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How Were Knights/Common Soldiers Paid? | In the later middle ages in England, military service increasingly became based on service contracts, either for long or short periods. The earliest such short term contracts (that we have found) date from 1270 CE, when Prince Edward (later King Edward I) paid a company of knights to serve with him on the Eighth Crusade for a year's time. There are earlier references to such arrangements as well. Military service contracts began to increase in importance starting from the 1290s, until the 1330s, when an entire field army would have been fielded through the mechanism of contracts (whether for life service in a retinue or for a specific campaign).
The primary benefit of signing such a contract and fighting for the king in France or Scotland was being paid. Aside from the regular daily wage of a man-at-arms or an archer, there were several other benefits. Mounted troops could recieve the *restauro equorum*, which provided for compensation in the event that a man's horse was killed or lost in battle. *Regard* was a bonus payment to captains and officers to cover the general costs of raising a company and leading it in the field. Bonuses might also be paid in the aftermath of a major battle, if the king or one of his advisors thought a man or a company had fought particularly well.
Soldiers could also loot conquered towns or victorious battlefields for the copious amounts of booty free for the taking. In the aftermath of battles like Crecy (1346), where the bodies of thousand of French aristocrats littered the field, the pickings could be extremely lucrative. The exact division of spoils varied, but at Crecy, half of a man's spoils would be forfeit to his captain, who would then hand over half of that half to the king. Ransom from prisoners counted as spoils in this circumstance, although English tactics often ensured that there were very few prisoners remaining by the end of a battle. With extremely important prisoners (like a French noble of royal blood, or an important noble from some other kingdom), the king had the right to take custody of these prisoners from the soldiers who had captured them. If this ended up being the case, it was usually expected that the king would pay compensation to the soldier who had been deprived of a ransom. However, that depended on the generosity of the king at that particular moment.
There were several legal benefits available as well for soldiers. Convicted criminals might serve in exchange for a royal pardon. There were two main benefits to this: 1) Convicts often would be required to fight without drawing a wage and 2) criminals generally paid a fee in exchange for their pardon. Men with what Andrew Ayton calls "significant property interests" could get a letter of protection for his lands after he signed up for military service. This meant that his estate and lands were secure from being sued when he was away. Without this protection, landowners wouldn't be able to leave England to fight.
Of course, this is all in ideal terms. Often, wages were not paid, or if they were, were insufficient. Sometimes wages were only paid to men who had achieved some kind of political influence years after their actual service. Henry V was forced to pawn off many of his royal jewels in order to convince nobles to serve and to receive loans from towns. War debts escalated wildly for the English crown over the course of the Hundred Years War, which contributed to the eventual English defeat. Henry VI was so desperate to find additional sources of revenue that he formed a committee of alchemists to try and make gold for the crown. | [
"The poor knights were impoverished military veterans, required to pray daily for the Knights Companion. In return, they received a salary and lodging in Windsor Castle. The knights are no longer necessarily poor, but are still military pensioners. They participate in the Order's processions, escorting the members,... |
Is it possible for something travelling at the speed of light, such as photons, to orbit a body, like a black hole for example? | Yes, photons can orbit a body like a black hole, but there are no stable orbits. There is [a certain radius](_URL_0_) around a stationary black hole where a photon would have a circular orbit, but it isn't stable, so a photon deviating a little from that radius will either escape or be pulled into the black hole eventually.
> Additionally, how about something that has mass, unlike photons?
Objects with mass cannot move at the speed of light. | [
"Current commonly accepted physical theories imply or assume the photon to be strictly massless. If the photon is not a strictly massless particle, it would not move at the exact speed of light, \"c\", in vacuum. Its speed would be lower and depend on its frequency. Relativity would be unaffected by this; the so-ca... |
(Astronomy) How do astronomers differentiate the change in a stars color caused by movement (blue/red shift) from the change in color caused by temperature? | Spectroscopy. All the elements emit/absorb light of specific wavelengths. We can measure the wavelengths in the lab and we can find the same patterns in starlight - just shifted. This shift depends on their motion only, not on their temperature. Once you correct the spectrum for this shift (in software, not in a telescope) you can measure the temperature. | [
"The motion of stellar objects can be determined by looking at their spectrum. Because of the Doppler effect, objects moving towards us are blueshifted, and objects moving away are redshifted. The wavelength of redshifted light is longer, appearing redder than the source. Conversely, the wavelength of blueshifted l... |
Why is it reptiles and certain animals are able to survive such long periods on a single meal, compared to humans? | Cold blooded. Humans use up massive amounts of energy keeping ourselves at optimum temperature, humans also have higher than average energy requirements than most other mammals due to our larger brains. Humans can survive months without eating btw. | [
"Reptiles generally have a shorter retention time than mammals. However, this loss of digestive efficiency is offset by their ability to process food into smaller particles for digestion. Smaller particles are more easier to digest and ferment. \n",
"Most reptiles are insectivorous or carnivorous and have simple ... |
why do apartments keep raising rents every year until you leave, if they're just going to rent it out to someone new and unknown at a lower rent afterwards? | They aren't. Your rent is being increased to keep up with inflation, and rental prices in your market. Any new tenet will be paying a comparable amount to you. | [
"The proliferation of short term rentals can affect those in the area who are looking for long term rentals. Through short term rental, landlords can make upwards of 20% more than they would on a rent controlled property. Thus landlords convert their properties into short term rental units, and there are less long ... |
After I receive a transition of blood, when does that blood physiologically become my blood? | Functionally, it remains the same. Both the donor blood and the recipient blood have the same oxygen-carrying properties, so from a blood-draw standpoint it all just looks like blood. In most cases, the transfused blood is also a very small part of the body's total blood volume, and so any differences between it and the rest of the body will be nearly undetectable in your average blood draw. Of course, if there are blood type mismatches, you would see reactions between donor blood and recipient blood, but barring that, everything would be kosher. Finally, the life of red blood cells is about 120 days, and in most transfusions, the transfused blood is completely absent from the system in 60.
One interesting side effect can happen in the event of massive transfusion that replaces an incredibly large volume of blood. If the volume is large enough to essentially replace the patient's own blood, then you can get something called "dilutional thrombocytopenia" since transfused blood has platelets that aren't fully functional. This can be corrected with further transfusions, but it's something that might actually show up in a blood draw. | [
"The first appearance in the blood is normally two months after infection. The only stage seen in the blood are gametocytes. These double in number for the first three days and mature. Having reached maturity, they gradually decline in number and normally disappear after a month. Secondary episodes may occur at var... |
How did/do wings evolve? Why are the in-between generations of "not winged" to "winged" creatures considered advantageous for evolution's criteria? | There are considered 4 separate evolutions of flight- insects, bats, birds and pterosaurs. I can't comment on 3 of the 4, but there are two common theories for how pre-avian theropods started evolving wings. They are wing-like front limbs to aid in gliding and to aid in ascending steep surfaces/aid in climbing. Feathers appeared before any of this and are thought to have evolved for temperature regulation.
Edit- spelling | [
"Natural selection has played an enormous role in refining the wings, control and sensory systems, and anything else that affects aerodynamics or kinematics. One noteworthy trait is wing twist. Most insect wings are twisted, as are helicopter blades, with a higher angle of attack at the base. The twist generally is... |
if some letters are silent in certain words then why include then at all? | Often just tradition. When they began printing books in English, there weren't many typesetters in England, so they imported Dutch typesetters who often spelled English words in a Dutch way. So that's how we got the 'h' in 'ghost' and 'ghastly.'
Other times the silent letter actually serves a purpose. The difference between 'can' and 'cane' is the silent letter 'e.' That 'e' lets the reader know that they should pronounce the 'a' as a long vowel.
Edit:
[A much more eloquent source](_URL_0_) | [
"The letter is usually (but not necessarily) silent if preceded by a consonant, as in \"en mand\" (‘a man’), \"blind\" (‘blind’). Many words ending in are pronounced with a stød, but it's still considered a silent letter.\n",
"Some words contain silent letters, which do not represent any sound in modern English p... |
how does it work in america when someone doesn't have health insurance? | I'm an "uninsured" Californian who was recently run over by a truck. Ambulance, 2 operations, countless MRIs and X-rays, 9 day stay in the ICU, lots of pills, physical therapy, follow ups, and outpatient gear (back brace, cane, etc). Ballpark estimate was a half million dollars, roughly $30 of which will be out-of-pocket. Being low income I qualified for a free government "insurance" that pays pretty close to 100% of any scenario. My only expense was 30% of my wheelchair rental.
If I didn't have that program my hospital bill would be written off as a charity case. I was not eligible for walking assistance device coverage, so the hospital donated a cane to me because I needed it to leave. This was supplied to them by the cane company the hospital pimps out to patients (heh, pimp cane... I'm still on pain killers). The hospital itself had a program to offer free medication to patients, but because I was enrolled in a program I had to fill it at the local free clinic. They didn't carry one of the prescriptions, so they wrote a referral to another pharmacy, so they were also free. They also write referrals for free glasses, hearing aids, birth control, fillings, crowns, etc.
Hospitals have someone on staff who's job it is to find a way for a sick or injured patient to get he necessary care regardless of ability to pay. It isn't always ideal, One uninsured friend's hospital would only operate on his herniated disc if he came in to the ER 3 times... Otherwise they sent him home with painkillers and an order to rest. But by simply asking the social services worker how to fix the problem when he had no insurance or money, he got the answer and made it work.
For more information on health care options for low income or uninsured call 311 or 211, or look up your local Department of Public Social Services office. | [
"Health insurance in the United States is any program that helps pay for medical expenses, whether through privately purchased insurance, social insurance, or a social welfare program funded by the government. Synonyms for this usage include \"health coverage\", \"health care coverage\", and \"health benefits\".\n"... |
Did early agriculture effectively strip-mine the Fertile Crescent? | From the book [*Guns, Germs, and Steel*](_URL_0_), by Jared Diamond pg. 411:
"The region's transformation from fertile woodland to eroded scrub or desert has been elucidated by paleobotanists and archeologists. Its woodlands were cleared for agriculture, or cut to obtain construction timber, or burned as firewood... Because of low rainfall and hence low primary productivity (proportional to rainfall), regrowth of vegetation could not keep pace with its destruction, especially in the presence of overgrazing by abundant goats. With the tree and grass cover removed, erosion proceeded and valleys silted up, while irrigation agriculture in the low rainfall environment led to salt accumulation..."
So in effect, Diamond is citing numerous factors (not only agriculture, which was far from primitive for its time), most of them man-made, which contributed to the downfall of the very ecologically sensitive fertile crescent. The term 'dust-bowl' doesn't precisely apply here, though as you say the processes are similar. | [
"The Fertile Crescent had many diverse climates, and major climatic changes encouraged the evolution of many \"r\" type annual plants, which produce more edible seeds than \"K\" type perennial plants. The region's dramatic variety in elevation gave rise to many species of edible plants for early experiments in cult... |
In the Antebellum South, how did plantation preachers treat the story of Moses and its anti-slavery elements? | It is important to remember that Christianisation was not a universal phenomenon in the antebellum South; efforts to bring slaves into the Christian fold begin on a meaningful scale only quite late in slavery's history, and the extent to which they were successful is highly debatable. For some context on this, I wrote [this post](_URL_1_) about a month ago that you might interesting.
Something to keep in mind is that slaves were, by and large, illiterate. Plantation owners had little interest in teaching the majority of their slaves to read and write; agricultural work, after-all, did not require reading or writing. State laws in this period ranged from imposing limits on slave literacy to making it outright illegal.
In this context, pro-slavery preachers had quite a lot of freedom in what they could preach; it is not difficult to be selective in how you quote the Bible if your audience cannot pick up and copy and read it for themselves. As the slave narrative of Henry Bibb, published in 1849, notes:
> This is where they have no Sabbath Schools; no one to read the Bible to them; no one to preach the gospel who is competent to expound the Scriptures, except slaveholders. And the slaves, with but few exceptions, have no confidence at all in their preaching because they preach a pro-slavery doctrine
Another narrative written by John Dixon Long, this one in 1857, tells us that:
> They hear ministers denouncing them for stealing the white man's grain; but, as they never hear the white man denounced for holding them in bondage, pocketing their wages, or for selling their wives and children to the brutal traders of the far South, they naturally suspect the Gospel to be a cheat, and believe the preachers and the slaveholder to be in a conspiracy against them. In vain do we tell them the justice of the Father, of the precious promises in the Word of Life. Unbelief springs up; they doubt our sincerity, and say: "We poor slaves can't read, and how do we know what the Bible says!" Bitter experience has taught me some of these objections while laboring among them.
For the preachers on plantations then, seeking to advance a pro-slavery agenda, it would normally be quite straightforward for them to simply omit passages in the Bible that were not favourable to their cause, or distort their truth. Assuming that none of the slaves would be able to read the Bible if they wanted to, they had little fear of being undermined in this way.
That is not to say, of course, that there were not slaves who could read the Bible and found exception to the selective preaching of the planter class and their agents - there certainly were. Similarly, some white preachers and clergy did feel the need to address elements of scripture that condemned slavery, though this was to address challenges from the abolitionist community rather than from slaves themselves. On the subject of Moses, we can learn a great deal from an essay published in 1850 by Thornton Stringfellow, *A Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery*.
Stringfellow, a Baptist preacher from Virginia, discusses Moses quite a few times in his essay. He says, for example, that:
> on the night the Israelites left Egypt, which was before the law was given, Moses, in designating the qualifications necessary for the passover, uses this language, Exod. xii. 44, 45: "Every man's servant that is bought for money, when thou hast circumcised him, then shall he eat thereof. A foreigner and an hired servant shall not eat thereof." This language carries to the human mind, with irresistible force, the idea of two distinct states--one a state of freedom, the other a state of bondage: in one of which, a person is serving with his consent for wages; in the other of which, a person is serving without his consent, according to his master's pleasure.
Later in the article, he goes on to note that:
> the opinion has been announced also of late, that slavery among the Jews was felt to be an evil, and, by degrees, that they abolished it. To ascertain the correctness of this opinion, let the following considerations be weighed: After centuries of cruel national bondage practised upon Abraham's seed in Egypt, they were brought in godly contrition to pour out, "the effectual fervent prayer" of a righteous people, to the Almighty for mercy, and were answered by a covenant God, who sent Moses to deliver them from their bondage--but let it be remembered, that when this deliverance from bondage to the nation of Egypt was vouchsafed to them, they were extensive domestic slave-owners. God had not by his providential dealings, nor in any other way, shown them the sin of domestic slavery--for they held on to their slaves, and brought them out as their property into the wilderness. And it is worthy of further remark, that the Lord, before they left Egypt, recognized these slaves as property, which they had bought with their money, and that he secured to these slaves privileges above hired servants, simply because they were slaves. Exod. xii. 44, 45. And let it be noticed further, that the first law passed by the Almighty after proclaiming the ten commandments or moral constitution of the nation, was a law to regulate property rights in hereditary slaves, and to regulate property rights in Jewish hired servants for a term of years.
