Daily Stuff--9/28/2012

Languages--Chinese:

I watched episode 69 of Travel in Chinese. This was a review of topics like taking a trip to Shanghai and buying plane and train tickets.

Articles:

There was an interesting article on myfox8.com about self-driving cars being made legal in California. The cars are required to have a human behind the wheels at all times just in case something goes wrong but during testing, the only accidents have occurred with humans controlling the cars. This shows that the self-driving cars are very effective and in the near future, they can be dropping people off at work and then picking up other people, completely on their own. Having self-driving cars on the road would reduce the number of traffic accidents and would allow people to do other things besides the watch the road and would also be good for intoxicated people who can't drive themselves home. Since Nevada is the only other state to pass a law like this, having a significant number of self-driving cars on the road might be a fairly long way away but it's definitely a start.

Philosophy:

I read about mental entities in metaphysics. These aren't physical entities with clear properties and characteristics. Because they exist in the mind, their identities can change, depending on how one perceives them over time.

Internships:

I looked at Dragon Search for the iPhone and iPod touch on nuance.com. It allows users to simply speak what they want to search without having to type anything.

To-Do:

• Italian tutorial (1 hour)
• Still all in Italian but it's much slower-paced with a lot of group interaction. 
• Customize header for blog (1 hour)
• Done. It doesn't work with the dynamic template so I switched to simple. Next step is to figure out what the difference between the two is.
• Find out how to rent textbooks (1/2 hour)
• Will do tomorrow. 
• Read Udacity article about self-driving cars (1/2 hour)
• Done
• Skim through the reader for writing class on Monday to see what the class will be like (1/2 hour)
• Done. Should be an interesting but challenging class.
• Change layout of blog (45 minutes)
• Most of the videos I found only talk about changing the template of the blog, not the content of it. I need to see if there's a way to change the format of the comments.