Pennsylvania is going to start allowing “platoons” of up to three autonomous trucks or buses following a human-driven lead vehicle. The only concern seems to be what to do if human car drivers choose to insert themselves between the platooning vehicles.
Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com
Oslo has removed onstreet parking
Oslo has apparently removed all or most onstreet parking.
“Cities, like Oslo, have been built for cars for several decades, and it’s about time we change it,” Hanne Marcussen, Oslo’s vice mayor of urban development, said in an email. “I think it is important that we all think about what kind of cities we want to live in. I am certain that when people imagine their ideal city, it would not be a dream of polluted air, cars jammed in endless traffic, or streets filled up with parked cars.”To help support the shift, the city made “massive improvements in public transport and making cycling safe and comfortable,” says Rune Gjøs, Oslo’s head of cycling. The city is adding new trams and metro lines and more frequent departures, and lowering the cost of tickets. For the last few years, the city has also been quickly building out a better-connected bike network, converting parking to bright-red bike lanes. It handed out grants to help citizens buy electric bikes. The city bike-share system has quickly grown, tripling to nearly 3 million trips a year between 2015 and 2018.
As more people bike, that opens up room on overcrowded public transit. “Usually when you have these discussions you say, ‘Oh, we need bikes to replace cars,’ but there’s a missing link there, and that’s public transit,” says Bentsen. “What we see is that actually we take people out of the bus and onto the bike and walking, which leaves room for people to leave their car and take the bus.”
What, no entitlement to use part of the public realm to store my car for free?
Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception
DARPA is funding research into defense against AI attacks.
The growing sophistication and ubiquity of ML components in advanced systems dramatically increases capabilities, but as a byproduct, increases opportunities for new, potentially unidentified vulnerabilities. The acceleration in ML attack capabilities has promoted an arms race: As defenses are developed to address new attack strategies and vulnerabilities, improved attack methodologies capable of bypassing the defense algorithms are created. The field now appears increasingly pessimistic, sensing that developing effective ML defenses may prove significantly more difficult than designing new attacks, leaving advanced systems vulnerable and exposed. Further, the lack of a comprehensive theoretical understanding of ML vulnerabilities in the “Adversarial Examples” field leaves significant exploitable blind spots in advanced systems and limits efforts to develop effective defenses.
fracking with explosives in China
China has a plan to pump shale gas using explosives. The headline grabs attention by suggesting they might be nuclear weapons, but in reality they are using the tape of explosion that sets off a nuclear weapon, which is a conventional charge directed in a very precise direction.
The problem is that 80 per cent of its deposits are located more than 3,500 metres (11,500 feet) below sea level, which is far beyond the range of hydraulic fracturing, the standard method for extraction.
But all that could be about to change, after a team of nuclear weapons scientists led by Professor Zhang Yongming from the State Key Laboratory of Controlled Shock Waves at Xian Jiaotong University in Shaanxi province, released details of a new “energy rod” that has the power to plumb depths never before thought possible.
January 2019 in Review
After blogging pretty consistently daily for years, I’ve finally slowed this blog down to every other day due to the realities of work and family. Maybe I’ll get back to daily in a couple years. In the meantime, I’m going to pare my “month in review” posts to highlight three items, because it wouldn’t really make sense to do a Top 9 out of 15.
Most frightening and/or depressing story:
- Writing in 1984, Isaac Asimov thought we would be approaching world peace, living lives of leisure, children would love school, and we would be mining the moon and manufacturing things in orbital factories by now.
Most hopeful story:
- The dream of fusion power is not dead. There is even some hope of new advancements in fission power.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
- Some in the U.S. Senate and military take UFOs seriously.
what is “dark enlightenment”?
Well, according to Quartz, basically “dark enlightenment” is a neo-fascist ideology to beware of, in which democratic governments are replaced by corporations.
What are the tenets of Dark Enlightenment theory? There are a few consistent themes, circling around technology, warfare, feudalism, corporate power, and racism. “It’s an acceleration of capitalism to a fascist point,” says Benjamin Noys, a critical theory professor at the University of Chichester and author of Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism.
Land believes that advances in computing will enable dominant humans to merge with machines and become cybernetic super beings. He advocates for racial separation under the belief that “elites” will enhance their IQs by associating only with each other.
Capitalism has not yet been fully unleashed, he argues, and corporate power should become the organizing force in society. Land is vehemently against democracy, believing it restricts accountability and freedom. The world should do away with political power, according to Dark Enlightenment, and instead, society should break into tiny states, each effectively governed by a CEO.
I’m reminded of a lecture I attended by Paul Romer on his idea of “charter cities”. The basic idea was to create something that looked very much like a corporate state where virtually all institutions including politics would be subordinated to the maximization of economic growth. Now, I am not accusing Paul Romer of being a fascist. In fact, in his conception people from any country can be part of the charter city, as long as they have skills and follow norms of behavior designed to maximize economic growth. But one thing his concept does appear to share is that those norms of behavior are imposed from above, and the only free choice people have is that society is a choice to either be part of it or not.
Boeing’s prototype flying taxi
how did the moon form?
This article in Science Daily says that one theory consistent with the evidence is that the moon formed when something as large as Mars slammed into the proto-Earth (which is what the Earth was called before it was called the Earth. Or to be more precise, there was nobody there to call it anything, but that is what we now call the thing that was there before the thing that we now call the Earth.) This may also be how the Earth came to have a lot of the elements that allowed life to form, which is actually the main point of the article.
urban planning trends to watch in 2019
This one is from Planetizen. One interesting point is the role that (lack of) land use regulation has played in bringing the climate crisis about, and how that is not really part of the conversation at the federal level, but maybe could be.
The Green New Deal also provides the latest example of the lack of understanding about the role of land use regulations in housing affordability and climate change. So far, the Green New Deal lacks any specific land use regulation suggestions. Planners realize land use regulations can be a key tool in mitigating climate change, achieving environmental sustainability, and encouraging shared economic prosperity. Getting land use wrong, however, is how we ended up in the current crisis…
After programs like the interstate highway system, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, and the federal Property Tax Exemption created some of the most egregious environmental and social justice mistakes of the 20th century, taking the federal government out of the equation now threatens to cement the legacy of these errors for perpetuity…
In 2019, climate change action, and questions about the effectiveness of future climate change action, must be measured in urban growth boundaries, flood insurance maps, and reduced Vehicles Miles Traveled (VMT). Big talk and subsequent capitulation won’t suffice. (I’m reminded of the implementation of VMT as the legal metric of environmental impact in California, which buckled under pressure from the Southern California Association of Governments.) The built environment will eventually render the failures of compromise.
I do in fact remember Al Gore talking about suburban sprawl. And that is the last I remember a prominent politician talking about it. I don’t think anyone would want to see zoning regulation coming from the federal government. That is not how we do it. But the idea of tying federal funding to a comprehensive infrastructure plan at the metropolitan area sounds to me like it could work. We could think big and make it a lot of funding through an infrastructure bank that served a counter-cyclical function in the macroeconomy, and we could think even bigger by considering all forms of infrastructure from water to the food system to green infrastructure.
do trees really lead to cooling and carbon sequestration?
Well, yes, generally they do, especially in the tropics. But there is scientific uncertainty as to exactly how much, and there are some special cases where some types of trees in some places don’t lead to net cooling and carbon sequestration. That’s my read anyway. Science shouldn’t be censored of course, but some scientists are either really bad at communication or they like to make a name for themselves by trying to grab headlines with contrarian claims. Not that I have all the answers on how to communicate uncertainty concepts to a non-scientific audience. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go warm up my super-axe-hacker, which can chop down four truffula trees in one smacker.