Author: gulley

Blogging On / Web loggers bare their souls — and reading lists — to the Internet

Metaphor abuse at the Joseph Campbell Foundation. I am a big fan of Campbell’s writing, but this metaphoric attempt to use “Indra’s net” as a means of navigating the web site is sadly misguided. Old Joe Campbell is dead and gone now, sad to say. I can only guess that he would have disapproved.

In rc3.org I saw a reference to a fascinating TV show/web site about the merchants of cool. How is cool manufactured? This is the closest you’ll ever get to really seeing the process in action. It has to emerge, but at the same time it feeds on itself so quickly these days that the whole cool industry moves at a frenetic pace.

Now here’s what I like about the web: William Langewiesche has written some great stuff for The Atlantic. I’ve read a few articles and wanted to track down more. Here they are. Read the Shipbreakers. Wow.

Amusing spoof of bad web design from Jay Boersma.

Good science news source: World Scientist.

More fun with robots. Disney is building a big dinosaur robot. They could have made an audio-animatronic piece of nonsense for a fraction of the price, but this looks like the real thing. Good for them.

I’m a sucker for HyperDiscordia and Discordianism. It’s geek humor with a core of honest philosophy, and they get the proportions about right. Not to mention the fact that there is a ton of material here. Easy to lose track of time while browsing.

Interesting/annoying article in Forbes about DNA as code. Starts off interesting, then veers into a we’re-not-so-smart meditation on the shortcomings of science and then ends with a fanfare about how maybe Stephen Wolfram has figured out the secret of the universe after all. This is the same author (Michael S. Malone) who wrote a hagiographic piece about Wolfram in Forbes a few months ago. Give me a break. Between Wolfram’s automata and Dean Kamen’s Ginger, there’s nothing left for the rest of us but sit on the couch and watch Survivor.

Cool self-reconfiguring robot: Polypod: Example Locomotion with Reconfiguration. They’ve really built a prototype of this robot, but the niftiest stuff is in the movies of what they might be able to do some day. It’s creepy to watch this robot walk like a caterpillar, then crawl like a snake, then mutate into a spider-like tetrapod. But don’t worry. It’s just a movie. For now.