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why do countries have gold reserves? | Imagine for a minute you're a nation. The nation across the ocean wants to buy some cruise missiles from you, and they want to pay you 12 billion Flerbos for the pleasure.
The first question that should come to mind is this: **What the f__k is a Flerbo?** The Flerbo is made up crap, just like every other currency on the planet; the US Dollar, the British Pound, the Euro, Yen, Yuan, Peso, etc are all paper currencies, and have value because the govt says they have value. Meaning, they have exactly as much value as the government printing them says they have...
So say now that you make the deal, sign the papers, and agree to deliver the missiles in exchange for 12 billion Flerbos... which your business partner delivers in freshly printed bills, a few hours after they devalued the Flerbo. Those bastards didn't actually have the money when they made the deal, and they just watered down their own currency. Those cruise missiles are every bit as deadly as when they were made, but your compensation just dropped sharply in value. You still have 12 billion Flerbos, but they don't have the same buying power you thought they would.
Lets wind back a bit, and see the deal again if the buyer doesn't deliberately screw you. You build the missiles, they draw the Flerbos from available stocks, and the exchange happens. Now you're holding on to 12 billion Flerbos. Do you have any idea what a nation can do with 12 billion Flerbos? That depends pretty strongly on how many other nations like the Flerbo; just because you were willing to make a deal for them doesn't mean your peers around the globe will also accept them for business. They may not do enough business with the issuing nation to justify keeping Flerbos on hand, or they may be actively opposing the Flerbo for fear that it will become a more important international currency than their own, and so on. Now you are holding money that doesn't spend universally.
And now, lets go all the way back to the beginning. They offer you the Flerbos, which you accept... in the form of the equivalent quantity of gold all those Flerbos could buy, to be physically transferred to you, half on purchase, half on delivery. You lock in the quantity of gold to be delivered when the deal is made, making you immune to any financial screw-jobbery on the part of the buyers. When the deal is done, you are physically holding 12 billion Flerbos worth of gold. All those nations from the last paragraph who didn't want to do business in Flerbos? They're perfectly happy to do business in gold. Gold is virtually universal, and can be used to do business in virtually any currency simply by virtue of setting a price per ounce in the relevant currency. | [
"Although central banks do not generally announce gold purchases in advance, some, such as Russia, have expressed interest in growing their gold reserves again as of late 2005. In early 2006, China, which only holds 1.3% of its reserves in gold, announced that it was looking for ways to improve the returns on its o... |
How much did the Moorish people mix with the Spaniards over the time in which they ruled over them? | This a great question! The answer is a complex one. First during the time you are talking about 711-1492, the category/ethnicity of "Spaniard" had only just begun to crystalize (at the time of the Umayyad invasion it was non-existant). Second, both groups you are talking about the residents of the Iberian Peninsula and the Muslim invaders from North Africa were not homogenous nor of uniform ethnicity. Prior to the invasion, the Iberian peninsula had been influenced by a multitude of cultural and ethnic groups including but not limited to Phoenicians, Celts, Romans, Greeks, Jews, and Visigoths. The armies of the Umayyad dynasty contained Arabians, Egyptians, North Africans, Nubians, among others. Neither group had a uniform skin color or phenotype.
As to the meat of your question yes there was likely considerable mixture, at least overtime; however, just as neither population was uniform at the outset, long-term unions were not either. As a general rule, there was more mixture in southern Spain than northern Spain because the Islamic presence was longer in the South. That said there are likely Spaniards from the north with Muslim ancestors and Spaniards from the south with no Muslim ancestors. | [
"In the later part of the 1500s, the Spaniards took possession of most of Luzon and the Visayas, converting the lowland population to Christianity from their local indigenous religion. But although Spain eventually established footholds in northern and eastern Mindanao and the Zamboanga Peninsula, its armies failed... |
At what point did History become something that the average person knew about? | Well, there are a lot of aspects to your question that make it complicated to answer at face value. Obviously we need to draw a line between the modern field of history and the nebulous awareness and discussion of past events that has always been a part of the human consciousness. If a group of people have no conception of a difference between their historical past and a mythological past, then where do we draw the line between history and theology? Are Jewish biblical scholars historians if they believe that the events described in the Genesis are historically accurate? If they are not, then what about medieval chroniclers who regularly included accounts of religious miracles taken at face value? And then there is the question of what is an average person and what society are we talking about, both of which obviously need to be answered before attempting to say anything except the most useless generalities.
I'm not going to try to touch most of that. I'm going to answer a simpler question, and only with regards to western society. At what point did a concept of history as an independent and interpretive discipline become part of the general scope of an "education"?
The answer to that comes in the Renaissance and with the rise of a very broad and influential intellectual movement called "Humanism" or "Renaissance Humanism" to which we owe many of the ideas that differentiate us from the medieval mind. Until this point, a civic education consisted of two groups of disciplines, the "Trivium": Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic which had formed the core of an education in Classical Antiquity, and the later Medieval addition of the "Quadrivium": Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. If you were the son of, say, a French duke in the mid or late middle ages, those seven disciplines likely formed the core of your intellectual training.
Humanism, which we tend to say began with Francis Petrarch in Italy in the 14th century, was an intellectual movement that challenged the status quo in many different arenas. One of its earliest and most important principles was the concept of "Ad Fontes", meaning to the source. While you and I think of the Roman Empire as having fallen in 410 CE, Medieval Europe tended to conflate Christendom and Roman Civilization (en route to a lot of very interesting notions on the fate of the world and the coming of God's kingdom), and they believed that the rule of Rome continued in the form of the Roman Church, and that the mechanism of rule had simply transitioned from the temporal means of the empire to the spiritual means of the Church. They believed that Rome, as a figurative concept, was still alive and well and that medieval Christians did not differ a great deal from their earlier Roman counterparts. It took Petrarch and his study of ancient texts to reveal the true rift that had grown between this assumption and reality. He coined the term 'the dark ages' to refer to the ongoing era of intellectual regression that separated Medieval scholars from their Classical counterparts. As some of his ideas took hold, there was a natural impetus to relearn what had been lost and to study ancient texts in their original form, i.e. go to the source, rather than read recent productions in the oversimplified Medieval Latin (often referred to as Vulgar Latin). This and the ideas that arose in its aftermath brought about many of the things that we now place under the umbrella of the Renaissance. One of those things was a challenge to Medieval scholasticism in universities. The Trivium and Quadrivium were reformed into the broader collection of "studias humanitatis," or the Humanities. Among them was history, and it has been there ever since. Obviously methodologies have evolved, but I'm sure you can see why the notions such as 'ad fontes' that inspired so many new ways of thinking would lead directly into a more attentive and factually rigorous attention to the past, its events, and its ongoing processes.
What I've just given you is a very traditional account of one answer to your question. As I said, there are innumerable possible answers depending on how you choose to draw your dividing lines and who you really want to talk about. Hopefully this is part of what you wanted to know.
TL;DR For western culture, it happens in the Renaissance.
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"Despite the fact that there was no written record about the past up till the end of the 19th century, some elders still remembered a lot of things about themselves and their surroundings as was handed down to them from their ancestors, and have advantage of being able to store those facts in their memories and pas... |
Any literature recommendation on "retro" or "nostalgia" throughout history? | So, as you mentioned, a romanticized view of ancient Greece was an important source of nostalgic longing for an idealized past that you see occurring throughout European history, especially in Italy. When this looking back took on an especially nostalgic tone, it tended to focus on a particular image: shepherds, nymphs, and satyrs frolicking about in the mythical pastures of Arcadia. The tradition of pastoral poetry extends all the way back to Virgil's *Eclogues,* and encompassed some of the greatest works in Italian history such as Guarini's *Il pastor fido* and Tasso's *Aminta.* In the eighteenth century, there was a whole group of literati who formed what was called the Arcadian Academy, they took on the names of mythological shepherds, created poetry, and debated matters political and artistic. Through them, the Pastoral tradition had a pretty huge influence on Eightenment thought in Italy and also on emerging romantic aesthetics (for instance, in Schiller's *On Naive and Sentimental Poetry*).
I know mostly about pastoral traditions through musical scholarship, which is my primary era of interest. Pastoralism not only affected poetic and artistic subjects, but there also became a characteristic sound of "shepherds relaxing carefree in the fields." Of course, this was a constructed vision of what it meant to be poor (poor = free of modern stress and more in touch with nature) that has nothing to do with the actual state of the economic poor of the day. But for a good discussion of pastoralism as it relates to musical practice, see Raymond Monelle's *The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military, and Pastoral.* This talks not only about the mechanisms that musicians used to invoke pastoralism (pastoral "signifiers"), but also about the cultural meaning of pastoralism in general (the pastoral "signified"), which is probably what would interest you the most.
I'm less familiar with the literature on pastoralism more generally (though the Monelle has copious references that will point you to things). But one I have read is Vernon Minor's *The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste,* which has a lot to say about how pastoralism intersects with the emergence of the modern notion of taste and with Enlightenment aesthetics more generally. | [
"Most commonly \"retro\" is used to describe objects and attitudes from the recent past that no longer seem modern. It suggests a fundamental shift in the way we relate to the past. Different from more traditional forms of revivalism, \"retro\" suggests a half ironic, half longing consideration of the recent past; ... |
what was ancient civilization's knowledge of volcanoes? | Pliny the Younger wrote two letters about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which he witnessed. They're letters 6.16 and 6.20.
Though my Latin ability has faded, to the extent that it ever existed, and I'm therefore unable to tell you the quality of these translations, [here](_URL_0_) are two translations, such as they are :). An excerpt:
Recalling his relation, Pliny the Elder, observing the eruption:
> It was not clear at that distance from which mountain the cloud was rising (it was afterwards known to be Vesuvius); **its general appearance can be best expressed as being like an umbrella pine, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches**, I imagine because it was thrust upwards by the first blast and then left unsupported as the pressure subsided, or else it was borne down by its own weight so that it spread out and gradually dispersed. Sometimes it looked white, sometimes blotched and dirty, according to the amount of soil and ashes it carried with it. My uncle's scholarly acumen saw at once that it was important enough for a closer inspection, and he ordered a boat to be made ready, telling me I could come with him if I wished. I replied that I preferred to go on with my studies, and as it happened he had himself given me some writing to do. [. . . .]
> He hurried to the place which everyone else was hastily leaving, steering his course straight for the danger zone. He was entirely fearless, describing each new movement and phase of the portent to be noted down exactly as he observed them. Ashes were already falling, hotter and thicker as the ships drew near, followed by bits of pumice and blackened stones, charred and cracked by the flames: then suddenly they were in shallow water, and the shore was blocked by the debris from the mountain.
The account is fascinating and merits reading in whole.
I'm sure someone else can give a fuller idea of ancient notions of volcanoes, but this is certainly a start! | [
"Many ancient accounts ascribe volcanic eruptions to supernatural causes, such as the actions of gods or demigods. To the ancient Greeks, volcanoes' capricious power could only be explained as acts of the gods, while 16th/17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler believed they were ducts for the Earth's tears.... |
why doesn't it matter that an ssd is fragmented? | Fragmentation causes problems with a normal hard drive because the drive has to take time to move a physical head from the location of the first part of the file to the location of the second, wait for the head to settle, and wait for the disk to rotate until the data is under the head. All this extra time makes access slow.
None of this applies to a SSD. No matter where in the memory the data is, it is instantly available. | [
"In distributed computing, a single system image (SSI) cluster is a cluster of machines that appears to be one single system. The concept is often considered synonymous with that of a distributed operating system, but a single image may be presented for more limited purposes, just job scheduling for instance, which... |
moles (not the animal) | A mol represents 6.022 x 10^23 individual atoms or molecules. Each element of the periodic table has a weight in grams next to it. That is the atomic mass unit (amu) and shows how many grams 1 mol of the element will weigh. For example, oxygen has an amu of about 16. This means 6.022 x 10^23 atoms of O will weigh 16 grams, 2 moles 32 grams, etc.
This is important when you start combining substances for reactions. You can't do this based solely on the weight of two or more substances; it has to be based on a molecule to molecule ratio. That's why chemical equations have a number in front of the element or compound. For every x molecules of an element, you need y molecules of another. You almost always have to then refer to your periodic table to multiply those numbers into a weight.
If I want to make OH^- , I need 1 oxygen and 1 hydrogen. Oxygen weighs 16 gams per mol, and hydrogen weighs 1 gram per mol. If I take the 1 to 1 ratio as a literal measurement of weight (1 gram of oxygen, and mix it with 1 gram of hydrogen) I won't have enough oxygen to finish the job. | [
"Moles are small mammals adapted to a subterranean lifestyle (i.e., \"fossorial\"). They have cylindrical bodies; velvety fur; very small, inconspicuous ears and eyes; reduced hindlimbs; and short, powerful forelimbs with large paws adapted for digging.\n",
"While many groups of burrowing animals (pink fairy arma... |
why does moss only grow facing north | It doesn't.
It just doesn't grow well in direct sunlight. So in the northern hemisphere it generally only grows on the North side of things. It will grow on the south side of something as long as it doesn't get too direct sunlight, or it's in the southern hemisphere, and all the other conditions for growth are met. | [
"It is generally believed that in northern latitudes, the north side of trees and rocks will generally have more luxuriant moss growth on average than other sides. This is assumed to be because the sun on the south side creates a dry environment. South of the equator the reverse would be true. However, naturalists ... |
How does the modern Big Bang theory incorporate the Law of Conservation of matter? | First, there is no such thing as a "law of conservation of matter".
Second, you are misinterpreting what the Big Bang *is*. It was not a magical explosion where something was created from nothing. It was an epoch in the early universe where all of space simultaneously underwent rapid expansion. | [
"The Big Bang theory offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the CMB, large scale structure, and Hubble's Law. The framework for the Big Bang model relies on Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity and on simplifying assumptions s... |
When we see something positive, why do we clap? | The glib answer is that it is just an arbitrary signal, based on social norms.
However, one might speculate that clapping has some attractive qualities. It's a cheap way of generating an impulse response, which contains a wide range of sound frequencies. As such, it will be audible in a wide range of acoustic environments (small crowded rooms, up to large amphitheatres).
In a crowd, a clap also becomes a Poisson process, so *en mass* you generate a *pink* noise (where intensity is proportional to 1/frequency, like the sound of the ocean). Pink noise matches the sensitivity of the human auditory system, and results in a sound that both loud and reasonably pleasant (incidentally, it is much less harsh/irritating than whitenoise, making it good for making annoying sounds in your environment, e.g. in order to sleep/work).
I guess clapping also has quite a large dynamic range and a reasonable amount of differentiation within that range, so you can communicate high or low 'positivity', with a fair degree of nuance.
This is all somewhat speculative, but I doubt one could be any more concrete. | [
"Limb also investigated the relation of emotion to creativity. He asked jazz musicians in the fMRI to improvise music they felt corresponded to the emotions in photos of a sad, neutral, and happy woman. He found that when musicians responded to happy photos, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex deactivated much more ... |
Psychologically, what is this called? | This could be the result of several different cognitive processes. It depends on his reason for choosing to do that. This could be polarized or "black or white" thinking. That is, the person is inflexible in their view of how the task is completed. "I have to do it this way or it's a failure." Another likely option is that this could also be the application of "sunk costs." The person irrationally believes that because he has already put so much effort into completing the task in a specific way, that he has to complete it in that way now or that all the previous effort is wasted. Another angle is that this is an "opportunity cost" failure. The person may see the benefit of fixing the machine but not consider other things that could have been accomplished instead. There is also a very specific cognitive bias for underestimating how long tasks take.