If you want to read the whole thing, you can find a searchable version of the text online [here](_URL_0_), in which Stringfellow comments on a number of aspects of the Moses story to construct his scriptural defence for slavery. | [
"Following the financial failure and human tragedy of his and his brothers' role in the slave trade, Moses broke with his brothers and refused to continue his business sponsorship of it. Later, after becoming a Quaker, he began a long crusade against slavery, and soon became Rhode Island's leading opponent of the s... |
why do people hate the .gif file format? | It's old and terribly inefficient, meaning that a small number of frames make a file that is much larger and slower to load than modern file formats. | [
"CompuServe introduced GIF on June 15, 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas, replacing their earlier run-length encoding (RLE) format, which was black and white only. GIF became popular because it used LZW data compression, which was more efficient than the run-length encoding that ... |
explain to me the difference between something as a nuclear reactor and something like a nuclear weapon, how are they different, and how are they the same? | In short, weapons are constructed to release the stored energy in the fuel all at once whereas reactors are designed to do so slowly over the course of decades. Technically a reactor can never explode like a bomb can and movies really exaggerate. It can explode but it’s more so because of intense pressures than a nuclear reaction. | [
"Most nuclear reactors use a chain reaction to induce a controlled rate of nuclear fission in fissile material, releasing both energy and free neutrons. A reactor consists of an assembly of nuclear fuel (a reactor core), usually surrounded by a neutron moderator such as regular water, heavy water, graphite, or zirc... |
Why do satellite dishes near the equator NOT point up? | satellite dishes need to point towards the satellite
the odds are very low for the satellite to be directly above you | [
"In the continental United States, because it is north of the equator, all gateway and subscriber dish antenna must have an unobstructed view of the southern sky. Because of the satellite's geostationary orbit, the gateway antenna can stay pointed at a fixed position.\n",
"BULLET::::- Declination offset: Because ... |
how exactly gps works? who owns the satellites? why i don't have to pay a fee to use them? | GPS satellites are basically big clocks in the sky that broadcast what time it is and what time they sent the signal. Your device "hears" from 4 satellites, and can do some cool equations using the difference in time from each satellite to determine where you exactly are. (This is the very simplified version)
The US Air Force owns the satellites, the offer it to the world free of charge. | [
"GPS is based on a network of satellites that constantly transmit radio signals. GPS receivers pick up these transmissions and compare the signals from several satellites in order to pinpoint the receiver’s location to within a few meters. This is done by comparing the time at which the signal was sent from the sat... |
Were the majority of the population of North Africa ethnically black previous to the Islamic expansion? | There is a large genetic continuity between modern North African populations and their pre-Islamic ancestors. [Studies of Egyptian DNA](_URL_0_) show that waves of invaders and settlers have accounted for only about 10 percent of the population's DNA. As in many other modern Arab nations, the vast majority of people are descended from natives who adopted Islam and the Arabic language. I will defer to a specialist on any questions about that process. | [
"Islam arrived in Central African Republic in the 17th Century as part of the expansion of the Saharan and Nile River slave routes. In February 2014, tens of thousands of Muslims fled the Central African Republic for Chad as they felt they were no longer safe in the country.\n",
"Some West African slaves taken to... |
in american football, other than the quarterback, why do most players never pass the ball? | Well it's not their job or position. Each individual position has a specific job. The quarterback's is to pass. The running back's is to carry the ball. The wide receiver and tight end's is to catch. The Offensive Line is to block. It's like asking why the shortstop doesn't pitch in baseball. | [
"Many early references to football refer to balls \"flying high\" and being \"hit here\". These, however, cannot be considered to be passing as there is no indication that they were between players of the same team. Similarly, they may not have been intentional passes (as opposed to fortuitously trying to move a ba... |
why isn't caffeine dependency considered a 'drug addiction'? | Because with few exceptions, caffeine doesn't disrupt your life in any meaningful way. It's cheap and legal, which means people don't go broke or get in trouble for doing it. Not getting it can make people grumpy but it's not life-threatening. It's not especially bad for you. In many cases, it's also quite useful for increasing productivity and focus.
I'm absolutely a caffeine addict. I drink it nearly every single day, multiple times a day. When I don't have any, yes I'm grumpy and yes sometimes it gives me a bit of a headache, but otherwise it really doesn't affect my life. I can and will operate without it, but I'd really rather have it. | [
"Whether caffeine can result in an addictive disorder depends on how addiction is defined. Compulsive caffeine consumption under any circumstances has not been observed, and caffeine is therefore not generally considered addictive. However, some diagnostic models, such as the and ICD-10, include a classification of... |
Did people justify slavery on the basis that it was 'better than what they'd have in their own country'? | Just a layman here so hopefully someone more knowledgeable comes along. The short answer is yes iirc. Here is a quote from Robert E. Lee
> There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence
Taken from the wiki page _URL_0_. | [
"Conservative writer David Horowitz wrote a list of ten reasons why \"Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea for Blacks - and Racist Too\" in 2001. He contends that there isn't one particular group that benefited from slavery, there isn't one group that is solely responsible for slavery, only a small percentage of w... |
How does the cell control its mitochondria? | basically the same way it controls most of its organelles:
the regulation of theexpression of mitochondrial proteins is not much different from other organelles.
the reason for this is that the mDNA codes for few proteins
_URL_1_
the genes for most of the mitochondrial proteins are stored in the nucleus and are thus regulated by the same machinery as any other gene would.
why this is evolutionary favorable is simple: a mitochondrium is a bad place for DNA to be. with ROS flying around, a different pH value and a lot of electron donator/acceptor systems present, the mDNA is prone to being damaged.
most of the mitochondrial proteins go the usual route: mRNA transcription in nucleus; transaltion of those by ER-membrane-resident Ribosomes and subsequent modification in golgi.
these proteins are then transported to the mitochondria in vesicles (recognition is via signal sequences in the alpha-structure of the protein).
as to how these proteins get into the membrane:
there are a lot of specialised transporters that mediate this process:
- Oxa
- SAM/TOB
- TIM/TOM (translocon of the inner/outer membrane)
further reading:
- google sec-pathway
- translocons specifically: _URL_0_
- more generally: _URL_2_
i don't really understand your question concering yeast. they have to keep them, or they wouldn't have any other means of producing ATP | [
"Mitochondria are thought to be organelles that developed from endocytosed bacteria which learned to coexist inside our cells. These bacteria maintained their own DNA, the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which codes for components of the electron transport chain (ETC). The ETC is found in the inner mitochondrial membran... |
what is the big deal with the movie "the breakfast club"? | It was one if the first teen angst/teen problems that portrayed teens in more of an adult manner. Plus, the music and directing was good. I'm 36 so it has plenty of nostalgia for me. | [
"Breakfast of Champions is a 1999 American satirical black comedy film adapted and directed by Alan Rudolph, from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s 1973 novel of the same name. Though the producers entered it into the 49th Berlin International Film Festival, the film was panned by critics and was a box office bomb that was with... |
If I was in a perfect vacuum with zero gravity at rest, is there any possible way that I could move myself? | Exhale the air still in your lungs. Spit. Throw a shoe. Shoot laser beams out your eyes (assuming you have that ability, of course). | [
"Astronauts floating in space are able to move forward, backward, upwards, downwards, left, or right without restriction by using a jetpack. They are also able to rotate clockwise or counterclockwise. Astronauts and structures can also enable or disable inertial dampeners, which automatically attempt to reduce spee... |
How long were the ship battles in WWII? | If we are talking ship-to-ship combat then generally no, modern battleships took a lot of punishment before actually sinking.
An example would be Bismarck which had pretty much it's entire superstructure shot away and took multiple torpedo hits before actually sinking.
However, less modern battleships would prove terribly vulnerable in WW2. A lot of the ships involved were WWI vintage due to the naval treaties in effect prior to the war. This meant that you had some rather old (although modernized) ships participating in battles against modern weapons.
The british battleship(well battle-cruiser) HMS Hood was sunk in the opening minutes by the Bismarck/Printz Eugen in the battle of the Denmark Strait. It's speculated that a shell from the Bismarck somehow hit a magazine on the Hood blowing up the ship with nearly all hands. Hood was built towards the end of WWI.
Another example could be the Japanese battleship Fuso (from 1912), she was struck by aerial bombs and torpedoed in the battle of the Surigao Strait and sunk. So this might perhaps count as sinking after taking a few hits.
In conclusion, yes, they could sink to one very unlucky shot, or they could do as designed and survive tremendous punishment. | [
"During World War II, there was an air battle waged against the Sakishima Islands' two largest islands that lasted for 82 days in order to neutralize Kamikaze airfields. Twenty-five US escort carriers, five larger fast carriers with their air groups consisting of fighters and torpedo bombers along with heavy naval ... |
Why are you not supposed to use cellphones at gas pumps? | Mostly because people are paranoid. These is a non-zero chance your phone gives off a spark that ignites the gas fumes and blows up the whole station.
There is also a non-zero chance that the Sun will electron tunnel 100% of it's mass right on top of Earth so take these non-zero chance things with a grain of salt. | [
"Devices that have rechargeable batteries and are always plugged in use standby power even if the battery is fully charged. Corded appliances such as vacuum cleaners, electric razors, and simple telephones do not need a standby mode and do not consume the standby power that cordless equivalents do.\n",
"In a simi... |
how does the combined birth control pill work and how likely is pregnancy if directions are not followed precisely? | The pill is designed to allow occasional missed doses, but its effectiveness definitely plummets if you don't use it correctly. You will not get your period if you're pregnant on the pill, since that's how pregnancy works (you may get implantation bleeding, but that's not everybody and is relatively mild). You need to educate yourself a lot on what you're doing to your body if you don't know the answer to that so that you know if something's off or not. There are no symptoms of pregnancy that early - first you'd miss a period, then you'd start getting tenderness in your breasts and nausea in the morning (though this doesn't happen to everyone).
How difficult it is to take a pill every day if it means the difference between pregnancy and not? Keep it in your purse and set a freaking alarm. Also, I hope the unprotected sex was with a faithful partner who you know is clean. | [
"When the first birth control pill was being developed, the researchers were aware that they could use the contraceptive to space menstrual periods up to 90 days apart, but they settled on a 28-day cycle that would mimic a natural menstrual cycle and produce monthly periods. The intention behind this decision was t... |
What evidence is there that the Black Death in the 14th Century was *not* bubonic plague? | As walker6168 said: hard to answer without the source article.
I'll add that their data had better be pretty solid as there has been extant genetic caracterisation of pathogen material from mass graves from medieval Black Death epidemics ([source](_URL_0_)).
However there was a suggestion that an Ebola-like virus might have been involved (see: Scott, Susan and Duncan, Christopher; 2004. Return of the Black Death: The World's Greatest Serial Killer) based on circumstantial evidence and rates of pregression. Given the quite conclusive data from Haensch *et al.* (2010) which have actually IDed real *Yersinia Pestis* DNA in the mass graves to the extent where they could caracterise the strains in presence, that theory has been put to rest (unless your source refers to more recent work and actual paleo-viral samples). | [
"The Black Death seems to have originated in Central Asia, where the \"Y. pestis\" bacterium is endemic in the rodent population. It is unknown exactly what caused the outbreak, but a series of natural occurrences likely brought humans into contact with the infected rodents. The epidemic reached Constantinople in t... |
According to wikipedia, instants after the big bang occurred, the four fundamental forces "separated" from each other. What exactly does that entail? How did they separate, and what were they like before they did? | To begin with: We do not know for a fact that the four fundamental forces were unified at some early stage. This is theoretical speculation/prejudice. Thus we cannot say how they separated, or what they were like before they separated.
What we can do is offer scenarios in which something like this could happen. Let me offer two. This isn't short (these are big ideas), but I hope it's relatively clear.
The four known forces are electromagnetism, the weak force, the strong force, and gravity. The first three are very similar to each other in their mathematical structure. This is key to attempts at unification.
*Grand unification*: Grand unification is the merging of the three non-gravitational forces. In fact, we know that the electromagnetic and weak forces are unified in something called the electroweak theory (due to Weinberg and Salam), and so grand unification takes this one step further.
Mathematically, where electromagnetism uses charge, the weak force uses a 2x2 matrix and the strong forces uses a 3x3 matrix. The simplest attempt at grand unification (due to Georgi and Glashow about 40 years ago) embeds these objects in a 5x5 matrix. So in the very early universe, it would appear that there would be one force, governed by a 5x5 matrix, but then, as the universe cooled, a Higgs mechanism (analogous to the one that produces the Higgs boson that the LHC appears to have observed) makes different parts of this matrix act differently -- there is a 3x3 chunk that gives the strong force, a 2x2 chunk that gives the weak force, and a single element that gives electromagnetism. (There are other components that become irrelevant).
Unfortunatley, this simply model does not work experimentally (it predicts proton decay at too rapid a rate), but something like this -- in which the various matrices underlying the different forces we know are embedded in some overarching matrix -- remains a compelling framework for grand unification.
*Unifying all four forces*: What if we want to include gravity as well? Gravity doesn't have quite the same mathematical structure, so we need some other ideas. One idea goes back to the 1920s, to Kaluza and Klein, and actually to Nordstrom several years before them. The idea is that we start with gravity only, but in a spacetime with more dimensions than the 4 (3 of space, 1 of time) with which we are familiar.
Simplest case: 5 dimensions. Imagine we have 5 dimensions, but the fifth dimension is very small -- it's so short that we can't see it (the way a piece of thread looks like a line, even though it actually has a non-zero diameter). In fact, we will imagine that this 5th dimension is a tiny little loop. This world would have 5 dimensions, but we'd see it as 4 dimensional. Would there be any leftover indication of the fifth dimension?
The answer is yes. Gravity in five dimensions would give us gravity in four dimensions, but it would give us two other bonuses: one is an additional force in four dimensions (from one of the pieces of 5D gravity that gets hidden), and this force would take exactly the form of electromagnetism! The other bonus is not so good -- it's a new particle that, it turns out, we don't observe, so this model is ruled out. But look at what happened: We started with just one force -- gravity in 5 dimensions -- and got two forces in four dimensions (gravity and electromagnetism) when the fifth dimension curled up.
So we extend this idea. Imagine we start in 11 dimensions with only one force, 11 dimensional gravity. Then if 7 of these dimensions curl up in just the right way, the net result might be a theory that looks 4 dimensional, but has, as remnants of the 11 dimensions in which it started, three additional forces -- electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force.
String theory and M-theory use versions of this Kaluza-Klein idea. (One of the challenges is our existing theory of gravity does not merge well with quantum mechanics, so any true unification of all four forces will have to solve the problem of what quantum gravity looks like.)
So those are some ways that unification might work. But be aware that although these are very compelling ideas, there is nothing definitive, either theoretically or experimentally, here.
| [
"If GUT is correct, after the Big Bang and during the electroweak epoch of the universe, the electroweak force separated from the strong force. Accordingly, a grand unification epoch is hypothesized to have existed prior to this.\n",
"BULLET::::- For up to 10 seconds after the Big Bang, the energy density of the ... |
Where is the mistake in this line of thinking? | Your mistake is thinking that amount of energy (or energy density) is what determines energy flow, when really it is entropy that determines it.
As you know, heat will flow from a higher temperature object to a lower temperature object. In an ideal gas, temperature is simply a function of energy density- the higher the average kinetic energy of the particles, the higher the temperature. But obviously, in water/metal this can't be the case- the water and metal have the same temperature, but different energy densities (the water is higher). So what is going on here?
Well, the second law of thermodynamics says that in a closed system, entropy will stay the same or increase. And temperature is literally a measurement of "how much entropy increases given an increase in energy." The physical definition of temperature is:
> 1/T = dS/dE
where T is temperature, S in entropy and E is energy. That is, a low temperature object will have a large increase in entropy with a small increase in energy, and a high temperature object is the opposite- a large increase in energy only leads to a small increase in entropy.
Thus, if two object are in thermal contact- energy (heat) will flow to increase entropy. Since the colder object will get a bigger increase of entropy from the added energy, heat flows from the warmer to the colder. In the case of water and metal being the same temperature, equal amounts of heat will flow in each direction since they are in an "entropy balance" they lose and gain the same amount of entropy per unit of energy gained or lost. | [
"\"How Not to Be Wrong\" explains the mathematics behind some of simplest day-to-day thinking. It then goes into more complex decisions people make. For example, Ellenberg explains many misconceptions about lotteries and whether or not they can be mathematically beaten.\n",
"Instead, he proposes to focus on the p... |
where does the name of the game “duck duck goose” come from? | Do you mean "duck, duck, grey duck"? | [
"Duck (), is a platform puzzle game developed and published by Bit Corporation in 1987, making it the very first Nintendo unlicensed video game released for Famicom (internationally known as NES). The title has been later published in 1990 as Duck Maze by HES and Dismac, respectively in Australia and Brazil.\n",
... |
takata airbags has been given a $70 million fine with the possibility of a $200 million fine for non-compliance by the nhtsa. how are the fine amounts determined in large cases such as this? | The law states what the maximum possible fine can be per X thing. For example VW can have a maximum possible fine of $35,000 per car for what they did.
