question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
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Would the new hydrophobic material weve been seeing online have negative impacts on water treatment plants and the environment? | Generally if it's really hydrophobic it will either sink to bottom or float to the top of the pool of water it's in, making it relatively easy to clean in a treatment plant. Think cooking oil for example. Let it aggregate on top, then scrap it off, easy-peasy.
If it gets out into the world that's another story. If it's not biodegradable it will eventually aggregate somewhere and sit there for nigh-on forever. Provided it isn't toxic that's not an issue. I see people touching this stuff with their bare hands so I wouldn't worry too hard about that.
I would be far more concerned about the millions of gallons of oil that get spilled than this business. | [
"Vollertsen's research has made an impact on the understanding of microplastics and their perceived effects on the environment. He has concluded that modern sewage treatment plants reduce the discharge of microplastics by up to 99.7%. Furthermore, Vollertsen's research has provided the foundation for an eco-friendl... |
why don't human foetuses be small enough to be easily carried and delivered by the mother? | They do come out and grow bigger. But that's a trade off. The smaller they are when they come out, the more likely they are to die after they come out, and the longer they will have to be intensely cared for by their family, rather than being able to exist at least semi-independently. I am sure it could have come out differently, but the present balance is also quite plausible. | [
"A \"fetus in fetu\" can be considered alive, but only in the sense that its component tissues have not yet died or been eliminated. Thus, the life of a \"fetus in fetu\" is akin to that of a tumor in that its cells remain viable by way of normal metabolic activity. However, without the gestational conditions \"in ... |
What is an example of a heartwarming tale from your researched point of history? | I posted this over in /r/chemistry, but I think it's an awesome story so I have to share.
The Nazis made a habit of confiscating Nobel Prizes. When the Germans invaded Denmark, George de Hevesy dissolved Max von Laue's and James Franck's Nobel Prizes in Physics in aqua regia. He left the jars on a shelf in his lab, where the Nazis overlooked them among the many other jars in the lab. After the war's end he returned to find them untouched. The gold was precipitated out and the Nobel Foundation re-cast the medals and presented them to von Laue and Franck again. | [
"The Broken Heart is a Caroline era tragedy written by John Ford, and first published in 1633. \"The play has long vied with \"'Tis Pity She's a Whore\" as Ford's greatest work...the supreme reach of his genius...\" The date of the play's authorship is uncertain, and is generally placed in the 1625–32 period by sch... |
Roman Historians - I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the crisis of the third century, any good book recommendations? | Adrian Goldsworthy's *How Rome Fell* does a pretty good job of it, but to be perfectly honest it pretty much stays confusing. | [
"The prologue of the book provides an overview of the main argument. It begins in San Francisco during the great 1906 fire that destroyed the city, then moves on to Rome, 2003, with some reflections on the remnants of a once powerful global empire. The prologue finishes with a perilously fast car ride along unfamil... |
Would I be able to communicate with a neanderthal? | Body language might be a bit of a blind alley; it's not nearly as universal as you might think. Take pointing, for example. Directing someone's attention with an outstretched finger is as natural as it gets, right? Wrong. Some cultures point with their entire hand, or their elbow, or a stuck-out bottom lip. The principle of pointing is universal, but people you're trying to communicate with might be very confused by the way you're doing it. And you don't have to go to exotic places to find potentially-confusing differences in body language: Bulgarians shake their head to indicate yes, and nod to indicate no, for example. Ultimately gestures are just as arbitrary as the signs used in spoken language, so there's no guarantee your body language would translate well to Neanderthal.
Having said that, humans are communicative enough that the lack of a common language (spoken or gestural) won't throw a spanner in the works. Say tomorrow you were transported to a random location in the world. Even if you met someone with which you had absolutely no language or gestures in common, you'd expect that eventually (after a lot of misunderstandings) one of you would figure out what the others gestures mean, and you could start to build up a common basis for communicating. So the question is did Neanderthals have a similar faculty for communicating? Precisely what Neanderthal language would have looked or sounded like (it's possible they relied much more heavily on gestures than we do – almost like sign language) is a hotly debated topic. But I think it's safe to say that they had linguistic abilities that were roughly comparable to ours. We know that they had a gene – FOXP2 – which is important in language development. They also coordinated mammoth hunts that must have involved dozens of people, made sophisticated tools, had symbolic art and decoration, and interbred with *Homo sapiens* on many occasions – all activities it would be hard to imagine happening without a sophisticated ability to communicate. There would be a lot of challenges: Neanderthals had a different vocal tract so they would sound very different to humans; as I already mentioned, they might rely more heavily on gesture; and the grammar of their language might be radically different (i.e. simpler) than those of any modern language. But, in theory, given enough persistence, yes you could communicate with a Neanderthal. | [
"Most specialists credit the Neanderthals with speech abilities not radically different from those of modern \"Homo sapiens\". An indirect line of argument is that their tool-making and hunting tactics would have been difficult to learn or execute without some kind of speech. A recent extraction of DNA from Neander... |
How did colonies such as New York grow so large while others like Salem and Plymouth are still small communities? | /u/uncovered-history has provided a [previous answer](_URL_3_) about why Jamestown didn't work out. The town was built on a swamp, which made the nearby seaport town of Norfolk and the adjacent community of the "Middle Plantation" (later renamed Williamsburg) to be more attractive settlements for newcomers. It was also mostly burned to the ground during Bacon's Rebellion and then the statehouse burned down again in 1698. Virginia then decided to take the opportunity to move the statehouse to the higher ground in Williamsburg, more centrally located between the James River and York River.
Plymouth and Salem didn't grow like New York because Boston did instead. Plymouth was founded in 1620, and while it has a satisfactory seaport, it isn't built on any river system with access to the interior of the colony/state. Salem was founded in 1626, and while it is adjacent to the Crane River, that river doesn't provide much access to the interior, either.
Boston, then, became the major seaport in Massachusetts (which was, at first, the two separate colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, but founded by very like-minded Puritan populations; the two were merged into one in 1691 after the Boston Revolt). The oldest part of Boston is Charlestown, founded in 1628, while the original town of Boston itself was founded two years later, in 1630. Before 1630, the population of the whole Plymouth colony was only about 350-400 people.^1 The population in the Massachusetts Bay colony was even smaller. The Winthrop Fleet arrived in 1630, carrying upward of 1,000 new colonists with them,^2,3 which alone outnumbered the pre-existing English population in the two colonies combined. The next decade marked the height of the Great Migration of the Puritans to New England, when an estimated 20,000 new colonists arrived to the area,^4 1,200 of whom settled in Boston.^5 The initial populations of Plymouth and Salem weren't much more than a blip in comparison to this influx that began a decade or less later.
One of these arrivals was William Wood, who published a portrait of Massachusetts and Plymouth in 1634 called *New-England's Prospect*. The aim of the book was to encourage new, potential English colonists to immigrate. In the book, Wood describes Boston Harbor as the most natural harbor in either colony, with Boston being the area's preferred seaport already (spelling modernization mine):
> "This Harbor is made by a great company of islands, whose high cliffs shoulder out the boisterous seas, yet may easily deceive any unskillful pilot; presenting many fair openings and broad sounds, which afford too shallow waters for any ships, though navigable for boats and small pinnaces. The entrance to the great Haven [i.e., Boston Harbor] is called *Nantascot* [now Hull, Massachusetts]; which is two leagues from *Boston*; this place of it self is a very good Haven, where ships commonly cast anchor, until wind and tide serve them for other places; from hence they may sail to the River of *Wessaguscus* [i.e., Weymouth Fore River], *Neponset*, *Charles* River, and *Mystic* River, on which rivers be seated many towns."^6
It's a bit unclear if Wood is referring to Hull or Boston as the "very good Haven" for ships to anchor, but it's most probably Hull. Nevetheless, that didn't last long, and Boston became the preferred seaport. Wood mentions the "many towns" along the rivers flowing into Boston Harbor, and it's the Charles River which provided many of the major inland settlements of the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies in its early years. The Charles River is the most navigable river, and easily gives more access to the Massachusetts interior, than any other river that flows out into Boston Harbor. It also provided access to a freshwater source to more colonists than any other river could. Not only that, but Boston was built between both the Charles and the Mystic rivers, so colonists along the Mystic relied on the Boston seaport, too. Thus, Boston could service more farms and communities than any other seaport on Boston Harbor, or on the Massachusetts and Plymouth seaboards in general. Boston quickly eclipsed any of the other seaports of either colony.^7,8,9
That said, that's not to say Plymouth and Salem didn't grow at all. They were both among the 25 largest U.S. cities on the 1790 Census, and while Plymouth fell off rapidly after that, Salem didn't fall out of the top 50 cities until after the Civil War. They both continued to grow, Salem in particular, just nowhere near as fast as Boston did, as it became the main seaport and commercial trade center. And it quickly fell behind many other major settlements as the U.S. expanded westward.
As for why New York grew and not any other city in New York, the answer is pretty much the same as it is for Boston: geography. Manhattan lies in the middle of New York Harbor, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The Hudson River system provides better access to the interior of the North American continent than any other on the Eastern seaboard. In fact, New York City is the *only* point in New York that provides access to the interior of the colony/state from the Atlantic Ocean, and New Jersey doesn't have anything comparable to the Hudson. The rare hurricane aside, Manhattan is not very prone to flooding, and New York Harbor rarely freezes over, making it one of the best natural harbors in the world, certainly in North America. That is only one reason why New York ended up dwarfing any other city in the U.S. population-wise; I have written [a more comprehensive answer on this subject in this sub](_URL_10_) before. But when limiting the comparison to New York City vs. Jamestown, Plymouth, and Salem, the difference is New York has the geographic advantages that the others do not, which resulted in those other settlements being abandoned/overtaken in favor of more preferable seaports nearby.
^1 Stratton, Eugene Aubrey. [*Plymouth Colony, Its History & People, 1620-1691* by Eugene Aubrey Stratton](_URL_0_), 1986, p.50.
^2 Winthrop, John, and James Savage. [*The History of New England from 1630 to 1649*](_URL_5_"), 1853, p.442.
^3 Morgan, Edmund S. [*The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop*](_URL_6_), 1958, p.55. While Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop himself estimated the number arriving with his fleet at 700, Morgan estimates that around 1,000 immigrants arrives in 1629-30. But Morgan also notes that upward of 200 of these new arrivals died during their first winter there, and as many as another 200 returned to England the following spring.
^4 Baines, Dudley. [*Migration in a Mature Economy: Emigration and Internal Migration in England and Wales 1861-1900*](_URL_7_"), 1985, p.57.
^5 Friedman, Karen J. ["Victualling Colonial Boston"]( _URL_1_), *Agricultural History*, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Jul 1973), p.189.
^6 Wood, William. [*New-England Prospect*](_URL_8_), 1634, p.3.
^7 Weston, George F. [*Boston Ways: High, By & Folk*](_URL_4_), 1957, p.10-15.
^8 U.S. Government Printing Office, pub. [*Boston Harbor Massachusetts Deep Draft Navigation Improvement Project*](_URL_9_), Part 3 of 3, 2014, p.595-597.
^9 Rawson, Michael. [*Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston*](_URL_2_), 2010, p.8-21. | [
"New York's strategic central location and port made it key to controlling the colonies. The British assembled the century's largest fleet: at one point 30,000 British sailors and soldiers anchored off Staten Island. General George Washington barely escaped New York City with his army in November 1776; General Sir ... |
Is the moons phase different depending on your location on earth? | In the Southern Hemisphere, people see the moon 'upside down' so the side which is shining (sunlit) seems the opposite from the Northern Hemisphere. Full and New moons come at the same time in both hemispheres, but the intermediate phases will be rotated by 180 degrees. | [
"In western culture, the \"four principal phases\" of the Moon are new moon, first quarter, full moon, and third quarter (also known as last quarter). These are the instances when the Moon's ecliptic longitude and the Sun's ecliptic longitude differ by 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270°, respectively. Each of these phases occ... |
why is the u.s. so outraged that n.k. continues to test missiles? | North Korea is run by an almost totally opaque and hyper-paranoid military cult that routinely kidnaps foreign nationals, attacks its neighbors, and threatens mass murder over twitter insults. The other nuclear powers are not nearly on that same level of crazy.
Just because you have a gun does not make it hypocritical to be concerned when the crazy guy down the street is on his front lawn, waving a rifle and screaming at a fire hydrant. | [
"In July 2014, the U.S. government formally accused Russia of having violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty by testing a prohibited medium-range ground-launched cruise missile (presumably R-500, a modification of Iskander) and threatened to retaliate accordingly. Concern in the U.S. was al... |
How many possible universes exist according to multiverse theory? | There's no such thing as multiverse theory in science. | [
"The Multiverse hypothesis proposes the existence of many universes with different physical constants, some of which are hospitable to intelligent life (see multiverse: anthropic principle). Because we are intelligent beings, it is unsurprising that we find ourselves in a hospitable universe if there is such a mult... |
what is sharp and flat in music and how do they differ? | Sharp is going up 1 semitone, Flat is going down 1 semitone.
For example C# would be 1 semitone higher in pitch than C and Cb would be 1 semitone lower than C | [
"In intonation, sharp can also mean \"slightly higher in pitch\" (by some unspecified amount). If two simultaneous notes are slightly out-of-tune, the higher-pitched one (assuming the lower one is properly pitched) is \"sharp\" with respect to the other. Furthermore, the verb \"sharpen\" means to raise the pitch of... |
what is an ip camera, how is it different to a web cam and how is it so easy to hijack? | It's just a normal camera that uploads images to the web constantly for remote surveilance.
The reason they're easy to hijack is that they typically come unsecured by default -- and they are really easy to find because they tend to contain a certain word in their title or URL, so you just have to Google for that to find one. | [
"An Internet Protocol camera, or IP camera, is a type of digital video camera that receives control data and sends image data via the Internet. They are commonly used for surveillance. Unlike analog closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, they require no local recording device, but only a local area network. Most... |
how do criminals use small businesses to launder money!? | The point of laundering money is to make money gained from illegal (or illegitimate) sources _appear_ to come from legal (or legitimate) sources. By doing so, you can declare that money as "legal" income, pay taxes on it, and spend it without worrying about people wondering where it came from (and thus investigating you).
This is often done by falsifying sales records. If I have a business where I can artificially inflate the number of products I sold, I can take some of my illegal income, deposit it in my bank account and then forge sales receipts saying that that came from legitimate customers. Thus, the income now looks legit.
In the case of a small football club, you could do this any number of ways. You could say you sold more tickets than you actually did, say that you sold more concessions than you actually did, claim that people paid more for seats than they actually paid, etc. Really, you could to anything that makes it seam that people paid you more in revenue than actually happened. | [
"To gain more profits, thief-takers begun to control and direct criminals moves, thus converting into thief-makers. They induced people to commit felonies with the objective of later arrest and prosecute them to obtain the reward. Stephen MacDaniel and John Berry prosecuted even innocents to take possession of the ... |
Can the CBD part of cannabis influence your reaction time? | Here's a study talking about the interaction between THC and CBD when it comes to a task involving reaction time. It looks like CBD may mitigate some of the negative effects, but in this study THC didn't show any effect on reaction time (based on a really quick read), so who knows.
Also, this study was in only six patients, and those patients were monkeys. So massive grains of salt necessary.
_URL_4_
Here's a study showing that CBD doesn't affect reaction time. It's from 1979, and it was in fifteen people, so again massive grains of salt.
_URL_3_
Here's a study showing that CBD doesn't seem to have an effect on motor inhibition, which is sort of related to impulsivity and reaction time.
_URL_1_
As a fun side note, apparently there have been multiple studies involving bathing sea urchin sperm in THC, for some reasons I...don't quite understand.