There are many more that could be relevant. But again, it's all wild speculation without actually talking to the person. | [
"Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others. In this definition, \"scientific\" refers to the empirical investigation using the scientific method. The terms \"thoughts\", \"feelings\", and \"behavio... |
does my iphone soak up data while apps are open but not in use? | Yes they will use some, for updating info, like facebook gives you notifications. The amounts will be very small and shouldn't make a difference unless you have really, REALLY shitty plan. You should be able to turn off mobile data if you want it to use nothing. | [
"Apple gave an official response on their web site on April 27, 2011, after questions were submitted by users, the Associated Press and others. Apple clarified that the data is a small portion of their crowd-sourced location database cache of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers which is downloaded from Apple into the iP... |
what is the difference between being "legally blind" and blind in the colloquial sense? | Legally blind means that even with glasses you can't see enough to function (e.g. you can't read, navigate or drive). But you can still see some shapes, the eyes are still working. Blind blind means everything is gone. | [
"In the United States, the terms \"partially sighted\", \"low vision\", \"legally blind\" and \"totally blind\" are used by schools, colleges, and other educational institutions to describe students with visual impairments. They are defined as follows:\n",
"The word \"blind\" (adjective and verb) is often used to... |
does "beginner's luck" have any truth to it in various games or sports? | Experienced game players go in with prepared strategies. A new player doesn't know the strategies, so the opponents may not know how to best deal with the non-strategies. | [
"Beginner's luck refers to the supposed phenomenon of novices experiencing disproportionate frequency of success or succeeding against an expert in a given activity. One would expect experts to outperform novices - when the opposite happens it is counter-intuitive, hence the need for a term to describe this phenome... |
why doesn't greece just refuse to pay it's debt? | If Greece defaults on its debt:
1) No one will loan any more money to them - which is kinda a big deal since they got into the current dilemma by spending more money than they have. They will have to fire thousands of public works, slash pensions, close schools, etc to make up the difference.
2) No longer part of the Euro, they will have to create their own currency... which no one will want to use outside of Greece because it is backed by the full faith and credit of a government that just walked away from its debt obligations. Any one that wanted to do business with them, or any bank that would ever consider loaning them money ever again, would not do so in Greece's currency, they would insist on the transactions being fulfilled with Euros, putting Greece right back in their original problem of not having control of the currency. | [
"Greece could accept additional bailout funds and debt relief (i.e., bondholder haircuts or principal reductions) in exchange for greater austerity. However, austerity has damaged the economy, deflating wages, destroying jobs and reducing tax receipts, thus making it even harder to pay its debts. If further austeri... |
Since the Sun is also spherical like the planets that orbit it, and if Earth has polar orbiting objects, why are none of our solar system planets "polar" orbiting the sun? Are there any? | They're in that plane because it's the same as the plane of the disc of gas and dust which coalesced to form the Sun and planets in the first place, and nothing has perturbed them very much since.
It's entirely possible that a body could orbit in any plane. I think Uranus's moons orbit "vertically" compared to the rest of the solar system, but only because Uranus itself is tilted over for some reason. However, any large object in a polar orbit might be hard to find, because it would so rarely interact with the other planets.
Comets come in from various angles, I think. | [
"Most large objects in orbit around the Sun lie near the plane of Earth's orbit, known as the ecliptic. The planets are very close to the ecliptic, whereas comets and Kuiper belt objects are frequently at significantly greater angles to it. All the planets, and most other objects, orbit the Sun in the same directio... |
why do some dishes heat up quicker than the actual food contents? | Today you learned there's a difference between scold and scald. | [
"Because larger objects have a lower surface-area-to-volume ratio, they are more able to retain heat. This heat retention translates to a uniform temperature increase throughout the food as the heat dissipates to cooler areas. Additionally, foods with a higher water content are more subject to carry over cooking as... |
how is reddit free? i can't wrap my head around the business model. | The vast majority of the work is done by volunteers. So they have very few expenses.
The expenses that they do have are covered by ads, reddit gold donations, etc. | [
"RedditGifts is an online user-to-user gift exchange service that connects Reddit users around the world with one another. Free to participate in, RedditGifts was first created by Reddit user \"kickme444\" (the alias of Dan McComas), while working on freelance projects. The service involves signing up, filling out ... |
Can someone explain the evolutionary benefits to having a foreskin? | "What is the evolutionary purpose of...." questions are typically invitations to speculation rather than things that can be answered with scientific rigour. In this case, remember that we evolved without underwear, and speculate for a few minutes about living your life with your unprotected glans swinging around exposed to the world; your answer to your own question will be as good as anybody's. | [
"The foreskin extends out from the base of the glans and covers the glans when the penis is flaccid. Proposed theories for the purpose of the foreskin are that it serves to protect the penis as the fetus develops in the mother's womb, that it helps to preserve moisture in the glans, and that it improves sexual plea... |
How do you clean up a natural body of water? | Biological Engineer here! I specialize in the field of ecological engineering, which is the restoration or creation of ecosystems which benefit human society and the natural environment. Wastewater wetlands are one example of an ecosystem we would create. The concept is to allow natural processes within the water body to reduce, eliminate, and/or transform (through chemical reactions) waste products, such that the outflowing water is much cleaner. Here are some of the main processes for treatment that occur naturally:
1. Denitrification: Nitrate is one of the most problematic pollutants in our water. Nitrogen from fertilizers and animal/human waste enters water bodies, providing a large influx of nutrients for algae. This causes algal blooms. The algae is then consumed, and the oxygen in the water column is used up through respiration, causing hypoxia/anoxia and fish kills (this process is referred to as eutrophication). In anaerobic environments, soluble nitrate (NO3-) is converted to the form of nitrogen in our atmosphere, dinitrogen gas (N2). N2 is inert, therefore as it bubbles out of the system (such as in a wetland which provides many anaerobic zones), nitrogen leaves the water system permanently. Denitrification is one of the main goals considered in treatment wetland design.
2. Sedimentation: Phosphate is another major pollutant, and is found in human/animal waste and fertilizers. Excesses of phosphate cause the same eutrophiciation issue mentioned above. As opposed to nitrate, phosphate (PO4 3-) is tightly bound to solid particles such as soil. When phosphate enters a stagnant to semi-stagnant water body, such as a wet pond or wetland, the phosphate-bound soil particles have time to sink down and settle on the bottom. This is called sedimentation. Soil is actually considered one of the main pollutants in the US, and it is THE worst pollutant in certain states such as North Carolina. So sedimentation helps reduce turbidity of downstream systems which impacts wildlife, and allows phosphate to be consumed and reduced in the system.
3. Phytoremediation/plant uptake: Plants uptake the nutrients mentioned above along with water and several metals, which often wash into water bodies off roofs and parking lots. Therefore the presence of plants helps filter these pollutants. It should be noted that while plants sequester these substances and carbon (from atmospheric CO2) while they are alive, when they die they decompose and release these components back into the system, which in the long term can introduce more organic matter than is being treated. One way to counteract this is by harvesting the plants every now and then and planting new ones. In waterlogged systems like wetlands, there is simply not enough oxygen for the dead plants to decompose, so the organic matter accumulates and stays unreactive for near perpetuity. This is the best case scenario for truly sequestering carbon and other pollutants.
4. Dessication/microbial activity: Pathogens from wastewater are killed through direct sunlight and consumption by microbes. Hydrocarbons that wash in from roads and parking lots break down due to the same processes.
Nature is remarkable in its resilience and capacity for ecosystem self-care. In many cases, ecosystem-based treatment systems such as wetlands are sufficient to reduce pollutant loads to regulation standards for public waterways or consumption. Other times it is a stepwise process requiring more intensive methods such as bioreactors, which employ some species of microbe to induce a chemical transformation for the filtration and treatment of pollutants.
This is by no means a comprehensive list and I am a recent graduate so it is also simplified but I hope this helps! Questions welcome (: | [
"Clean water is essential for hygiene, for consumption and for feeding programmes (for mixing with powdered therapeutic milk or porridge), as well as for preventing the spread of water-borne disease. As such, MSF water engineers and volunteers must create a source of clean water. This is usually achieved by modifyi... |
why the new trend to shave pubic hair? | The ubiquity of pornography with the rise of the Internet and the desire to mimic the "actors". | [
"The reason for the removal of pubic hair from women in pornography was a matter of \"technical considerations of cinematography\". Hair removal progressed to full removal. Because of the popularity of pornography, pubic hair shaving was mimicked by women.\n",
"Today in much of the world, it is common for women t... |
What was life like for an allied conscientious objector during WWII? | In the US a conscientious objector could become a medic. One such objector, Desmond Doss, was awarded the Medal of Honor for bravery in saving the lives of quite a number of men over a number of days and was himself wounded.
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"During World War I, he served with the Friends' Ambulance Unit (FAU), from 1916–1918. In a 1971 retrospective, he records that he was a C.O. (conscientious objector), to which fact he ascribed a difficulty in finding a job in the post-war years. However, he found part-time work at Sheffield University teaching eco... |
why the more dangerous vehicles (scooters, small cars) are available to teenagers, while the safer ones are not? | Scooters and small cars may be more dangerous to their driver, but they are less dangerous to everyone else. If you hit something with a scooter you might kill yourself, if you hit something with a large sedan you stand a much higher chance of damaging the other thing/people.
| [
"Children present significant challenges in engineering and producing safe vehicles, because most children are significantly smaller and lighter than most adults. Additionally, children far from being just scaled down adults, still have an undeveloped skeletal system. This means that vehicle restraint systems such ... |
Are Aerodynamics and Gravity theories or laws? | The term 'law' is really a sort of historical artifact that we should have gotten rid of a long time ago. It dates back to around Galileo, when people were finally realizing that mathematics could be used to model the world. For whatever reason, mathematical descriptions were called 'laws' - for example, the inverse square law. You can see this in old mathematical texts, especially on geometry, where they often say things like, "The circle is constructed according to the law that all its points are equidistant from a fixed center".
When mathematical physics finally showed up, the term came along for the ride. (Speculation: It may have been translated from Latin, which was the *lingua franca* of learned literature at the time.) So it's just like the word 'theory' - not the same meaning used in everyday speech.
For all intents and purposes, feel free to replace the word 'law' with 'theory' in all scientific matters. There's no essential difference, and it just confuses the issue with all its implications. People wind up saying things like 'breaking the laws of physics', which is a bit silly. Physical law isn't forcing the universe to behave a certain way, like human laws do - it's simply a precise description of the way the universe behaves. | [
"Aerodynamics is a significant factor in vehicle design, including automobiles, and in the prediction of forces and moments acting on sailing vessels. It is used in the design of mechanical components such as hard drive heads. Structural engineers resort to aerodynamics, and particularly aeroelasticity, when calcul... |
what is the deal with the unholy trinity of kroger, cvs pharmacy and walgreen's? | Kroger store manager here...
1) Proximity to one another allows stores to potentially steal customers away from eachother based on better service, instocks, cleanliness and speed of checkout.
2) there really arent a ton of high traffic intersections available to retailers, and it gets even lower when you factor in the size of the lots we need to build on.
3) cvs and wal-greens break even on scripts and make their money on the convenience goods and impulse products they sell. Compare their OTC prices to a Kroger, Target or Wal-Mart and it is stunning.
You will typically find us at the exits to freeways entering area zoned as residential....
Anyway, not a full list but definitely some of the answers I have received over the years from our Real Estate department!
I suggest you get your scripts transferred to Kroger! :) | [
"On October 19, 1998, Fred Meyer, parent company of Smith's Food and Drug, announced a strategic merger with Kroger. On May 27, 1999, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved the merger of the two companies, named The Kroger Co.\n",
"As of August 2014, Merck's research and development effort has led to the app... |
what is ideal mechanical advantage and how can i calculate it? | Ideal mechanical advantage is the number that your force is multiplied by in the absolute best case scenario when using a simachine (no friction or other ways to lose force applied.) How it's calculated varies depending on the machine you're using but can be generally expressed as: amount of force output divided by, force applied | [
"Mechanical advantage that is computed using the assumption that no power is lost through deflection, friction and wear of a machine is the maximum performance that can be achieved. For this reason, it is often called the \"ideal mechanical advantage\" (IMA). In operation, deflection, friction and wear will reduce ... |
can someone please explain for me the nba salary cap and luxury-tax threshold? | The NBA has what is called a soft-cap. This means that there are certain rules that allow a team to go over the salary cap. Contrast this with the NFL, which has a hard-cap: a team cannot, under any circumstances, go over the NFL's cap.
The luxury tax threshold is a level that is higher than the salary cap. When a team has a total salary above the luxury tax threshold, then they have to pay a fine to the league for every dollar over the threshold. | [
"In addition to the soft cap, the NBA utilizes a luxury tax system that is applied if the team payroll exceeds a separate threshold higher than the salary cap. These teams pay a penalty for each dollar their team salary exceeds the tax level. From 2002 to 2013, if a team exceeded the luxury tax threshold, they must... |
Why was the Holocaust in Lithuania so complete and utter? What is the reason for the staggering scale of collaboration by Lithuanians? | **Part 1/2**
So to start off I want to point to recent research concerning the Soviet deportations you mentioned: Atina Grossmann in a lot of her recent work points to the fact that the majority of Eastern European Jews who survived the Second World War did so because of Soviet deportations and evacuations into the central Asian republics of the USSR. I write more about this [in this answer](_URL_0_) but to directly cite Grossmann:
> This forced migration away from the Soviet territories first attacked by the Germans therefore provided—and I keep repeating this fact because it still seems alien to the dominant narrative—the main chance for eastern European Jewry’s survival. The so-called Asiatics who survived the extreme hardships of the Soviet “refuge” constituted the numerical, if not the most visible or articulate, core of the She’erit Hapleta (the core of Eastern European survivors of the Holocaust) Yet we know remarkably little about these Jews’ everyday life, about the political decisions and wartime contingencies that determined their fate, about their numbers, about the relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Polish refugees, about relations with Soviet citizens, Jewish and not. It is astonishing.
Anyways, on to Lithuania.
Scholarship on the issue has identified several factors that played a major role in Lithuania having its Jewish community so thoroughly annihilated and becoming the first European territory to be declared "Jew-free". One of these factors was that it served in the words of historian Konrad Kwiet a "rehearsal stage" and Nazi case study for how the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and more specifically the Einsatzgruppen operated. Secondly, and in contrast to other territories of the Soviet Union and Poland, the Jewish community in Lithuania was highly concentrated in the urban centers and at the same time, easy to identify and isolated from the majority population (I will get to that); and thirdly, a history of organized political anti-Semitism dating back to the inter-war period, that the Germans were able to activate and use for their purposes in order to make use of a relatively small portion of Lithuanian society serving as very active collaborators.
As Michael MacQueen writes in his article *The Context of Mass Destruction: Agents and Prerequisites of the Holocaust in Lithuania*:
> [T]hree themes are central to our understanding of how the Lithuanian Holocaust happened: (1) the nature of Lithuanian nationalism and its setting; (2) the political context of the late interwar and early war years (i.e. spring 1938-June 1941); and (3) the notion of the complete disruption, perhaps more accurately atomization, of Lithuanian society in the period in question. Although this atomization requires additional research, it appears to have provided a prime element of the setting for mass murder. Antisemitism in Lithuania, especially the violent forms it took during the Holocaust, derived impetus from all three of these elements.
