BBC had a documentary called Out Of Control where they show this technology.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM_iiPFkNas&t=52m1s
It's a very interesting hour-long program. It makes me wonder if it is me that's posting this to slashdot or my subconscious overlord inside my brain.

These are all very important points. I think there are some examples of them in the video.

For example at 9:00 the speaker talks about how proud they are that their car didn't run down some pedestrians crossing the street. The car stopped just meters from them while making a left hand turn, blocking an oncoming car. The higher level decision that I'm sure the parent would make in practice is to judge the intentions of the pedestrians on the street and not commit to the turn. Although it's not clear in the video, it looks like the pedestrians didn't even run the light. The speaker doesn't acknowledge that their car blocked the oncoming lane resulting in a fairly dangerous situation. As you can see in the video, the oncoming car eventually swerves around the Google car.

Later on, at 12:00 he jokes about how a car nearly sideswipes him while merging onto the freeway. The speaker doesn't acknowledge the Google car's role in that dangerous situation. It's a simple lack of defensive driving on google's part. Yeah, they are not at fault for driving down the freeway, but it's not hard for a human to anticipate the fact that a car in a merge lane tail-gating behind a big semi-truck is going to change lanes at any moment. The Google car had an empty lane to the other side that it could have changed into at no cost.

I think these driverless cars are an insanely great innovation for our society, and I was really impressed with their TED talk too. But I just wish that now that they have the nerdy computer technical issues resolved, they can work on higher level algorithms, perhaps consulting with defensive driving professionals. I think defensive driving algorithms would be pretty interesting too, involving game theory and optimization. They seem to get it right with their four-way stop video, where they say they had to drive forward a bit to show their intention to proceed.

Wired had a nice article about the motivating power of statistics, and the positive sociological pressure that motives members from feeling they are part of a group. There's five excellent reasons to keep track of your workouts in this article.

Kde's Step is a good basic physics simulator. It is part of kde's education project.
From their description:
Step is an interactive physics simulator. It works like this: you place some bodies on the scene, add some forces such as gravity or springs, then click "Simulate" and Step shows you how your scene will evolve according to the laws of physics. You can change every property of bodies/forces in your experiment (even during simulation) and see how this will change the outcome of the experiment. With Step you can not only learn but feel how physics works !

There's a similar project out there called "Seventeen or Bust" whose goal is to find primes that will eventually prove a conjecture. To date they have eliminated 11 of the 17, leaving only 6 candidates left. I prefer to donate my cycles to them since there's bound to be a big party when the last candidate is eliminated and the goal is completed.