The science of being normal

Simply being outside is good for your vision.


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Cars that Drive Themselves, Ctd - The Terror of Two Floating Points

MSNBC reports that cars are becoming increasingly autonomous.

The current set of semi-autonomous safety features can quickly combine into something more. For example, a car could use Lane Keep Assist and Adaptive Cruise Control together to drive itself under highway conditions, sticking to one lane and not hitting the car in front.

The next step is to expand these capabilities. Adaptive Cruise Control currently works only over 25 mph, but the next version (called Full Speed Range ACC) lowers that number to zero so that cars can begin to handle traffic jams in the city.

The problem with this is that each car is autonomous. TAE holds that you cannot build a network of completely autonomous robots without an immediate cascade failure. In mathematics we call this "one equation with two unknowns." You need a second equation to drive a value for each unknown. Or if there are three unknowns, you need three equations. Or if there are five hundred thousand cars commuting one morning in Nashville, you need fifty thousand equations...in each car.
Or, conversely, you could have a single control mechanism running all the cars. Suddenly you go from five hundred thousand organisms to a single organism with five hundred thousand legs. A superorganism. And these have already been on Earth for millions of years.

Take this example. If two fully robotic, fully autonomous cars are going down the highway, and up ahead there is a traffic accident, they will just slow and crawl through traffic like the rest of the cars around them. However, if a central architect is running the flow of traffic, and an accident occurs, it can automatically divert one of the two cars onto other highways or side roads, and the traffic is lessened so that both cars potentially do not lose time on their trips.
A reader might argue that the cars could still be autonomous, while having the advantage of the traffic diversion techniques. That is true, and is probably a logical step that will occur in the gradual evolution of autonomous vehicles. An accident occurs, the vehicle informs you of it and you elect to take a different route. However, you are already giving up your autonomy.
And consider this, would a traffic diversion protocol be better served if people had the option to ignore it's suggestions? Or should an autonomous vehicle, for your expedience (and others), just divert you around traffic accidents without your input?
A better system would be to mimic, on a much more intricate and low-altitude scale, the system used by Air Traffic Control to keep airplanes from colliding in mid-air. Micro-management of airplanes is done by a pilot, he/she takes off, climbs to altitude, changes direction and pitch, yaw, etc., descends, and eventually lands. However, the actual flightpath of the plane is determined by an Air Traffic Controller sitting in a dark room at several locations across the nation, who is specialized in calculating vectors and intersection points, and carefully keeps planes from ever coming within a few miles of one another.
Why is this a good idea? Other than the obvious reduction in airplane collisions, we are returned to the "two floating points" problem. In lieu of ATC vector-guidance, a pilot, up in the sky, might have a radar screen and see a nearby airplane approching. So the pilot might adjust their course. Which might compel a third airplane pilot to adjust his/her course. Which might compel a fourth pilot to adjust, and so on and so forth until we come around to the original pilot, who has to move to avoid the nth airplane, and the circle continues. If this free-floating directional guidance were to happen, planes would zigzag across the sky and waste valuable time and fuel. They'd hit weather patterns unexpectedly, be unable to avoid turbulence, and potentially a large number of airplanes might reach their destination at the same time, snagging an airport in a quagmire of landing airplanes.

This system would work for cars. The autonomous driving systems, like those suggested in the MSNBC article, could provide micromanagement of the car in its current location. But an automobile traffic control system, sending simple navigational data to the cars to optimize the entire traffic system would produce the most efficient system for traffic. The traffic system could say "take highway 50 to Smart Street and take Smart Street to 56th Avenue." and the autonomous vehicle could then do so. Should an accident occur on Smart Street, the traffic system could update the car: "take Alternatate Avenue 2 miles then turn south and divert back to Smart Street, continue on original path from there."

Basically, what I am suggesting, is that everyone on earth has a GPS device in their car and all the GPS devices are linked to a central optimization database, which runs on 3 rules:
TAE's Three Rules of Traffic Robotics. 1. Provide the shortest (time) path possible from point A to point B for each car.
2. Minimize the number of cars at any given point at any time, without violating rule 1.
3. Do not divert a car's path mid-travel unless the new path is shorter (time) than the existing path.

