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From the 70s to the '83 crash, what did the average working American think of video games as a whole? | Finally, a topic I can actually answer! First things first, I'm not quite sure what "an average working American" would think or know, or even who that might refer to. In lieu of responding to that, then, I'll instead briefly summarize some popular press articles on the subject, presuming that those might stand in for contemporary views on digital games. In particular, I'll look at Time magazine's Jan 1982 cover story on video games and compare it to their 1983 "machine" of the year, the computer.
To give a little bit of background, it's important to remember that video gaming's economic success during the late 70s was both explosive and likely unexpected. While early releases like Pong and consoles like the Magnavox did garner consumer interest, Taito's 1978 title Space Invaders was a smash hit, revitalizing the midway entertainment business and kicking off the "golden age of arcade games." Space Invaders spawned a number of sci-fi themed relatives - such as Atari's own Asteroids - and game cabinets started popping up in shopping malls to pizza parlors. The revenue from these games grew rapidly, rising from $300 million in 1978 to almost $3 billion in 1980.
Home programmable video game consoles - like Atari's VCS or Mattel's Intellevision - were buoyed by the success of arcade games. In particular, Atari's console conversion of Space Invaders drove sales of the VCS, boosting their revenues from around $100 million in 1979 to almost $900 million in 1980. The industry's growth drew a lot of public attention, as mainstream marketing campaigns were launched, arcade cabinets proliferated in public spaces, and pundits tried to figure out whether video games were another fad.
In January of 1982, Time magazine’s cover story claimed that “video games are blitzing the world.” The titular article treats video games with a blend of incredulity and alarm, describing the staggering growth and strangely addictive properties of video games. “The video game craze, more frenzied even than the universal lust for designer jeans or Kalashnikov rifles,” has a “poor reputation across the world,” including “homosexual cruising,” “teenage hooliganism,” and the possibility of “lur[ing] young men into beer houses, where they see burlesque dancers.” Though the article dismisses some these fears as “absurdly exaggerated,” it nevertheless produces a narrative of electronic gadgetry consumed shame-facedly in the dark corners of noisy arcades and pizza parlors. It is described as a domain of “ear-weary males, their backs welted with wifely sarcasm,” an embarrassing hobby that women “view as black holes, soaking up male attention.” Each player interviewed feels the need to either defend their spending habits - “It’s my money; I’ve earned it..there aren’t many fun things in life” - to castigate themselves for their hobby - “it’s like a drug...I’ve tried to wean myself - I wish I had back all the money I’ve spent” - or just to wish for anonymity - “I’d rather you not use my real name...this is my secret place.”
But despite these somewhat worrying evocations of everyday folk being sucked in by simultaneously alluring and bizarre games, the article closes by citing the seemingly unending juggernaut of financial growth for digital game designers. “Mere earthlings,” concludes Time, “must cope as best they can.”
In Time's "machine of the year" announcement, the tone is fairly different. Unlike the nearly mocking tone describing video games, the computer is figured as a serious transformational machine, poised to radically change culture writ large. The computer is “a process, and a widespread recognition by a whole society that this process will change the course of all other processes;” denying this fact is akin to “conclud[ing] that the earth is flat, and the sun circles it every 24 hours.” It will liberate workers from the drudgery of labor at the workplace, enabling families to live in an “electronic cottage, an utopian abode where all members of the family work, learn, and enjoy their leisure in front of the electronic hearth, the computer.” Despite these exciting visions of the future, however, games only have a small place in them:
> This most visible aspect of the computer revolution, the video game, is its least significant. But even if the buzz and clang of the arcades is largely a teen-age fad, doomed to go the way of Rubik's Cube and the Hula Hoop, it is nonetheless a remarkable phenomenon. About 20 corporations are selling some 250 different game cassettes for roughly $2 billion this year. According to some estimates, more than half of all the personal computers bought for home use are devoted mainly to games.
> Computer enthusiasts argue that these games have educational value, by teaching logic, or vocabulary, or something. Some are even used for medical therapy. Probably the most important effect of these games, however, is that they have brought a form of the computer into millions of homes and convinced millions of people that it is both pleasant and easy to operate, what computer buffs call "user friendly." Games, says Philip D. Estridge, head of IBM's personal computer operations, "aid in the discovery process."
By this rhetoric, games themselves have no redeeming value - instead, they function as the electronic “gateway drug,” making developing core computational competencies fun. This conceit becomes a critical way that games advocates make the case for the role of games in a rapidly digitizing workforce.
> No less important than this kind of drill, which some critics compare with the old-fashioned flash cards, is the use of computers to teach children about computers. They like to learn programming, and they are good at it, often better than their teachers, even in the early grades. They treat it as play, a secret skill, unknown among many of their parents. They delight in cracking corporate security and filching financial secrets, inventing new games and playing them on military networks, inserting obscene jokes into other people's programs. In soberer versions that sort of skill will become a necessity in thousands of jobs opening up in the future. Beginning in 1986, Carnegie-Mellon University expects to require all of its students to have their own personal computers. "People are willing to spend a large amount of money to educate their children," says Author Fishman. "So they're all buying computers for Johnny to get a head start (though I have not heard anyone say, `I am buying a computer for Susie')."
In short, video gaming's sudden economic success took many by surprise, and video games were seen as somewhat inscrutable and even a little embarrassing to play. However, they were implicated as part of the "computer revolution," and thus had the potential to draw players into developing their technological skills, preparing them for an increasingly computerized world. | [
"The North American video game crash of 1983 was largely caused by excess inventory of low-quality games and systems. Atari so greatly over-produced the game \"E.T.\" that they were unable to sell them and buried them in a landfill.\n",
"As the video game market became flooded with poor-quality cartridge games cr... |
how do red blood cells know when/where to release its oxygen and how does that oxygen find it's way into a cell rather than staying in the blood stream? | Oxygen combines with the haemoglobin in your red blood cells to make oxyhaemoglobin. It doesn't then "know" when to release, it just isn't very stable and it breaks apart naturally after not very long to make oxygen and haemoglobin again.
Side note: this is actually why carbon monoxide is so bad for you - carboxyhaemoglobin (what is formed when CO bonds to the haemoglobin) is like 300x more stable, so all of your red blood cells get stuck carrying around useless CO and they can't carry nearly enough oxygen.
This is from GCSE biology like, 15 years ago so I might possibly be misremembering or science might have changed its mind about how stuff works. | [
"Oxygen diffuses through membranes and into red blood cells after inhalation into the lungs. They are bound to dioxygen complexes, which are coordination compounds that contain O as a ligand, providing a more efficient oxygen-loading capacity. In blood, the heme group of hemoglobin binds oxygen when it is present, ... |
How did the armed forces in anarchist territories such as Revolutionary Catalonia and the Free Territory work? | It really depended on which Trade Union was in charge. In the CNT, for example, the militias democratically elected leaders, but their authority was temporary. It might be best to think of it like a temporary task force commander who can be replaced after the conclusion of an operation, though even this comparison isn't entirely accurate.
In short, there wasn't any typical signs of military professionalism. Leaders as said were elected, so you had commanders and fighters, more or less. Orders were derived, theoretically, from the Republican Ministry of War but in practice were mostly disregarded. The Unions and local committees more or less directed the militias, though even this was tenuous. They often operated fairly autonomously.
This all eventually ended around 1938 when it became clear that the Republic was losing. Many militias were folded, after much negotiating, into a moderately unified Republican Army though still the militias operated in a fairly autonomous manner regardless. They just paid a little more attention to the directives from higher authority.
Edit: It should be noted that not ALL militias folded into the Republican army, just the majority of them. Some still refused to be part of any hierarchy. | [
"At the start of the Civil War, there were two primary anarchist organizations: Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI). Representing working-class people, they set out to prevent the Nationalists from seizing control while also serving as reforming influences inside Sp... |
Who would be King of Britain if Catholics were allowed? | The likely heir would have been James Francis Edward Stuart. His father was the last Catholic king of the United Kingdom, King James II in England and Ireland and known as James VII in Scotland. He fathered a son, James Francis, who was baptized and raised as a Catholic. This birth sparked fears of the nobles, as England had been Protestant for nearly 150 years by this point and was still deep in its rivalry with Catholic France. James was removed by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 but still tried to reclaim his crowns from exile, leading a serious Jacobite rebellion in 1690. He was succeeded in the throne by his son and law/nephew and his daughter, the dynamic duo of William and Mary. These two died without children, Mary in 1694 and William in 1702. In 1701, afraid of the crown becoming Catholic again, Parliament passed the Act of Settlement, declaring that only Protestant descendants of Sophia of Hanover could become the monarch of the UK. After William's death, James II/VII's second daughter, Anne, became Queen for the next 12 years until she also died without children. This is when the Act of Settlement kicked in, making Sophia's son George I the king, the first Hanover king of the UK. However, James II/VII took over from his (legitimate) childless brother Charles II and Anne took over from her childless sister Mary, so James Francis Edward Stuart should have taken over after William's death in 1702 and become James III/VIII because he was Mary's oldest brother and William had no siblings. So he also should have taken over after Anne's death 12 years later. And yes, baring any revolutions, assassinations, or other unforeseen events, the Catholic descendants would still be the monarchs, although the House of Stuart has been extinct since 1807. There is still a Catholic claimant to the British throne, but it gets really messy to trace a theoretical claim through 300 years of intermarried nobility. | [
"George III agreed to allow Catholicism within the laws of Great Britain. In this period, British laws included various Test Acts to prevent governmental, judicial, and bureaucratic appointments from going to Roman Catholics. Roman Catholics were believed to be agents of the Jacobite Pretenders to the throne, who n... |
Why is fluorine more electronegative than nitrogen? Than bromine? Why is hydrogen so weird? | Electronegativity is how strongly a particular atom attracts electrons.
To understand what that means, you need to know what attracts electrons, and what factors can affect that.
Electron orbitals have very specific shapes in 3 dimensions, and can be thought of as a waveform. These waveforms are most stable when filled with an appropriate number of electrons. The first valence shell is *s* and the first level of the *s* orbital prefers 2 electrons, this makes it most stable. Hydrogen is nothing more than a proton and an electron, but it is very stable when it can fill its valence shell with 2 electrons, hence a high electronegativity and why it is so weird. Helium has 2 protons and 2 electrons (and 2 neutrons, but they don't matter for the moment), so its valence shell is full at 2 electrons, and it does not attract electrons to fill and sort of void, and therefore has a low electronegativity.
Now, we talk about ionic forces.
Electrons are negatively charged, and as such they are attracted to positive charges, such as the nucleus of an atom. The force of ionic attraction is proportional to the charges of the two objects, and inverse of the square of the distance between them. The higher the positive charge of an atomic nucleus, the stronger the force of attraction, and the smaller the distance between those charges, the stronger the force of attraction.
As you move from the left to the right of the periodic table, you have more and more protons, which means an increasing positive charge in the nucleus. This increasing positive charge exerts an increasing force of attraction on the electron orbitals. This causes the **size** of the orbital to **decrease** as you move across the periodic table. This is why the **electronegativity increases going from left to right.**
Now to add another concept.
Valence shells exist in orbitals that have different levels of energy. The fact that energy is discrete (dividable down to quanta) means that the orbitals have discrete levels, or layers. Not only do more layers increase the distance between the nucleus and the electron it is attracting, but those layers are all negatively charged and will act to repel another negatively charged electron.
This is why as you **move down** the periodic table (increasing levels of valence shells), the **electronegativity reduces.**
Now remember that we talked about valence shells being most stable with certain numbers of electrons? The next 'magic number' of valence electrons that make the orbitals stable is 8. Now count over from left to right on the table. Florine has....**7** electrons in its valance shell, just one short. It strongly attracts that last electron not only because it is small and has a large charge in its nucleus, but because gaining another electron makes it have a **more stable** valence structure.
OK, so we've talked about what electronegativity means, and what factors have an affect on it, but why do we care?
We stated that a stable valence shell has 8 electrons. This is why Carbon, with 4 electrons in its valence shell, will make 4 covalent bonds. Covalent bonds, as their name suggests, are when 2 atoms **share** an electron so that **both** atoms can have a stable valence shell. in the case of a covalent bond between atoms that are the same, the electron is shared equally, because the **electronegativity** of each atom is the same. However, if one atom in the covalent bond has a higher electronegativity, the electron is attracted more to that side of the bond. What happens when you're attracted to something? You want to spend more time there. Because of this unequal sharing, the bond becomes **polar**, in that one side of the bond has a slightly negative charge, and one side has a slightly positive charge.
This matters in incredibly significant ways. Water, for example, is a polar molecule. Because of this water is liquid at room temperature, held together by hydrogen bonds (a consequence of polar molecules). DNA is also held together to their complementary strands by hydrogen bonds.
edit: the stability of 8 valence shell electrons are also why the noble gases are very unreactive. They do not need to share electrons to be stable. The low reactivity of this group of elements is why they are called 'noble', as nobility kept to themselves.
| [
"Because fluorine is so much more electronegative than hydrogen, in fluoromethane the carbon will direct hybrid orbitals higher in s character towards the three hydrogens than towards the fluorine. In difluoromethane, there are only two hydrogens so less s character in total is directed towards them and more is dir... |
During US Segregation, were Whites free to use Black facilities without legal penalty? | In his book *The Land Where Blues Began*, folklorist Alan Lomax says he was arrested for shaking hands with Robert Johnson's mother in the 1940s. Alan Lomax was white and Robert Johnson (and his mother) were black. There's also an interview of Alan Lomax collected by the Association for Cultural Equity that mentions his arrest: _URL_0_.
