John T. Reed’s news blog

I am about 3/4 through the new book Autonomy: the quest to build the driverless car and how it will reshape out world.The authors claim we are going to shift to driverless electric or hydrogen-fuel-cell powered, two-seater cars that we do not own.They further say that these will cut the cost of that which we now do with cars we own by 80%. They say you would only need about 15% as many of these new cars as the current number of cars to be able to give everyone about a one-minute wait for the ride they need. And they...

Blocking is key to offensive success in football. On a typical running play it is what nine or ten of the offensive players are supposed to be doing. (After a handoff, the QB should be pretending he still has the ball to decoy some defenders.) How do you expect to succeed if some of your nine or ten blockers are not doing their jobs? Everyone is a blocker Who is in charge of your team’s blocking? Most youth or freshman or JV coaches say the line coach is in charge of that. My ass! Receivers and running backs also need...

I saw the fourth quarter of the Army-Hawai’i game at West Point yesterday. Army managed to hang on for a 28-21 victory—ending Hawai’i’s three-game win streak.The story to me was that Hawai’i came in to the game having averaged 47 points a game including 59 against Navy. (43 against both CO State and Rice). Army too slow to play man pass defense My son Mike who coached high school football with me was watching with me. I marveled at Army doing well on DEFENSE against a team like HI which was described as having a “high-flying” offense. “How the hell...

A Facebook friend asked the following: I would love to see one of your in-depth, unemotional and well reasoned analysis on the value associated with the three different schools your sons went to relative to each other. Columbia being highest ranked, Arizona in the middle, and ASU near the lower end in terms of academic reputation, where would you want your son to go all things considered? I’m guessing cost followed their reputations (with Columbia the most expensive and ASU the least). John T. Reed No one in my family went to ASU. Two went to U of A. My middle...

The heavy bag of coins my wife gave me to figure out what to do included a bunch of foreign coins from the expatriate lives of my wife’s parents and her father’s parents. Initially, I despaired of being able to make heads or tails out of them. Many contain no Latin letters or Arabic dates (Those are the letters and numbers Americans use.) But it was fairly easy to figure out what each and every one was on the Net.For example, one seemed to be Chinese or Korean with a picture of a man on one side and a junk...