You can read my other thoughts on cars that drive themselves here, here and here. As you can imagine, I feel strongly about this.


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Explaining the human soul with Legos.

Brilliant.


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Weekly Poetry Burst, Fort Hood Edition

into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness, friends

i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-coloured twilight

i smilingly glide. I
into the big vermilion departure
swim, sayingly;

(Do you think?) the
i do, world
is probably made
of roses & hello:

(of solongs and, ashes)


into the strenuous briefness, by e e cummings.


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Deep Thought on Grey's Anatomy

Last season "the Chief" bought a Da Vinci machine to lure Bailey back to general surgery, this season the hospital and a nearby hospital are merging because of a fiscal crisis. Many high-quality surgical residents are laid off.

A da Vinci system costs $1.5 million plus several hundred thousand in maintenance fees annually. And since it was shown off in the season 5 finale, it hasn't been used.


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Sign Me Up! Just Don't Tell My Wife.

JSO thinks we need elite manhunting units to track down and kill baddies.


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Going to the Ovens for Gravity

Yesterday I happened to run across the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego going to the furnace because they wouldn't bow before the statue of the king; and I wondered "what would I do in that situation?"

Though I do not consider myself weakly principled nor a coward, I think I'd probably bow, and my inner monologue would mutter things about how I didn't agree with what I was doing, but preferred survival to principles.

I say this because if someone put a gun to my head and said "I will shoot you in the head right now unless you state out loud that gravity is not real." I would absolutely say gravity was not real, even though it obviously is. The reason for this is that my speaking out loud that gravity does not exist in no way lessens the body of evidence in support of gravity, hell, the Universe is still here as I type "gravity does not exist" (and gravity does not smite me).
Or if someone said to me "every day at such and such time you will read "What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs" or similar books OR ELSE YOU WILL BE PUT IN THE OVENS!" I would more than happily read Young Creationist garbage to avoid the ovens, because my death in the ovens would not further the cause of Evolution (there'd be one less evolutionist writing a blog!) nor would my reading of books about dinosaurs with children saddled to their back weaken the case of evolution, the body of evidence is not strengthened nor weakened by my not standing by my "principles."
Or if someone captured me in a war and forced me to say "America is a clown-nation full of yellow-haired pansies" every day or be ruthlessly tortured, I would probably pony up and say that "America sucks, dude." Of course, I do not believe America sucks, nor would I when I said it.
So why is it any different with God? Why do people go to the gallows so many times throughout Christian history because they refuse to refute the ultimate power of God? It seems to me, that like gravity and evolution, God is an immutable part of existence, and no amount of fingers-crossed lying will ever change that. If everyone on Earth became a spineless weasel like me and denied gravity in exchange for not getting shot in the head...if not a single person on Earth believed in gravity...would that in anyway cancel gravity's effect on the universe? Would we spontaneously float in to outer space?
Or would we simply replace gravity with a new term, like "intelligent falling" to explain phenomena that are universally true and immutable, and behave the way they behave independent of what they are named and how many people believe in them?

Perhaps I am trying to justify my own squeamishness and lack of courage. But on the other hand, perhaps I am seeing the bigger picture better than hard-headed people obsessed with principles. So while I enjoy the Old Testament stories of persecuted peoples dying before they'd deny their God, I have to ask...did they really think so little of God that they were afraid their personal denial of Him would reduce His power? Seems a little egotistic. Or if instead their fear was that God would feel betrayed and cast them to the outer darkness (where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth), didn't they know that God saw what was in their heart, and would have known the tyrannically-forced, vocal God-denial was a lie?
I suddenly have a gun to my head. A lunatic is holding the gun and demanding I say gravity is a lie and intelligent falling is the truth. I can either refuse, and die, or acquiesce, deny gravity is real, and eventually I will hopefully escape this situation, at which point I will obviously go back to acknowledging that gravity is an immutable part of life. In the meantime I can secretly still believe in gravity. Hmm, what would Newton do...what would Newton do...


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