Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 28th, 2009
If you’re looking for new ideas for medical therapies, it’s generally a bad idea to seek inspiration in the therapeutic practices of eighteenth century medicine. Bleeding was prescribed for almost any ailment (including bleeding-induced weakness), and compounds laced with mercury were commonly used in diuretics and antisyphilitics. And how about the practice of placing maggots [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 23rd, 2009
What are people talking about? That used to be a speculative question, but since the advent of blogs and now Twitter, it’s become a more tractable problem. You don’t have the time to read and distill a million Twitter messages, but your computer does. Algorithmically it’s getting to be pretty straightforward. Trendsmap caught my eye [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 18th, 2009
When it comes to big things, it’s hard to get momentum right. We don’t have much experience with truly massive things moving quickly and unpredictably. Airplanes, trucks, and trains in normal circumstances aren’t surprising. But here’s a video of a train wreck during a tornado (nobody gets hurt). Watch through to the end to see [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 16th, 2009
Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach is one of my all-time favorite books. As the name implies, there are many references to Bach’s music, particularly his fugues and canons. When I was reading the book back in high school, it was hard to track down and listen to all the music that came up in the book, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 11th, 2009
The Economist gives a surprisingly upbeat assessment of the future of electric cars in this week’s article The electrification of motoring. I hope they’re right. It seems clear enough that if the battery cost comes down, then a lot can be simplified out of a car. This is looking pretty far down the road, but [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 10th, 2009
Everybody likes humanoid robots (especially the Japanese, for some reason), but even nontechnical folks these days realize they’re not useful for much more than entertainment. Too tippy, too breaky, too expensive. Instead, we’re accustomed to things like robot arms bolted onto the factory floor. Much simpler. Simpler still is the Roomba, the ultimate in workaday [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 3rd, 2009
When I was a lad and my brother was on the medical school track in college, I remember he had these plastic models that he used for his organic chemistry class. I remember remarking that, since he got to play with cool little plastic models, it must be a fun class. He tried to persuade [...]