Concerning Lithuanian nationalism, there are several developments that kicked off in the 19th century that are fairly typical for the development of nationalism overall. Once a nation has been "invented", so to speak, it will in the minds and arguments of its nationalists, have already existed for a long time. History is always a prime method of legitimizing nationalist positions and aspirations and in Lithuania the history that was rather obvious to serve as this backdrop was that of the Lithuanian Grand Duchy and the subsequent Lithuanian-Polish commonwealth. However, in terms of Lithuanian nationalist policies of the 19th century the Commonwealth was viewed rather negatively. MacQueen cites a Lithuanian historian who describes it as "disastrous to the Lithuanian people and state: the union opened wide the doors for the influence of western Polish culture and the anarchy that accompanied it". The end of the Commonwealth with the partition of Poland spelled – to them – a disastrous end to Lithuanian identity and politics that needed to be re-asserted in opposition to Polish and other foreign culture. They blamed the decline of Lithuania from the greatness of the Grand Duchy to an alleged illiterate peasant people on the Poles. Alleged "polonization" and the link of Lithuania's fate to the Polish pursuit of revolutionary goals had ended,in their interpretations, in the near eradication of Lithuania during the repressions and Russification that followed the abortive nineteenth-century Polish-led uprisings. Lithuanian nationalists came to regard the smothering power of Polish culture in its historical perspective as the engine which had denationalized the local elite and caused it to identify with a nation other than that from which it had originated. This became especially pertinent in the aftermath of WWI when the newly created Polish Republic seized Vilnius in 1920, which the Lithuanians claimed as the capital of their state.
Enter the Jewish community of Lithuania – or rather, Russian imperial policies regarding the Jewish community. The very short version of the background here is that after attempts to either convert Jews or drive them out of the country, Tsarist Russia in 1791 created the so-called "Pale of Settlement", a territory in the West of Russia which was the only territory Jews were allowed to reside in. The Pale did include parts of Lithuania and in the 100+ years it existed fostered a particular Eastern European Jewish culture that differed from Western Europe in as far as assimilation of Jews into the majority society was something that started comparatively late and was more difficult due to several cultural and political obstacles.
The most notable of the obstacles in the Lithuanian case was language. To speak Lithuanian became – as was the case in other developments of nationalism – the prime signifier of allegiance to the Lithuanian nation and people. Jews on the other hand, who had been forced to live in shtetls (almost exclusively Jewish villages) or ghettos in the major imperial cities, did not speak Lithuanian en large. Their primary language was Yiddish and their secondary languages Polish and Russian. Lithuanian had until the Independence of Lithuania not been the language of power and administration nor the lingua franca of the territory. This is an important detail in as far as to both nationalist Lithuanians and political active Jews in Lithuania, the fact that the Jews did not speak Lithuanian made a mutual understanding as Lithuanians not really possible.
This perceived lack of identity between the Jewish and Lithuanian national interests created tensions that were compounded by traditional and newly formed forms of Antisemitism in the inter-war period. Next to "traditional" forms of Antisemitism such as clerical (Christ killers) and economic (money lenders), the spread of the idea of Jewish-Bolshevism was a most important element. The idea of the Jewish international conspiracy was one that was highly popular in Tsarist Russia (see f.ex. the Protocolls of the Elders of Zion) and that with the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922 morphed into the idea of Bolshevism being a forced controlled by said Jewish conspiracy. Many national movements, including that in Lithuania, saw Jews as "anti-national" and agents and executioners of the Bolshevik policies.
These issues were further compounded by the development of political culture in inter-war Lithuania, starting with Antanas Smetona's 1926 coup d'etat. Smetona had already served as the first president of Lithuania after independence and was a highly prominent figure in Lithuanian nationalism. Enveloped in anti-Polish irredentism and revanchism, he and Augustinas Voldemaras – another prominent Lithuanian nationalist – supported a military coup against a more left leaning government and installed themselves as president and prime minister respectively. Over subsequent years of Smetona's rule Lithuanian political culture took a noticeable turn to the right, including becoming very hostile towards Jewish and Polish minorities and prevalence of organized political violence, especially in from of the Voldemarist Iron Wolf movement, which was founded after Voldemaras was removed from power in 1929.
Already enveloped in these trends, the political crisis of 1938-1941 further worsened the atomization of Lithuanian society. In 1938 Poland forced Lithuania under threat of war to recognize their sovereignty over Vilnius. In 1939 Germany forced the retrocession of Memel/Klajpeda, adding to the profound sense of national demoralization. In the same year, the Soviets offered to station troops in Lithuania to "protect" it from further incursions; a pretext that lead to the occupation and annexation of Lithuania by the USSR in 1940.
| [
"An important component to the Holocaust in Lithuania was that the occupying Nazi German administration fanned antisemitism by blaming the Soviet regime's recent annexation of Lithuania, a year earlier, on the Jewish community. Another significant factor was the large extent to which the Nazis' design drew upon the... |
in difderent languages, what influences the way every number is called or pronounced as ? | French is the absolute WORST about this. They don't have a word for a lot of numbers. Example: 80 is said as two forties. 70 is seven tens. 90 is the worst, it's four twenty ten. It got so confusing that Switzerland (IIRC) invented their own version of the French number system. | [
"In many languages, such as English, number is obligatorily expressed in every grammatical context. Some limit number expression to certain classes of nouns, such as animates or referentially prominent nouns (as with proximate forms in most Algonquian languages, opposed to referentially less prominent obviative for... |
why do i tense my body and brace myself when i know a loud noise is imminent? does it help at all? | You are preparing for "fight or flight". Even if you know there is no real danger, your instincts cut in just as they would if the loud noise was a nearby lion getting ready to roar.
Your conscious brain notices that the noise is imminent, and your subconscious blindly says: "loud noise: could be danger - better prepare for fighting or running away".
It could also be that there was once a loud noise near you which *did* lead to danger. Your subconscious then flagged up loud noises as *really* bad and still reacts as if it were that same time, happening over again.
Regular exposure to loud noises will lessen your reaction. That's not always a good thing, because sometimes having that danger sign get raised is a good thing.
Does it help? Not if the noise isn't dangerous. It'll help if it does turn out to be dangerous: your muscles will be prepped to take explosive reactionary measures.
**EDIT** bloody hell, reddit. I hang out on the rising threads and try not to talk total shit. Normally this means that I get three upvotes or downvotes in a largely forgotten thread. This is the second post in as many days to blow up on me. I have to confess that I'm not an expert (put it this way: I wouldn't have made this a top-level reply on /r/AskHistorians). I merely sound plausible sometimes, when I lose concentration. I also change accounts whenever I hit 10k karma. I only got this account a few days ago and I've only had one vicar so far (and technically he was a priest but I was too polite to point that out to the lovely chap who PM'd me). Show mercy: I want more vicars. | [
"A startle reflex can occur in the body through a combination of actions. A reflex from hearing a sudden loud noise will happen in the primary acoustic startle reflex pathway consisting of three main central synapses, or signals that travel through the brain.\n",
"Contracting muscles produce vibration and sound. ... |
Does the body really treat cooked food as a toxin? | Just a [brief] review on the history of cooked food:
**History of cooked food**
First we can do a comparative analysis and look at what living chimps and bonobos eat since they are our closest relatives. We find modern day chimps hunt for raw meat and it makes up a small part of their diet. The rest is raw fruit and plants. Thus we assume that our last common ancestor with chimpanzees, what would become us, and what would become them, have always eaten and hunted for raw meat, but again this made up a small part of their diet.
The first group of ancestors of which we have substantial evidence in our lineage are the [Australopithecines](_URL_2_). They appeared some 4 million years ago in the fossil record. There is evidence for them eating meat with tools but not cooking it or even having the ability to control fire. So the australopithecines ate raw meat, fruits and plants. It is also worth nothing that they probably engaged in "scavenging" rather then "hunting". This is because of the types of tools we find them with. These individuals would have to have had different internal gut morphology to deal with the raw meat/food and the [foodborne illnesses](_URL_1_) associated with raw unprepared food.
The *Homo* lineage appeared about 2.4 mya with *Homo habilis* which evolved from an Australopithecine ancestor. The first humans speciated about 200,000 years ago. Evidence for fire and cooked food dates between 300,000 - 1.8 million years ago.
*Physical Evidence*: Excavations dating from approximately 790,000 years ago in Israel suggest that H. erectus not only controlled fire but could light fires. A site called Terra Amata, seems to have been occupied by H. erectus; it contains the evidence of controlled fire, dated at around 300,000 years BC. Despite these examples, some scholars continue to assert that the controlled use of fire was not typical of *H. erectus*, but only of later species of *Homo*, such as *H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens*."
*Morphological Evidence*: Some scientists argue that even the earliest members of the *Homo* lineage used controlled fire to cook food, starting with *Homo erectus* at around 1.8 mya. They justify this with changes in morphology resulting from this cooked diet like shorter guts and changes in dentition which reflect the new diet.
As fire and cooking developed to be more complex/widespread this lead to an even greater varied foraging and extracting diet. It's unclear if every *Homo* species used fire (there were lots of them) or how often it was used, or what all the types of food that were cooked. We just don't have enough fossil evidence. We do know that the diet was mostly cooked plants (tubers, fruits...) and that a smaller portion of the diet was made up of cooked meat. We do know that as tools became more refined, and hunting became more efficient meat increased in proportion. Fire, having been used to modify our food also in turn effected our internal gut morphology.
Thus, anatomically modern humans have always had the ability to control fire, and cook food. We are uniquely adapted to a cooked food diet and what we ate changed slowly over time - from our common ancestor with chimps to *Homo sapiens*. What is known is that the control of fire and cooked food precedes our arrival. Our lineage (the *Homo* genus) has always been omnivorous, we are adapted to a cooked food diet made up of mostly plants and some meat.
The next two articles discuss the origins of cooking food, its a highly debated topic.
Human Adaptation to the Control of Fire by RICHARD WRANGHAM AND RACHEL CARMODY.Evolutionary Anthropology 19:187–199 (2010)
The raw and the stolen: cooking and the ecology of human origins. Wrangam et al. 1999. Current anthropology. 40(5):567-594
**TL;DR** - Hunting/Scavenging for meat with tools probable (6 MYA), Hunting/Scavenging for meat with tools (evidence - 4 mya), control of fire and cooking evidence: morphological (~ 1.8 mya), Controlling fire and cooking evidence: physical (400,000-700,000 years ago), arrival of humans (200,000 years ago).
**Benefits of Cooked Food**
Lets make it clear that a cooked food diet does not mean that someone eats just cooked food...everyone eats raw veggies and fruits at some point. When we focus in on the cooked food portion of a diet we see:
* Kills harmful bacteria and parasites. This is not limited to meats/fish but also to vegetables and fruits where harmful bacteria like e. coli can reside. [There are many foodborne illnesses](_URL_1_) different "treatments" can reduce the risk of transmission, from cooking, peeling to washing your food before consumption.
* Cooking processes food for us making it easier to digest. Most of the energy we eat is used to either maintain the brain or digest more food. Cooking food before hand reduces the amount of "work" your digestive system does allowing it to gain more calories from the food you eat. This may have been critical in us becoming human. That cooked food freed up more calories and allowed our distant ancestors to redirect energy from maintaining the body to increasing brain size and function. Big brains require a lot of energy and it is thought that the transition to cooked food allowed us to develop these big brains. [Nat Geo on this with more information](_URL_0_)
* Cooking is obviously associated with fire, which in itself has its own benefits: warmth, protection, and provides a space to which humans or homo ancestors could gather and share social information (basically, the facebook of the time).
In light of this a cooked diet is more beneficial then a raw diet. The risks of a raw diet, at least for our ancestors were very serious and immediate. In the end a balanced diet is best, humans have been eating cooked food for longer then we have been human. The most important thing to understand is that humans are omnivores and as such we can adapt to pretty much any diet - cooked, raw food, meat, vegan, vegetarian or specialized (gluten-free, lactose-free, allergen free etc.). As long as you get all the micro and macro nutrients you need and you don't over eat you should be good to go!
| [
"BULLET::::- Toxins. Many virulence factors are proteins made by bacteria that poison host cells and cause tissue damage. For example, there are many food poisoning toxins produced by bacteria that can contaminate human foods. Some of these can remain in \"spoiled\" food even after cooking and cause illness when th... |
What was the cause of Æthelwold's Revolt? | Æthelwold was the son of Æthelred I, the older brother of Ælfred, better known as Alfred the Great. *Cerdicing* succession rules were somewhat pragmatic, and allowed for succession to pass to brothers in the event that passing the crown to a son would result in a minority. When Æthelred I was killed in 871, Æthelwold was still a child, and as a result the throne passed to Æthelred's brother Ælfred. In the 890s, Alfred was in the process of establishing his own son Edward as his heir. Æthelwold, however, had reached adulthood by this time and believed that as his father had been king, the line of succession should have by rights reverted to him, and that Alfred should hand over the throne. | [
"Æthelwold's Revolt was an attempt by Æthelwold ætheling to seize the Anglo-Saxon throne from Edward the Elder after the death of Alfred the Great in 899. It ended when Æthelwold was killed in battle in 902 while fighting alongside his Danish allies.\n",
"In early 1068, a series of uprisings in England, along wit... |
Were any Jewish athletes who participated in the 1936 Berlin Olympics killed during the Holocaust? | Yes, there were many Jewish athletes from countries in Europe, America, and North Africa who competed. For example, Bronislaw Czech, from Poland, was a downhill skier who competed in the '28, '32, and '36 olympics. During the holocaust he was sent to Auschwitz, and died there after refusing to train German skiers.
Source-The Hamsa, by E.S. Kraay | [
"On 25 June 1941 Nazi forces arrived in Kaunas, where they witnessed local Lithuanians drag about 50 male Jews into the center of the city while one Lithuanian man beat them to death with a crowbar (cheered on by spectators) in a public display of brutality that shocked many Germans. Once the Jews were all dead, th... |
how is the correction for astigmatism different to the correction of nearsightedness? | So nearsightedness is when there's an aberration in the lens (technically in the length of the eye itself), that prevents the incoming light from focusing to a point on the retina. The light still *would* focus onto a single point, though, when properly corrected.
When considering astigmatism, the lens isn't able to focus the light onto a *single* point, no matter what kind of spherical correction is applied. The correction for astigmatism involves a cylindrical shape applied to the lens.
This is because normally, the cornea (the front part of the eye) (edit: and sometimes, though less occasionally, the lens itself) is shaped like a section of a sphere. In an astigmatic cornea, it looks more like a football, with two different curvatures along two different lines, or meridians.
Applying a nonstandard cylindrical correction makes the incoming light, after it passes the cornea, focus onto a single point again.
[This site is a fairly good resource.](_URL_0_) | [
"Astigmatism causes difficulties in seeing fine detail. Astigmatism can be often corrected by glasses with a lens that has different radii of curvature in different planes (a \"cylindrical\" lens), contact lenses, or refractive surgery.\n",
"Astigmatism may be corrected with eyeglasses, contact lenses, or refract... |
the final fantasy universe. are each series separate stories or part of a bigger storyline? | They're separate stories and in many cases, they take place in completely different fictional worlds. Some are very loosely linked, but all of them are self-contained stories. If you were to play Final Fantasy VII, then Final Fantasy XII, and then Final Fantasy IV, the order you chose to play the games in wouldn't have impacted your understanding of the story in each one.
