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store tells me to rub the chip when my debit card is not recognized? the chip is clean, so why does this help? | Sometimes a fine layer of oil forms on the chip. Rubbing it removes this layer | [
"Until the introduction of Chip & PIN, all face-to-face credit or debit card transactions involved the use of a magnetic stripe or mechanical imprint to read and record account data, and a signature for purposes of identity verification. The customer hands their card to the cashier at the point of sale who then pas... |
How did Julius Caesar's mother and father raise him? And what effect did his upbringing have on his personality? | Little is known about Julius Caesar's early life; his father died when he was relatively young (about 16 years of age) and thus Julius was thrust into the position of pater familius at somewhat of a young age. It's extremely difficult to comment directly on how he was raised and his early life due to lack of evidence and documentation, but I can give you some idea as to what may have shaped his politics; Julius was born after the end of the Second Punic War, when Rome lacked any sort of real external threat and the influx of wealth into Roman society was immense. This had a two fold effect on the politics of Rome; lacking any external enemy to unite them, Roman infighting began almost immediately. Additionally so immense was the influx of wealth that it had the effect of basically breaking the political system; Men like Gracchi Brothers, Marius, Sulla, Cinna, and Pompeii were able to circumvent the political system using a combination of force and wealth to further their own political ambitions. Following the end of the Second Punic War, Roman conservatives almost immediately began to lament the loss of Roman virtue and morality among it's citizens. Although Caesar is often credited with killing the Roman Republic, it's important to understand that it was well on it's way there before Caesar was in any position to lay the finishing blow - Caesar was born in a time where might made right.
One other factor which likely shaped Caesar's politics is as follows; although hailing from a patrician family, his family could not be called rich by any standard. Caesar grew up in what basically amounted to a ghetto rather than on the Palatine Hill where a patrician family of solid financial standing would have lived. Growing up among the reality of the grinding poverty in Rome, while at the same time a member of a social class which had the ability to shape political policy to their own design most certainly had a dramatic impact on Caesar's political lens. I'm at work now and don't have time to comment more, but once I'm done I can try to expand on this. | [
"The early career of Julius Caesar was characterized by military adventurism and political persecution. Julius Caesar was born on July 13, 100 BC, into a patrician family, the gens Julia, which claimed descent from Iulus, son of the legendary Trojan prince Aeneas, supposedly the son of the goddess Venus. His father... |
Why did iced tea, rather than hot tea, become popular in the United States? | While hot tea was extremely popular in the colonies that would become the United States, taxes on tea became a point contention for many colonists, leading to boycotts and the adoption of coffee as a preferred patriotic drink.
As such, coffee is the standard hot drink in many American homes, and tea found it's niche as a cold beverage, often used as a mixer for alcoholic punches. Iced tea doesn't show up as a nonalcoholic drink until the late nineteenth century. Around this time temperance became a major movement in many areas. So now iced tea is a standard, nonalcoholic drink. People in the south often enjoy it very sweet, others don't.
But in short, coffee is the preferred hot drink in the United States, so tea found a niche as a cold beverage. | [
"Iced tea had started to appear in the USA during the 1860s. Seen as a novelty at first, during the 1870s it became quite widespread. Recipes appeared in print, iced tea was offered on hotel menus, and it was on sale at railroad stations. Its popularity rapidly increased after Richard Blechynden introduced it at th... |
showering after a meal | For a warm shower: Blood gets diverted to the skin, to lower your body's temperature (which increased all of a sudden when you're under hot/warm water).
Since this happens on a large surface area (almost your entire body's surface area), there is a chance for your blood pressure to drop, since a majority of your blood is diverted to the skin (for temperature regulation) and gut (for digestion). This MIGHT make the person feel dizzy, if he/she has some underlying disease, or is old (because the compensatory mechanism to raise the blood pressure is slower than younger people) and as a result faint. Normal people should not have any problems.
That's all I can think of. | [
"After supper, a couple watch through the window as their neighbor walks round the side of his house to spy on his own wife as she undresses. They seem puzzled at the incident, that has been happening \"one out of every two to three nights\" for the last three months. The man showers, as the woman prepares food for... |
why does the same setting in the shower feel warmer in the summer than in the winter? i've noticed on a warm day, i need to turn the shower down because it feels too hot, but surely it's the same temperature? | The quick answer is, because in winter the cold water coming from your cold water feed is usually a **lot** colder. I don't know about where you live, but where I live (UK) in winter the water coming out the tap makes your hand go numb very quickly. In summer you can hold it under there all day.
If you have a standard electric shower, the sort that normally has a Off/Eco/Low/High dial and then a numbered temperature dial, they work like this:
The first 'power' control (off/eco/low/high) of course switches the water on and off, but also puts the power to the heater to one of three states, low medium or high. Naturally three temperature settings isn't enough, you normally want something between, so that's where the other dial comes in.
The other 'temperature' dial is just a valve that controls the water flow. The higher you turn it the slower it allows the water to flow. The slower the water is flowing the longer it's spending going through the heater, so the hotter it comes out. Turn it down, the water flow increases, it spends less time going through the heater and comes out cooler.
The reason you have to crank the dial up in winter to get the same temperature is because, that's literally what's happening. The water is colder coming in, because the water supply pipes are colder - the water itself is colder, and it takes more heating up. Simple as that really.
If you have a standard mixer shower that works off hot and cold water feeds, the same is happening. The cold water is colder in winter, so you need more crank on the temperature dial to get the same temperature coming out the shower head. | [
"The slow night-time cooling of a home after its external brick wall has been heated by the sun is one example of thermal lag. Thermal lag is the reason the high temperatures in summer continue to increase after the summer solstice (in this case, it is termed seasonal lag), and it is the reason a day's high tempera... |
the difference between routers, switches, access points | In order of complexity:
A hub connects several devices in a network. When it receives data on
a port, it repeats that data out on every other port. These are
pretty rare now that switches have become so affordable.
A switch is a smarter hub. As it receives data, it learns which
device is connected to each port. When it receives data destined for
a particular device, it only sends the data to the device's port. If
it doesn't know which port to send the data to (e.g. it hasn't seen
that host yet), it acts as a hub and sends the data to all ports --
except the one it was received on. Once the host replies, the switch
learns which port is connected to, so it goes back to acting like a
switch.
A bridge is used to connect two physically different networks so that
they are the same logical network; e.g. connecting a Token Ring
network to an Ethernet network. (it doesn't matter if you don't know
what those are, it's just important that they are physcially
different.)
A router is used to connect two logically different networks
together. It routes traffic between the two networks.
A Wireless Access Point (WAP or AP) is a type of bridge because it
connects two different types of networks -- wireless (IEEE 802.11
b/g/n) and wired (usually IEEE 802.3),
Most of the devices that you will see are actually combinations of the
device type listed above. For instance, a gateway that a person would
get from their cable company that has wireless does all of these
things:
* If it has multiple Ethernet LAN ports, it is a switch.
* it connects the coax cable network, the Ethernet in the house and
the home wireless network, so it's a bridge.
* It connects between the cable company's network and a home network
(wired and wireless), so it is a router.
| [
"Layer 3 switching is solely based on (destination) IP address stored in the header of IP datagram (see layer 4 switching later on this page for the difference). The difference between a layer 3 switch and a router is the way the device is making the routing decision. Traditionally, routers use microprocessors to m... |
why car companies have such a problem with the destruction of their cars in video games , but apparently not that much in the movies ? | It depends on the video game. Manufacturers like certain video games and license their vehicles to those games because they put the brand in front of young and impressionable consumers. They also like their product in movies for the same reason. The ability of the manufacturer to control how their product is used is an important part of the licensing deal. Companies wan their product reflected in a manner that is consistent with their marketing message.
Manufacturers don't like their product licensed with games where they are unable to control the message or there is the possibility of negative associations with the brand. This is why the GTA games do not have licensed vehicles. Manufactures are afraid that parents will boycott their brands for fear that their children may end up knocking over a bank while using a Chevy Sonic as the getaway vehicle. | [
"The newly included damage feature received criticism for having limited effect on car performance (however a later update added the ability to \"turn on\" full damage and tire/fuel depletion). The AI was also criticized for still making CPU-drivers brake unexpectedly and not being aware of the player's car on the ... |
How did people keep track of time during the middle ages? | In Western Europe, certainly in ecclesiastical and monastic contexts, the day was broken up into eight parts by the Canonical Hours. These were times which were specified for different prayers and services (I believe these are still in use today in at least some Catholic monasteries.)
They started with the overnight vigils, Matins, and were followed by Lauds at dawn, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers in the evening, and then Compline at bedtime.
Certainly the general population would have been familiar with this arrangement of time, and literature of the time records references to these hours. Example: "Before the hour of nones had sounded, King Arthur dubbed four hundred knights or more all sons of counts and of kings." - from Erec et Enide, Chretien of Troyes. | [
"Medieval astronomers also used sexagesimal numbers to note time. Al-Biruni first subdivided the hour sexagesimally into minutess, seconds, thirds and fourths in 1000 while discussing Jewish months. Around 1235 John of Sacrobosco continued this tradition, although Nothaft thought Sacrobosco was the first to do so. ... |
Where there any inhabited places on Earth that were totally unaffected by World War II? | This is kind of a broad question. By "unaffected" are you purely referring to military action, or just any involvement with the war effort? | [
"In 1945, World War II was abruptly ended when an alien race appeared on Earth and began to slaughter the human population. This alien force, known as the \"Phantom Beasts\" (or Genjyu in Japanese) had effectively taken over more than half of the Earth. The year is 1999 – 54 years later, mankind is still fighting t... |
what exactly happens with the moon during a full eclipse? | The Earths shadow lines up with the moon completely blocking out the light from the sun which usually lights it up during the night, like if you put your hand in front of a torch, whatever you were shining the torch at becomes unlit *Your hand is the earth) | [
"Eclipses may occur when the Earth and the Moon are aligned with the Sun, and the shadow of one body cast by the Sun falls on the other. So at new moon, when the Moon is in conjunction with the Sun, the Moon may pass in front of the Sun as seen from a narrow region on the surface of the Earth and cause a solar ecli... |
why is it that a lizard can jump off insane heights but not take any damage and be fine but if we scaled us down to the size of a lizard we'd die from that high of a fall? | Lizards weigh less, so the impact when they land is a lot lower. If I fall, it's equivalent to a 100 pound person landing on me. If a 300 pound person falls, it's equivalent to a 300 pounds of person landing on them. The gecko just takes a few ounces of weight. | [
"A large lizard with a flattened head and body, its length is a maximum of . The soles of the feet have black rubber-like balls, an adaptation to living on rock outcrops. It is called the plated lizard because of the platelike scales on the back. This lizard is very shy and hard to approach. When threatened, it wil... |
how did medical care become standardized? | Many, many smart inventions. I'm not a history geek, so I'm unsure about the specifics, but the conventional microscope was only created in the last hundred - two hundred years. From this, people discovered bacteria, viruses, amoebas, cells, and how each related. This spawned vaccinations to stop smallpox and rubella, as well as people finding out microorganisms survive on skin, and can be contagious. Drugs, sanitisation, supplements; all of these things exist because of the microscope. While it'd be stupid to attribute every breakthrough in modern medicine to the microscope, it truly was the straw that broke the camel's back - or cured it, in this case. | [
"To reduce competition, the Medical Act also raised the standards for qualifications in 1858. A modern codes of medical ethics were also implemented in the 19th century. Again, this proves the high degree of power that the profession had. As a result, many medical practitioners came to experience ethical problems. ... |
How will the James Web Space Telescope orbit AROUND L2 lagrange point? | If you look at the individual coordinates then the point is unstable in the radial direction but stable in the other two. Overall that makes the point unstable but it gives a plane where you can orbit.
_URL_0_ | [
"The proposed satellite would have a dimension of , a mass of about 600 kg, and maneuver by means of an ion drive engine in combination with using the sheet as a light sail. Positioned at a distance of 100,000 km from the telescope, it would block more than 99.998% of the starlight.\n",
"The Lagrange point of the... |
why do we need the give the security code off the signature strip of credit cards when we buy things online? | It helps show you have possession of the physical card. That number is not stored on the magnetic stripe, so it can't be obtained using a card skimmer for example. | [
"Credit card security relies on the physical security of the plastic card as well as the privacy of the credit card number. Therefore, whenever a person other than the card owner has access to the card or its number, security is potentially compromised. Once, merchants would often accept credit card numbers without... |
If you control for accidental death/death by misadventure, crime related deaths and suicide, how much longer is female life expectancy than male? | I don't think there's a good answer here. How do you count child birth? Or differences in nutrition? Or that women go to the doctor more often to get checked? Depending on the local culture, life might be harder or easier for women vs. men, this also contributes to health and mortality. So depending on the details you can probably get any answer that you want. | [
"Since 2003, age-standardised rates of suicide have been stable for females across the life course whilst for young adult men there have been declines of between 5 and 8 deaths per 100,000 but increases of between 4 and 7 deaths per 100,000 in middle-aged men. Middle and older-aged men continue to suicide at rates ... |
Has surface of the Earth always been covered to 71% by water? | > has dry land on surface always been only 29% of its surface?
No, it varies. Controlling factors:
1) Amount of water on the planet. This has been stable for a long time, but early on in Earth's history would have increased in stages as much water was delivered via water rich asteroids, whilst some probably came from within the Earth itself.
2) Shape of the ocean basins. Specifically, how high the oceanic crust is sitting in the mantle, which is a function of how recently it was created. Younger oceanic crust is hotter and thus more buoyant, so sits higher in the mantle displacing more water over the continental shelves at the edge of ocean basins.
3) Amount of water locked up as ice at the poles, ie. the extent of any glaciation. This can have quite a dramatic change on the amount of dry land exposed, over much shorter timescales than any tectonic factors.
4) Amount of continental crust, which is markedly different from its oceanic counterpart - it's much thicker and chemically distinct. It is buoyant enough that the majority of it will be above sea-level, even when sea-levels are high. Continental crust is an irreversible product of planetary evolution and has accumulated over the length of geological time, specifically though emplacement and chemical interactions in arcs and continental margins above [subduction zones](_URL_0_). From the amount of continental crust present and rate of production today, we know that it hasn't always been produced at the same rate, although exactly how this has varied over Earth history is debated. | [
"Water covers 71% of the Earth's surface, mostly in seas and oceans. Small portions of water occur as groundwater (1.7%), in the glaciers and the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland (1.7%), and in the air as vapor, clouds (formed of ice and liquid water suspended in air), and precipitation (0.001%).\n",
"Earth's... |
How accurate if the movie, "Inherit the Wind"? | One of the most glaring omissions in both the play and the film is leaving out defense attorney Dudley Field Malone, who gave an impressive speech on why the government should not step into religious matters, among other things citing the religious wars of Europe in the 17th century. It was an immensely powerful argument to the town, jury, reporters and well admired... most were at least of a few different religious denominations and aware of the danger of the government preferring one church over another. Even the cynical H. L. Mencken said that "it was a great day for Ireland".
