Google's self-driving cars might be too good at braking for cyclists

Google's self-driving cars are cautious by design, but in at least one instance, it may be a bit too much. A cyclist posting on a road bike forum says that an encounter between themself and a self-driving car ended up with neither moving more than a few inches for a good two minutes. The cyclist apparently came to a stop at a four-way intersection moments after a Google car did, but the cyclist remained standing on their bike. As the car began to move forward, the cyclist also rolled forward slightly, causing the car to come to a halt. While trying to maintain balance on the bike, this back and forth keep going:
"I felt safer dealing with a self-driving car than a human-operated one."
"We repeated this little dance for about two full minutes, and the car never made it past the middle of the intersection," the cyclist writes. "The two guys inside were laughing and punching stuff into a laptop, I guess trying to modify some code to 'teach' the car something about how to deal with the situation."
Though it's obviously not the right behavior for a self-driving car, that's not a bad outcome for the encounter. Drivers often aren't very courteous of cyclists, but a well-made autonomous vehicle would have no option but to be careful and respectful. "The odd thing," the cyclist writes, is that "I felt safer dealing with a self-driving car than a human-operated one." Google may still have a lot of work to do, but that's the outcome it's looking for.

The encounter is said to have occurred in Austin, where Google very recently began a new set of self-driving car tests on public roads. In fact, it's encounters like this one that Google was looking for when it started up there. "From pedicabs to pickup trucks, Austin's streets will give our self-driving car some new learning experiences," Google said at the time. It's not surprising to hear that Google's cars continue to be cautious in their encounters with basically anything else on the road. Google recently started to report accidents that its cars have been in, and so far, Google says, every accident was the fault of another vehicle's human driverالمصدر===THE VERGE

.

Read More

Unique Jewelry That Features Remarkably Tiny Skulls and Faces Carved Into Pearls and Other Found Objects

Japanese jewelry artist Shinji Nakaba has crafted a wonderful line of wearable sculptures that features remarkably tiny skulls and faces carved into tiny pearls and other found objects. According to Nakaba, no material is more valuable than another.

(translated) I am making jewelry from recognition as “wearable sculpture” I use not only precious metals and stones but also something usual,such as aluminum Beer can or plastic bottle,or even some discarded materials.
I’m dealing all the materials equally no matter how precious or not precious they are.

Items can be purchased through Nakaba’s online store.









images via Shinji Nakaba
via Magnifico, Bored Panda

More Related Laughing Squid Posts

Bas-Relief 'Hobo Nickel' Sculptures Carved into Coins by Paolo Curcio

Artist Paolo Curcio craves tiny bas-relief sculptures into coins---a traditional art form known as the hobo nickel. Curcio's coins feature intricately detailed hobos, skulls and a variety of pop culture characters. Plastic castings of his works are available online. Here's our previous post on Skull Nickels. photos via Paolo Curcio…

December 27, 2013

Similar post

Beautiful Handmade Resin Jewelry Containing Real Flowers, Seashells, and Other Natural Objects

Oregon-based jewelry designer ModernFlowerChild handcrafts gorgeous clear resin jewelry that contains real flowers, seashells, leaves, and other organic materials. The jewelry is available in a variety of forms, including bracelets, rings, and earrings. ModernFlowerChild sells her work on Etsy. Her jewelry is also available at Faerie Magazine. And more photos…

February 11, 2015

Similar post

Incredibly Tiny Sculptures Carved in Pencil Graphite

In his spare time, Turkey-based engineering student Recep Alçamli carves incredibly tiny yet remarkably detailed sculptures in the graphite of pencils. He has more sculptures posted on his Facebook photostream. We previously posted about similar pencil graphite sculptures by Dalton Ghetti. photos via Recep Alçamli via Bored Panda

October 8, 2014

Similar post

Other Links From Around The Web

Contributing Editor at Laughing Squid - @HRLori

Read More

Israeli Artist Demonstrates How to Create a Realistic Siberian Husky Face With Makeup

Ilana Kolihanov, an extremely talented makeup artist in Israel, demonstrates how to create a realistic Siberian Husky face, using her own dog as a template.

