My grandparents #throughglass
My grandparents enjoying their great-grandchildren #throughglass.
I may have to get an extra pair…
Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category
PDLBKBR Part II
A little over two years ago, I attended an event and listened to Brad Templeton speaking about the Google driverless car and how hard it would be for society to adapt to this new method of transportation.
I’ve stumbled upon a recording of him lecturing about the topic at “Driving Innovation: A Speaker Series Powered by Nissan Motor Company” (also on iTunes).
Here’s the transcript.
One of the biggest barriers is that for some unknown reason people don’t like being killed by robots… they’d rather be killed by drunks.
They were actually more afraid of possible injuries and accidents that could come from a robot than they would be afraid of it being done by drunks and other human negligence.
And this is a real thing, there is a real fear, and so when these vehicles, because they will not be perfect, and it would be a serious mistake to set a standard that demands that they’d be perfect, that demands that they’d be as good as elevators. I think that would be a serious mistake because we’re looking, outside, at the second most dangerous consumer product that is allowed to be sold in terms of unintentional deaths. To be more dangerous you’d have to light it on fire and breathe it into your lungs, that’s the most dangerous product.
And this is an effort to take that dangerous product and make it safer, make it kill fewer people. And I think that’s a grand effort and I think it’s an effort on par with even curing polio which killed fewer people than cars as of today.
More people have died in car accidents in the United States than in all the wars in the history of the United States going back to the revolutionary war. It’s an astoundingly huge number and to reduce that number I think is a grand goal, and so I think that the standard of care here should be to do better than that. But if the standard of care is more like an elevator, where perfection is demanded, the technology will never be deployed (or almost never, it would take a very long time), and a lot of people will die in the meantime.
- Anatomy of a Robocar Accident – Brad Templeton’s Home Page
- Brad Templeton: Changing the World with Robocars – NEXT Berlin
- Robocars Prezi by Brad Templeton
Further reading
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What happens next starts with you…
You are a pioneer, a founder and an architect of what’s possible.
You are a Glass Explorer. We have an exciting journey ahead of us,
and what happens next starts with you.Start exploring at google.com/glass
I can’t remember the last time I had to RTFM before figuring out how *turn on* a gadget I purchased.
And that’s the first thing I was planning to do with it…
Tracx Dashboards in Times Square
Next month marks the 8th anniversary since the registration of the tra.cx domain name. Words can’t describe the way I feel right now, after reaching yet another peak in this amazing journey, with my five partners and a dream-team of amazingly talented people making Tracx a global leader, a family and a home.
For the next week our dashboards are displayed on a 15×10 meters screen in Times Square NYC, the most visible place on the planet, showing real-time data about the Super Bowl, the most watched sporting event in America.
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Thermodynamics
Brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.
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Our inability to understand the Exponential function
I was reminded of this quote, due to the discussions triggered by the Bitcoin private key database troll website about the feasibility of brute-force searching for the private key of a Bitcoin address.
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
A reddit user made some calculations:
So, if you could use the entire planet as a hard drive, storing 1 byte per atom, using stars as fuel, and cycling through 1 trillion keys per second, you’d need 37 octillion Earths to store it, and 237 billion suns to power the device capable of doing it, all of which would take you 3.6717 octodecillion years.
– PSBlake (reddit)
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Now You Have Two Problems
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.
However, if you really have to, use Grant Skinner‘s very useful RegExr tool.
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We don’t have the technology
One thing humans don’t know how to do is shut down peer to peer networks. We don’t have the technology.
– Peter Vessenes, founder and CEO of Bitcoin exchange CoinLab (via)
Google+ Auto Stupefying Awesome Thinger
I love love love the Google+ automatic photo combiner and GIF maker (GIF or JIF?). It even managed to automatically tag this photo with #BlackCat.
However, when I tell people about it, they say “but who the hell uses Google+?“.
I say, let them stay where they are, for now. There are awesome people on Google+, my feed there is much more interesting, and I feel like I’m using the word Awesome too much already.
Patent US7028023 – Linked list
Today I wanted to write a new software module, and considered using Linked Lists. To my surprise, while searching for Software Patents (which is common practice before writing a new module), I realized I have to either give up using such lists (and go over the existing code base to make sure no else does), or start paying royalties to LSI Logic.
“Congratulations are in order to Ming-Jen Wang of LSI Logic Corporation who, in patent #10260471 (filed Sep 26, 2002 and granted Apr 11, 2006) managed to invent the linked list. From the abstract, “A computerized list is provided with auxiliary pointers for traversing the list in different sequences. One or more auxiliary pointers enable a fast, sequential traversal of the list with a minimum of computational time. Such lists may be used in any application where lists may be reordered for various purposes.” Good-bye doubly linked list. We should also give praise to the extensive patent review performed by Cochran Freund & Young LLP.” (Slashdot)
Innerlogics 
Written
on May 25, 2014