This 'N' That

-- Clare Foran, writing in The Atlantic, attempts to answer the question, "Why Mike Huckabee lost in 2016." She uses a lot of words, but the shorter version of the answer is, "Because he's Mike Huckabee and if no one voted for him in the weak 2008 and 2012 GOP fields, his belief that someone would in the in the stronger and larger 2016 field was delusional."

-- A legal information site lists some things that bicyclists do that may annoy drivers but which are perfectly legal. I'll not dispute that with them for a moment, but I'll remind them that cars are obeying laws of physics that have a higher price for ignoring and that no one has ever found a way to make car drivers better at paying attention. The careless and inattentive driving citation the car driver gets when he plows into you in the left-turn lane you legally occupied will look great taped to your body cast.

-- All the education in the world and not one atom of sense. A group at the University of Oklahoma has posted a sign outlining that the line, "I must have called a thousand times" from Adele's song "Hello" helps normalize sexual harassment. The real problem with dumb stuff like this is how hard it makes the job of teaching and working against actual sexual harassment. Who could take this group seriously now?

-- Budding alternative history folks may sharpen their pencils on these ten scenarios about tweaks that might have made life in our solar system very different -- if it was still even possible. Some of them are plausible, such as the Earth without a moon or Jupiter having gained enough mass during formation to actually ignite as a star. Some of them are less so, such as the Earth and Mars switching places.