Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 28th, 2006
Online video is finally here in force. It’s been predicted for years, but people aren’t replacing their television consumption with TV on the Internet. The preferred format on the net, whether it’s a matter of bandwidth or simply limited attention span (brain bandwidth), is a small video clip a few minutes long. Within that timeframe, [...]
Posted in Alan K on Feb 23rd, 2006
Just because you can do something, does that mean you can teach it? Ever had a professor who you knew was brilliant, but was nevertheless feebly inarticulate when it came to helping you understand why the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality was so freaking important?
Doing is one skill, and teaching is another, and the intersection of the two [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 21st, 2006
Several years ago I went to New Orleans just before Mardi Gras. Remembering that Mardi Gras is coming up again (Fat Tuesday is February 28th this year), I wondered how well New Orleans was going to rise to the occasion. There’s plenty of brave talk about the show going on, and Lord knows they need [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 17th, 2006
It’s a fairly common thing for technology gurus to bemoan the backwards state of the computer interface world by saying things like “It’s the 21st century, and I still have to use a mouse and a keyboard to look at my data?! When will this madness end?” Typically people who say this don’t offer alternatives, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 16th, 2006
Quick: which is more important? Reason or wonder?
Don’t tell me you need more information… just answer the question. Which is more important? And which is more powerful? They clearly have a tangled relationship. Science fiction authors and scientists are always quoting each other. Arthur C. Clarke, quoting himself, famously conflated magic and technology: “Any sufficiently [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 13th, 2006
It’s much easier to be married for a short time than it is to be married for a long time. My parents were married on September 3rd, 1948 and they remain married to this day. That puts them in rare company. New York photographer Robert Fass was inspired by his own long-married parents to do [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 9th, 2006
I would have bet good money that this kind of fluid simulation wouldn’t have been practical for another few years. This is a link to the gallery of movie clips at Scanline, which appears to be a German computer visual effects company. What they have to show off are various kinds of liquids in motion, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 6th, 2006
Here’s some advice that might’ve done you some good yesterday: I’m going to tell you how to beat your fellow football party-goers when you play that choose-a-square gambling game. If I’ve already lost you, here’s the story in a nutshell… Most football games are boring. So you have to throw money at losing-odds gambling games [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 3rd, 2006
Point Celestron’s SkyScout gadget at a bright spot in the sky, press a button, and it tells you what sort of object you’re looking at, be it moon, planet, star, or galaxy (I wonder if it has a “That’s the sun you idiot!” response). It’s based on GPS and some other undisclosed magic, and it [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 2nd, 2006
Groundhog day is one of my favorite holidays. Not because of the antics of our rodent friend Marmota monax, but rather because the northern hemisphere is filling up with light again. We are halfway from solstice to equinox, having made it through the dark passage. Congratulations!
