Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 31st, 2009
Timothy Gallwey, in his book The Inner Game of Tennis, does a good job describing the strange nature of how people talk to themselves. He’s talking about tennis, but it happens all the time. Picture yourself, having just hacked an easy shot into the fence. “Keep your eye on the ball you idiot!” you grumble. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 27th, 2009
On BotJunkie I came across this robotic fish video. The fish, from the University of Essex, is a careful model in form and behavior of a real fish. The idea is that nature has already created a great design, and we can benefit from simply copying it. According to BotJunkie, the robofish will monitor pollution [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 23rd, 2009
I read two items within a few minutes of each other, and while they initially seemed unrelated, on reflection it occurred to me that the Era of the Swarm is now well underway. The first item has to do with coordinating the behavior of heavy machinery. As reported in Technology Review, a company called REGEN [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 19th, 2009
One day when I was maybe nine years old, I was in the very back, what we called the “way back”, of the family station wagon. An empty box was next to me, so I put it over my head, as any bored nine year old boy might do. The day was bright, and the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 14th, 2009
Question: What is the value of pi? Answer: For a fair approximation of pi, first look at the Google trends search for pi and detect when the annual spikes occur. Call this SpikeDay. Then take SpikeDaymonth + SpikeDayday/100. Question: How many polygon sides would you need to get this accurate with the approximation used by [...]
Posted in Robots on Mar 11th, 2009
When I was in grad school, I spent a lot of time in an aerospace robotics lab. People were doing research on things like robotic astronauts that juggle satellites and arm wrestle in space. Actually, they were pretty primitive things back then, and it was all we could do to keep them from damaging themselves [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 8th, 2009
There are many species of cave fish that, after millennia in utter darkness, have either lost their eyelids or lost their eyes entirely. You might think that losing your eyelids is a way station on a one-way trip to blindness. But the barreleye fish (for its tubular, or barrel-shaped, eyes) lost its eyelids even as [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 4th, 2009
Strange Maps had a lovely map of mutual incomprehension among languages last week: Greek To Me. It’s reminiscent of the old X-is-the-new-Y diagram I wrote about a while back. Read the commentary under the map. There’s some good stuff in there. Most poignant to me is the Esperanto taunt Estas Volapuk al mi! (“It’s Volapük [...]
