Using robotics, laser rangefinders, GPS and smart feedback tools, Dennis Hong is building a car for drivers who are blind. It's not a "self-driving" car, he's careful to note, but a car in which a non-sighted driver can determine speed, proximity and route -- and drive independently.

You must go read the chilling and amusing account of Jamie Bernstein and Ken Reibel's visit to the AutismOne Conference in the Chicago area. The story has all the elements. Horror: (that's what they were forced to eat); Police Absurdity (though not brutality); Screeching Breathless Paranoia; Jenny McCarthy; and Chemical Castration. The story is told by Jamie across two blogs: Autism One, Part One on Skepchick and How I Got Kicked Out of the AutismOne Con: Part 2 on Friendly Atheist. Ken Reibel gives his version of the events here.

Her statement: Well, every decision that I make I pray about as does my husband and I can tell you, yes, I've had that calling and that tugging on my heart that this is the right thing to do and because it's such a momentous decision, not only for myself, my husband and our 28 children, it is a momentous decision what ideas will I bring to bear? What are the resources that I have to marshal in terms of people, assets, the message and also the finances, the amount of time this will take, what this will mean for the nation. Am I the right person for the job? Every decision and every endeavor…

I see the brown streaks and spots and blotches all across your lawn, every brown area exactly like every other in its tone and hue, because all were caused by a single event, that being your misapplication of high-nitrogen fertilizer, as part of your misguided effort to make your lawn look like a golf course, which I assure you is an entirely futile expenditure of energy. Everyone in the neighborhood does this: They put fertilizer, weed killer, fungicide, grub-killer, and who knows what else all over their lawns. On this sandy plain, most of the chemicals are washed instantly into the…

Richard Tokumei has written a book that is so bad he is ashamed to put his own name on it. "Richard Tokumei" is the pen name of a 'writer/editor in Southern California [with] degrees in Humanities and Phychology from the University of California Berkeley" and he has produced a book designed to anger everyone who hears of it in order to create needless sensation and thus, sell copies. Which, once people get their hands on, will make rather low quality toilet paper. Monkeys On Our Backs: Why Conservatives and Liberals Are Both Wrong About Evolution includes an inexplicable mix of "correct"…

Back in my days wandering around in Harvard Square, I used to look at the beautiful churches and think .... "... those would make great indoor parking garages. And we could put bike racks on the steps. Or maybe indoor farmer's markets...." But it never happened. Then, the Rapture came.

It happens on June 25th. This is going to be a little like the Rapture but it's not the end of the world and it really will happen .... Water Collection: Ethiopia from water.org on Vimeo. The Event : Global Water Dances Initiative - "Dancing for Safe Water Everywhere" Global Water Dances is a world event planned for June 25, 2011. On this day, a 24 hour series of dances around the globe will be danced, centered around water issues. Beginning in the Western Pacific Rim, and encircling the globe, the series of dances will also be broadcast online. ... These dances will use dance and music to…

No! A surprising number of toddlers who manage to get their way through a window opening to fall to the pavement below live. Something just over three thousand toddlers do this every year in the US. Kids fall all the time. About 2,300,000 US children (under 14 years old) are treated at a hospital for a fall annually. Of these, a mere eighty die of the fall, though a much larger number are permanently injured or left in persistent vegetative state. Most, more than half, of these child-falls are accounted for by toddlers (age 5 and under). Falling is patterned. Infants tend to fall from…

Wake up early on Sunday and catch ""Choice In Dying," Eric MacDonald on Atheists Talk #117" Choosing one's own death should be the right of every living person facing the process of a long, debilitating, painful terminal illness. Not everyone finds "dignity in suffering," and yet religions insist that the value of "life above all else" trumps individual choice. Eric MacDonald and his wife faced the decision in her choice to end her life. The government of Canada and the authorities of the Anglican Church, of which MacDonald was a priest, threw up legal roadblocks and threats if Elizabeth…

Wow. And no keyboards! OK, gotta go. You wouldn't believe how many messages I have to deal with on my electronics correspondence machine thingie. What really happened ... Huh. Bill gates was a paranoid ass even in those days!

It is Memorial Day Weekend, which can only mean one thing. It's time for this year's Summer Reading Recommendations List! Unlike the Summer Readings Suggestions: Science list, these books are primarily (but not entirely) fiction. Since I've not read very much fiction over the last year, I polled my facebook friends and assembled their advice here. You may be thinking "Who cares about Laden's facebook friends, what do they know?" and you'd probably be right about that for a lot of topics, but not reading. These people can read! In fact, two or three of them are published authors.…

Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949. He spent his early years in Jackson, Tenn., attended high school in The Bronx, and spent time at Pennsylvania's Lincoln University before settling in Manhattan. His recording career began in 1970 with the album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, which featured the first version of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." The track has since been referenced and parodied extensively in pop culture. More at NPR

It is easy to make fun of other people with whom we disagree, but when it comes down to it, how do we really know when we are being smart about something vs. getting it all wrong? Gut feeling? Our friends agree with us? Some smart person tells us what to think? This is a problem that as plagued humanity since the first time anyone tried to establish ground rules for leaving flint chips around the camp where our unshodden Neanderthals brothers and sisters, who came by to visit now and then, would step on them1. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing by Swarthmore Professors…

It is possible that the bottom will fall out of the Fukushima Reactor 4 spent fuel tank. Efforts are being made to shore up the concrete structure. There is no longer any doubt that those mysterious holes hypothesized, seen or not see, in some of the reactor vessels are for real. It is now established that three of the reactors at Fukushima melted down within hours of the earthquake and tsunami. TEPCO is going back and forth on whether or not any of the main reactor machinery was damaged in the quake. It may be that the hydrogen explosions were preventable had standard procedures been…

When wildebeest, such as those famous for crossing the Mara River in Tanzania during their annual migration, run into a crocodile or some other danger it is often the first time they've seen that particular thing. This is because most wildebeest don't live very long so many are on their very first migration. One wonders what would happen if you killed all of the wildebeest migrating in a particular year and set new ones out on the landscape to take their place. Would the migration continue? Probably not, initially. Something like this did in fact happen on the Botswana-South Africa-…

NASA is going to send two probes to the moon, later this summer. They are called "GRAIL" which stands for Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory. They will orbit the moon in an effort to determine the structure of its interior. They will be launched by a Delta II rocket some time between early September and mid October, depending on the usual factors. The plan is to generate a highly accurate gravitatoial map of the moon. The high-resolution gravitational field, especially when combined with a comparable-resolution topographical field, will enable scientists to deduce the Moon's…

I'm going to have more to say about this topic and this book at a later time, but I wanted to get a notice of it out for Migration Week. Bird Migration and Global Change by George W. Cox addresses the issue of impact on bird populations under conditions of global warming. This is an authoritative and scholarly book that is totally accessible to the interested bird-oriented or climate/conservation-oriented audience. After several very important context and theory chapters, the author divides the world's migratory birds into major categories (such as "Northern Hemisphere Land Birds: Short…