Sebastian Thrun’s vision will be fulfilled when driverless cars are obviously safer than human controlled cars, and so become the norm. It appears the biggest obstacle is no longer technical, but regulatory. It’s not a matter of making a self-steering car that works, it’s a matter of persuading governments that automated cars do work, that laws should be changed to allow them, and having those laws worded in such a way that they don’t allow half-bit programmers kill people by putting buggy software into semitrailers.

I imagine there would have to be strong regulations governing self-driving car safety, something like the regulations covering air safety today. Providers of car automation software would need a licence. These licences could be revoked at the will of a body like the Civil Aviation Authority, which would exercise their authority in response to questions about a system’s safety. Crashes would be investigated as thoroughly as air crashes are today, by independent panels. Cars would have the equivalent of a black box, so that these panels could review the seconds leading up to a crash and the decisions made by the software. Perhaps the day will come when a single road fatality garners the same media attention as a plane crash does today.

So how do we get from here to there?

Laws are swayed by public opinion, and public opinion is swayed by dramatic events. The worst possible dramatic event would be a fatal accident caused (or simply not prevented) by an automated vehicle. How can Sebastian Thrun and his team generate the positive kinds of dramatic events that will make the public want these cars on the road? Here’s a few ideas.

Tell Everyone

Sebastian Thrun has already thought of one way to get these cars on the road – teach anyone who wants to learn how to make their own. You can register for an online course at udacity.com which will teach the basics of making a driverless car. If teams at Ford, Honda and BMW start to build systems like these into their cars and perfect them, they will certainly bring political pressure to bear in order to make them legal.

Taxis in India

Imagine if Google made a thousand driverless Tatas, sent them to Calcutta or Dehli or Mumbai, and put a thousand taxi drivers behind the wheel. Imagine if these cars started clocking up millions of miles a year with no accidents on those cities’ roads – that would make a powerful case that driverless cars are safe.

The Right Jurisdiction

Here’s a wacky idea : perhaps somewhere there is a state, province or country whose licensing laws are so badly worded that they allow software to get a driver’s license. I know it’s a bit far-fetched, but if Google’s car automation software passed a driver’s test and got a license, it’s on the road!

Car Safety Systems

This is the idea I think is the best.

Currently, Google’s car drives itself, but the autopilot cuts out as soon as the human takes the controls. Imagine if it worked the other way around – if the car needed a human driver, but the automation system cut in whenever it detected an upcoming accident. This could be marketed as a Car Safety System, and from what I’ve seen on the videos, it could be marketed now. It’s ready now.

The reasons why it’s ready :

• While a single accident by a self-driving car would set the idea back years, nobody expects Car Safety Systems to work perfectly. Think of seatbelts, air bags and ABS – people get killed in spite of them, yet these technologies still become standard or required features on automobiles. If a self-driving car killed someone it would make headlines. If a car safety system failed, nobody would bat an eyelid.
• For this reason, it will be years before Sebastian Thrun and his team can afford to put driverless cars on the market. It may be a decade before they save a single life. However, the same system, activating only when an emergencies arise, could begin saving lives in only a year or two.
• What’s more, a Car Safety System in widespread use will provide far more data to Sebastian Thrun’s team than they can possibly get in a lifetime from their limited testing on California’s roads. Their car automation system will get tested in a huge variety of driving conditions and emergency situations. They’ll see how it acts in circumstances they cannot hope to simulate. Best of all, they’ll discover exactly when their system fails, but in a way that doesn’t destroy the technology’s reputation.
• Eventually, there will emerge the kind of public-opinion-swaying amazing story that they need. A thwarted attempt at road rage. A drunk safely steered through a busy pedestrian crossing. A truck driver, asleep at the wheel, waking to find himself safely and legally parked. A Heart attack victim brought straight to hospital by his Car Safety System. Then, Sebastian’s team can tell the world “Yeah, well, our Car Safety System is really the same software as our Driverless Car, we’re just waiting for the government to make automated cars legal. By the way, here’s our suggestion for the way the Civil Automated Automotive Authority should run.”

