question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
|---|---|---|
why is it bad to stick a knife in a toaster? | The heating elements in the toaster are electrically insulated, but could easily be nicked by a knife, causing you to be electrocuted. Even if you have it off or unplugged, you could still knick the element, causing a short circuit or electrocution next time it's used. | [
"Toasters cause nearly 800 deaths annually due to electrocution and fires. Poking knives and other objects into a toaster is dangerous; aside from a risk of electrocution, such insertion can damage the toaster in ways that can increase the risk that the toaster will later start a fire. Even without such tampering, ... |
how do social media communities start when they have no users? | This is the reason most of them fail. The genius of Facebook was that it started with a small, elite community and expanded from there. You need a ton of capital because it takes a long time to get up to a critical mass that makes it usable for the general public. | [
"The lives of social web users are increasingly interconnected with their online profiles and accounts, such to the extent that many social networking and social media sites now offer support for mobile devices and internet phone connectivity. Popular social web sites such Facebook Mobile, Orkut, Twitter, and YouTu... |
If the Bible remained (mostly) untranslated from Latin and Greek in Medieval Christendom and church services were conducted in those languages, how did language-specific forms of Biblical names enter the vernacular? | Since these names would have first been introduced before the liturgical/spoken languages diverged (and not from later localized figures like saints), language-specific versions of names developed through the same process by which, say, Latin evolved into the Romance languages. At a given point in Late Antiquity, three Latin-speaking Christians in (what are now) France, Spain, and Italy could all be named Iohannes, since that was just the Latin form of the name that they could have read in the Bible/heard at Mass. As time went on, and their descendants continued to use the name (while at the same time they're "continuing" to use the language that used to be Latin) each version of the name would get further and further from the "original" Iohannes until we end up with forms as different as Jean, Juan, and Giovanni.
I imagine the case in Byzantium is quite similar, or even more so since there weren't numerous "child" languages as Latin had in Old French, Provençal, Italian, etc. - though I don't know enough about medieval demotic Greek to say if there were any changes beyond "they started pronouncing vowels funny." Ioannes (Ἰωάννης) is always Ioannes (in writing, at least). | [
"The Bible was translated into various languages in late antiquity; the most important of these translations are those in the Syriac dialect of Aramaic (including the Peshitta and the Diatessaron gospel harmony), the Ge'ez language of Ethiopia, and, in Western Europe, Latin. The earliest Latin translations are coll... |
AskHistorians Podcast 133 -- We Have Met The Enemy and They Are U.S. -- The Militia and the War of 1812 | Great episode. My hometown was the site of [a battle of the War of 1812](_URL_0_) that puts on a re-enactment every year so I always enjoy hearing more about the war.
Small correction: the song "The White House Burned (War of 1812)" is commonly misattributed to the Arrogant Worms, but it's by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, another Canadian comedy band.
Keep up the great work!
| [
"In 2013, \"The Combat Jack Show\" became the flagship of a network of podcasts founded by Ossé known as the Loud Speakers Network, which also includes \"The Read\", hosted by Kid Fury and Crissle, \"The Brilliant Idiots\", and \"FanBros\", hosted by DJ Benhameen.\n",
"Bolelli began hosting \"History On Fire\" in... |
What does pure protein look like? | the term protein is rather vague. different proteins in different configurations will have different optical properties. pure isolated individual amino acids as you would purchase from a scientific supplier such as sigma aldrich would be a white powder. | [
"A protein is a polymer that is composed from amino acids that are linked by peptide bonds. There are more than 300 amino acids found in nature of which only twenty, known as the standard amino acids, are the building blocks for protein. Only green plants and most microbes are able to synthesize all of the 20 stand... |
I've heard the Viking Conquest happened due to overpopulation back home. What caused this? | Historians in the 1800s and early 1900s thought that overpopulation may have driven viking raids because the sources said so—and perhaps because overpopulation seemed to be a cause of their contemporary problems as well. But modern historians are more skeptical. We now acknowledge that early medieval authors were every bit as coy as we are, so the overpopulation theory has become a matter of debate. At the same time, archaeological research has expanded dramatically, and archaeologists have focused especially on environmental factors, which are a pressing subject of inquiry given today's concerns about environmental change. So environmental factors have come to the fore.
When archaeologists and geologists identified a "warm period" just preceding the modern period, it was quickly assumed that this warm period allowed intensified agriculture and thus caused overpopulation in the subarctic—the spark for the Viking Age. The problem is that the more information we gain, the less we're able to associate this warm period with the period of colonization that began in the mid-800s. The [medieval warm period](_URL_1_) is now commonly dated to about 950-1250. Although there is evidence for expanded agriculture during this time, there seems to have been no lack of available land, and "overpopulation" is no longer a pressing subject of inquiry.
So why did Scandinavians begin to emigrate? I'm actually not sure this is even the right question. It looks to me like beginning in the 700s there were migratory communities of Norse speakers that would raid or trade as opportunity allowed. You might think of them like modern ex-pats, but without a real political patria to hearken back to in Scandinavia; the slave-trading Portuguese of the early modern Atlantic might be another good basis for comparison. A number of political and economic factors encouraged these Norse-speaking wanderers to take root in Western Europe in the mid-800s. I've outlined some of my thoughts in this thread regarding the [settlement of Iceland](_URL_0_). | [
"There is much debate among historians about what drove the Viking expansion. One widely held idea is that it was a quest for retaliation against continental Europeans for their previous invasions of Viking homelands, such as Charlemagne's campaign to force Scandinavian pagans to convert to Christianity by killing ... |
If the DNA is the same in every cell, how does the body know to build an arm here, run a blood vessel there, put a femur in the thigh, and put 4 chambers in the heart? | This is kind of the root of embryology/development biology, which is a huge field with lots still to be discovered. At the adult level, differentiated cells have different levels of DNA expression - just because the DNA is there does not mean it is expressed the same way everywhere. There's a lot of regulation at both the chromosomal level (eg histone methylation, chromatin condensation) and the nucleotide level (eg transcription factors, mRNA splicing, etc). This is further mediated by signalling via chemicals (eg cytokines/growth factors/hormones etc), as well as physical parameters (eg the stiffness of the underlying substrate, or contact inhibition when cells become confluent).
In the fetus, one of the key players is the HOX gene, which regulates development along the anterior-posterior axis. Various defects in this signalling pathway may result in things like duplication of structures (eg with synpolydactyly). There are many others (if you're interested, check out Shh and wnt-7a), and while we have a general idea of what each one generally regulates, there are many details that are yet to be perfectly described.
To address your last line, note that 'normal' anatomy is highly variable. The circle of Willis is actually one of the sites where the exact connections and locations of various vessels can vary a lot between individuals. So it's not like our DNA encodes every single connection in the body - often times, it's more a matter of regulation at the cellular level (eg cells sense lack of oxygenation, and release signals like hypoxia inducible factors to stimulate angiogenesis). | [
"The extent to which limbs and organs are duplicated varies from case to case. One head may be only partially developed (anencephalic), or both may be complete. In some cases, two complete hearts are present as well, which improves their chances of survival. The total number of arms may be two, three or four.\n",
... |
how do japanese internet users use so many different characters to make custom emoticons and why did no one else do the same? | It started on [2channel](_URL_1_). The culture and large audience of this text-only site led its denizens to go looking for characters to make pictures from, first [the Shift JIS character set](_URL_0_), but then later the whole Unicode character set.
Just like on Reddit, text that looks like a picture stands out and brings in praise, and the community want to one-up it or continue with pictures to make a story.
Western bulletin boards, message boards, USENET had already been doing the same since the 1980s with ASCII art and ANSI art.
4chan copied what they saw on 2ch and brought their ideas to English-speaking sites. However, their Japanese origin might make them seem niche or undesirable (e.g. for weebs only)
I suspect most people who repeat these little faces store them in a text file so they can copy-and-paste them on demand. | [
"However, the recent prevalence of computers has made it easier for Japanese speakers to identify and use rarer characters, and the idea of having a list of approved characters has come under reconsideration. The Japanese media has increasingly used non-approved kanji with furigana to aid the reader in place of \"m... |
why won’t “old phone” be able to work in a 5g network? do we have to get new phones when 5g becomes a more prominent thing? | The way I like to explain it:
Think of network technologies like languages.
5G speaks Arabic.
4G speaks Chinese.
3G speaks English.
Your phone now only speaks Chinese and English. You will need a new one to understand Arabic.
It gets more complex than this, in a technical sense, but the concept is the same. | [
"Mobile phones are, in surveillance terms, a major liability. This liability will only increase as the new third-generation (3G), LTE, WiMAX, and fourth-generation (4G) phones are introduced, as the base stations will be located closer together.\n",
"In the past decade, telecommunications has turned into a highly... |
can you define "time" without using a concept associated with it? | Science has already done this.
_URL_0_
Number of vibrations of a certain atom. In the past things it's been defined by things such as revolution of the earth, lunar cycle, oscillations of a pendulum, how long it takes earth to orbit the sun, etc. | [
"Interpretations of \"uji\" are plentiful. Dainin Katagiri says that Dōgen used the novel term \"being-time\" to illustrate that sentient \"beings\" and \"time\" were unseparated. Thus, \"being\" represents all beings existing together in the formless realm of timelessness, and \"time\" characterizes the existence ... |
How is the result "1+2+3+4+...=-1/12" used in string theory if it's based on a faulty proof? | My apologies but this is a hard question to answer without some analysis, I hope it's understandable, I've tried my best but it goes pretty deep.
This question rests deeply on what kind of limit you are using to evaluate the sequence. They are using an unusual sort of summation so it seems weird.
So what is usually done is to look at the subsequences, x(1) = 1, x(2) = 1 + 2, x(3) = 1 + 2 + 3, x(4) = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 etc
and say "for any e > 0 is there an N such that |x(n) - L| < e for all n >
N". (see wikipedia on Limits)
Because if there is then L is the limit of the sequence in a classical sense.
What this really means is "is there a number N so after that number the partial sequences are always close to L?"
Now obviously for this sequence there is no limit in this sense (the sequence is said to diverge to infinity). And this corresponds to what most people think.
The video you reference is full of cheating and is quite unhelpful (and I think elitist, it is condescending) but they do have a reasonable argument.
There is a thing called the Riemann Zeta Function and it's the sum of n to the power of -s (have a look on wikipedia).
Now we know there are some reasonable sums of the zeta function, that is for some values of s we can say Zeta(s) = L.
Then we can use a thing called analytic continuation, which extends the function.
The best analogy for this is if I give you two points on a line you can plot a straight line between them.
Well if I give you some values of Zeta(s) then there is a way to extend the function to all other values of s.
But when you do this extension the values of Zeta(s) you get are counter-intuitive and not like a normal limit as described above.
So what the video is talking about (and what is used in string theory very resonably) is the extension of the Zeta function to all values of s, which is legitimate.
But of course they don't go into any of that, because it's very complicated, and they just smugly produce something from nowhere.
I hope this is helpful, my apologies if I haven't explained it well.
| [
"A proof/recognition of a string formula_28 is done by showing that formula_53 produces the empty string. For the individual rewrite steps, when multiple alternative variable matches are possible, any rewrite which could lead the whole proof to succeed is considered. Thus, if there is at least one way to produce th... |
when a top starts to slow down and begin to tip over, the spin reverses direction. why? | That's an optical illusion created by it rotating slower. | [
"When a tippe top is spun at a high angular velocity, its stem slowly tilts downwards more and more until it suddenly lifts the body of the spinning top off the ground, with the stem now pointing downward. Eventually, as the top's spinning rate slows, it loses stability and eventually topples over, like an ordinary... |
Jobs/Careers circa 18th century Europe | You would have soldiers and officers, bakers, cobblers and cordwainers, some apothocaries and even fewer doctors of physick...Think of all the things you need in life and then who would have to make them if you couldn't just go to the store and get what you needed. Who killed the meat? Where did cloth come from? What about wagon wheels? Who tends your spiritual needs? Provides music? etc.
Some of this you'd only find in a larger town or city; villages might only have a couple professionals each and travel between themselves, or almost none at all and travel to town regularly. | [
"In the early part of the 19th century, the majority of Parisians were employed in commerce and small shops, but by the mid-19th century, conditions had changed; in 1864, 900,000 of the 1,700,000 inhabitants of Paris were employed in workshops and industry. These workers were typically employed in manufacturing, us... |
why are republicans stereotyped as racist when lincoln (who emancipated the slaves) was republican, and democrats perpetuated and enforced jim crow era laws? | Well, the only reason any group stereotypes another is in order to devalue anything they say or do. It's a form of prejudice.