I believe Alan Lomax was also threatened with arrest because he called a black man 'Mr.' instead of 'boy' but I cannot find the source for that. Perhaps some good redditor will know more than I do.
Whites were expected to follow the rules of segregation and faced arrest if they did not. | [
"Prisoners were compelled to work during the day, and the profit of their labor helped to support the prison. Prisoners were segregated by offense; additionally they were issued clothing that identified their crime. The traditional American prison uniform, consisting of horizontal black and white stripes, originate... |
Pre-modern Political Parties | The Greens and Blues weren't really political parties, although they evolved a political dimension. They began as the Byzantine equivalent of English soccer hooligans, but due to the importance of guanxi (there is no better term for it) in the ancient world, every organization had a political and social dimension. However, there was no ideological basis.
The Optimates and the Populares in the late Republic were really the exact opposite. The were broad ideological frameworks into which individual politicians could more or less be grouped. However, they had no organizational component, as factional politics in the Republic were more or less personal. | [
"The first modern political parties were liberals, organized by the middle class in the 19th century to protect them against the aristocracy. They were major political parties in that century, but declined in the twentieth century as first the working class came to support socialist parties and economic and social ... |
why must class action lawsuit commercials have to stress "i'm a non-attorney spokes person" | Giving legal advice without a license is a crime, and paying people to speak for you without disclosing it is a violation of legal ethics. | [
"Advertising by lawyers is commercial speech protected by the First Amendment. The First Amendment allows states to ban commercial speech that is false or misleading. If the speech is not false or misleading, then a state may only regulate or ban the speech if it asserts a substantial interest in support of its reg... |
What was day to day life like for European sailors en route to America around 1500? | Check out some of my old posts on ships of that exact period:
#### Portuguese ships questions
* [Crew to a 15th century caravel](_URL_20_)
* [How did they steer (cog) ships before the steering wheel?](_URL_16_)
* [Traveling to India in early 16th century by Carreira de India](_URL_5_)
* [How did convoy of ships stay together?](_URL_0_)
* [How did boats communicate to each other within their respective fleet during the age of exploration?](_URL_12_)
* [Repair times of Portuguese early ships](_URL_15_)
* [Where did sailors get fresh water from back in the day?](_URL_7_)
* [Did sailors fish on ships in time of Columbus?](_URL_22_)
* [When sailors during the age of exploration went to foreign ports, how did they buy stuff personally? Did they have time off the ship to shop and buy stuff from merchants and if so, with what kind of money?](_URL_10_)
* [What sort of music (if any) would have been common aboard 16th century sailing vessels?](_URL_23_)
* [I’m a sailor in the 16th century crossing the Atlantic. What would my diet consist of and what would I do to combat scurvy?](_URL_18_)
* [Meal of Portuguese sailors](_URL_14_)
* [What would happen when a Spanish treasure galleon would pull into port carrying a hold full of gold? And did any Spaniards ever try to rob it before it was secured?](_URL_11_)
* [Why did the galleons and carracks of the 15th-18th centuries have such dramatically sloping decks?](_URL_21_)
* [Are the triangular sails on the Caravel ship better than the more common square sails? If so why?](_URL_2_)
* [Naval tactics change from 15th to 17th century](_URL_3_)
* [Portuguese artillery Doctrine in 16th Century, in Africa, naval](_URL_6_)
* [What tactics did galleys use to combat sailing ships?](_URL_17_)
* [Were used sailing vessels commonly available in port cities in the 14th and 15th century?](_URL_1_)
* [Boarding a 17th-century vessel](_URL_9_)
* [Medieval and Early Modern ship repairs? With images](_URL_13_)
* [How long did it take for forecastles on ships to fade away?](_URL_8_)
* [Did Ancient mariners - rowers, deck hands, etc - protect themselves from the sun in any way, or did they just burn until their body developed as much tan as it could, and then maybe still burn some more?](_URL_19_)
* [Why does Saint Elmo always appear to be associated with sailors and the sea?](_URL_4_)
If you have some follow up questions please feel welcomed to post here :) | [
"The Canadian-American Joshua Slocum was one of the first people to carry out a long-distance sailing voyage for pleasure, circumnavigating the world between 1895 and 1898. Despite opinion that such a voyage was impossible, Slocum rebuilt a derelict sloop \"Spray\" and sailed her single-handed around the world. His... |
how come radio is free with advertisements, but tv has a paid subscription but still has commercial advertisements? | Television was originally free with advertising, before the predominance of cable. In fact, you could hook up an antenna to your TV right now and still get the network broadcasts and local PBS stations for free. (Probably some Spanish language channels, too) | [
"In the United States, commercial radio stations make most of their revenue by selling airtime to be used for running radio advertisements. These advertisements are the result of a business or a service providing a valuable consideration, usually money, in exchange for the station airing their commercial or mention... |
ELI4: "curled up" dimensions? | Imagine that you lived on a cylinder, and you could move up and down along the cylinder, or around it. Then imagine that the radius of the cylinder gets smaller and smaller, until you don't even notice that it's curved anymore, all you notice is the ability to move up and down along the length and it just seems one dimensional. Only really small things would still notice that that extra dimension is there.
Also touched on [here](_URL_0_). | [
"In 1926, Oskar Klein gave Kaluza's classical five-dimensional theory a quantum interpretation, to accord with the then-recent discoveries of Heisenberg and Schrödinger. Klein introduced the hypothesis that the fifth dimension was curled up and microscopic, to explain the cylinder condition. Klein suggested that th... |
do bald people wash their heads with shampoo or body wash? | I wash my head with a special shampoo to reduce the excess of brightness produced by my sweat. Sounds funny but it's true. | [
"Proponents of \"no poo\" claim that there is no medical reason for humans to wash their hair with synthetic shampoos, and that washing practices are determined by cultural norms and individual preferences, with some people washing daily, some fortnightly, and some not at all. From a clinical point of view, \"the m... |
why would anyone get a credit card with an annual fee when so many cards have no annual fee? | it depends if the "value added bonus" you get for the fee is worth the added fee.
for example many fee credit cards give free travel insurance, or a concierge service.
if you think that that's worth the extra fee, then it's worth it. | [
"Consumers who keep their account in good order by always staying within their credit limit, and always making at least the minimum monthly payment will see interest as the biggest expense from their card provider. Those who are not so careful and regularly surpass their credit limit or are late in making payments ... |
how do cold sores go from lying dormant for weeks or months, to breaking out and spreading, seemingly in a matter of seconds?! | Cold Sores are herpes. Two types, HSV-1 and HSV-2. Type 1 does cold sores, Type 2 usualNo fear though, in the United States, 57.7% of the population has it. This causes cold sores. HSV-2 is usually genital ones, 16.2% in the US have this.
Type 1 is no big deal, just cold sores. Usually given to children by parents kissing them, it transmits through the mouth and doesn't need sex. Type 2 is transmitted mostly through sexual activities.
So they're popping up so fast and feel weird because it's technically a Herpes-simplex | [
"A number of long term sequelae can occur after frostbite. These include transient or permanent changes in sensation, paresthesia, increased sweating, cancers, and bone destruction/arthritis in the area affected.\n",
"Cold sores are the result of the virus reactivating in the body. Once HSV-1 has entered the body... |
how can you hold a sparkler up to your hand and not get burned? | The spark of a sparkler is a very concentrated point of heat, so it dissipates rather more efficiently than larger sources of heat such as a naked flame on a candle (for example). The amount of heat it can put out is relatively smothered by the volume of air around it.
Rest assured, if you touch it or get too close to it, you can still get very readily burned. Always side with caution and don your gloves. | [
"The devices burn at a high temperature (as hot as 1000°C to 1600°C, or 1800°F to 3000°F), depending on the fuel and oxidizer used, more than sufficient to cause severe skin burns or ignite clothing. Safety experts recommend that adults ensure children who handle sparklers are properly warned, supervised and wearin... |
what's preventing the us from just not paying their debt to china? | Something the rest of the posters haven't explained is that our debt to China is mostly just treasury bonds they have bought, which they can trade in for dollars as a set time in the future. It's the same treasury bonds your grandmother may have bought you when you were little. The government offers them for sale to anyone because the government can usually make more off of the borrowed money than it has to pay in the future. China owns a large part of our debt because they bought our treasury bonds, not because we went to them begging for a loan or something.
We pay China back because we want to honor our bond obligations so people keep buying them in the future. Even if we had a "don't pay China" policy, China could just sell the bonds at a slightly reduced rate to another country who would then cash them in. | [
"A significant number of economists and analysts dismiss any and all concerns over foreign holdings of United States government debt denominated in U.S. Dollars, including China's holdings. Critics of the \"excessive\" amount of US debt held by China acknowledge that the \"biggest effect of a broad-scale dump of US... |
how los angeles flourished despite being built in a desert | Short answer: [William Mulholland](_URL_2_).
Long answer: William Mulholland is to the Los Angeles water system what Robert Moses was to NYC's highway and transportation network. Under Mulholland's reign, just about every single nearby river and stream was dammed and diverted for either flood control, water storage, or both - one dam in particular, in fact, [led to his resignation](_URL_3_), though we know now that there was no way he or his contemporaries could have anticipated his failure. Additionally, he recognized that nearby water sources would never be enough and began construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which - as someone else already pointed out - drained Owens Lake dry and nearly drained Mono Lake as well when the aqueduct was expanded in the late '60s. He also conceived of the [Colorado Aqueduct](_URL_0_), though it wasn't built until the '30s. Additionally, there's the [California Aqueduct](_URL_1_), which diverts water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, though most of that water goes toward growing tasty things in the San Joaquin Valley.
Long story short, Los Angeles gets its water from far away rivers and streams and diverts them hundreds of miles to support a metropolitan area of 19 million. | [
"In the 1870s, Los Angeles was still little more than a village of 5,000. By 1900, there were over 100,000 occupants of the city. Several men actively promoted Los Angeles, working to develop it into a great city and to make themselves rich. Angelenos set out to remake their geography to challenge San Francisco wit... |
While the USSR existed, were there any Russian towns that were unaffected by Soviet Russian policies? | There was the story of the [family that didn't know World War II happened](_URL_0_).
There are some places in Siberia that are very isolated and populated with indigenous peoples, that probably are aware of who is in power, but just continue some degree of subsistence living. | [
"In the period between World War I and World War II, conditions in Russia worsened, especially following the Revolution and the Great Famine of 1921. Many Volga Germans sought to leave the USSR, but faced opposition from a government that did not wish to see so large a portion of its population leave. The Russian g... |
life before clocks/alarm clocks. | The roosters crowed on the farm. The sun rose in the east. Our bodies have a pretty strong natural clock. | [
"The primary purpose of a clock is to \"display\" the time. Clocks may also have the facility to make a loud alert signal at a specified time, typically to waken a sleeper at a preset time; they are referred to as \"alarm clocks\". The alarm may start at a low volume and become louder, or have the facility to be sw... |
Since other animals have different nutritional requirements from humans, does meat taste sweet to dogs? | Dogs have the same ability to taste the basic 4 flavor components that we do (salt, sour, sweet, bitter). Their ability to taste might be somewhat diminished in comparison to us because they have only around 2000 taste buds to a human's 9000. Their senses are wired up somewhat analogously to ours so their various taste buds are mapped to the "same" bits of the brain as ours are.
That said we don't understand how conscious sensory experience arises, so it's simply impossible for us to know what feelings a dog's brain gives rise to when it has some sensory experience. So perhaps their 4 different tastes are in turn mapped to different conscious experience to us. Personally I think that's seems unlikely, biology is nothing if parsimonious, and it would be evolutionarily very expensive to swap tastes around when you've already got a working set.
So if I had to make a prediction I'd guess that dogs experience sweet things as sweet in much the same way as we do, although they may not taste things as strongly as we do. If I had to hazard a further guess, given dogs evolutionary history, they probably experience savoury things as very, very rewarding in much the same way that humans experience fatty or sweet things. That is we're both primed to find different tastes give us different neural rewards rather than all tastes which are rewarding being mapped on to "sweet"
It's definitely worth reading Thomas Nagel's 'What is it like to be a bat"
_URL_0_
| [
"Most dogs prefer a meal that is rich in protein normally from animal sources. However, with vegetarian and vegan diets in the United States, this appealing taste is mimicked using plant-based ingredients.\n",
"In his journal, Cook noted, \"For tame Animals they have Hogs, Fowls, and Dogs, the latter of which we ... |
why do some sites require you to enter your age to confirm if you're an adult if it's so easily circumventable? | It's a requirement by law that the website must attempt to discourage underage viewers but the site can't be held responsible for a viewer lying to the site about their age. | [
"The most basic form of age verification is to ask users to input their date of birth on a form. However, this depends on an honor system that assumes the validity of the end user (which can be a minor who fraudulently inserts a valid date that meets the age criteria, rather than their own), and has thus been descr... |
why do some fruits vary in taste such as watermelon and cantaloupe? | Your Red Delicious apple was selected from thousands of varieties of apples to survive the transportation journey from the orchard to the store yet remain ripe and delicious. Many other of the apple varieties would not do this. Some varieties were grown specially to survive an ocean trip on a sailing ship and be delicious on the streets of London.
You are missing truly good tastes if you only shop chain grocery stores. But to obtain a variety of apples is now impossible. Heirloom varieties are being preserved but marketing them in chain groceries will not work.
