question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
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why do carriers care if you tether? | the same reason why Hollywood cared about VCRs or the music industry cared about cassette tapes.
with tethering, you'll only need to subscribe to their service once instead of multiple times (ie one subscription per device). | [
"Carrier IQ is the consumer advocate to the mobile operator, explaining what works and what does not work. Three of the main complaints we hear from mobile device users are (1) dropped calls, (2) poor customer service, and (3) having to constantly recharge the device. Our software allows operators to figure out why... |
Can someone explain how astronomers know the exact spectral composition of the standard candles identified in the observable universe? | we use color-color diagrams and where they lie on a Hertzsprung-Russel diagram. You measure the stars flux in different wavelengths and it gives you a color. You can also get spectral lines and that is how you get spectral type. | [
"Spectral lines are highly atom-specific, and can be used to identify the chemical composition of any medium capable of letting light pass through it. Several elements were discovered by spectroscopic means, including helium, thallium, and caesium. Spectral lines also depend on the physical conditions of the gas, s... |
Police dispatchers in the 1960s | What a great question! And thank you so much for laying out your goal and providing so much detail on what you're looking for. It really helps!
For your exact topic, you might try finding a copy of the 1954 book *Daily Training Bulletin of the Los Angeles Police Department* by W.H. Parker. I only ran across a review in *The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science*, but it seems to be right up your alley.
I unfortunately don't have a copy of that book, but I do have [this April 6, 1964 article from the *New York Times*](_URL_0_) that describes exactly how the police dispatch systems of 11 U.S. cities (plus NYC's five-borough system) operate. Los Angeles, sadly, is not one of the 11 cities. What about fire/medical response? [Here's a fascinating editorial from the 1959 *New York Times*](_URL_11_) describing a new "one-number" system set up there.
The early 1960s are a fascinating time for law enforcement and emergency response in general. Nationwide, there's a huge swing away from individual, idiosyncratic ways of doing things and toward a standardized, scientific, organized response. Part of that is the federal government's influence.
Starting with the Johnson administration (and accelerating during the Nixon administration), huge amounts of federal money began to be distributed to local police departments. This money typically came with strings attached: In order for the federal government to have some kind of surety that the money was being used well, departments had to follow standardized procedures. This led to the creation of nationwide and statewide boards of police procedure, and methods flowed out from that.
At the same time, the transistor revolution was making it possible for every beat cop to carry a radio.
At the start of the century, police were tied to their station by special call boxes containing telephone links. You're probably familiar with *Doctor Who*'s TARDIS, but [police in the United States had them as well](_URL_3_). In the 1910s, the first mobile radio sets were developed, but they remained impractical until the "radiotelephone" or voice radio became small enough to be carried by a truck or car.
In its fifth issue, the *American Journal of Police Science* devoted an article to [the Detroit Police Department's radio system as it stood in 1930](_URL_9_). That article is really good at summarizing how the dispatch system worked, but I'll give it to you in brief here:
A caller rings the police department, and the phone is answered by the police operator. When the operator realizes it's an emergency, (s)he passes the call to a dispatcher. The dispatcher determines which precinct and district the call is coming from, takes down all the information and disconnects the call. The dispatcher then calls the radio room and relays the information about the call to the radio operator on duty.
Detroit at the time had two operators, one for the east side of the city and the other for the west. The radio operator would have a schedule of cars on duty and would call out to the car assigned to the source of the call. The call would be made several times, because the cars didn't have transmitters ─ only receivers.
When they arrived on scene, the officers in the scout car would take care of the trouble and then call the radio station by phone once the trouble was fixed. If the radio operator didn't hear from the officers for some time, they'd dispatch a second car.
Detroit was a real pioneer in this approach. At the time that article was written, only four cities in the United States had a police radio system. A decade later, Joseph Poli (in the same journal, which had been renamed to *Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology*) [wrote](_URL_10_) that by 1937, two thousand police agencies in the United States were using radio, and many were adopting the use of two-way radio. In California's East Bay alone, there were 10 police departments using radio, including San Pablo's one-person department.
Writing in 1942, Poli observed that the problem had become one of *overlapping* police jurisdictions, all with their own radio techniques, dispatchers and equipment. He notes that this is a particular problem in Chicago and Los Angeles.
After World War II, and particularly as the 1950s roll onward, this becomes an acute problem. It's not just one of jurisdiction, it's one of *geography.* As the 1950s progress, cities swell outward as the suburban building boom begins. Where during the 1930s and 1940s, cities are well-spaced and easily separated by low-population areas, they begin to merge in the 1950s and particularly from 1960 onward. This presents problems of encroachment and jurisdiction, heightening the need for standardization and interoperability.
The issues surrounding organized crime made cooperation particularly acute. In 1950 and 1951, the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime found local police departments particularly ineffective. Earle Garrett, hired by the American Bar Association as part of the committee's work, concluded:
> "the principle of local autonomy in government has encouraged the sprawling decentralization of thousands of unimpressive law enforcement agencies. The organization of police departments on the basis of some larger and more effective geographic unit such as the county 'has been little favored.' The political subdivisions of the counties, the cities, towns and villages cling to the police service they know they can control, even though such service is far less efficient than one that would result from a coordination of police departments."
That quote was first used in [a 1957 article by Virgil Peterson, operating director of the Chicago Crime Commission](_URL_6_), who was pointing out the problems faced by urban police departments in that year. Radio and communications technology (including dispatching here) didn't, on its own, promise a solution.
In 1954, the Atlantic City (NJ) police department became the first [to give long-range radio receivers to their beat cops](_URL_4_). Like the 1930 Detroit system, these were only receivers, however. In addition, they could only receive from the powerful central station; they couldn't talk back, and they couldn't hear other radios in use.
Two-way communication on foot was [short-ranged and short-lived in the early 1960s](_URL_7_), though miniaturization allowed two-way radios to reach motorcycle units in the late 1940s and become almost ubiquitous in cars during the 1950s.
Again, though technology was advancing, procedures lagged behind. In the late 1950s, there are ample examples of radio [misbehavior](_URL_8_), [accidents](_URL_5_), [malice](_URL_1_), and just [trouble in general](_URL_2_).
Now, let's circle back to that very first *New York Times* article from 1964. The dispatching systems in place across the country would not have been unfamiliar to a Detroit officer from 1930, though some departments had learned to cut out the "middle man" by combining the duties of the radio operator and dispatcher. Most cities had a central "help" number for the police, but you could also get help by simply asking the phone operator. (Fire departments and ambulance services had separate numbers, though the operator would connect you if you didn't know it.)
Some departments had their dispatcher fill out a computer punch card when a call came in, the better to record data. Either this punch card or a typed/written card would be passed to the radio operator. The operator would broadcast from police headquarters to an individual patrol car, directing it to respond. In 1964, Boston was unusual in that its cars had the ability to call each other; most departments didn't have that ability in their ordinary cars.
| [
"Toronto, Hamilton, Berlin (Kitchener), Windsor and other cities modernized and professionalized their public services in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. No service was changed more dramatically than the police. The introduction of emergency telephone call boxes linked to a central dispatcher, plus the use ... |
black holes suck in light, so why are they black? | We call them black because we believe that they suck in light and don't let it out.
It's outgoing light we can see, you can't see light that's being absorbed only light that is being sent out or reflected. | [
"Black holes are difficult to find because they do not let out any light. They can be found when black holes suck in other stars. When black holes suck in other stars, the black hole lets out X-rays, which can be seen by telescopes.\n",
"Black holes are talked about in this chapter. Black holes are stars that hav... |
What were the social requirements to becoming a naval officer in 18th century Britain? | Sure could.
If a family was wealthy enough they could get their son enlisted as a midshipman. Most midshipmen started when they were just boys and spent many years at sea under the tutelage of their superior officers. Once they had progressed far enough they had to pass competency tests. If they passed they became a junior officer.
Becoming a senior or successful officer was a whole different trick though. The Royal Navy was a combination of Gerontocracy & political maneuvering. There were a limited number of Captaincies, Admirals Pennants, etc... and they went to the officers with the most seniority (time in rank) and best connections. So becoming a lieutenant was easy. If you managed to proved yourself or get a field promotion or otherwise secure a captain's rank early you could move up the food chain pretty effectively. But if you didn't distinguish yourself or know powerful people you could languish as a lieutenant forever because there were so many people vying for a small number of positions including many crusty old Admirals well past their sea going days. So without an excellent record and friend in high places you advancement basically revolved around waiting for your superiors to die off. | [
"Theoretically, the highest commands of the Royal Navy were open to all within its ranks showing talent. In practice, family connections, political or professional patronage were very important for promotion to ranks higher than Commander. British captains were responsible for recruiting their ship's crew from a co... |
why is being bare foot seen as taboo? why is it different between being barefoot or in flip flops. | Where i work its an insurance thing, yes we clean our floors but there is no guarantee there is not an odd shard of glass somewhere, if you cut your foot the company could be held liable so we would just rather you wear your fucking shoes please, hippy. | [
"Forcing people to go barefoot has been used as a relatively effortless and more subtle form of humiliation in most past and present civilized cultures, primarily using the visual contrast to the standard form of appearance while also creating some level of physical discomfort. The exposure of bare feet often serve... |
Did Tibetan rule practice slavery well into the 20th century and if so, did chinese annexation actually end it? | This question has come up a few times before that has yielded some good answers, and while we are always interested in more answers, I thought you might be interested in the following threads:
* [There has been some claim that the Dalai Lama presided over a feudalistic/slave Tibet until Chinese Communism abolished the system. How accurate is this?](_URL_3_), I found /u/JimeDorje [multi‐part answer](_URL_1_) to be the most satisfying of all these threads (if you want to skip over the premodern times, skip to the second section), though there are several interesting answers here.
* [How did the Dalai Lamas act before China's annexation of Tibet?](_URL_2_), particularly the article linked by /u/ctesibius which tells a narrative more common to narrative told in China than the one told in the Tibetan exile community, but seems to be quoting rather selectively with a clear agenda (which doesn't mean it's wrong, just highly selective‐‐it gives you all the gory details without being able to say how widespread these details were, or where, or even what proportion of the population were serfs).
* [What was life really like for Tibetan people under the Dalai Lama?](_URL_0_) doesn't directly deal with slavery/serfdom, but includes an interesting social history from /u/JimeDorje.
/u/JimeDorje's assessment that most of the Dalai Lamas didn't "rule" in the centralized sense that we think of a king or president ruling their country, and that our associations with American chattel slavery or European feudalism don't quite give us the most accurate impression for the situation in Tibet before the Chinese/CCP invasion. From the little I've looked at, I think that /u/JimeDorje's assessment is fairly accurate:
> I have no sources for slavery/serfdom in Tibet that aren't very clearly biased towards the Chinese claims that prior to their "liberation" of Tibet, it was an aristocratic, slavery, caste-ridden hell scape, or the Tibetan claims of, "Meh, can't remember. It was probably nothing."
Therefore, I think /u/JimeDorje rather ingenuously gets around this source problem by giving a detailed look at Bhutan's similar system for a less politicized case of something similar, which I think is about as good an answer as we'll get. | [
"The serfdom in Tibet controversy rests on Chinese claims of moral authority for governing Tibet, portraying Tibet as a \"feudal serfdom\" and a \"hell on earth\" prior to its invasion in 1950. Claims of unfree labour practices have been a recurrent theme, covering periods both before and after the Chinese takeover... |
what does this patent troll bill say and do? | Let's say you own the patent on brass plated, triangle shaped bottle openers. Here are some of the basics.
Right now you could file a lawsuit on someone making gold plated square shaped bottle openers saying, "Hey, we have a patent for bottle openers!" The people making gold plated square shaped bottle openers don't have the time or money to fight you in court because it costs a lot of money to find out what patent you own, figure out if it's a legally binding patent, figure out if they're violating it etc...etc..., so they settle out of court for a couple thousand dollars to get you to go away.
What the bill does is not only forces you to state the specifics of the patent they are violating (in this case your brass plated, triangle shaped bottle opener patent), but when you lose the lawsuit because it's pretty obvious there is no patent violation, you would have to pay their lawyer fees.
Another thing the bill adds is the right for the patent office to re-review your patent after the case if it was deemed frivolous. "Wait a second, why are we allowing someone to patent brass plated, triangle shaped bottle openers? That's silly." | [
"This view was supported in an article in 2014 that suggests that the pejorative term \"patent troll\" works in the benefit of large organisations who infringe patents and resent smaller inventors being represented by someone with the clout to take them on. The argument against the use of the term is that NPEs, in ... |
What would happen if the North Star goes Supernova? | **Short answer:** It would be brighter than a full moon and visible during the day, likely for a few weeks or months. Unfortunately, it's not massive enough to produce a supernova.
**Longer answer:** The concept of a north star is cool. As the earth rotates, it looks like everything in the sky does a lap around the earth, once a day. Because the north star lines up with the axis of rotation, it stays put, and this is pretty easy to see if you've ever seen a time lapse exposure of the night sky.
Fun fact: the current north star wasn't always the north star. The earth's rotation actually wobbles a little bit, sort of like the wobble of a spinning toy. This wobble is only apparent on the timescale of centuries, so you won't wake up with a different north star tomorrow. For a sense of scale, 5000 years ago it was a star in Draco, 3000 years ago it was a star in the little dipper, and the Romans didn't actually have a pole star, but a few were still close enough to the pole for navigational purposes.
Anyway, today the North Star is a star in the Little Dipper which we call Polaris, and is actually a multistar system about 400 light years away. The primary is a yellow supergiant about 4.5x the mass of the sun, with two smaller companions, each about 1.2-1.3x the mass of the sun. The yellow supergiant puts out the most light, so it's really the star we see, but unfortunately it won't go supernova.
But what if it did?
There's another nearby star, about 600 light years away in Orion, called Betelgeuse (pronounced like Beetle-juice). He's a red supergiant, about 10x the mass of the sun, who is likely due for a supernova, so discussions of 'what would happen if Beetlejuice exploded' are pretty abundant.
If Betelgeuse popped, he would light up the night sky like the moon, and would easily be visible during the day. Supernova get really bright really fast, so we'd notice it immediately. After a few days or weeks we'd notice that it's growing dimmer, but it would still be visible for up to a few months.
