I should go to an overworked NHS doctor for a check-up occasionally but, as with the car and gas boiler, I wait for something to go wrong. This website does gets a check-up; it comes with the rations as us old soldiers say.
It is called a Lighthouse score and reminds me to digress. A United States aircraft carrier was on a collision course with another vessel, requesting it quite trenchantly to change course, and eliciting the response – “I’m a lighthouse, your call”. The story is spun out a bit and made me laugh when I first was told. As it happens it is an urban myth in circulation since 1995, a complete invention.
“A good Lighthouse performance score is 90 or higher, which lands in the “green” zone and indicates excellent speed and user experience. Scores between 50 and 89 need improvement, while those below 50 are considered poor. Aiming for 90+ is practical, though chasing a perfect 100 is rarely necessary.” (AI). So that’s all right.
While Amazon is experimenting with drones to make drops, literally, from drones near Darlington, Waymo has an all-electric Jaguar I-PACE autonomous car driving round in Kensington. This is to bring driverless robo-taxis to London, with a planned service launch expected later in 2026. It has a driver at the wheel for now, by law and in case something goes wrong. The Jag, easily identified by its extensive roof-mounted sensor arrays (lidar, cameras, and radar), is collecting data and mapping areas.
“LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing method that uses pulsed laser light to measure distances to objects and create precise, three-dimensional maps. By calculating the time it takes for light to reflect off surfaces and return to the sensor, it produces detailed “point clouds” used for mapping terrain, navigation, and autonomous systems.” Technology which moved forward rather slowly in the last century is galloping now.
Here’s one for the pub quiz. A double-landlocked country is surrounded by countries that are themselves landlocked. There are only two in the world: Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan.
With regard to Uzbekistan being landlocked, don’t you count the Caspian Sea?
“Countries bordering the Caspian Sea are considered landlocked. Although the Caspian is large and saline, it is an endorheic basin — an isolated body of water with no natural, direct connection to the world’s oceans.” Britannica.