YTechnology

  The car in front of me misjudged a traffic light and stopped in the crosswalk. Braking early, I left a gap should the driver wish to back up. Then I wondered, would an autonomous vehicle extend the same courtesy? But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before being courteous, autonomous driving has yet to master the rules of road. There are two prevailing approaches: solve for general AI or use geo-fencing.  The former, pursued by Tesla, is harder to achieve but will make autonomous cars capable of driving on almost any road. The latter, used by GM Cruise and Alphabet Waymo, is easier to achieve, but restricts autonomous cars to certain locations. GM Cruise is already accepting fares for its driverless taxi in San Francisco. The service, however, is bound by both time and space, allowed only to run between 10pm and 6am (lighter traffic) and within a 7x7 mile area. Choices and trade-offs such as these are common when planning and building a future. Thirty years ago, Apple introduce...

The Borg were a fearsome adversary introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  With a collective hive mind, they assimilated entire worlds, stealing their technology and enslaving the population to serve as drones.  Able to adapt to and neutralize any defense thrown up by their victims, the Borg were relentless. While much has been written about the Borg, here are some little known facts about them. Earth's first Borg was Earnest Borgnine. His name should have given him away, but he looked human and was very likable. A very distant descendant of his was Annika Hansen, better known as Seven of Nine. Earth did eventually succeed in capturing and containing the Borg.  Below is a monument to this achievement. And turning the tables, we see Christmas has assimilated the Borg. Happy Holidays!

A recent project had me fitting my Mazda3 with a cloaking device.  The  goal was just to learn, as speeding without being seen is arguably more dangerous than speeding while visible. Here is a photo sequence of the cloaking device in action.  There was absolutely no photoshop trickery! Photo 1: Mazda3 Photo 2: So'wI' chu'  (Engage cloaking device) Photo 3: Qapla'! (Success!) The most difficult part of this project wasn’t the installation, although I did need special tools, including a phase coil resonator.  Nor was it the additional power requirements; I simply advanced the engine’s spark timing and switched from regular gasoline to premium.  No, the difficult part was locating the parts.  eBay and Craigslist were dead ends.  Inquiries on various car forums went unanswered.  And I sniffed around several junkyards to no avail.  The last junkyard search ended like all the others — in...

This September, the Star Trek television series debuts with Enterprise. I happen to like all the Star Trek series because it describes optimistically what could be in our future. It's not just about advances in technology, but also in medicine, philosophy, and the human spirit. Returning to the present, it reminds me how much work needs to be done to improve our society as a whole and in computing in particular. The late Michael L. Dertouzos, director of MIT labs for Computer Science, believed access to information should be as seamless as breathing, hence MIT's futuristic computing infrastructure named Oxygen. Details can be found on MIT's Lab For Computer Science website . An excellent article also appeared in the August 1999 issue of Scientific American . Basically, Oxygen involves eight novel technologies: a handheld computer, wall and trunk computers, a novel net, built-in speech understanding, knowledge access, collaboration, automation, and customization. The bind...