Hike Ohio: Blendon Woods Metro Park

Yesterday was a cool, overcast morning in Columbus–another prime day for a romp in the Ohio woods. For our weekend hike, we decided to stay a bit closer to home, and took a short drive over to Blendon Woods Metro Park. The park is a popular one and very conveniently located in the northeast corner of Franklin County, just outside of I-270, the highway than encircles Columbus.

Blendon Woods is a big park–653 acres in all–with a number of trails, family and picnic areas, and the Walden Waterfowl Refuge, a 118-acre preserve in one corner of the park. We began our day with the trail to Thoreau Lake, which is part of the Walden Refuge. When you reach the lake, the trail ends in two viewing stations where you can watch the birds and waterfowl unobtrusively. We didn’t see any ducks or other waterfowl, but we did catch a good look at a colorful cardinal, shown above, who was munching on some seeds just over the squirrel guard in a bird house next to the viewing station.

The trail to the Walden Refuge is a paved trail, and there were a number of families and birders out for a walk in the cool air. The birders are easy to recognize, because they’ve all got their binoculars in hand, with cords looped around their necks, ready to focus in whenever they hear a bird call. It must have been good viewing conditions, with some trees largely stripped of leaves while others are still displaying their colors. The non-birders among us could just enjoy the remaining fall foliage.

The lake trail is a short one, so after our return from the Walden Waterfowl Refuge we crossed the parking lot and headed onto the Sugarbush Trail, a natural trail that winds through the woods and some marshy areas for two miles. The trail was matted with fallen leaves, and you had to watch your step to make sure that you didn’t get snagged by a stray tree root, but the woods were lovely, with lots of brilliant gold and yellow in the background to frame the trees in the foreground.

The Sugarbush Trail wasn’t quite as crowded as the lake trail, but we did see a few other walkers along the way. The trail is mostly level, with only a few easy hills. The woods were quiet and cool as we strolled along, and I once again thought I should learn more about how to distinguish between the different kinds of trees you typically find in the Ohio woods. I can identify a pine tree, a buckeye nut, and a maple leaf–thanks largely to seeing the maple leaf on the national flag of our neighbors to the north–but that’s about it. Otherwise, I can’t tell a walnut from a sycamore from an elm, and I suppose it’s about time I learned.

At one point on the Sugarbush Trail, the woods take a break, and there is a meadow area with a sprawling field of wildflowers. The plants had grown to about shoulder height, and if you stood on tiptoe you could just look over the plants to get the full effect of the field and a better sense of the size of the park. As we finished our hike, a few patches of blue showed up on the far horizon. With our appetites stimulated by the cool weather and the walking, it was time to leave Blendon Woods behind and head home to make some scrambled eggs, sausage, and strawberries for our Sunday brunch.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween, folks! To put you into that special, glowing jack o’ lantern mood, here’s a blast from the Halloween past, and a photo of our pumpkin-carving efforts in 2011.

Football Season Is Political Ad Season

Yesterday, when we watched the Buckeyes game with Penn State at JT’s Pizza and Pub, the vast majority of the TV commercials during the game were for political candidates. The campaign strategists know that, in Ohio, virtually everyone drops everything to watch the Buckeyes on the gridiron, so it is prime time to deliver a message to a captive, very focused, every sense on heightened alert audience. It undoubtedly costs the campaigns a boatload to buy the ad slots, but they figure it is worth it–which is why Buckeye fans were seeing so many political ads rather than the standard in-game car, tire, or “remember to ask your doctor about Altavlid” commercials.

Fortunately, they had the sound off at JT’s, and we couldn’t have heard the voice over of the commercials in any event, over the din of football analysis and “OH-IO” chants. But you don’t really need to have the sound on to follow the political ads. Basically, they fall into two categories: the scary ads and the “humanize the candidate” ads. And it’s immediately clear which category a political commercial falls into, because every ad in either category shares obvious common characteristics. In fact, the touchstones are so commonplace that both Democrats and Republicans use them, and if you run a Google search you’ll find that the British and Canadian political wizards use the same techniques, as the Canadian ad above demonstrates.

