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An injured caterpillar pupates. Will the butterfly be injured? | It would depend largely on what portion of the insect was damaged, assuming it didn't lose enough hemolymph to die outright.
For instance, if it suffered a substantial brain injury - one that inhibits the prothoracic glands, the corpus cardiacum, etc. - then even if it makes it to the pupal stage, the insect will not be able to produce the necessary hormones (prothoracicotropic hormone, ecdysteroids, juvenile hormone) to complete development and become a fully functional adult.
If the larva suffers an injury to the muscles that would eventually become the mouth region, it's possible that the the mouthparts and associated glands would not develop properly, preventing the adult from actually exiting the pupal case.
That being said, some muscles are destroyed during metamorphosis and not replaced. However, they would provide both energy and cellular materials for other developmental processes. | [
"This butterfly has no protective coloration and is not toxic to predators. It is the victim of predation by many bird, lizard, frog, and arthropod species. However, this butterfly is so ubiquitous that losses from predation do not cause endangerment of the species.\n",
"The caterpillar is regarded as a dangerous... |
why does my brain resist exercise until i feel shitty for not exercising? why doesn't my brain crave exercise, knowing i'll feel better for it after? | Because for most of our existence we had to fight very, very hard to survive. That meant eating the food with the most calories because we didn't know when we'd be eating again, and not expending extra energy if we didn't need to.
So now that our lives are very different, we haven't changed our DNA. Exercise is not something we cared about 99.999% of our existence. Life was exercise. Hard exercise. | [
"Protecting the brain from even minor disruption is important since exercise depends upon motor control, and particularly, because humans are bipeds, the motor control needed for keeping balance. Indeed, for this reason, brain energy consumption is increased during intense physical exercise due to the demands in th... |
Why does cornstarch dissolve better in cold water? | The thing is, it doesn't.
You're right that things dissolve more quickly and usually reach a higher concentration at higher temperatures. This is especially true when you talk about small molecules like sugars or ionic substances like salts.
The thing that makes starch different than these substances is that it is a very large molecule, with a lot of ability to contact itself. So, it's possible that it can make lots of long-range order or even get into "knots" with itself and other starch molecules. This means that in addition to solubility, you also have to take the molecular shape and self-interactions into account. When you heat the starch up, it can start dissolving, but if it is too concentrated (or not evenly dispersed) those molecules can then interact with each other and come back out of solution. This might be familiar as the same process an egg undergoes when cooking. In that case, heat "denatures" the large protein molecules, which allows them to interact with each other, and they come out of solution as a kind of gel. This can also happen with starch, which is why high temperatures can result in a clumpy mess if not handled carefully.
In addition, your "dissolution" at low temperatures might not be dissolving at all. The starch particles can be suspended in the liquid, but remain solid. If that is the case, they will settle out of the solution with time - this doesn't happen if they're truly dissolved. | [
"In this process, the corn is hydrated in order to loosen starch granules from the protein matrix and to make germ resilient to milling. This process reduces the germ density and softens the kernel making the milling easy. Chemicals like sulphur dioxide and lactic acid are added to the water too. Lactic acid breaks... |
when a person or corporation "pledges" a dollar amount to disaster relief, what exactly do they do with that amount of money (typically)? | Often, they'll just give the amount to a big, general relief charity like the Red Cross or perhaps a government agency handling the purchase or relief goods. Or if they have a product that is useful, they may donate that amount of the product (say Huggies donating diapers).
A pledge is just a public announcement of intention to make a donation, before the actual payment is made. | [
"BULLET::::- Loans for up to $2 million for small business, small agricultural cooperatives and most private, non-profit organizations of all sizes that have suffered disaster related cash flow problems and need funds for working capital to recover from the disaster's adverse economic impact. This loan in combinati... |
Can the brain/consciousness be effected by electromagnetism? | If you stick your head in a 0.5 tesla magnet and shake it around (I don't really recommend this) you will see sparkly hallucinations. Generally speaking you won't develop any intense desire to go on a shooting rampage.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation uses fields of 1.5 teslas or so, in a gun-shaped thing jammed right up against the the brain region you want to stimulate. It's handy for controlling seizures and cluster headaches.
A tesla is not a small unit. A hospital MRI machine runs at 1.5 to 3 teslas. Conspiracy theorists are also generally unaware of the inverse cube law, which means fields get **much** weaker with distance. 1.5 teslas a foot away is feasible. That kind of field strength from the white unmarked van across the street or the black helicopter circling overhead is not feasible, and if it were possible you'd do very noticeable things like suck metal objects towards you and/or completely destroy everybody's credit cards and cell phones.
Human brains are squishy, densely-packed, and not actually that electrically conductive. It's not rational. You cannot program people from far away. If you could get right up next to them then maybe, but the action at a distance conspiracies are something else.
A lot of people do have powerful delusions of being under control of some sort of influencing machine (often controlled by either the government or aliens) that robs them of control of their bodies, causes voices in their heads, prevents sleep and inflicts severe pain. This has been around for [a while](_URL_0_) and it is always the same, predating the discovery of radio even. You are looking at the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, which often get blamed on some distant controlling entity.
The conspiracy theorists come along and, well, they're conspiracy theorists. They patch together somebody's recurring delusions and fear and they come out with bizarre nonsense like this. | [
"Electromagnetic theories of consciousness propose that consciousness can be understood as an electromagnetic phenomenon that occurs when a brain produces an electromagnetic field with specific characteristics. Some electromagnetic theories are also quantum mind theories of consciousness; examples include quantum b... |
why do police who do horrible things in the media seem never to get punished? what's actually going on? | According to a recent post on reddit, what actually happens (in the US at least) is that they go on paid leave while two investigations (a criminal and then an administrative one) take place, only after which will any charges be brought against them.
This is additionally complicated by the fact that evidence gained during the administrative investigation cannot be used in court, but lying or refusing to answer a question is grounds for dismissal of the officer.
What generally apparently happens is that by the time this process has taken place, the media no longer cares and has moved on to some other story. | [
"Judges and magistrates then come under public pressure to deal out harsher sentences and politicians pass new laws to increase their popularity by giving the impression that they are dealing with the perceived threat. The responses by those in authority tend to reinforce the public's fear, while the media continue... |
how do scientists know that a rock is from space and not of earthly origin? | depends on what it's made of. [meteoric iron](_URL_0_) is unique because metal doesn't naturally make that kind of pattern on earth.
certain elements and compounds are reactive in earth conditions. metallic aluminum famously doesn't exist naturally on earth. if we found a hunk of it that wasn't man made, we'd know it wasn't on earth however many thousands/millions of years ago, or it would have eroded away.
this also applies to certain isotopes. if something radioactive is too young, it can't be from earth. earth has a well known age and all the crap that was here has been aging all this time.
there are also more obvious signs. something from space smacking into earth has an impact. if a meteor slams into a desert, you're going to find a lot of natural glass around the impact site. entire forests have been obliterated by meteors. | [
"Prior to Biot's thorough investigation of the meteorites that fell near l'Aigle, France in 1803, very few truly believed that rocks found on Earth could have extraterrestrial origins. There were anecdotal tales of unusual rocks found on the ground after fireballs had been seen in the sky, but such stories were oft... |
What kind of toxins (such as pesticides) are found to be stored in our adipose tissue? | Assuming you've been exposed to a given compound, this depends on the polarity of the compound and its metabolites. Lipophilic molecules are more likely to accumulate in adipose tissue, whereas hydrophilic ones are more easily excreted. Lipophilic ones can get stuck in enterohepatic circulation and are therefore more persistent in the human body. The body does have mechanisms for excreting nonpolar xenobiotics (such as glucuronidation and glutathione conjugation), but this is assuming the chemicals make it out of adipose tissue and to the liver. Any follow up questions feel free. | [
"Many of these chemical residues, especially derivatives of chlorinated pesticides, exhibit bioaccumulation which could build up to harmful levels in the body as well as in the environment. Persistent chemicals can be magnified through the food chain and have been detected in products ranging from meat, poultry, an... |
Did Wilson intend for the League of Nations to have an army? | Actually, the League of Nations wasn't just Wilson's idea, he just happened to be in a position of great power at the time of its formation. So at the Paris Peace Conference, when the *Covenant of the League of Nations* was drafted,
> "President Woodrow Wilson instructed Edward House to draft a US plan which reflected Wilson's own idealistic views, as well as the work of the Phillimore Commission. The outcome of House's work, and Wilson's own first draft, proposed the termination of 'unethical' state behavior, including forms of espionage and dishonesty. Methods of compulsion against recalcitrant states would include severe measures, such as 'blockading and closing the frontiers of that power to commerce or intercourse with any part of the world and to use any force that may be necessary...'"
- _URL_0_
So from what I can gather, it seems that Wilson's contributions and original ideas for the League of Nations didn't involve the League to have its own army, but for all the nations involved to contribute their own military power for the betterment of world peace. | [
"In pursuit of his League of Nations, Wilson conceded several points to the other powers present at the conference. France pressed for the dismemberment of Germany and the payment of a huge sum in war reparations. Wilson resisted these ideas, but Germany was still required to pay war reparations and subjected to mi... |
where will the potentially $18 billion volkswagen fines go? | Governments. It is theoretically to go towards the costs of similar, future enforcement actions. | [
"In June 2015, the German Federal Cartel Office imposed fines totaling 75 million euros on five automotive suppliers, including the German subsidiary of Autoneum due to illegal price fixing in the period from 2005 to 2013. Autoneum paid a fine of 29.5 million euros.\n",
"On 28 June 2016, Volkswagen agreed to pay ... |
how does ice actually burn the skin? | I'm not a doctor, but:
To my knowledge, a burn is when heat (or a chemical) causes tissue damage by denaturing proteins. Think of what happens to an egg when you cook it. The change you see is due to proteins unfolding or "denaturing."
Similarly, heat and chemicals can damage our tissues by denaturing proteins.
The "burning" sensation is completely different. Sometimes it happens because we are literally being burned, but other things can cause it as well (bug bites, hot peppers, scrapes, etc.). It's just your nerves signalling your brain that there's some sort of injury, even if there isn't.
Real damage from ice (frost bite) is due to the water in our cells freezing and expanding. These ice crystals cause cells to rupture.
What I'm not sure of is if cold temperatures (say cold enough to hurt but not freeze) are actually damaging the tissue. Cold temperatures can mess with cell metabolism and restrict blood flow but that's not "burning." | [
"Ice is excellent at reducing the inflammatory response and pain associated with heat generated by increased blood flow and/or blood loss. A good method is apply ice for 20 minutes of each hour. Other recommendations are an alternation of ice and no-ice for 15–20 minutes each, for a 48-hour period. To prevent local... |
What is the chemical reaction pertaining to the fermentation of grape juice? | C6H12O6 → 2 C2H5OH + 2 CO2 | [
"BULLET::::- Fermentation – catalyst function that turns grape juice into an alcoholic beverage. During fermentation yeast interact with sugars in the juice to create ethanol, commonly known as ethyl alcohol.\n",
"Since grape juice begins naturally fermenting upon pressing, opponents of wine utilized alternate me... |
How do museums decide which artifacts to display? | Most museums only display a small fraction of their artifacts, and only a fraction of those are on display at any given time. At even medium-sized institutions, it's usually less that 5%.
First, the easy stuff: Rare items directly related to the mission of the museum will nearly always be displayed, if they can be shown in a safe fashion that does not damage the artifact. Even some slight wear and tear/fading/etc may be considered worth it to display a signature item.
As I said, though, those items tend to be rare. A lot of the artifacts that most museums own are, quite simply, crap. Spinning wheels, china sets, knicknacks, spinning wheels, buttons and coins, and quite possibly more spinning wheels. These items can have fascinating histories, and can be used effectively in exhibits, but owning things in duplicate is a major concern. Legally, it is very difficult for museums to just throw things out, so these things tend to pile up. In these cases, the stuff that gets displayed (if at all) tends to be the best condition.
Things get really tricky when museums have to deal with artifacts that are "politically" sensitive. Say, for example, that a major donor wants a certain item (grandma's wedding dress, their favorite artifact, etc) displayed. Do you risk having the donor walk if you don't pay homage to them? In art museums, pieces that have been displayed in a museum resale for higher value. Are donors lending you their artwork because it is a valuable addition to your new exhibit, or because they want to turn a profit off of the experience? These questions have to be addressed by curators with some frequency at larger institutions.
Museums will generally let researches examine/have access to specific collection items to answer a specific research question. Generally, collections storage is off-limits to the public, and is usually the most secure location in a museum. Many museum are adopting *open storage*, a system that allows the public to see more (in some cases all) of the collection while still preserving and protecting the artifacts.
Museum staff generally spend *a lot* of time researching objects and ideas. Any new artifact should be researched before being accessioned into the collection. Many museums, having evolved from amateur groups, have a great many "found in collections" pieces - items that have little or no background information in a museum's records. For example, I once had to hunt down information on an empty jar of coffee that someone found in the collection of a museum for a midterm project in grad school. Using a bit of dective work, I figured out that it was manufactured in Schenectedy, NY in the early 1930s. Along the way, I learned the history of the radio station that the coffee brand was named after, and relations between the city and General Electric, which owned the station.
For museums more focused on interpretation than mere display, research is also ongoing. The living history sites I worked at were constantly researching the weapons, clothing, and food available to people at the sites, the accents and languages being spoken, deciphering journals and letters to unravel day-to-day life, and so on. Even if a few people on the senior staff had already done all this work, this information needs to be taught to new staff, which are constantly rotating in and out of jobs that tend to be part time and low pay. | [
"Museums vary in their approach to interpretation ranging from traditional museums that display collections of artefacts behind glass, with labels identifying each item and giving provenance, to living museums which attempt to recreate a historical place or period so that people can experience it. \n",
"Most U.S.... |
what exactly is happening when you hold your nose and blow to help relieve your ears during pressure changes in an airplane? | Your middle ear is connected to the nasal cavity by a [eustachian tube](_URL_0_) and as the animated gif shows, you make the tympanic membrane go back to normal when you hold your nose and force air up the tube. | [
"When rapid ambient pressure increase occurs as in diving or aircraft descent, this pressure tends to hold the Eustachian tubes closed, preventing pressure equalization across the ear drum, with painful results. To avoid this painful situation, divers, caisson workers and aircrew attempt to open the Eustachian tube... |
saudi arabia says it's rejection of a unsc seat is a "message for the us, not the un." how does this make sense? | If Saudi Arabia accepts the UNSC seat, then they do have more power, but they also give up some power because they are now part of this body and have to play by some new rules.
