Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Video on Jan 31st, 2008
You know who would love YouTube? Wile E. Coyote would love YouTube. Take a look at the rocket boots in this video. Life imitates art. What are the odds that the Acme Company makes those little turbines? And there’s something very Coyote-like about the fact that he’s using hot water bottles for his fuel tanks. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 28th, 2008
For the last year, my oldest brother and his wife have been participating in a weekly civic protest of the war in Iraq. Up here in the Boston area, you’re unusual if you’re not protesting the war and making fun of George Bush (just ask Mitt Romney), but in a small town in red-state North [...]
Posted in Space on Jan 25th, 2008
One of my new favorite sites is Riding with Robots on the High Frontier. I have always liked NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, but I tend to filter out the deep space stuff. Nebula, shmebula. I want to see something in this solar system. Too many parsecs spoils the soup. Riding with Robots is [...]
Which word is more colorful: color or colour? If you’re American, do you ever color your “colors” with an occasional “U” to lend your prose a sense of savoir faire? At any rate, have you ever wondered where the U went? A lovely blog called COLOURlovers addresses this question with an informative post called Color [...]
Posted in Biology on Jan 17th, 2008
Want to buy a slightly used genome? Back in 2000, Craig Venter and Francis Collins (and Bill Clinton) announced the completion of “the” human genome. Not to take anything away from that achievement, but genomes are just as varied as humans. Whose genome was the human genome? Or to come at it from another direction: [...]
Posted in Language on Jan 14th, 2008
Good stories always trump facts. A good story is like brain glue. It stabilizes loose piles of memory inventory, thereby relieving some of your mental strain. This is why we have famous people say the things they should have said: because your brain is always trying to relax. For example, did Galileo, while being tried [...]
Posted in Wiki on Jan 11th, 2008
One of the nice things about Wikipedia is the fact that you can go to it for information about new cultural trends. Want to know what a flash mob is? How about Leetspeak… what’s that? Wikipedia can tell you, with reasonable accuracy and long before more sober references chime in. Still, even Wikipedia has its [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 9th, 2008
Back in August, I posted something about a nifty 3-D printing product called the Desktop Factory. Commenter Doug Moore made the following wisecrack: I have a better way to save money on a 3-D printer… just print a 3-D printer and then return the original to the store. Yes yes, ha-ha and all that, but [...]
Posted in Video on Jan 7th, 2008
After the busy December holiday season, I wanted to get back in the blogging saddle last week. But as I was sitting down to write late last Thursday night, a pipe burst in our house (we were in the middle of a nasty New England cold snap). It could have been much worse: my wife [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 2nd, 2008
If history is written by self-flattering victors, then ambiguous and unfortunate battles are in danger of being forgotten altogether. We Americans never tire of the story of D-Day, of the great carnage on the beaches of Normandy that eventually put Allied troops across the Rhine and into the heart of Germany. But what do we [...]