_URL_0_
_URL_2_
(Also, please don't get high and drive, even if it's just CBD, and no matter what the studies say) | [
"Via CB receptor activation, THC indirectly increases dopamine release and produces psychotropic effects. Cannabidiol (CBD) also acts as an allosteric modulator of the μ- and δ-opioid receptors. THC also potentiates the effects of the glycine receptors. It is unknown if or how these actions contribute to the effect... |
when i have a common cold, what physiological process makes me feel cold even at room temperature in the summers ? | Your sense of cold doesn't really work the number on a thermometer. It's actually a really complex calculation your body does that looks at a lot of things like hoe quickly heat is leaving your body and what temperature your body wants to be.
Your body has a built in temperature that it wants to be. If you get colder than that your body makes you want to find a warmer place or put on clothes. It can also make you shiver so you make more body heat but that takes extra energy.
When you are sick your body wants to be a warmer temperature than normal because the virus gets messed up when it's warmer. That's why we have fevers. Your body also doesn't want to spend lots of extra energy shivering to make you warmer because it needs the energy to fight the virus and it's harder to eat when you are sick.
To make itself warmer your body makes you feel cold so you put on warmer clothes and get under your bed covers. That way your body temperature goes up and helps fight the virus without using lots of extra energy shivering. | [
"The amount of warmness and humidity fluctuate over days and nights, therefore different temperaments form: morning is cold and wet, before noon is warm and wet, afternoon is warm and dry and evening and night are cold and dry. The various \"Mizaj\" of the day and night are the reasons behind mood swings and pain o... |
How accurate is it? | #Part 1
The video isn't that accurate. Let's start with a breakdown.
First, the video is produced by Prager University, a non-profit conservative organization that addresses areas such as economics, history, and...politics. Second, the video is hosted by Steven Crowder, a conservative political speaker who often demonstrates an interest in challenging what many on the right perceive to be Left-leaning values and notions in the mainstream discourse. Knowing this helps us to identify their bias.
Right off the bat, the video politically polarizes the presentation by presuming the adopting of Indigenous Peoples' Day to be about White guilt and child indoctrination by "Progressives," demonizing the U.S., and placing Native Americans (note: not a synonym for Indigenous Peoples) within the "Noble Savage" myth. These three things have little to do with Indigenous Peoples' Day and the desire to replace Columbus Day.
Then he goes through a brief history of identifying terms used to refer to Indigenous Peoples, seemingly criticizing such terminology because it keeps changing. Within Indigenous Literature discourses, this has been the case. Why? Because as relations between groups evolve and the development of language, political context, and legal ramifications continue to go on, what we are the manifestations of such evolution. Younging (2018) notes this numerous times in his detailing of terminology applied to Indigenous Peoples in Canadian Literature, where terms were applied to Indigenous groups by missionaries, government officials, and explorers and the determination of a name rested little with the Indigenous group themselves, but with what the colonizer at the time figured was appropriate. The results from this are what we have now--a colonial mindset that believes Indigenous Peoples do not have a right to call themselves what they want. However, since the 60s, many colonial countries such as the U.S. and Canada have seem significant social movements that have shifted the thinking on this and reflect the adopting of more appropriate terms that Indigenous Peoples agree with. So what the video is missing is that it isn't Left-leaning Liberals who are determining the instillation of such a day or even the real structure of it. The structure and existence of the day is brought forth by the resistance of Indigenous groups fighting against marginalization. Having support from the Left naturally draws opposition from the Right, but for Indigenous Peoples, allies from either side of the American political spectrum wouldn't affect the actual meaning behind the day. The terminology that is used is but a mere manifestation of *other* struggles Indigenous Peoples have endured. The point is moot and vapid. It has nothing to offer in this case except political agitation.
Next, around the 0:40 mark, he talks about how the celebrating of this day is just an "exercise in hating Western civilization, which is really just an exercise in hating yourself." At this point, he has identified his audience. He isn't speaking to all people or including Indigenous Peoples. He is attempting to reach those who identify with "Western civilization," which could be any number of people from any number of backgrounds. Yet, this again identifies that he is missing the point of the day because it isn't self-hating Liberals who are the crux of this day--it is Indigenous Peoples. There is reason to believe that Indigenous Peoples who back the repeal of Columbus Day do not identify with Western civilization and so Steven targets those who he usually targets: Liberals. Hence the "hating yourself" bit, since Liberal ideology originates in the West.
Next, around 0:50, he starts touting the achievements of Columbus. Many things could be said to underscore the achievements of Columbus. But that's exactly what the video is trying to do, in the reverse. They want to reify his achievements in order to underscore the atrocities (the little drop of "he wasn't *that* great, but c'moooooonnn" is a pitiful attempt to contextualize the situation, which he didn't do at all). Rather than evaluating his achievements, let's look at the fact that for most of the beginning after his "discovery," he wasn't even recognized. I will be pulling some excerpts from a previous [Monday Methods post of mine, entitled, "Indigenous Peoples Day and Columbus Day: Revisionist?"](_URL_0_)
> For example, the development of Columbus Day, really the veneration of Columbus as a whole, has an interesting past. Thomas J. Schlereth (1992) reports this (bold mine):
> > In **1777,** American poet Philip Freneau personified his country as "Columbia, America as sometimes so called from Columbus, the first discoverer." In **1846,** shortly after the declaration of war with Mexico, Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton told his Senate colleagues of "the grand idea of Columbus" who in "going west to Asia" provided America with her true course of empire, a predestined "American Road to India." In **1882,** Thomas Cummings said to fellow members of the newly formed Knights of Columbus, "Under the inspiration of Him whose name we bear, and with the story of Columbus's life as exemplified in our beautiful ritual, we have the broadest kind of basis for patriotism and true love of country."^1
> > Christopher Columbus has proven to be a malleable and durable American symbol. He has been interpreted and reinterpreted as we have constructed and reconstructed our own national character. He was ignored in the colonial era: **"The year 1692 passed without a single word or deed of recorded commemoration."^2 Americans first discovered the discoverer during their quest for independence and nationhood;** successive generations molded Columbus into a multipurpose [American] hero, a national symbol to be used variously in the quest for a collective identity (p. 937).
> For the last 500 years, the myth of Columbus has gone through several transformations, as the above cited text shows. While his exulting went silent for quite a while, the revival of his legacy happened at a time when Americans wanted to craft a more collective, national identity. This happened by linking the "discoveries" made by Columbus with one of the most influential ideologies ever birthed in the United States: expansionism, later known as Manifest Destiny. Schlereth (1992) further details this :
> > In the early republic, Americans began using Columbia as an eponym in their expanding geography. In 1791, for example, the Territory of Columbia, later the Dis- trict of Columbia, was established as the permanent location of the federal govern- ment. A year later Capt. Robert Grant, in a ship named Columbia, made a ter- ritorial claim on a mighty western river (calling it the Columbia) for the United States in a region (later Oregon, Washington, Idaho) then disputed with the British. Britain eventually named its part of the contested terrain British Columbia. The ship Columbia in 1792 became the first American vessel to circumnavigate the globe, foreshadowing imperial voyages of a century later.
> > Use of the adjective Columbian became a commonplace shorthand by which one could declare public allegiance to the country's cultural pursuits and civic virtue. It was used in the titles of sixteen periodicals and eighteen books published in the United States between 1792 and 1825 -for example, The Columbian Arithmeti- cian, A New System of Math by an American (1811).^9 Columbian school readers, spellers, and geographies abounded, as did scholarly, literary, and professional societies -for example, the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of the Arts and Sciences, which later evolved into the Smithsonian Institution. | [
"These are claimed as the most accurate measurements ever made, with a standard uncertainties cited as low as 78e6/(6674184+150) round 0 ppm. The difference of (484-184)/(78*sqrt(2)) round 1σ between the two results suggests there could be sources of error unaccounted for.\n",
"BULLET::::7. People favour \"plausi... |
How did the Romans get back the eagles (aquila) from the legion XVII, XVIII and XIX? (Varian disaster) | The eagles were captured during the battle, not hidden by the legions. The eagles were captured by certain tribes out of Arminius' confederation, the Bructeri, Marsi and Chauci respectively, and taken with them to their own lands.
* The eagle of the *legio XIX* was captured by the Bructeri, who lived on the upper Ems in modern southwestern Lower Saxony. This eagle was recovered in the year 15 by a unit led by Lucius Stertinius, one of Germanicus' subordinates, when he devastated the bructerian countryside after defeating them in battle:
> The Bructeri, who had set their belongings on fire, were beaten bei L. Stertinius with a unit (marching) without baggage at Germanicus' command, and during the murdering and plundering he recovered the Eagle of the 19th legion, which had been lost with Varus. [Tac. Ann. I, 60.3]
* The eagles of the Legio XVII and XVIII. The first of the two remaining eagles was recovered from the Marsi during the expedition of Germanicus in the following year. Tacitus doesn't mention to which legion this eagle belonged:
> Personally, he [Germanicus] invaded the territory of the Marsi [between Rhine, Ruhr and Lippe rivers in modern Westphalia] with an even greater force, while their leader Mallovendus, who had submitted himself shortly before now stated that one of the eagles of the legions of Varus was buried in a nearby grove, and was only lightly defended. Immediately a unit was dispatched to draw out the enemy in front, while another one was to go around the enemy in the back and dig up the ground, and both units were aided by luck [that is to say, the enemy was defeated and the eagle recovered. Tac. Ann. II, 25].
* The last remaining eagle was only recovered later during the reign of Claudius in the year 41, when Aulus (sometimes also Publius) Gabinius led an expedition against the Chauci, who settled at the coast of the North Sea between Elbe and Ems (modern East Frisia):
> This same year, however, Sulpicius Galba overcame the Chatti, and Publius Gabinius conquered the Cauchia and as a crowning achievement recovered a military eagle, the only one that still remained in the hands of the enemy from Varus' disaster. Thanks to the exploits of these two men Claudius now received the well-merited title of imperator. [Cass. Dio LX, 8]
What exactly they did with them is unclear, but it seems that they were stored in sacred groves, mirroring their use in the Roman legion where they were revered as deities and stored in a sanctuary, often together with statues and images of the emperor and the *vexillae*, the other standards; but Arminius and his Cherusci seem to have captured none of the Eagles. During the reign of Augustus, the recovered standards (*signa recepta*) were an important propaganda asset. Augustus had already recovered the eagles that had been lost to the Parthians in 20 BC, and erected a temple (the temple of Mars Ultor, or Mars the Avenger) to store them in on his new forum. [Coins](_URL_0_) were minted that showed the temple together with the recovered Eagle and other standards. Similarly, the Eagles recovered from the Germans were celebrated as well. An arch was dedicated to Tiberius next to the temple of Saturn that celebrated the recovery of two of the Eagles under his command ("At the end of the year an arch was erected next to the temple of Saturn as thanks or the recovery of the standards lost with Varus under the leadership of Germanicus and the command of Tiberius" Tac. Ann. II, 41). Similarly, after the death of Germanicus in 19, three arches were erected in his honour, the one on the Rhine carrying a statue of Germanicus, showing him receiving back the Eagles from the defeated Germans:
> *[... supraque eam ianuam statua(?) Germanici Cae]/saris constitueretur recipienti[s signa militaria ab Ger]manis...*
| [
"The eagle was extremely important to the Roman military, beyond merely being a symbol of a legion. A lost standard was considered an extremely grave occurrence, and the Roman military often went to great lengths to both protect a standard and to recover it if lost; for example, see the aftermath of the Battle of t... |
Holocaust Awareness | Yes.
One general, I'm not sure if it was Patton or Eisenhower, once commented after moving his troops into a concentration camp, "if they don't know why they are fighting, they do now."
Here are a few quotes from a book I have ("The history of the holocaust", Langer):
In response to crystal night: "Humanity stands aghast and ashamed at the indecency and brutality that is permitted in Germany" -- Post-Standard, Syracuse, New York.
Headlines from the Jewish Chronicle, London: "Ghastly pogroms in Ukraine: thousands of corpses in river Dniester: 8,000 slain in synagogues."
"An indeterminate number of Jews have been killed. Hundreds of Jews have been beaten or tortured. Thousands of Jews have fled. Thousands of Jews have been, or will be, deprived of their livelihood. All of Germany's 600,000 Jews are in terror.." New York Evening Post, April 15, 1933.
It's a very insightful book about the holocaust as it does nothing more than present the holocaust through printed memos and reports from the US, Germany, etc. | [
"Education about the Holocaust or Holocaust education refers to efforts, in formal and non-formal settings, to teach about the Holocaust. Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust (TLH) addresses didactics and learning, under the larger umbrella of education about the Holocaust, which also comprises curricula and t... |
How is graphene both a good conductor of electricity and a semiconductor? | Graphene is not really a semiconductor since it has no bandgap, i.e. no energetic spacing between its highest lying filled electron band (the valence band) and the next available energy band (the conduction band). Instead it's sometimes (and perhaps a bit misleadingly) called a "zero bandgap semiconductor," to describe its unique electronic structure where the valence and conduction bands meet at one point [as shown here](_URL_0_). In any case, the key part of the story is that because its electronic structure is gapless, electrons can swoop through the conduction band, thus making graphene semi-metallic in character. | [
"Graphene could be used to improve the electrical conductivity of cathode materials. LiCoO, LiMnOand LiFePO are all commonly used cathode materials in lithium-ion batteries. These cathode materials have typically mixed with other carbon-composite materials to improve their rate capability. As graphene has a higher ... |
Why does the "Fertile Crescent" have such a green reputation? Isn't it mostly just sand? | While there is much to discuss here, [this post](_URL_0_) has a lot of good information on environmental change in that region. I particularly enjoyed the post by /u/Prufrock451, but there are many good contributions. | [
"The Fertile Crescent is a crescent-shaped region in the Middle East, spanning modern-day Iraq, Israel, Palestinian Territories, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan as well as the southeastern fringe of Turkey and the western fringes of Iran. Some authors also include Cyprus.\n",
"The term \"Fertile Crescent\" was ... |
how does the magnus effect work? | [Bernoulli's principle](_URL_0_) basically.
Its a basic consequence of fluid dynamics. Like wings on a airplane, a spinning ball exerts a force on the air, which according to Newton, exerts and equal and opposite force back.
| [
"The Magnus effect is an observable phenomenon that is commonly associated with a spinning object moving through the air or a fluid. The path of the spinning object is deflected in a manner that is not present when the object is not spinning. The deflection can be explained by the difference in pressure of the flui... |
Did any nation/culture even begin to approach the level of sword-making of Japan? | It's sort of a myth that Japanese sword making is the best in the world. European and Middle Eastern sword making was just as impressive. Those common long swords in Europe are the product of hundreds of years of development, research, and progress!
No doubt, Japanese swordsmithing is incredibly impressive, most of all because of the general low quality of raw materials they had to work with. Which is to say, their source of ores for steel was complete shit, due to the **resource poor nature** of the Japanese home islands and they still managed to turn out weapons that are globally renown for their quality. Nothing short of miraculous.
There are two techniques that many seem to know about now, because of a resurgence of interest in samurai and the Orient perhaps. They are the **multiple foldings** of the steel, to create a more uniform material and **hammer out impurities**, as well as the technique of **forging the sword from two 'parts'**, the stiff, sharp edge and the 'soft' spine or back.
Here's the thing. **This wasn't a uniquely Japanese technique**. Swordsmiths elsewhere came up with these ideas independently as well. This does not detract from the skill and prowess of Japanese swordsmiths but it also serves to show that they were not almost mythical in nature.
The reason these techniques feature so prominently in Japanese sword making is because after thousands of years of trial and error, generations of sword making, they decided that **this is what worked**, given their circumstances with technology, tools, and raw materials they had to work with. Other swordsmiths had other circumstances and so they worked differently, having different obstacles and different needs. Everyone's techniques were tailored to highly specialized locations, situations, styles and pressures.
The biggest thing I'm trying to get across is that Japanese swords, while definitely amazing and exquisite, equal parts engineering marvel and awe inspiring art, **they were not definitively better than any other swords out there**.
