Liquid Hand Soaps. Balea (Shopper’s) moisturizing hand soap. Shea butter and cocoa butter beads (cream bottle/copper top) Equate (Walmart) Antibacterial Liquid Hand. In 2014, a picture of Pooh gripping the hoof of his donkey friend Eeyore was compared to a photo of Xi shaking hands with Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe. Archives and past articles from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly.com. The premise behind Yes or No Genomics is simple: Genetic disease is typically caused by a variation in at least one of the many thousands of genes in the human genome. Google’s Driverless Car . They talk on the phone and run red lights, signal to the left and turn to the right. They drink too much beer and plow into trees or veer into traffic as they swat at their kids. You'll find more in the pages of Backstreets! The Backstreets.com website was established in 1995 to help pass along the important news and setlists between issues;. They have blind spots, leg cramps, seizures, and heart attacks. They rubberneck, hotdog, and take pity on turtles, cause fender benders, pileups, and head- on collisions. They nod off at the wheel, wrestle with maps, fiddle with knobs, have marital spats, take the curve too late, take the curve too hard, spill coffee in their laps, and flip over their cars. Of the ten million accidents that Americans are in every year, nine and a half million are their own damn fault. A case in point: The driver in the lane to my right. He’s twisted halfway around in his seat, taking a picture of the Lexus that I’m riding in with an engineer named Anthony Levandowski. Both cars are heading south on Highway 8. Oakland, going more than seventy miles an hour, yet the man takes his time. He holds his phone up to the window with both hands until the car is framed just so. Then he snaps the picture, checks it onscreen, and taps out a lengthy text message with his thumbs. By the time he puts his hands back on the wheel and glances up at the road, half a minute has passed. Levandowski shakes his head. He’s used to this sort of thing. His Lexus is what you might call a custom model. It’s surmounted by a spinning laser turret and knobbed with cameras, radar, antennas, and G. P. S. It looks a little like an ice- cream truck, lightly weaponized for inner- city work. Levandowski used to tell people that the car was designed to chase tornadoes or to track mosquitoes, or that he belonged to an . But nowadays the vehicle is clearly marked: “Self- Driving Car.”Every week for the past year and a half, Levandowski has taken the Lexus on the same slightly surreal commute. He leaves his house in Berkeley at around eight o’clock, waves goodbye to his fianc. The ride takes him over surface streets and freeways, old salt flats and pine- green foothills, across the gusty blue of San Francisco Bay, and down into the heart of Silicon Valley. In rush- hour traffic, it can take two hours, but Levandowski doesn’t mind. He thinks of it as research. While other drivers are gawking at him, he is observing them: recording their maneuvers in his car’s sensor logs, analyzing traffic flow, and flagging any problems for future review. The only tiresome part is when there’s roadwork or an accident ahead and the Lexus insists that he take the wheel. A chime sounds, pleasant yet insistent, then a warning appears on his dashboard screen: “In one mile, prepare to resume manual control.”Levandowski is an engineer at Google X, the company’s semi- secret lab for experimental technology. He turned thirty- three last March but still has the spindly build and nerdy good nature of the kids in my high- school science club. He wears black frame glasses and oversized neon sneakers, has a long, loping stride—he’s six feet seven—and is given to excitable talk on fantastical themes. Cybernetic dolphins! Self- harvesting farms! Like a lot of his colleagues in Mountain View, Levandowski is equal parts idealist and voracious capitalist. He wants to fix the world and make a fortune doing it. He comes by these impulses honestly: his mother is a French diplomat, his father an American businessman. Although Levandowski spent most of his childhood in Brussels, his English has no accent aside from a certain absence of inflection—the bright, electric chatter of a processor in overdrive. As a freshman at Berkeley, he launched an intranet service out of his basement that earned him fifty thousand dollars a year. As a sophomore, he won a national robotics competition with a machine made out of Legos that could sort Monopoly money—a fair analogy for what he’s been doing for Google lately. He was one of the principal architects of Street View and the Google Maps database, but those were just warmups. And we’re trying to make it as robust and reliable as a 7. Not everyone finds this prospect appealing. As a commercial for the Dodge Charger put it two years ago, “Hands- free driving, cars that park themselves, an unmanned car driven by a search- engine company? We’ve seen that movie. It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy.” Levandowski understands the sentiment. He just has more faith in robots than most of us do. Someday soon, he believes, a self- driving car will save your life. The Google car is an old- fashioned sort of science fiction: this year’s model of last century’s make. It belongs to the gleaming, chrome- plated age of jet packs and rocket ships, transporter beams and cities beneath the sea, of a predicted future still well beyond our technology. In 1. 