I recently updated my book recommendation box to list the very best recent SF to read from the last few years. This is SF that meets my goals for great SF. I see somewhat "hard" SF that speaks about important and real ideas, while being entertaining writing at the same time.

Today Google released a new 3 minute video highlighting advanced self-driving car use. Here I embed the video, discussion below includes some minor spoilers on surprises in the video. I'm pleased to see this released as I had a minor & peripheral role in the planning of it, but the team has done a great job on this project.

This video includes active operation of the vehicle on not just ordinary streets, by private parking lots for door to door transportation. You can click on it to see it in HD directly on Youtube.

For some time, the US Postal Service has allowed people to generate barcoded postage. You can do that on the expensive forms of mail such as priority mail and express mail, but if you want to do it on ordinary mail, like 1st class mail or parcel post, you need an account with a postage meter style provider, and these accounts typically include a monthly charge of $10/month or more. For an office, that's no big deal, and cheaper than the postage meters that most offices used to buy -- and the pricing model is based on them to some extent, even though now there is no hardware needed.

Sometimes when I travel I see a great idea that hasn't yet spread everywhere yet. A parking garage I parked at in Tel Aviv had LEDs visible on the roof above every stall. These were red and green if the stall was full or empty. So it was quick to find an empty stall. This probably makes the garage more efficient because people don't have to circle hunting for a spot, and this justifies the cost. (The main cost of these is probably wiring the power for them.)

I've seen studies claiming that in busy areas, up to 30% of the traffic is cars circling looking for parking. Mostly they are looking for free parking or convenient on-street parking, since parking garages, though expensive can usually be found and entered quickly. Indeed, while on-street parking is often much more convenient, in many cases this is an artifact of parking being subsidized (because it's free, or free to people who live in an area) or cheaper than commercial parking markets. But we don't seem ready to fix that, though many cities put restrictions on street and metered parking, limiting the number of hours so that it is in theory only for visitors rather than all-day parkers.

There are many companies trying to see if they can improve parking using mobile devices and the internet. There are companies with sensors that manage parking spaces, companies that let you find spaces on a mobile device and even enter a garage with your mobile device. In some cases you can even extend your parking (if you prepaid) over the phone. Cities have been moving away from traditional meters to things like block meters (where you get a ticket and then put it on your dash) or fancy enforcement vehicles with licence plate cameras that spot not only if you are in a spot too long, but if you move within the busy zone to another spot.

As a user of parking, I would like to know I've got a good spot lined up before I get to my destination, and just pull right into it. I want a competitive market but I don't want to waste time and gas hunting. There are companies trying to address this, though mostly in commercial lots. It's mostly pretty basic right now -- it's considered fancy to even have sites like parkopedia or bestparking with a database of the parking in a city with the prices so you can comparison shop the parking lots.

So now for some rambling on what might be done on street.

You may not know the name of Continental, but they are a major supplier of components to the big automakers. A story in the Detroit Free Press details their latest project in autonomous driving. This is a VW Passat using radar Automatic-Cruise-Control combined with lane-keeping, similar to projects announced by Mercedes and VW/Audi itself. The story has a video showing the screen of the car displaying its lane-keeping.

I'm back from our fun "Singuarlity Week" in Tel Aviv, where we did a 2 day and 1 day Singularity University program. We judged a contest for two scholarships by Israelis for SU, and I spoke to groups like Garage Geeks, Israeli Defcon, GizaVC's monthly gathering and even went into the west bank to address the Palestinian IT Society and announce a scholarship contest for SU.

A recent article on bicycles and pedestrians in the robocar world appears at the Greater Washington web site, which has taken an interest in robocar topics. In particular they are concerned about the vision of a reservation-based intersection, which does not use traffic signals. These designs from U of Texas got a lot of press in the last few weeks after a presentation at AAAS, but they've been around for years and I have a number of links to them.

In our effort to reduce the corruption in politics, one of the main thrusts in campaign finance regulation has been for transparency. Donations to candidates must be declared publicly. We want to see who is funding a candidate. This applies even to $100 donations.

While the value of such transparency seems clear -- though how effective it's been remains less clear -- there are some things that have bothered me about it.

1. It's quite a violation of privacy. We demand secret ballot, but supporting a candidate gets us in a database and a lot of spam.
2. Some people are so bothered by this invasion of privacy that they actually refrain from making donations, even small ones, to avoid it.