Ilana has also offered tutorials on creating amazing tiger faces, alien faces, skulls along with everyday makeup tips. The commentary is in Hebrew, but the Ilana makes the videos easy to follow along with her deliberate brush strokes.source==========

images via Ilana Makeup Artist

Read More

+18+Don't watch this realistic Mortal Kombat fatalities video during lunchtime

Oh … oh my. Oh my word. The Mortal Kombat series - and Mortal Kombat X in particular - features some pretty graphic violence with over-the-top X-Ray attacks and vicious fatalities, but there's a reason these things should exist only in video game land; seeing them in real life is enough to make you more than a little queasy. Still, if you think you've got the stomach for it, YouTube channel RackaRacka has crafted a video showing what some realistic fatalities would look like:

Props to the filmmakers for their great special and practical effects, as well as camera work that perfectly captures the brutality of Mortal Kombat. The humor throughout ("I'll fatality you bro!") and creativity in their kills was also admirable. Personally, I quite enjoyed the "man gets beat to death with his own entrails." Anyway, enjoy your lunch!
Oh … oh my. Oh my word. The Mortal Kombat series - and Mortal Kombat X in particular - features some pretty graphic violence with over-the-top X-Ray attacks and vicious fatalities, but there's a reason these things should exist only in video game land; seeing them in real life is enough to make you more than a little queasy. Still, if you think you've got the stomach for it, YouTube channel RackaRacka has crafted a video showing what some realistic fatalities would look like: Props to the filmmakers for their great special and practical effects, as well as camera work that perfectly captures the brutality of Mortal Kombat. The humor throughout ("I'll fatality you bro!") and creativity in their kills was also admirable. Personally, I quite enjoyed the "man gets beat to death with his own entrails." Anyway, enjoy your lunch!Source==games===

Read More

We asked Cortana some Halo questions - can you guess the answers?

If you've upgraded to Windows 10 of late, you'll have gained easy access to Cortana, a voice-activated personal assistant who bears a striking audio resemblance to Master Chief's see-through secretary/guidance councillor/probable love interest. That point's proven when you ask her Halo-themed questions - she's got a surprising repository of trivial/sassy responses to questions about the franchise she sprang from.

I've put together 15 of my favourite questions and answers to pose to my new trapped AI - but there's a twist. You have to guess which are the real responses, and which are dumb things I made up because I'd really like a job writing dialogue for text-to-speech robots.
Oh, and if you've found any particularly good secret questions I didn't ask, leave a comment - I want to bug her some more.Source==games  Radar+====

Read More

The best web browser of 2015: Firefox, Chrome, Edge, IE, and Opera compared

We put the screws to all five modern browsers, testing them in all manner of scenarios. If you're looking for a fast, efficient, convenient browser, we've found two that we think you'll like.

The best browsers go beyond benchmarks, racing through real-world webpages as well as canned routines. They’re easy to set up, flexible and extensible, and connect other devices and services into an ecosystem. 
Look, throwing a few benchmarks at a browser just doesn’t cut it any more. Just as you expect us to test graphics cards against the latest games, we think your browsers should be tested against a collection of live sites. Can they handle dozens of tabs at once? Or do they shudder, struggle, and crash, chewing through your PC’s processor and memory? 
To pick a winner, we put Google Chrome, Microsoft’s Edge and Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera to the test, barring Apple’s abandoned Safari for Windows. We used the latest available version of each browser, except for Firefox, which upgraded to Firefox 40 late in our testing. And we also tried to look at each browser holistically: How easy was each to install and set up? Does Opera make it simple to switch from Chrome, for example?

For 2015, we have a newcomer: Microsoft’s Edge browser, which has been integrated into Windows 10.

You’ve already seen part of our tests, where we showed you how much of an impact enabling Adobe Flash can have on your system. Disabling or refusing to load Flash can seriously improve performance—some sites, like YouTube, have begun to transition to less CPU-intensive HTML5 streams. Still, other readers pointed out that they simply need to run Flash on their favorite sites. That’s fine—we tested with and without Flash, so you’ll have a sense for which browser performs best, in either case.
Oh, and Microsoft: We found that your new Edge browser isn’t quite as fast as you make it out to be. (Sorry!) But it still demonstrated definite improvement over Internet Explorer.

