I See The Damnedest Things

Saturday and my brain gets to have a heavy sigh of relief…..do not have to think about the world as we know it and dream of a world to come…..

Recently I was tooling down I-10, a major East-West artery that runs through my area….I was putzing along in the right lane doing a couple of miles under the speed limit….because….well I am old and in no hurry and I was passed by a car and as I looked over there was NO one driving….No one in passenger seat…there was someone in the back on the passenger side…..I thought it was odd and sped up to check it out…..no one’s head popped up….so I let it go….I just figured that some one got out to take a leak and forgot to put it in park and off it went…..or maybe my medication was better than I thought………but I may have found a plausible explanation…..

This from the magazine The Week…….

On a clear and sunny day in January, Steve Mahan stepped into the driver’s seat of a Toyota Prius to run errands around town. Mahan is also 95 percent blind, far past the legal driving limit for impaired vision. But the car transported him through the drive-thru of a Taco Bell and parked while he picked up his dry cleaning. The vehicle is part of Google’s self-driving car project, which can chaperone passengers based on pre-programmed commands (Watch a video below). The vehicle relies on laser range finders, radar sensors, and video cameras to safely navigate roadways, without the driver ever having to take the wheel. “Look Ma, no hands and no feet!” says Mahan as the car cruises down the street. “This is some of the best driving I’ve ever done.” Google was awarded a patent for the self-driving system in December, and Mahan is the first blind driver to test its capabilities.

I had read about the Google car and the article said that in all the trials there had been only one accident and it was someone hitting the car not the other way around……this is pretty cool.  This is technology that can be I could use….like I said…I am OLD!

My first thought was , “where was this invention when I was young and doing a lot of bar hopping?”