The New York Times
March 6, 2018 “Uber’s Self-Driving Trucks Hit the Highway, but Not Local Roads” Daisuke Wakabayashi The article is about “Uber Freight”, which is a sub company of the shuttle service “Uber”. Uber plans to use autonomous driving for their semi trucks, and officially tested it on the highways of Arizona. The current event that I chose is about “Uber Freight”, and how they managed to get their self driving semi truck on the highways of Arizona. “Uber Freight” is a sub company of “Uber”, the shuttling and food delivery company. They just recently developed and tested their own self driving, or autonomous, semi truck. They tested their truck on the highways or Arizona, but they say that it won’t be going on the streets any time soon. Self driving trucks aren't anything new from Uber however, about a year ago, Uber did something similar to this. They developed a self driving truck that delivered 2,000 cases of budweiser beer 120 miles across Colorado. Their trip was successful, but now Uber is trying it again, but on a larger and more mass produced scale. Uber hopes to have these trucks take over the trucking industry, by making it easier and safer to deliver with their self drivings trucks. Uber says that this will actually be creating more jobs, in part because of greater demands as delivery costs fall. Uber doesn’t plan for the truck to do everything either, it still requires somebody to be in the truck in case of an emergency at the moment, and it can’t make it to the loading docks and park itself or unload. As of right now, Uber doesn’t plan to do anything huge with their new technology, but it will definitely change the way things get delivered. This event happened on the highways of Arizona. Uber was testing its new self driving semi trucks in a fairly straight line, so they decided to use Arizona's highways. This event happened on Tuesday, March 6, 2017, when Uber successuly got their self driving truck from Point A to point B, roughly a 120 mile distance. Uber decided that it was time to change the way we delivered things. For so long, people have had to drive long hours, without sleep, to deliver something from point A to B. Not only is this not the best way to go about doing things, but it’s also not the safest. Those drivers could fall asleep at any moment, and it can’t be good to be sitting in the same spot for up to 18 hours. We’ve gone from horse drawn carriage, to train, to semi truck, and Uber decided to improve the semi once more. In my opinion, I think this is really big news for the trucking, and the automotive industry. Autonomous and self driving cars aren’t anything extremely new, but Uber is definitely moving things along with their self driving trucks. Even if it's only meant for highways, this is definitely still progress. Can’t wait for this technology to improve and be seen in all models of cars. Tesla is still the leading company in autonomous, self driving cars, but the idea of self driving cars is definitely becoming a reality. Link:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/technology/uber-self-driving-trucks.html
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NASA has finally decided to have his crew turn back and rescue Mark on Mars. They communicated with Mark that this was the new plan, and he has to use one of the HAB’s to launch into space, and the crew will catch him. It sounds like a crazy plan, but I think it just might work. The HAB that he is using to launch into space is really far away, so he has to plan for the trip. He’s been taking the rover out everyday and seeing how far he can make it on a certain amount of gas. Eventually, he figures out a way to make it to the HAB location with enough gas, food, and water. Once he launches into space, the crew manages to catch him, but not without some issues. The tether wasn’t quite long enough to catch Mark, so Mark has to puncture a hole in his glove to project himself closer to the person catching him. He was basically floating out in space, and all he had to get him closer to the ship was the air coming out of his space suit. This may sound like a bad plan, but it was the only option Mark had, so he had to make it work. And that's exactly what he did. Infact, the glove nearly propelled him to far, but luckily the person catching him caught him before he flew right past her. That was basically how the book ended, and a few years after Mark landed back on earth he started teaching young astronauts about space, mars, and how to avoid situations like this. I think if the book had a sequel, it would talk about some of Marks students actually going to space, and a similar situation happens to them, but something slightly different so it’s not to repetitive. Maybe the new younger crew has an issue with their ship, and their just floating off into space instead of being stuck on Mars like Mark. It would be an interesting sequel because at least the students would have been taught what to do in situations like this. Another thing that could happen is the ship loses all connections to NASA, and the ship stops working entirely. The crew will be able to fix the oxygenator though so they are able to take their suits off and not die. I would definitely recommend this to a friend or anyone else who wants to read a slightly sci-fi, slightly non fiction book that is also pretty funny. I really enjoyed it and I’m sure other people who haven’t read it will too.
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AuthorDylan Lewis Archives
November 2018
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