Bad Crow Review: Could Be Worse?
More like a hard drizzle
Links are at the end.
One of the very few candidates to whom we donated this year, Mary Peltola in Alaska, has more or less doubled up two Republican opponents in her effort to retain the House seat she won in a special election against Sarah Palin. Palin is in the contest along with former Alaska representative Nick Begich. With 25% of the vote yet to be counted, Peltola has about 48% to 25% each for the Republicans. She needs 50% to win this ranked-choice contest, which means she’ll likely need to pick up a few percent as the second or third choice for voters supporting the two Republicans.
Our useless congressman, Ed Case, won with about 75% of the vote. He’s actually pretty good on constituent services, but he’s among the most conservative of congressional Democrats and stands ever ready to strip a bill which might help somebody. Senator Brian Schatz won reelection by a similar margin.
Case’s fundraising appeals weren’t what one could call frenetic this year, but anyone who didn’t know the score might have thought Schatz was endangered.
Our new governor and our incumbent state senator were the only people on our ballot who fell short of 70%, with both claiming 65% or more. Always exciting to vote here.
We thought Democrats — not Hawai’i Democrats, but mainland ones — would get clocked, preserving our solid record of bad political prognostications. One thing of which we’re confident is that Democratic leaders will accept the most disadvantageous possible understanding of what happened.
If Republicans take the House we will of course see a 24-month shitshow. If they take one chamber and not the other then nothing will get passed except money for the War Department, essentially. If they take both chambers then Biden will be using the autopen for vetoes.
One would think all this bodes well for Democrats in 2024 but, again, we’re crap at predicting stuff. You know who is pretty good at it is our friend Kevin Hayden at Streams of Crunchiness.1 Good in general, is our Kevin.
This is interesting.2 Tiny little semi-aquatic creatures which could qualify for a highly commercialized and ruinously expensive athletic competition if only they were about 600 times larger.
[Springtails] likely evolved their accurate jumping abilities for survival: Landing on their feet allows them to recover quickly and, if necessary, jump again to dodge danger. In the laboratory, springtails landed on their feet roughly 85 percent of the time, per the study.
Researchers say this discovery could lead to advances in robotics. They tried to mimic the springtails’ movements by building a tiny robot, which landed upright about 75 percent of the time. Further research, inspired by the biomechanics of springtails, could help improve robots’ accuracy even more.
“It has been a major challenge for jumping robots, specifically at small scales, to control their orientation in the air for landing and jumping,” says study co-author Je-Sung Koh, a mechanical engineer at Ajou University, in a statement. “The finding in this research could inspire insect-scale jumping robots that are able to land safely and expand the capability of robots in new terrains, such as the open-water surfaces in our planet's lakes and oceans.”
Good videos in the story.
Meet the Big Fucking Gun.3
On a quiet industrial estate in England, the silence is occasionally broken by the thump of a 72-foot-long gun. At the end of the barrel, a star is born.
The Big Friendly Gun (BFG) is a prototype for what U.K.-based nuclear fusion company First Light Fusion hopes will be the future of energy production.
The giant steel gun works by firing a high-velocity piston with 6.6 pounds of gunpowder. Speeding down the barrel, the piston, compressing hydrogen gas as it moves, enters a cone segment that crushes the gas to a tiny point before it bursts through a metal seal. This shoots a projectile at 4.3 miles per second into a vacuum chamber where it strikes a nuclear fusion fuel target, temporarily producing the conditions in which nuclei can fuse together.
“Big Friendly Gun,” our bad. No reason to think otherwise.
In England, a young lad was arrested for throwing eggs at the King. One of the eggs bounced off the royal skull before shattering on the pavement. Frantic security officers scanned the crowd whilst some sort of official presented His Majesty with a giant broadsword for self defense.
We’re not making any of this up, mostly. Video and story here.4
Nazi photos of Kristallnacht newly revealed. Looking at them, one is not struck by a sense of impossibility.
Photo from the Associated Press story on the collection of snapshots donated to the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.5
Coleman Hawkins, “The Hawk Relaxes,” is as the name suggests a mellow exercise in masterful saxophony. Follows Charlie Parker backed by Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and others on “Jazz in the Village (La Naissance du Be Bop).”
That, comrades, is all we got. Be well, Take care.
We Dems have such convoluted standards for measuring wins.