Melons from the same vine will ripen at different times, especially those grown in gardens and picked individually. As you noticed, melons will peak in flavor and go beyond that quickly. Most popular apples will survive a winter of storage. | [
"Pears, apples, guavas, quince, plums, gooseberries, and oranges and other citrus fruits contain large amounts of pectin, while soft fruits, like cherries, grapes, and strawberries, contain small amounts of pectin.\n",
"Citrus fruits are notable for their fragrance, partly due to flavonoids and limonoids (which i... |
Followup to: What is the distribution of numbers picked at random by people? | There's something in game theory call a beauty contest, where you tell people to pick a number between 1 and 100 and that a prize will be awarded to whomever picks closest to two thirds of the average of all the numbers. If you assume everyone is an idiot and guesses randomly then the average should be about 50 and the winner would guess 33.3. If you assume everyone assumes everyone is an idiot, the average would be 33.3 and you should guess 22.2. But then if you assume that everyone assumes that everyone assumes...etc...equilibrium is reached when everyone guesses 0. | [
"Tables of random numbers have the desired properties no matter how chosen from the table: by row, column, diagonal or irregularly. The first such table was published by L.H.C. Tippett in 1927, and since then a number of other such tables were developed. The first tables were generated through a variety of ways—one... |
what happens to the flooded cars after a major flood? | From what I remember after hurricane Sandy, the cars that were floating around tunnels and underground parking garages are indeed written off by their insurers. However they are also scooped up, cleaned, and somehow find their way to ethically questionable used car lots that attempt to resell them. Usually along with a predatory car loan to people who can't afford it. The cars from Sandy have probably been repossessed and resold several times by now. | [
"After nearly 50,000 cars were flooded and ruined, many people attempted to sell the cars across the country without telling of the car's history. Following the extreme flooding, a mosquito outbreak occurred, though FEMA provided aid to control the problem. Health officials also recommended disinfecting private wel... |
how did it happen that the population of oman upwards of age 25 contains a lot more men than women? | Lots of migrant workers. Oman is a rich country thanks to oil. Lots of people from other countries come to work there and send money back home. It is usually men that do this.
Over 40% of the population are migrants, mostly from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Other gulf countries have a male skewed population for similar reasons. | [
"In 2003, after recovering from a financial meltdown, the unemployment rate for women were 12% in the 15-29 age group. In 2006, women in the age group of 20-29 constituted 40% of the total unemployed population, the figure being roughly around 340,000. The high levels of unemployment for women has attributed to the... |
why does an extremely bright source of light cause the surrounding area to appear dark? | Yes, this is exactly it.
Your pupils expand and contract according to the amount of light you receive. When you see something very bright your pupils contract, making everything darker. | [
"A dark area has limited light sources, making things hard to see. Exposure to alternating light and darkness (night and day) has caused several evolutionary adaptations to darkness. When a vertebrate, like a human, enters a dark area, its pupils dilate, allowing more light to enter the eye and improving night visi... |
how is it possible that the little birds are not all frozen solid right now? | Birds can store a lot of air in their feathers, which insulates them from the cold air. | [
"Despite their ungainly appearance and habit of freezing motionless, they are sure-footed, fast and agile on the ground, and although they seldom fly during daylight hours, they are far from clumsy in the air; flight is rapid and direct on long, broad wings.\n",
"All have, as their name implies, long, stiff tail ... |
why when i'm nervous do i have more bowl movements than normal? | Voiding the bowels when under stress or danger is part of our evolutionary heritage, although the exact reason is unknown. One theory is that it "lightens the load," allowing you to run or fight more effectively. This is unlikely however as the weight difference before and after is negligible. | [
"Ambivalent attitudes that demonstrate weakness are accessed slower than strong attitudes. This leads to a conflict called response competition; the process of slowing down responses because of the difficulty to choose between positive and negative beliefs and feelings. Bottom-up processing shows how greater cognit... |
Why do hard-boiled eggs explode loudly when microwaved? | As others have mentioned, boiling the water in the egg forms steam, which builds to high pressure and explodes the egg. But that raises the question (posed by /u/pavel_lishin ), why *doesn't* this happen when cooking eggs on the stovetop?
It's not about even vs uneven heating, it's about boiling point. The water inside the egg has lots of dissolved molecules in it, so its boiling point is higher than plain water. The water bath can't rise above its boiling point until it all boils away, so the egg can't get hot enough to boil so long as it's underwater.
In a microwave, however, there's no water bath, so the temperatures in the egg can rise much higher.
One consequence of this is that you totally can hard-boil eggs in the microwave, so long as you [put them in a bowl of water](_URL_0_). | [
"Closed containers, such as eggs, can explode when heated in a microwave oven due to the increased pressure from steam. Intact fresh egg yolks outside the shell will also explode, as a result of superheating. Insulating plastic foams of all types generally contain closed air pockets, and are generally not recommend... |
what is a hacker and what differentiates a good hacker from a great one? | It all depends on what you mean by "hacker."
Traditionally a hacker was a person that like to take things apart to figure out how they worked.
Now, when people say hacker, they are usually talking about a cracker. These are the people that test and try to bypass security checkpoints. They are usually divided into the "White Hat" & "Black Hat" categories with a grey area as well.
White Hats are usually the on the good side. These are the people that test and find vulnerabilities and try to improve the securitiy systems to make them even better.
Black Hats are on the opposite side. These are what the media usually refer as the "hackers" though they are really malicious crackers. They attempt to find vulnerabilities to get into protected systems for their own purposes. They may use this to gain access to data or information that they are not intended to have. For example stealing credit card and customer's personal information from businesses.
Things are never always black and white though, so of course there are the gray hats, which fall under both categories depending on the situation on hand. They may use their skills to improve some systems why also taking advantage of other systems. | [
"A security hacker is someone who explores methods for breaching defenses and exploiting weaknesses in a computer system or network. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, such as profit, protest, information gathering, challenge, recreation, or to evaluate system weaknesses to assist in formulating de... |
When do you cauterize a wound vs applying a tourniquet? Assuming the wound is on a limb where either could be applied. | A tourniquet is more often used as a temporary way of stopping a wound bleeding until the damaged vessels can be repaired.
Cauterizing is generally used as a permanent way of sealing off a vessel, for example if something has been amputated. | [
"Urgent interventions, including therapeutic irrigation and wound debridement, are often necessary to clean the area of injury and minimize the risk of infection. Other risks of delayed intervention include long-term complications, such as deep infection, vascular compromise and complete limb loss. After wound irri... |
how much does a cloud weigh and how does it defy gravity for so long? | A cloud is made of many tiny, individual water drops. its total weight is huge, but since each drop is separate, they can all remain floating together, just like dust in a room. | [
"The cloud's mass is about twice that of the Sun, and it measures about half a light-year across. Barnard 68's well-defined edges and other features show that it is on the verge of gravitational collapse followed by becoming a star within the next 200,000 years or so.\n",
"The liquid water density within a cumulu... |
eli: why do dogs eat grass when they're about to throw up? | Dogs cannot digest grass so it irritates the stomach, working as an emetic, and causes them to vomit.
It is similar to humans using activated charcoal. | [
"While it is true that cats and dogs eat grass, it has nothing to do with the weather and is because cats and dogs are not exclusively carnivorous. Some researchers believe that dogs eat grass as an emetic when feeling ill.\n",
"\"As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly\" is an aphorism which a... |
To create artificial gravity in space, why cant the spaceship be rotated at high speeds generating centripetal forces that 'pull' the occupants to the edges? | > why isn't this ever talked of as a possibility?
It is! It's a really common sci-fi trope, for a start. Recently, there was a proposal put to NASA in 2011 for a spacecraft called [Nautilus-X](_URL_0_), which had with a big spinning wheel. I'm sure it's just one design of many over the decades.
Unfortunately, the other non-inertial forces can cause motion sickness, and the whole thing is very expensive and would have to be inflatable (inflatable spacecraft is a technology still in its infancy). | [
"In science fiction, artificial gravity (or cancellation of gravity) or \"paragravity\" is sometimes present in spacecraft that are neither rotating nor accelerating. At present, there is no confirmed technique that can simulate gravity other than actual mass or acceleration. There have been many claims over the ye... |
Have historians figured out how they will process and interpret teets and internet posts? | I don't think any historian today knows, and I don't think the historical community of today will even make the decision. In my view, the decision will be made by archivists who have surprisingly little interest in anticipating the needs and future research interests of historians.
As of roughly the WW2 era, entities like the US government have produced far, *far* more records than people could hope to process effectively. Sure, much of that were redundant records (you don't need to keep 20 copies of the same document, right?) but a lot of it also wasn't. Since about that time, perhaps 5% of what was produced has been saved for future reference. First off, that's a minuscule amount. Second, that proportion has only gotten worse over time, as you can imagined how expansions in government and technology have multiplied the amount of records created (especially vs. the funds invested in archiving, which to put it delicately, haven't kept up).
So who makes the decisions about what's kept and what isn't? Archivists, that's who. There was a time when they were deeply interested in what questions historians asked, and what governed their research questions and methods. That time ended roughly in the 50's. Why? Because historians began radically changing the way they conducted their craft, and rightly so. They underwent the social and later the cultural turn, both of which significantly altered the types of questions they asked and the types of sources they used to answer them. To put it mildly, those changes promised to send recordkeeping off the rails because it became incredibly difficult to figure out what was important and what wasn't. The sheer volume made simply "keeping everything" impossible, and when historians moved in a direction which made discerning important documents from unnecessary ones impossible, archivists took it upon themselves. They became concerned with organizational integrity, provenance, and original order as governing principles, and that is not by any means a criticism. They were tasked with the impossible and performed an act of triage.
I expect the same thing will happen with the internet. It's too much. The task of combing through the internet for every scrap of information associated with, say, the 2016 election, would be impossible for the 2116 historians (barring, perhaps, technology I can't conceive of). I highly doubt most of the information will even be retained that long. If it isn't, the task of discerning what's kept and what isn't will be decided at best by digital archivists and at worst by the corporate stewards of the various platforms on which this information was shared (Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook, etc), who will likely base their decisions on records management compliance standards (most likely legal requirements, if there are any), or things like server capacity. At best, if the decisions rest wholly in the hands of archivists, those people won't care one bit about the hypothetical research interests of historians not yet born.
The fact of the matter is, the internet will constitute a nearly unfathomable glut of information for future historians, who will either be forced to cull useful information from the deluge through yet-undetermined means or else examined previously curated information--this curated information will either be extremely sparse due to the limited means of archivists (unless they are blessed with increased financial and human support) or else be a small recorded fraction of what exists today, selected by non historians using yet-unknown criteria which may or may not have any historical interest in mind.
This is a major reason why historians shy away from claiming they can uncover the 'truth' of the past. In addition to acknowledging the inherent subjectivity of themselves and the creators of historical sources, there's the undeniable fact that the vast majority of the historical record simply has not survived. Some, probably most of it (like the day-to-day thoughts/experiences of anyone who doesn't keep a diary) was never recorded at all, some of the recorded stuff simply didn't survive (everything from overzealous spring cleaning to the burning of the Library of Alexandria), and some of it was selected to be discarded by the recordkeepers for one reason or another. I for one think it's unfortunate how unaware historians are of the gap between theirs and archival professions. They're quick to problematize the archive yet reluctant to fully understand what they're problematizing.
If you want to read up on the divergence of the archival and historical professions, and more about how the historical record is compiled by archivists, check out Blouin and Rosenberg's *Processing the Past*. It's excellent. | [
"Projects like Zotero provide tools for historians to research and analyze the past. But will digital media change the nature of scholarly argument, communication, and publication? In order to encourage experimentation in this arena, American Quarterly in collaboration with the American Studies Crossroads Project a... |
how my dash cam knows there are red light cameras ahead. | All red light cameras must be of public knowledge. So if your dash cam is connected to gps, it has them marked on the “internal map.” My radar detector does the same. | [
"A red light camera (short for red light running camera) is a type of traffic enforcement camera that captures image of vehicle that has entered an intersection in spite of the traffic signal indicating red (during the red phase). By automatically photographing vehicles that run red lights, the photo is evidence th... |
We've advanced a lot in the last 500 years. What were the major changes and improvements in the 500 years before that? | This is actually a quite tricky question. Of course you must specify which culture and types of innovations you are referring to.
For western and European culture there is of course the fact that much of the technology and knowledge of the Romans was practically lost after their decline: cement, elevators, road building etc. This doesn't mean however, that between 1000 and 1500 nothing was invented that wouldn't shape our society today - quite the contrary.
Just a few examples:
The banking system we have today evolved in 14th century Italy (with predecessors in such institutions like the Knights Templar). That's why many terms are still of Italian origin: credit, solvent, brutto, netto, cheque - the word bank itself derives from the *banca*, the bench where the moneylender would sit. You could get credit or receive a sheet of paper to exchange for your money at another place after a trip or so
The idea of self governance through a council - of course people love to refer this to ancient Greek democracy, and that's where the enlightenment derived it from - but the idea that certain urban elites could vote for their own government was practiced in the medieval cities of Europe for centuries, without any ideological base
Architecture experienced a few remarkable changes in the middle ages as well. Think of the changes from the Romanesque style (small windows, sturdy walls) to the Gothic style (large windows, pillars and arches bear the weight) - that's mastery of statics!
Maybe less positive: Gunpowder and the cannon. These didn't revolutionize warfare until the invention of the Arcebuse, but cannons were already used by the English in the 100-Years-War. They proved burdensome in battle, but quite effective in sieges
Universities: teaching the people of high birth and/or high skills in certain fields raised the intellectual level of Europe significantly. They codified ancient Roman law (Bologna, the oldest University and first with a law school) and invented Scholasticism. Although not necessarily a modern school of thought this approach to philosophy and theology - ultimately truth - reintroduced the idea of logic and rational thought
Paper: Although an imported idea from China, the Europeans figured out how to make it themselves with their own resources.
