Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 3rd, 2010
In the latest American Scientist, I came across a book review of Paul Davies’ new book The Eerie Silence. It’s another take on the old Fermi Paradox that bedevils the SETI crowd. Very briefly, it goes like this: if aliens exist, where are they? It sounds flip, but the more you pick at it, the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 27th, 2010
I remember, as a kid, being mesmerized by these cheesy old sci-fi paintings of the frozen surface of a moon IX around Tau Ceti 4, or some such thing. Frosty rocks in the foreground, a gas giant looming large above, and maybe a space ship for good measure. I was aware of how speculative these [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Feb 18th, 2010
Great news! Dan Schroeder, the physics professor whom some of you will remember from his excellent reviews of iPhone astronomy apps, has written his own astronomy applet. Give it a look. Why write another astronomy program? Here’s Dan’s answer. To be useful to most of my students, a simulation program has to be (a) free; [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Dec 10th, 2009
I have wonderful news: the days will not, in fact, keep getting shorter and shorter until inky blackness is total and the sun is forever blotted from the sky. Maybe you are cleverer than I am, but I have my doubts every year. In my corner of the northern hemisphere, yesterday was the day with [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Jul 28th, 2009
Here’s the setup for a joke: once there was a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer, and… Oh, wait, that’s not the setup for a joke. That’s a description of my house in grad school. Okay, it was actually a trailer, not a house, but that’s not important. For the purposes of today’s story, what [...]
Posted in Astronomy on May 28th, 2009
Once on a camping trip in Utah, I took a picture of our group late at night. I had a tripod and used a long exposure, but not being a very skilled photographer, I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out. When the pictures came back from the lab, I was in for [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Apr 8th, 2009
It’s been a big year for anniversaries. First we have Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin blowing out 200 candles apiece (were they jealous of each other?), and now comes a Galileo event at twice that span: 400 years. When you put it that way, it’s interesting to consider that Darwin gets you halfway to Galileo. [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Oct 22nd, 2008
It’s fun to look at pictures of planets taken by our robotic eyeball extenders. We get to see things that are too darn far away to see with even the biggest earthbound telescope. But there’s another kind of treat when we look at our own sun with new eyes from here on earth. We’re used [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 19th, 2008
The autumnal equinox is nearly upon us. Or is it? Equi + Nox, which comes from the Latin for “noxious horse”, or more generally “nightmare” … oh I’m sorry … wrong book. Here it is: equinox means the length of the night should equal the length of the day. Theoretically. But someone’s been lying to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 27th, 2008
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 took them several hours to [...]
