question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
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why do fruits taste so much better when in season | Because the phrase "in season" is used by humans to describe the time of year when we most prefer the taste of different fruits. | [
"The fruiting begins in November, maturing between February and April, where living in Minas Gerais, where it is popularly associated with the Lent season. When the fruit is ripe it falls to the ground under the protection of the crown, exuding a strong and distinctive smell. These are the best quality fruits for t... |
How do computers get an exact value for integration and derivatives? | Differentiation is relatively straightforward and can be done by applying a few simple rules. Integration is the tricky thing. One way that computers integrate is by using the [Risch Algorithm](_URL_0_). | [
"Despite having infinitely many derivatives of delta functions, still obeys the optical equivalence theorem. If the expectation value of the number operator, for example, is taken with respect to the state vector or as a phase space average with respect to , the two expectation values match:\n",
"The th derivativ... |
Did Vikings or pirates ever develop moral codes limiting what they could do to their victims? | A very curious bit of Viking morals: it's wrong to steal, but it's right to take by force. One of the Icelandic sagas tells of a Viking raid in the Baltic, where the Viking party manages to steal stuff from a farm under the cover of darkness without the occupants realizing what's going on. Halfway back to the boats, the Vikings feel ashamed and return to murder the men and burn the farm down with the women inside, so that they're not thieves, but raiders. This was not done to hide their act, but to legitimize it. Generally, victims of raids were expected to take revenge by counter-raiding, or be entitled to financial compensation; inability to properly respond to a raid was seen as a loss of honor of the victim, not of the raider.
This culture of 'might makes right' also included the practice of Holmgang; to settle disputes through single combat. Occasionally, this got so much out of hand that some berserkers just went around Iceland making fights with everyone so they could challenge (or get challenged) into a Holmgang and take the loser's stuff. This possibility for abuse led to complex rules and restrictions, and eventual abolition. Normally disputes were settled peacefully at councils. | [
"In 2011, Stolt-Nielsen suggested that captured pirates should be executed and their boats sunk, the historical response to piracy, as an effective solution to the problem of piracy off the Horn of Africa. He was criticised by Norway's Foreign Ministry's state secretary, who said that \"human rights\" apply even to... |
my father says he can taste the difference between whether i boil the water for his tea over the stove, or, in the microwave (our kettle is bust). is it possible that the water could taste different due to different boiling methods? | It could actually! When water is boiled on a stovetop, the impurities (metal ions) that generally settle at the bottom (fall out of colloid/solution) get pushed up with the bubbles of water vapor that form at the bottom of the kettle.
That causes a remixing of the impurities and is what gives water a taste.
Microwaves on the other hand don't heat the water by causing convection as they heat all of the water evenly so convection is minimal. That means the impurities tend to stay out of solution at the bottom of the container and don't affect the taste of the water, which gives it that bland taste. | [
"A kettle, sometimes called a tea kettle or teakettle, is a type of pot, specialized for boiling water, with a lid, spout, and handle, or a small kitchen appliance of similar shape that functions in a self-contained manner. Kettles can be heated either by placing on a stove, or by their own internal electric heatin... |
why when common people debate abortion it turns into "every sperm is sacred" vs "legalized infanticide" when there is an obvious gray area? | Because hard set, black and white arguments are easier. They're not more right. They're just easier. It's hard to paint someone as an inhuman monster when you're forced to admit they may be right on some points...or that the issue at hand may be more gray than a lot of folks would like you to know. Also, it's easier to vilify the other party in an argument/debate when you paint them as an extreme antithesis of your viewpoint. | [
"Controversy over the beginning of pregnancy occurs in different contexts, particularly as it is discussed within the abortion debate in the United States. Because an abortion is defined as ending an established pregnancy, rather than as destroying a fertilized egg, depending on when pregnancy is considered to begi... |
how did doctors ever think that cigarettes were good for you? | Back then the regulation on corruption and advertising were much looser. Big tobacco companies would pay their own doctors to conducts their own studies and publish false claims. Any studies that exposed the risks of smoking were silenced with money or buried under the flood of false reports.
Edit: Also when cigarettes first came out no one was really sure what the consequences were. It took some time for the correlation between smoking and disease to be noticed, and more time for studies to be done.
It is very much comparable to what Vaping is now, people claim its better than smoking and “healthy” but no one really knows the consequences yet as it is too soon to determine. | [
"A true breakthrough came in 1948, when the British epidemiologist Richard Doll published the first major studies that demonstrated that smoking could cause serious health damage. While some physicians in the United States once pitched cigarettes as health-improving products, some commentators now argue that it is ... |
Is there a limit to the number of songs that can be composed? | Composed? No. The space of time limited [continuous signals](_URL_2_) is of course uncountably infinite.
Differentiated? Yes. To explain this, we have to make two assumptions,
* each song can be reproduced with some maximum amount of power,
* there will be noise added to the signal (which we will assume is [Gaussian](_URL_4_))
* that all sounds outside our hearing range are immaterial to use and can not be used to differentiate songs.
We will say this maximum amount of signal power to noise power is S, while the range of human hearing (about 20 to 20 KHz) is W. With these definitions, there are at most
2^(TW log[1 + S])
T-second songs that can be reliably differentiated between.
This observation is in essence, the [Shannon-Hartley theorem](_URL_1_). In more detail, any bandlimited^([1]) (occupying finite frequency range) signal can be reproduced using a version of the signal sampled in time at frequency of 2W. [See here for a graphical representation of this, the middle on the right being the time sampled version of the top left.](_URL_3_). This is, in essence, the [Nyquist Shannon Sampling theorem](_URL_0_). Hence allowing us to replace this continuous signal, with a vector of length
samples = seconds (samples/second) = T (2W)
At this point we have a vector of length 2TW. For every possible song that could be differentiated, we can associate a binary sequence of length *c*. If this sequence was length 3, then 2^3 = 8 songs could be reliably distinguished. Now note that
log(number of songs)/vector length = bits/symbol.
The maximum number of bits/symbol is a well studied metric, called [the channels capacity](_URL_7_). For the case of Gaussian noise, *c* = 2^(-1) log(1 + S), where S at the outset.
Thus the capacity defines the maximum number of differentiable signals subject to the noise, and the sampling theorem the maximum number of discrete points needed to represent the continuous bandlimited function. Multiplying the two quantities gives a maximum number of
2^(TW log[1+S] )
T-second songs. You can also approach this problem from a [rate distortion](_URL_5_) perspective (ie every song within a certain distortion is equally likely, so I just need to pick the minimum number of songs to represent them all), and end up with the same result.
[1]- All bandlimited signals are infinite in time. To account for this nuance you should technically use [prolate spheroidal functions](_URL_6_). The result is unchanged, you need a vector of 2TW for representation.
edit- As /u/DevestatingAttack pointed out, screwed up my units originally. Had bits of song instead of songs. Changed from TW log[1+S] - > 2^(TW log[1+S]). | [
"Composers often impose a limit on how complex the ratios may become. For example, a composer who chooses to write in 7-limit just intonation will not employ ratios that use powers of prime numbers larger than 7. Under this scheme, ratios like 11:7 and 13:6 would not be permitted, because 11 and 13 cannot be expres... |
Is there an estimate for what percentage of the population is completely free from mental illness ? | About 80% are free from mental illness each year, so says SAMHSA [[ABC article](_URL_0_), [bunch of raw data](_URL_1_)].
Brought to you by the good doctors that invent disorders for drugs rather than the other way around (think prescribing amphetamines to pre-pubescent kids) and have a long history of expanding their diagnoses for profit and power (read some historical/semantic analysis such as Foucault's *History of Madness*).
Their job is literally to define abnormality from an interview. Talk too much? ADHD. Talk too little? Anxiety and reclusion. Talk to yourself? Bipolar or schizophrenia. Care too much? Obsessive-compulsive. Care too little? Self-destructive behavior. It goes on and on.
On top of that they have no physiological links to their craft. Blood/fluid tests, gene tests, protein assays? No such thing to a psychiatrist. It is 100% qualitative. Every single other branch of medicine is quantitative -- sure with a physician's experience and discretion -- but at least decisions are grounded in data!
I'm not saying psychiatric disorders don't exist, but certainly over-diagnosed with some disorders invented entirely. So take their data with a grain of salt.
/rant | [
"BULLET::::- Comorbidity: Of the people who had experienced a mental illness in their lifetime (48% of the population), 27% had experienced more than one. The resulting average is 2.1 mental disorders per disordered person.\n",
"As an example, in an attempt to measure the prevalence of mental illness in the Unite... |
if space is constantly expanding, are we expanding too due to all of the empty space there is in atoms? | Short answer: no.
Long answer: Yes, empty space inside of us is expanding. However, its expanding so slowly that all the forces that normally keep us together are able to counteract that expansion, meaning everything stays together at the same distance | [
"Even if the overall spatial extent is infinite and thus the universe cannot get any \"larger\", we still say that space is expanding because, locally, the characteristic distance between objects is increasing. As an infinite space grows, it remains infinite.\n",
"Based on a huge amount of experimental observatio... |
Why is it that we are just now beginning to find so many new planets? | It mostly arises from the Kepler mission, which was specifically designed to systematically find exoplanets. Before, it was basically astronomers booking time on a telescope and hoping for the best. | [
"BULLET::::- \"The Search for New Planets (Alien Planets: Anyone Home?)\" – Is there life among the stars? Are there planets circling other suns? Astronomers are ready to take on the greatest challenge in the search for extraterrestrial life: to discover another Earth, but how? The answer lies in extremely sensitiv... |
how does the scientists confirm that a planet has water or is possibly habitable? | When light passes through a gas like the atmosphere of a planet or star, the molecules that make up the gas absorb light of very specific colors. If you take this light and split it up into a rainbow, you can see dark lines where this light was absorbed.
Many molecules have had their absorption lines mapped and those can be used to figure out which molecules are present in the gas that the light passed through.
If we point our telescope at a planet and are very careful, we can measure the light which passes through any atmosphere which may be present on it and can then detect which molecules are present there, including water.
Objects which are in our solar system can be observed more directly than this, but similar techniques are still useful, particularly for very distant or dim objects. For planets outside of our solar system, this is pretty much the only way we can confirm anything about what is present in their atmospheres.
There are other theories and techniques regarding habitability, however. In particular, the size of the planet, the size of its star(s), and their proximity to each other are very important in determining what is likely to exist.
And of course, this is all limited by our ability to imagine what life might even look like. We only have one example to work with, so other systems for something we would even recognize as life are all speculative, but it is very likely that the universe will surprise us with its creativity. | [
"A planet's orbit in the circumstellar habitable zone is a popular method used to predict its potential for surface water at its surface. Habitable zone theory has put forward several extrasolar candidates for liquid water, though they are highly speculative as a planet's orbit around a star alone does not guarante... |
what's the difference between someone getting arrested, indicted, charged, and subpoenaed? | Arrest is done by a police officer based on either probable cause to believe that you are or have committed a crime, or on a warrant issued by a judge. You are detained and subjected to bail and/or other conditions of release (or held) while awaiting trial. Within a few days of arrest, a defendant is entitled to have the legality of the arrest reviewed by a judge, although it is not required to be a formal hearing.
"Charged" and "Indicted" are both formal initiations of a criminal case. Indictments are handed down by grand juries, after presentation of the case by a prosecutor, while "charges" (called an information or complaint) are brought directly by the prosecutor without using a grand jury. It depends on the jurisdiction whether the prosecutor can choose (grand jury or information) or has to use one or the other. If a grand jury indicts, the case will be held over for trial. If an information/complaint is used, a preliminary hearing will be held so a judge can determine whether to hold the case over.
A subpoena is a court order that demands the presence of a person or of documents in a person's possession. They are used to force people to show up in court, in both criminal and civil matters. They are also used to obtain information (like police records) before trial. Basically, it is a demand that carries the power of the court.
Hope that helps! | [
"A criminal charge is a formal accusation made by a governmental authority (usually a public prosecutor or the police) asserting that somebody has committed a crime. A charging document, which contains one or more criminal charges or counts, can take several forms, including:\n",
"When a person accused of a crime... |
Can someone explain this phenomenon? The coffee in my mug is independent to the motion of myself and the mug. (GIF included with description) | Inertia: the resistance of any physical object to any change in its state of motion including changes to its speed and direction or the state of rest.
Plus, low friction coefficient between the side of the mug and the liquid.
Equals, the coffee tends to remain in the same place while the mug (and you) moves around it.
If you spun really quickly for a while, eventually the coffee would start spinning too. Then, when you stopped, the coffee would keep spinning.
Give it a try and report back! | [
"The phenomenon is explained by the effect of bubble density on the speed of sound in the liquid. The note heard is the frequency of a standing wave where a quarter wavelength is the distance between the base of the mug and the liquid surface. This frequency \"f\" is equal to the speed \"v\" of the wave divided by ... |
What is the difference between an ordinary headache and a migraine | To start, migraines are more of a disorder that will happen to a select few sufferers, while headaches are something that can affect everybody. Physiologically, migraines most often include nausea, sensitivity to light, sound, and temperature, and a sensory aura (like tunnel vision) to signal an incipient one. Migraines are usually on one side of the head or above one eye. The cause of most headaches is muscle tension, while the cause of most migraines is neurotransmitter or hormonal issues.
