The Link LonkThe reality is, Red Land’s push to becoming a District 3 playoff contender again is attached to moments like Oct. 4, 2019.
Frank Gay’s Patriots, a noticeable 4-2 over the first six weeks of the season, let the next one slip away at West Shore Stadium.
Red Land nearly doubled up Mechanicsburg’s offensive production, but the weight of three turnovers and ill-timed penalties in the fourth quarter opened the door for Mechanicsburg to steal a 16-11 road victory.
The Wildcats would eventually land a postseason bid. Red Land, unable to slow the descent, finished 4-6 overall and missed the playoffs for the fifth season in a row.
“Those are the close games you need to win, and that’s part of learning how to win again,” said head coach Frank Gay, entering his third season after returning to Red Land in 2018.
“They are catching on. We needed to beat Mechanicsburg, which we should of. That keeps the ball rolling and good things start to happen. That’s why this group is so motivated.”
Every season offers new challenges, and at least some new faces in the process of improving the program. The 2020 Patriots are no different, although replacing the vital QB position is top priority.
Tough-minded Adam Cramer earned his diploma, so Gay and his coaching staff, which includes former Mechanicsburg head coach and NFL quarterback Chris Hakel, are running auditions.
Versatile veteran Dylan Robenhaber, a three-year starter, is likely the frontrunner to fill those shoes, but newcomers Landon Henline and Roman Jensen have bolstered the competition.
“Adam Cramer was a heck of an athlete for us. That’s a big void right now,” Gay said.
“We’re replacing some skill guys and have some linemen coming back. I really like this group of kids. They are fun to be around and they’re working their butts off. You know, sometimes you get those teams that don’t really mix. This team is different.”
Red Land's Kaden Peifer celebrates his touchdown against Susquehanna Twp.in their week 8 high school football game. Oct. 11, 2019. Sean Simmers | ssimmers@pennlive.com
Another veteran, jack-of-all-trades receiver, linebacker and return man Hayden Zechman said the team’s confidence, despite the frustrating finish last season, is high.
“The year before (1-9 in 2018), obviously, was tough. Last year we came back a little bit and gained some confidence. This year, we’re more confident in ourselves and we’re working hard,” Zechman said.
“We’ve been getting together a lot, having a couple of night practices a week. We’ll even text some guys and get together. There have been a lot of young guys that want to get in.”
Only hard work, Zechman said, starts to path to regaining a strong footing in the Mid-Penn Conference and beyond. “It’s the key for any player, on any team,” Zechman said.
And, Zechman is a big part of a defense that should steer the Patriots in the early part of the season. Zechman and Rodenhaber were division all-stars a season ago. Kaden Peifer, a first-team all-conference TE, is another anchor at DE.
Red Land’s front seven also will include hard-hitting OLB Chase Lawyer, DE Garrett Hodges, Aaron Snelbaker and, potentially, Parker Lawyer and newcomer Bryce Phillips.
Griffin Socash is part of a developing secondary, where Zechman will slide in at times. Nearly every ’19 starter at linebacker and defensive back returns.
“We feel pretty confident in those areas for the most part,” said Gay. “That’s our strength, and our team unity.”
In addition, Gay said a strong sophomore class is pulling their weight following a 9-1 junior varsity season.
Red Land is scheduled to open its regular season Aug. 28 at Northern.
Follow Eric Epler on Twitter -- @threejacker
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The Link LonkOslo architecture studio Sanden+Hodnekvam Arkitekter has designed a house from prefabricated concrete panels in Norway for a three-generational family that took part in its construction.
Sanden+Hodnekvam Arkitekter's House in Red Concrete in the town of in Lillehammer was built with a facade made from repetitive, insulated-concrete elements in order to help keep costs down.
"The repetitive facade made it possible to use the same casting for the concrete elements many times," co-founder John Sanden told Dezeen.
"The cost is really low, which was possible because of the simple construction system, the repetitiveness and the work done by the client themselves."
To keep the project affordable, Sanden + Hodnekvam chose to use prefabricated, insulated concrete elements with a 50-millimetre outer layer of pigmented concrete for all the facades.
The studio also designed the house so that no inner walls are load-bearing. This was to save money in the future as it means the house can be adapted to the client's changing needs but also meant the owners could help build the house themselves.
"After the load-bearing part of the construction was in place, the clients have put up inner walls and finished large parts of the remaining work themselves," the studio said.
"This gave them a deeper understanding of the building, and it made them really love the house already long before they moved in," Sanden added.
As the house was built on a sloping site, with a height difference of about 10 metres across it, Sanden+Hodnekvam Arkitekter dug it into the hilldside and aligned it at a diagonal angle to the fall of the terrain to create outdoor spaces and improves its views.
"A large part of the house is dug into the hillside in order to fit the programme to the compact site, and at the same time follow height regulations and maximise the view," the studio said.
The distinct red colour of the exterior was achieved by adding iron oxide to the concrete mix. "The pigment gives the house a different appearance than the grey, which gives the house its own character," Sanden said.
"The pigment, along with the wooden windows and the geometric pattern between the concrete elements, makes the building stand out as something different than just a concrete box."
Inside the house, the rough concrete walls and ceilings have been left exposed and are complemented by walls in knot-free pine panelling, which was also used for the ceilings in the kitchen and living room. Pine plywood furniture was built on site.
"A lot of the furniture is specific for each room, which creates a clean interior that is easier to keep tidy in the everyday life," Sanden said. "The furniture also helps to create an area-effective building."
Floors were covered in hardwearing cement screed. "It is a house that is built to last by adaption or re-appropriation," the studio concluded.
Norweigan studio Sanden+Hodnekvam Arkitekter was founded in 2014 by John Sanden and Ingvild Hodnekvam. The studio also chose to work with concrete and wood when creating a cabin overlooking a Norwegian fjord.
Photography is by Sanden+Hodnekvam Arkitekter.
COLUMBUS (WCMH) – There was some good news and some bad news regarding the spread of COVID-19 across the state during Gov. Mike DeWine’s briefing Thursday.
The good news is that the state has fewer counties in the red Level 3 on the state’s coronavirus advisory system.
The bad news is there are many more orange Level 2 counties across the state.
As of Thursday, there were 13 counties, including Franklin, Licking and Fairfield counties, designated Level 3, down from 23 counties last week.
“What we’re seeing… is the urban counties that have had the mask orders the longest are seeing a significant decrease in where that line (of COVID-19 cases) was going,” DeWine said. “They’re still at a high rate, but that rate increase has certainly been dramatically slowed down.”
Eight of the red counties remain at that status due to meeting the CDC’s definition of a high incidence of COVID-19, which is more than 100 new cases per 100,000 people over a two-week period. Franklin, Licking, and Fairfield all fall into this category, DeWine said, adding that while the increase of cases may be slowing, those counties still exceed the CDC’s definition.
Another bit of good news is that none of the red counties are on the watchlist for moving up to Level 4. Last week, Allen County was on the watchlist, but has since been removed from the watchlist. DeWine said cases are still increasing there, but that the increase is not as rapid.
The governor said that the mask order as well as peoples’ adherence to it is what caused the new daily case rates to decline in those counties.
“That is no accident that those two things are occurring together,” DeWine said.
The bad news, the governor said, is that 52 of Ohio’s 88 counties are now at Level 2.
“What this means is is that it’s spreading out and candidly in the rural parts of Ohio, where the mask wearing is much, much less, much, much less than it is in the urban areas, that is one of the reasons you’re seeing that spread, and that spread will continue,” DeWine said.
DeWine, who met with Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, last week, quoted Birx, saying the spread of COVID-19 won’t slow the spread of the virus unless something slows it down, and masks will do that.