If this happened to Polaris, it would make finding your bearings at night really easy for a while, but after a few months the Little Dipper will be missing part of its handle. Ultimately though, there are enough stars in the neighborhood of the pole that would still be possible to find north at night. Just pick a point somewhere past the end of the now shortened handle of the Little Dipper. Additionally, the compasses still work and so does GPS. No animals are known to rely on the north star for navigation, so I think the only people that would really be effected by the loss of the north star are hikers that go out after dark, and astronomers who said it wasn't massive enough to explode.
As one last fun fact, since Betelgeuse is 600 light years away, it could have exploded during the Renaissance and we'd have no way to know because the light hasn't gotten here yet. If you're hoping to see a supernova like this in your lifetime, then hope that it happened 600 years ago. | [
"Supernovae can result from the death of an extremely massive star, many times heavier than the Sun. At the end of the life of this massive star, a non-fusible iron core is formed from fusion ashes. This iron core is pushed towards the Chandrasekhar limit till it surpasses it and therefore collapses.\n",
"Some me... |
how can a microwave heat up food but have no affect on plastic food wrap? | Microwaves are radio waves that are roughly around 2,500 megahertz
These radio waves are absorbed by water, fats, and sugars.
These waves are also not absorbed by most plastics, ceramics, or glass.
If you were to change the frequency then you could design a microwave that only melted plastic but didn't heat up the food. But this would be less marketable. | [
"The use of unmarked plastics for microwave cooking raises the issue of plasticizers leaching into the food, or the plastics chemically reacting to microwave energy, with by-products leaching into the food, suggesting that even plastic containers marked \"microwavable\" may still leach plastic by-products into the ... |
nuclear preparedness | Everybody's going to die, slowly. That's arguably an improvement over people inside the loop, who are going to die quickly.
The sort of war that would include attacks on major American cities is likely to be the sort of thing that ends humanity as we know it. Perhaps a single nuclear missile attack by crazy North Korea wouldn't end up killing everybody, but a full scale NK vs US vs China vs US nuclear war is the end of days.
Some folks might survive the nuclear effects by being in KY, but all the millions of city folks who don't get killed are going to come for your food. Fields of corn in Iowa aren't any good without the food distribution networks. 95% of the population has to die off before a simple agricultural society can be established. They will never see the glory days we currently have, because the raw materials they would need to industrialize are beyond their reach because we've used up all the easy to get to stuff.
It's Mad Max science fiction times. Not fun. | [
"\"Nuclear War Survival Skills\" aims to provide a general audience with advice on how to survive conditions likely to be encountered in the event of a nuclear catastrophe, as well as encouraging optimism in the face of such a catastrophe by asserting the survivability of a nuclear war.\n",
"Preparedness refers t... |
why do people protest the nato summits? | If you use the search bar, you'll find [this was already asked](_URL_0_). Unfortunately there was only one answer so it's not incredibly helpful. | [
"The fear that NATO is evolving into a worldwide coalition of the willing, as such increasing polarisation and militarization in international affairs, sparked protests at NATO's HQ in Brussels two weeks before the summit, and in Bucharest. Protesters targeted the renewed determination of NATO to use nuclear weapon... |
why if i approach any wild animal in the countryside on foot it sprints away, but when you're in a car they just sit in the middle of the road until you nearly, or do, run them over. | A survival skill is the ability to recognize and react to movements of animals (such as people) differently than movements of objects (such as trees blowing in the wind) - you run when it's the former but the latter is just background noise to be ignored. But cars are something relatively new, something that looks like an object and not an animal.
It's further complicated because that object can move in ways that no other object they've encountered can move. It goes much MUCH faster, for one, and does it without using legs.
Deer do things like run in front of cars because it doesn't look or behave like their instincts tell them a carnivore does, and because they don't really understand and can't rationalize how fast it's moving. They start crossing the weird wide open black smooth field when that shiny rock is still hundreds of feet away and suddenly it's right at their location. "What the fu-"BAM. | [
"The recommended reaction to a large animal (such as a moose) is to slow down in lane, if at all possible, and to avoid swerving suddenly, which could cause loss of control. If a collision cannot be avoided, it is best to swerve towards the rear end of the animal, as it is more likely to run forward. Drivers who se... |
What would a persons diet consist of before the processing of grains. | You might try x-posting this question to /r/AskAnthropology, they would probably better be able to answer your question. | [
"The ancient Israelites depended on bread, wine and oil as the basic dietary staples and this trio is often mentioned in the Bible (for example, and ) and in other texts, such as the Samaria and Arad ostraca. Written and archaeological evidence indicate that the diet also included other products from plants, trees ... |
why do we see multi-colored dots in the dark? | I'm in a sensation and perception class right now. Even when your eyes are closed, the inner anatomy of your eye is still picking up what minimal sensations are present. Your neurons are still firing from this input, just not much so your perception will almost never be pitch black. | [
"It is constructed by superimposing white discs on the intersections of orthogonal gray bars on a black background. Dark dots seem to appear and disappear rapidly at random intersections, hence the label \"scintillating\". When a person keeps his or her eyes directly on a single intersection, the dark dot does not ... |
How do our brains remember the time of the events that have been fixed in the memory? | nobody really knows for sure, but recent work suggests it likely involves the hippocampus and surrounding cortex. memories involve binding certain aspects of experiences together, which is likely reflected in neuronal firing patterns (either pattern of which neurons fire or firing rate.. or both, nobody knows for sure). the idea is when you retrieve a memory, you re-activate a portion of those patterns, and your brain activates (at least some of) the rest, allowing you to remember | [
"Temporal memory consists of remembering \"when\" a specific memory has occurred. In a study participants were placed in 4 groups; two control groups either given caffeine or a placebo and two groups that were sleep deprived for 36 hours either given caffeine or a placebo. The task used to measure temporal memory c... |
Recommendation | Hi, Buddhist historian here. Here is a list to get you started:
* [A Concise History of Buddhism](_URL_8_) by Andrew Skilton; *Perhaps the simplest introduction to Buddhist history, but what it lacks in completeness, it makes up for in readability.*
* [The Buddhist Religion: A Historical Introduction](_URL_1_) By Richard Robinson, Willard L. Johnson, and Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu; *Slightly more comprehensive than Skilton's book, but much more like a text book. It is a good introduction nonetheless.*
* [Theravāda Buddhism: A Social History From Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo](_URL_4_) By Richard F. Gombrich *A more focused work specifically on the Theravāda form of Buddhism practiced in Southeast Asia and Śrī Lankā. Gombrich's work is divisive for his textual approach but ultimately is highly regarded*
* [Indian Buddhism](_URL_11_) by A.K. Warder *The standard history of Buddhism in India, it is somewhat dated at points, specifically in it's work on the decline of Buddhism, which Warder blames primarily on Turkish Muslim invasions, but good nonetheless.*
* [Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations](_URL_0_) By Paul Williams; *I personally go back and forth on Williams more personal style of writing and dislike some of his analysis, but this is a good intro to the development of Mahāyāna both in India and beyond. This hits all the key points of Mahāyāna's development.*
* [In the Buddha's Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pāli Canon](_URL_9_) by Bhikkhu Bodhi; *A compilation of discourses from the Pāli canon and an introduction to Theravāda philosophy and the primary sources. Written in a readable and organized manner with commentary and footnotes to elucidate the meaning of certain terms.*
More Specialized works inclued;
* [Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge](_URL_2_) by KN Jayatellike; *Exactly what it says on the tin, probably the most influential work on Early Buddhism and pre-Dignāga Buddhist Logic and epistimology.*
* [The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophy](_URL_12_) by Thomas McEvilley ; *an absolutely breathtaking work of comparative philosophy. I don't always agree with McEvilley's conclusions but his work is invaluable to any comparative study.*
* [Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization](_URL_5_) by Richard Foltz ; *Not focused exclusively on Buddhism, but on how religions spread along the Silk Road, which Buddhism did.*
* [The Making of Buddhist Modernism](_URL_10_) by David L McMahn; *Focuses on the evolution of Buddhism in the last 150 years worldwide in order to accommodate modernity.*
* [Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey](_URL_6_) by Kenneth Ch'en; *An in depth look at the history and evolution of Buddhism in China from the Han to Mao*
* [Studies in the Origins of Buddhism](_URL_7_) by Govind Chandra Pande; *A dated but nonetheless comprehensive text examining the Pāli canon linguistically to date it. The methodology is sound, but some conclusions seem flawed. In any case, valuable.*
* [The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts](_URL_3_) by Bhikkhu Sujato and Bhikkhu Brahmali; *A somewhat flawed, but quite good work arguing for the authenticity of EBTs using linguistic analysis, comparative analysis, and textual analysis. Rather short and readable*
There are more, but that should be enough to start you off for a few months at least. I would recommend starting with one of the introductions and either studying Mahāyāna or Theravāda next since they start to diverge around the 3rd century CE when Buddhism leaves India in a big way. | [
"This type of report examines either a stated need or a selection of choices, or in some cases both. The report is a collection of analysis and evaluation of the situation, and generally will examine the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the situation, take them into account, and be combined wi... |
why does a website with a recipe often include a long preface before you get to the actual recipe? | Imma answer your question, but first let me tell you about this time I watered the lawn on a warm july afternoon, there were clouds in the sky and childrens laughter....
ok seriously, who knows, maybe they just like to hear themselves type, or create an emotional connection to the recipe, perhaps they are just killing white space so the ad banner on the side fits the page.
could be worse, you could be asking about youtube videos. *11minutes to review a potato peeler? how???* | [
"Chefs provide the producers with shopping lists for each of the possible secret ingredients. Consequently, they can surmise what the secret ingredient will be just before it is officially revealed, based on which of their items were purchased.\n",
"Tea of all shapes can be made by numbered recipe. Not all recipe... |
Did the Roman Empire ever contact the ancient Chinese? | /u/Tiako is probably best placed to provide a detailed account of earlier instances of Roman contact with China, but I have written a little bit on what the (Eastern) Romans knew of China in the sixth and seventh centuries [here](_URL_0_). Crucially, after nearly two centuries of zero official contact between Rome and China (at least according to the Chinese sources), in 643 a Roman embassy once again reached China. This would be repeated several times in the following decades, which is indicative of how the two empires were aware of each other's status and tried to communicate with each other. Unfortunately, it is impossible to piece together whether there was any unofficial contact between people from the two empires in this period, even though it was entirely possible for traders to travel very far away from home. Nor do we have any Greek sources for what the court in Constantinople thought about China, aside from the account of Theophylact I quoted. This description remains understudied and I only know of a suggestion that it was a garbled version of some information relayed by Turkish envoys. Beyond that, we can only speculate, especially as we literally have no way to prove how Theophylact got that information. | [
"Sino-Roman relations comprised the mostly indirect contact, flow of trade goods, information, and occasional travellers between the Roman Empire and Han Empire of China, as well as between the later Eastern Roman Empire and various Chinese dynasties. These empires inched progressively closer in the course of the R... |
Best book to understand Islam | Whether you're looking to understand the theology, politics, or history behind Islam, I would start off by reading the Quran. It provides some much needed background. | [
"Towards Understanding Islam is a book written by Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi which gained its author a reputation as a religious teacher and major thinker. This book has been translated into a number of languages. Jamaat-e-Islami claim that it has been translated into 13 languages. One English translation of this book... |
Do satellites rotate with the earth? | Satellites in geostationary orbit maintain the same position above the Earth because it takes them 24 hours to rotate. These are about 30,000 km up. Many satellites are much closer to Earth and orbit in a few hours. | [
"Orbital planes of satellites are perturbed by the non-spherical nature of the Earth's gravity. This causes the orbital plane of the satellite's orbit to slowly rotate around the Earth, depending on the angle the plane makes with the Earth's equator. For planes that are at a critical angle this can mean that the pl... |
Is there a limit to the amount of energy that can be in one place at one time? | If you cram too much into one space, you get a black hole. | [
"It is simple to see why we perceive a continuum of energy in this limit. With = 1 rad/s, the difference between each energy level is ≈ 1.05 × 10J, well below what we normally resolve for macroscopic systems. One then describes this system through an emergent classical limit.\n",
"The law of conservation of energ... |
Are fish in tanks/aquariums aware of the fact that they live in an enclosed space? | Probably depends on the fish. Some groups of fish (e.g. mormyrids, gymnotids, notopterids, gymnachids) have either passive or active electrosensory abilities which allow them to image conductivity of their surroundings in three dimensions; these fishes would be directly aware of how small their habitat actually was. | [
"An aquarium's physical characteristics form another aspect of aquarium design. Size, lighting conditions, density of floating and rooted plants, placement of bog-wood, creation of caves or overhangs, type of substrate, and other factors (including an aquarium's positioning within a room) can all affect the behavio... |
What would a typical day be like for an RAF pilot during the battle of Britain? | Pilots were actually required to do very little apart from fight. Pilots on alert (duty) had to wait either in their aircraft or at airbases very near them: literally every second could count in 'getting up' as time = altitude.
If not on duty pilots were quite free, but transport could be difficult as it was disrupted and special passes were sometimes required. Aircrews usually went to the pub, wrote letters, played sports and generally did the things young men do with free time. Some would go into London for dances, meeting girlfriends and such. Unit commanders would have many duties: securing supplies and equipment, writing to relatives of killed squadronmates, checking training progress and bringing in new pilots, discipline and the minutiae of 'middle management'. Tactics were changing rapidly and commanders had considerable discretion in this regard, these were much discussed and debated, and imparted to new arrivals.
A pilot on duty could be required to fly several times a day, and combat fatigue built up quickly. This was poorly understood but the RAF tried to deal with this by rotating pilots.
Most pilots- though not all- were officers with privileges and 'batmen', or servants, to take care of mundane tasks.
Keith Park's 11 Group bore the brunt of the fighting, as his area covered south-east England. Pilots in other areas, or rotated for a rest of other areas, had less combat. | [
"The List of RAF aircrew in the Battle of Britain is a summary regarding the lists of those who flew during the Battle of Britain, and were awarded the Battle of Britain Clasp to the 1939–45 Star by flying at least one authorised operational sortie with an eligible unit of the Royal Air Force or Fleet Air Arm durin... |
what is the connection between greenland and denmark? | Greenland is a country within the Kingdom of Denmark, similar to how Scotland is a country within the UK.