But the answer to why this particular stereotype is like this is simple: 150 years ago, the GOP was the liberal party, and the Democrats were conservative. The roles have since switched. | [
"Black Republicans felt betrayed as they lost power and were subject to discrimination and harassment to suppress their voting. By 1905, most black men were effectively disenfranchised by state legislatures in every Southern state.\n",
"During her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on the rise of hate... |
why is blackmail illegal? | its coercion or extortion involving a threat of harm or slander.
youre basically demanding money under threat of harm. | [
"There is no statutory offence of blackmail in Scotland. The common law offence of extortion is similar. Extortion is the offence of using threat of harm to demand money, property or some advantage from another person. It does not matter whether the demand itself is legitimate (such as for money owed) as the offenc... |
what does data actually cost the mobile operators? | Your phone company is paying for bandwidth not data.
It's not about how much they download, it's how much can they download at ONCE.
1gb a second, 500mbit, 5gb etc.
But what about things other than the cost of data?
Someone has to pay to put those mobile towers everywhere.
Someone has to pay to replace those 3g pieces with 4g pieces when you're looking for something faster.
The cost of data is there because it covers their operating costs for everyone to use the data across the whole month.
The actual data costs very little. But there is a lot going on behind the scenes to get the data to you.
Check out some details from a financial report for your phone provider. Look at how much money they made last year and how many customers they have. It's not a huge profit per head. | [
"A subscription costs $20 per month for unlimited calls and messaging, plus a customizable data allowance costing an additional $10 per gigabyte. Money for unused data is credited back to the user's account, and overuse of data costs an additional $10 per gigabyte. A group plan costs an additional $15 per user per ... |
how come when you tilt your head sideways you can still read words and everything looks normal, but if you're upside down everything becomes upside down. why doesn't the world become sideways? | Get real close to a mirror and look at your eyes. Continue gazing into your eyes as you tilt your head side to side. You will see your eyes rotate to compensate. | [
"Rather than \"reading\" left to right, a viewer simply stares at the same location of the pictures in the flip book as the pages turn. The book must also be flipped with enough speed for the illusion to work, so the standard way to \"read\" a flip book is to hold the book with one hand and flip through its pages w... |
If the universe is expanding, what is it taking the place of? | "Expanding" here means "distances within the universe get larger as time goes by".
So if we see a galaxy 1 billion light-years away, one day it will be 2 billion light-years away, not because either of us are "moving", but because "space itself is expanding".
In case this seems like arguing over semantics, not that nothing can move faster than the speed of light, but it *is* possible for things to be so far away from each other that as space expands, distances increase faster than the speed of light.
Imagine ants walking along an elastic band. The fastest form of communication they have is the "ant telegram", a kind of vibration in the elastic, which travels at 1 m/s.
The elastic band is very long, and you and I are stretching it very quickly - distances double every second.
If there are two ants a centimetre apart, ant A might send a message to ant B. The message takes sabout 0.01 seconds to arrive.
If the ants were half a metre apart, the message would take a *bit more* than half a second, since the elastic band stretches as the message travels, and the message actually needs to cover more than half a metre of distance.
If the ants were 2 metres apart, they could never send a message to each other - the distance between them is growing faster than the speed of "ant telegrams", and the message A sends gets further and further away from B, *despite the fact that it's travelling towards B*. A is not part of B's "observable universe".
We also are not part of their observable universe. The ants don't know we are the ones stretchign the elastic, in fact they don't know why it's stretching. In fact, their current simplest model is that the elastic band is infinitely long, and there are no ends for strange bipedal humanoids to hold onto and pull. Being infinitely long, the elastic band isn't getting "bigger" (in the sense of occupying more "space"), but it is "expanding" (in the sense that distances between things increase).
Edit: a few people said I didn't really answer the question. So I'll just repeat: "expanding" here means "distances are increasing", not "occupying more of .. something"
If the universe is infinite, it's size doesn't change as it expands. Even if it's finite, there doesn't have to be anything "off the edge" for it to expand into. | [
"universe will expand forever. Contrary to this he shows that if Ω is a number greater than 1 then the universe will eventually collapse into itself in a \"big crunch\", the opposite of the Big Bang. Ferris then shows, in a third possibility, that the universe is hanging in the balance in a \"critical density\" tha... |
when watching poker on tv, how can the graphic calculate the chips bet so quickly? | The obvious answer is that you are not watching a live feed and the graphics were edited in afterwards. | [
"BULLET::::- At the Casa Pilsner restaurant, teams would have to correctly count the value of a large amount of poker chips. When teams provided with the correct value of 80,650, a dealer will hand teams their next clue.\n",
"A minor controversy arose during the main event. The colors of the chips made it very di... |
how are proteins formed? | Proteins are basically long long chains of molecules called *amino acids*. The particular sequence of amino acids in a protein determines the shape it will bend itself into, which determines what it will do. For example, some proteins are the perfect shape to grab two other molecules and smush them together so that they get combined (these proteins are called enzymes). Other proteins are the perfect shape to carry important molecules (like hemoglobin, which is a protein that carries oxygen around your blood).
Your DNA is also a long chain of molecules, but these molecules are called *nucleotides*. There are four main nucleotides that make up the chain, and each is represented by a letter (A, C, T, and G). The sequence of "letters" in DNA contains all the information to make proteins in your body. Scientists represent DNA by writing out the sequence of "letters," like ATCTGCCATCCCGT.
Now here's the important bit: these letters are arranged in 3-letter words that "mean" an amino acid. For example, "ATC" in DNA corresponds with an amino acid called glutamine. A long chain of these three letter words will match perfectly the chain of amino acids in a protein. So if a protein has amino acids 1, 2, and 3, the DNA corresponding to that protein will have the 3-letter words that mean amino acids 1, 2, and 3 in order. A sequence of DNA that matches a protein is called a *gene*.
When it's time to make a protein, your body unravels the DNA and makes a copy of the gene on a different, very similar molecule called messenger RNA (mRNA). This copying is called *transcription*--like you're transcribing your notes from your notebook to your computer. This mRNA flies out to a thing in your cells called a *ribosome*, which actually goes through and READS the RNA sequence and attaches amino acids in the right order. So it will go "okay, these 3 letters mean this amino acid, the next 3 letters mean this amino acid, etc." and just attach all the amino acids in a row.* So you end up with a long long chain (hundreds, even thousands!) of amino acids in the exact sequence of the DNA letters that you had originally. This process of matching DNA "words" to amino acids is called *translation*--like you're translating from the "language" of DNA to the "language" of proteins/amino acids.
This long chain of amino acids then detaches itself from the ribosome, folds itself up, and voila! You have a protein! This is happening millions of times constantly all around your body as all your cells make all the proteins they need to function.
Now in reality, it's actually a lot more complicated than that--the DNA isn't always in the right order, the protein can get "cut" and shaped by other things after it detaches, etc. But this is the basic process and is what you need to know!
PS Here's a pretty cool animation of the whole process: _URL_0_
*There are actually two other kinds of RNA that work in this process. Ribosomal RNA (rRNA) makes up the structure of the ribosome. Transfer RNA (tRNA) holds the amino acids and attaches them in the right order. You might have to know that for your exam.
| [
"Proteins are the product of a gene that are formed from translation of a mature mRNA molecule.Proteins contain 4 elements in regards to their structure: primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary. The linear amino acid sequence is also known as the primary structure. Hydrogen bonding between the amino acids of th... |
what are the lines across some bodies of water on large satellite image maps? | Those are where the satellite took a long series of photos as it passed overhead in lines, and the photos were later stitched together with imperfect colour correction, so you see the edges of the photo series. | [
"These maps usually show not only the contours, but also any significant streams or other bodies of water, forest cover, built-up areas or individual buildings (depending on scale), and other features and points of interest.\n",
"These maps show not only the contours, but also any significant streams or other bod... |
is it possible that the human race could evolve to live without rest/sleep? | This is a great question! I have absolutely no scientific proof to back this up, but, given enough time (billions of years) I think ANYTHING is possible in regards to evolution. We evolved from single-cell creatures. No reason to think we can't evolve to not need rest. | [
"Under some hypotheses, humans and their recent evolutionary ancestors may have needed to be able to run long distances in order to survive, and therefore natural selection would have favored traits that improve humans ability to run for long periods of time. \n",
"Few studies have compared the effects of acute t... |
how does mdma make people feel happy and magical? was the happiness already inside the mind in the first place? | > Was the happiness already inside the mind in the first place?
Yes. MDMA releases all of your serotonin in your brain. That's what creates the feel good feeling.
Of course, you can squeeze all that out at once at the cost of never feeling good about anything the next couple of days until your body can resupply. | [
"MDMA is unpredictable and produces different responses in different people. The drug causes neurotransmitter activation across the main neural pathways (including serotonin and dopamine, noradrenaline) that can result in large mood swings and changes. The memories that emerge under the influence of MDMA can evoke ... |
how do massive companies like thomas cook airlines go bust? | By having expenses that are even greater than the amount of money they bring in. For example an airline has to lease incredibly expensive planes, and pay for vast amounts of fuel and labor. | [
"The airline filed for bankruptcy in May 2002, but the bankruptcy was declared invalid in July later that year; however the airline did not resume operations due to the lack of investments, personnel and infrastructure. Aeromexico attempted to buy and rescue the airline in April 2003, but soon abandoned this plan.\... |
Why are some alloys better for some musical instruments than others? | Different metals behave differently when forces are applied to them (be it by percussive nature, or by the air itself). One measure of this is the Young's Modulus. Simply stated, the higher the modulus, the stiffer a material is.
You can see [here](_URL_0_) that brass/bronze are similar, whilst steel is much stiffer - making it better for cymbals. | [
"The high malleability and workability, relatively good resistance to corrosion, and traditionally attributed acoustic properties of brass, have made it the usual metal of choice for construction of musical instruments whose acoustic resonators consist of long, relatively narrow tubing, often folded or coiled for c... |
If natural or artificial flavorings are supposed to taste like fruit, why does sugar need to be added to soda? | Naturally sweet things have sugar too. Fruit, fructose, notice the entomology there? Its on purpose. Fruit can have an enormous amount of free sugars | [
"Many kinds of fruit have a natural acid content which would be too high to produce a savory and pleasant fruit wine in undiluted form; this can be particularly true, among others, for strawberries, cherries, pineapples, and raspberries. Therefore, much as to regulate sugar content, the fruit mash is generally topp... |
Did historical army recruits go through basic training? | There is quite a lot of information out there on the subject of Roman army recruits, and a lot of it can be found in Vegetius' *[De Re Militari](_URL_0_)* which I strongly recommend anyone interested in this topic to check out. I could really go on for ages about this, but I'll try to keep it short and the points salient. Sorry for the wall of text.
The Roman military was essentially based upon the idea of teamwork and tactics of a group, rather than individual capabilities of the soldiers which is an accusation that was levelled towards the Gauls for example.
The age of a recruit would've been as soon he reaches puberty and not a specific age. Romans favoured taller recruits - Keep in mind that a lot of the fighting was essentially mêlée combat.
The first thing that a recruit to the Roman legion would have learnt is to march with his comrades. You have to keep in mind, that with no other method of transporting masses of troops back then, marching in formation was a huge priority for the safety of the troops. Vegetius mentions that in the summer the troops were to be marched ~30 kilometres/18.5 miles in under 5 hours. Each single soldier would also learn how to swim in the winter mothers. He also mentions that the young recruits should be trained in running in order to charge at enemies.
Apart from physical exercises, they were also trained in the techniques of battle with a number of weapons, the primary weapon being the sword. You might remember Gladiator with Russell Crowe and the swinging swords all over the place, but Roman recruits were taught to *stab* with the sword. Vegetius says that however hard a sword may be slashed at someone, the chance of the soldier dying was far less than if he was stabbed with the same or even much less force. Another advantage of stabbing is that the time for a stab to reach an opponent is far less than if a swing is taken at him - giving him less time to defend.
The recruits were also trained to throw spears. They were actually trained to throw with spears that were heavier than those they would use in battle in order to build strength in their arms. Though, they were also trained with the "real" battle spears. In addition to the spear, they were also all taught how to use the martiobarbuli and the sling. The martiobarbuli was like a small spear, almost like a bigger version of a dart that was weighted down with a metal such as lead and thrown at the enemy.