The Ohio Public Health Advisory System consists of four levels:
U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton is taking flak for suggesting that “we” Northeasterners think the populations of conservative “red states” are “getting what’s coming to them” with a surge in coronavirus cases.
Moulton waved away criticism of his statements late Thursday as “cheap shots,” but others said they expected more from the former presidential candidate.
Moulton, a Democrat from Salem, was speaking in a streamed conversation with U.S. Senate candidate Amy McGrath, asking the Kentucky Democrat whether she’s “seeing minds change on the ground” on the coronavirus in her state.
“We certainly have this perception in the Northeast that all the red states are, you know, they kind of — they’re getting what was coming to them because they refused to follow these mandates, and they’re playing politics with this rather than listening to the science,” Moulton said to McGrath in a July 27 conversation hosted by the nonprofit organization 92nd Street Y.
Moulton continued, “I also remember saying when people asked me, ‘Hey, is McConnell in the Senate ever going to support another relief package?’ My answer was, ‘I think when they go home to their districts, it’s going to be pretty hard for them to ignore what’s going on.’ But when I said that I didn’t expect them to be facing the surge in cases that we’re seeing today.”
Liberal Dem claims “red states are getting what was coming to them” on coronavirus.
Amy McGrath smiles and nods. #KYSen pic.twitter.com/iuGPmy42fE
— Katharine Cooksey (@Cooksey__) July 30, 2020
The press secretary for McGrath’s opponent, U.S. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, first circulated a clip from the stream online with the purpose of bashing McGrath for nodding along with Moulton, who McConnell’s camp simply identified as “Liberal Dem.”
A Moulton spokeswoman didn’t address what the congressman said, simply writing this off as “cheap shots.”
“While Mitch McConnell’s constituents are trying to figure out how they’re going to pay their rent and feed their kids because he’s letting their unemployment benefits expire, his staff is clipping videos in an attempt to troll his opponent on Twitter,” said spokeswoman Michaela Johnson. “This is a great example of why we need Amy McGrath in the Senate. McConnell and his office would do well to spend more time working to pass the relief legislation Americans so desperately need, and less time taking cheap shots on Twitter.”
McGrath and Moulton are former Marines.
GOP strategist Pat Griffin told the Herald he expects better of Moulton than this “unfortunate choice of words.”
“Obviously no one deserves to get the coronavirus,” Griffin said. “It’s obvious hyperbole, and that is the kind of hyperbole that Democrats get mad at Donald Trump of using.”
Cases have been trending upward in Kentucky in July as the U.S. experiences a second surge, largely in southern and western states that are a mixture of red and blue. Issues like mask-wearing had become somewhat political, with more Republicans than Democrats telling pollsters they eschew mask-wearing, which is recommended to stop the spread of the virus. President Trump long resisted wearing a mask, but changed his tune recently, and is doing so more frequently.
The Link Lonk
Visteon Corp. said Thursday that its second-quarter earnings fell into the red after revenue was cut nearly in half as the coronavirus pandemic continues to bludgeon many auto suppliers.
The cockpit electronics supplier's adjusted second-quarter earnings before interest, taxes and other adjustments dropped to a loss of $3 million from a gain of $46 million during the same quarter last year. The Van Buren Township-based company reported a $45 million net loss compared with a $7 million gain in 2019.
Total revenue fell to $371 million, compared with $733 million in the second quarter last year.
"Adjusted EBITDA was impacted by lower sales volume, primarily due to COVID-19 and partially offset by strong cost-reduction actions," the company said in a statement.
"Despite the challenging environment, we launched 21 new products during the first half of the year, including all-digital clusters, a new Android-based infotainment system and large displays," Visteon CEO Sachin Lawande said in the statement.
The company said it generated $1.7 billion in new business in the first half of 2020, down from $3.2 billion in the first half of 2019.
In a call with analysts Thursday morning, Lawande said the proactive actions Visteon took to preserve cash are helping the company to be stronger and more competitive.
