Rich people really do act like jerks

I have written about how rich people often behave like jerks, such as ignoring the major role that luck played in getting them to where they are now and also drive arrogantly, as if they own the roads. These were largely impressionistic views, based on either my personal experience or reading about the behavior of others. So it was nice to come across this article that summarizes some studies that suggest that my impressions had some correspondence with reality.
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Meet the new kilogram and other new standards

On May 20th, the 26th General Conference on Weights and Measures instituted a new standard for the kilogram mass. A metal block kept in a hermetically sealed vault in Paris had been the mass standard for 130 years. New standards were also introduced for the unit of current (Ampere), temperature (Kelvin), and the mole.

It used to be the case that standards for the basic units used in science had been defined in terms of macroscopic objects like this and thus could be easily understood. But the need for increasingly precise and unvarying standards meant that these were no longer suitable and standards have increasingly shifted to using the fundamental constants of nature and getting from those to the familiar quantities involves quite a long chain of reasoning. The kilogram is the last remaining physical object to be so displaced.
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Coroners in the US

I like watching British police procedurals and a key person in those stories is the forensic pathologist who determines the cause of death and other particulars that help the investigators solve the crimes. These people are portrayed as highly trained, highly skilled medical professionals. I had assumed that in the US, the people who did similar work were similarly trained. Silly me. You would think that by now I would know better.
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When dating began

That is a blatantly clickbait-and-switch post title. Anyone expecting to read about the origins of romantic outings involving two people will have to look elsewhere. What this post is about is how the idea of assigning consecutive numbers to the years originated.

We now routinely assign a numbered year to events in recorded history, so that I can write that Bishop Ussher’s year of the creation of the Earth was 4004 BCE or that the American revolution was in 1776 CE. This sequential numbering of the years enables us to immediately fix an event in relation to other events. The system seems so natural that one feels that it must have always been in place and did not have to be invented at all, let alone have a definite beginning. But classicist Paul J. Kosmin says that there was a time when this system of numbered years did not exist and that events were placed in a historical sequence using various circumlocutions that had only local validity.
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Why and how birds fly in V-formations

We have all seen migrating birds traveling in a V-formation. It has long been speculated that this pattern is chosen because it reduces the energy required for flight in the birds that are at the back. But so much fine-tuning of positions was required to save energy by this method that some researchers doubted that this could be the reason and suggested alternatives, such as that the better navigators were in the front for others to follow or that this formation reduced the risk from predators.

But scientists were able to attach devices to a flock of birds and noticed that the birds were not just locating themselves precisely with respect to the lead birds as predicted by the aerodynamics of fixed wing aircraft, but that they were even synchronizing the flapping of their wings to achieve maximum energy savings.
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Poetic justice

A Kentucky teen who sued his school because they required all students to be vaccinated has now been diagnosed as having chicken pox.

A US teenager who took legal action against his school after he was banned for refusing the chickenpox vaccination now has the virus, his lawyer says.

Jerome Kunkel, 18, made headlines last month after he unsuccessfully sued his Kentucky school for barring unimmunised students amid an outbreak.

His lawyer, Christopher Weist, told US media that the teen’s symptoms developed last week.
The student had opposed the vaccine on religious grounds.

His lawsuit argued the vaccine is “immoral, illegal and sinful” and that his rights had been violated.
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“These are deeply held religious beliefs, they’re sincerely held beliefs,” Mr Wiest said.

Just because a belief is ‘deeply’ and ‘sincerely’ held does not make it reasonable. People can deeply and sincerely believe all manner of absurd and even harmful things.

How train wheels work around corners

Some time ago, I discussed how a car’s differential works to allow the outer and inner wheels to rotate at different speeds when going around curves. Along with that I discussed how trains manage to go around curves even though they do not have differentials and the two wheels rotate at the same rate. Via Mark Frauenfelder, I came across this video demonstrating it even more clearly.

New UN warnings on harm to the planet

Pretty much everyone who follows the news would be aware of the new report released by the United Nations yesterday about the impact of climate change, this one focusing on what is happening to the biodiversity of the planet. You can read the summary of the report here with the full 1,500 page report to be released in September. This news report outlines the major findings.

Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.
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Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in. When combined with the other ways humans are damaging the environment, climate change is now pushing a growing number of species, such as the Bengal tiger, closer to extinction.
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Scientists have cataloged only a fraction of living creatures, some 1.3 million; the report estimates there may be as many as 8 million plant and animal species on the planet, most of them insects. Since 1500, at least 680 species have blinked out of existence, including the Pinta giant tortoise of the Galápagos Islands and the Guam flying fox.

Though outside experts cautioned it could be difficult to make precise forecasts, the report warns of a looming extinction crisis, with extinction rates currently tens to hundreds of times higher than they have been in the past 10 million years.

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Let’s give Occupy Wall Street and young people the props they deserve

In September 2011, hundreds of protesters known as the Occupy Wall Street movement took over Zucotti Park in downtown Manhattan. It gave birth to the powerful and memorable “We Are the 99%” slogan that so succinctly and yet accurately captured the huge and growing income and wealth divide in the US. Emily Stewart looks at what that movement spawned. (Link thanks to Cory Doctorow.)
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