The 2015 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Patricia Yang, David Hu, Jonathan Pham, and Jerome Choo, for testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds).
They explain that research in detail, in the study “Duration of Urination Does Not Change With Body Size,” Patricia J. Yang, Jonathan Pham, Jerome Choo, and David L. Hu, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 111 no. 33, August 19, 2014, pp. 11932–11937.
Patricia Yang and David Hu, together with additional colleagues, were awarded a second Ig Nobel Prize four years later. The 2019 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Patricia Yang, Alexander Lee, Miles Chan, Alynn Martin, Ashley Edwards, Scott Carver, and David Hu, for studying how, and why, wombats make cube-shaped poo.
They explain that research in detail, in the study “How Do Wombats Make Cubed Poo?” Patricia J. Yang, Miles Chan, Scott Carver, and David L. Hu, paper presented at the 71st Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, Abstract: E19.0000, November 18–20, 2018.
“A Michigan court rejected a Trump campaign filing challenging the results in the state, calling the motion “defective” because it lacked several requisite pieces of information, including any evidence.” — New York Times, 11/9/20
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We Republicans knew this election was a total fraud from the moment the first vote was cast. We just didn’t know how. Thankfully, we have since come up with the answer: A dead man in Michigan voted four million times.
We know what you must be thinking. Just four million times? Sure, we could have thrown out a higher number, but four million just felt right. We did the math. If roughly 5.5 million people voted in Michigan, it simply wouldn’t make sense for us to say that one dead man voted eight million times. That just doesn’t add up. But four million? Makes perfect sense.
You might also be wondering who this dead man who voted four million times in Michigan is? How does a dead man vote four million times? How did he die? Did he know before he died that he was going to be implicated in the biggest voting fraud scandal this country has ever seen? All good questions. We think this man’s name was Bob. We haven’t come to a consensus on that yet. As soon as Jared puts the finishing touches on the plans for Infrastructure Week, he will make Bob a birth certificate. We’ve got all our bases covered.
Bob was born in 1952 in Detroit to an Italian mother and an even more Italian father. Or something like that. As I said, we haven’t nailed down all the particulars yet. Bob was a pretty average student and got a job repairing car mufflers right after graduation. And then fifty years later he died and cast four million votes in Michigan.
We haven’t made up all the specifics yet surrounding how Bob died. It was untimely and tragic, but simultaneously beautiful and poetic. We would like to think he was hit by an 18-wheeler that was carrying teddy bears for sick children. White House spiritual advisor Paula White is consulting her South American angels on the matter as we speak.
How does a dead man cast a vote? How does anyone who is not a white male cast a vote? Because we’ve tried pretty hard to stop that, and it doesn’t seem to be working. Plus, dead people can walk through walls. We’re pretty sure that at his peak, Bob was casting 42,000 votes per second.
We really want to get to the bottom of this — for Bob’s sake. How is expected to rest peacefully knowing that we randomly pinned him as the dead guy who cast four million illegal votes in Michigan? This is a problem we created, and a problem we intend to fix.
Oh, and also, Bob’s dead cousin Eugene cast three million votes in Georgia. He was either a firefighter, a mall cop, or an alpaca farmer. He may have also sold American flag toaster cozies on Etsy. We’re still working on the details.
Dr. Jill Biden plans to continue teaching English at Northern Virginia Community College when her family officially enters the White House. The education doctorate has taught writing at the local college since 2009 — and doesn’t intend to stop just because she’s adding a new gig to her CV. The American people just made a […]
Dangers on the Internet
Staying safe on-line
Rothman
2000
This is part of one of those series that tackle issues for teens. This book was just fine for the early 2000s. It was before Facebook and other social media, which presents its own kind of “danger.” This book really doesn’t address dangers, but more is about standards of behavior. It also assumes that the kids are low tech, which isn’t necessarily wrong for the time. This book is really not helpful anymore. Issues of cyberbullying, doxing, threats, and other dangers just weren’t mentioned. Frankly, this book should have been retired by 2006. I take that back, it was probably a candidate for weeding as soon as MySpace showed up.
I remember early on doing a social media presentation for parents, specifically about MySpace. I remember pulling up a random account and the parents nearly keeled over over seeing what kids were posting. Half of them were going to take computers away. Oh, the simple days of social media. I wonder what Tom is up to.
While there are still plenty of mail-in ballots to be counted, the results are clear: I, Joe Biden, am the next President of the United States.
Americans can breathe a sigh of relief: our national nightmare is over. When I take office in January, I will put an end to Trump’s divisiveness and begin the healing process to bring this country back together again. Despite my best intentions, I know the damage Trump has caused will be difficult to repair. As a nation, we’ll need to have long, difficult conversations about how we got to this point, what we can do to prevent the next far-right wannabe-dictator from seizing power, and how we’ll punish Trump and his cronies who have violated our Constitution and democracy. Or, we can just pretend none of this ever happened and let them get away with it.
