Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, March 24, 2024
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19 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Happy Sunday to all of you on the standard Terran calendar.
Interesting, relatively brief, video about the state of self driving cars.
About the whole kerfuffle of cars self-driving over child standees, shouldn’t all systems plain not drive into or over obstacles, regardless of what the obstacles are?
@Kathy: Are speed bumps okay? I could see a prankster painting a speed bump in a parking lot to look like a person laying there. My understanding is they even call ’em “sleeping policemen” in some countries.
@Tony W:
The one thing I can tell you for certain about speed bumps, is they are designed for vehicles to drive over.
Meh, I think it’s just a matter of time and processing power. A self driving car will be able to integrate info from cameras all around the car. It wont fall asleep, get drunk or answer texts. However, I dont see them as being perfect, just a lot better than having a human drive, but people will get a lot more upset about a self driven car having an accident. Liability issues still need to be settled.
Steve
@steve: I like the current trend of the car taking over more and more of the driving job – for example, my car has adaptive cruise control, so it maintains distance between me and the car in front of me. Similarly, the emergency braking, warning me when I drift out of my lane, the mirror camera showing me my blind spots during lane changes, etc.
Amusing anecdote. A couple of cars ago we were buying a Subaru Outback with these features. The sales guy was showing me how the steering wheel would shake if I drifted out of my lane. I asked “how do I change lanes then without triggering the system?”
He replied: “You use the turn signal”.
Oh.
Golf. Does this AP writer know anything about professional golf over the last 50 years?
Se Ri Pak is the most influential player in LPGA history maybe even golf history. Her success, beginning with two major championship wins in 1998, inspired hundreds of Korean ladies in both the ROK and in the United States (Michelle Wie, Danielle Kang to name two) to take up the sport and look at how well they have succeeded. This 2001 article puts the South Korean win total at 200. That has obviously increased. Some have reached #1 status in the Rolex rankings, Ji Yai Shin Inbee Park, So Yeon Ryu to name at least three.
One of the most influential golfers in LPGA history? No the most influential.
@Tony W: “He replied: “You use the turn signal”.”
The what, now?
@wr:
It’s the finger you stick out to he window to tell the bastards behind you that your turning.
@Tony W:
My BMW X3 M40i 3.1415 LSMFT has the thing where it keeps me from drifting out of a lane. It is wrong ~95% of the time. Going through an intersection it can’t see any lines so it fights me for control. Or, on a boulevard that’s empty for a half mile in every direction, it gets pissy if I change lanes without signaling. A system that wrong, that often, is more dangerous than helpful.
@Kathy: Good point!
@Tony W:
My newish Honda has lane change proximity warning lights, replacing the side mirror camera on my previous Honda. The camera is still available in Canada, but not the U. S. I assume somebody in the U. S. sued Honda for a real or imagined problem with the camera. One can see the Honda N.A. legal department had almost as big a hand in the design as engineering. I had to search through the manual to find how to turn off the damn smart cruise. I found it a constant irritation. Even on its lowest setting it thought 50 yards was a minimum following distance, I would find myself going 50 mph on an Interstate with clear lanes both sides of the car in front of me. The “emergency” braking was constantly slamming on the brakes on city streets because the guy in front of me had turned off and was ten feet down a side road. But my big concern is how do I maintain attention and alertness if I’m not actively driving the car?
LOL
Stop the Presses is a weekly newsletter by veteran journalist Mark Jacob about how right-wing extremism has exploited the weaknesses in American journalism and what we can do about it.
@Kathy: yeah and how does the software know that? After all it feels and looks like a child laying in the street according to the sensors.
I could see a viral thing where people intentionally mess with automated cars (more so than they already do).
@gVOR10: Oh man Honda’s collision mitigation stuff has outright nearly caused multiple accidents for me. Brand new car and it slams on the brakes with traffic behind me because “reasons”. I legit have had open road in front of me after I legally passed a car and the collision warning went off causing me to brake check a big truck hard. Nothing I can do to shut it off or tell it to stop being stupid… My favorite is how it wants to stop in an intersection because someone made a right hand turn prior to me. If it let me floor the gas pedal I wouldn’t be able to hit the car but it acts like I’m smashing into them. The one time it should of worked was when I was behind a car at a stop sign taking a left. The car in front of me started hard like they were going only to slam on their brakes for no conceivable reason. There was a good 10 second gap in traffic (heavy traffic area). Instead of yelling at me and slamming on the brakes it just let me bump into the guy. No damage to his car but it did mark my bumper. Best I can figure is they used a shitty cheap CPU and it’s literally lagging behind reality so the software itself is written to be vastly too cautious.
The amount of road rage incidents that piece of shit has caused is astounding.
The adaptive cruise control on the other hand is amazing. I just wish I could turn off the collision mitigation like I can turn off the lane keeper. Oh that’s another story. I had to turn off lane keeper because it kept swerving into other lanes because of damage/marks on the road. One of the areas near me had a spot where it looked like something very heavy was dropped on it’s corner in the lane where the right tires normally ride and dragged it for a bit. So for some reason the lane keeper decides that the groove cut in the blacktop is the actual side of the road and not the barely visible lane markings. So naturally it swerves to the left into any car in the lane to my left…
Always meant to ask local Tesla owners if they had similar problems but I never found myself near enough to one to ask.
@Matt:
Taking a RIGHT not left ugh. Guess my repressed rage at the shitty design of a “safety” system that actually makes the car less safe is more than I realized.
@gVOR10: I meant to mention that proximity warnings are cheaper than camera systems. I imagine they did that as a cost savings measure to bump dat profitability.
@Matt:
What’s to keep you from running over a speed bump masquerading as a child? Figure that out and write it into the software 😉
On other things, the vanilla ice cream went well and fast. I did 400 ml of heavy cream, 500 ml, of milk, 1/4 cup splenda (for baking, not packet form), and about 2-2.5 tsp of vanilla extract. Whisked it by hand (which produced a light foam), then tasted it. It tasted sweet and vainallaish enough, so I put it in the ice cream maker.
I’m more relaxed about letting it run unsupervised, so I washed some utensils and took a short break, about 12 minutes all told. When I returned, it was done. Usually it takes longer. Maybe it was the cream, maybe the smaller amount of liquid (not quite a liter). It was still good, though once frozen the flavor was more subtle (not unexpected).
In a brilliant move to aid Trump in winning in November, the Biden campaign has a nickname that reminds everyone of the lawfare against Trump. On the upside, Trump is getting tons of free airtime as people think about why Trump is “broke”
Looking forward to Broke Donny Trump not having the money to pay his bond tomorrow. 😛 😛
Just in case anybody was wondering about the definition of “broke”.
I raise cattle, and the term is often used to describe old cows with not many teeth left. “Broke- mouthed, short term cows.”
@JKB: You mean Don Poorleone?