A couple of weeks ago, a colleague of mine was reading an article about Tesla's new gigafactory that they're going to build to manufacture batteries. It was mentioned that the entire roof of the facility would be covered in solar panels to offset the running cost. One hapless commentator then posted this :
"D'uh - solar panels only work in the day time - what's the point of that?"
To which the first, only, and best reply was:
"I know. Wouldn't it be amazing if there was some way to store all that power generated in the daytime so it could be re-used at night?"
Well - I thought it was funny.
But it did raise an interesting point about internet trolls - how can you tell nowadays if the commenters are trolling, or if they really don't know the answer to the question they're posing?
Monday, October 13, 2014
Monday, October 6, 2014
What would you do with $2.5bn?
The developer of Minecraft recently sold out to Microsoft to the tune of $2.5bn (yes, with a 'b'). Naturally the topic of conversation in our office turned to 'what would you do with that sort of money?'. The obvious items came up and when we started talking about cars, I said I'd buy an Aston Martin Vanquish. We played with the calculator a bit and figured out that if you walked into a dealer at 9am and kept them talking until 1pm, you'd have made enough interest in that 4 hours to pay for the car with cash. At which point someone mentioned that I could just buy Aston Martin outright and still have a huge chunk of change left over. That's a sobering thought : if I came into $2.5bn, I could by an entire luxury car company and still have $1.9bn left over. Meaning I could pretty much just have any of their vehicles I wanted, in any colour (not monochrome) with any options I wanted, without really having to think about it. Heck - I could buy an F1 racing team and have money left over. I could buy a huge tract of land somewhere and have Hermann Tilke design me a race track that I could race all my Aston Martins on, with friends.
So what would you do with that sort of money, apart from paying off your house, and hiring a great bodyguard and a lawyer?
So what would you do with that sort of money, apart from paying off your house, and hiring a great bodyguard and a lawyer?
Monday, September 29, 2014
How soon is too soon?
Nobody is ever going to accuse Formula One of being a cheap spectator sport. Everything about it is expensive from the tickets to the concessions and everything in between. In 2010 my wife and I went to the Singapore Grand Prix for our 10th anniversary, and as we were flying home, we decided we needed to go back. We both love F1 and Singapore, so it seemed like a natural fit. We decided 2015 would be the year to do it again - then we stood some chance of being able to pay off the first trip before doing it all over again.
So a couple of weeks ago, the Singapore GP facebook page posted "super early bird" tickets for the 2015 race - two weeks before the 2014 race had taken place. Essentially, the day that the 2015 calendar was announced, the tickets went on sale.
Normally I don't pay much attention to these sorts of things, but knowing that 2015 is when we are planning to go again, I figured it was worth a look. The executive summary is this : I saved $640 by booking the tickets two weeks ago. If I were to buy them right now - today - they cost more. And if I wait until almost any time after January 1 2015, the cost goes up again.
So when is it "too soon" for things like this? I would argue 'never'. If you know you're going to want to do something, and an offer or opportunity comes up, take it. Like oil changes. You know you're going to be changing the oil in your car this year at some point (hopefully twice). If you see a coupon for money off, use it - get the oil now, and use it when the time comes.
Same for almost any sort of maintenance. So you're supposed to take your car in in November for it's annual checkup and lookover. If the dealer you use is having a promotion this week, then do it this week.
When you save a little bit of money here and there, it all adds up. Being smart about when and where you save the money - that's the key. And if you want to do anything to do with F1 as a spectator, snap up the bargains as soon as you see them because they don't happen often.
So a couple of weeks ago, the Singapore GP facebook page posted "super early bird" tickets for the 2015 race - two weeks before the 2014 race had taken place. Essentially, the day that the 2015 calendar was announced, the tickets went on sale.
Normally I don't pay much attention to these sorts of things, but knowing that 2015 is when we are planning to go again, I figured it was worth a look. The executive summary is this : I saved $640 by booking the tickets two weeks ago. If I were to buy them right now - today - they cost more. And if I wait until almost any time after January 1 2015, the cost goes up again.
So when is it "too soon" for things like this? I would argue 'never'. If you know you're going to want to do something, and an offer or opportunity comes up, take it. Like oil changes. You know you're going to be changing the oil in your car this year at some point (hopefully twice). If you see a coupon for money off, use it - get the oil now, and use it when the time comes.
Same for almost any sort of maintenance. So you're supposed to take your car in in November for it's annual checkup and lookover. If the dealer you use is having a promotion this week, then do it this week.
