Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Discussions of the relative merits of intelligent design and natural selection fill endless web pages, but it strikes me that these discussions consistently overlook the nature of design itself. Intelligent design happens all the time; we may disagree on whether God or pasta-themed deities design, but we can at least agree that humans do it.
But [...]
Posted in Biology on Nov 28th, 2006
Video blogs are getting more and more interesting. This one, My JoVE, isn’t really a blog so much as a repository of valuable information for biologists, but it aspires to become a kind of video journal. JoVE stands for Journal of Visualized Experiments, and they’re trying to attack two big problems in biological research: “low [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 24th, 2006
If you’ve seen Line Rider, then you’ll enjoy this.
If you haven’t seen Line Rider, then you’ll enjoy this. There are stacks of these videos on YouTube. Who knew this guy was launching a franchise?
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 21st, 2006
Now this is why I read blogs: Paul Docherty is head-over-heels in love with chemical synthesis and wants to tell you all about it. And I want him to tell me about it. His blog, TotallySynthetic.com is crackling with enthusiasm and filled with lovely diagrams and little stories that report on the latest news in [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 17th, 2006
Popular Science magazine also hosts a blog, and it’s got a bunch of fun stuff on it. I had always thought of the old school Popular Science as a pretty silly magazine, mostly about hyped up quasi-science fluff. But it’s gotten a lot better over the last few years, and their blog is so entertaining [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 14th, 2006
I don’t know if you buy into the Web 2.0 meme, but I do. There’s an amazing amount of good stuff to keep up with these days. It’s getting ever easier to create, package, route, re-package, re-route, and consume information. Mashups, those unanticipated combinations of multiple websites, were a good indication that things were getting [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 10th, 2006
Recently I watched the movie Touching the Void the story of two British climbers who have a really wretched experience climbing a mountain in the Andes. A friend of mine, who is a climber, had told me that this was the climbing movie that gets climbing right. This statement intrigued me, because climbing [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 9th, 2006
Twice a year, I help run a MATLAB programming contest in which contestants try to write the fastest code to solve a math puzzle, using a resource any work done by previously submitted entries. In other words, you’re welcome to steal from those who came before you. It’s a free intellectual property open source barbecue. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 7th, 2006
My friend Steve is not only an image processing wizard with a book title under his belt, he’s also a chess player. He is modest about his mad chess skillz, but he has done something unquestionably useful for the chess community in creating a nifty chess diagram widget. Written in PHP, it lets you use [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 3rd, 2006
When I was at Foo Camp last summer, I heard Philip Rosedale, the founder of the 3-D virtual world Second Life, describe how this community has not only virtual newspapers to serve its citizens, but paper versions too. They were handing out free copies copies. I picked up a tabloid that advertised stores and tourist [...]