German, English, Middle Eastern, Chinese, and other smiths besides all had their own masterpieces and incredible skills, patterns, secrets, etc.
Plus, as every sword was handcrafted back then trying to determine which arbitrary grouping of swords was better than another arbitrary grouping of swords becomes *extremely* theoretical and much less *historical*, key word here being **history**.
Even if there was some completely objective way to determine which kind of sword or what style of swordsmithing was better, accounting for every single unique factor that led to each sword's creation, we would run into the obstacle of determining what time frame, how should we group them without being arbitrary by deciding what should be included and what shouldn't, should the smiths themselves factor in or not, etc.
I understand that there is no need to be exactly precise but it is undoubtedly frustrating that we can't reach an answer that seems to be almost intuitive, as though it should be impossible for us to *not* know the answer.
However, the questions of "katana vs any other sword but usually European something" is nearly as ubiquitous as "European armor vs Samurai armor" or even "Knight vs Samurai". I get asked these questions all the time and the short answer is, there is a lot more similar than there is different.
For example, the average European sword and a katana were **about the same weight**, 1.1 kg, which was considered the optimal weight for deft movement in combat. Many people have this idea in their heads that the average European longsword was some glorified metal club that caused men to lumber around like slow witted brutes while the katana zipped around like a light saber while samurai cut and thrust at the speed of light. Neither is true.
The small differences however, make subtle if massive differences in style, doctrine and philosphy. But they certainly didn't make one supremely better than the other. At best, there were slight advantages each held in certain areas, and even then only for periods of time because **weapons are constantly evolving**.
It would be interesting to make theoretical rants about swords at some point. | [
"Japan was famous for the swords it forged in the early 13th century for the class of warrior-nobility known as the Samurai. The types of swords used by the Samurai included the ōdachi (extra long field sword), tachi (long cavalry sword), katana (long sword), and wakizashi (shorter companion sword for katana). Japa... |
after several trips to the bathroom with diarrhea and eventual chafing of the wiped area as evidenced by specks of blood on toilet paper, how do these wounds generally not lead to illness by infection? | Fecal bacteria is generally very good for us, but they can cause an infection if it they grow in the wrong part of our body.
We’ve lived in harmony with certain bacteria so long that we have a hard-coded system in place to recognize when they get into the wrong place. There are molecules on the surface of those bacteria that are different then ours, and white blood cells in our blood are born knowing to attack them. They’re called “pathogen associated molecular patterns” or “PAMPs”.
Certain white blood cells are born with instructions to kill anything that has a PAMP. Those cells don’t go into where the bacteria normally live, but they do travel in the blood.
This is part of what we call the “innate” immune system. The innate immune system is born with the ability to attack some things without having to be taught to attack them, but they don’t learn from being exposed to new things. The “adaptive” immune system can learn about new things, but it has to be shown the thing first and study it.
When I teach immunology, I call them “George and Lenny.” Lenny knows some things are bad, and he kills them right away. If there’s something Lenny doesn’t know about, he takes it to George and asks if it’s a bad thing. George can learn about new things, but it takes time. If George decides the thing is bad, he can tell Lenny to kill it.
Lenny knows most of the fecal bacteria, and he knows that they’re not allowed in the body. He doesn’t need George to tell him that. If something slips by Lenny, it’s up to George to decide if it belongs there or not. George is smart, but he’s not perfect. It takes time to learn about new things, and George can be wrong sometimes. But most of the time, George and Lenny are very good at keeping bacteria where they belong. | [
"The typhoid outbreak may have encouraged replacement of traditional laundered roller towels in public toilets, which allowed bacterial cross-infection from person to person, by disposable paper towels and warm air hand driers.\n",
"Routine cleaning of (hand, food, drinking water) sites and surfaces (such as toil... |
When a woman dies giving birth, what exactly happens? | The most common is hemorrhaging. There are fairly big blood vessels connecting the placenta to the uterus. During birth the placenta detaches from the uterus, so if anything goes wrong there, she can lose a lot of blood quickly.
Also possible are heart attacks or strokes induced by the exertion of childbirth. | [
"A \"maternal death\" is defined by WHO as \"the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management but not from accidental or incidental causes\".\n",
"Ma... |
what's the benefit of https on regular websites? | The encryption within HTTPS is intended to provide benefits like confidentiality, integrity and identity. Your information remains confidential from prying eyes because only your browser and the server can decrypt the traffic. Integrity protects the data from being modified without your knowledge. We'll address identity in a bit.
There’s an important distinction between tweeting to the world or sharing thoughts on Facebook and having your browsing activity going over unencrypted HTTP. You intentionally share tweets, likes, pics and thoughts. The lack of encryption means you’re unintentionally exposing the controls necessary to share such things. It’s the difference between someone viewing your profile and taking control of your keyboard.
| [
"Historically, HTTPS connections were primarily used for payment transactions on the World Wide Web, e-mail and for sensitive transactions in corporate information systems. , HTTPS is used more often by web users than the original non-secure HTTP, primarily to protect page authenticity on all types of websites; sec... |
Ireland and Scotland had strong clan systems from the Dark Ages until the Modern Age. Was this common in other European countries from 500 - 1746? | This is a pretty broad question, and I certainly can't answer all of it, but I'll try to give some impressionistic answers for some parts of Europe in some periods.
Firstly, I think your statement about the Gaelic clan system is very sweeping, and couldn't really be described as accurate. Kinship and kinship ties have always been central to society on the 'Celtic Fringe' of the British Isles (see Thomas Charles-Edwards' *Early Welsh and Irish Kinship*), but the 'clan system' (itself a very problematic term, in that it wasn't a system in any sense of the modern word), as it's usually conceived of today, developed only in the 14th century, and was gone from Ireland, at least, by the beginning of the 17th. I (/u/miles_sine_castrum, so I don't get a bot asking me to give credit) have written about this before [here](_URL_0_), from which I'll quote the relevant part:
> As I understand it, the clan system was a kin-based system of social organisation, where free men and their families were bound to clan leaders through bonds of obligation and solidarity. Not all members of a clan were related by blood, but clans were small-scale units and there would have been frequent marriage between the clan elite. This elite was supported through tribute and booty from raids and wealth was redistributed via gifts and salaries paid by the chief to his retainers and warriors. The system originated in the late 14th century across the northern Gaelic cultural area (modern Ulster and Connacht in Ireland and the Highland and Islands of Scotland) and survived until 1603 in Ireland and the mid 1700s in Scotland. The origins and workings of this system in Ulster are detailed in Katherine Simms, 'From Kings to Warlords'. I wish I could provide something similar for Scotland, but I'm not really familiar with the field, although IIRC Simms talks about the connections with Scotland and probably has further reading.
In relation to the main part of your question, I don't think that there was anything really analogous in Europe during the medieval or early modern periods. Kinship ties were, without a doubt, incredibly important for both politics and society in every European country throughout the period, but structures, practices and importance varied hugely in both space and time. Take, for example, Ireland, where the famously huge kinship and inheritance structures of the *Derbfine* and *Gaelfine* were radically simplified and limited (in practice if not in theory) throughout the Early Middle ages, with much more emphasis on immediate family from the tenth and eleventh centuries. There are analogous processes in Frankish Europe, where there seems to be a gradual movement from wider kinship groups, with frequent links with cousins of many degrees and partible inheritance, to much tighter lineages, focused on the 'nuclear' family and primogeniture (although the continuing importance of matrilineal kin has been underplayed in the past by historians.) Final example, in Northern Italy in the late middle ages, kin realtionships were concerned primarily with the male lineage and nuclear family, but this was complicated by marriage alliance, frequent multiple marriages by widows and women's loyalty to their own families (or their own families' continuing claims over them, however you want to frame it).
TL;DR: No. The clan system was only one example of kinship practices in medieval and early modern Europe, practices which, while always important, varied enormously in time and space, even in Gaelic Ireland and Scotland. | [
"Scottish society in the Middle Ages is the social organisation of what is now Scotland between the departure of the Romans from Britain in the fifth century and the establishment of the Renaissance in the early sixteenth century. Social structure is obscure in the early part of the period, for which there are few ... |
Did ancient civilians get PTSD? What do we know of the psychological effects of war on noncombatants, and how they dealt with them? | *Content warning: mention of sexual violence, suicide, casual misogyny*
& nbsp;
PTSD is a label we use to describe a group of symptoms connected to trauma and moral injury. The label was created in the 1970s to get Vietnam veterans in the US the support and mental health treatment they needed. As such, it was originally focused on making sense of the symptoms shown by soldiers, and connected to earlier diagnoses like shell shock and battle fatigue. Only when the label was well-established did people begin to realise that victims of other traumatic experiences (accidents, crime, violence, loss, abuse) often showed the same combination of symptoms. Today the most common causes of PTSD are domestic violence and sexual abuse. But the origin of the term in the treatment of veterans means it's still most commonly associated with war trauma.
The scholarly search for *historical* PTSD has the same origin. When Jonathan Shay wrote his groundbreaking *Achilles in Vietnam* (1994), it was not to examine Antiquity for its own sake, but to explore similarities in ancient and modern experience in order to help modern veterans. Shay is not a historian but a clinical psychologist; his work was prompted by his own practice treating veterans in Boston. Understandably, his focus was on warriors and their experiences with war and combat. The Ancient Greeks have helpfully left us a rich collection of material on just that topic, which allows us to examine their thoughts on warfare in detail.
Later scholars followed Shay's lead. Classicists and ancient historians arguing over whether or not the Greek experience was comparable to that of modern soldiers have made this a debate about war trauma rather than trauma in general. Their search for evidence has been focused entirely on trauma in men returning from war. As debate raged over whether Greek soruces really described war-related psychological disorders (on which see [this great post](_URL_1_) by u/hillsonghoods as well as the answers in [our FAQ section on PTSD in past societies](_URL_3_)), the fact that there are many recognised causes of PTSD besides war has been largely ignored.
The result is that we don't (yet) know the answer to your question. Put simply, there is no study of trauma and the effects of moral injury in Antiquity that does not focus on warriors. The search for specifically *military* experiences was baked into the question when it was first asked. It's only now that the study of the psychology of Antiquity has become more established that scholars have started looking beyond this extremely limited perspective and considered that there were other groups in Ancient society besides warriors.
We do know that there were many potential causes of moral injury in Antiquity. In a world of endemic violence, high mortality and little protection for vulnerable groups, in which enslavement was common and sexual violence was an accepted part of the relation between the powerful and the powerless, many people would have experienced things traumatic enough to leave lasting psychological damage. War made this particularly true for non-combatants, since it was understood that a defeated population was [subject to rape, enslavement and murder](_URL_2_). Many tragedies written in 5th-century Athens contain women lamenting their fate if their city were to fall, or bitterly grieving for themselves and their relatives once their city has fallen. The horrors that awaited a city that fell into the hands of the enemy were enough to inspire radical acts of defiance including [women taking up arms to defend their city](_URL_0_) or, in a final act of desperation, choosing mass suicide over enslavement.
But unfortunately there is almost nothing that tells us how non-combatants dealt with their traumatic memories afterwards. There is no parallel to the cases of lasting changes in personality or lasting psychological disorders that have prompted modern authors to argue that Greek warriors suffered from what we would call PTSD. Since most of those scholars use partial and tenuous evidence to build their case to an excessive degree of confidence, it seems quite likely they might be able to do the same with what scraps of evidence we have for non-combatants' lives after trauma. But the evidence is even thinner, since our best evidence is for war, and since ancient sources overwhelmingly focus on the experiences of elite men of military age. So if this study were ever undertaken, no doubt its basis would be extremely thin. For instance, a study by Ustinova and Cardeña^1 - while still entirely focused on warriors and military experience - cites Hippokrates' *On Diseases in Maidens* 5-10 as evidence for ancient awareness of trauma-related psychological disorder in teenage girls:
> My topic relates to (...) terrors of the sort that people fear so strongly, that they are beside themselves and seem to see certain hostile spirits, sometimes by night, sometimes by day, and sometimes at both times. Then as a result of this kind of vision, many have already hanged themselves, more women than men, for female nature is weaker and more troublesome. (tr. Rebecca Flemming)
But what Hippokrates goes on to describe is blood going the wrong places inside the body and causing these fears and suicidal thoughts. He does not identify any traumatic experience as the cause, and does not regard the problem as one of mental health. His solution, moreover, is for young girls who suffer this form of disorder to get married and get pregnant as quickly as possible, for "if they become pregnant, they become healthy" (42-3). This hardly counts as treatment - especially if, as we may suppose, the cause of the girls' unexplained terrors is not past trauma but the anticipation of marriage into a strange home and pregnancy at an early age. But even if we do consider these symptoms to be caused by some unspoken trauma, they fall very far short of the requirements for a modern diagnosis.
In other words, a study of the possible effects of trauma on non-combatants in Antiquity has not been done; it would be an uphill struggle both against the scholarly tradition as it stands, and against the source base available. I hope it will one day be undertaken. Myhtic stories such as that of Klytemnestra, Penelope and Persephone will probably end up being very important, since they represent some of the few examinations of what it was like to be a non-combatant and a dependant in a brutish patriarchy - but how closely such stories reflect real experiences will always be a matter of debate.
& nbsp;
1) Y. Ustinova, E. Cardeña, 'Combat stress disorders and their treatment in Ancient Greece', *Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice and Policy* (2014), 1-10. | [
"PTSD became first evident due to those individuals who suffered extremely horrible experiences from war. Society noticed that those who took part in war, or had family members who took part in war, became distant from themselves and suffered terribly and found it very difficult to cope with the tragedies. Research... |
What are some fields in history that have stagnated? | I think 'stagnated' would be going a bit too far, but 'local historiography', ie. the history of villages, cities, local regions etc. is very slow moving compared to 'big historiography' that looks at larger developments. So, for example, in larger-scale early modern social historiography, literature older than two or three decades tends to be almost always outdated in regards to modern scholarship (for example, even in literature from the 80s, you can find claims of 'millions' of convicted witches in the context early modern witch hunting, while the number currently supported by modern scholarship is only around a 100k for all of Europe). Meanwhile, from my experience, in local early modern historiography it's not uncommon to refer to literature from the 60s or 70s without major revisions.
(FWIW this is based on my experience with local early modern European historiography, for US historiography it may be different). | [
"Diamond's next book, \"\", published in 2005, examines a range of past societies in an attempt to identify why they either collapsed or continued to thrive and considers what contemporary societies can learn from these historical examples. As in \"Guns, Germs, and Steel\", he argues against explanations for the fa... |
How were people not constantly dehydrated before modern plumbing? | > Before the days of sanitation, I know that many people drank beer, even children, which probably only made dehydration worse.
This is actually a myth -- please see the ["Drinking Water" section of our FAQ](_URL_0_), and below it, "Beer." | [
"People wealthy enough to enjoy 19th century flush toilets often had the political power to allow them to drain into public sewers; and the practice became the norm as indoor plumbing became more common, based on large-scale supply networks such as the Croton Aqueduct in New York.\n",
"In the elderly, blunted res... |
what exactly is happening during a cold when your sinuses become extremely painful for a moment? | I recently battled a cold and I think I know what you mean. All of a sudden, the inside of your nostrils will hurt for a good 30 seconds. I believe it is because they are dry. Maybe someone with more knowledge in the medical field can help us out? | [
"The most common, everyday cause is temporary restriction of nerve impulses to an area of nerves, commonly caused by leaning or resting on parts of the body such as the legs (often followed by a pins and needles tingling sensation). Other causes include conditions such as hyperventilation syndrome and panic attacks... |
Did Ethiopians know much about the state of Christendom outside East Africa before regular contact with Portugal was established? | This is a difficult question to answer directly: we have basically no surviving manuscripts from the early/high medieval period in Ethiopia. This will change in a big way in the 13th-14th century, in conjunction with the flourishing of the Ethiopian state and a renaissance in its Church.
