Welcome to the latest installment of our perennial fic updates thread.

The previous thread can be found here.

As the title says.  I'm getting "This site can't be reached ... server IP address could not be found" when I click on the links in this entry:

Quote:12-jo 1K
Standard Japanese real estate notation for an apartment with a separate kitchen(ette) and bedroom/sitting room, measuring about 200 square feet (or about 18.5 square meters, for my readers who don't use Imperial). "Jo" is an unit of measurement equal to one tatami mat. (And in Tokyo the standard mat is of course just a bit smaller than the one used elsewhere, because rents are based on the number of jo.)
In New York City this would be called a "studio apartment". If you're curious about how Japanese apartments are arranged and how they differ from American (or European) apartments, check out this page and this one.

Yeah.

Quote:Wisconsin State Sen Majority Leader acknowledged that Republican legislators would not be working to pass a plan to weaken the governor if Walker had won reelection. He said the bills are necessary now because they “don’t trust” Evers. https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/poli...191923002/

A bit of history:

Nine years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Viola Desmond refused to give up her seat in the whites-only section of a movie theatre, and was arrested for refusing to comply with segregationist laws.

In 2010, she posthumously received a free pardon for the act. (In Canada, a "free pardon" is different from a regular pardon in that it is an official acknowledgment that no wrongdoing took place.)

This week, Viola Desmond replaced Sir John A. Macdonald on the $10 bill. (For you folks in the USA, this is like replacing George Washington with Rosa Parks. Analogies don't get much more exact than this.)

Here's a photo of the new bill, held by Viola Desmond's sister:




Now for the question:

Is this the first time a regular circulation bill has been designed in portrait orientation instead of landscape orientation? (It's definitely a first in Canada.)

George H.W. Bush: June 12, 1924 - November 30, 2018

A man who:

• Knew enough to be polite to political leaders that he strongly disagreed with (e.g. Saddam Hussein);
  
• Knew that free trade was a generator of wealth (bringing Mexico into NAFTA);
  
• Knew that maintaining friendships with allied nations even during trade disputes with those nations was important;
  
• Was able to work with the Democrats even when he didn't want to;
  
• Knew climate change was real and supported legislation to reduce acid rain; and
  
• Was secure enough to poke fun at himself on SNL.
  

Quirks & Quarks: A new plane with no moving parts flies by electrifying the air

MIT's Electric Aircraft  Initiative have managed to get electroaerodynamic propulsion working in the lab - 60 meters over 10 flights, with an average altitude of 0.47 meters, with no propellers or jet engines or other moving parts. There's a video of how it works on the web page, just above the link to the paper published in Nature.

EDIT: Oh, it's a YouTube vid. Here you go:




It's barely at the Kitty Hawk stage right now, if that, but it flies.


And, no doubt, the same principle is used by all those flying electromasters in superhero fiction...  

Just so no one who's joined us since last December panics, on Saturday I turn the snow back on again.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...ge/576802/

Interesting article trying to diagnose why we can't seem to act on the big challenges facing the nation.

• Anti-statism combined with the assumption that the free market will take care of it.
  
• Anti-intellectualism
  
• The conceit that this Nation special and above what ails everyone else
  
• A system of government that disproportionately favors rural states