Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 29th, 2010
The Cantaloupe One cantaloupe is ripe and lush, Another’s green, another’s mush. I’d buy a lot more cantaloupe If I possessed a fluoroscope. [or an MRI machine] Ogden Nash [with addendum by Ned Gulley] From Inside insides (Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Foods): behold, the cantaloupe revealed, as pried open by the magnetic fingers of a [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 28th, 2010
Yow! Here’s an item that trips nearly all my triggers: robotics, biomimetics, aircraft design, 3-D printing, genetic algorithms… <SWOON> Throw in some cooperative swarming and alchemy and you’d pretty much have it all covered. Here it is: Printing Insects. The idea here is to rapidly evolve flapping robot bugs with the assistance of 3-D printing. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 22nd, 2010
William Gibson is often cited for this insight: “The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” It’s a brilliant observation, and it leads to an interesting hypothesis: if we distribute the future more quickly, will it get here faster? The answer is certainly yes. Here’s an example of what I mean. Last [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 16th, 2010
The World Cup is now safely behind us, and life is returning to normal. For most Americans, the World Cup is a non-event, but more and more people here at least realize something important and globally disruptive is going on. You get some sense of this when you look at graphics about things like the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 2nd, 2010
A few months ago I saw MIT finance professor Andrew Lo give a talk about the causes of the (what are we calling it now?) Great Recession. Professor Lo has a marvelously MIT-ish title: Director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering. I’m picturing Bunsen burners cooking murky brews of currency to test their liquidity. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 1st, 2010
The NS Savannah is one of the most glorious dead-ends in history. A nuclear cargo ship and the spawn of Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace initiative, it appeared to be the harbinger of a brilliant future. But it was expensive to operate and carried too little cargo for its size. Most important, it carried break [...]
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