Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 30th, 2008
High speed photography has become increasingly commonplace. Even so, every now and then you see pictures that remind you how much your slow eyes miss, especially when the pictures are artfully made. Here’s a site called Liquid Sculpture that specializes in beautiful art prints of splashes frozen in time. The artist’s name is Martin Waugh, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 24th, 2008
I recently finished Before The Dawn by Nicholas Wade, a book about the evolution of the human race which I happily recommend.
Studying the history of human development has typically drawn on things buried in the dirt: paleontological/biological artifacts like the fossilized bones in Olduvai Gorge for one example, and archaeological/cultural artifacts like the ruins [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 22nd, 2008
There was a time, years ago, when even clever, well-informed programmers pronounced name of the operating system “Linux” much like the name of Charlie Brown’s friend Linus. Lye-nix. One of the things that eventually set people straight on this (it was certainly the thing that set me straight) was a little audio recording of Linux [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 18th, 2008
You may have seen my recent interview in the Times.
Okay, it wasn’t actually the NY Times. It was the EE Times. EE is a big city right next to NY. It’s even bigger than NY.
Right: EE Times stands for Electrical Engineering Times, and I was interviewed by chief editor Junko Yoshida as part [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 16th, 2008
I am a procrastinator. You might guess this means I was up last night doing my taxes. I was. I don’t mind admitting it, because mostly I have come to terms with my eleventh-hour tendencies. And anyway, coming clean about it is a win-win situation. Suppose you finished your taxes weeks ago: I’ve just given [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 11th, 2008
Every son should be so lucky.
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 11th, 2008
Three-dimensional printing is a wonderful thing, and it keeps getting better. A few years ago, I bought a beautiful model of a transfer RNA molecule. All you had to do was tell them the Protein Data Bank ID, and your favorite molecule can be yours.
Of course not everybody gets excited by molecules. But other markets [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 10th, 2008
The other day when I was trying to track down an old friend from my previous job, I ended up on a Beach Volleyball photography site. Because that’s what I used to do in my old job: pro beach volleyball. Yep. I was quite the pro beach volleyballer back in the day. You can probably [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 7th, 2008
When I was in grad school I asked a mathematician friend of mine how the real math insiders stay current. It was just inconceivable to me that they would sit at home and plow through giant stacks of the latest journals. He told me the secret: it was all done with preprints and word-of-mouth recommendations [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Apr 3rd, 2008
Yowza! Check out this panoramic landscape from Mars.
It’s from a place called Hebes Chasma. What you’re looking at is a plateau in the middle of a canyon 8000 meters deep. That is to say, this thing would make a dandy bathtub for Mount Everest (8848 m). Mind you, that mountain could use a good [...]
