Walking on sunshine
On the hundreds of occasions when I've told people about the robot car thing, I've found that there are certain things they are very likely to say. A lot of people talk about driving the car by remote control. A lot of people say there should be a driver hidden inside the car. A lot of people seize on the phrase "no human driver" and say there should be a chimpanzee or some other animal driving. A lot of people think the best off-road vehicle would be a sphere, like a hamster ball.
When I was in Scotland in September, I told three people about the robot race for the first time and each one of them asked something along the lines of, "Is this supposed to reduce the use of fossil fuels?" I don't recall one person in America ever asking this, but in Scotland it was three for three.
This weekend I was filling out the answers to a set of questions sent to me by a class of eleven-year-olds in Shetland. Sure enough, along with such questions as "How fast did your car go?" and " What was the most difficult obstacle to avoid?" they ask, "Is your car solar-powered or does it run on fuel? Why?"
Maybe Scots are more environmentally conscious.
---
Speaking of economical British race cars, I watched the 1969 original version of
The Italian Job. As I thought would be the case, the original is better and makes more sense than the 2003 remake. However, the whole point of the movie is a car chase with stunts which were probably innovative in 1969, but seem rather staid and unexciting today, after nearly forty more years of action movies. Now the whole movie seems low-key.
---
There are no car chases to speak of in the new Bond movie
Casino Royale. I liked it okay, but the last twenty minutes are a bit muddled. Also (aside from whether it is plausible or otherwise a good idea to make the high-stakes card game Texas hold'em poker instead of baccarat), the poker game is overly simplistic. James Bond is supposed to be the best card player in the Service... You can tell how good he is because he gets dealt straight flushes when his opponents get dealt full houses.
Tell my wife I am trolling Atlantis
I read
The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon. It is quite short, perhaps because it was never finished. There is not much plot.
The narrator's expedition comes to a large island in the Pacific with a secret civilization. This civilization, Bensalem, has kept itself in deliberate near-total isolation from the rest of the world since 300 B.C. It's not clear to me exactly what ill effects they expect from interaction with other countries, but they figure their kingdom is so great that exposure to strangers has more downside than upside. However, the wise men of the kingdom send out a select number of spies to gather information from the outside world, so they can benefit from any positive discoveries while excluding everything negative and revealing nothing about themselves.
Bensalem is a Christian kingdom because around 50 A.D., Saint Bartholomew sent the island a magical floating capsule containing advance copies of the complete Old and New Testament, including the books of the New Testament that hadn't been written yet. (Seriously, that's what it says in the book.)
Apparently
The New Atlantis is remembered in part because the association of wise men who do various experiments and send out spies to gather knowledge was an inspiration for the foundation of the Royal Society in 1660.
The narrator seems weirdly obsessed with the linens and silks and velvets and plush that make up the wardrobe of the various characters. I guess maybe that is his idea of character description: to give a very detailed account of their outfits.
The story has consistency problems. When the narrator's crew first lands on the island, they're told that there's sufficient government funding for them to stay six weeks, and they may apply for an extension if necessary. Then later it turns out that the kingdom's visitor policy, to humanely discourage travelers from returning home with the secrets of the island, is to bribe them to stay forever in comfort. Then right before the story ends, one of the kingdom's wise men tells the narrator to go home and tell everyone about the scientific society... basically chucking Bensalem's 1900-year policy out the window.
I think Francis Bacon was a pretty terrible writer of speculative fiction.
Go greased lightning, you're burning up the quarter mile
Advance congratulations to
Insight Racing for fielding probably the sportiest DARPA Grand Challenge entry, a
Lotus Elise donated by Lotus Cars USA. Lotus Engineering will provide engineering support. A Lotus Elise accelerates from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 5.63 seconds.
“Last year, we were there on the cheap with a 1987 Chevy Suburban,” said Sliva. “We didn’t get a lot of press out there. People looked at us as sort of an after-thought while others had Hummers and things like that.” [...] Sliva is hopeful that the shiny Lotus will draw attention to the technology that the Insight team continues to create.
“If that doesn’t get us attention,” Sliva said, “what will?
“We are competitive on a technology basis, but we weren’t competitive on a looks basis, on the glamour. Maybe people will take us seriously with our $40,000 car.”Hey Dr. Sliva, I will take you seriously in a 1974 Ford Pinto, if it drives in traffic by itself.
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right
Endy Min gave an interesting lunch talk on polymerization today. "Olefins are to chemists what flour is to a chef." I should learn some chemistry some day.
We were set to continue the theme of chemistry and food because we had tickets to an evening talk with food and chemistry writers Shirley Corriher and Jonathan Gold. We left an hour and fifteen minutes to get to Pasadena, which should normally be sufficient. But the freeway was jammed solid... after thirty minutes, we had only gone four miles. We gave up and came back home. I'm pretty annoyed. Someone needs to do something about terrible Los Angeles traffic. I don't know. High speed robot cars?
"Total memory requirements are modest except for the sizable digital map requirements (50 to 100K bytes)." -- W.E. Longenbaker, "Terrain-Aided Navigation of an Unpowered Tactical Missile Using Autopilot-Grade Sensors," J. Guidance, Vol. 7, No. 2, March-April 1984.
Back in the back of a Cadillac
It
looks like the Grand Challenge prize money has been restored, courtesy of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering.
I guess now we have to go back to trying to win.
He bought the neighborhood deli
We went to a double feature of
Amelie and
The City of Lost Children at the Aero Theater. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who with the possible exception of Terry Gilliam is the greatest film director alive, was there to answer questions at the intermission! How great is that?
Jeunet's English is pretty good, but he also had an interpreter there to help with difficult expressions.
Ideally one would prefer to be one of the people engaging Jeunet in some witty conversation in French, rather than being one of the cretins just trying to get him to sign something. However, you don't always get what you want in this life. At least I got him to sign my
Delicatessen DVD. Most people were waving copies of
Amelie, but I told him
Delicatessen "is the best one," which made him say to his companion something like, "See, there's one in every crowd."
The cretin behind me in line hadn't even thought to bring a pen for Jeunet to write with, so she asked to use my marker. And the next one in line also, and the end result was that I let Jeunet keep my Sharpie. Which is fine.
Both
Amelie and
The City of Lost Children are better on a repeat viewing. I remember on the first viewing I thought
Amelie was great, but had a long slow section-- this time I had more patience. And
The City of Lost Children is quite confusing the first time round-- obviously it's clearer the second time, although the ending is still a bit weak.
There is a twice-referenced quote in
Amelie that gets translated in the subtitles as, "Without you, the emotions of today would be the scruf of yesterday's." The scruf? Of yesterday's? What is that supposed to mean?
And in
The City of Lost Children, Miette says, "Born in the gutter, you end up in the port." I don't need to know the French to see that's a poor translation... The English should be, "end up in the bay."
---
In totally unrelated news, I ended the day in second-place out of 897 people in a
Motley Fool stockpicking contest. The contest ends on Monday... It's doubtful I can hold on to my #2 position, much less pull ahead to #1 in two days. But you never know.
