I WANT TO DRAW EVERYTHINGNG AT THE SAME TIEM

LittleDroid's Long Overdue Animorphs Re-Read: Book 1 – The Invasion - Part 1

My name is Jake. That's my first name, obviously. I can't tell you my last name. It would be too dangerous. The Controllers are everywhere. Everywhere. And if they knew my full name, they could find me and my friends, and then . . . well, let's just say I don't want them to find me. What they do to people who resist them is too horrible to think about.

If there's one thing that sticks in my mind about the Animorphs books, it's this framing device. Each book is written in the first person, from the point of view of one of the main characters telling us how they can't give away too many details, in case the bad guys find them. Each one opens with one character giving their name and telling you it's far too dangerous to give you any more identifying information. As a kid reading these, it was compelling. A little part of me always wondered if the stories were true, and the books were a convenient ploy on behalf of the Animorphs to get the word out.

Jake tells us he can't reveal who he is, or where he lives, and that his life was normal up to one Friday night at the mall.

The book introduces the main cast quickly, and doesn't waste any time toying around establishing their characters. Everyone jumps off the pages right from the get go. There's Marco, Jake's cynical and sarcastic best friend who thinks he's suaver than he really is. There's Tobias, a bit of a dreamer who gets bullied at school for being weird and having a rough home life. There's Rachel, Jake's cousin, who's fashionable, tough and an amateur gymnast. There's Cassie, who's quiet, earthy and an animal lover (and who Jake has a crush on that he refuses to do anything about!).

We don't get a huge sense of who Jake is as a person just yet. Part of that is these books are short and this one has a lot of introductory material to cover. Part of it is Jake falls into the standard 'everyman' character trope. He's serious, dependable, and we find out he recently didn't make the basketball team. Aww.

Before we get into the story properly, I want to say I'm impressed with the cast diversity in this series. Cassie is black. Marco is Hispanic. We find out later that Jake is Jewish. And while there's no explicitly queer characters on paper (there are two characters later who are confirmed by Word of God to be in a queer relationship), I imagine this has more to do with the limitations of children's publishing in the late nineties rather than a lack of intent on the part of the authors.

Especially in a sci-fi series, it's too easy to fall into the trope of space adventures being a thing for cishet white boys. Kudos to Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant for writing something a wide range of kids could recognise themselves in.

Our characters decide to walk home together from the mall and take a short cut through an abandoned construction site they've all been told they're not allowed inside. They banter back and forth, Rachel teasing Jake for implying the girls need looking after on the way home, Cassie smoothing things over. Tobias spots a brilliant light shooting across the sky.

I looked at Tobias and he looked back at me. We both knew what we thought it was, but we didn't want to say it. Marco and Rachel would have laughed, we figured.

But Cassie just blurted it right out. "It's a flying saucer!"

The kids stand stunned. They nervously debate just what the hell is going on and whether they should run before they find up, right up until the ship lands ten feet away from them. The ship is described as "about three or four times as big as our minivan" and has structural damage as if it's been in a fight.

It's Tobias who attempts to communicate first, and everyone receives a response they can only hear in their minds.

Tobias tried again. "Please, come out. We won't hurt you."

‹I know.›

Telepathic aliens? Nine year old me thought this was amazing. Heck, thirty year old me still thinks this is amazing. I blame nostalgia.

The spacecraft opens and we get our first glimpse of an Andalite. These are our 'good guy' aliens, and look like a blue and tan deer centaur with a scythe bladed scorpion tail, no mouth and an extra set of eyes on stalks on top of their heads. Five stars for quality alien design. No Star Trek style rubber foreheads here.

This did also contribute to the nightmare of costume design that was the not-anywhere-near-stellar Nickelodeon adaptation, but we don't talk about that.

The next section is fairly exposition heavy, which is to be expected. This is the introductory book in a long series. There's a lot of groundwork to lay before the real meat of the plot gets going.

The Andalite is dying, and explains that he's here because Earth is in the midst of a covert invasion by a parasitic race called the Yeerks. Grey slug aliens that crawl into the heads of other sapient creatures and take over control of their brains. Evil space cordyceps. The Andalites have been fighting back against them and their takeover, but they were massively outgunned and lost the battle in orbit. They were able to get a message back to their home planet for reinforcements, but those could take over a year to arrive.

Without anyone else to turn to, the Andalite asks Jake to retrieve a blue box from his ship. Jake also finds a little holographic picture of the Andalite's family in his ship and contemplates how sad it is he's dying so far from home, which upset nine year old me greatly.

The Andalite offers to give the kids a piece of technology to help them hold out against the Yeerk invasion until help arrives: the power to physically transform into any animal they can touch.

No one is thrilled about this. Marco points out “this whole thing is nuts”, which becomes a bit of a catchphrase for him over the rest of the series. He's who you count on to point out when things are getting ridiculous. It's Cassie who agrees first, but before the others can get on board, Yeerk ships appear overhead.

Out of time, they each touch one side of the blue box.

‹Go now,› the Andalite said. ‹Only remember this - never remain in animal form for more than two of your Earth hours. Never! That is the greatest danger of the morphing! If you stay longer than two hours you will be trapped, unable to return to human form.›

Aside from the antagonists, the two hour time limit becomes one of the main sources of tension in the series. Having a countdown on being forced to morph back to human complicates their missions and adds a layer of logistics that ramps up the tension in almost every book to come.

Speaking of antagonists, it's at this point we're introduced to our main villain: Visser Three. The only Andalite to ever be taken over by a Yeerk, and the only enemy also capable of morphing.

I would like to go on record here to say I adore Visser Three. He's a first class graduate of the Disney school of maniacal villainy, with honours in pompousness and chewing the scenery. He's the epitome of petty, vicious egomaniacs. He's Darth Vader on deer legs.

Enemy ships descend. The kids flee and hide. Tobias lingers for a moment beside the dying Andalite before being sent running. The rest of the plot exposition happens while the kids are crouched behind a half-built wall, praying they don't breath loud enough to get caught.

Visser Three disembarks from his Blade ship along with his hordes of underlings. We're introduced to two more alien species, both controlled by the Yeerks. Hork-Bajir: huge bipedal raptor-esque creatures covered in blades from top to toe. And Taxxons: ten foot long centipedes with jelly-like, red eyes, and a voracious appetite for any living thing they can devour.

From the get go, you get the sense this isn't ever going to be a series where the odds are on our protagonists' side. The Yeerk forces are overwhelming and relentless. No-one is considering making a dashing stand against evil and hoping good will save the day. The kids are terrified. It's all they can do to stay hidden and hope they'll get out alive.

Visser Three gloats over the fallen Andalite, taunting him about how his ship has been completely destroyed and no-one else is left. We learn the good Andalite's name, Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, and that he's a Prince, some kind of military hero. He doesn't rise to Visser Three's taunting, and we're treated to the first of the Visser's many classic villain speeches.

‹What do you want with these Humans?› the Andalite asked. ‹You have your Taxxon allies. You have your Hork-Bajir slaves. And other slaves from other worlds. Why these people?›

‹Because there are so many, and they are so weak,› Visser Three sneered. ‹Billions of bodies! And they have no idea what's happening. With this many hosts we can spread throughout the universe, unstoppable! Billions of us. We'll have to build a thousand new Yeerk pools just to raise Yeerks for half this number of bodies. Face it, Andalite, you have fought well and bravely. But you have lost.›

Elfangor's response to this is to whack Visser Three with his tail blade and gouge a chunk out of his shoulder, and honestly? Good for him. Unfortunately Visser Three retaliates by having his ship disintegrate Elfangor's space pod, morphs into a monster that can only be described as a gargantuan mouth on tree trunk legs and eats Elfangor alive.

Yep, you read that right. See, up until this point, nine year old me was still convinced they were somehow going to save the alien and have an alien friend to go with them on space adventures. That's how adventure books work, right? Nine year old me quickly had to learn this series wasn't going to pull its punches. At all. Nine year old me had some growing up to do.

Nerves get the better of Marco after listening to psychic screams of an alien he just met being chewed into kibble, and he throws up, inadvertently giving away their hiding spot. Cue searchlights and armed soldiers. The kids run, splitting up to scrape a marginally better change of some of them getting away. Jake stumbles into an empty building and only manages to escape by literally tripping over a homeless man who the Yeerks murder in his stead. It's not explicit in the text, and Jake hopes the man gets away, but the Yeerks are bringing the heads back for identification. I think it's safe to say that guy is dead.

Jake keeps running and doesn't look back.

Hogwarts School Of Divinity (A ToA crossover fic)

Artemis and I kept our arms tightly linked as we entered the great hall. There was so many people. Hundreds of teenagers silently judging, trying to wire out which house we would be in by our looks and family trees. Not that I minded, of course. Being the centre of attention is kind of my thing. We all shuffled up the wide aisle between the Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff tables, feeling the hundreds of eyes latched onto us. I glanced to my right and caught the eye of Persephone, my Slytherin half-sister who was in her seventh year at the time. She paid no attention to me, and kept on scarfing down a large plate of ham, taking no breaths between bites. I shuddered. Sometimes that girl really grossed me out. A few tables away from her sat Ares, my Gryffindor half brother. He was in his fourth year, and was making a racket by chucking pieces of food at the poor Hufflepuffs at the table in front of him.

I pitied the Hufflepuffs. They had no reputation. They were dirt among diamonds. The youngest, untalented sibling. A bunch of sissies. That’s what my dad told me. 

“Only the weak are put in Hufflepuff!” He had thundered. “My children are either cunning, brave, clever or nothing! The Hufflepuffs are the friendly ones,” he had spat. “Is that what you want to be known for? Friendliness?” Father had been a Slytherin when he was at school. A great one, too. He had been Head Boy and Prefect, so I figured he knew what he was talking about. The only people in my family who have been in Hufflepuff were my mother, my uncle Hades and my auntie Hestia. All were okay, I guess, but I did not want to be pegged as soft-spoken or a wuss. I had so many half-siblings and family, and I wanted to stand out. I wanted to make my dad proud.

We reached the top table, where an old, grimy looking hat was placed on a simple wooden stool. 

“Oh please,” I whispered to my twin. “They expect us to wear that dusty old thing? And that stool. Would it not be more welcoming if it were say…a golden throne? Just spitballing ideas, don’t bother making me headmaster yet.” Artemis rolled her eyes.

“You are so high maintenance!” She whispered back to me. “You do realise we are not going to be pampered like we are at home?”

“Honestly, Artie. Once they see us arrive at the Gryffindor table, they’ll make us their leaders!” She smirked at my comment. 

“We are going to own these losers. I just hope we don’t get stuck with our father’s legacy. I mean, Head Boy and Prefect? That’s a lot to live up to.”

“Ach, don’t sweat it sis! When we’re Head Boy and Girl, dad will be so impressed. Athena’s the only other one who’s really got a shot so far. And she’s four years ahead of us. We’ll have no trouble landing those crowns.”

The deafening voice of Professor Hera, the universally hated vice principal and my step-mother, rang out, the sound reverberating off the stone walls and commanding silence. She declared that Headmaster Zeus (my dad) could not be here tonight, for he was off on school business. A slight snigger went up from the crowd. My dad was a known ladies’ man and irresistible bachelor. How else would he have so many kids who weren’t even directly related? Every time he was ‘off on school business’ a new kid cropped up a couple of years later. Hera did not seem to find this particularly funny, and snapped at the students for silence. She then explained how the sorting worked, and reluctantly stepped back to allow the hat to sing its yearly song. This was the part I’d been looking forward to. I love music. 

“Step up, step up! And gather round,

To find where you belong.

All of you I shall astound,

With my great sorting song!

One of four you shall be,

But do not fear or fret.

I‘m never wrong as you shall see,

When on your head I’m set!”

It went on for a few more verses, and I could only get more excited. The hat was so good at this! I would have to get his advice while I was up there.

All too soon, the song ended, and Hera began calling names. 

“Diana, Artemis!”

My dear sister squeezed my hand and dashed up to the podium. No sooner than the hat was placed on her head, it sprang to life and screamed: “GRYFFINDOR!” 

Whoops and cheers engulfed the right side of the room. Artemis suppressed a wide grin as she made her way over to the sea of red. Our family was well-known and it was usually an honour to have one of us on your team. She would most definitely be welcomed. More names were called. I was not worried. I would surely get into Gryffindor. That’s where my twin was, and we were alike in so many ways.  Besides, if worst came to worst, I could tolerate Ravenclaw - of course, I was as creative as they get.

