Wikijumps

There was an interesting Facebook discussion surrounding a Wikipedia article on the "Depopulation of the Great Plains", which noted that some counties in the rural heartland had lost as much as 60% or more of their population from their peak in the early 20th century (all but one on the list had its peak population between 1900 and 1930, and the sole exception peaked in 1940.)

If you grew up reading the Little House on the Prairie books, and know enough history to know about the Dust Bowl, none of this will come as a surprise to you. The Great Plains were settled by eager homesteaders, either from Back East or new immigrants from the great immigration wave of the 19th Century. These people would stake their claims and, as documented by Laura Ingalls Wilder's lightly fictionalized memoirs, find out that the high, dry Great Plains were simply not suitable for subsistence farming.

During the discussion Bobbi noted that since they'd been edited heavily by Wilder's daughter, the proto-libertarian Rose Wilder Lane, the Little House books may have possibly made the homesteading subsistence farming life look less grim than it was.

While the books ended on an upbeat note on the farm, in real life, Wilder's attempt to farm a Great Plains homestead was a bust, and the little family abandoned De Smet, South Dakota for the greener hills of Missouri in 1894. (De Smet is in Kingsbury County, which had a population of 8,562 in the 1890 census. Its population peaked at 12,805 in the census of 1930 and was barely over five thousand in the most recent census.)

Anyway, this left my always-open Wikipedia browser tab open to the entry for Rose Wilder Lane while I browsed The Online Photographer in another tab while eating dinner at my desk this past weekend. While reading there, I ran across this comment:

"I love the irony that Android, as an operating system, was originally intended for digital cameras."

I seemed to recollect that to be the case, and I wanted to double-check my memory. So I clicked my Wikipedia tab with my mouse and immediately faced a quandary.

I was eating dinner at my desk, and my keyboard tray was full of a big steaming bowl of paneer masala instead of keyboard. I could reach for my keyboard, or I could...

• "After high school graduation, Lane returned to her parents' home in Mansfield and learned telegraphy at the Mansfield railroad station."
• "The advent of radio in the early 20th century brought about radiotelegraphy and other forms of wireless telegraphy. In the Internet age, telegraphic means developed greatly in sophistication and ease of use, with natural language interfaces that hide the underlying code, allowing such technologies as electronic mail and instant messaging."
• "Today, most instant messaging takes place on messaging apps (such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Viber and Telegram), which by 2014 had more users than social networks."
• "Originally developed as Facebook Chat in 2008, the company revamped its messaging service in 2010, and subsequently released standalone iOS and Android apps in August 2011."

Bam!

Rose Wilder Lane to Android (operating system) in four clicks! This would be my kind of party game.
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