Mother-of-the-Year candidate

Reposted for Mother's Day, 2025.

The long crystals in a meteorite

Comment from the discussion thread at the mineralcollectors subreddit:

To be clear, large crystals can and do form on Earth, most are much larger than those in these structures. There are stable places in the earth crust where this can happen - but the cooling rates required for this iron-nickel pattern is what makes them unique.

These interlocking structures are like a fingerprint for iron-nickel meteorites. They can only form only in space, where asteroid cores cool at an incredibly slow and stable rate—about 1 to 100°C per million years. That kind of slow cooling doesn’t happen on Earth.

Edit: Had to look up the name. They’re called Widmanstätten patterns.

So molten metal gets ejected into space from some collision, and then in a vacuum there is nothing to conduct the heat away, so it cools only by radiation and only a couple degrees per million years.  You learn something every day.

More info on Widmanstätten patterns.

U.S. Secretary of Education mispronounces "A.I."

There has been quite a bit of press about her letter to Harvard University that was riddled with grammatical errors, but I found this report only in the Irish Star.

The former promoter, who co-founded World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), shared her thoughts during a recent panel discussion in San Diego, California. McMahon said to an assembled crowd: “I heard…there is a school system that is going to start making sure that first graders, or even pre-K, have ‘A-one’ teaching in every year, starting that far down in the grades.”

How do people botch a firing squad execution ?

The shooters were standing 15 feet away...

Mahdi was sentenced to death in 2006, and the execution was carried out on 11 April [2025]. On the evening of his killing, Mahdi was brought into the state’s execution chamber, strapped to a chair and had a red bullseye target placed over his heart. Witnesses were positioned behind bulletproof glass, and three prison employees on the firing squad stood roughly 15ft (4.6 metres) away.

Officials placed a hood over Mahdi’s head before the staff fired, according to an Associated Press reporter, who was a witness. As shots were fired, Mahdi cried out and his arms flexed, and after roughly 45 seconds, he groaned twice, the AP said. His breaths continued for around 80 seconds, then a doctor examined him for a minute. He was declared dead roughly four minutes after the shots.

South Carolina regulations call for the shooters to fire bullets “in the heart … using ammunition calculated to do maximum damage to – and thereby immediately stop – the heart”.

But the autopsy report commissioned by the SCDC indicates there were only two gunshot wounds, not three, and that the bullets largely missed his heart before hitting his pancreas, liver and lower lung, Mahdi’s lawyers say.

Text from The Guardian.  Details re the case at Associated Press.

Sea anemone sting

This lesion developed on the posterior thigh of a 28-year-old woman who fell on a rocky beach in Greece.  The central clearing is a characteristic pattern reflecting the morphology of the anemone.  Case published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Pizza ovens are HOT

All of this was news to me...

"In pizza heaven, it is always 950 degrees. The temperature required to make an authentic Neapolitan pizza is stupidly, unbelievably hot—more blast furnace than broiler. My backyard pizza oven can get all the way there in just 15 minutes. Crank it to the max, and the Ooni Koda will gurgle up blue flames that bounce off the top of the dome. In 60 seconds, raw dough inflates into pillowy crust, cheese dissolves into the sauce, and a few simple ingredients become a full-fledged pizza...

The traditional home oven is great for lots of things: chocolate-chip cookies, Thanksgiving turkeys, roasted brussels sprouts, whatever. Pizza is not one of them. Let’s consider a classic New York pie, which doesn’t require the same extreme heat as its Neapolitan brethren. It sounds weird, but you want the pie to be medium rare. The crust should be crispy but still pliable, the cheese melted but not burned. The only way to achieve that is to blast pizza dough with heat from both top and bottom—about 600 degrees at the very least, preferably 650. But nearly every kitchen range tops out at 550 degrees...

Overcoming the limitations of the reviled kitchen range has long stumped homemade pizza enthusiasts. Julia Child laid out tiles in her oven to soak up the oven’s heat and transfer it to the crust for extra crispiness. That inspired the pizza stone, an oversize ceramic tile that you insert into your oven...

Before making pizza, some recipes suggest that you should leave your oven at full heat for 45 minutes, or an hour, or even two... Even if your oven reaches 750 degrees, its walls “are not going to be as thick as the walls of a commercial pizza oven.. So there’s just less heat energy trapped in there..."

The discussion continues at The Atlantic.