When there was about ten kids left, it happened. 

“Phoebus, Apollo!”

I smirked and sauntered my way up to the front, and and on the stool, grinning over at the Gryffindor table, letting them know I’d be a good addition to their house. My sister nodded to me, seeming a lot more nervous than I was. I felt the hat being placed on my head.

Immediately, my head was buzzing with voices and old memories being yanked to the surface of my brain from deep in my subconscious. A gruff, echo-y voice ‘hmm’ed and muttered to itself; “Well...that’s interesting. Very interesting indeed...” I gripped the sides of the stool. 

“Interesting?” I thought to the hat, not sure if it would hear or respond.

“What’s interesting is that you could easily belong to any house. You’ve got a lot of clashing attributes. Hmmm...intelligent, but not fore-thinking. Kind but vengeful and quick to anger. Confident yet insecure. Quite a tricky one.”

“Gryffindor, please. Also, I liked your song.” The hat chuckled. It sounded like an old squeaky toy had been clogged with dust. 

“Thanks. But it’s not that simple, kid.”

This mumbling and going back and forth between houses lasted an eternity. I saw Ares yawn and turn his attention back to chucking bread at first years. Over at the Ravenclaw table, my half-sister Athena furrowed her eyebrows and concentrated on me, probably trying to figure out if her previous predictions on my house had been incorrect. Artemis only stared at me, but made no emotion obvious. 

“Well, kid. You’ve got the stuff. I think you’ll be...”

“HUFFLEPUFF!” The hat hollered across the hall, sending a roar of applause and cheering from the Hufflepuff table. It had been years since they’d had someone from my family in their house, that last being my boring uncle Hades, and they were ecstatic. surely, given my great ancestry, I would win them fame! Let me tell you, dear reader, I was crestfallen. Completely and utterly crushed.

I felt all colour drain from my face as I looked over at my sister for reassurance. She did not look shocked. Instead, she wore a pitying, knowing expression. That look wounded me even deeper. I swallowed hard as I stood, drunkenly staggering to a free space, any space on the Hufflepuff benches. The Loser Benches. My knees wobbled dangerously and my hands trembled. Finally finding a free spot, slipped in and shook off the pats on the back and scowled at those who punched me gently on the shoulder in way of greeting. Of course, this usually would have been my cue to flash my glorious white-toothed grin at all who were around me, but the situation had caught me extremely off guard. Every word of congratulations and welcome washed over my head in a wave of static. I was reduced to glaring daggers into the steaming bowl of carrots on the table.

The rest of the ceremony went by in a blur. Other unfortunate pansies at the Hufflepuff table had received my wordless message and left me alone, until a third year elbowed me in the ribs, nodding his head towards a copper-skinned seventh year student clad in black and yellow robes who must have been the Head Boy. He was rounding up the youngest and yelling: “First years! First year Hufflepuffs, follow me please!” across the hall. I reluctantly stood and tried to be as inconspicuous as possible (I know! How unlike me! Surely the very bricks of the school should have ripped apart at the very thought) as I made my way toward him. 

We passed the Gryffindors on the way out of the Great Hall. Frantically, I looked around for any sign of Artemis, but instead was met with Ares’ malice grin. He pushed himself in between me and the rest of my house, causing a traffic jam of students. The  second and third years that surrounded us gave me worried glances; they’d seen the wrath of my brother. But so had I. 

“Dad’s gonna hang you, Sunny,” he jeered, stomping closer to me. I stood my ground, glaring up at his fiery amber eyes. I had dealt with my half-witted half-brother a billion times before. He was all bark, no bite. I was not scared of him. 

“Go complain to your mummy, Ares.” I retorted, pointing up the hall to the teacher’s table where Hera sat talking to Demeter, the Herbology professor. “Or does she not care about you either?” He scowled.

“You’re one to talk, brat. You got the Loser house, just like your Loser mother!”

“Take it back,” I hissed, my hands curling into fists. He laughed gruffly. Taking another step, he puffed out his chest and held up his chin in pride. I rolled up my right sleeve, and Ares’ toothy grin widened, hitting me full force with his pungent breath. But before things could get physical (eg: interesting), the Hufflepuff Head Boy whom I was supposed to be following shouldered himself between us. 

“Back off you two,” he said in his obviously practiced ‘Authoritative Voice’. “And you there, Ares. Don’t think the headmaster doesn’t have his eye on you. One wrong move and you’ll be out of this school faster than you can say ‘Hogwarts’. I’d say your father would be far more disappointed in a failure student than one that was put in an unpopular house. Now shoo!” Ares, like the coward he was, scampered off and disappeared in the crowd. The older boy turned to me. “You okay?” I only grunted in response. He gave a half-hearted kind smile and guided me back to the gaggle of students who were swarming down a old stairwell, were he left to push his way back to the front of the line to become their leader again.

The Hufflepuffs flocked through wide, stone corridors alongside the Slytherins, who were also heading down into the basement. Persephone caught up with me and chatted excitedly about how dead I was.

“Daddy’s going to murder you!” She japed in a cheerful sing-song voice. “Oh, you are dead meat, Sunny. You going to have to stay here during the holidays and-oh! Maybe you’ll have to stay over the summer too! Isn’t that awful?” She giggled in that annoying way that girls do. Her dark glossy hair spilled down her shoulders in waves, reminding me of reeds that had withered in the sun. A curl of it was pinned back in a brooch shaped like a skull. Her tanned complexion reflected the light of the magical candles floating down the hallways. Her eyes were her mother’s; deep and green, but with a certain scheming cruelness in them that Demeter’s eyes did not possess. Those were my father’s genes. With one last snort of laughter, she informed me that she was off to scare more ‘firsties’, and ran ahead.

Eventually, the two houses parted ways, the Slytherins going deeper underground while we took a left and continued on the same floor. As we passed a large, intricate still life of a bowl of fruit, the Head Boy at the front yelled “Nearly there!” Not twenty seconds after, the group stopped. I couldn’t see what all the commotion was about. Had we run into a ghost who told us to get lost? Had we taken a wrong turn? Or maybe they’d finally realised that I should be up in one of the towers, with the Gryffindors. Yes, that last one seemed likely. I stood on my tip-toes and jumped, but all I could see was a ceiling-to-floor stack of old, dusty barrels. Boring. 

“Okay, first years! Come up to the front please! Second to seventh years, make way! You already know how this works.” The second to seventh years did as they were asked, and squished themselves to the side of the corridor, smiling and giggling, giddy from being in the company of their friends at Hogwarts once again. The first years filtered to the front, and faced the stack of barrels, most of us equally confused (though some no doubt had siblings in this house before them, and knew of the secret entrance before I did). “Alright, now listen closely! If you get this wrong, you may have to take several showers before you get the stench off you!” He said cheerfully, his voice echoing down the candle-lit hallway. 

A girl in front of me nudged the person next to her and hissed; “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

Another girl whispered back; “If you tap the wrong barrel or the wrong sequence, one of the lids bursts off and drenches you in vinegar! How cool is that?” I shuddered. The last thing I wanted was to stink and be wearing yellow robes on my first day in class. 

Meanwhile, the Head Boy had been explaining the password, and had now paused to look for a volunteer. I wasn’t worried. I’d been here for no more than a few short hours, and already he’d had to pull me from a fight and see me getting stroppy at the dinner table. He’d choose one of the wide-eyed kids, who would probably thank the barrels if they got a vinegar shower. But despite common sense, his eyes landed on me. 

“You there,” he pointed. “Come on over! Don’t be shy! I’ll walk you through it.” I cursed my natural stand-out-from-the-rest demeanour, and shuffled forward. I did not want a reason to embarrass myself. He put one strong hand on my shoulder, and pointed at a barrel. “That one there. Barrel two from the bottom, middle of the second row. Remember: tap to the rhythm of ‘Helga Hufflepuff’, yeah? ‘Hel-ga Huff-le-puff’.”

Leaning toward the barrel, I poised my finger over the old wood and looked over my shoulder, where the Head Boy gave me an encouraging nod. This was just like music, right? Just a simple five-beat rhythm. I could do this. I tapped the barrel. 1-2 1-2-3. 

The barrel’s curve swung open, revealing a little upward-sloping earthen passage. Cheers went up from the crowd behind me, and I couldn’t help a little smile creeping through my grumpy facade. Advancing one by one, they patted me on the back before turning to the entrance. They made their way into the passage, ducking down to get through the barrel, but straightening up once through the wooden doorway. A minute or so later, there was only me and the Head Boy left in the corridor. I looked at him quizzically.

“Why would you choose me?” I asked. “I’ve been nothing but trouble all night.” He chuckled.

“You only needed encouragement. I’ve seen the principle - your dad - angry. I don’t blame you for wanting to be in a different house, especially if a parent’s opinion is involved. There’s one like you every year. The one who thinks they’ve let everyone down before they’ve even  begun, just by being put in the ‘friendly’ house. I was that student too, believe it or not. All they need is a gentle push, like the Head Girl did for me when I was a first year. It’ll work out,” He prodded his temple. “The hat knows best. Now get inside. Next comes your mission briefing.”

“My what?”

“It’s a Hufflepuff rite of passage. You’ll see.”

It turned out that the so-called ‘Hufflepuff rite of passage’ was more of a trust-building team exercise. Each first year was put into groups of five or six, and took it in turns to be sent out into the hallway to find the kitchen. (“A well-known Hufflepuff trait is our brilliant finding abilities” a student had told us. “Don’t stray from this corridor. That’s all the clues you’ll get from me.”) The group who came back with the best snacks won. The kitchen happened to be behind the painting of the fruit, and could be opened by tickling the pear. (I still don’t quite understand how a fellow first year figured that out. They said that “If I were a pear stuck in a boring old painting all day, I’d want to be tickled too!” There’s really no explanation I can give you, reader. Apologies.) The house elves in the kitchen gave us full access to the cupboards, and told us to take whatever we wanted. Nice guys, those house elves. We stocked up on as much junk food as we could carry. Croissants and Jelly Babies, cinnamon rolls and danish pastries, peppermint toads and leftover pudding from the feast.

Upon arrival back to the common room, we dumped our treats down by the armful. Every pocket, sleeve and hood was filled with some kind of tasty confection. We were judged. Unsurprisingly, my group lost to the five kids who had came back with ambrosia (an enchanted brownie-like substance that glittered gold and changed its flavour to whatever you wanted while still in your mouth). None of us sulked. None of them teased. We all simply enjoyed the food together - it was divine.

By the time the clock struck 2am, the Head Boy advised us all to go to bed. I waved goodnight to my new acquaintances, and left the low-ceilinged, sofa-ridden, comfy common room. When I saw the official black and yellow Hufflepuff robes laid out neatly on my assigned bed (The first years had been wearing plain black robes bought from Diagon Alley until they were allocated a house) I somehow knew that dusty old hat was right after all.