So, Google should keep the driverless car as a high-profile research project, and in the background, market it – starting as soon as possible – as a car safety system. A Car Safety System would be easy to market:

• Make it affordable. License it to car manufacturers – with no exclusive licenses – for $1000 per install in developed countries, or down to $50 per install or less in developing countries.
• Imagine the fun publicity stunts they could do – “The world’s most boring demolition derby”, or “Top Gear stuntman fails to destroy Google Safety Car”

I’m sure there’s a large base of people who’d love to have an uncrashable car. I know I would.

When the video below was taken, Google’s cars had done 200,000 miles of automated driving. That sounds like a lot, but they actually need 1,000,000,000 miles to know if their automated cars are safer than humans. That’s 5000 times what they’ve managed to clock up so far, and then they’ll need another billion or two to convince regulators. This can only be accomplished by going to market, but one mistake by a driverless car would do far more harm than the extra miles of testing would do. It certainly seems to be that the quickest way forward is to market they technology as a Car Safety System. They’ll clock up far more miles, and start saving lives straight away.

Do it, Sebastian!

A plastic spatula with my bread slicer... mmmmmm!

We bake our own bread with a breadmaker, and I use an electric knife to slice it. I wouldn’t dream of trying to do that without a bread slicer (the white rack in the picture), but even with it, it’s hard. The first few slices tend to be uneven as the force of the knife squashes the end of the loaf. Then the last few slices are worse, if you remove the cut slices, or else if you hold the end of the loaf in place with the other slices it means your hand is near the blade of the electric knife.

At least it was like that, until I got myself a wide plastic putty knife from the hardware store. Now, I slot the putty knife in place at the end of the loaf, and slice away. The loaf holds together until I remove the putty knife, down to the very last slice. No more endangered fingers, no more mangled slices.

It really is the best thing since sliced bread!

Can you please write down the optimization problem which has as its solution “tax the doctor’s income and the homeowner’s capital gain at the same rate”?

However, it’s actually not difficult to construct an example exactly like this.

So, here’s my example. What follows is quite technical, but here’s a non-technical summary :

Imagine there’s a rich guy who doesn’t get much of a kick out of money, and a poor guy for whom money is very important. The tax rates on earned income and investment income don’t affect the rich guy’s happiness very much, but they greatly affect government revenues. However, the choice of tax rates greatly affect the poor guy’s happiness, without much affecting revenue.

If the poor guy likes spending up-front, it makes sense for the government to pay its bills by taxing capital gains. On the other hand, if the poor guy has more of a preference for savings, it can make sense to tax earned income instead. After all, the rich guy in this scenario doesn’t care. In other words, the optimal tax rates depend very much on the poor guy’s preferences. It can easily be the case that investment income and earned income should be taxed equally. In fact, it can go way off the scale in either direction, with one of wages or investment income heavily taxed in order to subsidise the other.

Now for the technical bit….

Imagine two people. They earn incomes I0 and I1, get taxed at a rate of p, spend X0 and X1, then save the rest. Some years later, they get taxed on they capital gains and spend the rest.

Converting all future dollar amounts to today’s dollars, they earn incomes I0 and I1 today, get taxed at a rate of P, spend X0 and X1, then save the rest. Some years later, their savings are taxed at a rate of Q, leaving them with Y0 and Y1 dollars respectively, which they spend.

The two people get to choose how much (X0 or X1) they spend today. This determines Y0 and Y1, assuming they know Q, so X0, X1, Y0 and Y1 are all functions of P and Q.  The individuals make their choices to maximise their happiness (the technical term is “utility”), which I’ll give a formula for. Let U0 = A0 * X0^B0 * Y0^C0, and U1 = A1 * X1^B1 * Y1^C1. Now the government must choose, in advance, the tax rates P and Q. The constraint is that the government’s total tax take Ttot (in today’s dollars) is fixed, but apart from that, the government will try to maximise the total happiness of the population. So, here’s the optimisation problem:

Maximise U(P,Q) =  A0 * X0(P,Q)^B0 * Y0^C0 + A0 * X0(P,Q)^B0 * Y0^C0, subject to
T(P,Q) = P * (I0 + I1) + Q * ((1-P) * (I0 + I1) – (X0 + X1)) = Ttot

That’s a bit hard to solve in general, so let’s look at a special case, B0=1, C0=2, B1=2, C1=1. Here, person 0 is a saver – he or she gets more happiness out of Y than X. Person 1 is the opposite, a spender. I’ll also let Ttot be 1/10 of I0+I1, just for the sake of having a specific number. For the same reason, assume I1 is twice I0.