Vegetius also tells us that around a quarter to a third of the best young recruits were also to be instructed on how to use a bow in battle, both from their feet and on horseback.
Oh, and in addition to all of this training, every recruit was expected to carry around approximately 30 kilograms/60 pounds or more at all times when in training and with fellow recruits in order to prepare him for the necessity of carrying food and water as well as weapons when on an actual campaign.
Keep in mind that De Re Militari is essentially a compilation of other military works from the era and that it has been criticised by some scholars. | [
"When first enlisted, a fresh Roman recruit (\"tiro\") was not given real weapons to train with. Instead, he was given wooden swords and shields designed to be twice the weight of their counterparts in battle. This allowed the recruit to develop strength as he trains with these wooden weapons. Alongside battle trai... |
what is an operating system kernal and what does it do exactly? | The kernel has 4 essential jobs in a system:
- Divide memory over running programs and make sure they don't access each other's memory. This also includes things like swapping things out when too much memory is used.
- Provide proper access to all the peripherals of the system.
- Schedule the many threads that are running so that each get to run on the CPUs in a reasonable amount of time.
- Handle the file system(s) again so that everything on that level happens nice and orderly.
Kernels are complex though. Way back when we had a 1 year 2-hour course on all of that when I studied IT. | [
"OS-9's notion of processes and I/O paths is quite similar to that of Unix in nearly all respects, but there are some significant differences. Firstly, the file system is not a single tree, but instead is a forest with each tree corresponding to a device. Second, OS-9 does not have a Unix-style fork() system call—i... |
how much power does the computer need to fully emulate human's brain? | since we don't have anywhere near enough knowledge of how the human brain works to be able to make a computer emulate one, the correct answer is:
No one has a clue. | [
"It is difficult to directly compare silicon-based hardware with neurons. But notes that computer speech recognition is approaching human capabilities, and that this capability seems to require 0.01% of the volume of the brain. This analogy suggests that modern computer hardware is within a few orders of magnitude ... |
What's the earliest book we know that teaches (actual) history? As in, do we know the oldest history textbook? | Herodotus is known as "the father of history". He wrote *The Histories*, which is about the history Greek world and the ethnography and culture of the region. It isn't exactly accurate, but he attempts to tell a somewhat fact based story, rather than relying on the oral tradition like Homer. He includes myths and uses casual relationships to explain history, so he still has somewhat of a narrative format. But he did research, talked to eyewitnesses, consulted records, etc- things that are familiar to a modern historian. *History of the Peloponnesian War* by Thucydides was relatively contemporary to *The Histories* which focuses more on political history and tends to shun the cultural history. | [
"The oldest written records in the collection include eight books printed before 1501 (incunables) and 85 printed in Mexico in the 16th century. The oldest printed book is a History of Venice (in Latin) published in 1490 and the oldest manuscript dates to 1452. The eight incunables are \"History of Florence\" (1476... |
Did anyone make a fortune from the 1929 stock market crash and the depression that followed? How did he/she/they do it? | (edit: not a historian, just have a passion for all things about financial history :D)
Benjamin Graham is a pretty notable example of somebody who made money during the depression years because he modernized the academics around investing.
After losing most of his wealth in the crash, he decided to look for a different approach to investing. In the 19th century and the early 20th century brokers would pick stocks based on two things: the dividend and the expected growth. As the crash of 1929 came closer, the former was disregarded almost entirely, and analysts valued stocks at ridiculous growth expectations.
Graham believed that an approach based entirely on dividends and, especially, growth was a foolish and unprofitable way of investing. Instead he focussed on two other parameters: current earnings and assets.
The reason those two were great indicators of a good investment opportunity, especially during a depression, is that instead of looking for a company which might one day be worth a multiple of your investment, he looked for companies that are already worth quite a bit more than their shares costed.
The best example I can give are what he called "net-net" stocks. These are stocks where the net working capital minus all debts were worth more than what the whole company was valued at on the stock market. To put it simple: he bought a stock at $10 when the company had $15 cash per share in the bank.
He went to teach security analysis at Columbia and the only student he ever gave an A was Warren Buffett. | [
"Despite the dangers of speculation, it was widely believed that the stock market would continue to rise forever. On March 25, 1929, after the Federal Reserve warned of excessive speculation, a small crash occurred as investors started to sell stocks at a rapid pace, exposing the market's shaky foundation. Two days... |
are there any differences between prison labor and slave labor and should we worry about the future of privately owned prisons? i know slavery is not entirely illegal according to the 13th amendment. so it's kinda scary to imagine what could happen, am i worrying for no reason? | > ... should we worry about the future of privately owned prisons?
I don't think you need to worry about the future, privately owned prisons are a concern **today**.
Instead of working solely to rehabilitate inmates, the prison industrial complex is very involved in lobbying government to influence laws to the benefit of their profits, not the general population. | [
"The prison industry also includes private businesses that benefit from the exploitation of the prison labor. Some scholars, using the term prison-industrial complex, have argued that the trend of \"hiring out prisoners\" is a continuation of the slavery tradition, pointing out that the Thirteenth Amendment to the ... |
So, say a blind person develops a heightened auditory sense. What would happen to this heightened sense if their vision was restored? | First of all, blind people do not really "develop" heightened senses. They learn to use their existing senses in ways that could be learned by sighted people if they were pressured to do so.
By and large, these increased learned capabilities would be intact if vision were returned, and would gradually fade away, just like all brain abilities that are not used. | [
"New studies have adapted this hypothesis to explain cross modal plasticity which seems to occur in blind people. This is the fact that other senses in blind people seem to be heightened as a result of the loss of vision. Since blind patients are not exposed to the novel function of visual reading, the cortical are... |
why do we study limits in calculus? | Calculus, both integral and differential calculus, is based upon limits. We don't actually reach our answers but we get infinitely close to it. You can't calculate instantaneous rate of change (the value of the derivative) without using two infinitely close points. Well, you *do*, but not without using limits to derive that ability. The rules of differentiation can be derived (no pun intended) by taking the limit as delta approaches zero blahblahblah you know the rest. Similarly, when calculating area, you're actually calculating the sum of an infinite number of rectangles. As you approach an infinite number of rectangles, you approach the actual area under a curve. | [
"Despite these attempts calculus continued to be developed using non-rigorous methods until around 1830 when Augustin Cauchy, and later Bernhard Riemann and Karl Weierstrass, redefined the derivative and integral using a rigorous definition of the concept of limit. The concept of using limits as a foundation for ca... |
why is it that normal pencils will rub off with an eraser, but color pencils won't? | Color pencil pigment is carried by wax, which only smears around when it's written on something and then erased. You're essentially writing with a form of grease that carries a coloring agent, and like rubbing your finger across a greasy frying pan, doesn't remove it that well without some other form of chemical help (which would likely destroy the paper it's written on in the process).
Pencil leads are made largely from graphite, a naturally black carbon form that transfers very well to paper in a tacky powder of sorts. Because it doesn't require any sort of glue to stay in place, and because it doesn't need any sort of wax to carry a different pigment (which is composed of different molecules for different colours), you only really need pressed graphite in the lead.
Tacky rubber or plastic erasers remove graphite from paper very well because that substance sticks to graphite better than paper does, so it lifts it off and removes it in the little flakes that come away from your eraser as you use it up. | [
"An ink eraser is an instrument used to remove ink from a writing surface, more difficult than removing pencil markings. Older types are a metal scraper, which scrapes the ink off the surface, and an eraser similar to a rubber pencil eraser, but with additional abrasives, such as sand, incorporated. Fibreglass eras... |
why i dont have to pay sales tax on most things i buy online | You do. You just have to pay it yourself come tax time. You can only be charged sales tax online if you live in the same state as the site you're buying from. If you don't, you're supposed to, as part of your state taxes, calculate how much you spent on online purchases, then pay the state sales tax on that. The amount and whether or not you even have to at all varies by state. At least in Michigan, this is how it works. | [
"In the United States, an advantage of this type of shopping is that the merchant is typically not required by law to add sales tax to the price of the goods, unless they have a physical presence in the customer's state. Instead, most states require the resident purchaser to pay applicable taxes. There has been per... |
why after i take a photo of my computer monitor on my phone, if i open the photo and zoom in and out, the lines change almost like they're animated? | This is called *moiré*. It is caused by two grid-like patterns not quite lining up. Your screen has pixels with dark boundaries, and the phone screen also has pixels with dark boundaries. As these partially line up and the stop lining up as you zoom in and out, changing patterns happen.
Moiré patterns are really interesting - there are plenty of YouTube videos showing what can be achieved. | [
"A screenshot can be taken on iOS by simultaneously pressing the Home button and the Lock button, however on the new iPhone X it is achieved by pressing the Volume up and Lock button. The screen will flash and the picture will be stored in PNG format in the \"Camera Roll\" if the device has a camera, or in \"Saved ... |
how come in america when a bill is passed through the senate, it can have its title and contents completely changed? | So, in order for a bill to become law, it has to be passed by both houses. A bill will start in one house, they'll study it in committee, make changes, vote on it, make more changes, vote on the changes, etc, and then they will eventually reach a consensus.
Once the bill is passed by the first house, it goes to the other house. The other house is also free to study it in committee, make changes to it, vote on it, vote on the changes, etc. They are under no obligation whatsoever to pass bills in exactly the form that they were passed by the first house - otherwise, what would be the point of having two houses?
If the second house makes a bunch of changes to the bill, then the first house has to vote again to accept the bill. If not, the bill dies. If they vote to accept it, it goes to the White House for signature.
It's considered in a lot of legislatures that the upper house (the US Senate, Canadian Senate, UK House of Lords, etc) is to be a "chamber of sober second thought," composed of more experienced legislators, who can shape and improve legislature from the lower house (the US House, Canadian and UK House of Commons, etc.) | [
"Once passed by the Senate, a bill is sent to the House of Delegates for consideration. If the House also approves the bill without amendment, it is sent to the Governor. If there is amendment, however, the Senate may either reconsider the bill with amendments or ask for the establishment of a conference committee ... |
does the movie studio pay the movie theater to show their movie? or does the movie theater pay the movie studio to bring in customers by letting them show their movie? | The movie studios and the theaters split the income depending on when people buy tickets to the movie, basically, each side gets a percent of ticket sales
For example:
Weeks 1 & 2: 90% studio / 10% theater
Weeks 3 & 4: 70% studio / 30% theater
Weeks 5+: 50% / 50%
This can and will vary depending on specifics and the specific movie.
As you can see, since most people view movies when they first come out as well, the movie studio is making their money there.
But so where do theaters make their money? Popcorn, sodas, and hot dogs, sold at gigantic markups.
| [
"The manager of the defendant theater owners sent a letter to each of the distributor defendants, in which he demanded as a condition of continued dealing in the distributor's films that the distributor (1) require that second-run theaters never exhibit such films at any time or in any theater at a smaller admissio... |
what really happens when i stall my manual car? | You stall because your car is heavy and takes energy to get it moving. Without enough fuel to burn to provide enough energy to move, your car is basically sitting still with the engine turning. This is literally impossible, and since it can't make the car move since it doesn't have enough fuel, the engine stops turning.
Imagine sitting on a bicycle with your a friend lifting the back wheel off the ground while you pedal slowly. Your friend is basically acting like a clutch. If your friend were to suddenly drop the bicycle to the ground (thus releasing the clutch) either the back wheel and pedals stop spinning or the bicycle moves forward. Now pretend you're doing this with the front brake locked, and how hard it would be to keep pedaling, and that's basically what happens when you stall.
Edit: quick add on. There are other ways to stall, such as lack of air intake and a general combustion failure, but I'm guessing this is the one you're wondering about. | [
"With a manual-gearbox car, engine shutdown typically comes with braking to a complete stop, gearbox in neutral and clutch release. Cars with automatic transmissions shut down upon braking to a full stop - the shut down is activated by the footbrake pedal being in use when the car comes to a halt. If the car is slo... |
what are the practical uses of logarithms in real life ? | A logarithm is just the inverse of an exponent. Aside from solving equations with exponents in them ( like parabolic trajectories in ballistics for example) they show up in nature a lot).
The natural log, which is the inverse of e, I was able to use to model human vision. Ever try dimming your light bulbs (especially smart bulbs)? Go to 50% brightness. It sure doesn't look 50% as bright. Human light sensitivity is 5logN. If a product design engineer knew what I know and modeled the brightness of a bulb as a logarithmic function, he could make a lightbulb that dimmed by what a person would precieve as 50% halfway through a dimmer knob.