That said, they do share many common elements. There's certain monsters that will spring up in each one, certain species (Moogles, Chocobo), and certain items (for example, Gil being the currency). You'll also see some character names reused, such as Cid, but each time its a new character (many of the Cid-named characters share some common elements, but they're different people). | [
"Each game in the main series takes place in a different fictional universe, although beginning with \"Final Fantasy X-2\", additional video games set in the main series games' worlds have been released. \"Compilation of Final Fantasy VII\" and \"Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy\" are cross-platform multimedia ... |
What was the process of Taiwan's removal from the UN's permanent Security Council like? | Taiwan wasn't a member in the sense that the UN decided to give one little island a permanent seat. They were recognized as the true government of *all* of China, and had a strong presence there until they were eventually forced to flee the mainland to Taiwan in 1949. By 1971 the People's Republic (communist China) was obviously there for good, and gained more international recognition, so China's seat was essentially given to them instead of the government in Taiwan.
Source: _URL_0_ | [
"In addition to losing its seat in the UN, the UN Secretary-General concluded from the resolution that the General Assembly considered Taiwan to be a province of China. Consequently, the Secretary-General decided that it was not permitted for the ROC to become a party to treaties deposited with it.\n",
"Many atte... |
What were the reasons for the resurgent of extreme Islam in the Muslim world? | What is extremism? Is violence? Is it extreme neo-Orthodox religious practice? Is it anti-Westernism? Is it a social vision where Islam is combined with the modern state?
You might be interested in two older answers of mine:
* [What is the history of (modern) Islamic extremism? When did this all start and why? (x-post from /r/history)](_URL_2_)
This focuses on modern Salafism (the most prominent Sunni neo-orthodoxy), modern Jihadism (with Qutb, which was initially primarily directed against domestic enemies like Nasser, and a vision to take over the state and run it Islamically), and the combination of those two threads (by Bin Laden, who also added a strong anti-Westernism--it took effort him to convince people to attack faraway America over the much closer secular "hypocrites" who ran Arab states). It doesn't cover a lot of stuff--I don't think there's a mention of the Iranian Revolution, for example, but it's really a short intellectual history of how we get to things like ISIS and al Qaeda, which tend to be what people think of when they think of "Islamic extremism".
The follow questions as the thread goes down get into a lot more about political Islam of all kinds, and away from terror.
* [At what point in history did radical Islam become a serious problem?](_URL_0_)
This tries to take a somewhat broader view, but there's a lot going on because it really matters how you think of extremism. Make sure to at least read /u/DeSoulis's follow up, though the other comment thread is good as well.
*Edit*: if people have questions about this, they may also be curious about the Arab Spring. In another sub that doesn't have a twenty year rule, I went through what's happened to the Arab Spring from late 2010 until about nine months ago. I won't answers questions on that here because of the twenty year rule, but I thought people interested in this would also be interested in that:
* [ELI5: How are the countries involved in the "Arab Spring" of 2011 doing now? Are they better off?](_URL_1_) | [
"The revival has also seen a proliferation of Islamic extremist groups in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim World, who have voiced their anger at perceived exploitation as well as materialism, Westernization, democracy and modernity, which are most commonly associated with accepting Western secular belief... |
how are people with insomnia able to be simultaneously exhausted and yet unable to sleep? | Being exhausted and being able to sleep are two separate states. For most people being exhausted makes it easy to sleep, but for someone with insomnia those mechanisms are disrupted in some manner and they cannot sleep. This means they cannot rest and thus they cannot get out of exhaustion. | [
"BULLET::::- Insomnia cannot be blamed for all the deficits the patient is experiencing in his daytime life (not all problems will go away once the patient is able to sleep), this is important to know, because it takes some of the unrealistic expectations off sleep.\n",
"Some cases of insomnia are not really inso... |
alcohol percentage? | If the amount in both glasses were the same, then the amount of alcohol in both would also be the same. It is a percentage, so the small bottle would have less total alcohol then the large one because it is a lower volume. But having the same percentage per volume means the same about of alcohol if the volume is the same. | [
"The definition of a unit of alcohol ranges between 8 to 14 grams of pure alcohol/ethanol depending on the country. There is no agreement on definitions of a low, moderate or high dose of alcohol either. The U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism defines a moderate dose as alcohol intake up to two ... |
how and why do our brains make up the color magenta? | It's a mixture of colors and can't be defined by one wavelength. So is any kind of brown. No big deal. | [
"In humans, melanin is the primary determinant of skin color. It is also found in hair, the pigmented tissue underlying the iris of the eye, and the stria vascularis of the inner ear. In the brain, tissues with melanin include the medulla and pigment-bearing neurons within areas of the brainstem, such as the locus ... |
who exactly are the syrian rebels? | Right let's get a proper answer with some sources.
[
This article](_URL_0_) from the Telegraph has some actual numbers rather than the one's /u/spiderhuman has pulled out of thin air.
First the rebels are not some monolithic organisation, they are comprised of numerous different groups who are loosely aligned in different alliances. The two main alliances, **the FSA (Free Syrian Army)** and **SIF (Syrian Islamic Front)** differ in ideology. **The FSA** being a **secular organisation** with some of the groups within being Islamists. **SIF** are an **Islamist organisation**, specifically Salafist, who are funded by clerics in the gulf, they have distanced themselves from the FSA but are also wary of al-Nusra.
We then have a third group named **al-Nusra**. These are an offshoot of the **al-Qa'ida affiliated Islamic State of Iraq**, they have been declared a terrorist group in the US since December 2012 and are not part of any alliance. Whilst they work with the FSA and SIF they do not like them, the two alliances tolerate al-Nusra but there has been occasional fighting between the groups.
**The FSA** consists of around **80,000 fighters**, **SIF** contains around **25,000** and **al-Nusra** just **5000**.
The FSA and SIF have within them a number of different groups from different parts of the country and I'll list them here, just to note the numbers here are included in the FSA and SIF totals.
* **Farouq Battalions, FSA**: Approximately **14,000** strong, they are a national group but originate in **Homs**. They are an **Islamist leaning** group.
* **Islamic Ahrar al-Sham Movement, SIF**: Possibly as many as **10,000**, SIF have claimed that they have 25,000 fighters but this is unlikely. A Salafi group, they originated in the **Idlib-Hama region** and were key in creating the SIF alliance, they are an **Islamist group** and seek a state based on sharia law.
* **Syria Martyrs’ Brigade**s, FSA: Up to possibly **10,000** though **most estimates put that slightly lower**, originally from **Jabal al-Zawiya, Idlib** they are a **secular group**.
* **YPG – Popular Protection Units, PKK**: A **Kurdish group** which **control Northern Syria** and consist of a **few thousand men**. Affilated with the Turkish PKK, a Turkish socialist group who want independence for the Kurds.
* **Islam Brigade, FSA**: From **Damsacus**, they have **"thousands" of fighters** but refuse to give any estimates. Ideology is not mentioned but the leader's son is a salafist so **Islamist** can be assumed.
* **Tawhid Brigade, FSA**: Around **11,000**, these rebels are from the **countryside surrounding Aleppo**, whilst they want some form of **Islamic government** they say that religious minorities should be treated equally.
* **Suqour al-Sham Brigades, FSA**: **10,000 fighters** from the town of **Sarjeh in Idlib’s Jabal al-Zawiya region**, they are an **Islamist group**.
Not mentioned are the numerous smaller rebel groups as well as numerous army defectors. | [
"Rebels from the group reportedly kidnapped and threatened to kill more than 100 Alawite civilians in August 2011. They also shot and killed a 15-year-old child of an alleged spy for the Syrian government in September 2011.\n",
"Between 26 April and 1 May 2017, more than 95 rebels were killed during clashes betwe... |
why did adultery become decriminalised in many western countries? | In a secular society, a marriage is just a contract. There are no criminal penalties for violating other types of contracts (aside from things like fraud,) and no harm to society from violating a marriage contract. So it makes no sense to criminalize a matter that's ultimately between two people, when there's already civil courts to deal with the financial consequences of adultery (i.e divorce, alimony, division of assets, etc) | [
"Adultery is no longer a crime in any European country. Adultery was decriminalised in England and Wales in 1857. The change also applied in some British territories of the British Empire and was adopted in others. Among the last Western European countries to decriminalised adultery were Italy (1969), Malta (1973),... |
What was the impact of the Holocaust, if any, on Rabbinical Judaism? | First of all, a bit of terminology. "Rabbinism" isn't really a thing. "Rabbinic Judaism" is, but from roughly 1000 years ago until present the overwhelming majority of Judaism has been Rabbinic (Karaites have existed and still do, but after 1000CE they were only a significant minority of Jews in a few regions). So, you're just asking about Judaism, full stop.
If you're looking for specific changes instituted because of the Holocaust, you won't find a whole lot. There is a field of "Holocaust theology", theology specifically dealing with the Holocaust, but it is not something the average Jew has necessarily been aware of or interested in. There are communities where Holocaust remembrance day, Yom HaShoah, has been given particular religious significance. It is a civil memorial day in Israel, but there are people who observe it as a fast day and do various rituals for commemorating other bad days on the Jewish calendar, but it is a very small-scale practice for a variety of reasons. For the most part, people commemorate Yom HaShoah as a memorial day, and in a religious context just think about the Holocaust on other days on the Jewish calendar reserved for mourning historic calamities.
In terms of general changes to the Jewish world, the effects have been immense. Eastern Europe was a huge center of Jewish life, which was almost entirely destroyed. The Rabbinic centers of gravity moved to America (which had been a Jewish, and especially a Rabbinic backwater a few decades before) and Israel. Yiddish ceased to be a powerful Jewish language. Before the war, German Jews fleeing the Nazis formed an important part of Israeli demographics. After the war, American Judaism got a major boost of Eastern European traditional Jews who had not had the assimilation/"melting pot" experience of the past few decades in America. I've seen it argued (though I'm not sure I agree) that the explosive growth of widespread intensive Jewish learning among Orthodox Jews was in large part driven by a desire to replace the centers of religious scholarship that the Holocaust destroyed.
The Holocaust changed the Jewish political scene, too. Bundism, which was a major Jewish ideology before the war, was effectively crushed by the one-two punch of the murder of most of its adherents, and the lack of a large enough Jewish minority in Eastern Europe to be meaningful politically. Zionism had a large core of adherents relatively unharmed in Israel, and the experience of the Holocaust made it a compelling ideology for Jews abroad, too. Before the Holocaust Zionism was a major political force among Jews, but a definite minority, opposed by most of the traditionalist world (who were uncomfortable with the nationalism) and most of the secularist world (who were uncomfortable with the particularism, and preferred socialism in their home countries or assimilationism). After the Holocaust Zionists were able to persuasively argue to both secularists and traditionalists that a Jewish safe haven had value, even if various elements of Zionist ideologies were uncomfortable.
And of course political support for Zionism was significantly raised after the Holocaust, which was an important factor building support for Israel, which in turn influences basically all of Jewish history in a variety of ways in the past 70 years or so. That includes communities who were not directly affected by the Holocaust, whose history was indirectly altered by it that way. Mostly I'm referring to the early-50s mass migration of Middle Eastern Jews to Israel, which affected Israel's demographic makeup and effectively ended Jewish life in areas which previously had substantial and long-term Jewish minorities (this time, thank God, not because they'd been killed). Those places, such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Egypt basically had their entire Jewish population migrate in a short time span. Of course it's impossible to say what would've happened without the Holocaust regarding Israel and the Middle East, but nonetheless those communities were indirectly affected despite not being targets of genocide (with the exception of some Jewish communities in North Africa).
So in terms of hard religious changes that the Holocaust brought about, the list is pretty bare. But the disruption of such a major center of Jewish population had major impacts to the Jewish world, and the demographic impact that many Jews being killed and the survivors moving around had is a major part of the Jewish landscape today. | [
"In 1839, in the eastern Persian city of Meshed, a mob burst into the Jewish Quarter, burned the synagogue, and destroyed the Torah scrolls. The Jews themselves were violently forced to convert, narrowly avoiding complete massacre. There was another massacre in Barfurush in 1867. In 1839, the Allahdad incident, the... |
What was the British response to the sinking of the HMS Hood? | The response to the loss of the *Hood* was generally, and initially, one of shock, tinged with sadness. The *Hood* had been thought of as a 'mighty' ship, the pride of the fleet, and capable of beating any ship afloat. To lose her in such an immediate manner was a real surprise. Many, especially in the Royal Navy, had friends or family aboard (or knew someone who did), and mourned for their losses as well.
The Navy was the first to know, with many ships intercepting the message about *Hood*'s sinking sent by *Prince of Wales* immediately after the Denmark Strait battle. While the RN was aware of *Hood*'s shortcomings with respect to more modern ships, the news came as a considerable shock. Paymaster Lt Keith Evans, serving aboard HMS *Hawkins*, described his reaction on hearing the news:
> On that fateful day, after visiting Capetown and the
Seychelles, we were coming alongside Mayden Wharf in
Durban when on the tannoy of another ship (I think
*Dorsetshire*) we heard the announcement 'We regret to
announce that in action with the German Battleship
*Bismarck* in the Denmark Strait off Greenland, H.M.S.
*Hood* has been sunk, it is feared with considerable loss of
life'. All hands on deck seemed to stop what they were
doing for about a minute (in fact more likely several
seconds). As a former shipmate I just could not
comprehend that the Mighty *Hood* had gone and am not a
bit ashamed to say that I began to cry.
Similar reactions were reported by the Reverend Kenneth Thomas, chaplain of *Rodney*:
> It is
difficult adequately to describe the gloom that existed;
food went untouched in most messes, and many men,
especially those who had served in the *Hood*, went about
their work in a daze. For a time one of the chiefs cheered
his mess with the suggestion that perhaps the signal had
been misread, but that consolation was very quickly
removed. The *Hood* had indeed been lost, together with
most of her ship's company.
Some tempered their grief and shock with a desire for revenge, with George Blundell, first lieutenant of *Nelson*, stating in his diary that 'all I hope and pray for is that we get the *Bismarck*
in revenge. It would be terrible for her to get away. Those poor
fellows in *Hood* - Tony, Tiny Gregson, dear old Grogan, Tubby
Crosse'.
Reactions amongst the civilian population were similar. The first civilians to know were the workers at the Admiralty. Gladys Wilkin, working in the Admiralty Signals Department, described her reaction to receiving the signal that *Hood* had been sunk:
> I was shocked, stunned and unhappy.
For another reason also. One of the telegraphists with
whom I was particularly friendly at this time was a girl we
all called 'Len' because her surname was Leonard.Her
fiance was a member of the crew of the Hood and when she
came back from supper I was unable to tell her of the signal
because of its classification. Naturally, she learned
eventually when lists of the casualties began coming in.
The news would make it to the wider population at 9pm on the 24th May 1941, when the BBC broadcast an Admiralty communique giving a terse description of the battle. The initial response was disbelief, but this soon moved to sadness, especially in naval towns like Portsmouth:
> H.M.S. *Hood* and its loss became the topic of conversation
that permeated everything. I can only describe the
atmosphere now when I look back as that of a pall of shock
and misery descending on the city and its environs. Every
conversation wherever people gathered was constantly
punctuated by the word '*Hood*'.
