A mural signed by Adam Turman at Uptown Theatre on Hennepin Avenue South. Photo by Hannah Black/Minnesota Reformer.
Welcome to The Topline, a weekly roundup of the big numbers driving the Minnesota news cycle, as well as the smaller ones that you might have missed. This week: Klobuchar approval ratings; the “happiest” city in the U.S.; an extremely high blood alcohol reading in Carver County; satellites fouling up dark skies; and what the May aurora display did to space junk.
1 in 5 Trump voters approve of Amy Klobuchar
Fifty-five percent of likely Minnesota voters approve of the job Sen. Amy Klobuchar is doing, according to the latest Star Tribune/MPR News/KARE 11 poll. That’s well above the 46% approval for Joe Biden.
The difference? The 19% of Trump voters who give Klobuchar high marks. Klobuchar consistently outperforms other Democrats at the state level, due to her ability to pull votes in staunchly conservative areas of greater Minnesota.
That cross-party appeal – rare in the current political climate – illustrates why running against Klobuchar is widely viewed as a fool’s errand. It may also partly explain why the Minnesota GOP endorsed an inexperienced and scandal-plagued conspiracy theorist to go up against her in November.
Is Minneapolis really the ‘happiest city in the U.S.’?
That’s what the Institute for Quality of Life says, but I have doubts. Rather than asking residents how happy they are directly, which is what you might expect a happiness ranking to do, the Institute takes a whole bunch of metrics that are linked to happiness – GDP, productivity, air pollution, natural resources management, educational quality, good governance, and so on and so forth – and mashes them all together to create a composite “happiness” score.
But you can also simply ask people questions about how satisfied they are with various aspects of their lives. Gallup’s been doing that for forever, and while they don’t have city data readily available they do routinely rank the states on these measures. Minnesota doesn’t even crack the top 20.
The number one state? Hawaii, naturally. Turns out living on an island paradise is good for one’s overall sense of well-being. Minneapolis in the middle of February, on the other hand…
Someone blew a 0.44 in Carver County
The blood alcohol threshold for a DUI offense in Minnesota is 0.08, which equates to somewhere between 2 and 4 alcoholic beverages in an hour for the average person. People – including a surprising number of state legislators – routinely get pulled over with a lot more alcohol than that in their blood.
But every once in a while police will find someone behind the wheel with potentially lethal levels of impairment. The Carver County Sheriff’s Office says they pulled someone over last week who blew a BAC of 0.44, which is more than five times the legal limit.
That’s enough alcohol to quite literally kill most people. But chronic heavy drinkers need to consume more alcohol to achieve the sensations they’re chasing, and some can continue to function, on some level, after consuming amounts that would render the average person unconscious.
Here’s hoping the person behind the wheel in Carver County gets the help they need.
What the new wave of satellite constellations is doing to the night sky
Planetary scientist and meteor-watcher Peter Brown of Ontario’s Western University recently posted an image vividly illustrating the impact of satellite constellations like Elon Musk’s Starlink on astronomy.
The image shows a single night’s worth of “meteor” detections from one of the university’s dedicated meteor cameras. More than 95% of the detections are actually false-positives from satellites, Brown explains, and over 80% can be attributed to the Starlink network.
The number of objects launched into space from the U.S. has risen twentyfold since 2016. Satellite constellations – groups of small satellites used for everything from navigation to internet access – account for the bulk of the increase.
Astronomers have ways to filter out light from manmade satellites, but doing so becomes more difficult as the number of them increases. Many scientists view satellite constellations as an existential threat to astronomy.
On the other hand, the May solar storm hastened the demise of a lot of space junk
A working paper shared by MIT scientists on arxiv.org underscores an unexpected benefit of major solar storms like the one that caused a dazzling aurora display across the globe early May: they help knock space junk out of orbit.
The influx of solar particles that happens during such a storm increases drag on objects orbiting the earth. Active satellites can compensate for that drag through various maneuvers, ultimately maintaining their orbits.
But the millions of pieces of inert space junk can’t make those maneuvers. Their orbits decay, bringing them closer to the point at which they re-enter the atmosphere and either burn up or fall to earth. Previous solar storms have led to significant decreases in the amounts of orbital debris.
The post The Topline: Is Minneapolis really the happiest city in the U.S.? appeared first on Minnesota Reformer.