I know these people deserve prison, but do you seriously want to reckon with everything Trump revealed about the nature of the GOP and American capitalism? My donors and I sure don’t. Look, we can deal with the fact that one of our country’s major political parties is a shade to the right of the Third Reich, or we can just back away from it slowly like we walked in on our parents having sex. Some of these same Republicans are going to work in my administration, after all. Do we really want to impeach ghouls like Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett? Put Mitch McConnell on trial? Give Ivanka’s inevitable MSNBC correspondent’s job to a journalist? I know they say you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube, but dammit, Joe Biden has never been a guy who listens when someone tells him no.
There’s no denying that the Trump administration revealed a lot of ugliness in America. As President, I promise to sweep all that ugliness back under the rug. White supremacists will no longer march out in the open. During the Biden administration, those white supremacists will return to the police departments from whence they came. The ICE agents who kidnapped children and locked them in cages will resume their normal ICE duties of kidnapping not as many children and locking them in fewer cages. Consider the Biden administration like Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black. You saw the aliens, and now it’s time to get your memory blanked. Because while there’s a lesson we can learn from the Trump years about how easy it is for a country to fall into fascism, there’s an even greater lesson that none of this ever happened, and I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.
See, America is like a house. While it may have been built on a rotten foundation with shoddy materials, it’s just easier to add on a new patio and hope that’s enough to convince a Chinese business person to buy it off you with cash. When one of your stove burners stops working, you don’t try and fix it or get a new stove, you just stop using that burner. If the water heater bursts, you learn to deal with ice-cold showers. If you find asbestos insulation in your attic, you don’t ask questions like, “How long has this been here? Don’t I have the inalienable right to live in an asbestos-free house? Do the people who built this house even care if I live or die?” No, you crack a window and do all your important breathing outside. The Biden presidency is looking forward AWAY from the asbestos, not backward TOWARD the asbestos!
I’m not saying forgetting these past four years is going to be easy. We’re all going to have to do our part in buying former Trump staffers’ tell-all books, donating to their non-profit foundations, publishing their think tank’s articles uncritically, and whatever else is necessary to launder these maniacs back into society. How are we going to ignore something as big as climate change if we can’t ignore this? We’re Americans – there’s no easily-avoidable disaster we can’t glumly accept!
One of the few bright spots of the Trump years was that so many Americans become radicalized for the first time. They participated in protests, marches, walk-outs, and mutual aid efforts. They learned how Trump was just a symptom, not the cause of America’s woes, and that systemic problems require systemic solutions. I heard over and over how, despite how precarious these past four years felt, ordinary people found hope in fighting for a better world, in connecting with their community and taking some modicum of power back from the billionaires and corporations that have made even the simple act of living day-to-day untenable. I’m asking every American to hold on tightly to that feeling and let it go immediately following my inauguration. Release it from your heart like a pack of white doves and watch it get sucked up into a low-flying 747 jet engine.
Americans can sleep easy knowing that the criminals are no longer in the White House. They’re now back in the streets, running rampant over the private sector, where they belong.
We’ve seen both companies and research teams attempt to make modular robots an everyday reality, but, more often than not, they all run into the same problem: the mechanism that allows those devices to connect to each other is complicated and fragile. With a new design called FreeBOT, a team of researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen may have figured out a simple but elegant solution to that problem as highlighted by IEE Spectrum.
Each FreeBOT comes encased within an iron shell. Inside, there are a pair of motorized wheels and a single magnet — in that way, it’s not too dissimilar from one of Sphero’s adorable STEM toys. The combination of a ferromagnetic shell and an internal magnet is what allows two or more FreeBOTs to attach to one another. When a FreeBOT moves close to one of its friends, its magnet excites a magnetic field in both its shell and that of its counterpart, allowing them to attach without much fuss. They don’t need to connect at a specific point, and detaching is as simple as one of the robots turning on its motorized wheels and moving away. As you can see from the above video, multiple FreeBOTs can work together to mantle over obstacles. The magnet inside each FreeBot also allows it to traverse over ferromagnetic surfaces, and that effect is more pronounced when a group of FreeBOTs work together.
It may take a while before you see a swarm of FreeBOTs out in the wild, climbing their way over obstacles. In their current iteration, they’re not autonomous and require a remote control. But that’s not stopping the researchers who worked on the project. They plan to produce more units to show off the potential of their invention and work on a way to make them more autonomous.
For decades, I’ve tuned into the trivia game show “Jeopardy!” for the facts. On Sunday, the show lost its judicious leader, Alex Trebek, who died at age 80 after a battle with cancer.
Trebek had hosted “Jeopardy!” for my entire life. He began in 1984 and hosted every episode since — save for April Fool’s Day in 1997 when he and Pat Sajak of “Wheel of Fortune” swapped places — more than 8,000 half-hour shows in all. For many, watching Trebek was ritualistic — the way a day ends and a night begins. It was also a way to get real facts, a brief respite from the “alternative facts” so prevalent over the past few years.
