Google's Self Driving Car

Closed course, through cones and some pretty tight driving.  A lot of people wouldn't be able to drive this particular course like this.  The coolest part is probably at the end where we see how the car recognizes its surroundings.  Pretty unreal, and VERY cool.

On the Rutgers Suicide

ABC News has the written story and the video from their broadcast.  The stories are dramatically different.  The print story is a reporting of the news, using facts and interview quotes to convey what just happened.  ABC's broadcast, on the other hand, tells another story altogether.



ABC's broadcast team decided to make this an issue on two fronts.  First, they lightly touch on the callousness of kids, and then they go into a much more in depth discussion on persecution of homosexuals resulting from that callousness.  But is this really the issue at hand in this story?

While certainly it will be argued that our general cultural anti-gay sentiment was a driving factor in creating such a level of shame in Tyler Clementi's mind over having his encounter broadcast live online that he would decide to jump to his death from the George Washington Bridge, I don't really feel like this was the proper topic of discussion in ABC's broadcast.  At least not quite so immediately anyway.

Following the facts in the story, it looks much more like Clementi's roommate, Dharun Ravi, intended to watch him on webcam no matter what was happening.  Ravi has a count against him for attempting to spy on Clementi several days before September 19th in the same manner during a different encounter.  This, to me, points much more to the "callousness of kids" discussion, accompanied by a discussion on invasion of privacy and how our ever-more-interconnected electronic lives are eroding our cultural expectations of privacy.

The facts here are that a stupid kid pulled a stupid stunt with his stupid friend and hurt his roommate tremendously.  The fact that Clementi was having a homosexual encounter, while very likely a leading factor in Clementi ending his life due to much much higher level emotional and cultural issues, was not the immediate issue at hand here.  General respect for other people was.  The discussion of acceptance of homosexuality was going to take place around this event, no matter what.  But by making it the lead topic, ABC really overshadowed what needs to be discussed here.

It is an interesting time that we live in right now.  Daily we become more and more connected at a more and more immediate rate.  For people like Dharun Ravi, a young man who has been raised in this culture of interconnectivity, rather than adjusting to it, this interconnectivity culturally means that the people around him have no expectation of privacy.  He likely felt little to no remorse for the act of invading his roommate's privacy, and was acting to invade that privacy no matter the result.  In this time of an ever eroding expectation of privacy, and an ever eroding respect for one another, we should learn from what has happened here that we need to begin working at showing each other that respect.  It's something that used to be a person's default position in life; to respect the privacy of those around him.  It wasn't something we needed to try so hard for.  It seems we need to begin trying just a little bit harder.

The Future is Now

Arthur C. Clarke makes predictions in 1964 for what is, almost to a T, our present.  Phenomenal.

USB Stick: Finally One I Won't Forget

Over at BigBadToyStore.com a brand-spanking new flash drive has popped up for pre-order. Yea, I know, new USB drives are a dime a dozen. And each one is just some pretty, or ugly, skin on a $2 one you get at Costco.

This one though, is a fully functional Ravage Transformer. I will give you a moment to go back and click through those links now..... another moment..... OK, good.

The only issue I see is this one is too amazing. Why would you do work when you have a Transformer to play with! Excel spreadsheets go to hell, I have Ravage!

via BoingBoing via OhGizmo!

Why It's Officially the Future #01

This is the beginning of a series of posts that I hope will help illuminate for you, dear reader, our current state of scientific understanding and achievement in areas that have generally eluded common knowledge, but are now very quickly becoming part of our everyday lives, and are clinching proof that while we may lack flying cars, we none the less officially live in the future.

First, watch this video from Juan Enriquez's latest TED talk. It should give you a good idea of where we are in understanding life as a set of mechanical systems. Such understanding has eluded us for ages because as Douglas Adams put it years ago 'We have always preceded from the idea that to learn how something works, we take it apart. However as soon as you take apart a cat, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. Life is an order of complexity so far above our understanding that we have classically assigned a mystical explination to account for its existence.'

This holds true to the idea that religion is just a standing explanation for things we don't fully understand yet. It's a placeholder, like the incomplete special effects on the leaked version of the new 'X-men Origins: Wolverine' movie ... or so I'm told. However our science has now progressed enough that while we don't understand conscious thought and all this sentience crap just yet, we do understand how cells and DNA interact and function like the hardware and software of a computer (respectively). We can, and indeed have manufactured life at the cellular level, as well as what amounts to 'replacement parts' for our own bodies. Such advancements have only been possible because of our understanding of how life functions at the most basic level.

This understanding began with Darwin and On the Origin of Species, and really got going with Watson and Crick's (slightly stolen) discovery of DNA. But our approach was still governed by the idea of an intelligent and deliberate creator. A 'top-down' system of complexity.

[there is a famous explanation of the universe that has turtles 'all the way down' but logically, a universe created by a god of some kind raises the question of the god's creation, and leads one to the conclusion that in such a system there are 'gods all the way up']

But with the advent of modern computing and the way in which software works, we began to see that all the marvelous complexity and beauty around us could be explained from a perspective of 'bottom up' design. No matter how complex the computer program, it all begins with adding 1 and 1 and testing the result. And then doing it again. 'Ones and zeros' as my father says whenever I try to explain a complex technological concept. With an observable model like software, we can see that very very simple actions, iterated many times over, can lead to very very complex results.

