Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Language on Sep 28th, 2007
Friend of the Star Chamber and regular commenter JMike is the guest author today. He wrote this in an email to me some time ago, and I asked him if I could post it. I’ve been meaning to put it up on the site for a while, and when I saw his recursive Billy Crystal [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 27th, 2007
I saw this over at the Popular Science blog: Consumer Reports has crash test videos for every single car ever made in the whole world. Okay, that’s probably an exaggeration, but I bet they have your car. They had mine. There’s something disturbing about watching your car get smashed, particularly if the color matches and [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 25th, 2007
I flew to Seattle last week for the Microsoft Symposium on Social Computing. The best price I got for the flight was from JetBlue. I know they hit some turbulence earlier this year, but my experience was very good. I was impressed with a few things. For one, I had never experienced live network TV [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 21st, 2007
From the Google Operating System blog I came across this: Blogger Play is a site that shows you pictures that have recently been uploaded to Blogger. It’s sort of like looking at the latest pictures on Flickr, but it’s slightly better: if you see a bizarre or intriguing picture, you can almost always work out [...]
Posted in Language on Sep 13th, 2007
We’ve had a few interesting discussions here about snowclones. Snowclone is the unlovely name given to the notion of phrasal templates, or what might be called do-it-yourself cliché kits. One of the great snowclones of our age is “X is the new black“, a construction that generalizes into “X is the new Y”.
Search engines can [...]
Posted in Games on Sep 11th, 2007
Not wasting enough time yet today? I have just the thing for you. Bloxorz is a dangerously addictive game that will exercise your spatial reasoning muscles. Not to mention your procrastination muscles. I have no idea how to pronounce Bloxorz, but then again, I don’t speak hax0r.
The idea is to roll a little brick [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Sep 10th, 2007
Many people don’t fully realize that the appeal of amateur astronomy is cerebral rather than a visual. An expensive telescope can afford you some breathtaking views of the moon as well as a nifty view of Jupiter and its satellites. Saturn is a minor thrill, and a few of the larger nebulae also make for [...]
Posted in Biology on Sep 7th, 2007
I gave a talk at the second O’Reilly Ignite Boston event tonight, and I was lucky enough to meet Hari Jayaram who was also there to present. Hari is a crystallographer at Brandeis with several Protein Data Bank entries under his belt, including the notorious coronavirus nucleocapsid of SARS fame. Along with several other friends, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 4th, 2007
Okay Matt, this one’s for you. Matt Simoneau’s parents have a funny dog named Lucky. If you mention the word “beach” to her, she does an amazing simulation of an amp-mic audio feedback squeal. Here’s the video proof.
Matt wants Lucky to unseat Miss Teen South Carolina from her throne atop the most-watched YouTube videos list. [...]
