You want funny NASCAR, my former cofounder of one of my two present companies is the ‘renewables’ director of NASCAR. He could surely arrange a spritz from POET subsidized cellulosic ethanol. Although that would cost more than vintage champaigne. My personal opinion, stick with grape stuff.
Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by ristvan
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by Horst Graben (@Graben_Horst)
I know, right? Only 33,000 US traffic deaths deaths in 2013 and these so-called septics are concerned about careening down Highway 17 in a computer controlled car designed by dweebs who don’t have drivers licenses.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by ruttbridges
Don and Ristvan, I have similar stories of ‘interesting’ taxi rides in interesting places… including some in the U.S. of A. We are often at the mercy of taxi drivers in unfamiliar cities.
In a sense, I believe that driverless taxis will be a welcome respite from these challenges many travelers face, especially if they are branded Uber or Google or Mercedes, in spite of the hard feelings some of these corporations may engender. Their software is at least far less likely to take you on a grand tour of the city (with an accompanying high fare), or worse still to a dangerous neighborhood with a “pay up or get out” alternative. And driverless car software is designed with safety, for pedestrians, cyclists and passengers, as a heavy priority over speed.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by bedeverethewise
let’s get driverless trains down first. I was shocked when I learned that a passenger train was capable of going over 100 mph into a 55mph curve. I mean the train is on tracks, it shouldn’t be hard to put some controls in place that limit the speed throughout the whole route.
Once we get trains working, then lets move onto buses travelling on a standard route. Once we get that working, then move onto cars traveling on random routes
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by ruttbridges
Peter, great to have you chiming in! Personally, I suspect that driverless EV’s, with software controlling every move, sensors detecting every skid or slick spot on the track, and no need for any safety cage or even passenger compartment, would not only set track records but also be a hoot to watch! A sort of 300 kph demolition derby, with no one getting killed.
Except of course for the folks in the trackside stands!
Maybe battery acid instead of Kristal.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by Wagathon
My driverless car said I’d better start changing the oil every 3,000 miles if I knew what was good for me.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by ristvan
Ragnaar, those who do not learn (slow, careful) winter traction lessons in the upper midwest US end up getting Darwin awards for removing their genes from the pool. Good that your driving schools teach that. We do the same in winter in big parking lots, with old cars and lots of extra student underware.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by bedeverethewise
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by ruttbridges
SciGuy54, I agree that the final product seldom matches the design. That is why my book should be read with significant skepticism. It is one model among many, and while it may sound plausible, critical readers will recognize that many other models, both financial and technical, are possible. It was written to encourage serious thought about what very well may be a disruptive technology with a major impact on our economy, our environment and our society. It will no doubt be an evolutionary process, as is historically the case. But I am convinced that it will be here sooner than many people think… first emerging commercially by 2020, and common in another decade or two. History teaches that technologies that are economically compelling manage to find a way into the marketplace.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by ruttbridges
I find it hard not to find fault with anyone named Horst Graben. Are you by chance a geologist?
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by matthewrmarler
tonyb: <i>I would wonder how a driverless car would cope in snowy conditions, </i>
Probably better than people, but probably not for a few years yet.
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Comment on Science, uncertainty and advocacy by Vaughan Pratt
@DS: How one might expect to duplicate Wood’s experiment with such marked departures is beyond belief. Predictably it failed miserably.
Your prodigious powers of prediction are peerless, David. The best I can do to try to match them is to predict that you will continue for the foreseeable future to misrepresent anything that disagrees with you in the expectation that no one will complain.
Which typically works because (a) CE denizens have grown accustomed to your style and see no point in harping on it (except maybe Don Monfort who sees the occasional need to point it out), and (b) the oxen you like to gore (no relation) typically don’t hang around CE.
But since you’re you, and since it’s my ox you’re goring (again no relation), I can’t resist pointing to the little 2×3 table of temperatures at the foot of the web page you’re referring to,
http://clim.stanford.edu/WoodExpt/
Once you’re wrapped your prodigiously powerful processor around that teeny tiny table, you might (or might not) realize that the entire basis of Wood’s little experiment was his assumption that there is a such a thing as “the temperature inside the box”.
