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Untitled from Amanda Erickson on Vimeo.

You can join the discussion on reddit and read a lot more about them at The Atlantic Cities.

France’s culture has been so strongly linked with the taking of wine with midday and evening meals though, that despite exceeding world’s best practice in every area other than alcohol, it has maintained a much higher rate of alcohol involvement in fatal accidents than its major European neighbors.

Police will begin issuing fines in France from the beginning of November, and it’s interesting that the required “kit” includes not just a working breathalyzer, but a range of accessories that we should, as good citizens, always carry on board a car anyway: a first aid kit, fire extinguisher and and spare bulbs for both headlights and blinkers.

Also compulsory fare will be a warning triangle and a fluorescent safety vest carried inside the car for every vehicle occupant. Failure to comply will cost another EUR90.

As far as the breathalyzer required by French authorities, a US$2.00 disposable item will be acceptable, but already everyone is being encouraged to buy such items in pairs so that one can be used to test, or for a friend to use, and still to have the required one to drive home with.

In all likelihood, reusable digital breathalysers will become standard fare when drinkers realize they are paying $2 every time the go for a drink.

The French alcohol allowance is 0.05% blood alcohol content which is far less than in many other countries, even neighboring countries. Deux vins or trois bières and you’re approaching the limit.

It’s a very strict proposal and it will be interesting to see if it becomes a law.

I have gone from sitting in 4 different classes 7 and 9 students to 17 students. This has meant that, although I passed junior high many years ago, there is a lot I have forgotten. Just because I sit in an 8th grade Science class doesn’t mean I don’t have to learn. I have to help the children with their classwork, homework, and studying for exams. It’s not a difficult job, but it is mentally challenging, particularly when you help a student with their homework and they lose it by the next day in class. That means you get to help them all over again.

This is not meant as a rant against my job. It’s simply an explanation as to why I’m not able to post as much as I’d like to here. There is also some good news about The Gaven.

Two years ago, I threw up an early draft of The Gaven onto the internet for anyone to download and comment on. In that time, I’ve had 973 downloads, 11 people give positive feedback, 3 people point out some grammar mistakes, 1 person write in for clarification on a part of the story (I’ve now fixed that bit), and 1 person actually paid me $7 because they enjoyed The Gaven that much. This generated interest in an interview that I did a few months ago with Morgen Baily.

This was all accomplished with no advertisement. It was word of mouth. Imagine what I could do if I had advertised!

That’s it for now folks. I hope everyone is doing well and keep checking back for more news about The Gaven.

You can read the paper here and on Wired.

Physicists and engineers had already demonstrated rudimentary invisibility cloaks that can hide objects from light, sound, and water waves. Now, they’ve devised an “antimagnet” cloak that can shield an object from a constant magnetic field without disturbing that field. If realized, such a cloak could have medical applications, researchers say.

The cloak could handle fields of any shape and any strength within what the superconductor can stand. If the external field gets too strong, the magnetically induced current becomes so powerful that it knocks the superconductor out of its resistance-free state and ruins its field-repelling qualities. Computer simulations showed that the cloak could work with as little as four layers, but with 10, it would guide a magnetic field nearly as well as a perfect cloak, as Sanchez and colleagues report today in the New Journal of Physics. “It doesn’t need to be a closed cylinder; it can be an open cylinder or open plate, although in this case the magnetic cloaking properties are reduced,” Sanchez says.

Read more about it over on Wired.

Just another interesting technological advancement related to The Gaven.

The cars will create a real-world test environment for communications, control and automation systems being developed by consortia of automakers and academics. In the U.S. the main group is the Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication Consortium (based as Univ. Michigan rival Ohio State University). In Europe it’s the CAR 2 CAR Communication Consortium – a semi-coordinated association of eight automakers, most of which actually started working together on C2C systems almost 10 years ago.

DoT predicts some level of practical C2C safety systems will become standard technology in as little as 10 years.

Well, they’re in The Gaven, so they’d better hurry up and perfect it.

“We only set a maximum speed and then left everything to the car itself. It knew the speed limits, traffic patterns, lane changes and roads using video cameras and radar sensors to detect other cars. It was all controlled by a command center in the trunk.”

Technical details are limited but it is claimed that GPS wasn’t used to navigate the car and it relied on its sensors not only to stay on the road but to work out which road to stay on. Unlike Google’s the Chinese driverless car uses computer vision to navigate aided by laser range finders. As a result it cannot drive and night and so the entire journey had to be completed during daylight. It also encountered some problems with fog and indistinct road markings. It could be argued that relying on computer vision is a more sophisticated approach than using GPS and laser range finders but without more information it is difficult to be sure. As well as just driving in a single lane the car overtook other cars a reported 67 times at an average of 87km/h.

The researchers say that, while this car is good, they want to build a better, commercially viable version for use on the roads.