Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 28th, 2005
Craig Venter has finally gone public with his latest venture, synthetic genomics, inc. Just as with the synthetic biology company Codon Devices, there’s not much specific information about what they plan to do, but the non-specific version of the story is that they want to make (!) a simple bacterium by subtracting circuitry from it, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 26th, 2005
This is definitely cool, but I can’t decide if it’s simply cool in a retro backwards-looking kind of way. PressDisplay lets you read 225 newspapers from 55 countries as though you had the actual paper spread in front of you. They’ve got a nifty interface that lets you flip through paper, almost to the point [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 22nd, 2005
Bathsheba Grossman is a sculptor who sculpts with a computer. She makes mathematical models of 3-D objects that never were, and then prints them in three dimensions using new solid printers. In every age, artists are enabled by technology, and a new age is dawning for sculptors like Grossman. Two things are new here. First, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 20th, 2005
The British drive on the left; Americans drive on the right. Simple enough. Since you can’t drive directly from here to there, you don’t have to worry about switching in mid-road somewhere. The Channel Tunnel goes from England to France (where they drive on the right), but you don’t actually drive through the tunnel, so [...]
Posted in Books on Jul 18th, 2005
One of my favorite books of all time, Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Cox, went out of print soon after it was published in 1989. A friend of mine happened to own a copy, but when I went to buy one for myself, only expensive collectors’ editions could be [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 14th, 2005
Interesting things afoot in radio these days. Boston folks may remember talkshow host Christopher Lydon from his old show “The Connection” (which still exists, only without him). He feuded with his host station WBUR and was shown the door. He has wandered in the wilderness for a few years, maintaining a part-time blog at Harvard [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 12th, 2005
One of the standard birthday gifts you can get for someone, particularly as they start to get a little, er, older, is a scrapbook of what happened the year they were born, or a fake newspaper of events that happened on the day they were born. But really, who cares what was going on when [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 7th, 2005
Talkr (their tagline is “Letting blogs speak for themselves”) is a site that lets you listen to popular blogs being read to you. The catch is that it’s not a person reading, but a computer. If your idea of computer-generated voice is the Speak & Spell toy from the 1980s, you can be forgiven for [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 5th, 2005
I just got back from a week’s vacation on the beaches of North Carolina, and no sooner had I squeezed my family into a Boston cab at Logan airport than a right-of-way squabble broke out. My driver, who turned out to be an affable Nigerian gentleman, was trying to work left into a lane owned [...]