Printing Press: The mother of all media revolutions started when Johannes Gensfleisch (aka Gutenberg) invented a printing press with movable letters. Literacy skyrocketed, When before a manuscript of the bible was worth half a village, a printed version became available even for a wealthy burgher.
I could go on and on - but remember that even if you say the discovery of the Americas started modernity, the Santa Maria was built in the middle ages (I'm not a big fan of strict limits between the eras) | [
"Technological innovations of the final third of the 20th century were significant, but were not as powerful as those of the first two-thirds of the century. Manufacturing productivity growth continued at a somewhat slower rate than in earlier decades, but overall productivity was dragged down by the relative incre... |
What is the earliest usage or mention of "shock troops"? | The general idea of shock troops has been around pretty much forever. When you have a defending force that's dug in and an attacking force, just throwing your standard line infantry against the defenses is rarely effective. So, you need heavier, better trained soldiers that can crack the defensive lines before sending a full infantry assault. This role was preformed by Viking berserkers, heavy cavalry units, and mercenary German Doppelsöldner. In a way, since the very beginning of warfare there have been troops that are better trained by the rest and are sent into battle first, so while they weren't called "shock troops" the concept is fundamental to military theory.
The actual term "shock troops" came about during WWI. After the stalemate of trench warfare, the Germans developed new strategies for assault tactics. Their first dedicated assault battalion was formed in the spring of 1915. These soldiers developed into German units of Stroßtruppen, a word that literally means "shock/impact/push/thrust troops". This was the first major dedicated unit of assault troops and they preformed very well during the war, to the degree that the loose translation of shock troops took on the meaning of encompassing all similar assault troops. After WWI, those assault tactics were expanded on and instead of using large groups of untrained men, armies were reorganized into small, much better trained and equipped units. So shock troops is not used as a term very often anymore because the original concept has become a bit of a standard in modern military theory. | [
"Although the term \"shock troop\" became popular in the 20th century, the concept is not a new one, such as the utilization by Western European armies of the forlorn hope. Presently, the term is rarely used, as the strategic concepts behind it have become standard contemporary military thinking.\n",
"A special s... |
Can you improve your vision? | What you are referring to is called "The Bates Method" and has no scientific evidence to support the claims made. The American Academy of Ophthalmology did a study in 2004 on how effective The Bates Method is and while some people reported that their vision had improved, when tested the patient's vision had not changed.
From the article: "No evidence was found that visual training has any effect on the progression of myopia. No evidence was found that visual training improves visual function for patients with hyperopia or astigmatism. No evidence was found that visual training improves vision lost through disease processes such as age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, or diabetic retinopathy."
[Web-MD Article on 'Natural Vision Correction'](_URL_0_)
[AAO Study](_URL_1_) | [
"The fact that optical powers are approximately additive enables an eye care professional to prescribe corrective lenses as a simple correction to the eye's optical power, rather than doing a detailed analysis of the entire optical system (the eye and the lens). Optical power can also be used to adjust a basic pres... |
what caused the consistent physical attributes amongst different races? | What if I told you there was only one race?
Every difference mentioned is environmental adaptation, Genetic mutation, and survival of the fittest.
Being a redheaded Caucasian with fair skin I can tell you I uptake vitamin D much more redily than other skin types. This is due to the fact that my ancestry is northern European. The Sun there isn't as bright and there's a lot more clouds so I had to get better at taking vitamin D from sunlight
However, I've always been interested why we don't know where RH- people came from. There are zero RH- primates for them to have evolved from.
| [
"The existence of races is a token of change in the human species, and suggests there is some significance in geographical separation. Lawrence noted that racial characteristics were inherited, not caused by the direct effect of, for instance, climate. As an example, he considered the way skin colour was inherited ... |
how can the recent droughts and floods in texas both be caused by climate change? | The key word is change. Not necessarily "drier" or "Wetter." The actual impact to a particular region's climate varies on a lot of factors, and climate change is becoming one of the players there, but it isn't the sole factor. As such, you can see differences in how climate change impacts a region.
For instance, global warming can increase the rate at which water evaporates from a land surface, decreasing the availability of water down through the drainage basin of a river.
On the other hand, it can also increase the evaporation from the ocean, increasing the availability of rainwater for adjacent regions.
But because the Earth isn't 'perfectly shaped' increased availability in one place doesn't necessarily cancel out decreased availability somewhere else.
The primary take-away of climate change is an increase in what we consider 'severe' weather. | [
"Droughts are becoming more frequent and intense in arid and semiarid western North America as temperatures have been rising, advancing the timing and magnitude of spring snow melt floods and reducing river flow volume in summer. Direct effects of climate change include increased heat and water stress, altered crop ... |
Where to find reliable sources of Ancient Roman History, mainly about welfare? (Primary or secondary sources) | Hi,
our [homework policy](_URL_0_) requires some effort on your part:
> If you do some research, come here and be honest about what your assignment is and give us a run down of what your research is showing you so far, you'll find users here being quite amenable to lending a hand and pointing you in the right direction.
I commend you for trying to take a subject which not many people in your class will choose; I'm sure your teacher will be happy reading something different :)
Your question as it stands though is too bare-bones. "*I am having a hard time finding these sources that talk about the subject.*" is a vague statement. Where have you looked? What search terms have you used? Also, what level is this class at?
If you can expand on that, I'll be happy to give you some pointers. Because there *is* lots of information out there, it just may be not in the places you've been looking. | [
"The single most important source on early Roman history is the Roman historian Titus Livius (59 BC – 17 AD), usually called Livy in English literature, who wrote a history known as \"Ab Urbe Condita\" (\"From the Foundation of the City\") covering the entirety of Rome's history from her mythical origins up to his ... |
why women feel embarrassed if seen in their bra and under wear but completely content with a smaller bikini? | This is my opinion of it:
Underwear is usually only seen in intimate settings, with very few people around (so there's more focus on the individual). Bikinis are public clothes, something worn with the intention of being seen, and usually worn where everyone else is also scantily-clad. The intimacy of underwear is why there's embarrassment if someone accidentally sees it (like if her skirt flips up or something). | [
"One feminist viewpoint sees the bikini uniform as objectification of women athletes. US beach volleyball player Gabrielle Reece described the bikini bottoms as uncomfortable with constant \"yanking and fiddling.\" Many female beach volleyball players have suffered injuries by over-straining the abdominal muscles w... |
why do certain trials, like james holmes, take years when they are essentially 100% guilty? | Getting ready for trial takes time. There are numerous activities that need to be performed before either side is ready to argue their case (depositions, evidence gathering, pretrial motions, jury selection, etc.). Each one of these events involves coordination and preparation and it is rare that the prosecutors or defense attorneys are working on just that one single case.
While one of the goals of the justice system is swiftness, the most important goal is fairness. Sometimes that just takes a while.
| [
"The report discussed the long process of criminal trials, concluding that it was due to the large number of cases and slow processes in every part of the criminal courts. A Home Office Research Unit attached to the Committee showed that 5,000 criminal cases a year (almost a quarter of the total number) had to wait... |
Eating Horse meat was made taboo by the Roman Catholic church in the 8th century CE, while this taboo was successfully implemented in almost all of Christian Europe it wasn't in Italy where horse meat is still eaten in great amounts today, why ? | Taken from an earlier answer I had on Horses in Germanic cultures, if you have any follow up questions, please let me know.
___
During the conversion process to Christianity, among the practices that were outlawed or at least very harshly condemned, was the practice of horse consumption. Robin Fleming's Britain After Rome mentions this in the context of Anglo-Saxon England, but it was also present in Scandinavia and on the continent. The relationship between Germanic pagan religious life and horse meat did not escape the notice of Christian authorities. As a part of St. Boniface's mission in Germany, he was instructed by the Papacy to stamp out the practice of horse consumption as a pagan and abominable practice that had no place in Christian society.
So why the vitriol for eating horse meat? Christianity after all isn't quite as well known for dietary restrictions across the board as other religions.
Kristopher Poole makes the argument that horse meat was consumed almost exclusively in pagan sacrifices and this association between paganism and horse meat was too strong for contemporary Christians to look the other way on. He examined the relative levels of horse remains that are believed to have been consumed in England in three time periods. The levels of horse remains in each time period is rare, but much more pronounced in the Early period of Anglo-Saxon England (c500-700), pre-conversion. It then collapses quite dramatically in the middle period (c700-900), and finally concludes with a slight uptick in the Late Anglo-Saxon period (900-1100), however it does not become nearly as well represented it was in the earlier sites. The connection between horse meat and pagan sacrifice is further born out in other contexts as well such as Iceland.
These traditions and movements against hippophagy are reflected in Scandinavia as well. Again the sagas, with all the caveats that need to be kept in mind, are somewhat useful here. The story of the possibly apocryphal Haakon the Good comes to mind. His coronation as king of Norway becomes fraught when he refuses to consume the horse meat that his pagan subjects require of him. One of his subordinates suggests a compromise with biting the meat through a cloth, but no one is satisfied by this arrangement and Haakon is forced to eventually renounce his faith in Christ to be made king. While the saga is a much later invention, it does capture Christian anxiety about participation in horse centered sacrifice quite ably, as well as demonstrating the importance of the horse in the religious life of these people.
Finally there is another aspect where horses are quite well represented in the religious practices of these societies, and that is in burials. While ideas on the afterlife were certainly not uniform, horse interments in burials are quite well represented in the archaeological record as well as in literary accounts.
The famous Sutton Hoo burials contain several burial mounds, both cremations and inhumed bodies, that include horse remains. While it is not possible to identify with certainty why horses were interred with these burials; it is indicative of their prominence in religious life for these people.(Of some interest is that in some cases the horses are deposited along side other much more common food animals such as deer and cattle) This is complimentary to other accounts from the opposite side of the Germanic world in the land of the Rus. The Arab account of Ibn-Fadlan is the most famous example of a "viking funeral" in the surviving accounts and as a part of the funeral two horses are sacrificed, dismembered, and placed in the ship. Horse burials are also well documented in Iceland as well. In an interesting twist on the idea of male association with horses, the Sutton Hoo burials and Ibn fadlan's account are mostly associated with men for example, in Iceland women as well as men, as well as couples, were all found with horses interred, and some graves included choice cuts of horse meat as opposed to just simply horse remains. | [
"In 732 AD, Pope Gregory III began a concerted effort to stop the ritual consumption of horse meat in pagan practice. In some countries, the effects of this prohibition by the Roman Catholic Church have lingered, and horse meat prejudices have progressed from taboos to avoidance to abhorrence. In a study conducted ... |
why is it that if i walking through a neighborhood that the smaller dogs are more likely to chase me than the bigger ones? | Maybe they're just compensating for their small size. | [
"Dogs who locate themselves in high traffic areas realize that, in such places, they often won't need to make any effort to procure food, as pedestrians will simply toss it as they pass by. Malnourished-looking dogs are uncommon. Food is often easy to come by, allowing dogs the luxury of being selective.\n",
"\"I... |
why is it harder to cup water with your non-dominant hand? | Everything is more difficult in your non-dominant hand, you don't have the same level of fine motor control, dexterity and eye-hand coordination. | [
"Splashing others with water has likely been around since humans first discovered that a cupped-hand can be used to cradle water within. As mankind learned to use various natural objects, then tools, the ability to carry and pour/dispense water upon others became more possible. One still used ploy is to simply fill... |
If you were to keep a bunch of cell phones within close proximity and call one of them, why does only that cell phone ring? | That's actually a two-part question. First is the matter of how all these cell phones manage to communicate _at all_ with the base station, without interfering with each other, the second one is how the cell phone identifies itself to the network, so that calls get routed to it correctly. The first part is the hard part. Which is why there are many solutions to the problem, and it's done differently in every cell phone generation (GSM/3G/4G).
The simpler scheme still in use today (through GSM) is [Time-division multiple access](_URL_0_), which basically means chopping up time into time-slots and giving each phone its own time-slot to 'speak' in. The tricky part there is to get them synchronized though.
As for the second part, phones identify their user to the network with a subscriber identity (IMSI) number that's stored on the sim card. Your operator's network does the mapping from phone number to IMSI. (so as a bit of trivia, phones don't automatically 'know' what their phone number is)
| [
"The reason that several cell phones can be used at the same time in the same location is due to the use of frequency hopping. When the user wishes to place a call, the cell phone uses a negotiation process to find unused frequencies among the many that are available within its operational area. This allows users t... |
what is a covered bond? and how do they work? | Covered bonds are bonds that are secured by an underlying pool of assets, known as the cover pool. Investors buy covered bonds and so they have claim on the underlying pool. The underlying pool (typically mortgages or loans, but can also be ships, aircrafts, etc) generate cash flow, and that cash flow is passed on to the covered bond holders. | [
"Covered bonds are debt securities issued by a bank or mortgage institution and collateralised against a pool of assets that, in case of failure of the issuer, can cover claims at any point of time. They are subject to specific legislation to protect bond holders. Unlike asset-backed securities created in securitiz... |
Could a person live normally only by sleeping small periods of time like 15 minutes if done correctly? | I don't know about 15 minute increments specifically, but NASA has done some research into polyphasic sleep that might be interesting to you. The most interesting part is that taking occasional naps can increase working memory.