2018 Nissan Leaf First Drive Review

“You know what I’d do if I were you guys?” The jet lag from the 11-hour flight to Japan had me talking in a stream of consciousness. “I’d build a NISMO version of the Leaf. Make it all crazylike, you know what I mean?” The young Nissan engineer sitting across from me stared back blankly. I tried a different angle. “The Leaf’s image needs a big shakeup. I mean, Elon Musk has had the press in the palm of his hand with his Insane- and Ludicrous-mode stuff, right? How about you do something like that!” Without a muscle twitch of expression, he replied, “Thank you for your suggestion, Mr. Reynolds. I’ll pass your views along to our team.” Then he gave me a polite, Japanese nod of the head. Well, that went badly. Was it too obvious that I think the Nissan Leaf is a car in need of a pulse? If done right, though, this redesigned 2018 version of the car has the makings of a NISMO EV heart-pounder. About 30 minutes earlier, maybe 50 of us were seated around the Leaf for its styling explainer at the Nissan Technical Center. But the whole time, I’d been staring at its profile, thinking that it reminds me of another car. Light bulb: the Faraday Future 91 I rode in a few months ago. I Googled its profile. The 91 is longer, but yes, there are some very similar ideas here. And what’s important about that statement is this: Whether that Faraday sinks or (miraculously) swims, it’s a seriously cutting-edge design. And here I am, comparing it to the descendant of one of this century’s most notorious oddballs. If Leaf 1 (my name for it) looked like a four-wheel amphibian, this Leaf 2 before us has not only flash-evolved into a svelte automotive shape, but it’s also learned to speak in the visual language of the rest of Nissan’s edgy designs. I must say, I’m not a fan of every word in its vocabulary—particularly Nissan’s Vmotion grilles. But for Leaf duty the rabbit-grin frames an interesting 3-Dish blue finish, which does pull you closer in to study it. And did you know that Leaf 1’s surprised-eyes headlights had an aerodynamic purpose? They did—to twirl air sideways and around the side mirrors. Now the twirling’s done by more elegant ribs on the hood, a trick Nissan’s aerodynamicists later demonstrated in a full-size wind tunnel where we watched smoke from the tip of a handheld wand magically bend sideways off the cowl. EVs are quiet, amplifying your awareness of side-mirror wind hiss; the ribs specifically hush that. There are additional noise defeaters, too, including greater rigidity of the inverter, a noise-blocking top for the integrated charger and DC-to-DC power inverter, and even a quieter motor. I looked back at the profile. There’s a lot going on here. But I’d characterize it as complex rather than busy. Although the Bolt shares many of these same EV-identifying cues, it’s a jigsaw jumble of pieces—some of them are a bit too forced into place. The Nissan’s elements are all aware of each other. Fit together like the neat rectangles in a Piet Mondrian painting. (Ironically, the Model 3 entirely dispenses with all these noisy little EV cues, being finished with starkly pure surfacing. To equate it to another painter, I’d pick my favorite one, Mark Rothko.) While we’re staring at the new Leaf’s profile, let’s use it to do a little automotive detective work. Imagine overlaying the current Leaf’s profile on it. See the match? The front and rear wheels exactly align—a giveaway that Leaf 2’s platform is fundamentally carryover bones not only in wheelbase but also in front track (its rear one is 0.8 inch wider), its essential suspension components, and the positioning of all the basic building blocks needed to assemble a modern EV. Consequently, its interior specs are a close match, too (it’s luggage space is more useful from ironing out small intrusions); externally, it’s 1.4 inches longer, 0.8 inch wider, and 0.4 inch taller. But don’t dis Leaf 2 as just some sort of overblown reskin. Nissan’s techs took the time to sprawl it out on their engineering operating table for a marathon multiple-organ transplant; the motor is all-new, spinning out a chunky 147 hp instead of 107 and 236 lb-ft of torque, up from 187 lb-ft. The electric power steering is more refined. Nissan is anxious to note that although companies are ballyhooing the births of their first EVs, Yokohama was there/did that back in 2010 and now has 270,000 customers, 2.1 billion miles of user experience, and programs such as 6,000 Leaf-to-home installations in Japan, where bidirectional charging/discharging coupled with solar roofs is slashing power bills. This ain’t Nissan’s first rodeo. It’s their second. And the show could be on the brink of going big time—the cost of battery storage has dropped from $300/kW-hr in 2015 to a projected $150 by 2020/23 and below $100 by 2025/26, according to a Morgan-Stanley analysis. (Nissan’s says they’re beating this.) And by the mid-2020s, battery-electric cars will be cheaper than internal combustion ones (in part due to the ramping complexity of internal combustion engines). So. Nissan should have anticipated the Bolt and base Model 3’s 238- and 225-mile ranges, right? Cue the drumroll. How big is the new Leaf’s battery pack (still underfloor and cooled with recirculated air, by the way)? Forty kW-hrs for 150 miles of range (S and SV trims). Eyes narrowed. Chins rubbed. True, that doubles the original Leaf’s 73-mile capability (from 24 kW-hrs) and is a 40 percent jump from its current 107 miles (from 30 kW-hrs). In a world without the Chevrolet Bolt, 150 miles would be a bold type headline. Now it’s a number in a math problem: How much less is it than 238? There’s going to be a lot of data thrown at you arguing that 150 miles more than matches most people’s real-world lifestyles most of the time. Let me ask you: How many gasoline-powered, five-passenger sedans could be sold with a 150-mile range? Maybe anticipating criticism, the Leaf will offer an even-better-chemistry 60-kW-hr pack next year (SL trim), likely extending its leash to about 225 miles (a two-tier strategy akin to the Model 3’s estimated 50 and 75 kW-hrs). Thus, the Bolt’s singular battery size will be bookended by its competitors, with the Nissan’s upgraded pack matching it and the Tesla’s smaller pack offering Bolt-competitive range due to better sedan aerodynamics. (One of the reasons, by the way, why I think Tesla controversially went with a mass-produced sedan first: A crossover’s worse aero would require a bigger, more expensive battery—something that’ll be more affordable by the time the Model Y makes its debut.) If carrying over the Leaf 1’s platform has painted Nissan into a corner, it’s these subsequently locked in battery dimensions that require expensive chemistry to keep it apace with the Bolt and base Model 3. (A plus for us is that it offers an insight into the march of ever-rising energy density; those additional 16 kW-hrs crammed in there mean 67 percent greater energy density in seven years, or 9.5 percent per year.) Another questionable call: clinging to the CHAdeMO standard for fast charging. Maybe it’s stubbornness, maybe Nissan’s got a giant investment in this thing, but CHAdeMO is a dead plug walking in the U.S., and Nissan would do the EV cause a big, fat favor by finally adopting SAE (or everybody going to Tesla’s standard). Time to drive. During their presentations, Nissan repeatedly emphasized twin messages: One, the Leaf is about making driving less stressful, and two, it’s about making driving fun. Not knowing what stress-free, fun driving exactly means, we headed out onto the test track to find out. The new Leaf’s most potent driving relaxers? ProPilot Assist is sort of a Tesla Autopilot light (at a fraction of the price). Relying on just a single forward-facing radar and a monocular video camera, ProPilot Assist provides single-lane, feet-off-the-pedals driving (what’s called adaptive cruise control). Alone, this is nothing unusual. Its dexterity in responding to slinkying traffic (including right down to 0 mph) is, though. Yet what elevates it to the same conversation as AutoPilot is how accurately it also threads down the center of the road. Like with other Level 2 semiautonomous systems, you need to keep your hands on the wheel, but here, there’s no need to give it periodic tugs. The electric power steering’s frequent and small corrections automatically sense their presence. I later tried the system in Detroit, driving for several miles on an expressway with my hands relaxed on the rim. No scoldings to put my hands back ever appeared (which, if persistently ignored, would ultimately result in the car stopping in its lane). Available later this year, ProPilot Assist is ordinary sensors doing an extraordinary job due to great software. Within two years, the system is expected to be even greater (perhaps with added sensors) by expanding to automated lane changing, and by 2020 it should have the skill to negotiate city scenarios, too. Next year it will joined by ProPilot Park, which highly automates parking, including selecting an empty spot not already bordered by a parked car (reading lane stripping). Remember this system as the tipping point when semiautonomous driving finally met the masses. (It’s had a 60 percent take rate in markets where it’s already available on other Nissan models.) The Leaf’s other driving simplification is its one-pedal EV-driving feature—what they call e-Pedal. Tesla has long offered a similar heavy-regen effect when you release the accelerator. But completing a stop requires a brake pedal dab at the bitter end. In its transmission’s Low mode, the Bolt will come to a one-pedal stop without touching the friction brakes, but the deceleration rate isn’t always enough. E-Pedal leapfrogs both with a deceleration rate of 0.2 g’s (covering 90 percent of real-driver stopping, Nissan says) and comes to a complete stop (including automatic friction braking, if necessary). If that stop is on a hill, the Leaf’s motor will just hold it motionless (after pausing, you can lift your feet from both pedals; no need to hold the brake). The new Leaf could quickly become the most popular car in San Francisco. E-Pedal and the availability of ProPilot Assist spotlight the intention to make the Leaf the tech standard-barer for the Nissan Intelligent Mobility Initiative, Yokohama’s campaign to destress driving. The notable destresser, though, is the car’s lowered MSRP of $29,990 ($30,875 including destination)—a $690 drop. Standard with that is a noticeable upgrade in interior materials, and when you option a nav system, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are included, too. After incentives, this is a heck of a deal. But what about that driving fun factor? I can answer about 65 percent of that question. Without a doubt, its extra power and torque renders the new Leaf satisfyingly quicker and more responsive. Test-track recordings are yet to come, but given the Bolt’s and Model 3’s better power (and power-to-weight ratios) it’ll probably lag in a three-EV drag race. Interior noise is phenomenally hush—a nice complement to its supple yet controlled ride quality (absent of the bounding I’ve sometimes noticed in the Bolt). Indeed, it’s downright limousinelike compared to the Model 3’s German sport sedan tautness. However, the Tesla’s payoff is razorlike steering response, which is tough to compare to the Leaf’s because the suspensions of these Japanese prototypes were not yet tuned for Nissan’s intentions for the American market. Intentions? Sportier ones. Which circles me back to that styling walkaround earlier in the day. As it concluded, the chief designer had an impish look on his face. The one you have when there’s something you want to semaphore with minimal words. As he neared his seat, it finally came out: “Oh,” he paused, “and eventually, um, the letter N will be associated with the Leaf, too.” He had said too much, so out it came. “Not now, but eventually … there will be a NISMO version.” OMG! A NISMO Leaf. The last time I predicted something this correctly was in 1987 when I knew I’d regret selling my Austin-Healey Bugeye Sprite. But here’s the deal, Nissan: Don’t screw it up. It’s your chance to permanently flip the Leaf’s librarian identity right on its peroxided head. With wings and flairs, there’s room between the rear wheels for a second motor, too. (I looked.) Ludicrous Leaf sounds like a villain in a Batman movie. Holy anticipation.   Chevrolet Bolt EV Nissan Leaf Tesla Model 3 BASE PRICE $38,370* $30,875* $36,200* VEHICLE LAYOUT Front-motor, FWD, 4-door hatchback Front-motor, FWD, 5-pass, 4-door hatchback Rear-motor, RWD, 4-door, sedan MOTOR permanent magnet, 200-hp/266-ft-lb rear (MT est) AC induction, 147-hp/236-ft-lb permanent magnet, 258-hp/317-ft-lb (MT est) TRANSMISSION 1-sp Auto 1-sp Auto 1-sp Auto BATTERY 60 kWhr, Li-ion 40 kWhr, Li-ion 50/75 kWhr, Li-ion (MT est) CURB WEIGHT (F/R DIST) 3580 lb 3433-3508 lb (mfr) 3,550-3,800 lb (mfr) WHEELBASE 102.4 in 106.3 in 113.2 in LENGTH x WIDTH x HEIGHT 164.0 x 69.5 x 62.8 in 176.4 x 70.5 x 61.4 in 184.8 x 72.8 x 56.8 in TRACK, F/R 59.0/59.1 in 60.6/61.2 in 62.2/62.2 in CARGO ROOM, BEHIND 2ND ROW 16.9 cu ft 23.6 cu ft 15.0 cu ft DRAG COEFFICIENT 0.31 0.28 0.23 0-60 MPH 6.3 sec 8.0 sec (MT est) 5.6 sec (mfr est) LEVEL 2 CHARGE TIME 9 hrs 16 hrs, 3.6 kW/8 hrs, 6.6 kW na FAST CHARGE TYPE SAE COMBO, 50-kW CHAdeMO, 50-kW Tesla, 145-kW RANGE 238 miles 150 miles 220/310 miles *Before potential federal and state incentives The post 2018 Nissan Leaf First Drive Review appeared first on Motor Trend.

http://www.motortrend.com/cars/nissan/leaf/2018/2018-nissan-leaf-first-drive-review/

Driverless Cars May Be Coming, but Let’s Not Get Carried Away

“Sometime next year,” Elon Musk says, “you’ll be able to have the car be autonomous without supervision.”

“None of us have any idea when full self-driving will happen,” counters Gill Pratt, an expert in robotics and the director of the Toyota Research Institute.

Beyond Mr. Musk, who has said twice this year that Tesla could have a million “robotaxis” on the roads next year, few experts in autonomous cars believe that the technology is ready to safely chauffeur occupants in any and all driving conditions. And that’s before the regulatory hurdles, including a quaint-seeming 1971 New York law that requires at least one hand on the wheel.

Instead, for the foreseeable future, there are Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Think of them as a co-pilot, not the Autopilot of Tesla’s marketing parlance but a wingman that amplifies human skills instead of replacing them.

These building blocks of autonomy are becoming common on even the most affordable cars: electronic stability controls, certainly, but now radar, cameras and other sensors that perceive their surroundings and automatically accelerate, stop, steer, follow lanes or take evasive action. And every major carmaker in America has pledged to make automated emergency braking standard on all new models by September 2022.

