http://www.starchamber.com Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds. Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:07:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.starchamber.com/2008/07/defender-in-16-by-16-pixels.html 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 ... http://www.starchamber.com/2008/07/print-your-shoes.html A few weeks ago I wrote about how my iPod touch serves the purpose of a laptop in the kitchen. With the advent of the new iPhone 2.0, I was able to upgrade my iPod software (for $10) and get some of the new iPhone Apps. Among the apps are ... http://www.starchamber.com/2008/07/pandora-radio-on-the-ipod-touch.html If you think of a hole as positive space instead of negative space, then you can think of digging a hole as something like sculpting. Pour metal into the hole and you'll get a sculpture that corresponds to the empty space. This is worth considering because there is a guy, an ... http://www.starchamber.com/2008/07/inverted-ant-hills.html Gas prices are tough all over. For years, Europeans have lectured us about our profligate ways with petroleum. We deserved the lecture, no doubt about it, but even so I've always felt that judgmental Europeans have portrayed themselves as virtuous and far-sighted when in fact they were simply responding as ... http://www.starchamber.com/2008/07/gas-prices-here-and-there.html Back from a week-long vacation and a long web hiatus. The vacation was at the beach in North Carolina, and since it was an extended family gathering I got to play some music with my cousins and my brother. That's my cousin Billy on the mandolin and my cousin Missy ... http://www.starchamber.com/2008/07/music-at-the-beach.html I once heard an interesting story about a group of scientists that had written some improbably small thing on a metal platter, something like the IBM logo written in individual xenon atoms. And here's what they learned: it was easy enough to write something tiny, but having written it, it ... http://www.starchamber.com/2008/06/astronomical-crowdsourcing-and-hannys-voorwerp.html The idea of a zoomable user interface has been around for a long time, but I mostly find it to be an unpleasant experience in practice. So I was surprised to find myself enjoying zooming around the virtual bookstore called Zoomii.com (which I first came across on ReadWriteWeb). A couple ... http://www.starchamber.com/2008/06/book-browsing-with-zoomii.html How's this for a sitcom pitch? What happens when 29,000 adorable, fun-loving bath toys wash overboard in the middle of the Pacific during a routine ocean voyage? It's Space 1999 meets Gilligan's Island! It's Lost meets Lost in Space! Join the "Floatee Flotilla" on Thursday nights at 8 and follow their ... http://www.starchamber.com/2008/06/toys-global-tour-the-world-is-your-bathtub.html St. Frank called my attention to some fun flag sites in two of his recent posts. Inspired by Flag Day, he wrote about the drawing of flags by third-graders (and their like) around the world. The coolest flag, as seen through the eyes of a third grade boy: definitely Mozambique, ... http://www.starchamber.com/2008/06/flags-of-all-nations.html