Some Thoughts I Share With This Poet-

when the day’s temp has exceeded 70 degrees. Time to think about the weather again! (Still!)

Late February

Short clips from TizzyEnt

This videos are hard to watch, I had to fast forward over the part showing the man harassing these people and acting like a deranged gang thug, which maga is. It is going to get worse as more of these vigilantes think they have a right to be enforcers of their own opinions. We need to make sure that every event is punished and made public to stop these people from acting this way. Hugs

A south Carolina man is in jail for illegally detaining people he thought were “illegals”

Canceling any non white male centric holiday in the name of DEI? Sounds about Project 2025 of them.

Wanting lower grocery prices is good; believing a liar is not.

Deporting his supporters: They got your vote, they don’t need you anymore.

Looks like DOGE is coming for the Department of Labor next.

More Ugly News From Kansas

Kansas House embraces bill on religious, moral liberty within state’s foster care program

Snippet (it’s not too long to go read):

An amendment from Rep. Susan Ruiz, a Shawnee Democrat, to modify the bill’s language so best interests of a child in foster or adoptive care remained the top priority at DCF was rejected by the House. She said the amendment was necessary because the bill was drafted in a way that could force a subsection of children in Kansas to endure more trauma.

“You have to remember why children come into the system in the first place,” Ruiz said. “They come into the system because of abuse and neglect, and it comes in so many forms.”

Ruiz told House colleagues that Kansas youth were physically beaten and emotionally traumatized by parents and church leaders who wanted children to adhere to a certain sexual orientation or gender identity. Some kids were expected to “pray away the gay,” she said.

Others were compelled to undergo so-called conversion therapy, she said. It has little basis in science, but proposes to erase a person’s gender identity or sexuality — usually to conform to ideals of other people.

“This bill opens up the door to one of the most horrible forms of therapy that any human being can be exposed to,” Ruiz said. (Snip-MORE)

I know it is too late to change the vote, but we can make their vote hang on them and drag them down. They depend on us forgetting what they did.

They Don’t Care …

Thank you Ten Bears for posting this video. I wish more people could have seen it and stuff like it … before the vote. Hugs

Off Topic, A Piece from Nancy Beiman

She was there, too. by Nancy Beiman

NPR interviewed me in 2014. Read on Substack

The number A113 appears in [yesterday]’s FurBabies strip. It’s the number of our classroom at Cal Arts. Click on the link to see the entire comic.

https://www.gocomics.com/furbabies/2025/02/16

NPR interviewed me for an hour in 2014 after a Vanity Fair article appeared about the program. Here it is.

https://www.npr.org/2014/02/16/277882145/disneys-first-crop-of-trained-animators-profiled

Leslie Margolin, the other girl in the first class, was not interviewed. A group photo was taken of other graduates for Vanity Fair. I am not in it. Tim Burton was Photoshopped in, but no one would do that for me even though I offered to go to New York for the photo shoot.

The so called Cal Arts Mafia only worked for the male students.

Thanks for reading FurBabies (formerly Animation Anarchy)! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Two For Science On Sunday

Fully recyclable solar cells – just add water

February 14, 2025 Richard Musgrove

Swedish researchers have invented a fully-recyclable perovskite solar cell that may provide a solution to the growing problem of solar panel waste.

All renewable technologies have a life span — with solar panels it’s 25 to 30 years — which means our solar waste pile is rapidly becoming mountainous. Just 17 % of solar panel components were recycled in Australia in 2023, specifically the aluminium frames and junction boxes. The remaining 83% (glass, silicon and polymer back sheeting) was shuttled out to landfill. Other countries do better; France’s ROSI was an early starter in what could be a $2b market by 2050.

Linköping University researchersmay have a solution — fully recyclable perovskite solar cells.

These cells are also flexible, transparent and inexpensive — who needs aluminium frames when your PVs are stuck to your windows?

Low res — *Professor Feng Gao with postdocs Xun Xiao and Niansheng Xu at Linköping University (Image Thor Balkhed)*

“There is currently no efficient technology to deal with the waste of silicon panels. That’s why old solar panels end up in the landfill,” says coauthor, Xun Xiao, at the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM) at Linköping University (LiU).

“Huge mountains of electronic waste that you can’t do anything with.”

