1. Your car could automatically pick up deliveries for you.
2. Automatic cars could manage to have the optimal amount of space between them, which would make merging smoother and reduce traffic congestion.
3. Those who are too old or too young to drive themselves would be able to get around.
4. Drunk driving would not be a problem anymore.
5. The technology necessary to create viable self-driving cars could be used in many other agricultural and industrial settings.
6. Your car would be able to easily find a destination without getting lost or making a wrong turn.
7. Publicly owned auto-automobiles could be used to ferry people from a mass transit station to their final destinations, thus increasing mass transit use and reducing pollution and energy use.
8. Cars could automatically move aside to let emergency vehicles pass with greater speed and safety.
9. Traffic speeds would be more uniform, which would increase safety while allowing speed limits to be higher.
10. You could sleep or watch a movie on your way to work.

Labels: robots

If you want to post a comment to my blog, you'll have to log in now. I was receiving several abusive comments from an anonymous user. Seriously, I am running this obscure little blog, getting 4 visitors per day, and one of them keeps posting garbage in the comments.

I think this is representative of a general lack of politeness and civility on the web. An ordinary person wouldn't shout vitriolic insults to someone's face, but when you give him a computer, an AOL account, and anonymity, suddenly he becomes an obnoxious jerk.

I have been watching the local real estate market a lot lately, as I am planning on moving from Kaysville further south, to be closer to my job in South Jordan. As I am trying to sell my house and find another one to buy, here are some of my observations about the Utah market (particularly the Wasatch Front:)

1. Houses are still way overpriced. Home prices are dropping a lot in other parts of the country, but not in Salt Lake County. The Deseret News reported today that house prices have stayed virtually the same since the same period in 2007, but sales have gone down 42.21%.
2. The median income for a family in Salt Lake County is $54,470. The median house price is about $240,000. This works out to be about 4.4 times a family's annual income, which is higher than historical norms. Traditionally, home prices have a ratio of no more than 3 times a family's annual income.
3. That means that the median home price in Salt Lake County ought to be more like $164,000. That is a long way to fall before house prices reach an equilibrium based on market fundamentals.
4. Many REALTORS® are lying about market conditions to trick people into paying too much for a house. I think I may have got the only sane one. One clueless REALTOR® posted the following on the Deseret News website:

The economy is fine in Utah, just not in CA, AZ, and NV. You'll see that this summer will be a big year in Utah real estate and if you don't buy a house this summer, you'll miss the perfect buying opportunity. Get in now while the gettin' is good!

I think the market will correct itself with time, but that doesn't help me out much in my personal situation, since I want to move this year. It will be interesting to continue to watch the market and see how it irons out. With prices falling so sharply, a lot of people are going to get hurt if they were left holding the bag.

Labels: real estate, utah

With the recent raid on the FLDS compound in Eldorado, Texas, I have been thinking about polygamy and civil liberties.

I am troubled because of the similarities between the government's persecution against the FLDS folk, and the persecution against my Mormon predecessors in the nineteenth century. My third great grandfather, Robert Owens, practiced plural marriage and was driven out of Navuoo, Illinois along with the other Mormons. They had to trek across the United States into the wilderness of what would later become Utah Territory, in order to live and practice their religion in peace.

Even after arriving in the Great Basin in 1847, the government continued to harass the Mormon people. They sent an invading army to the Salt Lake Valley in a conflict known as the Utah War. They passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy act in 1862 and the Edmunds-Tucker act of 1887, both of which were specifically targeted against the Mormon church. It was not until the church stopped practicing polygamy in 1890 that they were allowed to live in relative peace.

These early pioneers suffered persecution by violent mobs and also by government decree. Governer Boggs of Missouri issued an Extermination Order in 1838 to drive the Mormons out of the state, or kill them if they wouldn't leave voluntarily. The order wasn't rescinded until 1976.

These events have set a historical precedence of flagrant and tyrannical abuse by the government against the God-given, Constitutionally-protected rights of its citizens. It happened 150 years ago, and it can happen again.

With recent reports that the 2008 raid against the FLDS compound in Texas may have been instigated by a prank phone call, I am greatly concerned about the apparent violations by Texas authorities against due process of law, of the right to habeas corpus, and the protection of individual liberties of the citizens of the United States of America. It is the FLDS today, but tomorrow, it could be anyone. When will we cry out against injustice and tyranny?

May heaven help us all.

Labels: government

In my spare time at home, I usually have one or a few projects I work on for fun. When I get my muse, I become obsessed with creativity; my one-track mind can scarcely think about anything else except the function I am working on. This usually lasts until I get excited about something else which takes over my passion like a democrat is going to take over the White House in November.

Thankfully, my dear sweet wife is very understanding of my incessant need to create, and she lets me lock myself up for a few hours a week to work. After this last month of being Mr. Mom, I have come to appreciate this support from my wife more than ever.

Anyway, my latest obsession has been programming an automatic short-story generator. It uses artificial intelligence to create characters and plots, randomizes them together, and churns them out in dry third-person prose. It's never going to be Jane Austen, but what do you expect from a computer? It's not like my PC went to college to get a degree in English.

Before that, it was a GEDCOM importer for my online genealogy website, ActiveFamilyTree.com. Sometimes, I would like to build a time machine just so I can go back and tell the guy who created the GEDCOM format about the benefits of well-formed XML. That project is still unfinished, just like most of the other hobby projects I've started in the last ten years. If there were a job that involved creating things and never finishing them, I would be awesome at it.

Labels: genealogy, programming, robots