Whether or not the maximum fine is sought depends on how the error came to be, what the company did to address it, if there was a criminal element involved (e.g. VW intentionally breaking the law, Takata trying to cover up the issue) etc.
In practice the number is determined by the prosecution pulling the biggest, baddest number out of their ass that they can. And then hoping they can get 1% of that. As the well funded lawyers fight like hell, and the jury pulls more numbers out of their ass.
Typically a lot of discretion is involved. | [
"The TSA has also been criticized for not responding properly to theft and failing to reimburse passengers for stolen goods. For example, between 2011 and 2012, passengers at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport reported $300,000 in property lost or damaged by the TSA. The agency only reimbursed $35,000... |
Creativity seems to be directly related with intelligence. What's the psychology behind this? | Well you could easily conclude that more intelligent people know how to use their brain faster, more efficiently, and can perform certain functions that slower and inexperienced people haven't used their brains for yet.
Here's a cool fact I learned today. Albert Einstein supposedly didn't learn to speak until he was 3, or later, meaning that he spent a much longer time thinking abstractly, with mental visuals/sounds/etc rather than mostly silent mental thoughts of speech. Today a lot of people spend most of their thinking time just thinking in words with little to no visuals. As intelligent people start to learn more advanced things, like certain math that requires abstract thinking to fully grasp the logic, or visualizing physics and engineering math problems, or chemical reactions, or quantum physics theories, light rays being bent, and other crazy things, they start thinking more visually and abstractly than people who just learn business/blindly follow their bosses orders at their office/retail jobs or don't really do shit with their brains. When you think of it like that, it makes sense that people who are intelligent in the sense they use their brains to simulate reality along with advanced mathematics and "what ifs" like physics theories, are also better than the average idiot human at thinking creatively and successfully applying their brains to art and music. | [
"Evidence attempts to look at correlations between intelligence and creativity from the 1950s onwards, by authors such as Barron, Guilford or Wallach and Kogan, regularly suggested that correlations between these concepts were low enough to justify treating them as distinct concepts. Some researchers believe that c... |
how does the weatherman/woman know where to look on the chroma key when reporting? | They do look off camera to see the things the viewer is seeing. How awkward/smoothly they can pull it off depends on their expertise and experience.
Take a look at [this random example](_URL_0_) from youtube. He spends most of the time looking off to the side as he is gesturing to the map. It doesn't come off as awkward because our attention is drawn to where his hands are on the map. | [
"The OPC provides an important role in the production of the National Weather Service Unified Surface Analysis. After the Weather Prediction Center, or WPC, sends out their analysis for the synoptic hour, OPC cuts and stitches the WPC analysis to its area. The National Hurricane Center, or NHC, stitches the analysi... |
i have ulcerative colitis. it’s extremely painful. but if there are no pain-sensing nerves in the colon... what is actually hurting? | Where did you read that there are no pain sensing nerves in the colon?
You have pain receptors in pretty much every part of the body, safe for the brain itself.
The pain is caused by ulcers and subsequent inflammation, both triggering your pain receptors. | [
"Ulcerative colitis can affect any part of the colon (and other mucosa, such as the mouth), but when it affects the descending colon, it is called \"left-sided colitis\". Inflammation and ulcers on the lining of the intestine mark its presence. Symptoms of ulcerative colitis include diarrhea, bleeding, fever, abdom... |
How could the pupa stage of insects evolve? | [Here's](_URL_0_) a sort of pop-sci version of the (relatively) current state of the field. The basic idea is an original group of insects whose initial form was basically the same as the adult form, followed by steps of less complete metamorphosis, and finally the kind of metamorphosis we think of today. It also discusses the cell biological underpinnings of metamorphosis in modern insects, which are very well understood in a couple model organisms, especially fruit flies, and some potential evolutionary rationales, like the young and adult insects occupying different niches and so not competing with each other. There are some links out to actual research articles in the text. | [
"The pupal stage follows the larval stage and precedes adulthood (\"imago\") in insects with complete metamorphosis. The pupa is a non-feeding, usually sessile stage, or highly active as in mosquitoes. It is during pupation that the adult structures of the insect are formed while the larval structures are broken do... |
why music or albums aren't released worldwide the same day | I can't speak as to why it started out that way, they are changing it to Fridays globally this summer
_URL_0_ | [
"However, in some countries, particularly in Asia, local music repertoire will still be released on different days. For instance, in Japan domestic acts will continue to release new music on Wednesdays, two days earlier than international repertoire.\n",
"Music releases are now uniformly available around the worl... |
what would happen if you sprayed a mosquito with mosquito repellent? | It will die, never knowing what it means to love. | [
"Some experts also recommend against applying chemicals such as DEET and sunscreen simultaneously since that would increase DEET penetration. Canadian researcher, Xiaochen Gu, a professor at the University of Manitoba’s faculty of Pharmacy who led a study about mosquitos, advises that DEET should be applied 30 or m... |
In the early Middle Ages the belief in Witchcraft was condemned as "unChristian" by high-ranking churchmen, as well as by Charlemagne. At the same time, both secular and canon law decreed that Witchcraft existed, had power, and deserved punishment. How were these contrary positions resolved? | There isn't a lot to reconcile here, but rather a reframing. At no point did any decree of Catholic Church or medieval Christian king accept the existence of witchcraft (*maleficium*). Most of these decrees state flat out that belief in *maleficium* was itself the work of the devil, a contamination of the brain, of dreams, seeking to steer the good Christian flock wrong. The actual act of *maleficium* was declared impossible: a delusion created by the devil, and to stand by that illusion as the real work of a human was a heresy^1 .
Here is Norma Cohn's translation of the relevant section of *canon episcopi*
> ...there are wicked women who, turning back to Satan and seduced by the illusions and phantoms of the demons, believe and openly avow that in the hours of the night they ride on certain animals, together with Diana, the goddess of the pagans, with a numberless multitude of women; and in the silence of the dead of night cross many great lands; and obey (Diana’s) orders as though she were their mistress, and on particular nights are summoned to her service. Would that they alone perished in their perfidy, without dragging so many others with them into the ruin of infidelity! For a numberless multitude of people, deceived by this false view, believe these things to be true and, turning away from the true faith and returning to the errors of the pagans, think that there exists some divine power other than the one God.
Prum, Burchard and many others picked this up and included it in their various editions of canon law pretty much as is; Gratian then included it into what became Church law in the 12th c. No synod that I know of conflicts with this.
This was the standard view of the Church through the middle ages and into the early modern period. For Catholicism, witches never existed, nor did witchcraft. For this reason the Church rejected the *malleus maleficarum* in the 15th century soon after it was written.
Heresy existed concretely, and any form of showing allegiance to the devil and more explicitly, his intercessors, the pagan idols, was punishable.
I've written extensively on aspects of this which can be found [here](_URL_0_).
1. For example, see the lengths Roman inquisitors would go to try to convince self-confessed 'witches' (*benandanti*) of this in the classic study *The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries*, Carlo Ginzburg (JHU Press, 2013)
| [
"During the Early Middle Ages, the Christian Churches did not conduct witch trials. The Germanic Council of Paderborn in 785 explicitly outlawed the very belief in witches, and the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne later confirmed the law. Among Orthodox Eastern Christians concentrated in the Byzantine Empire, belief ... |
Why can some viruses (smallpox, polio) be virtually eradicated while others cannot (HIV, influenza)? | There are some characteristics of a disease that make it practical to try to eradicate it:
1. Only infects one species
2. Short-term infection, followed by
3. long-term immunity
4. No asymptomatic carrier state
5. Highly effective vaccine
6. Visible and easily identified infection
Those characteristics mean that it's possible to identify and vaccinate around cases, and if you can eliminate outright cases for a couple of weeks the disease is gone from a region. All of them are true for smallpox; most are true for polio (many cases of polio are asymptomatic, but they're not carriers).
"Political willpower" could go on the list as well; there are eradicable diseases that are underestimated by the population so that most people wouldn't support the cost of eradication. That's probably the major barrier to eradicating measles, for example.
HIV doesn't fit with 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. Influenza doesn't fit with 1, 3, 5, or 6.
There are certainly a number of human diseases that are [potential candidates for eradication](_URL_5_) still. The usual list includes:
* [Polio](_URL_1_)
* [Guinea worm](_URL_4_)
* [Measles](_URL_0_)
* [Mumps](_URL_8_)
* [Rubella](_URL_2_)
* [Elephantiasis](_URL_3_)
* [Leprosy](_URL_6_)
The [Carter Center has a list](_URL_7_) that includes a column on "Chief obstacles to eradication", which is sad reading. | [
"Of the many diseases of humans that were found to be caused by viruses in the 20th century one, smallpox, has been eradicated. The diseases caused by viruses such as HIV and influenza virus have proved to be more difficult to control. Other diseases, such as those caused by arboviruses, are presenting new challeng... |
So, the universe is ever expanding. Does that also mean that the distance between our planets in our solar system will also slowly drift apart? | The answer is no. That's because the rate of expansion is too small to affect such closely gravitationally bound objects. The expansion can have an effect on the maximum size of a galaxy, but for a solar system the effect is way too small.
Here are some numbers. Hubble's law for the expansion is that v=d*H. v being the velocity the two objects are moving away from one another, d their separation, and H Hubble's constant. H is ~70 km/s/Mpc (Mpc = Megaparsec = 3.26 million light years). The Earth is about 93 million miles from the Sun, that's only 4.85x10^-12 Mpc. Using Hubble's law that gives a velocity of ~1.2x10^-6 km/h = 1.2 mm/h. And that's if expansion of the universe is the only factor. Which it isn't. This expansion is dwarfed by the gravitational attraction. | [
"Planetary scientists have considered moving the Earth farther away from the sun as the solar luminosity increases over the next billion years. Various mechanisms have been proposed to increase the size of the Earth's orbit.\n",
"As the Sun expands, it will swallow the planets Mercury and Venus. Earth's fate is l... |
What happened to the Jews expelled from Spain and went to the Ottoman Empire? | Like... do they still exist? Yes. There are several thousand who still live in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire, at this point Turkey and the Balkans (including Greece). They continued to speak Judeo-Spanish/Ladino until a generation or two ago (so most people around 50 can speak it, but most people around 30 can't). There's a documentary on it called las Ultimas Palavras, official website [here](_URL_0_). The websites in Turkish, but the trailer has English subtitles.
These Jews are properly "Sephardi"--Sephardi means "Spanish" in medieval Hebrew, but can ambiguously refer to either just the descendants of those expelled from Spain and Portugal, or not only the Judeo-Spanish speakers, but all Middle Eastern and North African Jews (Arab, Kurdish, and Persian Jews are often called Mizrahi, Eastern, Sephardi can mean either Sephardi or Sephardi and Mizrahi, though then the Jews of Yemen are sometimes included or not included in Mizrahi).
In the 18th and 19th centuries especially, the Jewish communities thrived in the Ottoman Empire, especially these Judeo-Spanish communities (the Jews of Yemen, the Temani, for instance, remained very very poor). There were also small Ashkenazi (Central European) communities in parts of the Ottoman Empire; for instance, Istanbul once had two or three Ashkenazi-rite synagogues (there's one now, but the other building has become an art museum) with the rest being Sephardi-rite. Greece is somewhat more complex because in addition to the large Sephardi (Spanish-speaking) community there was also a large Romaniote (that is, Roman, that is Byzantine, so Greek-speaking) community. There's also some Crimean Karaite Jews in Istanbul. The whole thing is quite mixed.
But the ones in the Balkans were mostly murdered in the Holocaust. Something like 90% of the pre-war Jewish community in Greece was killed during World War II. Salonica, a city that for much of the 19th century was majority or plurality Jewish (and the rest pretty evenly divided between Greek and Turkish) has about 1,500 Jews today.
In Turkey, the Jews gradually consolidated in the big cities, mainly Istanbul, over the course of the 20th century (there are about 10,000 in Istanbul, 1,500 in Izmir, 500-1,000 in Ankara, 40 in Bursa, 10-15 in Antakya, 1 in Edirne) though they were much, much more spread out originally (there were about half a dozen to a dozen towns with Jewish communities in the Izmir Viyalet, for example, around 1900).
In Turkey, there were specific events that made the Jews feel less welcome: the Thrace Pogroms (Trakya Olaylari) of 1934, the "Wealth Tax" of 1942 that targeted minorities, the Istanbul Pogrom of 1955 being some of the big ones. There was migration before that (mainly to Western Europe, particularly France), but those events are generally said to have spend up the outmigration. Once the state of Israel was founded, the Turkish Jews (particularly lower and middle class Turkish Jews) migrated there, especially in periods when Turkey was experiencing economic or political instability and Israel was doing relatively well. So while there are maybe 15,000 Jews in Turkey today, I believe there were maybe 60-80,000 in Modern Turkey at the end of the Ottoman Empire (the vast, vast majority Spanish speaking), perhaps as many in Modern Greece, and more scattered throughout the Balkans as far as Bosnia. Bulgaria had a large community of Sephardi speakers, but I just don't know much about their history.
Look at [this translated chart of literacy rates from the 1945 Turkish census](_URL_1_) (coincidentally, at the very point when most of the rest of the Judeo-Spanish speaking communities of Europe had been destroyed by the Nazis). The original Turkish census listed the language as "Jewish", I believe, but that meant Judeo-Spanish. The English translator was not familiar with it, and rendered it as "Yiddish". Still, notice that there were still more than 50,000 native Judeo-Spanish speakers--most literate--in Turkey in 1945. Most of these Jews or their descendants ended up in Israel, with only a minority staying in Turkey, Greece, Bosnia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. Most of the Jew who stayed in Anatolia and the Balkans and most of those who moved to Israel ended up not transmitting Judeo-Spanish to their children in last quarter of the 20th century. | [
"Many Spanish Jews also fled to the Ottoman Empire, where they were given refuge. Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire, learning about the expulsion of Jews from Spain, dispatched the Ottoman Navy to bring the Jews safely to Ottoman lands, mainly to the cities of Thessaloniki (currently in Greece) and İzmir (cur... |
- if pi is in between the number 3 and 4 how can it be infinite? | It is *not* an infinite amount. It is less than 4.
In *does* take an infinite amount of digits to explain precisely what the amount is, but that's about being precise, not about being huge. | [
"Multiplying this infinite sum by 3 in base 5 gives …0000001. As there are no negative powers of 5 in this expansion of 1/3 (i.e. no numbers to the right of the decimal point), we see that 1/3 satisfies the definition of being a -adic integer in base 5.\n",
"It has been conjectured that there are only a finite nu... |
how do shops during the week still attract so many customers. | There will always be:
- people with weekdays off that work a weekend day
- part time workers
- retirees
- people who work flexible hours
- housewives/husbands
- people using their breaks
- people on annual leave/holiday
Naturally they generally add up to less than the usual weekend numbers, but it is evidently enough to have been financially viable since shops were first 'invented'. | [
"Many retailers open very early (typically 5 am or even earlier) and offer doorbuster deals and loss leaders to draw people to their stores. It is not uncommon for long queues to form early in the morning of 26 December, hours before the opening of shops holding the big sales, especially at big-box consumer electro... |
why does beer taste so different on nitro? | Beer on nitro - either on nitrokeg or draughtflow cans - has very little carbonation, which makes the mouthfeel very smooth. Carbonation is dissolved carbon dioxide, which actually adds a small amount of acid to the beer, and makes the mouthfeel prickly.
The faucet for nitrokeg is different because it's a special type specifically for making that dense, creamy foam that Guinness is famous for. A number of other beers (not just stouts) are served that way also.
