Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 27th, 2008
I was late to the Airplane on a Treadmill party, so maybe you were too. Not since the famous Monty Hall and the Goat problem has so much hot air been generated by an online puzzler. Stated briefly, here is the problem:
Imagine a plane is sitting on a massive conveyor belt, as wide and as [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 24th, 2008
From my earliest TV-watching years, I remember we had a movable antenna on the roof that you could orient based on which channel you wanted to watch. You had your pick of three or four channels, depending on your appetite for static and snow.
By the time we got cable TV, thereby enabling our local PBS [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 20th, 2008
I’ve started following the BotJunkie blog for fun stories and videos about robots. It reminds me how close I came to a career in robotics. I like the blog’s tag line: “From the folks who brought you OhGizmo.com, BotJunkie obsessively chronicles Man’s inevitable descent into cybernetic slavery.”
BotJunkie has plenty of weird stuff like snake-like locomotion [...]
Posted in Biology on Mar 18th, 2008
I just finished reading Sean Carroll’s book The Making of the Fittest. Subtitled “DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution”, it’s the follow-on book to Endless Forms Most Beautiful. In this book Carroll devotes several chapters to demonstrating how, against our natural intuition, there really is enough time (given a few hundred million years) [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 13th, 2008
Got a 1938 Action Comics #1 sitting in a box in the attic? It might be worth half a million dollars. I learned that last Saturday.
My son recently turned nine, and at his birthday party I happened to be talking to another parent, talking the party talk, as one does. Talkety-talk-talk. What sort of work [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 10th, 2008
No blogging last week because the pestilence, by which I mean the dread stomach bug, went through my house last week like a big stinky freight train.
As it happens, my four year old daughter and I have been watching (and re-watching) a DVD of Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, which is just about the ideal movie [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 3rd, 2008
In the latest issue of Dwell magazine I saw a short article on how a Dutch design firm called Freedom Of Creation is making furniture by printing it out. Three-dimensional printing is increasingly common as a tool for prototyping and design assessment, but that doesn’t go far enough to suit the folks at Freedom of [...]
