Rambles at starchamber.com

I wrote a short guest post for Loren Shure’s Art of MATLAB blog over at MATLAB Central. It’s based on a surprisingly visual explanation of a remarkable theorem.

Have a look: Nicomachus’s Theorem.

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“The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.” -Ralph W. Sockman.
Magic is a slippery word. Does it refer to a trick or a glimpse of something deeper? This simple question has always puzzled me. This little essay is my attempt to nail down why that is. I want to talk about [...]

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Pakistan and India share a border that is well over 1000 miles long, but in all that distance, there is only one road that goes directly across the border. Or at least that’s what is claimed by the Wikipedia entry for Wagah, a town that straddles the Grand Trunk Road between Amritsar (India) and Lahore [...]

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This is, to me, serious evidence that the robot age is right around the corner. For a long time now, it’s been easy enough to solve the Rubik’s Cube problem on a computer. But solving a real cube using a computer, that’s a different matter. First you have to take pictures of all the sides. [...]

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You know you’ve struck a cultural nerve when you inspire not just one but dozens of parodies and copycats. It’s hard to say, for instance, why the Lazy Sunday video inspired so many spin-offs, but YouTube tells me there are 278 as of this writing.
Across the Pond, the Keep Calm and Carry On poster [...]

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Here’s a little slice of Ned’s Ancient History: I artfully surfed the dying wave of the Cold War. I paid for an expensive education with the help of an Air Force ROTC scholarship, thanks to Ronald Reagan’s extravagant defense bender. After three years of thoroughly enjoyable active duty, I emerged from the Air Force earlier [...]

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If you have any interest in synthetic biology, Nature Biotechnology has been kind enough to A) devote a special issue to the topic and B) make it available for free. I first learned about this on Rob Carlson’s Synthesis blog because he’s the author of an article on the economics of DNA synthesis (PDF).

I [...]

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I can’t let this day pass without a salutation.

Mr. Groundhog has some good news to share: you made it halfway through the winter. It’s February, and you can actually sink your teeth into the afternoon sunlight. Yum.
People often remark that Thanksgiving is nice because, as holidays go, it’s not overly commercialized. Groundhog Day is humbler [...]

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If you needed a kidney, who’s the best person in the world to donate that kidney to you? Your brother? Your sister? Your child? If I told you this was a trick question, you might guess the answer is you. Of all the people in the world, you are the only donor guaranteed to cause [...]

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For some time my wife Wendy has had strong feelings about the topic of simple friendliness among strangers. I agree with her, but I’m too lazy to do much about it. She’s not. She wants make the world a friendlier place. Will you help her? More follows below…

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