Random thought

If it's possible to be morose, is it also possible to be less ose?

Now this is some seriously cool shit.

Volkswagen has built a self-driving VW Golf that can plan its own routes in real time around obstructions and traffic cones, then race through the route at up to 150mph -- no creeping around the test course at 10mph here.  VW claims it can drive a laid-out test course faster and more precisely than their own engineers can drive the car manually.  VW says features of the car will be appearing in production VWs "in a few years".

Now THIS could cut down on traffic fatalities -- and maybe traffic congestion too.

(Thanks to midiamin for the out-of-band pointer.)

First day on the Somme

This, too, is a day late.  Britain's Daily Mail carries an article about the first day of the Somme offensive, ninety years ago yesterday, when the whistles blew and seven hundred and fifty thousand men went "over the top" into No Man's Land.  Nineteen thousand of them died on the first day, of fifty eight thousand British casualties on that day; one Canadian regiment was reduced to a third of its strength in the first half-hour of the offensive.  More than seventy two thousand of the dead of the Somme have no known graves, and are commemorated on a single monument at Thiepval.

When the abortive assault was over, four months later, the British Expeditionary Force had suffered four hundred and twenty thousand casualties, the French two hundred thousand, the Germans an estimated five hundred thousand ... all for an advance that at no point along the front exceeded twelve kilometers.