Perovskites used in photovoltaic solar cells are ‘metal-halide perovskites’ — made from organic ions, metals and halogens. Such cells’ active layers are much thinner and cheaper than those of conventional silicon PV and show efficiencies of more than 26%, comparable with silicon PVs (20% – 22%).

But perovskite PVs are not yet produced at scale.

Recyclability is the key.

“We need to take recycling into consideration when developing emerging solar cell technologies,” says Professor Feng Gao, also at IFM at LiU and a co-author. “If we don’t know how to recycle them, maybe we shouldn’t put them on the market at all.”

(Snip-MORE, and they can recycle them!)

Pressing pause: how a unique insect survives Antarctica

February 14, 2025 Ariel Marcy

The inhospitable Antarctic Peninsula hosts only one native insect, and scientists from Japan have just identified an unprecedented combination of adaptations that allow it to thrive in the extreme cold.

The Antarctic midge is a tiny, flightless insect that lives most of its two-year life as a larva, the grub-like stage that follows the egg stage. (Complete metamorphosis in insects includes egg, larva, pupa, and adult stages).

Two insects, adult flightless antarctic midges on ice. — Adult Antarctic midges. Credit: Yuta Shimizu / Osaka Metropolitan University.

How these larvae overwinter in Antarctica could have implications for cryopreservation technology but, perhaps more pressingly, better understanding of the species’ response to climate change. Previous researchers have suggested that the Antarctic midge be developed as a model organism for survival in extreme and fluctuating temperatures.

The Japanese research team led by Shin Goto of Osaka Metropolitan University studied the unique midge after developing a specialised rearing method, which took them six years to establish.

The team then tracked the growth and physiology of the midge larvae through their natural lifecycle. In a first for science, they documented two distinct forms of dormancy used as seasonal survival adaptations.

In general, dormancy is a state of inactivity, suspended development and reduced metabolism, but insect scientists distinguish between two types: quiescence and diapause.

In the first winter, the Antarctic midge larvae adapted via quiescence, a form of dormancy triggered by external conditions, such as cold temperatures. This means all the midge larvae go dormant at the same time. Quiescence ends when the temperature rises.

(Snip-MORE; it’s fascinating and worth the click. Also not long.)

Sure, We’ll Do That …

I don’t know if it’s a scam, phish, spam, or real. I wonder if anyone else got one of these, though, so let me know, and please don’t click anything within it. Meanwhile, I got a macabre giggle out of this email I received this morning from noreply@studentaid.gov ; Help your child submit their FAFSA form today. (You know how I love my giggles.)

Yeah, after all the news for over a week about access to such sites by unauthorized, unsworn, unelected, non-government employees actually younger than our “child,” who needs no help with such things nor even needs such things, we’re gonna log right on and put all that info in there! (Yes, we did it way back when he did need it done.)

The graphic won’t show here, but the body is very like my recollection of things from FAFSA.

I don’t know if anyone here has or knows someone who will need to fill out these forms with their kids for college in Fall. I simply hope we all remember to not click through from anything in an email, but to go directly to the site to do our work, OK? Thanks!

Two More Poems I Ran Across Yesterday,

posted in observance of Black History Month. The titles link to the pages with more info about the poet and their works.

Surrender

Angelina Weld Grimké 1880 – 1958

We ask for peace. We, at the bound
O life, are weary of the round
In search of Truth. We know the quest
Is not for us, the vision blest
Is meant for other eyes. Uncrowned,
We go, with heads bowed to the ground,
And old hands, gnarled and hard and browned.
Let us forget the past unrest,—
We ask for peace.

Our strainéd ears are deaf,—no sound
May reach them more; no sight may wound
Our worn-out eyes. We gave our best,
And, while we totter down the West,
Unto that last, that open mound,—
We ask for peace.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 8, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

=============================

Expectancy

William Moore

I do not care for sleep, I’ll wait awhile
For Love to come out of the darkness, wait
For laughter, gifted with the frequent fate
Of dusk-lit hope, to touch me with the smile
Of moon and star and joy of that last mile
Before I reach the sea. The ships are late
And mayhap laden with the precious freight
Dawn brings from Life’s eternal summer isle.

And should I find the sweeter fruits of dream—
The oranges of love and mating song—
I’ll laugh so true the morn will gayly seem
Endless and ships full laden with a throng
Of beauty, dreams and loves will come to me
Out of the surge of yonder silver sea.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 9, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.