Daily Archives: February 25, 2020

The Bud and Irene Hopkins Foundation made several stops in Emporia on Tuesday.

Foundation Vice President Michelle Hopkins-Molinaro joined several district administrators and board members in presenting the Hopkins Project Awards. Hopkins-Molinaro tells KVOE News this is a natural extension of the foundation's willingness to help the district after it organized the Star Performer and WOW! awards for individual teachers for years.

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Board member Leslie Seeley says the program helps teachers as they meet student needs.

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Nearly 15 projects were awarded across the district, with grant amounts ranging from $620 to over $5,000.

Since 2002. the Hopkins Foundation has handed out almost $450,000 to better than 230 teachers and support staffers across USD 253.

*Katrina Goscha, Emporia High: Lightboard*Randy Wells, Emporia High: Lebert Buddy System trainers*Misty Lawson and Rick Jones, Emporia Middle School: Learning About the Past*Samuel Barrett, Logan Avenue Elementary: Logan Avenue disc golf course*Emily Joplin, Logan Avenue Elementary: Mars Colonization PBL field trip*Randielle Houser, Riverside Elementary: Flexible seating for fourth grade*Jenna Adkins, Timmerman Elementary: Math PBL projects*Tabatha Granado, Timmerman Elementary: Resource room*Annisa Lord, Village Elementary: STEAM productions*Hannah Prophet and Ashlee Anno, William Allen White: Growing Our Health Together*Marilyn Dalton, Carol Taylor, Jennifer Wendling, Karen Horton, Roberta Shafer, William Allen White Elementary: Books in Kids Hands, Kids in Parents Laps*Melanie Curtis, William Allen White Elementary: Green Screen Storytelling*Stephanie Yoho, Walnut Elementary: The Eagles Nest

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Hopkins Project Awards offer teachers another avenue to enhance learning experience - KVOE

Musician Grimes appears to have an interest in going to Mars, much like her boyfriend, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

In a candid new interview with British fashion and culture magazine The Face, Grimes discussed everything from her pregnancy to the harmful effects of social media. She also touched on her ambitions for the future, including her dreams of going to Mars.

Interviewer Michelle Lhooq asked Grimes whether she'd "rather go to Mars or upload your consciousness to the cloud," Grimes described going to Mars as one of "the main things I'm trying to do."

Here's her response in full:

"WOW, what a question. Ummmmm.. I would very much like to do both of these things. Like, these are the main things I'm trying to do. I guess I'd like to upload my consciousness, and then when it's technologically possible, have my consciousness live in some kind of humanoid vessel that can speak and move freely, and then that body can go to Mars and other planets with my mind inside it."

Mars is also the focus of Grimes' boyfriend, Elon Musk's, rocket company, SpaceX. Musk founded the company in 2002 with the goal of making spaceflight cheaper by a factor of 10. SpaceX's long-term goal is to make colonizing Mars affordable, and Musk has said that the company won't file for an initial public offering until what Musk calls the "Mars Colonial Transporter" is flying regularly.

Musk currently has plans to send 1 million people to Mars by 2050 and build a city there. The plan includes building 1,000 fully reusable spaceships, called Starships, over the next 10 years. Eventually, the goal is to launch three Starships each day.

"Needs to be such that anyone can go if they want, with loans available for those who don't have money," Musk recently wrote.

Musk and Grimes have been together since 2018, debuting their relationship at that year's Met Gala. Since then, the couple has weathered the storm of Musk's "funding secured" fiasco at Tesla, have shown up for each other's big career moments, and may now be expecting a baby together. Grimes has said that she's seven months pregnant, but more details about the pregnancy, such as whether she is having the baby with Musk, are not clear.

Read Grimes' full interview with The Face here.

Read more:
Grimes says going to Mars is one of her main goals - Business Insider - Business Insider

In context: If you've lived on this planet for longer than a couple decades, there's a good chance you've experienced a natural disaster or two. Tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis are common throughout the world, but new information suggests they're common on other planets as well: Mars, in particular.

