Taking a Thanksgiving holiday break

I'm taking a short break from posting this week. I expect to post again on Sunday, December 2.

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Driverless cars and bodiless brains

The death of a pedestrian during a test drive of a driverless vehicle (even as a backup human sat in the driver's seat) calls into question not just the technology—which didn't seem to detect the pedestrian crossing a busy roadway and therefore didn't brake or swerve—but also the notion that driving is nothing more than a set of instructions that can be carried out by a machine. The surprised backup driver seemed to have confidence in the inventors of driverless cars as he was looking down at his computer briefly just before impact. Certainly, a real human driver might have hit this pedestrian who was crossing a busy street at night with her bicycle. But, of course, as a friend of mine pointed out, there is a big difference in the public mind between a human driver hitting and killing a pedestrian and a robot killing one. If the incident had involved a human driver in a regular car, it would probably only have been reported locally. But the real story is "robot kills
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Does the Australian LNG export experience foreshadow soaring U.S. natural gas prices?

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