We used to believe migraines to be caused by vasodilation (blood vessels expand) and headaches by vasoconstriction, but I think it's more complicated. Changes in the volume of blood vessels of the brain - contraction *and* dilation* - occur, known as the "squeeze and release" mechanism. This starts in the occipital lobe that controls vision, hence the visual auras people get. The blood vessels first contract, then dilate enough that they become semipermeable and fluid starts to leak out. This process sets off pain receptors and triggers the inflammation response - this causes increased blood flow to the area. Each heartbeat sends another pulse of blood, hence the throbbing of the migraine.
| [
"Migraine without aura also referred to as a \"common migraine\", (previously known as \"hemicrania simplex\") is a specific neurological disorder characterized by recurrent, throbbing headaches that often affect one side of the head (i.e., it is unilateral), are of at least moderate intensity, and may cause nausea... |
What time is it on a space station? | The time aboard the ISS is Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) -- which is a time zone roughly halfway between Houston and Moscow, where the two main control centers are located. So when astronauts wake up (at around 7:00 GMT), it is 2 in the morning in Houston and 11 in the morning in Moscow. | [
"The time zone used aboard the ISS is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The windows are covered at night hours to give the impression of darkness because the station experiences 16 sunrises and sunsets per day. During visiting Space Shuttle missions, the ISS crew mostly follows the shuttle's Mission Elapsed Time (M... |
Since the brain is a plastic malleable organ, how does one properly manipulate it to become smarter? | Things that can help improve synaptic plasticity (and consequently memory performance):
* [Repetition, spaced trials](_URL_1_)
* Concentration
* [Sleep](_URL_2_)
* Some cognitive enhancers like [caffeine](_URL_3_)
* [Diet and exercise](_URL_0_) | [
"Furthermore, even single neurons appear to be complex and capable of performing computations. So, brain models that don't reflect this are too abstract to be representative of brain operation; models that do try to capture this are very computationally expensive and arguably intractable with present computational ... |
how can incredibly complex software programs be so tiny in size, yet simple files like movies or audio can be several gb? | Software programs are nothing but text in a file (really binary) with some graphics.
A movie is millions of pictures. Its immensely more data. | [
"Since the S/34 ran \"16-bit\" programs, the largest program that could be compiled and run was 64K. Most were not nearly that large. Since memory addresses were stored in 16 bits, a 64K program was often a giant monster RPG screen program with 3,000 lines of code, five or six files, and forty-odd array/table entri... |
how do pirates crack game? | It depends on the game, or rather what type of DRM (anti-piracy software) the game is using.
In the old days, all you had to do to crack a game was figure out how CD keys were created for it and then make you own the same way.
Later on, companies started connecting their singleplayer offline games to online servers, so you had to figure out what the game and servers said to each other and copy it. | [
"Puzzle Pirates is a massively multiplayer online game developed by Three Rings Design, a company acquired by Sega Sammy Holdings in 2011. The player takes the role of a pirate, adventuring on the high seas and pillaging money (\"pieces of eight\") from roaming enemy ships (human or computer-controlled). The mechan... |
why don't food products contain braille? why aren't they blind friendly? | Not a bad question. In terms of reading nutritional information I can see the benefit.
In terms of picking out food, it would still be extraordinarily difficult to shop for food and therefore pointless in that sense.
A better system would be a braille kiosk that functioned like a catalogue and coincided with braille labelling along the aisle. Pick out what you want, maybe the data is transferred to an audio thing, audio things tells you where to go generally, braille aisle thing confirms you are in front of the correct product.
Or just get someone to help. That works too. | [
"The blind community of Sri Lanka is alienating gradually from the use of braille due to a number of reasons. A recent survey reveals that only 15% of blind people use braille. Today, braille usage is limited to examination purposes in educational institutions. It is worth inquiring as to what could be the possible... |
if each parent gives half the chromosomes needed for a baby, how do they keep from overlapping some and missing others? | Our somatic cells (the ones that form all our body) have two pairs of each chromossome. Even though they carry the same functions, they're not identical, that's what lead to variations in our characteristics. In the reproductive cells formation, there is first a specialized somatic cell. During it's division, it develops intracelular structures called spindle apparatus, that organize each chromossome with its pair and then pull them apart to each side of the cell, then it splits and each side carry one sample of each chromossome. When the male and female reproductive cells merge, they form a zigote, that have the pairs made again. Of course this system can fail during the division, pulling the whole pair to one side and leaving the other without or breaking them in parts. That is the cause of some syndroms, like Down Syndrom, that happens when they have an extra chromossome on 21st pair; Turner syndrom, when the person gets just an X instead of two X or a X and a Y, Cri-du-chat syndrom, when a part of 5th cromossome is missing, etc. | [
"If the chromosome pairs fail to separate properly during cell division, the egg or sperm may end up with a second copy of one of the chromosomes. (\"See\" non-disjunction.) If such a gamete results in fertilization and an embryo, the resulting embryo may also have an entire copy of the extra chromosome.\n",
"The... |
Do you favour the "Dark Matter" hypothesis, or do you feel that the statement "Perhaps we simply don't understand gravity well enough" is a more plausible solution? | So we haven't ruled out alternate gravity theories, but the majority of astronomers are definitely in the WIMP dark matter camp. There are alternate gravity people, but it hasn't really caught on at all. But yet, in the general public people seem to think of dark matter as some sort of weird phlogiston theory, and that it seems much "simpler" to "just change gravity".
So I'll try to defend why dark matter isn't as weird as it seems:
1. We already know that there are particles that interact only through the weak nuclear force and gravity: neutrinos. We have built neutrino detectors and found them. We're just looking for a fatter neutrino, not something entirely different to anything we've ever seen before.
2. The Bullet Cluster can't be explained by alternate gravity - it really shows that the gravity is not where the visible matter is.
3. It's actually quite elegant physically, because we have all the physics for particles worked out. We can set up a simulation with a bunch of dark matter and see if it falls into galaxy-sized clumps etc. This means it's a very testable theory, because it's not as flexible as changing gravity. We have some unknowns (like the mass of the particle), but we aren't changing the basic laws of physics, so we can run simulations and make predictions for observations, and hence either confirm or rule-out dark matter. For example, dark matter should be its own anti-particle, so with a good enough instrument we should be able to observe the gamma-rays it produces
4. Some fairly sensible extensions of the "standard model of particle physics" naturally produce a particle with properties very similar to what a dark matter particle should be. Although there's no proof that any of these models are correct yet, so this point is not super solid.
Although it's worth pointing out that we really do need to actually find the particle before this is in the 100% confirmed category, it's definitely the favoured option.
Next: why is changing gravity weirder than it seems?
1. Einstein changed gravity by making a very small number of very strong assumptions, and all of general relativity naturally flowed from that. GR is basically the simplest possible solution that satisfies these basic assumptions. But if you're making GR more complex, you can change it in any direction you like. You can make it fit pretty much any data you want. You aren't bound by the laws of physics any more, because you're changing these laws. So if anything contradicts your theory, it's much easier to adjust your theory to make it fit. So it's much harder to prove or disprove the theory, and that makes it unsatisfying.
2. The most popular model, Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) doesn't even change GR properly. It's more or less just an ad-hoc modification to basic Newtonian gravity to make it fit the data. The fundamental physics isn't justified at all, it's literally just changing the equations to fit the data.
So, to put it a bit harsher than it probably deserves, we have a choice between a minor adjustment (adding a new particle similar to other particles we have observed) that is inflexible enough and specific enough to be properly tested, and a major adjustment (changing the fundamental laws of general relativity) that is too flexible and unspecific for us to design really good tests to confirm or disprove it.
This is all my perspective as an astrophysicist. Someone who does particle physics or who works directly on general relativity may have a different opinion. | [
"BULLET::::- Sabine Hossenfelder and Stacy S. McGaugh, \"Is Dark Matter Real? Astrophysicists have piled up observations that are difficult to explain with dark matter. It is time to consider that there may be more to gravity than Einstein taught us\", \"Scientific American\", vol. 319, no. 2 (August 2018), pp. 36–... |
Does headbanging, dancing, and rapid velocity shifting movements (sports and such), aerobic neck workouts, etc cause brain damage? | You're basically asking two different questions (even though you didn't necessarily know you were... how exciting).
1.)The first is, "Can [the activities you listed] cause a concussion/brain injury?"
A concussion occurs when there is a sufficient level of force applied to the brain that causes alterations in normal brain functions. There isn't a single number that can be used to define the force required to produce a concussion, but it's a fairly high G-force load. **Is it possible the activities you listed could produce sufficient force to cause a concussion? Yes. Do they on a regular basis? No.** So the answer to question one is yes, it can, but it would be pretty rare and would require some pretty aggressive circumstances.
2.) The second question is, "Do repetitive subconcussive forces applied to the head lead to brain damage?" I anticipate this was the question you were really more interested in, and unfortunately we don't really know. If you've heard in the news about the NFL players and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), this is what they're talking about. We've known for a long time that multiple concussions can cause lasting effects on the brain. What is new is the idea that hitting your head over and over and over, but not doing so hard enough to cause a concussion, might be bad as well. So far, the evidence suggests that doing this repetitively over many many many years, there could be some damage that occurs in the brain. We also think there might be a genetic link to the production of a protein that repairs the brain after these small hits, and that's actually what some of my research focuses on.
**The key, however, is that we believe these subconcussive forces must occur with frequency over a long period of time in order to cause problems.** So someone who engages in the activities you listed on a normal basis, and doesn't do so with enough force to cause a concussion, should not experience any brain damage based on the current available research and thinking.
Hope that helps.
| [
"Another hazard, susceptibility of the brain to shearing forces, plays a role primarily in injuries that involve rapid and forceful movements of the head, such as in motor vehicle accidents. In these situations rotational forces such as might occur in whiplash-type injuries are particularly important. These forces,... |
what would happen to us/nature if we planted enough oxygen producing plants to increase the oxygen content of earth's atmosphere by 1%? 5%? 10%? | Higher oxygen content would do two things I can think of off the top of my head.
Insects size is constrained mainly by oxygen content because of how their breathing systems work. If you increased the oxygen content of the Earth, bugs would get bigger. Like, doubling their normal size.
Second, fire burns more intensely and easily with higher oxygen content. Globally, forest fires would be more common and more destructive, which would balance out the extra oxygen by releasing more CO2.
But a big problem with generating that extra oxygen in the first place would be the giant amounts of resources needed to ramp up tree planting or algae growth. Those efforts would almost certainly need industries which would pollute so much that it would be difficult to reach even 1%. | [
"As aerobic respiration decreases, the plants become oxygen deficient, since the roots are unable to produce enough oxygen in the reduced soil conditions. Decreased oxygen uptake can also decrease plant productivity.\n",
"Over the last 100 years the Earth's temperature has increased 0.6 degrees Celsius and it is ... |
why are the pi digits so special? | Pi (The number), is not special, but the things which you can calculate from this number is very special. Without Pi we could not be able to calculate the surface area and volume of curved faced objects reliably. | [
"Pi certainly seems to behave this way. In the first six billion decimal places of pi, each of the digits from 0 through 9 shows up about six hundred million times. Yet such results, conceivably accidental, do not prove normality even in base 10, much less normality in other number bases.\n",
"While the PiHex pro... |
Do you think with current science and technology, that we could start a colony on another planet? | Mars is pretty different to Earth. The atmosphere is about 1% of the thickness of Earth's - it would basically feel like a vacuum to any Earth organism. It also gets less than half the heat the Earth does. So you would need to pump in a lot of gas to make the air breathable, and to trap the heat in.
It is easy to underestimate the scale of this endeavour. All of the total sum of all of the carbon dioxide emission from all of the industry in the history of the Earth *has* made an effect on the atmosphere, but it's still on the order of hundreds of parts per million (though of course, this is affected by the natural processing of CO2).
We can use this as an estimate of the scale of the project. What would happen if this scale of industry was producing oxygen and nitrogen instead of CO2? While dedicated machinery might produce air more efficiently, it's unlikely we'll get that scale of dedicated machinery on Mars without already terraforming it already, so this is still a good estimate of an upper limit. We're talking about the effects of 7 billion people here...
According to wikipedia, the sum of all of our CO2 emissions is 29,888,121,000 tonnes per year (let's say 3x10^10 ) , while Mars's atmosphere is 25,000,000,000,000 tonnes (25 x 10^12 tonnes). To multiply this by 100 (roughly what we need) would require 2.5 x 10^15 tonnes. So if we had the equivalent of Earth's entire industry on Mars, but producing air instead, it would take about 100,000 years to get an Earth-like atmosphere.
So even with an unrealistically large-scale industry on Mars producing air, it is not going to happen any time soon.
Edit: No need to downvote the people responding to me - they're just follow-up questions! | [
"Millions of dollars have been invested in these colonization projects by private companies. The first to inhabit the new colonies are selected following reconnaissance missions to the newly discovered planets, and the United Nations has put in place a charter regulating the colonization of new planets. Most notabl... |
Why did the IWW decline so much by the early 1920s? | The 1907 trial of Big Bill Haywood in Idaho for the murder of former Governor Frank Steunenburg was a first ordeal for the upstart union, and also the most amazing event in US labor history. Read *Big Trouble* by J Anthony Lucas for the incredible story, a tapestry of American society of the time. Haywood's lawyer was Clarence Darrow. Pinkerton James McParland managed the prosecution's efforts. He had been instrumental in defeating the Molly McGuires, and was the go-to guy for anti-labor dirty work.