"My Old Ass"

Suppose you could meet and talk with your teenage self - the self that is finishing high school, leaving home and starting a new life.  Suppose you want to give your younger self advice that might improve your (joint) lives.  You can't tell your young self to invest all your money with Warren Buffett because that might change your life too much, and your adult life is o.k. so you don't want to take a chance on messing it up with some big intervention.  But maybe you could give your younger self some advice regarding a relationship.  Perhaps that would make your joint lives better... but perhaps not.

I thought My Old Ass was a real gem.  The premise of meeting your younger self has been done in books and movies before, but I did enjoy this take on it.  The mechanism of the meeting isn't sci-fi but rather just your basic magical realism; the meeting and conversations happen and you don't need to know or understand why - you just accept it.  In terms of genre I would agree with the publicity calling it a coming-of-age movie, but it blends in a touch of rom-com - a category I turn to in times of stress.

The acting is spot on.  This is the first movie role ever for the lead actress, Maisy Stella; she won multiple awards for her performance.  The older self, the parents, the siblings, the boyfriend are all equally well executed.  But my real award goes to the scriptwriters for crafting a series of dialogues that sound true to real life.

An additional plus is that the movie was filmed in the lake district of Ontario north of Toronto, where the landscape features look ever so much like northern Minnesota.  Excellent.  

Addendum: Note to my future self.  The storyline skillfully addresses my favorite quotation from Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend (which I can't cite here because it might serve as a spoiler for those who haven't yet seen the movie).

"The Indian Card. Who gets to be Native in America?"

I suppose most of the books I've reviewed for my list of recommended books have been of limited interest to a broad population but of intense interest to certain subgroups of readers.  Such will likely be the case with The Indian Card, a scholarly examination of the role of racial identity in modern American life.  The book was of interest to me because through marriage and adoption I have relatives from at least four Native American tribes (Ácoma, Laguna, Ngäbe-Buglé, and Seminole).

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, but one of her grandfathers was German, passing on to her a European surname and a complexion that allows her to "pass for white."  She can also "play the Indian card" when social situations render that the best choice.  This flexible identity gives her a breadth of experience and a deep insight into the importance of (and the determination of) race.

She is also a skilled writer, holding an MFA in creative writing and a Master's degree in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.  She spent seven years working in the Obama administration of issues of homelessness and Native policy.  Her writing style is to describe detailed individual situations (friends, relatives, professional colleagues) and then to extrapolate from the specific to the general.  She combines these narratives with deep dives into publicly-available statistics from surveys and census data.  Sometimes the details are TMI, but they lend credence to her conclusions.

There are lots of reviews you can access on the internet, so what I'll do here is just append a series of notes, excerpts, and thoughts that I jotted down while reading (lots of notes, so I'll dispense with full sentences and precise grammar).  Page notations are so that I can go back to look stuff up.

"At the same time that the number of people in the U.S. who claim Native identity has exploded - increasing 85% in just 10 years - the number of people formally enrolled in Tribes has not." (intro)

There are notations in the 1830 census of Native American heads of household who were also owners of (black) slaves (57-8).  Because they owned slaves they were recorded as "white" in the census. (87-8)

"Cases of white men marrying and the divorcing Creek women to qualify for a land allotment were rampant.  Neah Micco, a Creek headman noted that 'desperate men are rapidly collecting among us, under color of authority as Indian countrymen, are seizing and occupying our most valuable lands.'" (89)

A Native girl raised by an Amish family found herself "too dark" to be accepted in an Iowa community, but "too white" when she's in the Navajo Nation.  While there she picks up new vocabulary ("rez words"), but on a return to Iowa "she performs the careful dance of code-switching, reverting back to the Iowa way of speaking, with all the midwestern politeness she can muster." (92)

During the 1832 Creek Census, the (white) census-takers had a powerful incentive to undercount Natives because that number determined land allotments, so fewer Natives would mean more land available for Whites.  Those who were listed on the census as white rather than Native would then have descendants generations later who assume they are full-blood white. (94)

In modern times there is an incentive for Tribes to "disenroll" members, in part stimulated by the sharing of casino revenues or land and services on a reservation. (95)  The Pechanga Band in Southern California disenrolled 250 members, including posthumously (and thus their descendants).  The enrolled population is only 1,400, so the process resulted in an increase in "per cap" from casino revenues tom $15K to $40K per month. (98)

Hitler and the Nazis knew of the American process of displacing and disenfranchising Native peoples, and applied the same principles to the Jews in Germany.  

