This year’s Bristol Radical History Festival focused on the persistent threats of racism, xenophobia and, of course, our radical collective resistance to it across Ireland and Britain, reports LYNNE WALSH
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Defining the kilogram: a massive question
The International Prototpe of a Kilogram is getting old and fat, 130 years and 50 micrograms overweight to be precise. But how to replace it? SCIENCE AND SOCIETY explain
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The FBU is demanding 52 weeks of full pay for women firefighters, highlighting the unique health risks they face — and the continuing need to recruit and retain more women if policies like this are still not in place, writes SEONA HART
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A recent Immigration Summit heard from Lord Alf Dubs, who fled the Nazis to Britain as a child. JAYDEE SEAFORTH reports on his message that we need to increase public empathy with desperate people seeking asylum
HOW much is one kilogram? The answer, it turns out, is “about one kilogram…but not quite.” In just a few months, the definition of 1kg will be fundamentally changed, thanks to an international conference of scientists in Paris last November.
Defining 1kg might seem like an abstract philosophical question, but it’s also a practical one. When Marx wrote Das Kapital, he explained “A sugar-loaf being a body, is heavy, and therefore has weight: but we can neither see nor touch this weight” (Chapter 1). To weigh anything requires a system of standards for measurement.
Marx goes on to talk about how one can define weight using a particular piece of iron. Weighing is then a relation into which “sugar or any other body, whose weight has to be determined, enters with the iron.” The value of everything that we buy stands in relation to money, just like the weights of many different things we might compare stand in relation to the lump of iron. You might ask: but how much does the iron weigh? Where does the chain of relation stop?
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Science has always been mixed up with money and power, but as a decorative facade for megayachts, it risks leaving reality behind altogether, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
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