Scary ads: Dark, grainy, blurry footage, with quick cuts from one troubling scene to another. Opposing candidate depicted in unflattering poses in slow motion or with some kind of color filter to give him or her a more devilish, unsettling appearance. Children in peril or worried people sitting around their kitchen tables. Messages in large type that appear on the screen like shotgun blasts that usually include the words “we can’t afford.”

Humanize the candidate ads: Candidate is shown in a bulky, woolen, Mr. Rogers-type sweater, carrying a cup of coffee and sitting on the family sofa with their spouse. Candidate makes breakfast or kicks a soccer ball or throws a football with kids. Lots of warm hues and sunshine. Candidate is shown gesturing forcefully to smiling, nodding blue-collar workers, who are deeply absorbed in everything the candidate is saying.

I’ll be glad when November 8 finally arrives and we can go back to watching the Buckeyes, the tire ads, and those helpful spots about the latest miracle drug.

The Buckeyes And The Bars

Today we joined a loyal slice of Buckeye Nation at JT’s Pizza and Pub to watch the Buckeyes come back strong in the fourth quarter to top Penn State in Happy Valley. We cheered lustily, did “OH-IO” chants, marveled at the talent of Marvin Harrison, Jr., and tried to learn how to correctly pronounce the last name of the newest Buckeye hero, J.T. Tuimoloau. (It’s easier to just call him “number 44.”) it was a great game, a great win, and a lot of fun watching the game with a raucous crowd.

Bar owners in Columbus love the football season because they know people will turn out to root for the Bucks, eat, and down a few beers. Today’s noon start isn’t the preferred time slot, however. Pubs like the 3:30 slot best because people come early, enjoy the game, and then roll right into the slate of night games. When the Buckeyes play at noon, however, the crowd tends to head out after the game rather than making a full day of football and feeling guilty about it. Today, a full bar had emptied out about a half hour after the game ended and excited debriefing had occurred.

No worries, though—I’m betting another shift of Buckeye fans will fill the seats tonight, to see if Michigan State can knock Michigan out of the ranks of the unbeaten.

Fake Smiles And True Feelings

People have thought about fake smiles for a long time–probably for about as long as human beings have walked upright and the act of smiling became associated with happiness. They are curious about how to distinguish a fake smile from a real one, and why people fake smiles in the first place. Researchers have even examined whether working in a job where you are supposed to give a cheery smile to even unpleasant customers for your entire shift is likely to make you drink more at the end of the work day. (Spoiler: it looks like it does.)

But what about fake smiles outside the workplace, where you don’t have to give that grimace grin for eight hours while interacting with jerky customers? Does forcing a smile make you feel happier? This question had been the subject of scientific debate for so long that even Charles Darwin weighed in on the topic. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin argued: “Even the simulation of an emotion tends to arouse it in our minds–but different studies over the years have produced different results.

Recently researchers decided to test the hypothesis, again, with a study of 3,800 people from 19 countries who were asked to respond to different prompts with a smile or a neutral expression, and then rate their happiness. The prompts were disguised, and mixed in with other facial expression requirements and even math problems, so participants presumably didn’t know that they were involved in testing whether a fake smile actually produced a happier perspective. The results suggest that faking a smile does, in fact, tend to make the fake smiler feel incrementally happier, at least in the short term.

So old Chuck Darwin apparently is right again, and forcing a grin will cause momentary changes in attitude–and at least so long as that keeping that fake smile on your face isn’t one of the requirements for your job at the neighborhood coffee shop.

Not The Next Big Thing

Economic theory teaches that stock prices usually are brutally honest. When investors are deciding whether to put money into a company or venture, social niceties typically go out the window, and investors–particularly the professional money managers–take a hard look at the company’s products and business plan and make an unvarnished judgment about whether they will succeed or fail. If the product line looks like a winner, buy decisions will follow; if products and sales are disappointing, the sell sign flashes.

The stock market’s honest judgment is saying something is wrong at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp that is trying to introduce us to the “metaverse”–the virtual world pictured above. And the consequences have indeed been brutal: Meta closed at $323 a share on February 2, 2022 and $97.94 yesterday. Yesterday alone, the stock price fell $31.88 a share, losing 24.56 percent of its value, and the stock information page linked above says Meta’s “technicals” put the stock down into the “strong sell” category. In short, if you’re a shareholder in Meta, you’ve had a bad year, and apparently some investors have decided enough is enough.

