TARTAN RACING WINS $2 MILLION PRIZE FOR DARPA URBAN CHALLENGE

Stanford Racing Wins $1 Million Second Prize, Victor Tango Takes Home $500,000 Third Prize

(Victorville, Calif.) – Tartan Racing’s “Boss” of Pittsburgh, Penn. turned in the top performance in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge and won the $2 million cash prize as the competition’s first-place winner, DARPA announced today. Stanford Racing’s “Junior” of Stanford, Calif., won the $1 million second place prize, while Victor Tango’s “Odin” of Blacksburg, Va., received $500,000 for finishing third.

The Urban Challenge prize winners competed as part of a field of 11 finalists that was selected from 35 semifinalists that competed in the National Qualification Event (NQE) prior to the final event. Semifinalists were selected from the original field of 89 competitors. The NQE and the main event took place October 26 to November 3 at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, Calif., that is used by the U.S. military to train for urban operations. The network of roads on the site effectively simulated the type of terrain American forces operate in when deployed overseas.

Vehicles that competed in the Urban Challenge were required to operate entirely autonomously, without human intervention, as they obeyed California traffic laws and performed maneuvers such as merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles and avoiding obstacles. The vehicles had to think like human drivers and continually make split-second decisions to avoid moving vehicles, merge into traffic and safely pass through intersections. Demonstrating safe operation in an urban situation was an effective and consolidated method of testing situations the vehicles might face even while conducting missions in less populated areas.

Also a science story on the brains of Liberals and Conservatives ran all over, showing that Conservatives are less able than Liberals in managing habitual responses. Put plainly, they tend to be knee-jerk rather than thoughtful.

Janus

The On The Media story was fairly detailed and thorough. The columnist being interviewed, Shankar Vedantam , stated that studies show the way people remember declarative statements is asymmetrical and inherently biased. He says that people are not good at remembering where they heard a statement, and that they easily confuse repetition with hearing something from multiple sources. Hence Lenin’s famous statement, ” a lie told often enough becomes the truth.” People also are better at remembering an association, than a negation. So if a candidate proclaims, “Joe Schmoe hates women” and repeats it over and over, it’s actually worse if Joe Schmoe responds, ” I do not hate women.” His response just adds repetition ( by associating Joe Schmoe with hating women ) to the original without effectively negating it. See the infamous Swift Boat allegations, “there you go again” and a host of other lies and perfidy. So the lesson here is make negative statements early, repeat them endlessly and treat the opponent’s denials as further proof of the original statement. Having a network of paid flacks, columnists, bloggers, and henchmen who also repeat whatever the fax machine spits out in the morning helps too. It’s a good piece from one of the best shows on NPR.

Edit: Just today the LA Times reports that the Director of National Intelligence McConnell lied when he told Congress last month that the new Patriot Act had helped the Germans arrest a terrorist ring. In fact, the spooks used the old, more restrictive rules effectively. Now I can’t help saying I am shocked, shocked, that an intelligence chief should lie to Congress about legislation he promoted. The relevant point here is the original piece ran on P1 and the correction on page twenty-something. So what will readers remember?

The political brain story was met with predictable glee and sourness, and to be fair, the science behind it was pretty lame, but since it confirmed our prejudices, let’s run with it. Seriously, though it lacked gravitas, its findings matched keen observation of the neo-conservative followers, particularly the talk-show fans and evangelicals. At Science Daily the story ran,

Liberals are more likely than are conservatives to respond to cues signaling the need to change habitual responses, according to a new study by researchers at New York University and UCLA.
The findings, which show that self-rated liberalism is associated with the type of brain activity involved in regulating conflict between a habitual tendency and an alternative response, appear in the online edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience….

The notion that Conservatives are inherently less likely to change ( duh!), also strongly implies they are more impervious to argument, and unable to handle the messy details of the modern world. It dovetails all too well with the the principle of Rove: hit ‘em early, hit ‘em dirty, hit ‘em hard and keep hitting ‘em. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to me to think that the right-wing is more susceptible to the first statement on a subject and less willing to listen for later nuances. Look no farther then the history of invading Iraq with no plan to govern, to find a clear example.

