A drone flies over a railroad track during a trial in Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture, on Tuesday. It was the first drone flight above a railroad track out of the sight of an operator in an inhabited area in the country. The test was conducted jointly with Deloitte Tohmatsu. Sagawa Express and East Japan Railway cooperated with the test. The drone flew in an area of 3.5 kilometers from east to west by 2.4 kilometers from north to south.

The scene was a stretch of railroad tracks in Lincoln Heights on Saturday: A blizzard of torn plastic wrappers, cardboard boxes and paper packaging attesting to a wave of rail car thievery that officials say has been on the rise in recent months. Several scavengers picked through the debris, hoping to find electronics, clothes or whatever valuables thieves left behind. "Everything comes on the train -- cellphones, Louis Vuitton purses, designer clothes, toys, lawnmowers, power equipment, power tools," said a 37-year-old man who declined to give his name. He said he comes to the tracks regularly and once found a Louis Vuitton purse and a robotic arm worth five figures: "We find things here and there, make some money off of it." Thieves are pilfering railroad cars in a crime that harks back to the days of horseback-riding bandits, but is fueled by a host of modern realities, including the rise of e-commerce and Southern California's role as a hub for the movement of goods.

Do you know where you are? I don't mean that you perhaps know that you are at a particular street address or sitting in your favorite chair at home, but instead, I am referring to the aspect that you spatially know where you are. Via your senses and your mind, you might realize that you are ten feet away from a nearby TV and that you are five feet away from the nearest window. As you sit inside a room, your mind has an abstract model that keeps track of where you are and where other nearby objects reside. On top of that realization, your mind also knows that the room is within a building, the building is within a neighborhood of buildings, and the neighborhood is within a city, which is within a county, and within a state, and within a country, etc. Imagine using something like a mental version of Google Earth and having your mind be able to zoom in and zoom outward, quickly imagining your position from a faraway location and at the same time being able to get close-in and know exactly where your feet are placed and your immediate and within reach surroundings.

According to compiled statistics, every 90 minutes in the United States a vehicle and a train collide. Train-vehicle crashes are a lot more common than most people assume they are. Plus, sadly, injuries and deaths are the likely result of cars and trains opting to ram into each other. There are about 500 deaths each year in the United States due to failures to safety navigate a railroad crossing, amounting to about 20,000 deaths over the last forty years. Remember this sage advice that was drummed into our heads when first learning to drive: Stop, look, and listen.

Railroad crossings are dangerous for human drivers and for self-driving cars. That's the customary sage advice for car drivers that come upon a railroad crossing. Do you abide by that simple rules-of-the-road driving principle? In fact, you probably don't put much thought these days toward railroad crossings at all and are apt to make just a cursory glance before you zip across those bothersome railroad tracks that seem to mar the roadway ahead of you. Well, don't be quite so quick to treat railroad crossings with such little respect.

One of my part-time jobs is as an internet investigator. When crazy things happen, people want to know more about that crazy thing. In this case, the crazy thing is a Telsa driving super fast over a railroad crossing. It's going so fast that the car gets airborne before eventually losing control. Fortunately, it doesn't seem like anyone was seriously injured, and it is also fortunate that a security camera caught this motion on video. Normally when I need to find the velocity of an object in a video, I just use my typical video analysis techniques in which I mark the position of the object in each frame.

Recently, the "trolley problem," a decades-old thought experiment in moral philosophy, has been enjoying a second career of sorts, appearing in nightmare visions of a future in which cars make life-and-death decisions for us. Among many driverless car experts, however, talk of trolleys is très gauche. They call the trolley problem sensationalist and irrelevant. But this attitude is unfortunate. Thanks to the arrival of autonomous vehicles, the trolley problem will be answered--that much is unavoidable.