Rambles at starchamber.com

Molecular biology is moving quickly from cartoons to pictures to movies. It used to be that the cell illustrations in biology textbooks were either blurry, grainy micrographs or fanciful, cartoonish diagrams. But pictures based on accurate knowledge of protein structure are becoming more common, and now we are moving into the realm of time with [...]

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This is my daughter Carolyn going to town on a piece of corn. The picture was taken by Rob (a.k.a. the Coffee Czar). I posted this directly from Flickr as an experiment. Looks like it worked.

I’m pretty well sold on this idea of stitching together an online existence from a patchwork of well-tuned tools from [...]

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Send me an email if you want a Gmail account. I’ve got one to give away, and the first person to send me a note (to gulley@gmail.com, naturally) is welcome to it. [NOTE: I've given away my last Gmail account] I’ve been very happy with it so far. They have redesigned the flow of filing [...]

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One of the problems that has faced the aimless web surfer since the web came into being is this one: where do you start? You have a little time, and you have a vague desire to see something new and cool. What then? Back at the beginning, there was the NCSA What’s New list maintained [...]

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The era of the travel agent is nearing its end. If you fly much, you’re probably used to using Orbitz or Expedia by now. Maybe you still check in with a travel agent just to make sure you’re not missing a better deal, because after all, Orbitz and Expedia are looking for your business. So [...]

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Saw this on the newstand yesterday in Smithsonian magazine. It was the most heart-warming thing I’ve read in a long time: let prison inmates train seeing-eye dogs. The training is intensive and extremely expensive (if you don’t have prisoners do it for you). At the same time, the inmates are cynical, detached, and hardened to [...]

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If you visit this site regularly, you may have noticed that every now and then lurid, bizarre, or simply commercial but inappropriate comments get posted here (personal favorite: “I don’t really think your thoughts are right. Maybe you need a loan?”). It’s comment spam, designed to increase the Google rating of some tasteless URL. My [...]

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Very soon after I started using bookmarks back at the dawn of time (ca. 1995) I found them too tedious to be worth the trouble. I spent lots of time categorizing them, but very little time actually using them. It took me a little while using a blog to realize that my blog is the [...]

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Jason Kottke makes some good observations about “Web as platform”. He’s sharpening ideas that I’ve been pondering a lot over the last few weeks. There’s been a real blossoming of activity related to linking, leveraging, and cross-feeding blogs, wikis, and web services of all kinds, almost a Cambrian explosion of activity. And it’s becoming clearer [...]

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Google’s IPO has been getting consistently bad press in the last few weeks. “Don’t expect much,” we’re told. “They won’t actually do very well,” we’re told. “Competition is much worse than we originally believed, the economy isn’t doing very well, and you know what? those two founder guys are smarty-pants jerks.”

This is all a [...]

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