Of course I might be grasping at a statement and ignoring follow-up qualifications.

Chris Hedges, ex-war correspondent, from his book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, from the introduction:

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. And those who have the least meaning in their lives, the impoverished refugees in Gaza, the disenfranchised North African immigrants in France, even the legions of young who live in the splendid indolence and safety of the industrialized world, are all susceptible to war’s appeal.

Those who make war do so for many reasons, although many of these motives are never acknowledged publicly.

The Palestinian uprising was not just about throwing the Israelis out of Gaza and the West Bank, but also about crushing the urban elite, the shop owners and businessmen, in East Jerusalem and Gaza City. The “strikes” organized by the shabab, the young men who fueled the uprising from the refugee camps, hurt the Palestinian community far more than they hurt the Israelis.

In Bosnia it was the same, the anger turned against a Communist hierarchy that kept for itself the privileges and perks of power even as power slipped from their hands in the decaying state. There is little that angers the disenfranchised more than those who fail to exercise power yet reap powerful rewards. Despots can be understood, even tolerated, but parasites rarely last long.

War is a crusade. President George W. Bush is not shy about warning other nations that they stand with the United States in the war on terrorism or will be counted with those that defy us. This too is a jihad. Yet we Americans find ourselves in the dangerous position of going to war not against a state but against a phantom. The jihad we have embarked upon is targeting an elusive and protean enemy. The battle we have begun is neverending.

But it may be too late to wind back the heady rhetoric. We have embarked on a campaign as quixotic as the one mounted to destroy us. “We go forward,” President Bush assures us, “to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world.”

The patriotic bunting and American flags that proliferated in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were our support for the war mounted against the “axis of evil.” Elected officials, celebrities and news anchors lined up to be counted. On Friday, September 14, three days after the attacks, Congress granted the President the right to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks.” The resolution was passed unanimously by the Senate. There was in the House only one dissenting vote, from Barbara J. Lee, a Democrat from California, who warned that military action could not guarantee the safety of the country and that “as we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.”

When we ingest the anodyne of war we feel what those we strive to destroy feel, including the Islamic fundamentalists who are painted as alien, barbaric, and uncivilized. It is the same narcotic. I partook of it for many years.

And like every recovering addict there is a part of me that remains nostalgic for war’s simplicity and high, even as I cope with the scars it has left behind, mourn the deaths of those I worked with, and struggle with the bestiality I would have been better off not witnessing. There is a part of me–maybe it is a part of many of us–that decided at certain moments that I would rather die like this than go back to the routine of life. The chance to exist for an intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant certain oblivion, seemed worth it in the midst of war–and very stupid once the war ended.

Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness. The weeks after the September 11 attacks saw New York City, with some reluctance, slip back to normal. One felt the same nostalgia.

The attacks on the World Trade Center illustrate that those who oppose us, rather than coming from another moral universe, have been schooled well in modern warfare. The dramatic explosions, the fireballs, the victims plummeting to their deaths, the collapse of the towers in Manhattan, were straight out of Hollywood. Where else, but from the industrialized world, did the suicide hijackers learn that huge explosions and death above a city skyline are a peculiar and effective form of communication? They have mastered the language. They understand that the use of disproportionate violence against innocents is a way to make a statement. We leave the same calling cards.

Corpses in wartime often deliver messages. The death squads in El Salvador dumped three bodies in the parking lot of the Camino Real Hotel in San Salvador, where the journalists were based, early one morning. Death threats against us were stuffed in the mouths of the bodies.

And, on a larger scale, Washington uses murder and corpses to transmit its wrath. We delivered such incendiary messages in Vietnam, Iraq, Serbia, and Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden has learned to speak the language of modern industrial warfare. It was Robert McNamara, the American Secretary of Defense in the summer of 1965, who defined the bombing raids that would eventually leave hundreds of thousands of civilians north of Saigon dead as a means of communication to the Communist regime in Hanoi.

