Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 28th, 2009
I was captivated by an article in this month’s Wired: The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell. It’s a good example of straightforward proposition that makes you wonder why it hadn’t occurred to you before. The big idea is that search engines, effective as they are, only address the desire side of the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 23rd, 2009
One of the great things about the Internet is that, while it encourages the creation of fierce micro-cultures built around arcane factoids and bizarre practices, it simultaneously facilitates the cheerful and articulate explanation of the same. Where you might stumble across the phenomenon known as Juggalos (I can’t recommend that you follow that link), you’d [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 21st, 2009
I’m a sucker for the robot videos on BotJunkie, and this soft deformable robot is no exception. It’s fun to see how a blob bot can be made to work, but I’m especially impressed with the video itself. I love the pencil animation at the beginning. Back in the original desktop publishing revolution, it took [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 16th, 2009
A UAV is an unmanned aerial vehicle. In the old days, a home-made unmanned aerial vehicle would be called a model airplane, or perhaps an RC (radio-controlled) plane. But the fancy-pants term UAV is well earned these days because of the amazing things amateur enthusiasts can do with them. It’s remarkably close to what much [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 16th, 2009
Every year in October Wendy and I do our best to get you to pay good money to send us around a horse track. The part about the money is serious. It’s hard for you to earn it and we accept it with respect. The horse track, on the other hand, is a MacGuffin. It’s [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 8th, 2009
Fourier analysis tells us that you can do a darn good job modeling any periodic waveform by adding together a series of sine waves. The image below was lifted from the Wikipedia article on the Gibbs phenomenon, in which the goal is to assemble a square wave. On Jim Bumgardner’s KrazyDad blog I came across [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 6th, 2009
Seeing is believing, but sometimes just seeing is not enough. A snapshot of a sick glacier with a sad caption doesn’t really compel. The hour hand advances and the water slowly rises, but busy people can be forgiven for shrugging and moving on. James Balog is a photographer, in the seeing business as you might [...]
