Guardian of the Non Sequitur

Wired Magazine had a very interesting article about the current activity in driving automation.  Written by Tom Vanderbilt, it reviews the large leaps that have been made in the field in the past decade.  It’s amazing that we really are so close, so much that it will be a legislative problem over the coming decade to catch up with the state of the technology.

On a week that my mother bought what she expects to be the last car she owns, not expecting to be allowed to drive (by me) after she’s 80, it looks like she might be able to buy a car that (mostly if not entirely) drives for her by that time.

Reading over the article, which is quite long, thorough, and awesome, I had several thoughts on the future of the technology and implications.

Stop n’ Go Traffic

I was reminded this week of an awesome example of the emergent nature of stop n’ go traffic in a non-bottleneck/accident environment.  A video of a circle of cars that begin equal spaced but because the nature of humans begins to undulate.

One would hope that the automation of driving would put an end to the annoying of such.  Prediction 1: I think it won’t (without legislative force or technical cooperation).  I suspect that the varying granulation of the differing softwares among cars, and also likely setting of comfortable follow distances will cause the same emergent fluctuation of speeds.  The best way to counter this, in my opinion, would be to recognize a stop n’ go situation and limit the allowed acceleration after a slow down.  Just a critical mass of cars taking that approach could cause the behavior to not manifest. Continue reading

I’ve been doing some genealogy work lately and came upon the details of the death of my great grandfather.  I’d heard he’d been “stabbed” or “shot”, and sometimes it was “in a bar fight” and sometimes it was “about a woman” and that my grandfather was a teenager at the time and quit school to support the family.  Well, about half of that is true.  It was a few weeks after (grandfather) Jesse’s 16th birthday – not sure about the quitting school detail.

I was quite interested at the details they included in the articles, many that would not be today.  And the fact that justice seemed swift back then – though I don’t have an article about the trial.

Five word summary to story: Stabbed in Heart with Icepick.  And if that hooked you in enough, here are the articles I found.

Dallas Morning News - 15 Aug 1923

MAN STABBED TO DEATH WITH PICK

E. L. Noble Charged with Murder Following Death of Stanley Label

Stabley C. LeBel, 44 years old, 1616 McCoy street, a salesman, was fatally injured when he was stabbed in the heart with an ice pick during an affray at 9:30 o’clock Tuesday morning at Main and Jefferson streets, near the Dallas County courthouse. Dr. W. R. McAdams of the Emergency Hospital, who was called to the scene, found LeBel dead when he arrived. Continue reading

I’ve always enjoyed sports.  Participating and watching.  Drama can be found in every step (and yet TNT “We Know Drama” doesn’t show sports).  I, of course, grew up loving the Columbia Blue “Love ya Blue” Houston Oilers.

As I’ve aged, and the number of hours in a day seems continually less available, many of my interests have had to make way for others.  Most of the sporting teams I have followed have become more of a background interest.  On top of that, either my perception or reality has come to give me the view that many professional athletes are whiney spoiled asses.  (More so in basketball than football.)  This has tended to push my interest down to college sports over professional.

In 1994 I moved to Calgary.  At the time Bud Adams was trolling for a new stadium; the City was in an economic lull and saying “no”.  It was foregone, it seemed to me at the time and obviously in retrospect, that the Oilers would leave.  As it was, Canada didn’t have much coverage of the NFL and I just started ignoring the league entirely that year.

The next two years I spent in Washington and didn’t pay too much attention to the NFL except when I spent a sunday with friends.  I did attend one Redskins home game with my good friend Bill Cavender which was an awesome experience.

Back in Houston years later I rode my bicycle downtown for the NFL Franchise mascot announcement.  My preference of Toros was passed by for the Texans.  I went to several early year (sometimes preseason) Texans games.  I remember being deafened at one of the first games there.  I’ve enjoyed some tailgating there (something always lacking at an Oilers game).  But I’ve never scheduled my fall sundays according to the Texans’ schedule.

Now, after almost a decade, today is the Texans’ first playoff game.  To say the least: this city is excited!  I no longer have even a television I can watch live sports on.  So, I will be joining some friends at a sports bar a short 5-block bicycle ride away in the ‘hood.

