Elon Musk recently stated that in the near term, only 90% of driving can be completely autonomous. Judging by a new post on the Google blog, that company is consumed by the other 10%. An excerpt:

“Jaywalking pedestrians. Cars lurching out of hidden driveways. Double-parked delivery trucks blocking your lane and your view. At a busy time of day, a typical city street can leave even experienced drivers sweaty-palmed and irritable. We all dream of a world in which city centers are freed of congestion from cars circling for parking (PDF) and have fewer intersections made dangerous by distracted drivers. That’s why over the last year we’ve shifted the focus of the Google self-driving car project onto mastering city street driving.

Since our last update, we’ve logged thousands of miles on the streets of our hometown of Mountain View, Calif. A mile of city driving is much more complex than a mile of freeway driving, with hundreds of different objects moving according to different rules of the road in a small area. We’ve improved our software so it can detect hundreds of distinct objects simultaneously—pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held up by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn. A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can’t—and it never gets tired or distracted.

As it turns out, what looks chaotic and random on a city street to the human eye is actually fairly predictable to a computer. As we’ve encountered thousands of different situations, we’ve built software models of what to expect, from the likely (a car stopping at a red light) to the unlikely (blowing through it). We still have lots of problems to solve, including teaching the car to drive more streets in Mountain View before we tackle another town, but thousands of situations on city streets that would have stumped us two years ago can now be navigated autonomously.”

BBC is reporting that the Chinese firm WinSun has built giant 3D printers which can create 10 concrete houses in a day. They’re admittedly not glorious living or anything, but it’s still impressive. An excerpt:

“The cheap materials used during the printing process and the lack of manual labour means that each house can be printed for under $5,000, the 3dprinterplans website says.

‘We can print buildings to any digital design our customers bring us. It’s fast and cheap,’ says WinSun chief executive Ma Yihe. He also hopes his printers can be used to build skyscrapers in the future. At the moment, however, Chinese construction regulations do not allow multi-storey 3D-printed houses, Xinhua says.”

Charles Hatfield, rainmaker, 1915.

Of the things humans still can’t do, making it rain is one of the more perplexing. We should be able to manage that by now, right? You would think making nuclear power and traveling to the moon would be tougher. We finally may be making progress in this area. From Kurzweil AI:

“Researchers at the University of Central Florida’s College of Optics & Photonics and the University of Arizona have further developed a new technique to aim a high-energy laser beam into clouds to make it rain or trigger lightning.

The solution: surround the beam with a second beam to act as an energy reservoir, sustaining the central beam to greater distances than previously possible. The secondary ‘dress’ beam refuels and helps prevent the dissipation of the high-intensity primary beam, which on its own would break down quickly.

A report on the project, ‘Externally refueled optical filaments,’ was recently published in Nature Photonics.

Water condensation and lightning activity in clouds are linked to large amounts of static charged particles. Stimulating those particles with the right kind of laser holds the key to possibly one day summoning a shower when and where it is needed.”

Thanks to the wonderful Browser, I came across one of the three best pieces I’ve read so far this year (along with this one and this one), Roger Highfield’s eye-opening Mosaic article “The Mind Readers,” which focuses on the life that lingers beneath the surface when humans are rendered into a vegetative state. A passage:

“Half a century ago, if your heart stopped beating you could be pronounced dead even though you may have been entirely conscious as the doctor sent you to the morgue. This, in all likelihood, accounts for notorious accounts through history of those who ‘came back from the dead’. As a corollary, those who were fearful of being buried alive were spurred on to develop ‘safety coffins’ equipped with feeding tubes and bells. As recently as 2011, a council in the Malatya province of central Turkey announced it had built a morgue with a warning system and refrigerator doors that could be opened from the inside.

What do we mean by ‘dead’? And who should declare when an individual is dead? A priest? A lawyer? A doctor? A machine? [Adrian] Owen discussed these issues at a symposium in Brazil with the Dalai Lama and says he was surprised to find that they both agreed strongly on one point: we need to create an ethical framework for science that is based on secular, rather than religious, views; science alone should define what we mean by death.Near death experience

The problem is that the scientific definition of ‘death’ remains as unresolved as the definition of ‘consciousness’. Much confusion is sowed by the term ‘clinical death’, the cessation of blood circulation and breathing. Even though this is reversible, the term is often used by mind–body dualists who cling to the belief that a soul (or self) can persist separately from the body. Today, however, being alive is no longer linked to having a beating heart, explains Owen. If I have an artificial heart, am I dead? If you are on a life-support machine, are you dead? Is a failure to sustain independent life a reasonable definition of death? No, otherwise we would all be ‘dead’ in the nine months before birth.

The issue becomes murkier when we consider those trapped in the twilight worlds between normal life and death – from those who slip in and out of awareness, who are trapped in a ‘minimally conscious state’, to those who are severely impaired in a vegetative state or a coma. These patients first appeared in the wake of the development of the artificial respirator during the 1950s in Denmark, an invention that redefined the end of life in terms of the idea of brain death and created the specialty of intensive care, in which unresponsive and comatose patients who seemed unable to wake up again were written off as ‘vegetables’ or ‘jellyfish’. As is always the case when treating patients, definitions are critical: understanding the chances of recovery, the benefits of treatments and so on all depend on a precise diagnosis.”