It should be obvious from that table that this about as accurate as the assumption that all the world is on the same page about AGW. Wood’s unexpected initial result that the salt-windowed box got hotter than the glass one is easily explained by an inadvertent placement of the thermometer lower in the former than in the latter. And his attempt at fixing it by placing a glass window over the experiment instead of diagnosing the problem is essentially equivalent to replacing the salt window with a glass one, thereby completely nullifying any difference.
Your failure to realize that my experiment completely discredits Wood’s is not entirely your fault: I should long ago have rewritten that page to make all this much clearer than I did back in 2010. I did list the take-away points at the bottom, but perhaps I should reword them with your needs in mind.
Some time later I added a note at the foot of that page to the effect that “I plan to find time to rebuild this setup, hopefully in the next few months if possible since people have been bugging me about this lately.”
Evidently I didn’t find time, but not entirely for reasons of busy-ness.
Some time later I was rereading Craig Bohren’s whimsically titled “Clouds in a Glass of Beer”, which I’d bought on Amazon a while earlier for $1.77 plus shipping and handling of $3.99, and ran across the section that you can find for an even smaller outlay by googling for a couple of words from that title along with the words, delicate shade of purple. I had the sudden epiphany that this question of whether the glass in greenhouses traps infrared had been beaten to death in several papers and letters written in the 1970s. I concluded that it was perhaps better to let sleeping dogs lie, along with DS.
But if one or two of them are going to keep waking up periodically to bark frenziedly, perhaps it would make sense to write a short note that goes into more detail about my little experiment of 2010 and what it implies about the meaning of Wood’s experiment.
Given that the subject had for all practical purposes died decades ago, such a note would seem just as publishable as a CE post as it would be unpublishable in a peer-reviewed journal like Philosophical Magazine, which published two articles by Wood in 1909 along with two reviews in the same year each pointing out a fatal error in each, but whose threshold of publishability has surely risen over the intervening century. As an indication of that threshold back then, neither article nor their reviews were heard of again until the 1980s, and only one of them at that, namely when attention to CO2 began increasing.
And given that Phil. Mag., unlike CE, has been bought by Francis and Taylor and hidden behind their paywall in order to keep us cheapskates in a state of ignorance, perhaps CE would be the more effective venue.
Would this make sense, Judy?
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by matthewrmarler
Steven Mosher: I love the way skeptics who see no problem or risks with dumping c02
get every imaginative about the risks of driverless cars.
Always criticize extravagant claims.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by ruttbridges
SciGuy54, Generally this is a good assessment of some of the challenges.
I believe that Uber may struggle in making the transition to driverless cars. With a $45 billion or so valuation, and an $80 million or so monthly revenue ‘nut’ to deliver, if their drivers see this coming, which they already do, they may defect to Lyft or others. It is hard to change the wings while flying 350 mpg at 30,000 feet.
Under the books financial model (Appendix V), at 39 cents a mile riding solo or 19 cents ridesharing, if a company could capture a 25% US market share or 1% worldwide marketshare, they would generate $152 billion in revenues and about $75 billion in pre-tax profits annually. And this is a recurring revenue. Google’s revenues in 2014 were $66 billion, and profits were far lower than the 49% the model allows for. At a more reasonable 25% margin, the cost to consumers would be 29 cents/14 cents per mile solo/rideshare. That is 10,000 miles a year of door-to-door on call 24/7 service for $2900/$1400. That is a compelling value proposition for any business. And I am confident that these companies can do the spreadsheet math far better than I. Thus the surge in interest.
And it would also bankrupt many of the auto manufacturers.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by Steven Mosher
take a taxi in Jordan in 1993 as an american with my last name—
and then we can talk about interesting cab rides..
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by Steven Mosher
Uber needs to get the driver out of the equation, and they cant rely on google to finish what they start.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by Steven Mosher
yes.
I am merely pointing out that some people are highly selective in their perception of risk.
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Comment on Science, uncertainty and advocacy by curryja
Hi Vaughan, go for it, I’m game.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by Steven Mosher
I’ll see you on the threads claiming huge benefits from C02…
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by Steven Mosher
how are you going to get your revenge on sharks or machines..
how are you going to see them burn in hell?
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