Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 23rd, 2010
I’m a few days late, but Happy Solstice to you. Now the days will at last be getting longer again. Or at least, that’s what will be happening in South Africa, where so much of the world’s attention has been focused for the Great Big Soccer Thing. Those poor soccer players have been laboring away [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 18th, 2010
Time to revisit one of my favorite topics: crystal grain boundaries and the limits of annealing. Of course you know what I’m really talking about is driving. Specifically: which side of the road do you drive on? Driving standards (any standards, really) make me think of polycrystalline solids, because they are assembled from an earlier [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 11th, 2010
In recent news under the heading “Private Enterprise Goes to Space”, most of the press coverage has gone to SpaceX’s launch of the Falcon 9 rocket. This is a genuinely big deal, and it deserves the glowing prose, but it overshadowed an impressive test by a smaller private launch company called Armadillo Aerospace. Here’s a [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 10th, 2010
Did you catch much of the Spelling Bee last week? It finished up last Friday. The winner, Anamika Veeramani, knew how to spell nahcolite and stromur. Do you? Yes, you caught me: the correct spelling for a rheometer that measures arterial blood flow is actually stromuhr. Well done. English spelling is full of oddities and [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 3rd, 2010
In the latest American Scientist, I came across a book review of Paul Davies’ new book The Eerie Silence. It’s another take on the old Fermi Paradox that bedevils the SETI crowd. Very briefly, it goes like this: if aliens exist, where are they? It sounds flip, but the more you pick at it, the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 2nd, 2010
“Controls” is the branch of engineering that deals with the regulation of moving things. Thermostats and cruise control are the obvious examples, but control systems show up all over the place: temperature control, power control, attitude control… anything that, if left untended, is likely to become a puddle, a crater, or a ball of flame. [...]
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