I visited a friend recently in Etobicoke (Toronto). It's a 80-minute drive on some of Ontario's most complex traffic during a weekday. When I arrived, he asked, "How was the traffic?". I paused, thought about it for a few seconds, and answered honestly: "I don't know!".

This surprised even me. How was this possible?

The main answer is that our Tesla drove itself, basically all the way. But that's not new; the car has been taking us from address to address within or between cities, since we grabbed it 19ish months ago. When activated, it operates with near-zero input from the "driver", but for regulatory reasons, does insist that the driver commit some overt acts of "supervision" every now and then. This means we have to keep looking out the windows to confirm that the car is doing the right thing. Not constantly, but generally. A little cabin camera is tasked with assessing whether the driver is looking out "enough", and if not, reminding, nagging, NAGGING, and eventually pulling over and stopping the car. (It's a purely local computation, no big brother privacy violation involved.)

The rate these acts of supervision are enforced vary by unspecified factors and the driving profile (basically an "passivity" vs "aggression" setting we control). Looking at the computer screen for 10ish seconds at a time to look at the map or change music or whatever has been fine. Staring at your phone or out the side window for tens of seconds, not fine. It means one can sightsee, monitor traffic conditions, and become alarmed at all the phone use by other drivers (whom one can now stare at and give the evil eye to). The computer screen notifies us when it wants us to look up and around.

With the current version of "Full Self Driving (Supervised)", v14.3.4, however has become so damned good, so reliable, that people have been driven coast-to-coast in North America, several times. Been driven, as in hands entirely off over thousands of kilometers and also thousands of miles. So, in "standard" driving profile, Tesla has backed off the attention-monitoring thresholds, way way off. So much so in fact that this day, I ended up looking at $social_media_platform for the bulk of the drive on the car's web browser. I only looked up a few times when I got reader's block, noticing, "hey, we're in the next city", or "look at that nice park".

The drive was smooth, and - as best as I can tell - flawless. And I still don't know how traffic was.

Show #21, the very next morning, featured just Eric.

Piano Escape season is in full swing. Next show: Friday, July 25, down in Waterford. Come for the music, stay for the snacks!

The boys are at it again. The event was on Saturday 2025-06-28, just beside the Farmers Market, presented by the City of Brantford. We hope we entertained a whole new audience.

Are you troubled by the firehose of questionable information today? Stop worrying, with these simple tips:

• Question always
• Trust nobody
• Verify everything

... and apply it to everything you hear and read, wherever! Easy, isn't it?

Well, not really. Constantly questioning everything is a constant cognitive effort. You may not have been educated about actual critical thinking practices like looking for logic, errors, fallacies, rhetorical trickery. Even if you know how, doing it all the time is kind of like living in Cooper's Condition Yellow. Combat may sound like an inappropriate analogy, but it's apt. Some would say there is a war on for your mind, an information war. One might as well take it seriously. After all, what could happen if you get it wrong? According to some twit named Voltaire:

‘Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’

Sounds serious, and it really is. When you're called to vote, to comply, to judge, you should aim to get your facts correct, or at least not incorrect. Doing the whole cognitive analysis every time is hard for most people. But, being a reader of this here blog, you are in luck!

I have condensed for you a variety of green / red flags, using which you have a chance of assessing the truthfulness of random information. Whenever you encounter information that might matter, you can relax when you see plenty of these positive factors, and worry when you see plenty of the negative. Even with red flags, you only need sufficient courage to say/think: "I'm not sure. I don't know.", and move on. It's okay to not know!

The Frank™ brand list of Positive factors:

• (The opposite of any of the below.)
• Venue invites relatively uncensored third-party commentary.
• Venue / writer has earned a good reputation among people you care about.
• Topic is something many people would find boring.
• Material includes usable citations to sources.
• Material makes an effort to be logically structured, brief, and topic limited.

The Frank™ brand list Negative factors:

• (The opposite of any of the above.)
• Venue / writer is corrupted by financial, material, or reputational impact of your audience & belief.
• Topic is connected to any major political controversy.
• Material shows signs of emotional manipulation, whether making you feel angry or tribal or affirmed.
• Material shows signs of stylistic sophistication / attention engineering to appeal to your subconscious.
• Material scrupulously avoids quantifying risks, harms, probabilities, phenomena.
• Material offers manipulative numbers without units or context.
• Material that calls for urgent action.