Back in 2018, NASA's "InSight" lander touched down on the surface of Mars, with the goal of examining the Red Planet's interior. InSight has been in operation for around three months, and it's already turned up some interesting results. According to reports, InSight has detected hundreds of "marsquakes"; planetary tremors that behave similarly to the ground-shaking natural phenomena we experience here on Earth.

These quakes are caused by the "long-term cooling" of Mars -- as the planet cools, its crust becomes more brittle and begins to crack or even shatter. The impact of these cracks can be felt on the way on the surface.

The severity of most detected marsquakes paled in comparison to earthquakes, but about 20 tremors were "relatively significant," The Verge claims, coming in at a magnitude of "3 or 4." However, for the most part, even the worst quakes would not pose much of a threat to human life. "Mars is a place where we can probably say the seismic hazard is extremely low," InSight team member Philippe Lognonne reportedly said in a press release. "At least at this time."

That's good news for humanity in the long term; provided our efforts to colonize the Red Planet pay off down the line. For now, though, this news is just an interesting piece of trivia that further demonstrates the many differences between Earth and our distant, significantly less hospitable cousin.

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NASA's InSight lander detects 'marsquakes' on the Red Planet - TechSpot

SpaceX is teaming up with Space Adventures, an American space-tourism company, to send a small number of tourists into space as early as 2021, Engadget reported on Tuesday.

There's not much information about how the people will be chosen, and The Verge reported Space Adventures wasn't yet revealing pricing details. A spokesperson for SpaceX wasn't immediately available for comment.

The agreement comes several weeks after SpaceX opened an online booking tool for sending satellites into space on the Falcon 9 rocket, with payload prices starting at $1 million.

SpaceX, founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, manufactures and launches rockets and spacecraft with the goal of lowering the cost of space travel and eventually enabling humans to colonize Mars.

SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, which can carry up to seven passengers, will bring as many as four tourists into space for up to five days in orbit. The four noncrew members will receive several weeks of training before launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Engadget reported.

The Dragon spacecraft hasn't completed a flight with humans aboard, but it's scheduled to carry a crew in a mission in spring. The spacecraft had a successful trip to the International Space Station last year.

Flight tests for the upcoming tourism trip appear to have fixed problems that resulted in an explosion in April and demonstrated that the passenger capsule could release and land in the Atlantic during launch in case of malfunction.

But space tourism isn't the only frontier SpaceX is pioneering. The Falcon 9 launch service caters to customers who want to send small satellites into space but can't afford a full rocket, which can cost more than $60 million, according to TechCrunch. (Companies can book a payload flight on Falcon 9 by filling out this form.)

Falcon 9 is the first orbital-class reusable rocket, according to the SpaceX website. Rocket reusability is a key factor in reducing costs for access to space.

Falcon 9 made its first flight in 2012 to the International Space Station and completed its most recent launch on January 29.

Read more here:
SpaceX plans to send a small number of tourists into space - Business Insider - Business Insider

Friday saw the release of Miss Anthropocene, the first record by Canadian pop artist Grimes in five years. The indelible mark she made on the 2010s with her breakthrough fourth record Visions (the soundtrack for every cool girl with a synthesizer at a Montreal loft party, wearing a neon beret) and her 2015 follow-up Art Angels (the soundtrack of every cool girl with a synthesizer who has since moved to Los Angeles, wearing a pink cowboy hat) now feels like a cultural curiosity from a bygone era; her promising career as a songwriter, producer, and a feminist icon (remember when she sold "pussy rings" as merchandise?) soon overshadowed by a high-profile relationship with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the South African billionaire set to colonize Mars, now the father of her unborn child. Today Grimes's career feels like the setup to a unfunny punchline in a Jimmy Fallon monologue. She's become a millennial punching bag, living on the verge of cancellation, despite her indisputable talent as an innovator of pop. After being lauded as one of the most innovative musicians and producers of her generation in the early 2010s, how different is the world she's returned to than the one she shook up a decade ago?