As the hunt for the *Bismarck* progressed, the mood did turn somewhat to vengeance. The hunt was seen in the context of seeking revenge for *Hood*'s loss, as shown well by the titles of the newsreels describing the sinking of the *Bismarck*; Gaumont British called theirs 'H.M.S. *Hood* Avenged', while British Movietone gave theirs the title '*Bismarck* Sunk: Navy Revenges *Hood* by
Sinking *Bismarck*'. | [
"The Raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby on 16 December 1914, was an attack by the Imperial German Navy on the British ports of Scarborough, Hartlepool, West Hartlepool and Whitby. The attack resulted in 592 casualties, many of them civilians, of whom 137 died. The attack caused public outrage towards the Ge... |
Just watched Dunkirk and was wondering ... | Hi there -- when the movie came out we had quite a few questions about it, so we collected them into a big [Dunkirk Megathread](_URL_0_) that may be of some interest to you. Feel free to post follow-up questions here, though. | [
"\"Dunkirk\" used archive film footage, eyewitness accounts and original dramatised sequences to describe the events of the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation. The BBC also included an interactive 'red button' facility allowing television viewers to reach further information. The documentary has been described as helping the ... |
why do forearms and calves stay relatively skinny on fat obese people? | Because there is limited value in moving fat to the extremities. All of the organs that need protection and warmth are in the chest & abdominal cavities. | [
"There is also fat \"accumulation\" in various body parts. Patients often present with \"buffalo hump\"-like fat deposits in their upper backs. Breast size of patients (both male and female) tends to increase. In addition, patients develop abdominal obesity.\n",
"The android, or male pattern, fat distribution has... |
what happens to your stuff when you die if you don't have a will? | > If you have a spouse? If you have no spouse? (What is the order? If your parents are alive, do they trump your siblings? What if you only have one distant cousin, etc. is an effort made to find them? By whom?)
It depends on jurisdiction. Since 16 states have adopted the Uniform Probate Code, let's look at that.
Under the UPC:
1. If no parent or descendant (child or grandchild) of the dead guy survives, the spouse gets the whole thing.
2. If the only surviving relatives are children of the dead guy and the spouse, the spouse gets the whole thing *if the spouse has no kids who aren't from the dead guy*
3. If a parent of the dead guy is alive (and no kids), the spouse gets the first $200,000, and 75% of whatever's left over.
4. If the dead guy has no parents or kids alive, but the spouse *does* have kids alive not from the dead guy, the spouse gets the first $150,000 an 50% of the remainder
5. If the dead guy has surviving kids who are not from the spouse, the spouse gets $100,000 and 50% of the remainder.
For the part the spouse doesn't get (or the entire thing if there is no spouse), it goes:
1. To the kids of the dead guy.
2. If there are no kids, equally to his parents (if they're both alive), or all to the surviving one
3. If no surviving parents or kids, then to brothers or sisters (including half-brothers and sisters) in equal share
4. If no parents, kids, or brothers or sisters: half to the paternal grandparents, half to the maternal grandparents. If no grandparents on one side, it goes fully to the other. If no grandparents either, then to the grandparent's descendants.
> If you have a mortgage? If you have other debts?
Debts are always paid out of the estate before it goes to the heirs, even if you have a will.
> If you have wholly-owned property? Partially-owned (i.e. there are other co-owners) property?
That depends on how the property is owned (joint tenancy versus tenancy in common versus tenancy by the entirety). Here's the short version:
1. Tenancy in common: if you die, your share becomes part of your estate.
2. Joint Tenancy: If you die, your share goes to the other owners (note that joint tenancy doesn't happen often). This is called the right of survivorship
3. Tenancy by the entirety. It's only for marriages. There's a right of survivorship, it goes to the spouse.
> What happens to your bank accounts?
They become part of the estate.
> Who is in charge of doling everything out if you haven't declared anyone? The government?
The state will appoint an administrator (called in some jurisdictions, including Colorado, a Personal Representative) whose job it is to sort this stuff out. It's a gigantic mess, and plenty of probate lawyers make their entire living working on these kinds of cases.
> Are there taxes involved?
It depends on the size of the estate. But, AFAIK there are no more taxes than if you had a will.
And if you have literally no one who can inherit it, it may go to the state. | [
"If a deceased person did not make a Will, then the family members need to apply for Letter of Administration. The person who will a apply is commonly but not always the surviving spouse or eldest child of the deceased. In this case, the assest are distributed according to the Intestate Succession Act.\n",
"The u... |
what is so special about baking soda? why does it have such amazing properties for everything? | Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) (IUPAC name: sodium hydrogen carbonate, *if you're a pedant*😉) has several chemical properties which are generally useful, and relatively few disadvantages.
* Shortest Answer: It's cheap to produce and very chemically reactive, but won't melt your skin off or poison you.
* The obvious one: It reacts strongly with acids, giving off CO₂ and water in the process. This is useful to turn certain baked goods from a solid mass of baked flavoured flour to a fluffy porous network filled with gas bubbles that you can actually bite through.
* Although it's mildly alkali ("base" or "anti-acid") in solution, and reacts strongly with acids, it's actually an *amphoteric salt*, meaning it can react with alkalies as well as acids (though not quite as strongly).
* Many (but not all) common chemicals associated with "bad smells" are volatile acids. When they react with baking soda, they are turned into less-volatile salts - they'll tend to stay solid instead of becoming a gas, and what little does evaporate is less "smellable" by human noses (it binds more weakly or not at all to scent receptors).
* It's non-toxic (in quantities needed for functional results), so it can safely be used in food and on food-contact surfaces.
* Despite being non-toxic in normal quantities, it can cause gastrointestinal distress in humans from released CO₂ if consumed in large quantities. Yet, for some insects (particularly cockroaches), this gas release can cause their internal organs to *explode*, if you mix baking soda with suitable bait.
* It dissolves in *enough* water, but if there's not enough, it'll just get wet without fully dissolving. This makes it a mild fine-textured abrasive that can be used for scrubbing, which can still be rinsed away fully.
* When it gets very hot, it starts to break down into simpler compounds and carbon dioxide. This reaction absorbs quite a bit of heat - so throwing it on a fire will *both* cool down the fire *and* drive away oxygen with CO₂.
* The alkalinity breaks down pectins and hemicelluloses in plant cell walls - compounds which give plants rigid structure. Adding it to cooking water helps soften vegetables faster - particularly beans and pulses, which require longer cooking times to be edible. This used to be much more common for cooked vegetables in general, but too-mushy vegetables have fallen out of fashion, and baking soda has been found to accelerate the breakdown of vitamin C (an acid) and some other nutrients in cooking.
* It interferes with protein coagulation - the ability of proteins to stick together and form a semi-rigid network. Gluten in flour is formed by is formed by two proteins, glutenin and gliadin, which stick together and form a stretchy network when hydrated and kneaded. Disrupting gluten network formation helps the texture of less-leavened or unleavened baked goods, as they won't be held together by so much gluten - they'll be more tender or even crumbly, depending on the amount used. (Also, this works on meat proteins, by making it harder for the protein to bind into a tough matrix while cooking.)
* As an alkali, it can steal hydrogen ions from the amino acids in proteins, making them more chemically reactive. These "deprotonated" amino acids and proteins can then more easily react with reducing sugars, speeding up the "Maillard Reaction" - the tasty browning that happens on cooked meats and baked goods.
* Many microoganisms and fungi can only survive in a limited range of pH. Baking soda works as a mild disinfectant/antifungal agent, by raising the pH beyond what the microbes/fungi can survive.
* It's (currently) made out of carbon dioxide, common salt, and ammonia - three *very* common compounds. The process (Solvay) is relatively easy and inexpensive, as far as industrial chemical synthesis goes. If there was a "baking soda cartel" that conspired to raise the price of baking soda, they'd be easily outcompeted by any other manufacturer that charged even a little less. (Unlike, say, diamonds, which can be monopolized by controlling diamond-rich regions and investing in expensive processing equipment.) Eventually, the price would fall to the point of just barely covering production, distribution, wages/salaries, and factory maintenance.
^(*Edit: Cockroaches won't explode as dramatically as I had previously ~~hoped~~ described. Still messes 'em up but good, though.*) | [
"In cooking, baking soda is primarily used in baking as a leavening agent. When it reacts with acid, carbon dioxide is released, which causes expansion of the batter and forms the characteristic texture and grain in pancakes, cakes, quick breads, soda bread, and other baked and fried foods. Acidic compounds that in... |
why do people shit themselves after they die maybe nsfw | The intestines are loaded with bacteria, which start to eat you once you're dead. They produce gaseous waste, and eventually the gas can build up enough pressure to push poo out. The anal sphincter is also no longer active, so there's nothing really to hold the poo back. This is also why things that have been dead for a moderate amount of time get all bloated.
If anyone wants to know more about what happens to dead bodies after they die, I highly recommend the nonfiction book [Stiff](_URL_0_) by Mary Roach. | [
"They can apparently cause major problems for people undergoing medical operations, as \"pain, an anaesthetic or a serious accident cause him to change to the other area with a shocking impact on the other body. The other body quite commonly dies or is deranged by the sudden impact\". This gives the patient a repre... |
In what way is spin related to the standard model? | The Standard Model is a quantum field theory that describes a particular set of fields, and their interactions. Excitations of each of those fields can carry intrinsic angular momentum, called "spin". Excitations of the electron field carry spin 1/2 (in units of ~~h~~), excitations of the photon field carry spin 1, excitations of the Higgs field carry spin 0, etc.
> And how come the bosons have 1 as spin number and the fermions 1/2?
Bosons and fermions are defined based on their symmetry or antisymmetry under exchange of identical particles. The spin-statistics theorem then relates symmetric particles (bosons) with integer spins, and antisymmetric particles (fermions) with half-odd-integer spins. | [
"A spin model is a mathematical model used in physics primarily to explain magnetism. Spin models may either be classical or quantum mechanical in nature. Spin models have been studied in quantum field theory as examples of integrable models. Spin models are also used in quantum information theory and computability... |
why are overtones produced? | From what I understand, a plucked string will play one note (like C for example) but different parts of the string are moving differently relative to one another. The part you pluck, where you start the vibration, has a larger degree of movement than the same string further down it: this causes different "frequencies" of that note to be heard, and the frequencies can build to form the characteristic noise of an overtone, even though only one string is being played.
(Huge disclaimer: i was taught this a long while ago, If ive misremembered this please don't hesitate to correct me!) | [
"In music, the undertone series or subharmonic series is a sequence of notes that results from inverting the intervals of the overtone series. While overtones naturally occur with the physical production of music on instruments, undertones must be produced in unusual ways. While the overtone series is based upon ar... |
why do graphics cards, ram and hard drives have such different prices per gb? | Read / Write speeds (usually) is what makes a difference in prices. The Rule of thumb here is Faster access speed - > Expensive parts. I will explain why difference memories need to have difference speeds.
RAM and hard-drives work "almost" the same way, you store information there that you are going to use later. The only variables are "time stored" and "access speed (speed that the CPU gets the information)". There are also SSD, that work the same way as Hard-Drives but are way faster (and expensive as well).
The major differences are that you can access RAM several times faster (from 50 to 600) but the information on the RAM is lost when you turn the power off. So RAM is good to hold information you are working (like videos that are playing, programs in execution, etc) and Hard-Drives are good to store information for long times ( albums you "downloaded", images, etc)
Think of that like: Hard-Drives are for storing information "for ever". And RAM is to temporary store information for the Central Processor.
Graphics Card work differently compared to Hard-Drives. The Graphics card contain the GPU and that's is a Processor very similar to the CPU, that's optimized to work with Matrices and Arrays, that are the basis of most images / 3D objects.
As all processing units, it needs a bit of memory to help it out. That's where the 4GB / 2GB part comes in: It's basically the RAM for the Graphics Card / GPU.
There are 2 types of GPUs: Integrated and dedicated. Integrated is often seen in small devices and it does not have "RAM for GPU", It steals from the RAM. However most Graphics card nowadays are Dedicated, meaning they have their own memory (most seen values are between 1 to 8GB).
There are other factors in a GPU that can affect performance. Don't look just to the amount of memory it has. GPUs also have working speeds. But a general rule is that more memory = faster / better graphics
| [
"The Prices of different pieces of graphics hardware vary due to the power and speed of the piece. Most high end gaming pieces of hardware are dedicated graphics cards, and cost over $200, and can go as high as the price of a new computer, depending on the quality desired. In the graphics cards department, using in... |
America seems to be fixated on the advances of a rising China. Did the British Empire feel the same imperial angst towards the United States at the turn of the Century? | Yes, they were uneasy to some degree. [The Washington Naval Treaty](_URL_1_) 1922, [The London Naval Treaty](_URL_3_) 1930, and [The Second London Naval Treaty](_URL_0_) 1936, were all attempts to control warship building and reduce tensions between the major naval powers of the day which included Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy. Traditionally the British had controlled the largest number of capital ships in the world and the production of those vessels in other nations, including the US, made them uncomfortable.
Granted this is a little later than the time period you asked about, but it reflects trends begun at the turn of the century. In 1906 the British launched [HMS Dreadnought](_URL_2_). This vessel revolutionized battleship design introducing better gun arrangements, compartmentalization, and engines. All previous designs were considered obsolete almost overnight. Other nations had learned of the construction and begun on their own versions even before *Dreadnought* was completed. The arms race was on. It was very similar to the arms race between the US and Soviet Union during the cold war, only there were about 8 factions involved instead of just two. This arms race was given a large share of the blame for WW1, resulting the in the treaties mentioned above.
Basically, at the turn of the century, all the major players (Britain, US, Germany, Italy, France, Russia, Japan, Spain) believed that to be a world power they needed to have colonies. This caused world leaders to believe that the world was a zero sum game. So one of the major powers could only make major advances at the expense of the others. The Spanish American War is an excellent example of this. The United States went to war with Spain over imperial ambitions in 1898. The British had a huge empire and had the most to lose as new Imperial powers (the US, Italy, Japan, and Germany) joined their old rivals (France, Spain, Russia).
tl;dr Britain, an old imperial power felt threatened by the US, a new one. | [
"The U.S. became a major military and industrial power during this time, gaining a colonial empire from Spain and surpassing Britain and Germany to become the world's major industrial power by 1900. Despite this, most Americans were reluctant to get involved in world affairs, and American presidents generally tried... |
When did Italians start identifying as Italian instead of Latin or Roman? When did they begin to see themselves as fundamentally different from the Romans in Constantinople? | That's a million euro question. The issue of Italian identity has been controversial and debated for a very long time. Italians themselves seem to be unsure: there are examples of Independence and Unification champions travelling to other regions and describing them as "different as Japan" and that was the Age of Nationalism.
There are generally two different attitudes that are common. One is to identify as Italians against non-Italians. This happens generally abroad and there are examples of this as far back as Boccaccio's novels where even Sicilians are included in the lot. Although the first use if the words Italy and Italians (Italici) dates back to the Bellum Socialis in Roman times.
The other is raising differences when confronting Italians from other regions. This is also reported as far back as early Middle Ages, with a "Lombard" or “Frankish" north and a "Greek" (Byzantine) south and a "Roman" central area that reached as far as Ravenna. The kingdom of Italy, successor if the Lombard kingdom, had its southern border in Tuscany and Marche, and that lasted in Cavour's project in 1850s. The inclusion of southern Italy and Rome in the kingdom was a diversion of Garibaldi and not in the plan of the Piedmontese elites. | [
"The emergence of identifiable Italian dialects from Vulgar Latin, and as such the possibility of a specifically \"Italian\" ethnic identity, has no clear-cut date, but takes place from roughly 12th century. Modern standard Italian derives from the written vernacular of Tuscan writers of the 12th century.\n",
"Is... |
How can matter remain stable when photons travel at light speed? | Why would atoms be torn apart? Atoms are made of protons (not photons), neutrons, and electrons, all of which travel much more slowly than the speed of light (and can be seen as being at rest).