Greenland has been aspiring to greater autonomy, and Denmark has completely, putting them on a track to assume increasingly more control of their domestic affair. Despite this, Greenland remains economically dependant on Denmark. | [
"During World War II, when Germany invaded Denmark, Greenlanders became socially and economically less connected to Denmark and more connected to the United States and Canada. After the war, Denmark resumed control of Greenland and in 1953, converted its status from colony to overseas \"amt\" (county). Although Gre... |
Are there any political or social trends that tend to repeat themselves over the course of human history? | Robert Michel's concept of "Iron Law of Oligarchy" in his book *Political Parties* deals with the inevitability of a rule by a small elite within any organization, no matter how egalitarian and democratic it is in its design. | [
"As a graduate student in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Goldstone noted a persistent pattern: in the decades leading up to major historical outbreaks of political instability, such as the string of revolutions in France, the Netherlands and America in the late 18th century or the Taiping Rebellion in China (1850–... |
Do headphones increase the likelihood of being struck by lightning? | I would say the magnet inside an earbud would have essentially no effect on increasing the likelihood of you being struck by lightning. | [
"Another effect of lightning on bystanders is to their hearing. The resulting shock wave of thunder can damage the ears. Also, electrical interference to telephones or headphones may result in damaging acoustic noise.\n",
"Lightning interferes with AM (amplitude modulation) radio signals much more than FM (freque... |
why does licking the wrapper of a cinnamon gum and placing it into your skin start to burn your skin? | The cinnamon oil that flavors the gum feels hot in your mouth when you chew it. This is because it's an "irritant", or a molecule that activates pain receptors. The gum wrapper has some of the cinnamon oil on it, and when you moisten it by licking you make it easy to transfer the oil from the wrapper to the skin. In the skin, it finds your nerve cells and tells them that they hurt. | [
"Because of the burning sensation caused by capsaicin when it comes in contact with mucous membranes, it is commonly used in food products to provide added spice or \"heat\" (piquancy), usually in the form of spices such as chili powder and paprika. In high concentrations, capsaicin will also cause a burning effect... |
If we can build huge reflectors/magnifiers to concentrate light into extremely hot beams, why can't we harness this power for all our energy needs? | You mean [like this Solar Power Tower in Spain?](_URL_1_)
edit: [Better link](_URL_0_). | [
"The power reduction is done by such means as absorption, reflection, diffusion, scattering, deflection, diffraction, and dispersion, etc. Optical attenuators usually work by absorbing the light, like sunglasses absorb extra light energy. They typically have a working wavelength range in which they absorb all light... |
Does your body still "recharge" at all if you are just lying there, eyes closed, not moving, but not sleeping? | Yes, to a certain extent.
The body's systems are not usually just "on" or "off". There are gradients and different levels of activation of each system in the body. Even within the context of sleep, there are different kinds of sleep, with some biological processes occurring at different rates.
Several of your body's recovery mechanisms are always active. They are constantly fighting against the damage inflicted on your body over time. Resting just reduces the damage being inflicted, causing the effect of the recovery mechanism to be more pronounced. Other mechanisms will increase or decrease based on your activity level.
There are some mechanisms that kick in only when you're actually asleep, so resting is never going to be "enough", but you definitely get some benefit. | [
"A phenomenon of REM sleep, muscular paralysis, occurs at an inappropriate time. This loss of tonus is caused by massive inhibition of motor neurons in the spinal cord. When this happens during waking, the victim of a cataplectic attack loses control of his or her muscles. As in REM sleep, the person continues to b... |
was scurvy actually particular to sailors? it seems like citrus wouldn't have been available to most of the lower classes | Scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin C.
Vitamin C can be found in peppers, turnip greens, cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, peas, and other foods.
A lot of those would be available to the lower classes at least some of the time. | [
"The medical establishment ashore continued to be wedded to the idea that scurvy was a disease of putrefaction, curable by the administration of elixir of vitriol, infusions of wort and other remedies designed to 'ginger up' the system. It could not account for the benefits of citrus fruits and dismissed the eviden... |
why can massive video games like the witcher or elder scrolls come on a single disc, but most tv shows always come on around 5 discs? | Because video isn't generally a small thing to carry, whereas 3D data can be.
Video is just being read and played back, all the data you're seeing has to be there on the disk, otherwise, well, there's nothing to play.
With something like Elder Scrolls games however what the disk is storing is 3D asset data, which for want of a better word are just instructions on what shapes things are, where certain lights are, what the colour or texture of this particular surface is, and so on.
The actual 'video' you're seeing is being generated on the fly by your graphic card. It's not like every view you see is being pulled off the disk, it's being generated.
*edit* To address a criticism of this answer - it's true texture data can be enormous in modern games, but if you scale both sides of the argument, for a modern game compare to a Blu Ray box set, rather than an older game and a DVD box set, the same differences still apply, for the same reasons. | [
"Some GameCube games with large amounts of data span two discs, such as \"Resident Evil 4\" and \"Enter the Matrix\". Multi-platform games that fit on PlayStation 2 and Xbox DVD discs occasionally saw the removal of certain features in order to fit on GameCube Game Discs. Full-motion video scenes and audio are more... |
How many solar panels would be needed to power all of the U.S.? | a 100 mile by 100 mile solar thermal plant located in the desert southwest could power the United States.
_URL_0_
| [
", there were nearly 5,500 schools in the United States that had solar installations with the total capacity of approximately 910 MW. Top five states were Nevada, California, Hawaii, Arizona, and New Jersey with 23.10%, 14.50%, 14.50%, 14.10% and 13.00% of the schools in the respective states that had installations... |
native reserves in the usa and canada. | Basically Native Americans didn't see land ownership in the same way the Europeans did.
As the Europeans came to North America they began claiming land that they saw as "unclaimed". This lead to conflicts between the two groups as Natives lost access to land they previously saw as for everyones use.
Eventually these conflicts came to a head with a treaty being signed and agreed to between the colonists and the natives. In the treaty the colonists agreed to designate a certain amount of land as being "owned" by the Native communities.
It differs a bit between US and Canada so I can mostly only speak to the Canadian perspective but on a Native reserve there are no federal or provincial taxes collected and the reserves themselves have their own system of government and regulation. Anything that happens on that land in terms of building or development must be approved by the council and the chiefs of that land.
As for whether they're good or not, there are pros and cons.
The reserves allow the native communities to have a space to help preserve their culture and to exercise a measure of self determination that they would not have access to otherwise. Some have been able to maximize their ability to control regulations and taxation in order to draw businesses to the reserve land and generate a healthy economy for their people to take advantage of.
On the con side, it isolates these communities from the rest of the culture and helps foster an "us vs. them" attitude between Canadians and what are typically refereed to as First Nations (Natives). It also makes them extremely vulnerable to the common problems that occur in small clusters of people in a relatively small geographic area: corruption, economic instability, localized natural/man made disasters. These events can have a magnified impact on these communities because their Independence means they have fewer ties to outside communities and their fixed geographic locations means they can't simply re-locate without effectively losing their reserve land. They can't settle a new reserve somewhere else without re-negotiating the entire treaty.
In Canada issues of corruption among local leaders has been a pretty common story and because of their Independence it's difficult to enforce any kind of government oversite without being seen as meddling in the affairs of First Nations people so it's always a balancing act when one of these communities finds themselves in desperate need of assistance. | [
"Canada has numerous Indian reserves for its First Nations people, which were mostly established by the \"Indian Act\" of 1876 and have been variously expanded and reduced by royal commissions since. They are sometimes incorrectly called by the American term \"reservations\".\n",
"Indian reserves, established in ... |
Does sound have an infinite volume? | Ish. The quietest sound is simply no sound. Any given device is going to have a threshold minimum sound it can sense, but I don't see a reason you can't get as close to zero as you want, at least averaged over a large area. Since particles in a gas never fully stop moving, there is always going to be some local noise though.
For loudness, sort of. Loudness is related to the pressure of sound waves. At 194 decibels, the amplitude of the pressure wave is 1 atmosphere, the same as the pressure of air under standard conditions.
If you increase the pressure of the oscillations beyond this, you will wind up creating local vacuums, and air molecules will actually be moving overall, instead of (on average) oscillating in place.
At that point it's less "sound" and more "a bunch of explosions". | [
"The theory of the volume is based on a new interpretation of the term \"Ápeiron\", central in Anaximander's philosophy. Anaximander defines the element from which all things originate with the Greek term \"ápeiron\", commonly held to be formed from \"a\" (alpha privative, \"without\") and \"péras\" (\"determinatio... |
What was the role of Capitalism in starting the first world war? | Could you please specify what you mean by "capitalism"? It is a very loaded term; most people actually mean various things they associate with it when they use it.
| [
"In the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression and with the rise of fascist powers, many western socialist and liberal thinkers believed that capitalism caused war. However, Keynes in his \"General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money\" in 1936, argued that this need not be so, and that the management of c... |
is a poisonous reaction just a effective form of allergy? | A poison is something that attacks your system and causes it damage.
An allergy is when your body overreacts to a substance and *thinks* it's under attack. The key point of an allergy is that it's something that is actually benign (or at least not terribly threatening) but your body goes apeshit anyway. | [
"Pyrrolizidine alkaloidosis poisoning in the United States has remained moderately rare among humans. The most common reports are the outcome of the misuse of medicinal home remedies, or the alkaloids are present in food and drink substances such as milk and honey when the animal carriers were exposed to the toxins... |
why are "red" cameras so expensive? (upwards of $77,500 per camera) | They're not. They're cheap. Like WAY cheap.
"Red" cameras are not consumer products. They are essentially the digital equal/evolution of 35mm film cameras, such as the Panavision Milennium XL, which many Hollywood movies are filmed on. These cost MUCH more (well into 6 figures), plus you gotta buy the film, and the entire process is more expensive. These are marketed toward Hollywood production companies, not regular joes.
Also keep in mind you're going to need to be buying attachments, lenses, etc. There is a reason that most companies in the industry rent this equipment vs. purchase it.
| [
"Quality cameras often have a high price range (often US$3,000 or more) due to the expense of the larger pixel array (state of the art 1280 x 1024), while less expensive models (with pixel arrays of 40x40 up to 160x120 pixels) are also available. Fewer pixels reduce the image quality making it more difficult to dis... |
packing a cigarette before smoking. | As far as I know it prevents the end of the cigarette from burning weakly or unevenly, and also helps it to 'draw' better. | [
"Smoking is a brand of rolling papers, manufactured by Miquel y Costas in Barcelona, Spain. According to their website, they were one of the earliest factories to produce rolling papers. Smoking offers different color packages to differentiate the weights or materials of the paper inside.\n",
"There is also a non... |
how did telephones work in the early 1900s? | Do you mean the decade the 1900s or the century the 1900s?
If you're talking about the old timey box on the wall with a crank telephones, The crank is a generator that rings a bell for the operator, you tell the operator who you want to talk to, and the operator then plugs your line into either the line you want to call, or a line to another telephone exchange, closer to the person you want to call.
If you're talking about the rotary dial telephones, there were automatic relays triggered by the number of pulses generated by the dial as it rotates. | [
"The first telephone was installed in 1885 by H.V. Dalling, a homemade telephone whose wires ran between his home and shop. The Bell Telephone Company later opened a small telephone exchange in his store.\n",
"Telephone and telegraph wires were run into the valley by private companies in the 1890s; by 1899 it was... |
how/why do boogers form and why can't i feel them forming? | Mucus is excreted into the nose by a few types of cells on the inner surface of it. It's purpose is to trap pathogens, dust, or other particles in order to prevent them from entering your respiratory system. You can't feel it form because it happens so slowly and gradually that it never causes any nerve cells to fire, much like your hair growing | [
"When pus forms, the pressure increases, with increasing pain, until it spontaneously drains and relieves the pain. When pus drains into the mouth, a bad taste and smell are perceived. Usually drainage occurs via the periodontal pocket, or else the infection may spread as a cellulitis or a purulent odontogenic infe... |
how do electric fences cause discomfort if the person or animal touching the fence is essentially a load resistor in parallel with a short? | The fence isn't a short. The entire fence is energized to very very high voltage. The fence completes a circuit through you to the ground because you offer less resistance than the air does.
| [
"Most modern fences emit pulses of high voltage at a given interval of time, and don't take into account whether there is an animal or person touching the conductive wires, except for the voltage multiplier based electric fence charger that stores high voltage potential and dumps its charges as soon as a conductive... |
If I were traveling at near the speed of light (enough to significantly slow time), would I be able to "think" normally? Would I be able to tell that time is slowing down? | As long as you were moving at a constant velocity, then nothing would appear "strange" to you. A key point of [special relativity](_URL_2_) is that the laws of physics work the same in any (i.e. non-accelerating) inertial frame of reference. So yes, if you have a spaceship that is moving *relative* to a planet, then the clock on the spaceship would tick more slowly than a clock on the planet due to [time dilation](_URL_3_). But for the people on the spaceship, nothing would change, they would perceive time as passing normally.
**edit:** Even though it's a bit late, I hope this follow-up can clear up some of the questions that have come up since my initial reply:
One of the consequences of the fact that the speed of light must be equal in all frames of reference is that the very notion of [simultaneity is relative](_URL_0_). In other words the idea that two distant events happen at the "same time" is not an absolute, but depends on our frame of reference. This is the key to understanding one of the apparent paradoxes of physics, namely the so-called [twin paradox](_URL_1_). In the most general terms, the "paradox" is that if you have two objects say A and B, which are moving relative to each other, then from the perspective of an observer on A, it is B that is moving, and hence time on B should run slower due to [time dilation](_URL_3_), but by the same token for an observer on B, it is the time on A that is moving more slowly. The fact that both perspectives are equally valid physically goes goes to the heart of special relativity and to the idea that there are no "privileged frames of reference."
Let's go back to the classical example of a person leaving the Earth on a spaceship and making a roundtrip and to the question of who would be older, a person on the ship or a person left on Earth. If the spacecraft is moving close to the speed of light, for an observer on Earth events on the spaceship would be unfolding in "slow motion" due to time dilation while life on Earth would continue at a normal pace. On the other hand, for a person on the spacecraft, it would appear as though things on on the ship would unravel at a normal pace, while it would be events on Earth that were happening more slowly! The resolution to this apparent contradiction is that once again, simultaneity is relative. It is not until the traveler would switch reference frames first by changing direction to return back to Earth and then again when stopping that a person on the spacecraft and a "stationary" observer on Earth could agree on the time. In that case they would find that it was the person on the spacecraft that would actually be younger than the one on Earth. Switching reference frames effectively creates discrete jumps in the apparent time. | [
"There's no way you can visualize the speed. There's nothing you can see to see how fast you're going. You have no depth perception. If you're in a car driving down the road and you close your eyes, you have no idea what your speed is. It's the same thing if you're free falling from space. There are no signposts. Y... |
Were any of the German soldiers who slept with sexual slaves in government brothels prosecuted after WW2? | These questions are rather difficult to answer altogether since while there is literature on the subject, mostly published since the mid-2000s forward, it still is a fairly under-researched area.