Why has this happened? Some observers believe that Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta kingpin whose metaverse avatar is seen above, has unwisely focused all of the company’s attention on the metaverse, rather than protecting and nurturing the company’s core assets, like Facebook, which are facing their own problems. And the effort to summon the future in the form of the metaverse hasn’t gone well. So far, at least, people haven’t jumped at the chance to don virtual reality headsets, create an avatar of themselves, and interact with other people in interactive virtual spaces. The fact that the headsets are expensive–Zuckerberg recently introduced a new headset that goes for $1,500 a pop–and the virtual reality graphics don’t look all that compelling isn’t helping. One of the recent developments announced by the company, that metaverse characters will now have legs, sounds like a funny parody of a bad TV commercial. “Metaverse characters–now with legs!”

Meta’s struggles reveal a basic truth about technology companies: sometimes the tech product is a huge hit, but many times it isn’t. For every smartphone or personal computer that are wild successes, there are other devices or concepts that crash and burn. And it looks like the metaverse that Meta had invested billions in developing might just fall into the latter category. A recent article in Forbes expressed the point this way: “The entire problem with Mark Zuckerberg’s fascination with the metaverse is that he’s trying to force a sci-fi reality to happen long before the rest of the society wants or needs it to actually exist.” 

Sports Gambling, Everywhere

Recently I was watching a baseball playoff broadcast–it might have been a pregame show, or it might have been one of the games themselves–when a little box flashed up on the screen with some of the bets you could place on the game. It wasn’t just who would win, either. Instead, you could bet on the final score, the spread, who would score first, and whether a particular player would hit a home run during the game. Time to pick up the phone and call your bookie, fans!

It’s not just baseball, of course, You can’t watch a pro football game without seeing ads for DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, or Caesars Sportsbook. The NFL broadcasts not only feature commercials telling viewers that they still have a chance to bet, the pregame shows include segments where specific bets are suggested. In the commercials, the wagerers always seem to win (although, in one particular point-of-view ad that is broadcast regularly, the bettor eats some pretty crappy-looking pizza while a player improbably scores to make his bet pay off, so maybe there’s an implicit gambling-isn’t-so-great message there).

The sports world is so associated with gambling these days that organizations like NASCAR have joined forces with the American Gaming Association, as shown in the picture above, to encourage fans to bet responsibly and “know when to pit.” Such ads seem like a way to have your cake and eat it, too: the sport is saying that some betting is just fine and perfectly natural and understandable, but can point to their ads as encouraging moderation rather than betting your bottom dollar. The problem, however, is that gambling addicts don’t know when to stop. They lose, and lose, and always believe that the next bet is a sure fire way to turn things around and get them back on the plus side.

In the last few years, gambling on sports has emerged from the shadows and come out into the daylight, and moved well beyond office college football or NCAA tournament pools. Sports betting is now legal in many states, and reports indicate that the amount of gambling skyrocketed during the COVID pandemic–with unfortunate consequences for some people who lost their shirts. It’s clearly a big-money business–which makes you wonder when the next sports betting scandal, with games being fixed and players tanking, might happen. Could another Black Sox scandal be just around the corner?

The Pandemic And The Schoolchildren

Now that the COVID-19 pandemic is over–or, perhaps more accurately, now that we’ve accepted that coronavirus will apparently always be with us, and are learning to live with it without turning the world upside down–we’re starting to get a better sense of the true impact of the disease and the shutdown orders issued in response to it. One area of particular interest for many people has been how schoolchildren were affected by lengthy school closures and reliance on remote learning. Now the test scores are starting to come in, and unfortunately the news is alarming

The New York Times recently published an article on the devastating results reported by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tests fourth graders and eighth graders in reading and math. The NAEP is federally administered and was given to 450,000 fourth and eighth graders in more than 10,000 schools between January and March. The results show that math scores fell sharply among both classes of schoolkids, in virtually every state in the country, and reading scores also declined in more than half of the states. (Ohio kids did slightly better than the national average, according to a chart compiled by the Times.)

