Category: Informative

In reading a little about the calendar today NewMexiKen learned that Pontifex Maximus, the official that kept the Roman calendar, was so corrupt before Julius Caesar’s reforms in 46 BCE, that he, Maximus, sometimes lengthened the year to keep certain officials in office longer (or shortened it when his enemies were in office).

The question is: Which five states spend more on prisons than on higher education?

Inside Higher Ed reports the details.

Link via dangerousmeta!.

Why do we have leap year anyway?

The regular calendar has 365 days, but it takes 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds for the Earth to orbit the sun. That means the calendar falls behind the seasons 348.75 minutes every year.

Who cares if the calendar falls behind the seasons?

The people of Arizona and parts of Indiana.

How does leap year fix it?

Every four years we are 1395 minutes behind (348.75 times four), so we add a day (1440 minutes).

Wait, 1395 doesn’t equal 1440, aren’t we adding 45 too many minutes?

You are wise beyond your years. Every 100 years (25 leap years times 45 minutes) there would be 1,125 minutes too many. Eliminating leap year every 100 years tips the balance back toward even. That’s why there wasn’t a leap day in 1700, 1800 or 1900 and won’t be in 2100. But we did have a leap year in 2000 (and will again in 2400) to tweak it back a bit the other way.

Does that do it?

No, even then the intelligent design is such that the calendar will be off by a day in a few thousand years. Nothing’s perfect.

“A handy, who-knew guide to 77 foods, beauty products, and household goods.”

RealSimple.com

From an article in the Christian Science Monitor:

Not so long ago it seemed as if we all spoke the same pop-culture language. But in an era of 500 TV channels, billions of Web pages, unlimited Netflix rentals, and iPods with music libraries of Smithsonian proportions, popular entertainment has suddenly become mind-bogglingly vast. As the overlap between what we all watch, read, and listen to steadily erodes, the water cooler has become a modern-day tower of Babel, where conversations sound like the jumbled voices emanating from the jungle in “Lost.” (If that reference is lost on you then, well, Q.E.D.)

In decades past, major pop-culture moments – the ones that everybody experienced at the same time – acted as an intangible glue that bound us together. “There’s a ‘we’ in all of those; the unum of the pluribus,” says Tim Burke, a cultural historian at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. “It’s harder to get those things as the media fragments.”

Which makes Sunday’s Super Bowl all the more remarkable.

“It’s the largest national event, at least in terms of people doing a common thing at one time in American culture,” says Mark Dyreson, a Pennsylvania State University professor who co-wrote the chapter “Super Bowl Sunday: A New American Holiday?” for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Holidays.

That got us thinking: Which other pop-culture phenomena still bind us together? After days of argument, research, fact-checking, and multiple rounds of voting – a process as rigorous as a “CSI” forensics test – the staff here at Weekend came up with a highly subjective, nonscientific list of 10 things that act as common denominators.

Go read about the 10.

[Reposted from 2006.]

Eric at The Edge of the American West identifies the celebrity who originally called Bill Clinton the “first black president.” Guess what? It wasn’t Toni Morrison.

This is interesting.

Thanks to JD for the pointer.

First posted here three years ago. (Oops, and I see just now that I posted it again last year, too. Oh, well.)

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What You’ll Wish You’d Known, a possible talk for high schoolers by Paul Graham. Interesting reading.

I’ll start by telling you something you don’t have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you’re supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.

Like Paula Poundstone, NewMexiKen thought adults asked kids what they wanted to be because the adults were still searching for ideas.

… If you’d asked me in high school what the difference was between high school kids and adults, I’d have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong. It’s that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it.

… It’s dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it’s not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart.

… If you think it’s restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.

… What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college.

mental_floss Blog is asking for photos of the “oldest thing you own” for a feature they are working on.

But it got me to thinking: what is the oldest thing I own?

I have some petrified wood book ends from Arizona. The trees that produced the rock would be about 225 million years old.

I also own a family Bible published in 1844.

How about you?

For instance, a study led by Arizona State University psychology professor Arthur Glenberg found that arm movements can affect language comprehension. Children are more likely to solve mathematics problems if they are told to gesture with their hands as they think through the problem. Another line of research has found that unconscious eye movements help people solve certain kinds of brainteasers.

Body actions also seem to subtly shape preferences over time. Expert typists, when told to name their favorite two-letter combinations from a random selection, picked out easy-to-type couplets, but couldn’t give a reason why they preferred them.

The Informed Reader – WSJ.com

The source for the above (there’s more if you follow the link) is Don’t just stand there, think from The Boston Globe.

At The Edge of the America West, Eric critiques the state flags.

Revelations that a polar bear and a snow leopard came close to escaping from their enclosures at the San Francisco Zoo over the past week renewed questions Friday about the safety of visitors and workers at the facility, several zookeepers said.

