Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 29th, 2005
I have been sold on the value of books on tape for a long time now. But sadly my old standby BooksOnTape.com stopped renting and then, as an added insult, decimated their collection down to bestsellers. No sign of a long tail here. They seem to have some deal with Audible.com, so I took my [...]
Posted in Alan K on Apr 27th, 2005
A very good friend of mine from college, Alan Kennedy, worked until recently in the music industry. It’s very common these days to read uninformed bloggy prognostications about the music business by people like me who have no real direct experience with it. I’m extremely happy, therefore, to report that Alan has volunteered to go [...]
Posted in Books on Apr 18th, 2005
If you are interested in any of the ten thousand opportunistic books about the famous baseball rivalry between New York and Boston, I thoughtfully encourage you to consider The Yankees vs. Red Sox Reader. Happily, this particular instance of the genre includes a short essay by me. Check out the table of contents: there I [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 18th, 2005
I find myself completely agreeing with Clay Shirky’s assertion that ontology is overrated based on a speech he gave at a recent O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I didn’t go to the conference, but I did hear the speech, courtesy of ITConversations. The gist of it is that we have inherited a world view of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 15th, 2005
Happy tax day! As I was wading through TurboTax, I came across a “Frequently Asked Question” that seemed entertaining enough to pass along. The topic was income received in the form of awards (not that I received any…). Here’s the screenshot.
I can see how this comes up a lot. Gangs of angry and confused [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 12th, 2005
I recently started reading Roland Piquepaille’s site again; it’s got some darn good stuff on it. This item caught me eye: Seagliders Break Endurance Records. A seaglider is an underwater airplane, or rather an underwater glider. Take a look at the size of the “wings” and you’ll get an idea of the difference between flying [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 11th, 2005
My Dad is a faithful reader of this blog (he’s married to the other one), so allow me to wish him a very happy birthday and thank him for getting me started.
Posted in Wiki on Apr 11th, 2005
I find this both astonishing and inevitable: From Corante’s Many2Many blog I learn that Microsoft is stealing a page from Wikipedia. It’s making some of the articles in its Encarta dictionary (which is a very profitable enterprise) open for editing.
What’s astonishing is that this happened so fast. Predictably, some people are crying out [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 6th, 2005
Take a look at this Annotated New York Times. It pulls down the most recent version of the Times and then weaves in blog commentary about each article. The cost of prominently displaying bad writing is going up every day. There’s an old quote that you shouldn’t pick a fight with someone who buys their [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 4th, 2005
The Rolling Stone recently published an article called The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler in which Kunstler spells out an apocalyptic vision of the coming Great Weaning from Oil. Briefly, he forecasts an Atlas Shrugged sort of societal meltdown. That giving up oil will not be pleasant, I have no doubt, but his Cassandra [...]