Trebek and the show — the two difficult now to divorce — were a beacon of democratic ideals, flattening the world for all to consume. High and low, popular and obscure, new and old, holy and profane, Trebek put all of them on equal terms. Look no further than the episode of “Jeopardy!” that aired this past Friday, for example. It featured clues about Rihanna, Madonna and Katy Perry, and clues about the city of Vaduz, the Russian navy and the German chancellor. All were on the same game board — though Gene Wilder and the Cook Strait were worth more money than any of them.
“Jeopardy!” and Trebek have been a haven for facts as monuments of truth have crumbled in the public sphere. The holder of the country’s highest office now baselessly disputes legitimate election results, espousers of baseless and dangerous conspiracy theories are elected to Congress, and fact-checking is a booming industry.
Trebek’s performance hasn’t changed to combat the untruths of the last few years, in part because it already was a kind of totem to the value of fact. Since 1984, he has stood each weekday in a suit behind a podium with a sheet of notes and delivered more than 400,000 clues, each a minor daily inoculation against the creep of lies — or whatever you want to call them.
“Alex was so much more than a host,” tweeted James Holzhauer, who set a series of unreal records on “Jeopardy!” last spring. “He was an impartial arbiter of truth and facts in a world that needs exactly that.”
The show’s eclectic and unpredictable subject matter is the result of an unassuming, wide-angle lens cast upon a large and complicated world. We call the material Trebek delivered “trivia,” but few things are less trivial than turning a generous eye toward the world — in all its strange and diverse splendor — and calling things by their right name.
The headline on a great 2014 profile of Trebek in the New Republic declared him the “Last King of the American Middlebrow.” This is true not in a pejorative sense but in a statistical one, as in the average between high and low. Trebek’s essential demeanor — and therefore “Jeopardy!” itself — is stripped of pretension and pretext.
The show’s archive showcases its diverse interests, each of which was presented on the show’s giant board simply and equally in the iconic all-caps white text on a blue square. Knowledge of the former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is worth the same as that of “The Office” actor Steve Carrell, as that of the toy Mr. Potato Head. The playwright Shakespeare is equal to the running back Walter Payton. The element helium is as valuable as the airport Heathrow.
Trebek’s performance as host emphasized this egalitarianism. His affect was steady and his pronunciation — of French, most famously — was impeccable, and he took pre-show notes with diacritical marks to ensure that he’d get it right. And at the same time he was, among other things, an underrated rapper, as Holzhauer joked, enthusiastically engaging with the repertoires of Lil Wayne, Drake and Kendrick Lamar.
“I’m not too good at it, but I was getting into it,” Trebek said after delivering the verses, and I believed him.
Moreover, Trebek’s performance didn’t just lack pretension, it was anti-pretentious. He once famously lightly chastised three contestants, who had correctly answered clues about Molière and Thor Heyerdahl, for not knowing enough about football. “I have to talk to them,” Trebek said disapprovingly before going to commercial. The democratic nature of trivia had been thrown off-kilter, and Trebek had to correct it.
By all accounts, Trebek embodied these trivia ideals while also being a genuine and gracious human.
“Alex wasn’t just the best ever at what he did,” tweeted Ken Jennings, the show’s most famous contestant, who won a record 74 consecutive times. “He was also a lovely and deeply decent man, and I’m grateful for every minute I got to spend with him.”
It was with this same ethos of decency and calm that Trebek announced, in March 2019, that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He said he “wanted to prevent you from reading or hearing some overblown or inaccurate reports regarding my health.” The rest of the short statement was filled with facts, and he vowed to fight the cancer and continue working. “Truth told, I have to,” he said, with a characteristic pinch of humor. “Because under the terms of my contract, I have to host ‘Jeopardy!’ for three more years.”
I wish he were able to do so. The show may go on, but it’s hard to imagine anyone personifying its ideals as well as Alex Trebek did. Of course, the contestants on “Jeopardy!” just ask the questions. It was Trebek who had all the answers.
Rebel fighters have at last dealt the Empire a fatal blow. With a blast heard around the galaxy, our forces have destroyed the Death Star and with it the Emperor’s reign of terror. This blow has turned the tide of galactic oppression and righted the ship of justice. Now is the time to set off your fireworks, celebrate in the streets, and hold an Ewok close. The nightmare is over, the Emperor has fled, and we can say with absolute certainty that there will never be another Death Star ever again.