It is part of war’s perversity that we lionize those who make great warriors and excuse their excesses in the name of self-defense. We have built or bolstered alliances with Israel and Russia, forming a dubious global troika against terrorism, a troika that taints us in the eyes of much of the rest of the world, especially among Muslims. Suddenly all who oppose our allies and us–Palestinians, Chechens, and Afghans–are lumped into one indistinguishable mass. They are as faceless as we are for our enemies.

As the battle against terrorism continues, as terrorist attacks intrude on our lives, as we feel less and less secure, the acceptance of all methods to lash out at real and perceived enemies will distort and deform our democracy. For even as war gives meaning to sterile lives, it also promotes killers and racists.

Organized killing is done best by a disciplined, professional army. But war also empowers those with a predilection for murder. Petty gangsters, reviled in pre-war Sarajevo, were transformed overnight at the start of the conflict into war heroes. What they did was no different. They still pillaged, looted, tortured, raped, and killed; only then they did it to Serbs, and with an ideological veneer. Slobodan Milosevic went one further. He opened up the country’s prisons and armed his criminal class to fight in Bosnia.

Once we sign on for war’s crusade, once we see ourselves on the side of the angels, once we embrace a theological or ideological belief system that defines itself as the embodiment of goodness and light, it is only a matter of how we will carry out murder.

The eruption of conflict instantly reduces the headache and trivia of daily life. The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation. War, in times of malaise and desperation, is a potent distraction.

George Orwell in “1984″ wrote of the necessity of constant wars against the Other to forge a false unity among the proles: “War had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war…. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.”

Patriotism, often a thinly veiled form of collective self-worship, celebrates our goodness, our ideals, our mercy and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us. Never mind the murder and repression done in our name by bloody surrogates from the Shah of Iran to the Congolese dictator Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who received from Washington well over a billion dollars in civilian and military aid during the three decades of his rule. And European states–especially France–gave Mobutu even more as he bled dry one of the richest countries in Africa. We define ourselves. All other definitions do not count.

War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.

With the earthquakes, mud slides, and runaway celebrities California gets a little exciting from time to time. This weekend, the Day fire covered the county in smoke.

Californians take fires mostly in stride, covering their pools, moving their horses to safety, keeping indoors, and going about their business as usual. This fire doubled in size on Saturday-Sunday, taking 30-50,000 more acres depending on when you asked. Chaparral is what’s burning, a mix of shrubs and grass and the occasional oak tree. With no rain since May, and humidity in the teens, it is dry out there.

Driving past it Saturday night, looking up at the Los Padres mountains, the red glow looked quite a lot like the fires of Mordor, and Sunday morning we woke to an evil orange light that lasted all day. Inside the smoke area, it seemed quite apocalyptic, though as you can see from the picture, the other 15 million Southern Californians had clear skies. To give you the scale of the satellite picture, LA is about 100 miles from Santa Barbara, and the Channel islands are 35 miles out to sea. They are saying this fire may be burning itself out without significant damage to buildings, but we won’t know for a few more days.

In nearby Ojai, the Eastern edge of town was evacuating, but these shots were taken on the West side. Ash was falling wherever the smoke was seen. In Santa Barbara it was too smoky to go outside.

Ash on a car.

Afternoon sun.

Topa Topa mountains

Maybe Hermenaut is right, or maybe authenticity just doesn’t mean anything. Things trying to be themselves are fake; things trying to be something they manifestly are not, are faker, especially when they are selling themselves to you. We need a word for the ridiculously fake status gee-gaws that gesture at something else just to infer its status. This Zimmer is mostly made of these:

Note the fake spare wheels. Its just a boring old Lincoln underneath.

An English country garden is trying to be itself, yet you wouldn’t say it could be fake. Maybe if you are a gardener in same town, the hollyhocks and delphiniums are just a bit much. So maybe as soon as a thing is a member of a type – English garden, classic motorcar – it is subject to authenticity. So is it fake if claimed to be authentic? Surely an authentic Stradivarius is The Real Thing, even if it’s used in a Coke commercial. But there’s no point in talking about authenticity if there’s no chance of fakery, and you can’t even think about it if theres no archetype for the thing under discussion. And a fake Strad might be a very fine instrument indeed.

