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Take whatever action you feel is appropriate.

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Everything good is bad for you.

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In a decision with far-reaching implications for national politics, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that federal courts do not have power to review partisan gerrymandering claims.

The decision was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the conservative majority. Justice Elena Kagan led the liberal bloc in dissent.

When district boundaries change to match demographic changes after every decennial census, there are going to be attempts to arrange things so that one side or the other gets an advantage. Aside from having some kind of computer algorithm do it, that’s inevitable.

Some people love the idea of having districts so evenly balanced that a little mood swing one way or the other can tip the election. I don’t, because thees people forget that the more evenly balanced the partisan makeup of a district, the more people are effectively not represented by the final winner of the contest. (Sure, Congresscritters make a lot of noise about ‘representing everybody in the district’, but that’s about as true as most Congressional utterances.)

An ideal district map would be as gerrymandered as possible, with each one being overwhelmingly toward one side or another. Sure, there would be people ‘marginalized’, but that’s always going to happen, and extreme gerrymandering minimizes the number of people who wind up taking it in the shorts. People who have been raised on professional sports teams, and the media who report on them, have been conditioned to want a ‘horse race’ that they can whoop and holler over, and they’ve forgotten the whole point of the system, which is to make people have the best shot of being represented in the legislature by somebody who feels the way they do on issues.

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I must confess that the subject didn’t occupy much of my time, but it’s interesting nevertheless.

With the possible exception of some Big Wheels or other child transportation vehicles, most tires are black. You’d be hard-pressed to find a tire shop and come across a Goodyear or Michelin sample that’s any other color.

Natural rubber, however, is closer to an off-white shade, and early-model cars sported that lighter color. Early tire makers also often added zinc oxide to their natural rubber as a way to strengthen the material, resulting in white tires. But at some point, tire manufacturers decided to go darker. Why?’

Racism would be my guess.

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This would appear to be a good fit for the new Zumwalt destroyers, whose original gun ammunition proved impossibly expensive.

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CMF (Composite metal foam) could provide superior protection against bullets and be much lighter as well, the theory was put to the test and it worked. This was done by modifying existing composite armor designs by substituting CMF for steel. This resulted in armor that weighed less and had superior stopping power. Composite armor is most widely used for tank armor. This is also called Chobham armor, after the place where it was developed in Britain during the 1960s. Composite armor used layers of metal (steel, depleted uranium and now CMF) separated by layers of ceramics to provide the most effective tank armor ever. Composite armor remains popular because it provides superior stopping power compared to the same weight of just high-quality steel plate armor. CMF takes this one step further by adding another lighter material, this time to replace some of the steel layers.

..

What makes CMF so effective is that the metal foam compresses when it is hit by a high-speed projectile.

Such as an APDS penetrator rod, the most common form of anti-tank ammunition. Chobham armor was developed to defeat shaped charge weapons, like RPGs, which is why RPGs aren’t used on tanks any more.

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The Italian government is really cracking down on the trafficking of migrants from Libya across the Mediterranean. Not only are they denying entry to the NGO migrant-ferries, they are intercepting and arresting the people-smugglers before they can return to Libya.

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It would appear that Trump has succeeded in getting ghe Mexican government’s attention.

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Doing well by doing good.

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Recently, scientists from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences cracked this intriguing black box by fully elucidating the biosynthetic pathway of MPA.

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Apparently there is a collection of such things in Dallas. Who knew?

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We developed a noninvasive stimulation procedure for modulating long-range theta interactions in adults aged 60–76 years. After 25?min of stimulation, frequency-tuned to individual brain network dynamics, we observed a preferential increase in neural synchronization patterns and the return of sender–receiver relationships of information flow within and between frontotemporal regions. The end result was rapid improvement in working-memory performance that outlasted a 50?min post-stimulation period.

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Now, biophysicist Joshua Weinstein and colleagues have invented an unorthodox type of imaging dubbed “DNA microscopy” that can do just that. Instead of relying on light (or any kind of optics at all), the team uses DNA “bar codes” to help pinpoint molecules’ relative positions within a sample.

With DNA microscopy, scientists can build a picture of cells and simultaneously amass enormous amounts of genomic information, Weinstein says. “This gives us another layer of biology that we haven’t been able to see.”

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Companies can’t advertise on social media — so they have female influencers do it for them.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was an International Yoga Day.

I’m not sure about the need for ‘breathing exercises’. Are we in danger of our lungs getting flabby?

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Most people have this idea that trade just stopped during the ‘Dark Ages’, but there were always people willing to take a risk.

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Whenever I see a picture of El Capitan I want to put a castle on top of it.

Perhaps with a Nazgul perched on it.

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THERE ARE MORE THAN 9 million dairy cows in the United States, and the vast majority of them are Holsteins, large bovines with distinctive black-and-white (sometimes red-and-white) markings. The amount of milk they produce is astonishing. So is their lineage. When researchers at the Pennsylvania State University looked closely at the male lines a few years ago, they discovered more than 99 percent of them can be traced back to one of two bulls, both born in the 1960s. That means among all the male Holsteins in the country, there are just two Y chromosomes.

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I guess being all tatted up is something we got from the Indians…?

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I guess it’s a fan.

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A useful site for people who make things.

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Swiss journalist Urs Gehriger recently visited African migrants who breached the border and hung out on the streets of San Antonio, Texas, waiting to go elsewhere in the country, and he met hostility from people who didn’t want to share details about their experiences, conflicted each other, and had rolls of $100 bills.

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You want fast food, go Chinese.

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It sounds amazing, like an organ for strings.