Our reports state that, at the time of the attack, the Emperor was playing golf at his resort in Canto Bight, but has since retreated to the farthest reaches of the Outer Rim. He continues to send out communications claiming that he won The Battle of the Death Star, even though flaming chunks of debris from the former moon-sized battle station are currently raining down on nearby planets. Try not to take his refusal to acknowledge defeat and his vow to never relinquish supreme power too seriously. In the wake of our victory, his regime and all of the anti-republic support he has stirred up over the last few years will surely fade back into the dark corners of space from whence they came. There’s no reason to believe that his followers will quietly nurse their hatred in the shadows and commence rebuilding a second Death Star the minute we become complacent and return to the status quo. But, if they did, we would absolutely notice before it was almost fully operational and poised to once again destroy the galaxy (how dumb would we have to be to let that happen a second time?).
Thanks to a poorly placed exhaust port and a brave contingent of fighters, the Rebel Alliance has reclaimed at least partial control over the fate of the galaxy. The fact that we just barely managed to secure this victory by very thin margins doesn’t mean anything at all. A win is a win, even if 55% of white women and 99% of Hutts still support the Empire. And there’s definitely no reason to be concerned that 47.7% of the galaxy’s population still rallied around the Emperor despite the fact that he blew up Alderaan, called fallen stormtroopers losers, killed over 200,000 people by failing to respond to an intergalactic pandemic, and is obviously a hideously malformed, agent of the evil Sith Order. Now that we’ve won this one battle, those are just details!
It also seems totally fair to say that “dismantling the Death Star with a well-placed laser blast” and “dismantling the systemic oppression and empire supremacy that led to the rise of the Sith to begin with” are basically the same thing. All that remains for us to do now is clean up the remaining star destroyers, ignore the Emperor’s calls for vengeance, and pat ourselves on the back for something that was largely achieved by a small and extremely marginalized subset of our organization. Once that’s complete, everything can return to normal. Which is something we all long for because, as it turns out, launching and sustaining a rebellion to restore balance to the Force takes up quite a bit of time and emotional energy — energy we’d much rather dedicate to sailing the sand dunes on our pleasure barges and posting selfies on The Holonet.
Fortunately, now that we’ve achieved victory in this single battle, it seems perfectly safe to return to the idle apathy that allowed an evil Sith lord to take over the galaxy in the first place. After all, the Emperor doesn’t have his Death Star anymore and he never will again. What can he do to us without it? Sure, he does have those scary lightning hands and that super evil apprentice and all those henchmen who still believe in his ideology, but they’ll probably just give up and go into hiding now that they’ve developed a taste for power. That’s clearly something a group of angry, hate-filled, empire supremacists would do in the face of defeat…
Just wait and see, in a few months, things are almost guaranteed to go back to exactly how they were before the Emperor seized power. And by “normal” we do mean “still not even remotely okay for many of the marginalized groups that were key to the rebel alliance’s success.” But, there will be plenty of time to deal with those issues later. Because now that we’ve blown up the Death Star, there will never be another one, and none of this will ever happen again.
I manage a small digital marketing firm. The owner is usually in the background doing the “big stuff” like networking and bringing in sponsors or big clients, I do almost all the hiring, and we use a virtual assistant HR company that tends to just forward me complaint emails (a separate issue).
We have one staff member who has been with us since the company formed 10 years ago. “Lola” has an amazing creative mind, produces great work, and our clients adore her. Our last three major accounts we landed because of word of mouth that Lola works for us and us alone. She’s also a joy to work with, very friendly, and a hard worker. I don’t have any negatives about her performance over the 10 years I’ve worked with her.
Lola has been very open with us about some medical needs she has. She’s been open with the whole team so it’s not a huge secret or hush-hush, especially since her condition is degenerative and she’ll slowly lose functionality over time. We’ve even all joined 5k runs as an office in her name and when we have a chance to donate to a charity it’s almost always to charities that represent research for Lola’s condition. I always thought that as an office, we had her back.
Even before the pandemic, I noticed our younger “go-getter” staff (two in particular who need a lot of attention and reassurance) complaining about Lola not meeting deadlines. The complaints increased drastically since the pandemic started. Lola works at a different pace than the rest of the team, but she’s not missing deadlines. If something is due at noon on Tuesday and she has it submitted by 11:45 on Tuesday, that’s not late or past the deadline. When we do project management, we set realistic goals and timelines for everybody on the project, taking into account the pandemic, child care, access to materials, all of it. We consider the entire team’s needs and the client’s, not just Lola’s. But I have the two staff who complain a lot that Lola’s behind or not working as fast as they’d like, both of whom even went so far as to exclude her from a project and finish her work for her, which was unnecessary since (1) the work they turned in wasn’t what the client wanted and caused rework and (2) they still had four weeks left until the deadline for a first draft. Both employees were told to stop doing that multiple times and they were put on different projects so that they didn’t need to monitor Lola’s progress. (Their bosses, who both report to me, agree with me that we should keep them off teams with Lola, but there is overlap in skill that we require for some projects.)