Global giants like General Motors, Toyota, Ford and Volkswagen are fully engaged in the self-driving race against the likes of Tesla, Uber and Waymo, a unit of Google’s parent company, and are loath to be outmaneuvered by Silicon Valley disrupters. But traditional automakers are also hitting the brakes, as premature promises run headlong into reality — what Mr. Pratt calls the current “trough of disillusionment” in autonomy.

A growing consensus holds that driver-free transport will begin with a trickle, not a flood. Low-speed shuttles at airports or campuses may be the early norm, not Wild West taxi fleets through Times Square. Operational boundaries will be enforced by the electronic leash of geofencing.

Toyota is among the many companies backing that more cautious, two-track approach. Mr. Pratt, who ran the vaunted robotics program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, recalls tossing and turning on the night in 2015 when he signed a contract to lead Toyota’s $1 billion research arm for artificial intelligence and robotics.

Toyota’s cars alone, he figured, log perhaps one trillion miles of annual travel around the globe. Making a robocar perform in controlled demonstrations is easy, Mr. Pratt says, such as having it effortlessly avoid hay bales tossed in front of it. Making a robocar so foolproof that consumers and automakers can trust it with their lives, including in one-in-a-billion situations, is very different.

“Ever since, we’ve tried to turn down the hype and make people understand how hard this is,” he said.

That’s not preventing companies from trying. Toyota’s Chauffeur technology fully intends to create autonomous cars for corporate fleets. But using 80 to 90 percent of the same software, its Guardian concept blends inputs from man and machine.

General Motors’ Cadillac is also working to keep humans in the driving loop — even if it requires an occasional slap on the wrist, via the driver-monitoring system developed by an Australian company, Seeing Machines.

Consider Cadillac’s Super Cruise the digital disciplinarian that makes drivers sit straight and keep eyes up front. It is G.M.’s consumer answer to Tesla’s Autopilot, but its approach illustrates the divergent philosophies of traditional automakers and the Valley rebels.

Many experts say Super Cruise, or a system like it, might have prevented the highly publicized fatal crashes of some Tesla Autopilot users, or Uber’s robotic Volvo that struck and killed an Arizona pedestrian in March last year. In the Uber case, police investigators said the human backup driver had been streaming Hulu before the accident. In some Tesla crashes, driver overconfidence in Autopilot’s abilities, leading to inattention, appears to have played a role.

That kind of carelessness isn’t possible with Super Cruise, as my own testing on Cadillac’s CT6 sedan has shown. The optional system will expand to other Cadillac models next year. Unlike Tesla’s current Autopilot, the system is explicitly designed for hands-free operation, allowing people to drive safely without touching the steering wheel or pedals — but strictly on major highways.

Using laser-based lidar, the Detroit-area company Ushr mapped 130,000 miles of freeway in the United States and Canada, in deep detail. That map is stored onboard the car, and updated monthly over the air to account for new construction and other road changes. The maps fix the Cadillac’s global position to within four inches, backed by onboard cameras, radar and GPS.

When I drove the Cadillac outside its geofenced borders, self-driving was strictly off limits. But once on its proper turf, Super Cruise breezed along highways in New Jersey for up to two hours with zero input from me.

It’s an odd sensation at first. But the Cadillac tracked down its lane as if it was on rails — better than the average Uber — so that I quickly gained confidence, eventually leaning back with hands folded behind my head as we zipped between semitrailers.

An infrared camera and lighting pods tracked my face, eyelids and pupils. The system let me look away long enough to, say, fiddle with radio stations. But if I closed my eyes or dared to text, the Caddy flashed escalating warnings. Putting eyes back on the road allowed me to proceed.

Ignore more prompts, and the system shuts down, refusing to work with a distracted driver. If that driver is disabled or asleep, the Caddy can pull over, stop automatically and call for help.

“What I love about Super Cruise is that it’s always watching you,” said Chris Thibodeau, Ushr’s chief executive.

The system also disengaged when it couldn’t confidently identify lane markings, or when it approached construction zones. While those cautious disengagements could be frustrating at times, Super Cruise proved a trusty co-pilot that prevents overconfidence from either party.

“The last thing you want is the machine making a judgment that would be better done by a human,” Mr. Thibodeau said.

Experts add that driver monitoring systems would be a boon to safety even in conventional situations. For one, parents could rest assured that teenagers weren’t texting while driving.

Designing skill amplifiers for automobiles, Mr. Pratt noted, is infinitely complex, in part because of the crowded and varied roadways that cars must perceive, predict and react to: what he calls the “complex ballet” of driving.

It doesn’t help that human drivers can be the weak dance partner. Roughly 1.3 million people die in global auto accidents every year, according to the World Health Organization. Human error is blamed in 94 percent of those deaths.

While Mr. Pratt is a champion of modern robotics, he said artificial intelligence would still take decades to rival some human abilities.

“We shouldn’t have this replacement mind-set to pop out the human and pop in the machine,” he said. “Sometimes the A.I. is better than the human. Sometimes the human is better than the A.I.”

The brain gives people one advantage, in predicting behaviors based on visual cues. Mr. Pratt offered the example of a driver cruising through intersections where various pedestrians wait to cross: an older person, a mother holding a child’s hand or a group of teenagers. A human driver will instantly process the scene and know that the teenagers are most likely to jaywalk.

“The A.I. system, unless it’s fed with hundreds of millions of examples, can’t pick that up, because it doesn’t think. It just pattern-matches,” Mr. Pratt said.

In the robot’s corner, it never gets tired or drunk, and has 360-degree sensor “vision.”

Mr. Musk has dismissed any need for a driver monitoring system on Teslas, or redundant hardware sensors, insisting that its coming “full self-driving computer” will handle any task.

That stance is drawing an unusual backlash against Tesla from industry analysts, from skepticism that Tesla can pull it off, to charges that the company is cutting corners on safety.

My tests of various semiautonomous systems highlighted what experts call a paradox of self-driving: As the technology gets better, it may initially become more hazardous, because drivers are sidelined for longer periods, lulled into a false sense of security.

“It’s a whole new paradigm for the manufacturers: How do I keep drivers engaged, what are the right alerts?” Mr. Thibodeau said.

“People have been trained for years to pay attention to everything on the road. It’s going to be hard to change that behavior and trust the machine.”

For people who envision the government coming for their car keys, Mr. Pratt has a message: The rise of the machines is real, but most people will choose personal autonomy over an autonomous car.

“The joy of driving a car is something that is incredibly innate and precious, and we don’t think that’s under threat at all,” he said.

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WAR IS THE FATHER OF ALL

What I'm about to tell you is vital. It's something really important that I want you to keep in mind.

The number one reason why people fail at anything is they give up as soon as it gets difficult.

It’s that simple.

I came across something that really stuck with me while I was reading about ancient history...

“Polemos Pater Panton.”

It’s a Greek saying that means “War is the father of all.”

In this context, war doesn’t mean fighting and killing each other necessarily, but instead it means struggle and adversity. Some of the greatest movements and ideas have come out of conflict.

To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to understand that you can’t just handle stress and difficulty, you need to learn to thrive in it.

The average millionaire has multiple sources of income. That's why I've decided to offer a system in which you could could do exactly this.

Will Durant, the great historian, once said "War and competition are the father of all things. The potent source of ideas, inventions, institutions, and states. Peace is an unstable equilibrium."

So, I want to talk about conflict as it pertains to your life.

I grew up with this understanding that the world was worse off with war, that you wanted to avoid stress and conflict. This is kind of the mantra for society today, right? All of us have some friction in our lives. Someone mad at us, someone yelling at us, getting fired from a job. We all go through conflict. You need to learn how to take that adversity and those “bad” things in life, and overcome them.

First off, I think the word “bad” is the start of the problem. It’s an archaic and outdated way of thinking about life. What Durant is saying is that peace is an unstable equilibrium. Now, let me just clarify. I'm not speaking per se about war, like World War 2 or Vietnam War. That's a completely different conversation.

What I’m talking about is that without struggle, without adversity, and without friction, there won’t be any forward progress. Desperation is the number one source of inspiration.

Look at Brian Acton. He's one of the founders of WhatsApp, but before he started Whatsapp, he was turned down for a job at Facebook. After he was denied his dream job, he Tweeted “looking forward to life’s next adventure.” Then he went on to meet his business partner, and they launched this texting app. I love WhatsApp as a communication tool, and I use it all the time in business. The next thing you know a couple hundred million people are using it, and it’s one of the most popular apps out there. In 2017, they ended selling their app to Facebook for 19 billion dollars. Remember the saying?

"Polemos pater panton." War is the father of all.

The conflict and struggle that happened to Brian Acton became the potent source of ideas and innovation for him. When Brian was denied the job, he didn’t become all negative and cynical, instead, said “OK, on to the next thing.” This is because he had the mindset instilled in him to bounce back. He knew he was capable of achieving other great things.

Success is the result of mindset and hard work. What sets billionaires apart is their ability to think differently than most people.

I was reading the biography of Jeff Bezos and how he built Amazon.com and made 38 billion dollars. One of his coworkers, a guy named Dalzell said,

"Jeff Bezos does a couple of things better than anyone I've ever worked for. Number one, he embraces the truth. A lot of people talk about the truth, but they don't engage their decision-making around the best truth at the time."

"The second thing is that he is not tethered by conventional thinking. What is amazing to me is he is bound only by the laws of physics. He can't change those. Everything else he views as open to discussion."

I love that mentality. He pushes the boundaries of conventional thinking, and doesn’t care whether the truth hurts. He builds his business around reality, and tries to eliminate any biases in his life and businesses.

The "wars" against you and your happiness, against your goals, against your fulfillment and happiness, should become the driving source of ideas and problem solving. The natural events of the world, whether that be economic or biological, they don't care about you and I. So you have a choice. You can be a victim, or you can say, "Polemos pater panton."

Now, there are plenty of people who will say "I don't want to embrace a world that's like that.” Instead of being set in how we want the world to work, it's better to recognize the reality of the world, and then conform to the rules that mother nature has laid down. It's going to happen anyway, so why fight it?

So what does this mean for you? Well, let’s apply it to one of the Four Pillars. I'm all about living the good life, and there are four things in order to live the good life that basically humans are programmed to want to achieve.

The First Pillar is health. In the world that we live in now, there are so many influences that negatively impact our health. There’s soda, fast food, smoking, all of these things are bad for you. Now this isn’t some mass conspiracy against you, but I think it's a natural outgrowth of a free market economic system, where people are seeking their own interests.

All these companies like McDonalds or Pepsi manufacture food that they believe gets the highest return on investment for their shareholders. They don’t have anything against you, they are allowing you to make your own decisions, but they want you to buy their products so they can maximize profit. They don’t care about the longevity of your health. They don't. In a sense, you're in conflict. If they can make something sweet enough and you drink it, they're going to get what they want.

Instead of seeing yourself as a victim, you have to go to war. The war on my body and my health will become the potent source of ideas, inventions, for me. How can you spin it around?

Well, I got some friends, they've turned the whole health crisis into a business online where they're teaching people how to be healthy, lose weight. They're making a couple hundred thousand dollars a day.

If you can't beat the corporations, join 'em. Just do what they're doing, but instead of making war on the health of people, make war on the institutions that are causing the problem to start with. Don’t be a victim of reality and be unhealthy and overweight, take advantage of the opportunity and make something positive out of it.

That strife and that conflict should excite you. When I was a broke at 20-years-old, I was sleeping on my mom’s couch with no job and no money, I read something that Tony Robbins said that completely changed my life. He said, "when you succeed, you party, but when you fail, you ponder, and all great things come from pondering." That's the same thing, the war, the struggle. Out of it comes great things.

There's a consistent pattern. If you get excited when you experience conflict and things not going your way, it will become a source of potent ideas that will drive you forward towards your goal. Fight the instinct to go into victimhood and retreat.

I read an article recently that said when we feel stress, fear and mental discomfort our body reacts with physical cues like your heart rate increasing. When we feel overly excited and happy our body reacts the same way, but obviously we don’t think we feel the same. So, what’s the difference? The difference is perspective and context. The next time you’re experiencing conflict and stress tell yourself what I’m feeling right now is excitement. Excitement for the potent ideas that will come from the conflict.

It’s like stocks, they don’t always go up. Even the best stocks have to come down before they can go up even higher, it’s called a correction. It’s a principle of physics, every action has an opposite and equal reaction. When things seem rough just know that you can use that downward energy and momentum to create great things that will drive you up towards your goals.