The Ethiopic Church is of course one of the most ancient in Christianity, and was tied into the greater Christian hierarchy from initial evangelization. Most importantly, medieval Ethiopia could not ordain its own priests or consecrate its monks. It depended on the periodic arrival of an abuna or metropolitan, a delegate from the patriarchate down in Alexandria (Egypt). Initially, of course, this was no problem. Coptic abunas brought the power to ordain, but also Christian intellectual culture. Some early texts, like the Book of Enoch, are basically unknown in the rest of medieval Christendom but survive in abundance in Ethiopian translations! It is not a stretch to argue that if the abunas are bringing Christian culture, they are also bringing news of the outside world.
This connection became both more important and more threatened after the seventh century. The cascade of Islamic caliphates across Egypt, Kush, Arabia sharply isolated Ethiopia (Aksum) from the outside world for centuries. We know abunas from Egypt occasionally made it through, but their visits were rare and *precious*.
Although their mission was theoretically religious, it becomes apparent that there was much more involved. The Ethiopian rulers basically kept a lockdown on the visitors, requiring potential monks and priests seeking orders to come to the royal palace to receive them; prohibiting the abuna from leaving. The reasons for this are lost to history, but you can probably imagine a combination of not wanting the outsider to gain intelligence (for whom?) on Ethiopian society/church, and seeing the visitor as too precious with knowledge to be wasted on traipsing around to monasteries.
So periodically, Ethiopian *rulers* would have received an injection of news from the outside Christian world, although it would have been necessarily limited to one person's perspective and knowledge. Beyond the royal court, though, the average person would have had basically no way to know.
The Ethiopian revival of the 13th and 14th century brings a lot of changes, especially to the Ethiopian church. A handful of charismatic and talented native emperors and Egyptian abunas headline a state/Church-wide revival of military, monastic, intellectual might. At that point, it seems likely that a few more Ethiopians, though probably still more upper-crust level, are gaining an awareness of the outside world. We have surviving Christian manuscripts again, this time translated from Arabic!
Of course, a 15th century translation from Arabic of a 12th century French text that claims to be written by a 7th century Spanish saint is a book of religious stories, not a status report on Christianity around the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, books don't travel in isolation in the Middle Ages. They are carried from one place to another by people who bring news and ideas and gossip far beyond the text. In that way, the trickle of abunas from Egypt throughout the isolated Middle Ages and then the dynamite abunas Ya'iqob and Salama in the 14th century linked Ethiopia's rulers, at least, to wider Christendom. | [
"The Portuguese voyages of discovery at the end of the fifteenth century opened the way for direct contacts between the Catholic Church and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Due largely to the behaviour of the Portuguese Afonso Mendes whom Pope Urban VIII appointed as Patriarch of Ethiopia in 1622 and who was expelled... |
Were snare traps ever used by the Vietcong during the Vietnam war? | In general, the traps used by VC insurgents were not as "primitive" as they are usually depicted in the popular culture of the war. They were encountered, sometimes as stand-alone traps, sometimes as something the VC would lure into during a firefight - but not in a widespread sense nor something an ordinary soldier would encounter on every hump. What was far more common was mines (concealed as booby traps or not), and that was the true psychological weapon in this context, which could lead to far more devastating effects than to ones personal psyche. Mines found in the outskirts of villages could lead to retaliation against the whole village.
I've written a more extensive post on the use of psychological warfare by the VC and how the booby traps fit into this category [here](_URL_0_). | [
"The psy-war tactics that were most usefully used by the Vietcong were the use of Booby Traps. They came in all shapes and sizes and in varying degrees of sophistication, but they had a huge impact on the morale of American troops. These traps were not meant to kill, but instead maim and injure because it instilled... |
who makes malware, viruses, and trojans? | Pretty much anyone with a knowledge of computer programming and code. As to why they make viruses/malware/trojans and their motivations really varies from person to person and could be for a multitude of reasons (everything from politics to "lulz"). | [
"Trojans are generally spread by some form of social engineering, for example where a user is duped into executing an e-mail attachment disguised to appear not suspicious, (e.g., a routine form to be filled in), or by clicking on some fake advertisement on social media or anywhere else. Although their payload can b... |
How far does sunlight go through space? E.g. does Pluto still have the same bright daytime, or does only part of their sky get lit up? | \- how far does sunlight go through space?
This doesn't really differ from light on earth, it will go in a straight line until it hits something. So unless it hits one of the other objects (planets, moons, asteroids, dust, ...) in our solar system first it will reach Pluto. Just like on earth, only there are a lot more objects on earth than in space.
& #x200B;
\- does only part of their sky get lit up?
If there is anything in the way then technically yes, part of the sky will be "not lit up". However given the distances involved this will be like a communication satellite (or the ISS) passing between the sun and us, not really noticeable at all (by our eyes at least).
& #x200B;
\- does Pluto still have the same bright daytime
Brightness roughly means how much photons (light particles) are received in for example a second. Consider a point (on a paper sheet) and draw a lot of lines through it from all directions, this is a simple view of our sun (the point) and the light that is emitted (the lines), now take a small object and place it close to the point. Then move that object further away from the point, and notice how fewer and fewer lines will cross the object as it gets farther and farther from the point.
This shows why even when nothing is blocking the light (lines), Pluto will still receives a lot less light (less lines will cross it) than earth, just because it's farther away. | [
"From Pluto, the Sun is point-like to human eyes, but still very bright, giving roughly 150 to 450 times the light of the full Moon from Earth (the variability being due to the fact that Pluto's orbit is highly elliptical, stretching from just 4.4 billion km to over 7.3 billion km from the Sun). Nonetheless, human ... |
how does esp and crystal ball psychic readings work? | Psychics use a technique known as cold reading. They watch to see how the mark reacts as they make vague pronouncements, then they get more specific as they discover what the mark wants to hear. The mark wants to be fooled which makes the process easier. | [
"A psychic reading is a specific attempt to discern information through the use of heightened perceptive abilities; or natural extensions of the basic human senses of sight, sound, touch, taste and instinct. These natural extensions are claimed to be clairvoyance (vision), clairsentience (feeling), claircognisance ... |
the phrase 'uncle' meaning 'i give up' | It's not really known. But, the romans said a similar phrase, also of an origin that is not known. The best theory i've seen as that you're just calling out - in weakness - for an adult. | [
"In the United States and Canada, the idiomatic expression \"\"Say 'uncle'!\"\" may be used as an imperative command to demand submission of one's opponent, such as during an informal wrestling match. Similarly, the exclamation \"\"Uncle!\"\" is an indication of submission – analogous to \"\"I give up\"\" – or it m... |
why is it whenever someone is watching me do something, or if i'm doing something with someone, i suddenly get worse at that thing? | Even if the person watching us is totally cool, a part of us still worries that we'll be judged for the little mistakes we might make. That anxiety in turn causes us to lose some focus and make mistakes that we wouldn't otherwise make. | [
"He also proposes a natural 'motor' response to seeing the actions of others: If we see a knife hacking off a person's leg we wince away, if we see someone dance we move in the same ways, we feel the injuries of others as if we had them ourselves.\n",
"BULLET::::- Eyes up - Different people look up for different ... |
What was life like for a Babylonian under Nebuchadnezzar II? | If you don't mind my hopping on this to ask;
Was Nebuchadnezzar a popular name at the time? or was the 1st one so fucking awesome that he became many people's namesakes? | [
"Under Nebuchadnezzar II, Failaka was under Babylonian control. Cuneiform documents found in Failaka indicate the presence of Babylonians in the island's population. Babylonian Kings were present in Failaka during the Neo-Babylonian Empire period, Nabonidus had a governor in Failaka and Nebuchadnezzar II had a pala... |
Were there any large IRA raids/attacks against British forces in Northern Ireland during World war two? | No. The IRA did not have the resources for anything that big. They had run a bombing campaign in England in 1939 before the war but were in pretty bad shape afterwards. Both Éire and Northern Ireland used emergency laws to suppress them and Nazi Germany never provided the help the IRA wanted.
There was a campaign in 1942 targeting the RUC but it was not much of a success. Richard English has characterised the IRA's activities during the war as 'low level brutality and largely directionless violence'
Sources
Richard English, *Armed Struggle : the history of the IRA*
Tim Pat Coogan, *The IRA* | [
"In 1971, during The Troubles, after two years engaged in violence based on a defensive strategy in Irish communal districts of Northern Ireland, the Provisional IRA launched an offensive against the United Kingdom. At a meeting of the IRA Army Council in June 1972 the organization's Chief of Staff, Seán Mac Stíofá... |
Does your body's production of Vitamin D change depending on your dietary intake of Vitamin D? | That particular question either has not been addressed, or it is not documented in this summary.
_URL_1_
Here:
_URL_0_
"The evidence indicates that the synthesis of vitamin D from sun exposure works in a feedback loop that prevents toxicity."
This would seem to indicate that your body will stop producing to avoid toxicity, so if you have "enough," it will like stop production in sunlight. | [
"Vitamin D metabolism is complex because the provitamin can be formed in the skin by ultraviolet irradiation or obtained from the diet. Once hydroxylated, the vitamin has a half-life of about 2 months.\n",
"The blood plasma concentration of vitamin C or ascorbic acid as a function of dose attains a plateau with a... |
where do fake twitter accounts come from, and why do they keep following then unfollowing me? | They want you to refollow them. Once followed, they hope that you are more likely to click on their malicious links. Alternatively, if they gain enough followers they can sell the account to some dodgy PR company.
As for why they find you. Could be keywords in your tweets, or maybe at some point you followed one and you got added to a "likely to refollow" database (kind of like how replying to a spam email may increase the spam you get) | [
"A Twitterbot is a computer program that automatically posts on Twitter, they are programmed to tweet, retweet, and follow other accounts. According to a recent report, there were 20 million, fewer than 5%, of accounts on Twitter that were fraudulent in 2013. These fake accounts are often used to build large follow... |
If I pour boiling water into my metal water bottle, will it kill off most/all of the bacteria inside? | High Temperature Short Time Pasteurization (i.e. Milk Pasteurization) is only 72C for 15 seconds. Sanitization is 80 C for more than 30 seconds. The water bottle should be cleaned with hot soapy water, but between times this should work fine. Look up control of pyrogenic bacteria (i.e fever producing bacteria) or sanitization for food safety. | [
"Potassium metabisulfite is sometimes used in the brewing industry to inhibit the growth of wild bacteria and fungi. This is called 'stabilizing'. It is also used to neutralize chloramine that has been added to tap water at the source as a disinfectant. It is used both by homebrewers and commercial brewers alike. I... |
the exsecant and excosecant in trigonometry. | If you're trying to use exsecant to simplify the explanation of tangent, I think you'd be better off with secant instead. Exsecant is just (secant - 1), so it takes one more step to explain. It's also barely ever used.
A *tangent line* to a circle is a line that touches it at just one point (*tangent* means "touching" in Latin, while *secant* means "cutting"). The tangent and secant functions create a second right triangle with the unit circle, as you can see in your linked diagram. One leg of the triangle touches the circle (*tangit*) at the specified angle, the other leg of the triangle is the radius of the circle, and the hypotenuse cuts through the circle (*secat*) to the center.
It's also very important to stress the identity that tan(x)=sin(x)/cos(x). This comes in very handy. | [
"The exsecant (exsec, exs) and excosecant (excosec, excsc, exc) are trigonometric functions defined in terms of the secant and cosecant functions. They used to be important in fields such as surveying, railway engineering, civil engineering, astronomy, and spherical trigonometry and could help improve accuracy, but... |
How did a nation as politically unstable as the Roman Empire last as long as it did? | From my understanding its because even though Rome had many usurpers to the throne, they wanted to be emporer and not destroy the empire itself. I'm going to assume by politically unstable your referring to the 3rd century crisis were there were at least 60 emporers or userpers. The enemies Rome faced during the 3rd century weren't interested in conquest. They much prefered raiding or to solify there claims in their home regions.
I hope that helps
Any spelling or grammatical errors I apologise for.
Sources: Adrian Goldsworthy: How Rome fell | [
"From Gaius Marius and Sulla onwards, control of the army began to be tied into the political ambitions of individuals, leading to the political triumvirate of the late 1st century BC and its resolution in a civil war that led to the Republic's collapse. The Empire was increasingly plagued by usurpations led or sup... |
how do previously prescription-only medications become over-the-counter medications? | After they've been on the market for many years, and proven to be effective and not having any major serious side effects, the drug maker can apply to the FDA to sell the product over the counter. If and when the FDA approves their application, that's all there is to it. | [
"Over the counter medications are those medications that do not require a prescription to purchase in the US. Medications that require a prescription to purchase in the US may be available in other countries without a prescription. The following guidelines are recommended:\n",
"Prescriptions are also used for thi... |
why is it some people can naturally throw a ball (like a tennis ball or a baseball) whilst others seemingly can't? | Form most likely. As in most things, proper form outpaces brute force.
Some people either don't know there is a technique to throwing a ball, or do it badly. I used to basically just go with 'fling my arm as fast as possible and the ball will go farther', and could never understand why other people could manage the same distance with much less apparent effort. | [
"In still another variation, a volleyball or similar ball may be used and there will be no pitcher. The \"up\" player sets the ball in motion by holding it in his or her non-dominant hand, and sets it in motion by a hefty strike from the other hand. This often occurs in crowded play areas, such as schoolyards, wher... |
how does the boston bomber face the death penalty if the death penalty itself was abolished in massachusetts | Although the Boston Bomber committed the crime in a state which does not allow the death penalty, he also committed a federal crime (terrorism), which means he can now be charged by the federal government as opposed to the state government. | [
"In 2013, Schumer said the death penalty would be “appropriate” in the case of the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the perpetrator of the Boston Marathon bombing. “The federal law allows the death penalty,” “I wrote the law in 1994 when I was head of the crime subcommittee in the House. This is just the kind of case that it sho... |
After America tested its first nuclear weapons (before being dropped on Japan), how did they keep the weapons program a secret after the first test? | So it was definitely intended to be secret — the reason is because they wanted to surprise Japan with the weapon. This presented obvious problems with keeping it secret when they were exploding a massive bomb.
Their main way to keep it secret was to do the test in relative isolation. The Trinity Site was in an area of very low population density near Alamogordo, New Mexico. It was not, however, zero population density.
Part of their strategy for keeping it quiet depended on how big the explosion was, which they did not, at that time, know. They could guess the theoretical maximum size and the most probable size, but they didn't really know what it would be. (The actual yield was 5X larger than their guess as to the most likely yield.) They also knew that detonating a nuclear weapon on the ground would involve a cloud of radioactive fallout spreading with the wind, and they hoped it would not go to inhabited areas, but they couldn't really control that, other than waiting for the weather to be good and hoping it wouldn't change.
So they spread military intelligence agents all around the test site, in the local towns. These agents kept a watch on the people to see if anyone talked about it. They were also in place in case evacuation proved necessary. They also stationed scientists nearby, with Geiger counters, to help track the spread of the radioactive cloud, and to raise an alert if the radiation levels got too high.
They also prepared a series of press releases to be sent out after the test. [You can read them here](_URL_0_). They range from the most understated disinformation (i.e., a remote ammunition dump exploded, but nobody got hurt) to catastrophe plans that involve revealing a lot (i.e. we were making a new kind of bomb and it blew up wrong and required evacuation of lots of people and killed a lot of top scientists).
As it happened, the test went fine. Nobody died, nobody had to be evacuated, the cloud more or less did what it was hoped it would do (except for some cattle ranchers' cows who got a bit overly irradiated — the government bought the cows and destroyed them). The "ammo dump" story was given to the local newspapers, and the military intelligence people monitored talk around the towns (e.g. in the bars, shops) to see if anyone was speculating on anything else to the contrary. People accepted the ammo dump story, and that was that, until after the Hiroshima bombing, when it was revealed was the truth actually was. | [
"The test surprised the Western powers. American intelligence had estimated that the Soviets would not produce an atomic weapon until 1953, while the British did not expect it until 1954. When the nuclear fission products from the test were detected by the U.S. Air Force, the United States began to follow the trail... |
Is there a correlation between introversion and intelligence? | Hi everyone. Professor of Neuroscience here. First of, intelligence is a scientific measure and can be traced biologically. I think what one of the posters was confusing is that there are two components of intelligence.
