5 Intriguing Things
1. What happened when the Nevada DMV tested one of Google's self-driving cars.
"They have driven more than 1 million kilometers since the company started secretly developing them in 2009, but they have been tested only once by a government body on open roads—by Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) officials in May 2012. IEEE Spectrum has now obtained the driving log of this test, and e-mails referring to it, under Freedom of Information legislation. Some of this information is not new. For example, Nevada officials shared that the Google’s autonomous Toyota Prius passed the test almost immediately. What has not been revealed until now, however, is that Google chose the test route and set limits on the road and weather conditions that the vehicle could encounter, and that its engineers had to take control of the car twice during the drive." (ieee.org)
2. I've really been enjoying all the mediations on the meaning of the watch.
"A watch is a ubiquitous computing device, and like many others that have come after it, is one that has take such a firm position in everyday life that one rarely thinks about how they got there. At some point someone made an engineering decision about everything I touch, but I know little about how or when they were made." (medium.com)
3. How robot writing software works.
"Quill starts by importing data (tables, lists, graphs) structured by other software. 'These days that represents a large part of the information produced by humans, from spreadsheets containing company accounts to a blog describing the events of a football match,' Birnbaum says. Upstream, other intelligent systems can take care of converting data in diverse formats (including text) into structured data that can be used by a machine. In this way robot writers potentially have access to all human knowledge. The next task for Quill is to carry out narrative analysis. 'Data is sorted and ranked using a method which focuses exclusively on building a narrative,' Birnbaum adds. 'It selects certain facts, underlines actions, highlights figures.' The third, most innovative task is to generate a narrative." (theguardian.com)
4. Like Julie & Julia but for the 17th-19th centuries!
"'Cooking in the Archives' sets out to find, cook, and discuss recipes from cookbooks produced between 1600 and 1800. This project is situated at the intersection between the practice of modern cooking and the history of early modern manuscript and printed recipe books. Penn’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts holds over 100 recipe books from the early modern era. We believe these recipes belong in the modern kitchen as well as the historical archive. After all, what are recipes if not instructions for cooking?" (rarecooking.wordpress.com)
5. What if the Big One turns out to be a series of Pretty Big Ones?
"They found that between 1690 and 1776, a cluster of earthquakes with magnitudes estimated to have ranged from magnitude 6.6 to 7.8 occurred on the Hayward Fault (north and south segments), San Andreas Fault (North Coast and San Juan Bautista segments), northern Calaveras Fault, Rodgers Creek Fault, and San Gregorio Fault. Paleoearthquake data for the Greenville Fault and the northern extension of the Concord-Green Valley Fault are still lacking. 'By our calculations and given the geologic uncertainties [in determining magnitudes of pre-instrumental quakes], this cluster of earthquakes released about the same amount of energy throughout the Bay Area as the 1906 earthquake,' Schwartz says... 'Everybody is still thinking about a repeat of the 1906 quake,' Schwartz says. 'But what if every five years we get a magnitude 6.8 or 7.2? That’s not outside the realm of possibility.'" (earthmagazine.org)
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
colorful is a fairly recent addition to the language & greatly overused by US writers as a synonym for vivid, picturesque, striking, &c.: colorful writing, a colorful history; The manic is one of the most colorful of psychiatric types.
An Engineering Decision About Everything