Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology.
Posted in Uncategorized on May 11th, 2012
As the world becomes more virtual, the virtual becomes more fungible. It’s sort of a dance. Take color. Once it was a fragile and passing attribute of some real object. We may speak of red roses, but what do we mean? So many reds, so many roses. Nevertheless, in times past, it sufficed to say [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 2nd, 2012
When I first read about the Descriptive Camera, I thought, “Smells fishy to me. I’m not falling for that Invisible Camera routine.” The Invisible Camera, you may recall, was an extremely well-made hoax about a “revolutionary” new camera. It was so successful (at least in the spirit of War of the Worlds or the Emperor’s [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 30th, 2012
My daughter Carolyn and I are in a singing group called the Newton Family Singers. It’s an intergenerational family chorus, which means that, even though she’s just 8, we get to enjoy the experience of singing together. Like all kids these days, Carolyn stays very busy. We’re always taking her to this or that class [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 20th, 2012
I just listened to a SALT talk (the little brother of the TED talk) by Jim Richardson, a photographer for National Geographic. In the introduction Stewart Brand said something that is somehow strangely non-obvious: Journalists can write prose from a distance, but a photographer always has to be there to get the shot. Richardson joked [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 13th, 2012
I just finished a biography of Thomas Edison called The Wizard of Menlo Park by Randall E. Stross. A biography is either going to improve or degrade your earlier opinion of its subject. Whenever I read about Washington or Lincoln, I always come away thinking, “Wow, that guy really is impressive.” With Stross’s treatment of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 5th, 2012
Some weeks ago Bret Victor made a big splash with a talk called Inventing on Principle. His basic message was about the value of direct manipulation and instantaneous visual feedback. These aren’t new concepts, but Victor’s demonstrations were brilliant. They were elegant and persuasive in a way that words alone would not be. As impressive [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 28th, 2012
Galileo commands us “Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.” An updated version of this might be “Visualize what can be visualized, and make visible what cannot be seen.” If you grew up with a globe like this, you can be forgiven for thinking the big blue oceans weren’t much [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 19th, 2012
Watch this. This is a wrenching video to watch. But rather than build it up any more than that, I’ll just encourage you to watch it. It was recommended to me under the heading this is what leadership should look like. I agree. (Thanks to Karim for the link)
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 14th, 2012
Great hovering kookaburras! Pi Day is upon us, and me with my best pi coat at the cleaner’s. In honor of the blessed event, I like to point people back to the Pi-Ku poetry we made up on this site back in 2007. There still are some great poems in there. My favorite is Chris [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 8th, 2012
If you have a fondness for epigrams, you should follow Alain de Botton on Twitter. The man is a bon mot machine. One morsel: “What disappears from memory is how much of any moment is spent worrying about the future.” He’s a sort of Philosopher 2.0, contending with the problems that confront us in the [...]
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