Pun Salad

… when I read this headline at Ars Technica: Solar drone with jumbo jet wingspan broke a flight record—then it crashed.

To be fair, it had a good run, longer than the Titanic's:

Keep trying, guys.

Also of note:

• Could they all please just crawl back under their rocks? Barton Swaim looks at Antisemites Right and Left. (WSJ gifted link)

  An “antisemitism problem” exists on both the left and the right, according to the latest political cliché. Like most clichés, this one contains truth, but its expression sounds like an excuse to keep quiet and do nothing.

  Jew-hatred thrives in some precincts more than others, and for reasons nobody fully understands it does so more among the credentialed and allegedly better-educated Americans than it does among the rest. What makes antisemitism in the 2020s so menacing isn’t its ugliness or brutality but its subtlety and intellectual appeal, its expression by gullible journalists and kaffiyeh-wearing postgraduates using big terms they don’t understand: “Zionism,” “genocide,” “occupation.”

  The zeal with which a sizable part of the Democratic primary-voting electorate fixates on the Jewish state—a sliver of a country on the other side of the world—defies explanation. Even granting some of the cockamamie claims about Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank, lots of countries around the world commit ill deeds. Why the obsession with Israel but not Myanmar or Sudan? Why such expressive pity for the Palestinians but none for the Uyghurs?

  Barton notes a right/left disparity though: numerous voices on the right call out and condemn antisemitic slurs made by "our side"; on the left, not so much.

  Also at the WSJ, the editorialists summarize a new report containing The Truth About Hamas (WSJ gifted link).

  Reading “Silenced No More,” the new report by the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, we were transported back to Oct. 27, 2023, and a screening of the raw footage of Hamas’s atrocities. The mouths of journalists were agape, but time dulls horrific reality.

  "Horrific" is, if anything, an understatement. Read if you think your stomach can stand it.

• From the newspaper that published the rape dog fantasies … The New York Times has a softball interview with University Near Here's Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who is headlined-described as A Physicist Who Thinks in Poetry from the Cosmic Edge. This stood out (interviewer in bold):

  How do you want readers to approach this book?

  There is this feeling that you’re supposed to read a book like this and walk away an expert. That’s actually not the point of this book at all. The point is to wander through physics. Even if math terrifies you, you are entitled to spend some time with it.

  And so here, I have made you a book with a bunch of tidbits on the oddities of the universe. The universe is stranger and more queer and more wonderful and more full of possibility than whatever limitations you might be experiencing right now. Physics challenges what we are told are social norms. For example, non-trinary neutrinos are fundamental to our standard model of physics.

  “Non-trinary,” as in they shift between three different forms.

  Non-trinary is natural. It’s such a challenge to the current anti-trans rhetoric that says people can only ever be one thing.

  A short physics tutorial: there are three "flavors" of neutrinos: electron, muon, and tau. They are almost massless, rarely interact with any matter they encounter, and travel nearly the speed of light. And their extra-special "queerness" is that they oscillate between flavors as they zip through space.

  And of course this implies that guys can oscillate into girls while travelling through ladies' locker rooms! Take that, J.K. Rowling!

  CPW has a new book out, and I have requested a hold for it at the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. Should be a fun read!