Nitrokeg is really an imitation of beer served by hand pump (aka beer engine). Beer served through a pump passes through a "sparkler," which is a cap on the end of the faucet with tiny holes in it. In order to emulate that, beer on nitrokeg is pushed through a restrictor plate, a piece of steel with only a few pinholes in it. This restrictor plate is what makes the characteristic head. Because the holes are rather small, you have to push the beer harder at the keg to get a decent flow rate. If you used all CO2 for that level of pressure, the beer would be massively overcarbonated (because CO2 dissolves in beer much more readily than nitrogen does), and would gush in the glass. In short, nitrogen is used to push the beer because high pressures are required to pour the beer through the equipment that makes the foam, not because the nitrogen causes the foam itself.
You can give any beer a creamy head by pushing it through fine holes. I've done this myself, by building an ersatz beer engine. This uses a hand pump to push beer through fine holes I drilled in a brass fitting. I've also heard of it being done by just drawing up beer in a syringe and squirting a needle-stream back into the glass. Both of these are done without dissolving nitrogen in the beer; it's the turbulence that makes the dense, creamy foam.
| [
"Beers can be carbonated with CO or with other gases such as Nitrogen. These gases are not as soluble in water as carbon dioxide, so they form bubbles that do not grow through Ostwald ripening. This means that the beer has smaller bubbles and a more creamy and stable head. This less soluble gas gives the beer a dif... |
Can black people have blond hair? | In theory yes. Melanesians (I'm not sure how you are defining "black") have a blond gene among them that is not related to the European genes and works in a different way: _URL_0_ | [
"Black hair is the darkest and most common of all human hair colors globally, due to larger populations with this dominant trait. It is a dominant genetic trait, and it is found in people of all backgrounds and ethnicities. It has large amounts of eumelanin and is less dense than other hair colors. In English, blac... |
why are people / country's banning or heavily against huawei from using 5g? | It's not because of 5G, but because of Huawei themselves. They have close ties to Chinese goverment, and other countries see that as a major threat. Huawei phones were even banned from being used in USA senate and other important places due to suspicions of Huawei installing spyware on their phones etc. | [
"Although successful internationally, Huawei has faced difficulties in some markets, due to cybersecurity allegations—primarily from the United States government—that Huawei's infrastructure equipment may enable surveillance by the Chinese government. Especially with the development of 5G wireless networks (which C... |
if the average surface temperature on mars is below freezing, how is colonization a possibility? | Actually, the technology to protect us from such harsh conditions already exists for the most part, except that Mars has not atmosphere compared to the Earth, which is actually why it is so darn cold on the surface.
Ideally, any colony we establish will actually have an atmosphere, as in air and whatnot. If we can do that, hospitable temperatures will come included. | [
"According to scientists, Mars exists on the outer edge of the habitable zone, a region of the Solar System where liquid water on the surface may be supported if concentrated greenhouse gases could increase the atmospheric pressure. The lack of both a magnetic field and geologic activity on Mars may be a result of ... |
Have any other fashion choices/hairstyles/et cetera been ruined in the same manner as the "Hitler mustache," either before or after? | It wasn't as enduring, but another example from WWII was the umbrella becoming a symbol of appeasing one's enemies. Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister of Great Britain is perhaps most remembered for brokering the Munich Agreement, which basically said that Germany could have portions of Czechoslovakia if they promised not to invade anyone else.
At the time, Chamberlain was well known for carrying a black umbrella. [Here's a picture of him meeting Hitler at the conference](_URL_2_), and [another of him leaving the conference](_URL_3_); both clearly show him carrying an umbrella.
When he returned to England, his opponents used umbrellas to protest his policy. It even spread to America for a time:
> Vice President Richard Nixon banned his own aides from carrying umbrellas when picking him up at the airport for fear of being photographed and charged as an appeaser. Returning from the Geneva Conference in 1955, President Eisenhower had to give a speech in the pouring rain because Nixon had prohibited presidential assistants from carrying umbrellas.
[Umbrella Man ](_URL_1_)
[Hong Kong's Protest Umbrellas Have A Deep Political History](_URL_0_) | [
"Curtained hair and undercuts went out of style in the early 2000s, but underwent a revival in the early 2010s among hipsters and skaters who imitated the 1930s and 1940s version: longer with pomade in or swept to one side on top and shaved or clipped at the sides. At the time, although the style had many different... |
why does glitter stick to everything even if it isnt really sticky? | Glitter is made of a plastic that can easily create **"static electricity"**.
In short, the **"static electricity"** makes the glitter more easily able to be stuck on surfaces. And as they're very small, they can go everywhere and be very hard to take care of.
#For more details on static electricity, read more below;
All electricity is made up of two different types of energy; **Positive** and **Negative**.
**Positive Energy** pushes things away.
**Negative Energy** pulls things in.
So what is Static Electricity?
**Static Electricity** occurs when an object is charged with too much **Negative Energy** or too much **Positive Energy**.
When this happens, the energy in that object cannot move (in other words, becomes **static**) until it becomes attached to another object that can take that "overload" of energy.
So, when an object is charged with a lot of negative energy, it can easily become stuck to things since the negative energy is making the object "stuck" to the other. | [
"Glitter can be seen as a tool of fashion used various subcultures, as it allows for a visible statement to be worn and seen on the body. This is because it has been theorized to be a \"flickering signifier\", or something that destabilizes known notions of popular culture, identity, and society. Glitter is associa... |
When becoming accustomed to eating spicy food is your mouth physically changing/adapting to be more resistant to spice, or is it is a neural/phsychological change where you no longer experience the heat? | Conditioned responses. Over time your body acclimates to the stimulus, and you stop having as strong of a response. This is why it takes more and more for some people to get the same feeling from it.
It's the same thing people experience with exercise, or drugs. You get used to the sensation, so it takes a bigger stimulus to cause the same response. | [
"Stimulus generalization is another learning phenomenon that can be illustrated by conditioned taste aversion. This phenomenon demonstrates that we tend to develop aversions even to types of food that resemble the foods which cause us illness. For example, if one eats an orange and gets sick, one might also avoid e... |
how do magnified mirrors work? and why do they seem blurry if you look into them from a distance? | A lens is a piece of glass that bends light so that the rays converge to a single point. If you bend a mirror it will make all the beams converge in the same pint, so it’s the same as a lens, only instead of passing light through, it reflects it, so both the observer and the object are on the same side, or in this case both are your face
Just like a magnifying glass you need to be in the right place for everything to be in focus | [
"They are made for applications requiring a strict reflection without a \"ghosting\" effect as seen with a second surface mirror, where a faint secondary reflection could be observed, coming from the front surface of the glass. This includes most optics applications where light is being manipulated in a specific ma... |
why does the female body need less calories than the male? | Women are generally smaller and have less muscle mass than men, so they don't burn/require as many calories to perform the same metabolic functions. It's sort of similar to a smaller car needing a smaller gas tank and engine when compared to a larger car. A Mini Cooper and a Semi truck can both go 60 mph, but it takes a lot more fuel to move the truck than the car. | [
"Women in some societies are traditionally given less food than men since men are perceived to have heavier workloads. Household chores and agricultural tasks can in fact be very arduous and require additional energy and nutrients; however, physical activity, which largely determines energy requirements, is difficu... |
When Germany reunified at the end of the cold war, how did the militaries of East Germany and West Germany merge into one? | This question was asked pretty recently: _URL_0_
Remember, the search bar is your friend. :) | [
"Following the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, symbolised by the opening of the Berlin Wall, there was a rapid move towards German reunification. East Germany voted to dissolve itself and accede to the Federal Republic in 1990. Its five post-war states () were reconstituted along with t... |
Did Winston Churchill approve of Alan Turings punishment ? | I cant see any evidence that he commented on it. However, its likely he did approve, to an extent. Cabinet notes from 24th Feb 1954.
Winston Churchill.
Tory Party won´t want to accept responsibility for makg. law on homosexuality more lenient – or for maisons tolerées. But, w´out enquiry -
i) could we not limit publicity for homosexuality, as was done for divorce?
ii) persons convicted shd. have opportunity to apply for medical treatment.
.Otherwise, I wdn´t touch the subject. Let it get worse – in hope of a more united public pressure for some amendment.
_URL_1_
Note: This is a transcription from a website. I havent seen the source, but it looks credible.
So not only may he have approved, but even suggested the punishment was relevant.
Note2: This was in 24Feb 54, 6 months or less before Turings death, Turing had already undergone this punishment and had already ceased it at the time of the memo.
You should be aware Churchill was born in the 1800s and was thus limited in his viewpoint. Furthermore current opinion at the time by many was that Homosexuality was a sexual deviancy, like Paedophilia or Necrophilia is today, and thus subject to valid legal repression.
Edited, thanks to Ezterhazy
Primary Source for his quotes. _URL_0_ | [
"Turing was targeted by government officials, which led him to feel that he could never have a normal life. The hormonal treatment also started having impact on him. Turing admits to Dr. Greenbaum that he should have gone to prison instead of taking the hormonal treatment. During another interaction with Dr. Greenb... |
How do you devise an original research topic, fellow historians? | I pretty much at random pick a source text, read it, and see if anything sparks my imagination. I know this is too general so I'll give you two examples:
1. Latin America history class: I chose a topic at random from the teacher's list - the Panama canal and its construction. I looked online and found the treaty between the Panamans and the Americans, looking for all the little things I was trained to notice during said class: Mainly, how much did the Americans try to screw over the Panamans. I then read a bit about earlier attempts to build the canal and the American involvement in Colombia (As Panama belonged to Colombia back then) and about the American presence in the Canal area post-construction. That gave me a topic to write on: The "True" meaning behind various clauses in the treaty, their meanings and historical context and the way they served both Panaman and American agendas.
2. Medieval Studies class: I was given an Inquisitorial protocol: The trial of a Waldensian woman (A medieval Catholic heresy). I compared what the inquisitor was asking her and the answers she gave him to a textbook I found that details the main principles of the heresy and found out they only had a 50% match. I proceeded to try and find out why that happened (assuming the textbook was correct) and what that said about both the Inquisitor and the accused. Basically my point was that that woman, like other Waldensians, didn't consider herself a heretic but personally believed some things that were considered heretical by the church, and therefore she was found guilty although she considered herself Catholic until her last day. | [
"BULLET::::12. Historical research allows one to discuss past and present events in the context of the present condition, and allows one to reflect and provide possible answers to current issues and problems. Historical research helps us in answering questions such as: Where have we come from, where are we, who are... |
Can we predict when the next major change in the earths layout and therefore map will be? | "Major" changes don't really happen when you're talking geological timescales. The tectonic plates are always moving. Tomorrow's map will be different from today's map, just on miniscule scales.
The fastest moving plates are the Cocos and Nazca plates which are moving at the breakneck pace of about 6 inches a year.
Even with such tiny movements, we can still make predictions about the global map over the course of the next few hundred million years. [Here's a nice animation](_URL_0_) that goes up to 250 million years into the future. Even then you can still kind of recognize some of today's landmasses. | [
"Where real-world patterns may not conform to the regions discussed, issues such as the ecological fallacy and the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) can lead to major misinterpretations, and other techniques are preferable. Similarly, the size and specificity of the displayed regions depend on the variable being... |
the ongoing lawsuits between apple and google. why are they suing each other, and who is winning? | It's kind of like if McDonalds came out with a new sandwich called the McMushroom Burger, and it's an angus beef burger with mushrooms, gruyere cheese, a smokey chipotle BBQ sauce on a whole wheat bun. They release it, people go nuts and love it, and McDonalds is raking in the money. Then a month later Burger King comes out with their Angus Mushroom Swiss Burger, which is a an angus beef burger with mushrooms, swiss cheese, a smokey chipotle BBQ sauce on a kaiser roll. Now that starts selling really well and Burger King is selling even more of their burgers than McDonalds is.
So McDonalds calls up Burger King and goes "You totally just copied my idea", and Burger King goes "What, you invented the concept of putting mushrooms on a hamburger?" To which McDonalds replies "No, but I invented that particular burger, and you blatantly copied the idea", and Burger King finishes with "It's not a copy, it's not our fault that mushrooms and swiss go together, and people like our version better anyway, so screw off". McDonalds shakes his fist in the air and says "I'll get you for this".
In the meantime one of the big Burger King franchise owners decides he actually likes his Angus Mushroom Swiss Burger with gruyere, and he prefers a whole wheat bun to a kaiser roll, and he also doesn't like the name so he starts calling it "Mac's Mushroom Burger". Now McDonald's finds out about this and he is seriously pissed, he calls up the Burger King owner and says "take that off your menu right now, I'm not kidding", and the owner says "make me", and McDonalds says "I will" and calls the FDA to come mediate the dispute, and they just recently decided that McDonalds is right about the Mac's Mushroom Burger, and BK needs to pay up and possibly stop selling their product.
Basically the state of intellectual property law is pretty fuzzy right now. The rules aren't always clear on exactly what people are allowed to own, and how new, unique, and unobvious an idea has to be before someone is allowed to own it, and even if they own it, how different someone else's idea has to be before it's considered theft. So Apple says they own some of the basic features of a touch based phone interface, and they say Android copied some of those ideas, and specifically Samsung went out of their way to blatantly copy not only those ideas, but also the look and feel of the product to such a degree that it's confusable to end users who's product is who's. The most recent court case came down very heavily in apple's favor. Samsung was fined $1 Billion, and will likely have to remove some functionality from it's new phones, and possibly stop selling some of it's older models. Now we are left with an open question of whether Apple goes on to sue other manufacturers, or even Google itself. Samsung was the easy target, it might be harder to extend their legal success further, so we'll see where it goes. | [
"Google has accused Apple (alongside Oracle, Microsoft and others) of trying to take down Android through patent litigation, rather than innovating and competing with better products and services. This ties into Apple's recent patent infringement lawsuits against Samsung, which by July 2012, included more than 50 l... |
could someone please explain to me like i'm 5 what an insurance deductible is? metaphors are always good. | The deductable is the amount deducted from what the insurance company gives you when you file a claim.
EXAMPLE: You wreck your car. It's insured value is $10,000 and it's a complete loss. You have a $1000 deductible. The insurance company therefore pays you $9000.
As for the Roth thing, maybe you mean Roth IRA.
In a Roth IRA, you put money into the account and cannot deduct this contribution from your income taxes, as you can with certain other retirement accounts. BUT! When the time comes to cash out a Roth IRA, nothing is taxed.
So if you put $100,000 in there in the course of a lifetime, and it grows in value to $500,000, then you have access to $500,000 tax free. | [
"Insurance is a contract based upon speculation. The special facts, upon which the contingent chance is to be computed, lie most commonly in the knowledge of the insured only; the underwriter trusts to his representation and proceeds upon the confidence that he does not keep back any circumstance in his knowledge, ... |
Around what voltage is needed for you to actually feel yourself being shocked? | It's not really as simple as a voltage measurement to determine sensation; voltage is a measure of electrical pressure (which will help to overcome the skin barrier), but amperage -- the measure of current -- plays easily an equal part in determining shock sensation. AC or DC current will also play a part, as will resistance; dry skin is more resistant (measured in ohms, or Ω) than damp skin.
At 120VAC (regular US household current) with dry skin (roughly 100kΩ), the threshold for sensation is about 1mA. That's the point at which you'd feel a tingling sensation. If you were to have very damp skin (say, 1kΩ) you could experience this tingling sensation at just over 1V.
The threshold for sensation on DC is usually a bit higher than AC, and begins around 5mA.
Further compounding the issue is frequency. In the US we use 60Hz AC. As frequency increases, so does the threshold for sensation; for the same voltage, at a higher frequency you would require more current to feel a shock.
So, in summary, voltage isn't exactly immaterial in this question but it's also not enough of a determinant to provide a complete answer in itself.
For reference, Georgia State University has an informative page about this topic:
_URL_0_ | [
"Although voltage, current and duration of shock can be used to calculate the amount of energy applied (in Joules), these are not indicators of the intensity of the stimulus or how it may be perceived by the recipient. Static electric shocks that are experienced in daily life are of the order of 20,000 to 25,000 vo... |
why are the american presidential primary elections not riddled with voters registering with the opposite party and voting against the candidate most likely to beat their favorite? | Nothing stops it, and registering for the opposing party in order to vote for the candidate that you think will win a nomination, but lose an election is not an unheard of thing.
