Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 27th, 2010
One of the standard scenes in science fiction movies and TV shows is the image enhancing scene. PROTAGONIST (furrowing brow): “Computer, zoom to grid 24 14 and enhance.” Like all good screenplay tropes, it has its own page on the TV Tropes site. My friend Steve, who has an image processing blog, wrote about the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 25th, 2010
I’ve written before about the hygiene hypothesis (here and here). To recap: filth is bad except when it’s good. We seem to be discovering a lengthening list of diseases that either didn’t exist or were quite rare back when squalor was mankind’s boon companion. And now that we’ve cleaned up our collective act, autoimmune diseases [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 20th, 2010
Via Jon’s Twitter feed, I came across this gem. By now you’ve seen many parkour videos. The novelty has worn off. You’re ready to move on. But wait! Look at this one. It’s a nicely edited little film, the music is fun, and the skills on display are remarkable. The two protagonists have obviously practiced [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 19th, 2010
A couple of months ago, Best Buy employee Brian Maupin ended up in hot water for making a video about someone trying to buy an iPhone. He got in trouble (and was briefly suspended) because his video makes fun of obsessive iPhone fans. Here it is: I find a couple of things interesting here: 1. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 13th, 2010
This is a wonderful tool, but my advice is to take advantage of it quickly before the lawyers make it vanish. It’s a Calvin & Hobbes Search Engine. Type in a word and find all the Calvin & Hobbes strips that match. I remember the glory days, back when it was still in the papers. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 10th, 2010
Here’s a NY Times piece on the much-discussed topic of happiness studies: Consumers Find Ways to Spend Less and Find Happiness. It starts off with a heart-warming vignette about a woman who reduces her personal belongings to a toothbrush and one shoe, discovering nirvana thereby. Perhaps I exaggerate, but she does get rid of a [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 6th, 2010
Those people, the ones who lived back then, the ones who made us, what did the world look like to them? When I hear old family stories, I make pictures in my mind, but the details are so fuzzy. I want to look into those faces. How did they hold themselves? What did their clothes [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 5th, 2010
When I was in high school, way back last century, there was a brief nationwide infatuation with generic food. Long stretches of shelf space at our local Kroger’s were devoted to yellow cans with plain text labels. You want sweet peas? Get the big yellow can labeled “sweet peas”. You want beer? Grab a yellow [...]
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. [...]