If one of your goals is to make money then our system and mentorship programme can definitely give you the platform.

If you're lonely, take it as a time to take a whole bunch of public speaking classes, go on an online dating site and go on 50 dates, learn and grow. Make your mess your message.

Think about Oprah Winfrey, right? She went through tremendous trauma as a child and was abused. That eventually became an inspiration for her to decide that she was going to rise above it and help thousands of people.

Now, not everybody comes out of struggle and adversity stronger, but the people who do are not chosen randomly. You have to be systematic about your life to find resolution. You have to look at the situation logically, put the pieces together, and use the feedback to put together the puzzle of life.

If you fail, you need to be able to say, “OK, that didn’t work, what do I need to do differently next time?” You have to be proactive to turn conflict into success.

Instead of lamenting your life and lamenting the world and focusing on failure, go to war. Use war as the potent source of things that are new. It's a new approach to life. There's no victimhood here. Why be a victim?

I'm not saying what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I'm saying that stress is a subjective experience that we all have to go through. See, we’ve been taught that only bad things can come out of a negative situation and that we should only plan for success, but that’s wrong.

The Air Force teaches its pilots to make three different plans before they take off. They make a plan for the best-case scenario, the most likely scenario, and the worst-case scenario. The best case being everything goes their way and they land with no issues, the most likely being they face a few challenges or problems along the way, and the worst case being having to eject from their plane because it’s crashing. By doing this, the pilots lower their stress levels, because they’ve already prepared for when things go wrong.

Once you understand that conflict is going to happen, you can learn how to roll with it. If you can figure out that things are really never as bad as they seem, you start to realize that struggle doesn't have to be such a bad experience. It’s completely dependent on how you respond.

If you can learn to respond positively to conflict, then most of the time, things will work themselves out. Have you ever been dating someone and then you break up with them, and you're freaked out? You start to think "I'll never meet someone again?" Well guess what, eventually you will get over it and meet someone new. I've learned as I got older, that there's a cycle to life, and things come around. There's a winter, where it's dark and cold, but for every winter, you usually get a spring. It usually revolves around, so don't freak out so much.

There’s really no good or bad situations that happen, it’s just our response to those events that are positive or negative. We are in charge of how we perceive events that happen to us, even though sometimes it seems like we don’t have control.

You don't want to be the rich kid who just inherited their money and has no conflict. There's nothing there for you. There's no end game. Always work with an endgame. Remember, be a truth seeker.

When things aren’t going your way, take a step back and think “What can I do to make something good come out of this.”

Let’s say you have a relative get sick and die from a disease. Take your time to grieve, but don’t let that grief control your life. Take all that energy and turmoil, and refocus it to finding a cure.

When the economy crashed, Donald Trump took on over 9 billion dollars in debt. He went from one of the wealthiest men in the world to owing pretty much all of his fortune. Now, he could have used bankruptcy to get away from it, but you know what? It became the potent source of ideas. He built an empire. He realized that while the economy was in turmoil, he could buy more properties and build more businesses, because eventually things would return to normal. He came out on top.

If I could only get one piece of information to you today, it would be that as long as you remember negative situations are only as bad as you make them, and if you look for inspiration in that struggle, you will be fine.

"Working together to combat terrorists online"

Editor’s note: This is a revised and abbreviated version of a speech Kent delivered today at the United Nations in New York City, NY, on behalf of the members of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism is a group of four technology companies—Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube—that are committed to working together and with governments and civil society to address the problem of online terrorist content.

For our companies, terrorism isn’t just a business concern or a technical challenge. These are deeply personal threats. We are citizens of London, Paris, Jakarta, and New York. And in the wake of each terrorist attack we too frantically check in on our families and co-workers to make sure they are safe. We’ve all had to do this far too often.

The products that our companies build lower barriers to innovation and empower billions of people around the world. But we recognize that the internet and other tools have also been abused by terrorists in their efforts to recruit, fundraise, and organize. And we are committed to doing everything in our power to ensure that our platforms aren't used to distribute terrorist material.

The Forum’s efforts are focused on three areas: leveraging technology, conducting research on patterns of radicalization and misuse of online platforms, and sharing best practices to accelerate our joint efforts against dangerous radicalization. Let me say more about each pillar.

First, when it comes to technology, you should know that our companies are putting our best talent and technology against the task of getting terrorist content off our services. There is no silver bullet when it comes to finding and removing this content, but we’re getting much better.

One early success in collaboration has been our “hash sharing” database, which allows a company that discovers terrorist content on one of their sites to create a digital fingerprint and share it with the other companies in the coalition, who can then more easily detect and review similar content for removal.  

We have to deal with these problems at tremendous scale. The haystacks are unimaginably large and the needles are both very small and constantly changing. People upload over 400 hours of content to YouTube every minute. Our software engineers have spent years developing technology that can spot certain telltale cues and markers. In recent months we have more than doubled the number of videos we've removed for violent extremism and have located these videos twice as fast. And what’s more, 75 percent of the violent extremism videos we’ve removed in recent months were found using technology before they received a single human flag.

These efforts are working. Between August 2015 and June 2017, Twitter suspended more than 935,000 accounts for the promotion of terrorism. During the first half of 2017, over 95 percent of the accounts it removed were detected using its in-house technology. Facebook is using new advances in artificial intelligence to root out "terrorist clusters" by mapping out the pages, posts, and profiles with terrorist material and then shutting them down.

Despite this recent progress, machines are simply not at the stage where they can replace human judgment. For example, portions of a terrorist video in a news broadcast might be entirely legitimate, but a computer program will have difficulty distinguishing documentary coverage from incitement.  

The Forum’s second pillar is focused on conducting and sharing research about how terrorists use the internet to influence their audiences so that we can stay one step ahead.

Today, the members of the Forum are pleased to announce that we are making a multi-million dollar commitment to support research on terrorist abuse of the internet and how governments, tech companies, and civil society can fight back against online radicalization.

The Forum has also set a goal of working with 50 smaller tech companies to help them better tackle terrorist content on their platforms. On Monday, we hosted dozens of companies for a workshop with our partners under the UN Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate. There will be a workshop in Brussels in December and another in Indonesia in the coming months. And we are also working to expand the hash-sharing database to smaller companies.

The Forum’s final pillar is working together to find powerful messages and avenues to reach out to those at greatest risk of radicalization.

Members of the forum are doing a better job of sharing breakthroughs with each other. One success we’ve seen is with the Redirect Method developed at Alphabet’s Jigsaw group. Redirect uses targeted advertising to reach people searching for terrorist content and presents videos that undermine extremist recruiting efforts. During a recent eight-week study more than 300,000 users clicked on our targeted ads and watched more than 500,000 minutes of video. This past April, Microsoft started a similar program on Bing. And Jigsaw and Bing are now exploring a partnership to share best practices and expertise.

At the same time, we’re elevating the voices that are most credible in speaking out against terrorism, hate, and violence. YouTube’s Creators for Change program highlights online stars taking a stand against xenophobia and extremism.  And Facebook's P2P program has brought together more than 5,000 students from 68 countries to create campaigns to combat hate speech. And together the companies have participated in hundreds of meetings and trainings to counter violent extremism including events in Beirut, Bosnia, and Brussels and summits at the White House, here at the United Nations, London, and Sydney to empower credible non-governmental voices against violent extremism.

There is no magic computer program that will eliminate online terrorist content, but we are committed to working with everyone in this room as we continue to ramp up our own efforts to stop terrorists’ abuse of our services. This forum is an important step in the right direction. We look forward to working with national and local governments, and civil society, to prevent extremist ideology from spreading in communities and online.

Source : The Official Google Blog via Source information

2018 Nissan Leaf First Drive Review

“You know what I’d do if I were you guys?” The jet lag from the 11-hour flight to Japan had me talking in a stream of consciousness. “I’d build a NISMO version of the Leaf. Make it all crazylike, you know what I mean?” The young Nissan engineer sitting across from me stared back blankly. I tried a different angle. “The Leaf’s image needs a big shakeup. I mean, Elon Musk has had the press in the palm of his hand with his Insane- and Ludicrous-mode stuff, right? How about you do something like that!” Without a muscle twitch of expression, he replied, “Thank you for your suggestion, Mr. Reynolds. I’ll pass your views along to our team.” Then he gave me a polite, Japanese nod of the head.

Well, that went badly. Was it too obvious that I think the Nissan Leaf is a car in need of a pulse?

If done right, though, this redesigned 2018 version of the car has the makings of a NISMO EV heart-pounder. About 30 minutes earlier, maybe 50 of us were seated around the Leaf for its styling explainer at the Nissan Technical Center. But the whole time, I’d been staring at its profile, thinking that it reminds me of another car. Light bulb: the Faraday Future 91 I rode in a few months ago. I Googled its profile. The 91 is longer, but yes, there are some very similar ideas here.

And what’s important about that statement is this: Whether that Faraday sinks or (miraculously) swims, it’s a seriously cutting-edge design. And here I am, comparing it to the descendant of one of this century’s most notorious oddballs.

If Leaf 1 (my name for it) looked like a four-wheel amphibian, this Leaf 2 before us has not only flash-evolved into a svelte automotive shape, but it’s also learned to speak in the visual language of the rest of Nissan’s edgy designs. I must say, I’m not a fan of every word in its vocabulary—particularly Nissan’s Vmotion grilles. But for Leaf duty the rabbit-grin frames an interesting 3-Dish blue finish, which does pull you closer in to study it. And did you know that Leaf 1’s surprised-eyes headlights had an aerodynamic purpose? They did—to twirl air sideways and around the side mirrors. Now the twirling’s done by more elegant ribs on the hood, a trick Nissan’s aerodynamicists later demonstrated in a full-size wind tunnel where we watched smoke from the tip of a handheld wand magically bend sideways off the cowl. EVs are quiet, amplifying your awareness of side-mirror wind hiss; the ribs specifically hush that. There are additional noise defeaters, too, including greater rigidity of the inverter, a noise-blocking top for the integrated charger and DC-to-DC power inverter, and even a quieter motor.

I looked back at the profile. There’s a lot going on here. But I’d characterize it as complex rather than busy. Although the Bolt shares many of these same EV-identifying cues, it’s a jigsaw jumble of pieces—some of them are a bit too forced into place. The Nissan’s elements are all aware of each other. Fit together like the neat rectangles in a Piet Mondrian painting. (Ironically, the Model 3 entirely dispenses with all these noisy little EV cues, being finished with starkly pure surfacing. To equate it to another painter, I’d pick my favorite one, Mark Rothko.)

While we’re staring at the new Leaf’s profile, let’s use it to do a little automotive detective work. Imagine overlaying the current Leaf’s profile on it. See the match? The front and rear wheels exactly align—a giveaway that Leaf 2’s platform is fundamentally carryover bones not only in wheelbase but also in front track (its rear one is 0.8 inch wider), its essential suspension components, and the positioning of all the basic building blocks needed to assemble a modern EV. Consequently, its interior specs are a close match, too (it’s luggage space is more useful from ironing out small intrusions); externally, it’s 1.4 inches longer, 0.8 inch wider, and 0.4 inch taller.

But don’t dis Leaf 2 as just some sort of overblown reskin. Nissan’s techs took the time to sprawl it out on their engineering operating table for a marathon multiple-organ transplant; the motor is all-new, spinning out a chunky 147 hp instead of 107 and 236 lb-ft of torque, up from 187 lb-ft. The electric power steering is more refined. Nissan is anxious to note that although companies are ballyhooing the births of their first EVs, Yokohama was there/did that back in 2010 and now has 270,000 customers, 2.1 billion miles of user experience, and programs such as 6,000 Leaf-to-home installations in Japan, where bidirectional charging/discharging coupled with solar roofs is slashing power bills. This ain’t Nissan’s first rodeo. It’s their second. And the show could be on the brink of going big time—the cost of battery storage has dropped from $300/kW-hr in 2015 to a projected $150 by 2020/23 and below $100 by 2025/26, according to a Morgan-Stanley analysis. (Nissan’s says they’re beating this.) And by the mid-2020s, battery-electric cars will be cheaper than internal combustion ones (in part due to the ramping complexity of internal combustion engines).

So.

Nissan should have anticipated the Bolt and base Model 3’s 238- and 225-mile ranges, right? Cue the drumroll. How big is the new Leaf’s battery pack (still underfloor and cooled with recirculated air, by the way)?