A female polar bear nearly scaled the wall of her enclosure on Jan. 3, several zookeepers have told The Chronicle, almost escaping and prompting the zoo to raise the height of the exhibit wall the next day. A week later, on Thursday, a snow leopard chewed through a temporary enclosure, according to a zoo spokesman.

The zookeepers said the latest incidents made them fearful for their safety and called into question whether visitors are safe. But zoo officials disputed the keepers’ characterization of the incidents, saying that the wild animals were acting normally and that neither posed a threat to employees or the public.

San Francisco Chronicle

Salon has an interesting article on tigers, zoos and all that.

The moat wall protecting the public from the tigers at San Francisco Zoo is only 12 1/2 feet high – 4 feet below the accepted national standard for safety.

It’s also 7 1/2 feet shorter than zoo officials first said it was.

“There have been a lot of different measurements regarding the moat,” zoo Director Manuel Mollinedo said Thursday. “Today we went out and measured the moat ourselves.”

In the two days since a fatal tiger attack on Christmas Day, the zoo has given at least five different measurements for the outdoor exhibit. The dimensions have been unclear in part because the zoo has remained closed since Tuesday, and it has denied the public and press access to its grounds and has forbidden employees from talking about the tragedy.

San Francisco Chronicle

Follow the link for more information about tigers, the zoo and what happened.

“[O]fficials are exploring the possibility that one of the three people who were attacked climbed over a fence and dangled one of his legs or another body part over the edge of the moat, somehow helping the tiger across.”

The Lede

“The new energy bill signed this week makes it official. When 2012 hits, stores can no longer sell the cheap but inefficient incandescent light bulbs that are fixtures in most homes.”

The New York Times

Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are the answer. They are nontoxic (no mercury) and last 50,000 hours compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 6,000 for compact fluorescent lights. Alas, so far they can’t make them give off white light.

Here’s the cockpit of a Boeing 737-85C.

How realistic are those scenarios where someone over the radio guides an inexperienced pilot to a safe landing? .

Ask the pilot’s Patrick Smith says not at all.

He also has some interesting information about pilots’ salaries.

Malcolm Gladwell joins the fray.

My contribution to the (endless) Race-IQ debate is out in this week’s New Yorker. You can read it here. In the meantime, the psychologist Richard Nisbett has also published a rejoinder to the James Watson-Will Saletan foolishness in Sunday’s New York Times. It is–characteristically–very good ….

Here is the link to the Nisbett piece.

Images of the five quarters to be issued next year by The United States Mint — Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii.

Thank a veteran for your freedoms today.

23.7 million
The number of military veterans in the United States in 2006.
(Source: Table 505 of the upcoming Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2008.)

Female Veterans

1.7 million
The number of female veterans in 2006.
(Source: Table 505 of the upcoming Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2008.)

16%
Percentage of Gulf War veterans in 2006 who were women.
(Source: Table 506 of the upcoming Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2008.)

Race and Hispanic Origin

2.4 million
The number of black veterans in 2006. Additionally, 1.1 million veterans are Hispanic; 292,000 are Asian; 169,000 are American Indian or Alaska Native; and 28,000 are Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. (The numbers for blacks, Asians, American Indians and Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders cover only those reporting a single race.) (Source: 2006 American Community Survey.)

When They Served

9.2 million
The number of veterans 65 and older in 2006. At the other end of the age spectrum, 1.9 million were younger than 35.
(Source: Table 506 of the upcoming Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2008.)

8 million
Number of Vietnam-era veterans in 2006. Thirty-three percent of all living veterans served during this time (1964-1975). In addition, 4.6 million served during the Gulf War (representing service from Aug. 2, 1990, to present); 3.2 million in World War II (1941-1945); 3.1 million in the Korean War (1950-1953); and 6.1 million in peacetime. (Source: Table 506 of the upcoming Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2008.)

430,000
In 2006, number of living veterans who served during both the Vietnam era and the Gulf War.

Other living veterans in 2006 who served in two or more wars:

350,000 served during both the Korean and Vietnam wars.
78,000 served during three periods: World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
294,000 served in World War II and the Korean War.
(Source: 2006 American Community Survey.)

3
The documented number of living World War I veterans who served with U.S. forces as of Oct. 2, 2007. (Source: Department of Veterans Affairs)

US Census Press Releases

There are 800,000 fewer living American veterans since I published these details just two years ago.

Malcolm Gladwell is back at The New Yorker after a book-writing leave. The link is to an outstanding and revealing article on the profiling of serial killers.

I received my shirt from Mental Floss today — Mt. Rushmore.

Their site continues to have all kinds of good stuff — it’s “Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix.” I urge you to check it out.

From Mental Floss, 15 Award-Winning Facts About The Nobel Prize.