Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 30th, 2007
There is weirdness behind every blade of grass. We generally prefer our weirdness packaged and delivered in myths and monster movies, cloaked in comforting otherworldliness. But really, it’s right under our noses all the time. You don’t have to look far. I like how this xkcd cartoon treats the utterly bizarre concept of sleep and [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 29th, 2007
Loren Shure keeps a blog called The Art of MATLAB at the MathWorks community site (a.k.a. MATLAB Central). She’s been extra busy this week so I filled in with a guest piece for her called Calendars and Leap Years. As befits the venue, it’s a mixture of prose and the MATLAB language code that’s used [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 24th, 2007
My tent is now visible on Google Earth.
If you wanted to find the world headquarters for O’Reilly Media, you would need to go to 1005 North Gravenstein Highway North in Sebastopol, California. If you just want to take a virtual trip there, Google Maps will do just fine. If you zoom into the complex [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 23rd, 2007
McNaught was the comet that got away. I didn’t realize what a rare find it was until it was no longer visible from the northern hemisphere. Our friends down under had a better time of it. Look at this incredible image of the dying bird’s tail. My my.
Photo courtesy of the always enjoyable Astronomy Photo [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 19th, 2007
I was recently reading Sean Carroll’s excellent book on evolutionary developmental biology, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, in which he says that “brain size [in humans] roughly doubled in a million years.” This was a dramatic (and expensive) departure in the brainweight-to-bodyweight ratio compared to all other mammals. Carroll goes on to say:
The brain is a [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 18th, 2007
Today I attended Mashup Camp in Cambridge, just around the corner from MIT. I went not expecting too much. I came away thoroughly impressed.
What is it? Mashup Camp = mashup + camp. Both parts are worth a digression. So:
1. What is a mashup? A mashup happens when you add new and sometimes startling value to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 17th, 2007
If you’re like me, you are generally successful at denying the foolish position you put yourself in. You are fully aware that your hard drive could fail at any moment. You know the mayhem and suffering this event would cause. You even know that, as an imperfect product of human manufacture, your hard drive certainly [...]
Posted in Biology on Jan 12th, 2007
In the fall of 2002, MIT proudly announced its OpenCourseWare initiative. They were rightly praised at the time for putting course materials directly online and making them freely available to anyone with access to the web. I was interested in biology classes and poked around the site and came away a little disappointed. Not all [...]
Posted in Models on Jan 11th, 2007
Modeling is the word for the new millennium. I don’t think people realize how powerful it is to have an accurate computer model of whatever it is you want to build. It frees you to simulate, iterate, and optimize your design in entirely new ways. Back ten or so years, aerospace geeks (that’s me) were [...]
Posted in Books, Uncategorized on Jan 9th, 2007
Morgan Spurlock, the hefty man behind the fast food fright flick Super Size Me, has also written a companion book called Don’t Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America. Spurlock takes a dim view not only of corporate fast food purveyors but also of the American public’s ability to make sound dietary [...]
