feedle

Oscar Schwartz in The Drift: As Isaacson surveyed the landscape in search of a new genius, one name kept coming up: Elon Musk. He was, without a doubt, a man with grand vision — electric cars, space travel, telepathy. He was unyielding in this vision, too, sometimes belligerently so. …Nevertheless, ...

by Mark R. DeLong Writing about American cars stranded in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, John McElroy observed that “there’s something very appealing, almost romantic about these cars. Coated in a patina of history they hearken back to a time when Detroit iron dominated the global auto industry, a time of can...

Tomas Pueyo in Uncharted Territories: In the beginning, you’ll take self-driving cars because they’re new and fun: “Look, it’s moving the wheel alone!” It will help that you’ll look at the stats and know that they have fewer accidents than human drivers. Then, you’ll notice that self-driving cars ar...

by Eric Feigenbaum Anyone who has ever watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit knows Los Angeles’ entire trajectory was changed dramatically in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s when politicians and planners of the day – perhaps spurred by some alleged corruption – believed cars and freeways were the directi...

Chris Power in The Guardian: In the early evening of 12 November 2015, three cars left Charleroi in Belgium, arriving a few hours later at a rented house in the northern suburbs of Paris. The occupants of the cars – or “the death convoy”, as they called it – were Islamic State terrorists who, the…

by Carol A Westbrook This autumn we had to buy two cars. If you are a typical, average, middle-class American, there are times in your life when you have to buy a car. Americans take car ownership—and car buying—very seriously. Since cars and their accessories (insurance, maintainence, repair, e.) o...

Buddha I used to sit under trees and meditate on the diamond bright silence of darkness and the bright look of diamonds in space and space that was stiff with lights and diamonds shot through, and silence And when a dog barked I took it for soundwaves and cars passing too, and once I heard…

Ryan Gilbey at The Current: The Long Good Friday whisks audiences across late-1970s London, taking in everything from the Concorde landing at Heathrow Airport to the desolate undeveloped Docklands, from the chauffeur-driven cars at the Savoy Hotel to the beat-up jalopies south of the Thames. The fil...

Weizi Li in The Conversation: Robotic vehicles can optimize the flow of traffic in cities even when mixed in with vehicles driven by humans, thereby improving traffic efficiency, safety and energy consumption, my colleagues and I found. Robot vehicles are no longer a sci-fi concept: Cities around th...

Hazel Southwell at Ars Technica: We live in a weird time for autonomous vehicles. Ambitions come and go, but genuinely autonomous cars are further off than solid-state vehicle batteries. Part of the problem with developing autonomous cars is that teaching road cars to take risks is unacceptable. A r...

Eliza Strickland at IEEE Spectrum: Theory of mind—the ability to understand other people’s mental states—is what makes the social world of humans go around. It’s what helps you decide what to say in a tense situation, guess what drivers in other cars are about to do, and empathize with a character i...

Matthew Yglesias in Slow Boring: The Obama administration saw a flurry of tech sector hype about self-driving cars. Not being a technical person, I had no ability to assess the hype on the merits, but companies were putting real money into it, and so I wrote pieces looking at the labor market, land ...

Gideon Lewis-Kraus at The New Yorker: While one segment of Silicon Valley lamented the perpetual absence of flying cars, another, it turns out, was quietly building them—or, at least, something flying-car adjacent. Just three months after the Founders Fund manifesto appeared, a Canadian inventor nam...

eVTOLS: Flying Cars Posted on Tuesday, Apr 16, 2024 8:53AMMonday, April 15, 2024 by Morgan Meis

Paolo Gerbaudo in Phenomenal World: In the late 1970s, Western markets were flooded with Japanese cars from then-unfamiliar brands like Toyota, Mazda, Datsun, and Honda. The combination of a high quality product, efficient fuel consumption, and a low price tag made these brands very popular in the U...

Cars in front of the train station of Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, during a brief but heavy snowfall last week.

by Terese Svoboda The first video portapacks arrived in the 1970s, cameras that skipped the lab and allowed the cameraman to be mobile, but they were so expensive only those who had connections with a TV station could experiment with them. Or if you had a rich aunt who needed to document a wedding, ...

Steve Nadis in Quanta: Driverless cars and planes are no longer the stuff of the future. In the city of San Francisco alone, two taxi companies have collectively logged 8 million miles of autonomous driving through August 2023. And more than 850,000 autonomous aerial vehicles, or drones, are registe...

by Tim Sommers (The butter robot realizing the sole purpose of its existence is to pass the butter.) In the halcyon days of “self-driving cars are six months away,” you probably encountered this argument. “If self-driving cars work, they will be safer than cars driven by humans.” Sure. If, by “they ...

Meat Market —after Lebanon, a country with one of the worst economic crises since the 19th century the price of bread has gone up again. Throngs of cars slouch toward shuttering gas stations. The currency, a farce with each swing of the gavel, numbers soar. Fifty thousand pounds by day’s end. what’s...

Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist: Driverless cars have the green light to operate as paid ride-hailing services in San Francisco after the companies Waymo and Cruise won approval from California state regulators. But the decision comes amidst pushback from city officials and residents over the cars creat...

Michael Reid in The Conversation: First, the physical effort of driving a race car is much greater than that of driving your family car. Turning and braking require more force due to the high speeds and the unique engineering of race cars. Drivers control the vehicle by constantly engaging the muscl...

A stationary passenger train behind and between two cars of a moving cargo train, at the train station in Bozen, South Tyrol.

Hannah Ritchie in Sustainability by Numbers: For every dollar of petrol you put, you get just 20 cents’ worth of driving motion. The other 80 cents is wasted along the way – most of it as heat from the engine. Electric cars are much better at converting energy into motion. For every dollar of electr...

