Last week, West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey released a letter (full text) addressed to parents, students and school officials reaffirming that his Executive Order 7-25 is still in effect. The Executive Order issued last January provides for religious and conscientious exemptions for students from compulsory school immunization requirements.  He based the Order on the provisions of the state's Equal Protection for Religion Act of 2023. The Governor's recent letter, issued in light of the fact that the state legislature has not taken action on the matter, sets out a procedure for parents to use in applying for a religious or philosophical exemption. The governor's office also issued a press release summarizing the letter. The Inter-Mountain reports on the Governor's action.

In Northland Family Planning Center v. Nessel, (Ct. Cl., May 13, 2025), the Michigan Court of Claims held that three abortion restrictions currently in Michigan law are unconstitutional under the Reproductive Freedom for All amendment to Michigan's Constitution that was approved in 2022.  The court invalidated the 24-hour mandatory waiting period, the informed consent requirement and the ban on nurse practitioners, midwives and physician assistants performing abortions.  The court said in part:

The Court agrees with intervening defendant that the ostensible goal of the challenged laws is to protect patient health.  The inquiry, however, does not stop there.  In order to survive the constitutional challenge, the challenged laws must achieve the purpose of protecting patient health, by the least restrictive means, and be consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice and evidence-based medicine.  This is where intervening defendant’s argument unravels.   

Against the mountain of expert opinions and citation of accepted clinical standards and medical literature submitted by plaintiffs establishing that the challenged laws do not protect patient health and are contrary to accepted clinical standards..., intervening defendant has produced two witnesses deeply entrenched in the national anti-abortion movement who have frequently and widely testified in favor of complete abortion bans.  These witnesses believe abortion is murder and an offense to God.  Dr. Wubbenhurst’s testimony was based on theologically skewed studies from journals known to support anti-abortion views.  Dr. Wubbenhurst’s testimony also made clear that she interpreted the findings of studies in ways the studies’ authors cautioned against.

However, the court upheld the coercion screening requirements of Michigan law, finding that they do not burden a patient's access to abortion care.

The majority of the traffic on the web is from bots. For the most part, these bots are used to discover new content. These are RSS Feed readers, search engines crawling your content, or nowadays AI bots crawling content to power LLMs. But then there are the malicious bots. These are from spammers, content scrapers or hackers. At my old employer, a bot discovered a wordpress vulnerability and inserted a malicious script into our server. It then turned the machine into a botnet used for DDOS. One of my first websites was yanked off of Google search entirely due to bots generating spam. At some point, I had to find a way to protect myself from these bots. That’s when I started using zip bombs.

↫ Ibrahim Diallo

I mean, when malicious bots harm your website, isn’t combating them with something like zip bombs simply just self-defense?

You might be old enough to remember record platters, but you probably aren’t old enough to remember when records were cylinders. The Edison Blue Amberol records came out in 1912 and were far superior to the earlier wax cylinders. If you had one today, how could you play it? Easy. Just build [Palingenesis’] record player. You can even hear it do its thing in the video below.

The cylinders are made of plaster with a celluloid wrapper tinted with the namesake blue color. They were more durable than the old wax records and could hold well over four minutes of sound.

The player is mostly made from wood cut with a mill or a laser. There are some bearings, fasteners, and — of course — electronics. The stylus requires some care. Conventional records use a lateral-cut groove, but these old records use a vertical-cut. That means the pickup moves up and down and has a rounder tip than a conventional needle.

Rather than try to control the motor to an exact speed, you get to set the speed with a potentiometer and see the resulting RPM on a small display. Overall, an involved but worthwhile project.

We recently looked at some players that would have been new about the same time as the blue record in the video. We don’t think you could modify one of these to play stereo, but if you do, let us know immediately!

Some things are so common you forget about them. How often do you think about an ordinary resistor, for example? Yet if you have a bad resistor, you’ll find it can be a big problem. Plus, how can you really understand electronics if you don’t know all the subtle details of a resistor? In the mechanical world, you could make the same arguments about the washer, and [New Mind] is ready to explain the history and the gory details of using washers in a recent video that you can see below.

The simple answer is that washers allow a bolt to fit in a hole otherwise too large, but that’s only a small part of the story. Technically, what you are really doing is distributing the load of a threaded fastener. However, washers can also act as spacers or springs. Some washers can lock, and some indicate various things like wear or preloading conditions.

Plain washers have a surprising number of secondary functions. Spring washers, including Belleville washers, help prevent fasteners from loosening over time. Wave washers look — well — wavy. They provide precise force against the bolt for preloading. Locking washers are also made to prevent fasteners from loosening, but use teeth or stops instead of springs.

There are plenty of standards, of course, that mostly match up. Mostly.

If you like knowing about odd washers, you might also want to know about the bolts that pass through them.

If the Otis King slide rule in [Chris Staecker’s] latest video looks a bit familiar, you might be getting up there in age, or you might remember seeing us talk about one in our collection. Actually, we have two floating around one of the Hackaday bunkers, and they are quite the conversation piece. You can watch the video below.

The device is often mistaken for a spyglass, but it is really a huge slide rule with the scale wrapped around in a rod-shaped form factor. The video says the scale is the same as a 30-inch scale, but we think it is closer to 66 inches.

Slide rules work using the idea that adding up logarithms is the same as multiplying. For example, for a base 10 logarithm, log(10)=1, log(100)=2, and log(1000)=3. So you can see that 1+2=3. If the scales are printed so that you can easily add and then look up the antilog, you can easily figure out that 10×100=1000.

The black center part acts like a cursor on a conventional slide rule. How does it work? Watch [Chris’] video and you’ll see. We know from experience that one of these in good shape isn’t cheap. Lucky that [Chris] gives us a 3D printed version so you can make your own.

Another way to reduce the scale is to go circular, and you can make one of those, too.