Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Uber and car ownership

It appears Uber may be having a small effect on the number of people who want to own cars. This article also says they are working on self-driving cars.

In a recent survey of 2,000 adults ages 18 to 64 conducted by Frank N. Magid Associates, 18% of respondents said they had used Uber in the past year, and of those people, 22% said they are likely to hold off on buying a new car because of the availability of the service.

elephants don’t get cancer

Elephants don’t get cancer. Well, they do, but nowhere near the rates that humans do. There are a few theories – they have better genetic defenses against cancer, they don’t have bad habits like smoking and obesity, and they reproduce throughout their life spans so that evolution selects for traits that keep them healthy late in life. Which reminds me of the weird science fact that humans and two types of whales are the only animals on earth that go through menopause.

Best Steve Spurrier Put-Downs

I don’t normally post this sort of thing, but Steve Spurrier only retires once. I happened to catch the very tail end of the Ol’ Ball Coach era at Florida in person in 1998-99. Without further ado, courtesy of Gatorzone.com, are some of the all-time best Spurrier zingers.

  • “We read in their media guide where no opponent had ever come ‘Between the Hedges‘ and got 50, so we figured we’d do it,” he said. “Pretty nice ball yard, too!”
  • “Can’t spell Citrus without a U and T.”
  • “These kinds of games don’t prove all that much. Just proves we’re better than Kentucky,” Spurrier said after a 66-0 smashing of the Wildcats.
  • “They said it was going to be really loud up there and I have to admit it was — during pre-game warm-ups,” Spurrier crowed after UF took a 35-0 second-quarter lead and went on to beat Tennessee in a No. 2 vs. No. 3 showdown in Knoxville.
  • “Hopefully, LSU’s defensive coordinator won’t be giving any more clinics on how to stop the Gators all next offseason,” Spurrier said after hanging 635 yards on the Tigers in a 56-13 rout, the year after struggling for a season-low 327 in a win at Baton Rouge.
  • Oh, and that one about fire [that destroyed 20 books] at the Auburn library. “Shame of it all, 15 of the books hadn’t even been colored in yet.”

Let’s go over to ESPN for a few more.

  • “I don’t know. I sort of always liked playing them that second game because you could always count on them having two or three key players suspended.”
  • “Why is it that during recruiting season they sign all the great players, but when it comes time to play the game, we have all the great players? I don’t understand that. What happens to them?”
  • “You know what FSU stands for, don’t you? Free Shoes University.”

Ouch! We’ll miss you, coach.

Viktor Glushkov

Viktor Glushkov was a Soviet computer science who developed an idea for a cash-free, computer-controlled economic system. The theory is seductive because the idea was to improve information flows and feedback loops while reducing lag times. In other words, if you could collect perfect information and make it perfectly available, the economy could be perfectly efficient and in perfect balance. It didn’t work out, running into the crushing Soviet bureaucracy and technological limits. But in theory at least, the technology would be less of a constraint today.

Glushkov’s initial proposal included one particularly controversial provision. He envisioned that the new network would monitor all labor, production, and retail, and he proposed to eliminate paper money from the economy and to rely entirely on electronic payments. Perhaps Glushkov hoped that this idea would appeal personally to Khrushchev. The elimination of paper money evoked the Marxist ideal of money-free communist society, and it seemed to bring the Soviet society closer to the goal of building communism, promulgated by Khrushchev at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961. The Academy president Keldysh, who was much more experienced in top-level bureaucratic maneuvers, advised Glushkov to drop the provision, for it would ‘only stir up controversy.’ Glushkov cut out this section from the main proposal and submitted it to the Party Central Committee under a separate cover. If ideology were to play any significant role in Soviet top-level decision-making, this was its best chance. Glushkov’s proposal to eliminate money, however, never gained support from the Party authorities.

Norbert Wiener

Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

According to The Atlantic,

Wiener is best known as the inventor of “cybernetics,” a fertile combination of mathematics and engineering that paved the way for modern automation and inspired innovation in a host of other fields. He was also one of the first theorists to identify information as the lingua franca of organisms as well as machines, a shared language capable of crossing the boundaries between them…

Wiener refused, for ethical reasons, to accept research contracts from the military or from corporations seeking to exploit his ideas. Since the military and corporations were the main sources of research support, Wiener’s defiance hindered his progress during a period of unprecedented technological advance. Besides nuclear weapons, Wiener was perhaps most worried about the technology he was most directly responsible for developing: automation. Sooner than most, he recognized how businesses could use it at the expense of labor, and how eager they were to do so. “Those who suffer from a power complex,” he wrote in 1950, “find the mechanization of man a simple way to realize their ambitions…”

The complete synthesis of humans and machines predicted by the transhumanists could represent the vindication of cybernetics—as well as Wiener’s ultimate nightmare. His fears for the future stemmed from two fundamental convictions: We humans can’t resist selfishly misusing the powers our machines give us, to the detriment of our fellow humans and the planet; and there’s a good chance we couldn’t control our machines even if we wanted to, because they already move too fast and because increasingly we’re building them to make decisions on their own. To believe otherwise, Wiener repeatedly warned, represents a dangerous, potentially fatal, lack of humility.

