Ned Gulley's Blog. Resident buzzwords: wise crowds, accelerated design, swarm robotics, synthetic biology.
Posted in Uncategorized on May 15th, 2008
When I meet impressive people, I always wonder how they spend their time. Let’s suppose you meet someone who can play effortless bluegrass on the banjo, quote Shakespeare at length, write luminous heartbreaking prose, and throw together an award-winning web site with their right hand while simultaneously juggling five flaming tomahawks with their left. Not [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Nov 16th, 2007
The latest version of Google Earth now has a projection of the sky built into called, fittingly, Google Sky. It’s a natural extension. We’ve got lots of pictures of the starry sky, so why not stick them all together using the Google Earth glue that already exists. But when I tried it for the first [...]
“Japetus is unique in the Solar System—you know this already, of course, but like all the astronomers of the last three hundred years, you’ve probably given it little thought. So let me remind you that Cassini—who discovered Japetus in 1671—also observed that it was six times brighter on one side of its orbit than the [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Oct 5th, 2006
I’ve been on a good run with free software lately. As part of some recent work I’ve been doing with my Sky Clock, I wanted to check my accuracy against a web site that showed the current sky. Was Saturn where I said it should be? As part of my Google search for such a [...]
Posted in Astronomy on Mar 28th, 2005
I continue to be impressed with the community energy going on over at Flickr. I was struck by this lovely set assembled by Kokogiak (Alan Taylor) of pictures from the Cassini space probe at Saturn. What’s especially interesting here is that all the pictures come from NASA’s official Cassini site. Anybody could make a set [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 28th, 2001
Here’s a beautiful shot of the Earth at night from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day site. It’s big; if you look closely you can tell a lot of stories with it. For instance, South Korea looks like an island. There’s a line of blackness that starts right at the border with North Korea.
Galileo gives posterity the finger, and other revelations from an Italian science museum.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 9th, 1997
As the sun winds its way toward the summer solstice, permit us to pause for a moment and recall that the StarChamber has been operating since April 16th of last year. The first anniversary of that date slipped by with little fanfare. This illustration shows the configuration of the planets in the sky on that [...]
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