If A0 is four times A1, the optimal value of Q turns out to be 0, in other words, savings (that is, interest and dividends) are not taxed, and all the tax burden falls on the initial earned income. The tax rate P is 10%, matching Ttot.

On the other hand, we can make all the tax burden fall on savings by assuming instead that A0 = 1280/713 A1, that is, A0 is about 1.795 times A1. Then, the interest on earned income is nil, and the present value of savings are taxed at 22.5% before you get to spend them.

But Should The Government’s Tax Policy Aim To Optimise Total Utility?

One objection to trying to tax utility is that we can’t measure utility. However, Steve Landsburg wont make that objection, because he dismisses it when Uwe Reinhart makes it – Uwe says “we can’t always tell whether income is investment or earned” and Steve says “So what? That doesn’t mean treating them equally is good policy”.

So if you say “we can’t really tell in real life if one person gets more satisfaction out of spending than another”, I can say “so? That doesn’t mean it’s good policy to assume they don’t and treat them so.”

Another objection might be raised on a point of fairness – why consider only one person’s happiness when choosing the tax rates? The answer is that in fact, in this example, both person’s happiness was considered, but (in the example) one of them really doesn’t care much how things are taxed, and they happen to be the person with all the moola. If their preferences are so different, why would you insist on pretending they aren’t?

Maximising total utility may not be a practical policy, but any alternative means that you’re insisting on imposing policies on people that they don’t actually (in aggregate) like. How could that possibly be good?

The first objection is that in a classic Sci-Fi teleport machine, the actual molecules are supposed to be zapped from place to place. With a 3D Scanner and Printer, it’s not the actual molecules that get transmitted, just a bunch of information about what shape the final object is supposed to be.

My reply to that is “so?” A laser printer doesn’t work by whacking squid juice onto paper with bits of carved wood, but we still call it a printer. A maglev doesn’t burn coal to ram steam through a bunch of pumps, but we still call it a train. We name our technology for what it does, not for how it works. So if everyone had a 3D printer and scanner, we could “teleport” lego bricks and curtain rings to each other with our printer/scanners and legitimately call them teleporters.

The other objection I heard raised is that with a teleporter, when the object is reconstructed in a new place, the original is destroyed. A 3D printer/scanner would not destroy the original. However, surely that makes a 3D printer/scanner even better than a teleporter? And I can always throw the original lego brick away if I want to stay faithful to the original SciFi concept.

A 3D Printer/Scanner Could Have Saved Me Money Today

Today, however, I realised that the real reason I want a 3D scanner/printer is that it’s not just a teleporter, but also a duplicator.

My glasses have plastic arms. Last night, I walked into a door in the dark, and one of the arms broke. I tried superglue, but it didn’t hold. Now I’ll have to get some new glasses, putting me out of pocket by a hundred bucks or so, or more if I get suckered into some titanium alloy super-frame.

If, however, I had a duplicator, I could just unscrew the good arm, scan it, click “flip” then “print”, and presto! A brand-new arm ready to screw back onto my glasses frame!

What's That?

M1 : Why do you have that on your finger?
Me : Push this, here.
M1 : Ouch!
Me : You see?
M1 : Cool! Where did you find it?
Me : I bought it in a shop.
M1 : You mean they make them specially?
Me : Yup.
M1 : What’s it called?
Me : It’s a thimble
M1 : Oh! I’ve heard that word! I’ve heard of them!
Me : Yup.
M1 : You mean they’re real?

MK : Be careful of the bees
M2 : (reassuring tone of voice) there’s no bees, mummy. Only wasps.

