Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 31st, 2005
Hey, you want to read a fun book review? Read this review by Cosma Shalizi about Stephen Wolfram’s massive monument to himself, A New Kind of Science. The review is long, but it’s packed with lots of good information, and believe me, you’ve never read a review about a physics book that dishes quite like [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 26th, 2005
My friend and erstwhile co-worker Nabeel is getting deep into the Google Map hacking these days, and for his latest trick he’s come up with a real winner. His GeoIndex tool takes the stock performance for each company in the S&P 500 and puts it onto a map of the US. Little green and red [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 21st, 2005
Quick, how many airplanes are airborne in US airspace at the busiest time of the day? Answer: just over 5000 (that’s IFR airborne aircraft for you aeronautical sticklers out there). Next question: how many airplanes are in the air RIGHT NOW? Answer: go ask the insane detail-obsessed people who put together FlightAware. They’ll not only [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 19th, 2005
Newsflash: I know from my logs that people have been trying (unsuccessfully) to leave comments. I was puzzled for a while, but I believe the problem is fixed now. We’ll see if the new version of Movable Type has good spam controls.
In the meantime, if my blog gave you the comment cold shoulder, please accept [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 19th, 2005
I’m doing the big switch from one web host to another (from Interland to ImHosted.com). From where I sit, the nameservers are already pointing people to my new site, so that part’s good. At the same time, I upgraded my Movable Type installation to version 3.2. It seems pretty good so far, but man what [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 14th, 2005
When a buggy thing gives you the creeps, what’s going on? They’re perfectly reasonable (and very successful) creatures. Why cringe? If your skin crawls, is it because you imagine bugs literally crawling across you? Or is it the totally alien nature of their buggy bodies compared to ours? Their endlessly varied spines and hairs, their [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 12th, 2005
Planarity.net is a nifty game I found on LifeHacker tonight. You just shift around network nodes until the lines are all uncrossed. The good news is that you can easily play it over and over and over. I’ll let you guess the bad news. Like Sudoku puzzles, it’s a breeze to teach a computer how [...]
There’s something beautifully disturbing about Saturn’s moon Hyperion. It looks like the kind of place H.P. Lovecraft would write about. Check out this Astronomy Picture of the Day as snapped by our robot friend Cassini.
I love getting postcards from other planets. We need more robots and fewer astronauts!
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 10th, 2005
The Red Sox are done for 2005 - cooked in three quick games. The pain of elimination, one year after winning it all, is nothing like that same pain in years past. It is nothing remotely like the pain of the 2003 post-season, in which some demon scripted a particularly cruel eleventh-hour defeat at the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 7th, 2005
I’m obsessed with LibraryThing, and there’s a good chance, if you’re much of a book person, you will be obsessed with it too. LibraryThing is a service that lets you build your own virtual library online. As such, you can use it to represent your real bookshelf, books you wish you owned, or even the [...]
