Not if they're a 3yo asking for a video.

In contrast, here in Australia, a smart man replaced an idiot. Unfortunately the smart man is cowardly and unable to stand up to the idiot’s colleagues, so despite much hope in the electorate (the not-nutcase-right part of it anyway), the government is basically the same but with a better-looking prime minister who doesn’t eat raw onions.

From what I’ve seen above, it doesn’t look like a good idea to transferring petroleum away from a station. Overall it would be safer to have someone arrive, grab your keys and take your car to the gas station. They don’t have to buy a truck then.

But you only have to beat human level AI at the specific task of driving a car. Given an autonomous car is able to look in all directions at once, that’s a huge start.

That’s the only downside I came up with. Once most cars are autonomous, you might be able to have a seatbelt-free mode where the car moves slower and avoids sudden acceleration or deceleration. Then people will see a slow-moving bumping car and nudge and wink.

If the AI isn't up to the task then it's not a self-driving car.

And if the human has to constantly be alert and on standby in case he or she needs to take over, there’s not really any point, is there?

I learned Lua programming macros and then addons for World of Warcraft. I’ve found it’s the only language I don’t have to pretty much relearn every time I use it (programming tasks are infrequent for me). Since then I’ve done some pretty sophisticated stuff with it, so the toy became a tool.

My 2008 iMac has Bluetooth, and the Bluetooth is just as disfunctional as on all my other Bluetooth devices.

Keeping up with House of Cards takes a lot of effort, but so does making up interesting & entertaining stories for my daughter.

I went to see Melbourne’s fireworks on New Year’s Eve 1999 going into 2000. We arrived early and got a good viewing spot on Southbank Promenade. When it was all over and the crowd started moving, there were people pressing on every side, and we had no control over where we were moving. Until you’re near the edge you just have to go where the crowd is going.

Everyone was calm and patient, as I imagine they are 99.999% of the time at the Hajj. But from the BBC article:

With temperatures around 46C, two massive lines of pilgrims converged on each other at right angles at an intersection close to the five-storey Jamarat Bridge in Mina, a large valley about 5km (3 miles) from Mecca.

(This is nowhere near the Kaaba, where pilgrims circle around the stone, and where a lot of crowd-control research has been done.) At light densities, columns of people can cross easily and elegantly, such as at a pedestrian crossing. At high densities, it would become physically impossible to make (push) one’s way through a column moving at right angles, with this happening just as people lose their autonomy. With pressure coming in from behind it would become deadly.

Corporations seem to become behemoths whose only creative activity is related to money-making and tax-avoidance. As a corporation, âoeowningâ the rights to creative work done in the nineteenth century is only made meaningful by the among of money it brings in. If bringing in money on a large scale gives you your jollies, this is your path to enlightenment.

A year studying 20th-century music and doing serial music exercises in composition class prepared me well to listen to twelve-tone music. If I’m in the mood and I concentrate, I can quite enjoy an atonal piece. But in the end I grew to love renaissance music most, which is best described as pre-tonal (and definitely heptatonic).

Yes, yes, yes!

As far as I know, Thai music divides the octave into seven equally-spaced steps (7-tone equal temperament), then only uses five of them. So it’s a strange-sounding (to Westerners) pentatonic scale. Western music divides the octave into twelve equal intervals, but only uses seven of these in the scale that forms most of our music, which is basically heptatonic.

Experienced choral singers know that an F sharp is actually different from G flat, but that’s another thing altogether.