As an independent songwriter and producer, the 31-year-old Grimes built a formidable legacy making art in her own image: drawing her own cover art, directing and starring in her own acclaimed music videos, the curator of a unique crust-punk-meets-Sailor Moon aesthetic that made her into a fashion icon on Tumblr. During an era that also saw artists like Taylor Swift come into their own as songwriters only to be rejected by a culture who grew weary of women making confessional art about their own experiences, it's arguable that these women walked so that the 18-year-old Billie Eilish, or the incredible Lizzo, could run in 2020. Artists like Eilish and Lizzo are now entering a cultural climate that's grown (somewhat) more respectful of women, largely due to all the female musicians forced to be sacrificial lambs before them. And of the problematic faves on my Spotify, Grimes tops my playlist every time. You might hate it when she talks, but she continues to make compelling art.

In an interview with the British publication Crack Magazine, Grimes expressed her current conundrum: "Without me doing anything, just by random association with other people, I've watched my career and my reputation get totally fucking smashed. I worked my whole fucking life for this and now everyone thinks I'm so stupid. I was just sitting there incredulous watching my life's work go down the drain."

Miss Anthropocene sees her solution: to play the villain. It's a concept album in which Grimes subsumes a Voldemort-esque identity (she actually seems more like Cara Delevingne's "Enchantress" in Suicide Squad), taking on the persona of a hateful bitch who loves climate change and seeks death and destruction for the world. "If I'm stuck being a villain, I want to pursue villainy artistically," Grimes continued in the same interview. "If there's nothing left to lose, that's actually a really fun idea to me. I think it has freed me artistically. The best part of the movie is the Joker. Everyone loves the villain. Everyone fucking loves Thanos. Let's make some Thanos art."

Before she was Thanos, Vancouver-born Claire Boucher belonged to Canada. After attending McGill as a neuroscience and philosophy student, she began making music at Montreal DIY loft parties with her Arbutus Records labelmates Majical Cloudz and d'Eon. Her fourth record Visions was recorded on GarageBand in an apartment on Parc Avenue during a three-week period where she blacked out all the windows and effectively lost her mind, offering luscious dark-edged singles ("Oblivion," "Genesis," "Be A Body") that sounded like the internet: sad and infectious, futuristic and solipsistic, though she'd call her aesthetic "post internet" in interviews. It was irresistible at a time when the weirdest frontwoman we'd seen recently was Karen O., better still when we saw the Emily Kai Bock-directed video for "Oblivion," featuring a spritely 25-year-old Grimes bopping along to her own song in places like a McGill football game and a dirt biking event, waving the drunken bros past the camera. Amongher many cultural legacies at the time, she embraced a K-pop influence, tried to tour with sustainable environmental practices, and also introduced an intriguing new length for bangs.

But as Grimes signed to Roc Nation and began accepting invitations to the Met Ball, her career trajectory throughout the 2010s followed the same path as her counterpart in film and television, Lena Dunham. Both women's early self-produced efforts were heralded as genius feminist masterworks. They talked openly about their experiences being talked down to in rooms of men who wanted to teach them something, and with sexual assault. But as the media scrutiny increased alongside their fame and success, they found themselves in the impossible position of having to be everything to all people at all times in a vitriolic internet landscape. Dunham and Grimes were two emotionally sensitive weirdos who became famous in their 20s, set with the daunting task of making art about their own experiences, branded as "the new hope" in two industries (film and music) on the verge of collapse. As white women of notable privilege, they did not handle it well, leading to behaviour that was questionable at best.