When you save a little bit of money here and there, it all adds up. Being smart about when and where you save the money - that's the key. And if you want to do anything to do with F1 as a spectator, snap up the bargains as soon as you see them because they don't happen often.
Monday, September 22, 2014
A short post this week.
This week's post is simple and to the point - I recently contributed a paragraph or two for a short guide on car maintenance - I encourage you to check out the article at car loan warehouse : Practical skills.
Monday, September 15, 2014
Why self-driving cars really aren't "just around the corner".
In light of the news this month that London is going to start allowing fully autonomous drone cars to be tested from 2015, I thought it was worth rehashing some of the finer points of why these cars are not "just around the corner".
We'll concentrate on one particular car here - the Google self-driving car - simply because they're further along than anyone else.
The biggest single issue facing drone cars is really simple : they don't have quantum artificial intelligence. They can't deal with unpredictable situations, so they rely on meticulously collected information from (human-driven) scanner cars that analyze the route ahead of time. Think Google Street View, but a thousand times more detailed, mapped with cameras that photograph every sign, and laser scanners (LIDAR) that maps every bump and crevasse. So every time you see a video of a self-driving google car, you need to understand that thousands of intricate preparations have been made beforehand, with the car's exact route extensively mapped. Data from multiple passes by a special sensor vehicle must later be pored over, meter by meter, by both computers and humans. And because a laughably tiny number of roads in the U.S. have been analysed at this level to allow autonomous car use, essentially if you take a google car off-campus, it's a very expensive paperweight.
Tied to the unpredictability part of that are three other factors - weather, construction, and humans. Drone cars are currently so stupid that they can't even drive in rain, let alone ice or snow. Google have so much trouble with rain in particular that they haven't even reached the testing stage yet. The reason is simple : to a human, rain makes things look wet. To a computer synthetic vision system, they might as well be driving on Mars.
Remember I said how much work goes into mapping a road for a Google car to drive on? Go and park a utility truck in the inside lane and put some cones out. Voila. One incapacitated self-driving car. Because the truck and cones weren't there when the road was mapped, the car can't handle it. The same goes for potholes and open manhole covers - the car will just drive straight over (or into) them. Some changes can be handled, obviously. Google's cars look for things like stop signs - even in unexpected places - and react accordingly. At least that's the theory. They also look for pedestrians and other traffic all the time, so missing one stop sign shouldn't be a problem right?
If we welcome pesky humans into the equation, things change radically. As Google says, "Pedestrians are detected simply as moving, column-shaped blurs of pixels, meaning that the car wouldn't be able to spot a police officer at the side of the road frantically waving for traffic to stop". Similarly it has trouble with pedestrians who don't use crosswalks (ie. all of them) and people standing in the road where they shouldn't be.
So whilst headline-grabbing mayors and confused mainstream newspaper editors may have everyone believing they'll be able to go out and buy a self-driving drone this Christmas, it simply isn't the case and won't be for probably another 10 years.
We'll concentrate on one particular car here - the Google self-driving car - simply because they're further along than anyone else.
The biggest single issue facing drone cars is really simple : they don't have quantum artificial intelligence. They can't deal with unpredictable situations, so they rely on meticulously collected information from (human-driven) scanner cars that analyze the route ahead of time. Think Google Street View, but a thousand times more detailed, mapped with cameras that photograph every sign, and laser scanners (LIDAR) that maps every bump and crevasse. So every time you see a video of a self-driving google car, you need to understand that thousands of intricate preparations have been made beforehand, with the car's exact route extensively mapped. Data from multiple passes by a special sensor vehicle must later be pored over, meter by meter, by both computers and humans. And because a laughably tiny number of roads in the U.S. have been analysed at this level to allow autonomous car use, essentially if you take a google car off-campus, it's a very expensive paperweight.
Tied to the unpredictability part of that are three other factors - weather, construction, and humans. Drone cars are currently so stupid that they can't even drive in rain, let alone ice or snow. Google have so much trouble with rain in particular that they haven't even reached the testing stage yet. The reason is simple : to a human, rain makes things look wet. To a computer synthetic vision system, they might as well be driving on Mars.
Remember I said how much work goes into mapping a road for a Google car to drive on? Go and park a utility truck in the inside lane and put some cones out. Voila. One incapacitated self-driving car. Because the truck and cones weren't there when the road was mapped, the car can't handle it. The same goes for potholes and open manhole covers - the car will just drive straight over (or into) them. Some changes can be handled, obviously. Google's cars look for things like stop signs - even in unexpected places - and react accordingly. At least that's the theory. They also look for pedestrians and other traffic all the time, so missing one stop sign shouldn't be a problem right?
