Author: admin

Today there were several in-depth articles in the New York Times about the first reported death in a Tesla while the car was driving itself. The death occurred on May 1, when a tractor-trailer unexpectedly cut off the vehicle, and the robot autopilot failed to swerve out of the way.

The slant of every article was the same: Because the Tesla’s autopilot failed to save its occupant, maybe self-driving cars are not yet ready for prime time.

What none of the articles failed to acknowledge was that the death was caused not by an errant Tesla autopilot, but by an errant tractor-trailer driver. A human, through faulty decision making, inadvertently killed another human, and the Tesla’s software failed to prevent that death.

Am I the only person who finds this absurd? The killer on our roads isn’t software, it’s human drivers. Automobile accidents are the single largest cause of death in the U.S. after heart failure and cancer. The death toll from people killing and maiming themselves and others while driving their cars vastly exceeds all fatalities and injuries to U.S. citizens from warfare or terrorism.

OK, in this one case out of many the robot did not succeed in stopping someone driving a vehicle from inadvertently killing somebody else. But why blame the software? Clearly the solution is to get all those killer humans out of the driver’s seat.

A road on which all vehicles were robot driven would be a completely cooperative road. No humans with bad judgement would be cutting off and killing other humans, no drivers would be trying to guess what’s on the mind of other drivers. It would all be a single coordinated packet-switching network, with every vehicle knowing, at all times, the exact location and intended movement of every other vehicle.

So why is this story not being reported for what it really is? Suppose after the horrific shooting in Orlando, the news media had focused entirely on the failure of bullet proof vests to save every victim.

I can envision hand-wringing editorials declaring that bullet proof vests are not yet ready for prime time, and criticizing the makers of bullet proof vests for not taking responsibility for the lives of the murdered people their vests had failed to save.

Wouldn’t that be a completely idiotic view of the situation?

Late last night, on my way home from the lab, I decided to pick up a few groceries at my favorite corner market, and I got a little carried away. By the time I arrived at the checkout counter, I had a basket full of things to buy.

At the checkout counter I saw a disheveled and very lost looking man, clearly homeless. Sitting on the counter before him was a packaged snack and a can of beer. He just stood there stoically, as though waiting patiently for his turn to be served.

The proprietor, ignoring the homeless man entirely, asked me if I was ready to be served. I thought to myself that this homeless guy’s life is clearly hard enough, so maybe I could help a little.

“He has a lot fewer items than I do,” I told the proprietor. “I can go after him.”

Just then a young man, maybe twenty years old, stepped in front of me and put two items down on the counter for purchase.

Now that seemed just plain rude. “OK,” I siged, trying to stay civil, “I guess I will go after everybody else.”

The young man looked at me sheepishly, then gestured toward the homeless man. “I’m paying for him.”

And so he was. I felt very embarrassed, but I guess I learned one good lesson from this awkward episode:

When you find yourself feeling all puffed up and proud after being kind to a stranger, just remember that there are people in this world who are kinder than you are. I think that’s a good thing.

I read an article today about people running hydroponic farms in small spaces, the kind of spaces you might find in a crowded city. The key is to use LED lights and make the farms highly vertical, so you get a lot of plant growth in a relatively small footprint.

The LEDs are only 50% efficient in their use of electricity — the other half turns into heat. So in some ways it’s a bit energy wasteful, and the electrical bill is usually quite steep.

But it occurred to me that if we look at this from a more global perspective, it might make sense to link solar power in one part of the world to electric hydroponic farming in another part of the world. Why not harvest solar energy in equatorial deserts, where it can be done efficiently, and then pipe the resulting electricity away from the equator?

You could then have electric hydroponic farms in more frigid climates. The people in those climates would then be able to get freshly grown food, right from their own neighborhood.

Also, 50% of the piped electrical power that dissipates into heat could also be harvested. In particular, it could be used to heat peoples’ homes.

Wouldn’t this solve two problems at once?

when we’re at our best
we are too busy to ask
am i at my best?

After a few days reflection, I find myself changing my mind about the larger implications of Brexit. At first I had thought it boded ill for our own nation. After all, if Great Britain can manage to vote itself down from a major world power to a shrunken frightened little child, then the same could happen here.

But now that the charlatans behind that bizarre maneuver have had a chance to show their true colors, I am heartened. The mythical three hundred and fifty million pounds paid weekly to the E.U. has vanished in a puff of rhetorical smoke, just as the promised greater investment in British healthcare was revealed to be nothing but empty talk.