The major downside is that you remove your ability to vote for the candidate that you think is best suited to lead your own party's bid for the presidency. | [
"In United States presidential elections, vote pairing usually comes in the form of voters from \"safe\" states, or non-swing states, voting for third-party candidates, and voters from swing states voting for their second-preference candidate. This form of vote pairing encourages third-party support while minimizin... |
why all the censorship on reddit in relation to the whole zoe quin thing | Also, what started the whole Quinn controversy was the rantings of a jilted lover; not exactly an unbiased source with credible verisimilitude.
Quinn's game got publicity because of her public complaints about sexual harassment, the game got mostly good reviews from journalists, but far worse reviews from gamers. So the elements of the story pre-existed. The ex-boyfriend's exposition combined those points together in a salicious and compelling manner.
If Quinn would not have publicly complained about sexual harassment, then a story about who she sleeps with would be far less salient. If the allegations are accurate, then it leads us to ask if the 'harassment' she cited was from men who perceived/knew her as someone willing to use sex to get ahead. | [
"In April 2013, the subreddit was threatened with a shutdown by Reddit admins after r/MensRights subscribers gathered personal information on a supposed blogger of feminist issues, and the subreddit's moderators advised members of the subreddit on how to proceed with this 'doxing' without running afoul of site rule... |
Are mutations overrated? | The standing (already existing) genetic variation in a population is usually what is selected upon in a natural population. However, all of that natural variation was originally created through mutation. So neither is more important than the other, because all genetic variation was initially created by mutation.
Does that clear things up? | [
"Mutation bias effects are superimposed on other processes. If selection would favour either one out of two mutations, but there is no extra advantage to having both, then the mutation that occurs the most frequently is the one that is most likely to become fixed in a population. Mutations leading to the loss of fu... |
why the body can kill some viruses like the common cold but not others like hiv. | HIV is like a Blue Spy in Tf2. It takes the "skin" (cell membrane) of your cells and uses it to hide from your body's Red Team(immune T-cells). It also has a hack(reverse transcriptase) to infiltrate your spawn point(DNA) and stay there killing the entire Red Team at a rate faster then they can respawn. Eventually the rest of the Blue Team classes (opportunistic infections) go on to capture the flag(kill you). | [
"Common human diseases caused by viruses include the common cold, the flu, chickenpox and cold sores. Serious diseases such as Ebola and AIDS are also caused by viruses. Many viruses cause little or no disease and are said to be \"benign\". The more harmful viruses are described as virulent.\n",
"Examples of comm... |
What was British culture like right before the Anglo-Saxons settled the island? | The Roman province of Britannia in the 5th century was in the middle of a horrific economic collapse that marred the northern periphery of the Roman world. Robin Fleming's *Britain After Rome* deals with this economic collapse pretty extensively and that's the source I'll be using for the majority of this answer. The evidence for this economic collapse is pretty clear, imports and exports from the rest of the empire dramatically ceased and Britain lacked the means to make up for this decline.
Britain had been a part of the Roman world for centuries by this point, but it did have the reputation as a backwater. It participated in a couple rebellions, propelling Cnstantine's father into the Imperial limelight for example, and a couple of religious disputes, and was unsecure enough that there were permanent stations for soldiers to fend off raids from the sea and land.
The big question about culture in Britain at this time is whether the population had Romanized or was still "Celtic". We know that there was a Romanized urban society in Britain at the time, but that had begun to decline rapidly with the economic downturn of Late Antiquity. It was also focused in urban centers on the east coast, and villas through the center of the countryside. Lack of documentation form Britain complicates our understanding of how ingrained Roman civilization had become in Britain however. For example its not clear how deep Latin had penetrated into the society and whether the "average" dweller still spoke a Celtic language or had started to assimilate into a nascent Romance language. We know that the island had been Christianized during Roman rule, and Christian communities would survive the Anglo-Saxon migration. However Christianity would come to be supplanted by the paganism brought by the Germanic migrants across much of what is today England.
These Romano-British populations did not totally disappear in Britain of course, they not only gave rise to the Welsh kingdoms of the early Middle Ages, but also survived to a limited degree under the regimes that the new Germanic migrants dominated, although many in time would assimilate to the new Anglo-Saxon identity that was cropping up across the lowland parts of Britain.
If you are looking for more specific aspects of British society I'm happy to try and field more specific inquiries, but keep in mind the limited surviving documentation, and spotty archaeological record for much of this time, may make some firm answers all but impossible. | [
"However, by the early 1100's, the Anglo-Saxons and Gaels had become the dominant cultural force in most of the formerly Brittonic ruled territory in Britain, and the language and culture of the native Britons was thereafter gradually replaced in those regions, remaining only in Wales, Cornwall, Scilly Isles and Br... |
The weird sounds that NASA recorded of Saturn, are these sounds audible to the human ear, or is this caused by the electromagnet interference caused by the planet? And what is actually going on? | No, these are electromagnetic phenomenons that are transferred into electric signals which are then amplified and used to excite the membrane of a loud speaker thus creating sound that we can hear.
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sources:
1. _URL_0_
2. _URL_2_
3. _URL_4_
4. _URL_3_
5. _URL_1_ | [
"On 7 December 2018 \"InSight\" recorded the sounds of Martian winds with SEIS, which is able to record vibrations within human hearing range, although rather low (aka subwoofer-type sounds), and these were sent back to Earth. This was the first time the sound of Mars wind was heard after two previous attempts.\n",... |
Will a host body eventually replace the cells of a transplanted organ with cells of its own DNA, thus removing the need for immunosuppressants, or will the host body and transplanted organ always be genetically distinct? | Biology BS but still layman here: Most organs aren't capable of regenerating their cells to any great extent. Regardless, if the original organ was removed and a new one put in its place, there shouldn't be *any* cells from the previous organ from which to regenerate. Additionally, cells that were not part of the original organ (every other cell in the body) are not capable of transforming into the cells of said organ. I am fairly confident that the answer is no. | [
"Transplanted tissue is accepted by immunocompetent recipient if it is functional in the absence of immunosuppressive drugs and without histologic signs of rejection. Host can accept another graft from the same donor but reject graft from different donor. \n",
"Substitution of whole genes or chromosomes, or large... |
Can a brain injury cause someone to forget a language? | Given that some people with traumatic brain injuries can forget all manner of things (childhood memories, family members, what they did yesterday to name but a few) why do you think it's fishy someone with a brain injury could forget how to speak a language they used to know?
And to be even a bit closer to the point, people with brain injuries can lose vocabulary, forgetting the words for things, even in their native language.
Check out r/tbi for examples of the above. | [
"Damage and injury in the brain can severely lower one's ability to communicate, and therefore lower one's linguistic intelligence. Common forms of major damage are strokes, concussions, brain tumors, viral/bacterial damage, and drug-related damage. The three major linguistic disorders that result from these injuri... |
Are there examples of Brits calling Americans terrorists (or equivalent) during the American Revolutionary War? | John Paul Jones and his ship the Ranger, sailed in the Irish sea during 1778. They raided White Haven, then tried to kidnap the Earl of Seakirk, from his Scotish castle. The Earl wasn't home. The crew of the Ranger wanted to burn his house down. Jones talked them into just taking the silver tableware, which he bought back from his crew, and later returned to the Earl. However, the British newspapers were in a full throttle rant. They called John Paul Jones a terrorist, and likened him to the Viking pilligars from days of yore. | [
"During the 18th and 19th centuries, attacking an enemy during a parley was considered one of the grossest breaches of the rules of war. The British Army was accused of multiple parley violations during the American Revolutionary War, specifically arresting Continental Army officers engaged in negotiations as trait... |
how is weather so unpredictable? why can you have 0% chance of rain when you go to sleep and wake up to hours of thunderstorms.? | Weather is really complicated issue, there are many many inputs you have to know to predict weather (like temperature, wind speed, humidity, clouds etc). What is more weather is phenomenon we can describe as highly sensitive to initial conditions. So let say you make two weather simulations, and the only difference between those simulations is let say 1 degree temperature difference. You will find that this tiny difference will make huge difference in results, and this difference grows very quickly over time. So at beginning simulations result would be similar, but over time differences will grow very quickly. In reality many phenomenons are sensitive to initial condition, think about throwing a dice. You try to throw dice twice in the same way, but in both cases result is basically random, small differences in initial conditions make huge difference in the result.
To add to this you cannot know every variable (temp, wind etc.) in every point in space, so you have to make some approximations. So connect those two, we cannot know every variable with perfect accuracy, and weather is highly dependent on initial conditions. Result: we cannot predict weather perfectly. | [
"Late-night rains and early morning rains may simply be the last precipitation of a passing weather front. However, since fronts pass at night as often as they do in the day, morning rain is no predictor of a dry afternoon. However, this lore can describe non-frontal weather. Given sufficient surface heating, a lat... |
how can data travel at the speed of light while electrons travel at a speed of 1 meter per day through a wire? | I'm not sure where you are getting that speed from. But the speed at which energy or signals travel down a cable is actually the speed of the electromagnetic wave, not the movement of electrons.
Data transmission is simply machines looking for changes in energy along a cable. In the case of electrical signalling over copper cables you're looking at changes in the electromagnetic field, the intensity of that field and perhaps the phase of the wave being sent down a wire. But electrical signaling is much more susceptible to electromagnetic interference and attenuation. So sometimes the signal needs to be resent. That can affect the speed of transmission.
With fiber optics, a transmitter converts electronic information into pulses of light. A pulse equates to a one, while no pulse is zero. Fiber does not have these limitations and thus can transmit at a faster speed.
Either way as your data travels across the internet your signal will be change from electrical to optical and optical to electrical many times. All of this will have an effect on your transmission rate.
Just in case wanted to see how quickly your PC can reach different hops along the internet you can try this.
If you are using a Windows machine click on the start button. Then type "CMD" into the search text box and hit enter. This will open a black window.
Type the command "tracert 4.2.2.2" this will run a trace route to 4.2.2.2 which is a public DNS server hosted by LEVEL 3.
As the program runs you'll see each hop on your packets path to 4.2.2.2. (Don't worry about any "Request time out" messages. Not all machines respond to ICMP) Here is a sample output:
> Tracing route to _URL_1_ [4.2.2.2]
> over a maximum of 30 hops:
> 1 < 1 ms < 1 ms < 1 ms 192.168.0.1
> 2 * * * Request timed out.
> 3 6 ms 5 ms 6 ms 68.85.162.74
> 4 13 ms 8 ms 9 ms _URL_2_ [68.86.90.57]
> 5 95 ms 100 ms 90 ms _URL_4_ [10.1.169.45]
> 6 10 ms 8 ms 9 ms _URL_0_ [10.2.16.133]
> 7 11 ms 13 ms 12 ms _URL_3_ [4.31.16.153]
> 8 11 ms 11 ms 12 ms _URL_5_ [4.69.155.80]
> 9 12 ms 10 ms 10 ms _URL_1_ [4.2.2.2]
Each of those numbers first three numbers represents a RTT or Round Trip Time in milliseconds. The tracert command sends three packets to check this to give you a rough idea of network conditions. | [
"Optical cables transfer data at the speed of light in glass. This is the speed of light in vacuum divided by the refractive index of the glass used, typically around 180,000 to 200,000 km/s, resulting in 5.0 to 5.5 microseconds of latency per km. Thus the round-trip delay time for 1000 km is around 11 milliseconds... |
In ancient times, how did merchants traveling long distances ensure their safety? How did they make sure they were not being robbed in the way, or that they had enough supplies to last going from A to B? | Oh man, this is a really cool question, and I'll answer it as well as I can. I'll start by discussing the ancient Silk Road, because bad news always comes first. We know virtually nothing about a land route between Rome and China, if there actually was one. We know about routes between Parthia and China (Chinese envoys were generally received with high aplomb and they lavished gifts on each other), and we have a few trade cities that sprung up on the eastern frontiers of the Roman Empire (and a bit beyond, really, which is potentially why they were so prosperous). You may have heard of these names a couple of times: Petra and Palmyra. [Petra is famous because of its glorious, extant, architecture](_URL_1_), even if most of it is closed to tourists for the purpose of preservation (see: tourists who vandalize ancient sites, like carving their names into the Colosseum or stealing pieces of Pompeii). [Palmyra](_URL_4_) is famous for a much sadder reason: the ancient site recently suffered enormous damage at the hands of IS. Both of these sites were trade cities. Petra was a "Last gas station for the next hundred miles" kinda place - it was built around an oasis and water was one of its most precious resources. As a result, it became the natural gathering point for merchants heading both east and west, and its prosperity fueled the Nabatean Kingdom for centuries. Goods came in, merchants were taxed appropriately, merchants bought the supplies that they would need for their journey, and merchants sold goods to those who wanted them. It was a busy and prosperous place and, if there *was* a Silk Road between Rome and China (again, unknown because we have no direct evidence for one), this would be the city where it started and ended.
What is more likely, however, is the idea of periodic trade. For example, the *Periplus of the Erythrian Sea* records that:
> There is a very great inland State called Thina (China). From there, silk floss, yarn, and cloth are transported by land via [Bactria](_URL_2_) to [Barygaza](_URL_3_) and via the Ganges River to the [Malabar Coast.](_URL_5_)
From there, Roman merchants avidly traded for these resources, selling them for a huge markup back in Rome. Another example of periodic trade is the idea that Chinese merchants would sell goods to nomads, who would trade these goods among each other across the steppe until they reached Rome through a more northern town - [Palmyra](_URL_0_). There are no extant *documents* about the silk trade in Palmyra, though there's plenty about trade in general, but there's a huge amount of physical evidence (literally thousands of fragments of silk and other foreign textiles) that has been found at the site. Palmyra, like Petra, was a caravan city. It was founded around an oasis, and was the last port of call for merchants heading East - this time, more heavily focused directly toward Parthia. Like Petra, Palmyra was founded independently, but unlike Petra, it was conquered much earlier, and therefore gives an example of a city directly under Roman auspices. And it seems like that overhead didn't hurt the city at all - in fact, Palmyra just continued to grow and develop, with its apex sometime in the second century.
These cities were responsible for guarding the roads nearby - as caravan cities, they had a special interest in chasing off bandits, and there are epigraphic texts attesting to relatively nearby cities fending off bandits (and being rewarded for doing so). Here's a letter from Commodus to Boubon, a small town in Lycia (trust me on this one - I'll bold the part where the actual letter starts):
> Imperator Caesar, son of the divine Marcus Antoninus Pius Germanicus Sarmaticus, grandson of the divine Pius, great-grandson of the divine Hadrianus, descendant of the divine Traianus Parthicus and of the divine Nerva, Marcus Aurelius Commodus Antoninus Pius Felix Augustus Sarmaticus Germanicus Maximus Britannicus, pontifex maximus, holder of the tribunician power for the fifteenth time, imperator for the eighth time, consul for the sixth time, pater patriae, greets the magistrates, the council, and the people of Boubon. **I have commended you for your zeal and bravery and I have endorsed the (decision of the) federal council of the Lycian League. For you set out with such great zeal to catch the brigands and you defeated them, and either killed or took them captive; and the Lycian League acted justly when, in response to those (deeds), it bestowed upon you the appropriate honor of increasing your votes by one. This was bound to enhance your reputation, and it made others more eager toward such brave deeds. I have therefore confirmed the decision taken at the sitting of the federal (body) and have permitted you to be counted henceforth among the cities that own three votes.** The embassy was undertaken by Meleager, son of Meleager, grandson of Artemon. Be happy.
