Another beautiful, sunny day in San Mateo!
I put about a dozen, short videos taken yesterday and today onto a YouTube playlist.
This one (below) is probably the sweetest - a couple interacts across a kind of windmill made of mirrors.
If this tweet doesn't mark the first time the word "drone" has been used as a verb to denote summarial execution by air, well, it's the first time I've noticed such a use.
What does Obama mean by “engaged in combat” when talking about droning Americans? Secrecy makes it hard to know. nytimes.com/2013/03/09/opi…
— Drones (@drones) March 10, 2013
Also, drone down on tweeted takeoffs of lines from famous novels, in this series of tweets by Teju Cole.
Shelf space at a premium, I'm culling books.
Books worth their keep have attributes - design, typography, heft, upholstery - that amplify and supplement the text and signify other things besides, making the work - sewn and bound - more than the same text rendered under a slab of glass.
"Here is New York," the spine of which is pictured at right, is a good example.
After 9/11, this classic long essay by EB White, about the uncanny energy of Manhattan after the end of WWII, was republished in paperback in a manner that foregrounded White's admonition that New York City might at any moment be attacked by air.
When you read the book in an edition hard-covered and slip-jacketed in a manufacturing process contemporary to its writing, you yet get the chills at that prophetic turn in the text, tingle at the way White makes a refrain of the warning; but you're also cognizant that White's immediate reference is to Europe, great cities of which lay in ruins from German and Allied bombing.
Next to the White book is "Plan B," my book of sonnets designed with the format and scale of the "Here is New York" first edition in mind.
Every other book pictured has a story and other associations.
It's easier to cull electronic devices, which antiquate quickly. Books designed for specific content seem to have utility measured more in decades.
Sometimes even just two rules side-by-side can be hard to reconcile.
Pictured from a neighborhood coffee shop: a prohibition on cell phone use, and instructions for using your phone to pay.
Someone at Yahoo is paying attention!
I uploaded the new Flickr iPhone app last night. (As you know, I do not go gentle into that app update, so I did so only after reading a glowing review.)
It looks like you'll be able to take pictures on the Flickr app and post them to Twitter.
I tried it last night, and the picture nestled nicely in a Twitter card.
The filters are more interesting than those I recall from Instagram (though I used Instagram only briefly, stopping after it was purchased by Facebook).
It still feels like Flickr, because you can still access photos taken by people who know what they are doing with Cannons and Nikons and lenses with this, that and other focal lengths.
The app is probably overkill for those who use incidental daily snapshots as a social networking vernacular. Too much information here for that purpose.
What I like most is the ability to find the license terms for each photo. The prior Flickr iPhone app I was using could not do this. I had to favorite photo, then go to the web to check license terms, before I could use a photo in a post. This efficiency is going to make it much easier to post to this blog from the road.
Pictures: Flickr mobile app filter/Twitter experiment; "Waiting at Great Portland Street" by Trowbridge Estate; one screen-ful of image detail accessible on the app.
"Drone" is not a word I would associate with the remote controlled helicopter that the Seattle Police Department displayed Thursday night at the Garfield Community Center.
If the device launches vertically into the air, never leaves the visual site of its operator, and can't fly for more than 10 minutes (the limit of the battery charge), I doubt it can pack and deliver weapons grade explosives.
At the meeting, a citizen asked if it would be legal for him to fly his own drone over his own property, for the purpose of monitoring police behavior.
An officer responded, yes, you may, as long as it doesn't fly over 400 feet.
I was late to the meeting, but in the 30 to 40 minutes I was there, I heard no city council member or other policymaker stepping into the breach between citizen agitators (most of whom were rude) pressing to discuss policymaking, and the (polite) police officers, who wanted merely to explain how they meant to use the drone under FAA rules and other instructions they'd been given.
"What's in a name," Juliet famously asked. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
Juliet hadn't considered the example of the word "drone." I'll bet that name impacts how policy is shaped over police use of remote controlled, low altitude cameras.