Likewise, Darrow's questioning of Bryan's beliefs was deeply resented by the town-it was seen as a big-city atheist lawyer mocking a pious man, which in a sense was true. Darrow was a volunteer addition to the ACLU team: he was in no way the lead. He'd asked to be a part of the trial, and in retrospect even though he made headlines it's hard to see how he greatly helped. Because a big problem with the general ItW story ( and the legend of the trial) is that the Dayton trial could not be not over whether the law was good or bad. It simply was a test case to start that process. The ACLU was looking for someone who'd actually taught evolution and broken that law, Scopes had volunteered because he had. He was going to be found guilty- that was really a formality, the jury had no choice but to "decide" only that question, and they did. The points his defense raised in court were not to get the jury to acquit, but to be used in the appeal to get the law struck down. Unfortunately, the Tennessee Law Court avoided the question, and found him innocent on a technicality, saying it saw no reason to further such a bizarre case. It was probably thinking of the Dayton circus moving to Nashville and setting up in front of its court.
The law managed to stay on the books in TN until 1966, when it was repealed with very little protest. | [
"The Making of a Legend: Gone with the Wind is a 1988 documentary outlining the successes and challenges of the casting, filming, and legacy of the 1939 film \"Gone with the Wind\", from concept to finished product. The documentary focuses on David O. Selznick from the time of the book's publication to the Academy ... |
why does sweet and salty food taste better together? | We generally do not like the taste of bitter. Salt has the miraculous ability to block the taste of bitter. When we say salt is a "flavor enhancer" what we're typically talking about is its capacity to block bitter, allowing other flavors to come forward. So, the flavor profile of caramel gets richer and yummier because the smidge of distraction provided by the smidge of bitter is pushed to the side by the salt.
This combined with our general need for salt and taste-appreciation for salt specifically adds up to something that is delicious!
(as an aside, I secretly believe, and for this I have no real justification, that the craze of butter-in-coffee (damn hipsters!) is actually explained a bit (beyond fat=yum) by the fact that butter has salt and coffee has bitter and the little bit of salt suppresses some of the coffee's bitter allowing the richness of the coffee flavors to come forward. can someone please do a taste test with salted/standard butter vs. unsalted butter?) | [
"“Salty” is one of the “five flavors” of Chinese herbology and Chinese cuisine which Chinese see as the basis of good food. Salt is not generally sprinkled on a dish at the last moment or at the table, as is often the case in western cooking, but is more often one of the ingredients.\n",
"One of the preferences o... |
Do we really know how much protein we need per day? | There are all kinds of calories and estimates, and formulas for determining this, however what it really comes down to is every person is different. A person's caloric and nutrition needs are unique to themselves and defined by many different factors (predominantly metabolism but also activity level, lifestyle, etc.) So really a person's dietary needs are highly specific and even seeing a licensed nutritionist, you would not be able to figure it out with any real precision. | [
"Edible protein per unit area of land is a measure of agricultural productivity. This measure for various major foodstuffs is shown in the chart below. Values are expressed for one calendar year. Biological values and usable protein values have been added to the chart to show the true relative value of each foodsto... |
bosnia | A place where bad people go. | [
"Bosnia and Herzegovina, sometimes referred to simply as Bosnia, is a country in Southeastern Europe on the Balkan Peninsula. It has had permanent settlement since the Neolithic Age. By the early historical period it was inhabited by Illyrians and Celts. Christianity arrived in the 1st century, and by the 4th centu... |
If I cook something at 200 Degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes, why can’t I cook it for 10 minutes at 400? | It takes time for heat to penetrate food; if you cook at a higher temperature, the outside can be overdone while the inside isn't done yet. So, you generally pick a temperature that is a compromise to get an acceptable result.
There are techniques that cook at low or high temps...
Stir frying uses very small pieces of food so it can cook fast at high heat. Sous vide uses very low temperatures but cooks for a long time. | [
"If a large part of the cooking time is spent at temperatures lower than 60 °C (as when the contents of the cooker are slowly cooling over a long period), a danger of food poisoning due to bacterial infection, or toxins produced by multiplying bacteria, arises. It is essential to heat food sufficiently at the outse... |
Questions About the Greek War of Independence | >
> Why did the greeks rebel?
The spread of Nationalism in Europe after French revolution and Napoleonic war. Also fueled by atrocities of Ottoman administrators in Greece and legal discrimination on Greek Christians population (They're allowed to practice Orthodox Christianity but couldn't hold many government offices, with the exception of Greek Phanariotes elite in Constantinople). Also jizya tax.
>
> Why did the European powers who were anti-revolution support the Greeks?
Many Europeans Intellectuals were what was called "Philhellenes", they idolized Ancient Greek and consider it as root of western civilization. The most famous of this was the British poet Lord Byron who actually personally came to Greece to aid the rebels. Also Russian were Orthodox and saw itself as protector of World's Orthodoxy and covet the land that the Ottomans owned, specifically the Turkish straits
>
> Why did Egypt get involved?
Egypt was *de jure* an Ottoman province, or as Muhammad Ali want it, an Ottoman Vice-royalty. The ruler of Egypt was bound to service of the Ottomans in theory, even if later Muhammad Ali tried to assert his independence too.
> Did other ethnicities in the Ottoman Empire rebel during this period?
In several decades after that, the Serbians revolted too, with the same reason. Muhammad Ali of Egypt also tried to, but his motive is rather personal, he anted to supplant the Ottoman empire with his own dynasty. He later come to the agreement with the Ottomans, which basically gave him *de facto* independence, but obliged him to come to aid of the Ottomans as sort of vassal and he had to return Syria and Palestine to direct Ottoman control. The al-Saud clan of Nejed, the ancestor of modern day Saudi Arabian monarch also rebelled around the same time, their motive is to establish Wahhabist state, independent from the Ottomans. The rebellion was defeated and the leader was sent to Constantinople to be beheaded.
| [
"The Greek War of Independence refers to the efforts of the Greeks to establish an independent Greek state, at the time that Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire. The revolution was initially planned and organized through secret organizations, most notable of which the Filiki Eteria, that operated in Greece and ot... |
During the American Civil War, what happened to the sitting Representatives and Senators of the seceded Southern states? Did they resign their offices, or maintain them? | They resigned...mostly. Seeing as their states had, per their lights, left the Union they viewed their service in the Congress at an end. After resignation, most went right home where they either sought some kind of office with the Confederacy or left politics for a while. One of the knock-on effects of this was to give the Republicans a healthy majority in Congress that they would not have had otherwise.
But I did say *mostly*. Some Representatives, and one Senator, from the rebelling states stayed behind and maintained their seats. These men disapproved of secession and generally represented whiter parts of the South with smaller enslaved populations. Such white belts, usually places where plantation agriculture wasn't economically viable at the time, were a source of persistent tension in Southern politics. The loyalty of the local whites to slavery was suspect, and they were inclined to use that perception to get concessions from the planter-dominated state governments by flirting with abolition. When push came to shove, some of them really were prepared to levy war against the enslaver elite, which is why we have West Virginia today.
The one Senator is Andrew Johnson. Johnson had enslaved people himself and was a staggering racist, both common traits in the white South's officeholders. He also came up poor, which is less usual, in a much less enslaved part of Tennessee. (Ditto.) He fancied himself a champion of the Common White Man against the moneyed elites, as was customary for Democrats of the era, and would have no truck with this treason business when it got going. He retained his seat until appointed military governor of Tennessee, at which point he went off to Nashville to do his part in suppressing rebels. | [
"In early 1877, the federal government withdrew its troops from the South after reaching a compromise over the national election. This marked the end to Reconstruction, and Governor Chamberlain left the state. The Democrats, calling themselves Redeemers, had taken control of South Carolina's legislature. Paramilita... |
when employers take 1+ weeks to get back to you after an interview, what are they waiting for? | They are interviewing other people. There's really no reason to reject someone immediately, for two reasons: one, it limits their options, and two, it takes time. It's easier to send a rejection notice after someone has accepted the offer. | [
"Once an employer has received résumés, they will make a list of potential employees to be interviewed based on the résumé and any other information contributed. During the interview process, interviewers generally look for persons who they believe will be best for the job and work environment. The interview may oc... |
Is whale sperm any bigger than human sperm? | [In male humans, sperm cells consists of a head 5 microns by 3 microns and a tail 41 microns long.](_URL_2_)
Whale sperm vary in length according to species: [73.8 micron for a porpoise, 40.6 for a sperm whale, 52.5 for a humpback whale.](_URL_1_)
I couldn't find it for the blue whale though, sadly. I will assume the blue whale's sperm is in the same ballpark as other whales, making it close to human sperm in size.
Sperm size doesn't really correlate to organism size; the longest sperm on Earth are from fruit flies; [Drosophila bifurca has sperm 58 mm (2.3 in) long.] (_URL_0_)
**Edit:** Links added. | [
"The penis on a right whale can be up to – the testes, at up to in length, in diameter, and weighing up to 525 kg (1157 lbs), are also by far the largest of any animal on Earth. The blue whale may be the largest animal on the planet, yet the testicles of the right whale are ten times the size of those of the blue w... |
What evidence is there for the use of the Roman pilum? | Vegetius was writing in the later part of the empire, I believe when he talked about 5 spears being carried, he was talking about Plumbata, which were carried inside the shield and thrown before engaging with the sword.
_URL_0_
_URL_1_ | [
"The \"pilum\" is a rifle, fueled by niter powder and the standard weapon for legionaries and praetorian guardsmen. \"Pilum\" is assumed to be the Roman term, since \"Niter Piece\", an obscure real world term, seems to be a more general name for such weapons. It is named for the Roman spear, the \"pilum\". In \"New... |
What is this I found at my grandma's house? (UK) | That is a form of currency- a note issued not by the Confederate States government or the State of South Carolina but by the Cotton Planters Loan Association. Or it appears to be- I'm no paper currency expert but I do know Confederate currency has been widely faked. Perhaps you should post this to /r/papermoney where collectors of such bills hang out. Like all banknotes of the time it could be redeemed in gold, but in this case that would have had to wait until the Union blockade was lifted and cotton could be exported again.
The back of it actually has nothing to do with the front- it appears to have been printed on scrap paper that was intended to be part of a bond issued by the Spartanburgh and Union Railroad Co. The warrants would be used to claim your half-yearly interest on your investment. | [
"The house contains portraits by Lawrence, Gainsborough, Romney, Lely, Reynolds, Hoppner, Kneller and many others, and a set of giant marble columns carrying busts, which are genuine antiques, collected in Italy by Lord Apsley, the son of the third earl, at the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1814.\n",
"Blythe ... |
difference between led, amoled, lcd, and retina display? | So these are terms that refer to some fundamentally different things. I'll throw a few other terms in the mix that will hopefully clarify things:
###Display Technology
* Cathode ray tube (CRT) where an electron beam is used to excite colored phosphors on the inside of a glass screen. You may have heard it referred to as a "tube TV". This is pretty old stuff, and is the earliest display technology for TVs.
* Plasma displays, where a gas inside each pixel is made to glow. This is now pretty outdated, but still way newer than CRTs. It was especially common back when LCD TVs were new, and lower quality than they are today.
* LCD (liquid crystal display). This is the most common type of display tech for televisions. There are three different colors of pixels (red, green, and blue) that can be made more or less opaque to let through light being created by a backlight behind the screen. The combinations of red, green, and blue can be used to form millions of different colors.
* AMOLED (active matrix organic light emitting diode). Each pixel is made of of individual little lights that don't need a backlight. This is newer, and is being used in a lot of newer phones, but is still very expensive for large TVs.
###Backlight technology
Note that backlights are only needed for LCD displays
* Cold cathode. This uses a light similar to the overhead fluorescent lights used in stores and office buildings.
* LED. This uses LEDs (light emitting diodes) to provide the backlight. Newer TVs will have hundreds of individual LEDs to provide even lighting and the ability to dim different sections of the screen to provide better contrast.
###Other stuff
* Retina Display. This is just a fancy Apple buzzword for having lots of pixels that are really tiny, so you can't see the individual pixels on the screen even when you look pretty closely. | [
"A LED-backlit LCD is a flat panel display that uses LED backlighting instead of the cold cathode fluorescent (CCFL) backlighting. LED-backlit displays use the same TFT LCD (thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display) technologies as CCFL-backlit displays, but offer reduced energy consumption, better contrast and ... |
Schizophrenia and optical illusions… | Well, the Wired article that ablackhat linked has a decent description of the "what" that happens:
> When healthy subjects looked at the concave faces, connections strengthened between the frontoparietal network, which is involved in top-down processing, and the visual areas of the brain that receive information from the eyes. In patients with schizophrenia, no such strengthening occurred.
The "why" is a bit more complex, though; it seems to have something to do with inhibition of neurotransmitters, and therefore various messaging throughout the brain.
In schizophrenics, the main issues seem to be lack of feedback throughout the brain - areas that would normally prevent hallucination by "reality testing" are not messaged for their input on self-generated images or sounds.
Same with the characteristic "disorganized" way of thinking - the lack of feedback and communication between areas of the brain mean that half-formed, partially processed thoughts are generated and allowed to surface without all the usual censoring that the mind does.
Yet again with the strange "symbolic thinking" that schizophrenics do; connections between ideas are not tested and regulated, and not further broken down/connected to sub-components as per usual, so mentation is significantly impaired and meaningless, in many cases, to anyone except the individual affected.
TL;DR: Parts of the brain don't talk to each other correctly, leading to poor processing of both internal and external stimuli. | [
"Visual illusions can be categorised into physiological/pathological, perceptual and ambiguous (bistable/multistable). A deviation from the natural perception of objects (stimulus) encourages evaluation of the theories of perception. Visual perception in schizophrenia is distinguished by reduced contextual adjustme... |
Question regarding British cruisers during WWII. | The shift towards smaller cruisers in the late 1930s was driven mainly by the 1936 London Naval Treaty. The 'Town's were built under the regime of the 1930 London Treaty, which placed a maximum cruiser tonnage of 10,000 tons. The 1936 treaty lowered this limit to 8,000 tons for ships laid down after 31st December 1936. The 'Crown Colony's were, in essence, a scaling down of the 'Town's to meet this new limit; retaining the same armament and many of the same capabilities on a slightly smaller hull with less armour. Doing so meant many unsatisfactory compromises. Most 'Crown Colony's completed slightly overweight, making it harder to add extra anti-aircraft guns, radars and fire control equipment without removing extra topweight. They were also considerably more cramped than previous cruisers. The mess decks were more luxurious than previous ships - the 'Crown Colony's were the first ships to carry a laundry and to have hot and cold running water in the basins - but they were heavily overcrowded. They had a design complement of 710, but over the course of the war, this would rise to over 900. They did have several small advantages over the 'Town's. They used the same 'long stalk' 6in turrets as the two *Edinburgh*s, which needed a smaller crew and were more reliable. The magazines for the 4in secondary armament were placed directly under the guns, reducing the number of crew eneded to work them. They had a flat transom stern, which was more hydrodynamically efficient. This made the 'Crown Colony's slightly faster and slightly more fuel efficient.
