Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology.
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 31st, 2006
Roy sent me this one: a radio-controlled airplane with a difference. Here is a guy who modified his model plane to include not just a camera but a wireless video link so he can see what the plane sees as he flies. If you’ve ever tried to fly a model airplane, you know that it [...]
Posted in MATLAB on Oct 26th, 2006
I’ve been spending a fair amount of time playing around with JavaScript these days. As the backbone of the Web 2.0 Ajax technology, homely old JavaScript is finally having its moment in the sun. Ajax gets all the press, but I think bookmarklets are loveliest little JavaScript tools around. Bookmarklets (also called favelets in deference [...]
Posted in Autism & Jay, Uncategorized on Oct 20th, 2006
Last Sunday we (along with several thousand others) had a great morning for our Autism Speaks walk along the Charles River in Cambridge. I want to acknowledge everyone who walked and everyone who supported the walk by donating to the Autism Speaks research fund. For the second year in a row, this included two teams [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 17th, 2006
This short video is making the rounds, but it really is a terrific film. When we see the glamorous beauty portrayed in ads and movies, it’s easy to forget what a construction it is. This industrial beauty is a thing built by many skilled artisans across a significant period of time. As long as we [...]
Dogma is a funny word to appear so prominently in a science like biology. Any picture, any model, any theory currently in vogue is resting on the shifting sands of biological weirdness. I love, for instance, the fact that the Nobel Prize in medicine this year was awarded for major form of genetic regulation that [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 13th, 2006
Look at this satellite view of central Niger. Zoom out, and then zoom out some more, and you’ll eventually see that you’re staring at a vast expanse of the trackless and empty Sahara. Except for this historical footnote: at the very center of this map stood, for several decades, a single tree, as well known [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 12th, 2006
The Boston Globe did a story yesterday called Healing the Body to Reach the Soul. It’s part of a series on faith-based initiatives called “Exporting Faith.” On the front page it had this picture, taken from a brochure published by a non-denominational Christian organization, of Jesus guiding the hand of a surgeon in the operating [...]
Posted in Autism & Jay on Oct 10th, 2006
Every fall, my family participates in a fund-raising walk to support autism research. My seven year old son Jay is severely autistic and unable to talk. When we tell people he can’t talk, they often assume that he must still understand things fairly well, but this is not the case. Sometimes I want to explain [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 6th, 2006
I need your help on this one. Is this a feature or a terrible omen for our deranged times? HP has introduced a digital camera effect called the slimming feature. Here’s their ad copy on the topic. They say cameras add ten pounds, but HP digital cameras can help reverse that effect. The slimming feature, [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Oct 5th, 2006
I’ve been on a good run with free software lately. As part of some recent work I’ve been doing with my Sky Clock, I wanted to check my accuracy against a web site that showed the current sky. Was Saturn where I said it should be? As part of my Google search for such a [...]
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