Go Texans.

I was listening to NPR’s All Songs Considered and it reminded me of a particular summer and the music that came with it.  In 1986 I was a sophomore in college and took a job at Mo Ranch.  Which is past Hunt, Texas – which you might otherwise think was the last thing on Earth if you were driving off the end.

We had 16 or so summer staff living in one large cabin.  I was working maintenance, groundskeeping, and life guard.  The schedule was: wake up, eat breakfast, labor harder than i ever have (leaving me at 165 lbs.), lunch, half the time: labor in the afternoon, the other half life guard, dinner, kill 6 hours before midnight and bed time.  We had no chaperones or house rules, we were all college kids able to patrol ourselves.  Yes, I could write a whole book about that summer, pre WWW, pre cell phone.  But for now, just the music.

I often spent time in a truck with one of the regular maintenance workers, i forget his name. [Edit: after chatting with a friend from that summer, we've decided: Richard.]  He also often spent time in the evenings at the low water crossings with us.  Almost every night included lots of beer, sometimes with a claw foot bath tub full of ice.  Usually with us hanging out in the water.  (We ran the water moccasins out the first week.)  Infrequently, I and one or two others would end up at his house.  He had a single cassette tape that had two albums on in, depending on mood it was on one side or the other. Continue reading

Today is the launch of the final mission of any of the space shuttles.

The first test launches occurred when I was in high school.  I loved space and space science.  I always dreamed of being the first computer programmer to live on the moon – someone would have to keep those things running.  I attended a 2-week summer “camp” that was space themed at Texas A&M, Galveston in high school.  I wanted to return the following year, but was too old having just graduated, so instead I was an intern on the same program I’d attended the year before.

June Scobee was the head of the program and I loved working with her.  She happened to be married to an astronaut, so we got a lot of great access to things going on at NASA JSC.  I had talks with June about her husband and her son (an air force pilot at the time). At the end of that program I helped June move stuff back to her place and met her husband Dick, and shared an iced tea with him on his back porch: casual, friendly, Houston warm.

I was almost always aware of when there was a shuttle launch.  In the early years of the program it would still be mentioned on the lead-up, and interrupt most television for the launch.  But six months later, in January of 1986, I was returning from a test a bit before noon.  This was a time before mobil phones or social networks.  I remember the post-test relief walking across a sunny campus back to my dorm.  I exited the elevator on my floor to the area that was the TV Lounge.

It took all of 10 seconds before “it blew up, the space shuttle blew up”.  Initially, I though he was confused.  Then I thought maybe it was a launch pad fire. I tried to get him to explain it; all he could say was “it blew up”.  I sat.  The sinking feeling was deep, waiting for the news people to figure out what they knew.  The tone of their voices told me it was bad. Then I back-calculated the launches and remembered this was Dick’s launch.  The sinking feeling got deeper.

Continue reading

art by fisher

I was listing to one of my regular podcasts on Saturday: 60-Second Science from Scientific American. [iTunes]  This particular snippet of science in the news was titled Box Jellyfish Eyes Aim at the Trees.  It seems that box jellyfish have 24 eyes, and four of them point above the water’s surface.  They use those four exclusively to navigate.  They live in mangrove swamps and use the tree limbs as navigation markers.

Box jellyfish, and most jellyfish, have minimal brains.  The multiple visual sensors allows less central processing by a brain able to pull out the variety of signals, redirect sensors to different targets when desired, and perhaps screen peripheral information to change task of a particular sensing organ.

For years, human language recognition tried to model language the way linguists understand it.  There were large breakthroughs in the area when massive computation became more available and we started treating it more like an engineering problem.  Solving the problem the way we thought we solved it seemed a good direction.  Early AI research has many similarities to this.

There have been a lot of robotic devices that have had one or two cameras for “eyes”, and we have done some work on image recognition from these.  Feeding this information (perhaps with other information from infrared or pressure sensors) to a central programming location.  Maybe an attempt to decentralize robot computation, and increase the number of sensors might lead to some interesting uses and solutions.

Just a thought.