Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 26th, 2006
There’s a song that’s driving you crazy. You keep humming it, but you can’t remember the name of it. If you have reasonably good pitch, you can use the Parsons code to work it out on the Musipedia site. All you need to do is say whether each note was higher or lower than the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 23rd, 2006
This is a sign of the times: Google’s Gmail has finally gotten around to putting a “delete” button in their interface. Up to this time, they had deliberately made it hard to delete email because they were trying to encourage a new philosophical approach to email: don’t delete it, archive it. Disk space is cheap, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 19th, 2006
I’ve got some bad news for you. The British Library has a special online exhibit called
Turning the Pages, and it’s designed to suck hours out of your day.
Honestly, they’re really onto something with this exhibit. Here’s a problem that famous libraries have with their Beautiful Old Books: all the really good stuff, they don’t want [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 13th, 2006
Conversations want to happen, and so they will happen just about anywhere people come in contact. As a case in point, the comment threads on this blog sometimes take on a life of their own. I’ve had a few spectacularly long comment threads. The one that’s been cooking most recently is the Goth-related thread over [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 12th, 2006
This is an unvarnished cry for help. I use a PC running the latest Windows XP. Ten feet away from me, my wife uses a PC running the latest Windows XP. Both of our computers are connected to the net through an old (but solid) LinkSys router. The printer (an HP PSC 2110 All-in-One) is [...]
Posted in Biology on Jan 6th, 2006
The Scientist web site has gone live with a new look, and as a result they’re making the entire site freely available for a few days. The bad news is that they will snatch this boon back under their subscriber walls in a few days. The good news is that their current cover story happens [...]
Posted in Language on Jan 5th, 2006
The old Roman patron saint of January was Janus, the god of thresholds and transitions. In honor of Old Twoface, today’s special word is “contranym.” A contranym, sometimes called a “Janus word,” can take on either of two opposite meanings. One of the nicest examples is “fast,” a word with the nautical connotation of being [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 3rd, 2006
This is sort of a follow-up to my Wiki Effect post a few days ago, but I happened across this like-minded commentary by David Weinberger entitled Why the media can’t get Wikipedia right. I agree with what he has to say, and his Anti-Executive Summary at the top of the article made me laugh out [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 2nd, 2006
Happy New Year!
When a one year ends and another begins, pundits feel compelled to opine about the next big thing. I almost always find these predictions tedious and off base. Worse even than this is the speculative fiction that imagines what it will be to wake up ten years in the future, floating cars, police [...]