Human hearing is logarithmic too. This is why decibels are 10x higher each time you increase 1 decibel. Sound seems to be twice as loud when you actually 10x the pressure behind it. | [
"Logarithms were introduced by John Napier in 1614 as a means to simplify calculations. They were rapidly adopted by navigators, scientists, engineers, surveyors and others to perform high-accuracy computations more easily. Using logarithm tables, tedious multi-digit multiplication steps can be replaced by table lo... |
what are "logistics" companies i see in industrial areas? | They are typically for goods distribution. I'm guessing you see a lot of Eastern European companies that handle import/export work. | [
"The term \"logistics\" applies to activities within one company or organization involving product distribution, whereas \"supply chain\" additionally encompasses manufacturing and procurement, and therefore has a much broader focus as it involves multiple enterprises (including suppliers, manufacturers, and retail... |
if weight gain/loss is just a matter of calories in and out, why is it so hard to keep weight off? | When you lose weight, the amount of energy your body needs also decreases, as you have a smaller body. A person weighing 300lb/150kg needs more energy to maintain basic body functions than a person weighing 150lb/75kg. So you have to adjust your basic caloric intake to your smaller energy need. | [
"A commonly asserted \"rule\" for weight gain or loss is based on the assumption that one pound of human fat tissue contains about 3,500 kilocalories (often simply called \"calories\" in the field of nutrition). Thus, eating 500 fewer calories than one needs per day should result in a loss of about a pound per week... |
I just saw in NatGeo that if you touch a 500 kV wire you would desintegrate from the electrical shock. Is this true? | Usually, you die from a steam explosion, and often your head pops off like a cork because the water in your 'guts' nearly instantly vaporizes. Idiots try to steal wire from high tension lines fairly regularly, especially in Eastern Europe. | [
"Electrical transmission and distribution lines for electric power typically use voltages between tens and hundreds of kilovolts, so contact with or close approach to the line conductors presents a danger of electrocution. Contact with overhead wires is a frequent cause of injury or death. Metal ladders, farm equip... |
how come trix stopped making the shape cereal? why is it only circles??? | Well, young 'un, back in the day, *way* back in the day, in the dark ages before the 1990s, Trix *were* round. So, really, what they are now is what they should look like, not your hippity hop fruit shapes. Now get off my damn lawn, you punk kids, or I'll turn the hose on ya ag'in. | [
"Trix is a brand of breakfast cereal made by General Mills in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for the North American market and by Cereal Partners (using the Nestlé brand) elsewhere in the world. The cereal consists of fruit-flavored, sweetened, ground-corn pieces.\n",
"On September 21, 2017, General Mills announced that... |
the origin of college spring break? | Back when the US was more religious, Easter was a pretty big holiday & people would get time off to travel & see family.
For schools on a quarter system instead of a semester system, spring break is the period between winter & spring terms. | [
"Spring break is a vacation period in early spring at universities and schools which started during the 1930s in the United States and is now observed in many other countries as well. Spring break is frequently associated with extensive gatherings and riotous partying in warm climate locations such as Daytona Beach... |
At what point in human history did we start drawing dicks? | I'm sorry, but we don't allow 'First'/'Last' questions on /r/AskHistorians, and so we have removed this submission. It's not that the question is bad; it is simply that, given the rules of this subreddit, these types of questions are ill-suited to its format. We've found that they tend to get responses along the lines of "the first/last example *I know of*," or else many short, speculative responses in the case that the answer went unrecorded. This results in many removed comments, and very few answered threads.
If this is a question you still are interested in a response to though, you have options!
* Consider the core of the question to rephrase and resubmit. Instead of asking, for instance, "Who was the first person killed by a firearm?", try "What do we know about the early development and use of firearms?". Asking about origins, developments, or declines is more likely to get in-depth, knowledgeable answers.
* Every other Wednesday we run a "[Short Answers to Simple Questions](/r/AskHistorians/search?q=flair_css_class%3Afeature+short+answers+simple+questions & restrict_sr=on & sort=new & t=all)", and if you can hang on to your question until then, it can likely fit unchanged.
* Finally, you could also try submitting your question to /r/History or /r/AskHistory, which doesn't have submission criteria quite as strict.
Thank you for understanding! | [
"This is consistent with the tradition of cave painting originating in the Proto-Aurignacian, with the first arrival of anatomically modern humans in Europe. A 2013 study of finger length ratios in Upper Paleolithic hand stencils found in France and Spain determined that the majority were of female hands, overturni... |
why has there been, seemingly all of a sudden, a big push to block pornography on the internet? | It's the thin end of the censorship wedge; once censorship of porn "for the safety of children" is accepted as the norm, it will be so much easier to bring in more censorship of other types of speech/expression that someone wants to suppress.
Porn was chosen as a type of literiture that enough people disapprove of to get a groundswell of support - it's difficult to argue that children should be exposed to more porn, without people assuming you're a paedophile, but most people would be outraged if they thought that Cosmoplitan or The Sun's Page 3 was going to be banned.
Fast-forward a decade or so, and Cosmo and Page 3 (or things like them) could well be the next target. | [
"BULLET::::- While there is no sustained government policy or strategy to block access to Internet content on a large scale, measures for removing certain content from the web, sometimes for fear they could incite violence, have become more common.\n",
"BULLET::::- While there is no sustained government policy or... |
why is it safe to eat salmon raw as sushi but not safe to eat it rare when you eat a salmon filet? why is tuna different? | None of those statements are true.
It is safe to eat salmon raw as sushi and it is also safe to eat salmon rare .. in a trusted restaurant or setting. It is also safe to eat tuna rare for the same reason - most fish are not susceptible to botulism or salmonella the way other meats are.
But it all depends on the handling. It's no different from eating rare steak or soft cooked eggs. At your own risk. | [
"Per Food and Drug Administration regulations, raw fish served in the United States must be frozen prior to serving in order to kill parasites. Because of this and the relative difficulty of acquiring fresh seafood compared to Japan, raw seafood (e.g., sashimi) is not as prevalent a component in American-style sush... |
Multiple questions about Gamma-Ray Bursts. How dangerous are they to Earth? | > 1\. Would we be able to detect a Gamma-Ray burst heading towards Earth before it hit Earth?
No, but with a pretty big catch.
They don't come from nowhere. It would be impossible to detect something coming at us at the speed of light, but we'd know it was coming thousands of years in advance from observing nearby large stars and seeing if any are even candidates for emitting a GRB in our general direction.
> 2\. What is the maximum range for a gamma-ray burst to pose a threat to Earth? I've read 200 light years is a conservative estimate.
The power output and degree of focus of a gamma ray burst can vary quite a lot, but try ~8000 lightyears.
There is a candidate star 5,000 lightyears away, but [it's pointed wrong](_URL_1_) and will zorch a region of space which does not include Earth sometime in the next few hundred thousand years. Stars like that are incredibly rare, and other objects expected to produce GRBs (a pair of merging neutron stars for example) are even rarer.
> 3\. What are the main threats to Earth?
> 4\. For the side of Earth directly hit by the gamma-ray burst, would the people be killed immediately?
Air has a [halving thickness](_URL_0_) of 15 meters. That is, every 15 meters the intensity of ionizing radiation will drop by half.
There's a lot of meters of air above you.
A few [kilowatts per meter squared](_URL_2_) of gamma rays for a few seconds would be very fatal to astronauts and a little bad for people on jetliners, but on the ground you get no appreciable dose.
However, absorbing radiation would produce lots and lots of nitrogen oxides and destroy vast amounts of ozone. The paper I linked forecasts darker skies and a global ozone hole. This would sunburn plants and people and require you to wear sunglasses to reduce risk of blindness.
The nitrogen oxides will come down in rain eventually after a few months and the ozone reforms after a few years, but an environment where plants can't be grown except under a greenhouse due to cold and ultraviolet would be pretty apocalyptic.
And again just in case it got buried in my overly long post, this should never happen because of a lack of nearby objects capable of producing a GRB. | [
"Because their energy is strongly focused, the gamma rays emitted by most bursts are expected to miss the Earth and never be detected. When a gamma-ray burst is pointed towards Earth, the focusing of its energy along a relatively narrow beam causes the burst to appear much brighter than it would have been were its ... |
how do islands float? | The thing in the video is basically a *boat*, not an island. Islands are connected to the ground under the water. | [
"A floating island is a mass of floating aquatic plants, mud, and peat ranging in thickness from several centimetres to a few metres. Floating islands are a common natural phenomenon that are found in many parts of the world. They exist less commonly as an artificial phenomenon. Floating islands are generally found... |
How do astronomers know the trajectory of very far away objects? | I'm not sure what you're referring to. We can measure the radial velocities (those towards or away from us) of galaxies due to redshift, but tangential velocities (those tangential to our line of sight) we can't. At least not that I'm aware of (never discount an astronomer's ability to find some clever way to estimate some difficult quantity with an enormous error.)
Want to point us to the thing you're thinking about? | [
"The path of a small planet, comet, or long-range spacecraft can often be accurately modeled starting from the 2-body elliptical orbit around the sun, and adding small corrections from the gravitational attraction of the larger planets in their known orbits.\n",
"In order to determine the unknown orbit of a body,... |
How do traditional filament lightbulbs fail? | The tungsten evaporates from the filament. You can tell a new filament from a well worn one by looking at it under a microscope. As it ages, it develops more resistance at the thinnest spot. Eventually, the filament breaks. Old bulbs can have a dark coating of tungsten on the inside of the glass bulb. Halogen bulbs get so hot that the tungsten doesn't condense on the glass. When the bulb is turned off, some of the tungsten vapor gets redeposited on the filament. | [
"The filaments can burn out (fail) at the end of the lamp's lifetime, opening the circuit and losing the capability to heat up. Both filaments lose function as they are connected in series, with just a simple switch start circuit a broken filament will render the lamp completely useless. Filaments rarely burn out o... |
how does spotify work? | > with unlimited access to their music for free?
Firstly, it's not free. Either you subscribe and straight up pay them money or you get ads which means the companies buying the ad space are paying spotify in the hope that you'll buy their product.
As far as convincing bands it's not about convincing bands, it's paying fees to labels which have a large number of bands. This is mainly the big 3 (UMG, Sony, and Warner) Other people can expand on this since this is as far as my knowledge goes. | [
"Spotify allows users to add local audio files for music not in its catalogue into the user's library through Spotify's desktop application, and then allows users to synchronise those music files to Spotify's mobile apps or other computers over the same Wi-Fi network as the primary computer by creating a Spotify pl... |
How does both internet and cable data travel through a coaxial cable? | Different TV channels are separated into different frequencies using [frequency division multiplexing](_URL_3_). They are all transmitted at the same time, and internet data is transmitted/received at the same time as well, in separate frequency bands. There is a great explanation in the "how it works" part of that article, but I will try to explain it here as well.
For each TV channel, a *carrier* wave is sent through the coaxial cable at a specific frequency, using an electronic oscillator - basically you end up getting an oscillating electric field / electric potential in the cable, looking like a normal sine wave. This sine wave gets **modulated**, or changed in a certain way, by the *baseband* signal which actually contains the digital data we want to transmit. This modulation may affect either the amplitude, frequency, or phase of the carrier signal to "encode" the digital data onto the wave. Today only *digital* data is sent on cable (as far as I know), but the same concept applies for analog signals like audio (see [amplitude modulation](_URL_1_) (AM) and [frequency modulation](_URL_2_) (FM)). This modulated signal is received at the other end in your cable box, and decoded using a demodulator, to extract the baseband signal carrying the digital data (1s and 0s). A simple method of modulation for digital signals is [amplitude shift keying](_URL_4_) (ASK). Bits are represented by: High amplitude sine wave = 1, low amplitude sine wave = 0.
Now how do you have multiple channels at once? Remember I said the carrier wave for each TV channel is at a different specific frequency? All these signals for each channel are combined, along with the internet data channel, into one big mess of a signal. On the receiving end, when you tune to a specific channel, **filters** isolate that channel's carrier frequency and block out all other frequencies. For example, a bandpass filter can pick out a small frequency band, say from 500MHz to 506MHz, and block all frequencies outside that range. These filters can be implemented using either analog circuits or using digital signal processing in a computer.