Lots of detail re the term "blood quantum" - the determination of what % of a person's blood is Native vs white or black.  Equivalent to the slave era process of designating mixed-race slaves as mulattos or quadroons or octaroons etc.

Details re the immense tragedy of the "Trail of Tears" during the forced removal of Natives from areas in the southeastern U.S.  (Chap 5 "Remove").

Details about forced "acculturation" (kidnapping of Native children and placement of them in boarding schools).  "In many cases, children were purposely separated from their siblings or other members of their Tribes.  Schools forcibly mixed together children from different Tribes, to prevent their use of Native languages of the practice of cultural traditions." (116)  "Indian agent Fletcher J. Cowart recalled that "it became necessary to visit the [Native American] camps unexpectedly with a detachment of Indian police, and [to] seize such children as were proper and take them away to school, willing or unwilling."

"To determine if a person can enroll, both Red Lake and Leech Lake use a calculation of blood quantum.  And, as with most Tribes in the United States, that blood quantum has to be from one Tribe alone.   So, to be enrolled at Leech Lake, a person must prove they have the required one-quarter blood quantum from the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe." (121)

Note the following words in the United States Declaration of Independence.  "Among the laundry list of grievances against the king of England was the accusation that he had "endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions." (123)

Theodore Roosevelt: "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are." (124)  George Washington had called Native people savages who needed to be "extirpated" or destroyed.

Details about the great land grab of the nineteenth century (Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion, homesteading).  "... there was a significant amount of fraud.  Historians estimate that most of the land granted through the Homestead Act went to speculators, cattle ranchers, miners,loggers, and railroads.  Of the more than five hundred million acres dispersed by the General Land Office between 1862 and 1904, only eighty million acres went to homesteaders." (127)

The Dawes Act, like the Homestead Act, alloted "the lands of any reservation anytime it was deemed advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes."  Plots were 160 acres for Indian heads of household and 80 for single adults.  The land was placed in trust, and people allotted land were given 25 years to demonstrate that they could succeed at Europeanized agricultural practices.  If so, they got the land.  (note the land being allotted was already tribal land).  But much of it wasn't appropriate for farming (soil, rain).  Many natives didn't have the $$ to purchase equipment to farm 160 acres.  The government also levied hefty taxes on the land granted to the Natives after the 25 years was over.  Whites were waiting in line for the land to go into forfeiture to pay taxes. (130-131).  Horror stories on pgs 132-3 re Indian Territory in Oklahoma.

"As with many Cherokee people, Marilyn's relatives included Black Natives and people enslaved by the Cherokee Nation.  It's a common story among the Five Tribes.  All five had a significant history of slavery, one that garered them the name "Five Civilized Tribes" by southern white society.  The thinking being that to own slaves qualified them as civilized."  Sometimes people enslaved by Tribes were part of those Tribes by blood.  Or the slaves spoke Native languages and practiced Native traditions.  "Categories like "Cherokee by blood" and "Freedmen" and "Black Native" were not distinct but, rather, significantly overlapping."...Some estimates are that the Cherokees enslaved more than 2,500 people in 1860; in 1867, in a census conducted of the Nation, there were almost 2,500 Freedmen among the 17,000 total Cherokee people." (134-5)

The Dawes Rolls database was a massive census that includes more then 100,000 people, but they are listed in no particular order.  It attempts to categorize people by "degree of Indian blood" (blood quantum), a principle incorporated into law in 1785 in Virginia.  In 1866 Virginia defined "Indian" as "every person, not a colored person, having one-fourth or more of Indian blood."  (144-5)

The U.S. government only quantifies three things by blood: dogs, horses, and Indians. (174)  There is an official Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood.