Yet, I don’t want to give up on fighting for the real and rejecting the ersatz. I am certain that shopping malls, Disneyland and City Walk are ersatz environments, though Venturi et al make a case in Learning from Las Vegas for real substance beneath the bright lights. Las Vegas is so fake that it’s something else, in the way that Cony Island was a real place, because of its garish vulgarity. A Hello Dolly of places.

So is it wrong to enjoy a stage set like Las Vegas? Of course not, and anyway its only authenticity is in comparison to its projected image. A Ronald Reagan of places.

An authentic Mississipi roadhouse is just a pile of throw-away buildings in the daylight,

and the House of Blues has good seats, good sound and a very authentic fire sprinkler system. But the HOB is just another ersatz franchise. Its not authentically poor.

Fake or real?

from Sears catalog

(houses could be ordered from Sears in kits)
Its a now a real house, with no hint of its flatcar origins, but it was designed to be a copy of real houses. Once it’s lived in for a few years is it more authentic? Or is it just not-new?

Originally created to be a Monsanto ad for plastic building materials at Disneyland, now demolished. It looks timelessly fake in a whole different way. Real houses were copied from Disney’s creation at the Anaheim park. It was built as a model. Is it authentic fakery now? How about the houses that copied it?

Its chic, because it used to be a factory, but doesn’t feel or smell like it anymore. Somehow transformation makes it authentic, while your average over-priced New York apartment is pedestrian.

Its a discarded warehouse. Definitely authentic, may or may not have any value. The gritty plainness stands in for authenticity, even though it was one of thousands of nearly identical workaday buildings when built.

What is less authentic than Disneyland, with its all-too-perfect facade. The food is still authentically worse than normally bad fast food.

itself an import from abroad, it has a tawdry appeal even as it mimics itself.

So maybe not-new is almost as good as authentic. The new factory, the new urban development, is just not as interesting as the old. There is a quality of designed-ness about new stuff that feels Stalinist in the way it manipulates you, but when things get old, and shopworn chaos creeps in, they become charming. The human mark is upon them. Can this ever happen to mini malls and franchise restaurants and Disneyland? I think not. There is hardly any there there in malls and corporate architecture, and Disney treats its parks like their toilet seats – any mark of character is quickly erased.

I even agreed with about half of what George Will said on this issue. Of course, he stumbled through his default rant of how this was a liberal plot, but I ignored that. Otherwise I thought he was pretty much on the mark. This is a terrible idea, letting governments seize real estate, just to increase the tax rolls, or more likely, enrich some mini-mall developer. It’s already happened, of course, see Chavez Ravine and Dodger stadium in LA for a classic instance. At least they weren’t supposed to seize the neighborhood for a municipal project and then turn it over to the O’Malleys.

footnote: Dodger Stadium is a great place, or was while the O’Malley’s owned it. Besides, Vin Scully works there.

Since the land developers are virtually the only source of local political donations across the country, see City of Quartz, I think this amounts to the WalMart and Home Depot Manifest Destiny Rule. Towns which have already sold their soul and future quality of life, not to mention property values, to strip mall developers, will be able to move any obstacle to pave the way for new mini-malls and big boxes. The temptation to erase a sagging downtown and build Sam’s Club will be irresistible. Narrow streets can be widened, firetruck turn-arounds established, and storm ditches straightened. Needless to say there will be zero ball fields, parks and greenbelts developed.

The American product is growth, so maybe enterprising towns will just start re-condemning mini-malls in a loop. As they get older and shabby, about two generations of stores worth, the town council can just tear ‘em out and build again. Jobs will be created, and tax money will make up the difference between the fair-market payoff to Old Developer, and the absurdly low price for New Developer. Anybody with a cornfield near an intersection had better start lining up a real-estate lawyer. You shed is about to become a nail salon.

Robert Moses would be proud.