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Monthly Archives: March 2010

Where Are You, Right Now?

SimpleGeo used their new tool Vicarious.ly to create this visualization of location-based data — Foursquare check-ins, Gowalla check-ins, geotagged pictures from Flickr, and geotagged tweets from Twitter — logged over 8 days of the South by Southwest conference in Austin. The patterns of people’s movements, day and night, are fascinating — and it’s easy to […]

DIYBio State of the Union

Jason Bobe, one of the “founders” of the DIYBio movement and director of community for the George Church-led Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School, recently gave a talk as part of a forum on biosecurity at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Bobe’s slides, which can be downloaded here, neatly describe the current scope of (known) […]

You Are Not a Gadget

By far one of the most interesting sessions I attended at South by Southwest Interactive last week, was a refreshing talk by Jaron Lanier, whom can I remember being a sort of techno-guru back when all this stuff was new. Anyway, he has a book out now called You Are Not a Gadget, a deeply […]

Robots in Vermont

Hey, everyone loves robots. Recently I learned that we have one of the foremost researchers on robot learning, Josh Bongard, working right next door at the University of Vermont. He spoke the other night as part of the Echo Lake Museum and Science Center’s Cafe Scientifique series. I missed it, but they did post a […]

New Ways of Looking at the Same Old Guitar

Over the past year or so, I’ve been playing a lot of guitar again. I’ve been especially interested in working with open tunings, which have opened up a fat new toolbox of techniques — not to mention the lion’s share of the Keith Richards song catalog. Coming back into standard tuning after playing for a […]

Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac, Safe in Heaven Dead

Here, two views of the holy scroll (original manuscript of On the Road) that launched a million journeys — enlightening, courageous, maybe foolhardy, but no doubt life-changing. Working in the dark ages before personal computers, Kerouac hacked a fix to accommodate the free-flowing, speed-fueled writing method he adopted for his breakthrough novel, which marked a […]

Speeding Up Evolution, More

People in the synthetic biology community have been excited for some time now about the potential of microfluidics to enable and advance their research agendas. Recently, a group composed of researchers from Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and international collaborators demonstrated a new microfluidic sorting device, smaller than an iPod Nano, that […]

Me Gusta Mexico