Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 27th, 2009
Objet Geometries is an Israeli company with some nifty new 3D printers. They did a press release recently that got some play: 3D Printers Play Starring Role in New Animated Film Coraline. The story goes like this. Coraline is a stop-motion animated movie. That is, people are moving little puppets around a big model house [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 24th, 2009
Carl Orff succeeded spectacularly where so many composers have failed. In the twentieth century he wrote a piece of music in a classical style, a secular cantata with Latin lyrics, in fact, that went on to be a modern pop cultural phenomenon. The Carmina Burana sounds ancient, but it was composed in 1937. The opening [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 19th, 2009
Are you attractive? Why of course you are. I have often admired your fine good looks. And as a reader of this blog, you possess a keen intelligence and a quick wit. Good for you! A slightly more interesting question is this. Where are you now, relative to your lifetime peak attractiveness? Or your lifetime [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 18th, 2009
More from the Python Channel on YouTube. I came across this while fishing for free videos to download from the iTunes store. It’s a refreshingly straight un-ironic take on the influence of Monty Python on American comedy as seen by American comedians. Jimmy Fallon has the best line: “If you play Dark Side of the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 17th, 2009
Social software, as exemplified by Facebook, claims to make us more social, but it often ends up encouraging some pretty antisocial behavior. We know by now that a successful platform breeds anonymous spam, but beyond that it’s amazing how weird otherwise normal people can act. There is, for instance, spam from people you know. As [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 12th, 2009
On BotJunkie I found this: the 2009 Singapore Robot Games. Robot soccer is one of those things that sounds really cool, but turns out not to be very interesting. Most of the time, the robots are so clueless that the game is interesting only if you’re one of the people that built the robots. Recently [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 5th, 2009
As noted in the NY Times, Google Earth recently added topographical seafloor data. So now, in addition to flying around Mount Everest, you can also swoop low across the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It’s an important shift of view, because it gives you a visceral appreciation of the different forces that shape the underwater surface of the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 2nd, 2009
It’s one of my favorite days of the year. If you listen carefully, you can hear the Sun starting to break the back of Winter. Where I live, it will be a while before the effects are visible, but make no mistake, the light is back and it means business.
