The machines

 Our biggest drugstore, CVS, has switched to self-scanning at the checkout counter. Quite suddenly, there are four machines in a forbidding row. Since there were never four checkout people—often there was only one—you might think this an improvement. It is not. Now the waiting line is 20 long, at least, all diffused with an air of dread.

The scanners are easy to operate, it turns out, but they do not gossip. They do not indulge in long, nuanced negotiations over the application of various coupons (and CVS is big on coupons, very big). When a person decides to run down Aisle 28 real quick to pick up one more thing, be right back, the robots do not wait gracefully. It may be a long time until things are back to normal at the CVS.

Speaking of waiting, there are new versions of the Apple operating systems on the way. Soon—which, right now, in Applespeak, means maybe in a couple of months. You may not care but me, it makes me nuts.

All three of them, the operating systems—MacOS, iOS, and iPadOS—are now available as public betas. This is something I would normally jump right into, since why wait soooo long for something you could have right now, risk be damned? But this year I've decided to hold off until the official release because it is, after all, 2020, and what could possibly go wrong?

And there's a story in The Verge with the self-explanatory title "Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates." Seems like it would be easier to just learn how to use Excel, doesn't it?

Yeah. Me too. But this does raise an interesting point, which is that if a group of people are engaged in exchanging data it's fairly important the data be always formatted in some uniform way, else problems will ensue. So all scientists, world-wide, who work with genetics should take the same Excel class.

Ahem.