And you thought Daenarys had a long title ;) Here's another example that actually directly concerns Palmyra (and the subject at hand):
> [The statues?], this one in [the temple of Athen]a, one in the sacred garden, and one in the temple of Atargatis, [which] have been erected next to the first four statues that were erected by the first caravan (synodia) for Soados son of Boliades son of Thaimisamsos, who is pious and patriotic, through his benevolence and magnanimity towards the citizens in every way, adorned with distinctions and very great honours, the caravan (synodia) of all Palmyrenes which came back from Vologaesias erected, because he advanced in a distinguished manner, taking with him a large force, and he protected (them) against [Ab]dallathos from Eeithe and those ('the robbers' in the Palmyrene text) that were brought together by him from P[ .......] who for a long time were lying in wait in order to harm the [caravan...] he preserved them. Therefore they erected for him [the statues?] to honour him, when Male son of Sumonos [.....] and [E]nnibel son of Sumonos son of Bazekes were caravan-leaders (συνοδιαρχούντων) in the year 455 (144 CE) month Daisius (June).
There are a pretty decent number of these, highlighting how, despite being a part of the Roman Empire, Palmyra maintained its own military force specifically to handle the prevalence of banditry in the region. If a certain area was dangerous for merchants, this military would neutralize the threat. The surrounding desert was regularly patrolled, units were stationed along the river, even on the islands in the middle of the Euphrates. The city did its best to facilitate and encourage this trade, providing pack animals to both go *to* the Euphrates and a trade station *at* the Euphrates to come back to Palmyra specifically. Basically, Palmyra did its best to say "Hey! Look! We've got a safer, easier, more comfortable route to India than sailing the Red Sea!" They also maintained an excellent relationship with Parthia, ensuring that the Persian Kingdom treated their merchants well.
So, let's look at how those merchant caravans were organized! A caravan was formed when a certain number (Probably a large number, in the hundreds) of merchants banded together to work together to reach a common goal. They would elect a leader, a head-merchant if you will, who would be responsible for the logistics of travel and for speaking on behalf of the group to negotiate collective deals. The members of the caravan would each contribute to a common pool of money, administered by the head-merchant, which would pay for the armed guards (which every caravan would hire), tolls, "protection money" (read: bribes), etc. These individual contributions may have been funded by a wealthy benefactor back home who sponsored said merchant, but they were paid nonetheless. Those guards came in handy on a regular basis, too - there's an inscription in 199 that honours Ogelos, son of Makkaios for "having given satisfaction through continued commands against the nomads, and having provided safety for the merchants and the caravans in all his commands of caravans." They were organized guards who had made this job their livelihood - and it paid dividends for all parties involved. | [
"Under the native pharaohs, the whole trade of southern Egypt with the Red Sea passed over these two roads; under the Ptolemies as well as in Roman and Byzantine times, merchants followed the same roads for purposes of barter at the coasts of Zanzibar and in Southern Arabia, India, and the Far East.\n",
"At some ... |
why are standard home lightbulb sockets shaped the way they are? | I guess to answer this we'd have to know what exactly you find weird about them.
To me it makes perfect sense to have a threaded cylinder that secures the bulbs and make it easy to replace. | [
"Some sockets have pins placed closer together, preventing the low-power bulbs they use from being replaced by bulbs that are too high power, which may generate excessive heat and possibly cause a fire. These are sometimes called \"mini-bipin\". Where the terminals of the lamp are bent back onto the sides of the ba... |
if video games require more use of the brain than something like reading, why are they considered to "rot your brain?" | They don't. This is just something moms tell their kids so they won't sit on their asses all day. | [
"\"Brain Games\" was suggested in the 1984 book \"Clinical Management of Memory Problems\" as an effective clinical device for memory retraining exercises. Noted for having a variety of useful games, patients would be faced with auditory and visual cues that may improve spatial reasoning.\n",
"Another cognitive e... |
why is it that the slower i go in a car, the tighter the turn is? even though my wheels are at the exact same angle. | That would be due to slippage, and is called understeer. It happens because, when the wheels have to push very hard to change your car's direction, they start to lose traction. At lower speeds they don't have to push as hard, so they slip less. | [
"The middle point on the curve in the third picture on the right is an unstable point, too. However the above-mentioned assumptions are not valid here. Torque and speed are the same but in case the speed will be increased only little then the torque of the drive will be much higher than the counter-torque of the ma... |
how do steroids cure illnesses? | Steroids are a whole class of medications. They're not all muscle builders/recovery minimizers. The steroid you were likely prescribed was prednisone, and it serves as an anti-inflammatory which is going to assist your lungs in dealing with the bronchitis. | [
"Steroids may be of benefit in peritonitis, miliary disease, tubercular osteomyelitis, TB osteomyelitis, laryngeal TB, lymphadenitis and genitourinary disease, but the evidence is scant and the routine use of steroids cannot be recommended. Steroid treatment in these patients should be considered on a case by case ... |
Why did Russia launch their 1939 invasion of Finland in the dead of winter? | The Soviet Union had been planning for the war for quite a while. Already in 1938 - that is prior to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (MRP) - Soviet war games in the Leningrad district were based on 'aggressive defense' after a 'theoretical' border incident at Mainila. So they had been preparing for the war quite some time by the end of the 1939. Most historians think that the ultimate Soviet goal was to conquer Finland and either turn it into a subject or outright annex it (opinions vary on that) in similar manner like what the Soviet Union did to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Moving the borders was just an excuse just like the base & troop agreements were with the Baltic states. Among other things the Soviet creation of puppet state (Finnish Democratic Republic) and subsequent refusal to recognize the actual Finnish government, Soviet plans of capturing the Finnish capital, captured Soviet orders prohibiting the Soviet units from crossing into Sweden (on the opposite corner of Finland from the contested area) show this.
As why to attack late in the 1939... Let's start with political side. First you need to realize that the picture Soviets got from Finland was vastly different from reality. What i mean by this is what the Soviet spies reported back got twisted and turned as it went through the Soviet bureaucracy to give an 'acceptable' view of Finland to the Soviet leaders. In other words aspects not supporting the Soviets were redacted and those even slightly in favor of Soviets were highlighted. Then you have the MRP which gave Soviets freedom of operations against Finland while the Western Allies had been shown to be unable to take any meaningful action. So there was little chance of effective support for Finland, Germans were still facing & holding down the Western Allies, and Finland was reported to be unstable.
Then the other aspects... Finland had very few land routes leading out of the country with any sort of actual capacity so in a logistical sense it could be seen somewhat like an island. This meant that ships were needed to transfer any meaningful quantity of material into Finland. However during the winter the northern Baltic Sea would freeze up helping to isolate Finland. Additionally the Finnish terrain is filled with swamps, marshes, rivers, streams and lakes. During the winter those could be traversed with relative ease especially by the infantry but they would be a huge problem especially in the autumn and spring. This is because of the 'kelirikko' or 'rasputitsa' which would turn the roads (there were very few if any paved roads in the area) along with other terrain into quagmires and turn the previously passable rivers and lakes into obstacles. While some military vehicles and infantry could traverse such terrain the logistics rarely could which would make any practical attacks in those conditions very difficult to carry out. So the only reasonable times for launching an invasion would be winter or summer.
Just to be clear, there wasn't any kind of military threat, time sensitive or not, from the side of Finland in that region in 1939 or in the decade preceding it. | [
"The Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union began in November 1939 after the Finnish government had rejected the Soviet claims to the Karelian Isthmus and all islands in the Gulf of Finland, as well as a demand to dismantle the defences in Finnish Karelia. Finland at the time was only officially allied wit... |
Which one is the oldest european coat of arms showing lions (or other exotic animals living far away)? | Lions weren't always as exotic as you think. As seen [here](_URL_0_), lions had a much greater range in the past than they do today. To quote wikipedia;
> Herodotus reported that lions had been common in Greece around 480 BC. By 100 AD they were extirpated. A population of Asiatic lions survived until the tenth century in the Caucasus, their last European outpost.
> The species was eradicated from Palestine by the Middle Ages and from most of the rest of Asia after the arrival of readily available firearms in the 18th century. Between the late 19th and early 20th century, they became extinct in North Africa and Southwest Asia. By the late 19th century, the lion had disappeared from Turkey and most of northern India, while the last sighting of a live Asiatic lion in Iran was in 1941. The subspecies now survives only in and around the Gir Forest of northwestern India. | [
"A form of these arms was first used by King William the Lion in the 12th century, though no trace of them can be made out on his seal. However, a lion rampant can clearly be made out on the seal of his son, Alexander II. Over the years many writers have claimed them to be much older; even Alexander Nisbet, conside... |
How did the most battle scarred countrys of WW2 cope with what must have been a very high amount of people with psychological disorders caused by the war? | China had the longest "experience" of the War (1937-45), very high battle and civilian casualties (estimates vary but 14M combined war dead is a minimum) and a staggering number of refugees (numbers are inexact but quite possibly 90 *million* people were displaced from their homes! That's two and a half times the entire population of France at the time and more than the entire population of Germany today!) Not to mention events like the Nanjing Massacre. So trauma aplenty.
There was *no* psychological help, either during or after the war -- for anyone. Simple as that. No psychological profession to speak of existed and little understanding of PTSD or other medical responses to trauma.
Since the war was followed by a bloody Civil War (1946-49), there was little time for contemplation about what had happened anyway. And bouts of revolution followed closely after that (1949-76). For the KMT and its servicemen and leaders 1949 brought yet another displacement to Taiwan, of course. No psychological help coping for any of it. It was several decades of trauma.
People coped on their own, or they didn't cope at all.
As an aside, scholars are just now beginning to map the effects (social, personal) of the War. The decades of Cold War (internationally) and revolution (internally) rendered this period largely opaque (except as a prelude for revolution).
ETA: As is obvious, I'm reading this question in psychological terms since it referenced psychological disorders. There **were** relief efforts both during and after the war. The Chinese government, NGOs, missionaries, and the UN (after the war) organized efforts to provide material aid to desperate people in China. But I'm unaware of any specifically psychological help. For photos from CNRRA (the postwar UN relief efforts in China) see this album from the UN on flickr: _URL_0_
ETA2: For a wonderful biographical description of how something as simple as being displaced from one's home could affect Chinese, see Keith Schoppa's chapter on FENG Zikai (a famous artist), "Veering into the Ravine", in *A Sea of Bitterness*, (Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 59-86. Based on FENG's wartime diary, it shows very vividly the paranoia that accompanied uprooting oneself and one's family from one's community. The Chinese attachment, both emotional and social, to "local place" is very, very strong; the uncertainty and paranoia that accompanied being unmoored from one's home is portrayed very well by Prof. Schoppa and I have used this chapter in my classes more than once. One of my friends is currently working on a manuscript that examines this refugee experience in new ways; for example, by looking at the efforts to reclaim and bury bodies of dead family members after the war was over (some of the bodies had been stored in the interior (Sichuan) for years and then transported back to their original homes at great expense after the Japanese surrender), but I've only read some draft chapters so it is not yet in print. When it comes out, it should shed much light on some of the emotional and social toll that being displaced took on individuals and Chinese society more generally. None of this really covers the medical diagnoses of disorders and treatments, however, because (as I said above) there was none.
Source for refugee numbers: 孙艳魁 (SUN Yankui)《苦难的人流——抗战时期的难民》(kunan de renliu -- kangzhan shiqi de nanmin), 广西师范大学出版社 (Guangxi Teacher's College Press), 1994.
Source for casualties: Rana Mitter, *Forgotten Ally: China's World War Two, 1937-1945*, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. (This is the most recent survey of China's war. Although it uses a rather facile device of organizing the narrative around three individual leaders (Chiang Kaishek, Mao Zedong, and Wang Jingwei), it synthesizes much of the flood of recent original research on the war in China of the last 10-15 years.) (In Britain this text is published under a different title: *China's War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival*.) | [
"Per Fugelli has said that World War II resulted in many persons acquiring psychiatric disorders (\"psykiske senskadene\") which could be from experiencing \"bombing, accidents involving mines, burning down of homes, forcible evacuation, illness and starvation during the war and liberation. But it was maybe in part... |
why does depression rebound so hard, the happier you were? | As someone who suffers from depression, I understand the feeling you describe. The simple answer is it's because you have further to fall.
Imagine this. You pick a ball up off of level ground. The act of you picking up that ball and holding it in your hand gives it *potential energy* because you're resisting gravity to keep that ball in the air. The ball is storing the gravitational energy. You drop the ball at your feet and it falls until it hits the ground. Once it stops, it's at it's lowest state of energy.
Now imagine the same situation but instead of dropping the ball at your feet, you drop it off a cliff. The ball has a lot further to go before it hits the ground. If you want to get that ball, you have to expend more energy to go get it, then fight gravity to bring it back up the cliff.
When your depression kicks in again, your baseline mood level is at the bottom of that cliff. It now takes more intense events to affect your mood for the greater because it not only has to bring you to the top of the cliff, but it has to first bring you to the top of that cliff, then above it.
If you seem to notice a pattern with your depression, such as it comes along around this time of the year, you might have S.A.D, which is Seasonal Affective Disorder. It is characterized by periods of depression towards the fall and winter months as the days get shorter and it is definitely a real and shitty thing to deal with. You're not only battling the world, you're battling your own mind and body.
I know how hard it is to stay positive when you're feeling worse than shit...when things feel so bad that it seems you just don't fit in - you're a square peg in a world for round holes. You see hundreds of people around you and you still feel alone. Your brain is your own worst enemy. It is betraying you..reminding you how much you suck...how much of a piece of shit you are, how no one likes you. It keeps you awake and torturing you with the lack of sleep. You're always tired...exhausted - both physically and mentally, even if you didn't do anything. It kills your appetite or even makes it insatiable..you can't resist that bag of candy or chips. You begin to push away from things that you once enjoyed as if they were ebola. You're now left with nothing except the dark thoughts that haunt your mind. But it's not true...it's a facade...it's your mind playing tricks on you. It's not real.
At some point you have to realize that the only thing that can begin to make you feel better is *you.* You are an incredible person. You have made it this far in life and you're still going. Not only that, you're asking the right questions - *why do I feel this way?*. Good question. *Why?*
Fuck everything in the past...it's called the past for a reason because you found a way to push forward, through whatever suck got in your way. You're now in the *present* - it's called that because it's a gift...it's a blank check for your future and you're the one holding the pen.
The next question you need to ask yourself is, *How?* As in, *How do I make myself happy?* and, *How can I make myself a better person?*
As much as your friends and family care about you and want to see you successful, *you* have to find what motivates you to be successful. *You* need to find something to get your momentum going towards reaching positive goals and keep pushing forward until it hurts...I had to force myself to be positive to the point where it literally physically hurt because it was just so mentally exhausting. Once you get to that point, things become easier as time goes by. You learn more positive ways to cope with your depression and anxiety.
Start with something small - clean your room even if it's one small thing at a time...
Do a few pushups, perhaps run around the block. Stay hydrated and eat right. Maintain proper hygiene and just treat your body right. If you at least treat your body right, your mind and mood will treat you right.
Now here's the other thing. There's nothing wrong with seeking help. In fact, it's important to know when you should. Of course you can *always* seek professional help, there are times when you *need* to seek it such as if you feel thoughts of hurting or killing yourself or someone else. With that in mind, it's important to go see a doctor if you're feeling depressed to help face your troubles head on.
Here's something for you: At the end of the day, write down 5 positive things that made you feel happy that day. Even something that put a small smirk on your face...no matter how silly you think it is. At the end of each week, read the list of the past 7 days.
See? There are things that still made you happy. Reach towards those positive events and make them more plentiful. I know how hard it might seem at the time, but you have to force yourself to make the best of the worst situations; Find the positive in the negative *until it hurts.*
At the end of the day, there's only one person that matters most in your life and that is you. Get moving. | [
"Depression can lead to a high increase of unemployment. It is more likely a balance sheet recession can cause depression. \"Due to falling asset prices and bank losses, this has a large impact on economic activity\".\n",
"Depressions are characterized by their length, by abnormally large increases in unemploymen... |
why aren't all foods high in protein? isn't protein used for the structure of all living things? | Some proteins are indigestible by humans, such as keratin - when a food is labelled as high in protein, it *should* mean that it is high in *available* protein. This is not always the case.