Having given it up, they are telling the United States (and the world) that they are going to go their own route and do whatever they want. This could include starting their nuclear program to counter Iran's nuclear program. The United States said they would protect Saudi interests and since they didn't in Syria, how can Saudi Arabia count on the United States to protect them from a nuclear Iran?
| [
"Following the vote, Saudi Arabia, despite winning, declined to take the seat citing the UNSC's \"double standards\" in being allegedly ineffective in regards to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, nuclear disarmament in the Middle East and putting an end to the Syrian civil war. This was the first time a state had r... |
How large of an impact did the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull have on the CO2 levels in our atmosphere? | Not a whole lot. The wikipedia page which describes the various [effects of the eruption](_URL_1_) estimates ~0.15 million tons of CO2 were put into the atmosphere. That seems like a lot, but it is nicely put into perspective by the immediately following line that the disruption in air travel caused by the volcano caused an estimated 1.3-2.8 million tons of CO2 not to be put into the atmosphere by jets. It can be important to take these numbers with a grain of salt, as other discussions suggest that the 0.15 figure might be the amount per day during the eruption, e.g this [page](_URL_2_), but the total amount expelled by the volcano remains small in comparison to human contributions.
For a more general discussion of volcanic vs anthropogenic contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere, the USGS has a nice discussion of it [here](_URL_0_). | [
"The Lomagundi Excursion Event is considered to be the most prominent carbon isotope event in Earth's history and can provide evidence for this large increase and subsequent decline in O. For this event, a release of 10 to 20 times the current atmospheric oxygen is predicted based on levels found in the carbonate δ... |
Does an average snowflake have more or less water than an average raindrop? | An individual snowflake has mass ~1-3 milligrams (_URL_1_).
Raindrops have mass from 4-100 milligrams (_URL_0_).
So, an average snowflake has less mass (and therefore water) than an average raindrop.
However, there is great variability in the mass of raindrops depending on weather conditions. Very large snowflakes are sometimes observed, but these are actually many individual snow crystals lumped together, so the answer depends on what you define as a snowflake, since a grouping of several snow crystals could outweigh a small raindrop. | [
"Scientists traditionally thought that the variation in the size of raindrops was due to collisions on the way down to the ground. In 2009 French researchers succeeded in showing that the distribution of sizes is due to the drops' interaction with air, which deforms larger drops and causes them to fragment into sma... |
At what point in human evolution did we develop a dominant hand? Is this a trait found in other primates as well? | Scientists (myself included) are still trying to figure this out. The current evidence suggests Neanderthals exhibited handedness and it appears to be roughly the same ratio as most modern humans: ~ 90% right handed. However, hand preference, that is consistently using one hand or the other for a particular behavior, has been found in several of our closest living relatives like chimpanzees and bonobos. But these apes are different from humans because they do not consistently use the same hand across different tasks whereas humans do. In short, it looks like handedness has evolved in the last few million years of our evolution but is likely at least half a million years old. | [
"The prehensile hands and feet of primates evolved from the mobile hands of semi-arboreal tree shrews that lived about . This development has been accompanied by important changes in the brain and the relocation of the eyes to the front of the face, together allowing the muscle control and stereoscopic vision neces... |
the difference between pop and imap email protocol | The biggest difference is that POP simply allows you to view or retrieve messages stored in a flat list on the server. You can order them by date, but that's about it. POP is useful if you want to organize and manage email messages entirely on the client side - so, you download messages from the server, then delete them off the server, then you can create folders or categories or whatever to organize your messages on the client (i.e. on your computer). The biggest advantage to POP is that you don't need to be connected to the server to read your saved emails. The biggest drawback is that if you are on someone else's computer, or a computer in a public library or something, you have no access to the saved messages on your computer at home.
IMAP allows you to organize messages by folder right on the server. So, an IMAP capable client can show you your messages remotely, very little information is actually stored on the client side. The biggest advantage of IMAP is that you can access all your saved and archived messages from any computer capable of contacting the server. The biggest drawback of IMAP is that you need to have a connection to the server to read your saved emails.
| [
"The POP protocol requires the currently connected client to be the only client connected to the mailbox. In contrast, the IMAP protocol specifically allows simultaneous access by multiple clients and provides mechanisms for clients to detect changes made to the mailbox by other, concurrently connected, clients. Se... |
Why did the UK and France support Finland in the Winter War but not the Continuation War? | The simple answer is simply because Finland allied itself with Germany and fought against their ally, the Soviet Union. During the Winter War, UK and France had not yet allied themselves with the Soviet Union (due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact). | [
"During the early stages of World War II, the British and French Allies made a series of proposals to send troops to assist Finland against the Soviet Union in the Winter War, which started on 30 November 1939. The war was a consequence of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which put Finland into the Soviet sphere of inf... |
We are told not to reuse the plastic bottles from bottled water because chemicals from the plastic will be leeched into the new water. What is different between the plastic/water from an unopened bottle and the plastic/water when the plastic bottle is refilled? | The chemical you're most likely referring to is Bisphenol A or BPA for short. The chemical can be leached into water or food that has been stored in the plastic bottle or container especially when heated. This is why you shouldn't microwave plastic containers or bottles. As of 2012 all baby bottles and sippy cups were supposed to be BPA free. If you look at the bottom of a plastic bottle and the recycle code is 3 or 7 it may be made with BPA. There's lots of information out there but please check and double check the source as manufacturing companies have been fighting against research into BPA for a long time and have developed nonprofit companies to fight it (a page out of the tobacco companies book). Anyway hope this answers your question a little better or at least points you in the right direction. | [
"Studies show that the plastics used for bottles contain chemicals having estrogenic activity, even when they claim otherwise. Although some of the bottled water contained in glass were found polluted with chemicals as well, the researchers believe some of the contamination of water in the plastic containers may ha... |
It is often heard that drinking small amounts of alcohol is good for you, but what if you binge on Friday night then have the recommended 1-2 glasses a day the rest of the week. Does the binge make the daily alcohol worse for you? | Could somebody explain how, if true, small amounts of alcohol is good for you? | [
"Alcohol consumption: Studies suggest that light-to-moderate alcohol intake is associated with lower risk (once or twice a week or three or four times a week), as were frequent drinking in earlier life is identified as a risk factor for cognitive decline in later life.\n",
"A study found that moderate consumption... |
Will there be an eventual limit to physical/athletic world records? It seems every year we run/pitch/jump/swim a mph/second faster/ foot higher. Will humans continue to become bigger stronger faster or will the body hit a point where it becomes physiologically impossible? | Please everyone this is not the place for speculation or answers that start with "I'm not a scientist but. .. " or " I heard somewhere that. . . ". This is asking for certain biological and biomechanical factors that may limit mobility. All answers should be sourced and scientific. | [
"A peak of five world records came at the 1993 World Championships in Athletics. The most recent world record was in the women's 50 kilometres race walk, which Portugal's Inês Henriques finished in 4:05:56 in 2017. World records have become less common as the history of the event has expanded, with no world records... |
how a midi guitar works | The guitar is just a controller, like for an xbox or playstation.
Let's take a simple case, where the strings are only used to tell the guitar if they were hit or not. In this case, the guitar checks to see which string is hit, and the highest fret that is being held down on that string. It codifies this somehow, and sends it off to whatever program that is currently listening to this guitar. This program has a table set up that tells it what sound to play for every possible response the controller could give. Usually, the sounds are set up like a regular guitar, where each string starts with a guitar-like open note sound, and every fret raises that same sound up a half step. Theoretically though you could make the guitar make any sounds you want, because the guitar doesn't actually make the sounds, it just tells the computer what fret and string have been hit. when multiple strings are hit at the same time, they are sent one at a time to the computer so fast that you cannot register the time delay with which they are played. They are played individually of each other, and the sound card in your computer or whatever is driving the guitar will overlay the sounds to make it sound like a chord.
In a guitar which takes string tension or other factors into account, more complex responses from the controller are required, probably with some form of 'force' variable that goes from 0 to 127 or 0 to 255. How this is handled I'm not sure, but once it gets to the program, it will have a bigger table based on the string, the fret, and the amount of force applied, or possibly (but not probably) an algorithm to run on the base note to make it sound louder and twangier
EDIT: the wiki page for further reading: _URL_0_ | [
"MIDI converters use a hexaphonic guitar signal to determine pitch, duration, attack, and decay characteristics. The MIDI sends the note information to an internal or external sound bank device. The resulting sound closely mimics numerous instruments. The MIDI setup can also let the guitar be used as a game control... |
What are the colorful lines in NASA's Pale Blue Dot image? | Sunlight reflected in the camera. [The Wikipedia article explains it in more detail](_URL_0_). The Sun was just something like 1-2 degrees away from Earth as seen by Voyager. | [
"Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the \"Voyager 1\" space probe from a record distance of about kilometers ( miles, 40.5 AU), as part of that day's \"Family Portrait\" series of images of the Solar System.\n",
"Red color images are 20,264 pixels across ( wide), and B-G ... |
What do historians think of Eric Williams book 'Capitalism and Slavery'? | *Capitalism and Slavery* is one of the seminal works on modern slavery and its relationship to Capitalism.
Many historiographical traditions saw slavery as a kind of throwback to pre-Modern social and economic institutions and not a part of Capitalist development as such. Marxists in particular tended to use a narrow definition of Capitalism (based on wage labor) which painted Modern slavery as a pre-Capitalist survival within the development of the Capitalist system.
There was a lot of pushback against this position, especially among historians in the Americas where Modern slavery was often a predominant socio-economic institution. They tried to demonstrate that Capitalism wasn't just some oddball survival in the transition towards mature Capitalism but instead an organic institution which was key to Capitalist development and which meshed perfectly well with the rest of the system.
In the case of Cuba, Williams influenced historians like Manuel Moreno Fraginals (*El Ingenio*) and Jorge Ibarra Cuesta (*Varela El Precursor. Un Estudio De Epoca*), who both saw the planter class as part of the broader Capitalist class.
The highly influential Immanuel Wallerstein has also incorporated the position that slavery is not an incidental survival. In fact, he takes the ball and really runs with it, stating that wage labor is typical for the 'core' of the Capitalist system while non-free forms of labor, from slavery to indentured servitude, peonage, etc., are typical to peripheral parts of the system.
Many recent historians, like Sven Beckert (*Empire of Cotton*, 2014) and Edward Baptist (*The Half Has Never Been Told*, 2014) have also argued that slavery is a perfectly organic part of the Capitalist system. They recently published a new compilation of articles, *Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development* (2016) which defends this view.
The problem for Marxists is that Marx' *definition* of socio-economic systems rested on the dichotomy between proletarians (wage laborers who didn't own the means of production) and Capitalists (who used Capital and legal ownership of the means of production to extract surplus value from the labor of proletarians they employ). If proletarian classes are also central to Capitalism, then Marx' definition doesn't work. I'd also note that many of the authors I describe as having assumed Williams' premise often fail to give a clear definition of Capitalism or clarify this issue entirely. It is still a point of contention, as demonstrated by the fact that its authors feel the need to make these arguments so forcefully in 2016 (ie. it isn't received wisdom just yet).
In short, what do historians think of his work? I can't speak to his writing on the British West Indies, but the underlying premise of his work, attesting to the intimate and non-contradictory relationship between Capitalism and slavery, has had far reaching significance. It should be read as a really important, though no longer up-to-date, precursor of this contemporary historiographical discussion.
Edit:
PS
The book itself is also really well written and touches on interesting topics, so I'd definitely recommend reading it. | [
"Williams specialised in the study of slavery. Many Western academics focus on his chapter on the abolition of the slave trade, but that is just a small part of his work. In 1944 his book \"Capitalism and Slavery\" argued that the British abolition of their Atlantic slave trade in 1807 was motivated primarily by ec... |
Was Tuol Sleng the only prison in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge? | On her visit to Democratic Kampuchea in 1978, Elizabeth Becker asked one of the top members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) ‘Standing Committee’; Ieng Sary, whether her and the small delegation she was travelling with could see the prisons of the country. He replied that ‘there were no prisons in Democratic Kampuchea.’
This, as most are aware, was not quite true. Ieng Sary, at the time foreign minister for the now defunct regime (and who died on trial for crimes against humanity in 2013) was telling Becker that there were no prisons in this country, despite their conversation probably taking place less than a few kilometres from the high school that was turned into an interrogation and execution centre that you reference in your question. This institution, codenamed S-21, would have been processing confessions and torturing its inmates as he uttered those words, while thousands of those who had already been sent there, now lay dead in a mass grave about twenty minutes drive away from Phnom Penh.
You could also say, as many survivors of the regime did, that the whole country was turned into ‘a prison without walls.’
To answer your question, I will detail the ‘prison network’ of DK, as well as relate the main differences between the ‘provincial prisons’ and the centre of the CPK’s security network, S-21.
But first, a note on how the ‘Khmer Rouge’ functioned in relation to those who were members of the army. This army was under the direction of the CPK, which was itself comprised of a ‘standing committee’, where a handful of people made all the decisions in a highly centralised system. The army itself was divided into those that were involved in combat and those who comprised the Khmer Rouge that worked at all other levels. The majority of low-level cadres not involved in combat would staff the security centres, but the entirety of the army was utilised in defending the regime from ‘enemies’, external ones – but primarily those *within* the country.
The army, therefore, was essentially just tasked with carrying out the will of the CPK, a regime obsessed with ‘sweeping clean enemies’, and one method of doing this was by setting up security centres around Cambodia.
Meng-Try Ea in *The Chain of Terror*, suggests that there were five categories of security centre. The lowest were small prisons that focused on localised areas, usually only detaining a few inmates who would be generally set free after a short period. Some prisoners would be sent ‘up the chain’ to the next category, the ‘district re-education and regional security centres’. Prisoners sent here would be detained, interrogated and executed and included members of the former Lon Nol regime, those who had stolen something, ran away, spoke ill of the current regime or cadre who had been accused of betraying the revolution.
