Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on May 29th, 2008
I was digging around for some Sousa marches on Memorial Day and came up with this. It’s my new favorite YouTube video.
It’s a video, transmitted over the internet, of a phonograph playing a 78 RPM recording of a man playing an arrangement for organ of Sousa marches. When I first saw it, it was streaming [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 27th, 2008
For years my wife has wanted to be able to check email from the kitchen downstairs. Seven years ago she convinced me to buy a laptop for this purpose, but it didn’t get used much, partly because of some trouble with the mail client she was using at the time… checking for mail from two [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 20th, 2008
This is a fine example of what The Onion does best. The premise is simple and potentially very unfunny: historical re-enactors at a carefully reconstructed “video store” of the future. But the writing and the delivery is just perfect.
Historic “Blockbuster” Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past
I grew up in a [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 15th, 2008
When I meet impressive people, I always wonder how they spend their time. Let’s suppose you meet someone who can play effortless bluegrass on the banjo, quote Shakespeare at length, write luminous heartbreaking prose, and throw together an award-winning web site with their right hand while simultaneously juggling five flaming tomahawks with their left. Not [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 12th, 2008
It’s fairly commonplace these days for people to write an “I’m Falling for Twitter and Here’s Why” piece. For instance, here is North Carolina journalist Ginny Skalski doing an impassioned video blog post for everyone who doesn’t understand Twitter. Twitter is becoming more and more mainstream (read: boring) every day. The true early adopters have [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 9th, 2008
During the Prohibition of the 1920s and 1930s, moonshine stills in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina supplied illegal alcohol to a great many thirsty Americans. But getting the booze to market wasn’t easy: drivers had to outrun and evade police along poorly-maintained mountain roads. Many of these drivers, the so-called “ridge runners”, [...]
Posted in Maps, Stories, Uncategorized on May 6th, 2008
How long have we got? Depending on who you ask, we’re roughly halfway through the time of tolerable tenure for life on Earth. The planet has been around for 4.6 billion years, give or take, and it’s got about that much more time before the swelling Sun boils our bathwater.
See the Universe Timeline for more [...]
