Intelligent roads?

21/5/2017

There's so much plastic floating around the world's oceans that it must qualify as a natural resource by now. More easily mined than coal, I imagine. There was a conversation the other day about grinding up plastic to make road surfaces. Today, there's a piece in the Weekend FT about wearable tech. Maybe sometime soon the folk at Google working on self-driving cars are going to have the idea of self-driving roads. Not like Scalextric exactly, but car and road in harmony, exchanging data/information about traffic conditions, upcoming signals and restrictions, et cetera.
Self-driving cars at the moment are designed on the "all else being equal" principle - the roads, the signs, the jaywalking pedestrians and the other drivers all remaining a constant factor. But what if the road was imbued with signage: stop here; turn there? Make a lot more sense, surely? In the week-old copy of The Economist I was reading earlier, there was a piece on training algorithms to recognise stop signs - clean stop signs, dirty, damaged and graffiti-market stop signs. Really?

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Kitchen parenting

I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
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9th May 2014

On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

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