The company said it has $759 million of available cash and no "significant" near-term debt maturities.
"This gives us ample liquidity to weather the crisis," Lawande said during the call.
Visteon (NASDQA: VC) shares fell 4.9 percent to $72.04 in early trading on Wall Street.
Visteon ranks No. 69 on the Automotive News list of the top 100 global suppliers, with worldwide parts sales to automakers of $2.94 billion in its 2019 fiscal year.
The Link LonkIf all goes as planned, an Atlas V-541 rocket will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, this morning carrying a new rover to Mars. Named Perseverance, this rover will look for ancient signs of life on the Red Planet, hoping to determine whether humans could survive there. We'll leave it to others to explain why man would want to live on Mars when we've got a perfectly good planet right here. We're better equipped to answer more practical questions. Like: Why can't we just launch a golf cart into space and drive it on Mars? What makes a rover different from a vehicle you'd use here on Earth?
To help answer these questions, we talked to John Grant, a geologist for the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum, and Rich Rieber, mobility systems engineer for Perseverance at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
Grant was a co-leader in the process for selecting the site in the Jezero crater where Perseverance will land in February, should everything go as planned. He was also involved with the Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers. Rieber's job is to make sure Perseverance can get where it needs to go to carry out its mission—an expert in off-planet off-roading.
"The main thing is, if you get a flat tire on the moon or Mars, there's nobody there to replace it," Grant says. "So we design for the worst case—surviving the biggest bump or the biggest temperature swing. And sometimes we can devise workarounds. We had bum wheels on Spirit, but the engineers figured out how to drive it backward." Rieber says NASA learned from prior rovers' wheel problems, leading to what he calls Perseverance's "sick rims."
Consider the growsers—what we would think of as the tread. Compared to Curiosity, Perseverance's wheels have double the growsers, 48 to 24. "That gives it better traction and makes it stronger," Rieber says. "That's one of the places where durability meets traction. The growsers have a very slight sine wave shape, four to five millimeters, but that adds an insane amount of rigidity. It has to get traction in sand but survive bedrock."
Scientific goals dictate the design of the rover, but the vehicle's limitations define the mission. There may be some intriguing geological formation at the peak of a 50-degree incline, but you're not driving up there. "We'll get images down and start planning, and multiple groups will want to go to different places, but if the engineers say we can't get there, we can't get there," Grant says. "You can't keep everybody happy all the time."
NASA
You probably can't go check out a site 200 miles from your original drop zone, either, because Perseverance tops out at a little less than 0.1 mph. It's the ultimate low-range rock-crawler: six motors, six-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, and the ability to drive over a 15.7-inch-tall rock. The Jet Propulsion Lab tested Perseverance's systems in the “Mars Yard”—essentially a parking lot filled with rocks and sand—using a rover named Scarecrow, because it had no brain. The Mars Yard is a good place to suss out the physical limitations of the platform, as well as potential problems with both hardware and software.
"My coworker got Scarecrow high-centered on a rock and snagged a suspension pivot, and we had to lift it out with a crane," Rieber says. "Another time, we got into a situation where the rover would only do Zoolander turns—it would only turn right. You told it to go left and it would go right 270 degrees to get there. It turned out it had a bad gyro package."
The Mars Yard was also the setting for some of the testing on Perseverance's self-driving capabilities, which are key to its (relative) speed. NASA uploads a plan for each Mars day and the rover needs to navigate its way through it, because—contrary to popular perception—you can't sit on earth and drive a rover on another planet in real time.
"We don't joystick the rover," Rieber says. “We don't have a steering wheel. There's no cool drone operator interface, because of latency. Our one-way light time is seven minutes. So it takes seven minutes for the image to get to you, seven minutes for you to send a command and seven minutes to see what happens. And that goes to 22 minutes when Mars is on the opposite side of the sun. So what we do is take the entire instructions for a Mars day, a sol, and send it up every morning. Then we have five or six hours when the rover has to operate by itself."