Astounding shenanigans abound, with jury tampering the mildest of the cheating and skullduggery. The trial was a near-perfect reflection of the struggle between capital and labor at the time. While the trial brought attention to the IWW, it also depleted its meager resources, which might have been better used fending off trade unionism, which was already stronger and easier to sell to American workers.
By 1917, the Espionage Act allowed the government to characterize the Wobblies as enemies of the state. Haywood was convicted in 1918, and fled to the USSR in 1921. His energy and personality were lost to the Wobblies.
The emergence of the Bolsehvik regime in Russia, and the Red Scare in the US, marginalized the IWW. Its leadership had been convicted under the Espionage Act, and supportive voices like Emma Goldman's were also lost to Attorney General Palmer's continual suppression of radicals, especially foreign nationals. Also, the US entered the war in 1917, and the resultant nativism pulled workers away from the more radical, and European, approaches to the struggle.
Overall, considering the reliance on Haywood as a leader, the direct efforts of capitalists to destroy the IWW, the legal attacks by the AG, the effects of the war on labor and the attitudes of workers, and the comparative attractiveness of trade unionism to American workers, it shouldn't be too surprising that the IWW lost its appeal and its power. Had the war not intervened, the Wobblies might have continued to grow after its success in Lawrence.
Again, read *Big Trouble.* It's an amazing telling of the intertwined social forces in play at the time. | [
"In spite of \"anti-radical hysteria\" during and just after the war years, the IWW continued to grow. The IWW's peak membership probably occurred in 1923. 1924 would see the beginning of a dramatic decline, and the recent repression would work to exacerbate the internal tensions responsible for that decline.\n",
... |
why is iraq considered an arab state rather than a persian(iranian) one? | Iraq is a (mostly) Arabic speaking country, full of people who consider themselves Arabs. Iran is not - it is neither Arabic speaking nor do the people consider themselves Arabs (though there's a minority of Arabs living there).
None of the countries whose names end with -stan contain a majority of Arabs. I can't think of a single one, anyhow. Asking why they don't consider themselves Arabs is rather like asking why the French don't consider themselves Japanese. They have very different cultures and histories, and speak languages that belong to completely different families. | [
"Due to Iraq's inherent multiculturalism as well as history, Iraqi Arabic in turn bears extensive borrowings in its lexicon from Aramaic, Akkadian, Persian, Turkish, the Kurdish languages and Hindustani. The inclusion of Mongolian and other Turkic elements in the Iraqi Arabic dialect should also be mentioned, becau... |
Is there a 'fantastic planet' out there? Could there be a terrestrial planet thousands of times the size of Earth, orbiting a Sun thousands of times as big as ours, inhabited by giant humanoids? | There are other scaling problems than just oxygen absorption. Strength is approximately related to the cross-sectional area of a muscle, but mass is proportional to volume. If you double in height your muscle cross section, and thus strength, go up by a factor of 4 but your weight goes up by a factor of 8. If you scale things up too much, you become too heavy to move. This is one reason why terrestrial animals are limited in size and why aquatic life can be bigger. A large planet would have higher gravity and would only make this problem worse. | [
"Caltech researchers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown have hypothesised the existence of a giant planet in the outer Solar System, nicknamed Planet Nine. The planet would be about 10 times as massive as Earth. It would have a highly eccentric orbit, and its average distance from the Sun would be about 20 times tha... |
why, on the news, is there a large delay for live feeds across oceans but we can play xbox live with people around the world with seemingly instantaneous response? | Live TV broadcasts use geostationary satellites which orbit 22 thousand miles up. So a satellite feed has to go 22,000 miles from the broadcast truck to the satellite (actually it will be more as the satellite will not be directly overhead), then 22,000 miles back to the broadcast center. If the broadcast is from very far away, then it may need to go truck > satellite > satellite > tv station
By comparison a journey over internet fibre optic cables is only going to need to travel 12,500 miles, half the diameter of the earth | [
"New forms of digital media have also allowed viewers to watch coverage through alternative means. \"With games airing live on cell phones and computers, the World Cup will get more online coverage than any major sporting event yet,\" said Jake Coyle of the Associated Press.\n",
"Senior producer Kip Katsarelis co... |
why were so many renowned scientists in the 19th-20th centuries from germany and austria? | We still do! My friend went to Germany recently. The majority of texts in Chemistry are all German. The US has Tech but I can't begin to list the developments in Europe. | [
"Austria was the cradle of numerous scientists with international reputation. Among them are Ludwig Boltzmann, Ernst Mach, Victor Franz Hess and Christian Doppler, prominent scientists in the 19th century. In the 20th century, contributions by Lise Meitner, Erwin Schrödinger and Wolfgang Pauli to nuclear research a... |
What other dating systems were widely used other than B.C. and A.D.? When were those systems replaced? | The Japanese used *nengo* (年号), eras declared by the imperial court. They didn't have a set length and a new era could be declared for any of a number of reasons: a new Emperor taking the throne, a natural disaster, astrology, etc. The longest *nengo* lasted for thirty-five years, but the majority were less than a decade long.
To give some a few specific examples, the Genroku era began in 1688, but when a massive earthquake struck in Genroku 16 (1703), the court declared the beginning of the Hoei era. That lasted until Emperor Nakamikado took the throne in Hoei 8 (1711), at which point it became the Shotoku era. Then when Shogun Tokugawa Ietsugu died in Shotoku 6 (1716) the Kyoho era was declared. If this sounds like a mess, you're not wrong.
I should also mention that these continue to be used in Japanese-language history books. They'll usually define an era once, telling you that Genroku 1 began in 1688, for example, and then just use the *nengo*. | [
"Computer dating systems of the later 20th century, especially popular in the 1960s and 1970s, before the rise of sophisticated phone and computer systems, gave customers forms that they filled out with important tolerances and preferences, which were \"matched by computer\" to determine \"compatibility\" of the tw... |
Do the laws of physics predict that the universe was spontaneously created from nothing? | it's a little simplified. saying "created out of nothing" sort of implies that there was nothingness beforehand, which is incorrect. Time itself was created then, so there was no 'beforehand.'
I don't think I helped. This is a difficult concept. | [
"Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, in his article \"Our Spontaneous Universe\", wrote that \"there are remarkable, testable arguments that provide firmer empirical evidence of the possibility that our universe arose from nothing. ... If our universe arose spontaneously from nothing at all, one might predict that its tot... |
By the 15th century, was the army of the Holy Roman Empire, an army of the empire, or of the emperor's own vassals and land? | One of the big issues when it comes to English speakers and the Holy Roman Empire is that we translate two words as 'Imperial' that have different meanings in German. We tend to translate both *Reichs-* and *Kaiserliche-* as 'Imperial', when--in German--the former refers more to the institutions and idea of the realm/empire, whereas the latter focuses more on the personhood of the Emperor. So, when something is called 'the Imperial Army', it can either mean 'the Army of the Empire' or 'the Army of the Emperor'. This can lead to confusion in the Early Modern period, espescially when we're dealing with politicking in the Holy Roman Empire. However, as I understand it, convention is to call the army fighting for the Emperor--whoever that may be--gets to be called 'the Imperial Army', regardless of where it came from. Hopefully, this should answer your question. Simply being called 'the Imperial'--or as I often see it, the Imperialist Army--does not imply it was an army of the Holy Roman Empire, but rather could just be saying that it was the army fighting for the Emperor.
However, to go into more depth, another concern is that armies did not tend to draw exclusively on one group. A Scotsman might very well find himself fighting for the Emperor against the French, even though his King is supporting the French against the Emperor.^1 So, almost all armies would consist of troops drawn from around Europe, even though they might pre-dominantly consist of recruits from one area or another. We tend to call these 'the Spanish Army' or the 'French Army' based off who they're fighting for, rather than where the troops came from. Charles V's army no doubt includes Germans, but also likely consisted of a great deal of Spaniards, Flemish, Italians, and other peoples from across his realm.
A better question to ask if we're wondering whether the army is the army of the Empire or the Emperor is: "Who is paying for the war?" Is the army being paid for out of the Emperor's treasury, through his own incomes, or is it an army voted for and paid for by the *Reichstag* and Imperial Estates? Unfortunately, I don't know that information about the army Charles V brought with him to Italy, so I can't answer you there, but hopefully I would have helped you out somewhat with this issue.
1: This is a hypotheticaal situation, not a statement about the Scottish king's position vis a vis the Italian Wars. | [
"The Holy Roman Empire was a fragmented collection of largely independent states (a fragmentation that the Peace of Westphalia would solidify). The position of the Holy Roman Emperor was mainly titular, but the emperors, from the House of Habsburg, also directly ruled a large portion of imperial territory (lands of... |
Did epicanthic folds evolve separately in different parts of the planet or were they spread from a certain focal point? | It pains me that I can't remember the source (a book tracing human migration through separate studies of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA), but I do remember reading that originally all homo sapiens had epicanthic folds, and a mutation in the population that eventually migrated to western Europe resulted in that group losing them.
| [
"Epicanthic folds also occur, at a considerably lower frequency, in other populations: Europeans (e.g., Scandinavians, English, Irish, Hungarians, Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, Finns, Estonians and Samis), Western Asians, Nilotes and Amazigh people. The degree of development of the fold between individuals varies g... |
how do states like monaco and singapore make so much money and have low taxes? | Singaporean here. We are rich because we have low corporate taxes. When it comes to high-skilled, high-salaried industries like banking, petroleum and medicine, the operating costs (skilled labour, input materials, energy costs) are the same worldwide. Even though land is expensive here, over the Long run of a company’s life it represents a minor cost at best.
So companies trying to max out their profits go for low-tax counties like Singapore, to retain as much of the profit margin as possible. It helps that Singapore is extremely business friendly, English-educated and politically stable. Many companies from neighbouring regions such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, China like to set up operations in Singapore, while international companies from the EU/USA/Australia/Middle East set up regional hubs in Singapore to coordinate their operations in Southeast Asia /Asia as a whole.
Eventually, the government gets the money back through individual income taxes, GST taxes (VAT or sales taxes), some smaller amounts through vehicle ownership taxes, property taxes etc. They aggressively invest the tax revenue and the returns provide even more revenue. Since we don’t have social welfare (unemployment benefits, universal healthcare, etc) the government doesn’t need to spend much and accumulates a budget surplus most years. This is again reinvested and provides more income in the future. | [
"Some low-income countries have relatively high tax-to- GDP ratios due to resource tax revenues (e.g. Angola) or relatively efficient tax administration (e.g. Kenya, Brazil) whereas some middle-income countries have lower tax-to-GDP ratios (e.g. Malaysia) which reflect a more tax-friendly policy choice.\n",
"Mona... |
Did nations/national identity exist before the modern age? | It really depends on what you mean by national identity. National identity definitely did exist to a degree but was not expressed in exactly the same ways as we do in the modern era. Pre modern national identity is not the same as modern nationalism and the reason why this is the case but I recommend the 'Invention of Tradition' edited by Hobsbawm and Ranger for a good series of discussions on this (especially the final chapter by Hobsbawm). Anyway I can give you an overview of some pre modern examples of what might be described as national identity.
Firstly the term nation comes from the Latin 'natio' which, unsurprisingly, is not a modern invention but goes back to ancient Rome - so the term is pre-modern. From the Roman period and through the Middle Ages nation was only one word used to describe a group of people along with others such as gens (people although translated as race in a lot of earlier published texts) or lingua (tongue, language or people) and all of these mean more or less specific things depending on context. Nevertheless the idea that you can identify and demarcate discrete groups, including your own, goes back a long way. Herodotus in his histories gives an account of different cultural groups who are defined by their customs, political organisation and language and he even provides many of them, like the Scythians, with a mythical ancestral origin - so shared customs and origin of peoples this is very much like a picture of a nation. Various Greek thinkers also offered theories as to why different cultures existed including the idea that climate or location affected the temperament of peoples (which was advanced by Hippocrates but significantly developed by Galen) or notoriously Aristotle's assertion that some people are natural slaves. As might be expected this differentiation of other cultures or peoples solidified Greek self identification - they were in the temperate zone, they were not natural slaves. Likewise in Rome you can see a form of national mythmaking in the Aeneid and Tacitus' Germania is a very developed ethnography of different German tribes. Moreover Romans stressed a form of cultural self identity of 'Romanitas' (Romanness) which differentiated Romans from barbarians. This belief in Roman cultural superiority persisted even as the barbarians were at the gates - one letter writer Sidonius Apollinaris writes mockingly in private about how slurred and bad a Germanic king's Latin is all while writing Roman panegyrics for him (in an irony of history the Loeb edition of Sidonius' writing has an introduction from the translator moaning about how bad *Sidonius* is at Latin).