In May 1940, work on three 'Crown Colony's was suspended during the invasion crisis. They were completed to a slightly modified design, incorporating the lessons of the early war, becoming known as the *Uganda* class. The most drastic change was the loss of X turret. This was exchanged for extra anti-aircraft weaponry - at first two twin 4in dual-purpose mounts, but this was eventually reduced to a single quadruple mount for the 2pdr pom-pom, which was viewed as a more effective AA weapon. Most of the 'Town's and 'Crown Colony's would also have X turret removed and replaced with increased AA firepower, but this was an impromptu modification rather than being made in the design stage (*Belfast* was the only one to avoid this, having had buoyancy-increasing blisters added to strengthen the hull following serious mine damage in 1939). Another important change was the removal of the catapult and hangars for the seaplane - these had been found to have only limited utility and took up a lot of space. The hangars were converted into accommodation spaces, plus a cinema or chapel. Similar modifications would also be made to the older cruisers, but this was again an impromptu change. The accommodation spaces were better arranged, reducing the distance men had to travel to reach their action stations. The electrical system was set up to be immediately compatible with radar systems, unlike earlier cruisers. The bridges were heavily redesigned; an admiral's bridge was added below the main compass platform, weather protection was increased and views of the sky were improved. A Fighter Direction Office was added, allowing these ships to use their radars to direct combat air patrols.
The next class, the *Minotaur*s or *Swiftsure*s, were a further development of the *Uganda*s. Ordered in late 1941, they added an extra foot of beam onto the base 'Crown Colony' design. In general, they retained many of the features of the *Uganda*s; they had only three 6in turrets, and no aviation facilities. The forecastle was extended back to close off the area that the catapult originally occupied, increasing space for accommodation. They had a considerably heavier AA armament than their predecessors, mounting five twin 4in turrets, four quadruple 'pom-pom's, another four pom-poms on powered single mounts, and twelve twin 20mm Oerlikon guns. They also had added fuel capacity, increasing the range by ~400 nm. In 1942, a further set of improved 'Crown Colony's was ordered; only one of these would be completed. *Superb* added a further foot of beam to the *Swiftsure*s. She had further increases to her close-in AA armament, completing with four quadruple and two single pom-poms, eight single mounts for the 40mm Bofors gun, and ten Oerlikon guns (four twin mounts plus two singles). She was equipped with new model fire control directors capable of blind-fire, though the new fire control computers intended for them were delayed, and would not see service during the war.
The final class of cruisers ordered for the RN during the war were the three ships of the *Tiger* class. As originally conceived, these would have been similar to *Superb* (she had been ordered as the first of the new class). None were completed before the end of the war, and the designs were updated. The main change would have been new mounts for the 6in guns; the Mark XXIV mount, which could be controlled directly by the fire-control directors. There were also improvements to the infrastructure of the ships. An automatic telephone exchange, and a 'ring main' electrical and pump system were to be fitted. Some aft bulkheads were made more solid, and counter-flooding systems improved. These changes were heavily delayed due to a lack of skilled draughtsmen and the prioritisation of work on new carriers; by the time work restarted, priorities had changed. They would instead complete with two twin 6in turrets. These Mark XXVI mounts had an autoloader, allowing the guns to fire fully automatic at a rate of up to 20 rounds per minute. The secondary armament was three 3in mounts, again autoloading fully automatic weapons (with an astonishing fire rate of 90 rounds per minute). Two of the ships would later lose their after 6in mount, which would be replaced with a hangar and flight deck for Sea King helicopters.
It should also be noted that there were many changes to the equipment and armament of the RN's cruisers over the course of WWII. As noted above, by 1945, every 'Town' or 'Crown Colony' bar *Belfast* would have lost X turret, in return for an increased radar and AA armament fit. There was a considerable degree of convergent evolution, with similar changes made to both classes. All classes found themselves carrying out similar roles in combat, with general success. | [
"Twenty-three British cruisers were lost to enemy action, mostly to air attack and submarines, in operations in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean. Sixteen of these losses were in the Mediterranean. The British included cruisers and anti-aircraft cruisers among convoy escorts in the Mediterranean and to ... |
what is the difference between economic espionage and corporate espionage? | In most contexts they mean the same thing. Specifically referring to China they may be avoiding the term corporate espionage because in a lot of instances the government of China is the one doing the spying and then handing the information they gather over to state-run business to make use of. | [
"While economic espionage is conducted or orchestrated by governments and is international in scope, industrial or corporate espionage is more often national and occurs between companies or corporations.\n",
"Economic or industrial espionage takes place in two main forms. In short, the purpose of espionage is to ... |
In what ways does gender appear in archaeology? | Gender archaeology can be a tough nut to crack. Working with various sites within the Virginia City Landmark District in Nevada, we initially thought we were seeing evidence of women with some small, delicate buttons, but then a button expert said that they could have just as easily been from some masculine undergarments. Other buttons were bejeweled in a fashion that could only indicate the presence of women.
One of the more concrete forms of gender analysis came from two artifacts that were tested for DNA. The first came from a private, in-house hospital run by a doctor, ca. 1875-1885. Hypodermic needles - broad mouthed implements designed to work with an open vein to irrigate a drug into the vascular system - was tested for DNA. We found four separate individuals on one of the needles - two women and two men who had used the needle at one time or another (and without cleaning - a true inspiration for those who insist they would like to travel back in time). Another artifact was a pipe stem from the Boston Saloon, an African American establishment that operated at the excavated location between 1866-1875. We hoped to find distinct African American DNA patterns, but that was the not the case. Instead, we found that the smoker was a woman, and her tooth mark on the stem was clearly visible, helping us to create a vivid image of a pipe-smoking woman in the African American bar - even if her ethnicity remained indistinct. That excavation was directed by Kelly Dixon, who wrote a wonderful book called Boomtown Saloons: Archaeology and History in Virginia City (2005).
Gene Hattori, now curator of anthropology at the Nevada State Museum, wrote a masterful article on Native Americans living in Virginia City for my volume, Comstock Women: The Making of a Mining Community (1998). He revisited a site he had looked at in the mid-1970s, before gender archaeology was in vogue. True to that time, he had considered the artifacts largely through a masculine perspective. Revisiting the material, he was able to arrive at a distinctly engendered analysis of the artifacts and of the history of Native Americans in the mining district.
A chapter on gender archaeology appears in my book, [Virginia City: Secrets of a Western Past (U of Nebraska 2012)](_URL_0_). It is intended not only to shed light on the archaeology of the American West, but also to provide a model as to how historical archaeology can be useful anywhere in any period.
Edit: I should have added that women's jewelry - particularly earrings - were some other obvious examples of artifacts indicating the presence of women. Often, that was not a shock - when we found them beneath the floorboards of the Piper's Opera House balcony, for example. But when we found them in a saloon site, they helped demonstrate which saloons served women as well as men. Primary documentation indicates that these were respectable women - in the case of Piper's Old Corner Bar, again, for example, which was a fine establishment that would not have tolerated prostitutes plying their trade there. | [
"Gender archaeology is a method of studying past societies through their material culture by closely examining the social construction of gender identities and relations. Gender archaeology itself is based on the idea that nearly all individuals are naturally born to a biological sex (usually either male or female,... |
Was there a scientific reason behind the decision to take a picture of this particular black hole instead of another one ? | Because it's really big. It's so big, that it looks bigger on the sky than closer black holes.
We can talk about the "angular diameter" or "apparent diameter" of an object. This is how big it looks on the sky, rather than how big it really is. For instance, the Moon and the Sun have about the same angular diameter - half a degree - even though the Sun is much much bigger in actual size. This is of course because the Moon is much closer than the Sun.
The super-massive black hole in M87 is about 3000 times bigger than the super-massive black hole in our own galaxy, and it's about 2000 times further away. So its apparent size is a little bit bigger than our own super-massive black hole.
These two are the two black holes with the greatest apparent sizes. They're still working on releasing the image for our own supermassive black hole - Sag A* - but it's a bit trickier because there's more of our galaxy in the way. | [
"studies into black holes with the goal to construct a black hole camera using the Event Horizon Telescope. This would allow testing of general theory of relativity by creating an image of the black hole shadow.\n",
"Such research has attracted much media attention, as black holes have long captured the imaginati... |
why is lifting weights with long arms heavier than with short arms? | It deoends on how you're lifting the weights, but usually the shoulder or the elbow will act as a pivot when lifting dumbbells.
This is because when a force is applied along a rod (arm/forearm) that is fixed to a pivot (shoulder/elbow), the horizontal distance between the pivot and where the force is applied acts as a sort of multiplier, which is strongest when the arm is horizontal (as horizontal distance is greatest).
Long arms have a bigger distance between the hand and elbow, so the weight is acting further from the pivot and requires more energy from the person to hold it in place and lift it in an arc motion. Shorter arms require less energy to lift the weight.
Think of a see-saw. You tip the see-saw the most when you're at the very end of it, furthest from the pivot. Making you seem heavier.
If you're sat at the end, and someone 2x your weight sits halfway along on the other side, the see-saw is balanced.
Doors work in a similar way. Door handles are always at the outer edge of the door (farthest from hinge/pivot) because when you push on the outside, your push is being amplified by the distance from the hinge, so it's easier to open. (Seems to be the opposite to the arm example but it isn't. Your push on the door is the same as the dumbbell's push on the arm. The longer the arm, the more the push is amplified). | [
"Upper arm weights are another method of adding weight close to the core beyond that of a weighted vest, or to add resistance to the shoulders with less danger to the elbows than wrist weights or the added biceps/triceps strain. A problem with these is similar to thigh weights in that those with large biceps, trice... |
why is it bad to defrost/heat up meat twice? | Commercially frozen meat is often flash frozen, this means that the ice crystals formed are small and don't damage the meat cells very much. If you freeze meat at home it's a much slower process, Large ice crystals form an like little spears puncture the cell walls of the meat. This means that when it defrosts the second time you loose a lot of the liquid contents of the cells and are left with spongy protein matrix that formed the cell walls. You loose all taste and moisture when that happens. | [
"People sometimes defrost frozen foods at room temperature because of time constraints or ignorance; such foods should be promptly consumed after cooking or discarded and never be refrozen or refrigerated since pathogens are not killed by the freezing process.\n",
"Due to this phenomenon, microwave ovens set at t... |
Is James Frazer's The Golden Bough 'true?' In other words, are its representations of ancient magic and religion accurate? | [I cross posted this answer on AskSocialScience, but if you want to reply, reply here]
No, it's not. Well, it depends on what part you're talking about, and which edition; it faithful quote ethnographic material in parts, but the overall question is flawed. Check out the article **"When the Bough Breaks" by Jonathan Z. Smith**, which is the best explanation of Frazer's project and why it fails (as well as cataloging the changes that occur over the various editions).
If you want to continue, the next place to go would be **Mary Beard’s “Frazer, Leach, and Virgil: The Popularity (and Unpopularity) of the Golden Bough”** (which is a response to a pretty dumb short article that Edmund Leach called "Reflections on Nemi--Did Frazer get it wrong?", Leach article is unnecessary to read, because it's summarized by Beard, but it's short and if you're interested in the topic, it's at least interesting to read).
It's worth pointing out that [Jonathan Z. Smith](_URL_0_) is maybe the most important living Religious Studies scholar, and almost without a doubt the universal most respected one (he's written on everything "from the Babylon to Jonestown", but this work is based on his PhD thesis at Yale). [Mary Beard](_URL_2_) is a well-respected, if sometimes political controversial, classicist. [Leach](_URL_1_) is an anthropologist who, decades before his article, wrote a great anthropological work called *Political Systems of Highland Burma* (still a classic), so it's kind of sad that his article is so dumb (Mary Beard does a good job explaining why). | [
"Among the most influential elements of the third edition of \"The Golden Bough\" is Frazer's theory of cultural evolution and the place Frazer assigns religion and magic in that theory. Frazer's theory of cultural evolution was not absolute and could reverse, but sought to broadly describe three (or possibly, four... |
Who in Poland was most responsible for letting the partitions of the 18th Century be successful? | A combination of both. The Polish Sejm in the 18th Century was an extremly inefficient system as any member could veto any bill with just 1 vote. Essentially all it took was the Russians paying off a single member to create a destructive deadlock that allowed for the partitions. The Poles also did try to fight off the Russians in 1792 but failed due to the shear scale of the Russian Army that outmatched them in almost every single way.
They tried again in the Kościuszko rising in 1794 which was put down. Then the most successful rising in 1807 created the Duchy of Warsaw which was basically a Napoleonic puppet state. | [
"The First Partition of Poland took place in 1772 as the first of three partitions that ended the existence of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth by 1795. Growth in the Russian Empire's power, threatening the Kingdom of Prussia and the Habsburg Monarchy, was the primary motive behind this first partition. Frederick... |
Brits in the IRA | It depends what you mean by "Brits", technically during 1916 and the War of Independence we were all Brits! James Connolly was born in Scotland to Irish parents and was one of the leaders of the 1916 Rising, Sir Roger Casement was, as hit title suggests, knighted for diplomatic service to the Crown. There were many members of the "Ascendency", the Anglo-Irish elite, on the Republican side, such as Maud Gonne. Constance Markievicz had technically lost her British citizenship on marrying Count Casimir Markievicz. Erskine Childers was born in England into an Anglo-Irish family and served in the Boar War and the First World War before being elected to Dáil Éireann and becoming one of de Valera's most trusted companions before his execution in the Irish Civil War.
The Irish Volunteers had a unit at Kings Cross in London and these travelled to Ireland before conscription was imposed in 1916. They included many Irish born members like Michael Collins who had been working in London but also many of Irish descent like Joe Good, born in Soho, who would later write a biography called "Enchanted by Dreams". These London Irish stayed on the grounds of Joseph Plunkett's estate and became known as the Kimmage Garrison.
All of these of course have some link to Ireland. There are only a handful I can think of that had no actual ancestral link. Not British but a passing Swede and Finn took part in the 1916 Rising, [I posted about this previously](_URL_0_) on r/ireland. A small group of men defected from the Black and Tans and the British Army during the War of Independence and joined the Irish Republican Army, most notably Rudge Hathaway. This was the alias used by Reginald Walter Stenning. Born in Middlesex he deserted from the East Lancashire Regiment in the summer of 1921, around the time of the Truce, and joined the IRA in county Kerry in 1922. He fought on the Anti-Treaty side of the Civil War and was captured and executed by Pro-Treaty forces on the 25th of April 1923, only a few weeks before the conflict ended. If you search for "Hathaway" on the [Military Archives](_URL_1_) page you will find a copy of an application by his parents for an IRA pension which was refused. | [
"The Official Irish Republican Army or Official IRA (OIRA; ) was an Irish republican paramilitary group whose goal was to remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and create a \"workers' republic\" encompassing all of Ireland. It emerged in December 1969, shortly after the beginning of the Troubles, when the... |
Why do small children seem to like the color red so much? | This is actually a very interesting question. Newborns show a preference for red over other colors (as measured by preferential looking time) ([Adams, 1987](_URL_0_); [Bornstein, 1976](_URL_1_); although see [Zemach et al. (2007)](_URL_2_) < - sorry, couldn't find non-paywalled versions of some of these). (Note, I think the latter two studies are in 4-month-olds, not newborns).
A recent study ([Franklin et al., 2010](_URL_3_)) examined variability in hue preference in 4-month-olds and found that around half of the variability can be accounted for by "red-green" and, to a lesser extent, "blue-yellow" color components. In other words, perhaps color preferences are just the result of the natural development of color opponency systems. However, as far as I know, there are no (or very small) differences in color sensitivities in infants corresponding to the 3 color channels (S-, M-, and L-cones).
An interesting tidbit: after "black" and "white", "red" is one of the first color words that is added to a language (Berlin & Kay, 1969). That is, not all languages have all / equivalent color words / categories. Some only have "black" and "white". For languages that have 3 color terms, the third term to be added is often "red".
