Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 28th, 2008
Via O’Reilly Radar I came across this video by Johnny Lee on DIY Multitouch with the Wiimote. Johnny Chung Lee is a graduate student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He’s a gifted hacker who realized that you can do a lot more with the Nintendo Wii remote than play games with [...]
Posted in Wiki on Feb 25th, 2008
If you don’t read the comments here, you may have missed the wonderful thing that Mary Beth did last week. After a brief discussion here about how all knowledge is a web search away once you remember to formulate the question, she went out and researched a topic that had mystified her for many years: [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 21st, 2008
Here’s another one of those semantic distance stories: how long does it take to formulate the right question when you just know the answer is out there somewhere? One of the various obscure records* in my house when I was growing up was Songs & Sounds of the Sea. It was a collection of sea [...]
Posted in Biology on Feb 15th, 2008
Do you suppose, if your house was knocked over by Hurricane Fifi, that you might feel more slighted than if the same damage had been done by a storm with a more muscular name? Generals have long understood the value of giving their military operations intimidating names like Rolling Thunder and Urgent Fury. If you [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 12th, 2008
On the subject of libraries, Boswell quotes Samuel Johnson thus: “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.” What would Johnson make of the web? I think about this quote whenever I reflect on the fact that, to a fair approximation, all human [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 11th, 2008
As long as we’re talking about environmentalism and eco-tainment, I watched some of Six Degrees Could Change the World on the National Geographic Channel tonight (I sure do watch a lot more National Geographic and Discovery programming since I got a high-definition TV). The show is all about the dramatic damage that a few degrees [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 8th, 2008
I added my animations to the explanation page for my Sky Clock and made a few small changes to the clock page. If you want to find your own latitude and longitude, I now link to Simon Willison’s excellent getlatlon.com. As I was poking around for a good mapping site to find global coordinates, I [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 5th, 2008
In a magazine with the unlikely title What Is Enlightenment, I came across an excellent review of the politics of the Green movement in America. The article, A Brighter Shade of Green: Rebooting Environmentalism for the 21st Century by Ross Robertson, touches on some history and the current diversity of opinions among Greens. In the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 2nd, 2008
Whatever your opinion of curious ceremonies involving certain celebrated shade-bestowing rodents, I nevertheless wish you a happy Groundhog Day. Shadow or not, Spring is just over there and it’s headed this way.