What if we reversed that thinking. What if we demanded that donations to candidates be anonymous?

• A special agency would be created. All donations would flow into that agency, along with which candidate they are meant for.
• Only the agency would know who the money went to. After auditing was done to assure the agency was distributing the money correctly, the info would be destroyed. Before that it would be kept securely.
• Money would be given to candidates in a smoothed process with a randomized formula every few weeks, to avoid linking donations with dates. This might mean delays in getting some money to candidates.
• While anybody could say that they donated, to offer, solicit, show or receive proof of donation would be a crime. An official method of hiding donations in corporate P&Ls would need to be established.
• In general, all donations in any given period (a month or quarter?) must be given as a lump sum, with a list of how much to give each candidate. So even if you're sure a donor would never give anything but party X, you don't know which candidates in party X.

Now it would not be impossible to hide things entirely. If the Koch brothers say they gave a big donation, and you believe them, it's fairly safe to say it wasn't to Obama. At least for now, this will buy them more access to candidates on their side. But this gets harder over time. And the common corporate strategy of donating to both sides of a race to assure access no matter who wins becomes vastly less valuable. While you might convince somebody you are a regular donor and will pull your donation if you don't get what you want, it becomes very hard for you to prove.

One of the useful attributes of electronic paper (such as E-Ink) is that it doesn't take any power to retain an image, it only takes power to change the image. This is good for long-lasting E-readers, and digital signs are one of the other key applications of electronic paper, though today they are sold with a focus on the retail market.

The state of Nevada today approved regulations for self-driving cars in the state. Last year, Nevada passed a law outlining the path to these regulations, and their DMV has been working in consultation with Google, car makers and other parties to write them down. Today they were approved, allowing testing, certification and -- someday -- operation of vehicles in the state. Other laws are in consideration in other states inspired by the Nevada move.

A new group has sprung up in the valley around the concept of the open source automobile. I will be speaking at their meetup, which was going to be at Hacker Dojo and has moved to Intel's auditorium. Looks like a good crowd is signed up. Sorry, no deep Google secrets but there will be a video featuring the car and many visions of the future.

Robocars at Silicon Valley Open Source Automotive

This group is about all aspects of computerization in cars.

I'm back from a trip to the Netherlands and Ontario, and there's more to come on that, but the press awakening about robocars continues to grow:

This week, Wired has expanded it's "Let the Robot Drive" series with more articles:

Two recent flight booking experiences on United Airlines:

a) I booked a round trip to Toronto with miles. Due to new plans, I ended up getting a different flight to Toronto but wanted to take the same flight back. I had booked return tickets for 2 passengers, but you can book one-way tickets for the same miles price, and you can book passengers together or independently (later joining the reservations to sit together.) It doesn't cost any more to get 4 single legs, it's just a lot more work for you and the airline.

Update: When I first wrote this, I was under the mistaken belief that Better Place only swapped one type of battery module. At present they only support one, but their swap stations are designed to support up to six kinds, as long as they can be loaded and unloaded from below.

BMW has spoken in the past of their Highly Automated Driving project. A new video about ConnectedDrive Connect goes into more details. While BMW insists this is just a research project and won't be in their cars for a long time, they also are expected to soon produce a traffic jam autopilot to compete with the offerings from Mercedes and Audi.

I've talked before about Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt. It's an interesting journey into the world of traffic psychology and engineering, and has one chapter on robocars. That chapter was based on seeing Junior at Stanford, and things have come a long way since then.

Yesterday I attended the conference on the legal implications of robocars put on by Santa Clara University Law Review. It was a well done conference, with some real content from a varied group of regulators and legal scholars, a sign of how real the robocar world has become.

Frequently these days I will see some shocking statistic reported:

A new robocar project named "Quasper" has emergence in France from the IRSEEM Esigelec lab and IFSTTAR. This vehicle uses a commercial actuator robot to control the wheel and pedals for drive-by-wire, and features a variety of typical sensors, though it only has a couple of smaller SICK LIDARSs rather than a high resolution LIDAR like the Velodyne used by many other projects. Their work is fairly basic for now.

Back to wishlists on credit cards: Every year, for tax time, I go over my downloaded credit card records and I classify them into categories. I could just try to divide out the business and personal expenses (which I handle by having credit cards for business only and for personal only) but I try to do a bit more categorization, and from time to time there's a reason I don't follow the strict rule about what card to use.