Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 30th, 2007
If you blog, Linkify from Xenomachina is a fantastically useful tool. If you don’t, I’m not sure it’s very useful, but it’s so good at what it does it’s worth a post.
Suppose you were writing along, and you happened to mention Dizzy Gillespie and his cameo appearance in the movie Bedtime for Bonzo. In order [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 29th, 2007
Even when I don’t care much for the product of an artist’s work, I am fascinated by the process they use to create it. The stories are so often surprising: what appears simple was five years in the making, or perhaps a magnum opus arrived in one crowded week. What inspired them? How long did [...]
Posted in Biology on Mar 26th, 2007
How close are we to truly playing Dr. Frankenstein and creating life from scratch? Watch this video to the end to find out. It starts off pretty tame, but stick with it. The ending is the most profoundly disturbing tub of damp cornstarch you will ever meet. Wet cornstarch is weird stuff. Even without divine [...]
Posted in Biology on Mar 21st, 2007
Read this story and you may well conclude a robot uprising is right around the corner.
Carl Zimmer’s recent post Evolving Robotspeak describes robotics research done by social evolution researcher Laurent Keller in Switzerland. Plenty of folks have used genetic algorithms to “breed” robots, but this is the first time I’ve heard of someone using family [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 21st, 2007
Be on the lookout for a lovely young crescent moon. It was beautiful this evening, just below Venus, which is putting on a dazzling Evening Star performance for something like a two month gig here. Still, as pretty as the moon looks from down here, I was amazed by today’s Astronomy Photo of the Day. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 16th, 2007
NPR recently ran a story on missing teaspoons at a scientific institute in Australia. Spoons were vanishing at an alarming rate, and it became a question of some urgency to determine what was happening.
We’ve all heard the jokes about how washing machines send socks into another dimension. But honestly, this is just one step [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 15th, 2007
Wow, it’s hard not to love the Nietzsche Family Circus, in which a random quote from Nietzsche is paired with a random strip from Bil Keane.
The insipid blandness of Jeffy, Dolly, et al. is skewered on the angry Teuton’s spear of righteousness, BUT the pompous old Kraut’s gassy bombast is deflated by the chirpy [...]
Posted in Language on Mar 13th, 2007
The topic is Turkey and the question is: Which came first, the country or the bird? The country. But the next question is: Why should an Old World country be associated with a New World bird? The answer is the same as with so many other things in the New World: we tend to name [...]
Posted in Maps on Mar 9th, 2007
Jay Cz and my brother Tad both sent me this one: The Imperial History of the Middle East. It’s a nice idea. Watch 5000 years worth of history as it splashes paint across the Middle East.
This animated map is from a site called the Maps of War. They host a number of other interesting maps [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 8th, 2007
Here’s a video of last year’s Reno Balloon Race. I’ve seen plenty of pictures of hot-air balloons, and on occasion I’ve seen them in person, and they always struck me as docile, passive creatures. How can one balloon race another? But this time-lapse video shows just how alive they are.
Try to track just one [...]
