazon’s generous web services: MTAmazon and BookQueue. MTAmazon makes it easy (via special tags) to provide information about any book that Amazon sells. BookQueue, when used in conjunction with MTAmazon, helps [...]
Posted in Books on May 14th, 2004
The Arcanum: The Extraordinary True Story
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), though critical of alchemy, compared alchemists to the father who, on his deathbed, told his lazy sons of a sum of money hidden underground in his garden. After his death they began digging in hopes of finding the treasure. They found none, because (as the father knew) [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 12th, 2004
Here’s a nice example of a what photo albums will look like in the future.
Ron and Taylor’s Road Trip takes all of the photos taken during a road trip and puts them, through the magic of GPS, in exactly the right cartographic context. The first page all by itself tells a great story of where [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 11th, 2004
Check it out. Erstwhile Star Chamber denizen Rob “The Coffee Czar” Mauceri has a professional blog over at Microsoft: FrontPoint. Rob works on the FrontPage team. He’s joining Robert Scoble and Chris Pratley as inside-the-Redmond-beltway bloggers. Go Rob!
Posted in Biology on May 10th, 2004
I’ve talked about synthetic biology here before, but only in the context of adding new functionality to organisms that are already alive. Science writer Carl Zimmer has written an article for the June 2004 issue of Discover magazine that addresses a far more ambitious approach to synthetic biology: synthesizing a new life form altogether. [...]
