Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Video on Oct 31st, 2007
Time lapse videos are always fun. Here is the entire 2007 Burning Man event compressed into approximately ten minutes.
What’s fun about this video is not just seeing the blinky lights and blinding sandstorms, but also the fact that you get to see the Man burn not once but twice. When there are just under seven [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 29th, 2007
As a Boston-based blogger, I can’t let the recent events in Colorado pass without a mention. At this point, I’m just wondering if there are any more National League fields named after beer companies. Beer parks have brought good luck to the Red Sox, first in Busch Stadium in 2004 and now in Coors Field. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 26th, 2007
Carl Zimmer, the blogging science journalist, mentioned in a recent post that he has a biologist friend with a DNA tattoo on his shoulder. He went on to offer to post pictures of any scientific tattoos that people cared to send him. So many people sent him pictures that he started a Flickr photo set [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 18th, 2007
Yes, I know this is a suggestive silhouette that was no doubt created by a man. BUT: see if the visual effect does not bend your brain.
The question is very simple: is this figure, as viewed from the top, rotating clockwise or counterclockwise? If you’re like me, you’ll have an immediate and unshakable opinion on [...]
Posted in Video on Oct 15th, 2007
It makes sense to me that big pickup trucks are advertised during football games. That’s probably as concentrated a demographic as you can hope for when it comes to potential truck-buyers. And I should probably also say that I personally am not in the market for a pickup truck. Even so, I find almost all [...]
“Japetus is unique in the Solar System—you know this already, of course, but like all the astronomers of the last three hundred years, you’ve probably given it little thought. So let me remind you that Cassini—who discovered Japetus in 1671—also observed that it was six times brighter on one side of its orbit than the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 11th, 2007
Here is a video, taken from a helicopter, of a cruise ship taking a beating from massive seas.
You look at this video and you think, Good God! What must it have been like to be inside that boat?
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this kind of thing anymore, but this being the [...]
Posted in MATLAB on Oct 9th, 2007
Tim O’Reilly likes to quote William Gibson when he describes his approach to predicting the future: “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” In other words, if you can just find the people (O’Reilly calls them alpha geeks) who are leading the way, you can serve yourself a tasty slice of future [...]
Posted in Autism & Jay on Oct 4th, 2007
Every year around this time, just as the leaves are starting to change color up here in New England, I put on my fundraising hat and try to convince you to give some of your money to help rid the world of a disease that my son has. It helps to have a cute picture [...]
Posted in Biology on Oct 3rd, 2007
Among the last of a proud breed, this Castanea dentata, or American chestnut, stands alone in a Kentucky field. It is one of the very few mature flowering chestnuts that has so far eluded the fungal disease known as chestnut blight. What you see in the picture is a tree so valuable that it is [...]