Some foods are also higher in carbohydrates, or fats, or fiber, than they are in protein.
In short, "high in protein" effectively means (in the US) that it contains protein, but - it doesn't indicate as relative to what. | [
"Protein can be found in a wide range of food. The best combination of protein sources depends on the region of the world, access, cost, amino acid types and nutrition balance, as well as acquired tastes. Some foods are high in certain amino acids, but their digestibility and the anti-nutritional factors present in... |
why does my hair stand up when i'm scared? | The idea was that, back when the hair covering our bodies was thicker, making it stand up would make us look bigger & more intimidating to whatever is scaring us. | [
"People often say they feel their \"hair standing on end\" when they are frightened or in awe. In an extremely stressful situation, the body can employ the \"fight or flight\" response. As the body prepares itself for either fighting or running, the sympathetic nervous system floods the blood with adrenaline (epine... |
How did wars back in the day work? Before guns and machinery. Would each person pick his target and fight him until one dies? | The Romans would employ a line relief system to allow fresh troops to move to the front if the front ranks, traditionally of hastati in the pre-Marius legions, were unsuccessful in breaking the enemy ranks. The most commonly cited depiction of the line relief system comes from Livy:
"When the battle formation of the army was completed, the hastati were the first to engage. If they failed to repulse the enemy, they slowly retired through the intervals between the companies of the principes who then took up the fight, the hastati following in their rear. The triarii, meantime, were resting on one knee under their standards, their shields over their shoulders and their spears planted on the ground with the points upwards, giving them the appearance of a bristling palisade. If the principes were also unsuccessful, they slowly retired to the triarii, which has given rise to the proverbial saying, when people are in great difficulty "matters have come down to the triarii." When the triarii had admitted the hastati and principes through the intervals separating their companies they rose from their kneeling posture and instantly closing their companies up they blocked all passage through them and in one compact mass fell on the enemy as the last hope of the army." (Livy's *History of Rome* 8.8)
It is also important to remember that battles could often last hours and there would be lulls to allow fresh troops to move up in a more organized fashion. I would also imagine that morale would suffer incredibly if a legionary in the front ranks was expected to be in the front ranks of, what could be expected to be, a day long battle with no hope of relief.
HBO's *ROME* does depict the line relief system but is important to remember it is a fictionalized portrayal loosely based on sources.
_URL_0_ | [
"One could characterize the earlier years of the First World War as a clash of 20th-century technology with 19th-century military science creating ineffective battles with huge numbers of casualties on both sides. On land, only in the final year of the war did the major armies make effective steps in revolutionizin... |
we have goat milk and cow milk to consume, but why is it merely impossible to find pig milk in a grocery store? | Firstly, it just doiesn't taste very good. Pig's milk is watery, and quite gamey.
The real reason though is that pigs simply don't produce very much milk, and don't like being milked. Cows have been domesticated for thousands of years, and selectively bred for milk production and docility. Pigs, on the other hand, will put up a hell of a fight. | [
"Milk, cheese, yogurt, and other dairy products are not consumed by vegans due to their animal origin. The consumption of dairy products together with meat is also prohibited as non-kosher in the Jewish faith, based on Deuteronomy 14:21: \"You shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk.\"\n",
"Some research... |
If velocity is relative, is angular velocity and therefore centripetal acceleration relative? Further questions inside. | When considering one body orbiting another you cannot assume they are stationary with regard to one another. The body that is in orbit has a tangential velocity with regard to the body it is orbiting. The centripetal acceleration is simply a measurement of the change in this tangential velocity. It is the combination of the tangential velocity and centripetal acceleration that keep the body in orbit. [This graphic](_URL_0_) depicts this nicely.
As far as the two appearing to be stationary if the period of revolution matches the period of rotation, this does not change the fact that the orbiting object has a tangential velocity.
If the objects were in fact stationary with regard to one another, the objects would then come together through mutual gravitation.
As far as observing this in isolation, if you were observing from a fixed point, the whole system would still be rotating so you should be able to tell.
Hope this covers what you were looking for. | [
"In three dimensions, angular velocity is a pseudovector, with its magnitude measuring the rate at which an object rotates or revolves, and its direction pointing perpendicular to the instantaneous plane of rotation or angular displacement. The orientation of angular velocity is conventionally specified by the righ... |
how do seat-belts know when to tighten? | A pendulum under the seat acts as a sensor. When it swings a certain way the seat belt locks up. | [
"BULLET::::- Seatbelts limit the forward motion of an occupant, stretch to absorb energy, to lengthen the time of the occupant's negative acceleration in a crash, reducing the loading on the occupants' body. They prevent occupants being ejected from the vehicle and ensure that they are in the correct position for t... |
If microwaves are lower on the em spectrum, how can they be any more harmful than visible light? | Microwaves are not harmful in the ionizing radiation sense: they don't have enough energy to remove electrons from their orbits around most atoms. (Your cell phone won't give you cancer.)
Microwaves that we cook with are tuned to the vibrational spectra of water (2450 MHz, 12cm, 10^-5 eV). Specifically the microwaves enhance the rotation of the water molecule which is one of the main ways it stores heat energy. By exposing water to microwaves you directly dump heat into it. Moist foods will cook faster in a microwave than dry foods.
Also, metals have very loosely bound electrons, especially in the bulk form. This is actually how we define what a metal is. The fractions of eV supplied by the microwaves is enough to stir the sea of electrons in a metal and produce current, which is why it's advised not to put aluminum foil or forks in the microwave.
eta: Microwaves are only potentially harmful in the sense that they could cook you if you're exposed to enough intensity. | [
"As the energy of radio frequency waves and microwaves is insufficient to directly disrupt individual chemical bonds in small or stable molecules, the effects are considered limited to thermal. Energy densities that are not sufficient to overheat the tissues are not shown to cause lasting damage. To clarify, the de... |
how do surgical masks protect you from getting infected when there are huge gaps near your cheeks and the bridge of your nose? | Wearing a surgical mask is not an effective way of preventing they wearer from getting infected. (As you suspected) They are fairly effective in preventing the wearer from spreading their own droplets (sneezing, coughing, just breathing), thereby decreasing the chance of them infecting another person. | [
"Simple surgical masks protect wearers from being splashed in the mouth with body fluids, and prevent transmission of body fluids from the wearer to others, e.g. the patient. They also remind wearers not to touch their mouth or nose, which could otherwise transfer viruses and bacteria after having touched a contami... |
How do different music scales and tuning systems work? | All Western music is based on a mathematical coincidence: 3^12 (531,441) is within 1.5% of 2^19 (524,288).
Some background: Scales are based on the harmonic series of notes that come out of most simple resonant systems (the "registers" of woodwinds and brass instruments, or "overtones" of strings). Combining pure tones with simple integer multiples of one anothers' frequencies makes those tones merge into complex, unified sounds; the reason for that is mathematical and is based on something called "Fourier analysis". What makes different sounds with the same pitch, well, sound different is their "timbre" and the timbre is determined by the mix of overtones that are combined with the base pitch in the sound. Brass and string instruments typically have several overtones mixed into the base pitch of a given note; womens' voices and flutes are noted for being particularly pure instruments with minimal overtones when well voiced.
The lowest note that comes out of, say, a simple flute with all the valves shut is called the "first harmonic". By changing the way you blow the flute (without opening any valves), you can get a whole series of tones out. The next higher note you get that way doubles the base note and is called the "second harmonic" or "first overtone". Musicians identify that with the octave above the first harmonic. The next one after that is the "third harmonic" and triples the base frequency, and so forth. To a musician: if the first harmonic to come out of an instrument is "C", the second harmonic is the "C" above that and the third harmonic is the "G" above that.
Chords are the auditory equivalent of puns -- combining multiple complex sounds (say, three separate horn notes), that themselves have simple harmonic relations, combines them into a full sound that seems to merge into one very rich voice with its own timbre and coloration -- even though, with care and training, you can often still pick out the individual voices.
Enough background: musicians speak of a "circle of fifths". You get that by starting with a frequency (pick one -- say 440 Hz). Call that "A". If you go up to 3x that frequency (1.32 kHz) and back down by a factor of two (to get back into the same general frequency range) you get another note (660 Hz) that sounds good with the first one -- because it is 3/2 the frequency of the original. Playing the two together makes them sound like overtones of a bass note at 220 Hz (a deeper A)!
Well, when you get bored of that, try the trick again, only starting from the higher note (660 Hz). Then again, and again, dividing by two as necessary to stay close to the original 440 Hz -- and after 12 times around you will find that you are approximately back at your original 440 Hz "A" note. The frequencies you picked turn out to be the half-steps on a piano keyboard (there are 12 of them in an octave). Combining those notes in various ways generates chords, those auditory puns I mentioned up above, because you can approximate many nice, integer harmonic relations with just those frequencies.
Essentially all Western music scales are based on those 12 frequencies, which arise because of the coincidence at the top -- 3^12 is approximately a power of two.
A particular scale is a particular choice of which of those notes you choose to use as the main building blocks of your music, and they affect both which types of close harmony you can make and how the harmony breaks with non-harmonizing combinations. (The three most commonly heard are the "major scale" and "pentatonic scale", which together cover the whole 12 notes of the circle of fifths -- the major scale covers 7 of them, and the pentatonic scale the other 5; and the "minor scale" that shifts the 3rd interval and 7th interval down a half-step. But there are many scales using those intervals in different combinations, and a musician should know them by name).
The problem with the picture I just gave you is that the notes don't come out exactly right in all contexts -- for example, an "E" should be a slightly different frequency depending on whether it is being part of a C major chord or an A major chord. If you think about it, that makes mathematical sense: making a chord requires sounding notes with small-integer ratios of frequencies (like 4/3 or 5/2), but those ratios can only be approximated by powers of (3/2) and 2. If you go all the way around the circle of fifths, you don't even get back to exactly the frequency where you started: every time you changed notes you *multiplied* by 3 and *divided* by a factor of 2 or 4. But **no power of 3 can ever be evenly divisible by a power of 2**.
A great deal of effort has gone into trying to patch up the note frequencies in Western music to make them work well together. These days we generally use uniform geometric steps in frequency (one half-step multiplies the frequency of the note by the twelfth root of two), but good musicians generally bend their notes (adjusting the frequency up or down slightly) to achieve close harmony (when possible). Instruments that *can't* bend their notes, like pianos, have special provisions to fuzz up the notes so that it's hard to tell they're not perfect -- that, for example, is why pianos have three strings per note: if a piano is tuned well, those three strings will sing at slightly different frequencies, fuzzing up each note so that you can't tell its central frequency isn't quite right for whatever chord is being played. Very good piano tuners will ask you what tuning system you want and which keys you will be playing in, and will tweak some of the notes up or down slightly to make those particular musical keys or scales sound better (the actual ratios of note frequencies will be closer to small-integer ratios in particular musical keys than others).
Non-European musical traditions (like Indian music) often go farther up the harmonic series, which is why many of them sound so strange to Western ears. The circle-of-fifths construction gets you up to about the 7th harmonic (on a C scale, this note is close to B-flat, but is the least well tuned of the standard harmonic series -- so different from the equal-tempered scale that people used to give it a different name, "H"). The 8th harmonic, of course, is 2^3 of the original frequency, and therefore three octaves above it. Under our rules from above (you get a free pass when dividing or multiplying by two), the 8th harmonic is just the same note. The 9th harmonic is 3^2 of the original frequency - close to a single full-step of the Western major scale above the 8th harmonic. The 10th and 11th harmonics of the base note (i.e. 4.400 and 4.840 kHz, compared to a 440 Hz "A") don't fit into the western scale at all but are commonly used as accidentals and coloration in other musical traditions.
| [
"Most commonly, however, musical instruments are nowadays tuned using a different tuning system, called 12-tone equal temperament, in which the main intervals are typically perceived as consonant, but none is justly tuned and as consonant as a just interval, except for the unison and octave. Although the size of eq... |
what is the "crunchy" feeling when a muscle knot is being massaged? | As I understand (from my massage therapist and physio), it's the muscle fascia sort of "slipping" past the skin, with just enough friction to "catch" and release repeatedly, such as when you rub your hands together when they're slightly wet. The effect is more pronounced if you're dehydrated. Working on the muscle fascia is the key component to the "myofascial release" (MFR) technique in some schools of massage therapy, which is a controversial technique not supported by good evidence (but with a risk of harm). | [
"BULLET::::- Friction massage is said to increase mobilization of adhesions between fascial layers, muscles, compartments and other soft tissues. They are thought to create an inflammatory response and instigate focus to injured areas. A 2012 systematic review found that no additional benefit was incurred from the ... |
WW2, western front: where there contigency plans if the germans would have beaten the allies? If so, what where they? | The extended German goal for the Battle of the Bulge was to reach Antwerpen and destroy the port so that the Western Allies could not use it to supply their troops, capture Western Allied supply dumps, destroy Westen Allied field air bases and generally destroy and cripple as many Western Allied field units as possible. The end goal of the offensive was to destroy the Western Allied ability to mount a huge offensive into Germany across the Rhine come spring 1945, not to drive the Western Allied out of France, which the Germans knew very well they were incapable of.
The Germans maintained garrisons in many if not most northern French ports as the Western Allies liberated France from German presence Summer and Autumn 1944. These towns and ports were often heavily fortified and the German troops in them had access to well-stocked supply depots of food and ammunition. The Western Allies considered it more important to liberate France than to deal with these holdouts, most of which would not surrender until Spring 1945. They were thus surrounded by small forces and left to be besieged as the Allied forces rushed across France. A side effect of this and the devastation to the French infrastructure in the fighting and the Allied bombardment of it during Summer 1944 to deny it to the Germans was that the Allied supply situation became critical Autumn and Winter 1944. It was no longer possible to supply a large wide-front offensive from the Mulberry mobile ports erected in Normandy over the long distances over the French countryside.
During Autumn and Winter 1944 the Western Allies had captured the large port of Antwerpen and had been clearing the port and the Scheldt estatuary from German troops and batteries in order to be able to use it to supply the troops in Belgium, southern Netherlands and northern France.
One of the reasons the German offensive surprised the Allies was that they correctly knew that the Germans lacked the fuel to conduct a major offensive. The Germans gambled that they would be able to capture Allied supply dumps and refuel from them. But even if that had worked out for them, which it did not, they did not have the ability to go anywhere beyond Antwerp.
A potential total success in the Battle of the Bulge for the Germans (which is very unlikely) means that the Allies has to re-fight to clear Antwerpen and the Scheldt estatuary and would perhaps delay their grand offensive across the Rhine by 3 months or so (it coming in June instead of March 1945), and meeting the Soviets at the Weser rather than the Elbe. At most, it could have bought the Germans another month, meaning they surrender in June 1945 instead of May, IMHO. By the time of the Battle of the Bulge, the Red Army was so much stronger than the Heer that even if the Allies did nothing, it could still defeat the Germans on their own.
The US had enough production capacity to support the Soviets, wage war in the Pacific, support the front in France and in Italy as well as supplying and equipping various free forces, the Chinese and the British and the Commonwealth. The limiting factor was not production capacity or economy but rather the ability to get the supplies to where they were needed. | [
"During the war, both sides disagreed on military strategy, especially the question of the opening of a second front against Germany in Western Europe. As early as July 1941, Stalin asked Britain to invade northern France, but Britain was in no position to carry out such a request. Stalin had also requested that th... |
why do horses start side by side while runners are spread at equal distance before the race? | They will generally only spread runners out to compensate if they are restricted to a certain lane during the race. In races where there's no "lane" (like horse racing) everyone can move to the innermost lane basically immediately. | [
"After the start the drivers fight to get a good \"running position\". How well this succeeds depends on the horse, the \"starting position\" and how the opponents drive their horses. Due to the sulky width and the oval race track overtaking is a far more difficult manoeuver to achieve, in comparison with gallop ra... |
Why did some rifles feature upward facing magazines in WWI or WWII? | Can you cite some examples. | [
"During World War I, it was quickly recognized that the Berthier's three-shot magazine was simply too small in comparison to foreign weapons, requiring too-frequent reloading. Additionally, it was found that trench mud and grit could enter the weapon through the opening in the bottom of the magazine. To correct the... |
the scientific consensus says gmo's are safe, and we seem to value our scientific consensuses here in the usa on other issues...so whats all the fuss about? | Ag student here. This is a subject that obviously gets discussed quite a bit amongst my peers.
