Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 30th, 2005
To what extent is your life just a sequence of tricks, shortcuts, and workarounds that you’ve learned over time?
The term “life hacks” is being used these days to describe discrete techniques and heuristics that can make you more productive and (sometimes) happier. As the author of an upcoming book entitled Life Hacks, Danny O’Brien, says, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 29th, 2005
Give a meme a name and it just might take off. By way of Jon Udell, I discovered that Dave Winer has given a name to my preferred feed reading technique: river of news. The basic idea is this. If you’re going to look at a bunch of little text items like RSS feed snippets, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 27th, 2005
I am fairly certain this is the kind of thing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act frowns upon. If the War on Terrorism has got you down, here’s a way to let your furry friends keep you up-to-date without freaking you out. The guy behind geek and proud has created a dandy Terror Alert Level indicator [...]
Posted in Biology on Sep 22nd, 2005
I knew it would come to this: dirt is officially good for you. The “hygiene hypothesis” has received another shot in the arm in a recent talk by Professor Peter Openshaw of Imperial College, London: How ‘Dirt’ Could Educate The Immune System And Help Treat Asthma.
What is the hygiene hypothesis? It’s the idea that being [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 19th, 2005
Posted in Autism & Jay on Sep 15th, 2005
Hey! It’s that time of year again when I ask friends and family to reach for their checkbooks and consider supporting autism research on behalf of my son Jay’s team. Jay’s team will be walking as part of the Walk Far for NAAR fundraising effort.
I’ve written various things about Jay in the past, but this [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 14th, 2005
I have never seen the aurora borealis, but I want to.
I live in Boston, which is far enough north for this not to be a crazy goal, but still, you have to be looking in the right place at the right time (often at an outrageous time of night) to be rewarded with a view [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 12th, 2005
Several years ago I visited the website for a company called Experts Exchange, a company that brokers information exchange between computer system specialists. As I typed in the URL, I realized something that must have been plaguing their marketing department right about then: one look at the URL www.expertsexchange.com, and your brain fishes out the [...]
Posted in MATLAB on Sep 8th, 2005
I get excited about the MATLAB Programming Contest that we run at The MathWorks because it’s such a cool and compelling window on how groups of humans work together to build complicate things. As such, it’s a sort of greenhouse model for some important trends in the modern infosphere, including open source programming and wikis. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 6th, 2005
When I lived in San Francisco, my car (a sleek white 1979 Chevette) got broken into twice. The second time it happened, all they really got was my overnight bag with all my clothes in it. I was lucky that’s all there was to it, but even so, aside from the nasty sense of violation [...]
