Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Space on Sep 30th, 2008
On Sunday, a private company called SpaceX launched a rocket into orbit. You remember all the commotion a few years ago about Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne. That was a private rocket too, so what’s the big deal now? Well… Burt Rutan’s space ship is definitely worthy of praise, but it only takes millionaires on suborbital joy [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 26th, 2008
Stephen Malinowski is a polymath composer/musician/programmer who created something called the Music Animation Machine. What it does is animate music scores in a way that makes their rhythmic and tonal structures really jump out at you.
For example, here is a Chopin Etude (opus 10, #7)
Having warmed up with that, you’ll have fun watching Bach’s Brandenburg [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 25th, 2008
One day as I was flying high above the Earth, as I like to do, I happened across this corner of London (Fulham, actually) wherein I spied a lovely football pitch situated thus:
“Great cows!” thought I, “all those soccer fans and not one scrap of parking! In my homeland this would not be.”
Compare this with [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 19th, 2008
The autumnal equinox is nearly upon us. Or is it?
Equi + Nox, which comes from the Latin for “noxious horse”, or more generally “nightmare” … oh I’m sorry … wrong book. Here it is: equinox means the length of the night should equal the length of the day. Theoretically.
But someone’s been lying to you. Here’s [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 18th, 2008
Mapping is expensive. There are lots of accurate maps of London, but not nearly so many of Hanoi. You have to pay a lot of people to get a good map. Or you used to. Another way to get more information about a place is simply to ask the people who live there to help. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 12th, 2008
If you read first-hand accounts of the Civil War, you get used to a certain blustery high-minded prose style peppered with tortured latinate constructions. In witness of their poltroonery, we set upon the knaves with much promptitude, winning the battlement with but minor effusion of blood, etc. etc. Huzzah!
When I read this stuff I think [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 10th, 2008
I like this hand-crafted wooden adding machine modeled on the digital logic found in microchips. It’s a very simple wooden computer. Still, as simple as it is, it really is showing you how to add any two positive integers that sum to less than 64. Any further addition is just more of the same.
You look [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 5th, 2008
I joined iPhone Nation a month or so ago. The iPod touch was my gateway drug. It seemed harmless enough at the time, but things got out of control. Now I’m one of those people. One of those iPhone people. You know the kind. Even I think we’re insufferable.
Anyway, I’ve been having fun with the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 1st, 2008
When I first moved to Massachusetts from California, I learned about the value of the private snowplow contract. When it snows hard, it’s really nice to have a pro come plow your driveway, even if it does set you back a little cash. But one winter when there wasn’t much snow, our (presumably cash-poor) plow [...]