The benchmark numbers favor Chrome and Firefox

We do consider benchmarks to be a valuable indicator of performance, just not a wholly defining one. Still, they’re the numbers that users want to see, so we’ll oblige. We used a Lenovo Yoga 12 notebook with a 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-5600U inside, running a 64-bit copy of Windows 10 Pro on 8GB of memory as our test bed.
We tested Chrome 44, Windows 10’s Edge 12, Firefox 39, Internet Explorer 11, and Opera 31 against two popular (though unsupported) benchmarks—Sunspider 1.0.2 and Peacekeeper—just for reference purposes. But we’d encourage you to pay attention to the more modern benchmarks, including Jet Stream,  Octane 2.0, Speedometer, and WebXPRT. The latter two are especially useful, as they try to mirror actual interaction with web apps. We also tested using Oort Online’s graphics benchmark as well as the standardized HTML5test—which is not so much a benchmark, but an evaluation of how compatible a browser is with the HTML5 standard for Web development.
From our testing, Chrome and Firefox topped the Speedometer and WebXPRT tests, respectively. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google was the fastest browser under the Google-authored Octane 2.0 benchmark. But Microsoft’s Edge led the pack in the Jet Stream benchmark—which includes the Sunspider tests, which Edge led as well. (For all of the benchmarks, a higher number is better; the one exception is Sunspider, which records its score in the time it took to run.)

Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox do well here. (A higher result is better, except for the Sunspider benchmark.)

What’s surprising about Edge is that it led the pack in the Jet Stream benchmark, but fell way behind on Speedometer, only to record a quite reasonable score in WebXPRT. (Microsoft claims that Edge is faster than Chrome in the Google-authored Octane 2.0 benchmark as well, but our results don’t indicate that.)
Chrome flopped on the Sunspider test; the only test Firefox failed equally miserably in was the Oort Online benchmark, which draws a Minecraft-like landscape using the browser.

For whatever reason, I noticed some graphical glitches as Edge rendered the Oort landscape, including problems drawing a shadow that slid across the bay in the night scene. But Oort proved even more problematic for Firefox, rendering “snow” as flashing lights and rain as a series of lines. (We’ve included the test result, but take it with a grain of salt.) Internet Explorer 11 simply couldn’t run the Oort benchmark at all.
We also included the HTML5test compatibility test, which measures how compatible each browser is with the latest HTML5 Web standards. Although some developers focus extensively on each browser’s score, even the test developer isn’t too concerned:
 And the only one that fails that test, of course, is the semi-retired Internet Explorer 11.
What does all this mean? It doesn’t indicate a clear win for any specific browser, including Chrome. Based on our benchmark tests, many of the browsers will handle the modern web just fine.
Next page: Real-world testing and "the convenience factor."

What is this?

Amazon Shop buttons are programmatically attached to all reviews, regardless of products' final review scores. Our parent company, IDG, receives advertisement revenue for shopping activity generated by the links. Because the buttons are attached programmatically, they should not be interpreted as editorial endorsements.Source==pc world==

Read More

Google says Project Ara didn't fail drop test, better camera and battery coming

Google's got truly brilliant engineers in its ranks, but some could use some sharpening of their comedic skills. Today the company tweeted a clarification saying that its Project Ara modular smartphone didn't actually fail any drop test. The Ara team is still reworking how modules attach to one another, but the change apparently wasn't inspired by Ara breaking apart; Google simply found a better way. "We have been configuring a new solution," the Ara group tweeted. "It's better too."
Project Ara is also getting a better camera and longer battery life, according to two other tweets posted today. Back at Google I/O, the company wowed its keynote crowd by assembling a functioning Ara model right on stage and snapping a photo. But the quality of that image left something to be desired.

On Monday, Google revealed that it was backing off plans to conduct a Project Ara pilot in Puerto Rico later this year. The company is now targeting a 2016 introduction and says it's looking into "a few locations" in the US where Ara could make its consumer-facing debut. Project Ara team has promised more details on what's to come "soon."Source==THE VERGE

Read More