A) Fluid: also known as G factor. Is determined mostly by genetics. Think of this as the raw horsepower of your brain. There are tests that measure G that are not (or aren't so posed to ) be influenced by culture. The progressive matrices by Raven is one such example. A person who dropped out of elementary school and a person who has three Ph.D.'s should score the same on this test if they have the same level of G factor.
B) Crystallized: This can be thought of the sum of all the things we know. So for example, if two people get dropped in a jungle and one has very high G factor and one has lower G, but has taken a survivalist course. The survivalist will be more adapt to responding to challenges.
As we get older, our G factor decreases and our Crystallized intelligence increases. What the other poster was referring to was the fact that crystallized IS a function of socio-cultural environment.
Now back to the OP's question. The problem is that there are many definitions of introversion, and a few of intelligence. If you want a straight answer I'd have to say they are orthogonal. If you would like, I'll explain where introversion- extroversion comes from in the brain, so that you can get a better idea.
| [
"The difference between extraversion and introversion comes from the source of the decisive factor in forming motivation and developing ideas, whether it is objective (i.e. the external environment) or subjective (the collective unconscious, or \"processes inherent in the psyche\"). When discussing function types, ... |
why do onions make me cry? | Your eyes produce tears to wash away any irritants, such as smoke. Onions absorb chemicals from the ground when they grow, which are released as gas when you cut the onion open. This gas, like smoke, irritates your eyes, leading to the production of tears.
Edit: I do not know what I am talking about! | [
"Freshly cut onions often cause a stinging sensation in the eyes of people nearby, and often uncontrollable tears. This is caused by the release of a volatile liquid, \"syn\"-propanethial-S-oxide and its aerosol, which stimulates nerves in the eye. This gas is produced by a chain of reactions which serve as a defen... |
why is the sea clearer on beaches in spain and italy for example rather than england | Because England can't have any nice things as punishment for trying to conquer the world. That's why we have cold and cloudy seas, and cold and cloudy weather, and when things get really bad, someone makes you cold and cloudy tea...
Source: Am English. | [
"Due in part to the relatively mild winter and spring climate, the south of Spain is attractive to overseas visitors–especially tourists from Northern Europe. While inland areas such as Jaén, Córdoba and the hill villages and towns remain relatively untouched by tourism, the coastal areas of Andalusia have heavy vi... |
politicians forced to resign instead of getting fired? | It's extending a kindness to allow them to resign with dignity. The implication exists that if they don't, then they'll be fired. In those cases, if someone refuses, it's to take a stance and attempt to become a martyr. | [
"From May 13 to 15, several senators and congressional representatives called for Acting Commissioner of the IRS, Steven T. Miller, to resign or be fired. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, said, \"My question isn't about who's going to resign, my question is who's going to jail over this sc... |
What is the actual benefit a sauna has on your health/body, if any? | Well, there are several elements that go into sauna'ing, as it were.
A simple review on the subject matter: _URL_5_
Study: phys of saunas
_URL_0_
This article's stated "health risks" have not been found by other studies, but their physiological data is good.
1) Improved mood
One of the only benefits that seems to be consistent throughout the years is that people enjoy saunas, as mentioned in the previous review.
2) Loss of body water
While body water is important, the shedding of it can help wrestlers and martial artists cut a significant portion of water weight without having to over-exert themselves during match preparation.
Study: _URL_1_
Secondary to this is the fact that the high release of sweat can aid in opening previously closed pores in the skin that are blocked enough not to be easily opened via scrubbing, but still able to be forcibly sweat from. This is relevant because work-induced sweating is more electrolyte dense than that of a sauna, so repletion with water only is safe.
3) Heart rate
One thing the study notes is the persistently elevated heart rates without force of exercise, which means that mild sauna-ing for purpose of cardiovascular work out could be an alternative for individuals who may be capacity limited to exercise traditionally, but are still aiming to "work out there heart" at a near exercise level. I am unaware that this has been investigated directly extensively but there is promising data in patients with CHF and ventricular arrhythmias:
Study: _URL_2_
4) BMR
Increasing body temperature results in a dramatic decrease in the basal metabolic rate. Now this is a bad thing for everyone trying to lose weight, but, building on our last example, a patient with a history of anorexia nervosa has two really important treatment goals: 1) Maintain adequate nutrition and calories to gain and maintain weight and 2) promote cardiac health. After severe periods of anorexic behavior, the heart can be dramatically weakened in its capacity to take any level of exercise and their muscles may be massively underdeveloped. Saunaing is a way to elevate heart rate without promoting weight loss and help rebuilding cardiovascular integrity. The same is true of the CHF patients in the previous study, but is less obvious why a decreased BMR is significant.
Study: _URL_4_
Review of study and additional thoughts: _URL_3_
Conclusion:
Sauna'ing for regular people is fun. For a number of types of patients it offers great therapeutic potential! | [
"The sauna-based part of the program is based on Hubbard's belief that the body's fatty tissue accumulate drugs and other toxins over time. This is said to contribute to cravings, which make it harder to overcome addiction. The use of vitamins, minerals and oils is supposed to dislodge toxins stored in body fat, wh... |
What did the vikings (8th century) call England? | This is actually a pretty hard question to answer with the specific qualifier of the 8th century, as the name "England" didn't become commonplace until the 10th century or so, as we can see from the [England runestones](_URL_1_). In that later period it would be *Ængland* in modern East Norse orthography, and spelt in a ton of different ways in actual runes due to the idiosyncractic nature of the Younger Futhark (examples: [*anklanti*](_URL_0_), [*haklati*](_URL_3_), [*eklans*](_URL_2_)).
These runestones are from the late 10th and the 11th centuries and are mostly Swedish, and this was indeed the period when most runestones were raised. This coincides with the period when many vikings traveled to England to demand Danegeld.
As for the 8th century, since England/*Ængland* is fairly transparently formed from *Angel* + *land*, it isn't really a stretch to say that they would have used a similar form earlier on, but the question is when the settlement by the Angles and their contact with the Norse became notable enough to warrant a specific name. Moreover, as there wasn't yet a unified England, it is very likely that the names used would denote the specific Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Modern Icelandic has *Bretland* for Britain, but this meant Wales in Old Icelandic -- it is possible that it actually referred to the whole island originally as in the original Latin, but came to denote the Welsh when other Germanic speakers took over parts of the island.
But the most truthful answer is: We don't know for sure.
| [
"The long-term linguistic effect of the Viking settlements in England was threefold: over a thousand Old Norse words eventually became part of Standard English; numerous places in the East and North-east of England have Danish names, and many English personal names are of Scandinavian origin. Scandinavian words tha... |
what determines when water is too deep to drive through? | Physics issue, vehicle becomes buoyant and drag from the water exceeds friction from the tires, usually when the water gets several inches above the floorboards. | [
"In shallow water, the group velocity is equal to the shallow-water phase velocity. This is because shallow water waves are not dispersive. In deep water, the group velocity is equal to half the phase velocity: \"c = ½ c\".\n",
"Channel related drifts form when deepwater bottom-currents are confined to a smaller ... |
why is the ocean sometimes really dark, like in the north atlantic yet in some places a turquoise colour like in the caribbean or south pacific? | It’s because dead animals and plants sink in water. That might seem obvious, but it means that any nutrients in sea water are rapidly used up by animals and plants and when those organisms die they sink to the bottom taking the nutrients with them. The only way those lost nutrients can be replaced is if water from the ocean bottom, where all those dead organisms go, can be moved to the surface again.
That cycling can’t happen in warmer regions because the surface water is warm and warm water floats on the cold water of the ocean bottom. As a result warmer waters very rapidly become nutrient deficient.
Because they are nutrient deficient very little actually lives in tropical waters. Very few algae, very little plankton and so forth. And because nothing much lives in tropical waters they remain clear. That means that light can get go waayyy down into the depths, and as light passes through the water the blue wavelengths get scattered. That produces a vivid turquoise blue ocean.
In contrast cold waters are dirty and full of life due to the upwelling of water from the ocean bottom. All that dirt and all the life it supports absorbs sunlight very fast. Light will only penetrate a few meters in cold waters. With very little penetration the light also doesn’t have much chance to scatter. That produces an ocean that is very dark colored, and where the blue wavelengths are muted by the reds and greens to produce a muddy blue-gray.
So what it all comes down to is that tropical waters are clear, and they are clear because they are sterile and nutrient deficient. Coral reefs thrive in tropical waters precisely because they are clear and sterile and that allows enough sunlight for the photosynthetic symbiotic algae that live in the coral and that provide most of their food. | [
"The sea waters have blue to green-blue color and a transparency of about . They are rich in dissolved oxygen, especially in the western and northern parts, which are colder and have more phytoplankton than the eastern and southern areas. The oxygen concentration is 95% of the saturation point near the surface, it ... |
how can a corporation know how much will it gain by naming a stadium in sports? | Tons and tons of market research, such as comparison of how much sales figures of other companies have risen when they have named a sports arena after their company/a product. | [
"While the highest prices have traditionally been paid for stadium rights, many companies and individuals have found that selling their naming rights can be an important consideration in funding their business. In the last few years many new categories have opened up, such as the selling of the rights to name a new... |
"I am Arthur, King of the Britons!" "Who're the Britons?!" To what extent did medieval peasants have a sense of nation and state? Did they know of, or care about, their kings and lords? | *None...they lived in a dictatorship! A self-perpetuating autocracy!* Just kidding :). If I recall, this question has been asked before to some degree, so I'll include parts of my last answer, while trying to taylor my response more to your question in particular.
Even as a peasant, you would likely know your king by name, and would certainly "care". You could, in some cases even feel the reaches of his administration in your life - though it's unlikely you'd be called to court for any reason.
In terms of your lord, your contact or "care" would be more direct. In theory, you had to entertain your lord if he dropped by for dinner or needed a bed (though it is doubtful he would stay with a peasant) and, of course, you had to pay his taxes in addition to the taxes of the king. Most importantly, however, you would have probably known that your lord was there to protect you. Should a Welsh raiding party arrive (if you were in the West), or a band of thieves, or a French invasion—you would probably count on your lord to muster a military defense.
I think talking about the "nation-state" in medieval society is at best vexing for several reasons, and most medievalists would contest using the term at all. It's a bit anachronistic. Rather than the modern nation-state (with a standing army, constitution, and all the comforts of the twenty-first century) medieval peasants operated within a system of lordship - which valued very little what our "nations" value today. (For what I view as a pretty edgy interpretation of medieval social organization, have a look at Thomas Bisson's *The Crisis of the Twelfth Century*. He deals with the peasantry pretty well).
This is not to say that they didn't have an identity. Their identity would be shaped, among other things, be shaped by culture. Stories, oral history, and memory were very important (though it doesn't deal with the peasantry, check out Clanchy's *From Memory to Written Record*).
As the Middle Ages progressed, and especially after the Black Death, there was a significant shift towards unrest within the peasantry. Their perceptions of their societal identity was certainly changing, but was it a recognition of membership in a "nation-state" that they were developing? I think think it's tough to argue. Maybe talk to some Early Modernists. Or Terry Jones, because not only is he a lovely Marxist peasant woman, but he's an *actual* historian! | [
"The title King of the Britons (Latin \"Rex Britannorum\") was used (often retrospectively) to refer to the most powerful ruler among the Celtic Britons, both before and after the period of Roman Britain up until the Norman conquest of England. The Britons were the Brittonic-speaking peoples of what is now England,... |
Were the Parthians/Sassanids extreme in their way of humiliating rivals compared to the Romans or other ancient empires? | The Romans were great fans of crucifixion, which is truly a horrible, agonising way to die. Allegedly the Crassus who got gold down the throat put up 6,000 crosses along the Appian Way after Spartacus' revolt (Appian. 13.120) to punish the rebellious slaves he captured in the third servile war. Not to mention beast hunts and gladiatorial combat where condemned men were expected to fight insurmountable odds so their execution provided entertainment to the masses. Nero kept a castrated slave called Sporus as a wife according to Suetonius (*Nero* 28, 46, 48-49), and Tiberius directly or indirectly authorised the rape of a young girl so that she could be executed alongside her older brother for being the wrong man's (Sejanus') daughter. It was decided she had to be violated because Roman law forbade the execution of virgins (Tacitus. *Annales*. 5.9).
Away from domestic debauchery, the Roman triumph was an exhibition in humiliation. Vercingetorix, the great leader of the Arverni who defied Caesar, was incarcerated for 5 years before being paraded through the city of his conqueror in a chariot, then strangled to death. Cassius Dio suggests that Octavian wanted Cleopatra alive so he could lead her in his triumph (51.11) but in any case slaughtered the rumoured son of Julius Caesar by Cleopatra Caesarion, a rival to Octavian's own inheritance (51.15).
What I'm trying to demonstrate is that no ancient culture was any better or any worse than any other. Autocrats used (and still use) fear to extend and solidify control. Whether we believe the cruel deeds written in the sources to the letter is in one sense academic; the readers of Tacitus certainly thought the Emperors capable of such brutality, as did the Romans of their enemies to the east.
Appian – [Roman History](_URL_3_)
Cassius Dio – [The Roman History](_URL_0_)
Suetonius – [The 12 Caesars](_URL_2_)
Tacitus – [Annals](_URL_1_) | [
"Until the Sassanids came to power, the Romans were mostly the aggressors. However, the Sassanids, being Persians, were determined to reconquer lands that the Achaemenid dynasty had once held and now lost. Their nationalistic zeal made them much more aggressive foes of the Romans than the Parthians ever were. For m... |
Why is it that our fingers can support our body weight, but people struggle lifting themselves with their entire arms? | Skeletal system vs muscular system.
| [
"Grip strength is a general term also used to refer to the physical strength of an animal and, for athletes, to the muscular power and force that can be generated with the hands. In athletics, grip strength is critical for rock climbers and in competitions such as the World's Strongest Man. Grip strength training i... |
antibiotic resistance? does dosage time matter? | Pharmacy student graduating in August. An hour late won't make much of a difference with most antibiotics. The thing you have to know is that antibiotics kill in a few different ways.
One of the methods is time dependent. This usually means time above a certain concentration required to kill the bug. An example of this type of drug would be amoxicillin. These drugs are the most likely to develop resistance if you forget to take them due to time being an important factor.
Another method is concentration dependent. For this the only thing that matters is that the concentration of the drug reaches a certain threshold in your body. Time doesn't matter as much so for these drugs we can dose them once per day.
With any antibiotic if you wait long enough the concentration will drop low enough for antibiotic resistance to form. An hour or 2 won't make that much of a difference but what is significant will be different for each antibiotic. | [
"Oral antibiotics are recommended for no longer than three months as antibiotic courses exceeding this duration are associated with the development of antibiotic resistance and show no clear benefit over shorter courses. Furthermore, if long-term oral antibiotics beyond three months are thought to be necessary, it ... |
from a tap, why is a low-pressure stream clear, and a high-pressure stream white? | There is an aerator on the end of the tap that only works when there is good enough water pressure. It looks like a little mesh screen and the water will just flow around it and become a constant stream again at lower water pressures | [
"Low-pressure discharges are discharges made under gas pressures from a few millitorr to a little less than atmospheric. They have the benefit of less power requirement of sustenance of the discharge as volume-recombination rates are lower.\n",
"On the characteristic curve at the flow rates below ṁS provides lowe... |
Where did the idea of the U.S. in WW2 having immensely inferior technology and skill come from and why is it so prevalent today? | I've literally never heard that view expressed. Can you give us an example of that view being supported? | [
"Americans, by and large, are often fascinated by new technology and new gadgets. There are many within the United States that share the attitude that through technology, many of the evils in the society can be solved. Many of the new technological innovations in the modern world were either first invented in the U... |
questions about dinosaur size. | > because an animal any larger than an elephant would collapse under it's own weight.
