The gap between professional race drivers and self-driven cars isn’t all that big, as a race at the Thunderhill Raceway in California proved yesterday. Although the human driver achieved victory against the self-driven Audi TTS in a head-to-head, he only managed to shave off a few seconds from the computer’s time.
photo { Roger Minick }
Adrian Wooldridge has an excellent column on how the advent of driverless cars might impact the global automotive industry and the broader economy. […]
When people are no longer in control of their cars they will not need driver insurance—so goodbye to motor insurers and brokers. Traffic accidents now cause about 2m hospital visits a year in America alone, so autonomous vehicles will mean much less work for emergency rooms and orthopaedic wards. Roads will need fewer signs, signals, guard rails and other features designed for the human driver; their makers will lose business too. When commuters can work, rest or play while the car steers itself, longer commutes will become more bearable, the suburbs will spread even farther and house prices in the sticks will rise. When self-driving cars can ferry children to and from school, more mothers may be freed to re-enter the workforce. The popularity of the country pub, which has been undermined by strict drink-driving laws, may be revived. And so on.
photo { George Kelly }
It seems as if stealing bikes shouldn’t be a lucrative form of criminal activity. Used bikes aren’t particularly liquid or in demand compared to other things one could steal (phones, electronics, drugs). And yet, bikes continue to get stolen so they must be generating sufficient income for thieves. What happens to these stolen bikes and how to they get turned into criminal income?
You’re on the bus, and one of the only free seats is next to you. How, and why, do you stop another passenger sitting there?
New research reveals the tactics commuters use to avoid each other, a practice the paper describes as ‘nonsocial transient behavior.’ […]
“Avoiding other people actually requires quite a lot of effort and this is especially true in confined spaces like public transport.”
One of the nightmare scenarios for modern society is the possibility of a global flu pandemic like the 1918 Spanish influenza which infected about a quarter of the global population and killed as many as 130 million of them.
An important question for policy makers is how best to limit the spread of such a disease if a new outbreak were to occur. (The Spanish flu was caused by the H1N1 flu virus that was also responsible for the 2009 swine flu outbreak.)
One obvious idea is to close international airports to prevent, or at least dramatically reduce, the movement of potentially infected individuals between countries. But is this the best approach?
Today, Jose Marcelino and Marcus Kaiser at Newcastle University in the UK, provide an answer. They say a better approach is to cut specific flights between airports because it can achieve the same reduction in the spread of the disease with far less drastic action.
A study of the world’s largest subway networks has revealed that they are remarkably mathematically similar.
The layouts seem to converge over time to a similar structure regardless of where or over how long they were built.
The study, in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, analysed 14 subway networks around the world.
It found common distributions of stations within the networks, as well as common proportions of the numbers of lines, stations, and total distances.
Some scientists think that subway networks are an emergent phenomenon of large cities; each network is the product of hundreds of rational but uncoordinated decisions that take place over many years. And whereas small cities rarely have subway networks, 25 percent of medium-sized cities (with populations between one million and two million) do have them. And all the world’s megacities—those with populations of 10 million or more—have subway systems.
{ MCA tribute at the airport | Chris Chapman }
{ We show that if a car stops at a stop sign, an observer, e.g., a police officer, located at a certain distance perpendicular to the car trajectory, must have an illusion that the car does not stop, if the following three conditions are satisfied: (1) the observer measures not the linear but angular speed of the car; (2) the car decelerates and subsequently accelerates relatively fast; and (3) there is a short-time obstruction of the observer’s view of the car by an external object, e.g., another car, at the moment when both cars are near the stop sign. | Dmitri Krioukov/arXiv | PDF }
{ Only 500 people have been to space, only three people have been to the bottom of the ocean, but no one has ever attempted to journey to the core of an active volcano. Until now. Using patented carbon-carbon materials pioneered for deep space exploration, Virgin is proud to announce a revolutionary new vehicle, VVS1, which will be capable of plunging three people into the molten lava core of an active volcano. | Virgin | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }
Previous studies identified a number of common cycling injuries, including neck and back pain, chafing, and genital numbness. In fact, 50 to 91% of men and women cyclists report experiencing genital numbness. The relationship between bicycle setup and genital sensation in women cyclists, however, has, until now, not been investigated.
