Autonomous Vehicles - DARPA Grand Challenge Finishers

Reported in various places including New Scientist, GCN and Slashdot four vehicles completed the Darpa grand Challenge in under the 10hr time limit, and one more completed it outside the time - hugely impressive. All of these vehicles (a Volkswagen Tuareg, two Humvees, a Ford and a Military truck) had to cover 212km across dessert terrain completely unassisted (no human drivers, no human navigators, no human remote control). Give that last year now one finished at all that's a big leap.

Give them 10 years and they'll be bringing home your goceries from the store.

On Scientific Publishing

A good reminder that i should update my publications list and sort out what to do about CC licensing - these links from Peter are an interesting read:

• http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/journals.html
  
• http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php
  

Blog Spam - the return of comments...!

After some playing around with Blogger i've turned anonymous comments BACK ON but with a passcode mechanism designed to fool scripts (lets hope so...). Most of the Blog spam was pretty inane so quite likely script generated :-/. Anyway, hopefully this will help. Interestingly Blogger seems to give no means of an overview over all comments - you have to hunt them across all your posts...

Blog Spam

Had to disable the comment posting mechanisms after an influx of spam while i work out how to deal with it :-(, seems like you cant escape it anywhere!