True's beaked whale.jpg

Western spotted skunk

Hooded skunk

Yellow-throated Marten

Wolverine

Archive for April, 2020

Links for April 2020

Sunday, April 5th, 2020

Wisc politics blog.
The Republican-led Wisconsin State Legislature has not taken one single action since the crisis hit. Not. One.
Even in the Before Times, they were planning to take a nine-month break. 
Tony Evers proposed one (very reasonable!) $700 million plan to address the crisis on March 21, and the Republicans did nothing with it, and proposed no alternate plan. The governor has now proposed a second plan. Democratic lawmakers are urging their Republican counterparts to take it up. It remains to be seen if the Republican leadership in the legislature will do anything.
Restaurants and other small businesses have been asking legislative leaders to waive the one-week waiting period to receive unemployment benefits– something the governor has supported even before the crisis hit–and they’ve done nothing about it. 
The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, inundated with 160 calls per second as unemployment claims skyrocket into the hundreds of thousands, even had to go out of its way to clarify that the legislature would be needed to waive that waiting period. The legislature could waive that waiting period quickly and easily and the governor would undoubtedly sign it into law.
The legislature could even just go in for a lay-up and allow at-home alcohol delivery. Who would be opposed to that right about now?
The Republicans in charge of the State Legislature spent more than a year shouting about being a co-equal branch of government only to do not one single thing once a real crisis hit.

Kids STEM stuff:
MEL Science
Mystery Science
Kiwi Crate boxes

What does this physicist think of economists? by Jason Smith (parody)

COVID-19
Will I Get A Check From The US Government, And How?
Illinois Dept of Public Health–COVID-19 cases, deaths statistics
IHME COVID-19 projections
This Is Trump’s Fault: The president is failing, and Americans are paying for his failures. by David Frum (conservative critic of Trump)

The Self-Made Man: The story of America’s most pliable, pernicious, irrepressible myth. by John Swansburg

Yasky-bot. An industrial robotic arm becomes open.
Built a controller and kinematics solver for a robot arm.