I wrote last month about how, as a result of gerrymandering, the representation of Republicans in the state and federal legislatures far exceeds what they should be entitled to by the proportion of votes they got, with 49.2% of the votes netting them 62.1% of the seats in the state legislature. I wrote that Ohio could be called the gerrymandering capital of the US but it looks like Wisconsin can give it a good run for the money.
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When in 1998 an organization called the Friends of Benjamin Franklin House decided to restore the house that Franklin had occupied while he was the American ambassador to England, workers discovered a trove of about 1200 human bones buried in the basement.
Initial reports said the bones were from the remains of more than 15 bodies — six of them children. Some of the bodies were dismembered, or with trepanned skulls (skulls with holes drilled through them).
The bones were dated to be just over 200 years old, which would mean they were buried around the same time Franklin lived in the house. So where did the bones come from? Did Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, kill people and hide their remains in his London basement or could there be another answer to this creepy story?
I was intrigued by this demonstration of a plane that has no moving parts and moves silently through space, accompanied by just a blue glow. The abstract of the paper describing it can be read here but the paper itself is behind a paywall.
The first detection of gravitational waves was in November 2015, a century after Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicted their existence. It was a discovery of such importance that the Nobel prize for physics was awarded for it soon after in 2017. But since then there have been a flurry of such waves that are caused by the collisions of massive stellar objects.
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This is the question that is on people’s minds after Donald Trump tweeted his name following his awkward performance at the G20 meeting in Argentina.
Seth Meyers looks into this question.
In an irony that Meyers missed, it turns out that the phrase ‘scot free’ may have originated to describe someone who avoids paying taxes.
Today was the day when the civil trial brought by the lawyer of some of the accusers against sleazy convicted sex offender multi-millionaire Jeffrey Epstein was to go to trial. Last week, the Miami Herald released a bombshell investigation into the allegations and cover up of the abuse of young girls by Epstein who had plenty of friends in high places. But at the last minute a settlement was announced that included an apology by Epstein to Bradley Edwards, the lawyer who brought the case.
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One of the goals of the Israel lobby in the US is to make sure that the ‘two-state’ solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict remain the only option that is discussed, even though the expansionist settler policies of successive Israeli governments has made that option dead. The only possibility now is a single state and the debate really should be about what form that state should take, whether it be a democratic state in which Israelis and Palestinians everywhere in Israel and the Occupied Territories and Gaze have equal rights, or a formalized theocratic Apartheid state to replace the informal Apartheid state that currently exists.
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In the last show before he goes on break until 2019, he tackled the topic of the dangerous spread of false information on the internet and how companies like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter are conveniently switching between portraying themselves as publishers and platform providers to escape responsibility for not doing much to stop it.
An Australian journalist was asked to leave the premises of the parliament because because her outfit was too revealing in that “you can allegedly see too much skin”. I naturally had to click on the article to see what scandalous clothing had prompted this decision. See-through blouse? Plunging neckline? Very short skirt? Here is a photograph of Patricia Karvelas in her offending outfit.
