Not often will an email make someone decide to embark on a cross-country trek. But that’s just what happened in 2013 when a friend emailed Brian and Charlotte Smith a story about huge concrete arrows pointing the way across the United States. “We knew nothing about the arrows,” says Charlotte. “So we started looking into what they were.”
She soon read that the arrows were part of a federal project to speed up communication across great distances. Transcontinental airmail service began in 1920, but even with this advancement over ground travel, service was slow. Pilots had no sophisticated instruments, so they couldn’t fly at night or in poor weather. The government built a path of 70-foot-long concrete arrows every few miles from coast to coast, each painted yellow and topped with a 51-foot steel tower that had a rotating beacon. Using the path, an airmail pilot needed only half the time to deliver a letter from New York to San Francisco. Eventually aircraft were equipped with navigation systems, making the paths obsolete. The towers were scrapped to supply metal for the war effort, leaving the arrows to bleach and crumble.
A month after finding out about the path, the Smiths headed out from their home in Sacramento, California, on a quest to find the remaining concrete arrows. Today they’ve amassed a database with 7,000 records documenting the markers’ locations, which they’ve used to mount road trips to 70 arrows. Their nine-year-old grandson recently taught them to operate a drone, which they’ve used to photograph 17 arrows, and they rave about how much it’s improved their project, since it shows exactly what the early airmail pilots saw. “We can see if it’s straight or angled, if it’s overgrown with brush, or if you can see the complete arrow,” Brian says.
“One in Nevada is in good condition,” says Charlotte. “The one 10 miles away is in real bad condition. The terrain is the same; the weather is the same. Apparently they knew how to make cement better in some areas or had a better product.”
Their quest is starting to attract attention—last August a Science Channel crew filmed them for a segment of “What on Earth?” that will air this spring. You can watch a dramatization of the couple “arrow hunting” and stumbling across one in the Nevada desert.
Here’s what Russia’s 2020 disinformation operations look like, according to two experts on social media and propaganda. By DARREN LINVILL & PATRICK WARREN Internet trolls don’t troll. Not the professionals at least. Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry. They don’t lack basic English language skills. They certainly aren’t “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as the president once put it. Your stereotypical trolls do exist on social media, but the amateurs aren’t a threat to Western democracy. Professional trolls, on the other hand, are the tip of the spear in the new digital, ideological battleground. To combat the threat they pose, we must first understand them — and take them seriously. MORE: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/russia-troll-2020-election-interference-twitter-916482/ P...
The Nightmare Scenario That Keeps Election Lawyers Up At Night -- And Could Hand Trump A Second Term (Photo: Photos: Getty Images) Americans will almost certainly go to bed on Nov. 3 without knowing who won the presidential election. Since millions of people will vote by mail, constraints on time and resources will slow ballot counting into potentially a weeks-long process. Voting patterns suggest it’s likely that President Donald Trump could end Election Day in the lead in certain key states, only to be overtaken by Democratic opponent Joe Biden when more votes are tallied. This could create a nightmare scenario during the three months stretching from Election Day to the Jan. 20 inauguration: a battle on the state and congressional level over who is the legitimate winner. This could include Congress reconvening on Jan. 6, presided over by Vice President Mike Pence , with no consensus over its potential role in choosing the next president. This...
It's like this folks: sometimes your mind goes blank. Happens more than usual with me of course. Take this forum for instance. I wanted to post something today and couldn't think of a topic. At least not a non-sexual one and we know sexual ones lately have been frowned upon. Then along comes one of our regulars and complains about something. Well, they might not say it was a complaint, just an observation, but it was a complaint. A minor one. It has something to do about being able to make something out of nothing. Sort of like me this morning, how to make a thread out of an empty head? But they (notice I am using the correct pronoun, not saying he or she), by what they said got me thinking. What I thought was: Not sure if that is the actual saying, if I remember correctly, I remember the saying going something like this: Umm, no, I don't think the saying I am thinking of goes that way either, maybe ONE of you good folks can remind me how the saying goes. Either way, when...
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