There were wild, regrettable, career-destroying, foot-in-mouth moments for both of them embarrassing social media overshares, casual experiments with bindis, an Instagram story maelstrom by Azealia Banks that summoned Grimes to testify in court. Even as I write this, Grimes has posted another cryptic tweet: "Only art ever saved me, everything else has betrayed me."

Grimes has always made undeniable bangers about deeply uncomfortable subjects her sexual assault, drug abuse, climate change, being a victim of the patriarchy but she also presents as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. We've never been able to handle that contradiction well since Manic Pixie Dream Girls can't also be smart, join protests to blockage a Kinder Morgan pipeline in B.C. as she did in 2018, or be genius-level producers. If women like Grimes fail to produce new music within a reasonable timeline, fall in love with problematic South African billionaires, or behave inappropriately online, they risk cancellation, exile, and belittlement, as well as repeated rape and death threats. We want them to speak their mind, only so we can tell them to shut the fuck up.

Scapegoating flawed female artists on the internet might feel like a nice release valve for all the aggression and anxiety we live with on a daily basis in the nightmare that is Trump's America, but it also means these female artists make worse and far more self-critical art, and far less often. Given all that's on her plate as a soon-to-be new mother of Elon Musk's child and the time it's taken her to confidently make new music again, it's entirely possible that Miss Anthropocene might be her last record, which saddens me.

In terms of world-building, Grimes was always ahead of her time: constructing a universe in her music videos as dense and cinematic as any Marvel movie, and this was pre-Lemonade. Like Robyn, she understood the mechanics of how to make a song bury into your brain, how the best pop songs were about feeling nostalgic for an experience that hasn't happened, and the challenges of making art in isolation. And like Madonna, she has tried to reinvent herself and failed: changing her name at one point to c, the scientific symbol for the speed of light, to distance herself from her reputation.

The start of 2020 has seen several young pop stars come out of the woodwork about the difficulties they've faced in the public eye. Thanks to the efforts of the #MeToo movement, there has been a shift of consciousness in pop music one that's become slightly more open to identifying women as human, but it still comes at a severe cost. Kesha's battle with her former producer Dr. Luke over allegations of rape recently ended with her being ordered to pay $375,000 to him for defamation of character, showing the fault lines in a system that continues to discredit women's stories of sexual assault but she also released a glorious new record, High Road, that sees her earning back her freedom of expression. Demi Lovato's performance of "Anyone" at the 2020 Grammys was a soulful triumph for the pop star, who was hospitalized in 2018 after an overdose and has been candid about her past attempts with suicide and drug addiction. Also this year, Selena Gomez who sought treatment at a mental health centre in 2016 and has been vocal about her experiences with depression and anxiety released the masterful Rare, a selection of beautiful songs that showcase her vulnerability as a strength. Meanwhile, Swift's documentary Miss Americana saw the singer confess to an eating disorder and explain why she was afraid to rally politically against Trump for fear of death and rape threats like the ones experienced by The Dixie Chicks when they denounced George Bush in 2003.

"I'm trying to be as educated as possible on how to respect people, on how to deprogram the misogyny in my own brain," said Swift. She later describes what might be the central goal for any young female artist: "I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful."

Miss Anthropocene is a great record, offering multiple tracks that are the grimiest Grimes has ever sounded. It delivers on the promise of the artist, less as a problematic pop star and more as an innovative producer like her hero Trent Reznor, seeing her embrace what could be seen as her id. Here, the industrial beats on "Violence" are positively oil-slicked as her ethereal vocals float above them, like oat milk on a latte. "U feed off hurting me...U wanna make me bad, and I like it like that," taunts Grimes in the song.

There is a freedom that comes with being cancelled, one supposes. If you're convinced no one wants to hear from you, maybe that empowers you to stop caring what other people think. I just hope Grimes continues to make music.