Anyway so now Rome has fallen but in the middle ages we have a lot of evidence for national identities of one sort or another. Early Anglo-Saxon lawcodes have differences in wergild based on rank which seems to include a reduced amount for a free non Saxon. The Exeter Book riddles includes disparaging comments on the Welsh including differentiating them as physically distinct ("dark Welshmen"). Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English people makes sure to show the differences between nations and makes sure to stress the unity of the English in spite of political division. Nationality was, therefore, noted in the early middle ages even if there was not really a notion that the nation had to have a political entity to represent it - in fact for a king to have the allegiance of many peoples is prestigious (Asser proudly talks about how Alfred the Great had the allegiance of the different peoples of Britain). During the Viking age there are also explicit references to Englishmen and Danes in decrees - even when they are under the same ruler. The English and Danes also had recognised differences in grooming habits - as can be seen when an Anglo-Saxon monk (Alcuin) writes a letter saying that the English were basically asking to be invaded by Vikings as they had started trimming their beards like them! All throughout this period different peoples associate themselves genealogically as a group and trace descent - the Trojans are especially popular for this.
Later on we see even more evidence of nations being identified with. After the Norman conquest Englishmen sometimes kept their beards as a sign of defiance. Histories of nations appear in which nations have a set character and sins (such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain). Ethnographies start to be written again by writers such as Gerald of Wales (who argues that different nations inherited traits from the climates of their ancestral lands). The importance of nation can also be inferred from the fact that having no nation is not viewed positively - one particularly furious pilgrim to Spain says that the Navarese were no true people (ne veres) and could not trace their ancestry back to a single nation and that this explained their nefarious behaviour (such as poisoning his horse). All of this, however, occurs in a context where a single all encompassing nation (to the exclusion of all others) is hard to find - Lowlanders and Highlanders in Scotland, for example, are sometimes presented as different peoples (gens) but other times as members of the Scottish people - by the same author! The easiest place to find strict national character defined, moreover, is where it is falling apart such as in the Statutes of Kilkenny in the 14^th century. These identify Irish characteristics and forbids English colonists to engage in Irish practises for fear of being tainted by Irishness - this was evidently not working. Nevertheless notions of national identity do exist in Pre-Modern Europe and they could include many ideas we see today - shared genealogy, language, culture, dress, methods of fighting etc. - and existed alongside other forms of identity such as religious.
If you want to read more I recommend you read the article by Robert Bartlett 'Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity' as it especially gets into the problems of language when addressing nation/ethnicity/race in the pre modern period. | [
"In his book \"Biblical Ideas of Nationality: Ancient and Modern\", Grosby argues that the ideas of modern nationhood were already present in the Ancient Near East in places like Armenia, Edom, Egypt, and especially Biblical Israel, which later became the major model for European nation formation.\n",
"All modern... |
Would an object falling in a vacuum with unlimited space to fall eventually reach the speed of light? | Just working with Newtonian gravity, the maximum speed reached by falling towards the surface of an object is the same speed as escape velocity at that surface (both are calculated by equating gravitational potential to kinetic energy, just in different order). So, what kind of object has an escape velocity equal to that of light? A black hole. So to answer your question, if only Newtonian gravity applied this is what would happen if you fell towards a black hole. | [
"Aristotle implies that in a vacuum the speed of fall would become infinite, and concludes from this apparent absurdity that a vacuum is not possible. Opinions have varied on whether Aristotle intended to state quantitative laws. Henri Carteron held the \"extreme view\" that Aristotle's concept of force was basical... |
Are there any musical instruments that need gravity to function? What instrument can you not play while in orbit? | Do pianos require gravity? I always thought the hammers "fell" back into place after hitting their strings. | [
"Parts of the instrument go back to instruments made and used by ancient Greek astronomers. Gemma Frisius combined several of the instruments into a small, portable, astronomical-ring instrument. He first published the design in 1534, and in Petrus Apianus's \"Cosmographia\" in 1539. These ring instruments combined... |
Do ducks get cold feet in water? | Yes, and that's part of why the entire duck doesn't freeze. Ducks, other birds, and even some mammals like deer have evolved so that the arteries and veins leading to their feet/hooves/ect. pass very close to each other for quite a long ways. As warm blood travels towards the feet, it passes heat to cold blood coming back in the veins. The result is that the duck's feet are maintained at a much lower temperature than the duck's core body. This reduces the rate at which they lose heat to their surroundings. Tropical apes like us don't have this adaptation, so we lose heat rapidly when we put our feet in cold water. A duck's feet will get cold, but the rest of the duck will remain toasty and warm. | [
"These are gregarious ducks, mainly found on fresh water. They are strong fliers; their broad, blunt-tipped wings require faster wing-beats than those of many ducks and they take off with some difficulty.\n",
"Adult ducks are fast fliers, but may be caught on the water by large aquatic predators including big fis... |
if we can smell an item, the item must lose some particles. does that mean it gets lighter constantly? | Yes. Things also get heavier from dust particles. You get lighter every time you breathe, because you take in O2 and expel CO2.
But the amount is so ridiculously small that it's irrelevant. | [
"BULLET::::- \"[I]t must certainly be concluded regarding those things which, in external objects, we call by the names of light, color, odor, taste, sound, heat, cold, and of other tactile qualities, [...]; that we are not aware of their being anything other than various arrangements of the size, figure, and motio... |
Assuming one full rotation of the Earth yearly, would there still be zones on the planet with seasons, or that are mild/temperate year round? | The seasons are caused by the Earth's axial tilt, so yes there would still be seasonal temperature changes on the side of the planet receiving sunlight despite the tidal lock. | [
"The seasons occur because the Earth's axis of rotation is not perpendicular to its orbital plane (the plane of the ecliptic) but currently makes an angle of about 23.44° (called the obliquity of the ecliptic), and because the axis keeps its orientation with respect to an inertial frame of reference. As a consequen... |
-what makes a beer "good?" | The short version is, it's subjective, and so what is "good" is whatever you like the flavor of. However, you can still discuss beer quality by breaking those qualities down into categories.
Things that affect this:
* How strong the beer's flavor is. In general, cheaper beers have less flavor (though again, you personally may like weaker beer)
* What kind of flavor it has. Some people like the bitterness of beers made with lots of hops (IPAs, etc) while others prefer beers made with wheat (hefeweizen, etc) or something in between
* What it's alcohol content is. Generally beers with a higher alcohol content will taste stronger, and the stronger it is, the "boozier" it tastes. Higher alcohol beers also tend to be more expensive
* Whether it's filtered or not. Filtered beers will be clear in color and won't have any sediment, but may not have as much flavor as unfiltered beers (though this is not a hard and fast rule)
* Whether it's pressurized with carbon dioxide (this is what naturally occurs) or with nitrogen (tends to give it a creamier texture) | [
"However, the most striking feature of \"Beer Bad\" is the twin moral: Beer and casual sex are bad. In a BBC interview, Petrie states: \"Well, very young people get unlimited access to alcohol and become horrible! We all do it — or most of us do it — and live to regret it, and we wanted to explore that.\"\n",
"Be... |
Why do electrons come in pairs? | Any given quantum state can hold at most 2 electrons, because [degeneracy](_URL_0_) of a state is 2s+1, and electrons have spin s = 1/2.
> Also I have read about electron spin, but I'm still rather unsure about what that actually means.
It's an intrinsic property of particles, like charge is. There were historically some attempts to explain electron spin as electron being a small charged sphere, spinning on its axis, so spin would literally be a measure of how fast the sphere spins, but we now know that this isn't the case, since, among other things, even neutral particles like neutrons have non-zero spin. | [
"In chemistry, a lone pair refers to a pair of valence electrons that are not shared with another atom and is sometimes called an unshared pair or non-bonding pair. Lone pairs are found in the outermost electron shell of atoms. They can be identified by using a Lewis structure. Electron pairs are therefore consider... |
what is the theological basis for the westboro baptist church "warning" people about stuff? | Referring not to westboro specifically, this problem arises in a lot of religious organizations as a consequence of human free will and gods plan often seemingly being at odds. Basically even though god has already selected these people only god knows who they are and for those people to know god and be saved perhaps someone has to save them and perhaps one of those people is convinced by the westboro folks. Essentially if the westboro folks convert someone its not that they have changed gods plan, but rather that it was gods plan all along for them to be there to change that persons path in the first place. | [
"The Westboro Baptist Church considers membership in most other religious groups, such as the Roman Catholic Church or Islam, as akin to devil worship, and states these other churches to be \"Satanic frauds preaching Arminian lies\". The church defines itself as \"Old School (or, Primitive) Baptist\" and sees itsel... |
How did the USSR tackle the issue of employment during the decade following WWII? | The USSR went through an extensive demobilisation process following the war. This was part of the vast, and generally quite successful, programme of reconstruction that retooled and rebuilt the economy. By 1950 the Soviet economic production had surpassed its pre-war levels. But on to the soldiers.
From a starting point of 11m Soviet soldiers in 1945, at least 8.5m were demobilised in batches over the period 1945-48. As was typical in the USSR, the process was 'difficult' (to quote Harrison) with the state simply unable to manage the transportation and promised material support of returning veterans. (That 1946-47 were also famine years didn't help.) Many soldiers were simply handed their papers and told to make their own way home.
But if these were years of hardship then at least employment was not a problem. If the veterans did not return home as a privileged cohort (and the degree to which they did is still debated) they had the advantage of a strong labour market. Labour shortages had emerged as a chronic feature of the Soviet economy in the pre-war years and the immense loss of life during the war had only sharpened this. The returning veterans did not come close to filling this gap, hence migration of peasant labour continued to be a feature of the post-war economy.
Crucially, demobilisation furthered this shift towards an urban economy. Approximately half of all veterans found their way into the cities, as part of the industrial workforce. Given that most soldiers had been recruited from the peasantry, this itself represented a significant demographic shift. Flitzer has some detailed figures on industry recruitment (see below, I unfortunately don't have the source to hand) but by and large they would have followed the patterns of pre-war industrial growth - eg metallurgy, mining, construction, etc.
I can't say how many career soldiers emerged from the war. From a macro perspective however, the Soviet economy never entirely demobilised. Many of the war industries, and formations obviously, were maintained into the Cold War. Despite a brief respite under Khrushchev (with a further round of demobilisations in 1953-60) the USSR emerged from the war with an economic 'defence burden' as high, or higher, than that of 1940.
**Sources**
Obviously my background is largely the economic and social impact of the war and demobilisation. In this I'm primarily drawing on Donald Filtzer (*Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism*), Mark Harrison (*The Soviet Union After 1945*, *The Soviet Industrial Defence Complex in WWII*) and Michael Ellman (*Socialist Planning*).
I've not read it myself but I've heard good things about Mark Edele's *Soviet Veterans of the Second World War*. I suspect that that work would answer most of your questions. | [
"The following table shows the employment of Soviet workforce during the years of the war starting with 1940, a year before the war. A drop of 13.8 million workers in total working population from 1940 to 1941 is due to the loss of European populated areas such as Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and Byelorussia... |
how does the hi-lo card counting trick work? | The casino advantage in Blackjack is about going last. To simplify a bit, the dealer will win every hand where the player goes bust - but the player loses hands where they go bust and the dealer also goes bust (because the game stops before the dealer gets a chance to go bust).
What this means in practice is that the dealer has an advantage when the card mix remaining in the deck creates high variances while the player is better off if the card mix creates low variances. The dealer wins by you going bust, so the casino wants to see a lot of cards that are likely to make you go bust - face cards and tens.
By counting how many low cards and how many high cards you've seen from the deck, you'll get a reasonable approximation of how 'volatile' the remaining deck is - and if it's too volatile (too high an advantage for the casino), you dial down your bets. | [
"Each circular player card has a series of lines and numbers arranged in a circle around its center. The card is placed on a spinner, which the batting player spins. (Aficionados would spin the metal pointers with rubber bands to avoid blisters.) Once the spinner came to rest between two lines, the number for that ... |
Is it true that Vikings let women handle their finances because they thought it was witchcraft? | We think women controlled the material wealth of Viking-Age households because many wealthy women were buried with a [key](_URL_1_). We assume that within the longhouse, there would have been a locked pantry, and only the matriarch of the household had access to it. Presumably this included food, possibly alcohol, and I would guess textiles as well. [Silk](_URL_2_) or [sails](_URL_3_) were both extremely valuable. It would make sense for a matriarch to control the household food distribution and textile production/consumption, and this seems like a pretty solid interpretation of the archaeological evidence. In contrast, textile production became a male industry in the later middle ages.
[Coins](_URL_4_) might also have been kept in these cupboards, although some hoards seem to have been buried in farmhouse floors. I suspect this would have been the safer option, since anyone with an axe could break through the pantry door, but you'd need to convince someone to tell you where the family purse was buried before you could get at the money. If a household were attacked, you could abandon the house, and even if it were burnt down, you'd still be able to dig any buried coins back up.
So women were probably in charge of managing food and textiles—which were the major material wealth of a Viking-Age farm—but there's less evidence that they were responsible for coins. Of course, much of the stuff that got moved around during the Viking Age was probably traded or gifted, rather than bought for cash. So although there was no such thing as a household 'budget' and even 'finances' seems like an ill-fitting word for Viking-Age households, women seem to have been in charge of the bulk of a farm or family's wealth.
The rest of the statement you're interested in seems much more dubious. Witchcraft or [seiðr](_URL_6_) wasn't solely associated with women, although some sorts of things that we would consider 'magic' were considered feminine. (Admittedly, 'magic' isn't quite the right word since 'magic' often suggests superstition or illusion.) I've seen no reason to assume that math was considered magic or a particularly feminine form of magic. Instead, [scales](_URL_5_) and [weights](_URL_0_) for measuring silver are often found in apparently male graves. So the reason you can't find proof that women and witchcraft and math and finances all went together as a regular thing ... is probably because there's no proof to find. | [
"Nevertheless, it has been argued that the supposedly misogynistic agenda of works on witchcraft has been greatly exaggerated, based on the selective repetition of a few relevant passages of the \"Malleus maleficarum\". There are various reasons as to why this was the case. In Early Modern Europe, it was widely bel... |
Are certain areas more prone to see meteors/shooting stars? | In general, no, no area is more prone to observing meteorite events than any other.
