Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 31st, 2006
I am a grinder and a clencher. Are you?
I wish I weren’t, but once I fall asleep, all the dentist’s good advice fades away, and the bruxism commences. This can lead to temporomandibular dysphoria (i.e. jaw pain). Pardon the language, but this dental jargon is too much fun. It gets much better up ahead. Anyway, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 28th, 2006
YouTube seems to be taking off as the de facto way of sharing short videos. I’ve used them here a few times before, and I’ve been very impressed with how easy it is to embed video in a blog post. Now, from the heart of Media ContentLand, here’s the Hollywood Reporter on the fascinating love/hate [...]
Posted in Jay Cz on Mar 23rd, 2006
Have you seen the Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager yet? It’s the product of the prolific and masterful Martin Wattenberg and his wife and baby name consultant Laura Wattenberg (she maintains an entertaining baby name blog). Martin is a scientist/artist at IBM Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We were actually lucky enough to have him give [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 22nd, 2006
Have you ever been flying over some remarkable landmark or unusual-looking city and wondered: what is that? I’ve always wanted, as I stared out from my window seat, an easy way to answer the question “What place is that?” or “Why are those big buildings all arranged like that over there?” Sometimes, on transcontinental or [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 17th, 2006
I’m betting that in the last two weeks somebody sent you a link to the video of the guy who juggles to Beatles music. In case you are one of the people who missed this gawk-and-forward juggernaut, here it is. Chris Bliss juggles continuously throughout the entire “Golden Slumbers” medley from Abbey Road. It’s a [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 14th, 2006
Today is a good day to give thanks for pi, the magical ratio without which circles would be lumpy misshapen things, wheels would clunk-clunk-clunk, and ball bearings would look like raisins. Pi was invented in 1737 by a Welsh typesetter named Samuel P. Maddock who was in need of a rounder letter O than had [...]
Posted in Maps on Mar 10th, 2006
One of the nifty things you can do with Google maps is grab them and move them around, sliding along a road, for example, until you come to your destination. The continuity gives you the sense that you’re actually looking at a single giant physical map, a map so big that it would cover the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 8th, 2006
I’ve been amazed to see how quickly web video has transitioned from novelty to mainstream. So often now interesting links come along with video. Here’s the latest, an electric pack mule.
When I read that Boston Dynamics had made a stable robot quadruped, I was intrigued enough to follow the link and look at the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 3rd, 2006
When I was in high school, I spent one summer working a NASA Langley Research Center as part of something called the SHARP program (Summer High School Apprenticeship Research Program). Basically, I got a really cool minimum wage job for the summer working on experimental airplanes. For the most part, it was a makework program [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 2nd, 2006
From Bruce Nussbaum’s design blog I followed a link to metacool, a blog by IDEO “design thinker” Diego Rodriguez. The link that caught my eye was this one about the designer’s commentary for the Honda Ridgeline pickup, something analogous to the director’s commentary on a DVD. One of my peeves is people who talk about [...]
