When I moved from New York to Los Angeles recently I hoped to turn that luck around in a city that is teeming with beautiful, intelligent, available women. I decided to give Tinder a try. After messages sent to aspiring models, actresses and comedians, agents' assistants and non-industry normals, I managed to land a first date. Most of our initial conversation was done over text. Talking and banter was easy, so we set a date for dinner in West Hollywood.

Though I haven't lived there for nearly three decades, I still consider myself a citizen of Los Angeles. That means, among other things, I drive. For me, a car is like a suit or a good exoskeleton. Road trips, going 100 miles per hour on a freeway, racing through Park La Brea--they're all sewn as tightly into my DNA as ice-skating in Central Park is for a New Yorker. Despite that heritage, I've been running an experiment on myself and my hometown. My last three trips there, I didn't rent a car; it's been nothing but taxis, Uber, and one time I borrowed my dad's. Not only did I move through space and time every bit as efficiently--more, if you believe that screwing around on Twitter and email is useful--I took new routes.

Consider Sarah Hyland a fan of good old-fashioned dating. "I think there's something special in forming a relationship with just talking," she told ET in a recent sit-down. "I think communication is really beautiful. The 25-year-old actress is happily dating former "Vampire Academy" co-star Dominic Sherwood in real life, but her character in Netflix's newest film, "XOXO," is another story. "My character, Krystal, goes through a lot," Hyland said on Sunday, chatting about the film at The London Hotel in West Hollywood, California. "She's really naive and very young, and believes in true love.

You see them at LAX airport in the second week of June every year, long snaking lines of them, sloping off long haul flights and waiting to pass through customs. They're mostly men, mostly in their 20s and 30s, dressed in jeans, T-shirts and trainers; they're in big groups, laughing and joking, enjoying the air of jubilant anticipation, but pretending not to. They're all here for the same thing; the same thing 50,000 other people are coming to Los Angeles for; the same thing I've now been doing for 10 years. E3 – the electronic entertainment expo – is effectively the Mecca of the mainstream video game industry. Held every year at the vast Los Angeles convention centre (except for a couple of ill-remembered jaunts to Atlanta, and two years when it was semi-cancelled), it is a trade-only event that everyone in the business has to attend at least once.

A few weeks ago, an anonymous website arrived with a countdown clock, one set to hit zero on May 31. The domain, Prophets of Rage, is named for a Public Enemy song, and arrived with a red-and-black militaristic logo. Prophets of Rage also started posting oblique Instagram photos and embeds of Public Enemy and Cypress Hill tracks. It did all this while referencing a hashtag: #takethepowerback. This wasn't a political movement or an armed insurrection.

The Expo Line, which opens today, will get you from downtown L.A. to Santa Monica in 50 minutes. That's the same as the old Red Car system took more than a half-century ago. Some experts say speeding up Metro's rail lines is crucial to the goal of getting more commuters out of their cars and using mass transit. San Francisco's police chief stepped down under pressure amid growing controversies over allegations of corruption and racially biased behavior on the part of the department. There was another fatal shooting that generated debate hours earlier.

Favourite ... Jon Snow was killed in the season finale of Game of Thrones. SIRI is great at finding directions -- maybe even to Westeros. It turns out your Apple gadget's artificial intelligence is a Game of Thrones super fan and will happily answer all your questions about the gory fantasy series. Your iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch will even come up with different responses if you ask the same question twice. If you ask, "Is Jon Snow dead?" in a reference to the show's season cliffhanger, Siri might reply: "Well, you know what they say to Death ... But why would tomorrow be any better? Puppy love ... Jon Snow finds Ghost as a pup in Game of Thrones. Or, as Scandal actress Kerry Washington showed on Twitter, Siri might respond with a reference to Snow's canine companion. I just hope someone is setting up doggie daycare for Ghost."

McKinsey analysts recently asked how traditional industries are now using machine learning to gather fresh business insights. With processing power so cheap, chewing through petabytes of data in order for machine learning to happen is no longer an activity restricted to science boffins or the cash-rich. No surprise then that the McKinsey list documents impressive examples in America. "This past spring, contenders for the US National Basketball Association championship relied on the analytics of Second Spectrum, a California machine-learning start-up. By digitizing the past few seasons' games, it has created predictive models that allow a coach to distinguish between, as CEO Rajiv Maheswaran puts it, "a bad shooter who takes good shots and a good shooter who takes bad shots"--and to adjust his decisions accordingly".

It's no longer the preserve of artificial-intelligence researchers and born-digital companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix. Machine learning is based on algorithms that can learn from data without relying on rules-based programming. It came into its own as a scientific discipline in the late 1990s as steady advances in digitization and cheap computing power enabled data scientists to stop building finished models and instead train computers to do so. The unmanageable volume and complexity of the big data that the world is now swimming in have increased the potential of machine learning--and the need for it. In 2007 Fei-Fei Li, the head of Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab, gave up trying to program computers to recognize objects and began labeling the millions of raw images that a child might encounter by age three and feeding them to computers. By being shown thousands and thousands of labeled data sets with instances of, say, a cat, the machine could shape its own rules for deciding whether a particular set of digital pixels was, in fact, a cat.1 1.Fei-Fei Li, "How we're teaching computers to understand pictures," TED, March 2015, ted.com.

The Pentagon, the world's largest user of drones, has posted a new policy on signs outside the mammoth five-sided building: No Drone Zone. The signs, complete with a red slash through an image of a quadcopter drone, reflect America's growing concern about the proliferation of the small, inexpensive remote-controlled devices and the risk they pose to safety, security and privacy. Federal law prohibits flying a drone anywhere in and around Washington, an area known as the National Capital Region. Other communities and institutions across the country are wrestling with the potential threat from more than 400,000 private and commercial drones now registered to operate in the skies. The pilot of a commercial jetliner said his plane nearly collided with a drone while approaching Los Angeles International Airport on Friday afternoon, sparking a search by L.A. police and sheriff's officials for the owner of the unmanned aircraft.