Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 30th, 2009
The Onion is one of the wonders of our age. Here is their swipe at the perpetual self-absorbed posing of Generation Y (as one of the viewer comments I read put it, “Y as in Why are we such losers?”). If you watch this and laugh, I’m guessing you’re uncomfortably close to this phenomenon. I [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 26th, 2009
In the book Genome, author Matt Ridley starts chapter four like so: Open any catalogue of the human genome and you will be confronted not with a list of human potentialities, but a list of diseases, mostly ones named after pairs of obscure central-European doctors. This gene causes Niemann-Pick disease; that one causes Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 24th, 2009
I love a good tools talk. You listen to the great ones talk about the tools and techniques they use to get through the day, and by the end of it you’re inspired to go out and buy some software or some special Sakura pens and a Moleskine notebook or something like that. At its [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 19th, 2009
Here’s a fun video from the BBC. It’s an un-narrated view of the F-22 Raptor flying at the Farnborough Air Show in England last summer. If you haven’t already, you should try to go to an air show at least once. Watching a plane pirouette like this in person is a visceral thrill that’s hard [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 12th, 2009
In all likelihood this video will be completely uninteresting to you if you’re not me, so I’ll give you a little time to sort that out and decide if it’s worth continuing. Right. This is a low-quality video of a mediocre ride at Disney World taken in 1985. The ride, “If You Had Wings,” was [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 11th, 2009
More than a decade ago, I came across a little hand-drawn journal in a second-hand bookstore in Cambridge. Written by Dan Price, it was called the Moonlight Chronicles, and I was completely charmed by the beautiful drawings and the quirky descriptions of his life and travels. Ten years later, at another Cambridge store, I happened [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 8th, 2009
It’s fun to chuckle while watching old and errant predictions of the future, like this one of Disney’s House of the Future. After watching a few of these videos, I have decided that the thing I miss most about the future-that-didn’t happen isn’t so much the jetpack or the silvery jumpsuits, but the chirpy background [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 4th, 2009
How is it that two people with similar talents and backgrounds can end up in such different places? This is the old nature versus nurture problem, and one way to unwind it is in terms of path dependence. Early choices, choices that may appear trivial at the time, lead to vastly different outcomes because of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 2nd, 2009
Words and virus particles are both infectious units of information that depend on human vehicles for transport. Their flows are often correlated too, since a quarantine on words can cause an outbreak of virus. The Spanish flu flared so spectacularly in part because no one was willing to talk about it; wartime censorship locked down [...]