Above this level were zone security centres. DK was divided into several ‘zones’ that generally overlapped with the ‘districts’ that had been in place prior to the Khmer Rouge coming to power (like states within a country). This category of security centre was large and held a thousand or more prisoners. Primarily Khmer Rouge soldiers and cadre were sent here –and their families– and these places served as both hard labour and execution sites.
Above all these categories, or perhaps at the centre, was S-21. The most important prisoners were sent here, including former members of the standing committee like Vorn Vet.
There were more than 150 of these security centres around Democratic Kampuchea, but they varied widely in their size, purpose and importance. Some were temporarily set up. I’ve visited one in Prey Veng province, a school that was used to detain soldiers caught up in the east zone purges of 1977-8, before they were executed and buried in a mass grave behind one of the buildings.
People could be moved up, and generally were, but some were also sent ‘down’, to work in hard labour camps or sent to re-education centres. This may have been as high as 20 or 30 percent in the smaller prisons, but the higher level of centre you were in would reduce that percentage eventually to zero, famously only a handful of people sent to S-21 would survive that sentence. After 1976, as the regime became more obsessed with purging internal enemies, the chances of being released at a district or regional centre also became nearly impossible.
One major difference between S-21 and the others was the focus on prisoner autobiographies. Because those sent to Tuol Sleng were considered to be important enemies of the regime, and because it was thought that none would have acted alone, it was imperative to comb through their confessions and produce huge statements of their guilt – often encouraging prisoners to produce the names of many accomplices as they were subjected to torture. In the provincial ‘prisons’, this was not a focus. Interrogations were different, prisoners never wrote their own biographies but were instead interrogated by just a three-person team, one asking questions, one taking notes and one beating the prisoners. Beatings were common, as was the use of plastic bags, but no ‘high level’ torture like that seen in the exhibits of Tuol Sleng.
Henri Locard suggests that living conditions in the provincial prisons, ‘were even worse than 21’, since the inmates had no right to wash themselves. He said that one had to be careful about generalising, as we’ve seen there were more than 150 prisons and he described it as ‘chaos’. Insects and parasites were more of an issue in these regional prisons, exacerbated by the filth and treatment of those detained. He said that food was very simple, all over Cambodia, clear rice soup twice a day and a very small amount. Usually after three/four weeks people would not survive. This was better at S-21 since prisoners could survive several months. The average lifespan was about three weeks according to the historian’s testimony at the Khmer Rouge tribunal. | [
"The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum () is a museum in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, chronicling the Cambodian genocide. The site is a former secondary school which was used as Security Prison 21 (S-21) by the Khmer Rouge regime from its rise to power in 1975 to its fall in 1979. From 1976 to 1979, an estimated 2... |
why do scientists research commonly known stuff? | Actually if you read the article it does next to nothing. It reduces soreness by between half a point and one point on a 100 point scale. So if you normally get soreness of 41/100 after going for a run, you could stretch and change that to 40.5, or maybe to 40. So essentially the time spent stretching is not worth the reward. You wouldn't notice the difference in those scores.
Your comment is exactly why we need to research commonly held beliefs, they may seem obvious but are often wrong.
In addition, it's impossible to give someone placebo stretches in a research study, so there's a very high likelihood placebo accounts for that 0.5 to 1 point change that the article is reporting. | [
"Scientific research is very important for any university. It enables professors to combine pedagogical skills with science activity. The result of the research is the Collection of Scientific Articles issued since 1971, which was reissued in 2004 as a Yearbook. Other than that, in 2013 a Fine Arts Academy Yearbook... |
Could a current be induced in plasma to make the matter expand instead of contract? | I assume you're talking about pinch devices like the [Z machine](_URL_0_) at Sandia National Laboratories? These machines operate by sending a very large current through a conductor called a liner. When this happens, a magnetic field is formed and the magnetic pressure compresses the liner to very high temperature.
If so, the answer is yes.
Magnetic pressure scales as the square of the magnetic field B, which itself scales as the current density J. Z is unique in that it was designed so that the discharge would happens very quickly, meaning exceptionally high magnetic pressures and rapid implosions of liners. If, however, the same discharge were sent through the liner more slowly, then the current density J would be lower and so would the magnetic pressure. It is possible to make a configuration where the discharge heats the plasma to high temperatures so that the gas pressure of the plasma exceeds the magnetic pressure. Such a liner would indeed explode, not implode, rather like the exploding wire in a fuse. | [
"BULLET::::- The plasma was an unstructured Gaussian sphere, with a strongly converged core that represented a small (~1%) part of the total volume. Nevins challenged this assumption, stating that the particles would build up angular momentum, causing the dense core to degrade. The loss of density inside the core w... |
since mars has no magnetic field, could we ever restore the atmosphere there? | The dissipation of an atmosphere is an incredibly long process. Mars still has an atmosphere, so its not like it would just vanish. The main issue would be the creation of enough greenhouse and other gasses to counteract the dissipation. | [
"The loss of the Martian magnetic field strongly affected surface environments through atmospheric loss and increased radiation; this change significantly degraded surface habitability. When there was a magnetic field, the atmosphere would have been protected from erosion by the solar wind, which would ensure the m... |
Why do things tear more easily once you get started? | Just some speculation, while waiting for a material scientist:
I would think it has to do with concentrating the stress in the material. If the edge is intact, when you pull it, the entire edge is in tension, and the force is distributed. If the edge is nicked, this becomes a place for the stress to concentrate.
That's my guess, anyway | [
"Materials vary in their susceptibility to tearing. Some materials may be quite resistant to tearing when they are in their full form, but when a small cut or tear is made, the material becomes compromised, and the effort needed to continue tearing along that line becomes less.\n",
"Tearing is the act of breaking... |
Could Native Americans take advantage of the Homestead Act of 1862? | Hmm. Hopefully someone will know of specific instances of indigenous people doing this, or attempting to, but it seems to me that it would theoretically be possible. Here's the relevant portion of [the act](_URL_0_):
> Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States, and who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies, shall, from and after the first January, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, be entitled...
In 1862, the vast majority of indigenous people were not citizens, and some had "borne arms against the United States." Certainly officials would do their best to prevent the people whose land was being seized from reclaiming it as settlers. But indigenous ancestry is complicated. Some settlers almost certainly had indigenous ancestors, and claimed to be white -- or may have been categorized that way. Actually, it strikes me that the makers of the 1931 film [Cimarron](_URL_1_ implied the main character of that film (a "white" settler in Oklahoma) had some indigenous ancestry. 1862 was several decades before the Dawes Rolls, which some tribes still use to determine tribal membership. And it's also possible that "assimilated" indigenous people from Eastern tribes (or Canada?) could have gained US citizenship and applied.
But that's speculation. If others know of specific cases, I'd be very interested to hear them. | [
"In 1887, the United States Congress passed the General Allotment Act, which is considered one of the earliest attempts aimed toward assimilation of Native tribes. This act intended to give Natives a sense of land ownership as well as integrate an agricultural lifestyle with the tribes, much like that of the Americ... |
Is there any primary evidence that exists that speaks of a trend of suicides and shifts in character as a result of the emotional and physical trauma of battle fatigue in ancient and medieval military veterans? | Ok, this is an interesting one - I can offer an excellent article discussing the role of social support in post-event PTSD mitigation: _URL_0_
Generally, based on current understanding, you'd expect to see a variation in PTSD severity and duration coming in based on whether the returning veteran came back to support or a lack thereof. Did the girlfriend marry someone else, the parents die, the job go away? Did the wife and kids happily embrace dad and put him straight back into his place? What injuries did the returnee have and what support and community were available?
Really interested in the historical references to this topic. | [
"Indications from all studies that have considered the question of severity have indicated that symptoms tend to be more severe for those who have killed than for other causes of traumatization. One study using the U.S. government data base of American veterans of Vietnam has suggested that the pattern of symptoms ... |
what exactly happens in the stomach when you bend over/lay over on your stomach right after eating? | What do you mean? What should happen? | [
"The stomach twists around the longitudinal axis of the digestive tract, also known as \"volvulus\". Gas distension may occur prior to or after the stomach twists. The most common direction for rotation is clockwise, viewing the animal from behind. The stomach can rotate up to 360° in this direction and 90° counter... |
Is listening to relaxing meditative music during study a help or a hindrance? | Being relaxed has been shown to have amazing effects on memory. We remember our relaxed moments way better and in more detail than stressed moments, which are often not really recorded at all, but some jumbled mess of half made up things. This is why eyewitness testimonial is often crap.
Personally, I like listening to OCRemix or other non-vocalized music while studying (or programming now, my job). When I did exams, I often thought of a song or hummed it really quietly, which helped me relax. | [
"Some relaxation methods can also be used during other activities, for example, autosuggestion and prayer. At least one study has suggested that listening to certain types of music, particularly new-age music and classical music, can increase feelings associated with relaxation, such as peacefulness and a sense of ... |
Why did post-WW1 Hungary maintain a monarchy? | TL;DR There was no concensus on who should be the king, the political landscape was split roughly in two factions, one that wanted Charles back and one that wanted the right to freely elect a king; as sort of a compromise, after Charles failed to gain the throne the second time, this question was shelved indefinitely for the sake of unity. There was little desire to get rid of the monarchy as following the fall of Béla Kun's marxist-leninist republican dictatorship, republicanism was associated with all sorts of issues and the post-Kun leadership was generally very conservative and reactionary.
---
Let's adress the issue of the monarchy itself - first off it has to be said that Hungary was, for a relatively brief time that is, a republic immediately after WWI albeit a very chaotic one. Mihály Károlyi, an aristocrat and a liberal politician, led the so-called Aster Revolution that forced the Emperor (or for Hungary specifically King) Charles to appoint Károlyi as the Prime Minister of Hungary on 31 October 1918 and on 13 November Charles issued a similar proclamation that was already given to Cisleithania two days prior, that is that he won't be involved in the Hungarian affairs of state, allowing Károlyi to abolish the Monarchy and proclaim the Hungarian People's Republic on 16 November.
However this republic was rather short-lived as in March 1919, communists and social democrats merged together under the marxist-leninist Béla Kun, seized power in the republic and proclaimed the Hungarian Republic of the Councils (or the Hungarian Soviet Republic if you will). It started the 'red terror' brutally persecuting any potential threat to this new regime and prepared for a war against its neighbours trying to hold on to the lost territories.
Kun's regime however lost the war (Kun himself fled to the Bolshevik Russia where he would be later executed during the Stalinist purges) against Hungary's neighbours and Budapest was occupied by the Romanian forces. Meanwhile in the city of Szeged an anti-communist and conservative/monarchist/nationalist opposition was formed, chief among them being Admiral Miklós Horthy with his army (the so-called 'National Army'), Gyula Károlyi (Cousin of Mihály), István Bethlen and Gyula Gömbös with his right-wing paramilitary organization known under the abbreviation MOVE (*Magyar Országos Véderő Egylet*; *Hungarian National Defence Association* in English). The National Army as well as MOVE started its own 'White Terror' against communists, Socialists, Liberals as well as Jews and Freemasons among others.
It has to be said that this was not the only opposition in Kun's Hungary, however it was the most prominent.
After the communists were defeated, there was an attempt by a socialist Gyula Peidl to reinstate the pre-communist republic, however István Friedrich, a factory owner and a conservative politician who was arrested and sentenced to death (though his sentence was commuted) during the Red Terror, he led his own anti-communist and conservative faction in Budapest called the 'White House', in early August 1919 overthrew it, became the prime minister and proclaimed the previous republican regimes as illegitimate. He reinstated the Monarchy (with all of the old laws, including the Pragmatic Sanction of 1723) and appointed his Habsburg ally, Archduke Joseph August, as regent. The Archduke did not last long due to the pressure of Entente and its Allies in Central and Eastern Europe and was replaced by Horthy.
Now why was the monarchy reinstated? For the 'white' forces in Hungary, it was republicanism, or more specifically the distain for the historic Hungarian royal institutions, that caused the chaos during the Károlyi and Kun's regimes (in this way, monarchy was also seen as an anti-thesis to these 'hated' regimes). Moreover for the conservatives the Hungarian Holy Crown symbolized the unity and integrity of the monarchy and its territories which in their eyes were broken the moment Károlyi proclaimed the republic.
Now came up the question of who should actually sit on the throne. The politicians were split on this issue roughly in two camps - the legitimists, who argued for upholding the Pragmatic Sanction which meant that they supported the claim of Charles, and the free electors who wanted to see the Pragmatic Sanction gone and argued for a right for the Hungarian people to freely elect the new Hungarian king be that a Habsburg or not.
The legitimists were generally speaking from prominent pre-1918 aristocrats and catholics, the most influential among them being Gyula Andrássy and most of the Christian National Union Party. The free electors were generally protestants, most of the factions inside the National Smallholders and Agrarian Workers Party were generally leaning towards the free election however with various degrees of flexibility, the aforementioned Gyula Gömbös, which would later in the 30s become the prime minister of Hungary, was among the most prominent and radical free elector.
These factions were difficult to reconcile, which paralyzed the Hungarian parliament, however the ambitious István Bethlen, who became the Prime Minister in April 1921, was determined to do it - from his perspective Hungary has suffered from a lack of national unity and the only remedy according to him was to unite all of the conservative factions, that is most of the Smallholder Party and the Christian Nationals, into one party.
He was ironically helped by Charles when he attempted to gain throne the second time in October 1921 - Charles flew to Denésfa and from there he travelled to Sopron where he mustered some legitimist troops, he also announced his governmental cabinet in which prominent legitimists were seated, however he did so without consulting them first. Andrássy, one of the appointees, had the misfortune of actually being in Denésfa at the time Charles arrived (doubly so because he reached an agreement with Bethlen few days prior), this was however pure coincidence and rather unfortunate timing as he was really attending a christening. Needles to say Charles was stopped by a force of students and right-wing radicals led by Gömbös (with the approval of Horthy who disliked Charles) in Budaörs, right outside Budapest. Charles himself was after a clash of arms arrested and expelled from the country for attempting a coup d'etat.
