Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 21st, 2008
Salem, Massachusetts is in love with witches. It took three hundred years or so for them to come around, but they’ve fallen in a big way. I happened to spend some time in Salem this weekend, and I can attest that, in addition to the various museums and tours, the “witch on a broom” motif [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 19th, 2008
English teacher (and Star Chamber Correspondent) Alan Kennedy writes to tell us about a new book recommendation site his brother-in-law is building called Flashlight Worthy. With lots of hand-picked book lists and reviews, it’s a sort of annex and way station to Amazon.
For our purposes here, one of the fun things about it is Alan’s [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 14th, 2008
Many years ago, while doing the college Europe thing, I found myself on an underground train in Munich. I had just come from London, where they mostly speak English, by way of Amsterdam, where they all do. I speak no German. So Munich was the first place where I was completely unable to communicate with [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 12th, 2008
Fargo North Decoder, of Electric Company fame, once helped a character played by Rita Moreno with her dangerously loose interpretation of a No Fishing sign. Her version went like this: “Private Property? No! Fishing Allowed.” She was wrong; trouble ensued.
In a similar vein, here is a good one from Steve Crandall’s blog. It appears he [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 8th, 2008
Some animals live up to their cool names. Animals like the toothy velociraptor and the mysterious leafy sea dragon. Others, despite their nifty cognomens, fall short. For example, the Northern beardless-tyrannulet (not to be confused with the Ruby-crowned Kinglet) is a comparatively plain little flycatcher.
But I imagine any animal might have a hard time living [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 7th, 2008
Here’s a fun image: the most complex Chinese character in common use.
You have to arrange 57 little lines just so to make that character. What it means (besides “Chinese is hard”) is a kind of noodle, the biang biang noodle. Now let’s imagine you work at a noodle shop in China’s Shaanxi province where these [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 31st, 2008
If you haven’t seen Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog yet, I highly recommend it. It’s Joss Whedon’s 42 minute web opera, a marvel of tight scripting, strong acting, and some real toe-tapping musical numbers. Whedon’s description of how it came about is worth a read too. Essentially, it grew out of the free time provided by [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 30th, 2008
A recent post by Friend of the Star Chamber Mike Onken over at the Industry! blog reminded me what a terrific resource Sporcle is. I’ve written about their excellent Name the Presidents game here before, but they’re on a roll now. They’ve got some kind of solid infrastructure that lets them churn out games lickety-split.
Their [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 24th, 2008
Minimalism is big. We’ve got 5k chess (an entire game of chess written is less than 5 kilobytes of JavaScript). We’ve got Lego versions of the Old Testament. We’ve got presidents with tiny cardboard facsimiles of a real brain. But here’s one that really blew me away: a tiny version of the old arcade game [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 23rd, 2008
In the future, we will print everything.
We will print toasters. We will print golf carts. We will print small children.
But for now, we are printing toys and shoes. Fast Company magazine has a good story this month on (among other high tech sports gear) Nike’s fancy “Flywire” shoes for the Olympics. They’ve been able to [...]
