Whaaaat?

 What not to do in a bear attack? Push your slower friends down in attempts of saving yourself, says the National Park Service

Seems like a perfectly good idea to me.

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.

Notices like this are easy to ignore

FBI Reports Increase in Online Shopping Scams

But now with so many stores closed (they are around here, at least) and so many more people shopping on line, it seems worth repeating here.

Be careful out there.

Before we all start running everything with electricity…

This morning: 2 million without power on the East Coast

…maybe we ought to think about, you know, getting some.

How many experts can disagree with Donald Trump on the head of a pin?

Experts predict…
Experts also see worrying trends emerging…
Without federal intervention, experts warn…
Experts say that the threat of major [election] fraud is virtually nonexistent.

Quite a few, it seems. But even more on the front page of any major newspaper (and TV show too, I suppose, if TV shows have front pages).

Just mentioning.

Looks now like the storm might track west of us

Sounds weirdly icky, doesn't it?

Wet Week Ahead: Trail of Moisture Moves Into South Florida Following Isaias

Of course, Florida.

They subscribe to Amazon Prime too?

Want to get away from home? Get rich, duh.

From Travel Pods to Private Jets, Affluent Travelers Are Eager to Make Vacations Happen

…one demographic — the affluent vacationer — appears to be more optimistic, making plans and holding onto reservations made pre-coronavirus. Industry experts see this resilience among luxury travelers as an encouraging sign a rebound might be just around the corner. How the wealthy are traveling, however, is evolving, too.

The devil's in the details, I guess.

Will the fun never end?

Pelosi says she has no confidence in White House coronavirus adviser Birx

“I think the president has been spreading disinformation about the virus and she is his appointee so, I don’t have confidence there, no,” Speaker Pelosi told ABC’s “This Week” when asked if she has confidence in Birx.

[Ed. Note: Having nearly run out of work to avoid at home, I'm playing around with how notes hereabout are formatted. Here, click on the headline for a link to the article (from Reuters) referenced, And stay on your toes, because this method will surely change.)