Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Jay Cz on Jun 24th, 2005
Are you ordinary or odd? And how does that make you feel? My friend Jay Czarnecki (you remember Rambles regular Jay by now) has an unusual name. At least in this country he has an unusual name. But this spring, for his 40th birthday, he decided to go to a place where his name is [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 23rd, 2005
The Power Of Us is a nice Business Week article about how companies can tap into their user communities. The punchline is: no matter how big your company is, there are always more people outside of it than inside of it. If you can get all those outside people to help you out, even a [...]
Codon Devices may be the world’s first true synthetic biology company. What is synthetic biology? Is it artificial life? No. The name is misleading, but it really refers to the idea of bringing a design-based engineering approach to biology: take well-understood biological mechanisms (protein synthesis, biochemical pathways) and bend them to create new desired end [...]
Posted in Books on Jun 16th, 2005
Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion
“I have seen the future, and it lives in Miami,” says Alan Burdick of Discover magazine. Burdick, author of the recently released book Out of Eden : An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, excerpted parts of the book for Discover in May’s The Truth About Invasive Species. Unfortunately the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 13th, 2005
I recently read an article about the latest stem cell breakthrough in South Korea and it resonated with something I read about some months ago: medical tourism. Medical tourism is the practice of traveling to a cheap country with excellent doctors, typically India, in order to get uninsured medical procedures done. Tech Central Station and [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 10th, 2005
What is a Sudoku? A Sudoku (as explained here in the Wikipedia) is a number/logic puzzle that involves placing the numbers 1 through 9 on a 9-by-9 grid such that no number appears twice on the same row, column, or specially marked 3-by-3 box. Perhaps the real puzzle is why it should have become such [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 9th, 2005
I had come across David Rumsey’s historical map collection before, but this article at the
O’Reilly Network provides some nice background on how it came about.
Posted in Space on Jun 7th, 2005
For those of you who missed the recent drama on Mars, for something like a month, the rover named Opportunity has been stuck in the mud, or rather in a fine powdery rover-swallowing dust. So for five weeks it’s been sending back picture after pathetic picture like this. Fortunately it had already been on the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 3rd, 2005
Clay Shirky has posted the full text of his Ontology is Overrated talk. I mentioned this before, but now that the full text is up (including the illustrations from the PowerPoint presentation), it’s worth a read. Here is an example he brings out from the old Dewey Decimal System, which I sure remember from my [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 1st, 2005
Some blogs just go on and on about stuff that other people create, but occasionally you find a blog, like my friend Nabeel’s, where he doesn’t say too much, but every now and then he actually makes something. As it happens, Nabeel has stitched together a few services (most notably Google Maps) so that he [...]
