Can we be smart about this?

I know we're usually pretty stupid as a species, but I'm hoping we can make an exception for this.

You might have heard some time ago about Google and how they made a car that could drive itself.

Here's a bit of footage.



The system has, apparently, done incredibly well.

"The only accident, engineers said, was when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light. "

A friend of mine sent me this link about how VW is putting a similar system in a commercial product. So, this tech is definitely going beyond Google's testing.

Now, here's what I want to ask everyone out there. Can we not be stupid about this? Please? I imagine a scenario where these cars have been doing well, reducing accidents and saving lives. Then one of them crashes and one or more people die. It's all over the news for a week and politicians are calling for all automated vehicles to be banned.

That, to me, would be the wrong response, but that's the one I see us having. We won't pay any attention to the improvements in traffic and saved lives that could potentially come from this, but after the first crash it will be a shit storm.

The truth is, such systems are likely to have far fewer crashes than human drivers. Human drivers will still be at the wheel and can take control at any time. And lastly, it will probably be some time before we can TOTALLY replace human drivers. They'll still be at least partially involved for the near future.

All I'm asking is for us to have a little bit of sense about this.

But I honestly doubt it.

Drawing practice.

So I've been practicing drawing a bit. I'm fairly horrible now, and by that I mean I'm completely horrible. But I figure with some practice I might get better, or not. It's worth a try, I suppose. I've always had an interest in drawing but was never good at it and didn't figure I COULD be good at it because I seem to lack natural talent for drawing.

I've spent some time lately sketching random stuff, mostly things I find online. I uploaded a couple of scans I did just to demonstrate. First one, second one.

Not great, but a bit better than I expected. I don't know enough about art to guess at whether I can improve with practice, but I'm giving it a shot.

Why start practicing drawing? I'd like to do a semi-regular web comic. I get random, odd thoughts sometimes as this blog surely shows and I would like to express some of those in comic form. I figure funny paper level art is all I would require to do something simple. Why not go the xkcd route? Well, because we already have one of those.

So maybe I'll get a little better with practice and I'll scan a few more things and post them, just to kind of update people on my progress. Or maybe I won't.

Still no respect... with much love to the late, great Rodney Dangerfield.

I get no respect... I went to a meeting but there was no one there, no one wanted to meet me!

I once had to eat out at a Chinese place, they wanted me to eat the food outside the restaurant.

I took my son to the doc, they told me he was retarded and gave me a tag for my car, so I could park in the special spots. They told me I'd have to double park in two of them because he's also really ugly. I told 'im he gets his looks from his mother, the doc said he should give 'em back!

No respect, let me tell you something. I had my picture in the paper, a friend of mine called and said someone had finally taken a good picture of bigfoot.

I bought one of those new Xbox systems, I was so terrible at the games that I got an achievement for turning it off!

If I had a nickel for every time someone gave me a compliment, I'd have all of two cents.