[This](_URL_0_) is an example of what it looks like, with TV and internet sharing the entire bandwidth of frequencies. The upstream and downstream data frequency bands are for internet. | [
"Cable Internet provides access using a cable modem on hybrid fiber coaxial wiring originally developed to carry television signals. Either fiber-optic or coaxial copper cable may connect a node to a customer's location at a connection known as a cable drop. In a cable modem termination system, all nodes for cable ... |
what is diarrhea? what causes it to happen? the cramps, the sounds, the smell, the result. | The final stages of digestion happen in the large intestine. The last bits of nutrients are absorbed, but most importantly, the large intestine absorbs most of the water back out of the digestive waste. Food, as it's digested, is mixed with a whole lot of water and basically turns into a soupy mess. But you don't want to poop out all that water, or you'd dehydrate yourself. So the large intestine re-absorbs nearly all of it, leaving the semi-solid poop we're familiar with.
If your body feels that it has been poisoned, it has an "oh shit" button. It says screw re-absorbing the water, we need to clear this poison out of the body. So it expels everything out of the large intestine, water and all. That's diarrhea. | [
"Exudative diarrhea occurs with the presence of blood and pus in the stool. This occurs with inflammatory bowel diseases, such as Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis, and other severe infections such as \"E. coli\" or other forms of food poisoning.\n",
"Chronic diarrhea can be the part of the presentations of a... |
- surrealism | The doctors say I have insufficient mactelinium in my diet. But mactelinium is a fictitious substance and I've never seen a doctor in my life, and I am a doctor. What should the government do? It's important, because we can't have people like you running around and performing abortions on plants.
| [
"Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the artistic and literary production of those affiliated with the Surrealist Movement. Surrealist artworks feature the element of surprise, the uncanny, the unconscious, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many ... |
why do banana slices split so easily into thirds? | Banana the fruit is made of 3 wedge shaped strips. | [
"Bananas are peeled and then sliced horizontally into thin slices and added to a bowl of custard, the custard is then heated until it is piping hot. The hot custard and banana slices are then served. Some versions are served with chilled custard. \n",
"When the tip of a banana is pinched with two fingers, it will... |
why does the human body store extra food (energy) as fat, while allowing extra vitamins and minerals to be passed through your body within hours? | It's not that your body requires them to pass through your system, it's just that some vitamins are fat soluble (which means they can be stored in your body tissues) and others are water soluble (your body absorbs what it can and the rest is urinated out).
Your body stores energy because without a constant source of energy you'll die a lot faster than a vitamin deficiency will.
| [
"The body has a natural store of fat (also called \"adipose tissue\") that stores reserve energy. One can still stay alive while the body breaks down the fatty tissue (hence people wasting away from starvation).\n",
"When the body is expending more energy than it is consuming (e.g. when exercising), the body's ce... |
How far away are asteroids from each other? | It depends entirely on what kind of sizes you want to talk about, as there are far more light asteroids than heavy asteroids, but in general the answer is "really really far away".
Note that the total mass of the asteroid belt is only 4% of the mass of the Moon ([1](_URL_1_)), while being spread out over an insanely large volume (approx. 10 trillion trillion cubic miles; [2](_URL_0_)). The estimated distance between asteroids of at least a mile in size is 1.9 million miles ([2](_URL_0_)). For this reason, space missions beyond the asteroid belt do not even worry about passing through the asteroid belt, as the probability of crashing into an asteroid is estimated to be less than 1 in a billion. So no, you would not be able to see other asteroids 'near' you, if you happened to be standing on one (or indeed holding onto one) | [
"On 8 January 2003, the asteroid approached the Earth from in front to a distance of , its closest approach for nearly a century. Since that date, it has been hurrying ahead (with a semi-major axis less than 1 AU), and will continue to do so until it has reached its closest approach from behind on 11 July 2097 at a... |
The British people, who were "Protestant Christians", were the ones who colonized India. How come most Indians are "Roman Catholic" instead of protestant? | Most Indians under British rule didn't change their religion, they are still mostly Hindu, only 2.3% are Christians. The tiny state of Goa in western India on the other hand was under Portuguese rule for centuries and long before the British were there. In fact it didn't join the rest of India until 1961. As you may know most Portuguese are Catholics, as a result of Portuguese rule [a large numbers of Goans are Catholic](_URL_0_). | [
"Indians also entered Australia in the first half of the 20th century when both Australia and India were still British colonies. Indian Sikhs came to work on the banana plantations in Southern Queensland. Today a large number of them live in the town of Woolgoolga (a town lying roughly halfway between Sydney and Br... |
why does it seem sometimes to require more physical and mental effort to stay still than to move/ jig/ sway? | Making yourself sit still requires some form of mind/body focus, which can require immense amounts of mental energy. Also, evolutionarily speaking, human beings naturally aren't used to maintaining a still posture for hours on end. | [
"While walking back and forth, practitioners should be aware of the feeling or the feet. It is not necessary to say to themselves, \"right foot moves\", \"left foot moves\". Practitioners should not walk too fast or too slow, they have to walk naturally.\n",
"Physical movement stimulates long-term memory and reca... |
japanese-korean relations, and why korea is constantly asking for compensations and apologies when they were given. | > Why is Korea asking for apologies when Europeans aren't asking Germany for apologies?
They probably would be asking for apologies from Germany, if political and government officials there kept visiting a shrine to those executed after the Nuremberg trials every year and making statements to the effect that various atrocities either never happened or were played up for reasons of anti-German propaganda. However, the German government never does that sort of thing. Japanese officials do, and all the time.
The various Japanese apologies are often seen as insincere in Korea and China because they do just that, with annual visits by senior politicians to the Yasukuni shrine and repeated statements by officials that, say, the Nanking massacre never happened, or that there was nothing wrong with the use of the so-called "comfort women" (sex slaves kidnapped from Korea and China, mostly). | [
"Although diplomatic relations were established by treaty in 1965, South Korea continues to request an apology and compensation for Korea under Japanese rule. The Japanese government has not apologized officially and many Japanese cabinet members have also not made apologies. In 2012, The South Korean government an... |
How did the Catholic Church respond to the theory of Evolution? | There have been few papal statements on the issue of evolution. In general, the Church has declared that this subject is outside of its purview. Many overstate the assertions made by Pius XII in 1950, found in [*Humani Generis*](_URL_0_), sections 36 and 37.
> (36) For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith.[11] Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.
> (37)When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.
A number of things should be pointed out about this statement. First, it is not an infallible statement (especially given that there have been so few of these statements made by pontiffs). It doesn't rise to the criteria necessary for that kind of proclamation. The statement also comes from a theological and philosophical document--not a scientific treatise. It also was written in 1950 and was compiled with the knowledge that the writer(s) had at that time. Further, section 36 has been emphasized by subsequent pontiffs but section 37 has not been as predominant (reference the below statements as well as other more recent statements than the rules of this subreddit would allow).
Speaking of other statements from pontiffs, we have this from John Paul II:
[we have this from John Paul II](_URL_1_) in 1996:
> Taking into account the state of scientific research at the time as well as of the requirements of theology, the encyclical Humani Generis considered the doctrine of "evolutionism" a serious hypothesis, worthy of investigation and in-depth study equal to that of the opposing hypothesis. Pius XII added two methodological conditions: that this opinion should not be adopted as though it were a certain, proven doctrine and as though one could totally prescind from revelation with regard to the questions it raises. He also spelled out the condition on which this opinion would be compatible with the Christian faith, a point to which I will return. Today, almost half a century after the publication of the encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. [Aujourdhui, près dun demi-siècle après la parution de l'encyclique, de nouvelles connaissances conduisent à reconnaitre dans la théorie de l'évolution plus qu'une hypothèse.] It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.
There is also this statement from Cardinal Ratzinger in 1995:
> We cannot say: creation or evolution, inasmuch as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, which we just heard, does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the 'project' of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary—rather than mutually exclusive—realities
In summary, I would assert that the Catholic Church has made no definitive statement on the subject, preferring to stick to the theological implications rather than the scientific concerns.
I hope that answers your question. Followup questions are always encouraged (though I must admit that this is slightly outside my expertise, and my comments should be read more as how the *papacy* has responded to evolution rather than the Catholic Church as a whole or individuals within it). | [
"Catholic concern about evolution has always been very largely concerned with the implications of evolutionary theory for the origin of the human species; even by 1859, a literal reading of the \"Book of Genesis\" had long been undermined by developments in geology and other fields. No high-level Church pronounceme... |
movies and film from past decades still look fairly decent. why do live sports from the same eras look so bad? even highlights from just 10 years ago look greatly inferior to nowadays. | The type of recording media being used.
Film looked (and still looks) awesome, but it's really expensive and time consuming to work with. It also takes extra steps to take something shot on film and broadcast it on TV. So for sports, it just wasn't an option.
Recording to magnetic tape systems was much less expensive, and the signal that comes out of that kind of camera can pretty much go straight to broadcast, making live TV possible. But they didn't look as good, and duplicating a tape (which often had to happen for archival purposes) or amplifying the analog signal (necessary if you're broadcasting a national game to local affiliates) hurts the quality even further.
Modern broadcast systems are digital, and the reason for that is that digital format things do not degrade in quality when duplicated. Ten years ago the switchover process was still happening, analog TV was still a thing until 2009. | [
"This compilation of films covers all sports activities. Sports films have been made since the era of silent films, such as the 1915 film \"The Champion\" starring Charlie Chaplin. Films in this genre can range from serious (\"Raging Bull\") to silly (\"Horse Feathers\"). A classic theme for sports films is the tri... |
why is it that we’re always told to stay away from power lines as they could kill us, but birds and squirrels have no issue running/sitting on them? | Earthing.
Lots of birds and small animals do get killed by powerlines when they touch both the live wire and an earthing path.
If you only touch the one wire and nothing else, in theory, you'll be ok. | [
"Squirrels have been the cause of many power outages in Pennsylvania. Cris Thomas has said that in the United States there have been six deaths associated with squirrel attacks on infrastructure, such as downed power lines (and two with other animals).\n",
"Ground squirrels may carry fleas that transmit diseases ... |
how reddit makes money, please. | Just like any other sites pushing content, Reddit makes money off reddit gold(almost like subscription fees), ads, reddit store and reddit gifts. There's also redditTV and RedditRadio which they get paid for through a contract for linking. I would imagine imgur is financially linked with reddit as well. | [
"Forbes.com uses a \"contributor model\" in which a wide network of \"contributors\" writes and publishes articles directly on the website. Contributors are paid based on traffic to their respective Forbes.com pages; the site has received contributions from over 2,500 individuals, and some contributors have earned ... |
what's a neocon? | So, starting in the 1960's a lot of democrats at the time rejected the leftward shift the party had started to take, and made a transition to the GOP.
In modern US politics, neoconservative is probably a fitting label for most "mainstream" U.S. Republicans -- Reagan, George Bush (Jr and Sr), Romney, and Paul Ryan for example.
There is variation, but if I had to describe what the general characteristics of a neoconservative are they would include:
\- Being socially moderate compared to the religious right, but usually still falling to the right of center. Neocons tend to be less occupied with traditional social conservatism beyond what is required to win an election.
\- Neocons aren't necessarily opposed to expanding the size and power of "big government", or increasing federal spending, provided that it suits their purposes. (Ex: The Patriot Act)
\- Neocons support interventionist foreign policy, which stems from the anti-communist sentiments from the Cold War era and is today motivated by a desire to maintain American hegemony. This point is a big one, and tends to be one of the first things associated with Neoconservatism.
\- Neocons support globalism and free trade. Partly because of corporatist influence, and partly because it allows the U.S. to project wide influence. | [
"Neoism is a parodistic -ism. It refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists, and more generally to a practical underground philosophy. It operates with collectively shared pseudonyms and identities, pranks, paradoxes, plagiarism and fakes, and has created multip... |
how come former british colonies do not have nobility? | The British Empire did not grant Lordships to those who ruled or owned land in their colonies and by the time those countries gained independence they had developed cultures without nobility. | [
"All of Europe's monarchies, except Norway, recognise nobility and hereditary titles. Their royal and princely courts also allow their use as courtesy titles by persons entitled to them under former monarchical regimes, unless they are accredited (e.g., to the Court of St. James's) in a diplomatic capacity without ... |
What's at the center of Jupiter? | That's hard to answer because current models are bas on estimations and computer calculations. The best model suggests, that jupiter has a inner solid core made of iron and therefore siderophile metals aswell and sillicate rock. It is surrounded by by an also solid layer of hot ice.
