Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 30th, 2007
The Nikon Small World contest for microscopic photography has become a perennial source of delicious eye candy. Go and behold the lovely and extravagant micropornographic images. The official judging is over, although the winners are as yet announced. But you can still vote to select a “crowd favorite.”
Posted in Biology on Jul 27th, 2007
In the continuing series of strange animal vs. animal YouTube videos, here is one from the Seattle Aquarium. Poor little octopus. Sitting defenseless in a tank full of sharks. Poor little guy.
I suppose that if sharks made their own version of a movie like Jaws, it would be called Eight Legs. “Just when you thought [...]
Posted in Maps on Jul 25th, 2007
I happened to spot these items in the same week, and it seemed a fairly obvious leap to mash them even further. Item number one is a heat map of rent and room availability in San Francisco: CraigStats. This is something that Zillow has been doing for a while, but CraigStats contains detailed information about [...]
Posted in Biology on Jul 24th, 2007
Freeman Dyson, the physicist, provocateur, and one-time colleague of Richard Feynman, has written a piece for the New York Review of Books called Our Biotech Future, and boy is it a doozy. This is no timid prediction about curing the common cold or even avoiding the next plague. It’s a full-on embrace of a bio-kaleidoscopic [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 18th, 2007
… and why is he being such a jerk?
Watch this. It’s remarkable what you can fit in a two minute video.
“Maybe I came on too strong… I don’t know.”
Posted in Books on Jul 17th, 2007
I can happily recommend Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, although it did strike me as longer than it needed to be. The book, about our food economy, features reporting, analysis, and some self-indulgent introspection. I enjoyed the reporting, in which he details trips into the heart of America’s industrial food-making machine. I was surprised, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 13th, 2007
The Atlantic has a great article by James Fallows this month called China Makes, the World Takes. Unfortunately it’s behind a subscription wall. But there is a free slideshow narrated by Fallows which pretty much gives you the gist of the article. In a nutshell: China’s manufacturing output is stupefyingly vast, but not only that, [...]
Posted in Maps on Jul 12th, 2007
I’m very impressed with the latest wrinkle over at Google Maps. They have solved one of the last remaining problems with computer-generated directions: often you are given a suggested route that is just stupid. Sometimes I want to thump the screen and say “Are you nuts? I’m not going to drive through the middle of [...]
Posted in Video on Jul 9th, 2007
I was away for a week of vacation, so my apologies for the comments getting untidy. My vacation was an extended family beach trip, and as one or two of the people there read my blog from time to time, I did some market research. This is what I learned: the things I blog about [...]
