AndreasM

Interestingly, though, it often turns out that recalling "where they were and what they were doing on 9/11" is very often wrong. And that when you're wrong, you're more certain you're right.

Malcolm Gladwell did a very interesting podcast episode on that: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/24-free-brian-william...

I'm from Denmark, but I lived in San Diego for a while. Between a bit of offroading and weekend trips, I have spent more time in Imperial Valley than most "tourists."

I find it a deeply fascinating place. Whenever I showed visitors around in California, I would take them past Salton Sea. Not only is Salvation Mountain an interesting place, the vibe of the entire valley seems special. Most tourists from Europe see only the coast, the big cities, and perhaps a couple of the larger national parks. The contrast from those places to Imperial Valley is stark. Everybody I brought there appreciated the experience.

I did know that Salton Sea was polluted (5 minutes in Bombay Beach will convince you), but I did not know it was as bad at this article portrays.

In short: NVIDIA has made a neural network which steers a car based on a single camera and trained only with footage from cars being driven manually. No control theory, no rules of the roads, not even the concept of a road is encoded manually.

Video here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9raQzOpizn1TkRIa241ZnBEcj...

This is pretty cool. Granted, it does not handle extremely complex traffic situations (yet), but is it a much simpler approach to what most other groups are doing.

I recently read The Box[1] by Marc Levinson. It is an excellent read which explains how the container came to be - it's really fascinating to think that this ubiquitous thing was only invented about 50 years ago.

The book is very entertaining and informative, though it has a rather US-centric approach (being Danish, I obviously looked for when Maersk would be introduced, but they are barely mentioned). I especially enjoyed the explanations of how shipping worked before "the box." Dockworkers' unions were extremely powerful, to the extent of introducing ridiculous rules. E.g. "seven people must be assigned to each hatch on the ship, even if there is not enough for them to move there, and they are not allowed to help crews at other hatches." They went to extreme lengths to protect their jobs, and ultimately failed because they would not accept that they could not stop the container.

[1] http://smile.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econo...