Only 26 percent of the eighth graders tested nationally were rated proficient in math, down from 34 percent in 2019, and less than one in every three eighth graders tested out as proficient in reading. Notably, “proficient” is not an especially lofty standard–it simply means that “students have demonstrated competency and are on track for future success.” Basic math and reading skills are prerequisites for most of the jobs that are available in the modern economy. If only 30 percent of eighth graders are competent at reading, and fewer than that understand basic math, what lies in their future?

The results show that the pandemic seriously hurt the educational development of our kids. The NAEP scores also suggest that remote learning simply is no substitute for the in-classroom experience, where students are drilled and taught directly by a teacher and there is the opportunity for one-on-one interaction that can spur greater student effort. As a society, we’ll have to make a special effort to help the kids whose learning curves have been so adversely affected, but we also need to make sure that authorities do some learning, too. One lesson is that we need to think very carefully about issuing prolonged school shutdown orders in the future, because the consequences obviously can be harmful to the students, their comprehension of the basics, and their futures.

Backfire Protests

The primary objective of protests is to call attention to your cause–and to do so in a way that makes people sympathetic to your position. The lunch counter sit-ins and freedom marches of the ’50s and ’60s to protest racism and segregation in the American South, in which peaceful protesters were attacked and manhandled by bigoted authorities and police dogs, were examples of protests that successfully turned public opinion.

The recent protests in which climate activists hurl food at famous paintings and then glue their hands to walls, in contrast, seem ill-suited to achieving that basic goal.

Monet’s magnificent Les Meules, shown above, is the latest painting to endure the indignity of being the target of thrown food, in the form of mashed potatoes. The mashed spuds were tossed by members of “Last Generation,” a group that wants the German government to stop using fossil fuels. The incident followed a similar escapade by members of “Just Stop Oil,” who splattered tomato soup on one of Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflower paintings in the National Gallery in London. In both instances, the food tossers then glued their hands to the walls holding the paintings. Fortunately, both the Monet and the Van Gogh were covered by glass, so no permanent damage was done.

There’s no doubt that the protests got media attention, and some people on the political spectrum have dutifully argued that the food-throwing protesters are “totally justified” in their actions due to concerns about climate change. I suspect, however, that a far larger number of people object to converting beautiful works of art into props for acts of political theater and turning quiet art museums into turbulent protest zones. It just seems wrong to throw things at artwork–especially when the paintings have nothing to do with the fossil fuels or climate change that are supposed to be the whole point of the protest. Committing assaults on paintings of flowers and haystacks doesn’t exactly drive home a point about global warming.

Gluing your hands to walls and floors doesn’t make much sense, either. Either the palms of the protesters are going to be painfully de-skinned when police arrive, or they are going to risk being left glued down in the dark overnight, without access to food, water, or the facilities–an unhappy fate which happened to protestors who glued themselves to the floor of a Volkswagen facility recently. Either way, it doesn’t exactly send a message that the protestors have intelligently thought through the potential consequences of their actions.

We’ll see whether the food-tossing, hand-gluing approach to protesting causes a shift in public opinion in a way that favors the protesters cause–or whether it has the opposite effect. People in Europe, and elsewhere, might not be receptive to the intended message as they approach a winter in which there are significant concerns that people won’t have enough fuel to heat their homes.

Hike Ohio: Blackhand Gorge State Nature Preserve

Yesterday was another perfect day for hiking in central Ohio. It was sunny and clear, with temperatures starting in the 50s and ending up in the 70s. We decided to drive east, to Heath, Ohio, to the Blackhand Gorge State Nature Preserve. Our car’s GPS took us on a circuitous route to get there, even directing us down some gravel-topped one-lane country roads, but it was such a beautiful day, and the rolling countryside was so pretty, we really didn’t mind. By the time we reached the preserve, however, we were ready to get out and stretch our legs as we followed a couple with a youngster down the main trail.

Blackhand Gorge features miles of different trails, some of which are paved and some of which are natural. We turned off the main, paved trail to take the first natural trail we saw, which was the Buttonbush Swamp trail. The trail meanders for more than a mile and gives you glimpses of swamps, like the one shown above, natural wetlands, and small streams, like the one seen below. The sun was so bright that the countryside seemed to be stippled with gold in the sunshine as we hiked through the woods among the towering trees.

The Buttonbush Swamp trail isn’t a difficult trail and is well marked. It offers the opportunity for a pleasant, and quiet, walk through the woods on a meandering journey. In some spots, there are elevation changes where two stout walking sticks or grabbing a handhold is a good idea. Eventually the trail joins with the Quarry Rim trail, leads upward, and presents you with a view of an old quarry and pools of water through the trees. Yesterday, the bright sun through the trees left the ground, water, and cliffside striped with black shadows.

After you wind around the rim of the quarry and back down to ground level, you can go off the main trail and follow an ancillary trial down to the shore of the pool of water that has collected in the quarry bottom. It’s a bit of a scramble down and back up again, but the view at the bottom is well worth it. Yesterday morning there wasn’t a breath of wind, and the water below the quarry cliff, framed by the surrounding trees, reflected the colorful scene like a mirror. This view, alone, made the trip worthwhile–but there was more to come.

Shortly after the spectacular quarry view, the Buttonbush Swamp trail rejoined the main trail. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources website indicated that parts of the paved trail ahead were closed, so we decided to turn back and try to get a good look at the Licking River. The trail almost immediately took us straight through the Black Hand sandstone formation, which towered above each side of the trail. It was dark and cool in the shadows as we walked through the crack between the two sandstone cliffs.

The sandstone walls are dark and textured with chips and indentions, and the almost black color made for a striking contrast with the colorful tree leaves far overhead. Fortunately for us, the Ohio countryside is still at close to peak fall colors, and many of the leaves hadn’t yet been knocked off the trees by wind or rain. The yellows, reds, and oranges stood our sharply in the bright sunshine above as we strolled through the shadows below.

The main trail at Blackhand Gorge follows the Licking River for a while, with the river to one side and stone and wetlands to the other. There are sandstone formations throughout the area and wetlands in between, like a silent and still black pool, shown below, that is wedged in a crevice between smaller sandstone mounds, just off the main trail.

The main trail gives you many opportunities to appreciate the immensity of the sandstone formations, which were cut by the Licking River long ago. The photo below provides a sense of the scale of the sandstone ledges along the trail, with the Licking River, screened by trees, just off the left side of the frame.

There are several opportunities to follow ancillary trails off the main trail and get down to the banks of the Licking River. Some portions of the river cut right through the sandstone, while others present a more pastoral scene. According to the ODNR website, this portion of the Licking River was part of the Ohio-Erie Canal (and, unfortunately, during construction of the canal in 1828 a black hand petroglyph that gave this area its name was destroyed). Yesterday the river, too, was like glass, without a riffle to be seen.

The area around the river also presented some interesting bonatical signts. Ohio’s State Nature Preserves are intended to simply maintain the natural beauty of the areas, without interference. One section of the river was bordered by a marshy field of bright green reeds, seen below.

As we headed back along the main trail, the sun’s rays made the woodlands to each side glimmer and glow, and the thermometer moved upward toward 70. It was a brilliant fall day at one of the more spectacular settings you will find in the Buckeye State. We’ve taken a number of really wonderful hikes in Ohio, but the Blackhand Gorge State Nature Preserve might just have been our favorite.

The Random Restaurant Tour — XLVIII

It’s autumn, folks — a beautiful and wonderful time of year in central Ohio (especially when compared to, say, winter). There are many great restaurants in the Columbus area where you might celebrate this season, and we decided to head to one of the finest — Veritas — to enjoy its autumn tastings menu. That’s because some of the best things about fall are the foods and flavors that are available to be enjoyed this time of year.

Veritas is, in a word, fabulous. It’s the kind of restaurant that you like to take out-of-towners to, because you know they will leave with a positive impression of our city and its culinary attributes. The food at Veritas is reliably spectacular, filled with interesting flavor and textural combinations, and a treat for the eyes, besides. Add in a welcoming ambiance, and nice attention to every little detail that can move a meal from great to greater, and you’ve got a restaurant that can do autumn, or any season, proud.