The possibility of multiple racial identities is now present in the U. S. Census.  "In 1990, 1.96 million Americans checked the Indian box.  In 2000, when respondents could suddenly check more than one racial category, 4.1 million people checked the Indian box... By 2020, that number had skyrocketed to 9.7 million people." (181)

"Sovereignty, enrollment, membership - these are all manifestation of a political identity, not a racial one." (186)

"I've lost track of the number of times I've been asked "how much" Indian I am, sometimes by complete strangers.  I'm often surprised at the number of people both familiar with the concept of blood quantum and comfortable asking Native people about theirs.  As if that's a perfectly reasonable question to ask someone.  As if it's anyone else's business.  As if there were some mathematical way to quantify an identity that was both meaningful and accurate.   I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a question I'd also asked of myself..."(187)

"It is in January 2023 - while I was writing this book - that I begin to notice an uptick in the number of people who have claimed Native identity who are exposed as liars... many of the claims of fraud feel legitimate, like true instances of people knowingly making false claims to profit somehow... In some ways, Native identity is relatively easy to forge.  Native people have no particular "look," despite what their portrayals on television and film might lead us to believe... (examples given of people tanning skin, dying hair)... My observation, though, is that while stories like these have some shock value, many of them are not so clear-cut... Often, such claimants are relying on stories passed down by family members or genealogy going back centuries.  They may have been told that their great-great-great-grandparent was Cherokee, and so they have internalized this not only as historical truth but as their modern-day reality. (191-2).  I've been told there's a list of "pretendians" floating around on the internet..."

"The problem - whether or not we care to admit it - is that we treat Nativeness differently depending on what a person looks like... In the US we generally accept claims of Native American ancestry by people who present as white.  We believe that it's possible to look white but also be Indian... Yet we do not as willingly give this same benefit of the doubt to people presenting as Black.  It was this way for my grandfather, my cousins, and it's this way for many Lumbee people when they travel outside Robeson County.  Their skin matches the color swatch to which society has assigned the category "Black," and so, therefore, they are Black.  If they claim Native identity, it's seen as hoax, a fanciful tale they've spun out of a desire to accrue privileges of some sort. (209)  

"Partly, I imagine, this is a result of the contradictory ways the United States has dictated Nativeness and Blackness throughout history.  For Native people, the federal project has long been to dilute their Native blood, to assimilate them into the larger society, to root out their Native traditions and force Europeanization (and whiteness) upon them... In the United States, Blackness has long been governed by the idea of "one drop" - that even a single drop of Black blood made a person Black and, thus, stripped them of any privileges or freedoms granted to white people... In the nineteenth century, as slavery became more important to the U.S. economy, the goal was to increase the number of potential slaves.  It was therefore the project of the dominant (white) society to ensure that anyone with Black ancestry could be enslaved.  Hence, anyone with any amount of Black blood would have been considered Black.   White people weren't as much after Native bodies as land... So, instead, the goal was to decrease the number of Native people to eventually make them disappear."  (200-201)

Credit for both bowls to Carmen Sarracino, Acoma, New Mexico

The improbable fact of our existence

"It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate.  That there are human beings on what we call our planet, that we can move around on a rotating sphere in a vast universe full of inconceivably large bodies comprised of elements so small that the mind simply cannot comprehend how small and how many there are. That in this unfathomable vastness, these infinitesimal elements are still able to hold themselves together. That we manage to stay afloat. That we exist at all. That each of us has come into being as only one of untold possibilities. The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences. Anyone would think that this knowledge would equip us in some small way to face the improbable. But the opposite appears to be the case. We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable."

— Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume (I), translated from the Danish by Barbara Haveland

"Take Five" - the Dave Brubeck Quartet

Y

Brubeck at the piano, Paul Desmond on alto sax.

"Time Out" was probably the first jazz album I ever purchased, back in about 1962. I've embedded the signature piece ("Take Five") above; in 1961 it became the biggest-selling jazz single ever recorded.

The album, released in 1959, was revolutionary for its era because of the unusual times used in many of the pieces. Blue Rondo a la Turk (video here) "starts in 9/8 (the rhythm of the Turkish zeybek, equivalent of the Greek zeibekiko), but with the unorthodox subdivision pattern of 2+2+2+3 (the normal pattern for 9/8 is 3+3+3), and the saxophone and piano solos are in 4/4."

Originally posted in 2009 to note the death of Dave Brubeck at age 91.   Reposted in 2016 because I happened to hear this piece played while I was shopping in Target this weekend.

Word for the day:  "Written in the key of E-flat minor, the piece is known for its distinctive two-chord piano vamp; catchy blues-scale saxophone melody; inventive, jolting drum solo; and unusual quintuple (5
4) time, from which its name is derived."

