
Turn-of-the-Century Pigeons Photographed Earth from Above - dthal
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-turn-of-the-century-pigeons-that-photographed-earth-from-above
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mikeash
A tangent, but: how long until “turn of the century” is assumed to mean the
time around the year 2000?

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matte_black
Around 2040s. We’re just recently making progress in getting people to stop
saying the current year as two thousand whatever.

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egeozcan
Maybe, saying "twenty" isn't enough of an improvement over "two-thousand" to
make it worth the complexity. Compare that to "one-thousand-nine-hundred" vs
"nineteen".

Also, years less than 10 years ago which are still referenced a lot then
require a switch to a different reading convention. This, I guess, wasn't a
big deal from 1999 to 2000 because, "twenty-oh-oh" was too awkward and, hey,
it's two-damn-thousand!

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skookumchuck
> only pigeons could have done before.

I find this peculiar. Hydrogen balloons were used for surveillance in the
Civil War, 40 years earlier. It would have been easy to attach a camera to a
small hydrogen balloon, with a clockwork device to puncture the balloon to
bring it down in a reasonable distance.

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fenwick67
> It would have been easy to attach a camera to a small hydrogen balloon, with
> a clockwork device to puncture the balloon to bring it down in a reasonable
> distance.

Maybe, but homing pigeons have a few advantages. They return to their home
"automatically" and they are not as conspicuous flying through the air.

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aaronbrethorst
I think the idea of owning a drone and being able to capture 4K 60FPS video of
the earth is cool and all, but I'd much rather strap a pinhole camera onto a
Phantom and recreate photographs like these. Hmm, now that I think about it...

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vaughanb
The thought that pigeons were high technology, too, is an interesting one.

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Robotbeat
Do they have to register with the FAA?

