Danny's Pathologically Polymathic: April 2016

UFOs are still handled by Westminster, not Wales - BBC

I visit another of Oxford's private preparatory schools - OxfordBlog

most pre-school craft production is a waste of time - NYmag

the UK cuts capital gains tax, in a £600 million a year handout to the country's richest

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/27/john-mcdonnell-osborne-capital-gains-tax-cut-gives-richest-population

1.25 million Britons living in destitution - Independent

The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science - The Invention of Nature [my review]

even conservatives realise Gove is bonkers about raising standards by making exams harder - ConservativeWoman

what's really going on in Brazil: Rousseff's impeachment - Guardian

"Brazil's elite political and media classes are toying with the mechanics of democracy"

as a first step, just ban the burning of coal - Krugman

examples of non-orientable manifolds in nature - MathOverflow [via @divbyzero]

short fiction, poetry, criticism - Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture [my review]

how Copenhagen reshaped itself for cycling - IrishTimes

"For each project a simple litmus test was applied: would you be happy letting your child cycle there?"

passports reveal the stories of Jewish refugees - CollectorsWeekly

is Boots' drive for profits a threat to public health? - Guardian

The Polyhedron Formula and the Birth of Topology - Euler's Gem [my review]

what it's like to be a drone target - Independent

the UK has a church problem - Apollo

"16,000 committees, 16,000 separate systems of fundraising and finance, 16,000 different approaches to maintenance and repair"

the dark side of online comments: "of the 10 most abused writers eight are women, and the two men are black" - Guardian

fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous or confused - Frontiers

new bamboo-slip manuscripts force a rethink of the ancient Chinese canon - NYROB

a comparison of tax-paying in Sweden and the United States - Vox

(I think property taxes are a good idea, though)

why is the Netherlands bucking the trend on obesity? - DW

this is what passes for a "Cycle Superhighway" in London - @hackneycyclist

Igor Stravinsky's last interview - NYROB

Pakistan's army goes into the Punjab - NYROB

some sanity: the UK drops "baseline assessments" of four year olds - TES

Narnia through a Hindu lens - Mantle

the UK's education system is in the hands of people who think they know what they are doing but don't - Guardian

a nice collection of reviews of children's books - StorySnug

AlphaGo took a radically different approach to DeepBlue - Quanta

better modelling of Antarctic ice-sheet contributions to sea-level rise - Nature

explaining how "global mean sea level has been 6–9 metres higher as recently as the Last Interglacial (130-115 thousand years ago)"

UK teachers may boycott age-inappropriate testing - TES

bash for windows! - Verge

for women, short hair is a political statement - NewStatesman

backgrounder on the Zika virus - OUPblog

Danny Dorling on Restoring Oxford as the UK's Cycling Capital - YouTube