Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 7th, 2010
A 19th Century dictionary may be the new Rolex. In the same way that people value fantastically complex mechanical watches ever more as electronic watches get cheaper, people may well come to value expensive hand-made books even as bookstores vanish, shelves get dumped into landfills, and reading becomes a wholly digital experience. The pick-up line [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 20th, 2009
Aristotle observed that an object falls at a rate that is proportional to its weight. Heavy objects fall quickly, and light objects fall more slowly. Makes sense, right? For hundreds of years Aristotle’s word on this was so widely accepted as truth that there was simply no point in performing an experiment to verify or [...]
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 [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 24th, 2008
I recently finished Before The Dawn by Nicholas Wade, a book about the evolution of the human race which I happily recommend. Studying the history of human development has typically drawn on things buried in the dirt: paleontological/biological artifacts like the fossilized bones in Olduvai Gorge for one example, and archaeological/cultural artifacts like the ruins [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 16th, 2006
Quick: which is more important? Reason or wonder? Don’t tell me you need more information… just answer the question. Which is more important? And which is more powerful? They clearly have a tangled relationship. Science fiction authors and scientists are always quoting each other. Arthur C. Clarke, quoting himself, famously conflated magic and technology: “Any [...]
Posted in Books on May 28th, 2004
The amount of activity undertaken by the U.S. military in World War II is truly staggering to contemplate. Germany had to fight on both eastern and western fronts, but America fought on eastern and western fronts each separated by thousands of miles of ocean from the homeland. This meant mastery of the seas was imperative. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 13th, 1999
I’m reading a book called Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz. Its subtitle is “Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War,” and in it the author travels through the modern South talking to people about the Civil War, what they know of it and what it means to them. Horwitz, who spent years as a [...]
