Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Biology on Sep 29th, 2006
A few years ago, PBS ran a series called, simply, DNA. It included some of the spiciest, most inspiring animations of biological molecules in action that I’d ever seen. I longed to linger over them and savor them, but they came and went so fast in the show, and until this evening I had no [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 26th, 2006
The game Assassin, as Wikipedia helpfully puts it, is a “live-action role playing game” where every player is trying to kill other players until only one remains. Unlike a card game or the round-the-table Werewolf game popular at Foo Camp, Assassin can span many days and include dozens of people. That means it collides with [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 25th, 2006
I recently bought NaturallySpeaking, a program that does voice-to-text speech recognition. It’s owned by Nuance now, but the Dragon Systems technology has been bought and sold multiple times since work started on it in the 1980s. The latest versions (I bought Preferred version 9) have been getting consistently good reviews and I have a lot [...]
Posted in Biology on Sep 22nd, 2006
The Public Library of Science has the laudable goal of making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. In the current sclerotic journal system, the flow of money greatly impedes the flow of information, and important scientific results are locked away behind expensive subscriptions. If you’re inside the privileged White Coat [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 18th, 2006
I was bidding for some software on eBay this weekend (new, unopened, never registered). I had the winning bid for a long time and just as the auction ended I was outbid and lost the auction. Fair enough… that’s life on eBay. Sniping happens all the time. What made the story more interesting is that [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 15th, 2006
I’ve spoken to several people who really liked the airplane flight visualizations that I linked to here and here. The patterns are so beautiful that they are practically aching to be put into the hands of an artist. That artist is among us, and his name is Aaron Koblin. Via peterme I found out about [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 14th, 2006
Tian over at What Tian Has Learned pointed out this funny skit from an Australian comedy show. The premise: just what are those dishes that you can only order from the Chinese side of the menu? As the waiter in the skit says, “Only Chinese people order that. You don’t like it.”
Watch the clip [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 12th, 2006
I’ve been slow to sort through my Foo Camp notes, partly because it was such an overwhelming experience, and partly because so many of the people from Foo Camp are famous and prolific A-list bloggers. What can I possibly add to the story that they have already blogged about in such detail? Well, of course [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 6th, 2006
You’ve heard of landscape architecture. Now get ready for the architected landscape. My brother-in-law Craig Pleasants is an artist who has worked on sculptures at an architectural scale. With years of experience to draw on, he’s now turning the idea of architectural sculpture into a business opportunity with a site called sculptorhouse.com. The picture shown [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 5th, 2006
I’m just back from a week’s vacation at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Between vacation and Foo Camp, it’s been a hectic couple of weeks, but things should be getting back to normal now. I mention the vacation because, at a stop for dinner on the way up, I happened to notice this dealership sign: [...]