Edit: tl;dr this preference has been observed in experiments but I don't think there is a convincing explanation at the moment | [
"The age when infants begin showing a preference for color is at about 12 weeks old. Generally, children prefer the colors red/pink and blue, and cool colors are preferred over warm colors. Purple is a color favored more by girls than by boys. Color perception of children 3–5 years of age is an indicator of their d... |
what if all people with the HIV virus died ? | I knew it had been asked before (the reddit search is worthless), here you go:
_URL_0_ | [
"In 2008, approximately 1.2 million people in the United States had HIV; 20% did not realize that they were infected. Over the 10-year period from 1999 to 2008, it resulted in about 17,500 deaths per year.\n",
"In 2008 in the United States approximately 1.2 million people were living with HIV, resulting in about ... |
water damage is horrible for houses. so what about when constructing a house, and it's completely exposed for weeks, and it rains? | Water damage is bad because the house traps moisture in, allowing mold to grow and wood to rot.
When a house is incomplete and exposed to air, it is able to dry completely. | [
"Water damage describes a large number of possible losses caused by water intruding where it will enable attack of a material or system by destructive processes such as rotting of wood, growth, rusting of steel, de-laminating of materials such as plywood, and many others.\n",
"Urban flooding can cause chronically... |
Did the Nazi's ever destroy ancient and/or culturally significant buildings and sites in the same way ISIS are currently going about destroying important buildings in Syria, such as Palmyra? | Yes, they did. The destruction of monuments, artwork,etc. by the Nazis took two different forms. Either they were doing it to humiliate/culturally destroy an occupied people, or they were destroying German monuments/artwork/etc. to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. Its also worth noting that the Nazis destroyed art works and cultural monuments that felt they were dangerous/subversive/or degenerate; so works from Jews, works depicting nudity, not properly playing up to Aryan ideals could all be destroyed by the Nazis; but that was mostly related to artwork and music.
In occupied Poland, Polish musicians and artists were suppressed; as well Polish monuments were destroyed, such as the famous Polish monument to poet Adam Mickiewicz in Krakow. Here is a picture of the [recreated statue](_URL_3_) and here is the picture of the Nazis [pulling it down](_URL_9_).
During the Warsaw uprising a number of Polish cultural and historical buildings were burned. [Including the Palace of the Four Winds](_URL_7_), [The Brühl Palace](_URL_8_), [Sigismund's column](_URL_2_) a monument dedicated to one of the Vasa kings (same dynasty as Gustavus Adolphus), and [Church of the Visitation of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary](_URL_4_) which had stood since the early 1400s, although it was reconstructed by the Polish government after the war. There were more monuments destroyed during Germany's planned destruction of Warsaw and these were just a few that stood out.
When the Nazis invaded France, the only culturally signifcant building they destroyed as far as I know was the [Glade of the Armistice](_URL_0_) which depicted the triumph of France over Germany in WWI. Naturally Hitler had it destroyed, and the rail car in which the armistice was signed was brought back to Germany (although not before Hitler had the French sign a new armistice in the rail car).
Now we move onto the monuments destroyed by the Nazis as Germany was retreating. A giant bronze statue of Paul von Hindenburg located Hohenstein (modern day Poland) was destroyed by the Germans; as was the [Tannenberg memorial](_URL_6_) where Hindenburg's remains were kept was also partially demolished. Likewise in Austria, the Nazis set fire to several old monuments and buildings, a good example being the [Schloss Immendorf castle](_URL_5_), which was burned by the SS in 1945.
As the Nazis retreated from Florence during the Italian campaign, they destroyed around 1/3 of the old Medieval city. Including many old bridges, houses, buildings, etc. Here's a picture of British officers [viewing parts of the damage](_URL_1_)
I don't know that you can necessarily compare the Nazi destruction to ISIS', but certainly the Nazis weren't exactly the best caretakers when it came to monuments and buildings, although it seems more strategically motivated than ISIS' which seems largely religious. | [
"It became known on 4 September 2015 that ISIL had destroyed three of the best preserved tower tombs including the Tower of Elahbel. On 5 October 2015, news media reported that ISIL was destroying buildings with no religious meaning, including the monumental arch. On 20 January 2017, news emerged that the militants... |
physical mimicry in nature | Evolution occurs by natural selection.
What this means is that, in every generation, some individuals will reproduce and some will not. In this case the key point is whether or not each individual was caught by a predator before it had a chance to do the deed.
Therefore it follows that a creature which, by pure random mutation, has a trait which reduces its risk of being caught by a predator, is more likely to reproduce and pass that trait on to the next generation.
Let's take the frogs- one frogs in one generation was born with a mutation which made them, in some small way, blend in with nearby leaves. That frog didn't get eaten so that slight 'leafiness' gets passed on.
The survival advantage persists so the frogs with that trait expand and multiply, and eventually the whole species looks a bit leafy.
Then a frog in a new generation has a mutation which makes it, by chance, look even more leafy. That frog has even more of an advantage against predators, so again the trait spreads through the population.
Following this path you can see that, over millions of years and millions of repetitions of this cycle I've described, the stacking of these leafy mutation would eventually lead to this frog species looking near indistinguishable from the leaf. | [
"In evolutionary biology, mimicry is an evolved resemblance between an organism and another object, often an organism of another species. Mimicry may evolve between different species, or between individuals of the same species. Often, mimicry functions to protect a species from predators, making it an antipredator ... |
how do you distinguish when to use one hyphen and when to use two? (- vs --) | There's actually no such thing as "using two hyphens" -- despite the fact that I just did it!
Using two hyphens is a hack to approximate a dash, since most computer keyboards don't have a key for dashes.
A hyphen is used to join words ("a dog-friendly cafe") or sometimes numbers, as in a phone number ("555-1212"), and they are also used in typeset text to break multi-syllabic words when a fixed-width line needs to be wrapped (which I can't demonstrate on a variable width Reddit page).
There are two forms of dashes: an en-dash ( & ndash; ) and an em-dash ( & mdash; ). An en-dash is slightly longer than a hyphen and an em-dash is the longest of the three. They're named that because traditionally an en-dash was the width of a capital N and the em-dash the width of a capital M.
In typography, each has different uses. For example, an en-dash would be used when representing a range of pages, such as "pages 33 & ndash;41."
The em-dash is most frequently used in places where a parentheses or color would be used.
For example, take the first sentence I wrote in this post:
> There's actually no such thing as "using two hyphens" -- despite the fact that I just did it!
Typographically speaking, the correct way to do that would be to use an em-dash without any spaces around it:
> There's actually no such thing as "using two hyphens" & mdash;despite the fact that I just did it!
But since there's no character on the keyboard for that, I had to plug in an HTML entity code to make the em-dash appear. That's a hassle, so when writing in a text editor or input box on a webpage, people use two hyphens (--) instead. | [
"A single hyphen is used to indicate a compound. What constitutes a compound is controversial, with some authors equating it to a \"word\" in English, and others not willing to limit it to the English concept of a word. Examples from POJ include \"forty\", \"circus\", and \"recover (from illness)\". The rule-based ... |
how does someone determine if a company is a shell company or not? | If the company has no registered assets and doesn't do any business, its a shell. | [
"A shell corporation is a company or corporation that exists only on paper and has no office and no employees, but may have a bank account or may hold passive investments or be the registered owner of assets, such as intellectual property, or ships. Shell companies may be registered to the address of a company that... |
Is development of muscle memory partially performed outside the brain? | I think the answer is no.
As far as I’m aware there is no evidence of neuroplasticity in the neuromuscular junction or within the muscle.
There might be something to say about muscle development (in size/strength and vascularity) and that may contribute to fluent performance of the task (eg playing guitar as per your example) but other than that no. It’s all in the brain, mostly cerebellum. | [
"Muscle memory is a form of procedural memory that involves consolidating a specific motor task into memory through repetition, which has been used synonymously with motor learning. When a movement is repeated over time, a long-term muscle memory is created for that task, eventually allowing it to be performed with... |
How does an electric arc choose it’s path in air (ex: a lightning bolt or Tesla coil)? | First, watch the video linked by /u/sxbennett - it's an amazing video showing what happens in a lightning strike. I've shown that same video to many others in the past to illustrate what's going on.
But in more detail: The air in our atmosphere is non-conducting in general, so charges can build up in two separate locations without them immediately cancelling out due to current flow.
However, if you apply a sufficiently high voltage to air (or any other gas), the story changes. In every gas, there are some random electrons floating around that aren't bound to an atom and under the influence of an electric field, these electrons will accelerate. As they fly away, they'll bump into molecules in the gas, lose part of their kinetic energy and then start over again. If the electric field is strong enough, then these electrons can gain enough energy between these random bumps to strike a molecule hard enough to knock an additional electron free from the molecule, leaving behind a positive ion (this process is called "impact ionization"). At that point you've got 2 free electrons accelerating in the field. These will free more electrons and so forth.
This phenomenon is called an "electron avalanche" and it happens whenever the electric field is above a certain threshold value, called the breakdown voltage. The field between a thundercloud and the ground doesn't exceed this breakdown voltage, which is a good thing, because otherwise we might get large scale ionization of the air.
So how do things get started then? Previously, I made no statements regarding the profile of the electric field and implied that it was mostly homogeneous. However, various objects can locally distort the electric field. In a cloud, ice particles can have sharp tips that function as a needle. Directly around such a sharp tip, the electric field is greatly enhanced, possibly to values above the breakdown voltage.
So you have a field that is generally below breakdown, but with certain areas where there is something that locally enhances the field above the breakdown voltage. In such an area, a stray electron can set off an electron avalanche, creating a large amount of ionization. Since electrons are much lighter than ions, the electric field, electrons will move much faster than ions under the influence of the electric field. In fact, in the timescales involved, one can assume the ions are essentially stationary.
What happens now is a somewhat complicated process where the blob of free electrons moves with the electric field, leaving the ions behind. This means that the area is no longer electrically neutral since the negatively charged electrons become separated from the positively charged ions.
This process results in the formation of a structure that resembles a finger: an elongated channel with a plasma that is mostly electrically neutral with a curved tip that contains a net charge. This charged tip replaces the sharp edge of an ice particle (or any other sharp object) in creating the local enhancement of the electric field and will generate more electron avalanches ahead of it and this process causes the tip to move forward and the channel to extend.
This process is visualized somewhat in [this image](_URL_0_) which depicts the electric field of this system in a computer simulation at various time steps.
In the space away from the tip, the field is about 20 kV/cm, which is below the breakdown voltage in air (~32 kV/cm). At the tip of the channel, the field is very much enhanced to well above the breakdown voltage, causing a large amount of ionization. Meanwhile, inside the channel, there's a plasma with a large amount of both positive and negative charge from previous ionization events, making the channel highly conductive, but also reducing the electric field. These propagating "fingers" are called "streamers".
Now, away from the small scale processes and back to lightning. What happens in a lightning strike is that a cloud of these streamers springs forth and propagates through the air. Following this is a larger structure called a "leader" which is essentially an upscaled version of a streamer. The tip of the leader has many streamers extending from it to create a path of ionization. The leader is the thing you see in the aforementioned video.
Leaders often propagate in steps, where it propagates for a while, then stops and moments later restarts, potentially in a different direction or with additional branches. The exact mechanism of the stop-start process is not well understood, but it's assumed that the leader stops when the tip becomes to smeared out, reducing its ability to enhance the electric field ahead of it. Once more charge flows in from the original source (e.g. the cloud) through the already established channel, it may restart again.
Once the leader connects to the other side (either directly or through another leader that emerged from the other side), a conducting channel is formed between positive and negative sides. At that point, charges can flow freely and this results in a large current rushing through the channel. This current rapidly heats the gas in the channel and causes it to emit a lot of light. The light we see as the lightning bolt, while the rapid heating causes a thermal shockwave that we hear as thunder.
The path of the lightning bolt is determined by the path taken by the leader. The actual path is very hard to predict, because while a lightning strike is a phenomenon with a lengthscale of an order of magnitude of a kilometer, it is affected by fluctuations at very small scales. In general, the path will prefer following the direction of the electric field and in the case of a lightning strike that's simply vertical. However, various atmospheric properties (such as local temperature variations) can make certain branches of the leader propagate more easily than others. And once a leader is propagating in a certain direction, it tends to stay its course. That is, until it comes to a stop. Once the next step of the leader starts, the direction may change.
So there's no real way to predict the path of such a discharge, because the path is determined both by local fluctuations of gas conditions as well as by a certain amount of "randomness". The same holds for discharges from Tesla coils, because the mechanism of action of these discharges is fairly similar. | [
"The various shapes of electric arcs are emergent properties of non-linear patterns of current and electric field. The arc occurs in the gas-filled space between two conductive electrodes (often made of tungsten or carbon) and it results in a very high temperature, capable of melting or vaporizing most materials. A... |
What are the physics behind different baseball pitches? | My time to shine! There are really extensive posts on the net about it if you just google Magnus Force Baseball, but considering I had something to do with the matter recently, I may as well give you a TL;DR.
Essentially, when you throw a ball-like object without any spin, the ball (theoretically) is under an equal drag on all the sides which simply slows it down based on the ball's speed and the drag coefficient of the ball (0.47 for a sphere) and cross-sectional area (which, being a sphere, is equal to pi*r²) (plus other stuff like viscosity of the fluid, but this doesn't really matter for the sake of this discussion). Most of this has been discovered experimentally (even the drag coefficient of many shapes has to be experimentally tested before, because it's pretty hard to calculate without any experiment to back you up), but drag is mostly due to two factors: form drag and skin friction. The form drag is due to the air "hitting" the front of the object and having to "move away" (and, as such, it's at his max for an object with a flat surface); the skin friction is regular friction between the sides of the object and air.
If, however, the ball is spinning, there's a main difference: the spinning of the ball increases skin friction on one side (the one moving against the flow of air), but decreases on the other side. This causes the air to apply a force on the ball from the side with the most friction to the one with the least friction (the air "hit" from the side with the most friction tries to get back up, pushing the ball).
I hope it was clear enough: aerodynamics is a pretty complicated matter, and going into details would have definitely made this overkill. | [
"Pitches in different parts of the world have different characteristics. The nature of the pitch plays an important role in the actual game: it may have a significant influence on team selection and other aspects. As the pitch deteriorates throughout a match, this can also have considerable influence on the success... |
Why does silica gel absorb water so effectively, and why only water? | I usually work with proteins dissolved in water, but I imagine it is approximately the same mechanism at play.
So first, silica gel absorb tons of water because it has a huge specific surface area. We're talking about 800 m^2 /g of silica gel. Our lungs pale in comparison. When something gets wet, water is usually not *in* the object per say, but at the surface of the molecular structure. So how much surface you have at the molecular level is crucial.
Then, why does it work so well with water and not with other things ? Water is a really small, really polar molecules. The [molecular structure of silica gel](_URL_0_) is particular : you see how it presents -OH groups on the surface ? Those are polar (strictly speaking, the C-O bound is polar) and water loves those. Water molecules arrange themselves, forming a mono-molecular layer, very organized and very stable (it actually behaves as solid water). Because of the geometry of the water molecule, another stable layer can get [on top of it](_URL_1_). And you can add lots of layers likes this, just a bit less stable every time.
