Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 29th, 2004
Wikipedia is one of the wonders of our age. It just keeps getting bigger, and I often find now that when I google to learn more about a topic, the first or second item returned is a very good article on Wikipedia. All free, built from nothing by everybody in less than three years.
Slashdot hosted [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 28th, 2004
Between Google’s IPO, its Gmail venture, Wikipedia, and the rise of a vigorous blogging culture, I believe we are entering the next period of go-go Internet excitement. A lot of good stuff is happening, and if I were Microsoft, I would be concerned. The next big trends, by and large, are online services that you [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 27th, 2004
I’m a big fan of Bloglines, the free online newsfeed aggregator. I keep talking about how aggregators are a big deal, and as time passes I believe this more and more. And aggregators are a natural fit for an online service like Bloglines (as opposed to a downloadable client like FeedDemon), because they can benefit [...]
Posted in Books on Jul 25th, 2004
This book is built around the very human stories of the engineers (we’ve heard enough about the astronauts) who built a machine that took men to the moon and back. In less than eight years, they built a great big machine that took people to the surface of the moon and back. The authors have [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 23rd, 2004
Nick Currie, a.k.a. Momus, is a musician who lives in Japan and keeps a clever blog called Click Opera. I came across his excellent entry on Japanese-ness recently: Superlegitimacy. He makes a number of sharp observations about the differences between East and West, beginning with his reverie about the strange behavior of his train conductor.
At [...]
Posted in MATLAB on Jul 20th, 2004
Suppose you wanted to build your own sundial. Where would you start? If you know how to use MATLAB, I can tell you exactly what to do. As part of my day job, I work on an online community called MATLAB Central. Recently we’ve added the ability to upload web pages there that have been [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 19th, 2004
Here’s an article by Ben Hammersley about the fantasy game money exchange I talked about last week: A virtual fortune: “A unique market has grown up whereby high-level achievers in online role-playing games can trade their virtual world characters for cash.”
Posted in Books on Jul 17th, 2004
This is the first of Horne’s trilogy about Franco-German mischief; the other two are about the World Wars. I hadn’t realized how much the Franco-Prussian war set up World War I. If the French are to be chastised for their harsh terms at Versailles in 1918, then the Prussians must answer for what they squeezed [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 14th, 2004
The similarities between the computer viruses and “real” biological viruses are getting more profound all the time. There’s already a good case to be made for the fact that the Internet is a true ecological space, a virtual hothouse inhabited by rapidly mutating organisms. Just this week CNET reported on a worm that sleeps to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 13th, 2004
The New Scientist reports on a novel DNA duplication technique called helicase-dependent amplification, or HDA, that promises to speed up and simplify the process required to duplicate (amplify) small amounts of DNA so that you do useful stuff with it. If this works out, DNA-based technologies will start to invade our lives in more and [...]