Photons have finite energy. It's not related to their speed, of course, but rather to their *frequency* - higher frequency photons (or bluer photons) are more energetic. | [
"In quantum field theory the Heisenberg uncertainty relations indicate that photons can travel at any speed for short periods. In the Feynman diagram interpretation of the theory, these are known as \"virtual photons\", and are distinguished by propagating off the mass shell. These photons may have any velocity, in... |
why is the sahara a desert when other places at the same latitude are tropical rainforests? | Look across the United States, if you draw a band across the US centered around San Francisco, CA. Coastal community, fairly foggy and cool year round. Nothing like the climate in Salt Lake City, Denver, and so on.
Latitude, geography, wind patterns, proximity to the ocean plus others are all factors in the weather patterns. | [
"For several hundred thousand years the Sahara has alternated between desert and savanna grassland in a 41,000 year cycle caused by changes (\"precession\") in the Earth's axis as it rotates around the sun which change the location of the North African Monsoon. When the North African monsoon is at its strongest ann... |
What do multiple antiviruses do when both are installed that is so bad? | Antiviruses hook system calls to add their verification routines. System calls addresses are stored in the system service dispatch table (SSDT).
Simply put, when a program wants to open a file, it tells Windows "Open file.txt please", and Windows looks at the SSDT where is the function to open a file, and calls it. An antivirus replaces the original "open file" function by its own, which after opening the file, check its content to see if it's fine. This considerably slows down the operation.
When multiple antiviruses are installed, verifications are chained, so the slowness increases.
Additionally, antiviruses don't like programs which modify the SSDT, including... other antiviruses. Since this is kernel space, anything that goes wrong will cause a blue screen, so you don't want multiple antiviruses to fight in kernel mode. | [
"Another approach is to trick users into uninstalling legitimate antivirus software, such as Microsoft Security Essentials, or disabling their firewall. Since antivirus programs typically include protection against being tampered with or disabled by other software, scareware may use social engineering to convince t... |
can internet porn really result in erectile dysfunction and lower libido? | EDIT: Thanks to those who replied regarding the error in my interpretation of OP's question. I have replied to the intended question in [a different post](_URL_0_). | [
"There are many concerns that mainstream, male oriented pornography causes rape and sexual aggression in males, calling for more porn created by women for women. A study by Berl Kutchinsky showed that rape crimes did not increase with increased access to pornography, despite popular misconceptions. It is important ... |
what happens if an incumbent president running for reelection loses the election to a challenger but the challenger and running mate are assassinated before being sworn in? | I think it would go to the current speaker of the house. I'm sorry, i couldn't think of a way to make it ELI5 | [
"An incumbent president seeking re-election usually faces no opposition during their respective party's primaries, especially if they are still popular. For presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, for example, their respective paths to nomination became uneventful and the races beco... |
why do they bother to try and "hide" cell phone towers? | Because it simply looks more aesthetically pleasing. Cell phone towers are an eyesore | [
"Many people view bare cellphone towers as ugly and an intrusion into their neighbourhoods. Even though people increasingly depend upon cellular communications, they are opposed to the bare towers spoiling otherwise scenic views. Many companies offer to 'hide' cellphone towers in, or as, trees, church towers, flag ... |
can photons/light form stable bonds with other atoms? | Photons are massless, electrically neutral 'packets' of energy, so they can't form bonds. The bonds we talk about between atoms come as a result of an equilibrium of the forces of electrostatic attraction/repulsion, and the Pauli exclusion principle, neither of which apply to photons. | [
"For example, a photon is a single quantum of light (or of any other form of electromagnetic radiation). Similarly, the energy of an electron bound within an atom is quantized and can exist only in certain discrete values. (Indeed, atoms and matter in general are stable because electrons can exist only at discrete ... |
why did it hurt so badly when the anaesthetic was injected into my iv? | I'm assuming you had propofol given to you for your anesthetic. A milky white fluid? The pain/burning is not unusual when administered in a smaller vein (relatively speaking). Different people have different sensations to it... from nothing, to slight tingling, to a burning, to outright pain... though most sensations are fairly mild. That's the best answer as to why... some feel it, some don't. It's normal.
What can be done next time is to give IV Lidocaine immediately prior to the administration of IV Propofol. *A LOT* of anesthesiologists do this to moderate/minimize the pain felt... in addition to other physiologic benefits of the IV lidocaine at the start of an anesthetic. | [
"Intramuscular progesterone often causes pain when injected. It irritates tissues and is associated with injection site reactions such as changes in skin color, pain, redness, transient indurations (due to inflammation), ecchymosis (bruising/discoloration), and others. Rarely, sterile abscesses can occur.\n",
"Th... |
How can string theorists assume there are... strings? | no there's no evidence for them, not yet. And most of the experts in the field, so long as they're behaving properly, understand that they just have an interesting idea, not science yet. But the idea stems from an older one in a way. We found that gravity could be explained by a curving of spacetime. Well then we developed the (failed) Kaluza-Klein model of electromagnetism. Here we were like, hey, what if there's this 5th dimension that you can't travel very far across at all, but exists in all space? What if that 5th dimension curves in the presence of charge? Do we generate a theory of electromagnetism that emerges from that curvature? Well, no, we didn't. Not one that matches our reality well.
Time goes on and then some physicists start toying with vibrational modes of higher dimension manifolds of subspace (yes it sounds like startrek gibberish, but manifold means a certain configuration of dimensions that establishes a geometry (and a real mathematician would probably kill me for that over-simplification) and subspace just means a few of the spatial dimensions out of all of them).
Well it turns out that this theory *may* produce some results that look kind of like the physics we expect to see. I'm not sure entirely how, but I'm told it does (it's way out of my field).
The common complaints are these two: one, it's very nearly impossible to test, or at least to test and get a unique signal for with any reasonable amount of technological development in the near future. Two (and why I used the words I did above) we don't know *which* manifold to do the math on. The allowed solutions, last I checked, were something like 10^500 , which is a huge parameter space. So... it's an interesting idea, and let's see where it goes. | [
"String theory is a theoretical framework that attempts to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics. In string theory, the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how strings propagate through space and interact with each other. In a gi... |
If you had a neutron star and kept adding mass to it, would you eventually see its escape velocity exceed the speed of light? | If you did this it would collapse into a black hole and then its escape velocity would be light speed. Neutron stars accreting mass is one of the ways that black holes can form. | [
"Some neutron stars are inferred to be traveling with similar speeds. This could be related to HVSs and the HVS ejection mechanism. Neutron stars are the remnants of supernova explosions, and their extreme speeds are very likely the result of an asymmetric supernova explosion or the loss of their near partner durin... |
what were the manson family's motives? | I don't blame you for not being able to wrap your head around it. It's very confusing.
Basically, Manson believed that an all out race war was coming between whites and blacks, and that the blacks would eventually win. However, Manson believed that blacks weren't smart enough to govern themselves. So, Manson was going to take himself and his selected cult members (The Family) and hide underground until after all the whites had been killed offed. Then, they would reemerge and lord over the blacks.
Now, Manson believed in a coming race war before the whole Beatles obsession. However, when he started listening to the Beatles, he began to interpret their lyrics to mean that THEY knew it was coming to, and cited a whole bunch of lyrics as being "clues" to their knowledge. Not only that, he believed the Beatles, as well as popular music in general, was trying to spark the race war, the scenario itself named by Manson "Helter Skelter" (after the Beatles song).
So, Manson was going to help this race war along by making even more inspiring and revolutionary music. However, he wanted to give Helter Skelter a push. The way he chose to do that? By murdering high profile white entertainment icons (Tate-LaBianca) and making it seem like it was blacks that did it, hence sparking the race war, which, as we all know, worked out really well for The Family in the end. | [
"After Manson was released from prison for petty crimes in 1967, the Family moved to San Francisco and later to a deserted ranch in the San Fernando Valley. Manson's followers also included a small, devoted unit of mostly impressionable young women and girls. According to group member Susan Atkins, the Family belie... |
in light of the us open women's final, why was 'coaching' considered a violation and what constitutes a sign of coaching? | A tennis match is considered to be a contest between two (or four, for doubles) athletes, without any outside help. That's a little different than, say, football, soccer, or baseball, where the coach is considered an integral part of the team and is responsible for strategic plays. In tennis, since it's not a league or team structure, coaches are considered less like team members and more like employees or consultants, and aren't allowed to interfere or assist during the actual matches. Of course, since they're close to their players and need to watch the game for things to coach them on later, they're usually sitting pretty close to the action.
& #x200B;
So almost anything the coach does that the player can see could be considered a sign of coaching, besides the normal sports-watching activities like cheering or groaning. Verbal instructions or hand signals are certainly going to be the most common ways that a coach could try to communicate with the player. And according to the rules, it doesn't matter if the player saw/heard the coaching at all - if the coach did anything that can be considered coaching, the umpire can penalize the player. In the US Open situation, this is what happened - Serena Williams's coach admitted that he was making hand signals (he also claimed that the opposing player Osaka's coach was doing the same thing and that it's very common), and Serena was penalized for it. That part's fairly uncontroversial, and it's the miscommunication that started with that penalty that led to all of the more controversial stuff. | [
"BULLET::::- Illegal coaching – coaching from the bench during play or after an official has said 'Quiet please' with intentions of continuing or starting play. From 2006, rules allowed coaching from the bench during an 'official time-out'.\n",
"In February 2008 Saint Mary's Academy, a school in Kansas affiliated... |
Is there something tangible in the brains of serial killers and the like that separate them from people that can comfortably function within the confines of societal rules? | > Doesn't the "triad of sociopathy" (bedwetting, pyromania, cruelty to animals) point to a problem that could maybe be recognized on a cat scan?
Well, psychopathy couldn't really be seen on a CT scan as that type of neuroimaging has relatively poor ability to visualize the structures of the brain.
However, there is evidence of structural differences on MRI, (which has better ability to visualize the structures of the brain) and on functional MRI which (obviously) looks at the function of the brain. One of the more well replicated findings has been in structural volume differences in the [amygdala](_URL_1_), a region of the brain known to be associated with the fear response (i.e., psychopaths may not experience fear to the same degree as others). Functional neuroimaging studies have shown differences in neural activation in [frontal and temporal regions](_URL_0_) of the brain, as well as some studies showing more specific differences in areas of the brain known as the reward circuitry (i.e., differences in behavior needed to produce pleasure/reward feelings).
There's a lot of research being done in this area, and a lot of interesting information is coming out, however we are a LONG way from being able to scan someone's brain and tell that they are or are not a psychopath (though the department of defense is funding this type of research... I may or may not be involved). I'm not sure that thing will ever be possible, but it is something that's being investigated.
| [
"Theories for why certain people commit serial murder have been advanced. Some theorists believe the reasons are biological, suggesting serial killers are born, not made, and that their violent behavior is a result of abnormal brain activity. Holmes and Holmes believe that \"until a reliable sample can be obtained ... |
Regarding the History Channel's Viking show: Was wife sharing as much a part of everyday Viking life as the show makes it out to be? | I haven't watched the show, so could you elaborate on what you mean by 'wife sharing?' Infidelity was not generally approved of in early medieval Scandinavia, and it was in fact one of the reasons why people could file for divorce according to Grágás, a 13th century Icelandic law code. | [
"Premiering in 2013, Hirst created \"Vikings\", the History Channel's first foray into serialised drama. It stars Gabriel Byrne, Travis Fimmel, Clive Standen, Katheryn Winnick, Jessalyn Gilsig and Gustaf Skarsgård.\n",
"The show is often famed as having been the place that record producer Simon Cowell made his te... |
How ethnically diverse were Army regiments in the Soviet Union? | Hey! I'm going to focus in on the 1930s and 40s to answer your question.
The Red Army from the Revolution until 1941 was largely a Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian institution. The proportion of those ethnicities - especially Russians - in the army never fell below 75%, and was usually much higher. This was an institutional decision implemented through a couple different mechanisms. Firstly, most Central Asian and Caucasian peoples were not subject to conscription - while they could volunteer, they didn't naturally filter into the Red Army. Secondly, the Soviet Union had a second reserve Territorial Army formed within each national/ethnic community within the country. All ethnicities would be conscripted into these bodies and carry out training and exercises a few days each month and a month or 2 in the summer.
Territorial Divisions were composed of a single ethnicity, with regiments, battalions, and companies being formed from the smaller communities. Their officers would usually be Russian-speakers from their communities, but the units as a whole would speak their native language and be composed of one national group. National military schools were also set up to train national divisions in the Territorial Army. This fit into the general ethnic policy of *korenizatsiya* - "putting down roots" - which meant allowing each ethnic minority to have its own nationality-dominated government, culture, etc separate from Russian-ness. The formation of national units would create cadres which would prepare the general population, perceived as "backwards compared to ethnic Russians, for general conscription
In the late 1930s the ethnic composition of the Red Army began to change. In 1935 the Politburo moved to abolish the Territorial System, gradually transferring all its units over to the regular army. In 1936 the draft was extended to all peoples and ethnicities and at the same time the minimum age was lowered from 21 to 19. Ethnic minority national units were disbanded and their cadres gradually spread throughout the Red Army, leading to many soldiers who couldn't speak Russian being thrust into Russian-majority units across the country. Around 18,000 Kazakhs entered the Red Army in 1939 and 16,000 in 1940, compared to just 8,000 in 1938.
However, the NKO (People's Commissariat for Defense) attempted to slow this trend by delaying conscription for minorities, particularly those from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Further, at a higher level, some recent research has argued that the Great Purge more heavily targeted ethnic minorities in the Soviet command structure, leaving it much more Russian even as the rank and file increasingly diversified. In general this period also saw an increasing move towards Great-Russian chauvinism and a retreat from encouraging ethnic particularism.
The outbreak of WW2 and the disastrous defeats suffered in 1941 greatly changed the Red Army's policy towards minorities. Its preferred cadres of urban, young, and educated Russians had been killed or rendered inaccessible by the German advance. Initially, the NKO and GKO (State Defense Committee) continued to mistrust ethnic minorities, deferring "unreliable" groups such as those from the Caucasus and Central Asia from conscription, raising *narodnoe opolcheniye* -"people's militia" - units for local deployment, or shunting minorities into labor battalions far away from the frontlines.
This "hierarchy of loyalty" with non-Russians on the bottom served as a negative feedback loop, discouraging already unenthusiastic minorities from service. Volunteers generally numbered in the few thousands and enthusiasm for joining the Red Army was low - most people maintained a stance of apathy rather than active support or active resistance. In the autumn of 1941, facing even more defeats, the NKO began conscription for all nationalities aside from "unreliable" groups such as Volga Germans. In general, initial waves of conscription were a failure. Out of 14,000 Chechen men liable for duty, only 4,395 were recruited and 2,365 of those deserted before leaving the region. Only 28% of Crimean Tartars could be mobilized before the region was overrun. The Bashkir Republic, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan all struggled to find recruits even among Communist Party members, and most of those they could find were Slavs who had settled in the region or evacuated there in 1941.
The NKO responded by disbanding most nationality-based units in January 1942 save for a few which had performed well or were needed for propaganda purposes, distributing the remaining men throughout the Red Army. But at the same time, responding to demands for manpower, it also ended all restrictions on minorities serving in frontline rolls - Kyrgyz soldiers, for example, were admitted to all roles starting in December 1941. This did away with all further official barriers to service for minorities. By September 1944, for example, 1 in 4 Kyrgyz had been drafted into the army.
Even when allowed to serve in the Red Army, minorities continued to face discrimination from both their fellow soldiers and their officers. Minorities were stereotyped as dumb cowardly, and useless for frontline tasks. Their often poor command of Russian made it difficult for them to bond in units in which they were minorities. In one incident in the 103rd Rifle Division, officers forced the minorities to do grunt work and dig trenches while keeping them away from important duties. In several incidents, officers would attempt to get minorities assigned to their units killed so that they could replace them with Slavs.