With methanol or ethanol, the alcohol group attach to the gel in the same way, forming a first layer of molecule. But then, the polar group (-OH) is hidden by the rest of the molecule, carbon chains being really non-polar. So the next layer is much much less stable.
Maybe a molecule like ethylene glycol (car anti-freeze), with an alcool group on both side, would work better, but I'm not quite sure what color is the flame. Also, it is moderately toxic, so be careful. | [
"Silica gel's high specific surface area (around 800 m/g) allows it to adsorb water readily, making it useful as a desiccant (drying agent). Silica gel is often described as \"absorbing\" moisture, which may be appropriate when the gel's microscopic structure is ignored, as in silica gel packs or other products. Ho... |
How long does it take sedimentary rock to form? | Hello, so this is a great question but the answer is hard to pin down.
In general, there are a two processes that go into forming a sedimentary rock:
1) Lithification (i.e. deposition and compaction, weathering etc)
The deposition of material which will go on to form the later rock. This could be sand, silt, shell/skeletal fragments, or other chemicals (e.g. bacterial ooze, brine, etc). These are laid down at different rates, depending upon the environment. The material is compacted as more material is added on top, but essentially the sediment grains are largely unchanged.
2) Diagenesis (temperature and pressure)
Over time (how much depends on the depositional environment), more sediments are added on top and the sediments become more compacted and become hotter as they are buried within the Earth's crust. At some point, diagenesis occurs (whereby the sediments change physically or chemically). Here, the space between grains is often reduced (as grains can get flattened, and re-precipitation of diagenetic fluids within pore spaces occurs). At this point the sediments are now a sedimentary rock. Tectonic or erosional processes can expose this rock at the surface, where it can be admired by geologists.
N.B. If pressure and temperature are increased to a much higher extent, the rock can then become a "metamorphic" rock. The boundary between sedimentary and metamorphic is a bit blurred, but essentially metamorphic rocks have widespread change in mineralogy and texture associated with the pressure-temperature conditions, whereas sedimentary rocks are still chemically and texturally similar to the sediments which formed them.
So, to take your example:
The length of time to form a sedimentary rock is a function of both the depositional rate of the original sediments, and the length of time it takes the sediment package to undergo diagenesis. This can vary widly depending upon the environment. For your example, the flooding of the depression and the deposition of silt, clay and sand may have happened very quickly (e.g. 1cm a year). However, to bury that sediment to diagenetic depths (e.g. 1km) would take 100,000 years as a minimum (1000m / 0.01 m yr-1 = 100,000yrs). This is a "best-case" scenario which assumes that the flood-rate stays the same, and that the river follows the same course and is able to flood the same depression every single year, and that weathering/erosion of deposits is nil. In reality, to enable that same river to contantly flood the same region would probably require \~ 1km worth of subsisdence at the location of the floodplain over 100,000 years. In reality, it would probably take between 1-10 million years.
& #x200B;
TL;DR : sediments need to undergo diagenesis to become a sedimentary rock; the flooding and deposition of silt might be rapid, but the burial process might take a much longer time.
& #x200B; | [
"Many rocks now making up Earth's crust formed less than 100 million (1) years ago; however, the oldest known mineral grains are about 4.4 billion (4.4) years old, indicating that Earth has had a solid crust for at least 4.4 billion years.\n",
"The oldest dated rocks on Earth, as an aggregate of minerals that hav... |
the rules of rugby | I'll do what I can for you here, but there are some intricacies that will probably be missed:
In general, you can't throw the ball in front of you, only directly to your side or a little bit backwards. This is to make you carry the ball across the field, or even to kick it. This is why you see the team with the ball creating a diagonal on the field: by the time the ball gets to them, they should be running full speed and hopefully run right through the defense.
Points are scored for "tries" which are like American Football touchdowns, only they actually have to touch the ball down in the try area. These are worth 5 points. If you run into the try area and drop the ball, then it doesn't count as a try! You can also score bonus points after scoring a try (similar to an extra point in American Football) and here, you have to kick the ball through the uprights from the same spot on the try line where you crossed. I know that sounds tricky: say you score a try right in the middle of the uprights. Great! Now, you can bring the ball back out as far as you want and you have an easy kick that is worth 2 extra points. You'll probably get this since you're in such good position. If you score a try way over on the side, you can bring the ball out far, but you have a crummy angle and you're far away from the uprights so it'll be very hard for you to get those extra points. This is why you will sometimes see players even after they've crossed the try line, keep running to the middle before touching the ball down; to give the kicker better position. You can also score during normal play by kicking through the uprights (worth 3 points) and this only counts if the ball touches the ground before you kick it. So, you can drop the ball and when it bounces, kick it through the uprights OR if someone does something bad to you and you get a free kick, you can also try and kick it through the uprights.
The scrum is like a big shoving match where your friend puts the ball in play and you have an advantage, because he's your friend so you kind of know when to expect the ball. Even though the rules are that your friend has to put the ball into the scrum perfectly straight so that both teams have a fair chance, you have a bit of an advantage because he's your friend. When the ball is in the scrum, there is a big pushing match to try and get over top of the ball. At the same time, everyone in the scrum tries to keep the ball in between their legs so that no one else can touch it. If the ball comes out, then the big pushing match isn't really helping the team any more so it stops. If the people in the scrum are really good, they can push the other team back AND keep the ball in between their legs and the other team won't really be able to stop them. The guys that you see on the outside of the scrum are called the scrum halfs (this isn't super important but it's a pretty easy position to identify). These two guys (on opposite teams) have the job of putting the ball into the scrum and taking it out and giving it to their team. So when the ball really close to the outside of the scrum on their team's side, or when the guys in the scrum kind of kick it back out to them, they pick it up and decide what to do with it.
Now, the person with the ball will run forward, run backward, kick the ball down field, pass it off, whatever, so long as they have the end goal of scoring on the other end of the field. If they get tackled with the ball, you have a "breakdown". What happens now is that each team tries to push over top of the breakdown and keep the ball on their side. Like a scrum, you want the ball to be behind your team and someone (usually the scrum half again) will come by and pick it up. In a breakdown, you are not allowed to run around the side and pick up the ball. If there are two opposing players there standing over the tackled person on the ground, you have to push them back over the ball so that it is on your team's side before your team can play it. This is why MOST of the time the team that gets tackled keeps the ball after being tackled: the person on the ground can move the ball closer to their team's side and they had friends close by to push over top right away.
Lineouts are like the rugby version of throw-ins. Instead of choosing where to throw the ball though, it has to be perfectly straight in from where the ball went out. This is to give each team a fair chance to get the ball, but like the scrum, you have an advantage when your friend is throwing in the ball because you know what to expect. Sometimes you'll see on or two people being lifted up high to try and catch the ball. this can be a huge advantage! If you're lifted up high and the other team is just standing on the ground, it will be much easier for you to grab the ball out of the air and hold on to it. When you have the ball (even in the air) you can throw it away to your teammate or you can be lowered back down and your team can try to push together like a tiny scrum, or move the ball out wide to the players farther away from you; you have options.
Just for fun, I'll run through what it might look like in a game (I think I've covered most of the general things that happen):
So we have two teams, Red and Blue playing a game of rugby. The Red team is kicking the ball first. So one of the players on the Red team (usually a good kicker) starts off by dropping the ball on the ground and kicks it far into Blue's end. A blue player tries to catch the ball, but he makes a mistake and accidentally hits it forward. Since it's against the rules to throw the ball forward, even accidentally, the referee calls for a scrum. The Red team has the ball here, and the scrum half puts the ball into the middle of the scrum. Right away, both teams start pushing against each other, but Red is a little bit quicker because they had a better idea of when the ball was coming in. The Red team is able to keep the ball in between their feet and push Blue back a little bit. While the ball is still in the scrum, no one outside is moving, just waiting for the ball to come out, and then suddenly Reds scrum half picks up the ball and throws it to his friend beside him. Unfortunately, this red player gets tackled. But, he is quick and turns his body over on the ground to give the ball over to his team much easier. Because they are still so close to the scrum, there are lots of players to help push over their tackled friend and the the ball, and Red is able to keep the ball without blue picking it up. The scrum half again picks up the ball and this time throws it REALLY far, all the way to the furthest guy, who catches it and runs into the try area, touches it down, and scores a try! YEA RED! Red's kicker now takes the ball back out onto the field directly from where the try was scored until he thinks he can make the kick based on the angle to the uprights in the middle of the field. Red's kicker lets the ball bounce before kicking and comes close, but it was a very difficult position to score from. Now Red is up 5-0 to Blue and play will continue with Red kicking to Blue just like before.
Hope that last bit helps tie everything together. Cheers | [
"Rugby union, widely known simply as rugby, is a contact team sport which originated in England in the first half of the 19th century. One of the two codes of rugby football, it is based on running with the ball in hand. In its most common form, a game is between two teams of 15 players using an oval-shaped ball on... |
how do dictionaries determine the earliest known use of a word? | It's the first "known" use, so they take the first use that they are aware of and put it in. There's no guarantee it's the actual earliest use of the word. If an earlier use of the word shows up, then they will update the entry in the next edition. Most of the first known uses come from old documents. | [
"The earliest dictionaries in the English language were glossaries of French, Spanish or Latin words along with their definitions in English. The word \"dictionary\" was invented by an Englishman called John of Garland in 1220 — he had written a book \"Dictionarius\" to help with Latin \"diction\". An early non-alp... |
Why does a piece of cloth act as such a good filter against odors and aromas and gases? Wouldn't the airborn molecules easily pass through the pores? | A piece of regular cloth often *isn't* a good filter because a lot of molecules, viruses, even bacteria can get through. If you're in a hospital and dealing with a patient with some airborne diseases you need to wear specially constructed masks that are relying on trapping droplets more than individual molecules. | [
"A particulate air filter is a device composed of fibrous or porous materials which removes solid particulates such as dust, pollen, mold, and bacteria from the air. Filters containing an adsorbent or catalyst such as charcoal (carbon) may also remove odors and gaseous pollutants such as volatile organic compounds ... |
in cases of mass shootings with one perpetrator, why do witnesses often report seeing multiple attackers? | Gunshots are very loud. That means that they echo in situations where other sounds wouldn't have audible echos. They hear shots from several directions, and tell that to the police, who decide to play it safe and act as though there are multiple attackers. | [
"Because of the layout of the complex and the fact that the attacks took place in different locations, no witness saw the entire sequence of events. Investigation by police and prosecutors showed that approximately a dozen individuals had heard or seen portions of the attack, though none saw or was aware of the ent... |
if families like rockefeller and rothschild have are famous for being rich and powerful, how come none of their members appear on rich lists online? | I think there are a couple reasons. First, old families get very adept at hiding their assets. Second, over time the wealth becomes very diffused so not one person holds that much money (i.e. the Vanderbilts). Sort of the opposite of the primogenitor laws of England where all the money stayed concentrated with one person.
There are some families like the Kennedys that keep all of their wealth in a family trust that they all draw on, but not so many are like that. | [
"While the Rothschild family rose to the status of the wealthiest family of bankers in the 19th century, their wealth was distributed among a number of family members, preventing them from appearing among the wealthiest individuals. The richest among the Rothschilds was the head of its English branch—Nathan Mayer R... |
the process of applying to and going to a four year college. | Those are some good questions! It's been a few years since I've had to complete the whole process, but I'll do my best.
In order to go to college, you need to do a few things. You need to either be on your way to graduating high school, have already graduated high school, or have a piece of paper called a GED that is very similar to having graduated high school. Colleges usually won't let you apply if you haven't done one of those, so that's step number one!
Step number two is picking which college you actually want to go do. Most colleges have lots of information available about the types of things that they can teach you very well and what sort of awards they have, because they make money by you going there so they try really hard to advertise for you. Sometimes, colleges will even send you information before you start looking for them! When you are looking for a college, you'll want to look at a lot of things. What do you want to learn? Where do you want to live? How much will it cost? How long will it take? What sort of other things can you do at that college? Those are just a few questions, but there could be a lot more! Most colleges are willing to answer these questions for you, and if you already have friends going to a college that you're thinking about, they can help a lot too!
Step number three is actually applying! Colleges will generally send you applications if you ask for them, and then you get to sit down and write a lot of information to send back to them. Usually there is a sort of fee associated with applying, since colleges like to make money and it costs money to pay people to look at your information and figure out if they want you to come to their college.
Once you've applied, you get to wait and wait and wait and wait and wait until you get a letter. The letter will either tell you that you've been accepted or not. Usually the acceptance letter will make them sound very excited - almost as excited as you - and the rejection letter will make them sound very sorry that "we are not currently looking for applicants of your type" or "we only have a limited number of positions for students and they have all been filled." If you've been accepted, then you get to fill out some more paperwork, talk to an adviser and eventually you get to start classes!
College can be paid a lot of different ways.
* Some people have saved up a lot of money in the past (or have had money saved for them), and they will use that money to pay for college all on their own.
* Some people will fill out a lot of applications to different organizations to get something called "scholarships," which are where other people will pay some money for you to go to college. Scholarships usually tell you that you have to keep good grades to keep them, so be a very good student if you get scholarships!
* Some people will talk to the government or the school and get grants, which is where those organizations pay some or all of your college money. These (and scholarships) are usually limited to a certain number of people, so if you want to do these options you should apply as early as possible and to as many as possible.
* Some people will go ask a bank or another organization to let them borrow money to pay for college. These are student loans, and a lot of people take these out. Be careful if you take student loans, since they are very hard to get rid of and can get out of control very quickly. There are a lot of laws in place to make sure that people have to pay student loans no matter what, so it's usually good to try these as a last resort.
Whether or not you'll need to take the SAT depends on the college. Lots of colleges really want you to take them, and some colleges won't let you apply without having taken them. On the other hand, some colleges will let you take another test called the ACT instead, and some colleges will *only* accept the ACT! I've heard of some colleges that don't require either test and allow you to take placement exams, but I can't say for certain. It's probably safest to take the SAT anyway.
I hope this helps! Do you have any more questions that I can answer? | [
"The application process takes considerable time and planning since it involves multiple steps, with choices to be made and deadlines to be met. Students file separate applications to each school, although the Common Application expedites the process in many instances. Most undergraduate institutions admit students... |
There has been an increase in electric car sales. How do we dispose of their batteries, once their lifespan ends? And would disposing batteries release less pollutants compared to gas engines? | Lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars get worn out when they can only retain about 80% of their charge. That being said these batteries are still perfectly good for other applications like backing up solar or wind power. So these batteries are first repurposed once they can no longer be used for electric cars.
After that these batteries are recyclable when they go end of life as well. Recycling of Li-I is still a new process and is under development. In the years to come we will get as good at recycling these batteries as we are at recycling lead acid batteries. An example of existing technology to recycle Li-I batteries is below:
Eventually discharging supersaturates lithium cobalt oxide, leading to the production of lithium oxide. Li^+ + e^- + LiCoO2 - > Li2O + CoO
A potential recycling process would take the degraded particles from the cathodes, pressurize them in a hot alkaline & lithium salt solution, then heat them. The result would product particles to make new cathodes.
More options for recycling are listed [in this study.](_URL_0_) | [
"A study published in 2011 by the Belfer Center, Harvard University, found that the gasoline costs savings of plug-in electric cars over the vehicles’ lifetimes do not offset their higher purchase prices. This finding was estimated comparing their lifetime net present value at 2010 purchase and operating costs for ... |
When you are developing in the womb, how does your body know which way is up? | Hopefully, a developmental biologist will chime in and give you a more detailed response. Until then, I'll give it a go.
There are a number of different strategies that organisms use to develop developmental axes - for us chordates, the primary axes are dorsal/ventral (front/back) and anterior/posterior (head to tail(bone)). In the earliest stages of development (the first few cell divisions after the fertilization of the embryo), these axes don't matter much. But at some point, an event called [gastrulation](_URL_0_) occurs, and this establishes the anterior/posterior axis (the initial invagination will eventually be the anus, and where it opens up on the other side of the embryo will be the mouth).
All of these developmental processes depend on the expression of genes, and there are incredibly intricate programs of expression that actually determine how/when and where things will be expressed. Your question is specifically how does this happen. I believe in humans the patterns of gene expression are determined from the point of fertilization - the place where the sperm initially gets into the egg causes a differential gene expression program that is carried through cell divisions until the time that it matters. Once the program is set, a series of feed back loops enforce that arrangement.
Hox genes are one set of transcription factors - proteins that regulate gene expression - that are very important in development. Different Hox genes get turned on in different cells depending on the stage of development and the tissue type, but for more details we'll need to get a developmental biologist in on this. | [
"In later pregnancy, a complex motion called \"stepping\" develops. This movement consists of circular \"bicycling\" motion of legs, which helps the fetus move to a head-down position in preparation for birth.\n",
"Fetal movement refers to motion of a fetus caused by its own muscle activity. Locomotor activity be... |
Is it possible to turn electricity (energy) into matter? (metal, for example) | Particle colliders such as the LHC are essentially extremely inefficient machines that turn electricity into particles. | [
"Conventional nuclear reactions such as nuclear fission and nuclear fusion convert relatively small amounts of matter only indirectly into useful energy, such as electricity or rocket thrust. For electricity production released nuclear energy in the form of heat is typically used to boil water to turn a turbine-gen... |
If the Hashemites trace their ancestry to Fatimah and Ali, why is the King of Jordan a Sunni Muslim? | I assume you meant 'descendants'.
While Shia Islam began with the followers of Ali, Ali was and remains a celebrated figure within Sunni Islam, just like Peter within Protestant Christianity despite Catholics believing him first Pope. | [
"BULLET::::- It is the Islamic tradition that Muhammad, as an Arab, is descended from Abraham's son Ishmael. Jewish tradition also equates the descendants of Ishmael, Ishmaelites, with Arabs, while the descendants of Isaac by Jacob, who was also later known as Israel, are the Israelites.\n",
"Fatimah bint Muhamma... |
In the time when maps were still rare enough that most people had ever seen one, how much did the average peasant know about the geography of the surrounding world?(their province, island, nation or continent). | FYI, here's a similar recent post (I'm sure there have been others, but this is the only one I could find quickly)
[I'm a peasant living in 16th century Britain, what do I know of the world outside my village?](_URL_0_)
edit: finished my sentence! | [
"Approximately 500 maps are known between the late-1400s to the mid-1800s; the significant increase in number is due to the advent of the printing press, and few of the mapmakers had travelled to Jerusalem – most of the maps were either copies of others' maps or were imaginary (i.e. based on reading of religious te... |
why does the smell of heated food spread easily? | A scent is actually physical particles that have spread out into the air and get inhaled into your nose.
Hotter gases or molecules have more energy, and move around much more quickly.
That means that the hot food item is sending off more excited particles into the air than a similar cold item.
Because these particles are hotter, they bounce around more quickly and manage to diffuse into the house faster.
| [
"Substances such as ethanol and capsaicin cause a burning sensation by inducing a trigeminal nerve reaction together with normal taste reception. The sensation of heat is caused by the food's activating nerves that express TRPV1 and TRPA1 receptors. Some such plant-derived compounds that provide this sensation are ... |
what's the big deal about the internet of things? why do people think it will change the world, and why do they think it will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars? | It means extending the configurability, extensibility, easy of access, and all the other perks of the Internet to everyday objects. It'll be amazing. Right now it's trivial to integrate your email to your cellphone, or some app to some other service. Imagine your bed talking to your central heating, your coffee machine, your vehicle, and your shower, so that as soon as you wake up, your body tells your coffee machine, so your cofee is ready, and after you shower (shower is ready and at the right temperature as soon as you finish your coffee), your vehicle is already turned on and warmed up, ready to go. Imagine your fridge notifying you of what you are missing, etc, etc, etc. | [
"By 2014, over three billion people had gained access to the Internet from around the world. This is a major advance in worldwide access to information and knowledge, but translates to only 42 per cent of the world, leaving most of the world without access. Even those with access are often constrained by technical ... |
if you were an English peasant in 1100 (after the Norman conquest) would you life likely be in anyway substantially worse or different than it would have been if lived in the same place 100 years before (before the Norman conquest)? | Ooh! I always like it when something comes up I can answer. I'm going to leave judgement value behind and mainly answer a long the lines of what changed after the Norman Conquest.
Now the historiography has been a real long one but around the 20th century, around the rise of inter-disciplinarianism between history and other fields, the debate shifted from the *changes* the Normans actaully made to questions like *'to what extent did they change things?'* or *'did they actually change things?'* So depending on which historian you ask there was a lot of change or very little - either continuation or enlargement of past practise.
So for an example: Did the reforms under the 'Norman' Church happen because of the Conquest or the Norman kings or were they simply the culmination of the Gregorian reforms hitting the periphery of Europe several decades after there instigation in Rome? Or in a counter-factual view of history: would they have happened anyway if the Norman Conquest had not taken place?
**Language:** After the Conquest there existed a mixture of Anglo-Saxon English and common French vernacular which peasants would have spoken. Above that the new Norman aristocracy and clergy would have spoken Norman-French. Three languages spoken at the same time made post-Conquest England unique in Europe at the time.
**Societal interactions:** The Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and Church hierarchy was near totally replaced by Normans or Europeans. This wouldn't have too much of an affect because of the little interaction between peasants and aristocracy or higher churchmen. But particularly for the Norman-aristocracy's cross-channel holdings meant absenteeism on estates would be more common with work more likely delegated to overseers.
For a short time after the Conquest depending on the local area/situation the Normans lived as either an army of occupation or were able to mingle with the local populace. Also the Norman penchant for hunting meant that there was more interaction between nobles, trackers and lower class hunter.
**Economic and population growth:** During the Conquest one tactic of William I's was basically very Pyrrhic. When London would not open the gates to him he circumnavigated around it destroying buildings and burning the countryside around it, later in the Harrying of the North he would do the same thing but to a much larger extent, which when described by later chroniclers very much sounds like an induced famine.
Later though under the Normans there was a growth in the population and towns in England. The Norman aristocracy took a keen interest in the founding or designation of settlements to borough status to induce further growth, particularly near baronial castles. Furthermore archaeological evidence points towards a sharp increase in the issuance of coin circulation and the growth of both internal and external trade.
**Law and government** The introduction of royal forests or reserves for the King and later the aristocracy for there own pleasure and hunting stock meant that heavy fines were introduced to deter previous hunting and supplementation of diet by peasants. In the Peterborough Chronicle of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles it mentions the disquiet of the English because of the above decisions.
Also in the Peterborough Chronicle is a reference to the peasants/people being annoyed of a rise in taxes and there view that the taxes were being used for William I to fight and put down rebellions in and around Normandy.
**Church:** Previously during the Anglo-Saxon period there was little uniformity in church practise or ceremony. After the Normanisation of the Church much of the English was replaced with Latin and the liturgy became standardised. Also during the period much of the parishes, ecclesiastical boundaries and bishoprics were recentred around urban centres.
In addition to the above there was an increase in founding and setting up of monasteries which had a (later) practise of hiring local labour for menial work.
**TLDR:** Common language became a mixture between French and English, socially not much difference, population and economic growth, a few more laws and general taxation complaints and Church reforms.
Bibliography
Primary:
1. [Peterborough Chronicle from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle](_URL_0_)
Secondary:
1. Barlow, Frank. *The English Church 1066-1154*. London, 1979.
2. Barlow, Frank. *The Feudal Kingdom of England: 1042-1216*. 3rd. London, 1972.
3. Bartlett, Robert. *England under the Norman and Angevin Kings: 1025-1225*. Oxford, 2000.
3. Barlow, Frank. *The Feudal Kingdom of England: 1042-1216*. 3rd. London, 1972.
4. Chibnall, Marjorie. *The Debate on the Norman Conquest.* Manchester, 1999.
5. Van Houts, Elisabeth and Christopher, Harper-Bill. *A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World.* Suffolk, 2003.
Edit: rewrote second paragraph to be more clearer. Edit 2: Realised the second Frank Barlow reference was after Robert Bartlett in the bibliography - just fixed that.
| [
"The years 1596-98 were the worst for many years for the English population, as bad harvests coincided with outbreaks of disease, as well as a fall in wages which forced many people into starvation. Given the state of the poorest classes, those with property felt threatened by revolt, a fact not helped by the boom ... |
How did King Stephen de Blois of England die? | Stephen fell ill with a stomach disorder and died on October 25, 1154, at Dover Priory while traveling. He was buried at Faversham Abbey with his wife Matilda and son Eustace.
King, Edmund, *King Stephen (The English Monarchs Series)* Edit to add the author is a professor at the University of Sheffield.
Note: I have not read the book. I followed the wiki citations and dug around until I found a reliable source. It's currently available on Kindle for $20. Hope that helps. | [
"After war with the Kingdom of England was renewed in 1415, Charles was one of the many French noblemen at the Battle of Agincourt on 25 October 1415. He was discovered unwounded but trapped under a pile of corpses, incapacitated by the weight of his own armour. He was taken prisoner by the English, and spent the n... |
why do we often feel more sad when viewing or hearing about animal suffering/death, than we do about the equivalent in humans? | There's a thing called the [Just-World Hypothesis](_URL_0_). Humans want to think that the world is a fair place; so when we hear about something bad happening to someone, there's a tendency to think of a reason they *deserved* it.
The most common moral frameworks don't hold animals accountable for their actions, so they aren't capable of deserving what happens to them. | [
"Scientific publications have made it clear since the 1980s that the majority of researchers do believe animals suffer and feel pain, though it continues to be argued that their suffering may be reduced by an inability to experience the same dread of anticipation as humans, or to remember the suffering as vividly. ... |
why are words like "queue" and "tea" have so many unnecessary letters behind them? | Some of them indicate a specific pronunciation. For example, the *ea* in "tea" indicates that it should be pronounced with the long e sound ("eeee"). Removing the a from the end would give you *te*, which could be pronounced "teh", "tay", or "tuh".
Others, like queue and colonel, are leftovers from the etymology of the word. *Queue* comes from the Middle French *queu*, which comes from the Early French *cueue*, which comes from the Latin *cauda*, meaning "tail".
*Colonel* comes from Old Italian *colonello*, the officer at the front of a *columna*, a "column" of infantry. The weird pronunciation "cernal" comes from when *colonello* was adopted into French and Spanish: one language kept *colonel* while the other swapped it to *coronel*. You can see how the pronunciation of "coronel" could be shortened to "cernal". | [
"BULLET::::- Queuing (getting in line/forming a line) is expected when there is any demand for an item or when waiting to board public transport, and is considered basic manners. Queues are formed on a first there first in line basis. The only exception to this is a pub where people will normally lean on the bar to... |
the mindset of very rich people that are trying to get even richer | Some people decide that there is a direct connection between happiness and money. From their perspective, the more money you have, the happier you are. There is no limit to how much happiness money can create, as long as you keep having more money. These people might associate money with love, respect, power, freedom or owning things. Since money is the greatest source of happiness, these people choose to ignore what others see as alternative direct sources of happiness (such as health, human relationships, adventure and doing good things). Some examples of people in this category are Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump and Conrad Black. They believe that they are worthy of respect and admiration even if the ONLY worthy thing they've done in life is make a lot of money.
Some other people see making money as more of a game, where you "win" by getting as much money as you can by any means necessary. They get addicted to this "game" and play it over and over again. People in this category may become investment bankers or work in finance. They will do ANYTHING to earn money, and may not care whether they or someone else gets to keep the actual earnings.
Hope that helps! | [
"BULLET::::- To foster an inter-dependence among mankind, that \"every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection.\" He explains that the rich are permitted wealth, not for their own benefit, but \"for the glory of his Creator and th... |
why do a lot of mentally disabled people look alike? | Typically they have similar genetic defects, thus similar appearance. | [
"Disabled people who are also racial minorities generally have less access to support and are more vulnerable to violent discrimination. For example, in the United States people of color who are mentally ill are more frequently victims of police brutality than their white counterparts. Camille A. Nelson, writing fo... |
why does it make sense to design new paper money that is harder to fake, if the old bank notes are still valid? | I'd imagine it's because the old bank notes would be slowly weeded out of circulation, but the process cannot begin without the new bank notes. | [
"Money is tamper-evident in the sense that it should be difficult to produce a financial token without authorization, even if starting from a token of lower value. For example, forgers may attempt to clean the ink from a banknote and print the image of a higher-denomination note on it, giving them the carefully gua... |
I have a question about an orbiting system? | There's nothing unusual about that orbit, it just looks odd because it's not relative to the frame of reference of the barycenter of the two bodies. If you were to look at the Earth-Moon system from the perspective of the Sun you would see something similar. The Earth-Moon system travels at 30km/s in orbit around the Sun, the Moon travels at 1km/s in orbit around the Earth, from the perspective of the Sun the Moon never travels less than 29km/s in orbit, it never goes backwards in its orbit, it always goes forward. | [
"The state of an orbiting body at any given time is defined by the orbiting body's position and velocity with respect to the central body, which can be represented by the three-dimensional Cartesian coordinates (position of the orbiting body represented by x, y, and z) and the similar Cartesian components of the or... |
what types of jobs do people in the cia actually do? how many people actually work as secret agents and whatnot? | There are tons of jobs in the CIA, from accountants and doctors to special operations types. The closest thing to James Bond would be guys from the Special Activities Division, the special operations arm of the CIA. they are recruited nearly exclusively from elite military units and perform similar tasks, such as direct action or intelligence gathering in extremely hostile terrain. The glitzy work that Bond does is usually carried out by officers know as NOCs. It's much less sexy. Imagine giving a guy $10,000 to bring you a picture or get you a phone number. There's no high stakes poker game involved. There are also a lot of rather mundane jobs at the CIA, like imagery analysts. Their job is to look at pictures. Basically, a lot of the CIA does 9-5 type work but with much more sensitive information.
Source: former Marine reservist, friends.
Edit: I believe the number of clandestine personnel is classified, but it's very small. Probably less than one percent of the entire agency. | [
"The role and functions of the CIA are roughly equivalent to those of the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service (the SIS or MI6), the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), the French foreign intelligence service (DGSE), the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (\"\", SVR), the Chinese Ministry of St... |
Remind me - in the early years of World War II, why did so much of the fighting take place in the deserts of north Africa? | Because of the Berlin Conference, many European nations had colonized Africa, including France. France got most of the northern part of Africa, Algeria being a good example. The French fell quickly, and the Italians and Germans wished to take Africa now that it had no army to defend. Not wanting to allow lands and resources to be lost, the British had to fight them there.