_URL_0_ | [
"Randy Gardner holds the scientifically documented record for the longest period of time a human being has intentionally gone without sleep not using stimulants of any kind. Gardner stayed awake for 264 hours (11 days), breaking the previous record of 260 hours held by Tom Rounds of Honolulu. LCDR John J. Ross of t... |
would i lose more weight on 1500 calories of healthy food or 1000 calories of junk food? | 1000 on junk food is faster however such a deficiency in calories would be a serious health risk.
> Others say 100 calories of burgers and fries is VERY different from 100 calories of fruits and veggies
This is true, but not in terms of weight loss. They differ in how healthy you'd be. | [
"A commonly asserted \"rule\" for weight gain or loss is based on the assumption that one pound of human fat tissue contains about 3,500 kilocalories (often simply called \"calories\" in the field of nutrition). Thus, eating 500 fewer calories than one needs per day should result in a loss of about a pound per week... |
I'm searching for a book by one of the founding fathers. | It sounds like you are talking about what is now commonly known as "the Jefferson Bible." Jefferson called it *The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.* However, it isn't a book he wrote, in the sense of composing it. Rather, it is an edition of material from the canonical Christian gospels from which Jefferson removed everything he didn't find appealing or credible, such as miracle stories. He literally cut and pasted it together with a knife or razor and glue. He did not publish it, but he did let various friends see it. The Smithsonian has owned it for a long time now. They have [a website about it](_URL_0_) where you can see images of each page.
You may find that you learn more from it about Jefferson than about Jesus. Since it is simply cut and pasted from a published Bible, if you have read the Christian gospels, there isn't anything there that isn't already familiar.
EDIT: Just to be clear, *Jefferson* didn't publish it, but others did starting in the late 19th century. It is readily available in several print editions today if you want a copy. | [
"His father worked for Eastman Kodak in Rochester and was a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He has written books that deal either with the nation's founding, or the principles of America's founders, including \"What Would the Founders Do?\", a book describing how the founding fathers would app... |
is a strong us dollar good or bad for the economy? | Good for imports bad for exports. The US is a net importer, so overall it's probably a net positive for the economy, but don't try telling that to export-oriented industries. | [
"Policies that affect the value of the U.S. dollar relative to other currencies also affect employment levels. Economist Christina Romer wrote in May 2011: \"A weaker dollar means that our goods are cheaper relative to foreign goods. That stimulates our exports and reduces our imports. Higher net exports raise dome... |
how come 500 million animals died in the australian fires? | They took the density of all animals over certain areas (an estimate) (not including bugs/insects) x area affected by the fires then they got to that number. The actual number might be much higher or much lower.
Here's a summary of how they got the density in the first place:
[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)
They took samples in an area for various purposes over the years and estimated how much of each animal is present in that area, no one actually knows the real numbers of course. | [
"The RSPCA estimated that over a million animals perished in the bushfires. Additionally, many of the surviving wildlife suffered from severe burns. For example, large numbers of kangaroos were afflicted with burned feet due to territorial instincts that drew them back to their recently burned and smouldering home ... |
Are there any special meanings behind Royal Crown designs? | I'd like to ask a specific question in relation to this, the Hungarian crown with its "tilded" cross, did that actually exist, and did it have any meaning? | [
"While various crown symbols had been used for this purpose for many years previously, the specific Tudor Crown design was standardised at the request of Edward VII. It was never intended to represent any actual physical crown, although in shape it bears a close resemblance to the small diamond crown of Queen Victo... |
how is an internal 3d representation of the video game world translated to what we see on screen? | None of these comments are ELI5.
The principle behind all current real-time rendering is rasterization. All things within games are made of triangles and these triangles are "projected" onto your screen depending on your view. Think of it like holding a flashlight towards an object and drawing the shadow. Once you have this projection you still have to find out how this projection translates to pixels. One way to do this is the Scanline method although this can't be quickly explained. | [
"The two-and-a-half-dimensional (2.5D, alternatively three-quarter and pseudo-3D) perspective is either 2D graphical projections and similar techniques used to cause images or scenes to simulate the appearance of being three-dimensional (3D) when in fact they are not, or gameplay in an otherwise three-dimensional v... |
How did Beach Landings occur in Medieval Times? | I've been doing some research on naval logistics, so I think I can probably give you a good enough answer.
The ships with ramps were almost exclusively to be found in the Mediterranean. They seem to have had a Byzantine origin, either in 960 AD or just before. Their first recorded usage was during Nicephorus Phocas' invasion of Crete. He brought the horse transports up to the shore and offloaded his cavalry already armed and mounted, much to the surprise of the Muslim defenders^1. Whether the ships were decked and the horses unloaded through a hatch, or whether the ships were open decked and the ramps attached to the gunwales isn't clear from the text.
At least by 1174 there were galleys with rear ramps^2. A contract drawn up in 1249 between Louis IX's agents and the Genoese in 1246 gives us an idea of what they would have looked like and how many horses they could have carried. They were 35.71m in length, 3.48m wide at the waist on the horse deck, and the headroom was 2.25m. They had specially constructed bluff sterns, with two doors for embarkation and landing, and were to transport 20 horses^3. The statutes of Marseilles of 1253 specified that the width of each space allotted a horse on a Crusader transport should be 0.76m^4. Interestingly, the stall width and the head room didn't change in 650 years^5. Anyway, Pryor proposes that, as the galleys (taradia) weren't wide enough for two rows of horses, the horses would have been loaded crosswise across the centre of the ship, alternately facing left and right. The knights could therefore be unloaded through both doors, ten to a door^6.
Unlike round ships, the oar powered galleys could be rowed to the beach. This allowed whoever used them to have a cavalry force almost immediately available after landing, and seem to have been employed by both Arab and Western commanders^7.
There were a couple of ways a force could be unloaded. They could, for instance, transfer into small ships boats, as Jean de Joinville did in the 7th Crusade^8. The boats could not always come in right to the shore, and so the men-at-arms might need to jump into the water and wade to shore^9. While some galleys might be able to drive up onto shore so that their combatants could land on dry land^10, it seems that a good proportion could not, and any landing would still require a wade through water^11.
Once a beach head had been secured, temporary docks and ramps could be made using hurdles, gangplanks and pre-built bridges, and these could be used to unload further horses and bulk supplies, like barrels of ale or flour, or grain^12. Some of the larger ships, which could carry upwards of a hundred horses and several hundred men, likely required a proper dock, however.
*****
^1 John H. Pryor (1982) TRANSPORTATION OF HORSES BY SEA DURING THE ERA OF THE CRUSADES: EIGHTH CENTURY TO 1285 A.D.: Part I: To c 1225, The Mariner's Mirror, 68:1, 10
^2 ibid, p19
^3 John H. Pryor (1982) TRANSPORTATION OF HORSES BY SEA DURING THE ERA OF THE CRUSADES: EIGHTH CENTURY TO 1285 AD, The Mariner's Mirror, 68:2, 109-110
^4 ibid
^5 M. Horace Hayes (1902), *Horses on board ship: a guide to their health,* Hurst and Blackett, p119, 125
^6 John H. Pryor (1982) TRANSPORTATION OF HORSES BY SEA DURING THE ERA OF THE CRUSADES: EIGHTH CENTURY TO 1285 AD, The Mariner's Mirror, 68:2, 109
^7 ibid; John H. Pryor (1982) TRANSPORTATION OF HORSES BY SEA DURING THE ERA OF THE CRUSADES: EIGHTH CENTURY TO 1285 A.D.: Part I: To c 1225, The Mariner's Mirror, 68:19
^8 *Joinville and Villehardoun: Chronicles of the Crusades*, tr. Smith, Caroline (2008), Penguin Classics, p184
^9 ibid, p185
^10 ibid
^11 Anonymous (2001), *Itinerary of Richard I and others to the Holy Land*, p24, Cambridge < _URL_0_; (accessed 26/12/16)
^12 Lambert, Craig L. (2011), *Shipping the Medieval Military*, p94-95 | [
"Rather than the beach assault of modern amphibious operations, seaborne assaults of the classical and medieval age more often took the form of raiders sailing up river and landing well inland of the coast. Prior to the invention of naval artillery that could sink hostile ships, the most that coastal defence could ... |
Is it more fuel efficient for a car to accelerate more before going up a hill or maintain a constant speed before and during the climb? | I have hauled logs off highway for many winters where my average gross weight per load was around 78,000 kgs (170,000lbs). Since fuel was my biggest expense I have spent many hours comparing my fuel consumption to varying driving habits. Over the years I have noticed that by following the following rules I can save up to 150 liters of fuel ($200) in a 12 hour day.
If it is a small hill with a gentle rise then the best way to conserve fuel is to approach the hill at normal driving speed and slowly easing back on the fuel pedal to coast up the hill, then let gravity help me get back to my cruising speed.
If it is a short but steep hill I will increase my speed to "run the hill" then ease off the throttle and let momentum carry me over the hill.
When I have to climb long and steep hill I will "run it" at the bottom, then find a gear where I can keep my engine running at the rpm where it makes its peak torque at full throttle - between 1,200 and 1,500 rpm.
When driving along a level road I try to keep in a gear where I am running it its "sweet spot" which is a little bit higher than running at peak torque but not much more than 3/4 throttle.
I have tried to keep my engine rpm in its peak torque range of 1,350 - 1,500 rpm for a few trips and found out that it gave me the worst fuel economy ever. The best engine speed I found for mileage was in a range between 1,550 and 1,650 rpm. I have a 550 cat in my truck. Here is a link to the pubiished torque curves for this engine.
_URL_0_
One gallon of gas has enough energy to create 10 horsepower in an internal combustion engine, period. How this energy is utilized determines the vehicles efficiency.
(edit: gasoline can theoretically produce more power than 10 hp per gallon but the thermal and frictional losses restrict the amount of power available in today' ice's to 0.6 pounds per horsepower.)
If you drive at wide open throttle at an rpm that is below the maximum torque then the engine will be working harder then it is designed to. This will produce excess heat causing your engines temperature to rise, and your fan to kick in... both of which will consume more fuel.
If you are driving at an engine speed that is above your torque curve, then your engine is using more fuel than it needs to to maintain your speed. This will also increase your fuel consumption as well.
edit: I have a jet boat to go fishing or play in the rivers with. I installed a vacuum gauge in it to help me get better fuel economy. I tuned the boat to get the highest vacuum reading at the fastest comfortable cruising speed as determined by my gps. I managed to save a little under a gallon per hour at a cruise speed of 24 mph by doing so. Now I only use 6 gallons per hour at 24 mph where before I used 7 gph at 26 mph. | [
"Generally, fuel efficiency is maximized when acceleration and braking are minimized. So a fuel-efficient strategy is to anticipate what is happening ahead, and drive in such a way so as to minimize acceleration and braking, and maximize coasting time.\n",
"Fuel efficiency varies with the vehicle. Fuel efficiency... |
Can two sound waves constructively interfere at an angle? | Yes. Such situations are common in first‐year physics problems. | [
"The two separate waves will arrive at a point with the same phase, and hence undergo constructive interference, if and only if this path difference is equal to any integer value of the wavelength, i.e.\n",
"Interference is the addition of two or more waves that results in a new wave pattern. Interference of soun... |
'Africans did not sell their own people into slavery' - how much of it is true? | Thats not a very academic source. The author doesnt cite any evidence of their claims, makes some very broad claims (an example being that non-african wars always resulted in a genocide of the conquered, whereas african wars did not), and beyond that is a facebook article. Good rule of thumb is to not trust facebook, most of it has a political agenda or is someone expressing their opinion on a subject. | [
"Some historians assert that as many as 17 million people were sold into slavery on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa, and approximately 5 million African slaves were bought by Muslim slave traders and taken from Africa across the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara desert between 1500 ... |
how common were young people who behaved in a stereotypically hippie like way (I.E travling, free love, drug taking) in 1970 America? | History isn't always great at telling you "how common" something was across a whole country. There were some hippies, and there were some squares as well. However, the [General Social Survey](_URL_0_) started in 1972. I'm not going to go through the whole question list now (there are thousands questions, but it's searchable--however, not every question was asked every year), but it's all publicly available. It's meant to be downloaded and used with a statistics package (like R, SPSS, Stata, which makes doing more complex things possible), but there is an online thing where you can mess around with it for free with [no experience needed in statistics](_URL_2_). Okay, so on the right side you want Row: to be the variable you're interested in, for Column: put "age" (so you can separate "young people" from "old people"), and for Selection Filter(s) put "year(1973)" (or any year you want after 1972). Two good variables to start with (remember, just type these in to "Row:") are GRASS ("Do you think the use of marijuana should be made legal or not?") and ANTIWAR ("Have you ever taken part in.... (c) An anti-war demonstration?").
Since I assume many of the readers are lazy, here's .jpegs of the output for 1973 for [those two questions](_URL_1_). **Probably about 15-20% of young people in 1973 had participated in an anti-war protest, but probably about 35-50% thought that marijuana should be legal** (notice there's a lot of random variation in the numbers because we're dealing with small sample sizes). To get at other questions (like attitudes towards sex), you can explore yourself. I don't think they actually asked about drug use for a few more year but they might have already been asking at this point--there are a lot of questions to explore and I've mainly just used this to look at religion, and generally use this to look at the last 20 years, not the last 40.