In order to study this relationship, scientists (…) recruited 41 female cyclists who rode an average of at least 10 miles per week, and who positioned their handlebars lower than or level with the saddle. (…)
The Medoc Vibratory Sensory Analyzer 3000, not your average vibrator, was used to measure sensation at eight genital regions: the clitoris, the left and right perineum, the anterior and posterior vagina, the left and right labia, and the urethra.
(…)
This increase in perineum saddle pressure resulted in a significant loss of genital sensation in the anterior vagina and in the left labia, where the threshold at which women were able to sense genital stimulation increased by 34% and 29% respectively in women with lower handlebars.
When you fly trans-Atlantic, why does the plane not go straight? One would think the shortest route would be a straight line from say NYC to London… but the plane makes a curve…
What is a straight line on the globe may appear as a curved line on a flat map. Use a globe and hold a piece of string tight against it with one end at each of the two cities you are flying between. You might find that this gives you a very different path than if you drew a straight line on a map. (…)
For example, a direct line from Toronto to Tokyo goes through Alaska and Siberia. On a flat map with the north pole at the top, this would look like an arch. (…)
Notice that the red line is shorter than the blue line. The sphere has a smaller circumference as you get closer to either of the polls than it does at the equator (closer to the blue line)
If you were to fly directly to your destination on a transatlantic flight (let’s say along the blue line), you would have to fly a much further distance than if you bowed up north over Greenland (and flew closer to the red line) for a bit.{ Askville | Continue reading }
North Atlantic Tracks (NAT) are trans-Atlantic routes that stretch from the northeast of North America to western Europe across the Atlantic Ocean. They ensure aircraft are separated over the ocean, where there is little radar coverage.
These heavily-traveled routes are used by aircraft traveling between North America and Europe, flying between the altitudes of 28,500 and 42,000 feet, inclusive. Entrance and movement along these tracks is controlled by special Oceanic Center air traffic controllers to maintain separation between airplanes.
The primary purpose of these routes is to provide a Minimum Time Route. They are aligned in such a way as to minimize any head winds and maximize tail winds impact on the aircraft. This results in much more efficiency by reducing fuel burn and flight time.
To make such efficiencies possible, the routes are created daily to take account of the shifting of the winds aloft. (…)
Concorde did not travel on the North Atlantic Tracks as it flew to the United States from the United Kingdom and France from a much higher altitude, between 45,000ft and 60,000ft. The weather variations at these altitudes were so minor that Concorde followed the same route each day, traveling to and from Europe to North America on fixed tracks.
Deep down on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, Swedish treasure hunters think they have made the find of a lifetime. The problem is, they’re not exactly sure what it is they’ve uncovered. Out searching for shipwrecks at a secret location between Sweden and Finland, the deep-sea salvage company Ocean Explorer captured an incredible image more than 80 meters below the water’s surface.
“I have been doing this for nearly 20 years so I have a seen a few objects on the bottom, but nothing like this,” said Lindberg.
Using side-scan sonar, the team found a 60-meter diameter cylinder-shaped object, with a rigid tail 400 meters long. The imaging technique involves pulling a sonar “towfish” — that essentially looks sideways underwater - behind a boat, where it creates sound echoes to map the sea floor below. On another pass over the object, the sonar showed a second disc-like shape 200 meters away.
Lindberg’s team believe they are too big to have fallen off a ship or be part of a wreck. (…)
The reliability of one-side scan sonar images is one of his main concerns, making it difficult to determine if the object is a natural geological formation or something different altogether. (…)
Odyssey Marine Exploration — a company made up of researchers, scientists, technicians and archaeologists — have at least 6,300 shipwrecks in their database that they are looking to find. Mark Gordon, president of Odyssey, says at least 100 ships on their watch-list are known to have values in excess of $50 million dollars.
“When you think about the fact until the mid 20th century, the only way to transport wealth was on the oceans and a lot of ships were lost, it adds up to a formula where we have billions of dollars worth of interesting and valuable things on the sea floor,” he said.
