Image by swanny338 at Morguefile

This week the state of Nevada finalized new rules that will make it possible for robotic self-driving cars to receive their own special driving permits. It’s not quite driver’s licenses for robots — but it’s close.: When The Car Is The Driver from All Tech Considered : NPR.

Also, from MIT Tech Review:
Fully autonomous self-driving cars are still far from the market, but a wide range of features—including sensor systems that warn of lane departures and imminent crashes, and can even apply the brakes if you don’t—are rapidly showing up in midmarket cars. Self-Driving Tech Veers into Mid-Range Cars

Shark, photo by Paulabflat

But this story — and the related video, shows how the surface of shark skin helps sharks swim faster by manipulating drag. When you watch the video, look for the little swirls near the fin’s surface.

Video: Scales Give Sharks Their Speed – ScienceNOW.

Tangling with Teleportation.

Original paper here: Direct Imaging of a Two-Dimensional Silica Glass on Graphene from Nano Letters.

I wrote an article for NOVA’s Physics Blog “The Nature of Reality” about how quantum teleportation works (Part 1) and whether it may some day be possible to teleport people ala Star Trek (Part 2). Part one is up on the NOVA website: Beam Me Up, Schrodinger.

Airflow across a wing – YouTube.

This short video is a beautifully clear rebuttal of a reasonable-sounding but wrong explanation of lift.

Cat-herding is an insufficient metaphor for getting tenured professors to do something.

Advanced faculty wrangling techniques – Research Centered – The Chronicle of Higher Education. By Minerva Cheevy

I work with some of the finest professors in the world. By and large, this means they are exceedingly competent in their field and quite competent at teaching. They are also experts at managing their time, which translates into not wasting any time on things that aren’t important to them.

This makes interactions difficult for anyone who is neither inherently important to them, nor willing to become unpleasant enough to graduate from ignorable to an important problem.

Most lasers with visible and infrared wavelengths use population inversion to create lasing; but X-rays lasers—while theoretically capable of being created this way—have used alternative schemes, partially because X-ray sources could not act as adequate pumps.

Now, they have. And that pleases me, because there’s something elegant and delightful about population inversion for stimulated emission.

Read more in my article: Finer Control from an X-ray Laser from Optics & Photonics News.

Image by swanny338 at Morguefile

Okay, not all people, and not all the time. Nevertheless, driving is a perilous activity. In the US, over 30,000 people are killed every year. Also, we’ve got a chunk of the population that drives while distracted, and another chunk of the population whose vision and reaction times are slowing. If we do nothing, the number of accidents and fatalities will only grow.

One strategy — and a very good one — is to make mass transit options available (by which I include affordability and ease of use) to many more people. But assuming that personal car ownership remains the gold standard, and that people want to drive themselves, then why not change the cars?

One alternative is to increase the autopiloting capabilities of cars. Don’t take control away from drivers, but give them tools to aid with driving. MIT Technology Review has an article on “advanced driver assistance systems”: Europe’s Driverless Car by Russ Juskalian.

Another alternative is to add different types of tools to allow more people to drive. The technology exists — and was demonstrated at the Daytona 500 last year — that provides all the information necessary to allow blind people to drive cars. See High-Tech Car Allows the Blind to Drive | Autopia | Wired.com. An engineer who worked on the technology at Virginia Tech tells me that the major barrier is social and political rather than technological.

We cannot just innovate our way out of the problem, but there’s a clear path where technical changes are making a difference. Now: will we make the social changes necessary to allow the changes to keep more of us alive and healthy?

Do you remember Apple’s “1984″ ad? Trade shows are a little like that: the ad agencies want to create that sense of excitement, but most of the people feel — at least by the end of the day — like colorless drones herded for too long in cavernous halls with concrete floors.

And with that intro, I’ll mention that I was not at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, for which I am profoundly grateful.

(I still write about CES, still peruse endless press releases in which Household Name Brand shills effuse about how their updated device will Change Consumer Life As We Know It because it’s specs are just a tiny epsilon different from last year’s specs.)

Rob Beschizza’s expose of what life looks like for a journalist at a big show tells much truth. He starts by saying:

Every year, however, readers ask about the nitty-gritty details of the show, beyond the gadgets but short of the existential despair….

Read more: What it's like at CES – Boing Boing.

I have (of course I have!) my own trade show stories. Stories about faking the mandatory extroversion, about being schmoozed particularly charmingly or ineptly, about blithely walking into a meeting room only to discover an salesman looking about 30 seconds away from kneecapping his competitor, about trying to cover the show floor on crutches, about discovering more than I wanted to know about the taste and personal lives of my colleagues (and vice versa), about astonishing acts of goodwill on the part of my own competitors, and about the potent effects of combined exhaustion and information overload and alcohol. And that’s not even counting the actual work: the writing to deadline while trying to find art, quotes, fact-checking; and trying to find a quiet spot with phone reception where I can talk to my boss about a scoop without alerting everyone around me, and the endless, endless walking.

But in 20 years of attending tradeshows, I remember a total of 2 devices that I first discovered on the trade show floor that excited me, that were important, that changed the industry. The first one was commercially available beta barium borate, a nonlinear crystal from China. The green lasers in all sorts of medical and other compact lasers (including your green laser pointer) use that, or one of it’s successors. The second device wasn’t a commercial product — it was a serendipitous mistake that resulted in an organic laser. The university lab grad student who found that his thin film lased was testing it’s lifetime on the show floor. Organic lasers were in their infancy then (and they’re not all that advanced now), and it was astonishing to see and exciting to hear about.