Forty kW-hrs for 150 miles of range (S and SV trims). Eyes narrowed. Chins rubbed. True, that doubles the original Leaf’s 73-mile capability (from 24 kW-hrs) and is a 40 percent jump from its current 107 miles (from 30 kW-hrs).

In a world without the Chevrolet Bolt, 150 miles would be a bold type headline. Now it’s a number in a math problem: How much less is it than 238? There’s going to be a lot of data thrown at you arguing that 150 miles more than matches most people’s real-world lifestyles most of the time. Let me ask you: How many gasoline-powered, five-passenger sedans could be sold with a 150-mile range?

Maybe anticipating criticism, the Leaf will offer an even-better-chemistry 60-kW-hr pack next year (SL trim), likely extending its leash to about 225 miles (a two-tier strategy akin to the Model 3’s estimated 50 and 75 kW-hrs). Thus, the Bolt’s singular battery size will be bookended by its competitors, with the Nissan’s upgraded pack matching it and the Tesla’s smaller pack offering Bolt-competitive range due to better sedan aerodynamics. (One of the reasons, by the way, why I think Tesla controversially went with a mass-produced sedan first: A crossover’s worse aero would require a bigger, more expensive battery—something that’ll be more affordable by the time the Model Y makes its debut.) If carrying over the Leaf 1’s platform has painted Nissan into a corner, it’s these subsequently locked in battery dimensions that require expensive chemistry to keep it apace with the Bolt and base Model 3. (A plus for us is that it offers an insight into the march of ever-rising energy density; those additional 16 kW-hrs crammed in there mean 67 percent greater energy density in seven years, or 9.5 percent per year.) Another questionable call: clinging to the CHAdeMO standard for fast charging. Maybe it’s stubbornness, maybe Nissan’s got a giant investment in this thing, but CHAdeMO is a dead plug walking in the U.S., and Nissan would do the EV cause a big, fat favor by finally adopting SAE (or everybody going to Tesla’s standard).

Time to drive. During their presentations, Nissan repeatedly emphasized twin messages: One, the Leaf is about making driving less stressful, and two, it’s about making driving fun. Not knowing what stress-free, fun driving exactly means, we headed out onto the test track to find out.

The new Leaf’s most potent driving relaxers?

ProPilot Assist is sort of a Tesla Autopilot light (at a fraction of the price). Relying on just a single forward-facing radar and a monocular video camera, ProPilot Assist provides single-lane, feet-off-the-pedals driving (what’s called adaptive cruise control). Alone, this is nothing unusual. Its dexterity in responding to slinkying traffic (including right down to 0 mph) is, though. Yet what elevates it to the same conversation as AutoPilot is how accurately it also threads down the center of the road. Like with other Level 2 semiautonomous systems, you need to keep your hands on the wheel, but here, there’s no need to give it periodic tugs. The electric power steering’s frequent and small corrections automatically sense their presence. I later tried the system in Detroit, driving for several miles on an expressway with my hands relaxed on the rim. No scoldings to put my hands back ever appeared (which, if persistently ignored, would ultimately result in the car stopping in its lane). Available later this year, ProPilot Assist is ordinary sensors doing an extraordinary job due to great software. Within two years, the system is expected to be even greater (perhaps with added sensors) by expanding to automated lane changing, and by 2020 it should have the skill to negotiate city scenarios, too. Next year it will joined by ProPilot Park, which highly automates parking, including selecting an empty spot not already bordered by a parked car (reading lane stripping). Remember this system as the tipping point when semiautonomous driving finally met the masses. (It’s had a 60 percent take rate in markets where it’s already available on other Nissan models.)

The Leaf’s other driving simplification is its one-pedal EV-driving feature—what they call e-Pedal. Tesla has long offered a similar heavy-regen effect when you release the accelerator. But completing a stop requires a brake pedal dab at the bitter end. In its transmission’s Low mode, the Bolt will come to a one-pedal stop without touching the friction brakes, but the deceleration rate isn’t always enough. E-Pedal leapfrogs both with a deceleration rate of 0.2 g’s (covering 90 percent of real-driver stopping, Nissan says) and comes to a complete stop (including automatic friction braking, if necessary). If that stop is on a hill, the Leaf’s motor will just hold it motionless (after pausing, you can lift your feet from both pedals; no need to hold the brake). The new Leaf could quickly become the most popular car in San Francisco.

E-Pedal and the availability of ProPilot Assist spotlight the intention to make the Leaf the tech standard-barer for the Nissan Intelligent Mobility Initiative, Yokohama’s campaign to destress driving.

The notable destresser, though, is the car’s lowered MSRP of $29,990 ($30,875 including destination)—a $690 drop. Standard with that is a noticeable upgrade in interior materials, and when you option a nav system, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are included, too. After incentives, this is a heck of a deal.

But what about that driving fun factor? I can answer about 65 percent of that question. Without a doubt, its extra power and torque renders the new Leaf satisfyingly quicker and more responsive. Test-track recordings are yet to come, but given the Bolt’s and Model 3’s better power (and power-to-weight ratios) it’ll probably lag in a three-EV drag race. Interior n

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2018 Nissan Leaf First Drive Review

“You know what I’d do if I were you guys?” The jet lag from the 11-hour flight to Japan had me talking in a stream of consciousness. “I’d build a NISMO version of the Leaf. Make it all crazylike, you know what I mean?” The young Nissan engineer sitting across from me stared back blankly. I tried a different angle. “The Leaf’s image needs a big shakeup. I mean, Elon Musk has had the press in the palm of his hand with his Insane- and Ludicrous-mode stuff, right? How about you do something like that!” Without a muscle twitch of expression, he replied, “Thank you for your suggestion, Mr. Reynolds. I’ll pass your views along to our team.” Then he gave me a polite, Japanese nod of the head.

Well, that went badly. Was it too obvious that I think the Nissan Leaf is a car in need of a pulse?

If done right, though, this redesigned 2018 version of the car has the makings of a NISMO EV heart-pounder. About 30 minutes earlier, maybe 50 of us were seated around the Leaf for its styling explainer at the Nissan Technical Center. But the whole time, I’d been staring at its profile, thinking that it reminds me of another car. Light bulb: the Faraday Future 91 I rode in a few months ago. I Googled its profile. The 91 is longer, but yes, there are some very similar ideas here.

And what’s important about that statement is this: Whether that Faraday sinks or (miraculously) swims, it’s a seriously cutting-edge design. And here I am, comparing it to the descendant of one of this century’s most notorious oddballs.

If Leaf 1 (my name for it) looked like a four-wheel amphibian, this Leaf 2 before us has not only flash-evolved into a svelte automotive shape, but it’s also learned to speak in the visual language of the rest of Nissan’s edgy designs. I must say, I’m not a fan of every word in its vocabulary—particularly Nissan’s Vmotion grilles. But for Leaf duty the rabbit-grin frames an interesting 3-Dish blue finish, which does pull you closer in to study it. And did you know that Leaf 1’s surprised-eyes headlights had an aerodynamic purpose? They did—to twirl air sideways and around the side mirrors. Now the twirling’s done by more elegant ribs on the hood, a trick Nissan’s aerodynamicists later demonstrated in a full-size wind tunnel where we watched smoke from the tip of a handheld wand magically bend sideways off the cowl. EVs are quiet, amplifying your awareness of side-mirror wind hiss; the ribs specifically hush that. There are additional noise defeaters, too, including greater rigidity of the inverter, a noise-blocking top for the integrated charger and DC-to-DC power inverter, and even a quieter motor.

I looked back at the profile. There’s a lot going on here. But I’d characterize it as complex rather than busy. Although the Bolt shares many of these same EV-identifying cues, it’s a jigsaw jumble of pieces—some of them are a bit too forced into place. The Nissan’s elements are all aware of each other. Fit together like the neat rectangles in a Piet Mondrian painting. (Ironically, the Model 3 entirely dispenses with all these noisy little EV cues, being finished with starkly pure surfacing. To equate it to another painter, I’d pick my favorite one, Mark Rothko.)

While we’re staring at the new Leaf’s profile, let’s use it to do a little automotive detective work. Imagine overlaying the current Leaf’s profile on it. See the match? The front and rear wheels exactly align—a giveaway that Leaf 2’s platform is fundamentally carryover bones not only in wheelbase but also in front track (its rear one is 0.8 inch wider), its essential suspension components, and the positioning of all the basic building blocks needed to assemble a modern EV. Consequently, its interior specs are a close match, too (it’s luggage space is more useful from ironing out small intrusions); externally, it’s 1.4 inches longer, 0.8 inch wider, and 0.4 inch taller.

But don’t dis Leaf 2 as just some sort of overblown reskin. Nissan’s techs took the time to sprawl it out on their engineering operating table for a marathon multiple-organ transplant; the motor is all-new, spinning out a chunky 147 hp instead of 107 and 236 lb-ft of torque, up from 187 lb-ft. The electric power steering is more refined. Nissan is anxious to note that although companies are ballyhooing the births of their first EVs, Yokohama was there/did that back in 2010 and now has 270,000 customers, 2.1 billion miles of user experience, and programs such as 6,000 Leaf-to-home installations in Japan, where bidirectional charging/discharging coupled with solar roofs is slashing power bills. This ain’t Nissan’s first rodeo. It’s their second. And the show could be on the brink of going big time—the cost of battery storage has dropped from $300/kW-hr in 2015 to a projected $150 by 2020/23 and below $100 by 2025/26, according to a Morgan-Stanley analysis. (Nissan’s says they’re beating this.) And by the mid-2020s, battery-electric cars will be cheaper than internal combustion ones (in part due to the ramping complexity of internal combustion engines).

So.

Nissan should have anticipated the Bolt and base Model 3’s 238- and 225-mile ranges, right? Cue the drumroll. How big is the new Leaf’s battery pack (still underfloor and cooled with recirculated air, by the way)?

Forty kW-hrs for 150 miles of range (S and SV trims). Eyes narrowed. Chins rubbed. True, that doubles the original Leaf’s 73-mile capability (from 24 kW-hrs) and is a 40 percent jump from its current 107 miles (from 30 kW-hrs).

In a world without the Chevrolet Bolt, 150 miles would be a bold type headline. Now it’s a number in a math problem: How much less is it than 238? There’s going to be a lot of data thrown at you arguing that 150 miles more than matches most people’s real-world lifestyles most of the time. Let me ask you: How many gasoline-powered, five-passenger sedans could be sold with a 150-mile range?

Maybe anticipating criticism, the Leaf will offer an even-better-chemistry 60-kW-hr pack next year (SL trim), likely extending its leash to about 225 miles (a two-tier strategy akin to the Model 3’s estimated 50 and 75 kW-hrs). Thus, the Bolt’s singular battery size will be bookended by its competitors, with the Nissan’s upgraded pack matching it and the Tesla’s smaller pack offering Bolt-competitive range due to better sedan aerodynamics. (One of the reasons, by the way, why I think Tesla controversially went with a mass-produced sedan first: A crossover’s worse aero would require a bigger, more expensive battery—something that’ll be more affordable by the time the Model Y makes its debut.) If carrying over the Leaf 1’s platform has painted Nissan into a corner, it’s these subsequently locked in battery dimensions that require expensive chemistry to keep it apace with the Bolt and base Model 3. (A plus for us is that it offers an insight into the march of ever-rising energy density; those additional 16 kW-hrs crammed in there mean 67 percent greater energy density in seven years, or 9.5 percent per year.) Another questionable call: clinging to the CHAdeMO standard for fast charging. Maybe it’s stubbornness, maybe Nissan’s got a giant investment in this thing, but CHAdeMO is a dead plug walking in the U.S., and Nissan would do the EV cause a big, fat favor by finally adopting SAE (or everybody going to Tesla’s standard).

Time to drive. During their presentations, Nissan repeatedly emphasized twin messages: One, the Leaf is about making driving less stressful, and two, it’s about making driving fun. Not knowing what stress-free, fun driving exactly means, we headed out onto the test track to find out.

The new Leaf’s most potent driving relaxers?