This ideological bombshell has not quite created the stir that it rightfully should, but it has changed the way that I look at the world, as well as the way any fervent fans of Douglas Adams surely have. (if this whole things smacks of his speech to the Cambridge Scientific Society it's because its completely riped off from it) So the 'miracle' of life has lost its mystic explination. As its put in the above video, 'life happens.' Software and Hardware, just following a set of rules and acting as they always have.

We are just beginning to be able to understand and modify life at not only its most basic level (cells) but also at the tissue, and almost organ levels. Just how we decide to modify or even replace these particular aspects of ourselves and other living organisms, I'll cover in another post. For now just let this information stew in your mind for a little while.

We no longer need to rebuild him. We have the technology. We can regrow him. Make him better, if he wants, faster, if he so chooses, stronger, if he sees the need. Or we can bring him back to just how he was before.

On the Evolution of Technology

The Unabomber said (before he started bombing, or maybe in between bombings) that technology is not simply something created and cultivated by man but rather is more liken to a separate entity which propagates its self independently of and in some cases despite mankind's best interests.

I've always been somewhat of a fan of this idea, if for no other reason than that it invokes images of technology evolving and becoming better by an odd and hitherto unknown form of natural selection. And I mean natural selection.

Mankind has for eons used artificial selection to create new breeds of plants and animals by enhancing the reproductive chances of those individuals which display those characteristics most favorable to human exploitation (larger grain size, thicker and faster growing wool, etc).

And in the case of technology as an organism one would expect a similar form of human-controlled artificial selection. However this is not always the case. I think those of us with enough tech-savvy to be reading this post are aware enough of the infuriatingly self-serving way in which tech tends to operate from time to time - the idea generally being that this concession in user-friendliness or this little bit of unnecessary complication is required as a stepping stone to reach a more user-friendly plateau.

Perhaps it is nothing but simple intellectual hubris which drives us to embrace stronger and faster technology as being 'better' than more usable and intuitive products. "This phone may be far too complex and ineffective at placing calls, but im smart and patient enough to deal with it. And besides, its really cool!"

Or perhaps I am simply making the cardinal mistake in attempting to understand evolution and natural selection by personifying the actions of a cold and impersonal system. Perhaps I am forgetting the universe's most potent and omnipresent rule - tautology as it is: That which happens, happens. And that which survives, survives.

Either way, this little slideshow put up by Wired shows (with perhaps the exception of the iphone) how the cell phone has evolved from 'brick to slick.' Furthering its own power and favoring intelligence over physical durability, the gradual change into my beloved G1 from Motorola's humble DynaTAC 8000x seems nearly to mirror our species' own ascent into the frail and over-brained beings we are now.

The Trouble with Thumb Drives

The USB thumb drive has been described as the refrigerator magnet of technology, because it can, and presumably does, come in every color, shape, and size imaginable. However I have been pondering this presumption and I've found it to be particularly problematic.

Here, let me illustrate while I alliterate. This is my USB thumb drive, as it currently is – attached to my keys:

Innocuous as such an incarnation of itinerant information storage as this may seem, it is actually ripe with the potential for tiny disasters. Just this morning in fact, I was nearly befallen of such a disaster. My carpooling flatmates had left for work and I was mustering – by the way, is the past tense of 'mustering' 'mustered'? – to head out to campus. Being February in Chicago, I found the morning pissing rain. A quick IM verified that while my crappy umbrella was broken, a spare could be found in said flatmates' car. So out the back door I poped, clad in my usual boots, jeans, Tshirt and hoodie with naught in hand but said flatmates' fancy car key/unlocker remote thingy. But as the door swung to close behind me my so far un-caffienated brain wobbled in warning. I caught the door with my boot and checked my pockets for good measure. [I have a ritualized pattern for leaving my apartment that I've kept to since highschool. I pat my pockets in order with one hand, saying aloud 'phone, keys, wallet' while holding the door open with the other. It ensures that I do not – nay, can not lock myself out or forget any of these vastly important personal rectangles] I realized with a sluggish start that my keys were plugged in – via the attached and above pictured flash drive – to my desktop pc.

I unlocked the door and a few quick moments later and I had gathered the spare umbrella and a fresh disdain for such a terrible and disastrously dangerous data disc design.

Is a keychain really the best we techno-geeks can come up with for a solution to the derelict data docking device? I tried a few other ideas for places to keep my thumb drive, but the design was working against me all the while. The only decent one I could come up with was to replace the little dongly thing that broke off my favorite hoodie's zipper.

Clearly I think the issue here is not where to keep these cleverly crafted keychain companions (close enough) but rather how we design our portable data storage solutions. The problem is certainly not one of size or form factor. Here next to my 1Gb flash drive is a 2Gb micro SD card I just pulled out of my phone:

So with data storage is so small and efficient, why not integrate said storage into a watch or wrist band? An anklet? A subtle and manfully simple (yet elegant) necklace? Such products have been attempted to be sure:

But clearly as a product marketed to fashion-sensible 'tweens [or to put it another way, someone who would buy any 'Bratz'-related product]. What of us sensible young techno-geeks who prefer a simple fashion statement of the black Tshirt and dark jeans? Is it too much to ask to be granted a more sensible solution to the simple storage of selected slices of saves and WAV's?