However, viewing patterns and environmental effects can make a large difference in observed rates at the individual level. Meteors are most likely to be observed pre-dawn, when the movement of the Earth is aligned with the skyward direction. Light pollution will also make observing smaller events much more difficult. And general time spent outside will obviously increase viewing rates.
It's certainly not unusual for these events to occur. There are many thousands of them all over the Earth every day. It's most likely a difference in your personal viewing habits. I'm guessing you didn't spend too much time staying up late at night outside while you were growing up. | [
"Meteors, often called \"shooting stars\" are also commonly observed. Meteor showers, such as the Perseids and Leonids, make viewing meteors much easier, as a multitude of meteors are visible in a relatively short period of time.\n",
"Meteors (commonly known as shooting stars) streak across the sky very infrequen... |
how are sites capable of showing fancy "too busy to load" pages? | Not really.
Reddit is stored on a series of servers, and you probably know how that works for the most part.
What happens though, is that when you can't access the specific server needed, they often have one set up for "overflow" which is for when the site is really busy, which is dedicated to showing just that "OW" picture. Making it much simpler. | [
"Some websites, especially many image hosting sites, use referer information to secure their materials: only browsers arriving from their web pages are served images. Additionally a site may want users to click through pages with advertisements before directly being able to access a downloadable file — using the re... |
Why is anti matter so rare today? | Essentially there are two main theories:
1) CP (charge parity) violations. If reversing charge and parity (flipping in the sign of one spatial coordinate) does not produce exactly the same physics, then the weak force can cause anti-matter to decay faster than ordinary matter.
2) We are in a part of the universe in which matter dominates, in another part of the universe antimatter dominates. This could occur if matter and antimatter repelled one another under gravity, giving the universe a dipole structure. | [
"Another question for astroparticle physicists is why is there so much more matter than antimatter in the universe today. Baryogenesis is the term for the hypothetical processes that produced the unequal numbers of baryons and anitbaryons in the early universe, which is why the universe is made of matter today, and... |
If I am traveling through space at the speed of light then how fast is the light from my spaceships headlights moving? | The light from your headlights will propagate at exactly the speed of light, as for you and for any outside observer. The Problem with your argumentation is the same with which any relativity discussion starts, that time is a fixed thing. According to Einsteins theory however, this is not true. The only thing that stays fixed in any frame of reference is the speed of light. Time does change according to the lorentz factor, which tends to zero when approaching the speed of light. This means that the time in your spaceship is significantly larger for an outside observer.
Just to clarify: 1. We cant even think about the concept, since your mass grows with that same lorentz factor and goes to infinity approaching the speed of light. That would mean infinite energy which simply is not there. Therefore thinking about that concept is physically very wrong!
2. Newtons laws of motion are only valid for "slow" speeds. Anything faster than about 0.3c will have significant differences.
| [
"Rather than exceeding the speed of light within a local reference frame, a spacecraft would traverse distances by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it, resulting in effective faster-than-light travel. Objects cannot accelerate to the speed of light within normal spacetime; instead, the Al... |
what is the difference between regular 3d and other types like imax 3d ? | The IMAX 3D projector delivers 3D images of unsurpassed brightness and clarity, unlike any other 3D technology available today. IMAX 3D takes advantage of the fact that we see the world through two eyes. An IMAX 3D movie actually consists of two separate images projected onto a special silver-coated IMAX 3D screen at the same time. One image is captured from the viewpoint of the right eye, and the other shows the viewpoint of the left eye. IMAX 3D glasses separate the images, so the left and right eyes each see a different view. Your brain blends the views together to create an amazing three-dimensional image that appears to have depth beyond and in front of the screen.
More info: _URL_0_ | [
"The two-and-a-half-dimensional (2.5D, alternatively three-quarter and pseudo-3D) perspective is either 2D graphical projections and similar techniques used to cause images or scenes to simulate the appearance of being three-dimensional (3D) when in fact they are not, or gameplay in an otherwise three-dimensional v... |
why don't birds lie down when the sleep? | Because they don't need to. They're limbs are mainly tendons that lock in place and many birds hang from trees, it's kinda like how horses sleep standing up (their knees lock)
Also if they lay down they'd just fall out of trees all the time. Some birds do lay down of course, bigger ones mainly, but they almost always are either non-flying birds or have some kind of stable nest or tree hole. | [
"Many sleeping birds bend their heads over their backs and tuck their bills in their back feathers, although others place their beaks among their breast feathers. Many birds rest on one leg, while some may pull up their legs into their feathers, especially in cold weather. Perching birds have a tendon locking mecha... |
Why is the "Water Erosion on the Sphinx Theory" Not Correct or More Popular? | I had a professor by the name of Peter Lacovara who explained this theory in class and why it is wrong. The body of the sphinx is made up of limestone from a former quarry. Everything around it was cut up and taken away to build the nearby pyramids. Not wanting to leave this hunk of rock sticking above the ground they turned it into a statue by importing some other nearby rock to do the head, legs, and arms. It isn't erosion from water, it is quarry marks. It doesn't help that the limestone that makes up the body of the sphinx is of a poor quality and can more easily erode. | [
"The Sphinx water erosion hypothesis is a fringe claim contending that the main type of weathering evident on the enclosure walls of the Great Sphinx was caused by prolonged and extensive rainfall that would have predated the time of Djedefre and Khafre, the Pharaohs credited by most modern Egyptologists with build... |
what exactly are "poppers" and how do they work? people who are using, why are you? why should/shouldn't i try? | Poppers are a type of chemical known as alkyl nitrates. They typically come in the form of a liquid contained in a small bottle; by inhaling the vapors coming off this liquid, a brief high is produced.
*This is not the same as huffing*. When you huff (inhale the vapors of gasoline, glue, solvents, etc), you are simply cutting off your brain's oxygen supply. Not only is this horribly dangerous and causes long-term damage, but the "high" you get is basically the same you could get from holding your breath. The chemical you're inhaling is usually not having any direct effect on you, and thus is not really a drug.
Poppers *do* have a direct effect on you, and when you inhale them you just sniff a little bit of the vapors. You are not denying oxygen to your brain. Alkyl nitrates are considered to be among the *safest* of drugs.
Asking personal opinions & experiences is not what ELI5 is for, but regardless, here's mine. I have used poppers before at parties. They are a fun novelty, but not something I would make a habit out of. I would definitely give it a try at least once if you are curious. They can cause a rapid drop in blood pressure, so sit down when you use them. **Do not drink or touch the liquid**, when ingested it is very dangerous and perhaps deadly. When sniffed, the only real danger is falling over from light-headedness. | [
"\"Poppers\" are small bottles of volatile drugs which are inhaled by clubgoers for the \"rush\" or \"high\" that they can create. Nitrites such as alkyl nitrite originally came as small glass capsules that were popped open, which led to the nickname \"poppers.\" The drug became popular in the US first on the disco... |
Why has the south of Germany been richer than the north? | South Germany being the richer half of the country is actually a very recent phenomenon. Over the course of history, the distribution of wealth has changed a lot, depending on political factors as well as the importance of various technologies and industries. The north used to be very rich due to trading etc. and Hamburg remains a rich city, while the south was very rural and agriculture-focussed up until the 20th century.
For post-war Germany, a good indicator is the "Länderfinanzausgleich". This is a fund into which the richer states (Bundesländer) pay money while the poorer states receive money in the form of subsidies. How much every state gets/pays is determined yearly.
If you look at the timeline of subsidies on the [Wikipedia page](_URL_0_) (section "Finanzvolumen"), then you can see for example for Bavaria ("BY- Bayern") that up until the mid-eighties, they were considered poorer than the national average and therefore got money from the fund. At this point, the manufacturing and high tech industry took off, propelling Bavaria into todays top position.
Northrhine-Westphalia ("NW - Nordrhein-Westfalen), on the other hand, used to be "in the green" after the war on account of their massive coal and steel industry. But here we see a decline in the 80's due to rising competition of foreign steel and coal and the closing of mines and steel mills.
Also, the statistics are a bit skewed due to the fact, that the poorer, former East German states are all in the north, or at least in middle Germany.
But at the moment, it is basically the powerful automobile industry, their suppliers as well as high tech firms (optics, medical technology, manufacturing, etc.) that cement southern Germany's economical lead.
| [
"Growth, employment and household income have lagged behind the South, and the five most deprived districts in England are all in Northern England, as are ten of the twelve most declining major towns in the UK. The picture is not clear-cut, as the North has areas which are as wealthy as, if not wealthier than, fash... |
Have there been riots in history that sparked the change they asked for? | I recently read a great overview of US riots-- Paul gilje's "rioting in America". He identifies many, many riots that achieved their goals, from the 17th c to the present.
American rioting, he argues, has strong roots in the medieval English system of collective violence by the plebeians, which was generally considered an acceptable form of expressing grievances because the patricians were understood as playing a paternalistic role, and therefore allowed their "children" to act out, and then made economic or political adjustments to make the people happy. Other successful riots regulated moral behavior in communities. All of these practices were continued in colonial America, frequently with success.
I think it should be pointed out here that Gilje, like many others who've written on the topic, emphasizes the fact that the term "riot" is usually a very loaded word that is often only applied to people the speaker does not feel have legitimate justification for their actions, and frequently incorrectly assumes that it does not have a strong organized element. He defines riot as "extralegal collective violence" and does not draw a sharp distinction between riots and rebellions or mob-based vigilante violence. So, for Gilje, other examples of "successful" riots in American history are the hundreds of mob lynchings of blacks in the American South, whose ultimate purpose was to terrorize and oppress African Americans.
EDIT I think it's also important to highlight gilje's argument that in the 20th c rioting, especially in urban ghettos, became MUCH LESS violent towards people, but more diffuse and destructive of property--being more of a venting of frustrations with a social and economic system that is far more depersonalized than that which existed previously, and this has led to a lesser ability to create change in the way many 17th and 18th century riots--which were often very unorganized themselves--were able to. | [
"The riots came on the back of a period of civil unrest, variously sourced from feelings transferring from the French Revolution, further changes in the Corn Laws, food shortages, and a general unhappiness of the population with their leading figures in politics and law. A proclamation banning \"seditious writing\"... |
what makes a doctors office smell like a "doctor's office?" | Most types of disinfectants that you can purchase for your home are scented in some way.
The standard cleaning chemicals for hospitals are generally unscented. What you are smelling are the unscented cleaning agents that are applied often because hospitals have to remain clean due to the number of possibly sick people going through it. | [
"Scrubs is an American medical comedy-drama television series created by Bill Lawrence that aired from October 2, 2001, to March 17, 2010, on NBC and later ABC. The series follows the lives of employees at the fictional Sacred Heart Hospital, which later becomes a Teaching Hospital. The title is a play on surgical ... |
How could a country like Afghanistan change from being a fairly liberal country to very strict religious? | Rodric Braithwaite points out in Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89, that the 'liberalness' of Afghanistan was only ever really confined the urban middle and upper classes, who were very much a minority, the majority of the rural population were pretty conservative add the ruthless brutality of the Taliban into the mix and the 'fascism' of the 90's becomes possible. | [
"The Taliban renamed the country to Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and imposed an even more strict version of Sharia on the population they controlled. This especially negatively impacted women, who were forced to wear a burqa, stay indoors and banned from working outside the house with rare exceptions, female sch... |
why should i not drink from my plastic water bottle if it has been sitting in my car for a couple weeks? does it matter if the cap is opened or not? | The inside of your car gets hot. Even in the winter, the sun is coming in through the windows. Over time, the heat and sunlight can cause chemicals in the plastic to leech out into your water. It's nothing super bad, but nothing you want to be doing often either.
If you refill your water bottles, the chemicals will eventually all be gone, and they can theoretically be refilled indefinitely | [
"A university student's master's thesis incorrectly suggested that repeatedly rewashing plastic water bottles can lead to the leaking diethylhydroxylamine (DEHA) into the drinking water, and can be detrimental to human health. The results of this research were repeated by various sources and also became a chain ema... |
Caffeinated Soap Bar, could this even work? How effective is the skin at absorbing chemicals? | That might have interesting effects on kids who swear in front of their mothers.
That said, to cross the skin barrier usually requires some sort of solvent to carry the molecule, DMSO is a good one. I wonder if the mint scent does more to wake you up than the caffeine.