EDIT: Spelling. | [
"The arrival of modern colonialism, World War I and World War II brought armies from afar to fight in North Africa, often against each other and not always against the native inhabitants. Battles such as the Tunisia Campaign eventually yielded the first battlefield victories of the Allies of World War II against th... |
Are there any society-wide (epidemiological) consequences to the widespread use of flu vaccines? | The epidemiological consequence of widespread use of flu vaccines would be a widespread drop in flu infection rates =) There is no (reputable) evidence that widespread use of vaccines have any significant downside (standard caveats about exceptional or rare side cases apply). As the thread you linked pointed out, vaccines won't produce "super-viruses" in the same way that antibiotics produce "super-bacteria" because they work in a fundamentally different fashion.
You are right that vaccines going after a "moving target" make it difficult for the vaccine to result in disease eradication (like what happened for smallpox, and what has nearly happened for polio). Not surprisingly, lots of viruses (as well as other types of pathogens) use the strategy of "I'm going to rapidly mutate/shift my surface proteins to evade an immune response" because, well, it's a damned effective way of evading an immune response!
There are tricks that we can use, however. The flu is a useful example. In most cases, vaccines are very good at eliciting CD4 T cell-driven antibody responses. Antibodies do a wonderful job at gumming up (literally) viral particles and preventing them from infecting cells, but they rely on having physical access to the specific viral bits that they recognize. Thus, viruses that can rapidly change their exposed bits can evade antibody responses.
There is another kind of immune response, though, driven by CD8 T cells that targets the cells that have been infected by a virus. When cells make proteins, they chop some of those proteins up, and stick the bits of protein on their surface. Your immune cells know what proteins are supposed to be there, and don't bother a healthy cell. If a virus infects a cell, though, the cell starts putting bits of the virus on its surface. CD8 T cells can recognize these bits, and when they do, they tell the cell to commit suicide, thus preventing more viruses from being made.
The key point in this process is that when a cell puts the viral bits on its surface, it doesn't distinguish between the variable surface proteins or the more conserved core proteins of a virus. Thus, if you can generate a CD8 T cell response against a part of the virus that can't vary (ie. a part that plays a key functional role for the virus), then you can target a wide variety of viral strains. Unfortunately, vaccines tend to elicit poor CD8 T cell responses. There is research being done right now to create a flu vaccine that specifically causes a CD8 T cell response, and would thus function as a universal flu vaccine. If/when we are successful doing this, the fact that the flu is a "moving target" wont hamper us nearly as much, and hopefully we'll be able to make flu infections much more rare/infrequent. Presuming there is a widespread use of the new vaccine =) | [
"In children, vaccines again showed high efficacy, but low effectiveness in preventing \"flu-like illness\". In children under the age of two, the data are extremely limited, but vaccination appeared to confer no measurable benefit. During the 2017–18 flu season, the CDC director indicated that 85 percent of the ch... |
Can a human gain calories from eating common leaves? | The calories that are available to humans even in the leafy greens we eat like spinach aren't much. It would take like 10-15 pounds of spinach per day for you to get enough calories to survive and at that point the amount oxalate you'd be getting would be a serious problem.
What makes leafy greens healthy to eat is not the calories, but the vitamins and minerals they contain. Particularly vitamins A, C, and K, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. All leaves will have these since they're indispensable parts of photosynthesis and cellular function for the plant.
The greens we eat have been bred for generations to have thinner cell walls, which means a higher nutrient-to-weight ratio, and also less of things like oxalates, tannins, and other metabolites that make them unpalatable, toxic, or even lock up the nutrients so that we can't digest them.
This would be the main problem, particularly with trees, which often have thickened leaves and a lot of secondary metabolites. They produce these things precisely to prevent animals from eating them. You'd be better off eating the leaves of herbaceous (non-woody) plants. In fact many like dandelion, lamb's quarters, lactuca (wild lettuce), plantago, etc. are perfectly edible and lots of people collect and eat them even outside of "survival scenarios".
tl;dr : You can get nutrition from any leaf that doesn't make you sick, but it might not be much. Definitely not much calories. You should look for the most tender, green leaves without nasty flavors. | [
"Although not as nutritious as other organs such as fruit, leaves provide a food source for many organisms. The leaf is a vital source of energy production for the plant, and plants have evolved protection against animals that consume leaves, such as tannins, chemicals which hinder the digestion of proteins and hav... |
why are for-profit universities (devry, ashford, phoenix, etc.) under so much scrutiny? | For-profit universities tend to be HUGELY profitable, but there's no real mechanism for shutting them down when they're bad. The government doesn't license higher education, so they have no power to do so. Traditional universities seek accreditation from professional associations, like the AACSB (the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) or the MLA (the Modern Language Association) -- this peer review makes sure that their education and faculty meet acceptable standards.
But most consumers don't know enough about the market to look for those accreditations, or they don't know the difference between the AACSB (legit) and the Academy for Contemporary Research (bogus). So they end up thinking that they're getting good value for their money, and end up with a degree that employers aren't impressed by and a lot of student loan debt. | [
"Universities have taken a growing interest in creations that have revenue-generating potential, like online classes or lecture slides, while also showing concern for products that may be used by comparable institutions, potentially reducing their competitive advantage. In order to stay on top of others academicall... |
Any precedence in US History for a natural disaster effecting a nation-wide election date? | I just did a quick google search and found this: _URL_0_
F. Glenn Abney and Larry B. Hill, "Natural Disasters as a Political Variable: The Effect of a Hurricane on an Urban Election", *The American Political Science Review*, Vol. 60, No. 4, 1966, pp. 974-981.
Apparently, Hurricane Betsy flooded New Orleans pretty badly in early September. The response to flooding became hugely politicized, allowing the incumbent to win thanks to his "political skill and material resources...for they enabled him to capitalize upon the disaster..." | [
"This list of United States natural disasters is a list of notable natural disasters which occurred in the United States from 1816 to 2017. In May 2018, an exhaustive overview of recurrent natural disasters in the United States since 1900, based largely on government data, including data from NASA, FEMA and others,... |
how does a common cold give me a headache? | The cold virus reproduces by hijacking the genetic machinery of host cells and causing host cells to manufacture copies of the virus. The virus then destroys the host cell outer membrane so that copies of the virus can escape the host cell and infect other cells.
When the host cell membrane is destroyed, the contents of the host cell, called cytoplasm, spills into the spaces between cells.
Cell cytoplasm is rich in adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which cells use to power cellular processes. Outside of cells ATP functions as a neurotransmitter chemical and can cause pain. Once outside a cell, ATP is rapidly degraded to adenosine, which is, like ATP, is a neurotransmitter that can cause pain.
Excessive extracellular (outside of cells) concentration of ATP and adenosine in the head is the immediate cause of headache.
| [
"It is possible to suffer from a cold-stimulus headache in both hot and cold weather, because the effect relies upon the temperature of the food being consumed rather than that of the environment. Other causes that may mimic the sensation of cold-stimulus headache include that produced when high speed drilling is p... |
When will humans reach carrying capacity? | depends on how you weight different things, whether or not we implement population control, when/whether we develop various technologies, whether or not we adopt certain cultural/lifestyle changes like heavily cutting down on meat consumption. some estimates say we passed it, some say we have yet to pass it, some say we're at it right now. technology might be able to compensate for another few billion. estimates vary, but a couple billion above and below our current population at least.
> "Several estimates of the carrying capacity have been made with a wide range of population numbers. A 2001 UN report said that two-thirds of the estimates fall in the range of 4 billion to 16 billion (with unspecified standard errors), with a median of about 10 billion.[4] More recent estimates are much lower, particularly if resource depletion and increased consumption are considered.[5][6]" wikipedia
it really does depend on how and what you measure the earths carrying capacity and how you predict human population growth. imo well before the end of the century if we follow "business as usual". | [
"Carrying capacity was originally used to determine the number of animals that could graze on a segment of land without destroying it. Later, the idea was expanded to more complex populations, like humans. For the human population, more complex variables such as sanitation and medical care are sometimes considered ... |
What Limits Our Running Speed | There are two ways to answer this, physics and biology. Power required for acceleration increases exponentially with speed. Meaning that it takes significantly more power to accelerate from 18 to 20 mph than it does to accelerate from 8 to 10 mph. This is why almost anybody can run 15 mph but very few people can run 20 mph. Also wind resistance isn't the major resisting force for humans at max running speed. A human running in a vacuum wouldn't be able to continually accelerate up to a significantly higher speed (it would be faster, but not much). We're more limited by our own inertia and ability to continually transfer higher and higher forces to the ground. At max speed it's not totally clear what limits us but it is likely some combination of contractile fiber speed, motor unit firing rate, economy, and elastic storage potential.
EDIT: Sorry I was a lazy biologist, the relationship between Power and speed/acceleration isn't exponential, power required to accelerate increases with the square of speed. Thanks for keeping me sharp.
Edit 2: Sloppy biologist again, changed kinetic energy to power. | [
"Limitations of animal running speed provides an overview of how various factors determine the maximum running speed. Some terrestrial animals are built for achieving extremely high speeds, such as the cheetah, pronghorn, race horse and greyhound, while humans can train to achieve high sprint speeds. There is no si... |
erdogan's politics. turkey is a democratic country, why is he still in power? | He is in power because more people support him than oppose him. Turkey is, in a way, an extreme form of the US in that it's split between eastern turkey and western turkey. Eastern Turkey is very islamic and the entire country has tilted that way several times since Ataturk created a secular nation. Erdogan plays to the majority who, in a world that is increasingly islamophobic, are flexing their muscles. | [
"Turkey considers itself a democratic country with a Prime Minister as the head of the government. Its political system is based on the separation of powers. Specifically, the executive branch consists of the Prime Minister and the Council of Ministers.\n",
"Turkey is a presidential democracy with a multi-party s... |
Did FDR campaign to Hoover's right during the 1932 election? | No, FDR did not campaign to the right of Hoover in 1932. He campaigned very much to the left of him. However, the Democrats *did* call Hoover a "Socialist" during the 1932 campaign, but not for the reasons you assume. The attack was political payback for what had happened four years earlier.
In 1928, Herbert Hoover ran against Democratic candidate Al Smith and won in a landslide. Late in the campaign, Hoover characterized Smith's policies as supporting "state socialism". Smith refuted the attack, while Republicans rallied to Hoover's side.
An October 27, 1928, AP article explained:
> "A further definition of 'state Socialism,' the term used by Herbert Hoover in his New York speech to characterize certain policies of Governor Smith, was on the books today following the speech here last night by Charles Evans Hughes, forrmer secretary of state.
>
> "What Mr. Hoover meant by 'state Socialism', said Hughes, 'is plain. He used the term in its proper sense as applied to the Bismarckian philosophy of the centralization of government dominating all the activities of the people. Mr. Hoover is a liberal and is opposed to state Socialism.'"
So, four years later, now that the stock market had crashed and the Great Depression was in full swing, the Democrats hit back at Hoover, using his own attack against him.
On October 5, 1932, former Missouri senator James Reed made a speech denouncing Hoover in no uncertain terms. Another AP article:
> "Former Senator James A. Reed of Missouri, in his recent speech at Claremore, Okla., assailed the Hoover policy of doling out billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to favored banking and railroad corporations, terming such practices 'capitalistic Socialism.'
>
> "On this subject, Senator Reed said, in part:
> "'I call attention to the fact that Republican leaders attack Roosevelt for declaring that present conditions should not be permitted to exist. They go so far as to charge him with being tainted with Socialism.
>
> "'I affirm that Hoover has established Socialism in the United States.
>
> "But it is not the Socialism of the proletariat. It is capitalistic Socialism, inaugurated not for the benefit of the common man or the small merchant, but for the benefit of the great banks and trust companies which have been overloaded with rotten paper.
>
> "'Out of the taxpayers' money and out of the credit of the country, it is proposed to advance billions of dollars to these institutions. What is that but capitalistic Socialism?'..."
FDR's running mate, John Nance Garner, made similar attacks during the campaign against Hoover and the Republicans.
The Democrats certainly did label the Republicans "capitalistic Socialists" in the same way someone later on might use the term "corporate welfare". Nevertheless, FDR and the Democrats ran well to the left of Hoover and the Republicans in 1932. | [
"Hoover's attempts to vindicate his administration fell on deaf ears, as much of the public blamed his administration for the depression. Roosevelt won 57.4 percent of the popular vote compared to Hoover's 39.7 percent. Hoover's popular vote was reduced by 26 percentage points from his result in the 1928 election, ... |
Why did Davy Crockett oppose the Indian Removal Act? | This one is pretty straightforward. Crockett was a Whig, and the Whigs were against it. He doesn't seem like he would have been a Whig. Outwardly he seemed the epitome of a Jacksonian Democrat, being a self-made man of humble origins from the new western states ( even Jackson's home state of Tennessee). This he found useful, as the Whigs made much of him for this reason. Like parading around with log cabins in election rallies, it helped them to hide their party's primary allegiance to wealthy, mostly eastern elites.
It turns out that party affiliation was a far more important factor in the votes than the number of resident Indians in any state: Fred S Rolater found 92% voted with their party. Crockett was also not the only southerner: 13 National Republicans ( Whigs) would also vote no, including one who represented Salem, NC, which had a long Moravian tradition of missions to the Indians. Crockett attributed his failure to be re-elected in 1831 to this vote. However, he was able to get elected back to Congress the following term. His failure in the 1835 election has been attributed to his taking too much time from politics, in order to promote his autobiography.
Rolater, Fred S. "The American Indian and the Origin of the Second American Party System." *The Wisconsin Magazine of History* 76, no. 3 (1993): 180-203. [_URL_0_](_URL_0_). | [
"The effect that Evarts's activism for the rights of indigenous peoples had on U.S. foreign policy through his son, William M. Evarts who was Secretary of State during the Hayes administration (1877-1881), is a question for historians. The moral and religious arguments that Evarts used against the Indian Removal Ac... |
the end of the movie stanley kubrik's "the shining" | i assumed he was possessed by the spirit of the previous caretaker. basically the hotel is evil and the spirits inside consume him. the photo appears after his death- and now he is one of the ghosts doomed to haunt the hotel. | [
"In \"Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures\", Jack Nicholson recalls that Kubrick said \"The Shining\" is an overall optimistic story because \"anything that says there's anything after death is ultimately an optimistic story.\" Stephen King recounts hearing the same thing from Kubrick in conversation with him, and ... |
if the universe is infinite, why is there doubt that there are other lifeforms? | The universe being infinite doesn't necessitate that everything happen in that universe. A unique event could still exist. Nor do we know the starting conditions of life, and with a sample size of one, we have no easy way to assign probability to its occurrence. | [
"According to Avicenna, the universe consists of a chain of actual beings, each giving existence to the one below it and responsible for the existence of the rest of the chain below. Because an actual infinite is deemed impossible by Avicenna, this chain as a whole must terminate in a being that is wholly simple an... |
How many years do you reckon it would take good ole earth to repair itself from a nuclear holocaust? | In most of the models the southern hemisphere would be pretty much fine as the fallout, aerosols, and particulates would just swirl with the jet stream around the northern hemisphere. All the radioactive fallout would be gone pretty fast, the nuclear winter would be over after a few years, and then you'd have a nuclear summer. Essentially it would be habitable but very unpleasant after a month or two. For nature to rebound would take many thousands of years. | [
"Decommissioning a reactor that has undergone a meltdown is inevitably more difficult and expensive. Three Mile Island was decommissioned 14 years after its incident for $837 million. The cost of the Fukushima disaster cleanup is not yet known, but has been estimated to cost around $100 billion. Chernobyl is not ye... |
if a hospital has to be evacuated, what happens to patients that are in the middle of surgery? | Standard practice would be to get them stable enough for transfer. There would be a lot of variables depending on the type of surgery, and how far along they were in it. Evacuation of a building as large as a hospital is not a fast process so they would likely have time to get the surgery far enough along to keep the patient alive, but the goal of the surgery may be forfeited. | [
"Patients who are waiting for surgery depend on the availability of the operating theater, and if any patient getting treatment in that room takes longer than scheduled, all patients who are waiting to be next must wait beyond their appointed time. It can be difficult to maximize efficient use of the operating room... |
If we knew the exact positions of all particles in the universe, and simulated the universe on a computer starting at those positions with the time sped up, would we effectively be predicting the future? | No. Since I'm on the phone, this is going to be a bit terse (and linkless) but here we go.