Starting with the post-war prosecution, there is to my knowledge no case that deals with the brothels, either them being set-up or people visiting them. If you look e.g. at the [list of West-German post war trials](_URL_5_) by offense, you'll notice only one trial dealing specifically with a sexual crime: [Case No. 386](_URL_1_) dealing with "Illicit sexual relations with dependants" where three guards from the Labor Camp Schloss Kaltenstein in Vaihingen/Enz were indicted fro, among other things, rape of female prisoners, and subsequently two of the three were sentenced to six and a half years in prison.
The list of [East German trials](_URL_3_) has no explicit references to sexual crimes at all. Also, a search in the Bundesarchiv's files on persecution of acts committed during the war, I could not find any references to brothels.
Another problem is that for a lot of countries, e.g. Yugoslavia, systematic empiric research and analysis on post-war trials is still missing. Also, a list of trials from the Soviet Union is published but I do not have access to that.
However, I did find a couple of references in the literature to post-war investigations that deal with this subject matter specifically. Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen makes reference to Soviet proceedings in her PhD thesis [Victims, Heroes, Survivors. Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front during World War II](_URL_2_), which I also used to discuss a related question at length [here](_URL_0_).
Gertjejanssen in her conclusion makes clear thought that
> Another form of discrimination is the long-standing and complete disregard of the problem or persons involved. After the war the West German government did not recognize women who were forced into prostitution, and to this day has taken no responsibility for its actions during the war. Likewise, the Soviet or Russian government has not acknowledged the mass rapes that their soldiers and officers committed. As Brownmiller wisely points out, at least there were trials against the Axis powers after World War II where many sexual crimes were made public, **even though no rapes were prosecuted.** [Emphasis mine, CSI] Still, there were never any proceedings against the Allied powers who also committed rape. As mentioned in Chapter One, the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities decided to delete any historical references to sexual violence and armed conflict in its Report of the Sub- Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. The omission of sexual violence came about in part because former German soldiers complained to their government, which subsequently filed a protest with the U.N. sub-commission. Publication and a greater national and international awareness of such historical information is essential.
To grasp why both the German government as well as the international opinion settled on disregarding sexual crimes that occurred during the Second World War, whether it was the violence exacted by their own soldiers or by the Wehrmacht, it is important to take into account the crucial post-war discourse in the immediate period after the war that focused on policing female sexuality during the war and during occupation rather than policing male sexuality.
Birgit Beck in her 2004 book *Wehrmacht und sexuelle Gewalt. Sexualverbrechen vor deutschen Militärgerichten 1939-1945* [Wehrmacht and sexual violence. Sexual crimes in front of German Military Courts 1939-1945] researched how German military courts in WWII dealt with sexual violence committed by Wehrmacht soldiers. Not only does she emphasize that the number of cases was comparatively miniscule but also that the crimes for which the members of the Wehrmacht and other formations were tried was not sexual violence but mostly "damaging the Wehrmacht's reputation" and spreading STDs. Gertjejanssen supports this by writing:
> Although one might guess that one of the main reasons for the German military to establish official brothels would be to control rape, as we will see in detail in Chapter Six, the Germans were not very anxious with the problem of rape, despite its prevalence. This is substantiated by the lack of German documentation and by the large numbers of witnesses who described rapes, together indicating the Germans' complete lack of concern over how much their soldiers raped. Primarily, the little concern there was seems to have been linked to Germany’s image, although there are a few cases where the “defilement of the races” is stated as a reason. However, there are still many more examples of brutal rape than there are documents discussing the needed cessation of rape. Documents linking the establishment of official military brothels and the prevention of rape seem, at this point, to be almost nonexistent.
But Beck makes another important observation in her conclusion. Referencing Ruth Seifert and her military sociology, she points out how in terms of individual practice as well as propaganda, the female body becomes a symbol for military defeat and subjugation – the taking and rape of women a sociological practice in war that signifies utter defeat and so on. This is important in as far as in a post-war context, social processes of negotiating the memory and meaning of defeat and occupation often were dealt with indirectly over policing the behavior of women during occupation.
In France for example, sleeping with the Germans, whether in a brothel or not and whether voluntarily or not, was condemned as *collaboration horizontale* and the humiliation of women known to have slept with the Germans turned [into a public spectacle](_URL_4_).
A similar trend did also take hold in other former occupied countries as well as in Germany itself, though there it more dealt with the sexual relations between German women and the Allies. "Has the German woman failed?" the German magazine *Der Spiegel* titled in 1948 with reference to German women beginning relationships with Allied soldiers. The sexual fraternization of German women with Allied soldiers became in the latter half of the 1940s a powerful metaphor in the public discourse for the decay of the German nation and the their treason of German men. Male sexuality resp. the rapes and sexual violence exacted by German men during the war was entirely ignored in this debate.
The situation in the Soviet Union was similar. As per Gertjejanssen:
> This kind of suffering was not discussed in the Soviet public realm. In the official Soviet language of World War II, women were praised for their equal contribution to the war and to the economy: “Soviet woman has proved that she has passed the examination with honour. At the front and in the hinterland, side by side with men, and shoulder to shoulder, equal with them, she helps to forge victory over the enemy.” As Mary Buckley points out, “during the war years it was suggested that Soviet superwomen could do anything” and they did. They fought alongside men, worked in mines, fought with the partisans, worked hard labor in factories, and harvested the crops. Similar to the silence that followed the “shame of 1941," there was no room for any specific suffering Soviet Jews endured, and within Soviet ideology there was no room for any kind of specific suffering that women endured. There was only room for their heroic efforts. In addition, within most eastern European cultures there were not many cultural or psychological mechanisms that would allow for discussion, public or even private, of the sexual violation of so many women. Sexual crimes that had been directed toward men were also stifled. Furthermore, the mass rapes committed by the Red Army of Slavic, Baltic, and other east European women and girls were not recognized publicly – neither by the perpetrators, nor by the victims.
So, to sum up:
Neither those responsible for setting up this system of sexual slavery nor those soldiers making use of it were prosecuted due to specific narratives and discourses after the war that focused on policing female sexuality rather than male sexuality. One could find out at least a selection names of those who visited through meticulous research but the list of "customers" is in the thousands if not hundred thousands making this a very laborious task. Revenge killings I have not come across in the relevant literature. That is not to say that they didn't happen but given the post-war climate surrounding this topic, it is likely that happened rarely or not at all.
Sources aside those mentioned:
*Miriam Gebhard: *Als die Soldaten kamen. Die Vergewaltigung deutscher Frauen am Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs.*
* Regina Mühlhäuser: *Eroberungen: Sexuelle Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion 1941-1945*
* Insa Meinen: *Wehrmacht und Prostitution im besetzten Frankreich.* | [
"The women forced into these brothels came mainly from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, except for Auschwitz, which employed its own prisoners. In combination with the German military brothels in World War II, it is estimated that at least 34,140 female inmates were forced into sexual slavery during the Third Re... |
why don't some other company produce sodium thiopental if others refuse to provide it for executions? | Why can't they just fire up ol sparky. | [
"A controversy happened in 2011 and 2012 when state officials imported sodium thiopental on two occasions from suppliers based in India and Switzerland. The furnishers said they discovered only after delivering the drugs that these would be used in judicial executions, prompting them to demand the return of the che... |
How did the UK go from running a globe-spanning empire controlling 1/4th the world to its current level of power, where fielding a military force to retake the Falkland islands was a major effort? | The reasons for Britain’s decline from the position of pre-eminent global super power are undoubtedly complex and multi-faceted. Here are some of them:
Relative decline in Wealth:
One of the reasons Britain became the hegemon was that Britain innovated the Industrial Revolution, and that led Britain to become the richest nation on earth. Although Britain continued to become richer throughout the 19th century, other nations grew their economies more rapidly and began to catch up.
It is easier to copy than to innovate. Once the institutions, technologies, competencies and skills required for industrialization became understood, other nations could industrialize without having to go through all the painful trial and error, and begin to catch up.
Relative Decline in Power:
After seeing off the French threat in the Napoleonic Wars, Britain had no rival in the ability to project power around the world (Naval power). With a secure Island base, and command of the seas, Britain could control a global empire and protect its interests very inexpensively. No need for a large army. However, as competitor nations grew (Russia and the USA), consolidated from smaller entities (Germany and Italy) or gained technological parity (Japan) the number of potential threats to British Hegemony, and the power of the individual threats increased.
Exhaustion of Manpower and Treasure:
WWI and WWII proved very expensive for Britain in wealth and manpower. Of course, they proved very expensive to many of Britain’s rivals as well. But some competitors (the USA) did not lose anywhere near the same wealth and manpower.
New Technologies:
One advantage Britain had long had in being the global hegemon on the cheap was that the Island position meant that Britain could concentrate on global power projection without having to invest much in defending the homeland. As aircraft and submarine technologies developed, however, Britain became much more vulnerable. From before WWI onward, Britain had to devote more and more resources to the defense of the Island, which left fewer resources for global power projection.
Moral ambivalence:
Through the 19th century Britain developed and adopted a popular narrative of the course of British destiny (Whig History). The national myth became that the history of Britain was a triumphant and inexorable progression towards ever greater freedom, liberty¸ and democracy. This was a popular myth, and it served to set Britain apart from its enemies, which were generally more despotic and tyrannical.
Britain was proud of her credentials in liberty and democracy, and leadership in activities such as outlawing the slave trade and abolishing slavery throughout the Empire. The British were not hypocritical enough to really be able to convince themselves that freedom and democracy were good for the British but not good for the British colonies.
The British could have chosen to try to build pan-Imperial institutions that would make the whole Empire more free and democratic, but they weren't really keen on giving up their own control of their own affairs to share control of the Empire with others. Thus, it became to some degree inevitable that the colonies would become independent. This was increasingly obvious to the British and the colonials from the early 20th century onward, and the debate only really focused on timing and process.
As Britain’s position as global hegemon and super power really depended on the British Empire more than the British Island, it was clear that as the Empire became independent, the hegemony of the Empire would disappear.
| [
"In the first half of the 20th century, the Falklands served an important role in Britain's territorial claims to subantarctic islands and a section of Antarctica. The Falklands governed these territories as the Falkland Islands Dependencies starting in 1908, and retained them until their dissolution in 1985. The F... |
How do we find out if electrons are not elementary? | There have been experiments looking for electron sub-structure, all of which have come up null. This can be used to further constrain a potential electron radius to smaller and smaller values. [This one](_URL_0_) puts it at below 10^-22 meters. Similar things can be done to look for a possible electric dipole moment of the electron, which has also been constrained to be below some ridiculously small value. | [
"An elegant illustration of the uncertainty principle is Heisenberg's thought experiment for locating an electron with an ideal microscope. The position of the electron can be determined to within the resolving power of the microscope, which is given by a formula from classical optics\n",
"This principle of uncer... |
how do we know we aren't seeding life on mars when sending probes there? | Simple answer, we don't, we actually assume at this point in time that this is exactly what we have done.
NASA has already stated numerous times that some of the equipment that was sent was not completely sterile, due to mistakes and errors and that they believe that they could have contaminated the soil.
They believe that the life that they found, was in fact from earth. | [
"Since it is currently unknown whether life forms exist on Mars, the mission could potentially transfer viable organisms resulting in back contamination—the introduction of extraterrestrial organisms into Earth's biosphere. The scientific consensus is that the potential for large-scale effects, either through patho... |
When European missionaries , such as the Portuguese, first landed in Eastern lands, such as Japan, how did they initially communicate and eventually learn the vernacular language to preach there? | /u/TheLegendofNick
In the specific case of Francis Xavier, the first Christian (Catholic) missionary to Japan, language was a significant barrier. Through is travels in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, Francis Xavier knew that language was important, so he sought to learn local languages to varying degrees of success.
In the specific case of Japan, he was fortunate to have run into a Japanese samurai, Anjirō, in Southeast Asia. Anjirō had left his home town in Satsuma following a murder, and he was interested in Christianity from his interactions with Portuguese sailors in East Asia. So he came to Malacca to seek out Francis Xavier, during a period when St. Francis was in the Moluccas. Disappointed, Anjirō was on his way back to Japan when a Portuguese captain persuaded him to turn back to Malacca. They finally met in 1547, leading to Anjirō's conversion to Catholicism when the two traveled to Goa together, at that time the site of the Jesuits' administration in Asia.
Finally, the two traveled back to Japan with three other Jesuit missionaries, arriving in 1549, hosted by Anjirō's family as St. Francis started his missionary work in Japan. By their account, up to 1551 the Europeans were still not fluent in Japanese and had to rely on translated tracts to aid in their preaching, and on translators. Thus, Anjirō played an important role in evangelization as the Jesuits relied on his translation. This was also the time when St. Francis and the Jesuits started to specifically adapt their missionary work to the existant cultures of the countries they work in, rather than the previous approach of *tabula rasa* that more emphasized acculturation to European culture.
One outcome of that translation effort was to use the word *Dainichi* for the Christian *single* God, which they did not realize in Japanese meant the *Vairocana Buddha*. It was only in mid-1551 that they realized this significance, and started to use the word *Deus* instead.
Language was a major obstacle, and one that missionaries took seriously. | [
"The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach Japan and the first to establish direct trade between Japan and Europe, in 1543. During the 16th and 17th century, Portuguese Jesuits had undertaken a great work of Catechism, that ended only with religious persecution in the early Edo period (Tokugawa Shogunate). T... |
why is it when we get angry or upset about something we can "sleep it off" and feel much better about the situation later? | Emotional responses are "faster" and "stronger" than logical responses.