This led to a another negative feedback loop, where widespread abuses encouraged minorities to defect to the Nazis - according to a report from the Coastal Army in 1942, 79% of defections (A number perhaps exaggerated out of racism) were from non-Russians. "Uzbek" and other terms for Central Asians was frequently used a a pejorative for all minorities. At a wider level, minorities were frequently shunted to less active and vital *fronts*. For example, the largely stagnant Volkhov Front near Leningrad was 25% non-Russian in 1942. While defections did occur at a higher rate among minorities, Russians still composed 55% of defections (Compared to being 68% of those serving in the Red Army).
Linguistic misunderstanding and poor training were often at the root of issues. For example, three non-Russians were put on trial for deserting their sentry post and running away. During the course of the investigation, however, it became apparent that they had not been taught anything about frontline security and didn't understand what their job was. They were fortunately acquitted of all charges. On another occasion a Kyrgyz and Kazakh recruit were seen to stand 10-20 meters behind their comrades at the front lines. Suspecting cowardice, their sergeant had the political officer observe them. Under investigation it was found that they had never been taught to fire a gun and were trying to learn from their comrades. The 8th Guards Rifle Division, which gained renown in its defense of Moscow under the command of Ivan Panfilov, had over 20 languages spoken in its ranks. Many non-Russian recruits spoke little or no Russia and had to learn "on the job". In one amusing case, a Kazakh recruit sent to the hospital could only ask to use the restroom using swear words because of how coarse front line language was. | [
"The 14th Guards Army () was a field army of the Red Army, the Soviet Ground Forces, and the Russian Ground Forces, active from 1956 to 1995. According to sources within the 14th Army, the majority of its troops came from the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, with 51% of officers and 79% of drafte... |
A hot day feels hotter to humans when humidity is high, as their sweat cannot evaporate as well. Are animals who do not sweat at higher risk of overheating during humid days? | I can think of one example in which the answer is yes. Kangaroos do not sweat (like humans do), and when temperatures are high they have to lick their forearms and dig themselves into the dirt to maintain their body temperatures. This was shown on BBC's the Life of Mammals with David Attenborough, but I haven't been able to find a good source from a quick google search. | [
"In equatorial climates and during temperate summers, overheating (hyperthermia) is as great a threat as cold. In hot conditions, many warm-blooded animals increase heat loss by panting, which cools the animal by increasing water evaporation in the breath, and/or flushing, increasing the blood flow to the skin so t... |
the difference between weight and resistance training. | Weight training is a sub category of resistance training. Weight training involves the use of weights to build strength. Resistance training uses cables, machines, bodyweight, or weights to build strength. | [
"The basic principles of weight training are essentially identical to those of strength training, and involve a manipulation of the number of repetitions (reps), sets, tempo, exercise types, and weight moved to cause desired increases in strength, endurance, and size. The specific combinations of reps, sets, exerci... |
recorded sound quality | So your three questions are:
1. What the values mean?
2. how significant is the difference in quality?
3. can you hear the difference?
1. The values are whats know as bit rate. The easiest way to describe them is ; audio is a [sine wave](_URL_2_) and they way this audio is captured is every second a number of snapshots are taken of this sine wave. So with an MP3 that's at 320kbps (kilobits per second) 320,000 snapshots of this wave are taken every second.The lower you go the less snapshots and the less accurate a picture you get.
MP3's are able to be smaller in size due to psychoacoustic models. What this means is that with mp3's they take out parts of the audio that the brain cannot detect without help. Anything outside the human hearing range , which is [20hz to 20khz](_URL_5_) it gets rid off and also uses a technique called masking. This is where the numbers come into play. Masking is simply when two frequencies are next to each other it takes a average of the two frequiencies and then captures at the frequency. [Like this](_URL_4_). This then reduces the number of frequencies needed to be captured. The lower the bit rate the more it does this.
2. The difference in quality between mp3's and other formats can be huge or tiny dependant on whats done with them. This will depend on what file container you have used . for example MP3's are what is know as lossy, the same as AAC this means is compresses the file to make it smaller. However files such as .wav and .aiff which are lossless. .wav and .aiff do not have sample rates as they are captured differently. So your CD will be at 44.1khz ,16 bits , which is the highest quality possible and will sound like [this](_URL_3_).
A MP3 at 256kbps will sound slightly less than that, as it looses a lot of quality and sounds like [this](_URL_1_).
and finally a MP3 at 32kbps sounds like [this](_URL_0_).
You should be able to hear the difference between the tracks.
3. As that last answer showed yes you can hear a difference between MP3's however between mp3 and WAV probably not so much, so if you want your music at the best quality that you will need don't go any further than 320kbps mp3 but of your on a mac use AAC as i know this is natively supported and is better quality for the nearly the same size files. If you want to make your music so you could have an exact copy of your CD rip it as either a .WAV or a . AIFF if your on a mac.
If you need any more info just give me a shout =) | [
"Sound quality is typically an assessment of the accuracy, fidelity, or intelligibility of audio output from an electronic device. Quality can be measured objectively, such as when tools are used to gauge the accuracy with which the device reproduces an original sound; or it can be measured subjectively, such as wh... |
how does the british parliament function, and how is it different from the us government? | So basic overview:
American: Three Branches; Legislative, executive, and judicial. The Legislative and head of the Executive (e.i President and Congressmen) are elected separate from one another. Legislative is bicameral, meaning two parts called houses. Each house has power of lawmaking.
British: Executive derives from the Legislative. Executive branch is headed by the British Prime Minister. The Legislative is also bicameral, but only one house has lawmaking powers, The house of Commons. The house of lords is more of a formality and respect for past times. The House of Commons is split among several parties. Whichever party has the majority can elect a PM from its ranks. The PM pretty much runs the show (albeit has to deal and work with other parties in order to ensure his agenda). If the majority party ever decides to change PMs, they must show a "vote of no confidence." This means that the members of Parliament pretty much leave the PM out to dry during a vote he has overstayed his time. Usually PMs will step down after that.
I took AP Comparative Government my last year. So if any actual Brits want to confirm/change/disprove anything, please do. | [
"The UK has a parliamentary government based on the Westminster system that has been emulated around the world: a legacy of the British Empire. The parliament of the United Kingdom meets in the Palace of Westminster and has two houses: an elected House of Commons and an appointed House of Lords. All bills passed ar... |
How did the Mars Curiosity Rover take this picture of itself with no visible arm? | The "selfies" taken by Curiosity are actually composite images stitched together from multiple shots. The photos are taken by the "MAHLI" camera that is attached to a flexible robotic arm. In the stitching process, the part of the arm that is in the shot is edited out, because each shot would contain the arm in a different position.
In the picture in your post you can see a grey bar sticking out of the front of the rover, more or less in the center of the picture. This is where the robotic arm is attached to the rover. In addition, there's a shadow cast by the robotic arm visible on the ground. | [
"Their panoramic photograph of Steve Squyres, the principal investigator on the Mars Exploration Rover team, taken in his office at Cornell University, is in the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; it was exhibited in \"Americans Now\" at the Gallery in 2010/11.\n",
"Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012... |
Is it true that having sex/masturbating before exercise/weight-lifting has a negative effect on performance? | I haven't seen any evidence that having sex decreases performance, but refraining from having sex when you are used to it will increase testosterone levels. This will in turn make you more aggressive and potentially have a positive impact on athletic performance. Note that the testosterone boost gained from not having sex / masturbating is the highest around a week after the last orgasm, so keeping it in your pants the night before isn't going to do much.
Also note that having sex actually increases testosterone levels in males the morning after ([source](_URL_0_)), so if you have had sex on a regular basis up to the night before a big wrestling match, having sex would probably be beneficial (to testosterone levels, at least).
We all know that having sex can be exhausting, so your coach probably just wanted you to focus and sleep instead of spending all night with a woman. | [
"BULLET::::- There is no physiological basis for the belief that having sex in the days leading up to a sporting event or contest is detrimental to performance. In fact it has been suggested that sex prior to sports activity can elevate male testosterone level, which could potentially enhance performance.\n",
"So... |
do objects still emit infared radiation at absolute zero (-273°c)? | We don't know, such a temperature has never been achieved and is theoretically impossible to obtain. So there really isn't a definite answer to that question. | [
"All objects with a temperature above absolute zero emit heat energy in the form of radiation. Usually this radiation isn't visible to the human eye because it radiates at infrared wavelengths, but it can be detected by electronic devices designed for such a purpose.\n",
"Any material, that is not at absolute zer... |
why is there such border dispute/flexibility/movement in the middle east when the rest of the world has permanent borders? | The rest of the world *doesn't* have permanent borders. Off the top of my head...
* Ukraine is being torn asunder by Russia.
* Scotland just decided not to leave the UK
* Folks in and around Barcelona want to leave Spain.
* South Sudan broke off from Sudan a few years ago.
* Taiwan and PRofChina are still disagreeing over who is the Real China.
* The Tamil Tigers were defeated a couple years ago. | [
"The most complicated border negotiations in the Central Asia region involve the Fergana Valley where multiple enclaves struggle to exist. Three countries share in the tangled border region; Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan all have historic and economic claims to the region's transport routes and natural reso... |
Are there examples of active participation in resisting colonial/imperial powers by their own people in pre-modern to early modern times? | I'm not sure what you mean by "direct" effort. But if activism counts, I'm sure there will be plenty of examples. In the Indian context, [Annie Besant](_URL_0_) comes to my mind, even though I'm not certain she'd be the foremost of such activists. | [
"Other example of successful armed resistance is the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974), which led to the independence of Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. The Rhodesian Bush War (1966–1979) was not against a colonial metropole, but the minority white government of Ian Smith.\n",
"The historical record shows... |
If F=MA gets to be law, what is it that keeps E=MC^2 from being a law? | It's been asked many times about similar stuff if you search for it. The short answer is that the distinction you're making between "law" and "theory" doesn't really exist. Things got called "laws" prior to the 20th century, but it was just a convention without any rigorous definition.
The laws of thermodynamics are more or less absolute. Hooke's law, Boyle's law and the ideal gas law are simple approximations with limited ranges of validity. Ohm's law is both an approximation and the definition of electrical resistance. In short, there was never really any consistency in what was meant by 'law', which is why the term stopped being used.
A theory is a theoretical description of something. The philosophers of science have come up with several ways of defining scientific theories, but the simplest and most common is Popper's, which says that a scientific theory is something that can be _falsified_ experimentally. In other words, something that can be proven wrong.
The term "theory" doesn't imply anything about its accuracy. The theory of relativity and the theory of evolution are some of the most well-verified things around. It's just not the case that theories get upgraded to 'laws' after some amount of verification.
The equation E = mc^2 or rather it's full form: E^2 = m^2 c^4 + |p|^2 c^2
Is actually a more valid theory than Newton's second law F = ma. Classical (Newtonian) mechanics are known not to work at the subatomic level, which is why we have quantum mechanics (where F = ma doesn't really apply). On the other hand, we don't know any situations where Special Relativity doesn't hold.
(Also, much like Ohm's law, F = ma is arguably not an empirical fact as much as it's the definition of force) | [
"The quantity \"m\"v is called the (canonical) momentum. The net force on a particle is thus equal to the rate of change of the momentum of the particle with time. Since the definition of acceleration is , the second law can be written in the simplified and more familiar form:\n",
"The above statements hint that ... |
Why do USA state's and county's borders get "lazier" as you move to the west coast? | 1) Squares are not formless
2) The original states were often formed by colonial communities from common parts of Europe. There were a number of geographical features AND practical community issues to consider. That is: They were colonized BEFORE the borders were defined.
3) The western states were colonized AFTER having been defined. Didn't really have to worry too much about offending anybody, if nobody is there. This ignores the native populations which really didn't get much of a vote in the matter.
4) Population. Since states actually get equal representation in the Senate, unpopulated states were 'drawn large' to encapsulate (potentially) enough population to warrant representation. | [
"The South Coast region, which extends from Reedsport to the California border, is distinct from the North and Central Coast regions because of its mountainous nature, due to tectonic uplift and terrane accretion in ancient times. Much of the coastline in this region is made up of sea cliffs and miles of beaches. A... |
how can bing rewards be doing any good for microsoft? | The points you get per search are pennies compared to the drive to the website you're creating.
When they try to get advertisers to advertise on Bing, those click counts mean they can charge more money for the same ads.
They make the money back tenfold, probably, especially since you're limited on the number of searches a day you get reward points for. They hope you go beyond that, and most people who choose a search engine don't watch to see if they have ran out of credits to obtain for that day. | [
"Bing Rewards provided credits to users through regular Bing searches and special promotions. These credits were then redeemed for various products including electronics, gift cards, sweepstakes, and charitable donations. Initially, participants were required to download and use the Bing Bar for Internet Explorer i... |
how is it people can jab themselves in the thigh without finding a vein? wouldn't there just be muscle and nothing to inject to? | Some medications, vaccines, etc are meant to be injected intramuscularly. Your muscles have tons of blood vessels that can get the medication into your blood stream.
_URL_0_ | [
"Access to the patient's femoral arteries can be with surgical incisions or percutaneously in the groin on both sides. Vascular sheaths are introduced into the patient's femoral arteries, through which guidewires, catheters and the endograft are passed.\n",
"All techniques involve an approximate 10-cm incision in... |
'bulking' and 'cutting' | Technically yes, in reality most people go *way* too far when they "bulk".
While it is true that you do need a calorie surplus to build larger muscles, the speed that you can build muscles is generally limited more by genetic factors than by how much you are eating. As such when you move into the "bulk" phase of your workout you will want to eat at a caloric surplus, but not the thousands of extra calories per day that many people will claim. Your goal when you are bulking should be to eat enough calories that your body uses basically all of those extra calories to build muscle, so you can stay in that building phase for a little longer than if you eat a huge amount, gain lots of weight, and then need to start cutting earlier to lose all that extra fat you accumulated from outpacing your ability to build muscle
Final note: For many people who are overweight and just starting it's completely possible to lose weight and build muscle at the same time. Cutting and bulking should be things you worry about after you start to get into shape. New people to exercise should focus more on establishing sustainable healthy eating and exercise habits first and only start to worry about cutting and bulking cycles later. | [
"\"Cutting\" is a collection of processes wherein material is brought to a specified geometry by removing excess material using various kinds of tooling to leave a finished part that meets specifications. The net result of cutting is two products, the waste or excess material, and the finished part. In woodworking,... |
Is it possible to join two pieces of material by having an atomically smooth surface? | I know this happens with metals - _URL_0_ - essentially what's happening with cold welding is that metals have a repeating molecular structure, and in a vacuum, where there are no "junk atoms" to bond to the edges of the metal, just smushing two pieces together is enough to weld them. I anticipate that this can happen with many things that have repeating crystalline structures. | [
"When discussing adhesion, this theory needs to be converted into terms relating to surfaces. If there is a net attractive energy of cohesion in a bulk of similar molecules, then cleaving this bulk to produce two surfaces will yield surfaces with a dispersive surface energy, since the form of the energy remain the ... |
How not to get burnt out on history? | > simultaneously want to know everything there is to know about Romans, but also want something else to learn in college.
If you keep this mindset, you'll get burnt out. Knowing things is great; it is also inherently unsustainable and bounded. Coming from another archaeology and Classics major, the real excitement is *discovery*.