Originally posted here:
Grimes went from industry-shaking genius to punchline in a decade. Are we treating her fairly? - CBC.ca

Guion Bluford became the first African American to fly in spacewhen he launched aboard Challenger's STS-8 mission on Aug. 30, 1983. Tribune News Service

President Trumps budget request for fiscal year 2021 proposes a 12% increase in overall funding to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The budget introduces several notable changes to NASAs funding, including a 46% increase in space exploration to land a crewed mission on the moon by 2024.

Conversely, it proposes slashing funding for NASAs science programs by 12% and eliminating the STEM engagement budget, which is used for grants and cooperative associations.

But why bother with space policy in the first place? Why not privatize it all? Should our tax dollars really be funding quasar research and meteor analysis?

Yes, they should.

Space policy is justified as one of the most appropriate uses of public funding because NASA consistently makes contributions to humanitys general well-being in a way other government agencies do not. To meet the demands of our time and ensure NASAs continued success, we should increase funding for all of its programs.

Lots of arguments are made against the practicality of space policy, from the economic to the social to the philosophical. However, the opposition is misguided.

One of the most common objections to the public funding of space exploration is its supposedly exorbitant cost. However, NASAs budget totals $22.6 billion for the 2020 fiscal year. Compared to the $738 billion our government is spending on defense, this figure seems reasonable.

Contrary to popular belief, NASA is actually a boon to the economy. NASA employs more than 17,000 people whose salaries average out at $91,013 per year. Moreover, NASA is an integral part of the global space economy through its prodigious investment in space-related industries, such as space technology manufacturing, which have been identified as key national priorities. Aside from the strategic importance of such investments, the space economy generated $414.75 billion dollars in 2018, according to the Space Foundation.

Privatization is undesirable. NASA renders services for the government that private businesses do not. For example, NASA offers grants that have bolstered scientific research in areas such as microbial ecology and climate change.

Additionally, as a world leader in the space industry, NASA represents the U.S. on the world stage in a way that no business could. Maintaining a strong international presence on space policy is strategically advantageous.

Not to mention NASA sent a loveable rover to Mars. Talk to me when your space capsules have endearing personalities, Elon.

Despite its wealth of cutting-edge technology and decades of research, the agency has found no evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. The nearest potentially habitable planet outside of our solar system, Proxima Centauri-b, is located approximately 4.24 light years away, and we are generations away from potentially attempting to colonize it.

But the majority of Americans still think it is essential that NASA continues to be involved in space exploration, according to the Pew Research Center.

Trying to figure out how to navigate and survive space yields insight into survival on Earth. For example, NASAs food science research has influenced closed-system ecology and pushed the needle forward on 3D printed food. This work could help develop more efficient and sustainable food sources for the future.

Not to mention there may come a time when it is necessary to harvest resources from outer space to maintain human infrastructure. One day we may even have to colonize nearby planets for survival.

The U.S. has an obligation to both its citizens and to humanity to propagate the species and expand our knowledge of the universe. Few other government agencies are tasked with such a forward-looking humanitarian mission.

It can be argued that the kernel of the skepticism surrounding NASA regards the merit of its forward-looking goals in government generally. Much suspicion is aroused in the heart of a conservative when there is no immediate payoff to be found. One analogy is climate change, which is another area of policy bedeviled by political skepticism despite its clear benefits in the long run.

If we want to avoid making the same myopic, greedy mistakes the previous generation made, we should ignore these skeptics and increase funding to all of NASAs programs, including its STEM engagement and scientific research. These forward-thinking initiatives are an investment in humankinds future and a testament to our species continued progress.

Carter Cooley (he/him) is a junior studying political science. After graduating he plans to go into political campaign management.

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Online charter schools lead to stolen tax dollars and poor education.

We must do more to notice ADHD and autism symptoms in women and nonbinary people.

Conservative homophobia toward Buttigieg rises with his popularity.

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OPINION: The government has a duty to fund space policy - Indiana Daily Student

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Todays best Android game/app deals and freebies: Colorzzle, MechaNika, more - 9to5Toys