Going to sleep, or any delaying action such as deep breaths, counting to ten etc. is kinda like the tortoise (logic) and the hare(emotion)
| [
"Sleep plays a role in emotion regulation, although stress and worry can also interfere with sleep. Studies have shown that sleep, specifically REM sleep, down-regulates reactivity of the amygdala, a brain structure known to be involved in the processing of emotions, in response to previous emotional experiences. O... |
Napoleonic Sailors Could Not Swim(?) | A combination of practical and cultural factors were at work here, which have been addressed in some earlier responses:
[Is it true that a lot of old-timey sailors couldn't swim?](_URL_0_)
[Sailors ability to swim in the 15th century](_URL_1_)
You are correct that there is no obvious reason why soldiers should be able to swim better than sailors, however, and I would suggest that the river fording activities that you mention very likely involved a combination of wading and swimming behind makeshift rafts or other floating objects. This is surely heavily implied also because troops would need a way of carrying their arms with them in order to engage the enemy once the river had been crossed. | [
"The Revolutionary French Navy made an opposite mistake in promoting seamen without sufficient experience or training, which worked well in the army, but not at sea. The Royal Navy by contrast was well served by many distinguished commanders of middle-class origin, such as Horatio Nelson (son of a parson), Jervis (... |
why do degrees break down into minutes and seconds? | I know about the words, but not about the number 60.
Minutes and seconds are both abbreviations.
Minute used to be Prima Minute "The first small part", second was Seconda Minute "the second small part". (Spellings probably wrong).
Hours and degrees both needed subdividing, and then subdividing again, so the existing terminology was used.
I hope you'll forgive the speculation on the significance of the number 60 in both cases, but I think it's because it has a lot of factors. You can divide 60 by 1,2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15, 20 and 30, and still get an integer, which is handy for designing dials and stuff. By comparison, 100 only divides by 1,2,4,5,10,20,25 and 50. | [
"By spreading 58 seconds over the 360 degrees (rather than the usual 60 seconds), the second hand comes to a complete stop at the 12 numeral for two seconds, giving the illusion that time has stopped. Then, the minute hand advances one step and the second hand starts a new cycle. However, the company stopped making... |
What was medical treatment like for slaves that got sick or injured in North America? | I'll answer based on why I know of U.S. slavery. I'm also going to assume you're speaking more about diseases and conventional medical questions, rather than the injuries that owners actually inflicted on their slaves.
African-American female slaves were often respected healers on plantations. Their approach to healing would have been very different from those of contemporary white doctors, and doctors today. For example, healing was often connected to religious notions of the sacred. In some places, where plantations were virtual islands of civilization, a particular healer might be the only medical authority in the vicinity. There is evidence of some owners relying on local slave healers to treat their own family. In some cases, there was a great amount of distrust between slaves and their masters in terms of healing. Owners might fear that a healer woman had poisoned a herbal remedy. As such, especially by the mid-19th century, the professionalization of medicine gained a responsive audience among some planters, who were more willing to trust a quack with their life than a slave.
Owners' levels of concern with their slave health differed. Some might have been genuinely paternalistic, and tried to take care of their slaves. However, I believe owners were ultimately most interested in healing as a means of maintaining the value of their property, and receiving a return on investment. Consider the fact that slave buyers were extremely careful and conscientious in choosing particular African slaves based on the appearance of their health. A darker-skinned slave was supposed to be a healthier, hardier slave. Moreover, owners were constantly wary of slaves malingering, and might force their slaves to work after recently giving birth, or while ill.
Ultimately, the extent to which slave owners provided medical care to their slaves depended on variables such as its availability, the trust they had in their slaves, their own self-identification as benevolent masters, their fear of losing out on the investment they had placed in a particular slave, and a slave's potential for profitable reproduction. As such, owners did have a pressing interest in keeping slaves healthy (especially after the closure of the Atlantic slave trade, when slaves became increasingly valuable). At the same time, though, an owner might insure a slave so that he wouldn't need to worry so much about taking care of him.
The best source for this topic is Sharla Fett's 2002 book Working Cures. | [
"Medical care was usually provided by fellow slaves or by slaveholders and their families, and only rarely by physicians. Care for sick household members was mostly provided by women. Some slaves possessed medical skills, such as knowledge of herbal remedies and midwifery and often treated both slaves and non-slave... |
When one donates blood, does he/she also pass on the hormones (female to male and vice-versa) to the receiver? What about immunity to diseases? What other things are transferred besides RBC? | When one donates blood, the blood is processed from its raw form to filter out all the parts they need into separate containers. This way, blood transfusions are only RBCs. Platelets transfusions are just platelets. And a number of other useful chemicals and substances can be extracted from the rest. | [
"Universal donor blood, which is both type O and Rh negative, can be given if the recipient's blood group is not known, as may happen in an emergency. Some institutions will only release O+ for male and O- blood for female patients. This serves two purposes. First, it preserves the lower stock of O- blood and secon... |
the political situation in wisconsin | This is a hard one to explain to a five year old and I'm not good at coming up with analogies, but I kept it as simple as possible.
Essentially, Scott Walker's "budget repair bill" does the following:
1. Eliminate collective bargaining rights for most public workers. So while unions still could represent those workers, they would not be able to seek pay increases above those pegged to the Consumer Price Index unless approved by a public referendum.
2. Unions also could not force employees to pay dues and would have to hold annual votes to stay organized.
3. Local police, firefighters and state troopers would retain their collective bargaining rights.
4. Public workers would have to pay half the costs of their pensions and at least 12.6 percent of their health care coverage. That represents an average of 8 percent increase in state employees’ share of pension and health care
This legislation, according to Walker, is necessary to close Wisconsin's $137 million budget gap. There are a number of problems with that argument, though. The unions are not to blame for the deficit, and stripping unionized workers of their collective bargaining rights won't in and of itself save any money. Walker says he needs to strip the unions of their rights to close the gap. But public safety officers' unions, which have members who are more likely to support Republicans and who also tend to have the highest salaries and benefits, are exempt from the new rules. Meanwhile, a series of tax breaks that Walker and the Republican legislature passed just after his inauguration dramatically increased the deficit that Walker now says he's trying to close. And Wisconsin has closed a much larger budget gap in the past without scrapping worker organizing rights.
I'm a student at the University of Wisconsin, and what so many of us students are upset about (in addition to union busting) is the detrimental effect on our education caused by the passage of the bill. In addition to the list above, the bill also cuts $900 million in education, including $250 million to the UW system (-11%) and $125 million to UW Madison alone (-13%). At the moment, we are a research one university that rates highly on academic achievement scales. This is due mostly in part to our excellent staff and professors. The minute you cut wages, benefits and funding, those faculty members have no incentive to stay at UW. The future success of our university is in jeopardy, because it will no longer be able to hold on to high quality staff members.
| [
"Wisconsin's political history encompasses, on the one hand, \"Fighting Bob\" La Follette and the Progressive movement; and on the other, the Republican and anti-Communist Joe McCarthy. From the early 20th century, the Socialist Party of America had a base in Milwaukee. The phenomenon was referred to as \"sewer soc... |
at what point does counterfeit money legally fit the definition of being counterfeit? | America has regulations for this:
_URL_0_
> * Illustration must be less that .75 or more than 1.5, in linear dimension, of the currency
> * Illustration must be one-sided.
> * Destroy or erase anything used in the making of the illustration that contains an image or part of the illustration. | [
"Similarly, in America, Colonial paper currency printed by Benjamin Franklin and others often bore the phrase \"to counterfeit is death\". The theory behind such harsh punishments was that one who had the skills to counterfeit currency was considered a threat to the safety of the State, and had to be eliminated. An... |
why does the us government keep publicly stating that they will be air-striking is? doesn't this give is a heads up and chance for counter plans? | There's not much a group like ISIS can do about air strikes. Their knowledge of them doesn't harm US forces. If it forces them to stay in hiding more, that's a plus. | [
"In June 2019, following President Trump's decision to halt an air strike on Iran planned as a response to an American surveillance drone being downed by Iran, Collins stated that the US could not \"allow Iran to continue to launch this kind of attack\" but warned miscalculations by either side \"could lead to a wa... |
what is aging? | Aging is thought to happen when the ends of DNA (telomeres) become damaged enough to let the important generic information get messed up. These telomeres act like a shield made of garbage, they help protect the more important parts of the strand of DNA by taking the brunt of the damage during cell division. Once the telomeres are gone, the ends of the important bits start to get damaged by mutations and division, eventually causing the cell to stop replicating, and die. | [
"Ageing or aging (see spelling differences) is the process of becoming older. The term refers especially to human beings, many animals, and fungi, whereas for example bacteria, perennial plants and some simple animals are potentially biologically immortal. In the broader sense, ageing can refer to single cells with... |
Looking for book recommendations: England 800-1100 | A few books that you might like include Nicolas Higham's *The Anglo-Saxon World* ~ A good introduction to the Anglo-Saxons.
Robin Fleming's *Britain After Rome* ~ Provides a authoritative account of how Britain transformed after 410 AD
David Hogwarth's *1066: The Year of the Conquest* ~ Places the Battle of Hastings within the context of the whole year. A truly tumultuous year starting with Edward the Confessor's death & ending with the coronation of William The "bastard" Conqueror.
Another book worth checking out would be Marc Morris's *The Norman Conquest* ~ Which looks at How & Why the conquest happened. Hopefully this helped, also you could try contacting /u/bitparity or /u/alriclofgar as they both specialise in Post-Roman Britain | [
"The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors is a handbook about Late Medieval England by British historian Ian Mortimer. It was first published on 2 October 2008 by The Bodley Head, and a later edition with more pages was released on 29 of February 2012. The volume debunks and explains ... |
If a single transistor on a modern cpu stopped working, would we notice? | Yes, that circuit would be inoperable.
To answer the inevitable follow-on question: how in the world do chipmakers get away with having to have a perfect record for chip production?
The answer: they don't. When they create, say, a 6-core CPU, they test every chip extensively. If they find a fault, they shut down that core - they have engineered it to be able to deactivate parts of the chip selectively (like cores, or cache memory) wherever there is redundancy within the chip. They then sell this chip as a 4-core chip.
Yes, it's often true: nearly identical CPUs of a lower grade are _actually_ often irregulars of the higher grade chip. | [
"Other problems associated with the circuit are the low input dynamic range imposed by the small-signal limit; there is high distortion if this limit is exceeded and the transistor ceases to behave like its small-signal model.\n",
"Digital machines first became useful when the MTBF for a switch got above a few hu... |
Where does 'political correctness' originate from? | It's hard to place down the exact lineage of the term in the modern sense down, but most sources on the topic seem to agree that it originates from a Communist leader, though there is disagreement on which specific one - generally, it seems accepted that the phrase first filters into the Western consciousness from the English translation of Mao's Little Red Book, but there are also those who link it with 'correct lineism' of the Soviets. Either way, in these earliest days it is used to signify the importance of thinking thoughts that are, literally 'politically' correct, that is, in terms with the party line.
When the term first enters into English-language use, which happens in the 60s and 70s it is originally used by those in the New Left who fancy themselves revolutionaries in the veins of Che, Mao, etc. This is originally without irony - one of the earliest reported print citations is from a 1970 article by African-American feminist Toni Cade Bambara entitled *The Black Woman* stating that "a man cannot be politically correct and a chauvinist too." However, the unironic use of the term is quickly overtaken by the use of the term amongst leftists as a sort of in-joke at their own expense, to poke fun at themselves and challenge orthodoxy within the movement.
The term doesn't really come into its currently used meaning until it's adopted by the right wing as a pejorative in the early 90s, to denote an excessive effort to defer to the sensibilities of a particular group at the cost of practical concerns. 'Politically incorrect' becomes a term of implicit praise, used by self-aggrandizing politicians and political figures everywhere to show that *they're* not afraid to tell the truth as they see it. However, just as quickly, it's also adopted in much the same manner by the left - Bill Maher's show *Politically Incorrect* hits the airwaves in 1993 - and the term loses value as a marker of political belief.
ETA: I realize that you asked for a conceptual rather than etymological answer, but I don't feel the two are entirely unrelated, especially when the meaning has shifted around so often in a relatively short period of time and it is currently such a loaded term. Trying to trace 'when did people start adjusting their language to be sensitive to minority groups and when did that behavior become an object of ridicule' is a bit broad.
___
Ruth Perry, (1992), “A short history of the term ‘politically correct’ ”, in Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding , by Patricia Aufderheide, 1992
Bernstein, Richard. "IDEAS & TRENDS; The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct." The New York Times 28 Oct. 1990, Education: n. pag. Print.
Cameron, Deborah. Verbal Hygiene: The Politics of Language. London: Routledge, 1995. Print.
And of course, the [wikipedia article](_URL_0_) is never a bad place to look, either :)
| [
"The term political correctness (adjectivally: politically correct; commonly abbreviated PC) is used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society. Since the late 1980s, the term has come to refer to a preference for inclusi... |
why do we sometimes experience tremendous mood shifts based upon music? | It's based on you experiences you have had with these genres. For example, I used to listen to the most annoying alarm clock every morning because it was the only thing loud enough to wake me. One day I was walking through a store and heard a sound with the same frequency going over the PA and immediately felt angry about the question my mom was asking me. When you hear sounds your brain uses your memory to consider what this sound means to you i.e. hearing gunshot would frighten you if you were at the gym. | [
"Listening to music in a mood-congruent state with those who are experiencing negative mood states such as dysphoria, or sadness, can allow for those individuals to be more likely to identify with the music that shares their current mood. This mood-congruency effect can allow for individuals engaging in the listeni... |
Is there something wrong with Bell's inequality? | > Is there something wrong with Bell's inequality?
Not really, no.
> Can't disagree with the math, but it felt like the premise was wrong for same axis, opposite directions.
Can you clarify what you mean by this? I can’t understand your diagrams at all.
> (if it's supposed to be up in vertical, then it would have preference for a certain alignment at 60°, 3/4 of the time)
This is a property of the non-hidden-variables version. In a hidden-variables set-up, each particle either is or is not spin-up along every axis, so probabilities like this don’t come into it.
There are two competing hypotheses:
1. The particles do not have a definite state. At the moment one particle is measured along *any* axis, it has a 50% chance of giving an “up” result, at which point the other is forced into a spin-down state along that axis. If a state is spin-down along one axis, measuring its spin along one of the other two axes will give an “up” result 75% of the time. If a state is spin-up along one axis, measuring its spin along one of the other two axes will give an “up” result 25% of the time.
2. The particles each have a definite, predetermined spin along every axis, and will therefore give a predetermined outcome if measured along any such axis. Each particle’s predetermined spin along every axis is the opposite of the other particle’s, so if you measure along the same axis, you always get opposite results.
Now we test.
Case 1:
You measure the first particle along a randomly chosen axis. The outcomes are
* 1/2 of the time the first measurement is up, regardless of axis. This means the second state is spin-down along that axis.
* 1/3 of the time, the second measurement is along the same axis, and you get down with probability 1.