George Stiffman in Asterisk: Guiyang didn’t have many restaurants, per se. The metropolis was more of a city-wide night market. Even in the pre-COVID days, streets like Qingyun Road were only half-filled with cars, to leave room for tents and tables that stretched to the horizon, and for smoke and s...

Mark Rollins in The Common Reader: In 1961, the Jaguar E-type sports car (called the XKE in the United States), designed by Malcolm Sayer, premiered at a major auto show in Geneva Switzerland. Enzo Ferrari declared it to be the most beautiful car ever made. Ferrari himself is, of course, a legendary...

Matt McFarland in CNN: The problem with trees is that they are too slow. Part of the issue with catastrophic climate change is that, by some measures, an incredible amount of damage is already done. Even if all the coal-fired power plants were magically turned into wind and solar overnight, and all ...

Jessica Parr in Black Perspectives: In 1852, the Third Avenue Railroad Company was founded. It ran between City Hall and 62nd Street in Manhattan. Its horse-drawn streetcars quickly became the primary mode of transportation in the city. A small number of the cars carried placards indicating that the...

Fixing Cars I like the argument that man is alone in the universe, and ipso facto its most intelligent being. It proves there is no God, or if there is, it’s the god of low SAT scores. Astronomers debate the dark matter between stars. I picture a conversational pause with a Trump apologist, each par...

Marco D’Eramo in Sidecar: In Europe, the war bulletins come not just from Ukraine, but also from the climate front. The French government has cracked down on water use, banning watering lawns and washing cars in 62 of 101 departments, as more than 100 municipalities no longer have potable water. Nuc...

by Fabio Tollon Machines can do lots of things. Robotic arms can help make our cars, autonomous cars can drive us around, and robotic vacuums can clean our floors. In all of these cases it seems natural to think that these machines are doing something. Of course, a ‘doing’ is a kind of happening: wh...

Nathan Gardels in Noema Magazine: “Move fast and break things,” the digital dictum of today’s Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, could have been penned by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his fellow Italian Futurists. Their famous manifesto in 1909 glorified the velocity of all things industrially muscular,...

Winter Dawn The men and beasts of the zodiac Have marched over us once more. Green wine bottles and red lobster shells, Both emptied, litter the table. “Should auld acquaintance be forgot?” Each Sits listening to his own thoughts, And the sound of cars starting outside. The birds in the eaves are re...

From Poem VI Cruising back from 7-11 esta mañana in my ’56 Chevy truckita, beat up and rankled farm tuck, clanking between rows of new shiny cars— ……………… “Hey fella! Trees need pruning ……………… and the grass needs trimming!” A man yelled down to me from his 3rd-story balcony. ……………… “sorry, I’m not th...

Matthew Hutson in The New Yorker: Each year, researchers from around the world gather at Neural Information Processing Systems, an artificial-intelligence conference, to discuss automated translation software, self-driving cars, and abstract mathematical questions. It was odd, therefore, when Michae...

by Bill Murray Anticipating war in Europe, 2022. Thursday, 13 January If an attack is imminent, Kyiv’s air raid sirens will alert residents to tune in to emergency service announcements. Cars equipped with loudspeakers will also patrol the streets to announce important information. The Kyiv City Cou...

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Artificial intelligence is everywhere around us. Deep-learning algorithms are used to classify images, suggest songs to us, and even to drive cars. But the quest to build truly “human” artificial intelligence is still coming up short. Gary Marcus argues that th...

Addison Del Mastro at The New Atlantis: Much of this progressive ire is directed at the presence of cars in cities. It resists how cities are shaped to suit the needs and preferences of drivers. But the attitude easily extends to sneering at rural or suburban life, especially when it seems to bleed ...

Brandon Kiem in Nautilus: In the annals of transportation history persists a tale of how automobiles in the early 20th century helped cities conquer their waste problems. It’s a tidy story, so to speak, about dirty horses and clean cars and technological innovation. As typically told, it’s a lesson ...

David Remnick in The New Yorker: Early evening in late summer, the golden hour in the village of East Hampton. The surf is rough and pounds its regular measure on the shore. At the last driveway on a road ending at the beach, a cortège of cars—S.U.V.s, jeeps, candy-colored roadsters—pull up to the g...

Robert Service in Science: HILLSBORO, OREGON—Though he catches flak for it, Garrett Kenyon, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, calls artificial intelligence (AI) “overhyped.” The algorithms that underlie everything from Alexa’s voice recognition to credit card fraud detection typically o...

On university vaccine mandates, remote meetings, and crowded clown cars

Matthew Hutson in The New Yorker: Deep learning, the artificial-intelligence technology that powers voice assistants, autonomous cars, and Go champions, relies on complicated “neural network” software arranged in layers. A deep-learning system can live on a single computer, but the biggest ones are ...

Jesse Lee Kercheval at the New England Review: It is 1966 and I am sitting on a stool at the Burger King on Merritt Island, Florida, eating French fries. My view is Highway 520 and the cars speeding up to the rare stoplight just beyond where I sit. My father, my sister, and I have…

David Byrne in Reasons to be Cheerful: My impression is that the police in New York have tempered their initially confrontational approach to the protesters. There were no barricades or cars set up to entrap and enclose marchers. It seemed to me that, slowly, some lessons are being learned. But not ...

Rana Mitter and Elsbeth Johnson in the Harvard Business Review: When we first traveled to China, in the early 1990s, it was very different from what we see today. Even in Beijing many people wore Mao suits and cycled everywhere; only senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials used cars. In the c...

John Farrell in Commonweal: In the view of many scientists, Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t living up to the hype of its proponents. We don’t yet have safe driverless cars—and we’re not likely to in the near future. Nor are robots about to take on all our domestic drudgery so that we can devote m...