You can play around with this. For example, you can put "year(1973-1978);age(18-25)" under "Selection Filter(s)" if you want to just get a picture of "young adults" in the mid seventies. Or you can search through the questions for ones about other topics you're interested in. But honestly, though this is slightly after you're interested in (1973 instead of 1970), it's maybe the best place to get an idea of "how common" something was in that era. | [
"The generation of people in the United States who grew up in the 90s, Millennials, are seen as having this same sort of detachment from serious or awkward situations in life, as well. Hipsters are thought to use irony as a shield against those same serious or genuine confrontations.\n",
"Ken Kesey and the Merry ... |
why do laptops run demanding programs smoother on ac as opposed to battery power. | The people who design computers make them do lots of clever things to save power when they're running on battery power instead of AC. One of the things they do is run the processor more slowly, so that it uses less power. Just like driving your car at 130 miles per hour on the freeway will use more fuel than driving at 56 miles per hour on the freeway over the same distance, making the processor run slower will also use less power than running it faster. Similar tricks are done with other parts of the computer too, like turning off the hard disk if you don't use it for 30 seconds - spinning the disk inside a hard disk is a huge power drain. | [
"A power supply unit (PSU) converts alternating current (AC) electric power to low-voltage DC power for the internal components of the computer. Laptops are capable of running from a built-in battery, normally for a period of hours.\n",
"Another advantage of the desktop is that (apart from environmental concerns)... |
Was Mao genuinely interested in hearing criticism during the Hundred Flowers Movement? | I want to start by saying that this is a complex topic, and I am by no means an expert on the matter. Feel free to disagree; we can examine the matter further together.
It's conventional wisdom that the Hundred Flowers Campaign (百花齊放、百家爭鳴) of 1956 was in fact a scheme devised by Mao Zedong to draw out the enemies of the regime, and get rid of them via the Anti-Rightist Movement (反右運動) in 1957. This perspective fits the popular view (at least among non-academics) that Mao was a diabolical evil genius of sorts who managed to single-handedly orchestrate major political upheavals like the Cultural Revolution. More recent academic research has pushed back against this "all-powerful Chairman Mao" view, recognising that Mao was not acting alone, and was influenced by forces both within and without the party. Just like any other politician, Mao had to negotiate and compromise with other actors in the political process; sometimes he got what he wanted, sometimes not.
Specifically with regards to the Hundred Flowers Campaign, some recent scholarship would suggest that Mao really did want to encourage criticism of the regime. By 1956, Mao saw that things were getting out of hand in the Communist Party – a huge bureaucratic apparatus had arisen with clearly defined ranks and privileges for cadres. In Mao's eyes, a new bureaucratic class had arisen within the party, which needed to be uprooted and removed. Along this line of thinking, it is posited that Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign precisely to *encourage* criticism of the party, *assert* the right of the people to protest, and *stop* bureaucratisation.
So why the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement? Some scholars believe the crackdown was neither initiated nor intended by Mao. Instead, the political elites around Mao felt that the protests were getting out of hand, and feared that the legitimacy of the party itself was at stake. It was they who forced Mao into a crackdown – Mao simply did not have enough power to overrule his colleagues.
\-------------------------
Source and Further Reading:
Wu, Yiching. *The Cultural Revolution at the Margins*. Harvard University Press, 2014.
(As the title suggests, this book is mainly about the Cultural Revolution, and the different appropriations of Mao Zedong thought at different levels of society.) | [
"The beginning of the Hundred Flowers Movement was marked by a speech titled \"On the Correct Handling of the Contradictions Among the People\", in which Mao displayed open support for the campaign, saying \"Our society cannot back down, it could only progress... criticism of the bureaucracy is pushing the governme... |
if a one time infection by certain viruses (e.g. chicken pox) usually leads to immunity, why can other viruses recur in the same person countless times? | They can't, but what happens is that what we call the common cold for example isn't one virus. It's dozens and dozens of different strains of roughly the same virus. When you get sick and then heal from the cold, you have immunity against that particular strain. Not against the hundreds of others one that are still out there. | [
"Infection with one genotype does not confer immunity against others, and concurrent infection with two strains is possible. In most of these cases, one of the strains removes the other from the host in a short time. This finding opens the door to replacing strains non-responsive to medication with others easier to... |
What steps are taken after a period of hyperinflation to ensure that that no one who kept all of their physical money will suddenly be able more wealthy than they were before? | The old currency would be declared invalid and exchanged for a new one at some fixed rate. So people weren't walking around Germany with trillion banknotes that could actually be used for anything :)
You can read about the German situation here:
_URL_0_
As you see the old mark was exchanged for the new mark at a rate of 1 trillion old mark to 1 new Reichsmark. | [
"During a period of hyperinflation, bank runs, loans for 24-hour periods, switching to alternate currencies, the return to use of gold or silver or even barter become common. Many of the people who hoard gold today expect hyperinflation, and are hedging against it by holding specie. There may also be extensive capi... |
why are home games so important in sports, and why do analysts make a big deal when a team loses at home? | There are a number of real home field advantages, one of the biggest being in every sport, having the crowd at your back. A stadium that is silent when you score is a lot less mentally exhilarating than a stadium that roars when you score.
It also means you didn't have to travel to play the game. Travel takes a toll on people, even professional athletes. No one likes to get off a plane and do anything. Now think about getting off a plane and playing a sport professionally. It sucks.
Finally, some sports have rules advantages when playing at home. I know in hockey, you get the last chance to change your players before each puck drop. This gives you better match ups against the other team's best players. In baseball, the home team bats second. This gives the home team a chance to come back when losing, especially in the final inning, but the away team always has to simply retain a lead. | [
"Teams that have had the scheduling disadvantage of giving up a home game to participate in the series, resulting in seven home games, eight away games and one neutral site game, have seen a significant disparity in their success relative to the designated visitors, who end up with eight home games, seven away game... |
If every light in America turned off at once, would we immediately see the milky way or would it take time for the light pollution to wear off? | It would take a few minutes for our eyes to adjust to the darkness before we would really see the Milky Way. | [
"In areas where power remained off after nightfall, the Milky Way and orbiting artificial satellites became visible to the naked eye in metropolitan areas where they cannot ordinarily be seen due to the effects of particulate air and light pollution.\n",
"Light pollution is an ever-increasing source of sky bright... |
how come there are still old us bills that look crisp, clean, and almost unused? | Issued doesn't mean it goes around alot. You can take a freshly printed bill and withdraw it from the bank and just never spend it. Some people keep an emergency stash of money in their home. They don't touch it for years until they need it for an emergency. | [
"The new $5 bills remain the same size and use the same—but enhanced—portraits and historical images. The most noticeable difference is the light-purple coloring of the center of the bill, which blends into gray near the edges.\n",
"The Treasury had made no plans to redesign the $5 bill using colors, but recently... |
the latest wikileaks email dump | Long story short some key people in the Democratic party had their emails published publicly and what it showed was that the many in the media and the DNC have been in the tank for Hillary's campaign from the start. It shows what goes on behind the scenes in establishment politics and how the system is rigged for the candidates the establishment supports. It also shows how the media is often complacent and chooses sides with Democratic party. It also shows that at least one debate was rigged with Hillary's campaign receiving the questions ahead of time to provide her with a huge advantage over her opponent. It also shows how strongly super-delegates were attacked if they would not support Hillary Clinton.
It's really nothing that most people haven't already figured out, but it's one of those things.. like nobody wants to know how the sausage is made. This peeled back the curtain and showed the public what happened behind the scenes. The majority of the mainstream media isn't covering the details of this leak because much of the mainstream media could eventually get burned as more emails come out. Also, it would be a negative story for the DNC at a time when most of the major editors and organizations have already publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton and made public they don't want Donald Trump to win. In the world of newspapers there's something like 80 - 3 in support for Hillary over Trump.
These emails show that the system was rigged to support Hillary in the primaries and even in the general election there is corruption that the DNC/Hillary are beneficiaries of.
_URL_0_ | [
"In 2016, WikiLeaks released nearly 300,000 emails it described as coming from Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, later found to be taken from public mailing archives, and over 50,000 emails from the Turkish minister of energy. In 2017, WikiLeaks published internal CIA documents describing tools used by... |
How do scientists go about directly measuring entropy? | I wrote [a brief PDF collecting ways to relate entropy and entropy changes to other, more easily measurable, thermodynamic quantities](_URL_0_). | [
"BULLET::::- The entropy or the amount of information revealed by evaluating (that is, evaluating and simultaneously) is equal to the information revealed by conducting two consecutive experiments: first evaluating the value of , then revealing the value of given that you know the value of . This may be written as\... |
how some gifted humans are able to perform extremely difficult calculations in their head? | Overly simple answer: A lot of math can be boiled down to simple procedures that the brain can more easily process. You already know a few of these tricks. One of the most basic is that when you multiply any whole number by 10 you just tack another 0 on the end. Most mathematical functions can be broken down like that into rules and methods.
Now, one popular theory is that people have a 'working memory'...think of it like the scratch paper of the brain. Some people simply can retain more information in their active thoughts then others and sort of...hold it there for use. Ms. Devi for example could hold a ton of information in her head without forgetting it.
Combine the two and she's just extraordinary at doing the math in her head. It's not like she magically knew the answers. She still had to do the mental arithmetic. That's why it took her 28 seconds or 50 seconds to figure out the answers. | [
"He was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes. But he made mistakes in a good direction. I tried to imitate him. But I've realized that it's very difficult to make good mistakes.\n",
"Giftedness is frequently not evenly distributed throughout all intellectual spheres. One gifted ... |
how does high productivity mean lower unit costs? | Pretend you need to earn $100 per day to live your life.
If you made 1 item a day, you'd have to sell that 1 item for perhaps $150, $50 for the materials, facilities, and other expenses, $100 for your labor.
If you were more productive, and made 2 items a day, you could perhaps sell them for $80 each, with a daily revenue of $160. So $30 each for the variable and fixed costs, and $50 each for the labor.
If you made 3 items, you could sell it for maybe $60 each. As you make more items, the fixed costs, such as rent of the building, tools, are spread across more items. You're also spending less labor-hours per unit. So while the cost of the raw materials might remain the same, many of the other costs decline. | [
"Marginal cost is not the cost of producing the \"next\" or \"last\" unit. The cost of the last unit is the same as the cost of the first unit and every other unit. In the short run, increasing production requires using more of the variable input — conventionally assumed to be labor. Adding more labor to a fixed ca... |
why is it so easy to fall asleep watching the tv but radio or simply waiting to fall asleep don't have the same effect? | This has to do with the way the brain tries to shut down. Our consciousness watching TV is in a very relaxed state because of the ease of watching and, because of the uninhibited comfort it can be very easy to slip into sleep. When trying to sleep, certain distractions such as words or loud music over the radio can make it hard to stop paying attention to the slightest details in the sounds over the radio, making sleep unreachable. Waiting to fall asleep is focusing on a goal that has to do with leaving consciousness. Again very hard, Try closing your eyes and thinking about what you did today before attempting a good nights sleep. | [
"A 2010 review concluded that \"the use of electronic media by children and adolescents does have a negative impact on their sleep, although the precise effects and mechanisms remain unclear\", with the most consistent results associating excessive media use with shorter sleep duration and delayed bed times. A 2016... |
how does getting rid of net neutrality improve competition in a way that benefits the consumer? | Getting rid of Net Neutrality does NOT benefit the consumer.
CGP Grey have made a 3½ minute video about it, that is vary easy to understand. _URL_0_
| [
"Opponents of net neutrality enforcement claim regulation is unnecessary, because broadband service providers have no plans to block content or degrade network performance. Opponents of net neutrality regulation also argue that the best solution to discrimination by broadband providers is to encourage greater compe... |
What were some of the mathematical methods used before the discovery of calculus? | > Surely they had to approximate derivatives and integrals for engineering applications before calculus was discovered and/or widely understood.
Nope. Engineering as a mathematics-based profession post-dates calculus. Math beyond arithmetic practically speaking wasn't used in "engineering" (which was then much different from engineering as we currently know it) until ~1800.
All those impressive buildings built before then are the result of experience, intuition, and trial and error. Nobody was calculating the stress in the stones/joints of Notre Dame de Paris to ensure it wouldn't collapse (which is why there are a substantial number of large buildings like cathedrals which *did* collapse, either immediately after some major work or slowly over decades). There's a good reason that the Great Pyramid at Giza was the tallest structure in the world until 1311, and within 100 ft of the tallest structure until the Eiffel Tower roughly doubled it in 1889: we really didn't have the knowledge and the materials science to build something large more efficiently than what is essentially a heap of stone for literally millenia. | [
"In the late 17th century, calculus was developed independently and almost simultaneously by Isaac Newton (1642–1727) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). This was the beginning of a new field of mathematics now called analysis. Though not itself a branch of geometry, it is applicable to geometry, and it solv... |
what is the sequester and why is an issue right now? also, how can the us senate not have a budget 4 years in a row? | The sequester is an agreement made a while back when Congress couldn't agree on how to deal with America's large deficit. The idea was that if they passed a rule that if they didn't come up with a decent plan then measures would automatically occur that would be so terrible that it would force them to compromise. It was called the Fiscal Cliff.
In January they dealt with the tax/revenue side of the Fiscal Cliff and passed tax hikes. At the same time they agreed to delay the spending cuts part of the Fiscal Cliff until March those spending cuts are called the sequester.
It then became a game of chicken each side waiting for the other to blink. Neither side has. Democrats are insisting on a tax hike for the wealthy to be part of a spending cut agreement, Republicans insist that they already compromised by agreeing to tax hikes in January and don't want to increase taxes more.
March 1st was the deadline for the seqester to be enacted and while many parts of the government are off-limit to cuts (VA, social security, food stamps) much of it is and instead of a prioritized spending cut list spending is being cut across the board. If it only lasts a few weeks not much will be noticed but if it lasts a month we'll see disruptions in construction and airports as well as federal employee hours being cut.