I just found out from our HR person that they’ve escalated their complaints about Lola to the owner, and their complaints are backed with no evidence about her “inability to do her job on time,” as well as a complaint about me that favoritism prevents me from making Lola meet her deadlines. (Keeping them off projects with Lola and not pairing them up for other work is their main evidence of my “favoritism.”) I think their behavior is based on ableism and I know it’s 100% not rooted in fact. If we lose Lola as an employee, I have no doubt in my mind our clients would go with her. The owner is frustrated that it’s even come up and wants me to “just handle it.” My idea of handling it would be to advise those two employees in particular (nobody else backed up their HR complaint) to maybe find work elsewhere.
What direction do I take with this?
Honestly, I’d prepare to fire them.
You have two employees who are targeting a disabled colleague, excluding her from work, taking over her projects, and complaining about things that are patently untrue like that she’s not meeting deadlines when she demonstrably is. On top of that, they’re doing work incorrectly, causing others to have to redo it, and creating a crapton of drama. They’ve been told repeatedly to stop, but instead they’re escalating.
I want to be clear: When someone has legitimate concerns about a colleague’s work, they’re entitled to raise those concerns, especially if it’s impacting them. But they’re not entitled to keep pushing it over and over, and they’re certainly not entitled to do what looks an awful lot like targeting someone because of a disability. They had a chance to be heard and now they need to accept that their management sees it differently and move forward. If they don’t like the way your organization manages Lola, they need to decide if they can live with it reasonably happily or not. It’s not okay to keep pushing their agenda about a coworker over and over.
What they’re doing is toxic for your organization. It’s awful to Lola, and it’s bad for the rest of your staff too because I can guarantee you that if they’re pushing this agenda so hard, they’re complaining to other coworkers about it too.
Where are their managers in all this? They should be taking a very hard line in shutting this down — and if they’re not, as their managers’ manager, you’ll need to coach them to. They need to be explaining that what they’re doing is unacceptable and needs to stop, and that if it continues they’ll be putting their jobs at risk. I’d frame it as, “We’ve heard your complaints, looked into them, found them without basis, and have been clear with you that Lola isn’t missing deadlines. At this point you appear to be harassing a colleague and it needs to stop. We will not entertain further complaints about Lola’s work, which is excellent, so I need you to decide whether or not you want to remain here, knowing that.”
That should come from their managers. If their managers are too inexperienced or too wimpy to deliver that as directly as it needs to be delivered, it might need to come from you instead. That’s not ideal since the complaints are now about you as well, but you have the authority to shut this down and should use it.
Of course, you don’t want an outcome where they stop complaining through formal channels but instead just complain to everyone else, so you and their managers will need to watch closely for a while to make sure that’s not happening. If it does, at that point I’d conclude the situation isn’t salvageable and you’d need to part ways. (Warn them ahead of time that that’s how serious this has become so they’re clear on the stakes and aren’t blindsided if that happens.)
Before any of this, though, make sure you and the owner are on the same page about what her instructions to “just handle it” mean. Let her know you plan to make it clear to these two employees that this needs to stop, period and — given how disruptive it has become and because they’re harassing a disabled employee — if it continues after that, you intend to let them go. It’s important to make sure she’s onboard with that plan before you do it (because if she has qualms about it, you’d need to work those out before you act, not afterwards).
I’m not sure how aware Lola is of what these two are saying and doing, but I’d also make sure she knows how much you value her and that you’re actively working to shut down this BS. If she knows even a little of it, she’s got to be tremendously unsettled and the more decisively and swiftly you can act, the better for her and the better for your culture.
I am a big fan of Sophia Loren, and my parents introduced me to the movie Houseboat (1958) with Cary Grant. She always seemed ageless to me and I would imagine this book to be a good choice in the early 1980s. I think the publishers were after a book that would show that even though you might be over 40 (gasp!), you can still look good.
The book wasn’t too bad, and aside from those horrible 80s glasses and the red puffy dress, the fashion isn’t too terrible. Again, I think Sophia Loren is just one of those timeless women who can wear about anything from any time and make it work. As far as a library book, I don’t think it really would work as a fashion or beauty book for 2020, but it might be one to hang onto just because it is Sophia Loren. In some libraries, it might be an automatic weed. This one could go either way, depending on the situation.
Five people tested positive, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, as the US sees record daily case counts.
As daily confirmed coronavirus cases continue to break records, a new cluster of cases was reported in the White House — meaning the Trump administration again has failed to control the spread of Covid-19 within its own circles, as it struggles to reduce cases throughout the rest of the country.
Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs reported Friday evening that White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tested positive for the coronavirus Wednesday, one day after attending an election night party at the White House alongside hundreds of unmasked guests. Along with Meadows, administration officials said four other staffers also tested positive.
Meadows has had a number of exposures since February: an interaction with an infected person at the 2020 the Conservative Political Action Convention, the nation’s largest conservative political convention, forced him — and other GOP leaders — to quarantine. And he was in close contact with President Donald Trump after the president was diagnosed with Covid-19 in early October. He has, however, until now, avoided becoming infected himself.
