Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 27th, 2008
I once heard an interesting story about a group of scientists that had written some improbably small thing on a metal platter, something like the IBM logo written in individual xenon atoms. And here’s what they learned: it was easy enough to write something tiny, but having written it, it took them several hours to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 26th, 2008
The idea of a zoomable user interface has been around for a long time, but I mostly find it to be an unpleasant experience in practice. So I was surprised to find myself enjoying zooming around the virtual bookstore called Zoomii.com (which I first came across on ReadWriteWeb). A couple of things made the experience [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 20th, 2008
How’s this for a sitcom pitch? What happens when 29,000 adorable, fun-loving bath toys wash overboard in the middle of the Pacific during a routine ocean voyage? It’s Space 1999 meets Gilligan’s Island! It’s Lost meets Lost in Space! Join the “Floatee Flotilla” on Thursday nights at 8 and follow their madcap misadventures and zany [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 19th, 2008
St. Frank called my attention to some fun flag sites in two of his recent posts. Inspired by Flag Day, he wrote about the drawing of flags by third-graders (and their like) around the world. The coolest flag, as seen through the eyes of a third grade boy: definitely Mozambique, on which we see an [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 16th, 2008
Books on the imperfect psychology of financial decision-making are popular these days. In works like Predictably Irrational, we hear story after story about how people make bad decisions, generally along the lines of being penny wise and pound foolish. What do you think about the following situation? With gas prices heading ever upward, web sites [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 13th, 2008
Jeff Howe, a contributing editor at Wired Magazine, is putting the finishing touches on his book Crowdsourcing. Since the book is about tapping into the resources of the public (i.e. you and me) he has essentially pre-published the book in blog form and asked for comments that might be included in the book. This book [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 11th, 2008
After I finished grad school, my friend and fellow graduate Larry Alder was nice enough to invite me on a rafting trip down the wild and scenic portion of the Rogue River in Oregon (here’s another story from that same trip). This was a great treat for me, because Larry, in addition to being an [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 6th, 2008
Via the Mathematical Tourist I came across this article on the Enigma machine. The short version of the story is that during World War Jr. the Germans were convinced that their code machine, known as Enigma, kept their military secrets safe. It didn’t, partly through the efforts of three Polish mathematicians and partly because of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 5th, 2008
If you visit this page, as opposed to reading my RSS feed, you may have noticed me trying out various new WordPress themes. When I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress (2.5), I wanted to start tagging my posts, and that wasn’t supported by the old theme I was using. So I tried the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized, art on Jun 3rd, 2008
We’re familiar with the idea of sitting and watching people play musical instruments. The rock star is an iconic figure in our culture, and YouTube has made it possible for people with mad skillz to achieve widespread acclaim even if they only ever play in their bedroom. Here is the famous Pachelbel’s Canon video that’s [...]