One key to Perseverance's guidance is a stereo camera system (think Subaru EyeSight), but its processing power is actually pretty minimal. "The processor we're using is like a Pentium 1," Rieber says. "It's like an early '90s computer. And that's because of all the radiation. The tighter you pack transistors on a chip, the more susceptible they are to radiation. But we've stripped down the code and we were able to make this rover less paranoid, less of a scaredy cat." In an elegant bit of recycling, the landing computer gets reprogrammed to become the navigation computer once landing is complete.
Perseverance will be powered by a 10.6-pound chunk of plutonium-238. NASA has estimated how much radiation spectators will be exposed to if the rocket explodes on launch. It's 210 millirem, which is about equivalent to getting a head CT scan.
The plutonium gives off heat as it decays, and that heat is converted to a constant 110 watts of electrical power by a 99-pound thermoelectric generator on the rover's aft end. A pair of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries store additional energy, allowing the rover to draw up to 900 watts—1.2 horsepower—for short stretches. Think of it as an IndyCar push-to-pass system for a really long, really slow race.
Perseverance's planned mission is scheduled to span at least 687 days, or one Martian year. The plutonium should last about 14 years, but previous Mars rovers have far outlasted NASA's expectations. The Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012 with the same mission length as Perseverance, is still doing research there today. Which begs the question: Why not add solar panels to the 2260-pound rover to potentially extend its mission indefinitely? Because, as with any vehicle, you can't have everything.
"You're flying right up to the mass limit of what you can fly," Grant says. "A lot of people asked, 'Why not put on windshield wipers?' back when the solar-powered rovers would get dust on the panels. It would be nice to fly a lot of other instruments, too. But the bigger the thing you try to land on Mars, the harder it gets. You have to consider what you really need to accomplish the mission." So no underbody neon or kickin' sound system on Mars. For now.
Anatomy of a Rover
NASA
NASA has spent around $2.4 billion on this mission so far, with the bulk of that going into developing its new rover. Perseverance is about the size and shape of a small car and weighs as much as a Mazda Miata. But there's a lot more to it than those modest dimensions would suggest. Here are a few of its notable features:
Antennas
Mars rovers are no good if they can't talk to Earth. Perseverance has three antennas. One communicates with Mars orbiters. One can pivot to point directly at Earth so the rover doesn't have to reorient itself and waste energy. The third receives signals and has a low data-transfer rate but can talk to NASA no matter which direction it's pointing.
Robotic Arm
NASA designed this mechanism with a drill that'll bore the surface and collect rock samples. The rover will then store these rocks in a cache on Mars in the hope that a future mission will allow these samples to come to Earth. Until that happens, the arm has a terrain scanner, called SHERLOC, and a camera, called WATSON, to document its findings. The N in WATSON is for engineering.
Body
After President Obama announced cuts to the Mars Exploration Program in 2012, NASA decided to build Perseverance on the same basic structure as the Curiosity rover but gave it new wheels and software and a more sophisticated robotic arm.
Wheels
Each of the rover's six wheels sits at the end of a length of titanium tubing. The wheels themselves are aluminum and have ridges for traction. The curved titanium spokes give the wheels some spring. Pneumatic tires are not a viable option.
Eyes and Ears
Perseverance has a couple microphones, one of which works with a camera and laser setup to determine the chemical composition of rocks on Mars. The camera scans for rocks that could contain evidence of past life on Mars. The laser then vaporizes these rocks, and based on the resulting noises, scientists can understand the mass and makeup of the specimen in question. The other mic is designed to record the descent and landing of the craft, but NASA doesn't expect it to survive beyond that.
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The Link Lonk
Alabama State Troopers are investigating a red substance splattered across the steps of the Capitol on Wednesday.
About 5 p.m., troopers huddled around the steps and took notes. The viscous fluid left a trail from the bottom of the steps to the top.
