Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology.
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 31st, 2011
First the hummingbird. Built by AeroVironment, this is one of those projects where the guy from DARPA says, “Here’s a giant pile of money. When I come back next year I want you to blow my mind. You understand me? BLOW MY MIND.” Putting a little bird face on it was gilding the lily in [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 29th, 2011
Have you heard about Khan Academy yet? The brainchild of former hedge fund analyst Salman Khan, it’s an educational site that’s got people buzzing. For all the fuss, there are really only a few new ideas here. But they are very well executed and they point the way ahead for education of all kinds, not [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 25th, 2011
I recently read, and thoroughly enjoyed, a book called The Box about the history of the intermodal freight container. If you’d like to know more about the book, I recommend this extensive review by Venkatesh Rao which inspired me to buy the book in the first place. Only 50 years ago, shipping was one of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 23rd, 2011
Music CDs are dead. That’s not big news, I know. But it sets up this great story from a friend-of-a-friend source: the aunt of one of our babysitters was running a music industry focus group for teenagers. After answering some questions about their musical habits and tastes, the focus group participants were free to leave. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 16th, 2011
More colors today, partly in honor of the fact that Alan’s color idioms project just crossed the 700 idiom mark. It’s idiotastic! Since it got picked up by a few blogs (like this and this), it’s even surpassed the Elvish page to be the single busiest page on my site. This particular post, however, isn’t [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 14th, 2011
Check out this little bungalow by the sea. Or land. Or whatever happens to be passing by. The price is high, and the driveway is long, but the view is spectacular. This is the cupola of the International Space Station. This is where everybody wants to sit (float) when they’re off duty, and it’s easy [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 10th, 2011
Wadah Khanfar is the Director General of Al Jazeera. He gave a stirring speech recently at the TED conference, recapping some of the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt. A genuinely independent and credible news network in the Arab world is one of the great transformative developments of our age.
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 4th, 2011
Here’s a good one that Doug passed along. It’s amusing on its own merits, but it’s also a stark illustration of the coming power of statistics. OkCupid is a dating site. There are thousands of dating sites out there, but this one was founded by mathematicians. So not only do they have tons of interesting [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 1st, 2011
I don’t know about you, but watching Watson demolish his human opponents in Jeopardy last week got me thinking about wooden shoes. Called sabots in French, these shoes were flung into weaving machines during the Industrial Revolution by angry workers. Clogs in cogs save jobs, or so went the reasoning. Ineffective at stopping automation, sabots [...]
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