1. Just the position of all the particles doesn't fully quantify the system. You need velocities too.
2. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says you can't jointly know the exact position and velocity of *any* particle, let alone all of them, so this situation is unreachable. In fact, even approximating these values can only be done to a certain limit.
3. Unless you're into extra spookly nonlocal hidden variables, quantum physics seems to dictate that certain events are random, so you can't in advance know what will happen even if you don't need positional exactness. If you've heard of Shroedinger's cat, this is like saying you can't predict whether or not you'll find only a carcass when opening the box.
4. Even ignoring points 1-3, you'll run into computational issues reminiscent of various paradoxes and the Halting problem, since the computer would be simulating itself. What happens if you modify your computer program to create a file called gotcha.jpg if, in its simulations, it sees no such file ever exists on the hard drive in the future (assuming the hard drive started empty). Does the computer end up with a silly image file at the end, or not? Either answer leads to a breakdown in causality. | [
"From the time of Newton until about 1890, it was generally believed that if one knows the initial state of a system with great accuracy, and if all the forces acting on the system can be formulated with equal accuracy, it would be possible, in principle, to make predictions of the state of the universe for an infi... |
What was it like in Post-Revolutionary War America in terms of establishing government, democracy, and popular opinion? | Sorry it's taken me so long to get to this!
There were a number of questions facing the United States after the War ended. There was a nominal national government in the form of the Continental Congress, but it had barely survived the war and was in many ways powerless.
Arguably the most immediate issue facing the new nation was what to do with loyalists - Americans who remained loyal to the British crown during the war. In the final months of the war, thousands of loyalists fled the new nation for Canada and other outposts of the British Empire. Their properties, which in some cases were substantial, was often divided between active patriots. Loyalists that stayed faced a variety of community and political exclusion, though this generally slackened over time.
Political participation and suffrage transformed following the end of the war. Women had been involved in the revolutionary process in a number of ways, including some women gaining the right to vote in New Jersey. With the war over and the need for mass politics reduced, women were gradually excluded from the political sphere. New Jersey revoked women's right to vote in 1807.
White male suffrage increased after the American Revolution. The flood of new people into political life challenged the traditional ruling class. In the years between the end of the war and the drafting of the Constitution, elites like Washington lamented that so many unworthy men in public life would ruin the nation and unmake everything the Revolution had achieved.
Politically, the biggest problem facing the Congress was it's inability to tax. This prevented it from paying the debts the nation incurred during the War. The ensuing inability for the nation to get credit or much value to its currency. These factors helped spark Shay's Rebellion, which the Congress was powerless to stop due to its inability to raise an army. That the revolt failed was more a product of chance than anything the government did.
The perceived social instability, coupled with the very real weakness and economic powerlessness of the government created by the Articles of Confederation, caused the states to send delegates to a Constitutional Convention to amend the Articles. Instead, they ended up drafting an entirely new document.
What did all look like for the common person? The economic pinch would likely have been distressing. The expanding and changing political landscape may have either cost you your place in public life or substantially increased your standing in society, depending on what you did in the Revolution. If you could, you would likely exercise whatever political rights you had, since they were viewed as a part of American (male) identity.
On the frontier, life changed significantly. With major Native American powers like the Iroquois destroyed or displaced, the edges of Euro-American settlement became both more peaceful and more populous as colonists and immigrants rushed in.
A good survey of this period is the Oxford History of the time, Gordon S. Wood's *Empire of Liberty.* | [
"After the success of the American Revolution, the independent United States government of the former colonies was confronted by its own tax resistance campaigns. Three were suppressed militarily by the fledgling United States government:\n",
"The American Revolution resulted in a government based on popular sove... |
Do fat people have more muscle as they have to move more weight around? | [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)
"The consensus is that obese individuals, regardless of age, have a greater absolute maximum muscle strength compared to non-obese persons, suggesting that increased adiposity acts as a chronic overload stimulus on the antigravity muscles (e.g., quadriceps and calf), thus increasing muscle size and strength. However, when maximum muscular strength is normalised to body mass, obese individuals appear weaker."
& #x200B;
So the answer is yes on an absolute scale (when compared to normal-weight people) but no on the relative scale (when normalizing to body mass). | [
"All body shapes are different, meaning, people carry fat in different places. Some locations on the body are more metabolically active than others, and those areas will lose weight quicker than those that are not as metabolically active. For many people, abdominal fat is more metabolically active, and can be reduc... |
why are people able to get away by not paying child support? | It's very difficult to get someone jailed for not paying what they owe. You have to prove that they *could* pay but choose not to; even when that's possible, we're generally uncomfortable with the idea of jailing people for not paying debts.
The other solution is taking their money. But we don't think it's okay for the government to just go into people's homes and take their cash to pay debts. So this has to be done through a very specific process, which not all parents have the time and energy to go through just for the possibility of payment. (Because the reality is, if they really don't *have* money, nothing can make them pay money.) | [
"In some cases, relatives who bring up a child when the parents cannot bring up the child face sanctions and financial penalties, they can be left poor and homeless. There are also widespread complaints from church groups and others that the UK welfare state does insufficient work to prevent poverty, deprivation ev... |
ancient languages deciphered | Your specific example of Sanskrit actually never needed to be “discovered”, because people didn’t stop using it. It became kind of like Latin for India and Asia, and continued to be studied by scholars throughout the centuries.
That said, language changes over time, and linguists do have to do some detective work to figure out how languages used to look. But linguists have figured out many general patterns in the structure of languages and how they change, so they can make some pretty good deductions about general shifts in language. Combined with knowledge of descended languages (like how Latin evolved into Spanish, French, Italian), and they can trace how things evolved through time with pretty good confidence.
For truly lost languages, you can try to use knowledge of grammar patterns and basically do code breaking (I don’t know if there’s an example of this approach actually working, but most human languages fall into a few categories and follow some general patterns), but the holy grail is something like the Rosetta Stone (the actual thing, not the software) which contains the same text in two different languages, in that case Ancient Greek (which we knew) and Egyptian hieroglyphics (which we didn’t know at the time). By comparing those texts, you get the initial breakthrough you need to start decoding the rest of the language.
I’m sure there are other approaches that an actual linguist could describe in more detail. | [
"In the case of Bronze Age literature, philology includes the prior decipherment of the language under study. This has notably been the case with the Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Hittite, Ugaritic and Luwian languages. Beginning with the famous decipherment and translation of the Rosetta Stone by Jean-François Cha... |
how do football clubs know who in a stadium has committed an offence in order to ban them? | CCTV surveillance and a security staff.
There is usually at least one guard per section watching the crowd. | [
"In the case of a player repeatedly infringing the laws during the penalty kick, the referee may caution the player for persistent infringement. Note that \"all\" offences that occur before kick may be dealt with in this manner, regardless of the location of the offence.\n",
"In case of an infringement of the law... |
why does draining a large body of water cause it to form a vortex? | The vortex that forms is caused by the physical principle called angular momentum. Let us assume a straight walled circular pond, with a drain at the center bottom. As the water begins to drain, the flow of water comes from the edges towards the center. This creates momentum at an angle from the direction the water is actually being allowed to move - straight down. The further (and thus faster) the water travels on the way towards the drain point, the more angular momentum it has.
You can envision this as a golf ball just barely hitting the hole - it skirts around the edge of the cup before dropping in (Or if you're really unlucky, skirts the edge and changes direction before not going in). More or less the same is happening to the water. It has speed in a direction that isn't straight down the drain.
This is what forms the vortex. A common misconception is that the direction (and the cause of the vortex) is the Coriolis effect, which is caused by the earth's rotation. This is actually not true. Although you can create conditions where you can observe the coriolis force creating vortexes that always go in the same direction (Depending on your hemisphere), most times the direction of the vortex is random, if the shape of the vessel or the drain doesn't affect the direction the vortex would form. | [
"Channel related drifts form when deepwater bottom-currents are confined to a smaller cross sectional area of flow and therefore their velocity increases substantially. This can happen if the deepwater bottom-current is trapped within a deep channel or within a gateway that connects two basins. Due to the high velo... |
why is the us national debt/spending preventing businesses from creating jobs? | Yeah, it's kind of convoluted.
The argument is that if federal spending goes unchecked, then people will have less faith in the government's ability to repay its debts. If that's the case, then people will be less willing to buy treasury bonds, and so the interest rates will go up. Since every other interest rate (in particular, commercial loans) is more or less based on the yield of treasury bills, that will make it harder for companies to borrow money to expand and hire more people.
It's a tenuous connection at best, especially as, despite our mounting debt and then continual log jam in D.C., interest rates are at historical lows. Not to mention that the private sector has plenty of capital, but are not hiring anyway. | [
"Debt held by the public is important because it reflects the extent to which the government goes into private credit markets to borrow. Such borrowing draws on private national saving and international saving, and therefore competes with investment in the nongovernmental sector (for factories and equipment, resear... |
austerity | Austerity as in, "austerity measures" is the general idea of cutting government spending on benefits and public spending.
This can include everything from social security to unemployment to (government) pensions.
So the basic idea behind austerity is to reign in spending. If your government spends more than it makes (in taxes and other revenue), you end up with a growing deficit -- like if a person paid for a bunch of stuff they can't afford with a credit card instead of living within how much they actually make.
Lets look at a fairly common government benefit: social security. So you work, you pay your taxes, and you retire. When you retire you get a monthly check to help pay for your living expenses.
Now lets say the country isn't doing well so they start to talk about cutting spending on social security or maybe bumping the age at which you're eligible for it.
Now this bothers a lot of people because of many different reasons, but one is typically that they feel that it's an issue of fairness -- haven't they been paying the same amount of taxes as previous beneficiary? Shouldn't they get same benefits? or not have to wait 5 more years to retire?
However this extends to more than just social security. Technically, any public benefit from the government could be under scrutiny or even government jobs in general.
On the other hand, if a government spends a lot on those sorts of things, it's not necessarily a crazy idea to make cuts there. The issue is that no one (in politics) can really agree on if they should happen nor where to draw the line if they (the cuts) do.
| [
"Austerity is a political-economic term referring to policies that aim to reduce government budget deficits through spending cuts, tax increases, or a combination of both. Austerity measures are used by governments that find it difficult to pay their debts. The measures are meant to reduce the budget deficit by bri... |
How does the brain decide the "best" way to recite long strings of numbers/alpha-numeric characters? | There's a psychological principle known as chunking by which people tend to automatically or at will divide large, unmanageable amounts of information into smaller, more useful pieces or chunks for the purpose of memorizing data.
Think of a phone number. You don't remember Jenny's phone number as 4258675309, it's 425-867-5309. It probably also has something to do with United States social security numbers, which are given as XXX-XX-XXXX instead of just a series of nine numbers.
So in your example, I would say yes, in that group of people there would be a strong tendency towards reciting the number back to you in a similar fashion, maybe three or four numbers at a time. If you asked them to memorize the number rather than read it off a board, I believe the tendency would be stronger, since chunking is strongly associated with memory. | [
"Once the algorithm is understood, one can type almost any character with a little practice, even if one hasn't typed it before. Muscle memory will make sure that frequent typists using this method don't have to think about how the characters are actually constructed, just as the vast majority of English typists do... |
How can cancer be Sexually Transmitted? | Think of it as more like a bacterial infection or parasite. These cancers started out at one point as a typical cancer in one animal. Somehow as the cancer developed rather than the usual mutations that just allow it to grow faster and metastasize, it also picked up changes that allowed it avoid being recognized as foreign tissue and to grow in wounds. Both the canine and the tasmanian devil types occur at points of contact between animals- genitalia for dogs and mouth/face from biting in devils. The mutations aren't worked out, because it been so long there are thousands, most of which are random and unimportant. Lack of genetic diversity may be part of it, making it harder to reject it as basically a transplanted tissue, or these animals may have an easier rejection system for the cancer to exploit.
Basically, these transmissible tumors are very rare and require a sort of perfect storm of mutations and animal lifestyle to work.
Cancer is transmissible in humans under the right conditions. Normally our immune system rejects any tissue from another human. The exceptions would be pregnancy and identical twins (although not always). There are tumors from mutated embryos that are not the same genetically as the mother that exploit the anti-rejection mechanism of pregnancy to spread (very rare and easily treated cancer). Transplant patients are the main victims of transmissible cancer. It's not common but very rarely a donated organ has metastatic cancer to small to see on gross examination and that the donor wasn't aware of. The cancer, now in an immunosuppressed host to protect the foreign organ, can grow without being attacked by the immune system. Once the cancer is advanced enough, even stopping the immunosppression isn't enough and it can kill them. Apparently the immune system isn't enough to overcome a large tumor burden. | [
"Like many malignancies, penile cancer can spread to other parts of the body. It is usually a primary malignancy, the initial place from which a cancer spreads in the body. Much less often it is a secondary malignancy, one in which the cancer has spread to the penis from elsewhere. The staging of penile cancer is d... |
If flies and bees were biting raw chicken outside, then it were to later be cooked, would that be a health risk? | It would be more dangerous if they landed on cooked food which was then eaten. Flies can carry harmful bacteria, but assuming the food is cooked quickly and thoroughly after contamination, the bacteria will not have had enough time to produce enough harmful toxins to make someone sick, and the bacteria will be dead so it cannot infect someone. | [
"A 2012 chicken meat study found 60% of home cooks were at risk of food poisoning by washing whole poultry before it was cooked, which can spread bacteria around the kitchen. A further 16% of those surveyed incorrectly tasted chicken to see if it was cooked properly rather than using a safe meat thermometer.\n",
... |
What drove the Ottomans to declare war in the first Balkan war before they could fully mobilize? | Your understanding of the beginning of the First Balkan War is not correct. There was no ultimatum: the war started when Montenegro declared war on the Ottoman Empire on October 8. 1912 and the rest of the Balkan Coalition (Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece) joined soon afterwards. | [
"The opening stages of the First Balkan War began with decisive Allied victories in both Thrace and Macedonia. Within a month, the Ottomans found themselves driven back by the Bulgarians to within 40 kilometers of Constantinople and badly beaten by the Serbians and the Greeks. A short armistice brought no conclusio... |
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