Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 31st, 2006
If you want to do cutting-edge science, you need access to cutting-edge data. Exciting new data is generally expensive to acquire and therefore closely guarded. Naturally whoever pays for the data wants to get the first crack at the fame-generating discoveries thereby engendered. You probably could have figured out, for instance, that Jupiter had a [...]
Posted in Maps on Jul 28th, 2006
I mentioned Zillow’s real estate heat maps here several weeks ago: Zillow calculates and then maps the cost per square foot of houses in Seattle and San Francisco. Well
they’re back, and this time they brought friends. Now they’ve added New York and Boston and some other cities to the list.
Mostly something like this tells [...]
Posted in Models on Jul 25th, 2006
People are starting to get used to the fact that unmanned aircraft, or UAVs in military parlance (for unmanned air vehicle), are being used quite a lot these days, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Generally it’s in a nonlethal spying mode, but the occasional UCAV makes an appearance, where C stands for Combat. What’s counterintuitive [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 21st, 2006
Now that the World Cup is over, we can finally get some respite from that quadrennial scourge, the op-ed piece on why Americans don’t like soccer. It’s an editorial staple, a lazy space-filler that practically writes itself: Americans need high scores! We need commercial breaks so we can pee and get more Budweiser out of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 19th, 2006
I saw this one a while back, and for some time I thought I wouldn’t post it, but it’s just too funny. Rude, but funny. Consider yourself warned. The topic under discussion is how one might effectively introduce an earnest visitor from Japan to the urban vernacular on, say, the mean streets of Oakland, California. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 13th, 2006
A biome is a distinctive ecosystem well-adapted for a specific geographic region and climate: tundra, taiga, savanna, your mouth. Ecosystems, it turns out, are complex, well-adapted, and crowded even as you get into teeny tiny biomes like your mouth, your stomach, and your butt. Colon! I meant to say colon. Sorry about that.
Anyway, the point [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 10th, 2006
I’m back from a week’s vacation at the beach in North Carolina. I got home with enough daylight to give me time for a run along the Charles River near my home. The run gave me a chance to recalibrate myself to the local culture. For a week I had been in a place where [...]