First of all, I see way too much confusion over the difference between:
1. Plant/animal species that we've been artificially selecting for (intentionally or not) over thousands of years (NOT GMOs), and
2. Transgenic crops that are usually created by using a 'gene gun' to insert DNA sequences into plant embryos over thousands of trials, usually with lackluster results.
With respect to transgenic crops, I agree that they are not known to be inherently dangerous, and can be a more economically attractive (and operationally simple) option for farmers. They also definitely promote monocultures that can lead to decreases in local biodiversity, which can tend toward putting short-term yield increases over long-term ecosystem/soil biota health.
My personal hesitancy toward completely accepting GMOs is for a different reason that I don't see mentioned often. IF, decades later, we discover an issue with any of these genes that has a truly harmful effect, as in the case of DDT in the early 70s (and it's happened with several other previously-issued classes of chemical controls), we can't just stop using them and expect their presence to diminish over a certain half-life like with pesticides. The gene will persist in any population that isn't prevented from reproducing, and if it spreads it'll be difficult to control or even identify.
I'm expecting a lot of negative feedback to this comment, hence the throwaway, but I can assure you it's not necessary. I'm not blind to the potential positives of GM crops; they can lower herbicide/pesticide use, slowing the ability of weeds/pests to evolve resistances. Bt crops have been, as far as I can tell, a very positive development. I think the real crux of the discussion lies in the proper ongoing education of farmers without the whole thing being politicized by the rampantly pro- or anti-GM groups. | [
"Commentators have criticized Stein's statements about GMOs, writing that they contradict the scientific consensus, which is that existing GM foods are no less safe than foods made from conventional crops. Among the critics was Jordan Weissmann, \"Slate\"'s business and economics editor, who wrote in July 2016: \"N... |
how do gps apps such as maps or waze know the new formation of roads after construction? | It first important to understand how Google Maps gets all if it's data. Some of it's data is pre-programmed into their systems. This is usually used as initial data, especially for testing. Google provides many more features, however. They also show traffic and other information for your daily traveler.
A few years back, Google acquired Waze and they use data from the Waze app to enhance Google maps. Waze is backed by a community of users who report cops, traffic, accidents, etc. But Google also injects tracking into their software. Google can access the speed of your car by checking it's locations at two different points and dividing it by the time between those two points. If the speed limit on a road is 50 mph, but every car on the road using Google maps is moving only 10 mph, then there is obviously traffic.
Using the same technique Google will track a cars movement. If a car is going off course, then Google will ignore the data, but still store it for later use. If 50 cars go off course, Google's map algorithm will detect this as an unknown road. Google will run several Artificial intelligence tasks to determine what is going on and will adjust their data accordingly. | [
"BULLET::::- 2009 – Waze, a community-oriented GPS app, allows for users to submit road info and route data based on location, such as reports of car accidents or traffic, and integrates that data into its routing algorithms for all users of the app\n",
"Automatic vehicle location (AVL or ~locating; telelocating ... |
Does musical interest correspond to intelligence? | I've looked for some papers on the subject and I didn't turn up empty.
I've found [this paper] (_URL_1_) that indicates that emotion recognition in music and emotional intelligence are highly correlated.
I've also found two papers ([one] (_URL_3_) and [two] (_URL_4_)) that claim that music has short-term benefits, but not different from those associated with other stimuli that optimize arousal level and that music lessons in childhood have a small but long-lasting intellectual benefit. Please note, however, that the sources I provided plead only for the cognitive benefit of music *in general*, and not by genre.
I've also found two papers ([one] (_URL_0_) and [two] (_URL_2_)), but there seems to be an awful lot of them, that correlate music preferenec to personality. The second also relates music preference to cognitive abilities. I've only skimmed through the second paper, and I advise anyone looking for more information to read it carefully, but page 15 features a table of correlations that seems interesting.
Also, this quote from the second paper seems directly relevant:
> Music preferences also appear to be influenced by cognitive
ability. The relationship between cognitive ability and music pref-
erences is consistent with the idea that people prefer music that
provides optimal levels of stimulation. Berlyne (1971, 1974) hy-
pothesized that individuals prefer aesthetic stimuli that produce
moderate amounts of stimulation to objects that produce too much
or too little stimulation. Previous research on aesthetic preferences
in literature and visual arts has supported this notion, and this
suggests that individual differences in cognitive complexity mod-
erate preferences for particular aesthetic stimuli. Whereas cogni-
tively complex individuals tend to prefer complex aesthetic stim-
uli, less cognitively complex individuals tend to prefer simple
aesthetic stimuli (Barron, 1955; Frances, 1976; Kammann, 1966).
`
The relationship between intelligence and preference for complex
music supports this previous work and suggests that the optimal
level of stimulation for highly intelligent individuals is produced
by complex music whereas the optimal level of stimulation for less
intelligent individuals is produced by comparatively simpler mu-
sic.
From what I understand, individuals prefer music that provide a moderate (optimal) amount of stimulation for them, so that "highly intelligent individuals" prefer complex music (Blues, Jazz, Classical, Folk) while "less intelligent individuals prefer simpler music (Country, Sound Track, Religious, Pop).
Again, I strongly advise you to carefully read the paper yourself, as I only skimmed through it and might have misunderstood or otherwise skipped important information. | [
"Children’s musical interest may vary from exploring a specific instrument to listening to a type of musical literature that the child finds interesting because of his or her cultural background. In other words, early childhood musical interest lies with the involvement that the child is actively engaged in the lea... |
How were sharks perceived in the WW2 Era? Particularly by the US Navy. More particularly by the types of people who would have made of the crew of the USS Indianapolis. | Expanded [from an earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_)
**Part I**
*Jaws*, both the novel and the book, certainly did shift cultural attitudes towards sharks as dangerous predators. However, neither Spielberg nor Benchley invented this image of the predator out of whole cloth. There was a long association within modern Western culture that associated sharks with other forms of predators and one of the dangers of the ocean.
The harpoonist Queequeg in Melville's doorstopper of a novel *Moby Dick* commented that "de God wat made shark must be one damn injun," in a chapter in which the sharks go into a feeding frenzy over a whale carcass. Queequeg's opinion of the shark mirrored much of contemporaneous Western thought on the shark in the nineteenth century. The shark mixed both mystery and unbounded savagery. Verne's *20,000 Leagues Under the Sea* tried to demystify some of the shark's behavior and biology, but a shark's attack on Captain Nemo's underwater oyster farm still played to tropes of sudden attack by an animal hell-bent on consuming human flesh. Nor were these depictions of sharks limited to print. [Winslow Homer's 1899 *The Gulf Stream*](_URL_1_) depicts the horror of a shark attack at sea. The Matawan shark attacks of 1916 certainly popularized the fear of sharks. John Singleton Copley's painting [*Watson and the Shark*](_URL_3_) depicted the boyhood shark attack on Brook Watson, one of the Lord Mayors of London.
Copley was heavily influenced in his portrait by one of the more famous maritime paintings of his era: Théodore Géricault's painting [*Raft of the Medusa*](_URL_4_). One of the most famous shipwrecks in the tail end of the Age of Sail was the French frigate *Medusa* which became beached in 1816 off Mauritania. The ship's crew constructed a raft for the 146 passengers and crew who could not fit in the ship's launches, and the intention was for the launches to two the raft to shore. The lines broke and the raft became adrift with little provisions. Thirteen days later, the raft was rescued and only fifteen of the raft's passengers were alive. The cause of death ranged from suicide, fights, attacks by sharks, and, in what proved most shocking for European contemporaries, cannibalism. Much like the relationship of the *Indianapolis* to *Jaws*, the travails of *Medusa*'s crew became immortalized in by Géricault's painting. While sharks may not be present in the painting, they were one of many elements in writings on the shipwreck. One of the more notable aspects of these tales was that the sharks arrived after the crew indulged in cannibalism.
One of the survivors, Henri Savigny wrote of the sharks surrounding the raft and preventing the survivors from collecting fish, which were the only available form of sustenance, and their jaws even managed to straighten a bayonet hook. Savigny noted as fights began to break out:
> it was a number of sharks which came and surrounded our raft. They approached so near, that we were able to strike them with our sabre, but we could not subdue one of them, notwithstanding the goodness of the weapon we possessed...The blows which [a crewman] struck these monsters, made them replunge into the sea; but a few seconds after, they reappeared upon the surface and did not seem at all alarmed at our presence. Their backs rose about 30 centimeters above the water: several of them appeared to us to be at least 10 meters in length.
Savigny's timing of the appearance of the sharks, just when human relations were breaking down, connected his account into the larger symbolism of the shark in European Romantic literature which emphasized the animal's innate baseness and predatory savagery. Becoming like a shark for a human meant preying on his fellow man. William Cowper's 1785 poem *The Task* invoked the shark in its meditations on the growing sprawl of London:
> London ingulfs them all! The shark is there,/ And the shark's prey; the spendthrift, and the leech/ That sucks him; there the sycophant, and he/ Who beheaded and obsequious bows/ Begs a warm office, doom to a cold jail/ And groat per Diem, if his patron frown.
Not surprisingly, abolitionists latched onto this metaphor of men becoming as sharks in both prose and poetry attacking the slave trade. James Thomson's poem *Summer* had this passage:
> Increasing still the terrors of these storms, /His jaws horrific arm’d with threefold fate, /Here dwells the direful Shark. Lured by the scent /Of steaming crowds, of rank disease, and death, /Behold, he, rushing, cuts the briny flood, /Swift as the Gale can bear the ship along; /And, from the partners of that cruel trade, Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons, /Demands his share of prey—demands themselves. /The stormy Fates descend: one death involves / Tyrants and slaves; when straight, their mangled limbs /Crashing at once, he dyes the purple seas / With gore, and riots in the vengeful meal.
In Thomson's account the slave-traders were no different from that of the shark, they were indeed "partners" in human misery. The abolitionist Thomas Clarkson contended that the slave trade altered sharks' migratory patterns as they followed the slavers:
> These voracious fish were supposed to have followed the vessels from the coast of Africa, in which ten thousand slaves were imported in that one season, being allured by the stench, and daily fed by the dead carcasses thrown overboard by the voyage.
In true Swiftean fashion, the Scottish radical James Tytler's pamphlet [*The PETITION of the SHARKS of AFRICA*](_URL_2_) asked the House of Lords to consider the sharks when discussing the slave trade. The sharks were aghast that there was even talk of abolishing an institution which so easily afforded them their favorite food, human flesh. Should the Lords give into "this new-fangled humanity", then the population of sharks would regretfully diminish.
Although obviously embellished for dramatic effect, the abolitionists' use of the image of sharks feasting on castoff slaves was attested to in various accounts of both slavers and in the colonies. Samuel Robisnon recalled in his memoir that as a teenager serving on his uncle's slave ship that the sharks clustered underneath the ship and the crew were afraid to stick their hands in the water lest they get bit. The entry for the White Shark in Thomas Pennant's 1776 encyclopedia *British Zoology* derived a number of its observations on this particular shark's from slavers' accounts, including one gruesome tale in which a slaver captain showed his cargo that they could not escape by jumping over by lowering a corpse into the water and pulling out the shark-eaten remains. Reports of the Royal African Company occasionally mentioned that sharks swarmed embarkation areas for slaves. William Smith, a surveyor to the Royal African Company, recalled that sharks swarmed the boats off the African coast in hopes of finding prey and would later note that as slave ships dumped their corpses, the "sharks give such due Attendance, that the Corpse can no sooner touch the Water, then it is immediately torn to Pieces, and devoured before our Faces." Jamaican newspapers reported in 1785 that the arrival of slavers also came with overgrown sharks, presumably fed from slave corpses. While notions of the slave trade altering the global migratory patterns of sharks are unlikely, the floating reef of a slave ship did likely provide sharks a human-based meal.
| [
"After the USS \"Indianapolis\" was torpedoed on 30 July 1945, most sailors who survived the sinking reportedly died from exposure to the elements rather than from shark bites. Some sailors, however, are believed to have died from shark bites, and oceanic whitetips are believed to have been responsible in those cas... |
if america spends so much more on its military than russia, why are countries somewhat evenly matched? | They aren't. In a conventional war the US could handle multiple Russias at the same time. However the war wouldn't be conventional because Russia's policy on nuclear weapons is that they will use them as a first strike against enemy soldiers that are at war with Russia. This would force the US to retaliate with their own nukes, and before you know it there are no more Russians and no more Americans. Because of this the countries have to be careful not to actually engage each other in combat. | [
"The United States spends vastly more than other countries on national defense. The table below shows the top 10 countries with largest military expenditures as of 2015, the most recent year with publicly available data. As the table suggests, the United States spent nearly 3 times as much on the military than Chin... |
does turning a car at a slower speed give it a sharper turning radius? | As long as your tires aren't slipping, they are controlling your path. So, your turning radius will just depend on steering wheel position. | [
"When turning, any object is subject to a certain amount of centrifugal force, directed away from the center around which the object is moving. As speed increases, the amount of force applied to the object also increases. As a result, standard narrow vehicles with a narrow wheel base, can only take turns up to rela... |
i have a math and odds question that i don't know how to explain in the title. | You're thinking about this wrong, and this is actually known as the Gambler's Fallacy. (Black has been rolled 3 times in a row, therefore red HAS to be next)
When you know the previous ball was a red, then the chance of the next ball being red is 40%. But, the chances of the next 2 balls being red is 40% times 40% or 16%.
In other words, the time before DOESN'T have any impact on the next ball choice. What happened in the past doesn't affect your future pick. What you're talking about only applies for the next 2 future picks | [
"In gambling, the odds on display do not represent the true chances (as imagined by the bookmaker) that the event will or will not occur, but are the amount that the bookmaker will pay out on a winning bet, together with the required stake. In formulating the odds to display the bookmaker will have included a profi... |
how can a broken heart hurt so much psychically? | Because the pain is infact not just emotional but also physical. Few reasons:
1)Hormones.
When you're in love, the body produces elevated levels of feel- good chemicals (hormones like dopamine). You kinda get addicted to these chemicals.
When your heart breaks , these chemicals are no longer produced and so you experience 'withdrawl syndromes' like anxiety,nausea etc.
2) Stress
On heartbreak, the feel good hormones get replaced by stress hormone( cortisol). Its increaed levels activate the fight or flight responses which can cause chest pain and other heart attack kind symptoms. | [
"A broken heart is a major stressor and has been found to precipitate episodes of major depression. In one study (death of a spouse), 24% of mourners were depressed at two months, 23% at seven months, 16% at 13 months and 14% at 25 months.\n",
"Broken heart (also known as a heartbreak or heartache) is a metaphor ... |
why does medical and other scientific research cost so much money? i've seen basic research funded by millions of dollars. | Yes, it does. Biomedical research starts with what you think of as lab experiments - people moving liquid from one tube to another, petri dishes, etc. Then it moves to animal studies, which themselves can easily cost millions of dollars per study. Then they move to human trials which can often cost tens of millions, if not more.
Once all the costs are added up, it easily costs hundreds of millions of dollars to bring a new drug to market, if not more. This money needs to be recouped in order to keep companies in business and provide the incentive to pursue new research. | [
"In the United States, data from ongoing surveys by the National Science Foundation (NSF) show that federal agencies provided only 44% of the $86 billion spent on basic research in 2015. The National Institutes of Health and pharmaceutical companies collectively contribute $26.4 billion and $27 billion, which const... |
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