The fact that Andrássy was both present in Denésfa and appointed into Charles' government meant that Andrássy and several others were arrested and the legitimist position was greatly weakened. Bethlen used this and successfully pressured the legitimists to give up on the Pragmatic Sanction of 1723, meaning that a road to free election was possible. However, Bethlen, probably afraid of pushing the legitimists too hard, went the way of compromise, on one hand annulling the Pragmatic sanction and on the other refusing to rule out the idea of a Habsburg king, so the way for Charles was still left open. The question was thus shelved and was supposed to be resolved at a 'suitable time'. This move managed to appease both the legitimists and the free electors, Bethlen was obviously satisfied with this resolution and did not want to press the issue further.
Sources:
BODÓ, Béla, *The White Terror: Antisemitic and Political Violence in Hungary, 1919 - 1921*, 2019
LORMAN, Thomas, *Counter-Revolutionary Hungary, 1920–1925: István Bethlen and the Politics of Consolidation*, 2006 | [
"The Compromise of 1867, which created the Dual Monarchy, gave the Hungarian government more control of its domestic affairs than it had possessed at any time since the Battle of Mohács (see fig. 4). However, the new government faced severe economic problems and the growing restiveness of ethnic minorities. The Fir... |
why is it that we use petrol as fuel when alcohol is both cheaper and easier to produce? | * It isn't as energy-dense; 20 liters of petrol is about equal to 30 liters of ethanol. This means cars either can't travel as far on existing tanks, or would need bigger tanks (and thus need to lug around more heavy fuel, reducing fuel economy)
* Ethanol is *hygroscopic*, meaning it absorbs water from the air. Water tends to be pretty bad for engines, so maintenance costs go up.
* Ethanol damages aluminum, magnesium, and rubber. These are all used in engines. Engines can be built without these materials but they are more expensive and harder to maintain.
* Ethanol can't ignite at low temperatures. For this reason, pure-ethanol fuel is not used on a commercial scale in most of the world, and is instead mixed with petrol in a 85/15 blend at maximum.
* Ethanol is **not** cheaper or easier to produce - in fact, in most cases *producing ethanol uses more energy than the ethanol produces* meaning that it's wasteful to use. Once produces of ethanol fuel transition to renewable/non-polluting energy sources this will become less of a concern, but it is still more efficient not to use ethanol.
* Ethanol at present tends to require large amounts of land and water to produce; whether this is a problem varies from place to place. As developments with ethanol sources (e.g. high-efficiency algae) progress, this may become less of an issue. | [
"One advantage shared by the four major alcohol fuels is their high octane rating. This tends to increase their fuel efficiency and largely offsets the lower energy density of vehicular alcohol fuels (as compared to petrol/gasoline and diesel fuels), thus resulting in comparable \"fuel economy\" in terms of distanc... |
History of History | I feel like I recommend this book all the time, but it is almost *sui generis*, and very excellent: Peter Novick, *That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession* (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Not only does Novick tell the story of how "Historian" became a profession, rather than an elite recreational activity, but also tracks the idea of 'objectivity' as history evolves within the United States. I must warn you though, it is very thick! If you already have a vague familiarity with the names involved, it can be quite juicy, almost gossipy at parts as you read about the spats and scandals between historians over the course of the twentieth century. | [
"The short history chronicles human development from the inventions of cavemen to the results of the First World War. Additionally, the book describes the beliefs of many major world religions, including Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, and incorporates these ideas into its narrative presentati... |
how can there be gas in space ? | Hydrogen has a melting point of 14 K *at atmospheric pressure.*
When there's hardly any pressure (i.e. in space), things can remain a gas at lower temperatures.
In the same fashion, a glass of water would boil in space. | [
"Gas is one of the four fundamental states of matter (the others being solid, liquid, and plasma). A pure gas may be made up of individual atoms (e.g. a noble gas like neon), elemental molecules made from one type of atom (e.g. oxygen), or compound molecules made from a variety of atoms (e.g. carbon dioxide). A gas... |
how did people study the human body? | The truth is that this is something that humanity was really, really bad at for a really long time and we had a lot of weird ideas about how things worked. Some people still believe weird stuff about the body to this day. It didn't help that people kept mixing in supernatural/spiritual theories about body parts. But overall, gross human dissection, dissecting sick people after they'd died and basic observations about living people all helped early civilisations to work out some of the basics.
A lot of it was done by trial and error and observation. Some stuff was more obvious than others. We could tell that people's chests inflated when they breathed and that if people didn't breathe, they died, so we got an idea that it must be important for air to go into the lungs. We could see that there were all these tubes in the body which connected to the heart and were full of blood, and we knew that the heart was beating in people who were alive but not in people who were dead, so we got a rough idea that it was important for blood to be carried around the body and started to cotton on the idea of the circulatory system. It wasn't until the 13th century that someone made the connection that there must be something important in the air that got transferred around in the blood stream and figured that must happen in the lungs, where all the air was going.
People could see through dissection that the brain was connected (via the spinal cord and nerves) to muscles and organs, so they worked out that the function of the brain was probably to control other parts of the body. They also were probably able to observe that people who'd been hit on the head might develop learning impairments and personality changes, so could conclude that the brain was important in these aspects.
People could work out that kidneys were connected to the bladder and the bladder was connected to your urethra, so they figured out that kidneys must have something to do with urine and waste production.
Same kind of story with the digestive system. It's fairly easy to see that food ends up in the stomach and the stomach is connected to the intestines and eventually feces comes out the anus. So it would be pretty easy to conclude that, since if you don't eat you die, the body must have a system for getting what you needed out of food and getting rid of the stuff from it that you didn't need. People could also see that bile (which ended up in the digestive system) came out of the gall bladder, which was connected to the liver, so they probably managed to at least figure out that bile was made in the liver and was important in digestion.
Other stuff was more complicated. Reproductive biology was poorly understood but again, it would be possible to make at least a primitive connection by looking at how all the tubes connected up and at the fact that sex lead to babies and babies were grown in the uterus.
Other stuff, like the thyroid, wasn't really properly understood until more modern times. People got goiters and surgeons would just remove the whole thyroid and someone eventually noticed that people without a thyroid showed certain symptoms (like cretinism) and realised that the thyroid must be producing something important. Then, as technology started to advance, that gave people something to go on for future studies into thyroid hormones.
Obviously, anatomy and dissection really only gave people a really rough and incomplete idea of what was going on and people still had a lot of weird misconceptions. It wasn't until we had labs and microscopes and modern science that we were able to figure out a lot of the details. | [
"Anatomical studies of the human body were also executed by medical doctors. The physician Andreas Vesalius work of anatomical studies ‘‘De humani corporis fabrica\" (\"On the fabric of the human body\"), published 1543, was a pioneering work of human anatomy illustrated by Titian's pupil Jan Stephen van Calcar.\n"... |
why do people celebrate guy fawkes night? i mean, he was a terrorist. | They celebrate the fact that he was stopped, not the fact that he acted. | [
"Guy Fawkes Night, also known as Guy Fawkes Day, Bonfire Night and Firework Night, is an annual commemoration observed on 5 November, primarily in the United Kingdom. Its history begins with the events of 5 November 1605, when Guy Fawkes, a member of the Gunpowder Plot, was arrested while guarding explosives the pl... |
How were train-mounted guns/cannons used during WW1? Were they to be used while the train was stopped, to shoot at stationary targets while moving, or to prevent people from chasing it down? | The response you want on this question is probably this comment chain by /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov
_URL_0_
| [
"After the American entry into World War I on 6 April 1917, the US Army considered converting coast artillery weapons to railway mounts for use on the Western Front. Railway guns were in use by all the major belligerents in the war by that time. Among the weapons that could be spared from fixed defenses were 150 12... |
What was the purpose of the Junkers JU 87 (Stuka Bomber) siren? | Found an older post here asking this question - the answers given are accurate by my recollection:
[_URL_0_](_URL_1_)
& #x200B;
Edit: The first answer was provided by an account that has since been deleted - sorry mods. An insightful follow-up response about a contributing factor to the sirens being eventually removed was their impact on performance of the aircraft was provided by u/Brickie78. | [
"The main purpose of the siren was to warn the public in the event of a nuclear attack by the Soviets during the Cold War. The operator's job was to start the engine and bring it up to operating speed, then to pull and release the transmission handle to start the wailing signal generation. The Chrysler air raid sir... |
does gravity decrease at a constant rate the farther away from the surface you get? | This is a good question because it illustrates a very common misunderstanding about space travel.
The answer to your question is "yes" - gravity decreases at a very specific, steady rate the farther away you get from an object.
But here's the thing: The ISS is only 260ish miles away from Earth - the gravity up there is only slightly less than what you're feeling right now while sitting at your computer.
So wait... how is the space station not falling then? How are the astronauts able to float around and stuff?
The answer is awesome: The ISS *is* falling. In fact, it's been falling nonstop for the past 16 years.
Imagine you throw a baseball straight ahead of you. Because of gravity, the ball kinda curves downward until it hits the ground, right? The faster you throw the ball the wider the curve gets, and the longer it takes for it to hit the ground.
So what would happen if you threw the ball *so* hard that its curve matched the Earth's curve? And what if you threw the ball from a really high altitude where there was no air to slow it down? That ball would just keep falling around and around the planet forever without ever actually hitting the ground.
That whole "falling around the planet" concept is what we normally call *orbiting*. When an object has enough sideways speed relative to its parent body a cool equilibrium is reached: Gravity is still trying to pull the object downward but the object is moving sideways so fast that it kinda keep missing.
That's basically what's going on on the space station (and every other spacecraft in Earth orbit). The station and all the astronauts inside are just free falling, but they're moving sideways so darn fast that they'll never actually crash in to the ground. | [
"The acceleration due to Earth’s gravity (see \"standard gravity\") at its surface is 976 to 983 Gal, the variation being due mainly to differences in latitude and elevation. Mountains and masses of lesser density within the Earth's crust typically cause variations in gravitational acceleration of tens to hundreds ... |
why do depressed people have a harder time getting things done? why are "normal" people so much better at getting things started than us? | Your brain is entirely based on chemical reactions. When you do something rewarding (even mildly, like getting a chore done) your brain releases dopamine, a reward chemical. It makes you feel good, it’s your brain training itself to be like “if we do this thing, we get cookie!”
Depression, in part, reduces the release or effectiveness of these chemicals. It makes it so you can’t see a reward for anything in the future, and don’t get that happiness boost from doing anything, training your brain to not even try | [
"Depressed people view their lives as devoid of pleasure or reward, presenting insuperable obstacles to achieving their important goals. This is often manifested as a lack of motivation and leads to the depressed person feeling further withdrawal and isolation as they may be seen as lazy by others. Everything seems... |
in order to determine traffic, how does google maps distinguish between phones being in cars on the street (actually traffic) and phones that are used by people in their homes right next to the road (no traffic)? | I’d think they’d have a window and if it didn’t move for X seconds then it’s a pretty good guess that it’s not in a car.
But for all we know they have some other profile/method to determine with great accuracy what we’re doing.
I’d be interested in a more exactly answer. Good question! | [
"Some connected cars have mobile apps associated with the in-car system, that can locate the car or indicate the last place it was parked. Cars with Internavi communicate to each other indicating recently vacated spots.\n",
"A small number of cars (typically fleet vehicles such as courier services and taxi driver... |
why can't we cut our body fat directly? | Fat is difficult for the body to process because it isn't water soluble, but stores energy very efficiently (compared to glucose, it stores about twice the energy per gram). It is stored in adipose tissue, whose purpose is to store fat and cushion/insulate organs. Because of those things, fat doesn't want to leave adipose tissue, and when it's forced to, it does so in small amounts to keep your blood from becoming lard. Fat is used for energy as a last resort, it's the least efficient aerobic process our cells use to make energy, and your body will start consuming your muscles before it starts consuming fat. This is why diet is so important to burning fat. If you keep taking more in, you can't burn it off, so it gets stored while your body burns off sugars and protein first. If you take too much of everything in, you end up storing some of everything as fat.
Even if you work out, you're not likely to burn more than 2500-3000 calories per day, that should be your ceiling, if you're trying to lose weight, exercise isn't the thing that will do it best. You should definitely exercise, because it helps a bit and it's really, really good for you, but taking in fewer calories than you burn is the only way to lose weight, and unless you're a professional bodybuilder or some sort of elite athlete, you are only in control of about 30% of the calories you burn at most. Even highly active hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa burn about the same number of calories daily as you and I.
| [
"Ripping is the stage that people, mainly bodybuilders, go through in order to lose body fat to a very low percentage. The idea is that if one's body fat is low, then muscle tissue will be more visible and therefore a better-looking body will emerge.\n",
"The cutting phase entails remaining in a net negative ener... |
If I were an average citizen in East Germany around 1985, could I get to West Germany in any legal way? | Previously raised questions are certainly allowed. Mentioning previous answers are intended to be a starting point, not to discourage discussion. Follow-on questions, data, and debate are welcome.
I PMed to ask what "get to" meant: "visit" or "emigrate to"? I just got an answer: "Either".
For legal emigration, I find "Could you, legally, leave East Germany for West Germany?" at _URL_1_ , with answers by /u/thesaefkows_css and /u/kieslowskifan .
Also for legal emigration, there was some sort of "selling" of people by East Germany, paid by West Germany, but not a lot of detail there. "Why did people try to defect over the wall in Berlin and not through some unguarded part of the huge border between East and West Germany?", under _URL_0_ , SirGuyGrand and Poebbel here.
For visiting, there's an FAQ item at "What was life like in East Germany before the Wall fell?" at _URL_2_ . In a much longer and informative reply, /u/BruceTheKillerShark wrote "Eventually, the GDR relaxed its border controls to a certain degree, mostly allowing West Germans and other westerners to enter East Germany, while occasionally authorizing East Germans (particularly in Berlin) to leave the country for visits to the west."
| [
"According to an East German passport law in 1957, East German citizens needed a visa to travel abroad, including West Germany and West Berlin. The penalty for making an unauthorized journey outside East Germany was imprisonment.\n",
"There was no formal legal basis under which a citizen could emigrate from East ... |
as a kid i hated the taste of broccoli, but as an adult i love it, how does that work? | Children have a lot more taste buds than adults and those are a lot more sensitive to bitter sensations. Which makes Broccoli pretty much their mortal enemy.
