Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 30th, 2009
I regularly read the robot-oriented BotJunkie blog. Evan Ackerman, the Bot-Junkie-in-Chief, covers everything from military flying robots to frivolous toy robots. There’s a lot of research these days into robots that show emotion, and I was struck by the difference in approaches used by different teams. Here is the creepy and uncanny Albert Einstein emoting [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Jul 28th, 2009
Here’s the setup for a joke: once there was a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer, and… Oh, wait, that’s not the setup for a joke. That’s a description of my house in grad school. Okay, it was actually a trailer, not a house, but that’s not important. For the purposes of today’s story, what [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 23rd, 2009
Misery loves company. Famous misery brings legions. Whenever somebody famous gets a disease, awareness about that disease spikes dramatically. For instance, can you match these famous people (list 1) with their famous maladies (list 2)? Lance Armstrong Michael Jackson Michael J. Fox Parkinson’s disease Testicular cancer Plastic surgery addiction, cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs certifiably insane Famous illnesses generate [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 21st, 2009
With the 40th anniversary of the faked landing on the moon, the exploits of our ancient space mariners are much in the public eye. As it simultaneously fades into the past and the future, the lunar landing becomes ever more unimaginable and mythic in the public imagination. Just as Erich von Däniken once speculated that [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 15th, 2009
Allow me to encourage you never to fly Air France. I should be on my way to Paris right now, but after a five hour delay, they cancelled my flight. It was a beautiful roller-coaster ride of almost scripted drama: The plane has a broken part. They found a spare replacement part! It’s not in [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 2nd, 2009
Okay, I’m going to talk about something boring, because it’s distressing me and there’s a small possibility that the clever, good-looking sort of person that reads my blog might be able to help. I will try to make the story interesting, but you and I both know that what I’m really doing is BEGGING FOR [...]
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