Brian below linked the etymology - but a ranger for Tolkien was pretty close to a park ranger: someone who wandered the woods keeping things safe.

Actually, I have a very vague memory of them teleporting a baby out of the mother during birth when there were complications, at the start of a TNG episode I think. Or did I make that up?

But doctor… I am the parent.

Seriously, half the stuff that we print is coloring pages.

They’re both quoting a (fictional?) author

I dunno, in this case the amateur happens to be able to absorb a whole lotta hits too - they can fail over and over while waiting for you to slip.

Maybe… More complicated limbs struck me as more prone to failure than rotors, and more expensive to maintain and replace

I’m remembering the old duelist’s adage, that the worst opponent to have is an amateur - because you have no idea what kind of idiocy they’ll try

So I’m not as caught up in the current state of robotics as I’d like… The article talks about these being used to patrol, do safety inspections, and the like.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper to replace each of these with a dozen quadrocopter drones?

To my knowledge, there is very little research at all - the programs that would look into whether this might protect children struggle to get funded, because it’s icky.

I’m in the Midwest, where we really have long had wild fluctuations in the weather day to day - think snowfall in the morning in early May followed by 60°F in the afternoon. I’m on the eastern half of Kansas, so there’s a lot of open land to the west for big weather patterns to bounce around, and not a lot of bodies of water to moderate things.

I’ve had better luck commenting on trends rather than days: “Loving all this nice weather the last few weeks!” “Yeah, but honestly, it’s kinda unnerving to have it in January…”