* 2/3 of the time, the second measurement is along one of the other axes, and you get up with probability 3/4.
So the results are the same in 3/4 of the 2/3 of cases where you measure along a different axis, or 1/2 of all measurements. To confirm, we’ve noted that they are different in the 1/3 of situations where you measure along the same axis, and in 1/4 of the other 2/3 of cases where you measure along different axes, so the probability of them being different is (1/3) + (2/3)(1/4) = 1/2, as expected.
Case 2:
There are two possibilities for the hidden-variable scenario:
1. One particle is predetermined to be spin-up along all three axes while the other is spin-down along all three axes.
2. One particle is predetermined to to be spin-up along two axes and spin-down along the third, while the other is spin-down along two axes and spin-up along the third.
Recall that in this case, there is no need to worry about the probability of any particular measurement giving spin-up or spin-down, because the results are fixed. The outcomes are
1. If one particle is spin-up along all three axes while the other is spin-down along all three axes, then you get one “up” result and one “down” result regardless of how the measurement axes are chosen. In this case, they differ with probability 1.
2. The measurements are independent. The possible outcomes are:
* (2/3)(1/3) = 2/9 chance to have both “up”
* (1/3)(2/3) = 2/9 chance to have both “down”
* (1/3)(1/3) = 1/9 chance to have the first “down” and the second “up”
* (2/3)(2/3) = 4/9 chance to have the first “up” and the second “down”
So in this case, they differ in 5/9 cases and agree in 4/9 cases.
Conclusion:
Regardless of the mechanism involved, if the spins of the two particles along each axis are predetermined in a way that guarantees they give opposite results when measured along the same axis, *at least* 5/9 of the outcomes should be different between the two. If the spins of the two particles along each axis are not predetermined, but are instead given by probabilities as used in standard quantum mechanics, then only *half* of the outcomes should be different between the two.
When checked experimentally, we find that the two outcomes differ approximately 1/2 of the time. | [
"Some people continue to believe that agreement with Bell's inequalities might yet be saved. They argue that in the future much more precise experiments could reveal that one of the known loopholes, for example the so-called \"fair sampling loophole\", had been biasing the interpretations. Most mainstream physicist... |
what causes sad (seasonal affective disorder) and what helps? | Though not definite, some think SAD is a caused by a lack of sunlight during the winter months. People have come to this conclusion since countries that are further North are more likely to report higher rates of depression during the darker months.
Melatonin is a hormone that our bodies produce. It is important in our wake-sleep cycle, making us drowsy. Light inhibits the production of Melatonin. So, during the winter months and especially the further North (or South in the Southern Hemisphere), we are exposed to less light and thus increasing the production of Melatonin.
Blue light (wavelengths between 460-480 nm) has the effect of halting production of the hormone. To help mitigate SAD, one can use light therapy. This is pretty much a box with a bulb that produces the necessary wavelengths that one stares at for a period of time with the goal of impeding the production of Melatonin. One can also force themselves outside more often, especially on sunny days, in an effort to get as much light as possible (this is probably very difficult for extreme northern and/or cloudy areas). Exercise is also an option.
_URL_0_
_URL_1_ | [
"Seasonal affective disorder is hypothesized to be caused by the diminishing of the exposure to environmental light which can lead to changes in levels of the neurotransmitter chemical serotonin. Diminishing active serotonin levels increases depressive symptoms. There are currently a few treatment therapies in orde... |
How did HIV cure cancer in the 7-year old girl? | They used a disabled form of HIV (one that cannot give you the AIDS, I'm assuming they removed the viral genes), and modified it by adding a specific gene that produces the "chimeric antigen receptor". This receptor gets expressed in the cells infected with the modified HIV, and is displayed on the surface of those T cells. With this receptor, the T cells are able to attach to the cancerous B cells (which have a protein that is recognized by the chimeric antigen receptor) and then they can destroy them.
Edit: I should add that the T cells become altered, because genes carried by HIV can be integrated in the host cell (via a viral enzyme known as Integrase). So once infected by the modified HIV, the T cells will now have the chimeric antigen receptor gene integrated in the chromosome of those infected T cells. | [
"BULLET::::- 3 March – American scientists report that they have cured HIV in an infant by giving the child a course of antiretroviral drugs very early in its life. The previously HIV-positive child has reportedly exhibited no HIV symptoms since its treatment, despite having no further medication for a year.\n",
... |
how can people in tough financial situations can be living in hotels? | It could be that their finances are in bad shape because they make poor decisions like that. | [
"The main purpose of this agreement is that the investors of some hotels lack the skill and knowledge of operating them. They are mere businessman with good financial status. They lack experience or expertise in such field. Therefore, they need the assistance of such management companies who can get the output of t... |
I've seen world WW2 posters with the message "loose lips sink ships" implying that there were axis spies in the US spying on american citizens for intel. Were there actually these spies and did these spies cause harm to the allies? | German spies landed in the United States in a (failed) attempt to cause harm to our economy.
Operation *Pastorius* was a plan to land teams of German spies (all of whom had lived in the United States) by submarine off the east coast of the United States in June 1942. The spies were equipped with false birth certificates, Social Security cards, $175,000 in counterfeit money, and dressed in German Navy uniforms so they wouldn't be executed as illegal combatants. They were equipped with bombs and ordered to meet up and attack important American economic targets and cause terror on a two-year mission.
The plan nearly backfired when the first team of four spies that landed on June 12 off New York City was discovered by a Coast Guard patrol after they landed, but the spies slipped away and weren't caught. The second four-man team landed safely in Florida on June 16. Unfortunately, the head of the operation (Dasch) secretly hated the Nazis and betrayed his comrades. The eight spies were arrested; Dasch was sentenced to 30 years in prison, another, Ernst Burger, (the spy he confessed to) received life in prison, and the others were all sentenced to death.
Sources:
*Insidious Foes: The Axis Fifth Column and the American Home Front* p. 131, by Francis MacDonnell
*Shadow Enemies: Hitler's Secret Terrorist Plot Against the United States*, by Alex Abella and Scott Gordon
George John Dasch and the Nazi Saboteurs
_URL_1_
German submarine U-202
_URL_2_
German submarine U-584
_URL_0_ | [
"However, propaganda experts at the time and historians since have argued the main goal of these and similar posters was to actually frighten people into not spreading rumors – or truths – containing bad news that might hurt morale or create tension between groups of Americans, since the FBI (in charge of dealing w... |
why do computer programs sometimes slow down when they're open for long periods of time? | Usually this is because of a memory leak, but there could be other factors.
A memory leak is when the programmer allocates memory to use some sort of data, i.e. they open a file, load an "[object](_URL_0_)", or do anything else where the request memory from the machine.
However it doesn't become a leak unless the programmer fails to close and deallocate that memory after using it. Over time this builds up, and the program has less and less memory to work with.
It becomes like slowly clamping a water hose, the more you bend the hose the more slowly water comes out of it. | [
"A computer may seem to hang when in fact it is simply processing very slowly. This can be caused by too many programs running at once, not enough memory (RAM), or memory fragmentation, slow hardware access (especially to remote devices), slow system APIs, etc. It can also be caused by hidden programs which were in... |
To what extent was North Korea a Soviet satellite state during the Cold War? | A follow up question: can we think of South Korea and Taiwan as American satellite states when they were ruled by military junta? | [
"The opposing regimes aligned themselves with opposing sides in the Cold War. Both sides received recognition as the legitimate government of Korea from the opposing blocs. South Korea became a strongly anti-Communist military dictatorship. North Korea presented itself as a champion of orthodox Communism, distinct ... |
Why only one origin of life? | Because of the massive degree of similarity between every living organism we have found so far, there is virtually no chance that the life we see today originated from multiple ancestors.
"A universal common ancestor is at least 10^2860 times more probable than having multiple ancestors…" "A model with a single common ancestor but allowing for some gene swapping among species was…10^3489 times more probable than the best multi-ancestor model…"
The source for this was [this](_URL_0_) nature paper.
It is entirely possible that there could be multiple origins of life. However, we have not found such life coming from a different origin, as it is extremely unlikely it would be related to life we observe now.
I see no reason why a genesis event would result in life being similar. Even if DNA was still the genetic material of life, the genetic code is fairly arbitrary and there would be no reason why it would have to use the same 20 amino acids we use in the same code. | [
"The origin of life on Earth is not well understood, but it is known to have occurred at least 3.5 billion years ago, during the hadean or archean eons on a primordial Earth that had a substantially different environment than is found at present. These life forms possessed the basic traits of self-replication and i... |
Does separating compost slow down the decomposition of landfill trash? | Garbage doesn't decompose in a landfill as they are compacted nd sealed off from oxygen. It wil be there for thousands of years to come. It will be where future archeologists will be digging to learn about us. In fact we are already king that to learn about past decades. | [
"Composting is a process for converting decomposable organic materials into useful stable products. Therefore, valuable landfill space can be used for other wastes by composting these materials rather than dumping them on landfills. It may however be difficult to control inert and plastics contamination from munici... |
Do insects see other dead insects as warning signs of danger? | I was able to find [this](_URL_0_) and [this](_URL_1_), which say that crushed insects release chemical signals that attract others of their nest. Big caveat: neither of those sites are sourced, and the PETA one clearly has an ulterior motive for saying this. So I'd wait til someone with some expertise in the field weighs in before accepting this as fact. | [
"Ordinary (non-phobic) fear of bees in adults is generally associated with lack of knowledge. The general public is not aware that bees attack in defense of their hive, or when accidentally squashed, and an occasional bee in a field presents no danger. Moreover, the majority of insect stings in the United States ar... |
why do people say 'film' instead of 'movie'? | Why do some people (I do this) refer to 'taping' something when it would be more accurate to say 'recording' these days? Old habits die hard, especially when they've been embedded in our daily vocabularies. The word 'film' has now been around for longer than anyone has been alive, so it's not likely to just disappear. And it's not inherently snobbish in any way, either. | [
"The name \"film\" originates from the fact that photographic film (also called film stock) has historically been the medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion-picture, including \"picture\", \"picture show\", \"moving picture\", \"photoplay\", and \"flick\... |
how do democrats and republicans rationalize billions of dollars in tax breaks every year to oil companies? | Without commenting on the merits of the argument or where I personally stand on this, the argument goes roughly like this:
- Cheap energy is the cornerstone of a healthy economy.
- Provide access to national lands and/or tax reduction for exploration and drilling in the US.
- The more oil we get domestically, the less we have to import from dictatorial sewers like most of the Middle East and Venezuela.
- The less we are dependent upon foreign oil, the more secure our nation will be.
EDIT: Well I'll be hornswoggled. Gilded yet again. Thank ye kind stranger(s).
| [
"BULLET::::- Congress also felt the industry was not paying its fair share of federal taxes. The oil industry's low effective income tax rates were due to the availability of two oil industry tax deductions: the percentage depletion allowance, and the provision which permits companies to expense (deduct fully in th... |
If vellum was so expensive in the Middle Ages, why do medieval books have such large blank margins? | While there are sporadic examples of wide manuscript margins dating back late antiquity, their consistent appearance in manuscript production, and explanation for them, show up in the 11th century.
The answer suggests itself when we look at manuscripts like [this one](_URL_0_) - this is a [compendium of theology by Peter Lombard](_URL_8_) from the mid 12th century with notes from theologians. Another example is [this 12th century Decretal (part of the Roman Church's canon law](_URL_9_) which has been annotated by legal scholars.
The texts with their simple illuminated letter have left a lot of room for [*glossing*](_URL_1_). Glossing can be explanatory notes and elaboration of ideas (*biblical exegesis*), definitions, pointers to other works or quotations from other works. Although glossing is an ancient habit which can be found in the oldest of scrolls and manuscripts, glossing becomes a consistent form from the 11th century onwards, in particular in biblical and legal works which theologians and legal scholars wanted to expand, explain and connect with other works. These scholars were often called [*glossators*](_URL_11_) because of their method of work.
So, historians have tied the formalization of consistently large margins for glossing to the blooming of academic inquiry with the invention of the university in the 11th century (the so-called 'medieval renaissance'). The practice then became standardized with universities controlling large productions of manuscripts for masters and students in Paris, Bologna, Oxford, etc. This practice is then said to have spread with the movement of manuscripts for copying in and out of scriptoria, both secular (scribes) and ecclesiastical (monks). An academic habit became part of the form of manuscript production.
Ironically, by the late 12th century we see these large margins, which were very common at this point, starting to be filled in *at the point of production* by illumination. That illumination includes the famous 'marginalia', famous because of images like the [*fart trumpets*](_URL_10_), [*bag-piping monkeys*](_URL_4_), [*beheading rabbits*](_URL_3_) and [*knights fighting snails*](_URL_6_).
And then with this image [here](_URL_7_) we can see the white space of glossing margins have been formally appropriated to illumination and design (this is 14th c manuscript of the tales of Arthur and Guinevere), yet it retains the formal design idea of white space. We can see in this the inheritance of production methods started for margin glossing which have been taken up in manuscripts which would never be glossed.
And in fact the large margins did not disappear with the advent of printing presses and cheaper production. In fact, a fairly famous [study by Jan Tschichold](_URL_5_) suggested the persistence of large margins into the age of the printing press became mathematically formalized (golden section) and then promoted as 'good design'. Here you can see an example of [large margins and a bishop's glossing in a 16th century book from a printing press](_URL_2_).
Reading about manuscript production:
* Jonathan J. G. Alexander, *Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work* (Yale University Press, 1992)
* Michael Camille, *Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art* (Reaktion Books, 1992)
| [
"Before the invention and adoption of the printing press, almost all books were copied by hand, which made books expensive and comparatively rare. Smaller monasteries usually had only a few dozen books, medium-sized perhaps a few hundred. By the 9th century, larger collections held around 500 volumes and even at th... |
Is it true that in colonial American rum and beer were considered more healthful than water? | well, both were distilled which is what killed the germs that were often found in water. however, knowledge of said germs was not the reason why. so the author, when I read the piece, is inserting modern knowledge to colonial thought (red flag). he also goes over several decades with some sweeping observations. after finding this review _URL_0_
I would say it is more of an interesting read, rather than a good historical text. If you are looking for US history on drink, let me know. I did a lot of research on the topic. | [
"Alcoholic beverages played an important role in the Thirteen Colonies from their early days. For example, the \"Mayflower\" shipped more beer than water when it departed for the New World in 1620. While this may seem strange viewed from the modern context, note that drinking wine and beer at that time was safer th... |
How does E=MC^2 give us time dilation? | Time dilation doesn't fall out of the mass-energy equivalence equation, it's a separate concept within relativity though they share common roots. So you're at least right in noticing that they are mostly unrelated even if it was based on the wrong premise. | [
"BULLET::::- Time dilation: Suppose there is a clock at rest in . If a time interval is measured at the same point in that frame, so that , then the transformations give this interval in by . Conversely, suppose there is a clock at rest in . If an interval is measured at the same point in that frame, so that , then... |
how is energy carried by electric currents? | An incandescent light bulb is pretty similar to a resistor, one gives off the energy from the battery as visible light and heat while the other only gives it off as heat.
