The author of TFA doesn't have a clue. This idea is useless as bridges, particularly suspension bridges, deflect by much more than 1 cm under traffic and wind loads.

I think the aouthor of TFA knows that:

Forget cursive handwriting (after 15 years of manual drafting in all caps, followed by 15 years of using CAD at work, I certainly have) pencil & paper still works much better than a tablet or laptop for writing out problems & solutions in algebra, geometry, trig, calculus, etc.

Case closed.

When I did some work for a financial company, the head of operations told me that the department handling collections of bad debt was the most profitable - because by the time the account got to them, the money was already written off and anything they collected counted as pure profit.

I must be missing something.

Aircraft operate in 3 dimensions, trains operate for the most part in one - which implies that there is much less of a chance of 2 planes being at the same place at the same time than 2 trains being at the same place a t the same time. The airplane autopilot flies at certain altitudes depending on the path, and if the plane stays at the assigned altitude, there is almost no chance for crossing paths. Trains going in different directions share tracks in a lot of places, and they can't move out of the way of each other - timing is everything in train safety (hence we have a few time zones rather than hundreds of local times)

Well, if you couple the gps to the odometer, that should work most of the time, even with brief gps outages.

Most of the time isn't considered good enough for train safety. Unlike the interstate, there aren't dedicated lanes going each way - there are a lot of single tracks sharing traffic going in both directions.

Hell, they've dug up and rebuilt a 12 mile stretch of four lane highway in front of my neighborhood, including new bridge work in 4 different places for only 12 million.

I call BS on this one.
If I'm wrong, I'd recommend against driving across or under those new bridges.

Apparently.

The signalling and controls for trains are much more reliable than GPS and the simple programming exercise you envision. The issue is that automatic failsafes being installed for that section of track were not yet tested and given control of the trains, not that they could not be done.

Planes are faster bro, even with loading/unloading time, which is why they [sic] can actually make money on their own . . .

Which is why every major airliner (except Southwest) has gone bankrupt in the recent past?
(Also, planes are not always quicker for short distances, if there are actually trains going where you're going.)

Regulations most likely require that someone is on the train to oversee operation and help in emergencies anyway.

This is true.

I dislike driving.
Still, I probably couldn't stand being in a self-driving car, and would much prefer to drive it myself.

Obviously, this train's driver was confident he could overrule the engineers, architects, and the laws of motion.

I don't see how we could know such a thing yet, let alone call it obvious.

Stiff foams typically aren't any good at absorbing sound.

Plenty of dogs will consistently catch a ball out of the air - you want to tell me they don't know where it's going to land ? Children catch balls many years before we teach them the maths needed to calculate their curves.

The argument was that you don't need to understand the physics to predict it. And the dogs don't understand the physics, but can predict where it's going.
Although I must add, my older dog, whose running days are somewhat behind her, can predict the balls path much better because she actually watches it before going after it, while my younger dogs tend to immediately take off to where they think I threw it and take their eyes off the ball, though they still usually beat her to it even when they have to make a U-turn.