Self Driving Cars

Having cars that drive themselves can help people in many ways. If the cars are well designed, there is minimal chance of accidents as the cars never get tired and are always fully aware of their surroundings. They can drive more efficiently, reducing gas mileage and they can reduce parking costs and the need for more cars as it has the potential to drop on person off and then go pick someone else up. If they interact with other driverless cars, they can become more efficient as it reduces stop and go traffic from forming. Although there is much good that can come from them, there is always some drawbacks.

First, there may be some bugs in the system and there is a risk of the software being hacked and manipulated, especially if the car is communicating with other cars or is network connected. There is also legal reasons, since the car maker of autonomous vehicles are the ones at fault in an accident, it is really hard for them to release more since they can't afford the potential for a flurry of lawsuits. Google proved they worked and for logged 10's if not 100's of thousands of miles, but sadly until more of the legal stuff is sorted out, not much can be done.

These cars could greatly increase the mobility of certain groups, such as the elderly and children who may not be able to go somewhere as they aren't able to drive. Calling a taxi is one option as well, but as many people prefer car ownership, owning your own car or sharing it with a car sharing program can make more use of the car while cutting down costs. As well, owning one autonomous car can cut back the need for multi-car households, as the one car can replace multiple other ones.

Besides commercial vehicles, most vehicles spend the majority of their time turned off. Just think how much better it would be to not only cut down on the amount of cars on the road and reducing congestion, but cutting down on the costs of owning a car as well.

Learning a New Language while Deciphering the Internet

While talking to some people, someone mentioned a site called duolingo.com which allows you to learn new language for free. I was a bit skeptical but I decided to try it out anyway. I looked into it, and the reason it is free is because it slowly translates the web from the language you are learning to the language you currently speak (in my case English). This works better than Google Translate since this is crowd sourced, so whenever you put what you think the translation would be, it gives you the option to up-vote translations from others since direct translations don't always work.

After signing up for the Beta and taking many months to get a response, I eventually got signed up. When starting, I was given the option of learning German or Spanish and I decided to try German. They later added French which is what I have been working on the last couple of months. Although it will take a long time to actually learn it, I am starting to pick up on more and more sentences without thinking too hard and getting the general of idea of what it is trying to say. If my mic was higher quality, you can even speak back to your computer and it would tell you if you are saying it correctly as well.

I found it great to learn at your own pace since days that you are bored, you can spend a lot longer on it and other times I may not look at it for a month. If choosing French, it gets you to translate English to French and vice versa. When it gives you French to translate, there is a French voice pronouncing the sentence properly to get a better idea how it is actually said. Starting off you get very short and simple sentences but later on the sentences get more challenging and I found you are eased into it nicely.

Either way, I found it to be a great distraction as opposed to checking Facebook or other sites while procrastinating. Since each lesson is only about 10 mins, it is also a great time killer when having to wait a short time. Although it is not the most effective teacher, being free and putting as much or as little time into it as you want makes it very helpful at starting to learn another language.