If we welcome pesky humans into the equation, things change radically. As Google says, "Pedestrians are detected simply as moving, column-shaped blurs of pixels, meaning that the car wouldn't be able to spot a police officer at the side of the road frantically waving for traffic to stop". Similarly it has trouble with pedestrians who don't use crosswalks (ie. all of them) and people standing in the road where they shouldn't be.
So whilst headline-grabbing mayors and confused mainstream newspaper editors may have everyone believing they'll be able to go out and buy a self-driving drone this Christmas, it simply isn't the case and won't be for probably another 10 years.
Monday, September 8, 2014
Drivers who are scared of acceleration.
I read a great article by Neil DeGrasse Tyson a few weeks ago about how you can't 'feel' speed, and that drivers who "love speed" really love acceleration - the forces they feel through accelerating and braking, lowered suspension and cornering forces. That's me - I love all those things and I understand the limits of my car and its tyres. I know where all four corners are, I know how wide it is and I know how quickly it'll stop (that last one is pretty important). Sadly, where I live (Utah) it would seem I'm one of only three people who are in this category. For as far as I can tell, everyone else is so deathly afraid of feeling any sort of g-force that they'll do anything to prevent it. Braking far too far away from traffic lights and intersections, "accelerating" by taking their foot off the brake and letting the engine idle them up to 15mph, and cornering so slowly that in some cases you would swear they'd actually parked mid-corner.
It comes down, once again, to driver education, or in this case a total lack of it. Americans, and Utahns in particular, are given such scant education when they learn to drive that it's laughable in comparison to other western countries. No night driving, no freeway driving, no explanation of how a car works - nothing. These are all things they're left to learn on their own, and for the most part you can tell. Everyday I follow people who are attempting to steer their car in a straight line, which of course means they're weaving all over the road. Just let go of the wheel if you have that much trouble. Short of a major mechanical issue, the car will steer itself in a straighter line than you're managing to. People driving along with their left foot resting on the brake, so that those of us behind have no idea when they're actually about to slow down because we're driving in a sea of permanently-illuminated brake lights. People coming to a gap big enough to get the Queen Mary through, but then parking their Corollas and Camrys because they think the gap is too small (because they have no idea of the extents of their car).
This stereotype was illustrated to me years ago when a colleague of mine invited me to drive his new car - a Mazda Speed 3. It was a fun little scoot - we took it up the nearest mountain road about 5 miles, turned around and came back down, and by the end of it he was white. I'd been driving like a European on a twisty mountain road. Like I do in my car. Or when I ride my motorbike. We'd been overtaking people on the broken yellow lines and hugging the corners because the Speed 3 was a very capable machine. Apparently though, in his 50-something years of living here, he'd never once driven these roads like that, and his parting comment was "don't ever drive my car again". I'm not sure his car ever went over 3000rpm after that.
It comes down, once again, to driver education, or in this case a total lack of it. Americans, and Utahns in particular, are given such scant education when they learn to drive that it's laughable in comparison to other western countries. No night driving, no freeway driving, no explanation of how a car works - nothing. These are all things they're left to learn on their own, and for the most part you can tell. Everyday I follow people who are attempting to steer their car in a straight line, which of course means they're weaving all over the road. Just let go of the wheel if you have that much trouble. Short of a major mechanical issue, the car will steer itself in a straighter line than you're managing to. People driving along with their left foot resting on the brake, so that those of us behind have no idea when they're actually about to slow down because we're driving in a sea of permanently-illuminated brake lights. People coming to a gap big enough to get the Queen Mary through, but then parking their Corollas and Camrys because they think the gap is too small (because they have no idea of the extents of their car).
This stereotype was illustrated to me years ago when a colleague of mine invited me to drive his new car - a Mazda Speed 3. It was a fun little scoot - we took it up the nearest mountain road about 5 miles, turned around and came back down, and by the end of it he was white. I'd been driving like a European on a twisty mountain road. Like I do in my car. Or when I ride my motorbike. We'd been overtaking people on the broken yellow lines and hugging the corners because the Speed 3 was a very capable machine. Apparently though, in his 50-something years of living here, he'd never once driven these roads like that, and his parting comment was "don't ever drive my car again". I'm not sure his car ever went over 3000rpm after that.
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