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Not bad for s guy who reportedly hates Jews.

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In the past, troops, of course, had their weapons with them when in a combat zone. But when not in a combat zone, troops rarely handled their weapons. The rifles and such were locked safely away in the “arms room,” and, for most troops, only taken out every week or so for cleaning, and once or twice a year for a trip to the rifle range. Combat troops would take their weapons out of the arms room when they trained, but the rifles and machine-guns still spent most of their time locked up in the arms room. After 2003 recruits spent their first three months in the army carrying around an M-16, and ammunition. The ammo was special training rounds, or “blanks”. These contained propellant, but no bullet. If one is fired, it sounds close enough to the real thing. If someone is really close (a few inches/40-70cm) to the barrel when the blank fires it can cause blast injury that can take an eye out, burst an eardrum and so on. The blanks were deadly enough to have the desired effect on the troops.

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Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer points out the obvious: Low wages create and sustain poverty, not lousy schools.

Although lousy public schools certainly contribute to the problem.

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This is Newsweek, so I’d wait for confirmation from a reliable source.

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We’ll know they’re serious when they come for #BitterBeerFace Maxine Waters and Elijah Cummings.3

BUT it could get very entertaining.

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A team of UK scientists have identified the mechanism behind hardening of the arteries, and shown in animal studies that a generic medication normally used to treat acne could be an effective treatment for the condition.

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Perhaps God is growing impatient. He sometimes does that.

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I used to do the same thing to help support myself in graduate school. It will definitely get you over any fear of needles.

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Probably good advice.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Why pollute the ground, where it’s your problem, when you can pollute the air, which makes it everybody’s problem?

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There have been talks about power outages for over a decade. The California Public Utilities Commission has rejected previous attempts, but following the deadly 2018 fires, allowed shutoffs under the guise of protecting public safety.

Yet this comes as California has taken nuclear power plants offline while increasing mandates for wind and solar. Nuclear power is clean and reliable; wind and solar power, while clean, are unreliable and significantly more expensive.

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Heated gloves, bracelets, and even rings are some of the potential applications of highly conductive MXene, a 2-D material made of alternating atomic layers of titanium and carbon. In a new study, researchers have fabricated MXene flakes, then electrostatically adhered the flakes to threads, and finally sewed the threads into ordinary fabrics that can be safely heated under a low voltage.

We have the technology.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

My question is: How did they come up with the idea?

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In the wake of the Christchurch mosque massacres, gun confiscation fizzles as Kiwis ignore new law.

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Composite metal foam—or CMF, for short—is a material made from hollow metallic spheres that are surrounded by a matrix that can be made from various types of metals, including titanium or even alloys. If you’ve ever had to clean up those tiny white balls of styrofoam after unboxing a gadget, then you already have a good understanding of what this material is. The researchers behind this study made their CMF exclusively from steel, to maximize its strength and stopping power.

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Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani—two brash New Yorkers as New York as New York can get—are planning to become residents of Florida.

The president and the former mayor both have homes in the Sunshine State and already spend much of the year down south.

Sources tell me the two are planning to give up their New York State residency because it is clear the state faces huge budget problems and will continue raising taxes, though New York is already the highest-taxed state in the nation.

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We have spoken on many occasions about the new wave of investments in automation could stimulate the economy after the next economic reset.

And we have also offered many sobering reminders that robots will likely displace 20% to 25% of current jobs (40 million jobs) by 2030. So, in our search for robots that will take jobs of the bottom 90% of Americans, this week, we have stumbled upon the world’s first raspberry-picking robot.

According to The Guardian, the new robot can pick upwards of 25,000 raspberries per day, outpacing human workers that pick around 15,000 in an eight-hour shift.

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In November 2016, Jonathan Aladin, a black student at Oberlin College, was caught shoplifting at Gibson’s Bakery near the campus of the elite private school, and two other black Oberlin students, Endia Lawrence and Cecelia Whettstone, were charged with attacking one of the bakery owners who tried to apprehend the thief.

People of Color behaving badly — what are the odds?

Activists with the #BlackLivesMatter movement at Oberlin accused the bakery owners of racism, and college officials promoted this false accusation. The three students pleaded guilty and, in November 2017, Gibson’s sued Oberlin, accusing the college of “libel, slander, interference with business relationships, interference with contracts, deceptive trade practices, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent hiring, and trespass.”

One of the deleterious effects of the ‘black people are all victims’ narrative is that it encourages teenage  black thugs to steal from white people whenever they feel like it because, hey, they’re entitled to ‘reparations’.

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But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

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just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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NuScale has brought on another legacy nuclear power firm to help it design and build its small modular nuclear reactor. Late last month, the Oregon-based company announced a memorandum of understanding with Sargent & Lundy to help it develop its reactor design and to provide additional architect engineer support. Sargent & Lundy will also become an investor in NuScale, majority owned by Fluor.

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Though the tire has conventional treads, the middle layer is made of composite rubber and resin-embedded fiberglass spokes. The spokes provide support for the treads and remove the need for air.

I have seen a number of proposals for this sort of technology — basically, the tire rim is supported by a series of springs — but this appears to be close to production. The key will be how well it deals with stress not orthogonal to the treat surface, e.g. in cornering or side-skids.

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The ‘migrant’ arguing with the federal officer in the picture looks African to me.

Say what you will about Trump, his methods work.

UPDATE: Border Patrol Reports A Surge Of Africans Trying To Illegally Cross The Border

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Progress.

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Of course, if major companies boycott Georgia over the ‘heartbeat’ law, there won’t be any warehouse jobs there for robots to take.