Over the years the amount of tastebuds reduces as does their sensitivity.
That's why broccoli (and spinach) are a lot more enjoyable once you grow older. | [
"The oldest of the kids who is nerdy in appearance and has a vast knowledge of Broccoli Punch. He also got really upset over the ending of the episode \"Don't Read the Comments\" because the message of the episode was preferred over the backstory of the entire plot, complaining that the creators have no idea what t... |
Is it normal to never get sick? | It's actually quite common for young people. It also depends a lot on self-perception and one's concept of sickness. Some people consider two liquid stools diarrhea or a two day cough a cold and think "omg I'm sick". Others just think "shouldn't have eaten that taco" or "should have worn a sweater" and expect to be fine soon. Also, you're probably lucky not to have caught an influenza or something similar. | [
"Most religions grant exceptions from religious duties to people who are sick. For example, one whose life would be endangered by fasting on Yom Kippur or during Ramadan is exempted from the requirement, or even forbidden from participating. People who are sick are also exempted from social duties. For example, ill... |
how do you fry ice cream. | You superchill the Cream first, coat it in a tempura batter and fry it at a very high temperature.
The outer tempura crust is what actually "fries" and it insullates the soft icecream inside a nice perfect crunchy shell.
in theory at least...
| [
"Ice cream (derived from earlier iced cream or cream ice) is a sweetened frozen food typically eaten as a snack or dessert. It may be made from dairy milk or cream, or soy, cashew, coconut or almond milk, and is flavored with a sweetener, either sugar or an alternative, and any spice, such as cocoa or vanilla. Colo... |
what exactly can workplace it staff see, besides my browsing history? | ELI5 answer: Depending on the company, yes to all of those.
More in-depth answer:
Obviously, most websites where you enter a password are SSL encrypted, so the data being transferred can't be seen. However, modern firewalls (they call them next-gen) have the ability to automatically do man-in-the middle decryption by using a different certificate. Normally this doesn't work, because your computer checks the certificate and sees that it isn't trusted. But since your IT department set up your computer, they told it to trust the firewall's certificate. They're not likely to be saving your passwords, but they are likely keeping an eye out for corporate data, credit card numbers, SSNs and other personally-identifiable information, things like that.
Regarding your files, your IT department probably has full admin-access to your computer, and can therefore remotely browse your entire hard drive.
But you're right, we have much better things to be doing than spying on you.
Source: I'm the guy that does network security at my job. | [
"Many objects that may be found at a usual workplace can be exploited to retrieve information on a computer's display by an outsider. Particularly good results were obtained from reflections in a user's eyeglasses or a tea pot located on the desk next to the screen. Reflections that stem from the eye of the user al... |
everytime i see a shark swimming on tv, there are tiny fish swimming alongside and under it. why is it so? | Those fish you see are in a mutualistic relationship with the shark. Most commonly they are Remora fish.
A mutualistic relationship basically means they benefit each other.
These fish clean the shark by eating small build up on the body as well as small scraps in and around the mouth/jaws, so the shark provides nurishment. The shark benefits because the fish clean the body and mouth from bacteria and infections which keep the shark healthy.
Similar situations happen with Hippos as well. | [
"Sharks tend to be seen quite often in cartoons whenever a scene involves the ocean. Such examples include the \"Tom and Jerry\" cartoons, \"Jabberjaw\", and other shows produced by Hanna-Barbera. They also are used commonly as a clichéd means of killing off a character that is held up by a rope or some similar obj... |
What is the theoretical maximum for wind speed? | _URL_0_
> The winds in the planets' wide equatorial jet streams rip along at speeds of up to 450 miles an hour on Uranus and as high as 1,300 miles an hour on more-distant Neptune.
> The planets beyond Mars exhibit the highest winds speeds of any other planets in the solar system. Yet from Jupiter on out, wind speeds increase with distance, even though less energy is available from the sun to drive atmospheric circulation at each orbit along the way.
> The reasons for this trend "are not well understood, actually," says Adam Showman, also with the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and a member of the study's team. But the prime suspect is atmospheric drag, or rather, the lack of it.
> The outer planets' atmospheres behave more like liquids deep in their interiors, so there is virtually no surface roughness to act as a drag on winds, as there is on Earth. And as the distance between a planet and the sun increases, there is less solar energy to impart turbulence to the atmosphere, which also acts as a drag.
You could theoretically move air at any speed up to just below the speed of light, although I imagine doing this would destroy the air. | [
"Currently, the second-highest surface wind speed ever officially recorded is 372 km/h (231 mph; 103 m/s) at the Mount Washington (New Hampshire) Observatory: 6,288 ft (1917 m) above sea level in the US on 12 April 1934, using a heated anemometer. The anemometer, specifically designed for use on Mount Washington wa... |
What was the relationship with Israel and the surrounding Arab neighbors like prior to the 1967 Six-Day war? | Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and some other Arab states and Israel were still at war, there was just a cease-fire. There was somewhat less tension with Jordan--the governments had been talking in secret. But they were still at war, and there were cross-border raids going on there, too. But elsewhere, pretty much as frosty as international relations can be. | [
"Since Israel's declaration of independence in 1948 this state has found itself in nearly continual conflict with the Arab world and some other predominantly Muslim countries. The animosity between the Arabs and the Israelis became a global issue during the 1970s. The Yom Kippur War of 1973, with the supplying of I... |
When trying to find theoretical particles or forces, etc, how do scientists figure out what experiments would give the best chance at discovery? | Well if you have a new kind of particle you will generally try to figure out how it would interact with other particles. If, for instance your new particle has an electric charge, a good way to see it would be trying to place it in a magnetic field and watch it bend.
The bubble chamber works, simply put, by taking a gas that is at just the right density to start condensing. The particle interacts with the gas and creates tiny density fluctuations that might just be enough to kickstart the to start condensing into a fluid. You will see this as tiny bits of mist that appear in the particles wake.
Generaly high energy photons (light) are produced by taking electrons and accelerating them to high speed before slamming them into a target (usually copper or other metals). The electrons stop really suddenly and in doing so give of 'braking radiation' which can be really highly energetic. If you then aim two of these beams at each other you might create a electron positron pair. This is pretty difficult though. | [
"A typical experiment involves the observation of particles, often photons, in an apparatus designed to produce entangled pairs and allow for the measurement of some characteristic of each, such as their spin. The results of the experiment could then be compared to what was predicted by local realism and those pred... |
Why does an electric charge make neon and other noble gases glow? Why the distinct colors? | if an electron passes its kinetic energy to an atom within its ground state, the energy will be transformed into potential energy of the atom. The atom then wants to lose this additional energy which is only possible through emission of light. The distinct colors are because there are only certain energy states which are "allowed"... therefore you have discrete electron transitions which are corresponding to discrete energies of the emitted photons...and since E=h*nu ... Energy and Wavelength (For Photons is that the color) is equivalent ... look for an easy example at the Balmer, Paschen or Lyman Series (_URL_0_)
______
edit:
it works for not-noble gases also ... the reason why these are used in lamps is that in noble gases the most distant orbital is fully occupied ... see "Pauli exclusion principle" ... Therefore there are more Electrons with the smallest ionization energy...which means to separate them from their coupled core's | [
"The blue glow of a criticality accident can result from the fluorescence of the excited ions, atoms and molecules of air (mostly oxygen and nitrogen) falling back to unexcited states, which produces an abundance of blue light. This is also the reason electrical sparks in air, including lightning, appear electric b... |
why does language change over generations / geography? i speak the same way my parents and grandparents do, so why do we speak differently from folks 200 years ago? also, in the us, why do people in different areas have different accents if we all came from england and spoke the same way? | I would also add that, although you think you speak the same as your grandparents and parents, it's likely that there is a, say, 3% difference in words commonly used.
Simple phrases like "oh my heavens!" or "holy Toledo!" that my gam gam uses are pretty rare.
You see where I'm going with this. Over 200 years, if language changes slightly every 20 years, it can add up quickly.
It's also of note that it can change rather quickly, such as in my family. My gam gam's "holy Toledo!" is a lot different than my "Holy buttfucking Christ!" | [
"American immigrants often end their pursuit of heritage language learning after two or three generations in the United States, and it is now becoming more common to shift into English within two generations. The decision to end heritage language learning can stem from a variety of factors, but often includes socie... |
What would happen if you uniformly increased the pressure inside a perfect sphere of perfectly consistent material? | In a thought experiment like this where everything is perfect and smooth, and there is no outside interference from anything, what you're describing is termed an *unstable equilibrium*. The simplest analogy of this is [a ball on top of a hill.](_URL_0_) It's in equilibrium because it will stay where it is so long as no outside forces ever act on it, and it's *unstable* because as soon as the most infinitesimally small force acts on it, it rolls away never to return. | [
"The problem is that a sphere formed by such a membrane and filled with incompressible liquid (water) cannot be indented or applanated even when the pressure inside is zero, because a sphere contains the maximum volume with the minimum surface area. Any deformation necessarily increases surface area, which is impos... |
Why was Rome able to replace the losses of 50,000 soldiers after Cannae, but the loss of three legions (20,000 men) meant the end of Rome's ambitions to conquer transalpine Gaul? | The three legions lost were in Germany, not Gaul. Gaul had been conquered some fifty years earlier and the Gallic nobility was already in contention for senatorial positions.
I don't think there's really a lot to say here. Regardless of the issues of Roman manpower (which increased many, many times over the course of the early Principate, as provincial recruitment became significant and, already by the end of Augustus' lifetime, likely predominated military recruitment, such that by Trajan's time Brunt calculated that only 1% of the legions were being recruited from Italy), this isn't a manpower question. The loss of the three legions in the Teutoburg Forest is not comparable to the losses at Cannae, because the army had undergone a significant change. Whereas in the Republic, particularly in the second century and following, armies would be recruited to meet whatever threat was at hand, and as late as Caesar's time were being disbanded after a few years when that threat was no longer in evidence. Thus the scramble in the late second century to find qualified magistrates and promagistrates who were capable of leading armies, now that the consuls and praetors were insufficient for the needs of the growing empire. Once Augustus won the civil war he disbanded most of the legions, both on his side and on Antony's, and fixed the number of legions, exercising his power of imperium maius, which afforded him total control over all military matters in the empire. Since Augustus was in direct control over all military commanders and all armies in the empire, the recruitment of additional forces was also under his control, and Augustus was extremely wary about the possibility of raising more troops--his own arrival into Italy and rapid rise to prominence after Caesar's death had, after all, been aided by the fact that he had an army at his back. Augustus did raise an emergency levy in the wake of the Teutoburg disaster, conscripting mostly urban freedmen, but he refused to levy additional legions to replace those that had been lost, and our information seems to indicate that his successors also did not levy additional legions, at least not regularly. | [
"Rome's victory broke up the coalition it had defeated. The Etruscans, Umbrians and Senone Gauls pulled out of the war. The Samnites, besides losing their allies, suffered heavy casualties. The Romans went on to win other battles against the Samnites. In the final stage of the war, which ended five years later, the... |
why can someone get used to strong alcohol? | You're cells have an organelle called the Smooth ER that detoxifies the cell from drugs and alcohol. The more often you ingest it the more efficient this organelle becomes at detoxifying. Since it detoxifies faster when you drink a lot you would need more of that substance to create the same effect. However when you stop drinking and or doing drugs for some amount of time the Smooth ER goes back to normal and your tolerance drops | [
"These varying capacities do not, however, avoid all health risks inherent in heavy alcohol consumption. Alcohol abuse is associated with a variety of negative health and safety outcomes. This is true no matter the individual's or the ethnic group's perceived ability to \"handle alcohol\". Persons who believe thems... |
why does a brown ring form around the inside of my coffee cup after it has been sitting? the ring only forms on the mug at the top level of the liquid. why isn't the whole submerged part of the mug turn brown? | Capillary action draws the coffee at the edge a little bit up the wall of the mug. Then the water evaporates, leaving coffee residue. | [
"In physics, a \"coffee ring\" is a pattern left by a puddle of particle-laden liquid after it evaporates. The phenomenon is named for the characteristic ring-like deposit along the perimeter of a spill of coffee. It is also commonly seen after spilling red wine. The mechanism behind the formation of these and simi... |
What is switching the Gate of a transistor? | The gates of transistors in modern digital ICs (MOSFETs) do not draw any current (apart from leakage). They are controlled by gate voltage not current. See [this video](_URL_0_) for an illustration of its working principle. Also [check this](_URL_1_) site for some interactive experiment. | [
"The circuit works by rapidly switching the transistor. Initially, current begins to flow through the resistor, secondary winding, and base-emitter junction (see diagram) which causes the transistor to begin conducting collector current through the primary winding. Since the two windings are connected in opposing d... |
What happens at either end of the electromagnetic spectrum? | There is a misconception that the amplitude of an electromagnetic wave is a length in the transverse dimension. The amplitude is that of the electric and magnetic fields that make up the waves, as measured along its direction of propagation.
There is no upper or lower limit to the wavelength of an EM wave, you can have arbitrarily long radio waves or arbitrarily high energy gamma rays. In fact, both are the same in a different reference frame. | [
"The region of the spectrum where a particular observed electromagnetic radiation falls, is reference frame-dependent (due to the Doppler shift for light), so EM radiation that one observer would say is in one region of the spectrum could appear to an observer moving at a substantial fraction of the speed of light ... |
How practical is harvesting geothermal energy as a significant renewable energy source? | It really depends on where you are. [Iceland](_URL_0_) generates about a quarter of its electricity from geothermal - but it's also a really volcanically active region. | [
"Geothermal power is considered to be a sustainable, renewable source of energy because the heat extraction is small compared with the Earth's heat content. The greenhouse gas emissions of geothermal electric stations are on average 45 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of electricity, or less than 5 percent... |
why are advertisers allowed to make text so small that is literally unreadable (on video), or talk so fast that no one can understand a word (radio/video) regarding "fine print" | There are lots of laws around how you're allowed to present a product in an advertisement. This includes things you have to say about a product (side effects of a medicine etc).