This is incorrect. Check your source, or stop reading that source if this is what it is saying.
Part 2: A couple of theories are out there. The levels of CO2 (carbon dioxide, the gas plants breathe) was a lot higher, and it was warmer. So plants grew very lush and dinosaurs could eat HUGE amounts of them easily. Another one is that when dinosaurs got big enough they were really hard to kill, so giant plant-eaters grew huge as a self-defense strategy. A third is they had really efficient lungs and laid lots of eggs so the many survivors of the various clutches could grow to enormous size. There's others too that are under debate.
| [
"In a 1997 \"Science News\" interview, Coria estimated \"Giganotosaurus\" to have been 13.7 (45 ft) to 14.3 (47 ft) m long and weighing based on new material, larger than \"Carcharodontosaurus\". Sereno countered that it would be difficult to determine a size range for a species based on few, incomplete specimens, ... |
How did Large Armenian Communities End up in the Levant and Balkans during the Middle Ages? What Roles did they Play in Society? | Armenian dispersal throughout the Middle East and Europe is largely attributed to the Byzantine Empire and their policies towards the many ethnic groups of the empire. The Byzantine Empire, while by virtue being Greek, it was never an empire of Greeks (except maybe for the last years of its existence). This isn't necessarily a new discovery, the Byzantine Empire is simply the Eastern Roman Empire and continuation of an empire that was inhabited by peoples of different origins and traditions. The native people of Asia Minor were not as Hellenized as you might have been led to believe and the Byzantines carried out a practice of transferring peoples from one region of the empire to another. This was a practice inherited by the Roman Empire and the Byzantines continuously resorted to this throughout their existence. The movement of Armenians within the empire can be broken down into movement by choice and forced transplantation. Early relocations of Armenians were mostly based on bolstering the military in one region of the Empire but eventually developed into tension between Armenians and the rest of the population on ecclesiastical problems brought on by the fact that Armenians were considered to be heretics by the Byzantines due to their refusal to follow the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon. There had always been heretics in the empire but since the loss of Egypt and Syria, Armenians became a powerful religious minority that was dominant in certain regions and very strong in others. The Byzantine church and state were concerned about the situation of the Armenians and brought pressure on the Armenians to accept the Orthodox point of view, but the Armenians (whose cultural and national development was strongly associated with their religious beliefs and practices) resisted stubbornly, and the efforts of the Byzantines to bring them into line served only to increase the tempo. Eventually, the actions of the Byzantine Empire against the Armenians led to the political disintegration of the Empire, its decline and final collapse.
We know that Justinian settled Vandals in Asia Minor, Bulgar peoples in Thrace and Goths in Bithynia but he also removed Armenians from their lands and settled them elsewhere, though these numbers were initially small. Population transfers of Armenians were carried out by the immediate successors of Justinian: Tiberius and Maurice. Tiberius had removed Armenians from their home land and settled them on the island of Cyprus where as Maurice wanted nothing less than the complete removal Armenians from their homeland. According to Sebesos (an Armenian historian) Maurice called on the Persians (where at this time Armenia was split between Byzantine and Persian control) to relocate Armenians in Persia to the East and Maurice would relocate his Armenians to Thrace “They are a perverse and disobedient race…they are between us and cause trouble. Now come, I shall gather mine and send them to Thrace; you gather ours and order them to be taken to the east. If they die, our enemies die; if they kill, they kill our enemies; but we shall live in peace.” The Persians did not follow through with this, but the Byzantines did so in part. It seemed that Maurice's motive to relocate Armenians was that he needed them to serve as soldiers in Thrace to counter the Avaro-Slavic incursion into the Balkans. Maurice also issued an edict requiring cavalry men in Armenia to be raised, I believe the number was around 30 thousand Armenian families, but the edict was not enforced as Maurice was overthrown before he had the time to do so. Keep in mind that it has been said that the Armenian element was dominant in the Byzantine army from the ninth century to around the Crusades, this didn't make the army Armenian but it did give Armenians a considerable influence in Byzantine military structure. There is little doubt that the population transfers under Tiberius, Maurice, Justinian II and by Basil II were done so because they needed the army in some particular spot. This enabled the Byzantines to reorganize its armies and survive the crisis of the seventh and eighth centuries.
There was also economic reasoning for these transfers, but the military and economic reasonings were often related. Historian Evagrius writes on the transfer of Armenians to Cyprus in 578 that this allowed land that was previously had not been tilled to be restored to cultivation as well as many armies were raised from these Armenians who were transferred to Cyprus. Basil II brought Armenians to Macedon in the hopes for them to serve as a Bulwark to the Bulgarians as well as to increase the prosperity of the region and this was also seen under Justinian II in the 10th century. A considerable number of Armenians were removed from their homes and settled in regions of the Empire which were inhabited by Slavs. They helped in the recovery and Byzantinization of certain regions which had been occupied by Barbarians or Arabs, in some instances they were meant to christianize the population or to completely rebuild cities for example the reconstruction and resettlement of Sparta. During the second half of the tenth century Armenians, perhaps forced or encouraged, were used to repopulate various towns captured from the Arabs (It would be important to clarify that the region you refer to as being north of the Crusader kingdoms is referred to as Cilicia) notably Maltaya, Tarsus and Antioch that had suffered considerable losses in population due to the departure of most Muslims.
The most important factor for the forced migration of Armenians was the religious one. Not only did the Byzantines put pressure the Armenian Church, which did not adhere to the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon, but was also focused on the largely on the Paulicans. The Paulicans were a religious sect and probably included elements of different ethnic origins, but the majority were no doubt Armenians. The Paulicans in Asia Minor were driven eastwards towards the mountain frontiers of the Byzantine Empire and there they became a menace to the Empire oftentimes working with the Arabs. Under Basil I, their strongholds were taken and were forced to abandon their homes and forced to settle elsewhere in the empire with a considerable number of them being settled in Thrace. The Byzantines believed if they were left in their homeland they might become serious sources of trouble and this was no doubt the principle reason for the removal of Paulican Armenians in the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries. The Byzantines also hoped that these heretical groups would be absorbed by the indigenous inhabitants of Thrace and the sect would be disintegrated, however was happened was the opposite. Not only did they tenaciously hold onto their beliefs, they also converted many of the indigenous inhabitants who were dissatisfied with the Byzantines for various reasons. The Paulicans grew as a result of the measures taken by the imperial authorities to suppress them, the Paulicans showed enmity in the most dangerous way by cooperating with enemies of the Byzantine Empire. In 1086 they urged the Pechenegs and Cumans to invade the Empire, an invasion which was repeated several times coming close to overwhelming Constantinople, and by helping Frederick Barbarossa on his way to the Holy Land almost a century later. The Paulicans no doubt contributed to the breakdown of Byzantine authority in the Balkans, though there were more important factors to the breakdown in the Balkans.
The annexation of Armenia by the mid-eleventh century led to more transfers of Armenians into both the old regions of the Empire and the newly acquired regions that were non-Armenian. Armenians moved with the Empire and were responsible for the integration of the Byzantine administrative system in certain regions that were left deserted in the East. The annexation of Armenia intensified the relocation and movement of Armenians, giving it an aspect of mass migration. ration. For as the Byzantines annexed the various Armenian territories, they transferred their princes elsewhere in the Empire and these princes took along with them, besides their families, a numerous retinue, consisting primarily of their nobility and the latter's following. So numerous indeed was the nobility that followed their princes that their going is said to have emptied Armenia of the most valiant elements of its population. Armenian historian, Tchamtchian, puts those who followed Senacherim, one of the displaced Armenian princes, at 400,000, and this figure has been repeated by others, but there is nothing in the existing sources which bears this figure out. All that we have is the figure given by a medieval Armenian historian, who says that Senacherim was followed by 16,000 of his compatriots, not counting the women and children. But whatever the final figure, there can be little doubt that the number of Armenians who left their homes and settled elsewhere in the Empire was a large one. Armenians by the thousands were forced to leave their homeland and went to settle in Cappadocia, in Cilicia, and in northern Syria. In displacing these Princes, the Byzantines wanted to assure peaceful control of newly acquired Armenian lands by removing sources that might cause trouble, this was traditional Byzantine policy and often work. In this situation, it proved to be one of the major factors leading to the breakdown of Byzantine authority of Asia Minor and eventual collapse of the Empire under the hands of the Turks. Minor. For the displacement of the Armenians coming as it did at a time when their homeland was being subjected to the repeated raids of the Seljuks had removed the element which, fighting for its native land, might have checked these raids and so prevented the occupation of Asia Minor by the Seljuks. | [
"During the Middle Ages, Armenians established a new kingdom in Cilicia, which despite its strong European influence, not unlike Cyprus, was often considered as being part of the Levant, thus in the Middle East. There were Armenian communities (in the form of well-established quarters in major cities) in the Edessa... |
will we gradually max-out the internet speed? | What you think of as "internet speed" is really more about "how much data can you get per unit time?" It's not like a car where you can look at it and say "it's going 60mph." In that sense, we can't really do all that much to make the internet go faster except lay more point-to-point fiber connections to physically shorten routing paths, since we're already pushing up against speed-of-light limits. Data is more like "how much traffic can go through that highway?" And we can always make the highway wider. There are diminishing returns, however, it's not quite as bad as all that.
(makin' up numbers, here) Say you have a fiber optic cable with 2 fibers, one for send, one for receive. Using this cable, the maximum theoretical speed would be 500 mb/s. Now, take a similar fiber optic cable, and put 4 fibers in it. Now the maximum theoretical speed would be 1 tb/s. Now lay two of those 4 fiber lines next to each other. Now the maximum theoretical speed would be 2 tb/s!
Well, not quite, because there's still the time it takes to re-integrate the signal paths and whatnot, but you get the picture.
A given line can only carry so much data, though improvements in data transmission protocols can up that. At some point, you have to upgrade the line. If you don't have a better line lying around, you have to just lay more lines.
Ultimately, the biggest issue isn't the transmission lines, but the devices attached to them. Your computers network card can only handle so much data, your home router can only handle so much data, your ISP's switches and the data center's switches can only handle so much data. It's pretty big business to improve the data throughput of a data center. | [
"The National Info-communication Strategy that sets goals for the 2014-2020 period states that by 2018 every household should have internet access of at least 30 Mbit/s and at least half of them of 100 Mbit/s or faster. Another goal to reach is to enable citizens and enterprises to manage the full range of their pu... |
When is a person at their physical peak? | Female or male (to your edit)? Females, in their teens. Males I believe in their mid to late twenties. I wish I had a source, but I read something about humans reaching their peak running shape at 27, and interestingly, it takes them until 62 to hit the point they were at 19. | [
"BULLET::::1. Awareness – maintaining constant enjoyment and awe of life. These individuals often experienced a \"peak experience\". He defined a peak experience as an \"intensification of any experience to the degree there is a loss or transcendence of self\". A peak experience is one in which an individual percei... |
As sound has a greater velocity when passing through a denser material, would it be possible for sound to travel at the speed of light if the material were dense enough?? .... and if so what could happen if the material were even desnser? | Sound speed actually goes *down* with density. The only reason why materials like steel or water have a higher sound speed than air is that sound speed increases in materials that are *less compressible.* Because fluids and solids are usually *much* less compressible than gases, this offsets the increased density and causes an increase in sound speed.
In case you are curious:
v^2 = B/ρ
Where v is sound speed, B is bulk modulus, and ρ is density.
Now, on to your real question: Can a material have a sound speed higher than the speed of light? The answer to that question is a resounding **No.** Even setting aside the question of causation, it turns out that the maximum sound speed that can be achieved is actually the sound speed of a relativistic fluid. The sound speed in such a fluid is equal to *the speed of light over the square root of 3* (c/√3). If this seems random, just keep in mind that the 3 in the denominator comes from the number of spatial dimensions in our universe. (Source: [Relativistic fluid dynamics](_URL_0_))
Does this figure into the observable universe in any way? Surprisingly, yes! It turns out that neutron stars (which are highly incompressible, because they're essentially oversized atomic nuclei) have *very* high sound speeds near their core. The sound speed is determined by the star's mass, which in turn, means that one upper limit of the neutron star's mass is given by its internal sound speed. If the internal sound speed would break the limits of causality and go too high, the neutron star collapses into a singularity instead!
Hopefully this answers your question! | [
"For instance, sound will travel 1.59 times faster in nickel than in bronze, due to the greater stiffness of nickel at about the same density. Similarly, sound travels about 1.41 times faster in light hydrogen (protium) gas than in heavy hydrogen (deuterium) gas, since deuterium has similar properties but twice the... |
how was the united states able to win the 1991 gulf war so quickly? | > was highly entrenched in Kuwait, and was essentially ready to fight hard against the US.was highly entrenched in Kuwait, and was essentially ready to fight hard against the US.
We knew this, and decided to say "well fuck all that" and fought on our own terms, very, **very** well.
How?
Maneuver warfare and combined arms. The Gulf War is, quite literally, the textbook example of both of these:
**Maneuver war**: Coalition forces, in various ways, were able to exploit and neutralize what Marine doctrine calls the Iraqi's "critical vulnerabilities", that is, those elements of their ability to wage a war that they could not do without. Think of their military as a house of cards; coalition forces very quickly took out singular cards from the bottom, rather than assaulting each head on. How did they do this? Air superiority, like you said, was a huge factor, but the *blitzkrieg* of the Marines in the southwest and Army in the south circumvented main Iraqi lines of defenses very quickly and exposed the soft underbellies behind. Iraqi forces were used to a protracted war of attrition with Iran, so their experience didn't count for much when fighting a fast, mechanized military like America's.
**Combined arms**: superior technology and implementation of that technology essentially put the Iraqi military in a no-win situation; they could fight head on, but be exposed to superior armor, infantry, and air power - or run, and be exposed to superior airpower anyway (see the controversial "Highway of Death"). Many commanders realized this and saw surrender as the only option.
The combination of maneuver warfare and expert usage of combined arms either neutralized Iraqi defenses all together or coerced them into surrender, which forced Saddam to capitulate very quickly. | [
"The 1991 Gulf War never fully ended because no armistice formally ended it. As a result, relations between the United States, the United Nations, and Iraq remained strained, although Saddam Hussein issued formal statements renouncing his invasion of Kuwait and made reparations payments for Kuwait. The U.S. and the... |
how come my wireless mouse works with one battery? | Because the device has a low enough voltage requirement that the batteries are wired in parallel rather than in series. This gives a longer run time, and since people are used to putting two batteries in mic, and there's room enough, they just continued doing that rather than using only one cell but getting half of the life. | [
"Many models of wireless computer mouse use nano receivers. A nano receiver is an extremely small wireless receiver that connects a mouse to a computer. This range of mice is meant mainly for laptops and netbooks, since it takes less space and reduces the risk of damage that could be caused by accidental shocks.\n"... |
What explains the denigration in Scots/Anglo relations from having Scottish James VI becoming King of England in 1603 to the Battle of Culloden in 1745? | Essentially the answer is that thinking of both of these events simply in terms of 'England' and 'Scotland' is not the full picture. This answer might get slightly long-winded (what can I say, I'm quarantined!), but hopefully I can help.
Firstly, to simplify things somewhat, James I was crowned king of England primarily because he was a Protestant. However, the sort of Protestantism he felt most sympathy towards personally was not, somewhat paradoxically, really the form that was most prevalent in Scotland.
Both England and Scotland had undergone Reformations in the 16th century, but while England's Reformation had centred around the monarch and generally speaking, served to increase royal power, this was not the case in Scotland. In Scotland, the Presbyterian system of Protestantism which had emerged from their Reformation did the opposite, empowering their church and nobility and providing a body of 'resistance theory', about how the monarch could be resisted, by force where necessary.