The Veritas autumn menu is five courses. You start with a mandatory broccoli and cheddar cheese tart, then make your choices from options for the other courses. Starting with a broccoli dish was a challenge for me, because in my view it is one of the most unholy, vile, unpleasant smelling and foul tasting vegetables in the land of greenery. Any yet, the wizards in the Veritas kitchen found a way to minimize the broccoli flavor and cushion it delectably in a flaky crust and a mound of cheddary scrumptiousness. When a culinary genius can turn a food you loathe into something that you would gladly eat again, it leaves you ready for more.

For the next course I went for the carrot, yogurt, and curry leaf soup, which thick, and rich, and creamy, and introduced me to multi-colored carrots that I had not seen before. Let’s just way that these were not Bugs Bunny’s kind of carrots. And speaking of hares, the follow-up dish was a rabbit, paprika, and creme fraiche combination that featured some delectable dumplings and perfectly cooked, supremely tender rabbit. That triumph was followed by the filet medallions shown above, framed with multiple kinds of potatoes, and a root beer infused sauce that I would have gladly eaten straight with a spoon–except it went incredibly well with the spot-on medium rare meat. The different kinds of potatoes were wonderful, too.

We ended our fall feast with the almond, banana, and sourdough concoction seen below, which is the best dessert I’ve had in a long, long time. What’s that, you say? Bananas aren’t an autumnal dish? To that I say you’re wrong, because any Midwesterner knows that the fall season is full of surprises, Just as the weather can suddenly turn cold, or warm, or blustery with rain, so can a banana creation suddenly grace a fine meal.

The autumn menu at Veritas was so good that I want to go back again, to try some of the dishes I didn’t choose this time around. If the chef can make broccoli an enjoyable treat, even cauliflower is worth a try. in fact, the seasonal tasting menu almost makes me look forward to what winter might bring.

Literally Robbing Themselves Blind

War often exposes otherwise unknown things about one of the combatants. That has been the case in Russia, where the invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing fighting have exposed a huge problem with outright theft of the supplies that were supposed to be used to clothe and equip Russian soldiers. The theft problem is so acute that the Russian men who have recently been conscripted to fight have to buy their own uniforms, boots, and other gear–and what they are given by Russian authorities is often obsolete. “The army has nothing,” one of the conscripts said in a recorded call.

The BBC has an interesting story about the official records concerning supplies stolen from the Russian army and the staggering scale of the thievery. One member of the Russian Duma complained that 1.5 million sets of soldier kit, consisting of basic items like uniform pants, shirts, and flak jackets, summer and winter boots, helmets, and other essentials, have vanished even though, for years, Russia has been allocating huge sums toward its military supply budget. One popular item for theft is the night-vision goggles that soldiers obviously need for operations under cover of darkness–which means the Russians are literally stealing themselves blind.

The BBC report suggests that most of the stealing is being done by members of the Russian army, so much so that theft from military stores seemingly is a way of life. Commissary officers are adept at pilfering goods, creating fake stock lists, invoices, or reports to cover their tracks, and writing off perfectly good supplies as damaged by mold or poor storage conditions. Russian army records of the thieves whose schemes have been discovered reveal that the larceny ranges from spur-of-the-moment decisions to boost available items to systematic schemes to take goods in such quantities that trucks are needed. In addition to clothing and protective equipment, the light-fingered Russians are filching food and petrol–which may be why so many Russian vehicles in the Ukraine seem to be running out of gas.

The prevalence and vast scale of the crime makes it likely that the official records of theft barely scratch the surface of what has really happened in Russian supply depots. And the extent of the theft likely would not have been detected but for Vladimir Putin’s ill-conceived decision to invade Ukraine, which revealed that the cupboard was bare when it was supposed to be fully stocked. You have to think that the invasion of Ukraine not only was opposed by the civilized world outside of Russia, but also by the supply officers and soldiers in the Russian army whose criminal schemes suddenly were at risk of exposure. Supply officers who have been stealing for years make for good pacifists.