Plus, I've never heard of PEG being called a "harsh ingredient" before. | [
"The addition of peppermint oil to the body soap is widely considered to help to stimulate the user's senses to effect an alert state in the user, as caffeine's ability to meaningfully diffuse through human skin is extremely limited and, as a result, users will generally not receive a meaningful dose of the drug th... |
what's the point of having and operating cctv if you can rarely actually identify anyone using it? | people are less likely to commit crimes if they know they are being recorded imho | [
"Using VRI for medical, legal and mental health settings is seen as controversial by some in the deaf community, where there is an opinion that it does not provide appropriate communication access—particularly in medical settings where the patient's ability to watch the screen or sign clearly to the camera may be c... |
how can words people use all the time "not be words." who decides when something is a word? | when enough people think it is a word, it is a word. The fact people understand it without explanation just helps it along to becoming a word. You have to realize, no word ever existed until people started using it. | [
"The word is an example of \"Time\" magazine's habit of supplying new words through \"unusual use of affixes\", although \"Time\" itself objected to the term's inclusion in the 1991 \"Random Webster's College Dictionary\", citing it as an example of the dictionary \"straining ... to avoid giving offense, except to ... |
Why don't Japanies swords have crossguards? | While there were some (elaborately decorated) cross-guards invented in the Edo period called *katanatsuba* (刀鍔) and another type called *mamorokobushi* (護拳) katanas generally lacked cross guards and hand protections for the simple reason that they were quick withdraw* (not primarily for thrusting however, as I've been corrected) weapons, whereas European swords with the exception of rapiers (which usually have hilts like 刀鍔) were usually broad weapons.
Japan had a different style of combat with the sword--Katanas were quick withdraw weapons, meant to be compatible with a Japanese concept called *Ieaidou* (居合道). The Japanese have developed a whole artform around this concept of swordplay, and it has developed into the sword tradition that Japan has today, with a focus on quick movements as opposed to slower, heavier striking. | [
"For protection and preservation, a polished Japanese sword needs a scabbard. A fully mounted scabbard (\"koshirae\") may consist of a lacquered body, a taped hilt, a sword guard (\"tsuba\") and decorative metal fittings. Though the original purpose was to protect a sword from damage, from early times on Japanese s... |
Was oral hygiene, or lack thereof, ever a deterrent for people to kiss before contemporary methods became available? | I am not knowledgeable enough on historical oral hygiene practices to answer the first part of your question.
However, I can answer your second question:
> Has kissing always been a part of people's love lives?
Well, prior to written history, we have a hard time concluding whether or not people kissed. There are various hypotheses for how kissing developed, ranging from "feeding" hypotheses, akin to canines and birds who pass food to juveniles through their mouths, to hypotheses which imply that kissing is a way of exchanging olfactory information. It's a very interesting anthropological discussion.
But from a HISTORICAL perspective, kissing is mentioned in writing about 5,000 years ago, in Sumerian poetry: (Kramer, Samuel Noah (1981). History Begins at Sumer (3rd revised. ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press., _URL_1_)
Later examples from Egypt also mention kissing, and are fairly specific: _URL_0_, _URL_2_
So I can't tell you about how people felt about kissing due to oral hygiene, but people were definitely kissing in a romantic context since almost the beginning of recorded history. | [
"In many human cultures, the act of premastication and direct mouth-to-mouth feeding is linked with the showing of affection, known as \"kiss feeding\". In the Manus cultures of the Admiralty Islands, the act of premastication has been used by a women to remind children and descendants of their obligations to her. ... |
the u.s. president is accused of a violent crime; what happens next? | The House of Representatives impeaches him and the Senate holds a trial with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presiding. He can't pardon himself in this case. | [
"Threatening the President of the United States is a federal felony under United States Code Title 18, Section 871. It consists of knowingly and willfully mailing or otherwise making \"any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States\". This also includes ... |
Did people in British colonies (eg. Canada, Australia, New Zealand) consider themselves British or did they moreover identify with the colony? | You may be interested in my answers in these previous threads:
* [At what point did Australians and New Zealanders begin to consider themselves as distinct from the British?](_URL_1_)
* [Why did Great Britain grant independence/autonomy to Australia and Canada? Was it political necessity or were there economic concerns?](_URL_0_)
| [
"The colonies were very different from one another but they were still a part of the British Empire in more than just name. Demographically, the majority of the colonists traced their roots to the British Isles and many of them still had family ties with Great Britain. Socially, the colonial elite of Boston, New Yo... |
why is that that wires can be bundled together without interfering with each others signals? | They can, it's called crosstalk and it's a big design problem. Normally the signals are small enough that the interference is minimal, and can be fixed by spacing the wires apart. When that doesn't work, foil shielding is used. And if that doesn't work, you can use balanced connections.
A balanced connection is when the signal and the opposite of the signal are sent on two lines. Then at the other end they are subtracted, this doubles the strength of the signal and any shared interference is removed. Professional audio cables are an example of balanced connections, but that's done to prevent interference from the environment. | [
"The wires are also twisted together, to reduce interference from electromagnetic induction. A twisted pair makes the loop area between the conductors as small as possible, and ensures that a magnetic field that passes equally through adjacent loops will induce equal levels of noise on both lines, which is canceled... |
How widespread was anarchism as a political movement? | Here's the start of an answer: "Anarchism" was not a widely used keyword until 1880 or so, around the time of the establishment of the The International Working People's Association or "Black International." Prior to that, anarchist ideas played a role in organizations like the International Association of the 1850s and the First International, and informed some elements in uprisings like the June Days of 1848 and the Paris Commune. In North America, they were also part of the movement for "equitable commerce," informed the radical wing of the abolitionist movement and inspired the organizers of the various New England reform leagues. But they were, in this early period, generally expressed in the context of larger socialist and/or internationalist movements. Those movements were marked by all sorts of internal struggles, including significant disagreements between anarchistic factions. It was arguably not until after the splits in the International that the various elements, anarchists among them, would emerge as movements in their own right, with the new divisions drawing anarchists together as socialism and the international labor movement split apart. | [
"Anarchism as a social movement has regularly endured fluctuations in popularity. Its classical period, which scholars demarcate as from 1860 to 1939, is associated with the working-class movements of the 19th century and the Spanish Civil War-era struggles against fascism.\n",
"Anarchism in the United States beg... |
Why is the Bering Strait never mentioned in the Cold War? | It's something like 4000 miles from there to Moscow, and 2000 miles to California. In both cases most of the trip would be across wilderness terrain with no major roads or infrastructure to speak of. In the age of nuclear weapons, the war would be over long before an army crossing the Bering Strait reached anything remotely important. Even if nuclear war did not break out, a large ground force making such a long and difficult journey would have little hope of survival. They would be hit by air strikes for weeks or months, and then would face a prepared defense if they ever made it to their goal. | [
"During the Cold War, the Bering Strait marked the border between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Diomede Islands—Big Diomede (Russia) and Little Diomede (US)—are only apart. Traditionally, the indigenous peoples in the area had frequently crossed the border back and forth for \"routine visits, seasonal... |
In Ancient Rome, who would act as the police detectives? Who would try to figure out who’s guilty for murders so they could have a trial? What methods for investigation would they use? | There have been a few previous answers that might be helpful here:
[How easy was it for fugitives to evade capture in the Roman Empire?](_URL_3_) by [u/mpixieg](_URL_2_)
[How were crimes investigated in Roman times?](_URL_1_) by [u/AwesomeDog59](_URL_4_)
And a couple by me:
[Prior to DNA evidence, finger prints, etc. how did they solve murders and actually know if they convicted the right person?](_URL_0_)
[I'm living in Ancient Rome and I just murdered someone. What chances do I have of getting caught?](_URL_5_)
In short - no one! If someone got murdered, that was a problem for the murdered person's family. If they could bring the murderer to court, then the government would deal with it. If not, then there was nothing to investigate. In Rome, the praetor was in charge of investigating, if someone was brought to him. But the government did not investigate crimes on its own. | [
"BULLET::::- Criminal enforcement is largely private in Ancient Rome; unlike today, there is no public system of enforcement, such as a prosecuting attorney ostensibly bringing a case on behalf of the community (e.g., \"People vs. _______\", or \"Crown vs. ________\".) For instance, Celer confesses to murder in the... |
what information can i get from a barometer and how can it be useful for me? | Barometers can be used to predict the weather or estimate your altitude. If you put your phone in a bag and submerge it underwater, you can use a bit of math to measure its depth.
Most useful stuff the barometer can do, apps already do. | [
"A barometer can also be found in smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Samsung Galaxy S3-S6, Motorola Xoom, Apple iPhone 6 smartphones, and Timex Expedition WS4 smartwatch, based on MEMS and piezoresistive pressure-sensing technologies. Inclusion of barometers on smartphones was originally intended to prov... |
how can people argue for mandatory drug testing to receive government benefits? doesnt this violate the constitution through self incrimination? doesnt testing for bac when pulled over also do this? | You are not legally entitled to most government benefits; you must be eligible. If not using illegal drugs is a condition for eligibility, then you can be required to prove that to obtain the benefits. That's not unconstitutional, because you're not being compelled to do anything--it is your choice to seek the benefit of the program.
Mandatory tests for intoxication without any suspicion are highly questionable, but that's a very different situation. Going about your lawful business and being required to submit to a test is not the same thing as applying for a benefit and having to submit to a test to prove eligibility. | [
"A study in 2004 by the Independent Inquiry into Drug Testing at Work found that attempts by employers to force employees to take drug tests could potentially be challenged as a violation of privacy under the Human Rights Act 1998 and Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights. However, this does not appl... |
How common was interfaith marriage on the medieval ages? | Great question!
In the twelfth century Latin Christian attitudes to this question were rather conflicted. On the one hand you have categorical prohibitions against miscegenation and on the other you have early depictions in chronicles and popular literature where such relationships are romantic and quite beautiful.
With respect to the former, two decades after the establishment of the Crusader states and Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem the religious and secular elite of these nascent communities met at the Council of Nablus in 1120 to pass sweeping new legislation aimed at policing the sexual ethics and morals of Latin Christians and multi-confessional neighbours. According to canons 12 and 15 Christian men and women who voluntarily had sexual intercourse with Muslims would suffer mutilation; men would be castrated and women would have their noses cut of (rhinotomy).
This was motivated in part due to a recent history of military defeat, exemplified most dramatically in the annihilation of the Antiochene field army in 1119 at the *Ager Sanguinis* or Field of Blood. The death of Roger of Salerno on the field with the majority of his men signalled to some Latin Christian observers within the Levant that God was punishing the faithful for their moral depravity and lasciviousness with non-Christians.
However I should note that there is little evidence of the canons of the Council of Nablus being enforced, so it is uncertain whether or not local administrations had the capacity or will to enforce such laws.
Finally on the other hand we have popular literary depictions of twelfth century knighthood. One of the most famous is the *Cycle of William of Orange,* a collection of tales involving the eponymous protagonist who fights valiantly in a fictionalized and deeply fantastical ninth century context against the enemies of Louis the Pious (the son of Charlemagne).
In the *Prise D'Orange* the tale recounts how William of Orange seduces Orable, the Muslim wife of the similarly "pagan" ruler of Orange, Thiebault. This romance is made licit in the tale through her conversion to Christianity, which obviously complicates the interfaith element of your question. However the point I am making is that Muslim individuals were not necessarily seen as being a maligned *other* and could themselves have great internal virtue making them worthy of Christian affection. Her confessional identity does not complicate William's desire and love, and her conversion is therefore a culmination of her joining him, his house and his faith. Also the emphasis upon a dazzling and beautiful foreign princess who would willingly submit to the sexual prowess of a Christian hero should not be terribly surprising given our enduring tendency towards eroticization and orientalism.
The earliest chronicles of the First Crusade also discuss how quickly Latin Christian settlers adapted to their new cultural and religious surroundings. Fulcher of Chartres explicitly records in Book III how Catholics took non-Catholic wives and came to embrace some of the local customs and dress. Although once again even Fulcher is careful to state that those saracens who were taken as wives had nevertheless been received into the church through baptism. Whether this is true or not is another matter, although given his clerical perspective it is easy to see why such a detail would be worth emphasizing. The First Crusade: Edward Peters, *The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres" and Other Source Materials* (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 281.
Perhaps the canonists of Nablus were troubled by the scale of the issue but simply had no means of confronting it despite the notional authority granted by these new legislative prohibitions.
| [
"The medieval view of the sacramentality of marriage has been described as follows: \"Like the other sacraments, medieval writers argued marriage was an instrument of sanctification, a channel of grace that caused God's gracious gifts and blessings to be poured upon humanity. Marriage sanctified the Christian coupl... |
If the universe is supposedly infinite, if we traveled in a straight line, given enough time, would be end up at the initial departure point? | > would it be cylindrical and would bend back in on itself at the edges if we ever found the theoretical "edge". Think of it as going to the top edge of a map in a video game and ending up at the bottom edge.
No, that would be roughly what happens in a *finite* universe (well, provided it's either not subject to accelerating expansion or you left early enough in the lifetime of the universe). No edge; just wrapping back around on itself. More like the surface of a sphere than a cylinder, though.
In an infinite universe, you just keep going. Forever. | [
"Hartle and Hawking suggest that if we could travel backwards in time towards the beginning of the Universe, we would note that quite near what might otherwise have been the beginning, time gives way to space such that at first there is only space and no time. According to the Hartle–Hawking proposal, the Universe ... |
How did commonly found specialized organs such as the liver originally develop? | The first multi-cellular organisms appeared because of evolutionary advantages of having specialised cells. Some seaweeds, for example, give us a look at what the most primitive multicellular organisms were like - they only have a few specialised cells, such as those that grip rock and those that are involved in reproduction. The rest of the cells all do exactly the same thing. The same concept applied to the first animals - initially, there were groups of cells, some of which performed different functions, such as allow the organism to move, while others all performed rudimentary function. We don't know for sure when the first epigenetic mechanisms arose, but we do know for certain that there was an obvious selective pressure towards organisms with a wider variety of specialised cells. Over generations, this resulted in organisms with more specific bundles of cells responsible for different functions - these were the first organs.
