Technobob

If I may talk a bit more regarding technology, Jaron Lanier is right on the money, the machines are taking over and we are letting them have their way.

I was looking for of all things, a portable vaporizer yesterday. I did a few google searches last week for a vaporizer pen. Now my blast spam filter is getting hit with a minor deluge of spam from vaporizer companies with the word vaporizer in the content. But obvious spam. How are they getting directed to me exactly? Is Google selling the information? Has somebody figured out how to hack into the himinajiminy after Google strains my emails for keywords? I assure you that the spam onslaught is not merely coincidental.

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It is amazing how fast we are moving forward with driverless cars. Soon they will be as omnipresent as drones in our skies. This blogger seems to have written on and researched the subject extensively.

I have one basic fear of the proposition of driverless cars. We are dealing with heavy mechanical devices whose parts eventually break. What happens if an axle was to snap or a tire blowout? Does the car deadstop, possibly creating a terrible hazard for others on the road? Does it know how to find a "safe" zone? This is when we hit a cognitive dystopia. No machine or computer can make the split second assessments, calculation and problem solving necessary when things careen off course due to unseen factors that will surely occur in real life. The problems always take place on the seams. Maybe the car could sectionalize and curl up into a rollypolly pillbug? Then if it got hit, you just might have to roll for a while but nobody gets hurt.

Unless we reroute the whole rail system and make it like Disney's Autopia, a master controlled system where speeds and traffic are seamlessly integrated and the passengers drink martinis or play internet scrabble on their smartphones while their steeds cavort in a jetson like pax de deux.

Only two accidents so far with the google fleet. One car was rear ended at a stop light and the other car was being piloted by a human while in manual mode.

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Digging the new computer. While the retina resolution is great, it doesn't seem all that much better than the prior old Mac Book Pro version 4.1.1. But all the other features are so much tighter. Unibody, incredibly light, solid state speed, better keyboard, starts up instantly. It has been a pleasure. 13" ain't 15" but it is more portable and the only problem so far is getting the horizontal gesture to register so that I can see the whole width of a document. Bit balky in that regard.