Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Space on Sep 30th, 2008
On Sunday, a private company called SpaceX launched a rocket into orbit. You remember all the commotion a few years ago about Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne. That was a private rocket too, so what’s the big deal now? Well… Burt Rutan’s space ship is definitely worthy of praise, but it only takes millionaires on suborbital joy [...]
Posted in Space on Jan 25th, 2008
One of my new favorite sites is Riding with Robots on the High Frontier. I have always liked NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, but I tend to filter out the deep space stuff. Nebula, shmebula. I want to see something in this solar system. Too many parsecs spoils the soup. Riding with Robots is [...]
“Japetus is unique in the Solar System—you know this already, of course, but like all the astronomers of the last three hundred years, you’ve probably given it little thought. So let me remind you that Cassini—who discovered Japetus in 1671—also observed that it was six times brighter on one side of its orbit than the [...]
There’s something beautifully disturbing about Saturn’s moon Hyperion. It looks like the kind of place H.P. Lovecraft would write about. Check out this Astronomy Picture of the Day as snapped by our robot friend Cassini.
I love getting postcards from other planets. We need more robots and fewer astronauts!
Posted in Space on Jun 7th, 2005
For those of you who missed the recent drama on Mars, for something like a month, the rover named Opportunity has been stuck in the mud, or rather in a fine powdery rover-swallowing dust. So for five weeks it’s been sending back picture after pathetic picture like this. Fortunately it had already been on the [...]
A bookstore, a weblog, a magazine, all these things take on the personality of their proprietor, and if that personality resonates sufficiently with your own, you find yourself coming back again and again, chuckling that someone should be able so consistently to amuse you, sight unseen. So it is for me, I find, with The [...]
