Self-parking garages at Writer's Rest

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

27 January

There's a discussion going on about cars that drive themselves (that age-old dream - of some, anyway!).

I have just posted this comment in a 'spin-off thread'* to the original posting:


Hmm. I'm not sure that this concept is a new one - if I am not raving, it originated in Japan (probably Tokyo), where, clearly, efficient use of the available space is of paramount importance. (It may be now in West Hollywood.)

In essence, I think that it is little more than a giant car-transporter (those huge things on the roads that look so dangerous on so many counts:

* What if the cars touch (in varying degrees of touching from a knock to a squash)?;

* What if the whole thing falls over?;

* What if a car - as in the films - tumbles off the back and into one's path, and would one's reactions be good enough?.


Self-parking garages are a mechanization of using storage space, as I recall, a bit like the capsule hotel - you get a bed for the night, but it's cheap and basic, as you're occupying a space not much larger than a coffin!

I believe that, with the self-parking concept, you leave the garage with fitting your car into the space available, rather than driving around and around a car-park, where a large surface-area is, of course, wasted in this search by providing the route for the cars to get around, and from floor to floor.

I think that it's computer-controlled mechanization, in fact, with hydraulics, sensors, etc. If I'm right, it's little different from the technology that we have already taken for granted with robots building vehicles for us in car-plants:

There's a very atmospheric scene in such a plant in The Hunter (2010) (write-up on my blog**, and the Cambridge Film Festival web-site), where Ali (writer / director / actor Rafi Pitts), who is a security guard on night duties, makes a patrol. There is no one around, but the robots are busy welding and the like.


Full blog at http://writersrest.com/2012/01/24/let-the-robot-drive/#comment-1108


End-notes

* Some such...

** Postings at: The Hunter re-emerges and Back to The Hunter.


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More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 January

I have mentioned Writer's Rest already.

Time does not permit a link to those postings to this blog, but here is my latest comment in the debate on cars that drive themselves:

I’m not sure that it is that [sc. that technology fails, because it is only as good as its human designers]:

Someone might be able to say what it is that makes my PC sometimes crash or go into a loop, and I’m not convinced that it is (directly) attributable to having been designed by human-beings – computer systems do just fail in ways that, as far as I am aware, are not predictable.

(Or, maybe, not worth predicting at the cost that would be attached: there’s always a cost, just as, if the maker of the PC, laptop or BlackBerry has skimped, we pay the price as the person using it, especially if we do not lose the simple time to try again, but data, or the chance to bid for that item at the last moment on eBay – the small fatalist in me then invokes You weren’t meant to win it?.)

After all, I believe both that the Apollo missions ran the flight software in multiple parallel because of this very problem, and that, because I understand jumbos that take off and land themselves have the same ‘redundancy’ with which we are, maybe, more familiar from the 32x oversampling of our CD-player (which still fails, but maybe for other reasons, such as a dirty lens), the problem is inherent and has not been solved.

Except by the very simple expedient of rebooting, and hoping that you can carry on, with whatever autosave routine was invoked in those crucial closing nanoseconds…


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