The White House is doing little to stop the spread of Covid-19 — in the country and in the White House
Meadow’s diagnosis comes less than two weeks after he admitted to CNN’s Jake Tapper that the administration isn’t going to control the pandemic.
“We are not going to control the pandemic,” Meadows said. “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics, and other mitigation areas.” And Meadows claimed that the US would not be able to get the coronavirus under control “because it is a contagious virus.”
MEADOWS: We're not going to control the pandemic
TAPPER: Why not?
M: Because it's a contagious virus
T: Why not make efforts to contain it?
M: What we need to do is make sure we have the proper mitigation factors to make sure people don't die pic.twitter.com/0DYgk4rB3T
But there is a way to get the pandemic under control: And that is doing the opposite of the behavior Trump administration officials have been modeling.
The first White House Covid-19 cluster arose shortly after the White House held a large indoor, maskless, gathering to celebrate the nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Trump and his wife Melania both tested positive for the virus after that event, with Trump spending several days in the hospital.
Several other White House staffers and GOP leaders who attended the celebration also tested positive at the time, including former New Jersey Governor and Trump ally Chris Christie. Christie spent several days in an intensive care unit fighting off the virus.
And in late October, several members of Vice President Mike Pence’s staff also tested positive.
There’s a reason this keeps happening over and over to those in Trump’s and the White House’s orbit: they simply don’t follow basic protection measures. This was evident on Tuesday night, when Trump held an Election Night event at the White House, with several hundred maskless people packed into a tight room. And there were speeches, as well as chanting — two activities known to increase the risk of spread.
.@MarkMeadows tested positive for Covid-19. On election night he was at the White House party with the president and his family and hundreds of unmasked people. pic.twitter.com/XyRliYIFdw
Covid-19 has been a continual problem for President Donald Trump’s White House. In early October, the president and his wife Melania both tested positive for the virus, with Trump spending several days in the hospital.
The diagnosis came shortly after the White House held a large indoor, maskless, gathering to celebrate the nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Several other White House staffers also tested positive at the time, including former New Jersey Governor and Trump ally Chris Christie. Christie spent several days in an intensive care unit fighting off the virus.
More recently, several members of Vice President Mike Pence’s staff also tested positive.
There’s a reason this keeps happening over and over to those in Trump’s and the White House’s orbit: they simply don’t follow basic protection measures.
Guests were reportedly tested before the event began, but as Vox’s Brian Resnick has explained, a negative test result doesn’t mean it is safe to mingle with others. And the new cases mean those who were in attendance Tuesday are now at risk of having been infected.
Meadows and the aides were just five of the more than 120,000 Americans who tested positive for Covid-19 Friday, a new record high. It was the third day in a row with over 100,000 new cases reported. There were at least 1,180 deaths from the virus Friday, the highest since mid September. And experts predict the case — and death — numbers will only rise as fall turns to winter.
In the face of this reality, Trump has continued to downplay the virus, and some of his advisers have pressed for wider spread reopening. He has returned to Washington, DC after holding nearly 20 large, mostly maskless rallies in the final days before Election Day. A rent study found that the president’s rallies over the summer may have caused an estimated 700 deaths. And in late July, Trump ally Herman Cain passed away from the virus shortly after attending a Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Trump and company have always leaned away from virus prevention methods and towards “returning to normal” after months of economic shutdowns. And the president has done so even more since becoming infected himself, telling supporters, “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”
But the problem with ignoring the advice of public health experts and living as one would normally is that the coronavirus demands carefulness. If the pandemic persists, it’s not possible to return to normal. That’s not a political stance, it’s just reality. The virus does not operate based on White House spin, and the repeated outbreaks in the building prove it.
Staff manning Donald Trump's election fraud hotline have endured stories of poop, a Hamburglar and a competitive fiddle player as they're bombarded with prank calls.
The US President’s campaign spokesperson confirmed a series of rallies would be planned to build support for the unproven claim of a fraudulent election.
• Most people tend to walk with their elbows slightly bent.
• Most people tend to run with their elbows acutely bent.
• No-one knows why.
There is however, a(n) hypothesis. It’s the ‘Mechanical Tradeoff Hypothesis.’ which was descibed by Andrew K. Yegian, Yanish Tucker, Stephen Gillinov and Daniel E. Lieberman in their 2019 paper for the Journal of Experimental Biology, 222: jeb197228, entitled Straight arm walking, bent arm running: gait-specific elbow angles
Their hypothesis provides possible answers for the ‘walking’ scenario – but the bent-arms-whist-running phenomenon is still a mystery.
“Optimal energetics appears to be the reason why straight arms are stereotyped during walking, but the reason for stereotyped bent arm running remains unclear.”
The authors suggest, however, that although bent-arm running might not have an energy-saving benefit, it could be related to balance instead – or :
“We must also consider that the stereotyped behavior during running may not provide a benefit at all.”