93. 9, at the World’s Fair in New York, visitors stood in lines up to two miles long to see the General Motors Futurama exhibit. Inside, a conveyor belt carried them high above a miniature landscape, spread out beneath a glass dome. Its suburbs and skyscrapers were laced together by superhighways full of radio- guided cars. Unbelievable?” the announcer asked. Skyscrapers and superhighways made the deadline, but driverless cars still putter along in prototype. Human beings, as it turns out, aren’t easy to improve upon. For every accident they cause, they avoid a thousand others. They can weave through tight traffic and anticipate danger, gauge distance, direction, pace, and momentum. Americans drive nearly three trillion miles a year, I was told by Ron Medford, a former deputy administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who now works for Google. It’s no wonder that we have thirty- two thousand fatalities along the way, he said. It’s a wonder the number is so low. Levandowski keeps a collection of vintage illustrations and newsreels on his laptop, just to remind him of all the failed schemes and fizzled technologies of the past. When he showed them to me one night at his house, his face wore a crooked grin, like a father watching his son strike out in Little League. From 1. 95. 7: A sedan cruises down a highway, guided by circuits in the road, while a family plays dominoes inside. General Motors pioneered the first approach in the late nineteen- fifties. Its Firebird III concept car—shaped like a jet fighter, with titanium tail fins and a glass- bubble cockpit—was designed to run on a test track embedded with an electrical cable, like the slot on a toy speedway. As the car passed over the cable, a receiver in its front end picked up a radio signal and followed it around the curve. Engineers at Berkeley later went a step further: they spiked the track with magnets, alternating their polarity in binary patterns to send messages to the car—“Slow down, sharp curve ahead.” Systems like these were fairly simple and reliable, but they had a chicken- and- egg problem. To be useful, they had to be built on a large scale; to be built on a large scale, they had to be useful. They needed sensors to guide them, computers to steer them, digital maps to follow. In the nineteen- eighties, a German engineer named Ernst Dickmanns, at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, equipped a Mercedes van with video cameras and processors, then programmed it to follow lane lines. Soon it was steering itself around a track. By 1. 99. 5, Dickmanns’s car was able to drive on the Autobahn from Munich to Odense, Denmark, going up to a hundred miles at a stretch without assistance. Surely the driverless age was at hand! Smart cars were just clever enough to get drivers into trouble. The highways and test tracks they navigated were strictly controlled environments. The instant more variables were added—a pedestrian, say, or a traffic cop—their programming faltered. Ninety- eight per cent of driving is just following the dotted line. It’s the other two per cent that matters.“There was no way, before 2. Sebastian Thrun told me. Radar was a device on a hilltop that cost two hundred million dollars. It wasn’t something you could buy at Radio Shack.” Thrun, who is forty- six, is the founder of the Google Car project. A wunderkind from the west German city of Solingen, he programmed his first driving simulator at the age of twelve. Slender and tan, with clear blue eyes and a smooth, seemingly boneless gait, he looks as if he just stepped off a dance floor in Ibiza. And yet, like Levandowski, he has a gift for seeing things through a machine’s eyes—for intuiting the logic by which it might apprehend the world. When Thrun first arrived in the United States, in 1. Carnegie Mellon University. He went on to build robots that explored mines in Virginia, guided visitors through the Smithsonian, and chatted with patients at a nursing home. What he didn’t build was driverless cars. Funding for private research in the field had dried up by then. And though Congress had set a goal that a third of all ground combat vehicles be autonomous by 2. Every so often, Thrun recalls, military contractors, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, would roll out their latest prototype. But they couldn’t tell if it was the technology or the people. So they did this crazy thing, which was really visionary.”They held a race. The first DARPA Grand Challenge took place in the Mojave Desert on March 1. It offered a million- dollar prize for what seemed like a simple task: build a car that can drive a hundred and forty- two miles without human intervention. Ernst Dickmanns’s car had gone similar distances on the Autobahn, but always with a driver in the seat to take over in the tricky stretches. The cars in the Grand Challenge would be empty, and the road would be rough: from Barstow, California, to Primm, Nevada. Instead of smooth curves and long straightaways, it had rocky climbs and hairpin turns; instead of road signs and lane lines, G. P. S. She’d seen a notice for the race when it was announced online, in 2. Was this so different? Levandowski was now a student at Berkeley, in the industrial- engineering department.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
August 2017
Categories |