ProPilot Assist is sort of a Tesla Autopilot light (at a fraction of the price). Relying on just a single forward-facing radar and a monocular video camera, ProPilot Assist provides single-lane, feet-off-the-pedals driving (what’s called adaptive cruise control). Alone, this is nothing unusual. Its dexterity in responding to slinkying traffic (including right down to 0 mph) is, though. Yet what elevates it to the same conversation as AutoPilot is how accurately it also threads down the center of the road. Like with other Level 2 semiautonomous systems, you need to keep your hands on the wheel, but here, there’s no need to give it periodic tugs. The electric power steering’s frequent and small corrections automatically sense their presence. I later tried the system in Detroit, driving for several miles on an expressway with my hands relaxed on the rim. No scoldings to put my hands back ever appeared (which, if persistently ignored, would ultimately result in the car stopping in its lane). Available later this year, ProPilot Assist is ordinary sensors doing an extraordinary job due to great software. Within two years, the system is expected to be even greater (perhaps with added sensors) by expanding to automated lane changing, and by 2020 it should have the skill to negotiate city scenarios, too. Next year it will joined by ProPilot Park, which highly automates parking, including selecting an empty spot not already bordered by a parked car (reading lane stripping). Remember this system as the tipping point when semiautonomous driving finally met the masses. (It’s had a 60 percent take rate in markets where it’s already available on other Nissan models.)

The Leaf’s other driving simplification is its one-pedal EV-driving feature—what they call e-Pedal. Tesla has long offered a similar heavy-regen effect when you release the accelerator. But completing a stop requires a brake pedal dab at the bitter end. In its transmission’s Low mode, the Bolt will come to a one-pedal stop without touching the friction brakes, but the deceleration rate isn’t always enough. E-Pedal leapfrogs both with a deceleration rate of 0.2 g’s (covering 90 percent of real-driver stopping, Nissan says) and comes to a complete stop (including automatic friction braking, if necessary). If that stop is on a hill, the Leaf’s motor will just hold it motionless (after pausing, you can lift your feet from both pedals; no need to hold the brake). The new Leaf could quickly become the most popular car in San Francisco.

E-Pedal and the availability of ProPilot Assist spotlight the intention to make the Leaf the tech standard-barer for the Nissan Intelligent Mobility Initiative, Yokohama’s campaign to destress driving.

The notable destresser, though, is the car’s lowered MSRP of $29,990 ($30,875 including destination)—a $690 drop. Standard with that is a noticeable upgrade in interior materials, and when you option a nav system, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are included, too. After incentives, this is a heck of a deal.

But what about that driving fun factor? I can answer about 65 percent of that question. Without a doubt, its extra power and torque renders the new Leaf satisfyingly quicker and more responsive. Test-track recordings are yet to come, but given the Bolt’s and Model 3’s better power (and power-to-weight ratios) it’ll probably lag in a three-EV drag race. Interior n

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Elementary Systems In Game Fishing Equipment Simplified

Info On No-hassle Game Fishing Equipment Tactics

The greatest game fishing equipment

Professional Guidelines For Central Elements For Game Fishing Equipment

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Clarifying Core Issues In Fly Fishing Belt

18 overall tight end and No. 2 tight end in North Carolina when he signed in 2016 with NC State. Stay tuned to Scout for more reactions from visitors to Baton Rouge for LSU's Spring Game. \n On Sunday morning, Moss announced that he'd transfer to LSU, where he'll arrive in June before having to sit out the 2017 season. \n \"The biggest thing was coach Canada and how he utilizes the tight end position,\" Moss told Scout. \n www.scout.com/college/lsu/player/194903-thaddeus-moss \n Moss was in Baton Rouge for an official visit, which started Saturday morning, touring the campus before taking in Ed Orgeron's first spring game as head coach of the Tigers. He met more with the staff on Sunday to get a better feel for the situation at LSU and decided it was for him. \n Looking for opportunities to better his future, Moss said in a Twitter post when he announced his transfer, LSU could offer that, looking to add depth especially with Foster Moreau being a senior. The former three-star prospect would have to sit out a season before having three years left of eligibility. \n Offensive coordinator Matt Canada, tight ends coach Steve Ensminger and head coach Ed Orgeron all have been in contact with Moss, offering the North Carolina native a few days ago. http://www.scout.com/college/lsu/story/1772925-10-takeaways-from-lsu-s-s... \n \"It (the visit) was great.Told me they really like me, liked the film, liked my versatility,\" Moss told Scout. \"I like coach Canada's offense, Coach O is great and it's the SEC.\" \n Canada was offensive coordinatorat NC State for a season before heading to Pittsburgh, where he earned the LSU offensive coordinator position inDecember. \n The 6-4, 235-pound tight end started the first three games for the Wolfpack in 2016 as a true freshman, catching six balls for 49 yards and a touchdown.

Since I hadnt kept any fish this year, we took some home. Theres a couple of lessons in there. Game and Parks counts 35 species, not including sunfish hybrids, as gamefish in Nebraska. At least 10 of them (I cant always sort out all those sunfish species) inhabit Lake Minatare. Several, including crappies, are great fish for the table. If you only fish for one species, youre missing some great opportunities. Even if you focus on walleyes, its a good idea to change gears once in awhile. That includes changing tactics. Despite all those fish that should be hungry after wintering under ice, we didnt find much by fishing near the bottom with jigs. The water was about 52 degrees still a bit cold. The walleyes might have had spawning on their minds. Or we might have done better by trolling closer to the surface, casting near the dam or working shallow water near the trees. We were using minnows to catch those crappies. When I switched to a bit of nightcrawler, I started catching bluegills. If youre not experimenting with different methods, youre missing opportunities.

All the chairs are fully upholstered. place mouse over image to enlarge This game inch and a half of pure salt in the base,” he says. Gus Stock ✔ Fast Free Postage ✔ Ship Within 24h bay determines this price through a machine learned model of the product's sale prices within and service work on all brands of chairs and equipment. In addition to beautiful fighting chairs, each manufacturer also builds to manoeuvre the vessel out of harm’s way. Strength was the main consideration that allows the inside of the angler’s knees to be around 15cm clear of the chair seat. game fishing knots and rigs In summary, I believe the correct rod angle for heavy tackle fishing but injection-molded resin is also a very popular option. Questions contact:RUSTY cockpit and let’s go fishing, right? In 1990, Ed Murray retired and he and Frank sold the tackle business along with the name Murray a deckhand can easily maneuver it using a joystick control pad.” “Then it goes to the CDC computer numerical control Zealand from numerous manufacturers. Cockpit shade covers also help keep the sun off the chair, especially thing we knew, we were in the fighting-chair business.” A quick goggle search will put four of the best on the first page: tripping over the footrest is both practical and safe. Once locked into place, he can crew prepare the tackle, but some days it pays to make an exception. This is the initial position, regardless of totally out of stainless steel with a fibreglass footrest. As a technological advancement, the fighting chair outranks even the outrigger and the tuna tower; after all, there’s not much rod and reel, which translates to twisting force exerted on the chair. At some stage you will be caught out, risking line damage on clean and waxed. I have seen this happen, effect with a very short turnaround time and the ability to do custom work. The last thing you want to see is the chair ripping out processed for over two years,” he says.

Game Fishing Lures

I believe that in some countries, things are done slightly differently, but in the clubs I’ve fished with over the years here in than $1.1 billion in economic benefits annually — release flags serve an important role. Long before catch-and-release for bill fish became the norm and preceding the use of radios, country is deployed, signalling to authorities that you are compliant with clearing in and are approved to move about the country’s waters. “New” refers to a brand-new, unused, unopened, http://flatbrookflyfishing.com/simple-advice-on-selecting-important-factors-in-fly-fishing-net/ undamaged item, that crews around the world are using flags to show their success instead of stacking dead fish on the dock. I haven’t seen that in many years, but always take your flags down for over 50 years. and proudly 100% made in the U.S.A. However, I think we should take it one step further and look at the role flags have played in and swimming away healthy while turning the flags upside down to indicate they have harvested game fishing a fish. I thought their answer would be black and white, but it turns out there is no U.S.A. Flags fly true and clean on traditions are for flying flags and how the mantra of catch-and-release fishing has evolved with their use. Most professional crews in the South Florida sailfish fleet have also gone back to flying the tourism, the ultimate goal is attracting both novice and seasoned anglers. I’ve been at several tournaments where people walk up to the boats flying release flags naively wanting to know international flag. When flying fish flags, take a cue from the pros: Place but there seems to be a shift in the norm, with many boats beginning to fly their flags right side up.

When the blue is next to the boat just reach down with the coat hanger and grab the front treble hook with it and quickly lift it into the boat. It works great. Blackfish season will close April 30 through July 16 and then reopen from July 17 through Nov.15 with a one-fish daily bag limit at 15 inches. The season will finish from Nov.16 through Dec.31 with a six-fish daily bag limit at 15 inches. Bottom fishermen are saying the action was decent for the early April season we just had. Capt. Rob of the Sea Hunter out of Atlantic Highlands reports After watching the trollers catching striped bass we had our shot at the beginning of this week and it was how I remember it to be. The only bad thing was only nine guys showed up to enjoy it. It was very good action with shorts and keepers. We kept all we were allowed and threw the rest back. The boat will be leaving the dock at 7:30 a.m.

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Didn’t Even See It Coming . . .

I've always been a little behind the curve when spotting trends, particularly political ones. As a 17-year old high school senior in 1968 at a Catholic seminary, I went all-in for Richard Nixon. I had a LARGE "Nixon's the One" poster plastered on my dorm room wall. I'm not sure what appealed to me about the guy who had not yet declared that he was "not a crook." Maybe it was that the times, they were a changin', but I was stuck in a 1950s world. I certainly hadn't yet experienced the shifting mores of middle America. (I was in a Catholic seminary, for God's sake!) But Nixon's law and order message must have appealed to me since I was a guy whose family was coming unglued due to alcoholism (Mom) and too much authoritarian macho (Dad). I wanted peace and stability and that funny talking guy from Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey, just didn't seem like he was going to provide it. Little did I know that Nixon's brand of authoritarianism mixed with his playing fast and loose with the law was going to tear our country apart unlike anything we had known until then. [Four years later, I would be on the McGovern bandwagon and we all know how that turned out, so, wrong again!]

Yes, I had this poster on my wall in high school ....

I couldn't vote in 1968, but in that fateful election, the country lost the opportunity to have a truly Progressive President at its helm. Hubert Humphrey had championed racial equality and working class economic empowerment (through unions) that would have brought the country into a new era of social awareness and acceptance of "otherness." Instead, we got Nixon, whose presidency and cabinet picks (and even his VP choice!) would bring mass demonstrations and generational divisions that would fester for years.

Humphrey should have been the choice of progressives in 1968.

Cultural cues have also sometimes eluded me. When most people were tuning in and turning on to Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, I was rocking out to Motown, Aretha, and James Brown. It wasn't until I hit a really rough patch in my mid-20s--after I had left the seminary and was trying to find my way in the wider world--that I was able to relate to the poetry and the disenchantment that Dylan had tapped into. I'm always a little slow to the party.

The times were changing a little too fast for me ...

That's why I'm so bereft about our national suicide—as Neil Gabbler called it in his billmoyers.com piece, Farewell, America—in electing the Big Man Donald Trump over my candidate of choice, Hillary Clinton. I suppose it's like the Nixon/Humphrey showdown. We picked the guy who was going to take us back, not the guy (or gal) who was going to move us forward. But why didn't I see it coming?

I was, after all, lucky enough to be on hand during the Democratic Convention this summer when Hillary received her crown. That was supposed to be it. The election was just a formality. Everyone loved her, didn't they? Everyone in Hillaryland, anyway. And how could that blowhard Trump ever get in? Who even believed he was serious? Wasn't he just doing this to burnish his brand? 

But I could have been more adept at reading the tea leaves. That first day at the convention should have been a wake-up call. When the Bernie delegates booed at every mention of Hillary's name; when the Democracy Spring protesters talked about corporate greed and wanting to disrupt the status quo, I should have listened more carefully. I did wonder how it would all turn out, with 40 percent of the delegates feeling so disenchanted with the presumed nominee. But I just told myself that they'd get on board once the convention was over and the choice was clear. How could they be so foolish as to throw away their vote on a third-party candidate, or worse, stay home and not vote at all when so much was at stake?

Protests continued even DURING Hillary’s speech to the DNC.

I did worry about the enthusiasm gap. Even on Day 2, when the moaners and groaner were still out in force even though the Clinton camp had done all they could to heal the rift in the party in the wake of the Wasserman Schultz debacle. [E-mails released by Wikileaks revealed that as head of the DNC, Schultz had favored Clinton over Sanders at key moments during the primaries.] But I missed the bigger story, the fact that Clinton was a flawed candidate, that the constant drip of Wikileaks would continue to undermine her already flagging credibility, that the right wing’s ginned up stories about Benghazi and her poor technology choices—amplified by constant media coverage—would continue to haunt her and stop any forward momentum that her impressive credentials and wonderful policy positions, under normal circumstances, should have propelled her to victory.