Sometime those things they have to say make the product look worse, and they don't like that. So a "loophole" to get around this as much as possible is make those messages as short/fast as possible.
The other reason is sometimes info has to be put into an ad but its just..boring. So they push it to the side | [
"Printed media is the most basic form of media advertising. It is the most challenging to create strong imagery with, due to its lack of sensory stimulation, but can be effective in efficient, clear information communication and message delivery. Where a consumer may miss a message in video or audio (perhaps a loud... |
How did ancient governments and economies interact? (talking up to about ~0AD) | I'm sorry you've not gotten many answers--it's a rather broad topic. I can only really help with a pretty narrow chunk of it, using biblical sources. While it's not a historical text in that the events described are necessarily accurate, it is really old and was written with ancient thinking about government. So:
* Granaries would've been filled with a tax on grain from farmers. IIRC the bible uses 20% as the tax used to fill Egypt's granaries during the "seven years of plenty" before famine.
* Farms would've been owned by local farmers, who'd hire groups of seasonal workers to work their fields.
* Labor taxes would've been used primarily for large projects, but could be used for a variety of smaller projects as well (fortresses, for instance). | [
"The Ancient Economy is a book about the economic system of classical antiquity written by the classicist Moses I. Finley. It was originally published in 1973. Finley interprets the economy from 1000 BC to 500 AD sociologically, instead of using economic models (like for example Michael Rostovtzeff). Finley attempt... |
why does mcdonalds have limited time flavors if they are popular? | To create artificial scarcity so when they bring it back, there's a frenzy for them. One of the first tools of salesmanship is to *create urgency.* "Time is running out, act now!"
Source: Former salesman. | [
"Because Kline's makes their ice cream every morning and it takes so long to make, they have one special flavor a week. They always make chocolate and vanilla, and rotate in this special flavor. This creates a way for them to compete with the chain ice cream sellers. They choose not to mix flavors but to keep these... |
Why did the Yongle Emperor move the capital to Beijing? And how associated was Beijing with the Yuan dynasty? | > Why did the Yongle Emperor move the capital to Beijing?
There are several different reasons why the capital was relocated:
* Yongle was sent to garrison Beijing in 1380 and lived there for more than two decades. Beijing was his base of power from which he launched the military campaign that toppled his nephew. He felt more secure and comfortable in Beijing than Nanjing, and he and many of his close subordinates were not at ease with the humid climate of the south.
* Like his father, Yongle attempted to control the steppes but he believed that offense was the best defense. Yongle would personally go on to lead five expeditions into the steppes and Beijing was more ideal as a military base to project power into the steppes than the faraway Nanjing.
* Recent scholars have noted that Yongle attempted to bolster his legitimacy by emulating the great Yuan ruler Khubilai. Indeed, Yongle saw himself as the next Khubilai, much like Khubilai, Yongle became ruler through challenging someone with a better claim to the throne. Yongle would go on to patronize Tibetan Buddhism, which the Mongols were heavily attracted to. He rebuilt the temples on Mount Wutai, which had been constructed earlier during the Yuan by Khubilai to offer prayers specifically for the imperial family. He frequently took part in hunts (something that his father never did personally, though Hongwu recognized the importance of the hunt and admonished his sons to do it) and donned Mongol clothing that was popular with the Ming imperial family at the time. Relocating the capital to Beijing would have been another way to call upon the legacy of Khubilai.
* Hongwu himself might have never been truly satisfied with Nanjing as a capital. He sent his eldest son, the Crown Prince Zhu Biao, in 1392 to survey Xi'an and Luoyang as potential capitals. But because Zhu Biao died shortly afterwards, if there was a plan to move capitals, it never went forward.
> And how associated was Beijing with the Yuan dynasty?
Beijing then was still heavily influenced by the Mongols. According to Henry Tsai's *Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle*, page 33:
> Soon after the prince and his family settled into the revamped palace, he encountered both culturally and military-administrative problems that he had never before faced in his young career. For example, Mongol customs remained evident in Beiping [early Ming name for Beijing], and the Mongol language and script were kept alive and juxtaposed with Chinese in official documents. He was mindful that his father had outlawed several Mongol customs and fashions, and ordered the people to dress as they did before the Mongol invasions and not to use popular Mongol names. The prince found it difficult to enforce these orders at once, as he was convinced that it would take some time to embed changes in the new society.
You can tell from [this map](_URL_0_) that a large portion of Ming Beijing overlapped with Yuan Dadu - although the entire city was shifted south. The Ming imperial palace was also pretty much in the same location as the Yuan palace, but it was also shifted south. Jingshan, or Coal Hill in English, is where the Yuan palace once stood. The Yuan palace was demolished and earth that was excavated for construction of the new city was dumped on top of it to create the mountain. But the three lakes (Beihai, Zhonghai, Nanhai), collectively known as Taiye Lake and which was constructed during the Yuan, was kept.
Debate on whether Beijing should be the primary capital raged well into the 1430s. It was only during the Zhengtong reign that the issue was finally settled and the Beijing was made the primary capital, with Nanjing downgraded to the status of auxiliary capital. For more than a decade, even though the emperor resided in Beijing and the government operated out of Beijing, Beijing was still designated officially as a secondary capital and the moniker *xingzai* 行在, best translated as auxiliary, was attached to all government agencies. This confusion was due to the fact that moving the capital north was considered a very controversial issue and was difficult to settle. Many officials and even the Hongxi emperor wanted to move the capital back to Nanjing. | [
"In 1421, Yongle moved the \"Jingshi\" of the Ming to Beijing, which made Beijing the main capital of the Ming dynasty. From Beijing, Yongle launched multiple campaigns against the Mongols. After he died in 1424, his son, the Hongxi Emperor, ordered the capital be moved back to Nanjing, but died of illness in 1425.... |
What's the history of the suburb? | The origin of the term suburb is from the Latin suburbium, which is a compound word combining "sub" (below) and "urbs" (city). Rome was built on the famous seven hills, and suburbium meant the area outside the city walls.
The furthest edges of the suburbs became a place where the wealthy built country homes. Catullus 44 says: "fui libenter in tua suburbana uilla, malamque pectore expuli tussim" which can be translated as "I was glad to be in your suburban villa and to clear my chest of the troublesome cough".
The term has since been applied to other cities.
There is more to read at [The Literary Allusions to the Suburbium of Rome and their Social Implications](_URL_0_)
| [
"The history of suburbia is part of the study of urban history, which focuses on the origins, growth, diverse typologies, culture, and politics of suburbs, as well as on the gendered and family-oriented nature of suburban space. Many people have assumed that early-20th-century suburbs were enclaves for middle-class... |
We are all 'star stuff'. But are we all stuff from the just one star or many? | The Sun is not a first generation star. Though I had been taught it was a fourth generation star, some poking about to verify that just now suggests there are credible arguments for the idea that it is a third generation star. In either case, my point is that most of our mass traces back to a series of stellar predecessors rather than the death of a single star.
Each major heavy-element production event leaves its mark in the form of distinctive isotopic ratios. Given a non-trivial sample of matter that has not (such as through processing with a powerful centrifuge) been biased unnaturally, the percentages of rare isotopes in that sample will serve as a sort of cosmic fingerprint based on unique traits of the origin event(s) for heavier elements in that sample. FYI, conventional stellar fusion can produce elements as heavy as iron. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, et al. may be forged inside very large stars, then ejected during the lesser cataclysms that often precede the explosive finale of that star.
It is likely that very little of any terrestrial object, including a person, could be traced back to an origin outside the events that gave rise to our solar system. This is because there is little evidence for an extrasolar origin to any matter that has been studied by human scientists. That said, not only is our solar system a sort of cosmic sequel, but it may also owe its origins to multiple stars. One notion popular with astrophysicists holds the matter that would become our Sun and its familiar companions was a well-dispersed nebula until shockwaves from a nearby stellar explosion created enough interaction to coalesce the beginnings of the Sun and surrounding accretion disk. It is possible the cosmic fingerprint of local isotope ratios results from a specific blend of indigenous atoms and newcomers blasted in this general direction during the death(s) of nearby star(s).
To sum it all up, it is highly likely that each member of a short series of stars preceding the Sun had some hand in forging the non-hydrogen atoms in our bodies. It is also plausible that some small portion of those atoms were foreign material that drifted into the mix that eventually formed our solar system. In any of those cases, the result is a distinctive pattern of isotope ratios marking all terrestrial and lunar samples so far studied as having been part of this solar system as far back as its formation. To answer directly, a "plethora" of stars contributing to our substance is extremely unlikely, but to suggest "a few" or "several" stars participated significantly in this process is reasonable. | [
"A star is an astronomical object consisting of a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its own gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth during the night, appearing as a multitude of fixed luminous points in the sky due to their immense distance ... |
why is martial law in a country such a big deal and important news all over the world? | Martial law is the act of the government suspending certain rights of citizens for a period of time. There are two big reasons that this is such a big deal and they are sort of circular;
1) Martial law is usually a last resort by governments (see number 2 for why) to control a situation. So the first reason that it is such a big deal is some situation has driven a government to play a card it should hope to never have to play. That alone is very interesting and news worthy
2) Martial law is a scary concept. As a society, we agree to cede some freedoms to the government (ability to run naked through the streets for instance) so that they may protect the rights we find more important (varies by country but freedom of speech is up there and often goes hand in hand with martial law). When a government imposes Martial law, it is a breach of this contract and raises a lot of alarms. Martial law is a good first step towards a lot of undesirable outcomes such as the rounding up of citizenry, the replacement of governments with less favorable more authoritarian regime styles. Largely, this point surrounds the question of, when will Martial law be lifted and how different will the country potentially look when that does happen?
| [
"Martial law can be used by governments to enforce their rule over the public, as seen in multiple countries listed below. Such incidents may occur after a coup d'état (Thailand in 2006 and 2014, and Egypt in 2013); when threatened by popular protest (China, Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, 2009's Iranian Green M... |
Is there a "universal speed limit" lower than the speed of light for an object of a given mass? | An object of non-zero mass can in principle attain any speed less than the speed of light.
In fact, since velocity has only a relative meaning, there are frames of reference in which an object of non-zero mass has whatever speed less than *c* you wish. | [
"According to special relativity, the energy of an object with rest mass \"m\" and speed \"v\" is given by , where \"γ\" is the Lorentz factor defined above. When \"v\" is zero, \"γ\" is equal to one, giving rise to the famous formula for mass–energy equivalence. The \"γ\" factor approaches infinity as \"v\" approa... |
How would Laws of Thermodynamics effect an Infinitely long row of Dominos? | In the initial set-up every domino is put in a state which is not it’s lowest energy state - that is, by standing on one edge it has some gravitational potential energy which the laws of thermodynamics ‘wants’ it to release (by falling over), but the careful act of balancing them on an edge is preventing the release.
Once you push the first domino just enough to take it’s centre of mass over the edge, gravity takes over and ‘pulls’ it over and into the next domino. Hitting the next domino pushes it far enough for gravity to pull it over into the domino... and the chain reaction continues from there.
Once you realise it’s gravity doing most of the work, you realise that the system you’ve set up will ‘continue forever’ because every domino is releasing the energy of the next one in line. | [
"This example assumes that dominoes toppling into each other behave deterministically. Even the above-mentioned external forces which might interrupt the system are causes which the system did not consider, but which could be explained by cause and effect in a larger deterministic system.\n",
"Michael Lind has ar... |
home come drinking salt water makes you vomit, but having something like chicken broth doesn’t? even though it has water and salt in it | Salt water? 🤔 Like drinking water from the ocean? | [
"They ask the cook how he made the oatmeal that morning and he explains how he uses dry cereal, water and a handful of salt. The cereal is a generic brand and the water is municipal; these are ruled out as sources of the poison, as more people would be sick if this were the case. That leaves the salt.\n",
"As a h... |
Could you get PTSD from something that you didn't personally experience? | Yes, this is actually listed in the DSM-5 criteria for PTSD. The first criterion involves exposure to a traumatic event that causes intense fear, horror, or helplessness, and this event can be experienced directly, witnessed, or indirectly experienced by hearing about someone close to you experiencing trauma. The key experience in developing PTSD is the extreme feeling of fear/horror/helplessness, which is more likely to be caused by direct exposure to trauma, but can be caused in other ways as well.
[This site](_URL_0_) gives a good overview of the criteria. | [
"Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that can occur after exposure to horrific events, or after a terrifying ordeal where there is immense physical harm that directly or indirectly affects a person. When the memories of these traumas do not subside, a person may begin to avoid anything that... |
what is core strength? | Put your finger on the middle of your waistline. It should be a few cm below your navel. If you go halfway through your body from there, you will be at a place that is roughly the center of mass for your entire body. Or to put it more ELI5ly you're at the place around which the rest of your body spins when you move around. The area around the center is called the core. You can think of it as all the musculature and skeletal structure from your hips up to the bottom of your ribs.
If you start there and travel outwards, the further you go, the weaker the muscles are. So every time you need to do any kind of strength based activity, the more you use your core to do it, the more strength you will have to do it with.
So strengthening your core, means developing the main muscles responsible for you being able to do stuff.
But, it is also a load of hogwash. In that, your body is smarter about its musculature than you are. If you try to exercise one set of muscles to make them stronger, but you don't exercise the rest of your muscles so that they can help transfer the enormous force that your core can generate, then there's no point in having those huge - and expensive to feed - core muscles in the first place. So those muscles you're focusing on won't get stronger, they'll just increase their endurance. Otherwise the imbalance caused by having strong muscles working with weaker ones could cause you injury.
So, if you want to work on your strength, find exercises that make you move your whole body. The Absolute favorite is the Squat. But many others are also good.
It's also worth noting that endurance isn't a bad thing per se, but focusing on one set of muscles at a time, even if you get to all of them individually, will give you less of an endurance benefit than doing a full body endurance type exercise like running or swimming.