These are the main ingredients. However, as denser material tends to think to the core, you will probably find almost the whole periodic table in the core of jupiter, either the siderophiles combined with the iron and all other others in the rock. Only the noble gases won't be there as the neither tend to combine with metals nor rock. | [
"Jupiter is the northernmost town in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. According to a 2017 Census Bureau estimate, the town had a population of 64,976. It is 87 miles north of Miami, and the northernmost community in the Miami metropolitan area, home to 6,012,331 people in a 2015 Census Bureau estimate. Ju... |
why can a capacitor let through alternating current and not direct current? | Electric current can be likened to a system of pipes full of water. The capacitor, in a water system, would be a rubber film blocking the flow of water. When you induce a flow in one direction, the water can stretch the rubber, but the elastic film will not let the water through. When the pump is turned off, the flow moves the opposite direction, as the rubber tries to return to its position at rest.
The flow alternates because it can't move directly through the capacitor. | [
"Alternating current is different from direct current in that the current can flow through what would ordinarily seem to be a physical barrier. In a series circuit, a capacitor blocks direct current but passes alternating current.\n",
"BULLET::::- Since alternating current (AC) flows very well through the capacit... |
Are there any historical instances of spies or agents being turned due to acceptance of "enemy" ideology? | Well we don't actually know much about his original motivation (i.e, if he meant to turn from the beginning or not) but [Agent Zigzag](_URL_0_) aka Eddie Chapman is a fairly famous WW2 example. A criminal in jail in Jersey, picked up by the Germans when they invaded and offered to spy for them, was trained to the highest standard and then promptly turned himself in and became a double agent once he parachuted into Britain. Ended up messing with an awful lot of German plans, because they were oblivious to his change in allegiance. Not sure if he meets your criteria but an interesting case nonetheless! | [
"Some people become spies because of their beliefs. These can include political opinions, national allegiances, and cultural or religious beliefs. This was particularly true during the Cold War, when many spies were motivated by their support for the ideologies of either the Western world or the Communist bloc. Exa... |
What happens if you add a catalyst to a chemical reaction that reacts with one of the reactants? | How can a catalyst promote a reaction if it does not react with one of the reactants? The role of the catalyst is to interact with your reagents. The key to promoting catalytic reactions is being able to regenerate your active catalyst. A simple example is the Pd(0)-- > Pd(II) cycle, as shown in [Heck type coupling](_URL_0_). If the catalyst does not react with your reagents, then no catalysis will occur. | [
"Catalysts generally react with one or more reactants to form intermediates that subsequently give the final reaction product, in the process regenerating the catalyst. The following is a typical reaction scheme, where C represents the catalyst, X and Y are reactants, and Z is the product of the reaction of X and Y... |
what does kombucha do for the body exactly and what makes good bacteria different? | Nothing that any other fizzy sweet drink doesn't do.
Kombucha has no real health benefits. It's all hype. | [
"She used a combination of biochemical experiments, bacterial genetics, and electron microscopy to investigate how bacteria transport lipopolysaccharides from the cellular interior where they are produced to the outer membrane where they reside. This work required the development of a new technique to separate the ... |
At what point in European history were black powder weapons introduced? At what point did they become very common artillery weapons on the battlefield? | I happen to be doing a bit of research on this at the moment, looking at gunpowder weapons in 14th century London. I can't really comment on explosives, because England doesn't seem to have bothered with them, but I can talk a lot about cannons.
**Short Answer**
Simple gunpowder weapons emerged in Europe in the 1320s. The first *effective* weapons emerged around 1340 and they became common, but they were small. The first wall-smashing artillery pieces were created in the 1380s. By the early 15th century, artillery pieces were a common part of any decent army.
**Long Answer**
The recipe for gunpowder seems to have been in circulation from the late 13th century. Exactly how Europeans became aware of gunpowder and gunpowder weapons is a topic of some debate, and it was very likely a combination of different avenues. By the 1320s the first gunpowder weapons saw action on the battlefield, and some are described in two London manuscripts, *De Nobilitatibus, sapientii et prudentiis regum*, a book of the ‘mirror for princes’ genre which contained a section on gunpowder warfare. And another called *De secretis secretorum Aristotelis*. Both were produced in 1326 and presented to king Edward III at his coronation.
These weapons were *really* terrible. The main type was the pot-de-fer, a vase-shaped cannon that fired an arrow which was plugged into it with some wadding, a bit like a champagne cork. Reconstructions have found that it was rubbish, accounts we have generally give no tactical significance to it other than being a novel technology, but it was *something*, and enough people saw the potential in the weapon to develop it further. Smaller versions became available and they started to be loaded with lead shot as well as arrows/bolts by 1340. They were more dangerous, but only at short range and their accuracy was awful.
Then in 1337 the Hundred Years War began, which was arguably the main catalyst for the development of black powder weapons in western Europe. France already had some black powder weapons, but Edward III seems to have had 0. The ranged weapons of the king's personal forces were managed by the Royal Wardrobe and the Tower of London, and we have the financial records for them. They had no guns. In fact, the only black powder related activity they did was the purchase of small quantities of raw ingredients for an unknown purpose. The English army did have at least one cannon, mentioned by the French Chronicle of London in the 1341 entry, but that's it. However, around the same time a new type of weapon called a ribault (or rebaultkin, rebilt, rebaltkine etc. the spelling of it is all over the place) emerged which was a series of gun barrels set up on a cart. The operator could quickly fire off a volley of a dozen shots into the enemy. English forces faced some of these guns in the late 1330s and early 1340s, and lost consistently. This seems to have impressed the potential value of black powder weapons upon the English king.
When Edward III prepared to launch a major attack on Normandy, planned for 1346, he ordered the repair of captured guns and the production of new ones. He ordered the Tower of London to make 100 ribaults with only a few months of notice, and only two people were tasked to do it (though they were given about £124, presumably to hire additional labour from London). Only 5 of those guns were actually ready in time, but they performed well at the Battle of Crecy. The Battle of Crecy is usually discussed in relation to English longbow tactics, but it is also a watershed moment in the development of artillery in Europe. From then on, the nations involved in the Hundred Years War tried to develop better and better artillery to outdo one another. Gunpowder was a regular feature of the battlefield from this point in the war.
These cannons were not big. London manufacturers had the great idea of charging the crown by the weight of the cannons, so we know how heavy they were. Cannons from 1340-60ish are rarely more than 200lbs (90kg). From 1380-1400, the 'standard' cannon produced by London's foundry was only 380lbs (172kg), with 47 being made from 1382-8. The largest cannon was 1590lbs (720kg), and only 5 were made. This latter type of cannon, usually called a 'bombard', was designed to smash castle walls. Whomever built a cannon capable of smashing down a castle wall obviously had a huge advantage, so there was a race to develop bigger cannons. France, England, and the increasingly involved power of Burgundy poured money into developing these cannons and centralised their research efforts. The Tower of London records from 1388 show that almost £1800 was spent on black powder weapons for the king's personal arsenal. References to gunpowder weapons in contemporary sources skyrocket at this time, they were everywhere.
In the 15th century the technology continued to accelerate. In the mid-15th century Burgundy was able to produce bombards such as the Mons Meg, which weighs 13,000lbs and fires a 175kg shot. Flemmish gunners became a regular part of English armies, and gunnery squadrons began to appear so often that they were no longer worth mentioning by contemporaries. | [
"In the early thirteenth century the Chinese turned black-powder–propelled objects, formerly only used for entertainment, into weapons of war. The Chinese ‘arrows of fire’ were fired from a sort of catapult launcher. The black powder was packed in a closed tube that had a hole in one end for escaping hot gases, and... |
i've always heard that lightning won't strike my car because the tires are rubber. so, 1) what about rubber repels electricity, and 2) how does lightning know my car has rubber tires? | Lightning strikes cars all the time. Nothing about your tires or anything will prevent that. What people generally say is that tires prevent the electricity from traveling to the passenger compartment and killing you... That too is wrong. When lighting strikes a car the electricity takes the path of least resistance which is outside on the metallic and/or wet skin of the car. It's called the "Skin Effect", you can google this, and that's what prevents the electricity from traveling inside the passenger compartment. As long as you're not touching the outside of the car you're fine. | [
"BULLET::::- Possible increased particulate matter emissions from tires. This is sometimes caused by the fact that most electric cars have a heavy battery, which means the car's tires are subjected to more wear. The brake pads, however, can be used less frequently than in non-electric cars, if regenerative braking ... |
why does google maps use computer-generated "imagery" instead of actual satellite imagery in the high arctic? | the satellites probably aren't able to get good images of the extreme poles because their orbit doesn't take them far enough north/south | [
"Some of the sources of collected imagery information for GEOINT are imagery satellites, cameras on airplanes, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and drones, handheld cameras, maps, or GPS coordinates. Recently the NGA and IC have increased the use of commercial satellite imagery for intelligence support, such as the u... |
details & ramifications of the new socialist french presidency | Point of clarification: Hollande's not a "socialist", that's just the name of his party. He's more of a center-left social democrat. This gets confusing to Americans because we're sort of unique in the negativity we ascribe to the term. | [
"On May 10, 1981, François Mitterrand became the first socialist leader of the Fifth Republic, defeating Giscard with 51.8 percent of the vote. The socialists and communists also swept the elections for the National Assembly in June in what became known as the \"Rose Vague\" or \"Pink wave\". He promised to \"Chang... |
Why does smoking marijuana seem to eliminate many symptoms of a hangover? | We could speculate, but since we don't know precisely what causes hangover (current research suggests it is a complex interplay of an immune response, acetaldehyde toxicity, hypoglycemia, and dehydration), we couldn't tell you exactly why any "cures" do or do not work. With cannabis, there is known research that suggests there may be some pain relieving properties, but again, the exact mechanisms are still poorly understood. | [
"The spins are often reported when alcohol is mixed with cannabis, since both may cause dizziness and magnify each other's effects. Smoking after drinking especially intensifies the effects of the alcohol, often resulting in nausea.\n",
"There has been a limited amount of studies that have looked at the effects o... |
How is a drug "born"? | There are several avenues that can lead to the discovery or creation of a drug.
* Serendipitous discoveries wherein, by coincidence, a researcher finds that some compound has beneficial properties against a condition. After such a discovery, time is usually spent isolating the exact chemical structure of the active agent and figuring out how best to purify it or synthesize it. Usually these kinds of compounds are improved upon before they are used as treatments (see later). These kinds of discoveries can even be made for drugs that are already used for other conditions; Viagra, for example, was famously developed for high blood pressure before its other talent was discovered. Many drugs also have so called "off-label" uses.
* Observation of a trend, wherein a researcher notes that a certain substance is useful in alleviating a condition. This may be based on a population that consumes a certain type of food or something more precise like noticing cells growing in a lab respond to a compound in a useful way. These observations are generally made in academic research and additional work is done to determine how the compound may be causing its beneficial effects. Usually the compound will need to be developed further until it is ready to be a drug.
* Hypothesis driven drug discovery. This is a little tough to describe or define, so I've just kind of vaguely given it the title I chose. This is where we know of a disease, but are not quite sure of what is causing it -- we therefore don't know where to start in looking for drugs. In this case, we are looking for compounds that alleviate the symptoms of the disease without really understanding the mechanism by which a drug is working. This often depends on historical knowledge of compound activities or previous work on body processes that resemble something relevant to the disease. Animal models can be useful here as an experimental system, but we can't always be sure the model recapitulates what is actually happening in the disease. Tricky stuff, but it has been productive.
* High-throughput screening for drug discovery. In this situation, researchers have a disease in mind or a specific target (usually a protein) that has been shown to be linked to a disease's cause. Researchers take large libraries of chemicals (from thousands to millions) and add them to an experimental system designed to detect if a compound is effective in combating the disease. The experimental system could be something simple like cells growing in a dish or purified proteins with known functions. This serves to identify a type of compound that might be useful to develop a drug from. It's a "see what we get" approach, but there are also opportunities to fine tune the library of compounds to get a maximum chance of success. We roughly know what kind of compounds have a reasonable chance of being good drugs, for example. Interestingly, high-throughput screening can even be done using computers to find compounds that will fit certain protein targets like a key would fit a lock.
* Rational drug design. This is the cutting edge of drug research. In this case, you know the target you want to go after. The target will usually be a protein you know is important in how the disease causes problems. In this case, you specifically go after making a compound that will interfere with whatever the misbehaving protein is. It involves a lot of structural biology (looking at protein structures), chemistry and careful monitoring of compound effects in the experimental systems I've described above. You can think of this as trying to make a key that fits a lock you know a lot about.