Note : One of the paper’s authors, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, US, was co-recipient of the 2009 Ig Nobel Physics Prize – for analytically determining why pregnant women don’t tip over.
Companies have jokingly given themselves code-based names in the past (you can thank XKCD for that), but one of them was just forced to mend its ways. The Guardianreports that UK business registrar Companies House has forced a software consultant to change his company name after discovering that it could launch cross-site scripting attacks against vulnerable pages — yes, including Companies House. A site could have inadvertently compromised itself just by mentioning the company, which could be more than a little embarrassing for officials who greenlit the name.
The initial name, ““><SCRIPT SRC=HTTPS://MJT.XSS.HT> LTD,” risked confusing sites that didn’t handle the HTML formatting properly. They would think the company name was blank and run a script from the troubleshooting site XSS Hunter. It’s an innocuous script that would simply have put up a warning, but Companies House wasn’t willing to take any chances. The name might have “presented a security risk” to some sites, a spokesperson said.
The consultant has since changed his business name to “THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD.” Companies House, meanwhile, said it had “put measures in place” to prevent a repeat. You won’t be trying this yourself, at least not in the UK.
It’s more than a little amusing to see a for-the-laughs code name stir up trouble, but this also illustrates just how fragile web security can be. If a clever name can wreak havoc, there’s a lot of work to be done before site owners can say they’ve nailed security.
"I love spending time with bright people," said the longtime game show host. Trebek began hosting the trivia show in 1984 and continued for nearly four decades, even through bouts of chemotherapy.
Multiple school districts have already canceled classes for Monday, in anticipation of a hurricane that could bring storm surges of up to four feet. The governor has declared a state of emergency.
Enlarge / Alex Trebek, seen here hosting a themed Jeopardy tournament in January 2020—and while the tournament's name was about high-performing contestants from the series' past, today, we are going to say that it's specifically about Trebek himself. (credit: Getty Images)
The staff of long-running TV game show Jeopardy confirmed on Sunday that its beloved host Alex Trebek has passed away. He was 80 years old.
While the announcement did not go into details, other than confirming he passed on Sunday in the presence of family and friends, Trebek had previously been transparent with fans about his stage-four pancreatic cancer diagnosis, using YouTube to tell fans directly about the news in March 2019. At the time, he said he chose to speak to fans via YouTube "to prevent you from reading or hearing some overblown or inaccurate reports."
Since then, Trebek went on to continue hosting the series between rounds of treatment, posting regular updates to Jeopardy's YouTube account. The last such message came in July of this year, which confirmed that the show's regular production had been put on hold due to COVID-19 precautions. This allowed him, among other things, to write a memoir that came out shortly after that last YouTube message: The Answer is... Reflections on my Life.
Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, speaks during a press conference held in the parking lot of a landscaping company on November 7 in Philadelphia. | Chris McGrath/Getty Images
The bizarre venue overshadowed Rudy Giuliani’s conspiracy-theory-laden election rant, providing a poetic stage for the end of Trump’s presidency.
President Donald Trump’s legal team gathered Saturday morning in Philadelphia to hold a press conference, at which they shared conspiracy theories about why Trump lost the 2020 election. The fact that the president’s lawyers are working to find ways to overturn the election results is notable, but perhaps even more so is where they chose to hold their conference: Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
The small business, which bills itself as a 27-year-old, woman-owned company that has grown to service major clients (including the city’s airport) appears to be an American success story.But the decision to hold the conference there, in front of a white garage door papered over with campaign signs, was incredibly odd. It felt awkward and small, the antithesis of a president and campaign that has long valued over-the-top visuals and maximum entertainment value.
The announcement of the event made it seem as though it would be a typical Trump team affair full of glitz: “Lawyers News Conference Four Seasons, Philadelphia. 11:00 a.m.,” Trump tweeted Saturday morning.
He later clarified, however, that it wouldn’t actually be held at the hotel chain but at the now-famous landscaping business, something the Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia confirmed on Twitter:
To clarify, President Trump’s press conference will NOT be held at Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia. It will be held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping— no relation with the hotel.
— Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia at Comcast Center (@FSPhiladelphia) November 7, 2020
The internet exploded with mockery and memes at the clarification, assuming there had been some bone-headed mix-up by the Trump campaign. The New York Times reported, however, that the mistake was “not in the booking, but in a garbled game of telephone.” The president was apparently told the conference would be at the business but misunderstood the name of the venue, thinking it would be held at the upscale hotel.
In many ways, this mix-up is indicative of the Trump presidency and the help he has received from his team of lawyers, led by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who headed the conference.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has made grand proclamations of things to come — be it a state-spanning border wall paid for by other countries or a health care plan he’s insisted will protect preexisting conditions.
But when those things arrive — if they do — they’re far less impressive than promised. Only 15 miles of new border wall have been built, for instance, while the health care plan Trump repeatedly promised would be coming “within two weeks” never materialized.