Also remember, that your muscles have to **learn** to work together, so exercising them separately will leave you fit and clumsy. | [
"Ultimate tensile strength (UTS), often shortened to tensile strength (TS), ultimate strength, or Ftu within equations, is the capacity of a material or structure to withstand loads tending to elongate, as opposed to compressive strength, which withstands loads tending to reduce size. In other words, tensile streng... |
What does it mean for a body to be radioactive? |
Marie Curie and her contemporaries worked a lot with radioactive materials, in particular radium which is particularly nasty. In fact she and her husband Pierre didn't just work with it but more or less sacrificed their bodies to see what it did to the human body (along with lots of other groundbreaking work). The reason that means their bodies had to be buried in lead is radium collects in the body in the bones and has a half life of 1600 years. As such by the time she died, Curie had enough radium in her body that it would irradiate it's surroundings were in not shielded, for example by a lead lined coffin.
The reason it's dangerous is if healthy cells get irradiated by radioactivity, for example from the decay of radium, they can become damaged and mutate. ~~For that reason the radium and resulting radiat in Curie's corpse won't affect the decomposition since (at this level of exposure) the damage radiation does to cells is only expressed in living cells~~
Edit: I dabbled too far into biology. Read below for better answers on decomposition | [
"Radioactive contamination can be ingested into the human body if it is airborne or is taken in as contamination of food or drink, and will irradiate the body internally. The art and science of assessing internally generated radiation dose is Internal dosimetry.\n",
"Some human-made radiation sources affect the b... |
Are there any possible neolithic or prehistoric stories, myths, legends, events that pre-dated recorded history but was passed down orally long enough to finally be preserved in writing? | Homer's stories, most Greek plays. One could argue those fit the bill.
Off the top of my head, all those were orally preserved and now we can (and should) read them. I'm sure someone else will give a more in depth answer. | [
"There are no extant textual sources from the Neolithic era, the most recent available dating from the Bronze Age, and therefore all statements about any belief systems Neolithic societies may have possessed are glimpsed from archaeology.\n",
"Various civilizations over the course of Mesopotamian history had many... |
In Egil's Saga, the protagonist buries a horde of silver in the ground and then kills the slave who helped him bury it. Are there other examples of deliberately buried treasure in Europe or the Americas? | In Britain there have been numerous [Roman hoards](_URL_0_) discovered, one of the largest being the recently discovered [Seaton Hoard](_URL_2_). A good example of a more recent hoard is the [Cheapside Hoard](_URL_1_), discovered under a London Cellar and thought to have been buried around the time of the English Civil War. | [
"After killing Regin, Sigurd mounts Grani, and rides to Fafnir's lair, where he finds \"an enormous store of gold\" from which he takes \"many precious things\" including the helm of terror and the sword Hrotti specifically. Sigurd loads large chests with the treasure onto Grani, despite expecting that it would be ... |
what can your average u.s. citizen do to change congress? | One average citizen alone can do nothing. So the way to institute change is to join, or help create, an organization of *many* people. These people can vote for a different candidate, or raise money to help a different candidate advertise, or write letters telling members of Congress how they wish to see them behave. | [
"United States Congress and citizens describes the relation between the public and lawmakers. Essentially, American citizens elect members of Congress every two years who have the duty to represent their interests in the national legislature of the United States.\n",
"The people, by their Constitution, affirmativ... |
what's happening when i exercise | Okay! Here we go. Let's see.
Body turning food or fat into fuel! Let's talk about food, and we'll get the fat part in there. That's digestion. Basics of digestion are that you chew up food and break it down, then it sits in your stomach and it gets broken down further. What 'breaking down' actually means is that it gets split into individual bits of steak and potatoes and salad, and then even further from there. Most of this work is done by enzymes and things in your saliva, in your stomach acid, and in your small intestine.
Imagine this! Imagine you eat a big plate of spaghetti carbonara. You gotcher meat, your carbs in the pasta, dairy, etc. Imagine each of these is made up of Legos (I know that there is no such thing as Legos, and that they are in fact LEGO (tm) brand building blocks, but bugger if I'm gonna write that each time, so Legos!). Now, inside your guts are enzymes that have specific jobs. One enzyme might just go in and break out chunks of red Legos. Another might take those chunks of red Legos and break them down into the smallest bit of red Legos there are. Your stomach and guts are full of very particular enzymes (and, actually, a host of very neighborly bacteria living in you for a free ride like some old aunt who's actually quite useful by knitting sweaters or something) which take food and break it down into the smallest bits it can.
Once these bits are as small as they can get, they'll be absorbed by the duodenum, which is the first 10 cm or so of the small intestine, whose job it is to absorb things from the hole that's running through you into your blood. If you wanna get metaphysical about it, this is the point where it goes from being 'food' to being 'part of you', sorta.
Now, to keep on truckin' with the Lego analogy, you've got various different parts. If you're going to need them right then (for energy) you use 'em. If you don't, you put them in bins (fat). When you need them again, you take them out of the bins, but the bins are all the way over in the closet, so you don't get them unless you have to (why we get fat when we keep eating).
Okay, now some of these little bits are quite literally the fuel of the cells. It's what the cells use to keep breathing, in the process called "cellular respiration". This is also where the oxygen comes in. A cell will take some glucose (sugar, one of the little bits) and then run it through the electron transport chain. This is the fancy part that we sort of understand band has chemistry involved, but the basics are this: the oxygen you breathe is O2, which is as stable form, but only sorta. So your body cracks that O2 apart, and sudden you've got 2 oxygens by themselves. When an oxygen is by itself, it's got 6/8 electrons. This is bad. It wants all 8. Gotta catch 'em all.
The electron transport chain is the process where an electron is passed along a chain, and each link in the chain wants that electron more and more, until oxygen, who wants it the most. The act of each link stealing the electron from the previous link creates energy, which the cell harnesses in the form of ATP. That's the unit of currency of energy on the cellular level. So, broad level understanding is that you eat by breaking down food into glucose which the cell eats and breaks down into ATP. Cells can run on that stuff.
Muscles using it! Current idea is the 'sliding filament theory' which is basically this - if you weave your fingers together, they're something like that. Put them together so that your nails are close to each other and there's room between them - that's a muscle relaxed. Now, everywhere your fingers are touching are little paddles, like oars on a boat. When you contract a muscle, those oars use ATP (the cell energy stuff) to walk your fingers against each other and pull the whole thing closer together. The bundles of your muscles pull together and eliminate that space, and then contract.
Fun fact! We don't think that they can go in the opposite direction. Like, you can't "un-contract" a muscle. What has to happen is that muscle goes slack, but is still in its dense, contracted form. Then an *opposite* muscle (tricep is opposite of bicep, hamstrings opposite your quads) contracts, which causes the original muscle to stretch out again. Do that over and over, and you're lurching along a footpath. This is also why a cramp is bad (besides hurting). It's basically one muscle of the pair having a hissyfit and refusing to play. Not much the other one can do in that circumstance. It's like a kid on the "down" side of a see-saw when the kid decided to play on the swings.
And, the homestretch. Panting and oozing gallons of sweat. Panting is because you need the oxygen. This whole process - giving fuel and oxygen and turning it into energy - is basically a fire. You're quite literally 'burning' energy, though not in the crackly, romantic, winter's eve kind of way. And your body is full of energy - there's food, there's fat everywhere (no offense), you could even burn muscle if you had to. But the limiting factor is how much oxygen you've got.
You've got a bit of ATP stored in your cells, ready to go, when you start running. But as soon as you start lurching, you've basically used it up. Let's say 10 seconds' reserve, tops. No prob! Your body can make more ATP, and it can do it *fast*. Just needs oxygen and energy. We've got those. So it starts doing that, sucking oxygen out of your bloodstream, and you're trotting along breathing deeply and enjoying the day. But pretty soon the rate of breathing isn't keeping up.
Now, you're cells can keep on making ATP in the absence of oxygen, it's just *much* more inefficient. I think it's something like 4 ATP instead of 36, something like that. And it's got some nasty byproducts that cause cramps and soreness and other sorts of "hey, d'you mind pulling over for a second?" sorts of signs from your muscles.
The presence of those signals tells your brain to tell your lungs that they're slacking, and that's when you start gulping down air and generally feeling much less studly and much more gimpish.
The oozing gallons of sweat is related to the same thing - you're on fire! The 'normal' burning level that was just fine when you were sitting there radiating heat into the room has gone up somewhere between 5 and 10 times, so all of a sudden you're a big old pot-bellied (again, no offense) stove, chugging out heat. Your body has very few ways to get rid of it. Sweat is the best one, because what you're doing is pouring water onto your outsides. Water sucks up heat much better than air, and when it sucks up heat it helps it to evaporate and disappear. So sweating is a heat sink.
Soooo . . . ya, too long for a TL;DR, and lemme know if you have more (or more specific or less ELI5) questions! | [
"Exercise is any bodily activity that enhances or maintains physical fitness and overall health and wellness. It is performed for various reasons, to aid growth and improve strength, preventing aging, developing muscles and the cardiovascular system, honing athletic skills, weight loss or maintenance, improving hea... |
depositing a check with your mobile device? | I would like to add that, as far as the bank is concerned, an image of the check is the same as the physical check. The other replies have done a good job answering your other questions. | [
"Genuine cashier's checks deposited into a bank account are usually cleared the next day. The customer can request \"next-day availability\" when depositing a cashier's check in person. Forged cashier's checks may bounce 2 weeks after being deposited.\n",
"Electronic checks allow funds to be withdrawn directly fr... |
If the surrounding temperature is higher than a surface's temperature, does radiation occur ? | That equation is about the *net* radiation from a surface. If the right side is positive, the surface has more radiation leaving it than it is absorbing. If it is negative, there is more radiation being absorbed than emitted. In the negative case, there is still radiation leaving the surface in the form of photons leaving, there's just more energy inbound.
If there was no outbound radiation at all, then, for example, you would not be able to see an icecube in a warm room, and a hot stovetop in a dark but very hot room would not glow red.
| [
"Heat transfer by radiation is a function of both the heat sink temperature, and the temperature of the surroundings that the heat sink is optically coupled with. When both of these temperatures are on the order of 0 °C to 100 °C, the contribution of radiation compared to convection is generally small, and this fac... |
why humans get relief when scratching a bug bite and why the feeling of the relief doesn't last for long? | Bugs like mosquitoes release an enzyme in their saliva that dulls pain receptors and allows them a chance they feed undetected. Your body releases histamines to attack the foreign enzymes and a wheal or bump due to excess histamine. When you scratch the nerves are stimulated with a stronger stimulus/signal than the histamines cause. After scratching, the activation energy required to fire the nerves is slightly elevated, as that threshold lowers eventually it drops below the level of stimulus emitted by the histamine and the bug bite sensation returns.
[edit: autocorrect] | [
"Individual responses to bites vary, ranging from no visible effect (in about 20–70%), to small macular spots, to prominent wheals and bullae formations along with intense itching that may last several days. The bites often occur in a line. A central spot of bleeding may also occur due to the release of anticoagula... |
what do ambassadors do? why are countries removing syria's ambassadors? | 1. Ambassadors present in a country means that you have diplomatic relations of some sort with that country and can communicate directly with it via the ambassador. It generally signals a net positive relationship between two countries.
2. The building the ambassador resides in is considered to be sovereign territory of the ambassadors homeland. So for instance, the german embassy in australia is technically on german soil. This is why we have dissidents able to flee to an embassy of another country and not immediately get arrested by their own government - to do so would technically be an invasion of sovereign territory.
3. Embassies are used to help facilitate tourism by giving tourists a safe haven should something go wrong either legally or whatever.
4. If you pull your ambassador out of a target country, you are effectively saying that you are so pissed off that you wont even talk. This is *sometimes* a prelude to war. Removing ambassadors for any reason is considered a very extreme act because it signals the end of all possible diplomatic discussion.
5. It is extremely rare for a country to kick out ambassadors, but it does happen. Usually because the embassy was housing spies or doing some other action that was harmful to the target country. | [
"The Syrian ambassador to Cyprus, Lamia al-Hariri, defected to the opposition bringing the total number of ambassadors to defect publicly to 3. She is the niece of Syrian Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa. The former ambassador to Sweden, Bassam Imadi said that the envoys to Germany, the Czech Republic, and Belarus, ... |
Do depressants change how “efficient” your sleep is? | So first let me say that studying sleep quality is very hard
We can measure how long you sleep for, how much time you spend in each stage, the presence of certain typical wave forms of electrical activity (at least is the accessible parts of the brain, more deep structures are hard to access, and that is not a trivial factor).
And many things, like NyQuil , benzodiazepines and antidepressants, do actually change the pattern of sleep - say reducing REM sleep for some of them - but then people say they still feel tired or not well rested . And they are usually in a sleep lab when they say that. That type of thing is really hard to address is a good scientific way because there isn't really a stringent way to measure "meh, I don't feel like I slept well". It is a massive health problem, just very hard to address.
But if your cold and cough etc were preventing you from sleeping, it is probably more "efficient" than having a cold and not getting any sleep, because not getting any sleep is almost always worse than getting sleep. | [
"Short-acting sleep medications can be used to improve sleep quality and timing, and stimulating substances such as caffeine can be used to promote wakefulness, though research results on their success at adapting to jet lag are inconsistent.\n",
"BULLET::::- Although pilots are often given layovers with ample ti... |
why in some countries people just wipe but in some countries they use a bidet and wipe? | There's a large number of contributors.
Origin point and time of the bidet. They were invented in the 17th century in Europe, and thus they would have spread to regional areas as a custom. Generally when people get used to a bidet (particularly one with warm water), they'll stick with it if it's possible and convenient.
Cultural momentum. If all the houses in a country have bidets rather than plain toilets, newly built houses will usually have bidets rather than toilets. It's the way things were done, so it's the way things will be done. And some countries even go to the point of requiring it by law.
Attachment to cleanliness. In the same way there are massive differences in how the process of "bathing" happen, there are cultural differences in how a person's toilet is approached. Some cultures place a lot more importance and ceremony on acts of personal toiletry like washing and bathing so, like in Japan, they'll lean toward using bidets.
Availability of toilet paper. Here in Canada bidets really haven't caught on because wood and paper are so available and cheap. In other cultures where there's not such a massively available supply, there's a bit more of a preference to save paper by using a bidet.
