Jun 4th 2009

Cars are becoming more connected, both to remote systems for navigation and information, and to each other

IN “KNIGHT RIDER”, a 1980s television show, Michael Knight fought for justice with the help of KITT, an artificially intelligent Pontiac Trans Am. The pair chatted amiably, with KITT sensing and reacting to nearby objects, navigating and looking up information about Mr Knight’s immediate surroundings and deadly adversaries. KITT could even drive itself. Thirty years on, many of the fantastical Pontiac’s features are becoming reality.

A modern car can have as many as 200 on-board sensors, measuring everything from tyre pressure to windscreen temperature. A high-end Lexus contains 67 microprocessors, and even the world’s cheapest car, the Tata Nano, has a dozen. Voice-driven satellite navigation is routinely used by millions of people. Radar-equipped cruise control allows vehicles to adjust their speed automatically in traffic. Some cars can even park themselves.

Read it on The Economist’s site…

May 29, 2009

“Why should it be absurd to suggest that the potato changed world history?” John Reader asks in “Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent.” If the claim seems odd to those for whom the tuber is little more than a mainstay of comfort foods, Reader argues that its low-key ubiquity is an indication of just how central the potato is to our lives.

Beginning with evidence of 12,500-year-old domesticated potatoes at an archaeological site in Chile, moving to the Inca Empire and on to Renaissance Europe, Reader shows how potatoes (which today are the world’s fourth-largest food crop) have tipped the balance of subsistence.

Read it on the NYT site…

March 1, 2009

FIRECRACKERS rained down like hail, filling the street with sulfurous billows. Young men, dressed in white, waved towels, trying to keep the explosives away from the black-faced god seated in the ornate sedan chair that some of them held aloft. There, in the center of it all, Phuket Town fell away; the formerly opulent Portuguese-Chinese mansions and rows of boxy concrete shops faded as the hot morning sun swooned before clouds of acrid smoke.

Participants in Phuket’s annual Festival of the Nine Emperor Gods follow a strict set of moral guidelines during its course, refraining from drinking alcohol, fibbing, killing, gossiping and, among other things, eating meat. Yet if the festival is known at all outside the region, it is for this small detail: In English, it is usually called the Phuket Vegetarian Festival.

Read it on the NYT site…