Tech News Monday

Nevada has approved self-driving cars for its highways. I suppose the cars will be allowed to text and phone while driving themselves, since they would necessarily be doing it hands-free. So far, it looks like Nevada is ahead of the actual state of the art, though. Via Slashdot, PC Mag, New York Times, and Technology Review.

Documentary proof that the Earth is flat. Very—uh, creative. Via YouTube. For a different kind of documentary, see “An Honest Man—The Story of the Amazing James Randi” with interviews with several other honest men: Science Guy Bill Nye, Richard Dawkins, and Penn and (?) Teller. Via Slashdot.

Quote of the Week: “Each and every change to my Twitter page is a Bad Idea. Did they go berserk?” -@ebertchicago. This for you—and all of us, Roger: Where we hid your stuff. Via Twitter.

Microsoft gets praise from an unlikely source for getting something right. Its new logo. Via Technologizer.

At Agile India 2012, Daniel Brolund talked about the Mikado Method for refactoring legacy software. He and Ola Ellnestam presented the method back in June 2010 in PragPub. Mikado here alludes to the pick-up-sticks game, not the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, more’s the pity. Via InfoQ, PragPub, Wikipedia, and Woodentoys.uk.

Two new languages, randomly selected from the stream: I like the modesty of this writeup on the Joxa language. I also like that the author like Lisp syntax. Not everything has to look like C. Via Joxa.org. And this language is further evidence that all sentences will soon be required to end with “and compiles to Java Virtual Machine byte code and JavaScript.” Via JavaWorld.

Why Chrome connects to three random domains at startup. Apparently it’s not nefarious. Via Mike West.

Here’s a loaded term: telemedicine. Mad scientists at MIT have come up with a chip that allows remote drug delivery. Via Hacker News firehose and TheNextWeb.

“Dropbox Automator is like IFTTT for Dropbox.” That got my attention. IFTTT and Dropbox are two tools that make you say, “That’s so simple! Why didn’t I think of that?” Via Hacker News firehose.

I grabbed this one purely for the headline: “Young goats can develop distinct accents.” Just in case you were wondering why kids today talk the way they do. Via New Scientist.