Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 28th, 2005
Here, as found by Google video, is a lovely time lapse movie of the Miraflores locks on the Panama Canal. Watch gigantic boats take the water elevator up and down, one after another. The canal actually defines an entire class of ship: Panamax vessels are limited 106 feet in width. In the movie it is [...]
Linguists and sociologists have, for years, been making dialect maps on which are displayed, for example, those places where people would be likeliest to refer to a water fountain as a “bubbler.” Professor Bert Vaux keeps an excellent archive here on his website at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (where, strangely enough, people sip their [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 22nd, 2005
Is there a Dark Side of the Moon? Yes, the same way there’s a dark side of the Earth. It’s called night time. On the moon, night time lasts two weeks. There is, however, something more mysterious called the Far Side of the Moon. One side of the Moon always faces the Earth. It’s impressive [...]
Posted in MATLAB on Nov 16th, 2005
We had another MATLAB Programming Contest, and in terms of participation it was our biggest so far. We like contest themes that fit somehow into the zeitgeist, so the puzzle this time around was a generalized version of the notorious Sudoku puzzle genre.
Aside: if you are ever in a Sudoku-solving pickle, I’ve got just the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 15th, 2005
It is reasonably well known in this country that 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, but how many Vietnamese died during the same conflict? Estimates vary, but the number (including civilians) may be as much as 50 times larger. We feel bad about the Americans dying in Iraq, as we should, but consider that the toll [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 11th, 2005
From Rob comes the Wacked User Interface of the Week: Etsy (tagline: “Your place to buy and sell all things handmade”). I can’t help but make fun of them for being over the top, but honestly, I am impressed. This is the zaniest UI I’ve ever seen in an online app that appears to be [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 10th, 2005
I was at an entrepreneurship and innovation workshop earlier this week held at the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School. There I was lucky enough to see a presentation by the guys from SkinnyCorp who built Threadless.com. Theirs is a beautiful story of falling into the product that the market wants you [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 3rd, 2005
Quick: you’re on the fourth floor of a hotel. You want to go to the first floor, so you step into this elevator… and now which button do you press? If you’re like me, you press the big number one just below the two. It even has little triangles on either side to indicate its [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 1st, 2005
When my cousin Margaret was a little girl, her mom (my Aunt Nancy) came across a whole collection of empty popcorn boxes stuffed into the back of her sock drawer. How come? As it happened, a few weeks earlier the family had been to the circus, and when the show was over, Margaret felt so [...]