All these avenues can be undertaken either by scientists in academic institutions or by industries big or small. Usually a certain compound will be discovered in academic institutions and be passed off to pharma companies for further development if there is sufficient promise of making a successful drug. But there is often collaboration of the two sectors to get a drug fully characterized.
After the discovery of compounds that have potential, drug development takes over. This is a big deal and takes a long, long time. It's extremely rare that a discovery will lead to a drug ready to be used in people. So drug developers spend a lot of time tweaking a compound's chemical structure to make it optimal for use. It's very back and forth as you make improvements on each new generation of compound. This is the part you describe as "this is what we need made." You will have medicinal chemists, synthetic chemists, structural biologists, disease specialists, animal specialists, chemical metabolism specialists, physicians, etc. all working together. A drug candidate will usually need to be improved upon to get better potency, better specificity (to limit side-effects), better absorption in a human body and several other important issues that can be very tricky to work out. So a chemists makes a new iteration of the working compound, it's tested, everyone generates data and feedback for everyone else in order to hone in on a compound that will eventually be a success drug.
Happy to answer any further questions! | [
"\"A Star Is Born\" is a song by American hip hop recording artist Jay-Z from his eleventh studio album \"The Blueprint 3\" (2009). The song, produced by Kanye West, Kenoe and No I.D., features a verse from American rapper J. Cole, Jay-Z's protege and the first artist to be signed to his Roc Nation label. In the so... |
Were any of the pre-Colonial societies north of Mesoamerica imperialistic? | One of the most warlike and military active Native American tribes in North Eastern North America was the Iroquois. They fought a series of wars of conquest (basically Iroquois against all) for about 130 years, from 1540? until the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701. These wars are sometimes called “The Beaver Wars”.
The league of the Iroquois, or Iroquois Confederacy is thought to have been formed by about 1530. Not much is known about many of the Beaver wars. There were no Europeans around keeping records until the French settled Quebec in 1608 (though there were some records from earlier French expeditions).
When the French first tried to settle Quebec, back in 1542, they gave up due to hostile Natives. By 1608, there were no native Americans living in the area around Quebec, it was a hunting ground of the Iroquois.
The Iroquois claimed (as recorded in “ The Jesuit Relations” (_URL_0_), to have fought a long war against the Susquehannock and the Algonquins (between 1580 and 1600?) and driven them out.
Champlain and the French formed an alliance with the Huron tribe against the Iroquois, and attacked them with arquebuses. However, by 1610, or 1614, the Dutch had arrived in the upper Hudson river valley, near the Iroquois territories. From them, the Iroquois acquired guns.
Armed, the Iroqois aggressively attacked the Hurons and their sponsors, the French. Much of this was to gain access to beaver rich territory, or to dominate the beaver trade, but the Iroquois also took many slaves, to boost their numbers and replenish their military strength, which was constantly being eroded, not so much by warfare, as by recurring smallpox epidemics, due to their exposure to the Europeans (though they did not realize this). The Iroquois defeated the Mahicans, drove the Wenro out of their territory, attacked the Hurons and the French, these proved tougher to beat, but the Iroquois strengthened their confederacy, stopped fighting among themselves and better co-ordinated their aggressive attacks.
In 1648, the Confederacy sent 1000 warriors, armed with 400 Dutch muskets to assault the Hurons. They destroyed many Huron villages, killed many Jesuit missionaries, took thousands of slaves, and drove the Hurons west (towards the north shores of Lake Huron).
In 1650 they attacked the Neutral Nation, driving them from their lands. Then they attacked the Eire, and sent them fleeing westwards as well. Next, in 1660 they turned south against the Susquehannock and drove the Manahoac out of western Virgina.
During this time, the Iroquois were regularly terrorizing the French, and raiding up to the walls of Montreal. In the mid 1660s, however, the French sent regular soldiers to Canada for the first time, to defend against the Iroquois. The French army of 1300 men invaded the Iroquois homelands, forcing the Confederacy to sue for peace in 1666.
Stopped from fighting northwards by the treaty with France, the Iroquois turned west. They pushed the Lakota over the Mississippi on to the Great Plains, they overran the Shawnee in central Ohio, and started fighting against the powerful Miamis in Ohio, and their allies the Pottawatomee in Michigan and the Illini in Illinois.
The style of Iroquois fighting was raids and terror. They would send war parties out, often by canoe, travelling at night. Sinking their canoes with rocks, they would scout through the forests to make a surprise attack on enemy towns. Using surprise and panic, and their much greater numbers of firearms, the Iroquois would burst into enemy settlement killing the warriors or causing them to flee, and taking as many slaves as they could.
They suffered occasional defeats. At one point the Anishinaabeg Alliance put together a large force armed with French muskets, and ambushed an Iroquois war party as it returned from raiding Miami villages, and destroyed the Iroquois war band.
The heyday of Iroquois aggression and expansion was ending, however. The French were becoming stronger, and were arming the Western tribes with firearms against the Iroquois. The Iroquois also, had a huge problem with manpower. They could never settle or occupy most of their conquests. It is probable that even with the influx of many captured slaves, the impact of recurring smallpox epidemics continued to restrict and diminish the Iroquois population.
By the 1690s peace with France had broken down. The Iroquois were allying with the English, but the French army raided into their home territories many times, and the Anishinaabeg alliance, once almost driven west of the Mississippi, now armed by the French, were re-establishing themselves in the Midwest.
At this point, the Iroquois decided to make peace with the French, and they also became more worried about the threat from the expansionist English colonists. In 1701, they signed the Great Peace of Montreal with the French.
This ended the Iroquois expansion and 130 years of Beaver wars. The Iroquios had peace (more or less) for a generation. When wars started up again in the 1720s (caught up in wars between the French and English) the concern of the Iroquois had changed from how to aggressively expand, to how best to hold on to what they had.
Throughout the Beaver Wars, the Iroquois were a formidable military force. They could easily defeat or dominate any other Native American tribes they encountered. They could hold their own against the French colonists. Only the French regular army, out of all the enemies they fought, gave them real trouble.
The reason they were so formidable was because they were supplied with (by the Dutch) ample firearms, and learned how to use them, and because they evolved their Confederacy into an effective and united political and command structure that was able to keep them united and focused.
There are many unknowns about the Beaver Wars, as there are no written sources (and few verbal sources) from the perspective of the Native American tribes involved, and the written sources (mostly from the French) cover the French encounters with the Iroquois fairly well, but do not give much detail on Iroquois fighting against other Native tribes.
I have an hypothesis that recurring smallpox epidemics kept depleting the Iroquois population, preventing them from expanding into and settling the many territories that they conquered. I think this is a reasonable hypothesis, but there is not enough evidence that I have found to be able to support it strongly.
Some sources:
Barr, Daniel P. “Unconquered: The Iroquois League at War in Colonial America” 2006.
Jennings, Francis, “The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire,” 1984
| [
"In the Pre-Columbian era, the northern areas of the relaxing Central America were inhabited by the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. Most notable among these were the Maya peoples, who had built numerous cities throughout the region, and the Aztecs, who had created a vast empire. The pre-Columbian cultures of eas... |
A good map for Gaul and the surrounding in The Gallic Wars | The excellent site _URL_3_ has these (small) maps:
[The Provence](http://www._URL_3_/site/assets/files/21076/caesar_map_6.gif), [Northern Gaul](_URL_2_), [Gaul](_URL_0_) and [Alesia](http://www._URL_3_/pictures/a/maps/map-of-the-siege-of-alesia/).
You could also use this [larger map](_URL_1_) which comes from a site I don't know, but the map appears to be accurate.
| [
"According to the Roman ethnography and Julius Caesar in his narrative Commentaries on the Gallic War, Gaul was divided into three main regions: Belgica, Aquitania and Celtica. The inhabitants of Belgica were called Belgae, those of Aquitania were called Aquitani. The inhabitants of the Celtica region called themse... |
Would a man and woman who 'excelled' at today's standards of beauty be judged "most beautiful" at points in the past? | A shapely bosom always went down well in 18th century France. Louis XV's first words to the Duc de Choiseul about the arrival of the new Dauphine Marie-Antoinette were famously 'How is her bosom?' to which the Duke replied 'I did not look at the Archduchess' bosom,' to which the King in turn replied 'It would have been the first thing I'd have looked at.'
Likewise, when the Comtesse de Provence arrived at Versailles, the courtiers lamented at how ugly she was - but Louis XV made light of the situation by noting that at least she had a full bosom.
Obviously hair was not worn down for women in this time period. Hair of good quality was an admired quality, but it was usually in women supplemented with coiffures and hairpieces (women *did not* wear wigs, contrary to popular modern belief). Likewise, men at the court of Versailles were shaven. Beards moustaches were seen as barbaric and a tad more Ottoman than European.
I am not an expert on sexual history, but from what I hear not a great deal of pubic grooming occurred in this period either. I take this from the fact that reports of the death of the Princesse de Lamballe featured claims that her pubic mound was cut off and worn as a moustache, and therefore indicates that it was normal for French aristocracy to *have* pubic mounds, and the existence of [merkins](_URL_0_), pubic wigs worn by prostitutes to hide syphilis, again indicating that having a bush of pubic hair was common. | [
"Theoretical physicist Thomas Fink defines beauty in \"The Man's Book\" both in terms of ships launched and in terms of the number of women, on average, than whom one woman will be more beautiful. He defines one \"helen\" (H) as the quantity of beauty to be more beautiful than 50 million women, the number of women ... |
how does a game on pc get poorly optimized? | Yes, either game code being more complicated than it needs to be, wasting clock cycles and RAM. Or, on the driver side of things, which someone more knowledgeable can explain | [
"This type of problem is difficult to predict and compensate for. Apart from enforcing minimum hardware requirements and attempting to optimize the game for better performance, there are no feasible ways to deal with it.\n",
"Because of the possibilities to edit the performance of the car, or to make other aspect... |
Historical Method Question | The greatest shift I remember experiencing between undergrad and grad work was that I had to re-learn how to read a book. We had to read so many, it was not physically possible to read through them all as one did as an undergrad. Instead, we took the book apart: read the intro, read the conclusion, read the first and last paragraph of each chapter, and maintain the focus so that we left that first step understanding what the author was arguing. Then it was a simple matter to decide whether the information inbetween was something that was needed. I took notes on an author's argument. I took notes on information when I needed it for a paper or an exam. And I quickly learned the difference.
Hope that helps. Good luck and do great work. Your generation is the reason I get up in the morning with hope. | [
"\"In history, the term historical method was first introduced in a systematic way in the sixteenth century by Jean Bodin in his treatise of source criticism, \"Methodus ad facilem historiarium cognitionem\" (1566). Characteristically, Bodin's treatise intended to establish the ways by which reliable knowledge of t... |
What did regular western Europeans understand by the word "socialism" in the late 19th century? | Can you narrow down who you're talking about? A French peasant and a worker in a Manchester factory would have quite different understandings. | [
"The term \"socialism\", used from the 1830s onwards in France and the United Kingdom, was directly related to what was called the social question. In essence, early socialists contended that the emergence of competitive market societies did not create \"liberty, equality and fraternity\" for all citizens, requirin... |
if you would go into space, and go out of space 12 hours later, would you be on the other side of the earth? | No. Maybe. Depends.
This really depends on how you go about going to space.
If you just shoot up straight (more or less) that it takes 12 hours to come down again then yes you will approximately be on the opposite side but still on the same hemisphere (so not quite the opposite point).
If you add some north/south component to that ballistic trajectory you could hit the opposite point.
But if you actually go into orbit then it might not even be possible to hit the opposite side after exactly 12 hour as you might go around earth every 70 minutes to hours or only every few days (although an orbital period that long would also mean it would take quite a while to come down again, too) so the spot you will be at after 12 hours really depends on the orbit. | [
"We will never get a man into space. This earth is man's sphere and it was never intended that he should get away from it. The moon is a superior planet to the earth and it was never intended that man should go there. You can write it down in your books that this will never happen.\n",
"For example, suppose that ... |
Ottoman sultans - fratricide and infertility | The murder of brothers was allowed, yes; but not every prince committed the act. Sometimes, when an heir claimed throne, there was already a brother or uncle in the picture no one really cared about. Mustafa I, Murad IV and Ibrahim the Deranged are the first ones that come to mind.