Aging population. Bidets make clean-up easier and they'll likely become more popular as we have more gray haired people with mobility issues.
| [
"Since the mid-2000s, wet wipes such as baby wipes have become more common for use as an alternative to toilet paper in affluent countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. This usage has in some cases been encouraged by manufacturers, who have labelled some wet wipe brands as \"flushable\". Wet ... |
How old is our ocean? | the water in the oceans is the same water that had always been there.
Sure there are some reactions that break the water down or form new water, but for the most part it's the same water. | [
"The last estimate Thomson gave, in 1897, was: \"that it was more than 20 and less than 40 million year old, and probably much nearer 20 than 40\". In 1899 and 1900, John Joly calculated the rate at which the oceans should have accumulated salt from erosion processes, and determined that the oceans were about 80 to... |
why does the lid start to cave in on a plastic container after i've microwaved it's contents? | Is it possible that the plastic is softening a bit and that's why it's drooping? Also, this is the first I've heard of someone leaving the lid on when microwaving. | [
"Closed containers, such as eggs, can explode when heated in a microwave oven due to the increased pressure from steam. Intact fresh egg yolks outside the shell will also explode, as a result of superheating. Insulating plastic foams of all types generally contain closed air pockets, and are generally not recommend... |
Why does water not lubricate our eyes? | Water is *very* hydrophilic, whereas our tear film is a combination of an outer lipophilic layer that prevents evaporation, a larger middle portion that is primarily aqueous and therefore hydrophilic, and an inner layer that is actually both hydrophilic AND lipophilic.
Water mostly disrupts this outer lipophilic layer, which drastically increases the evaporation rate of the tear film. You add more water, it basically just evaporates off (or is blinked off, usually both).
Artificial tears are usually more lipophilic AND more viscous in nature. Both of these properties serve to increase its "staying time" on the eye, causing greater relief of dry eye symptoms. | [
"Water in the eye can alter the optical properties of the eye and blur vision. It can also wash away the tear fluid—along with it the protective lipid layer—and can alter corneal physiology, due to osmotic differences between tear fluid and freshwater. Osmotic effects are made apparent when swimming in freshwater p... |
For most of history, most people have made their own clothes. Did people use this as a form of personal expression like we see in clothing today, or was clothing similar and generic among social groups? Do we have pictures? | The most obvious example of a group of people using clothing as a statement and form of personal expression are the *[sans-culotes](_URL_1_)* of the French Revolution, who neglected the fashionable knee-breeches of the nobility in favor of practical, workmanlike pants. The distinctive dress of the *sans-culotes* served as a political statement, a uniform, and a form of resistance.
If that doesn't answer your question, let me know, I have other examples if you can be more specific as to what you want to know.
For further reading: [The Sans-culottes by Albert Sobul](_URL_0_) | [
"The development of attire and fashion is an exclusively human characteristic and is a feature of most human societies. Clothing made of materials such as animal skins and vegetation was initially used by early humans to protect their bodies from the elements. The usage of clothing and textiles across the ages refl... |
why do i use my hands to talk? why is it more difficult for me to form my thoughts if i try to not use my hands? | Communication largely was/is body language. For example understanding pointing is a good intelligence indicator. | [
"Both self-talk, the propensity to engage in verbal or mental self-directed conversation and thought, and social support can be used as instruments of self-improvement, often by empowering, action-promoting messages. Psychologists have designed series of experiments that are intended to shed light into how self-tal... |
how to overclock a cpu | If you're looking to overclock your laptop or a prebuilt desktop system from Dell, chances are that the motherboard's BIOS doesn't support it. In order to overclock a CPU, you'll likely need to have a higher-end motherboard installed in a PC that you've built yourself. I've only done it once, but here's my take:
Usually there are a handful of settings that you can adjust in the BIOS that will run the CPU at a higher speed. Basically you manipulate these settings to increase the clock speed gradually and test the system until it becomes unstable, then back the clock speed off a bit so that you're left with the fastest possible stable system. The settings that need to be adjusted for overclocking vary depending on the CPU type and manufacturer, but the desired result is usually the same: make the CPU faster than it was designed to operate.
One byproduct of increasing the clockspeed of a CPU is increased heat output. Usually overclocking a CPU will require a user to install third party heat sinks and fans to increase the system's ability to dissipate the heat generated, otherwise the life of the CPU will be significantly reduced. | [
"Computer processors generally are overclocked by manipulating the CPU multiplier if that option is available, but the processor and other components can also be overclocked by increasing the base speed of the bus clock. Some systems allow additional tuning of other clocks (such as a system clock) that influence th... |
Were medieval royal women ever flat out ugly? | Not medieval but Catherine of Braganza, the wife of Charles II of England was described rather unflatteringly by members of his court as looking like a large bat when she first arrived in England. While other descriptions of her do tend to paint a more flattering picture, she was known to have larger front teeth and to have been somewhat homely, especially in comparison to Charles's mistress, Barbara Palmer, *née* Villiers, the countess of Castlemaine and later, the duchess of Cleveland. So, not *all* princesses were stunningly beautiful but this did not necessarily mean they were locked away from the world and shunned by their family. They were still extremely useful political tools...it just meant that a royal groom might have to be purchased with a pretty large dowry. For example, I think Charles II was promised something like sugar, plate and jewels to the value of 400,000 crowns, bills of exchange to double that amount, the rights to free trade with Brazil and the East Indies, and the cessions of Bombay and Tangiers as Catherine's dowry. | [
"Geofrey Chaucer's \"Canterbury Tales\" give an illuminating picture of many of the different people who made up medieval society, although these portraits are limited mainly to the middle classes. The Wife of Bath is one particularly vibrant character within the Tales and a few years later a real-world equivalent,... |
I'm in a bad mood. Physiologically speaking, what's going on? Are there well-understood neuro-biological factors keeping me from enjoying my work? Is there a theory about the evolutionary benefits of being surly? | First: your question and subquestions are all buzzwords and things that don't belong. Evolutionarily whatever is not required. Physiologically is pretty hard to answer (individual differences). Neuro-biological blah blahs.
You're in a bad mood: that's emotion. There is a wealth of knowledge on emotion from psych, neuro and cognition studies. We need to firm up your question:
* You're presuming that mood is aggregate chemical reactions
* Re: Outlook: you mean someone who's just kind of a dick and always grumpy vs. someone who is often cheerful and oblivious? I don't think there is a way to set up a study to follow "the grumps" and "the happies" for a longitudinal study...
What is it exactly that you want to know about mood/emotion? | [
"Heuristics are simple strategies to form judgments and make decisions by focusing on the most relevant aspects of a complex problem. As far as we know, animals have always relied on heuristics to solve adaptive problems, and so have humans.\n",
"One of the main ethical controversies regarding neuroprivacy is rel... |
how come astronauts would burn up in atmosphere upon re-entry from space without a landing craft but felix baumgartner was able to jump from the edge of space without getting singed? | To borrow [from xkcd](_URL_0_):
Space is not like [this](_URL_2_)
Rather, it is like [this](_URL_1_)
Space is not very far away, and falling from it is survivable with limited equipment as Baumgartner demonstrated. But if you want to *stay in space* (i.e. make orbits) you have to move so fast that's not an option any more. You could use your engines to brake while still in space, but it'd require enormously more fuel than air-braking missions (you'd need a lot more fuel at launch to lift all the fuel for braking). So for reasons of practicality and economics, that's what is used. | [
"It took five minutes for the pad workers to open all three hatch layers, and they could not drop the inner hatch to the cabin floor as intended, so they pushed it out of the way to one side. Although the cabin lights remained lit, they were at first unable to find the astronauts through the dense smoke. As the smo... |
How does the depletion region form in semiconductors? | A semiconductor is, as the name might suggest, not a very good conductor. This is because it lacks free charge carriers, as the electrons are all bound in the crystal lattice and it takes some energy to tear them out of that lattice to form a current.
By doping the semiconductor p-type, we create holes in the lattice that an electron nearby could jump to, thus creating the impression of a moving hole. If we dope enough, we create enough of those holes that they can act as free charge carriers, making the semiconductor conductive.
By doping the semiconductor n-type, we introduce more electrons than can fit neatly into the lattice, so they just kind of bounce around in between, again creating free charge carriers and making the semiconductor conductive.
What happens at the boundary between a p-type and an n-type is that it is energetically favourable for the free electrons in the n-type to move a little bit into the p-type and fill up those holes.
What is important here is that this means that the free charge carriers on both sides essentially disappear, making the region **depleted of free charge carriers** and thus unconductive.
The dopant atoms *in this region* also become ionized since the p-dopant atoms gain an electron to fill the hole and the n-dopant atoms loose an electron. However, this affects only the dopant atoms in the depletion region, the dopant atoms in the rest of the crystal are unaffected.
I hope this helps, if not feel free to ask more. | [
"In semiconductor physics, the depletion region, also called depletion layer, depletion zone, junction region, space charge region or space charge layer, is an insulating region within a conductive, doped semiconductor material where the mobile charge carriers have been diffused away, or have been forced away by an... |
How fast is lightning in a vacuum? | Lightning doesn't propagate in a vacuum.
In any case, lightning is the phenomenon of a current of charged particles propagating through a thin conducting channel within an otherwise non-conducting medium. Since the particles moving around have non-zero mass, they will never propagate at the speed of light, regardless of the background medium. | [
"The most noticeable aspect of lightning and thunder is that the lightning is seen before the thunder is heard. This is a consequence of the much greater speed of light than of sound. The speed of sound in dry air is approximately 343 m/s or 1,127 ft/s or at 20 °C (68 °F). This translates to approximately 3 seconds... |
how do world leaders call each other? | It's probably quite different from country-to-country and will differ based on what kind of relationship the two leaders have, but the model is that an adviser/aide will contact an adviser/aide in the other leader's office and say 'Hi, we should arrange for a call between my boss and your boss because x y z'. If the two countries involved don't have a particularly close relationship, embassy staff/ambassadors may be contacted to help lay the groundwork at this stage.
I guess in most cases they have to put a persuasive case for a conversation being necessary/desirable, not forgetting that, in developed democracies, NO policy is ever made in these types of calls. This is a really important point which I cannot stress enough: world leaders don't just ring each other to chew the fat and hatch master plans for world domination, there is ALWAYS a clear agenda, lengthy preparatory meetings, book-length briefings and a massive team of advisers on hand to deal with specific details.
In fact, world leaders probably only speak on the phone in about two or three particular circumstances: (a) to rubber-stamp a policy decision which has been endlessly hashed out at official level, (b) for regular 'keeping up appearances' type calls, or (c) to urgently discuss a developing crisis. Here in the UK, we often know when the PM has had a (b) type call with the President because they will put out a load of press releases about it. For these, and for the (a) type, they will be booked in the diary several months in advance so technological preparations can be made (e.g. the PM's Private Office are not going to schedule a call to the French President about nuclear strategy unless they know he's going to have access to confidential telecoms equipment - basically, that he's in the office at Downing Street or another approved location. So that partly answers your question about how they reach each other).
So once it's agreed that a call will take place, and it's been booked in the diary for next November, officials/assistants/colleagues will spend a long time and lot of effort putting together an agenda. Sometimes it's clear what's on the agenda ('We need to talk about European fiscal policy' or 'We need to lend you aircraft carriers for use in your military campaign in Mali'*) - other times, agendas will be general and based on what's going on in the world, an opportunity for both sides to say some bland platitudes and possibly indulge in a bit of ideological posturing.
Next step, after the agenda is agreed, will be the preparation of reams and reams of briefing. Nothing either side says in these types of calls is candid or spontaneous. All the 'lines to take' are prepared by policy assistants, strategies, deputies and aides. The leader will learn his or her briefing to a greater or lesser extent, and then repeat it as appropriate.
All this preparation means that by the time the call happens, it's more or less a formality. It's a question of finding out what's in the other parties briefing materials and what 'line' they are taking on the common issues. There are no surprises, ever. It's just not the context in which anything unexpected can happen. If there are difficult, challenging or sensitive topics on the agenda, both sides will have been briefed about them months in advance and they will both say something quite general which makes their respective position clear. That is not to say that you or I wouldn't find the content of these discussions interesting or surprising, but that any changes in policy position are likely to have been signaled way, way in advance and will be expected and met with the appropriate response.
There will probably be between 10-15 people in the room at each end, including the interpreter. That's actually a conservative estimate: I worked with a government minister who had about thirty people in all of his meetings (different people have different preferences). For example, there will probably be a one or two secretaries, one or two general strategists/advisers, one or two policy specialists, press officers, note-takers, etc. And if the leader is accompanied by a Minister with responsibility for the area under discussion, that number could easily double.
As for how the language point works, I don't have any experience of this at all, so I'd be guessing, but I'd imagine that at the 'agenda planning' stage, a lingua franca is agreed, and at least one party gets a translator involved. Even where both parties shared a language but one is speaking their second language, I'm sure they have translators on hand just in case.
For the (c) type call I mentioned above (urgent calls responding to particular issues like a national disaster, impending war, major diplomatic incident etc), I would expect a similar process but vastly slimmed down. Even where issues are sensitive and urgent, though, I doubt you could arrange a call between say, the Prime Minister and President, in less than a week. It would just be a waste of both parties' extremely valuable time if they got on the phone and found they didn't have the information they needed to make rapid, good decisions. And I still think there will be 5-6 trusted people in the room at both ends, since minutes will need to be taken, lawyers consulted, policies drafted, etc, etc. If they are on the move during an emergency, I imagine they either return to a location they know is secure in order to make/take calls, or use an encrypted mobile phone in a hotel suite which has been checked over by security specialists (who are bound to be part of any leaders' entourage anyway).
TL;DR: World leaders don't have private 1-1 chats on the phone - they are heavily orchestrated and staged occurances.
Source: I have worked in Private Offices at reasonably senior level in the UK government,dealing with people up to and including the DPM :)
*re-enforcing my earlier point, I actually doubt that either of these things are issues which would require a direct leader-to-leader conversation. Policies are proposed and discussed lower down the food chain of government, OK'd (or not) by the leader, and then communicated back down at the lower levels of government/the military (as appropriate).
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"The leaders of the four countries usually have a series of joint video conference calls with the US president (see NATO Quint), or with other leaders, on international issues. With Barack Obama they discussed for example the TTIP, the Syrian civil war and the use of chemical weapons during the conflict, the Crimea... |
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