Best laid plans

Look, Up in the Sky! It’s a Can of Soup!

"Drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery."

Also, mostly everywhere.

A New York Times story this morning notes the now decade-long effort Amazon's made to realize their vision of drone delivery. It's not going well.

 Which raises an interesting point.

“Having ideas is easy,” said Rodney Brooks, a robotics entrepreneur and frequent critic of technology companies’ hype. “Turning them into reality is hard. Turning them into being deployed at scale is even harder.”

We've all heard about the tech billionaires but nobody has much interest in all the people with easy ideas and almost-as-easy venture funds who've gone bust. Must be quite a few by now.

People just don't fly any more

Birds in North America will be renamed to avoid any ‘harmful’ historical associations with people

Birds in North America will no longer be named after people, the American Ornithological Society announced Wednesday.… 

“There is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today,” the organization’s president, Colleen Handel, said in a statement. “Everyone who loves and cares about birds should be able to enjoy and study them freely.”

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” Santayana said. Those who erase it entirely will forget it ever happened.

On getting high in France

Stranded on the Eiffel Tower, a couple decide to wed, with an AP reporter there to tell the story

When trapped at the top of a 1,083-foot (330-meter) tower, how can anyone say “No?”

 

Without comment

 This article from today's web edition of the Washington Post.

Whatever you think of it, you should think about it.

(And you're seeing it more every day, everywhere.)

Enlightenment at the Wall Street Journal

This morning's Apple News includes a Wall Street Journal piece about the massive mobs of Halloween tourists that jam into Salem, MA, in October every year (it's here if you can get here), which story reports as follows: 

Cellphone data shows visitors coming from as far away as Ohio, Texas and California.

Imagine.

Aside from its moderately disturbing reference to monitoring cellphone data, this sentence reveals a significant step forward in New York's view of the hinterlands.

In the middle years of a previous Century when I lived in NYC there was (maybe still is) a huge Post Office on 14th Street that had (maybe still has) three big brass mail drops — you know, those slots you stuff envelopes into when you want to get them mailed — in its lobby. One was labeled Manhattan. The second was labeled Bronx. And the third was labeled Everywhere Else.

(OK, really the third was labeled Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Out of Town, and Foreign. Which means Everywhere Else, doesn't it?)

So "Ohio, Texas and California" really fleshes things out.

Good work, WSJ.

Now do Nebraska.

(And Happy Halloween, by the way.)

On horrors yet to come

The Rigid World of French Cheesemaking Meets Unbound Climate Change

“We are studying all the aspects of cheesability,” said Philippe Thorey, trailing the large herd through the field at a government-funded experimental goat farm west of the town of Montélimar.

Note to Philippe: Just keep that spready one coming. 

With all this talk…

 …about Bidenomics working wonderfully and the U.S. economy getting better every day…

A new Department of Agriculture report, released Wednesday, paints a sobering picture of post-pandemic hardship with “statistically significant” increases in food insecurity across multiple categories. Using a representative survey sample of roughly 32,000 American households the report said 12.8% (17 million households) reported occasional problems affording enough food in 2022 — up from 10.2% (13.5 million households) in 2021 and 10.5% (13.8 million households) in 2020.

– Associated Press