In music, a vamp is a repeating musical figure, section, or accompaniment used in blues, jazz, gospel, soul, and musical theater. Vamps are also found in rock, funk, reggae, R&B, pop, country, and post-sixties jazz. Vamps are usually harmonically sparse: A vamp may consist of a single chord or a sequence of chords played in a repeated rhythm. The term frequently appeared in the instruction 'Vamp till ready' on sheet music for popular songs in the 1930s and 1940s, indicating that the accompanist should repeat the musical phrase until the vocalist was ready. Vamps are generally symmetrical, self-contained, and open to variation. The equivalent in classical music is an ostinato, in hip hop is the loop and in rock music is the riff. The slang term vamp comes from the Middle English word vampe (sock), from Old French avanpie, equivalent to Modern French avant-pied, literally before-foot.

Reposted from 2016 because it's been hidden deep in the blog for so long, and because today (5/4) is Dave Brubeck Day.*

*cue the rest of the world pointing out the "error" in this mm/dd/yy notation.  Let's skip those comments this time...

100,000 people having fun

This video is the happiest thing I have watched or blogged in a very long time. 

Pub Choir is a musical act founded in Brisbane, Australia, directed by Astrid Jorgensen.  At each Pub Choir event, Jorgensen arranges a popular song and teaches it to the audience in three-part harmony, concluding with a performance that is filmed and shared on social media.  There is no formal recurring membership; participants purchase tickets to attend each individual production, which is usually held at a licensed venue...

Jorgensen created a form of musical notation incorporating colour-coded contoured text and comedic visual cues to teach at Pub Choir, so that musical literacy is not required for audience participation...

As Miss C notes at Neatorama -

At every Pub Choir show since 2022, one of the things they did was record all the participants singing at least one line from Queen's operatic anthem "Bohemian Rhapsody" for a project almost three years in the making. Now all those shows have been compiled into one video. The participants totaled more than a hundred thousand singers! 

This video is a convincing reminder of the truth of the old axiom that "nobody cares if you don't know how to dance - just get up and dance," substituting "sing" for "dance."

Rooftop solar panels don't guarantee energy independence

The recent massive power outage in Spain and Portugal occurred despite those countries having advanced solar power installations.  An archived article from Bloomberg explains why some homeowners were surprised by the event:

When the electricity suddenly went out in Spain on Monday, Irene Casas and her husband Luis Morate, who live in an apartment building in a Madrid suburb, lost power along with everyone else. That’s despite the fact that they, along with their neighbors, own a source of electricity: 200 rooftop solar panels installed at the end of 2023.

The panels didn’t help them ride out the blackout because they are connected directly to the grid. Each co-owner, including Casas and Morate and their neighbors, gets a discount on their utility bill in exchange for the power they put into the electricity network, but the panels themselves don’t directly supply their apartments with energy...

Casas and Morate’s experience goes against what many people would consider conventional wisdom: Solar on your roof provides energy independence. Yet, that’s not always the case. “On principle, solar panels give us power during the day, but in reality we are connected to the grid like everyone else,” said Morate.

The predicament may have come as a surprise to some of the thousands of Spanish households who now have rooftop solar... It costs more to set up solar panels so they can quickly switch off the grid. Therefore many people living in places with rare blackouts and a reliable electricity supply may decide it doesn’t represent a good return on the cost, says Adam Bell, director of policy at the consultancy Stonehaven...

Carlota Sala, who lives on a century-old farm in Spain’s northeastern region of Catalonia, didn’t even realize the Iberian Peninsula was in the middle of a historical blackout until many hours into the outage. Sala, a 45-year-old mother of five who is a well-known speaker on maternity and childhood issues under the nickname Ninyacolorita, lives entirely off-grid, with solar panels and batteries that store power so the family can use it during the night as well.

This is an "omega block"

"Get ready for a surge of warmth and humidity in Minnesota. It's almost guaranteed to arrive in the coming days thanks to the development of an "omega block" pattern over the United States. 

The pattern describes a type of flow in the upper air, and it gets its name because the pattern resembles the shape of the Greek letter omega...

The pattern of flow will essentially place low pressure systems over the west and east, with high pressure building over the central United States. The flow in the atmosphere carves out a path for warmth and humidity to surge north.  

High temperatures in the Upper Midwest could resemble temps that are seasonally normal in the South. Stormy weather will dance around Minnesota and the zone of warmth on the cool sides of the omega block...Because of their size, Omega blocks are often quite persistent and can lead to flooding and drought conditions, depending upon the location under the pattern..."

