🛬 Good morning, RVA: A bucket of updates, medical drone deliveries, and a playlist

Good morning, RVA! It’s 75 °F, and we’re still under a dang heat advisory until 8:00 PM. Today you should expect highs in the mid 90s this afternoon but temperatures will feel about 10 or 15 degrees warmer. Be careful if you’ve gotta spend time outside.

Water cooler

Police are reporting a murder that occurred early Sunday morning on the 1900 block of Raven Street. Officers arrived at 3:47 AM and found Javonte Mangum, 21, fatally shot.

The most recent edition of Superintendent Kamras’s email is out and opens with “One of the best parts of being National Teacher of the Year is that you get to attend Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama.” Jealous! In more serious school news, the Superintendent reflects on the public tension over possibly pairing Fox and Cary Elementary schools in this round of rezoning and ends up where you’d expect: The draft rezoning plans are not final by any stretch of the imagination and more diversity in our schools is better for everyone. Kamras also touches on the miscounting of English Learners at Richmond Public Schools, and notes that we’ll probably end up reading more stories in the paper about things in need of fixing at RPS. This is what you want though, right? Wouldn’t we rather the school district dig into every bit of system and process and fix what’s broken? Isn’t that exactly what everyone has asked for—various Mayors, City Councilmembers, and the public included?

Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury has a short update on Abbie Arevalo-Herrera, the woman taking sanctuary in the First Unitarian Universalist Church. She’s been stuck inside the church for over a year and is kind of out of options until…November 2020, I guess?

Ned also has the details on a new Virginia Breeze extension that will connect Richmond to Martinsville via Farmville and Danville. The Virginia Breeze is a \nascent state-run intercity bus service that, until this new extension launches, runs between Blacksburg and D.C. I’m excited to see where/how the Breeze expands and how it begins to compete with private intercity bus service.

City Council meets tonight for, I think, their last regularly scheduled meeting of the summer. On the pretty hefty agenda (PDF): The Monroe Ward rezoning, the VUU/Chamberlayne rezoning, renaming a portion of Boatwright Drive, asking the GA to tweak the City’s charter to change the schedule of approving the budget (due to this past year’s threat of veto from the Mayor), a handful of special use permits, and approving the Chair and Vice Chair of City Council’s Navy Hill advisory Commission (PDF). That commission will look at the Mayor’s proposed downtown arena project, assuming there is eventually something for them to look at.

For the past year and a half, VCU and the Richmond Ambulance Authority have worked on pilot program to deliver Naloxone by…drone?? Gabby Birenbaum at the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the details on this thing of which I was definitely unaware. While I’m all for saving people’s lives, the thought of a second layer of streets—buzzy dronestreets—above our cities makes me uncomfortable. But, I am, admittedly, an old person. Related, I keep thinking about this tweet I read over the weekend: “Almost everyone is underestimating the tech revolution of chips + motors + batteries. You ain’t seen nothing yet. Tech tsunami coming.”

RVAMag has a 50-song Spotify playlist curated by Avail to celebrate their reunion show this past weekend. It’s a great way to start your Monday. 🤘

This morning’s longread

Chances are, you’re not as open-minded as you think

I thought this idea of “science curiosity” was interesting, although I don’t blame the participants in one of the experiments for not wanting to hear more about the arguments against gay marriage. I wonder about what I could be more curious?

Tetlock gave the forecasters nicknames, borrowed from a well-known philosophy essay: the narrow-view hedgehogs, who “know one big thing” (and are terrible forecasters), and the broad-minded foxes, who “know many little things” (and make better predictions). The latter group’s hunt for information was a bit like a real fox’s hunt for prey: They roam freely, listen carefully and consume omnivorously. Eventually, Tetlock and his collaborator, Barbara Mellers, assembled a team of foxy volunteers, drawn from the general public, to compete in a forecasting tournament. Their volunteers trounced a group of intelligence analysts who had access to classified information. As Tetlock observed of the best forecasters, it is not what they think but how they think. They argue differently; foxes frequently used the word “however” in assessing ideas, while hedgehogs tended toward “moreover.” Foxes also looked far beyond the bounds of the problem at hand for clues from other, similar situations.

If you’d like your longread to show up here, go chip in a couple bucks on the ol’ Patreon.

This morning’s Instagram