The great thing is that there are many organisms in various stages of evolutionary development. Maggots, for example, don't have a "brain", but they do have areas where the density of neurones is greater, which shows us that, perhaps, this is how the first brains came to be. | [
"The liver is found in all vertebrates, and is typically the largest visceral (internal) organ. Its form varies considerably in different species, and is largely determined by the shape and arrangement of the surrounding organs. Nonetheless, in most species it is divided into right and left lobes; exceptions to thi... |
How much did the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front know about the German atrocities and the holocaust? For those that were aware of these events (or even participants), how did they rationalize these actions? | **Part 1**
I have previously wrote answers to similar questions [here](_URL_0_), [here](_URL_2_), and [here](_URL_3_) and it is not really possible to gauge the number of how many members of the Wehrmacht were directly involved in war crimes, not at least because the difficulty of establishing what "directly" means in this context: E.g. was a group of soldiers guarding an Einsatzgruppen mass shooting directly involved or not?
The question of how many knew of war crimes and what they knew of them is easier to answer, especially in light of the newer research by Felix Römer as well as Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer. They worked extensively with Allied protocols of conversations between German POWs recorded in Allied camps when they didn't think anybody was listening. Their research uncovered that knowledge of war crimes was ubiquitous among members of the Wehrmacht. Every soldier knew of atrocities that had been committed against Jews and other civilians because they had either been present, had participated or had been told about them by their comrades. During their time as POWs, they quite freely discussed these crimes. To exemplify this, Römer cites among others the following exchange between the Viennese Artillerie-Gefreitem Franz Ctorecka and the Panzer-Gefreiten Willi Eckenbach in August 1944 in Fort Hunt (translation my own):
> C: And then Lublin. There is a crematoria, a death camp. Sepp Dietrich is involved there. He was somehow caught up in this in Lublin.
>
> E: Near Berlin, they burned the corpses in one of these thingies ["einem Dings], the people were forced into this hall. This hall was wired with high-voltage power-lines and in the moment they switched on these lines, the people in the hall turned to ashes. But while still alive! The guy who was in charge of the burning told 'em: "Don't be afraid, I will fire you up!" He always made such quips. And then they found out that the guy who was in charge of burning the people also stole their gold teeth. Also other stuff like rings, jewellery etc.
[Römer, p. 435f.]
What this passage shows is that these Wehrmacht soldiers, who after all were both on the lower side of the ladder, being only Gefreite (lance corporals) were uncannily well informed even if the story about using electricity for executions wasn't true. But knowing not only of the Majdanek death camp near Lublin but also knowing about Sepp Dietirch's involvement proves them to be very well informed.
Or take this exchange between two Wehrmacht soldiers, Obergefreiter Karl Huber and Pioniersoldat Walter Gumlich, in Fort Hunt:
> H: One day, one guy just came and stole this Russian's cow and so the Russian defended himself. And then we had to hang fifty or a hundred men and women and let them hang there for three or four days. Or they had to dig a trench, line themselves up at the edge and were shot so they fell backwards into it. Fifty to a hundred people and more. That were the so-called "retributions". But that didn't help anything. Or when we set the village son fire [...] Partisans were naturally dangerous, we had to defend ourselves against them but this was something different [...]
>
> G: Ach, that were war operations. They [the people who did the above] are not really criminals.
>
> H: Exterminating whole families, shooting their kids etc., literally killing whole families? We are guilty if the military without any right or any order steals the last bread of some farmer.
>
> G: Oh, come on.
>
> H: Ach, don't defend them.
These and so many more conversations of this kind between Wehrmacht soldiers show that virtually every soldiers had either heard or seen these crimes if he had not participated in them himself. And given how numerous the crimes of the Nazis and the Wehrmacht were in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, this is hardly surprising. You already mentioned it in your expanded text above and I go into this in the linked answers but it is imperative to realize that the war against the Soviet Union was planned, conceptualized and fought as a war of annihilation, being in itself basically a huge war crime. Nobody is this fact more obvious than in the OKW's Kriegsgerichtsbarkeit Erlass, which actually forbid Wehrmacht soldiers from being persecuted for war crimes in the Soviet Union. That this was seen as necessary, tells you not just how deeply the Wehrmacht was involved but just what kind of war they planned to fight: One where combat operations and war crimes bled into each other seamlessly.
The background of this is touched upon in my linked answers as well as by Dr. Waitman Beorn in the linked AMA [here](_URL_1_).
Now when it comes to the question of rationalization, the protocols reviewed by Römer et. al. are also rather enlightening. As you might have noticed in the converstaion between Huber and Gumlich above, these crimes were sometimes regarded as controversial. Römer in his analysis proposes based on the protocols that Wehrmacht soldiers did indeed distinguish between what they viewed as legitimate and illegitimate violence.
Take this exchange Römer cites between soldier Friedrich Held and Obergefreiter Walter Langfeld about the topic of anti-Partisan warfare:
> H: Against Partisans, it is different. There, you look front and get shot in the back and then you turn around and get shot from the side. There simply is no Front.
>
> L: Yes, that's terrible. [...] But we did give them hell ["Wir haben sie ganz schön zur Sau gemacht"],
>
> H: Yeah, but we didn't get any. At most, we got their collaborators, the real Partisans, they shot themselves before they were captures. The collaborators, those we interrogated.
>
> L: But they too didn't get away alive.
>
> H: Naturally. And when they captured one of ours, they killed him too.
>
> L: You can't expect anything different. It's the usual [Wurscht ist Wurscht]
>
> H: But they were no soldiers but civilians.
>
> L: They fought for their homeland.
>
> H: But they were so deceitful...
[Römer, p. 424]
| [
"It was particularly difficult for commanders on the eastern front to avoid knowing what was happening in the areas behind the front. Many individual soldiers photographed the massacres of Jews by the \"Einsatzgruppen\". Some generals and officers, such as Walther von Reichenau, Erich Hoepner, and Erich von Manstei... |
How often did people trade in money for gold? | Under a "classical" gold standard, money is not convertible into gold; money IS gold. The monetary unit is defined in terms of a weight of gold, and the law defines a right of any individual to go to a mint and turn that weight of gold into an official coin.
The circulating media of exchange consisted of both these coins, bank notes issued upon those coins, and checking. In many places these bank notes were central bank notes; but many countries lacked central banks, and privately-issued notes traded instead.
These banks notes were roughly analogous to banking deposits in a checking account. They are a promise to pay backed by a specific banking institution. So just as you usually spend most of your checking account balance without taking cash, but do withdraw some physical currency, people mostly used bank notes, but did redeem some for metallic currency. The metallic stuff was also used between banks.
So the answer is: yes, during the "classical" gold standard period, individuals could turn to the banking system and exchange their dollar-denominated assets for physical gold; and when the financial system was underdeveloped or malfunctioning, they would.
Later, after WWI in Europe, and after the Gold Seizures in the U.S. there existed various gold-exchange regimes. These were not "classical" gold standards, and under them, only certain people and foreign governments could exchange paper tender for physical gold. Under these systems it would be more accurate to say that money was "backed by" gold (often imperfectly) than to say that money "consisted of" gold.
The answer I have just given is substantially drawn from the following excellent article, which discusses your question in greater depth, and which demonstrates the limited historical scope of a true gold standard:
Selgin, George, The Rise and Fall of the Gold Standard in the United States (August 27, 2012). Available at SSRN: _URL_1_ or _URL_0_ | [
"Only a small number (probably fewer than 500) traveled overland from the United States that year. Some of these \"forty-eighters\", as the earliest gold-seekers were sometimes called, were able to collect large amounts of easily accessible gold—in some cases, thousands of dollars worth each day. Even ordinary pros... |
who is it exactly that make money every time i use visa or mastercard? | The issuing bank gets a cut and so does the network operator (visa/mastercard/etc).
That's why banks want you to use *their* cards. Well that and since they're the ones financing your credit they get the interest on the transactions. | [
"Cards may be \"topped-up\" or monthly passes purchased in the following ways: online, at ticket machines, at ticketing offices, and at selected retail outlets such as bookshops. Top ups may be made by credit or debit card, with the latter three mediums accepting cash payment. The card is designed to reduce the num... |
umbral moonshine | Perhaps while you're at it you'd like an ELI5 of the proof of Fermat's last theorem, and a simple explanation of the Hodge conjecture?
Some concepts are suitable for simplified explanations. This is not one of them. | [
"In mathematics, umbral moonshine is a mysterious connection between Niemeier lattices and Ramanujan's mock theta functions. It is a generalization of the Mathieu moonshine phenomenon connecting representations of the Mathieu group M24 with K3 surfaces.\n",
"The name of umbral moonshine derives from the use of sh... |
why when you learn a new word you suddenly see it used all the time? | It's called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. It happens with band-names, artists and types of food too. Our attention is quite selective and we tend to subconsciously ignore things we don't understand.
After we learn it we have confirmation bias where it seems that something we've just learned about is all of a sudden quite common. Sometimes it is but more often it's just that we previously weren't paying attention.
There's more about it [here](_URL_0_) | [
"BULLET::::- 'I'm coming now now', 'I'm coming just now', 'I'm coming now now', 'I'm coming right now': All rather vague variations regarding time. Each repetition of the word \"now\" represents a closer approximation of the typical English \"now\". Three repetitions of the word is generally the most you will hear.... |
why are there creases in our palm and why are they permanently there throughout our lifetime? | Creases form on our hands in the womb. They allow our hand skin to squeeze and stretch without bunching up. These creases are called Palmar Flexion creases. | [
"The skin crease as a fixed and permanent line, according to their histology, is related to connective tissue attachments with the underlying structures or extensions of the underlying muscle fibers in the dermis of the crease site. \n",
"Pustulosis is highly inflammatory skin condition resulting in large fluid-f... |
Literary Works on European Attire/Fashion | This is such a very broad topic that there are no scholarly works that deal with the whole thing. On the one hand, you can try Phyllis Tortora's *Survey of Historic Costume*, which is a textbook that can give a broad overview; like all textbooks, though, you lose the nuances and sometimes it's incorrect on the details. On the other, I list more specific works [in my profile](_URL_0_), which won't give you the complete history of high fashion/everyday dress/military uniforms/etc. but are helpful for more specific periods. | [
"Since the 1950s, \"Europe\" has issued thematic titles considered as a reference work. It also contains book and cultural reviews and publishes poetry or fiction. \"Europe\" has published works by authors as diverse as Aragon, Jean-Richard Bloch, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Emile Danoën, Jean Giono, Panaït Istrati, Ra... |
how do we define when the earth formed? | > how do we define when it stopped being a clump of rock?
But it still is a big clump of rock. That's not mutually exclusive with being categorized as a planet, and the actual definition of a planet is rather arbitrary. Pluto is a good example, as it was classified as a planet initially, but the International Astronomical Union updated its definition of a planet in a way that disqualified Pluto, reclassifying it as a dwarf planet instead.
Using the IAU's definition of a planet, the Earth became one once it met the following criteria:
_URL_0_ in orbit around the Sun,
2.has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape), and
3.has "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit.
| [
"The geological history of Earth follows the major events in Earth's past based on the geological time scale, a system of chronological measurement based on the study of the planet's rock layers (stratigraphy). Earth formed about 4.54 billion years ago by accretion from the solar nebula, a disk-shaped mass of dust ... |
why is february the shortest month? | Because it was the last month of the year.
The old Roman calendar had ten months -- which is why we see prefixes like Oct- and Dec- -- eight and ten -- for what was at the time the eighth and tenth months. In Rome, the year started with March.
So, what about the time between December and March? Originally, it was all "fuck it, it's winter, doesn't deserve a month". But eventually that became impractical, probably for reasons of commerce. So, they added two months -- January and February, the latter getting the leftovers. | [
"February is the second and shortest month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendar with 28 days in common years and 29 days in leap years, with the quadrennial 29th day being called the \"leap day\". It is the first of five months to have a length of fewer than 31 days (the other four months that fall unde... |
why i can't explain to others things like they're five? | There is a little bit of truth in the idea that if you can't explain it simply, then you don't really understand it. But that's not always the case, sometimes what you explain might just be really complicated. I mean, you can explain nuclear fission pretty simply, but the simple explanation is useless when it comes to application. You just need to remember that the ELI5 answers aren't meant to be research level answers. They just answer the little questions the person wants to know. | [
"To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty, and leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things.\n",
"We have allowed our life to become exceedingly complicated. But even now it is still possible ... |
what’s the difference between dolby, dts, and pcm sound options for surround sound. | In a nutshell PCM is an open standard for storing analog waveforms as digital samples. Pulse Code Modulation. It's not fancy but it's free and all samples are preserved without a loss of quality. DTS, Atmos, Dolby Digital, are proprietary audio formats that convert raw PCM data, into a proprietary audio stream. They modify the original samples and may or may not be lossy/lossless, and you need to pay a license royalty to the companies in order to encode or decode audio using their format.