Data from NOAA, via Bring Me The News. 

Other maps (located by reader Nepkarel), from The Weather Channel and a local news station, via National Security Counselors:

A Denmark television program shows children the varieties of the naked human body

Posted to accompany my post about "The Boobs of Texas," here are excerpts from a 2020 article in The New York Times:

COPENHAGEN — “OK, children, does anyone have a question?” the TV show’s host, Jannik Schow, asked. Only a few in the audience of 11- to 13-year-olds raised their hands. “Remember, you can’t do anything wrong,” he said. “There are no bad questions.”

You can’t blame the children if their thoughts were elsewhere. On a stage before them in a heated studio in Copenhagen stood five adults in bathrobes. There was a brief moment of silence, as faces turned serious. Having discussed it for days before in school, the children knew what was coming next. Mr. Schow gave a little nod, and the adults cast off their robes.

Facing the children, and the cameras, they stood completely naked, like statues, with their hands and arms folded behind their backs.

And so began a recording of the latest episode of an award-winning Danish children’s program, “Ultra Strips Down,” which is shown on Ultra, the on-demand children’s channel of the national broadcaster, DR. The topic today: skin and hair.

The program is now in its second season, and while perhaps a shock to non-Danes, it is highly popular in Denmark. Recently, however, a leading member of the right-wing Danish People’s Party, Peter Skaarup, said he found “Ultra Strips Down” to be “depraving our children.”

“It is far too early for children” to start with male and female genitalia, he told B.T., a Danish tabloid. At that age, he said, they “already have many things running around in their heads.”...

Mr. Schow, 29, who helped develop the concept of the show after a producer came up with the idea, said the point was also to counter the daily bombardment of young people with images of perfect — unrealistic — bodies. The adults are not actors, but volunteers.

“Perhaps some people are like, ‘Oh, my God, they are combining nakedness and kids,’” Mr. Schow said. “But this has nothing to do with sex, it’s about seeing the body as natural, the way kids do.”...

“Danish parenting generally favors exposing children rather than shielding them.”

One famous example of how far the Danes take this philosophy was the euthanization and dissection of a giraffe at the Copenhagen Zoo in 2014, where children observed from the front row.

Abroad it was seen by many as a nightmarish spectacle, topped off by the feeding of the carcass to the lions, but in Denmark people shrugged their shoulders. The children in the audience that day had asked “very good questions,” one zoo official told CNN...

Asked during the program on skin and hair why she decided to take part, one of the adults, Ule, 76, said she wanted to show the children that perfect bodies are rare and that what they see on social media is often misleading...

In its first season, in 2019, “Ultra Strips Down” won an award for the best children’s program of 2019 at the Danish TV Festival. In the 2020 season, the show, which is produced by the Danish branch of Warner Bros. International Television Production, will offer five new episodes on a variety of topics, each to an audience from mostly different schools...

If a child does become uncomfortable, she or he can join their teacher in the studio. “But we have had over 250 children in our audience,” Mr. Schow said, “and this has never happened.”

Addendum May 5, 2025:

In overturning District Court and Court of Appeals decisions, the state’s high court ruled last week that there is nothing illegal about a woman having her breasts out in public in Minnesota, as long as she is not engaging in sexual activity. ( Breastfeeding was already exempt from the law.)

The boobs of Texas

As reported by The Guardian:

"Virginia’s state flag and seal, depicting the Roman goddess Virtus standing over a slain tyrant, her drooping toga exposing her left breast, has been banned from younger students in a Texas school district.

The district, Lamar consolidated independent school district, near Houston, took action against the image late last year when it removed a section about Virginia from its online learning platform used by third through fifth graders, typically encompassing ages eight to 11, sparking a row, Axios reported on Thursday...

The group said that after it filed a public records request, the school district acknowledged that “Virginia” had been removed from the website due to the lesson violating the school board’s local library policy banning any “visual depictions or illustrations of frontal nudity” in elementary school library material...

In 1901, Virginia officials ordered that the depiction of the bared breast be included to show clearly that the figure of Virtus was female."

The idea that a third grader should not see a woman's bare breast, or that a fifth grade boy who has access to Pornhub on his phone should not see "full frontal nudity" is totally ludicrous.

Addendum:  see also the adjacent post "A Denmark television program shows children the varieties of the naked human body."