Another thing is, Ottomans weren't really a big fan of marriage when it comes to the head of the state. Meaning that the sultans produced offspring with concubines instead of getting a queen. This practice assured a strong and healthy supply of heirs.
In case a prince happened to be sterile, that probably wasn't a big problem; as most of the time princes did have children before they actually ascended to the throne, and the ones that did have heirs would secure more support(especially from their father) to dominate or get rid of the opposition. | [
"Hafsa Sultan (; died March 1534) was the wife of Selim I and the first valide sultan of the Ottoman Empire as the mother of Suleiman the Magnificent. During the period between her son's enthronement in 1520 and her death in 1534, she was one of the most influential persons in the Ottoman Empire.\n",
"Şah Sultan... |
Could a donor organ live forever if constantly donated before each persons death? | _URL_2_
_URL_0_
_URL_1_
Summary: A kidney can be reused, but scar tissue will build up as it is integrated into the new person making reuse each time more difficult. A kidney will only last a decade or two with current anti-rejection medications. Transplant patients regularly die of other conditions that can damage the transplanted kidney making reuse difficult.
Lastly, the first kidney transplantation occurred in 1950, meaning that there has not been enough time to prove conclusively that a kidney could outlive a regular human lifespan in perfect cases because there haven't been enough perfect cases that resulted in second (or even third) transplantation recipients. | [
"If the donor is living then he may not donate an organ where this will risk his death, even if this is to save the life of another. However, where there will be no appreciable detriment to his health, he may do so, and some even argue he is obligated.\n",
"Organ donation is possible after cardiac death in some s... |
how come you need to "re-login" websites, especially when both the username and password is remembered by the browser? | In most cases, it's the website that determines whether you're "logged in". The browser is where your username/password are saved. The website doesn't know that you've saved your username/password.
For a more technical explanation - persistent logins to websites are usually done with 'cookies' - these little data files a website puts on your machine. The cookie tells the site "This username has properly logged in from here before". Once the cookie expires, the site doesn't know who is logged in from that browser.
Your browser, separately, saves the usernames and passwords that you tell it to save. So it will fill those in for you whenever you get a login prompt on that site. But it won't actually send them to the site for login - you have to do that manually. | [
"The password manager in Firefox 3 asks the user if they would like it to remember the password after the login attempt rather than before. By doing this users are able to avoid storing an incorrect password in the password manager after a bad login attempt.\n",
"Every page with a password form gives the user the... |
why is the jump from 240p to 360p so extreme, but 360p to 480p is so minor? | Part of this could be that if YouTube defaults a video to 240p, it's because the video was already recorded with a potato (great wording, by the way. I'm stealing that phrase). If you record something in 240p, even if you scale it up to 1080p it's still going to look terrible.
However, the gains you get from adding pixels are much more noticeable on lower-quality videos. As you add pixel density, the increase in quality slows down significantly.
As an example of why, take going from 4 pixels to 6. With 4 pixels, you get basically nothing. With 6, you could have a face! Big difference. Now go up to 12 pixels, and you get a smiley face with hair. That's huge! Now get up to 240p, and you get a face, hair, facial structure, background stuff, and all kinds of other info. But now the picture is relatively clear. So you add more pixel density, and the details added don't really give your brain more info, they just make it look a little less blurry. | [
"A 720p60 (720p at 59.94 Hz) video has advantage over 480i and 1080i60 (29.97/30 frame/s, 59.94/60 Hz) in that it comparably reduces the number of 3:2 artifacts introduced during transfer from 24 frame/s film. However, 576i and 1080i50 (25 frame/s, 50 Hz), which are common in Europe, generally do not suffer from pu... |
How much closer would a human have to travel (Mi./Km) towards the Sun to feel a noticeable rise in temperature? Vice verse for traveling away from the sun? | Are we in space or on earth? The sun transmits heat via radiation (vs convection or conduction).
The amount of energy transmitted follows an inverse square law (1/x^2) so if you are twice as close to the sun, you experience 4 times the energy transfer.
You have a LOT of variables to consider if you are in space. What is the suit made out of? does it reflect heat back? how does it conduct heat to your body? The amount of energy transferred also depends on the difference in temperature of the two bodies.
In short, you need to define a lot more variables before you can get a viable answer. What is considered to be a "noticeable change", what sort of vehicle are you in? what is the vehicle made of?
| [
"Most people say, \"A few degrees? So what? If I change my thermostat a few degrees, I'll live fine.\" ... [The] point is that one or two degrees is about the experience that we have had in the last 10,000 years, the era of human civilization. There haven't been—globally averaged, we're talking—fluctuations of more... |
Does Germany have any fund/program in place to aid the families of Holocaust victims? | Yes. Germany began an (extremely controversial) reparations system in the 50s. It compensated Israel for absorbing refugees, as well as property and labor confiscated from people who were killed (those figures were all approximations, of course). There are also reparations programs to compensate individuals who lost property and for their imprisonment set up by the Israel-West Germany agreement, which help find lost property and negotiate with the German government for pensions and such. There's also a fund that several German companies pay into that compensates people for their slave labor during the war.
See [this wikipedia article](_URL_1_) and [this article](_URL_2_). [Here](_URL_0_) is the website of the fund established by the Israel-West Germany agreement that pays pensions and compensation for lost property, funded by the German government | [
"In addition, funds from restitution programs were used to finance social welfare programs for needy Nazi victims, as well as finance projects for Holocaust remembrance and education and the strengthening of Jewish identity through cultural programs.\n",
"Following annual negotiations between the Claims Conferenc... |
how are meals like ramen or sichuan (which are largely based on fatty meats and lots of oil) more healthy than a meal like a burger? | It's not, necessarily. It depends on size and ingredients.
Also, "Sichuan" is an entire region (and an entire genre of cuisine), not a particular dish.
All in all, ramen has similar macronutrients to a burger. Plenty of fat in the broth and meat, some protein in the meat, and lots of carbs in the noodles. Comparing [this ramen](_URL_1_) to the [Little Cheeseburger at Five Guys ](_URL_0_) because they are similar in calories... they are *very* close in the amount of saturated fats (burger has slightly more), carbs (ramen has more), and protein.
Thus, ramen is not necessarily healthier than a burger. The difference may be that eating a big bowl of ramen is more filling (because more water) than a burger. Most people can eat a 1000 cal burger no problem, but a 1000 cal bowl of ramen is a pretty huge bowl... that said I've eaten 1000 cal bowls of ramen plenty of times.
Ramen is also usually eaten by itself. The burger might come with fries, and if you eat all those, it's a tremendous amount of calories. Throw a milkshake on top of that... man that's like 2000 calories in one sitting. | [
"Xuzhou's cuisine tends to be high in fat and salt. Restaurants use a lot of oil and salt in their cooking, including vegetable dishes and soups. Meat is often very fatty, and it tends to be chopped up with the bones still in it.\n",
"Anfu ham () is an ancient dry-cured ham from Anfu, Jiangxi, China. It is eaten ... |
/ what is color? | The atom is the smallest part of matter that still retains its physical properties (such as color). So yeah, if you get any fixed amount of gold atoms only, it will always be golden; the same golden. Since most objects are not made of single kinds of atoms, but substances, we have to think about the color of the molecule that composes that object. But since almost nothing is made of a single kind of molecule, we have to think about the product of that heterogeneity. That's why macroscopically, gold may be of different colors. Because it's not pure. | [
"First, \"color\" refers to the human brain's subjective interpretation of combinations of a narrow band of wavelengths of light. For this reason, the definition of \"color\" is not based on a strict set of physical phenomena. Therefore, even basic concepts like \"primary colors\" are not clearly defined. For examp... |
how exactly do non-red blood cells get oxygen from the red blood cells? | > How exactly do non-red blood cells get oxygen from the red blood cells?
Non-red blood cells produce CO2 by reacting sugars or fatty acids with oxygen.
CO2 combines with water in the blood to form small amounts of carbonic acid.
Carbonic acid lowers the pH of the red blood cell.
Oxygen is released as the ability of haemoglobin to bind oxygen is pH dependent.
Non-red blood cells use this oxygen to repeat the cycle ad infinitum.
In extreme cases lactic acid is produced from anaerobic energy production which causes pH to drop even lower, releasing even more oxygen. | [
"Vertebrate red blood cells consist mainly of hemoglobin, a complex metalloprotein containing heme groups whose iron atoms temporarily bind to oxygen molecules (O) in the lungs or gills and release them throughout the body. Oxygen can easily diffuse through the red blood cell's cell membrane. Hemoglobin in the red ... |
most 3d renders (like blender) can render via gpu or cpu? why not both at the same time for maximum efficiency? | It takes a lot longer to send information from the CPU to the GPU and back than you would think. Processors are fast, but transfer speeds between parts on your computer slow compared to that, so it would take longer to have both the CPU and GPU working on it at the same time than it would for just one of them to do it.
Imagine trying to draw a picture with someone else. That someone else is several miles away, and you have to send it in the mail every time you want the other person to make changes. Sure you have twice the man power, but it spend so much time in transit that it would take a lot longer to get done. | [
"Some renderers execute on the GPU instead of the CPU (e.g. FurryBall, Redshift, Octane). The parallelized nature of GPUs can be used for shorter render times. However, GPU renderers are constrained by the amount of video memory available.\n",
"When performing basic 3D-rendering with only texture mapping and no o... |
Why did Ottoman Sultans take so many consorts from the Caucasus? | By the 18th and 19th centuries Circassians were just known for their beauty. It's not uncommon even today to have regions where the women are reputed to be particularly beautiful. In modern Turkey, it's Izmir (which perhaps not coincidentally is known for the large number of Circassians and other Caucasus Muslim refugees who settled there). In contemporary America, it's arguably California (from the Beach Boy's 1965 hit "California Girls" to Kendrick Lamar's more recent song "The Recipe" whose chorus explains that people come to California for "women, weed, and weather").
The Ottoman Empire also traditionally just had slaves from certain parts of the empire who did certain things. The [Kızlar Ağası](_URL_0_), literally "the master of the girls" but more often called "the Chief Black Eunuch" in English, was usually a slave from Africa by the late Ottoman period. He was in charge of the harem. The [Kapı Ağası](_URL_2_), literally "the master of the gate" sometimes called the "Chief White Eunuch" in English, was an important position at the height of the Ottoman Empire but declined in importance after. As far as I can tell, they just become associated with slaves from different places and, from then on, they continued to be associated with slaves from those regions. Early Janissary troops were likewise taken from Christians of the Balkans, but Christians of Anatolia or Syria or anywhere else, through the devshirme system. In many ways, Circassia just became the place to get female slaves for ones harem, I'm not sure I'm ready to say that that happened for geo-political reasons. Even Western travelers were quite taken with "[Circassian beauties](_URL_1_) and wrote a lo about them in the 18th and 19th centuries. European cosmetic companies might add "Circassian" to their name and P.T. Barnum even put some on tour (well, the women he put on tour weren't Circassian but he said they were). | [
"The marriages of Ottoman sultans and their sons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries tended to be with members of the ruling dynasties of neighbouring powers. With little regard for religion, the sultans contracted marriages with both Christians and Muslims; the purpose of these royal intermarriages were pure... |
Can I get some reliable sources on the percentage of equipment used by the UK and USSR that came from Lend-Lease or was otherwise manufactured in the United States during WWII? | I googled a little bit and found for example [this chart](_URL_0_) on [this page](_URL_1_). That's only for China, but imagine that other chapters might have similar charts? | [
"During World War II, Engineering Plant № 74 served as the main firearm manufacturer for the Soviet Armed Forces. Since Operation Barbarossa left the Soviet Union in a very desperate position, the plant produced as many firearms as it was physically capable of, more firearms than its lifespan for 92 years prior. Fr... |
what causes the light pain in joints/injuries before a storm? | Please remember to search before posting, as this question has already been asked, but I will answer anyways.
What's happening is that part of your is more susceptible to changes in barometric pressure. (Fairly sure it's due to excess fluid, don't quote me, I'm not a doctor, I only play one on Reddit).
It's the same reason older people can feel storms coming in their joints, and so on. Because there is more pressure when a storm is coming, and less pressure when it's nice out. | [
"Just as heat can cause expanding air in the lungs, the explosive shock wave created by lightning (the cause of thunder) can cause concussive and auditory injury at extremely close range. Other physical injury can be caused by objects damaged or thrown by the lightning strike. For example, lightning striking a near... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.