Giuliani, too, has had this tendency; he spent months leading up to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on potential collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia touting an explosive counter-report that never arrived. His publicity-drawing quest to find dirt on President-elect Joe Biden turned up nothing, and his recent attempts to play up salacious material found on a laptop that he alleged once belonged to Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, have been confusing and strange — and have gone nowhere.
Instead of giving the administration positive accomplishments, these grand promises by Trump and his allies have underscored their ineptitude while distracting from important issues. That’s what happened Saturday: The bizarre venue choice overshadowed the point of the press conference, which was meant to spotlight Giuliani’s rehash of disproven conspiracy theories about massive voter fraud.
The lies the press conference was supposed to be about, briefly explained
Just before noon on Saturday, reporters gathered in an industrial park in north Philadelphia for a press conference featuring Giuliani, Trump legal adviser and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski.
The team had called the press conference to share baseless accusations of electoral malfeasance. Giuliani made several untrue statements about nonexistent voting irregularities in Pennsylvania, falsely complaining that poll watchers had not been allowed at counting locations in the state, a claim that has been negated by courts and publicly available video evidence.
These claims, while lies, echoed Trump’s rhetoric about the election. The president spent much of Saturday golfing and tweeting falsehoods about vote-counting problems; later he said he had no plans to concede.
But Giuliani’s words ultimately got little attention: As Trump’s attorney began speaking, reporters suddenly started packing up their equipment to leave.
Several major media outlets had just called the election for Biden.
It was a poignant moment of clarity and, it seemed, a symbolic repudiation of Giuliani’s wild and baseless conspiracy theories. He continued his remarks, though not many people were paying attention: There was a new president-elect, one who rejects the style promoted by the president and his lawyer.
The campaign, which has held a number of similar press conferences in Philadelphia attempting to cast doubt on the state’s vote count, has struggled to find appropriate venues for these events. Earlier in the week, Bondi and Lewandowski attempted to hold a press conference in the city following a court decision that allowed poll watchers to stand just 6 feet from workers counting ballots, rather than 20 feet. They tried to spin the ruling as a win; however, a DJ nearby blasted Beyoncé music and completely drowned out their remarks.
incredible job by the every vote counts protest across the road who pumped up Beyoncé’s Party so not one word could be heard of Pam Bondi’s speech pic.twitter.com/BwRQcweNPY
The space outside the Philadelphia Convention Center, where votes were being tabulated, was filled all week with Biden supporters chanting “count every vote.” It made for a difficult setting for the various Trump press conferences baselessly alleging voter fraud.
So a new, more remote, location was looked for and apparently found at Four Seasons. “All great Americans in PA use Four Seasons Total Landscaping,” Lewandowski tweeted later Saturday. “They love this country and are American Patriots. Thank you!!”
All great Americans in PA use Four Seasons Total Landscaping. They love this country and are American Patriots. Thank you!!
But even there, far from downtown, reality intruded and overshadowed the Trump team’s message. However, the venue choice appeared to benefit the company itself, which quickly went from an obscure landscaper to a place of national interest — and worked to capitalize on its newfound notoriety Sunday:
The Trump era may have roared in like a lion, but it’s quietly fading out
The whole debacle, from the downscale venue to the reporters packing up to the president’s attorney ranting with no connection to reality, provided a stark visual for the end of election week and a desperate end to America’s Trump era.
The president and the right-wing media apparatus in the US spent the last four years constructing an alternate reality wherein the most powerful man in the world and the lawmakers who surrounded him — who at one time had complete control over the government — were perpetual victims of conspiracies and vendettas.
They tangled the country up in these claims, leading to protracted battles over the Mueller report as well as the president’s impeachment. All of the claims seemed to suggest Trump was justified in his attempts to bend norms, break laws, and grab more power.
The president long indicated he would dispute a loss in a close election, but this one isn’t all that close. Liberals and progressives had feared Trump’s gambit might work, similar to how he escaped impeachment and wasn’t held to account for multiple abuses of power over the last four years. But ultimately, not even Trump can spin electoral math.
The idea that multiple states, some of which are controlled by Republicans, conspired to illegally rob Trump of an election win is ridiculous. And the Four Seasons press conference was a real emperor-has-no-clothes moment: A presidency that began with Trump’s descent into a golden lobby ended in a landscaping company’s parking lot, with the press packing up and leaving instead of staying and listening to nonsense.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
There is however, a(n) hypothesis. It’s the ‘Mechanical Tradeoff Hypothesis.’ which was descibed by Andrew K. Yegian, Yanish Tucker, Stephen Gillinov and Daniel E. Lieberman in their 2019 paper for the Journal of Experimental Biology, 222: jeb197228, entitled Straight arm walking, bent arm running: gait-specific elbow angles 
Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, speaks during a press conference held in the parking lot of a landscaping company on November 7 in Philadelphia. | Chris McGrath/Getty Images