Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology.
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 26th, 2009
My niece Sarah is living in Lebanon for the next year or so. She got all settled in just in time for the big Lebanese Thanksgiving tradition. As she observes Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I will probably go to my friend Amal’s house to eat tabbouleh and baba ganoush, just like the Pilgrims did. I [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 19th, 2009
The When I was a kid, there was a book on our shelves entitled Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? This was in the 1970s, and I recall thinking the premise was absurd. But we now know the author was off by only seven years. The fears that dominate our psyches, that seem so [...]
Posted in Biology on Nov 18th, 2009
In a Zoomable User Interface (ZUI), you can move up and down the scale of a spatial dimension easily. This feels very natural when you’re zooming through something that you have some physical intuition about, like a picture of the inauguration, or a map of the planet. It can be very disorienting when you’re zooming [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 12th, 2009
If you look closely at a puddle during a rainstorm, you see a weird thing: little balls of water skating around as though the are being rejected by the receiving pool. They disappear quickly, so it’s hard to keep your eye on them. What’s going on? What would it look like if you had faster [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 10th, 2009
Brother Blue was a storyteller from Cambridge, Massachusetts. He died last week, and as one of our secular saints, his passing deserves notice. He enjoyed being at once eccentric and affirming. He had a calling, and the calling was touching souls, but he called his calling storytelling, and so it was. Like Fred Rogers, a.k.a. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 6th, 2009
I’m going to give you a quick lesson in the difference between Japanese and US robot research. Or how about this: I’ll just show you two pictures, and you see if you can spot the difference. There, on the left, that’s a Japanese robot. And on the right there, that’s a US robot. They are [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Nov 2nd, 2009
Some months ago I was reading an article in American Scientist, and I thought it would be interesting to blog about it. If I had been reading the article online, it would have been a simple matter to tag it with my little WordPress bookmarklet that would insert it directly into my blog database. But [...]
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