World Economic Forecast

The IMF has issued a new World Economic Forecast.

Relative to last year, the recovery in advanced economies is expected to pick up slightly, while activity in emerging market and developing economies is projected to slow for the fifth year in a row, primarily reflecting weaker prospects for some large emerging market economies and oil-exporting countries. In an environment of declining commodity prices, reduced capital flows to emerging markets and pressure on their currencies, and increasing financial market volatility, downside risks to the outlook have risen, particularly for emerging market and developing economies…

the persistently modest pace of recovery in advanced economies and the fifth consecutive year of growth declines in emerging markets suggest that medium-term and long-term common forces are also importantly at play. These include low productivity growth since the crisis, crisis legacies in some advanced economies (high public and private debt, financial sector weakness, low investment), demographic transitions, ongoing adjustment in many emerging markets following the postcrisis credit and investment boom, a growth realignment in China—with important cross-border repercussions—and a downturn in commodity prices triggered by weaker demand as well as higher production capacity.

self driving buses

Here’s another example of self driving vehicles expected in operation within a year or two, not 10-15 years as the pessimists are telling us.

EasyMile has already deployed its low-speed EZ10 shuttles — known as SDVs, or Shared Driverless Vehicles — in closed environments in Finland, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. At one location, the shuttles travel around an amusement park. In another, they take day-trippers from a parking lot to a beachfront. Much like the self-driving cars being developed by Google and other Silicon Valley companies, the vehicles use high-definition internal mapping software to know their routes and various sensors to avoid pedestrians and other obstacles.

But the vehicles will have to be modified to follow the new self-driving handbook from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which is already in force for testing on public roads and still being developed for consumer use.

“In Europe these are truly driverless cars; they don’t even have a steering wheel,” but in California a steering wheel, brake pedal and accelerator must be added, Willis said.

September 2015 in Review

What did I learn in September? Let’s start with the bad and then go to the good.

Negative stories (-11):

  • The Environmental Kuznets Curve is the idea that a developing country will go through a period of environmental degradation caused by economic growth, but then the environment will improve in the long run. Sounds okay but the evidence for it is weak. (-1)
  • The Inca are an example of a very advanced civilization that was wiped out. (-1)
  • Consumerism and the pursuit of wealth are not sufficient cultural glue to hold a nation together. (-1)
  • Climate may be playing a role in the current refugee crisis, and the future may hold much more of this. (-1)
  • North and South America would have enormous herds of large mammals if humans had never come along.  (-1)
  • The U.S. clearly has lower average life expectancy than other advanced countries. Developing countries in Asia and Latin America are catching up, but life expectancy in Africa is still tragically low. (-1)
  • People get away with criminally violent behavior behind the wheel because police do not see it as on par with other types of crime. (-2)
  • People are still suggesting a false choice between critical and creative thinking. This is not how the problems are tomorrow will be solved. (-2)
  • This just in – an extreme form of central planning does not work. (-1)

Positive stories (+9):

    • Pneumatic chutes for garbage collection have been used successfully on an island in New York City for decades. This technology has some potential to move us closer to a closed loop world where resources are recovered rather than wasted. (+1)
    • Scientists and engineers could learn some lessons from marketing on how to communicate better with the rest of humanity. (+1)
    • There is new evidence from New Zealand on economic benefits of cycling and cycling infrastructure. (+1)
    • There has been some progress on New York City’s “lowline“, which is what a park in space might look like. The only problem is, it looks to me like a mall. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the exciting science fiction future may look a lot like malls in space. (+0)
    • The U.S. Surgeon General thinks walkable communities may be a good idea. The End of Traffic may actually be a possibility. (+3)
    • Peter Singer advocates “effective altruism”. A version of his Princeton ethics course is available for free online. (+1)
    • Edward Tufte does not like Infographics. (+0)
    • The unpronounceable Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi believes he has found the key to happiness. (+1)
    • The right mix of variety and repetition might be the key to learning. (+1)

self-driving cabs in Japan next year?

We’ve been told self-driving cars might be commercialized on a wide scale by 2025 or 2030. Only in Japan, they are saying 1-5 years. How many years behind is the U.S. typically? Well, if we take the example of high speed rail, Japan started operation in 1964, and projections are that the U.S. will have it…never.

In all seriousness though, this is different. U.S. politicians representing rural areas have power out of proportion to the populations they represent, and because high speed rail can never efficiently serve those sparsely populated rural areas, it is politically nearly impossible. But we have designed our entire country around cars. U.S. politics also support big business – including auto, tech, and insurance companies – and opposes public transportation, all for weird incomprehensible ideological reasons. So the self-driving cars will come.