Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 29th, 2007
Hey, I just noticed my old pal Mike O. has revived his blog (Industry!) from its state of suspended animation. He just posted the video of an oddball Tootsie Pop commercial that I also remember from childhood. When seen through my 21st century lens, it seems strangely edgy. What’s up with that blind fox? Right [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 27th, 2007
I recommend this series of lectures by the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins. He delivered the lectures at Stanford, and they’re now hosted at the Social Innovation Conversations site.
Energy Efficiency in Transportation
Energy Efficiency in Industry
Energy Efficient Design For Buildings
I first came across these lectures on Jon Udell’s blog. Udell does a good job of [...]
Posted in Video on Nov 20th, 2007
I like soccer, and I don’t know much about rugby, but this is a funny video.
The slow-motion drama queen falls, the poor-me childlike appeals to mommy—I mean the referee—it all starts to make you wonder. If soccer players are so tough (which I don’t dispute), why do they come off like such babies?
It occurs [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Nov 16th, 2007
The latest version of Google Earth now has a projection of the sky built into called, fittingly, Google Sky. It’s a natural extension. We’ve got lots of pictures of the starry sky, so why not stick them all together using the Google Earth glue that already exists. But when I tried it for the first [...]
Did you know that the Japanese have a space ship orbiting the Moon right now? Known variously as SELENE or Kaguya, it is, as we speak, floating around the Moon, taking gorgeous high definition video. So much of our mental imagery of the lunar landscape is based on Apollo video from the early 1970s, grainy [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 9th, 2007
On the heels of TwitterVision and FlickrVision comes WikipediaVision, a real-time Google Maps mashup that shows where edits to the online encyclopedia are occurring: that is, where in the encyclopedia and where in the world. Wikirage (rhymes with “vicarage”) does a good job of showing what pages are most actively under revision, but WikipediaVision has [...]
Posted in Biology on Nov 7th, 2007
I came across this Andy Grove interview in Newsweek in which he is complaining bitterly about the pharmaceutical industry. The piece begins with the statement that during the time that former CEO Grove spent at Intel, “the number of transistors on a chip went from about 1,000 to almost 10 billion.” And I thought to [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Nov 5th, 2007
I had read that Comet Holmes had brightened dramatically, but I am suspicious of the word “dramatic” when used by astronomers. The events they describe are undoubtedly dramatic, but the images they describe are often tiny smudges even when observed through a big fancy-pants telescope. So I was pleased tonight when I finally had a [...]