After the sad spectacle of Brexit, I had worried that people in the U.S. might also be taken in by a narcissistic no-nothing opportunist who doesn’t know the first thing about how government actually works. But now I realize that we have the example of Brexit to show just how embarrassing it is for a country to be taken in by nonsense talk from fools and knaves.

The U.S. now has a clear working example of what happens when racist isolationist opportunists steal the microphone. At the end of the day, we Americans tend to be a fairly pragmatic people, with a strong instinct for self-preservation.

Which is why I’m newly hopeful that we on this side of the Atlantic will not follow Great Britain down the rabbit hole of small minded and racist fear mongering. Because that’s how a great nation destroys itself.

I am typing this while sitting on a panel about visualization. The first of five panelists is currently speaking, and I will be the last of five.

As it happens, we are a very diverse crew, with very different backgrounds and areas of expertise. Between us we cover government, science, education, and virtual reality. And I think that’s a good thing.

There is an argument to be made for organizing panels around some evocative starting word (in this case “visualization”) and finding the most diverse group of people you can find to speak to that topic. For one thing, this structure will discourage any individual speaker from approaching their subject in any way that is too narrow or focused on fellow experts.

But more than that, it is a great way to engage an audience, to discover and perhaps to create surprising connections between fields. In short, when choosing panelists for a panel discussion, there is something to be said for going broad.

And, of course, choosing a good starting word.

This past Friday, global financial markets lost about two trillion dollars, in the wake of the results of the Brexit vote. That’s a very large number, and I’m trying to wrap my head around it.

Here are are several ways to look at it: Assuming the market was open for eight hours, that’s two hundred and fifty billion dollars an hour.

Which comes out to a little more than four billion dollars a minute. Still a little difficult to grasp.

Fortunately, the financial markets lost only about seventy million dollars a second. Ah, now that’s a much easier number to understand. 🙂

For the last two years I have been working, with my students, on two related projects. One, called Holojam, allows people to walk around together in the same physical room, wearing very lightweight VR headsets, to share a kind of radical augmented reality: We are all physically together, but we are all visually sharing a fantasy world, as though we have entered the Star Trek Holodeck.

The other project, called Chalktalk, allows drawings to come to life, sort of like a real-life version of Harold and the Purple Crayon.

For months I have been working on putting those two projects together. Technically it has been very complicated. I needed to completely rewrite large portions of Chalktalk, build my own virtual reality modeling software and renderer, and learn more about web sockets and other bits and pieces of internet plumbing than I ever thought I’d need to know.

And just yesterday, it finally all started working together. I am able to draw things in Chalktalk and then see them come magically to life floating in the air before me. Other people can also share the experience with me.

The basic components are now all there, for example, to allow somebody to give a Chalktalk lecture in virtual reality for a group of people. Each person can each walk around the 3D animated chalkboard and look at it from his or her own perspective.

There are still a few wrinkles to work out, but things are now in the home stretch. And it feels great!

I woke up this morning wondering how much of Great Britain’s vote to leave the EU was motivated by fear of immigrants. Whether or not we’re talking about full scale xenophobia, the fundamental message seemed pretty clear from the rhetoric employed by the “Leave” spokespeople: Too many foreigners are arriving on England’s pleasant shores.

In the course of the day, I discovered that everyone I spoke with had had exactly the same thought. And like me, they had all linked it to the Trump campaign.

Here is the worry, in a nutshell: If a campaign essentially rooted in fear, xenophobia, resentment and thinly disguised racism can sway a populace, we’re probably all in trouble.

I was at the NYVR MeetUp this evening. In one cool augmented reality demo, a woman pointed her iPad at the audience. Up on the projection screen we could see MeetUp attendees, in real time, in the live video feed from the tablet’s point. Those attendees began waving happily at the camera.

She then chose from a menu of items, until she had selected a Coca Cola vending machine (Coca Cola is one of their company’s clients). As soon as she did this, we could see, up on the projection screen, a full sized Coca Cola vending machine, as though it were right there in the room, next to those MeetUp attendees.

Gesturing on her iPad, she then proceeded to move the virtual Coca Cola machine around the room, then open and slose its doors, and finally replace the contents by other Coca Cola drinks like Fanta and Sprite. It was all very impressive.

“In the virtual world,” she said, “I can do anything I want.”

I didn’t agree. Turning to the person next to me, I said, “I don’t think she can fill the vending machine with Pepsi.”