Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Your mother didn’t make you. Who did?
Your mother gave you a warm room and plenty of food. Who made you?
It’s a tricky question. To speak of making implies two things: the thing being made and the one who makes it. Birds make nests. Bees make hives. Carpenters make houses. But mothers don’t make babies. Mothers [...]
Posted in Essay on Oct 8th, 2001
I. SPECTACLE
As brutal stagecraft, the attack on the World Trade Center was perfection. You could almost split the moment right down the middle: nauseating mind-numbing horror on the one side and pornographic mesmerizing spectacle on the other (so that’s what it looks like when you fly a plane into a building…). It was perfectly calculated [...]
Posted in Essay on Aug 10th, 1998
Brother Blue says, "My father used to tell stories to God, tears pouring down his face."
Brother Blue is a storyteller of some fame, a jazz-riffing peacock of a performer, a first class wordconjuror and a damn good harmonica player. Brother Blue is a slight man, not a young man. When he performs he is topped [...]
Posted in Essay on Jan 6th, 1997
Deep in the Grand Canyon (and if you’re right on the Colorado River that seems like the only way to describe it) on the second day of our grand adventure, Claire, our longbeard sage and veteran river guide used an expression new to me: Up Top. When you live on the east coast, California is [...]
Posted in Essay on Dec 9th, 1996
December is a dangerous month
My birthday is in December. If your birthday is too, you may already be shaking your head sadly, thinking of me, your brother, whose birthday like yours is yearly tainted by its proximity to the most destructive holiday on the calendar. Indeed, Santa’s pitiless steel-shod boots can already be heard crunching [...]
Posted in Essay on Sep 16th, 1996
Three observations:
We should care about alchemy
Alchemists were not buffoons
The wisdom of the alchemist applies to us
Around the year 1350, a poor Parisian scrivener named Nicholas Flamel spent two florins on a strange but beautiful brass-bound book filled with curious diagrams. Extensive study revealed it to be an alchemical treatise on the art [...]
Posted in Essay on May 27th, 1996
Divination, that intuitive art that uncovers and foretells, comes in a multitude of forms, from reading tea leaves and Tarot cards to inspecting the entrails of sacrificial animals (popular in ancient Rome, though perhaps not with the RSPCA). Of the many widely-practiced modern forms of divination, only one has such a powerful hold on the [...]
E-mailbox clogging net stories are circulating in greater and greater numbers, but where do they come from? Is there some cyber-spot where they mate, like squids in the Sargasso Sea? Is there a burying ground where they go to die? Yadda-Yadda-Yadda is a speculative piece that came about because a) Paracelsus received yet another net [...]