So driverless cars are to be street legal in California!
I thought it would be fun to look "under the hood," so to speak, at the text of the legislation that Governor Jerry Brown signed this week, California Senate Bill 1298.
At the outset, we should note that the new law doesn't exactly legalize the widespread manufacture and distribution of driverless cars to ordinary people, at least not today. Rather, the law might be fairly said to be structured in the negative:
"Except as provided in subdivision (b), an autonomous vehicle shall not be operated on public roads until the manufacturer submits an application to the department, and that application is approved by the department pursuant to the regulations adopted pursuant to subdivision (d)."
This language is from subdivision (c) of the law, sitting between subdivision (b), the exception to the general prohibition, and subdivision (d), a provision that calls upon the California Department of Motor Vehicles to write implementing regulations "[a]s soon as practicable, but no later than January 1, 2015."
What the law appears to permit, more immediately, is the testing of "autonomous vehicles." Here is that subdivision (b), in pertinent part:
"An autonomous vehicle may be operated on public roads for testing purposes by a driver who possesses the proper class of license for the type of vehicle being operated if all of the [three, spelled-out] requirements are met."
The three requirements to be met, in summary, are: (1) the vehicle must be operated by someone "designated by the manufacturer of the autonomous technology," (2) a "driver" who is "capable of taking over immediate manual control" of the vehicle must be in "the driver's seat," and (3) the manufacturer must have $5,000,000 in insurance, and provide evidence of the fact "in the form and manner required by the department pursuant to the regulations adopted pursuant to subdivision (d)."
Now, I know I just implied that that a rulemaking process was going to hold up every day use of driverless cars for ordinary people – perhaps as far out as 2015 – but that driverless cars could hit the road, for testing purposes, right away. But look what’s in that third requirement: a statutory possibility that immediate testing of driverless cars in California could be held up for lack of regulations specifying what will count as proof of insurance.
A challenge with statutory law - not encountered in the development of common law, which emerges only slowly over the case by case course of court decisions - is in fixing, at the get go, language to circumscribe the behavior meant to be approved, permitted and/or regulated. The terms newly coined by a legislature in a statute are meant to have immediate legal effect.
You'll note that the term "driverless car" does not appear in any of the legislative text quoted so far. In fact, the adjective "driverless" is a misnomer. At least for purposes of the testing exception, the vehicle must have a driver sitting in the driver's seat and capable of taking back manual control, either from the computer or the operator with a joystick at the Googleplex. And at least the "driver" of the car (I'm not sure about the remote operator) must possess a driver's license.
For this statute, the key defined term is not "driverless car" but instead "autonomous vehicle."
The statute defines "autonomous vehicle" as "any vehicle equipped with autonomous technology that has been integrated into that vehicle." "Autonomous technology," in turn, "means technology that has the capability to drive a vehicle without the active physical control or monitoring by a human operator."
There's more fun and strange parsing to be had in this statute, and no doubt we'll return to the subject as the regs develop and other states consider similar legislation. I'll leave you with this inventory, from the new California law, of other automated features of the 21st Century automobile which are not, in and of themselves, indicia of an "autonomous vehicle."
"An autonomous vehicle does not include a vehicle that is equipped with one or more collision avoidance systems, including, but not limited to, electronic blind spot assistance, automated emergency braking systems, park assist, adaptive cruise control, lane keep assist, lane departure warning, traffic jam and queuing assist, or other similar systems that enhance safety or provide driver assistance, but are not capable, collectively or singularly, of driving the vehicle without the active control or monitoring of a human operator."
Oh the irony! The autonomous vehicle doesn't need you, driver, by its very definition; but it won't be legal for testing purposes unless you're sitting in the driver's seat, ready to make like Capt. Sullenberger and flip off the autopilot.
Photo: US National Archives / Flickr.