Economists agree that spending needs to be cut. They also agree that the sequester is a terrible way to do it.
As for not having a budget for 4 years the budget is simply a policy plan not a spending or appropriations bill. So money is still spent. We just have no large plan on how to spend it. Terrible way to run an organization but money still gets spent so it's not really needed. | [
"The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016 (, ), also known as the 2016 omnibus spending bill, is the United States appropriations legislation passed during the 114th Congress which provides spending permission to a number of federal agencies for the fiscal year of 2016. The bill authorizes $1.1 trillion in spend... |
If planes flying in a V formation, like geese, save fuel, would this also be true for cars ? | No.
The reason a V formation lowers drag for aircraft is [vortex shedding](_URL_0_) off the wings. Basically, it's a result of flow going around the wingtips resulting in a swirling air current. If another plane, bird, etc, hits the upward part of the swirl, it gets free lift. (Not really free, but it was waste energy from the bird in front.)
So it works for flying things, but it's not as straightforward for cars. Cars can take advantage of drafting, riding inside the pocket of attached flow from a car directly in front, but there's no vortex to ride for cars. | [
"Flying cars would be used for shorter distances, at higher frequency, and at lower speeds and lower altitudes than conventional passenger aircraft. However optimal fuel efficiency for airplanes is obtained at high altitudes and high subsonic speeds, so a flying car's energy efficiency would be low compared to a co... |
What would a laser "gun" sound like? What about other "future" weapons like plasma guns, photon cannons, energy blasts etc.? | Laser guns would likely not make a sound. Maybe a electrical hum of sorts depending on how the device was powered. Photon cannons are just science fiction. As for plasma.... I'm not quite sure. | [
"In weapons firing supersonic ammunition, the bullet itself produces a loud and very sharp sound as it leaves the muzzle in excess of the speed of sound and gradually reducing speed as it travels downrange. This is a small sonic boom, and is referred to in the firearm field as \"ballistic crack\" or \"sonic signatu... |
Do the Maori people have oral histories describing their arrival in New Zealand? | I really would like you to ask again in the Mega-Thread, because then we can build up a wee empire of knowledge (heh, a taonga) of our own about New Zealand. But I can answer here as well!
The answer is **totally yes**. The Maori have some really amazing Oral History narratives about their arrival in New Zealand. The narratives impact how they structure their societies to the present day, especially with the concept of *mana* being able to be inherited ((talked about [here](_URL_0_))).
The first thing to remember is that Maori Iwi are incredibly fractured; what one tribe says another might not. Anthropologist Dame Anne Selmond actually goes further in seeing that for Maori, it doesn't matter if the particular story they've been handed *is* correct - its value isn't that it's *true* or *false* like Western knowledge is, but in that it has been inherited from the ancestors, and will be handed on in turn. Problematically, it also means... why would you share a treasure - a treasure *your ancestors gave you* - to some outsider looking to publish it and dissect it? Often Kamatua (elders) of Maori Iwi simply refuse to tell these stories *even within the tribe*, and there are serious ethical pitfalls to negotiate before a researcher can continue.
From what we know, however, the biggest shared story - with Europeans, that is - is definitely... and I see /u/rraarr has totally beaten me there again! =D The story of Kupe, legendary discoverer or New Zealand. Those stories identify his origin as an island called "Hawaiki". As a story, most New Zealanders will know this one. In the "biggest" variant of the story he was fleeing Hawaiki after committing a pretty serious murder and running off with the murderee's wife. Bearing in mind this was the story taught in New Zealand schools as the Maori origin myth right up until the 1980s. How common the story was in actual Maori practice is a **really hard question to answer**.
I'd like to emphases again this is by no means the only answer; Maori tribes have an astonishingly rich cultural heritage in these stories. Another constant in these stories, however, is tracing back to what canoe the particular tribe arrived on. Some tribes claim there were only seven canoes. The names of these are the most famous in New Zealand, and tribes from a more senior canoe will claim *mana* over those from a lessor. But stories give dozens of names for these canoes, and it is impossible to reconstruct if they all arrived at the same time (although this is *seriously unlikely*), if some of the names are corruptions of others, or even when they arrived.
The earliest archaeological material we've got is tentatively dated from about the 13th Century, although the oral tradition would suggest as early as 900 AD, and some historians have disputed the ages of the findings and suggest sometime after 1400 AD is more likely. Conservatively the Maori have been in New Zealand 600 years, and that's a long time to hold an oral history tradition completely intact.
I am not sure if this helped with your question or just made you confused, but it's a complex question that I could talk about for ages. =D | [
"The Māori people of New Zealand trace their ancestry to groups of people who reportedly travelled from Hawaiki in about 40 named canoes (\"waka\") (compare the discredited Great Fleet theory of the Polynesian settlement of New Zealand).\n",
"The Māori are the indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand. They originate... |
how come we can capture video in slow motion, but not sound? | We don't capture video in slow motion. We capture video in real life speed. However the video camera has such a high frame per second recording that if we slow down the footage your eyes still can't see the individual frames and it looks like a (slowmotion) video.
With sound we can do the same. We can capture it with fast enough device. Which is all/most audio captures otherwise it wouldn't be able to record the high frequency bandwidths. Now the slowing down part of the footage/audio track. If we slow down the audio the frequency of the individual tones are also slowed down. And thus the sound we hear changes in tone. Kinda like how a low-fps video slowed down will result in a picture slide show. You can alter the change in tone with smart algorithms that correct the tone. They have various names, tone/pitch manuiplatots/correctors, etc. Applying those corrections to pitch/tone you will get a slowed down audio track that sounds normal. | [
"Typically this style is achieved when each film frame is captured at a rate much faster than it will be played back. When replayed at normal speed, time appears to be moving more slowly. A term for creating slow motion film is overcranking which refers to hand cranking an early camera at a faster rate than normal ... |
[Med] Is there a functional difference between "fresh" blood and "Stored" blood? | 1. Stored blood has things added to it so it stays fresh and lasts longer, don't know the exact time frame but it does store for a while
2. Having someone wait around at the hospital all day hoping for someone to need them to give blood is EXTREMELY unrealistic, since the most you could draw from them in the entire day would be like 2 pints
3. These people waiting around the hospital all day would be in the way, making the hospital more crowded
4. It would not be cost efficient to pay them for staying there waiting around and then donating blood, because the alternative of them donating it and storing it costs a lot less
5. Whatever made you ask this question sounds highly illegal, sounds like you are trying to keep a prisoner in your basement with your blood type in case you ever needed blood. | [
"Routine blood storage is 42 days or 6 weeks for stored packed \"red blood cells\" (also called \"StRBC\" or \"pRBC\"), by far the most commonly transfused blood product, and involves refrigeration but usually not freezing. There has been increasing controversy about whether a given product unit's age is a factor i... |
What sort of sports did people in the era you study play? | Ullamaliztli was one of the most popular games played by Aztec peoples. It involved a hard rubber ball. It was one of the first things set up in a new settlement and so it is surmised that the game was very important, and likely of religious importance.
It was popular amongst many peoples of mesoamerica and is thought to have been invented by the Olmecs. The rules today are not known, but it is guessed due to the descendent sport Ulama, that it was similar to racquetball. | [
"In the post-war period, sports other than the main ones of rugby, hockey, cricket, athletics, swimming and shooting began to be introduced including tennis, basketball, badminton, fencing, squash, sailing, soccer and golf.\n",
"The history of sports in the United States shows that most sports evolved out of Euro... |
If you were floating out in deep space, would you get hotter or colder? | You would get colder. There are three types of heat transfer, conduction, convection and radiation (_URL_0_). You are correct that in space there is nothing to transfer the energy to, so the first two mechanisms contribute nothing. However you can still radiate infrared light that will take away heat from your body. This is governened by the [Stefan-Boltzmann law](_URL_1_). For an average man [this would radiate about 1 Watt](_URL_3_).
An interesting point you bring up is in the absence of heat transfer you would get hotter as you continue to metabolize food. I have no great knowledge of this area but some preliminary googling shows that this would be on the order of ~~[63 calories/hour or .04 Watts](_URL_2_). So even taking this into account you would still radiate more heat than you produce and would loose energy at about .96 Watts. This would end up with you changing in temperature by (~.03 degrees farenheit/hour). So you would not suddenly freeze, it would be a long process.~~You apparently actually metabolize food at 73 Watts and thus would get hotter even including radiation, at 2 degrees F per hour)
Of course all of this is assuming you are not being bathed in sunlight, or killed the numerous other ways you could be. | [
"In a vacuum or in outer space, there is no convective heat transfer, thus in these environments, radiation is the only factor governing heat flow between the heat sink and the environment. For a satellite in space, a 100 °C (373 Kelvin) surface facing the Sun will absorb a lot of radiant heat, because the Sun's su... |
How did someone's social class and wealth in Britain affect their experience of rationing during and after World War Two? | During the Second World War, working-class Britons ate better than they had in a long time. Rationing was a really good thing for them, because it provided a baseline of foods and nutrients that the market generally did not provide in the 1930s. This included things like orange juice, milk, and cheese, nutrient-dense foods, along with staples like meat and potatoes. Bread, incidentally, was not rationed until after the war, and even then for only a short time. So, all the evidence we have suggests that the British working classes did very well indeed on rationing. (Though it should also be noted that at least some of this can be attributed to full employment, and not merely rationing.)
The middle and upper classes' diets were probably not dramatically affected by rationing, except to narrow their options. They had the ability to purchase supplemental foods on the black market, and many certainly did. Many luxury foods got harder to come by because of the war--wine, olives, tropical fruits, that sort of thing--but obviously their diets did not really decline nutritionally.
So, the interesting thing about rationing in Britain during the Second World War is that it was a profound leveling influence. Rich and poor ate a more similar diet than at any time since the early medieval period.
Derek Oddy's *From Plain Fare to Fusion Food* is the major academic survey of modern British food history.
Katherine Knight's *Spuds, Spam and Eating for Victory* is a short and readable popular history.
Lizzie Collingham's *The Taste of War* is a sort of world historical look at food during the Second World War which looks terrific, though I have not read it yet. | [
"On 8 May 1945, the Second World War ended in Europe, but rationing continued. Some aspects of rationing became stricter for some years after the war. At the time this was presented as needed to feed people in European areas under British control, whose economies had been devastated by the fighting. This was partly... |
How fast would a fully-fueled Saturn V rocket be able to propel itself without any Apollo spacecraft payload? | Well the S-IVB has a dry mass of about 10 tons, and fuelled mass of 119.9 tons. The CM/SM had a total mass of 30 tons and the LM had a mass of 14.5 tons for a total of about 45.5 tons of Apollo spacecraft payload.
The specific impulse of the S-IVB was 421 seconds.
Delta V = Isp * g0 * ln(m0/m1)
So... Delta V = 421 sec * -9.81 m/s/s * ln (10000 kg /119900kg ) = 10,259 m/s for the S-IVB alone, with out the Apollo payload.
With the Apollo payload, you'd get:
421 * -9.81 * ln (55,500/165,400) = 4,510 m/s
A difference of 5,749 m/s
So what if, instead, you wanted to turn that extra 45.5 tons into fuel. Let's say it'd take 3 tons of building material to extend the S-IVB's fuel tanks, that leaves you with a dry mass of 13,000 kg and a fuelled mass of 165,400.
Then your Delta V would be 10,504 m/s. A very slight increase compared to just the regular S-IVB without a payload.
| [
"An average mission used the rocket for a total of just 20 minutes. Although Apollo 6 experienced three engine failures, and Apollo 13 one engine shutdown, the onboard computers were able to compensate by burning the remaining engines longer to achieve parking orbit. None of the Saturn V launches resulted in a payl... |
If we breathe in O2 and exhale CO2, then do we lose mass just by breathing? | Yup! You get the mass back by eating. | [
"However, no CO is removed during apnea. The partial pressure of CO in the airspace of the lungs will quickly equilibrate with that of the blood. As the blood is loaded with CO from the metabolism, more and more CO will accumulate and eventually displace oxygen and other gases from the airspace. CO will also accumu... |
human skin only varies from a light cream to a dark brown. is there a particular reason that there are no other variations of skin colour? i.e blue, red, green, etc. | Other colors ARE possible, through genetic mutations. Look up the Kentucky Blue People.
Basically, remember that for something to change biologically requires 2 things: a mutation, and then for that mutation to be advantageous enough for the individual to propagate themselves.
A tribe of people in a jungle environment may, through some odd means, develop a mutation that turns their skin more of a green/olive shade. This helps them naturally blend into their environment, both helping them avoid predators AND stalk prey. BUT, if no mutation triggers this skin tone change, then it does not matter how much of an advantage it would provide - it still will not happen.
Now, flip it. A genetic mutation happens now, causing people from the same genetic background to grow gills. (Whatever, going for extreme example). Modern society does not provide the means for such people to gain a significant survival advantage at all. Also, most people would find such a change to be very disturbing, and would actively avoid such individuals. Some extremists might even take violent or political action against them. This isolates the population, and without anyone willing to intermarry with them, eventually they stop breeding and die out. So that oddball mutation never propagates itself. | [
"The actual skin color of different humans is affected by many substances, although the single most important substance is the pigment melanin. Melanin is produced within the skin in cells called melanocytes and it is the main determinant of the skin color of darker-skinned humans. The skin color of people with lig... |
Best book for Central American wars during the 20th century? | I'm currently working on an undergraduate research project on the Guatemalan Civil War from 1960 to 1976 or so.
One particularly useful primer has been Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley's Guerillas and Revolution in Latin America.
