Decision to switch Turkey Day game unfortunate

It’s too bad the Nashua School District administration chose to move the Thanksgiving Day football game between Nashua High School North and South to the day before Thanksgiving.

Too bad, but understandable.

Superintendent Mark Conrad said the decision stemmed from the results of a school community survey and the declining participation in previous Thanksgiving Day games – not just community participation, but students and cheerleaders, too.

Times have changed, we suppose, but we seem to remember an era when signing up for a team meant making a commitment to the bitter end.

Sure the Thanksgiving Day game is played on a holiday, but didn’t everybody know that going into the season?

Changing the day of the game is not that big a deal. If it increases participation, it may even be a positive development. But making the change because administrators felt they sort of had to, well, that’s a different matter.

Driverless cars will not lead
to victimless accidents

It was inevitable that somebody was going to die in a self-driving vehicle, and it finally happened on May 7 when a Canton, Ohio man, Joshua D. Brown, was driving his Tesla car on autopilot.

Statements by the government and the automaker indicate his car’s cameras failed to distinguish the white side of a turning
tractor-trailer from a brightly lit sky and didn’t automatically activate its brakes.

The question becomes, what now?

Most major automakers and technology companies, including Google and Uber, are working on fully autonomous cars, and have long worried that a highly publicized crash could dampen the public’s appetite for them.

We hope that’s not the case. While there is no substitute for sound human judgment in cases like this, it’s worth remembering that human error is a leading cause of crashes and that such accidents are part of the evolutionary process. Perhaps the closest historical parallel is the countless number of people who died in the early days of aviation.

We agree with Brown’s relatives, who say they hope information learned from the tragedy will lead to more innovation and safety improvements.

Red Sox seem to have a nucleus in place, at least

The Fourth of July holiday is as good a time as any to check in with the Red Sox, whose early-
season flirtation with first place in the American League’s Eastern Division seems to be over.

Their biggest problem, to nobody’s surprise, is the team’s lack of reliable starting pitching.

But the Sox have other issues, too. Left field, once the team’s most reliable position when it was patrolled by the likes of Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Rice, was turned over to a converted catcher before he got hurt. The team has also suffered a power outage at the corner infield positions.

But this is not the same sad Sox that finished in the cellar the past two seasons after their improbable World Series title in 2013. A healthy Dustin Pedroia has rebounded from a couple of injury-plagued subpar seasons and the Killer B’s – Xander Bogaerts, Mookie Betts and Jackie Bradley Jr. – offer hope for the future.

The team may have to deal at least one of those stars-in-the-making to shore up the pitching staff, but it appears at least that the nucleus for long-term success appears to be in place.