You have 2 files on your computer. One is a .wav file, and the other is a .mp3. They both contain music, but .wav is an open standard supported by everything and it contains uncompressed PCM audio, and mp3 is a licensed encoding scheme that requires a mp3 decoder, and the license (it's free now but didn't use to be) to allow software to decode it. The decoded MP3 is converted to PCM (just like the raw format of the .wav) and sent to the sound card where it's played back.
When you connect a digital output from a bluray player, computer, or game console to a stereo or TV, the physical connection is just like the files on your computer. They physically share the same type of storage and transmission, but the format of the data is different and needs different decoders to play it back.
PCM sends sound data over SPDIF or HDMI using a format that the stereo or TV recognizes as PCM, and the PCM data is sent to the digital to analog converter or DAC where it emerges as audio.
PCM is not compressed meaning the original samples are preserved. It can have 2 or more channels over the same cable, which get separated out and converted to your center, subwoofer, and surround sounds.
DTS is it's own format though. It uses the same physical cabling (like files on a disk) but the format of the data (like .wav versus .mp3) is different. In order for a stereo or TV to decode the DTS data, it has to have a DTS decoder. Once the DTS decoder finishes with it it's converted back to PCM, the audio is then sent to the DAC just like the PCM data was.
Dolby Digital, Atmos, TrueHD, etc are also other formats that can be sent over the HDMI cable. If the stereo or TV has a Dolby decoder on board, it can convert that data into regular PCM samples which are then sent to the DAC and decoded like normal. | [
"DTS and Dolby Digital (AC-3), DTS's chief competitor in the cinema theatre and home theatre markets, are often compared because of their similarity in product goals, though Dolby believed that the surround channels should be diffused and DTS said they should be directional. In theatrical installations, AC-3 audio ... |
What would happen if we were to point the Hubble Space telescope at the Earth? | From [_URL_1_](_URL_0_)
> The surface of the Earth is whizzing by as Hubble orbits, and the pointing system, designed to track the distant stars, cannot track an object on the Earth. The shortest exposure time on any of the Hubble instruments is 0.1 seconds, and in this time Hubble moves about 700 meters, or almost half a mile. So a picture Hubble took of Earth would be all streaks. | [
"For objects at the Hubble limit the space between us and the object of interest has an average expansion speed of \"c\". So, in a universe with constant Hubble parameter, light emitted at the present time by objects outside the Hubble limit would never be seen by an observer on Earth. \n",
"Hubble observations w... |
explain this comic to me. | [There's a website for that](_URL_0_)
> This is a reference to the phrase context-free grammar, which is a technical term used in formal language theory. The play on words is that Cueball does not provide any context for his statement. | [
"The comic is a satire of American art schools, presented in the manner of a sensationalistic exposé and ostensibly based on Clowes' own experiences at the Pratt Institute. (The story is signed \"By D. Clowes, B.F.A.\" and a Pratt Institute diploma appears on a wall in one panel.)\n",
"The Comic is a 1969 Pathéco... |
Can stable elements be induced to undergo nuclear fission? | Yes, we can make lighter stable elements split into even lighter elements, but below iron, it requires more energy to split them than you get back. Light elements require more energy to split, and give more energy when fused; heavy elements as opposite -- they require more energy to fuse, and give more energy when split. Iron is basically the middle-ground, the point where the transition between light and heavy happens.
So, you can split iron or lighter elements, but it requires more energy than you'll get out from the fission.
This is why we do fission with the heaviest elements (uranium, plutonium, etc.), but we try to produce fusion with the lighest elements (hydrogen). | [
"The stability of nuclei quickly decreases with the increase in atomic number after curium, element 96, whose half-life is over ten thousand times longer than that of any subsequent element. All isotopes with an atomic number above 101 undergo radioactive decay with half-lives of less than 30 hours: this is because... |
how does a serving of something like beef jerky have 10g of protein in it, when the serving size is 1g of meat? | 1 gram of food is about the size a jelly bean. I don’t think there are any beef jerkies with 1 gram servings. | [
"According to data presented by the United States Department of Agriculture, a typical 183-gram (6.5-ounce) serving of a beef and cheese chimichanga contains 443 calories, 20 grams protein, 39 grams carbohydrates, 23 grams total fat, 11 grams saturated fat, 51 milligrams cholesterol, and 957 milligrams of sodium.\n... |
how does a processor thread work? | A thread is a fancy way to say a task. Let's say you want to send shipments of Egyptian cotton from Sicily to Malta. If you have a single plane that can fly 500 mph, you have to wait until it flies there and back (a single clock cycle) before you can load it up and send it out again. In that sense it isn't very quick.
Now imagine you have a fleet of 8 planes. Even though they all fly at 500 mph, you're transporting 8x as much cotton as you were before. This is why the speed (measured in GHz) doesn't mean a whole lot. In the case of the i7 series, it has hyperthreading, which is a fancy way of saying there are twice as many virtual cores as physical cores. Since an i7 is a quad core chip (at least the desktop version I'm familiar with is), there are 8 usable cores, as detected by windows task manager. A core 2 duo, the second generation of Core Duo, only have 2 usable cores.
The way a thread works is fairly complex, but each core is basically set up to run one thread at a time, but cycle through them so fast that the user interprets them as running in parallel (wikipedia "time-division multiplexing"). The only downside to having a lot of cores running in parallel is that a lot of software can only utilize 2-4 cores at once, meaning you have a bunch of cores on an i7 doing nothing for a lot of the time unless you're seriously multitasking.
To most directly answer your question, it works by splitting a "job" into many smaller tasks called "threads" and then going through all the threads and doing them individually, but so fast that it looks like they're running simultaneously. If there is more than one core doing this then many tasks can be done at once.
Anyone with more experience in this field can correct me. | [
"Threads made an early appearance under the name of \"tasks\" in OS/360 Multiprogramming with a Variable Number of Tasks (MVT) in 1967. Saltzer (1966) credits Victor A. Vyssotsky with the term \"thread\". The process schedulers of many modern operating systems directly support both time-sliced and multiprocessor th... |
how can 100% orange juice have calories but something like flavored sparkling water containing fruit juice have no calories? | There is sugar in an orange so there are calories in an orange.
The sparkling water might have an sweetener that our bodies cannot digest (= 0 calories), or one that does not need very much to achieve the same level of sweetness that sugar does ( < 5 calories = 0 calories). | [
"The health value of orange juice is debatable: it has a high concentration of vitamin C, but also a very high concentration of simple sugars, comparable to soft drinks. As a result, some government nutritional advice has been adjusted to encourage substitution of orange juice with raw fruit, which is digested more... |
Are supernovae radially symmetric? | There are a number of things to pick apart here.
First of all, not all supernovae are core collapse supernovae, but due to thermal runaway processes on White Dwarfs. The mechanisms are different, and the explosions in these cases can in fact be highly asymmetric.
Regarding core collapse supernovae:
> Are coexistent shells the best way to illustrate it? Like is there really a clear and distinct boundary between regions where different elements fuse?
Yes, the shell model is the best way to illustrate it. The borders between the shells are not particularly sharp, but the dynamics of the matter inside the star lead to the postulated stratification. It's probably better to imagine the shells as *enriched* of the different elements, than exclusively consisting of them.
> Rather than "this fuses and then this fuses and then this fuses" aren't they all kind of going simultaneously?
It's both in a way. You have these distinct shells, and in all shells, fusion takes place. Even in a late stage star, you have hydrogen fusion, helium fusion, carbon fusion, etc. at the same time, but not necessarily at the same places.
> And then my final question: is the collapse symmetrical? It gets presented as an all at once, from all directions, thing.
Yes, the core collapse is symmetrically. However, there have been [processes discovered in simulations](_URL_0_), which can lead to an overall asymmetry in the resulting explosion.
> I get that planetary nebulae seem to come in a variety of shapes...
Very important to point out here that planetary nebulae are **not** the result of supernovae. This type of nebulae is formed from Red Giants shedding their outer layers and usually only contain a White Dwarf.
Supernova remnants are (if they aren't extremely old and distorted by interaction with surround gas and dust) [usually rather spherical](_URL_1_). | [
"Pulsational pair-instability supernovae are likely the most common pair-instability events and are probably common causes of supernova impostor events. Depending on the nature of the progenitor star they may take the appearance of either a type II, type Ib or type Ic supernova. . Like full scale pair-instability s... |
why does muscle stop growing stronger at some point? | It takes a constant caloric energy feed to support every gram of muscle. You're evolved to face the danger of imminent starvation at any time.
So the muscles grow in proportion to the exercise they get. Which is proportional to your daily activity. They generally stop growing when they are the size that daily activity does not damage them.
Your body doesn't want them to be much stronger than you need. Look up about the loss of strength people in 0g or being bedridden for even a handful of days experience.
Even with manual labor or purposeful exercise, they will respond by growing if you have proper nutrition. There is an upper maximum limit to their growth even in this case (which weight lifters strive to push). | [
"Difficulty building muscle is often associated with the ectomorph body somatotype, however other common reasons also include a lack of proper nutrition, suitable physical activity level or not allowing enough recovery time for the stressed muscles to regain their previous state and then grow bigger (overtraining).... |
Following implantation of a Cochlear Implant, can adult formerly-deaf patients understand language? | Neuroimaging of sign language is a bit thin on the ground; there's only a handful of studies, but they suggest that signed language uses many of the same areas but isn't as lateralized or localized as spoken language processing (e.g., Corina, et al., 2003; Soderfeldt, Ronnberg, & Risberg, 1994; for a dissenting opinion, see Macsweeney, et al., 2002).
Typically, cochlear implantation occurs early in life, but we do have evidence that implantees pick up fine-grained native-like performance on even low-level language tasks, even when their implantation occurs years after typically-hearing controls (Bouton, et al., 2012).
**References:**
Bouton, S., Serniclaes, W., Bertoncini, J., & Cole, P. (2012). Perception of speech features by French-speaking children with cochlear implants. *Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research*, 55(1), 139-153.
Corina, D. P., San Jose-Robertson, L., Guillemin, A., High, J., & Braun, A. R. (2003). Language lateralization in a bimanual language. *Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience*, 15(5), 718-730.
MacSweeney, M., Woll, B., Campbell, R., McGuire, P. K., David, A. S., Williams, S. C., Suckling, J., Calvert, G. A., & Brammer, M. J. (2002). Neural systems underlying British Sign Language and audio‐visual English processing in native users. *Brain*, 125(7), 1583-1593.
Soderfeldt, B., Ronnberg, J., & Risberg, J. (1994). Regional cerebral blood flow in sign language users. *Brain and Language*, 46(1), 59-68. | [
"Speech perception can be corrected prior to language acquisition with cochlear implants. After a year and a half experience, researchers found the deaf culture was able to identify words and comprehend movements of others' lips. There is a greater opportunity to hear a sound depending on the location of electrodes... |
why does water go through your system so quickly? | Your body only uses what it needs and gets rid of the excess. When it notices it has a whole bunch of water it doesn’t require it sends it straight through you. The reason this is good for you is toxins get diluted more and are flushed out faster. The downside is many of your essential vitamins and minerals will also be flushed out quickly. That’s why it’s important to eat nutritious food daily and not just once in a while.
In regards to your second question. You can get dehydrated easily if you only drink coffee and pop. Coffee and pop are what’s known as a diuretic. This means it causes more water to be excreted by your cells. This will initially cause frequent peeing but will quickly dehydrate you, at which point you’ll pee much less frequently. | [
"The water from a river can enter the receiving body in a variety of different ways. The motion of a river is influenced by the relative density of the river compared to the receiving water, the rotation of the earth, and any ambient motion in the receiving water, such as tides or seiches.\n",
"As it flows, the a... |
How did outsiders view the relationship between the emperor and shogun of Japan? | You don't really specify an era, so I'm just gonna talk about the 19th century and the Perry expedition as an example.
While planning for the expedition, the US understood Japan as having two emperors, a religious emperor and a military emperor. They addressed the letter it was the mission of the expedition to deliver to the "Japanese Emperor", with the intent of giving it to the Shogun in Edo. This lead to some confusion at first. They would become more familiar with the situation given some time after the opening of the country. | [
"During this period, although the Emperor of Japan was officially the ruler of his nation and every lord swore loyalty to him, he was largely a marginalized, ceremonial, and religious figure who delegated power to the \"shōgun\", a noble who was roughly equivalent to a general. In the years preceding this era the S... |
Does Einstein's theory of relativity connect electric and magnetic fields? | Yes; namely under changes of inertial frames in relativity (Lorentz transformations) E and B fields mix into eachother.
Super minimal example to show this: static charge, there's only an E field. You change reference frame, it gets moving and therefore part of the E has turned into a B.
Said in modern words, this implies E and B must be part (components) of a larger object that "transforms well" under Lorentz transformations, that is to say it doesn't mix into anything else, just into itself. This object is the Maxwell tensor F. | [
"The modern (post-Einstein) interpretation is that the magnetic field is equivalent to the electric field, but in a different reference frame. Since magnetic fields can be interpreted as electric fields in a different reference frame (and vice versa), special relativity connects the two fields. One postulate of spe... |
Why No American Aristocracy? | For one they didn't want to create any titles that would have been eligible for representation in the House of Lords which was quite powerful back then. | [
"The United States lacks titled nobility unlike Commonwealth countries. However there are various prominent American families that have held disproportionate wealth and wielded disproportionate political power not too dissimilar to that of titled nobility. Many of these families often have ties to older East Coast ... |
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