Daybreak Tuesday 12/14/21

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Still quiet, still sunny. A cold front dropped by last night, so things will be a bit cooler today, with temps getting to around 40 by early afternoon. If there are any clouds around first thing they'll be gone right quick. Steady breezes today from the northwest, down into the upper teens tonight.Some red-tailed hawks prefer to stick around. Mary Holland has a striking photo of a juvenile on her Naturally Curious blog, along with a brief post explaining that while most red-tails migrate south for the winter, breeding birds will stick it out in northern New England—and be joined by some from Canada, for whom this is apparently south enough.Things to notice about weasels, all in one photo. It's the lead "This Week in the Woods" photo for this third week of December, and Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast notes that weasels—like the one captured on camera—have teeth "perfectly aligned" for snapping mouse spines, strong necks (for carrying prey through narrow spaces), and fur-color change nicely timed for the season. Also out there this week: a couple of Virginia opossums, mice, highbush cranberries, and evidence of larvae doing damage to sugar maples.Are chemicals poisoning NH loons “on golden pond?” A biologist for NH’s Loon Preservation Committee is raising alarms about a possible link between declining loon populations on Squam Lake in Holderness and the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, synthetic chemicals that were banned four decades ago. The AP’s Michael Casey reports on evidence of lingering concentrations of PCBs still endangering wildlife around the globe. But why Squam Lake is a hot spot for chemical contaminants is mysterious. A state watershed administrator scratches his head: “There is no industry.” SPONSORED: THANK YOU, UPPER VALLEY for your continued support! Our team at Blake Hill has been thrilled to see so many of you in our shop, bringing your out-of-town friends for jam tastings, ordering gifts for loved ones near and far, and all your likes, loves, and shares on our social media! We have so enjoyed another year of artisan jam making! Ordering gifts online? Ship TODAY for guaranteed delivery before the holidays and add a FREE $10 Jam E-Card to your cart for every $50 you spend. Discount will magically apply! Available Dec. 14 & 15. Sponsored by Blake Hill Preserves.The interplay between dynamical metastability and nontrivial bulk topology... Okaaay. That, in a nutshell, is what Dartmouth grad student Vincent Flynn, physics prof Lorenza Viola, and visiting prof Emilio Cobanera say makes it theoretically possible for photons, the building blocks of light, to be split—a feat long thought impossible. "Similar to how liquid water can change into ice or vapor under specific conditions, the research indicates that light can also exist in a different phase—one where photons appear as two distinct halves," writes David Hirsch in Dartmouth News. The theory still needs to be proven in a lab."Everything’s on fire." That's Joseph Hou, a pulmonary care doc at Catholic Medical Center in Manchester. NHPR's Todd Bookman spent some time at the hospital talking to medical staff about what it's like right now. The answer: awful. Patients are terrified—or angry—and nurses are dealing with death and impossible decisions every day. "This is like a constant tsunami on a day to day basis," says Jessica Marchand, a nurse. "We care about the people that we care for and when you don’t have the ability to provide that care, it kills you." Transcript is only partial—listen to it for full impact.Omicron shows up in NH. The health department reported yesterday that the state's first case of the new Covid variant was found in a Cheshire Country resident who'd traveled out of state. The resident, the department says in a press release, was "considered" fully vaccinated, but hadn't yet gotten a booster. The state adds that "99% of infections are currently due to the Delta variant; however, the Omicron variant is predicted to be more infectious and may become predominant."Teachers, parents sue NH over "divisive concepts" law. The suit, filed yesterday in US District Court and coordinated by the American Federation of Teachers, says that the controversial statute is unconstitutionally vague, reports Ethan DeWitt in NH Bulletin. "The overbreadth and ambiguity of the statute makes it impossible for teachers to follow and highly susceptible to arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement,” the suit alleges. The teachers, DeWitt writes, say that the law's vagueness is keeping them from using their usual curricula. A "natural experiment" compares NH's two ways of counting ballots—and the machines win. For his Granite Geek blog, David Brooks first took a look at hand recounts of ballots tallied by machines in state rep races from 2016-20. He found that the recounts changed about one-half of one percent of the votes—and only in five of 150 seats he looked at did the recount change the winner. Then he moved on to recounts of multi-town districts in which some towns used hand counting and some used machines; in all three of those cases, the machines proved more accurate.Okay, it's official: No one is happy with the NH PUC. Even the state—or at least the NH Dept of Energy—has joined the massed chorus of voices asking that the Public Utilities Commission reconsider its decision cutting funding for energy efficiency programs and axing the state's efficiency plan. The DOE's move came on Friday, reports NH Bulletin's Amanda Gokee—the same day that the state's utilities, along with the state's consumer advocate and various environmental groups, filed a motion for a rehearing."Objectively unreasonable, excessive, and conscience-shocking physical force.” That is the allegation against employees in Vermont's now-closed juvenile detention center, contained in a lawsuit filed yesterday on behalf of six unnamed youth, reports VTDigger's Alan J. Keays. The lawsuit names about a dozen defendants, many of whom worked at Woodside Juvenile Rehab Center, which the Scott administration closed last year, and then at the Middlesex Adolescent Center. The state's bid to create a smaller facility in Newbury was rejected by that town's Development Review Board.Looking for a little hideaway in NH or VT? Every so often, the real estate gods come bearing gifts. Over in Thornton, NH, for instance, there's a full-size replica of Boston's Engine 21 firehouse, built by the late John Cullen, a firefighter enthusiast and former Globe reporter, for sale. Walking distance to the Welch-Dickey trailhead, people! Meanwhile, the Burlington Free Press reports, there's an "interpretation of a Vermont farmhouse" with not one but two castle-like turrets selling for $4.5 million on 240 acres landscaped by the same designer who did gardens for the Queen Mother and Steve Jobs."What is art?" And for good measure, "What if [sic] food? What is a chef? What is a client? What is good taste? What looks beautiful? What is a man on a horse?" The whole little tempest about that eviscerating review of the Italian restaurant Bros has gotten even better with Chef Floriano's "declaration" in response, which Today reprints in full. It contains three depictions of a man on a horse, including a modernist painting, about which Floriano writes, "Contemporary art does not provide you with answers, but offers you great questions. Contemporary cuisine should do the same."Earth’s largest living thing is 14,000 years old…and in trouble. In Utah’s Wasatch range, a 106-acre stand of quaking aspen may appear to be 47,000 individual trees, but in fact they're connected by the same root system—making them a single, gigantic organism. But as Richard Elton Walton writes in The Conversation, this millennia-old aspen cluster, known as Pando, now faces several menaces at once. Deer and elk, now with fewer predators, freely feast on newly formed stems; plant diseases have crept in; and then there’s climate change, promising waves of heat and drought that Pando’s never known.

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Outfitted in a list supplied by Wikipedia,(breastplates, gauntlets, steel collars, mail shirts,vambrace, pouldron, bassinet, barbute, aventail),chain armor from a 3-d printer for a smaller budget,emoji are at war: Blushing Emoji, Frustrated, Weeping,Smiling Emoji near the village firewall,& a thousand spears like toothpicks,emoji are at war.

—From

"Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak,"

by Alexandria Peary. Couldn't resist.

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