State Trooper Michael Carswell said troopers determined the substance was "a non-permanent tomato-like paste."
Metal barricades were placed around the area, Carswell said.
No arrests have been made and no additional information was available late Wednesday, Carswell said.
Contact Montgomery Advertiser reporter Kirsten Fiscus at 334-318-1798 or KFiscus@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @KDFiscus
Read or Share this story: https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2020/07/29/presence-unknown-red-substance-splattered-across-capitol-steps-under-investigation/5541212002/
With the coronavirus spreading into red America, policymakers there have been forced to change course.
Some reopening plans have been scuttled; Republican leaders in Washington have broken ranks with President Trump on response policy; and the president himself eventually declared that Americans should wear protective masks.
At the grass-roots level, however, it’s not clear if the partisan differences in how people view the pandemic have changed much at all.
There is some evidence of a narrowing on some fronts, but other survey data suggests that Americans disagree about the severity of the crisis as much today as they did two months ago, when people in Democratic counties were taking the brunt of the damage.
The New York Times recently published a detailed map on geographic variations in the use of face coverings, and here also there is a partisan difference. People who identify as Democrats more consistently report they use face coverings, regardless of whether they live in a county with a high case rate, while for Republicans, self-reported mask use goes up where the crisis is worse.
If the presence of the virus is driving these changes, the infection data shows why.
Through late May, counties that supported President Trump in 2016 accounted for just 26 percent of reported cases and 21 percent of deaths, despite making up 45 percent of the nation’s population.
Over the past two months, however, Republican-leaning counties have accounted for 43 percent of new cases and a third of deaths. Of the 100 counties that have seen the most case growth per capita over the past two months, 71 of them backed Mr. Trump in the last election.
Moreover, at the state level, where policy is made, the relationship also shifted. Survey data shows Republican governors are more likely to be taking criticism.
“New cases per capita were higher in redder states than in bluer states in June and July, even after controlling for a wide range of demographic, geographic and weather variables,” said Jed Kolko, an economist and Upshot contributor. “Deaths per capita, too, were higher in redder states than in bluer states in July.”
Still, it’s less clear how these changes affected perceptions on an individual level.
“Perhaps people who are skeptical about mask-wearing in the abstract might change their minds when the virus is an immediate threat,” he said.
Matthew Gentzkow, a Stanford economist who studies partisan behavior, led an early study based on cellphone records that showed “that areas with more Republicans engage in less social distancing, controlling for other factors including public policies, population density, and local Covid cases and deaths.”
Two months later, he said, there are still differences, but not as large.
“They’re strongly significant in a statistical sense but modest in magnitude,” he said. “People do appear to be behaving differently by party, but it’s not as dramatic as all Republicans are going to the beach and having parties while Democrats stay home.”
It’s still not hard to find pandemic naysayers in conservative-leaning media. And several surveys show that on broader questions, a large difference remains. Even as the virus spreads, Republicans and Democrats differ in their concerns about the health impacts.
Polling data from Civiqs shows Democrats are nearly three times as likely to be concerned about a virus outbreak in their area. Republican response to this question budged only slightly even as virus outbreaks actually multiplied in Republican counties in June and July.
Updated July 27, 2020
A recent Pew survey found that Republicans and Democrats agreed on one aspect of the pandemic — that it has a severe impact on the economy. But when asked whether the virus posed a major threat to their personal health, or the health of their community, Democrats were twice as likely to say yes.
The authors concluded that the partisan divide over all was about the same as it was in May, before cases and deaths surged into red counties.
The extent to which firsthand experience drives these ideological differences among Americans, and how much the differences in behavior contribute to the virus’s spread, is hard to disentangle with much precision.
But it’s more clear that shifts at the policy level have not come out of nowhere. They’ve aligned with the changing geography of the pandemic.
Josh Katz contributed reporting.
red.indah.link Orlando City (6-1-3, 21 pts), winner of three in a row and five of its last six, will look to keep its place near the top o...