The question you asked boils down to, "if I keep all of the factors that affect energy consumption the same, will I consume the same amount of energy?" Which is going to be true, but probably not a satisfying answer. | [
"The movement of electric charge is known as an electric current, the intensity of which is usually measured in amperes. Current can consist of any moving charged particles; most commonly these are electrons, but any charge in motion constitutes a current. Electric current can flow through some things, electrical c... |
What are some informative books, articles, or other resources one could look into regarding 20th Century French Colonialism in North Africa? | I'm currently reading *A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962* by Alistair Horne, and it's just phenomenal. The author has spent decades interviewing people on all sides of the conflict and gives a very detailed look into not only the war, but also the underlying social problems brought about by French Imperialism in Algeria. | [
"BULLET::::- Ernest Mercier, Histoire de l'Afrique septentrionale (Berbérie) depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu'à la conquête française (1830s) (History of North Africa (Barbary Coast) from Earliest Times to the French Conquest (1830s)), vol. 3, Ernest Leroux, Paris, 1891\n",
"Jules Brévié, governor of Frenc... |
why does surface tension cast a shadow? | It’s not the surface tension itself, more that the water bulges due to surface tension in such a way that it refracts the light round the centre of the bulge. Do you see how there are bright fringes around said ‘shadows’? | [
"There is also a problem with the shadow where the faces along the silhouette edge are relatively shallow. In this case, the shadow an object casts on itself will be sharp, revealing its polygonal facets, whereas the usual lighting model will have a gradual change in the lighting along the facet. This leaves a roug... |
When were first lock systems built for water transport? | Look to the early flash locks of [ancient China]( _URL_0_). (Just happened to run across that the other day while looking into the Ohio canal system that opened up exploration to the west.) | [
"The first modern lock was completed in May 1855 by Erastus Corning's St. Mary's Falls Ship Canal Company, and was known as the \"American Lock\". Today, there are four parallel locks on the American side of the river, although only two are in regular use. The Soo Locks were made a part of the Great Lakes Waterway ... |
Why does it seem as though it's more common to get sick when the seasons or weather change? | Many reasons... An important one is that when the weather/temp/humidity changes it can dry out the mucus membranes of your nose and eyes as well as the rest of your skin. Dry skin equals micro-cracks in those tisues which can allow microbial invasion. | [
"A long-standing puzzle has been why outbreaks of the flu occur seasonally rather than uniformly throughout the year. One possible explanation is that, because people are indoors more often during the winter, they are in close contact more often, and this promotes transmission from person to person. Increased trave... |
Why was the War of the Roses not called the First English Civil War? | It was known as The Cousins War. While the English Civil was a war between English *institutions*; the Crown and Parliament, the War of the Roses was a war between an extended family.
More than anything, it's the contrast in scales and impacts of the conflicts. In proportion to the population, as many people died in the Civil War as in WW1. The war also fundamentally changed the political structure of the country in a pretty unique way. These large scale social and political impacts are what justifies it being called the English Civil War. Although recent historians have revised their attitudes to the Wars of the Roses to a more important impact on English society, it has traditionally been seen to have had a minimal effects outside the political elite, with next to no impact on social or political structure, other than the ascendency of the Tudor dynasty. | [
"\"The Wars of the Roses\" is a phrase used to describe the civil wars in England between the Lancastrian and Yorkist dynasties. Some of the events of these wars were dramatised by Shakespeare in the history plays \"Richard II\", \"Henry IV, Part 1\", \"Henry IV, Part 2\", \"Henry V\", \"Henry VI, Part 1\", \"Henry... |
what is the proposed euro-zone banking union about and how will it work? | _URL_0_
It sounds like it's to give banks more power to lobby the government for bail-outs. So it's a bad thing that a few very rich people are trying to get away with so that they can go on staying rich and powerful by continuing to sell toxic investments back to the public through retirement savings plans.
That's all my opinion anyways. | [
"At this time, however, an alternative option became available. In April 1978, the European Council meeting in Copenhagen decided to create a \"zone of monetary stability\" in Europe, and European Economic Community institutions were invited to consider how to create such a zone. At the following Council meeting in... |
how do computers/computer systems deal with daylight savings time? | Most computer systems don't work with timezones at all and prefer to store data in UTC only. Later they just convert time locally using current system settings for display purposes.
When user needs to enter date (like schedule an appointment) computer converts it to UTC and stores in the database (or other storage).
And if you need something more complicated (like overlapped shifts on night of DST change) - then it's just a lot of pain for developers.
Good software don't use "current time" for timing purposes, using system timers instead. | [
"Many computer operating systems include the necessary support for working with all (or almost all) possible local times based on the various time zones. Internally, operating systems typically use UTC as their basic time-keeping standard, while providing services for converting local times to and from UTC, and als... |
the madonna-whore complex | The fundamental is the view that women are either virginal and pure, or unendingly slutty.
The concept goes back a long time. It can easily be traced in modern times to the thought that a woman must be a virgin until marriage, any woman who had sex outside of marriage was obviously for rent. Beyond that it can be traced to Roman times where women were an asset of their husband who could rent then out of he desired, sometimes used to make money.
In present times it is more about the balance that needs to be found between a woman being "too uptight" and so virginy, the Madonna side, or "too easy" and so the white side.
Often portrayed as a no win situation for the women. Typically by people who believe there has to be a magical absolutely correct time to be applied to all relationships.
It also applies further. As we age we expect our sexual partner to have greater experience, someone who does not have this experience is viewed by many as flawed. Simultaneously anyone with too much experience is viewed by many as flawed. Again portrayed as a no win situation, but again this portrayal is strictly by people who believe there is some magical absolutely correct amount of experience.
The correct answer is of course to have the right experience for your intended relationship. Simply because people are different. | [
"According to psychoanalytic literature, the \"Madonna–whore complex\" is said to occur when a male desires sexual encounters only with women whom he sees as degraded (\"whores\") while he cannot desire sexually a respectable woman (\"the Madonna\"). This was first described by Sigmund Freud.\n",
"Another theory ... |
why hasn't the ukrainian military fought back against the russian invasion of crimea? | An excellent analogy posted by /u/CallMeMrKnowItAll in a similar thread:
> If I'm out skinny dipping in a pond in the woods and a Grizzly Bear wanders up and sits its butt down on my boots, I think maybe I'll just walk home barefoot.
>
> I'm Ukraine. Russia is the bear. Crimea is the boots.
_URL_0_
| [
"In 2014, Russia made several military incursions into Ukrainian territory. After the Euromaidan protests and the fall of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, Russian soldiers without insignias took control of strategic positions and infrastructure within the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Russia then annexed Cri... |
legality of war | So, the first notion to dissuade yourself from is that there is international law on when a war is "legal" - there is not. Every country decides for itself whether a war is legal or not and imposes penalties if they feel it is "illegal." And there has not been a single case in the modern international system where such a decision has come down to anything other than international politics. For example, the League of Nations and UN Charter both forbid all offensive wars, but it only takes a quick glance at a history book to see how pointless both of those were/are.
In the US wars are governed by the Constitution, the War Powers Act, and the political reality of whats going on in the US. Under the constitution only Congress can declare a "war" but the President is free to commit troops to combat. Under the War Powers Act the President can only commit troops to combat for between 60-90 days without explicit Congressional approval.
The political reality of the situation is that the President can do whatever he wants, and then after 60 days Congress can exercise a sort of veto power over the President's actions, at which point he has an additional 30 days to remove the troops. But if the President commits troops and Congress takes no action then it is assumed that Congress has tacitly approved of the action and the troops stay. | [
"The law of war refers to the component of international law that regulates the conditions for war (\"jus ad bellum\") and the conduct of warring parties (\"jus in bello\"). Laws of war define sovereignty and nationhood, states and territories, occupation, and other critical terms of international law.\n",
"The l... |
Could King Henry VII of England speak Welsh? | As you mention, Henry VII was born in Wales, and in fact he lived in Pembroke Castle until he was 14 years old. He has regularly been claimed as 'Welsh' by the Welsh themselves, not least because, as Thomas points out, they considered themselves an oppressed people who were in need of an identifiable and credible saviour: "Welsh poets, since Glyndwr, had been prophesying, and from time to time identifying, a 'Welsh redeemer'." Even the decidedly unWelsh Edward IV had been proclaimed as a "royal Welshmen" by one of these poets, Lewis Glyn Cothi, and two centuries later Charles II was acclaimed in much the same way.
So there was a contemporary will to identify Henry as Welsh, and traces of this are still discoverable in even modern historical works. Even quite distinguished Welsh writers certainly have made the claim that Henry spoke the language of the country – Gwyn A Williams has written that he not only spoke Welsh, but spoke English with a discernible Welsh accent. The same claim can be found in Coupland, who claimed that he was "tended by a devoted Welsh nurse from Carmarthen, learning from her to speak Welsh as much as English."
Neither writer gives any source for their claim, however, and S.B. Chrimes, in his biography, says simply that
> the Welshness of Henry Tudor can easily be, and often is, exaggerated... There is no evidence one way or the other that he ever spoke or understood Welsh, even though it is true that he was brought up for the first fourteen years of his life in Wales.
Chrimes adds that Henry was not, in fact, that Welsh:
> His father was only one-third Welsh, and his mother was English... His grandmother Catherine was French and Bavarian.
As you point out, Pembroke Castle was, quite literally, at the heart of what was known as "little England beyond Wales", and this in itself would cast some doubt on the suggestion that Henry would necessarily have heard much Welsh spoken around him during his childhood. Furthermore, identification with Wales and Welshness was especially problematic for him as a Lancastrian claimant to the English throne, since the best known Welshman of the day, Owain Glyndwr, had been a prominent rebel against the Lancastrian king Henry IV.
Whatever the truth about Henry's feelings for Wales, which we cannot now recover, we can say that he never returned to Wales after acceding to the English throne and in fact, as Davies points out, the entire line of Tudor monarchs can be considered unique in that "they were the only dynasty of English sovereigns since the Norman Conquest not to set foot in Wales." In short, and for all the lack of decisive evidence either way, its seems reasonable to assume that Henry VII did not feel Welsh, and was at no pains to stress his Welsh ancestry once he had used his Welsh connections to raise the local levies who helped him win the throne.
**Sources**
SB Chrimes, *Henry VII* (1972)
Reginald Coupland, *Welsh and Scottish Nationalism: A Study* (1954)
John Davies, "Victoria and Victorian Wales", in *Politics and Society in Wales, 1840-1922* (1988)
Elissa Henken, *National Redeemer: Owain Glyndwr in Welsh Tradition* (1996)
JE Thomas, *Social Disorder in Britain* (2011)
Gwyn A. Williams, *The Welsh and Their History* (1982) | [
"In 1485, Henry Tudor, who was of Welsh descent, gained the English throne as King Henry VII, thanks largely to the support of the Welsh who hoped he was the Mab Darogan who would restore Britain to the Brythons. However, this led to the cementing of Wales into the English administrative and legal system under his ... |
Can the human body have too much blood? | In addition to polycythaemia, which is mentioned above, you can also be given too much blood! If you give too much blood [product] via transfusion to someone they can get Transfusion Associated Circulatory Overload (TACO). | [
"Adult humans have roughly 20–30 trillion red blood cells at any given time, constituting approximately 70% of all cells by number. Women have about 4–5 million red blood cells per microliter (cubic millimeter) of blood and men about 5–6 million; people living at high altitudes with low oxygen tension will have mor... |
When freezing saltwater how do you calculate how much salt can be added to a given amount of water for every degree below 0°C? | You have to use what is known as a [phase diagram](_URL_0_) which uses empirical data however this...
> I'm guessing that using saltwater instead of fresh water would keep the freezer's contents frozen longer.
...I can't see what you think the mechanism behind it is.
| [
"In the technical terms of physical chemistry, the minimum freezing point of a water-salt mixture is for 23.31 wt% of salt. Freezing near this concentration is however so slow that the eutectic point of can be reached with about 25 wt% of salt.\n",
"However, there is a limit to how much salt can be dissolved in a... |
looking for an in depth explanation of stocks and their market starting from the basics all the way to the complex. | Sorry, didn't realise the sub. My link to [investopia](_URL_0_) was removed.
A "stock" or a "share" (they're the same thing) is owning a slice of a company. Big companies are spilt into many millions of separate shares, but it varies company to company.
Say your friend wants to set up a lemonade stand. They need $10 to buy the essentials (lemonade, cups and table) but they only have $5. So they come to you and ask if you'd like to start a "business". You'd both put $5 towards it, and you'd both have an equal share. You could consider the lemonade business at this point has 2 shares, one issued to each of you. You now have _equity_, which is ownership of stock. You each have a 50% _equity stake_ in the business. You agree your share of the business entities you both to vote on business decisions (your share comes with _voting rights_) like who should be in charge of day to day decisions at the table.
Lemonade trade may go well and soon you are making $20 profit a day. You may decide to issue profit to the shareholders (this would be called a _dividend_) or you may decide to keep profits in the business in order to expand.
The spot your lemonade business owns is a good one and you have lots of customers. You also have a track record of managing the purchase and sale of lemonade well. So when you go to a meetup of all local lemonade stands, you find that people are quite keen to own your share of the business (this is because it'll give them access to the profits or a decision in how it's run). In fact you find that there are many offers for you share but the best one is $142. Most of this value comes from the fact that if someone owned your share they'd be entitled to a stream of your share of the profit which works out at $10 a day.