The DART Hits The Bullseye (II)

When we last checked in on the NASA Double Asteroid Rendezvous Test (“DART”) probe, the golf cart-sized spacecraft had successfully smashed into Dimorphos, the asteroid circling its big brother Didymos, What wasn’t clear at that point was whether the successful navigation of the DART into Dimorphos had changed the trajectory of the asteroid.

Now we know: the DART not only hit the bullseye, it successfully changed the trajectory of the asteroid and exceeded expectations in doing so. Mission planners hoped that the DART would be able to change the length of time it takes Dimorphos to circle Didymos by 10 minutes, and tests reveal that the collision with the DART changed the orbit by 32 minutes.

The success of the DART is a big moment in developing a planetary defense to a potentially catastrophic asteroid strike. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson observed: “This mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us. NASA has proven we are serious as a defender of the planet. This is a watershed moment for planetary defense and all of humanity, demonstrating commitment from NASA’s exceptional team and partners from around the world.”

Thanks to the DART, we are no longer at the mercy of the asteroids and meteors hurtling around our solar system. It’s not only cool, it’s great news for the future of homo sapiens and the other species that share planet Earth with us.

Robot Dog Delivery, At Your Service

The world is moving with increasing speed toward greater integration of robots into our daily lives, and we’d better begin to prepare ourselves. Next year, in Austin, Texas, a fleet of robot dogs, like the one pictured above, will begin making deliveries on the University of Texas campus. The robots, built by Boston Dynamics and Unitree, will deliver items to faculty, staff, and students pursuant to a network accessible via a smartphone app. Those who frequent the UT campus will have to get used to the sight of the robot dogs speeding down sidewalks and leaping up stairways as they make their appointed delivery rounds.

The robot dogs not only will make deliveries, they will be part of a five-year research program that will examine human-robot interpersonal (or, perhaps, intertechnological) dynamics. The idea is to study, and then modify, the behavior of the robots “to determine how to operate safe and useful networks of robots that are meant to adjust their behavior to integrate with human populations.” The project leader for the study states: “In addition to programming robots to perform a realistic task such as delivering supplies, we will be able to gather observations to help develop standards for safety, communication, and behavior to allow these future systems to be useful and safe in our community.”

It’s not clear exactly what the robot dogs will be delivering and under what circumstances, which I think will make a big difference in assessing the human-robot interactions. If the dogs will be making pizza and beer runs to dorms and off-campus apartments, I predict that students who have imbibed in a few adult beverages and perhaps some mood-altering substances will get a bit of a shock when they open the door and find a bright yellow robot dog that moves like the herky-jerky devil dogs on Ghostbusters bringing their pizza with everything and six-pack of Lone Star.

I also predict that the people who are part of the “keep Austin weird” movement will really like this development.

The Random Restaurant Tour — XLVII

I like trying new places, even if it means venturing out of the downtown/German Village/Short North footprint. On Wednesday night we hitched a ride with the adventurous Dr. Science and the G.V. Jogger over to the Near East Side. Our destination was the East Market, a nifty renovated trolley car barn that dates back to the era when trolley cars rattled down many Columbus streets, carting Columbusites hither and yon.

When we entered the main East Market building, a sign announced that we were in the “Historic Trolley District,” because every part of Columbus apparently has to be part of some designated district or another. The trolley cars were long gone, leaving plenty of space for shops, carry-out restaurants, a bar, and a butcher’s emporium with a smiling pig head in the window. The pig head looked happy to be there, and so were we.

We wandered around, checking out the options. There were lots of choices, including pizza, Cajun, burgers, chicken sandwiches, and Greek. We opted for a place called Koso that served Korean fare. I went for the bulgogi beef bowl, a hearty and piping hot serving of rice, beef, onions, and subtle seasonings. We took our food upstairs and ate among the old timber rafters in a nice seating area. Armed with chopsticks, I nimbly shoveled down all of my bulgogi bowl, picking up every last grain of rice and morsel of meat.

I enjoyed my first official visit to the Historic Trolley District. I’m planning on coming back and trying some of the other food options. I feel like the slyly grinning pig head would want that.