This meant that James, and later his son Charles, would make various efforts to bring Scotland closer to England, particularly where it came to religion, which underpinned Scotland's 'limited monarchy'. This came to a head in 1638 where Charles's efforts to impose English religion on Scotland resulted in the Scots creating a 'National Covenant' and power in Scotland being seized by what was essentially a revolutionary Presbyterian government.
This government would fight both for and against Charles over the course of the Civil Wars. In 1643 it agreed a 'Solemn League and Covenant' with the English Parliament, which many saw as a stepping stone to unifying England and Scotland in both politics and religion. The Scots sent an army to England, and this was crucial in winning the 'First Civil War' for Parliament. However, when it appeared that the Parliamentarians would not keep their end of the bargain, King Charles signed the Solemn League and Covenant, and the Scots (or rather a faction of them known as 'the Engagers') fought for him in the 'Second Civil War'. Charles and the Scots lost, and he was executed. The Scots then agreed the SLC again with his son Charles II, but lost again, ultimately being defeated by Cromwell in the 'Third Civil War'.
The upshot of this is that the relationship between England and Scotland in the mid-17th century was very complicated. Some saw large parts of the Civil Wars essentially as Anglo-Scottish wars, but in reality they were more complex than that. Also while both Charles I and II fought with the Scottish Covenanters, neither really liked them much, as they felt used by them and the 'High Anglican' Protestantism favoured by both Charles and his son was completely at odds with the Presbyterianism of the Covenanters.
Now, its also important to point out that when I refer to the 'Scots' here, I am referring to the Presbyterian lowlanders who dominated Scottish politics in the 17th century. These are not, as a rule, the 'Scots' who fought with Charles Edward Stuart at Culloden. The Jacobite army at Culloden was composed of a mix of Catholic Highlanders, and Episcopalians from the east of the country (Protestants who supported bishops, as opposed to Presbyterians who did not). I will attempt in my next answer to explain why these groups supported the Jacobite rebellion in 1745. | [
"The Scottish crown in the minority of James III of Scotland had taken the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses by welcoming the fugitive Henry VI of England. Edward IV was forming new alliances with disaffected English and Scottish nobles to reduce the threat posed by the exiled former king, now in the hands ... |
what is docker and docker-compose | Imagine you throw a party. To party like ELI5 you need soft drinks, popcorn and music.
You could buy *Magical Party Maker 2000* (MPM2k) which does all this stuff and more. Or you could buy soda machine, popcorn popper and bluetooth speaker.
Problem with MPM2k is that
* It's kinda complicated and it does some unnecessary things.
* If for the next day you go to the beach and just need the music, you still have to carry this heavy thing with all these unnecessary features with you.
* If you just want to practice your party dance beforehand, you need to fire up the huge machine instead of just small speaker.
* If your guests eat more popcorn than drink soft drinks, with MPM2k you'd still would need to buy another huge machine instead of just extra popcorn popper.
* If soda machine breaks guests might not even notice it, but if the MPM2k breaks, there is no party anymore. Unacceptable. The party must go on.
So it's better to have these small lightweight machines that are specialized in doing one job really well. You can change them, add more and fix them more easily than to do all this with one huge machine.
Docker containers are just like the popcorn machine. Docker is a platform for your party. Docker Compose is this super awesome girl who can use all of the party equipment together to host a party of a century or tool for defining and running these containers.
E: Oh, one more:You make awesome mixtape and copy that to CD and send it to your friend for their party. Next week you get a note that your friend didn't get the CD to work as their CD player is just tiny bit different than yours. Imagine if instead of sending just the CD you could copy your *CD player* and send it to your friend.
Docker enables you to run exactly same stuff on your development computer and production server. No more "this works on local machine but not our production server" type of problems! | [
"BULLET::::- Docker Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. It uses YAML files to configure the application's services and performs the creation and start-up process of all the containers with a single command. The codice_3 CLI utility allows users to run commands on multiple... |
why can someone's teeth feel fine yet they can go to the dentist and have multiple cavities? | Only the very inside of teeth have nerves in them, the rest is just specialized bones. You can't feel if the hard calcium parts have holes in them, you only feel when the nerves start being damaged. | [
"This disease apparently did not often occur in individuals with good gingival health, and usually targeted the mandible first. It was associated with localized or generalized deep ache or pain, often of multiple jawbone sites. The teeth often appeared sound and suppuration was not present. Even so, the dentist oft... |
While cleaning out my grandmother's closet, we came across a Nazi armband. Can any WWII/Nazi historians weigh in on the authenticity of this piece? [PICS LINKED] | Based on the tag it is real.
Did your grandmother have a husband, brother, or father who fought in WW2? Nazi paraphernalia often shows up in estate sales because it was often brought home as trophies from the war. Common items include the SS daggers, armbands, flags, lapel pins, and other small items that could be easily concealed for a return trip to the United States. It was technically illegal to bring this stuff home, but based on the sheer amount of it that made it to the United States, there doesn't seem to have bene much enforcement of the rules. War trophies were common, but it was more intense in the pacific theater, where the taking of Japanese body parts was a common part feature, even making it onto the cover of life magazine in 1944.
This stuff always has "value" on a market but with items of a politically charged nature, I always ask that people think about what they are selling and who they might be selling it to. | [
"The Nazi Party armbands were intended for immediate implementation upon the outbreak of World War II in 1939, although it was not until 1943 that the system was in total effect. Even then, photographic evidence reveals it was not uncommon for some political leaders to simply wear the pre-1939 bare swastika armband... |
In actual medieval warfare, how likely was it for a sword to get stuck in a body that it was striking? As often as seen in movies? | Very uncommon for the simple fact that the force needed to swing a sword so deep into a man that the blade sticks and is clenched by the flesh is ridiculous. you would more likely see weapons like Axes or Spears be stuck in bodies, though an axe wouldn't be incredibly hard to withdraw. | [
"An innovative feature of the game is that anything dropped by a dead opponent (body parts included) can be picked up and used. Limbs can be swung as clubs, and heads can be carried and used as weapons. Enemies whose sword arms have been chopped off will run away from battle.\n",
"BULLET::::- Spadonari di Venaus:... |
Why were the Sudeten Germans so unsatisfied with being part of Czechoslovakia? | > Were they discriminated against, or was the reason just nationalism (stemming from historical anomosity)? Given that such a vast majority of the Sudeten Germans supported the Nazi party (over 90% if I remember correctly from school), there must surely have been discrimination that turned even the less nationalist-minded to support to Nazis?
Czechoslovakia was not a 'nation' in the order of Germany, France, England, etc. It was a state of nations/nationalities. One of which were the Sudeten Germans. They were not so much 'unsatisfied' as they were eager to join what was going on around them, stemming from the Anschluss of Austria. But many were also happy to remain under Czechoslovakian control, this was a democracy with western European support, rather than a dictatorship like Germany. They were a group that was controlled by the Czechs well enough, when they attempted to rebel, they were quickly stopped by Czech forces. There was animosity within Czechoslovakia by various nationalities, but I doubt Germans were any more discriminated against than any of the other nationalities, there was nothing exceptional about how Germans were treated. | [
"The Republic of Czechoslovakia was home to a substantial minority of Germans, who lived mostly in the Sudetenland. Under pressure from separatist groups within the Sudeten German Party, the Czechoslovak government offered economic concessions to the region. Hitler decided not just to incorporate the Sudentland int... |
Does how much a person dream effect how rested they will be after waking up? | I'll do this one mostly from memory, I hope others can back me up or correct me if needed.
For sleep, the REM phase is often considered one of the most important parts of good quality sleep. There have been experiments where they continuously woke somebody up when they were entering REM sleep, they didn't do too well.
This is also the reason alcohol is bad for your sleep; [it affects your REM sleep](_URL_1_)
Dreams can occur in others phases as well I believe, but they occur most vividly and most often during REM sleep.
When you wake up in your REM phase, you tend to be able to recall the dream you just had. When you wake up in another phase, less so. [source](_URL_0_)
I don't dare saying if dreams actually affect sleep quality. But it does work the other way around, if you have proper sleep with good REM phases, you will have better sleep quality and more dreams.
[Here](_URL_2_) they say waking up during REM sleep isn't ideal, so remembering your dreams when you wake up might actually be less ideal as well. | [
"REM sleep is the less restful stage in which you dream and experience muscle movements or twitches. Also during this stage in sleep, a person's heart rate and breathing are typically irregular. Non-REM sleep, also sometimes referred to as slow-wave sleep, is associated with deep sleep. The body's blood pressure, h... |
When and how did 750 mL become the standard size for wine and liquor bottles? | I can only speak for the French standardization, but here’s how it happened.
It dates back to the 19th Century.
It started in Bordeaux, where their main foreign clients were the English. But French & English never had the same measure system, so it was hard to find an agreement. The Imperial Gallon was up to 4,54609 “litres”. So they had to find an easier way to count.
Example of a common ground: wine was put in barrels of 225 liters, or 50 gallons.
225 liters also equals 300 bottles of 75cl.
1 barrel = 50 gallons = 300 75cl bottles.
It’s just a game of “find the common determinator”.
Also, it explains why wine was (and still is) sold in boxes of 6 or 12.
6x0.75 =4.5 (1 gallon)
Source: Jean Marc Bahans ; Jean-Robert Pitte : La bouteille de vin, histoire d’une revolution, Tallandier 2013
| [
"Historically, a common bottle size for liquor in the US was the \"fifth\", i.e. one-fifth of a US gallon (or one-sixth of an imperial gallon). While spirit sales in the US were switched to metric measures in 1976, a 750 mL bottle is still sometimes known as a \"fifth\".\n",
"* For many years, the US standard (no... |
why is the last minute on a washing machine always like 2.5 minutes? | I don't know about yours, but my front loader has an automatic balancing mechanism which sometimes takes several tries to get up to high speed without wobbling. They don't factor this time into the estimate. (But it's a lot better than our top-loader, which would sound a loud buzzer to tell us we had to rebalance the laod by hand.)
| [
"During the wash cycle, the chamber is filled approximately one-third full of solvent and begins to rotate, agitating the clothing. The solvent temperature is maintained at 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), as a higher temperature may damage it. During the wash cycle, the solvent in the chamber (commonly ... |
continuously variable transmissions | I'll give it a go. There are a few different ways of making a CVT, so I'll just stick to the basic principles for now--the idea behind the CVT.
Because this ended up being pretty long, I'm breaking it up into sections, commenting on my own comment, and linking to them to let you more easily skip over the parts you already know. Since you are currently five, I have explained this from the very top, but if you already know most of this, you can skip over it.
To understand why the CVT is a neat thing, you have to first have a basic understanding of what a "normal" ("multi-ratio") transmission does and why we have them. For this answer, I will be talking about cars and trucks and so on, but do remember that lots of machines that have some sort of engine have a use for a transmission as well.
[What an engine does: heat, RPMs and torque](_URL_2_)
[Why a transmission is necessary](_URL_0_)
[principle behind a transmission gear ratio: mechanical advantage (probably my most poorly worded section)](_URL_1_)
[What a normal transmission does](_URL_3_)
...And here is where we come to the difference between a continuously variable and normal transmission. A normal transmission has a certain, fixed number of gear ratios that it can use. The engine has to adjust its RPM to do the fine-tuning of power and speed output within the different gears. Since the engine works best a certain speed, this means there is a little bit of inefficiency in this system, because even though you change gears, the engine is still changing speeds a little bit, and only one speed is the most effective speed for what you want. ("Most effective" can mean either the speed at which it most efficiently turns fuel into energy, or just the speed at which it produces its maximum possible horsepower, which is a combination of RPM and torque.) When you hear an engine rev up between gear changes while accelerating--when the sound of the engine rises to a higher pitch, then drops back down when the transmission changes gears--you're hearing that adjustment.
With a continuously variable transmission, there are no set gear ratios. The transmission doesn't have to choose from a set number of gears--it can smoothly and constantly adjust its gear ratio to precisely the most effective gear ratio, which is to say the one that allows the engine to turn at its most effective speed. So you won't hear the engine rev up and down as much, because that fine-tuning is done by the transmission instead of the engine. Since the engine can stay at its most effective speed the whole time, the CVT (in a perfect world) would get the maximum possible performance out of an engine, without the wasted energy used by an engine that has to rev up and down within a set gear.
**So, grown-up tl;dr: A CVT can (ideally) increase the efficiency or output of an engine by allowing it to remain it its most efficient or most effective (read: powerful) speed. It can do this because, unlike normal transmissions, which have a set number of gear ratios, it can adjust smoothly and with (practically) infinite customizability to any gear ratio within its operating range. This means the engine does not have to rev up or down within a gear before it changes to the next gear, which would mean turning at speeds that are not its most efficient or most effective. The need for fine-tuning speed by changing the engine RPMs is eliminated because that fine-tuning is now done by the transmission, and there are no gaps in gear ratio between gears that have to be jumped by revving up or down.**
edit: creating links to commented subsections
edit 2: This was kind of hammered out in a rush after an eleven-hour workday. I hope it's useful and I'm sorry if it's just confusing. I'd be glad to go through this again some other time if need be. | [
"The continuously variable transmission (CVT) is a transmission in which the ratio of the rotational speeds of two shafts, as the input shaft and output shaft of a vehicle or other machine, can be varied continuously within a given range, providing an infinite number of possible ratios. The CVT allows the driver or... |
How does an airplane's tailwind effect it's lift and thrust? | All that matters is your relative speed towards the air surrounding you. That's what your airspeed indicator shows. So, in level, stable flight, a constant tailwind doesn't matter at all. However, when conditions change, it becomes relevant. For example, you want to take off into the wind. Assume a constant 10kt tailwind while sitting on the runway. You now essentially start with a 10 knot penalty - you need to move at 10kt relative to the ground so that your actual airspeed becomes zero. Thus you need a longer take off run. Now turn around and start into the wind. Sitting there stationary, you already have an airspeed of 10kt, allowing for a shorter run before you reach your take off airspeed.
Same happens when you transition between layers of different wind speeds. You will lose or gain some lift during the transition and have to adjust the engine and trim to get into a stable configuration again. In cruise flight, that is no problem. Strong gusts and shear during approach, when you are close to stalling can become dangerous, though. | [
"Induced drag is caused by the generation of lift by the wing. Lift generated by a wing is perpendicular to the relative wind, but since wings typically fly at some small angle of attack, this means that a component of the force is directed to the rear. The rearward component of this force (parallel with the relati... |
Why did soldiers of the Napoleonic era march in neat lines into gunfire without breaking into a run/ ducking? | I would recommend you look at this [previous answer I gave](_URL_0_). If you have any other questions, I would willingly answer them. | [
"In the 19th century, a new tactic was devised by the French during the French Revolutionary Wars. This was the colonne d'attaque, or attack column, consisting of one regiment up to two brigades of infantry. Instead of advancing slowly all across the battlefield in line formations, the French infantry were brought ... |
hi reddit. what is privatization and why is it bad for a country? | As it stands the Mexican government maintains all the pipes and electric wires / power stations etc.... using money from tax and bills.
It costs so much to run the system (buy in fuel, build new power stations etc...) and then any profit that is made is either invested back into the system or put back into the government for other public services.
When things are privatised one or more companies own everything.
Now naturally they should do everything the government did, but they will also have share holders who expect profit. To ensure their business is making profit they either cut corners or increase bills.
There are also local concerns. If it costs $400000 to upgrade an area with only 15 customers the government will if it is needed, the private company won't unless it is forced to.
Businesses will only make decisions that profit them in some way in the future.
Government run systems are for the people.
Simply put:
Privatisation delivers the same but costs end users more because they have to make profit
Privatisation can increase efficiency because the company will want to try and deliver the same for less and will look to work smarter
Privatisation hurts the little guy often because its hard to justify spend if its not going to give a good enough profit.