When you're high school, you learn how to learn. The biggest difference between a freshman history class and and upper-level, advanced history class is not the "difficulty" of the information. It's the amount and the expectations of what you do with it. Entry-level textbooks are necessary because they present information in straight-forward, easily comprehensible chunks. They're heavily subdivided into paragraphs and sections with visible headers, there's graphic organizers galore, and primary sources have annotations out the wazoo. Beginners need instruction to know what to get out of texts and how to do it- you can't just give them a book and say "Learn!" As a senior with well-defined interests, you've gone beyond all that. You can read *and* comprehend the information available in most any text.
When you're in college, you learn how to discover and create. Professors can throw loads of readings and lectures at you because they no longer need to teach you how to take it in. Classes in your major will teach you how to do research and how to critically examine material and information you find: "Here's what we know, go and find out more!" For archaeology this will extend into lab methods, field methods, and classes on specific places or topics. You'll also want to go to a field school, where you'll work at an actual excavation. If you go the classics route, you'll start with intensive language classes (if you haven't already done Latin or Greek) and, depending on your interests, move onto intensive readings of Classical literature or seminars on history/art history/etc. You can, of course, do both. In either case, the curriculum is not about how much knowledge you get out of it. There is a certain base-level of expertise you'll need to acquire, but if you approach college expecting just to learn "things," you will quickly burn out. You should look forward to building the skills that help you contribute to existing knowledge.
With these skills, you can approach the real driving motivation of academia: questions. Everyone one of us here has a regional or temporal specialty, and we probably chose that because we think it's interesting. Yet what keeps me alive at 2 AM on my 12th cup of coffee, knee deep in incomprehensible GPR survey data, are those research questions that push you ever forward: how do people incorporate the past into their contemporary traditions? How are structures of authority enforced and reproduced through architecture, and how do people respond? Even, small, innocuous questions like "Why does this figure on the sculpture get a hat?" It's a historians or archaeologists jobs to pursue these questions to the limits of our knowledge, and to keep going just a little bit further.
Early in your career, it's easy to get caught with taking in everything that we do know- there is *so much.* Ultimately, history and archaeology are about inquiry, asking questions to build on or fill in gaps in existing knowledge. If you're scared to oversaturate yourself, remember that that's not what college is about. (And trust me, until you've read tomes on Roman tax law, there's always more to learn about Rome.) **Read to your heart's content, but, more importantly, ask questions.** Does an author drop a juicy anecdote about a 2nd-century general that leaves you with a "Huh?" or a "Why?" Follow that thread- what source does that author cite? Who does *that* author cite, or is it a primary source? What is the nature of the primary source? Can we trust it? Has anyone written any books or articles about the author? No? Well, you've got yourself a paper topic right there! In college and grad school, you're going from the consumption of knowledge to the production of knowledge, and that's a task that will never be finished.
(Also keep in mind that it's totally cool to have historical interests that you don't pursue academically. My shelf has books on cubist poetry, big band leaders, and multiple histories of National Parks- I'd never claim to have approached these topics as a scholar, but enjoy them nonetheless) | [
"This was, however, a false comparison, as the \"book burnings\" at those historic events were not acts of censorship, nor destructive of other people's property, but purely symbolic protests, destroying only one individual document of each title, for a grand total of 12 individual documents, without any attempt to... |
Is there a significant difference between smoking one time a day and five times every fifth day? | The currently accepted method to quantify tobacco exposure in clinical practice is by using [pack years](_URL_3_). Using this imperfect calculation, both of your smoking scenarios would result in the same amount of pack years smoked. The idea behind pack year calculations is that much research has shown a dose-dependent relationship between tobacco exposure and [increased DNA damage](_URL_1_), among other health effects.
There has been little research in the area of "binge smoking" or social smoking. But [an interesting paper](_URL_2_) was published that outlines the unique harms and challenges to social smokers. The article says that no research has been conducted to determine a difference in harm between binge and daily smokers. Also no research has been conducted to determine the rate at which social smokers transition into daily smokers. When social smokers are included in tobacco research they are usually lumped in with light-volume or intermittent smokers. The article also mentions that since some binge smokers don't consider themselves "real" smokers, they tend not to be exposed to the same opportunities for intervention or smoking cessation that daily smokers are.
While it's clear from the research that the amount of exposure correlates highly with risk, it's also clear that other variables correlate with increased risk. [For example](_URL_0_), with exposure levels being equal, smokers who have their first cigarette within a half hour of waking up increase their cancer risk by 79%.
I would contend that there are other factors besides exposure level, possibly including binge or social smoking, that lead to an increase in smoking related health problems. Unfortunately the research in this area is currently lacking. | [
"Similarly, smoking has been shown to follow distinct circadian patterns during the waking day—with the high point usually occurring shortly after waking in the morning, and shortly before going to sleep at night.\n",
"Overall, the average smoker consumes 12.4 cigarettes per day, with this figure rising slightly ... |
why does stale bread get softer when you warm it up? shouldn't the heat evaporate whatever water is left and make it harder? | Bread doesn't go stale because it dries out, it goes stale because the starches crystallize. If you weighed fresh vs. stale bread, you'd find the stale bread retains most of it's original weight, meaning it retains most of it's water. Weighing fresh or stale vs. dry would show a significant difference in weight, but dry bread isn't stale, and is delicious drenched in oil and spices! | [
"With the passage of time, breads harden and become stale. This is not primarily due to moisture being lost from the baked products, but more a reorganization of the way in which the water and starch are associated over time. This process is similar to recrystallization and is promoted by storage at cool temperatur... |
if our body replaces cells that are damaged/old regularly, then why do donated organs still require the use of anti-rejection medicine years after the surgery? | Cells regenerate with the more of the same cells, basically. As cells replicate, the goal is to copy the previous cell as perfectly as possible. So, a successfully donated organ will always be the same organ essentially, even though it's been completely replaced, many times over, with entirely new cells. | [
"After the procedure, a lifelong regimen of immunosuppressive drugs is necessary to suppress the patient's own immune systems and prevent rejection. Long-term immunosuppression increases the risk of developing life-threatening infections, kidney damage, and cancer. The surgery may result in complications such as in... |
How does water purification tablets work? Also does it matter how dirty the water is or if it is sea water? | There are different types, some work only to disinfect in which case the large particulate should be filtered out first.
Others with by coagulating sound dirt particles to make them heavy enough to sink, effectively separating the water from everything else.
I believe you would be interested in this video: _URL_0_ | [
"Iodine used for water purification is commonly added to water as a solution, in crystallized form, or in tablets containing tetraglycine hydroperiodide that release 8 mg of iodine per tablet adaptation to chronic tetraglycine hydroperiodide. The iodine kills many, but not all, of the most common pathogens present ... |
Will a candle actually help warm up a really cold room? | Yeah, a little, if you light it. According to wikipedia, a candle puts out about 80 Watts of heat energy, which is about the same as what a human puts out. An 800 W heater can heat up a small room, so you should expect that filling a small room with 10 people or 10 candles will warm it up noticeably. | [
"The advantages of using a candle warmer include the absence of open flame and the soot that often results from burning wax. The main disadvantage of a plate candle warmer is candle life. While the candle can still be burned (provided the wick is still exposed), the wax no longer contains any fragrances. Many warme... |
why do i hate foods that i enjoyed when i was younger, and now love foods that i hated as a child? | Our tongues aren't finished developing until [age 16](_URL_0_). | [
"There are multiple parts of an elderly person's life that can affect their preferences in foods. Aspects like the environment, mental & physical health, and lifestyle choices are all contributing to the way a person decides on what foods they happen to like or dislike.\n",
"On young girls not being encouraged to... |
what physical (or non physical) thing determines a unit of memory? | A sperm cell contains 23 chromosomes of DNA. DNA is written in (G, A, T, C) so it's essentially just text written with 4 letters. Bits are written in (0, 1). So for each DNA basepair you need two bits. Fx
> G = 00
> A = 01
> T = 10
> C = 11
Now you have a way to store the human genome as bits on a computer. There is about 3 billion basepairs in a human cell and half of that in a sperm cell. And remember each basepair require 2 bits. So that's
> 1.5 billion x 2 bits = 3 billion bits.
Converting to megabytes that's 375MB. 37.5MB doesn't seem like the right number. It's probably a bit less than 375MB because you can do compression (like a zip file), but I'm surprised if you can get it down to 37.5MB.
EDIT: Bad math.
EDIT2: Full human gnome in 2-bit format. _URL_0_ | [
"Object memory involves processing features of an object or material such as texture, color, size, and orientation. It is processed mainly in the ventral regions of the brain. A few studies have shown that on average most people can recall up to four items each with a set of four different visual qualities. It is a... |
What determines the direction and strength of wind? | Wind is caused by differences in pressure from one region to another, naturally the air tries to expand from high pressure regions to lower pressure regions.
Now your situation being near to an ocean means that air currents are probably well established as the sun heats the planet in the same way year after year. | [
"Wind direction is the opposite of the direction in which the windsock is pointing (note that wind directions are conventionally specified as being the compass point from which the wind originates; so a windsock pointing due north indicates a southerly wind). Wind speed is indicated by the windsock's angle relative... |
why is congress allowed to take so many breaks, many of which last weeks at a time? | Two separate points.
First is all the breaks. The breaks are not time off from the job. That is merely when congress is not in session. The congressmen still have responsibilities within their state, and their time is split between those functions. So even though congress is not in session, that does not mean they are sitting around doing nothing.
> Every day this bill doesn't pass it affects 3.5 million unemployed folks. How is this allowed?
There is no guarantee the bill will ever pass. There is no requirement that they even vote on it. Ultimately the congress, though its own procedures determine how/when/if it handles its business. | [
"Government shutdowns in the United States have occurred periodically since 1980, and are the result of failure to pass appropriations bills before the previous ones expire. Shutdowns of the type experienced by the United States are nearly impossible in other forms of government. The most current shutdown has happe... |
Can a person have diabetes if they are not overweight? | It's definitely possible. Most people who develop [Type I diabetes](_URL_0_) are otherwise healthy. Even Type II diabetes isn't universally caused by obesity. | [
"According to the Dasman Center for Research and Treatment of Diabetes, 15% of the adult population has diabetes, with 50% of adults over 45 living with the disease. 22 of every 100 children have developed diabetes as a result of an unhealthy weight.\n",
"According to the Dasman Center for Research and Treatment ... |
I sometimes hear that the new deal didn't really get us out of the great depression and in fact may have delayed it's end. Is there any truth to this? | This is an excellent question that you unfortunately will probably not have properly answered in your lifetime. There are two reasons for this:
1. It is still intensely relevant to our current politics. How someone is inclined to interpret the New Deal is almost directly correlated to their contemporary political beliefs. Republicans, who are not fond of government regulation and interference, will say that it was a failure. Democrats, who support government regulation and programs, will argue that it was effective. In my very humble opinion, the truth probably lies somewhere in between.
2. History is not a science experiment. We can't go back and replicate the setting, and try different things to figure out what worked and what didn't. There were simply too many variables to know for certain how much of an impact it made. | [
"Followers of the real business-cycle theory believe that the New Deal caused the depression to persist longer than it would otherwise have. Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian say Roosevelt's policies prolonged the depression by seven years. According to their study, the \"New Deal labor and industrial policies did ... |
during famines, children get huge stomachs while the rest of their body is nothing but skin and bone. why is this? | It's called kwashiorkor. It's caused by a deficiency in dietary protein. Basically they can no longer properly retain their fluids and it builds up in the abdomen. Normally proteins in our blood stream help to maintain the right amount of dissolved "stuff" to keep our fluids properly balanced due to osmosis. When there isn't enough protein the fluid can't be retained properly and leaks, causing the typical swelling. | [
"Childhood malnutrition is generally thought of as being limited to developing countries, but although most malnutrition occurs there, it is also an ongoing presence in developed nations. For example, in the United States of America, one out of every six children is at risk of hunger. A study, based on 2005–2007 da... |
What is the heaviest metal found that functions in a living organism? | > ~~Iodine is an essential trace element for life, the heaviest element commonly needed by living organisms, and the second-heaviest known to be used by any form of life (only tungsten, a component of a few bacterial enzymes, has a higher atomic number and atomic weight).~~
~~_URL_2_
~~EDIT: Correction, as Iodine isn't a metal. Molybdenum is the heaviest metal of the [dietary minerals](_URL_1_).~~
~~_URL_0_
EDIT2: Correction AGAIN as you only specified living organism. This time I've double and triple checked your question.
> Tungsten, at atomic number 74, is the heaviest element known to be biologically functional, with the next heaviest being iodine (Z = 53). Although not in eukaryotes, tungsten is used by some bacteria.
_URL_3_ | [
"Almost all living organisms, from bacteria to humans, store iron as microscopic crystals (3 to 8 nm in diameter) of iron(III) oxide hydroxide, inside a shell of the protein ferritin, from which it can be recovered as needed. \n",
"All known forms of life require iron. Many proteins in living beings contain bound... |
Discipline of Soldiers now and in the Medieval Age? | Frankly, there's no (useful) way to compare the two. Medieval armies did not have the kind of centralization and structural cohesiveness that would allow us to establish a baseline for comparison. While most combatants on the typical medieval battlefield would have trained for war to greater or lesser degree, there were no medieval boot camps and certainly no medieval Pentagons. The behavior and conduct of modern soldiers is governed by an enormous number of laws, rules, regulations, many (if not most) of which would be alien to the medieval warrior and the medieval world in general. | [
"In contrast to the belief of the caste and clan based warrior who saw war as a place to attain valor and glory, warfare was a practical matter that could change the course of history. History always showed that men of lower orders who, provided that they were practically organized and equipped, almost always outfo... |
Theoretically, is it possible for an intelligent being living in the second dimension to 'discover' the third dimension? | Dimensions aren't places, even though the term is often used that way in science fiction. Rather, dimensions are properties of spaces.
Specifically, when we talk about a space having "n dimensions", what we mean is that it takes n numbers to uniquely specify a point in that space. For example, if you want to specify a point on the surface of the Earth, you need two numbers, latitude and longitude, so the surface of the Earth is 2-dimensional. If you want to specify a point within the Earth, you also need to specift a depth, so the interior of the Earth is 3-dimensional.
Notice in each of these cases, there's not a unique way to specify a given point with numbers. We could, for example, specify a point inside the Earth using a rectangular coordinate system, instead of latitude, longitude, and depth, and it would still take three numbers (x, y, and z) to specify a point. Thus, even though we say a space is three-dimensional, that doesn't mean there are exactly three well-defined values that we could call "dimensions". However, time is a little bit unique in this respect. If we want to specify an event, rather than just a point, we need four values, three to specify a location in space, and one to specify the time at which the event occurred, so "space-time" is four-dimensional. But time is, for various reasons, distinct from space, and so you will sometimes see it referred to as "the fourth dimension". That does not mean, however, that there is a well-defined first, second, or third dimension.
Now, with all of this in mind, we can imagine hypothetical beings in a hypothetical two-dimensional universe (three-dimensional space-time). There are then two ways to interpret the question of whether they can "discover" the third dimension. If we're asking whether they could conceive of a three-dimensional space, there's no reason to think they wouldn't be able to, since we, in three dimensions, can conceive of spaces with arbitrary or even infinite dimension. If we're asking whether they could discover that time is "the third dimension" for them, as it's "the fourth dimension" for us, again there's no reason to think they wouldn't be able to.
On the other hand, if you're asking whether beings living in a hypothetical two-dimensional universe could discover *our* three-dimensional universe, then that question doesn't really make sense. | [
"The understanding of three-dimensional space in humans is thought to be learned during infancy using unconscious inference, and is closely related to hand-eye coordination. The visual ability to perceive the world in three dimensions is called depth perception.\n",
"The book describes two \"spaces\" that exist s... |
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