Oh.. Kaaaay….

Dreamboard Endroid in Celsius

Unfortunately, the details are a little tricky, but I’ll explain them as carefully as I possibly can below.

Step 1 – Install OpenSSH

OpenSSH allows you to log into your iPhone as if it were a computer, and tinker around with the files on it. Go to Cydia, search for OpenSSH, then install it.

Step 2 – Log on to your iPhone

If you have a terminal program installed on your jailbroken iPhone, you can use that to log on. Do so, and go straight to Step 2b. Otherwise…

• Make sure your iPhone is connected to a WiFi network, and you have a computer with a terminal program (ie, a Mac or Linux machine, or a Windows machine with the right software installed) also connected to the same network.
• Find out your iPhone’s IP address. To do this, go to Settings, then WiFi, then hit the blue arrow to the right of the name of the WiFi network you are connected to. You’ll see the phone’s IP address listed in a table. It will probably be 192.168.something.something or 10.1.something.something.
  

  My Phone's IP Address

• Open a terminal and type ssh root@<your IP address>. For example, I typed ssh root@192.168.1.4 because my IP address was 192.168.1.4
  
• If you’ve only just installed OpenSSH, your password is alpine.

Step 2b – if your password is alpine, change it

The very first computer virus for the iPhone took advantage of the fact that many people don’t change their password after installing OpenSSH. To change your password,

• Think of a password that you know you will remember.
• Type passwd
• Enter your new password
• Enter it again to confirm you typed it correctly

Step 3 – Change Farenheit to Celsius

The files that control what you see in the Endroid layout are in the folder /var/mobile/Library/DreamBoard/Endroid/Widgets/HTC. You can see them by typing

cd /var/mobile/Library/DreamBoard/Endroid/Widgets/HTC
ls

There are only two files, an html file, a css file and a javascript file. There’s also a folder containing the images. If you’re an HTML or Javascript guru, you can have lots of fun here. If not, what you need to do is change line 132 of functions.js from

url="http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?u=f&p=";

to

url="http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?u=c&p=";

Spot the difference? The ‘u=f’ becomes ‘u=c’. Now, the iPhone doesn’t come with any of my favourite text editors – nor even any of my less favourite. However, you can make the required change via these commands :

mv functions.js original-functions.js
cat original-functions.js | sed 's/u=f/u=c/g' > functions.js

Dreamboard Lock Screen Fixed

And you’re done! The first command moves the original functions.js file to a safe place, and the second command goes through that copy, changing every ‘u=f’ to ‘u=c’ (there’s only one) and writing the results back into functions.js.

If your phone doesn’t immediately display temperatures in Centigrade, try using it normally for a little while. Maybe lock the screen, check your email, whatever. If something goes wrong, you can always restore the original using the command

mv original-functions.js functions.js

Or, since you’re poking around in your phone, perhaps you’d also like to….

Step 4 – Change The Date On The Lock Screen to Day/Month/Year

By default, it shows Month/Day/Year, so the date of this blog post looks like 2/17/2012 instead of 17/2/2012. This is easy to fix. Enter the following commands :

cd /var/mobile/Library/DreamBoard/Endroid/Widgets/Lockscreen
mv Lockscreen.html original-Lockscreen.html
cat original-Lockscreen.html | sed 's/Date/QWERTY/g' | \
 sed 's/Month/Date/g' | \
 sed 's/QWERTY/Month/g' > Lockscreen.html

This makes a copy of your Lockscreen.html, then swaps the HTML fields <dateDate></dateDate> and <dateMonth><dateMonth>. Have a look at your lock screen (if need be, unlock then lock again) and see the happy result!

Again, if something goes wrong, you can restore the original Lockscreen.html via

mv original-Lockscreen.html Lockscreen.html

Sugar Subsidies - Bad or Good?

The Malaysian government subsidises a number of goods, to keep the prices at certain levels. Unfortunately for them, commodity prices have risen in recent years. So, they announced last week that they would increase the sugar subsidy to compensate. They were quick to say that the decision is to “ease the people’s financial burden,” and is nothing to do with the fact that there’s an election coming up.