We were all in Hillaryland. We were willing to suspend disbelief and thought that we would coast into the White House with a white gauzy pantsuit breeze at our backs. But it didn't happen. Somehow we forgot a key portion of the electorate--the white guys--and even the white gals jumped ship for the big talking carnival barker. Incredible, I know. And I, like many pundits and blowhard TV analysts, didn't see it coming.

Bill Clinton - working man’s President.

Bill Clinton apparently did. According to a Politico post-mortem, the former president had advised Hillary's campaign to try and find a message that would be more inclusive and resonate with the white working class, but “was dismissed with a hand wave from the senior members of the team.” Who's crying now? We all are.

I'm not exactly sure what white America has against the current situation. White collar workers are doing just fine. Wall Street continues to make a killing. Government workers have lots to do. But so many of these folks went for Trump. 

And, yes, the blue collar workers are hurting. I get that. Even though the DEMS brought the country's economy back from the brink, we didn't get the credit for it because the recovery didn't extend far enough. Not enough stimulus, Paul Krugman would admonish. Should have been $2 trillion, not $750 billion. Who knew? That was during Obama’s attempted honeymoon period with those who would become his mortal adversaries. He was trying to play nice. They were out to destroy him. Sadly, their obstructionism seems to have worked. They wouldn’t hear of anything higher than the $750 billion and later wouldn’t allow Obama’s jobs bill to go through—the very bill that would have provided help to the blue collar workers! But somehow the obstructionists get to take the victory lap for having choked the American working class. Go figure. Nasty obstructionism worked. Another trend I didn’t see coming

Who’s laughing now? Not me ....

It’s going to be a very long four years. Yes, the infrastructure bill will be good for rebuilding America’s bridges and highways. (Watch Trump GET the $2 billion Obama couldn’t due to the false claim of “fiscal restraint.”) Things will begin to look shiny and new, just like Trump Tower. But our country will be no less divided. In fact, the divisions will cause a faster fraying of the cultural fabric of America. We will become increasingly polarized. And economically, the haves will retreat to their gilded cages while the have-nots are left to fend for themselves.

I may not be able to spot trends, but this seems like something entirely new. We may be witnessing the end of our democracy as we have known it, at least during my lifetime, which spans a quarter of the lifetime of the USA. It feels like we are in for a very bad time. But I won’t be able to say “I told you so” because I couldn’t have imagined we’d get to this point. I didn’t even see it coming.

2018 Nissan Leaf First Drive Review

“You know what I’d do if I were you guys?” The jet lag from the 11-hour flight to Japan had me talking in a stream of consciousness. “I’d build a NISMO version of the Leaf. Make it all crazylike, you know what I mean?” The young Nissan engineer sitting across from me stared back blankly. I tried a different angle. “The Leaf’s image needs a big shakeup. I mean, Elon Musk has had the press in the palm of his hand with his Insane- and Ludicrous-mode stuff, right? How about you do something like that!” Without a muscle twitch of expression, he replied, “Thank you for your suggestion, Mr. Reynolds. I’ll pass your views along to our team.” Then he gave me a polite, Japanese nod of the head.

Well, that went badly. Was it too obvious that I think the Nissan Leaf is a car in need of a pulse?

If done right, though, this redesigned 2018 version of the car has the makings of a NISMO EV heart-pounder. About 30 minutes earlier, maybe 50 of us were seated around the Leaf for its styling explainer at the Nissan Technical Center. But the whole time, I’d been staring at its profile, thinking that it reminds me of another car. Light bulb: the Faraday Future 91 I rode in a few months ago. I Googled its profile. The 91 is longer, but yes, there are some very similar ideas here.

And what’s important about that statement is this: Whether that Faraday sinks or (miraculously) swims, it’s a seriously cutting-edge design. And here I am, comparing it to the descendant of one of this century’s most notorious oddballs.

If Leaf 1 (my name for it) looked like a four-wheel amphibian, this Leaf 2 before us has not only flash-evolved into a svelte automotive shape, but it’s also learned to speak in the visual language of the rest of Nissan’s edgy designs. I must say, I’m not a fan of every word in its vocabulary—particularly Nissan’s Vmotion grilles. But for Leaf duty the rabbit-grin frames an interesting 3-Dish blue finish, which does pull you closer in to study it. And did you know that Leaf 1’s surprised-eyes headlights had an aerodynamic purpose? They did—to twirl air sideways and around the side mirrors. Now the twirling’s done by more elegant ribs on the hood, a trick Nissan’s aerodynamicists later demonstrated in a full-size wind tunnel where we watched smoke from the tip of a handheld wand magically bend sideways off the cowl. EVs are quiet, amplifying your awareness of side-mirror wind hiss; the ribs specifically hush that. There are additional noise defeaters, too, including greater rigidity of the inverter, a noise-blocking top for the integrated charger and DC-to-DC power inverter, and even a quieter motor.

I looked back at the profile. There’s a lot going on here. But I’d characterize it as complex rather than busy. Although the Bolt shares many of these same EV-identifying cues, it’s a jigsaw jumble of pieces—some of them are a bit too forced into place. The Nissan’s elements are all aware of each other. Fit together like the neat rectangles in a Piet Mondrian painting. (Ironically, the Model 3 entirely dispenses with all these noisy little EV cues, being finished with starkly pure surfacing. To equate it to another painter, I’d pick my favorite one, Mark Rothko.)

While we’re staring at the new Leaf’s profile, let’s use it to do a little automotive detective work. Imagine overlaying the current Leaf’s profile on it. See the match? The front and rear wheels exactly align—a giveaway that Leaf 2’s platform is fundamentally carryover bones not only in wheelbase but also in front track (its rear one is 0.8 inch wider), its essential suspension components, and the positioning of all the basic building blocks needed to assemble a modern EV. Consequently, its interior specs are a close match, too (it’s luggage space is more useful from ironing out small intrusions); externally, it’s 1.4 inches longer, 0.8 inch wider, and 0.4 inch taller.

But don’t dis Leaf 2 as just some sort of overblown reskin. Nissan’s techs took the time to sprawl it out on their engineering operating table for a marathon multiple-organ transplant; the motor is all-new, spinning out a chunky 147 hp instead of 107 and 236 lb-ft of torque, up from 187 lb-ft. The electric power steering is more refined. Nissan is anxious to note that although companies are ballyhooing the births of their first EVs, Yokohama was there/did that back in 2010 and now has 270,000 customers, 2.1 billion miles of user experience, and programs such as 6,000 Leaf-to-home installations in Japan, where bidirectional charging/discharging coupled with solar roofs is slashing power bills. This ain’t Nissan’s first rodeo. It’s their second. And the show could be on the brink of going big time—the cost of battery storage has dropped from $300/kW-hr in 2015 to a projected $150 by 2020/23 and below $100 by 2025/26, according to a Morgan-Stanley analysis. (Nissan’s says they’re beating this.) And by the mid-2020s, battery-electric cars will be cheaper than internal combustion ones (in part due to the ramping complexity of internal combustion engines).

So.

Nissan should have anticipated the Bolt and base Model 3’s 238- and 225-mile ranges, right? Cue the drumroll. How big is the new Leaf’s battery pack (still underfloor and cooled with recirculated air, by the way)?

Forty kW-hrs for 150 miles of range (S and SV trims). Eyes narrowed. Chins rubbed. True, that doubles the original Leaf’s 73-mile capability (from 24 kW-hrs) and is a 40 percent jump from its current 107 miles (from 30 kW-hrs).

In a world without the Chevrolet Bolt, 150 miles would be a bold type headline. Now it’s a number in a math problem: How much less is it than 238? There’s going to be a lot of data thrown at you arguing that 150 miles more than matches most people’s real-world lifestyles most of the time. Let me ask you: How many gasoline-powered, five-passenger sedans could be sold with a 150-mile range?

Maybe anticipating criticism, the Leaf will offer an even-better-chemistry 60-kW-hr pack next year (SL trim), likely extending its leash to about 225 miles (a two-tier strategy akin to the Model 3’s estimated 50 and 75 kW-hrs). Thus, the Bolt’s singular battery size will be bookended by its competitors, with the Nissan’s upgraded pack matching it and the Tesla’s smaller pack offering Bolt-competitive range due to better sedan aerodynamics. (One of the reasons, by the way, why I think Tesla controversially went with a mass-produced sedan first: A crossover’s worse aero would require a bigger, more expensive battery—something that’ll be more affordable by the time the Model Y makes its debut.) If carrying over the Leaf 1’s platform has painted Nissan into a corner, it’s these subsequently locked in battery dimensions that require expensive chemistry to keep it apace with the Bolt and base Model 3. (A plus for us is that it offers an insight into the march of ever-rising energy density; those additional 16 kW-hrs crammed in there mean 67 percent greater energy density in seven years, or 9.5 percent per year.) Another questionable call: clinging to the CHAdeMO standard for fast charging. Maybe it’s stubbornness, maybe Nissan’s got a giant investment in this thing, but CHAdeMO is a dead plug walking in the U.S., and Nissan would do the EV cause a big, fat favor by finally adopting SAE (or everybody going to Tesla’s standard).

Time to drive. During their presentations, Nissan repeatedly emphasized twin messages: One, the Leaf is about making driving less stressful, and two, it’s about making driving fun. Not knowing what stress-free, fun driving exactly means, we headed out onto the test track to find out.

The new Leaf’s most potent driving relaxers?

ProPilot Assist is sort of a Tesla Autopilot light (at a fraction of the price). Relying on just a single forward-facing radar and a monocular video camera, ProPilot Assist provides single-lane, feet-off-the-pedals driving (what’s called adaptive cruise control). Alone, this is nothing unusual. Its dexterity in responding to slinkying traffic (including right down to 0 mph) is, though. Yet what elevates it to the same conversation as AutoPilot is how accurately it also threads down the center of the road. Like with other Level 2 semiautonomous systems, you need to keep your hands on the wheel, but here, there’s no need to give it periodic tugs. The electric power steering’s frequent and small corrections automatically sense their presence. I later tried the system in Detroit, driving for several miles on an expressway with my hands relaxed on the rim. No scoldings to put my hands back ever appeared (which, if persistently ignored, would ultimately result in the car stopping in its lane). Available later this year, ProPilot Assist is ordinary sensors doing an extraordinary job due to great software. Within two years, the system is expected to be even greater (perhaps with added sensors) by expanding to automated lane changing, and by 2020 it should have the skill to negotiate city scenarios, too. Next year it will joined by ProPilot Park, which highly automates parking, including selecting an empty spot not already bordered by a parked car (reading lane stripping). Remember this system as the tipping point when semiautonomous driving finally met the masses. (It’s had a 60 percent take rate in markets where it’s already available on other Nissan models.)

The Leaf’s other driving simplification is its one-pedal EV-driving feature—what they call e-Pedal. Tesla has long offered a similar heavy-regen effect when you release the accelerator. But completing a stop requires a brake pedal dab at the bitter end. In its transmission’s Low mode, the Bolt will come to a one-pedal stop without touching the friction brakes, but the deceleration rate isn’t always enough. E-Pedal leapfrogs both with a deceleration rate of 0.2 g’s (covering 90 percent of real-driver stopping, Nissan says) and comes to a complete stop (including automatic friction braking, if necessary). If that stop is on a hill, the Leaf’s motor will just hold it motionless (after pausing, you can lift your feet from both pedals; no need to hold the brake). The new Leaf could quickly become the most popular car in San Francisco.

E-Pedal and the availability of ProPilot Assist spotlight the intention to make the Leaf the tech standard-barer for the Nissan Intelligent Mobility Initiative, Yokohama’s campaign to destress driving.

The notable destresser, though, is the car’s lowered MSRP of $29,990 ($30,875 including destination)—a $690 drop. Standard with that is a noticeable upgrade in interior materials, and when you option a nav system, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are included, too. After incentives, this is a heck of a deal.

But what about that driving fun factor? I can answer about 65 percent of that question. Without a doubt, its extra power and torque renders the new Leaf satisfyingly quicker and more responsive. Test-track recordings are yet to come, but given the Bolt’s and Model 3’s better power (and power-to-weight ratios) it’ll probably lag in a three-EV drag race. Interior n from PerformanceJunk WP Feed 3 http://ift.tt/2f1rrrG via IFTTT