Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Astronomy on May 28th, 2009
Once on a camping trip in Utah, I took a picture of our group late at night. I had a tripod and used a long exposure, but not being a very skilled photographer, I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out. When the pictures came back from the lab, I was in for [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 22nd, 2009
It’s easy to think of a camera as an artificial eye. This lets you imagine that a photograph is something your eye might see if only your equipment was better. But when you take dozens of photos and stitch them together into one giant picture, the result is a strange hybrid. It looks like a [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 20th, 2009
Aristotle observed that an object falls at a rate that is proportional to its weight. Heavy objects fall quickly, and light objects fall more slowly. Makes sense, right? For hundreds of years Aristotle’s word on this was so widely accepted as truth that there was simply no point in performing an experiment to verify or [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 15th, 2009
I wanted a nice simple To Do list web service. I’ve been looking for ages. In theory, it should be easy to get what I want. There are plenty of options to choose from, some of which are quite well-developed and popular. But most of the dedicated To Do managers are too fancy for me [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 12th, 2009
Sixty-five years ago this week my Uncle Bill had a terrific headache. While touring through the Italian countryside near Santa Maria Infante, a piece of metal that would have killed him hit his helmet instead. I am glad for that. I came across some Life magazine pictures being hosted by Google, and I asked him [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 8th, 2009
Our best predictions of the future, which is to say, when those predictions work, tend to be straight-line extrapolations based on trends that don’t change too much. Our worst predictions occur when previously stable trends start to do loopy nonlinear things. Trendquakes. We’re in for a lot of those in the next few decades. There’s [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 5th, 2009
This little YouTube movie looks to me like it belongs in the exposition part of a science fiction movie. For some reason, it made me think of the Mr. DNA video in Jurassic Park. The images are so surreal and the voiceover is so oleaginous that it seems like fiction. But no, it’s not fiction. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 1st, 2009
If you want to explore the Mandelbrot set, or fractals in general, you have endless options, but you should definitely look at the Xaos Fractal Browser. It’s been super-streamlined for zooming around quickly. Lots of people use it and upload their pictures to Flickr, and Flickr, in turn, makes it easy for me to embed [...]