However, that’s just silly. If they really want to “ease the people’s financial burden,” they should completely scrap the subsidy, not raise it.

Imagine, if you will, a sugar consumer we shall call Rakyat. Suppose Rakyat earns $1000. He pays $200 in tax, and gets to spend the other $800 on whatever he likes. One thing he likes is sugar, so he spends $10 on sugar at the subsidised price of $1 per bag. The remaining $790 he spends on other things. He has chosen this spending pattern to make him as happy as he can be, under the existing tax and subsidy system.

Suppose the government scrapped the subsidy. Rakyat might be sad, at first, that sugar is more expensive, thinking that his sugar bill will now be $5 more. The government will save $5, which means $5 less tax they need to collect, so they give a tax refund. With the $5 now back in Rakyat’s pocket, he can, if he wishes, subsidise his own sugar. Or, he can do anything else he wants with the cash. In summary :

• With the subsidy, Rakyat gets 10 bags of sugar (for $10), and $790 to spend on other things, and this is the best he can do.
• Without the subsidy, Rakyat can still get 10 bags of sugar (for $15 now), and still have $790 to spend on other things. He would be just as happy as before.
• Alternatively, Rakyat can decide not to subsidise his own sugar, and spend the $5 on something he wants more than those last few bags of sugary sweetness. This will make him happier than before, happier than possible when the subsidy existed.

So, Rakyat will be happier, with less financial burden, if the government lowers taxes instead of raising subsidies.

Now, some caveats. Rakyat is not just one person. He is a whole citizenry of 28 million. Some of these pay no tax. Some consume no sugar. An individual citizen can’t always re-create the effect of a subsidy by carefully spending their tax refund. There are four groups of people

• Those who get more from the tax break than they lost through the subsidy, These will be truly happy campers. They can make up for the lost subsidy (if they wish) and have cash left over.
• Those, like Rakyat, for whom the tax break equals the subsidy. As we have seen, these people are also better off with no subsidy.
• Those whose tax break is not quite enough to compensate the rise in sugar prices, but by cutting back on sweets, still find themselves better off than before.
• Those who enjoyed the subsidy so much, or who paid so little tax, that they really are worse off after the subsidy is removed.

There’s no policy that pleases everyone, but it’s not correct to say that the subsidy “eases people’s financial burden.” Instead, it shifts the burden from one group of people to another, making the rakyat (citizenry) economically worse off overall. The only sensible way to justify the subsidy would be to identify those it helps and those it hurts, and try to prove that the needs of the former outweigh the needs of the latter.

As a final word, note that we got this conclusion without considering the harm excess sugar consumption has on a person’s health. The same argument could apply to many of the other products the Malaysian government subsidises, including petrol and rice, and to the completely subsidised water Selangor residents have enjoyed since the opposition won that state in the 2008 election.

Firstly, place your garlic and ginger in the thermomix and chop them for 7 seconds on speed 6. Do remember to scrape them down in the thermomix jug. If not they will stay at the side of the inner thermomix jug and not being cooked properly. After that, add your oil and sesame oil in and cook for 100C for 3 minutes on soft speed. Next add the rest of the ingredients for the sauce into thermomix. Cook it for 5 minutes at 100C on soft speed. Once the sauce is ready pour it into a bowl.

Now I will show you how to cook the rice. Do not wash the the thermomix jug which you use just now to make the sauce. Use the same jug and put in 900 of water. Weigh and wash your rice . I use about 400g of jasmine rice.Insert the basket of rice and cook it for 20 minutes at Varoma temperature on speed 4.  Your rice will have the fragrance of the sauce once it is cooked. I cook the rice together with my fish and tofu which are in the varoma . But I remove the tofu out from the varoma tray(upper tray) after 10 minutes of steaming.  I place the fish in the varoma receptacle(bottom tray).  Once the food is ready, remove the salmon from the varoma receptacle and place it on the plate. Pour the sauce over the fish and tofu and garnish them with spring onions.  Enjoy your salmon and tofu with your steamed rice.

Steamed fish and tofu with thermomix