You decline their offers for now but realise from week to week that the offers being made for your share go up and down. People tend to be willing to offer less when you've had a quiet week and profits are lower. Likewise when you've had a good week and _especially_ when other lemonade stands are also doing badly, offers seem to go through the roof. This is how the _stock market_ works with respect to shares/equity. In fact most of the people at the market aren't other lemonade stand owners, they're mostly other kids who want to _invest_ their pocket money somewhere that's going to get them a return (they'd like to own a slice of a successful lemonade stand so they receive a share of the profits - this gets a better rate of return than just leaving their money in the piggy bank)
As time goes on you and your friend find that you're not able to serve all the customers that go past because you can't make lemonade fast enough. You see that an automated juicer machine is $500 so you're not sure where you'll get the cash from but it would immediately help if you were able to buy it. So you go the market and find that people would now be willing to pay $200 for your share of the lemonade stand (business is going well) but the total value of your lemonade stand ($400) still isn't enough to buy the equipment. So you ask the market a different question: who would be willing to lend you the $500? Which you would some interest on. You find that you get a lot of offers, because your business is strong and reliable, and people competing with each other to lend you the money means that the best offer you get is from someone willing to ask only 1% interest (you notice lemonade stands that aren't run so well get offered higher interest rates 5% .. even 10% because the lender isn't sure they'll make all the repayments). So you make an agreement with the person lending you $500. As part of the agreement the overall loans is considered as 5 parts of $100 each. Each of these is called _a bond_ and the process of securing the loan via the market is called a _bond issue_. You notice that the values of the bonds tends to vary less from week to week, because after all they're a pretty safe bet, and highly likely to get repaid. Meanwhile buying an actual share in a lemonade stand might sometimes offer better profit returns, but you notice if the lemonade stand closes down that those who own shares get nothing but the bond holders need paying back out of any remaining cash in the piggy bank. So _bonds are safer than equity shares_ but offer lower returns.
You agree that the lender can swap with anyone else on the market who wants to take over lending you the money. This is because the lender is taking some risk lending you $500 and they might want at some point to reduce that to $200 by selling 3 of the bonds to someone else. The actual value of each bond on the market turns out to be $105 because other kids work out that each bond will not only get repaid $100 eventually, but also get the interest in the meantime. The process of people buy and selling who they are lending money to forms the _bond market_.
Over time you come to notice that the other kids at the market are just part of a wider team. The ones you actually see there are just particularly good at judging the right moment to make an exchange - they're called _traders_. But behind them you have kids whose hobby it is just to understand the running of lemonade stands _really well_. These guys are very good at looking at your sales and how well your stand is run and working out if the offers your getting on the market for your share are at the right value or too high or too low. These kids are _equity analysts_ and they sometimes pay a bit of pocket money to other kids who do special _research_ to give them the inside edge on making good decisions.
After a few seasons of lemonade stand trading you find that one of the biggest risks to your business is that the cost of lemons can go up and down quite widely. In fact, at the start of the season when you're deciding how many cups to buy and how many helpers to hire, you don't yet know if there are going to be loads of lemons on the tree (and the price is lower) or if the harvest is going to be bad (and the cost of lemons high). The worst case for you is if you spend a load of money assuming you'll be able to buy cheap lemons all through the season only to find out later that the cost was higher than you thought. In order to plan your lemonade stand better you go to the market and talk to the kids whose dad owns the lemon trees and see if you can some to an arrangement. What you agree on is that while prices of lemons vary of $0.05 to $0.25 from season to season, for this year you'll agree that lemons in August will be sold at $0.15. You haggle this with each other, based on your priorities, and available weather information, but in the end are both happy to lock the price in. On the market this agreement to buy each batch of 100 lemons at $0.15 is called a _futures contract_. Each contract can be bought and sold to other kids on the market. The person buying it becomes entitled to the delivery of lemons in August. You find that as you get closer to August and lemons are actually in short supply that the day to day price for lemons goes up to $0.30 (this is called the _spot_ price). And the value of each futures contract has gone up in value too. This is because it allows you to receive a batch of lemons, which you could immediately resell for $0.30 if you wanted and make a profit. Because the value of the futures contract is derived from the price of the lemons it's called a _derivative_. The main value of these type of derivative is that it let's you know what your lemonade stand costs will be in advance. The kids who owns the lemon trees also benefits because he knows in advance how much he's going to sell his dad's lemons for and that let's him plan to spend his extra pocket money on his new go kart.
Now that you've locked down a pretty solid and reliable business you look for additional way to drive profits. You notice that the weeks when lemonade sales are worst are when there's a bout of rainy weather and you consider if people are likely to buy umbrellas from your stand when they're not buying lemonade and vice versa. You see that one of the risks to your business is buying lots of lemons at a good rate but then being unable to make a profit due to bad weather. So you consider offsetting the risk of your futures contracts in lemons with an option to buy umbrellas in August. You go to the market and make an arrangement with someone that gives you the _option_ to buy umbrellas at $1 each in August. You don't have to make the purchase, you just have the option to, but if you want to then the other person agrees they'll honour the sale. This is called an _options contact_. Because its value is also dependent on the value of umbrellas it's also a type of _derivative_. The process of balancing your lemon futures contracts with an umbrella option contact is called _hedging_.
edit: typos | [
"The efficient market hypothesis posits that stock prices are a function of information and rational expectations, and that newly revealed information about a company's prospects is almost immediately reflected in the current stock price. This would imply that all publicly known information about a company, which o... |
Does anything happen when a super-sonic thing drops below the speed of sound? | > When something goes from sub-sonic to super-sonic, a sonic boom occurs.
That is when it begins, but a sonic boom is a continuing phenomenon. It is always present when the object is traveling faster than the speed of sound. Not just when the object breaks the sound barrier.
When it stops traveling faster than the speed of sound, the sonic boom stops. | [
"A common analogy is the sonic boom of a supersonic aircraft. The sound waves generated by the supersonic body propagate at the speed of sound itself; as such, the waves travel slower than the speeding object and cannot propagate forward from the body, instead forming a shock front. In a similar way, a charged part... |
Do deafblind people still perceive their consciousness as residing in their heads? | It must be noted that some of the past cultures (e.g. some ancient Greeks, most notably Aristotle) used to believe that the seat of intelligence was in the heart.
So it is less than clear that there is an actual perception of location of consciousness as residing in the head, in the sighted hearing individuals, to start with. It would seem that we learn it culturally. And if we were not to cut anyone open and if not for pondering the function of the optic nerve etc, it would seem that on the basis of heart rate changing, people actually tend to believe that the consciousness is located in their chest.
So I wouldn't expect deaf-and-blind individuals to have particularly different perception of the location of the consciousness, simply because they, just like everyone else, learn that it is located in the head. | [
"The condition does not seem to be directly related to sensory loss but is thought to be caused by damage to higher level neurocognitive processes that are involved in integrating sensory information with processes that support spatial or bodily representations (including the somatosensory system). Anosognosia is t... |
Most countries in Europe have a history of long lineages of nobility. How did these noble families originate? | There's no clear-cut answer. Marxists will tell you that in early agricultural societies, the strongest who were tasked with defending the settlement in exchange for food were the first to obtain status and wealth off the fruits of other's labor. Proto-capitalist-aristocracy, if you will.
More recent discussions point to the fact that very early agricultural societies tended to get dominated and become subservient to those societies which did not become sedentary; the non-sedentary dominators then became the aristocracy.
What's certain is that there have always been "haves" and "have-nots" in human society.
What's left of the modern european "Nobility" like to draw elaborate family trees, and generally point to either Charlemagne or an illustrious Roman as the final great ancestor. How accurate these family trees are can only be judged on a case-by-case basis (and the answer is often, "Not Very").
As an example, the Visconti, lords of Milan from the 13th to the 15th century (and active in Lombard communal politics since the 10th century) claim to have been landholders in Massino on the shores of lake Garda since the land was granted to an ancestor in the days of Imperial Rome. Today, although the main Visconti line died out in the 15th century, a cadet branch continues to live in a modest villa near Bologna. I went into more detail [here](_URL_2_), where I also gave some other tidbits on old Italian families.
Another example in the answer linked above are the the Obertenghi, who descend from Boniface, a Bavarian ennobled with significant lands in Northern Italy by Charlemagne. To this day there are Milanese and Emilian (based in the town of Zibellio) branches still in existence, both are active real estate developers in the Emilia-Romagna region.
I also gave a similar answer [here](_URL_1_) in a thread that then completely digressed, and [here](_URL_0_), where I elaborate that Roman descent was also popular among non-dynastic families, especially in the Republic of Venice. Dandolo family, for example, traces their lineage back to the Roman gens Ursia, specifically from Orso Ipato and his son Teodado Ipato, who were Byzantine Military officers when the Northeastern Italian lagoons were a Byzantine protectorate.
The Badoer family of Venice also traces their origins to the Gens Ursia, and in the early tenth century there is indeed record of one Ursus Badovarius applying for a subsidy when raving Maygar hordes devastated his land somewhere near Altino at the edge of the northern lagoon. That area between the mouth of the river Sile in the northern lagoon and the fortified town of Eraclea was one of the primary settlement areas for Byzantine soldiers, so I suppose the claim is realistic, but really we're taking the Badoer on their word here. The examples among Venetian families go on; were the Contarini descended from the Roman Aureli Cotta as they claim? We don't know, the first we hear of them is a jurist in the early ninth century underwriting a will. And the Giustiniani trace their heritage to Emperor Justinian! We have spotty documentation of a Byzantine family called Giustiniani in Istria that arrives in Venice sometime before the eleventh century, but that's it. | [
"In addition to the families mentioned above, a number of noble families originated from outside Belgium, but have since obtained Belgian nationality after residing (sometimes for many generations) in Belgium. Most of these families have come from neighbouring European monarchies (France, the Netherlands, Germany) ... |
does waking up during the night but going back to sleep pretty immediately affect the benefit of sleep for that night? | [](/adsleep)Few and short breaks in sleep, **as long as** they don't interrupt the deep sleep cycles, won't affect you.
In fact, is normal to wake up by yourself, and stay awake a little while at the end of a cycle, it's not mandatory to go back to sleep immediatly, as long as the sleep cycles are respected.
If you need to program a quick "Waking up" in the middle of the night, try to roughly calculate it in multiples of 90 minutes.
If you have to get up at 3 AM, go to sleep 11:45 (15 mins to fall asleep) or 10:15. | [
"Among lifestyle practices, going to sleep and waking up at the same time each day can create a steady pattern which may help to prevent insomnia. Avoidance of vigorous exercise and caffeinated drinks a few hours before going to sleep is recommended, while exercise earlier in the day may be beneficial. Other practi... |
why are djs like calvin harris and david guetta getting billing over the singers in their songs? | Besides producing the music, they usually also write/co-write the songs (though the singer may co-write also); so it usually is their song, they just asked a famous singer to sing it.
Since these DJ's are popular, they negotiate it. It's a simple business move. | [
"In the mid 00s Hook was regularly performing as a DJ, however he was discovered to be playing pre-mixed CD's and only miming the actions of a DJ. He admitted he was only pretending to be a DJ on his Myspace blog, but then removed it due to public backlash.\n",
"After blowing up at the rest of the DJs at RFR, Lil... |
Did the ancients have their own archaeologists/antiquities? What would, say, the Romans have known about the people's who inhabited their empire before them? | It is difficult to say how they would have interpreted their finds, but there were definitely some ancient "antiquarians":
According to various sources, [the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus](_URL_3_) (ca. 6th c. BCE) was an avid collector of antiquities. His daughter, Ennigaldi-Nanna, curated the collection of historical artefacts-- excavations have yielded some of the earliest known artefact tags.
Although they were common some two and a half thousand years beforehand, libraries arguably became "fashionable" with the rise of the cosmopolitan Hellenistic age (after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE). It was a great accomplishment for cities throughout his fractured empire to have vast collections of historical and theological texts, among others. The most famous of these libraries may be [quite familiar to you](_URL_1_). Some of the texts that may have been stored at these libraries would be familiar to historians today, such as the works of Herodotus.
This tradition carried into the Roman period. Although the Romans are often labelled as ruthless conquerors, they also held enormous reverence for cultures older than their own; it would seem that they felt there was a lot to learn about successfully running an empire. This is in part why they were often keen on "escorting" certain deities from a conquered area into their own pantheon: [Juno Regina](_URL_0_), for example, was brought to Rome from Veii after she "allowed" for her city to be taken by the Romans in the 4th c. BCE. They repaid the Etruscan goddess by constructing temples on the Field of Mars and the Aventine Hill.
The interest in the past continued into the Christian period, too. When Constantine came to power, he provided his mother, Helena, with funds to travel to Jerusalem and locate the cross on which Christ was crucified. This is why [Helena is now considered to be the patron saint of archaeologists](_URL_2_).
Finally, please note that this is only an analysis of a tiny slice of the world. I'm sure there are some folks here who specialize in the histories of East Asia, India, South and North America who could provide examples from their areas of specialization as well :) | [
"The culture and monuments of ancient Egypt have left a lasting legacy on the world. The cult of the goddess Isis, for example, became popular in the Roman Empire, as obelisks and other relics were transported back to Rome. The Romans also imported building materials from Egypt to erect Egyptian-style structures. E... |
Would the Battle of Gettysburg have turned out differently if Pickett's Charge had not happened? | We'll never know! But you're free to ask the folks over at /r/HistoricalWhatIf about your question. | [
"Devereux and the 19th Massachusetts played a significant role in the Battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. Confederate forces attempted a massive frontal assault on the Union position known as Pickett's Charge. The attack only managed to breach Union lines in one small place along Cemetery Ridge. The spot is now r... |
Is there a reason why bigger animals tend to have bigger eyes. What advantage is it having eyes in proportion to body size? | Bigger eyes generally mean better visual resolution and better light-gathering abilities. It's basically the same reason that big telescopes are better than small ones. For example, on the reef at dawn and dusk big predators come out to hunt. They have the advantage over small reef fish because their larger eyes allow them to see better in the dim light.
So big animals basically just have bigger eyes because they _can_. You couldn't stick a human sized eye on a mouse, because the poor thing would be about half eyeball. But there are diminishing returns, and eyeball size levels off. Cows are a lot bigger than people, but their eyes aren't all that much bigger. The animal with the largest eye of all, the giant squid, hunts in deep dark water and needs extra-large eyes to see. The much larger blue whale has smaller eyes, due to the fact that it doesn't rely on vision, especially vision in dark water, nearly as much. | [
"The animal's small size is reflected in its food choices. Due to its smaller mouth, body anatomy, and masseter muscle, it tends to concentrate on food items up to 3 cm in diameter, while larger species eat items up to 6 cm in diameter.\n",
"Bird eye size is broadly related to body mass. A study of five orders (p... |
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