Many people argue that if something is essential to a country's infrastructure it should remain owned by the people (government).
Both systems have there ups and downs and to be honest if i had the call to make i would outsource things from time to time rather than privatise (outsourcing means that the government still owns everything but pays outsiders to manage it all, the profit/terms of the agreement is set by both parties in advance, but importantly the government retains ownership and once the contract is up (say 10 years) it can do what it wants.) | [
"Privatization is mostly complete, except for some of the large state-owned utilities. Export growth contributed to the economic recovery, however, the bulk of the country's economic activity is in the services sector.\n",
"Privatization works when the person who owns the property (or rights of access to that pro... |
How disastrous were the Napoleonic Wars to Spain's economy and empire? | There are some very interesting answers in this thread particularly regarding the loss of Spain's empire during this period:
_URL_0_?
But basically, Spain's economy had been on a downward slop for a long time prior to the Napoleonic wars, and the French coup and invasion severed administrative ties to the Empire, almost the only real source of income, whilst at the same time sparking a series of destructive civil wars that ran on into the 1830s and beyond | [
"The Napoleonic wars had severe negative effects on Spain's economic development. The Peninsular war ravaged towns and countryside alike. There was a sharp decline in population in many areas, caused by casualties, outmigration, and disruption of family life. The demographic impact was the worst of any Spanish war.... |
How Did The Depiction Of Frankenstein's Monster Become What It Is Today? | There's really not a lot of mystery here. The popular depiction is based on the 1931 Universal Pictures film *Frankenstein* starring Boris Karloff.
Earlier film depictions of the monster are much different. The earliest surviving *Frankenstein* film comes from 1910 and was produced by Edison Pictures. There, [the monster had no bolts and wasn't zombie-like](_URL_4_). The monster wears some furs and robes instead.
In 1915, another silent adaptation of *Frankenstein* was produced called *Life Without Soul*. The film is lost but [some stills survive](_URL_1_) and the monster again doesn't have any of the trademarks now associated with him. He's more of a wild-eyed vagrant wearing disheveled clothing (though since the film is lost, we don't know if he was zombie-like here).
It was the Boris Karloff depiction that cemented the image of the Frankenstein monster in the public's imagination. The makeup artist on the film, Jack Pierce, invented the green skin, the bolts, and the haircut. ([Source.](_URL_7_))
The makeup took [about three hours to apply every day](_URL_5_), and there were weights in Karloff's shoes to make his walk more convincing. With the whole costume on, Karloff stood [almost seven feet tall](_URL_0_), even though Karloff was naturally only about six feet tall.
The Universal Pictures costume department came up with the black suit, which was intentionally ill-fitting, particularly the sleeves which were too short to emphasize that the monster was supposed to be much larger than everybody else in the film.
Interestingly, when Universal was hard up for cash in the 1950s, they began threatening lawsuits against others who used their version of the monster without permission ([Source.](_URL_6_)) They did the same with Dracula, because much of the popular depiction of Dracula also comes from a Universal film, 1930's *Dracula* starring Bela Lugosi. You had to license these depictions of the characters from Universal to use them.
The latter eventually resulted in [a lawsuit](_URL_3_) where Lugosi sued Universal for compensation, because part of Universal's depiction of Dracula included Lugosi's portrayal. Lugosi won, or, rather, his heirs did, establishing case law that personality rights are inheritable to the estate of the personality being depicted, after the person's death. This was then codified into [California's civil code](_URL_2_). | [
"The Evil of Frankenstein is a 1964 film directed by Freddie Francis. It stars Peter Cushing and New Zealand wrestler Kiwi Kingston. The film's version of the Monster is noted for resembling the one in Universal Pictures' original \"Frankenstein\" series of the 1930s and 1940s, including the distinctive laboratory ... |
how do we see the full moon? | It explains that in the same article:
> Lunar eclipses do not occur every month because the Moon usually passes above or below Earth's shadow, which is mostly restricted to the ecliptic plane. | [
"A full moon is often thought of as an event of a full night's duration. This is somewhat misleading because its phase seen from Earth continuously waxes or wanes (though much too slowly to notice in real time with the naked eye). By definition, its maximum illumination occurs at the moment waxing stops. For any gi... |
why are astronaut's movements in space seemingly slow motion when there's no air/water resistance to slow them down? | There are a few reasons. Their suits are pressurized. The joints of these suits want to fully extend due to this pressure. This makes it difficult to move and do things, and reduces precision substantially. Not only this, but the suits are quite heavy, and have inertia to slow movements. Lastly, the astronauts do not have anything to stand on. Fast movements will make their bodies start to rotate and further reduce the precision of their motions. | [
"In EVA, most work is done slowly, carefully and methodically not because of the neutral buoyancy training but because that is how a task must be performed by a pressurized astronaut in weightlessness. It takes more force to accelerate a mass to a higher velocity, and then to slow the mass back down, than to move i... |
why is it not possible that dinosaurs had beaks that didn’t fossilize? | Many dinos did have beaks, and those beaks fossilized with them. That said, even if no part of the beak remained, it would still be obvious that the had a beak, as we'd be able to see it in the skull structure, the same way we find feather and muscle attachment points on the other bones in the body. | [
"Fossilised remains of beaks are known from a number of cephalopod groups, both extant and extinct, including squids, octopuses, belemnites, and vampyromorphs. Aptychi – paired plate-like structures found in ammonites – may also have been jaw elements.\n",
"\"Aralosaurus\" was about the size of an elephant. Altho... |
how does gps work by just asking a satellite what its time is? | Yes - all the satellites have the same time, as they each have an atomic clock on board.
Now, the signal takes an amount of time to travel from the satellite to the GPS receiver.
When you look at the times you're receiving from all of the satellites, due to the fact that it takes a certain amount of time to get to your receiver, you'll see ever-so-slightly different times from each of the satellites.
By comparing these times, you can work out where you are in relation to those satellites. | [
"Each GPS satellite continuously transmits a radio signal containing the current time and data about its position. Since the speed of radio waves is constant and independent of the satellite speed, the time delay between when the satellite transmits a signal and the receiver receives it is proportional to the dista... |
How were Confederate veterans treated in the decades after the American Civil War? | More of course can be said, but this previous answer of mine on [commemoration I suspect will be of interest for you.](_URL_0_) | [
"During the postwar years, the Freedmen's Bureau opened a school, led by W. H. Gibson, and a bank in the city to serve the now free and growing African American population. Confederate women organized in associations to ensure the dead were buried in cemeteries, to identify missing men, and to build memorials to th... |
how come so many electronic devices can run the old doom so easily, and can other games like mega man or mario be played on the same devices | Doom was originally programmed for multiple platforms (e.g. PC, Mac...) and pretty much had multi-platform support from the get-go. Nowadays Doom's source code is open, which makes it even easier to make it run on different platforms.
Other games from the same era might not run on other platforms as easily. For instance, NES games were programmed just for the single platform with its own CPU and other hardware. In the end there's very little stuff that could be used between the platforms in those cases. However, emulating these old systems makes it easier to run these old games on other platforms (emulation being kind of an intermediate layer between the game and the host platform).
However, some platforms are more compatible with each other - it all depends on the hardware and software of the device. It's not enough that two devices have the same architecture (e.g. ARM is powering both Gameboy Advance and your smartphone), they have to be compatible in other ways as well (which is why you can't just plug in your GBA cartridge to your Android phone). In such cases, emulation is still an option (although it might sound wasteful to translate ARM instructions to ARM instructions). | [
"\"Doom II\" was not dramatically different from its predecessor. There were no major technological developments, graphical improvements, or substantial gameplay changes. Instead, the development team took advantage of advances in computer hardware since the release of the original game that allowed them to do more... |
If you were to defend Louis 16 against his charge of treason, what would you say to defend him? | I think that it would have been impossible to defend Louis whilst keeping your own head.
France was scared at this time and lashing out at anyone that was even tagently connected to royalists, so defending Louis would be impossible since the prosecution wanted him dead.
It must be noted that Louis wasn't a terrible king, he just wasn't the king France needed at the time. He let a financial crisis explode into a sociopolitical crisis and the people whom didn't have a voice had one, and they wanted to lash out at Louis for simply being born a king.
The more I've studied the Revolution, the more I feel sorry for Louis. He was a good person, he loved his family and didn't have any I'll feelings toward the people whom were wanting him dead, he was just afraid. | [
"His stance during the trial of the deposed king Louis XVI was unique. He declared it unfair to accuse Louis of anything before his acceptance of the French Constitution of 1791, and although implacably, he said, believing that the monarch's death would be good for the people, defended Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoign... |
Does it (technically) take an infinite amount of time for an event to occur? | No, it would take 10 seconds. | [
"BULLET::::- For any finite point in time \"t\", there can be only finitely many events in the flow that occur at time \"t\" or earlier. This implies that in which flow, one can always point to the point in time at which the flow originated. The flow itself can be infinite; in such case, at any point in time, event... |
why is there so much innovation & improvement with cellular technologies & speed(3g, 4g, 4g lte, 5g), but not with wired speeds? | > What are some of the reasons why cellular internet makes such huge strides while wired internet speeds have hardly budged in most regions?
Because with cellular internet, you have to wire a few cell towers with high-speed wired Internet, and then the rest is wireless.
For wired to-the-home Internet, you have to run high-speed cable *to every single house*. The infrastructure cost is orders of magnitude more expensive. And in areas without a large population density, companies don't think that they can recoup the cost.
So long story short, wired Internet is much faster than cellular Internet, but it's just too expensive to replace all of the cables in many areas. | [
"By 2009, it had become clear that, at some point, 3G networks would be overwhelmed by the growth of bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming media. Consequently, the industry began looking to data-optimized 4th-generation technologies, with the promise of speed improvements up to 10-fold over existing 3G te... |
how can certain camouflaging octopi and squid emulate their surroundings as close as they do? | This is what I want to know. How does a flounder, which doesn’t even have any freakin eyes on one side, know what the surface under its blind side looks like to match it? Does it feel differences in color as heat or wavelengths or something? | [
"Spirochaetes are distinguished from other bacterial phyla by the location of their flagella, sometimes called axial filaments, which run lengthwise between the bacterial inner membrane and outer membrane in periplasmic space. These cause a twisting motion which allows the spirochaete to move about. When reproducin... |
What do you think of the accuracy of the book Lies My Teacher Told me by James w. Lowen ? | This question has come up a few times before. You may want to check out [this thread](_URL_1_), or [this one](_URL_0_) for answers about the general accuracy of the book. Are there any other particular things mentioned in _Lies_ which you were wondering about? | [
"(2) However, he knows, having learned from experience, that, despite his best efforts, there are very likely undetected errors in his book. So he also has good reason to believe that there is at least one assertion in his book that is not true.\n",
"I May Be Wrong but I Doubt It is a memoir by former American pr... |
-why do we get darker in the sun but if we leave something outside it gets bleached white? | We get darker in the sun because our body is reacting to the sun damage, making us darker to try to protect us.
Random objects don't have any such defenses, so the colors are bleached out. | [
"Sunlight acts as a bleach through a process leading to similar results: high energy photons of light, often in the violet or ultraviolet range, can disrupt the bonds in the chromophore, rendering the resulting substance colorless. Extended exposure often leads to massive discoloration usually reducing the colors t... |
What is holding us back in making more efficient batteries, to store e.g. solar generated electricity? | We are using batteries to store excess renewable energy. Just not the kind of battery you're familiar with. There's something called a flow battery, explicitly designed for grid-scale energy storage. Many companies are racing to commercialize their products to handle the burgeoning demand for renewable storage, using many different chemistries that are quite different from consumer batteries. The main idea of a flow battery is to decouple energy and power. Power is the instantaneous voltage times current, while energy is power over a duration of time. A lithium ion battery has a fixed relationship due to the need for the lithium ions to be within a certain distance of the electrodes. This means in order to increase capacity, you have to increase everything that goes into the battery as well. A flow battery uses external storage tanks of electrolyte that can be of arbitrary size that is independent of the electrode area. The electrode area determines the power, but the size of the tanks determine the total energy capacity. Need more capacity? Just add more tanks.
This tech has its own set of challenges, however, and they're not trivial. The main problems stem from electrolyte crossover through the separator membrane, efficiency degradation, and cost of the electrolyte. There are literally dozens of different chemical schemes being explored right now with the aim of addressing these points. Bets are on as to which tech will win out. Chances are, however, you the end user will never purchase such a system. They're designed for utilities to incorporate. | [
"in a household equipped with photovoltaics, energy storage is needed. Multiple manufacturers produce rechargeable battery systems for storing energy, generally to hold surplus energy from home solar/wind generation. Today, for home energy storage, Li-ion batteries are preferable to lead-acid ones given their simil... |
why when i kick a basketball hard enough it creates a lump? | Basketballs are made of a rubberised (elastic) material. Every elastic material stretches and returns to its original length unless you stretch it past what is called 'the permanent stretching point' then the structure of the material is altered too much to go back to its original form.
Basically, kicking a basketball hard pushes the wall of the basketball in too far, pushes the material past that point and it doesn't return to the spherical shape it started as. | [
"BULLET::::- In basketball, the act of trying to box out an airborne opponent (while shooting or rebounding, for example), getting under the opponents legs, and causing them to become unbalanced & topple to the ground.\n",
"BULLET::::- Breakaway rim – hoop that can bend slightly when a player dunks a basketball, ... |
what are yield curves in finance | A yield curve is a graphical representation of a bunch of different bonds with the same credit quality, but different maturity dates. It helps you visualize how overall yield (money you will earn) changes as the length of the bond goes up or down.
Normally, as time increases, so does yield. This makes sense, as if you are going to tie up your money in a longer term investment, you demand more money in exchange for doing so. However, inverted yield curves do happen - when yields go _down_ the longer the term on the bond. This is typically a very bad indicator, as it often predicts recessions. | [
"In finance, the yield curve is a curve showing several yields or interest rates across different contract lengths (2 month, 2 year, 20 year, etc. ...) for a similar debt contract. The curve shows the relation between the (level of the) interest rate (or cost of borrowing) and the time to maturity, known as the \"t... |
From the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, to the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, what was the American Revolution like? Was there any fighting or major events? | The Battle of Yorktown was the end of major engagements between the Continentals and British. Henry Clinton was replaced, North and his government were replaced, and the British and Americans for the most part wanted to see how things went in Paris.
That did not stop militia on the frontier from raiding into the Ohio Valley from Pennsylvania and Kentucky. There were some raids back and forth, but nothing that major.
In the South some Cherokee refused to honor a Treaty with the Americans and they fought on until 1785. This hatred ran deep, as the Cherokee fought the South Carolina settlers in the French and Indian War as well.
But the most major post 1781 fighting was between the Franco-Spanish Alliance (and the Dutch) and Britain. America was afraid Spain and France would try to bargain the US cause for other territories, so they cut a separate truce with Britain, but that left their old allies and Britain to slug it out. It was mostly naval actions, most notably to capture Jamaica and Gibraltar but both of those actions failed. The Battle of Saintes, 1782, was a pretty big naval engagement which saw the British defeat the Franco Spanish fleet pretty handily.
There were numerous clashes in India, Central America, and really in many places the empires were in close proximity, all after 1781. There was one battle, which apparently is the last major engagement of the war was the Bate of Cuddelore (1783), was fought in the Bay of Bengal, and was only ended when a British ship carried news of the Treaty of Paris to the combatants.
In a way, between the large powers, the American Revolution was kind of a global conflict, much of it happening in the years between 1779 and 1783 at sea between Europe's great powers. | [
"The climatic battle of the Revolutionary War was the Battle of Yorktown which led to the Treaty of Paris (1783) recognizing U.S. independence by Great Britain. Washington was assisted by French troops under General Rochambeau, guns and a French naval victory under Admiral DeGrasse.\n",
"The Siege of Yorktown was... |
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