Ned Gulley’s Blog. Resident buzzwords: synthetic biology, ambient displays, swarm robotics, wise crowds.
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 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 May 20th, 2008
This is a fine example of what The Onion does best. The premise is simple and potentially very unfunny: historical re-enactors at a carefully reconstructed “video store” of the future. But the writing and the delivery is just perfect.
Historic “Blockbuster” Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past
I grew up in a [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 1st, 2008
Happy April First!
From tingilinde I found this gem: a genuine BBC documentary on the Swiss spaghetti harvest of 1957. At first I thought it was a newly minted faux-old spoof. But, my God! you just can’t fake that BBC voice over. What a pro! Fortunately, there was an attached link to the Museum of Hoaxes [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 24th, 2008
From my earliest TV-watching years, I remember we had a movable antenna on the roof that you could orient based on which channel you wanted to watch. You had your pick of three or four channels, depending on your appetite for static and snow.
By the time we got cable TV, thereby enabling our local PBS [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 13th, 2006
We’re definitely entering a new realm with robotics. Before robotic motion was always painfully awkward and stilted, not something you would ever mistake for the smooth motion of an animal. But these days you can find plenty of examples of remarkably fluid “un-robotic” behavior. Things will progress very rapidly from here. The YouTube video below [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 15th, 2005
Jon Udell’s Heavy Metal Umlaut video is being passed around a lot these days, and with good reason. He took a quirky page out of Wikipedia, coupled it with some quick and dirty video manipulation from Camtasia, and made a compelling illustration of how the Wikipedia actually works.
Here’s the current Wikipedia entry that initially tickled [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 2nd, 2005
This has been around since last summer, apparently, but if you haven’t seen it it’s worth the time. It’s a very slickly produced short video (Flash animation) put out by the ACLU that shows how information and identity might be abused in the near future.
ACLU pizza video
That’s one expensive pizza. (via Jon Udell)
Posted in Uncategorized on Oct 29th, 2002
More joys of the Astronomy Picture of the Day, a.k.a. APOD. I think this must be one of the best (and most cost effective) public relations efforts ever managed by NASA. I used to work at NASA Ames Research Center, and I remember how important PR was, given their steady diet of taxpayer’s cash. It’s [...]