He notes marked similarities and differences between the revolutionary movements throughout Latin America and the Caribbean as well as the regimes that sought to stamp them out.
His bibliography is pretty damned useful as well!
Edit: I changed Central to Latin America. | [
"Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present, a history of American involvement in the Middle East by Michael Oren, was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2007 and quickly became a New York Times bestseller.\n",
"Carrió's \"guide\" is a most interesting source of geographical, social... |
What is the oldest historical artefact still in use today? | What precisely do you mean by "artefact" and "in use"? | [
"Its most notable historical artefact is a 17th-century pre-Reformation silver chalice decorated with raised angelic figures. The chalice may have been used at a wedding as the letters \"S.C. M.P.\", thought to be the initials of the couple, are inscribed on the base.\n",
"The museum’s first-ever artefact was acq... |
How strong is an electromagnet when it's not on? | It really depends on the magnet. From the sounds of it, you have a magnetic core wrapped in wire? In that case the iron core still has a magnetic field. Is it an MRI magnet? Is that case it should probably never be turned off | [
"Stronger magnetic effects are typically only observed when d or f electrons are involved. Particularly the latter are usually strongly localized. Moreover, the size of the magnetic moment on a lanthanide atom can be quite large as it can carry up to 7 unpaired electrons in the case of gadolinium(III) (hence its us... |
my company's 401k, specifically the part where i become "fully vested" after a few years. | Generally a company will match part of what you contribute to your 401k. For example, for every $1 you put in they will put in 50 cents, up to some percentage of your normal salary. However, in order to discourage people from leaving for other jobs the money that your employer puts in during the first few years of your employment doesn't become your until you've worked a specified number of years.
For example, lets say in your first 10 months of employment you put in $5000, and your employer puts in $2500 at the match. If you quit after 10 months you get to keep the $5000 you put in, but your employer would take back their money. However, if you continued to work for the company fore several years before you quit then you would get to keep all $7500. | [
"In a 401(k) plan, the contributions are funded by the employee and are often matched by contributions from the employer. The contributions to an employee's 401(k) plan are made from the employee's salary before taxes. These funds grow tax-free until they are withdrawn; at that point the contributions can be conver... |
how does youtube's algorithm work? | YouTube uses machine learning to determine the best videos to recommend to you, based on several parameters, such as what you liked and disliked, view time, and probably other factors as well. Try watching a channel you're not subscribed to for a some time and you'll see those videos on your recommended. As far as I know the basis on suggesting what you want is determined by watch time. If YouTube thinks you'll watch a video for 40 minutes, it will be more likely to recommend it then a video which you'll probably click away after a minute. | [
"The YouTube Application Programming Interface, or the YouTube API, allows developers to access video statistics and YouTube channels' data via two types of calls, REST and XML-RPC. Google describe the YouTube API Resources as \"APIs and Tools that let you bring the YouTube experience to your webpage, application o... |
why does my body "get used to" cold water, but not cold air? | It is to do with heat transfer and thermodynamics: when you get cold it is your body losing heat. Your body has a variety of mechanisms that work to change the body so that if it is losing heat it will gain more heat and try to stop losing any additional heat. Heat is first detected by heat receptors all over your skin, and possibly on some specialised areas of the inside of your body too, these receptors will let off little electrical impulses when they sense a change in temperature and these go to your brain via neurons and in turn your brain will create a response to change it ('Homeostasis' is the word for it, your body does some pretty fucking rad stuff when it comes to this). So, when your body is cold is does a variety of things mostly via hormones and electrical impulses including:
- you get a sense of feeling cold and that will have an effect on your behaviour - you'll want to get warm (psychological effect)
- your skin will go cold and pale, this is because your brain will release hormones and neural signals that will act on the muscles surrounding the blood vessels that control blood going to the skin or not. The muscles contract and basically squeeze the blood vessel shut a little bit so less blood can get through (the opposite happens when you're cold, and also when you blush). Because less blood can get to the skins surface where it is cold there is less heat within the blood to be lost - it conserves heat.
- you shiver, this is an involuntary muscle contraction - when muscles contract they generate heat and so the body uses muscles to generate heat when it needs it.
- a variety of chemical changes will take place, including the increased burning off of fat and glucose.
There are other things too! But basically, in answer to your question, it's a combination of the thermodynamics of the environment and the body aswell as the humans biology, i'll try to explain:
So: when you are in cold water you are surrounded by molecules in a state of liquid, in particular - water which is a highly organised structure. This means that every inch of your body is surrounded by particles, which aren't moving very fast (relatively) towards or away from you, which means when one of those molecules gets your heat, it stays there for a while and doesnt carry it away until another one gets in touch with you.
In air however, the molecules are moving alot faster and therefore when one hits any part of your body it takes away energy and moves on, and then another comes, and another and another, and this all happens much faster than in water. that's why its even more cold in the wind. but even at an atomic levels the molecules are moving a lot faster because they are less organised and have more energy than water which has less energy and doesnt move quite as much.
In the water your movements will also help generate energy - and because it is less cold your body's reactions to the cold are actually enough to counteract the change, but in the air it isnt so you carry on feeling cold!
Hope that makes sense, it wouldnt suprise me if it doesnt! | [
"Cold water dousing is used to \"shock\" the body into a kind of fever. The body's reaction is similar to the mammalian diving reflex or possibly temperature biofeedback. Several meditative and awareness techniques seem to share similar effects with elevated temperature, such as Tummo. Compare cold water dousing wi... |
what happened to all the giant land animals? | Elephants are pretty big. | [
"Elephants are mentioned twice in a single verse in the Book of Ether. Mastodons and mammoths lived in the New World during the Pleistocene; however, as with the prehistoric horse, the fossil record indicates that they became extinct along with most of the megafauna towards the end of the last ice age. The source o... |
How long have people been saying "good morning" throughout history? | Old English for good morning is goodne morgen, so people have been saying it in English for well over 1000 years. | [
"\"Good Morning Good Morning\" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1967 album \"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band\". It was written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney. Inspiration for the song came to Lennon from a television commercial for Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Another refer... |
Does a video of an empty, stationary room have a smaller file size than a video of things moving? | Think of a video file as a series of still images. Each image is composed of rows and columns, each with pixels in it.
In theory, each frame would have the data required to tell the display software how to draw it. This many pixels wide, this many pixels tall, this color for pixel 1, then this color for pixel 2, etc.
Then each frame would have the same type of information.
Compression works like this:. Pixel 1 is this color, as are the next 200 pixels. No need to say what each pixel is, just that the color doesn't change for 200 pixels.
Compressed video takes it a step further. Rather than keeping each frames data, it says "this frame is like this, and the next one is close, except for these changes" etc.
Effectively, compression has some landmark pieces of data, then the rest is just comparison to previous data.
So, to answer your question, both videos would be the same file size if you had pure, raw uncompressed video. But with compression, the empty, sterile room would have less changing, and would be able to do a much smaller filesize because of it. | [
"BULLET::::1. A customized \".sparseimage\" image file can be assigned a larger total capacity than the physical volume (or HD partition) on which it originally resides. While the virtual volume will seem to make that capacity available, attempting to exceed the physical capacity of the underlying volume will resul... |
During the 1960 U-2 incident, what kind of interrogation techniques did the Soviets use on Francis Gary Powers, the captured pilot? | I'm no expert, but a basic response to your questions can be had.
[Accounts](_URL_3_) agree that there was no physical torture; but interrogations were long and harsh(11+ hrs/day for 61 days leading up to his show trial) and included death threats. He was in solitary confinement in the Lubyanka and the Soviets controlled the flow of information to him.
His [son](_URL_2_), investigated the issue.
> “He was not tortured,” says Powers Jr., founder and chairman emeritus of the Cold War Museum in Warrenton, Virginia. “But there were bright spotlights, grueling questions, sleep deprivation, threats of death.”
Gary Powers did keep a journal and publish his [memoirs](_URL_6_) and apparently the CIA declassified [accounts](_URL_5_) in 1998 followed by the [Soviet Union in 2006](_URL_4_). Unfortunately, I haven't read these.
An interesting [account](_URL_0_) of aspects of his behaviour at his show trial where his defence attorney convinced him to [plead guilty](_URL_1_) to avoid the possibility of a death verdict..
| [
"U-2 pilots were told if captured, Knutson later said, \"to tell them everything that they knew\", because they were told little about their missions other than targets on maps. Otherwise, Powers had little instruction on what to do during an interrogation. Although he had been told that he could reveal everything ... |
raster over vector based graphics? | Getting your display to show something involves a number of layers, each of them doing their own thing.
The display itself is rasters because that's the physical construction - you have LCD laid out in a rectangular grid. It directly renders those rasters from a highly parallel stream of data.
That highly parallel stream of data is generated by your video card/hardware from a frame buffer (which is laid out in the same pattern as the screen).
However, that frame buffer is rendered via both raster and vector processes to minimize the data exchange along the microprocessor bus. Note that both the raster and vector information is 'only part of the screen'. If your O/S wants to draw a window and leave everything else alone, it only sends the raster data for that particular window rather the entire screen.
Now, there are vector displays that are designed to render vectors specifically. But they don't really have much color depth and they can't display complex patterns easily. | [
"Vector graphics formats are complementary to raster graphics. Raster graphics is the representation of images as an array of pixels and is typically used for the representation of photographic images. Vector graphics consists in encoding information about shapes and colors that comprise the image, which can allow ... |
the market scene in "trading places" | This is one of my favorite movies, so I can take a swing:
Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd work for Duke & Duke. Duke & Duke makes money by buying and selling commodities, such as pork bellies, gold, and frozen concentrated orange juice. For example, if they believe that pork belly prices will rise, they will buy them now and sell them later (if you're not actually five: they don't actually buy and sell meat, but rather contracts to buy or sell meat at a certain date for a certain price).
Anyway, Duke & Duke are corrupt, and bribe a government official to get an early copy of a crop report, which will dictate whether the price of orange juice will go up or go down in the future. If the crop report is good, there will be many oranges, and so the price will be low. If the crop report is bad, there will be few oranges, and so the price will be high.
Aykroyd and Murphy give Duke & Duke a fake crop report, which says that crops sustained substantial damage, and so the price will rise in the future (though the real report says that crops are fine, so the price will fall).
So, at the beginning of the scene, Duke & Duke is under the false impression that prices for orange juice will rise (since the crop report that will be disseminated later in the day will have bad news for oranges). So, they want to buy all the oranges they can, since the price in the future will be much higher after the report is announced.
Aykroyd & Murphy know that the crop report will lower prices, so they instead sell oranges to people at a high price, intending to buy them back at a much lower price (this is a complicated transaction called short selling, since really they sell their oranges without actually owning them, and then buy oranges so that their position is zero).
So, right before the real crop report is issued, Duke & Duke have bought a huge number of oranges at around $100 per orange. Aykroyd & Murphy have sold a huge number of oranges at around $100 per orange.
The real crop report is issued, which states that crops are flourishing and oranges are plentiful. By supply and demand, oranges are cheap. This sends the price plummeting.
Duke & Duke now sells all of the oranges they have at around $20 per orange, meaning they lost $80 per orange, and since they bought a huge amount, they're out of business (really, they don't have the cash to settle, and so they need to liquidate their assets, such as auctioning off their set on the exchange).
Meanwhile, Aykroyd & Murphy bought a lot of oranges at $20 and sold them at $100 (even though they sold before they bought, but leave that aside), and so made a fortune, allowing them to retire to some exotic island locale while destroying Duke & Duke. | [
"Trading Places is a 1983 American comedy film directed by John Landis and starring Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy. It tells the story of an upper-class commodities broker and a homeless street hustler whose lives cross paths when they are unknowingly made part of an elaborate bet. Ralph Bellamy, Don Ameche, Denholm ... |
Euler's identity: Huge coincidence or deep connection? | À more insightful derivation of the full identity, (e^ix = cos(x) + isin(x) )
I'm on a train so I can't do the full thing comfortably but I will give the highlights and add derails later.
Basically e is *not* important because it relates to compound interest, it is important because it describes rates of change that are proportional the value at the time (I.e. dy/dt = ky) this happens to have applications in heat transfer, interest, radioactive decay, and many simple models. It remains important for the more complicated case where we are describing the rate of charge of a vector quantity, with some additional difficulties.
Okay, now what are sine and cosine? One convenient way to look at them is by the vector (cos(t), sin(t)). What is this crazy thing? It's the "parametrization" of a circle of radius 1, a way to describe a circle with a single parameter to. Alternatively you can think of it as a machine that takes a line of length of 2pi and twists it into a circle.
How are they related? Well if we look at e^it we know that it will be some complex number, call it u(t) + iv(t)
We then note the property that the rate of change of e^it is proportional to itself, namely it is ie^it or in our representation in, d/dt(u+iv) = iu-v where d/dt denotes rate of change with respect to parameter t
We can compare the real and imaginary parts and we get du/dt = - v, dv/dt=u
What does that mean? It means that at each point the u component moves in the (-v) direction, and the v component moves in the u direction. This system of "differential equations" actually has a solution the unit circle, with an appropriate starting point (e^0 =1). You can see it if you draw it out on a (u, v) plane, the way you're forced to go by following those directions at every point will from a circle.
Sorry, this got technical fast. Tl;Dr there is indeed a deep connection between e and cosine and sine that gives the well known Euler identity. | [
"Euler's identity is named after the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. It is considered to be an exemplar of mathematical beauty as it shows a profound connection between the most fundamental numbers in mathematics.\n",
"It has been claimed that Euler's identity appears in his monumental work of mathematical an... |
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