Good morning. 
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-eight. Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 4:36 PM, for 9h 55m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand ninety-seventh day.
On this day in 1969, Sesame Street premieres.
Recommended for reading in full:
Rob Mentzer reports Anti-Gerrymandering Group To Train Activists In ‘Fair Maps’ Fight:
The legislative maps Republicans drew after they took power in Wisconsin in 2011 gave them as much as a 13-point electoral advantage, according to expert analysis. They’ve also been the subject of multiple lawsuits. Most recently, in June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal courts don’t have the power to decide cases related to partisan gerrymandering. That decision effectively ended legal challenges to the 2011 maps.
[Activist Carlene] Bechen said that makes local activism even more important.
“The biggest thing people at the grassroots level can do is turn up the pressure,” Bechen said. “And the more the pressure gets turned up, people of conscience will pay attention.”
Because new maps are drawn every 10 years, the results of the 2020 elections will determine which politicians will be in power for 2021 redistricting, which could reshape maps again.
But activists like Bechen say politicians shouldn’t be drawing the maps in the first place. She points to Michigan’s Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission as a model. Another neighboring state, Iowa, also has nonpartisan redistricting that keeps legislators from control of how the maps are drawn.
….
A Marquette University Law School poll in January found 72 percent of respondents said they would prefer Wisconsin’s redistricting to be done by a nonpartisan commission. County boards in 47 counties have passed resolutions calling on state lawmakers to create a nonpartisan panel to draw the districts. Voters in eight counties have approved similar referendums.
AJ Vicens writes How Russian Hackers Conquered the World:
Before the 2016 US presidential election, most Americans had very little sense of Russia’s hacking capabilities and the extent to which its operatives were causing havoc. But the country’s hackers had been quite active and well known in some communities well before, staging a series of increasingly brazen and destructive attacks against regional rivals, including Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine. Even after 2016, most Americans are probably not aware of the extent to which such Russian operations remain a threat. A devastating cyber attack launched on Ukraine in 2017 ended up infecting business networks around the world and costing billions in damages, crippling hospitals—including in the US.
In his just-released book “Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers,” Andy Greenberg of Wired walks readers through the discovery of Sandworm, the name given to the small group of Russian military hackers thought to be behind the high-profile attacks, explaining that they sometimes launched them for the pettiest of reasons.
This Amateur Physicist Built a Fusion Reactor in His Backyard: