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Why are SSRI's used over supplemental serotonin? | Psychiatrist here. There is some very solid information in these replies, along with a bit of misinformation. Let me just add a few points, since there is a huge difference between the neuronal effects of SSRIs and 5-HTP.
SSRIs work by blocking the reuptake (recycling mechanism) of serotonin after it has already been released into the synapse. The end effect is that every natural serotonergic signal your brain sends lasts a little longer. Your brain compensates for the louder signal from the "sending" neuron by desensitizing the "receiving" neuron. This is accomplished by reducing the number of receptors and a variety of other regulatory changes inside the receiving neuron.
For Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, most other severe anxiety disorders, and a subset of Major Depression, this is a CORRECTIVE change in the serotoninergic neurons. In anyone else, it tends to create an abnormal state of apathy, amotivation, excessive risk-taking, etc. In some people it causes full blown mania. There is nothing inherently good or bad about SSRIs. They are the right tool for some folks and very much the wrong tool for others.
In contrast, 5-HTP just makes more serotonin available inside the neuron. You can load up on serotonin all you want, but it doesn't much affect the signal that is transmitted from one cell to another because you haven't altered the brain's regulatory mechanisms. Plus, our brains respond very quickly to surplus 5-HTP. It happens every time you eat a protein-rich (and therefore tryptophan-rich) meal.
5-HTP does have a place in mental health care. I recommend it for milder situational anxiety, stress-related symptoms, etc. My reasoning is that I'm helping an exhausted, but basically healthy, brain recover. 5-HTP seems to works well for those situations; SSRIs clearly do not. Recent research has confirmed what a lot of us already thought. SSRIs are not better than placebo for mild anxiety or mild-to-moderate depression.
On the other hand, I have never seen 5-HTP work for a serious anxiety disorder or severe depression. Simplistically speaking, those brains are stuck in a vicious cycle. The regulatory safeguards have stopped working. SSRIs can often get them back on track.
In fact, SSRIs have never been the most effective meds for depression. Prozac and it's successors became so popular because they were the first antidepressants that weren't lethal in overdose. That led to wider spread use than we ever saw with MAOIs and TCAs. In my opinion they've been over-used for 30 years now. But that doesn't make SSRIs evil. It's not the tool's fault that it was (and is) misused.
EDIT: Please don't take this post as endorsement for the "serotonin theory of depression" discussed in other comments. In my opinion there is no valid unified transmitter theory of depression. After all, Wellbutrin works for depression and it has no significant serotonergic activity. | [
"Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are believed to increase the extracellular level of the neurotransmitter serotonin by limiting its reabsorption into the presynaptic cell, increasing the level of serotonin in the synaptic cleft available to bind to the postsynaptic receptor. They have varying degree... |
why does it seem so common to see quotes where a word has been added in square brackets, but the quote [wouldn't] have originally made any sense without that word? | There are fundamentally three different reasons for changing or adding words in a quote, indicated by the square brackets:
* Change of person or any similar grammatical change that doesn’t alter the meaning, only the perspective:
* “this is my fault and I intend to remedy it”
* *Quote:* He said “this is [his] fault and [he intends] to remedy it”
* Filling in information that would be available from context in the original source:
* “I painted this picture, and a merchant offered to pay $100,000 for it.”
* *Quote:* In an interview, the artist revealed that “a merchant offered to pay $100,000 for [the picture].”
* Fixing spelling or grammar errors made by the original, especially words that are missing but obviously intended:
* “I tried to escape the burning building by running the stairs.”
* *Quote:* “I tried to escape the burning building by running [down] the stairs.”
| [
"If a quoting sentence introduces the quotation, it is preceded by a colon; the ending punctuation mark should be inserted as in the original. Lowercase initials should only be used if they are lowercase in the original. If a quoting sentence follows the quotation, they are separated by a dash (and spaces). Punctua... |
I’m wondering what this symbol is on this court note, it’s from 1853 in New York, I feel like i’ve seen it before but i don’t know what it’s called or what it means, any thoughts? | This appears to be the same as a copyeditor's note for a paragraph. This looks like a draft of a document that would be re-written more carefully crafted formal document. This would be indicating the need for a paragraph break.
edit: I yield to the counsel for the plaintiff, /u/qfrostine_esq. I believe the attorney may be correct, and his suggestion carries weight. | [
"The various symbols within the arms are representative of the history of the city. The book represents the education within the city, specifically the 16th century Wolverhampton Grammar School; the woolpack represents the mediaeval woollen trade within the city; the column is a representation of the Saxon pillar t... |
in the uk or places with a 3+ party government, how does it work to "form a government" | I think you have the basic idea. Part of the confusion is one of language -- in the US, when we say "government" we mean the permanent bureaucratic institution -- what people in some other countries might refer to as civil service or some other term.
In a parliamentary system, what we think of as the executive and legislative branches are intertwined. That's why when we hear phrases from foreign media like "the government is being dissolved" it sounds pretty dramatic, because in the US vernacular, that's equivalent to anarchy.
So, when they say they are "forming a government", it means that the an agreement has been reached by enough of the parties to set up how things will be run, so that they have a majority of the votes in parliament to make it happen. | [
"British governments (or Ministries) are generally formed by one party. The Prime Minister and Cabinet are usually all members of the same political party, almost always the one that has a majority of seats in the House of Commons. Coalition governments (a ministry that consists of representatives from two or more ... |
how do directional laser sensors for people counting work? | There's a bunch of different ways that could be accomplished but the easiest would probably be to just record the times each one is broken and sort it out with software. If the time for the outer one is first add one to the incoming. If the time for the inner one is first add to the outgoing. | [
"Laser trackers are instruments that accurately measure large objects by determining the positions of optical targets held against those objects. The accuracy of laser trackers is of the order of 0.025 mm over a distance of several metres. Some examples of laser tracker applications are to align aircraft wings duri... |
Examples of wars in the past that had multiple actors with dynamic alliances like the Syrian Civil War? | I think the factional nature of the Spanish Civil War gets overlooked partly due to the way that the two sides seemed to coalesce. The Nationalists were made up of the military and its supporters, two different stripes of Monarchists that were often hostile to each other, industrialists and large agricultural concerns that were joined in a marriage of convenience but had little in common, fascists who were often at odds with most of their ostensible allies, and much of the Catholic Church in Spain which had a number of conflicts with all of the aforementioned groups (not to mention the larger Catholic Church and its stance on the issues and groups in question). The Republicans featured multiple different groups supporting different types of communistic ideas that were often mutually hostile, groups of anarchists that were nearly as hostile to each other as they were to the communists and fascists, various democratic groups that were leery of revolution but even more leery of what they saw as fascism, unions of every type and political persuasion, advocates for regional autonomy that cared little for the revolutionary ideas of the communists and anarchists, and others. Add in the fickle Soviet support for the Republicans alongside the large Italian deployment in support of the Nationalists and the smaller but very potent German contingent supporting the Nationalists and you have an incredibly complex civil war that was less a war of two distinct sides than it was of two coalitions that were barely held together for the length of the war, as well as a kind of proxy war between the various European powers that wanted to influence the situation in Spain for their benefit while still not antagonizing potential enemies in a war that no side was quite ready to start yet. The alliances perhaps did not change as rapidly as the ones in Syria, but given the in-fighting amongst the Republican side as well as how much Franco had to suborn the various factions within the Nationalists in order to keep them in line I do think that the Spanish Civil War featured a good deal of fluidity in factional loyalty to their alliances (not to mention the bitter verbal sniping that happened after the war, especially on the Republican side). | [
"There are numerous factions, both foreign and domestic, involved in the Syrian Civil War, including ISIL, the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army, pro-government Christian militias, al-Qaeda in Syria, Kurdish YPG militia, or Shia sectarian militias from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom are aligned against each... |
In places like San Francisco where the weather is basically the same year round, do plants release pollen all year ? If not, how do they "sense" the season. | _URL_0_
Plenty of variation in rainfall, temperature, and sunlight hours.
You need to go to a tropical forest to find very little variation in climate, and in that case I think there is also little or no seasonal variation in plant growth and flowering. | [
"There is no official wet season or dry season. Precipitation is dispersed throughout the year with most of it coming from various types of fog. One variation of is San Francisco fog (also known as advection fog) which mainly occurs along the Central Coast, from San Francisco to Santa Barbara.\n",
"Research has b... |
why don't we just elect the president via a delegate system in lieu of primaries? | What do you mean by "delegate system"? | [
"In the modern U.S. presidential election process, voters participating in the presidential primaries are actually helping to select many of the delegates to these conventions, who then in turn are pledged to help a specific presidential candidate get nominated. Other delegates to these conventions include politica... |
How big would a building/dome/indoor park have to be in order to have it's own weather patterns? | It does in fact occur, there was a post recently about a ~~boeing~~ (e: Nasa) building that has weather patterns from the humidity in the air.
e:[source](_URL_0_) | [
"The classic residential tower is a massive building, two to four stories high, with tapering walls and a flat shale roof. The floorplan is usually rectangular, measuring 8–10 by 8–12 meters. The tower tapered due to the walls getting thinner to the top, and due to their inward inclination. The thickness of the wal... |
How do you handle the logical difficulties of 0! = 1? | The factorial function for positive whole numbers is defined, as you know, via n!=(n)(n-1)…(2)(1).
The question is, can you extend the notion of factorial to 0? It turns out if you define 0! to be 1, then a whole bunch of expressions involving factorials that work for positive whole numbers can also be extended to include 0, and so we find it useful to extend the definition of the factorial in this way. There is really not more to it than that.
In fact, it turns out there is a way to extend the factorial to the real numbers and indeed the complex numbers involving something called the *gamma function*. Of course, some properties may not persist when you extend a function to a larger domain, but if the properties that do persist are useful, then it can be worth extending our definition of the function.
| [
"BULLET::::- \"Top-down approach\": This is the direct fall-out of the recursive formulation of any problem. If the solution to any problem can be formulated recursively using the solution to its sub-problems, and if its sub-problems are overlapping, then one can easily memoize or store the solutions to the sub-pro... |
What happened in the middle east or more specifically Saudi Arabia and the way they dresses from the 40s and 50s to today? | > Why don't they still dress like he was in his youth today?
Frankly I'm not sure I would read so much into this. Your question is actually unique in that these questions are almost inevitably about what women are wearing, but whenever we do get these questions they are *invariably* about the clothing choices of elite, often urban, wealthy individuals. Such individuals very rarely face issues where they would have to:
> more recently [reject western clothing] and [go] back to more traditional wear.
So for instance, here's another image of Salman that to my eye looks to have been taken after that image from wiki from when he was "in his 30s", although it is undated: [here.](_URL_2_)
In the Arab Gulf countries among elite men it has been the long standing case that western attire is equally as valid as national dress, but that among the broader population that traditional dress remains the norm. Thus, you have someone like [Prince Turki](_URL_0_) who seems to appear equally as often in public in a western suit and tie as he does in some kind of [jalabiya.](_URL_1_)
All of that being said, in regards to other countries, for instance Egypt, it is nonetheless true that the 50s, 60s and 70s involved in many instances a more explicit and ideological move towards a secularist and therefore at least superficially western style of dress for men and women in elite or urban environments. But it's *this* period that strikes me as being unusual, and I don't think you could describe, say, Nasser's Egypt as being culturally Western, although of course that term has serious issues in that it basically means "modern, liberal and good" and so has value judgements attached to it that are historically uncomfortable.
Or, to put it another way, there has been a religious revival in many parts of the Arab and Muslim world which has resulted in superficial changes such as an apparent increase in the number of women who wear some kind of headscarf or veil. But so what? That's almost always ultimately just a visual proxy for other political issues, like the (false) implication that women only wear a headscarf because the patriarchy forces them to do so, rather than considering the autonomous piety of women who might willing choose to do so.
I don't agree with all of her points, but the best essay on this latter subject that I'm familiar with is Lila Abu-Lughod's *Do Muslim Women Need Saving?* | [
"The religion and customs of Saudi Arabia dictate not only conservative dress for men and women, but a uniformity of dress unique to most of the Middle East. Traditionally, the different regions of Saudi have had different dress, but since the re-establishment of Saudi rule these have been reserved for festive occa... |
Do two same atoms have unique identifying properties? | No, they do not. You cannot differenciate between two particles with the same quantum numbers. This is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics.
This has been confirmed from predictions made from [quantum statistics](_URL_0_) (as opposed to classical statistics which considers every particle to be unique). | [
"The molecular formula reflects the exact number of atoms that compose the molecule and so characterizes different molecules. However different isomers can have the same atomic composition while being different molecules.\n",
"Atoms of chemically pure elements may bond to each other chemically in more than one wa... |
how do tool-assisted speedruns work? | Imagine if you could pause time, evaluate the outcomes of any given action, choose the best course of action, and then advance time by the smallest increment possible and repeat.
That's the idea of Tool Assisted Speedruns. They are not designed in real-time gameplay: rather, the inputs are carefully selected frame-by-frame to gather a specific result.
The human part is the design and execution of an ideal route. The emulator (or device inputting to a console) just has a specific list of what buttons to press at what time. | [
"Creating a tool-assisted speedrun is the process of finding the optimal set of inputs to fulfill a given criterion — usually completing a game as fast as possible. No limits are imposed on the tools used for this search, but the result has to be a set of timed key-presses that, when played back on the actual conso... |
What mechanisms did the Romans use to mine gold and other ore? | Sorry if this is vague, but in the TV documentary series "What the Romans did for us", there was an examination of a Roman gold mine in the UK, which used a very interesting technique: a spring on top of a gold rich hill was dammed and used to fill up a large catchment pond. When full, the water was released all at once, pouring down the hill and flushing the gold out of the rock and soil. Colecting it was simply a case of workers sifting through the silty remains for gold nuggets with their hands. | [
"In Roman metallurgy, new methods for extracting gold on a large scale were developed by introducing hydraulic mining methods, especially in Hispania from 25 BC onwards and in Dacia from 106 AD onwards. One of their largest mines was at Las Medulas in León, where seven long aqueducts enabled them to sluice most of ... |
is there a genetic explanation for why some people can have a ton of energy throughout the day while after a 8 to 5 shift i just want to crawl in bed and sleep? | Everything plays a factor, exercise, proper diet, enjoying your job, getting up and moving throughout the day, proper nights sleep, everything possible can affect your body.
Everyone is different, if I don't work out in the morning I feel tired throughout the day, but my friends are the opposite and can only workout at night or they will be too tired. | [
"Modern humans often find themselves desynchronized from their internal circadian clock, due to the requirements of work (especially night shifts), long-distance travel, and the influence of universal indoor lighting. Even if they have sleep debt, or feel sleepy, people can have difficulty staying asleep at the pea... |
the purpose of a maestro. do bands or orchestras actually need one? | He (or she) essentially sets the pace, keeps everyone in line (volume from the different sections, the speed, balance of the entire orchestra), directs each section to cool it when they need to hear a soloist etc. a little more clearly.
Everyone on the group/orchestra looks at him, therefore everyone is on the same page.
This is needed as say for example you're in the middle of 10 other people blasting out your sections aspect of the piece, you haven't got a clue what the rest of the orchestra ate doing and if you're too loud / quiet / fast / slow in comparison to the entire performance.
The maestro is the one guy who has an objective opinion on all of the musicians and hence able to direct them to be a cohesive and awesome sounding unit. | [
"The orchestra is a club where many musicians can play their instrument. There are two of them at the ARG, one is for the musicians, who can’t play very well and the other one is for the better ones. In the second orchestra the more talented musicians play but most of them aren’t at the school anymore.\n",
"Class... |
how and why do cemeteries arrange their plots so close together? | They are not lying on top of each other, at least in the US. A plot here normally has 6 inches to a foot on each side of it to separate it from the other plots, but some older cemeteries which were dug by hand have a larger buffer.
Land is expensive so they make the plots as small as they possibly can in order to sell as many as possible. | [
"In order to physically manage the space within the cemetery (to avoid burials in existing graves) and to record locations in the burial register, most cemeteries have some systematic layout of graves in rows, generally grouped into larger sections as required. Often the cemetery displays this information in the fo... |
were ancient egyptians, african or middle eastern? | All of the above.
Seas were not barriers to ancient societies, but highways. Along the north of Africa, the Middle East, and for a while the South of Europe, Mediterranean features were common. People travelled and moved in those areas.
Egypt pushed south as far as Ethiopia, and people of the darkest shades of skin were also Egyptian.
Prior to the colonial age, humanity didn't really believe there was such a thing as race. As such, empires like Egypt were multiethnic and multiracial, with people in an area being whatever colour they happened to be. Some cities in Egypt were predominantly Mediterranean, others dark skinned, and others were a mix.
Statues of Pharaoh Dynasties show features that are sometimes Mediterranean, sometimes African. The families that ruled sometimes hailed from upper egypt, and sometimes from lower egypt.
So, really, in the same way that Belgium is both German and French but also it's own thing, Egypt was both African and Mediterranean and also it's own thing, and didn't have a racial divide. | [
"Located in the extreme north-east corner of Africa, ancient Egyptian society was at a crossroads between the African and Near Eastern regions. Early proponents of the dynastic race theory based this on the increased novelty and seemingly rapid change in Predynastic pottery and noted trade contacts between ancient ... |
What is some of the best evidence that corroborates the Afro-centric view of ancient history? | > the African presence in the Americas that predated the European
There is no evidence for this. You can read more about it and related theories in our [FAQ](_URL_0_), though please do follow up with more specific questions you might have. | [
"Scholars have challenged the various assertions of Afrocentrists on the cultural and biological characteristics of Ancient Egyptian civilization and its people. At a UNESCO Symposium in the 1970s, the vast majority of the delegates repudiated the Afrocentric assertions. Zahi Hawass has gone on record as saying tha... |
How do you explain the similarity between the equation of the electromagnetic force et the one of the gravitational force ? | What they have in common is that they both exist in a 3-dimensional space, have massless "force carrier" particles, and do not (strongly) self-interact. A property that is unique to 3 dimensions of space is that the surface area of a sphere is proportional to the square its radius. A consequence of this is that if you model force as being due to the exchange of some "force carrier", the density of those force carriers will decrease as the square of the radius from the source. Similarly using that same model, if the force carriers have mass, then due to the energy-time uncertainty relationship they have a very low probability of traveling far, and as a result the density of force carriers drops exponentially with radius from the source. Finally in this model, if the force carriers strongly self-interact, they no longer radiate outward isotropically, but can form "flux tubes" and other complicated patterns, such that their density some distance from the source may be very high or low, depending on whether or not you are in the line of fire of that flux tube.
For the above 3 reasons, only fields with massless, weakly-self-interacting force carriers that exist in 3-dimensions, are likely to have an inverse-square force law. The only two such forces we are aware of are gravitational and electromagnetic. Note that the weak force is not an inverse square law for two of the above reasons (mass and self-interaction), and the strong force is not an inverse square law for one reason (self-interaction).
Note to experts: I have deliberately simplified in the above, but I think I give the correct intuitive understanding to the lay person. The theory from which the above information is extracted is Quantum Field Theory, in which each force is associated with a quantum field, stable ripples in which I am calling "force carriers," and in which calculations of the strength of a force can be usefully thought of as involving the exchange of "virtual (force carrier) particles" (which just represent terms in an integral, but for which all of the above described features play an important role similar to what I described). | [
"This includes Newton's law of universal gravitation, and the relation between gravitational potential and field acceleration. Note that and are both equal to the gravitational acceleration (equivalent to the inertial acceleration, so same mathematical form, but also defined as gravitational force per unit mass). T... |
Why did Denmark go into a union with Iceland in 1918? | Sæll :)
Iceland's battle for independence had been very long and very arduous. In 1871, Denmark forcibly induced a new code of law for Iceland called the Status law. Among many other things which Icelanders had not wished for, the Icelanders' right to vote on the Danish parliament was revoked. It dictated which matters Iceland was allowed to handle on their own, and which they were not.
Iceland's future parliament, Althing, was little more than an advisory committee when it came to subjects that mattered. It tried to ignore all other matters but the Status law and interpreted it so that the law was only a declaration on behalf Denmark, and was not actually a binding contract for Iceland. Denmark answered this by establishing a powerful office which was chosen by the king. This office oversaw matters which had previously been fully handled by Icelandic officials.
The Danish government conceded a little by granting the Althing rights to write their own laws, with the king's approval, in 1874. I'm not certain what you mean by home rule, but you're right that Iceland got its first *Icelandic* minister, as it was a position previously filled by Danish officials.
From 1874 to the first years of the 1900s, the battle revolved around the minister of Iceland.
In 1908, an important concession was made on behalf of Denmark. They planned on allowing Icelanders to reject (after 25 years) the Danish court, coast guard, Danish citizenship, and the Danish flag. Icelanders were not allowed to reject the office of the king, foreign affairs or military defenses. However, this concession was rejected on the Althing, because the independence-minded Icelandic officials wanted a mere personal relationship between Denmark and Iceland, but that was unacceptable for the Danish government.
We have arrived at the year in question; the year 1918. The battle had almost been won already before the discussions in 1918 even started, as the concessions made by Denmark in 1908 were pretty close to what Icelanders wanted. Not quite, though. The two poles differed in what they thought ought to be rejectable and what should not.
There were hefty debates in the beginning as the Danes wanted to hold on to the concessions made in 1908, but they finally agreed on that the contract *in its entirety* was to be rejectable, and Icelanders could in turn come to terms with a mutual citizenship and Danish foreign affairs taking care of Iceland's.
The rejectability meant that either country could, after 1940, demand revision of the laws. If a new contract wasn't made in three years, either parliament (the Danish one or the Althing) could, without consulting with the other, dictate that the contract was no longer valid.
---
With all this said, you can see that it wasn't a sudden shift of perspective that made the Danes make those huge concessions. It was simply the result of a painstaking independence battle on behalf of Iceland--reaching so far that, in 1918, the Danes declared that "they were open to discuss anything, so that the Icelanders weren't constantly finding something to argue about."
I hope this answered your question.
Source: *From tyranny to democracy* by Heimir Þorleifsson. | [
"The Act of Union, a December 1, 1918, agreement with Denmark, recognized Iceland as a fully sovereign state—the Kingdom of Iceland—joined with Denmark in a personal union with the Danish king. Iceland established its own flag. Denmark was to represent its foreign affairs and defense interests. Iceland had no milit... |
Does purposely letting my laptop 'drain' the battery actually help it last longer unplugged than keeping it charged when I can? | No. Lithium-ion batteries (almost certainly what's in your laptop) gain no advantage from being discharged fully before charging.
Older Ni-Cad batteries (and possibly also older NiMH batteries) suffered from a so-called 'memory-effect' that could give them less capacity if not fully discharged before charging, but even those technologies have improved in recent years.
Edit: Please read on into this thread for some really good discussion and information provided by many users, some of whom really know their stuff. | [
"Battery life is limited because the capacity drops with time, eventually requiring replacement after as little as a year. A new battery typically stores enough energy to run the laptop for three to five hours, depending on usage, configuration, and power management settings. Yet, as it ages, the battery's energy s... |
why do shoes with heels make such a loud noise when people walk in them? | Compared to, say, sneakers, the sole of heels is very hard most of the time. And hard things (sole) hitting hard things (ground) make a louder noise than soft things (sneaker sole) hitting hard things (ground).
// edit: The same is true with a lot of dress shoes. They have a hard sole as well and are about as equally as loud when walking. | [
"These have a mostly smooth, rigid and inflexible sole, bent slightly at the ball of the foot. This, and the cleat attached to the shoe bottom, make a clicking sound when they come together and results in the waddle of the walking cyclist. These shoes are designed to function while the user is on the bike and littl... |
Why did Abraham Lincoln drop his vice president, and why did he choose Andrew Johnson instead? | The Republican Party in 1860 was relatively new - they had fielded their first presidential candidate in 1856 - and consisted of a number of different factions. They felt that they needed to keep as many of the factions (geographic and ideological) happy as possible. Hannibal Hamlin was relatively 'safe' in that he hadn't alienated wings of the new party like Chase or Seward had. He also came from Maine, which was one of the first states to support the Republicans.
By 1864, the war was winding down, and Lincoln was looking forward to the aftermath. Andrew Johnson was the only Senator from a seceding state that had stayed loyal to the Union, and it was believed that this would help ease the reintegration of the states. | [
"Andrew Johnson (December 29, 1808 July 31, 1875) was the 17th president of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869. Johnson assumed the presidency as he was vice president of the United States at the time of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. A Democrat who ran with Lincoln on the National Union ticket, Jo... |
when ants bite a human, do they know they are biting a living thing? | It's likely just a threat response. Some Activity Disturbs me enough = Bite.
Ants aren't likely to have any complex thoughts. | [
"Most ants are capable of biting, stinging, and spraying irritant chemicals. However, only relatively few species can harm humans; among which some can cause significant injury or, in rare cases, death. Like wasps, individual ants are capable of stinging multiple times as they do not lose their stingers.\n",
"Ant... |
why do nickels have smooth edges while other coins don't? | I'm not sure why nickels don't have rough edges, but I can tell you why others do.
In a nutshell, U.S. coins were sometimes made out of valuable metals like gold or silver. If you trim the edges off all the coins you find, you can start collecting a decent amount of metal shavings that you can sell for profit, and since the coin is only barely smaller than before no one is the wiser. Putting ridges on the coin's edge means that if you trim off the outside edge people will notice and you get in trouble. | [
"One theory is that the serrated edge made it easier to prove that the coin was solid metal. However, only the Seleucid bronze coinage, rather than coins of gold and silver, feature this sort of an edge. Certain Roman serrated denarii were especially designed to be harder to counterfeit or debase. However, the Roma... |
what being "spiritual" but not religious means? | When people say they are 'religious', it generally means they can put a name/label to their beliefs (ex. I am a Christian/Muslim/Buddhist/etc). When people say they are 'spiritual', it usually means they believe in a higher power/supernatural forces but don't have a name for it (ex. they believe in miracles, but they don't think that 'God' or any specific deity is the cause of those miracles).
Basically, a person who is religious is almost always spiritual (ex. a Christian believes in Jesus Christ AND miracles), but a person who is spiritual is not usually religious (ex. a person who believe in miracles but NOT Jesus Christ). | [
"\"Spiritual but not religious\" (SBNR), also known as \"Spiritual but not affiliated\" (SBNA), is a popular phrase and initialism used to self-identify a life stance of spirituality that takes issue with organized religion as the sole or most valuable means of furthering spiritual growth. Historically, the words \... |
How to detect cancer | I see where you are going with this but there are several problems with your idea. First, it isn't cancer cells that do this "recruitment" but rather tumors that do it. A cell here or there has sufficient nutrients to where it does not need a new blood supply to meet it high metabolic demands. It is when you have too many cells aka a tumor that this neovasculature occurs. Some argue, that at the point at which a tumor creates it's own blood supply, there is already a good chance that a metastatic cells has been formed. There exist drugs called VEGF inhibitors (VEGF is a signalling protein which cells release when they want new vessels to form) and this gets to the 2nd part of your question or something that you could easily ask. Why don't we all just take VEGF inhibitors all the time. Well the problem with this idea is the problem with your whole mapping idea, the production and destruction of vessels is an every changing process in the body as is. Based on supply demands (let's say you get a cut or an injury) or in order to combat things like blood pressure fluctuation, your body is always changing blood vessels. Hope this helps!
TL;DR: Too much variability in the production of blood vessels of the body to map the system
Source: Cancer Biology Ph.D. student | [
"Cancer can be detected at an early stage by observing certain signs and symptoms. Common diagnostic methods include physical examination, x-rays, ultrasounds, cytology, blood tests, urine tests, and nuclear scans. Depending on the type of cancer and its level of progress, surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, or immun... |
what are birds doing when they fly around in crazy, beautiful, yet chaotic formations? | Different species of birds flock together for different reasons, so depending on what species you were looking at they could have been foraging for insects, or moving en masse for protection, warmth, aerodynamics, or as a mating behavior.
The complex movements and formations they make are called *murmurations*, and it's only very recently that we've begun to understand more about how they work. It seems each bird is only reacting based on a few very simple rules that can be roughly summed up as 'do what the nearest seven other birds are doing'. In this way the movements of a flock are emergent patterns that ripple through the flock in waves. The same behavior is seen in shoaling fish and to a smaller extent in herding cattle and even in human crowds. | [
"This bird has a spectacular aerial display, which involves flying high in circles, followed by a powerful stoop during which the bird makes a drumming sound, caused by vibrations of modified outer tail feathers.\n",
"This bird has a spectacular aerial display, which involves flying high in circles, followed by a... |
why the uk never made their overseas islands integral part of their country? | In this case France is the odd man out. Most countries with oversea territories have different level of citizenship, different set of laws and different tax rules. There is some sort of superiority and ownership over these territories that is not part of the country but rather owned by the country. In the same way that a company do not allow the workers to vote in the board meeting a country do not usually allow their subject territories voting rights. However it is more complicated then that as there needs to be managers over the territory who may want to keep their citizenship and there may be loyalists who you might want to grant limited citizenship for their work, etc.
As for why France got away with the difference between real French and a French subject in a colony it is because of the revolution and considering everyone equal. | [
"The British Overseas Territories (BOTs) or United Kingdom Overseas Territories (UKOTs) are 14 territories under the jurisdiction and sovereignty of the United Kingdom. They are remnants of the British Empire that have not been granted independence or have voted to remain British territories. These territories do n... |
When Physicists say atoms are 99% free space of mass, what does that mean? | An atom is a nucleus (protons and neutrons) bunched together. Swirling around the nucleus are the electrons which "orbit" (using that term loosely...do not think of it like planets orbiting a sun but more like a fuzzy cloud surrounding the nucleus) at some distance.
If the nucleus was the size of a football placed on a goal line in an (American style) football stadium the nearest electrons would be orbiting somewhere past the far end of the field and in the stands somewhere.
All that space between the nucleus and the electron is "empty" ("empty" is in quotes because there is no such thing as "empty" space...there are fields and quantum foam and whatnot).
Consider it this way...
A neutron star is a place where the electrons are crushed into the nucleus of their atoms (there is no "empty space" between the nucleus and the electrons). A tablespoon of neutron star matter has the mass of Mt. Everest. Which is to say there is so much empty space in Mt. Everest if you squished it all down you could fit it in a tablespoon.
| [
"The large majority of an atom's mass comes from the protons and neutrons that make it up. The total number of these particles (called \"nucleons\") in a given atom is called the mass number. It is a positive integer and dimensionless (instead of having dimension of mass), because it expresses a count. An example o... |
Am I getting more petrol if I fill up on a cold day compared with a warm day? | This idea is a myth. First of all the fuel is housed underground so it undergoes minimal density change.
Secondly, The basic facts are correct, but the advice is not. Gasoline does expand and contract a little depending on its temperature. When gasoline rises from 60 to 75 degrees F, for instance, it increases in volume by 1 percent while the energy content remains the same. | [
"While gasoline internal combustion engines are much easier to start in cold weather than diesel engines, they can still have cold weather starting problems under extreme conditions. For years, the solution was to park the car in heated areas. In some parts of the world, the oil was actually drained and heated over... |
How the story is of Che Guevara is painted in U.S. schools? In South America he is like a hero. | The portrayal of Che Guevara, and the Cuban Revolution in general, in U.S. schools is usually pretty negative.
It's less about Che Guevara and more about Fidel Castro and the Revolution at large, but historian Aviva Chomsky covers a bit of this in the Introduction to her excellent *A History of the Cuban Revolution*. Of course, as a historian, she teaches at a university, but her explanation of the views of incoming students helps show what their previous education taught them.
> *Rarely does popular opinion in the United States diverge so strikingly from scholarly analysis as in the case of the Cuban Revolution.*
> *It's one of the few events in Latin American history that U.S. students have heard of. When I ask my students to come up with names of important figures in Latin American history, the only one that reliably emerges is that of Fidel Castro. And students are fairly unanimous in their opinions of Castro: "Dangerous," "evil," "bad," and "dictator" are the words they most commonly come up with to describe him. Survey results show that my students' positions are widely shared among the U.S. population: 98 percent of those surveyed in the United States had heard of Fidel Castro, and 82 percent had a negative opinion of him.*
> *...*
> *Most serious studies of the Cuban Revolution, though, focus less on the figure of Fidel Castro and more on the process, the politics, and the people of the Cuban Revolution. Here we find a giant gap between what scholars, including historians, have to say, and what U.S. political leaders and the general public seem to believe. Most historians frame the story of the Cuban Revolution with the long history of U.S. involvement in the island and in the rest of the Caribbean. But politicans and the general public have tended to see the USSR, rather than the United States, as the main factor explaining the nature of the Cuban Revolution. In this respect, U.S. scholars today have more in common with their Cuban counterparts than they do with the U.S. public.*
The general line on the Cuban Revolution in U.S. schools is that it was a part of the "Cold War" between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. and put Cuba in the Soviet camp. That's ridiculous, of course, but the nuances of history often escape primary and secondary schools.
I cannot say if it's a product of the school systems, but a major view in the United States is that Guevara was a mass murderer, which is inaccurate. On the other hand, films like *The Motorcycle Diaries* and *Che* did alright in the U.S., so opinion certainly is not unanimous. | [
"Che! is a 1969 American biographical drama film directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Omar Sharif as Marxist revolutionary Ernesto \"Che\" Guevara. It follows Guevara from when he first landed in Cuba in 1956 to his death in Bolivia in 1967, although the film does not portray the formative pre-Cuban revolutio... |
What happens when you plug two 9V batteries into one another? | They heat up | [
"A split-charge diode is an electronic device used to enable simultaneous charging of multiple batteries from one power source. The device prevents current from flowing from one battery to another while enabling the batteries to be continuously connected.\n",
"A problem with this style of connector is that it is ... |
Why is the Conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans considered as one of the greatest feats in military history? | It was considered one of the most important battles in military history mostly because of the extensive use of cannons and gunpowder to bring down the massive walls of the city, which were considered impregnable. After that siege extensive defensive fortifications became a lot less important and had to be adapted to the new reality of gunpowder warfare. In fact from then onwards fortifications became less and less relevant to the point they eventually disappeared. The fall of Constantinople essentially marked the coming of a new age in warfare.
Furthermore it was also important because it marked the definitive end of the Roman Empire but also because it completely changed the geopolitical realities of the entirety of western Eurasia. The Byzantines had effectively isolated the rest of Europe from invasion from the east for centuries while at the same time allowing for extensive trade with the wealthy eastern mediterranean and beyond, once they were gone they left a power vacuum wich allowed for the turks to penetrate further into Europe and even threaten Vienna for a time, the unstable situation in the east med. and the religious tensions between christianity and islam ( which now was in control of the entire southestern europe and middle east) also contributed to the interruption of trade with the east which eventually led to the rise of the maritime colonial empires of western Europe wich strived to find a new way to the Asian markets through the sea. | [
"Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Empire on 29 May 1453. The Ottomans were commanded by 22-year-old Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II. The conquest of Constantinople followed a seven-week siege which had begun on 6 April 1453.\n",
"The conquest of Constantinople began to make the Ottomans the rulers of one of t... |
Effects of solar gravity... | Solar gravity is negligible compared to Earth's gravity for a person on Earth. The acceleration due to gravity at Earth's surface is 9.81 m/s^2 . The acceleration due to the sun's gravity for a person on Earth's surface is
(Gravitational constant)*(mass of the sun)/(distance from Earth to the sun)^2
which is approximately [5.9 * 10^-3 m/s^2](_URL_0_). So the effect of the sun's gravity on us is about 1000 times less than the effect of Earth's gravity on us. | [
"The gravitational effects of the Moon and the Sun (also the cause of the tides) have a very small effect on the apparent strength of Earth's gravity, depending on their relative positions; typical variations are 2 µm/s (0.2 mGal) over the course of a day.\n",
"These include solar gravitational effects, the obliq... |
why do my feet feel sore and raw for days after walking around in wet shoes/socks for more than an hour? | There can be many reasons for this. Water can seep into the skin, and it can also dry skin out, causing friction and pain.
In WW1 soldiers who lived in wet boots often had the soles of their feet rot off because water would also cause molding from the *inner layers* of skin under the epidermis.
One thing they teach you in the military now is to ALWAYS air your feet when you can, and make sure you keep them dry and routinely change your socks.
The term is "trench foot" to be exact, google it if you're curious. | [
"Foot immersion is a common problem with homeless individuals wearing one pair of socks and shoes for extensive periods of time, especially wet shoes and sneakers from rain and snow. The condition is exacerbated by excessive dampness of the feet for prolonged periods of time. Fungus and bacterial infections prosper... |
Can someone help me understand two dimentional limits? | 1.) The important thing in limits is that as "whatever you input into the function" approaches a point of interest, the output approaches some value. In 1D, you can only input a single number, (x), into your function and you can only approach a point of interest from either the positive or negative side. In 2D, your inputs are pairs of numbers (x,y). So even though you are putting in two numbers, your putting in one point. As this point gets closer to the point of interest, say (a,b), then the value of the output will approach the limit. You can approach this point in many different ways, but the important thing is the distance that you are from (a,b). Don't think of it as two things approaching two separate things, think of it as single 2D thing approaching one other 2D point.
2.) [Here](_URL_0_) is a good discussion for limits of indeterminate forms in two variables. | [
"Limits are also referred to as \"universal cones\", since they are characterized by a universal property (see below for more information). As with every universal property, the above definition describes a balanced state of generality: The limit object \"L\" has to be general enough to allow any other cone to fact... |
what happened to the swine flu (h1n1)? | It's only a scare when it is novel (new), has not had a vaccine produced for it yet and is highly contagious. It is now in every vaccine batch and is nothing to be scared of.
Each hemisphere of the Earth (northern and southern) develops the flu that will appear in the opposite hemisphere's next winter. The goal is to identify and develop vaccines for all strains in time for the next flu season. Sometimes a highly virulent strain appears and spreads very quickly before a vaccine can be developed for it. When that happens, it is scary. | [
"In June 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the new strain of swine-origin H1N1 as a pandemic. This strain is often called swine flu by the public media. This novel virus spread worldwide and had caused about 17,000 deaths by the start of 2010. On August 10, 2010, the World Health Organization decla... |
when going up a hill in a car, do you get better gas mileage giving the car more gas or downshifting? | There is **A LOT** of bad science here, including the top voted answer by heit88.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Refer to [Here](_URL_0_) to see an engine fuel efficiency map.
When you demand a constant speed of your car, you are demanding a constant power output. This desired power output to maintain whatever speed you want going up the hill is what determines where you are on the Y axis of the map I linked above. Ignore what BMEP is, it is just the power you want from the engine.
Now that you are fixed along the Y axis, as you change RPM you move left and right along a straight line that meets the Y axis at the power you want.
The intersection of the RPM you are driving at, and line you drew from the desired BMEP, shows you what your BSFC is. This number is how much fuel you use for the power put out. The lower the number is the more efficient at using fuel your engine is. Red is the most efficient on the map I linked, blue is bad, and purple is the worst.
So lets say you want power from the engine at the 100 BMEP point (to say, go uphill constantly at 70 mph). Draw a straight line across the map from the 100 BMEP point on the Y axis. As you start out at low RPM, you are at medium fuel efficiency (in the green area). As you increase your RPM to 1500, you enter the red zone which is the most fuel efficient. As you further increase your RPM out of the red zone, you enter back into the green and blue zones which again means medium fuel efficiency. At high RPMS your fuel efficiency drops off into the bad range. As you can see if you read the numbers in the regions of the map, you will use 50% more fuel at 6000 RPM than at 1500 RPM just to maintain your speed at constant power. Also, as you lower RPM, you will use 20% more fuel at 500 RPM than 1500 RPM.
**TLDR; your engine has an optimum range to operate at. If your RPMs goes lower or higher than this range, you will lose efficiency and use more fuel. Operate in the gear that puts your RPM within this band.** | [
"Fuel economy-maximizing behaviors also help reduce fuel consumption. Among the most effective are moderate (as opposed to aggressive) driving, driving at lower speeds, using cruise control, and turning off a vehicle's engine at stops rather than idling. A vehicle's gas mileage decreases rapidly with increasing hig... |
why don't apple, samsung and co. integrate a qr-code-reader into their camera-app? | Windows phone 8 has this
Source, I have a Lumia 520
I know this doesn't directly answer the question but it shows that it is possible | [
"Many phones are able to decode barcodes using their built-in camera, as well. Google's mobile Android operating system uses both their own Google Goggles application or third party barcode scanners like Scan. Nokia's Symbian operating system features a barcode scanner, while mbarcode is a QR code reader for the Ma... |
why is it still so difficult to definitively determine the source of major rivers like the nile and yellow river? | Because hundreds of rivers merge to form these big rivers. So technically there are numerous sources.
| [
"Traditionally, explorers and geographers define the origin of a river system by tracking the longest tributaries while heading upstream, as volume can change dramatically from month to month. In a system as complex as the Amazon basin with dozen of streams as candidates in previously poorly mapped areas, no consen... |
curious european, why does cleveland suck? | To quote Tvtrope's article on Cleveland (yes, Cleveland is considered a trope):
Known in some circles as "The Mistake By The Lake" (namely, Lake Erie) or "The/Tha Land," Cleveland is the largest urban area in Ohio. Located on the state's northern coast, it's often considered a Wretched Hive and a Place Worse Than Death, a joke that's been ongoing for years. Many recent polls and news articles only reinforce this image, as it was once rated the most miserable city in America. It was also the original Trope Namer for Aliens In Cleveland, as the city is considered by many the image of mundane mediocrity (at best).
Possibly the biggest reason why this goes unchallenged is because all but the most anal-retentive Clevelanders have a sense of humor about it; they'll tell you themselves how Cleveland is America's Butt Monkey. With the brutal winters, massive urban decay, a river that was once so polluted that it caught on fire thirteen times, several political scandals leading to multiple FBI raids, and the fact that road construction is never finished (also a staple of Ohio in general), most residents have no illusions of being in paradise, and rely often on Gallows Humor. Some choose to stay, however, as the city has a low cost of living, a growing healthcare industry (the world-renown Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals), and decent nightlife. It can even be called a mini-Chicago, due to its patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods, midwestern atmosphere, public rail that's both elevated and underground, and division by a major river (east and west in this case, with people on either side almost never going further than downtown). | [
"By the turn of the 21st century, Cleveland succeeded in developing a more diversified economy and gained a national reputation as a center for healthcare and the arts. Additionally, it has become a national leader in environmental protection, with its successful cleanup of the Cuyahoga River. The city's downtown h... |
How is it that a projector can make something look bright white on a tan wall? | Your eyes actually can adjust or "white balance" quite dramatically without you even noticing. For example, the outdoor light is much, much bluer than indoor light, but when you look at your clothes in both environments they don't seem to change color. Hope that makes sense. | [
"The biggest challenge when setting up a bluescreen or greenscreen is even lighting and the avoidance of shadow, because it is best to have as narrow a color range as possible being replaced. A shadow would present itself as a darker color to the camera and might not register for replacement. This can sometimes be ... |
how do animals like fish, who have no way of seeing themselves, know to stay and mate with their own species? | Animals don't look at themselves first to figure out what they find sexually attractive. They just know what they like, and evolution means that tends to be things of their own species.
Did you look at yourself and think "Hmm, I am a human so I guess I should like other humans," or did you just get attracted to certain traits? | [
"Fish prefer to shoal with their own species. Sometimes, several species may become mingled in one shoal, but when a predator is presented to such shoals, the fish reorganize themselves so that each individual ends up being closer to members of its own species.\n",
"In biology, any group of fish that stay togethe... |
how is power restored after an outage caused by damaged poles or power lines? | They fixed / replaced the wires that were broken, and strung them up between the poles that were left intact, with perhaps a temporary pole or suspension wire to hold them in place until the full sized permanent pole is ordered and placed into the ground.
A residential area is also a "grid" (that's why it's often called the power grid), which means that there are multiple connections available and they can re-route the electricity much like they re-route cars to go on alternate roads until the main road is re-paved or whatever. | [
"A transient fault is a fault that is no longer present if power is disconnected for a short time and then restored; or an insulation fault which only temporarily affects a device's dielectric properties which are restored after a short time. Many faults in overhead power lines are transient in nature. When a fault... |
if the earth gets too hot because of global warming in the next 100 or 200 years, do you think it is possible and practical to shift the earth to a higher orbit with respect to the sun and thus moving us farther away from the sun's heat? | The Earth is pretty massive. Its mass is 5.97219×10^24 kg. | [
"By modifying the albedo of the Earth's surface, or by preventing sunlight reaching the Earth by using a solar shade, the sun's warming effect can be cancelled out—although the cancellation is imperfect, with regional discrepancies remaining.\n",
"Wagner erroneously asserted in March 2017 that climate change is t... |
Why is quantum entanglement so important to quantum computing? | It's not really necessary per se, it's more like an inevitable consequence of superposition. I think people have this idea that entanglement is somehow special, but it's not really: it's the unentangled states that are the special cases. Most possible 2 qubit states are entangled. | [
"Many quantum information applications, such as quantum teleportation, quantum error correction, and superdense coding, rely on entanglement. However, entanglement is a fragile quantum property between particles and can be easily destroyed by loss and noise arising from interaction with the environment, leading to ... |
what is the reason why brand name cereal companies don't sue the generic brands that are obviously complying them? | There is nothing about Fruit Loops that is patented or copyright protected, other than the trademarked name. Recipe's are considered trade secrets, so they are not revealed, but are free to be reverse-engineered should someone want to. | [
"Due to cultivation of a name brand mindset, customers might believe that a name branded product (say, cereal) tastes better than a generic one. In many cases, this may not be true. Misconceptions can be clarified by a blind test or by storing the product in clear glass containers.\n",
"Manufacturers may be able ... |
What dictates the throttle ranges of rocket engines? | It wasn't that you couldn't throttle in that range, it was that it wasn't healthy for the engines long term life.
One of the components of the engine combustion chamber/nozzle was an ablative insulation/cooling layer. The 60-90% throttle limitation was an attempt to reduce damage to that ablative layer. Essentially "If we're going to damage this layer we might as well run the engine at 100% power". Why they chose 60% specifically as the cutoff point I don't know. | [
"Rockets can usually be throttled down to an exit pressure of about one-third of ambient pressure (often limited by flow separation in nozzles) and up to a maximum limit determined only by the mechanical strength of the engine.\n",
"The formula_8 term represents the momentum thrust, which remains constant at a gi... |
how are tariffs different than taxes and won't these ultimately fall to consumers to pay? who's the beneficiary of the tarrif revenue? | Yes, consumers end up paying the price ultimately. They are a type of tax, charged to imported goods. They are supposed to benefit domestic producers of the same/similar good. For example, let's say US made steel costs $100/ton, while Korean steel costs $80/ton. Manufacturers needing steel will be likely to buy the Korean steel to reduce their manufacturing costs. But a 30% tariff would raise the price to $104 and make the Korean steel more expensive than the American steel. This may help the American steel maker, but the costs of the products would go up, and get passed on to the consumer. | [
"Taxes and subsidies change the price of goods and, as a result, the quantity consumed. There is a difference between an Ad valorem tax and a specific tax or subsidy in the way how it is applied on the price of the good. The final effect stays similar though. In the end levying a tax moves the market to a new equil... |
the difference between 59hz and 60hz refresh rate for monitors. | One refreshes 59 times a second and the other refreshes 60 times a second. | [
"On smaller CRT monitors (up to about ), few people notice any discomfort between 60–72 Hz. On larger CRT monitors ( or larger), most people experience mild discomfort unless the refresh is set to 72 Hz or higher. A rate of 100 Hz is comfortable at almost any size. However, this does not apply to LCD monitors. The ... |
why can you not get the same cold/virus twice, how are antibodies so powerful? | What we see as "being sick" is often the body's way of getting rid of diseases. This is part of our innate immune system, but it doesn't always work so well.
Once your body makes antibodies, that's part of the adaptive immune system. The antibodies "tag" the virus so that killer T-cells can get rid of them. So instead of trying to flush it out (runny nose etc.) or make it uncomfortably hot (fever), the adaptive immune system grabs and destroys the virus.
You could see it as the difference between having an alarm system and having someone on hand to arrest the thief. Both will stop your stuff getting stolen, but the alarm system won't stop your window being broken. | [
"While antibodies can only be directed at macromolecules such as proteins and at small molecules (haptens) only if bound to macromolecules, Anticalin proteins are able to selectively bind to small molecules as well.\n",
"Most antibodies work by binding to an antigen, signaling to a white blood cell that this anti... |
how do paleontologists differentiate dinosaur carnivore species? | Do sheep and horses look the same to you?
There are major fundamental differences between many of them, and more subtle ones between species within the same genus. It is simply a case of careful description. | [
"Along with anatomical similarities, \"Stratiotosuchus\" and other baurusuchids are thought to have had lifestyles very similar to those of theropod dinosaurs. While many small carnivorous crocodyliforms are known from the Adamantina Formation, \"Stratiotosuchus\" and \"Baurusuchus\" are believed to have been the o... |
What is the difference between the frequentist and the Bayesian meaning of probability? | Also [obligatory xkcd](_URL_0_). Bayesians condition their expectations on the occurrence of the event--while frequentists look at the raw frequency of the event. Is the event rare enough to say we think the null is false (freq) vs what's the likelihood given our expectations/observations (bayesian).
Bayes rule: p(b|a): p(a|b)p(a)/p(b) where p is probability and a and b are events. So the likelihood of b given a is the likelihood of a given b time a over b.
Also, so excited to have something to contribute here!
Edit: details and bayes' rule plus typing is hard | [
"Bayesian probability is the name given to several related interpretations of probability as an amount of epistemic confidence – the strength of beliefs, hypotheses etc. – rather than a frequency. This allows the application of probability to all sorts of propositions rather than just ones that come with a referenc... |
Do the types of lipids composing myelin alter its function at all? | It is highly unlikely that the fats from your diet alter the consistency of lipid membranes in myelin. I say very unlikely first because I've never heard nor read of such a thing. Second, they are different types of lipids but that's irrelevant really because who says edible fats can't be incorporated into cell membranes? I suspect they can, but cellular mechanisms would remove them under physiological conditions. Third, the myelin is being continuously recycled. Lastly, and this is just extrapolation rather than a reason incorporation couldn't happen, is due to the conductance (insulative properties) through the myelin sheath. Conductance has to be regulated in order to maintain proper signal transmission. If different types of fats were incorporated into the myelin, that conductance could change beyond a neuron's ability to compensate and you would see widespread neuronal dysfunction in obese people. | [
"Liposomes are composed of vesicular bilayers, lamellae, made of biocompatible and biodegradable lipids such as sphingomyelin, phosphatidylcholine, and glycerophospholipids. Cholesterol, a type of lipid, is also often incorporated in the lipid-nanoparticle formulation. Cholesterol can increase stability of a liposo... |
would it be possible or plausible to add a letter to the alphabet? | The fact is that in the english language it would be more prudent to remove a few letters. All of the phonetics required in the english language could be produced with fewer letters than we have in our alphabet. An alphabet which covered every phonetic instance in english would be far too expansive for practical purposes, so going in that direction would be a bad move.
On top of this, technology has had the effect of causing us to use less language to convey more information, ie: roflmao. So it seems that the tendency of our culture is going to be to simplify language, not expand upon it. Unless you include technical language. That will likely increase even as much of our language simplifies. | [
"According to Ledyard, the five borrowed letters were graphically simplified, which allowed for consonant clusters and left room to add a stroke to derive the aspirate plosives, . But in contrast to the traditional account, the non-plosives () were derived by \"removing\" the top of the basic letters. He points out... |
why do our hands get sticky if we wash them and let them dry without using a towel? | This sounds like a personal problem.
If you've properly washed your hands, then they shouldn't get sticky after air-drying.
If they do, it's because they had something sticky on them that didn't get washed off, and gets sticky again after the water evaporates. If you dry your hands on a towel, you're wiping the sticky stuff off. | [
"Medical hand-washing is for a minimum of 15 seconds, using generous amounts of soap and water or gel to lather and rub each part of the hands. Hands should be rubbed together with digits interlocking. If there is debris under fingernails, a bristle brush may be used to remove it. Since germs may remain in the wate... |
why is telephone clarity so low compared to the audio of live tv? | Most of it has to do with data compression. When the mobile networks began changing from analogue to digital almost a decade ago, it also changed how calls were handled. They became digital streams of bits and bytes. This meant that if there was a change in connection, the data loss could cause the call to be choppy or drop. To remedy this situation, phones were designed to switch to a different codec as signal changes fluctuated. The codec was a form of compressed voice data, designed to travel at the same speed without data loss to the network backbone, where it would be decoded and recompressed for transmission across the network.
Since there hasn't been much demand for a change, carriers haven't really made any changes, until now. With 4GLTE networks carriers are starting to transition once again from digital voice streams to IP Telephony. VoLTE (Voice over LTE) is the fundamental technology, but carriers are deploying it as Advanced Calling (Verizon), HD Voice (AT & T and T-Mobile, although a form of their HD Voice offering exists via HSPA+), or silently (as MetroPCS did back in 2012.) Part of the reason for compression has to do with how much bandwidth is available for the voice streams.
To contrast, live TV is compressed to Megabits per second (rather than kilobits for mobile telephony). Cable providers compress HD TV-shows to around 3-5Mbps that is used to carry visual data and digital audio. Over the air TV is uncompressed and HD TV-shows can consume all the bandwidth necessary (made available if they operate sub-channels) carrying uncompressed visual data, and uncompressed digital audio. | [
"Telephone speech signals are usually very degraded in quality. Part of this degradation is due to the limited bandwidth used in the telephone systems. In most systems frequencies lower than 250 Hz are cut and bandwidth only extends to frequencies of 4 or 8 kHz. Using filtering and waveshaping low and high frequenc... |
pinterest | Pinterest is a place to share links (called "pins" there) with each link being represented by a picture from the page and a description of your choosing. You can sort the pins into different categories (called "boards"). You can choose to allow other people to see your pins and boards so they can share links and post your pin on their own board. | [
"Pinterest, Inc. is a social media web and mobile application company. It operates a software system designed to enable discovery of information on the World Wide Web using images and, on a smaller scale, GIFs and videos. The site was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp. Pinterest has reached 29... |
If you were to fall into a black hole, just as anyone watching would see your time slow down until you stop forever on the event horizon, would you in turn see the entire future of the universe pan out in front of you? If not, why does the mathematics not allow this reversal of perspective? | No.
* The premise is wrong. No one will see you stopping forever. This is a purely mathematical result. Yes, the intensity of light you expect far away will never reach exactly zero. But it will quickly become ridiculously low ( < 10^-10^100 ). You will quickly receive the last photon ever, afterwards the object has fallen in for all practical purposes.
* If you fall in freely, it won't look that special. The dark region will occupy more and more of your field of vision, all the light appears to come from smaller and smaller regions of space as you fall in. Time dilation approaches a factor of just 2 (and you need to be inside to get close to that), and if I remember correctly it is redshifted, not blueshifted: You see *less* than you would outside.
From the outside people will see you slow down as you fall towards the black hole - but that also applies to the light behind you, and it is mainly something special about the outside view. For people falling into a black hole it is way less special than for people watching it from the outside. | [
"An observer crossing the event horizon of a non-rotating and uncharged (or Schwarzschild) black hole cannot avoid the central singularity, which lies in the future world line of everything within the horizon. Thus one cannot avoid spaghettification by the tidal forces of the central singularity.\n",
"On the othe... |
why is it when i have to verify a card with my bank, they want all the same information a card thief would require? | Regardless of what information the bank asks for this will end up being the information the card thief wants.
The reason the card thief wants this information is so that they can give it to the bank and pretend to be you. | [
"The only common security measure on all cards is a signature panel, but, depending on its exact design, a signature may be relatively easy to forge. Some merchants will demand to see a picture ID, such as a driver's license, to verify the identity of the purchaser, and some credit cards include the holder's pictur... |
Was North Korea ever actually communist? If not, where did the idea it was come from? | If a country does not describe themselves as communist, it does not automatically make it true. Remember that the USSR also described itself as a '[democratic](_URL_0_)' state.
Just don't fall into the 'No True Scotsman' fallacy involving communist, stalinist etc type countries. | [
"The Communist movement in Korea emerged as a political movement in the early 20th century. Although the movement had a minor role in pre-war politics, the division between the communist North Korea and the anti-communist South Korea came to dominate Korean political life in the post-World War II era. North Korea, ... |
how is it that games like lol and dota are still basically hacker-free, while cod games have hackers within hours after launch? | Hi guys. Software Engineer here. This might be a little bit more for 13 year olds than for 5 year olds but please bear with me.
About 10 years ago I discovered hacking in Counter-Strike. I tried out a couple of different cheats and even managed to make previously detected cheats undetectable by the VAC system.
Common with almost all first person shooters is that hacking in them is a lot easier than with strategy games. For example, it is possible to "hack" games like Red Alert 2 by removing the fog of war or by increasing your money, but that'll usually only work if you are the host (and if you're not, you'll be getting reduced fog of war at best which is indeed some advantage but a really good player will always win against a lousy player with fog of war hacks)...
Back to the main point, hacking in first person shooters is incredibly easy. It is trivial with today's technology to hook into the game executable, read the memory (and even modify it) and leverage that information to simulate mouse movements. What you really want to do (as a cheater) in a first person shooter is either see through walls or aim automatically. Aiming automatically is really easy when you have access to the memory, because you'll know the exact pixel coordinates of the enemy that your system is about to render and you'll know that you're aiming smack in the center of the screen (so (400, 300) if you're playing on 800x600 resolution), the vector that your mouse needs to travel is therefore **incredibly** easy to calculate, and moving the mouse is also really easy since these games run on Windows which uses the Windows API.
Now the really interesting thing is wallhacking, your game client doesn't get the information about enemies until it becomes likely that you will have to render them soon. If you've ever tried to use a wallhacking cheat, you may have noticed that your wallhack doesn't show entities (players, grenades, barrels, etc) that are being clipped by the server (clipped in this case means not being rendered due to being obviously out of view). What some wallhacks do is try to guess where players are by trying to sound-spot them, some of you old-schoolers may recognize early stages of this kind of hacking as `step step step` as seen from across the map. There are also other details that can be considered but for the sake of explaining to a Layman I think I'll leave it at that.
So there you have it, and here's a short TL;DR:
1. It's easier to hack in first person shooters than most other games **since the hacking happens on the client side**.
2. Games like Dota and LoL (RA2 was used in my example) are difficult to affect on the client side to produce better results than a human player would.
3. Hacking games is pretty much a solved problem, and it's very boring. If you're going to hack a game, you should probably stop playing that game and find something more exciting.
Great summary [here](_URL_0_). | [
"\"Hacker II\" is more difficult and involved than the first game. In \"Hacker II\", the player is actually recruited based upon his (assumed) success with the activities in the original game. Once again, they are tasked with controlling a robot, this time to infiltrate a secure facility in order to retrieve docume... |
classical music nomenclature, such as what 'op.' is, how a concerto is different from a nocturne, why a piano trio usually is a piano and various stings, etc. | Op. is short for opus - it's a chronological way of storing a composer's work by simply attributing a number to each piece. Several pieces in a suite can be numbered as Op. 32 no. 1 or 2 in order to keep them together.
There are many titles used for different types of pieces in classical music, there are probably reams of writing about them across the internet if you search for any given title. The two examples you give simply refer to the content of a piece.
The concerto - is a concert piece for soloist (and usually orchestra). It's often in 3 movements but these distinctions have become far less strict as 'classical' music has progressed.
A nocturne - is a piece of music that depicts a night scene. It is usually exampled in the nocturnes of Chopin (rightly so imho), but it should be remembered that even Mendelssohn's 'A midsummer night's dream' is, by definition, a 'nocturne'. Let me know if you have any further specific questions.
A piano trio originates in classical music a typically consists of a piano with violin and cello. These are just musical conventions - they sound 'good' and were therefore chosen for many compositions. You have to remember that during the classical period when the trio was popularised they weren't able to be as daring as the composers that would follow 100 years later - primarily because the audience were expecting a certain sound. | [
"\"The Piano Concerto\" is a piano concerto based on the music Nyman wrote for \"The Piano\" organized into four phases (one movement). The saxophone is omitted (\"Here to There\" is given to the piano soloist) and the piano is accompanied by a traditional orchestra. The work is Nyman's second concerto, having prev... |
Why is Finland not considered to be part of Scandinavia ? | Two reasons:
1. Geography: Finland isn't a part of the Scandinavian peninsula.
2. Language/Culture: The countries of Sweden, Denmark and Norway are traditionally Scandinavian, i.e. they speak North Germanic (Scandinavian) languages. The main language in Finland is Finnish, which is a Finnic language, which in turn belongs to the Uralic language family which is completely different language family than the one that the Germanic languages belong to (the Indo-European one).
**Edit:** I personally don't much like the definition "Scandinavia" in most contexts it's being used, and it certainly seems to be more used outside of northern Europe than within. "Norden" ("the Nordics") is the word most commonly used here in Sweden, and it includes Finland as well. I feel like it is an unnecessary distinction to talk about linguistical/cultural origins when speaking about the Nordic countries, because as it stands today, Finland and its culture, economy and politics is *very* similar to the rest of the Nordics, and political collaborations in northern Europe (such as the [Nordic Passport Union](_URL_0_)) tend to be within the Nordic countries, not exclusively just the Scandinavian ones. | [
"The clearest example of the use of \"Scandinavia\" is Finland, based largely on the fact that most of modern-day Finland was part of the Swedish kingdom for hundreds of years, thus to much of the world associating Finland with all of Scandinavia. However, the creation of a Finnish identity is unique in the region ... |
when i’m at home and playing video games an hour feels like 5 minutes, but when i’m at work an hour feels like 5 hours. why is that? | That's relativity. Either Einstein or people explaining Einstein's theory said, "A girl sits on your lap for an hour and it feels like a minuter and if you put your hand on a stove for a minute and it feels like an hour. That's relativity." | [
"1UP.com's Chris Pereira stated \"the music does become grating as you play (if you play for long enough in one sitting), and the standard levels can be too easy and ask too little of you at times. But the game is made so well for the platform -- you can pick it up, play a level, and go back to what you were doing ... |
typically, why do most abused children date abusive partners in their future? | Lingering self-confidence issues often draw them toward partners who are more controlling, who are therefore more likely to abuse them. Once abused they are also less likely to report it or leave the relationship since this treatment has been somewhat normalized in their own mind, as such they are less likely to be shocked enough to take action. | [
"Abusive incestuous relationships between siblings can have adverse effects on the parties involved. Such abuse can leave victims detrimentally hindered in developmental processes, such as those necessary for interpersonal relations, and can be the cause for depression, anxiety, and substance abuse in the victim's ... |
Why can we block off some senses but not others. | My basic educated guess - from a survival point of view the ability to shut off senses would more likely end up with you being unaware of danger than benefiting. | [
"The proprioceptive sense is often unnoticed because humans will adapt to a continuously present stimulus; this is called habituation, desensitization, or adaptation. The effect is that proprioceptive sensory impressions disappear, just as a scent can disappear over time. One practical advantage of this is that unn... |
when doing heavy excersise\lifting, why do we stop breathing? | > When doing heavy excersise\lifting, why do we stop breathing?
Tensing the muscles of the core will provide extra rigidity in the torso and can aid in whatever physical exertion you are attempting, but of course this makes it impossible to breath properly. It is a trade of breath for core strength. | [
"During heavy breathing as in exertion, a large number of accessory muscles in the neck and abdomen are recruited, that during exhalation pull the ribcage down, decreasing the volume of the thoracic cavity. The FRC is now decreased, but since the lungs cannot be emptied completely there is still about a litre of re... |
why do people raise their right hand when they take an oath? | Well, this is an interesting story. You know how we brand cattle? It's pretty much that. In Europe, 1600's, judges didn't have a way to keep track of who did what and got punished for what. So when criminals were given a light punishment, the judges would sometimes brand a letter on the convict's thumb to keep track of past crimes, so they could give a heftier punishment. Thus began the practice of raising your right hand so the judge can inspect it for any brandings. It evolved from there into what we have today.
tl:dr Old filing system. | [
"Raising one’s right hand while taking an oath originates from the courts of 17th century London. As judges did not have a reliable method of keeping track of criminal records, branding was sometimes chosen as a punishment, usually for defendants who were given leniency. For example, if the defendant received lenie... |
why do cats only meow at humans and not at other cats? | Cats know how to comunicate properly without vocalisation, they just have to dumb it down to get their point across to humans | [
"A meow is a vocalization of cats. They have diverse tones and are sometimes chattered, murmured, whispered or muttered. Adult cats rarely meow to each other, so an adult cat meowing to human beings is probably a post-domestication extension of meowing by kittens, a call for attention.\n",
"Cats have learned how ... |
why do elves, dwarves, orcs and goblins appear in most things 'fantasy'? why do they usually follow the same lore and where did they come from? | Many of these creatures, specifically elves, dwarves, and trolls, originally appeared in Norse mythology. They were introduced to modern fantasy by Tolkien in Lord of the Rings and surrounding books. | [
"Many fantasy creatures are inspired by European folklore and the romances of medieval Europe. Dragons and unicorns are among the most popular creatures. Other monsters, such as griffins, giants, and goblins also appear. Races of intelligent beings such as elves, dwarves, and gnomes often draw their history from me... |
Does half-and-half keep coffee warm longer, and if so why? | I never heard of half & half but from what I can find it's half cream and half milk.
Dairy products usually contain fat, which has a different specific heat from water. I'm guessing it's lower so it would make hot coffee+h & h cool even faster. But since you usually don't heat the h & h but add it cold/roomtemp it's cooling the coffee.
So your colleague is not making much sense | [
"Extending the shelf life of roasted coffee relies on maintaining an optimum environment to protect it from exposure to heat, oxygen, and light. Roasted coffee has an optimal typical shelf life of two weeks, and ground coffee about 15 minutes. Without some sort of preservation method, coffee becomes stale. The firs... |
How much control did the English King have over the Welsh Marches (11th and 12th centuries) and what legal systems did they use? | The Welsh marches and their Earls are quite an interesting part of the Anglo-Norman Kingdom, so forgive me if this post doesn't become too in-depth!
When William I succeeded in his conquest of England he appointed three of his most trusted and capable followers as Earls, William FitzOsbern as Earl of Hereford, Roger de Montgomerie as Earl of Shrewsbury and Hugh d'Avranches as Earl of Chester. They were certainly not usurpers, but they were granted special privileges which continued to be recognised throughout the 11th and 12th centuries (and beyond). They were most certainly a part of the Kingdom of England, but the privileges they enjoyed were quite significant, and this may have led to the confusion expressed in the title question.
The most significant privilege was perhaps the ability to ignore any peace or treaty the King had made with the Welsh Princes. For example, if King Henry II were to make peace with the Prince of Gwnyedd, this peace treaty would not apply to the Marcher Lords and a separate peace would need to be negotiated with them if the Ruler of Gwynedd wanted 'total' peace with his Anglo-Norman neighbours.
Other privileges included being exempt from royal taxation and being able to create their own markets and other economic assets. These differences are primarily due to the Marches being a 'frontier' zone, and as such were more likely to be raided and less security/profit was to be had then say central East-Anglia. However, this also meant the Marcher Lords were free to expand at the expense of their Welsh counterparts, so the very instability which made the marcher territories unstable also made them more profitable. Ultimately they were still vassals to the King and did have to support the King during times of war.
They encouraged migrants from England, Normandy, Brittany and modern day Belgium to settle in the areas of Wales they controlled. These settlers were often attracted by economic incentives, such as cheap land or favourable taxes. It can be argued that this gave the Marcher Lords less power over their subjects, or at least the migrants, but they did also enjoy the right to levy men into their forces as they saw fit, like other English Earls, so this is debatable.
Your question about law is tricky, as often the marcher lords would differentiate between which laws they followed, sometimes following the English laws and sometimes following the Welsh. This resulted in several debates as to which laws were to be followed in different cases.
In sum, although the Marcher Lords were part of the English Kingdom, they had privileges which other English Lords did not. Their control over their subjects was certainly no less then other English Lords, unless it was impeded by terms they themselves offered to attract new settlers. The English laws they followed were often exchanged for the Welsh and vice versa.
I hope this answered your question somewhat!
Sources:
Many of the rights are renewed in the Magna Carta, article 56 is of particular interest.
A book which discusses the status of the Marcher Lords, although the work also deals with a great many other Kings, Princes and Lords, is J. Benham's 'Peacemaking in the Middle Ages', and may be of interest if you'd like to read further of Medieval diplomatic practice.
| [
"The Marches remained outside the shire system, and nominally outside the control of the English monarchy, until the first Laws in Wales Act was introduced in 1535 under Henry VIII. This, and a further Act in 1542, annexed Wales to England and created a single state and legal jurisdiction, commonly referred to as E... |
If there were two passes at the Battle of Thermopylae,what made the Greeks decide to defend the first and ignore the latter? | The Greeks did defend that path, [Herodotus 7.217.2-3](_URL_0_) points out that a detachment of a thousand Phocians had volunteered to defend the path. The Greeks were clearly aware of its potential as a vulnerability to their position but the Persian force under Hydarnes drove them from their position. The news of this event, which apparently made the Greek defence untenable, precipitated the withdrawal of most Greek forces aside from Leonidas and his royal guard, who as we well know were killed in the final stand. | [
"Tactically, the pass at Thermopylae was ideally suited to the Greek style of warfare. A hoplite phalanx could block the narrow pass with ease, with no risk of being outflanked by cavalry. Moreover, in the pass, the phalanx would have been very difficult to assault for the more lightly armed Persian infantry. The m... |
How would a freedman (or woman) be able to prove he was not a fugitive/runaway slave in the Southern USA? | Manumission papers would be provided by former owners to their newly freed slaves. By the middle of the 19th century in Georgia and other states freedmen had to register with the state, providing proof how they became free, whether by birth or manumission.
[Source](_URL_0_) | [
"When the slaves were found missing, masters did everything they could to find the runaways. Flyers would be put up, posses to find him/her would be sent out, and under the new Fugitive Slave Act they could now send federal marshals into the north to extract them. This new law also brought bounty hunters into the b... |
Is it possible to write an equation for eccentric anomaly of an elliptical orbit in terms of time? | You have to use an iterative method, unfortunately.
The process is nicely outlined [here](_URL_0_). It takes several steps, and you will generally want to use a numerical algorithm to solve some of the equations, because they don't have exact solutions.
However, the results can still be very accurate, because you aren't integrating the equations of motion directly (e.g. calculating velocities & positions at each time-step), and that means that errors *don't* add up over time. There is an inherent error in using a numerical method, but it's small.
But yeah, there's no closed-form analytic equation to nicely plug in. You need a computer really. | [
"The 'eccentric anomaly' is useful to compute the position of a point moving in a Keplerian orbit. As for instance, if the body passes the periastron at coordinates , , at time , then to find out the position of the body at any time, you first calculate the mean anomaly from the time and the mean motion by the form... |
why is it the faster we go in and vehicle or mode of transportation we get wobbly? | Because no matter what medium you're traveling on/in, there are irregularities and the faster you pass over/through them, the more quickly they displace you.
Think of it like someone grabbing your shoulders and moving them back and forth. If they do it slowly, you dont feel much of an effect. If they do it quickly, your head will whip back and forth. | [
"Drivers make more mistakes and are more likely to have collisions when they are presented with the complex driving situations created by numerous conflict points. Conversely, simplifying the driving task contributes to improved traffic operations and fewer collisions. A less complex driving environment is accompli... |
why do americans still refer to their presidents as leaders of the free world. | It's primarily a military thing. The United States has a stronger military than all other free countries combined, and so a lot of the world depends on it for security guarantees. Presidents are commanders-in-chief of the US military, ergo "leader of the free world."
There is also nostalgia involved for when the US led in other departments. It still overwhelmingly leads in a lot of technological and scientific fields, but the curve is flatter and no longer reflected in a political situation that is now radically retrograde.
It will be a long time, if ever, before any credible person again uses the term "leader of the free world" unironically to describe an American politician.
| [
"The \"Leader of the Free World\" was a colloquialism, first used during the Cold War, to describe either the United States or, more commonly, the President of the United States. The term when used in this context suggested that the United States was the principal democratic superpower, and the US President was by ... |
why do you all of a sudden start busting to go to the bathroom when you near your home and not while out and about? | The same reason you cling to your blankie and not some random blanket from someone's house down the street. A sense of security | [
"Psychiatrist Takashi Sumioka (1997), meanwhile, has noted the possibility that hidden behind the symptom of \"wanting to go to the bathroom\" may be a condition such as irritable bowel syndrome or anxiety disorder.\n",
"They stop at an isolated gas station, as the girl wants to use the bathroom. As the girl has ... |
why have i never seen an indian or chinese baby with down syndrome | Because you couldn't be bothered to use [Google](_URL_0_)? That's Chinese conductor Hu Yizhou, and he has Down Syndrome, just in case somebody thinks I was making the inference based solely on his appearance. India even has their own [Down Syndrome Federation](_URL_1_) so it's not an unknown phenomenon to them. | [
"A Japanese baby girl born to an Indian surrogate mother was in legal limbo after the couple who had intended to raise her divorced. The three-month-old baby had been unable to leave India after her birth because she holds neither an Indian nor a Japanese nationality. The issue was resolved after the Japanese Gover... |
Did they smoke cannabis/marijuana in medieval Europe? | Short answer: No. Cannabis is indigenous to south Asia, whereas smoking was a practice first developed in the Americas. Trans-Atlantic travelers in the 1500s would smoke tobacco when they were in the Americas, but most Europeans looked down on smoking as something backwards or dangerous. Only in the 1600s did Europeans begin to import and smoke tobacco in large quantities. Tobacco smoking probably reached the Ottoman Empire (Turkey and the Middle East) around 1610, and the Ottomans soon began to experiment smoking other substances as well. Marijuana smoking began shortly thereafter, and the water pipe (hookah) was soon developed to further facilitate this practice.
But there's reason to believe that cannabis was at least occasionally used for its psychoactive effects well before the modern period. Cannabis shows up in the archaeological record beginning around 3000 BC. Herodotus wrote in the 400s BC that the Scythians (a Central Asian steppe people, around the Black and Caspian Seas) would make incense from the seeds of a hemp plant, which [*might*](_URL_9_) have been cannabis. Archaeologists found a [Scythian grave](_URL_8_) from that same time which included a tent, a censor, and cannabis seeds. (Herodotus was often inventive, so corroborating evidence is useful.) As far as I know, however, this is an isolated find, which means that using cannabis in incense was probably not a wide-spread practice and may have been very short-lived; it might only have been coincidence that Herodotus found out about this particularly interesting Scythian fad.
Consistent reports of using cannabis for its psychoactive properties only begin to appear in the 1100s in Arabic sources (at the height of the spread of Sufism). These make it clear that the cannabis was being chewed or eaten to produce an intoxicating state. But as is often the case with these sorts of texts, we can't be 100% sure that the plant being talked about is the same one that we call cannabis today. Language can change rapidly. After all, in the 1100s English sounded something like [this](_URL_1_)).
That's not to say that there weren't other psychoactive substances available in medieval Europe. For instance, several hundred seeds of [henbane](_URL_2_) showed up in one Viking Age female grave in Denmark, and henbane later appears as a common ingredient in witches' ointments for shape shifting. This isn't my area of expertise, so I'd recommend posting a question about psychoactive substances in the middle ages if you want other examples.
* Marcy Norton, [*Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World*](_URL_5_) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
* Neil S. Price, [*The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia*](_URL_3_) (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2002), 205-6 ("Narcotics and intoxicants"). Price also notes that Viking Age sites have produced a total of five cannabis seeds, excavated with the [Oseberg ship burial](_URL_6_).
* Gabriel Nahas, "[Hashish in Islam, 9th to 18th Century](_URL_4_)," *Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine* 58.9 (1982), pp. 814-31.
See also:
* [Did ancient Romans smoke cannabis, and if they didn't, why might they have not?](_URL_0_)
* [How did shisha smoking become a part of Muslim society?](_URL_7_) | [
"Cannabis was common in Eurasia before the arrival of tobacco, and is known to have been used since at least 5000 BC. Cannabis was not commonly smoked directly until the advent of tobacco in the 16th century. Before this cannabis and numerous other plants were vaporized on hot rocks or charcoal, burned as incense o... |
What decade did the printing press gain its first 'spike' of popularity/ wide usage in England? | England was never really a printing center. This is not to say that a print center did not exist in London, or that print production did not rapidly overtake manuscripts from the late 15th c. on, as it did elsewhere in Europe. However, compared to Germany, France, and Italy. For example, for the period from 1450-1600, 75,500 titles were printed in France, 88,000 in Italy, and 94,000 in Germany. For the same period, England produced 15,127. Scholars in England usually sought a publisher on the continent for their works. There are a variety of reasons for this: the Reformation(s) boosted production in Germany, England's geography and state apparatuses made shutting down illicit printers a fairly trivial task, continental publishers were solidly established, to name a few. England remained a net importer of books until at least the 19th century.
Facts and figures taken from Andrew Pettegree's *The Book in the Renaissance*. | [
"The spread of printing affected the transmission of literature across Britain and Ireland. The first book printed in English, William Caxton's own translation of \"Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye\", was printed abroad in 1473, to be followed by the establishment of the first printing press in England in 1474. \... |
why taking antibiotics long term does not lead to antibiotic resistance, but taking them for too short of a time (ie not finishing the prescription) does? | It's like weeding a garden.
If you don't get the roots out, the weeds come back.
Kill all the weeds and you keep a healthy garden, leave the roots and they come back.
But with anti-biotics it survival of the fittest, the most resistant survive the die off and re-populate with a more resistant strain. | [
"Antibiotic resistance increases with duration of treatment. Therefore, as long as an effective minimum is kept, shorter courses of antibiotics are likely to decrease rates of resistance, reduce cost, and have better outcomes with fewer complications. Short course regimens exist for community-acquired pneumonia spo... |
What kind of a woman would a peasant man in 17-19th century Europe find physically attractive? | All right, y'all, here's what's up:
There are over 100 comments in this thread. *Yes*, they have all been removed barring a follow-up that is closely related to OP's question. *Yes*, they all violate AskHistorians' rules in some way. Here is what you are missing:
Category | Tally
--------|-----
Mod comment | 3
If you know so much, why don't you answer? | 2
But I [circle one] want/need/deserve an answer | 21
Question is unanswerable | 10
Stop ruining reddit | 5
Follow-up questions | 14
*Unique* follow-up questions | 1
1-5 word answer | 15
Joke | 12
Bestiality joke | 3
Monty Python joke | 2
People who think the 17th-19th century are the Middle Ages | 5
Blatant misogyny | 4
RemindMe! messages | 4
Block quotes/links | 5
Evo psych speculation | 6
The more people complain about the number of removed comments, the more removed comments there are going to be.
You've all been warned, now twice, about shitposting in AskHistorians. We've banned ~~five~~ 11 people based on this thread already. [Don't be number ~~six~~ 12.](_URL_0_) | [
"If these descriptions are accurate, it is difficult to understand why a woman as gifted as Lillie would marry a man with such shortcomings. In her memoirs \"The Days I Knew\" she explains that Edward Langtry was an extremely shy person, and had spent his life since leaving Oxford in outdoor country sports. In Lond... |
Are there any real-life examples of historical figures "redeeming" themselves? | Aristodemus was one of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, who survived because he left the battlefield due to an eye infection, given permission by Leonidas to do so. However, upon returning to Sparta, he was publicly and widely shamed for this action, partially because his fellow Spartan with the same eye infection chose to fight anyway. At the Battle of Plataea, he fought with incredible, suicidal bravery and died, and by most accounts certainly deserved great honours for his heroic conduct. However, the warrior mentality of Sparta did not revere the warrior who fought as an individual but rather emphasized the group, probably due to their being the masters of phalanx warfare at the time, and Aristodemus had broken this ideal by fighting suicidally and accorded him no honours. However, he nevertheless cleared his name of the accusation of cowardice that plagued him after Thermopylae. | [
"In the Fortress of Regrets, The Nameless One encounters three of his past incarnations: one practical, one good, and one paranoid. The Nameless One learns that the \"good\" incarnation was the original man who was made immortal by Ravel, and learns that he had committed immeasurably terrible sins in his lifetime. ... |
how is it possible to run 4 million volts of raw electricity trough a human body without damaging anything? | This is a bit beyond me, because I'm a computer engineer and not an electrical engineer, but I'll do my best.
First, volts do not "flow". An electric current is electrons moving through something. A current is measured in amperes or amps. Amps are a measurement of how many electrons move through something per second. Volts are a measure of how much the electrons want to move, or how hard the electrons are being pushed. A good analogy is water in a pipe. Electric current, or amps, is just like water flow through the pipe. Volts is like water pressure, or how hard the water is being pushed through the pipe. The two are related, but not the same thing.
The reason these guys are able to do what they do is because the electricity is not actually flowing through their body. They are wearing metal mesh suits, and the electric current is flowing through those suits and *around* their bodies. This is probably happening due to the skin effect, because they are probably using high frequency alternating current.
Going back to our water analogy, direct current is like what you're used to with water flowing through a pipe. The water/electrons only ever move in one direction through the pipe/wire. With alternating current, the flow alternates direction. In other words, the electrons kind of slosh back and forth.
Imagine you have a setup like [this](_URL_0_). If you were to move one of those pistons up and down, the other piston would also move up and down. The water in the pipe between them would move back and forth. This is alternating current.
Alternating current also has a frequency. If you move the piston up and down slowly (once per second) that is a low frequency. If you move the piston up and down quickly (100 times a second) that is a high frequency.
Now, here's where the similarity between water and electricity starts to break down. Electrical current does not move through all parts of a wire evenly. The higher the frequency is, the more that current gets pushed to the outside of the wire. This is called the "skin effect" because all the electricity flows through the skin of the wire.
Now let's put this all together in the context of the Lords of Lighting. They put on these metal suits and run high frequency alternating current in one arm and out the other. If you think of their arms as wires, all that high frequency electricity gets pushed to the outside of the "wire", or the metal sleeve around the arm. Since none of the electricity flows through the dude's actual arm, and only around it through the suit, the guy stays safe. | [
"Human powered direct current generators are commercially available, and have been the project of some DIY enthusiasts. Typically operated by means of pedal power, a converted bicycle trainer, or a foot pump, such generators can be practically used to charge batteries, and in some cases are designed with an integra... |
why do we put so much effort in keeping certain species from going extinct and invasive species out of foreign areas when the more "natural" thing to do is let it happen? (read description for clarification) | Endangered is one thing. And more so humans trying to take responsibility for their actions. Most animals that are really endangered, it's partially our fault.
As for invasives, the thing is, naturally it wouldn't have happened in the first place. How is a Python from Burma going to relocate to the Florida Everglades without human interference? (Funny thing is they are endangered in Burma, but super invasive where I live. Idk why we don't just ship em over).
So, short answer for endangered, guilty humans. For invasive, depends.
Edit: I just want to reiterate I'm not like some tree hugger or human-hater that blames my fellow species for everything. Like I've seen other people say, it's hard to rule out what animal is genuinely endangered and which is our fault. | [
"Removal of exotic species will allow the species that they have negatively impacted to recover their ecological niches. Exotic species that have become pests can be identified taxonomically (e.g., with Digital Automated Identification SYstem (DAISY), using the barcode of life). Removal is practical only given larg... |
how come an xbox, which features 6 year old hardware, can run modern games smoother than my recently built pc? | When you program a game, you have to plan for what machine it'll run on. If I'm planning on making a game on Xbox, I can do some fancy tricks to make the game look even nicer than the games that first came out, but if the game needs a higher spec than what the Xbox is built for I need to start again.
So how do I make games for the Xbox look newer while using old technology? Well I only have 512 MB of RAM, which isn't a great deal by today's standards, but how much of the RAM do I actually need to use? It'd be nice if I could just build my program without thinking about it, which is what people could do when it first came out, but nowadays if I want to make something that looks good I've got to be very spartan about how much of the Xbox I *really* need to do what I want.
Doing this is called **optimization**, don't say in a hundred words what could better be said with ten! The drawback to doing this is at some point you've stopped cleaning your code, and have done so many optimizations that your game is 'built' for an Xbox. Is the Xbox bad at Graphic Card Input/Output?^1 Better send requests in bulk! However, this isn't always best for computers that *aren't* Xbox's, so you end up making your code slower for non-Xbox computers.
^1 I don't know if the Xbox *is* particularly bad at this, just throwing an example | [
"Because the Chihiro and Xbox share the same hardware architecture, porting from the Chihiro is theoretically easier than porting from a different arcade platform. In practice, there are a number of challenges - the first being that the half-size main memory restricts the size of the working set and the second bein... |
Do Humans take the longest to mature or are there other animals out there that take longer? | There's some animals that take a similar amount of time, e.g. blue whales and elephants. Elephants usually hit sexual maturity around 16-17 years old and stop growing around 25, where humans stop growing around 20. Blue whales and tortoises are also similar, with blue whales maturing at around 15 or so, and tortoises in between 10-16. | [
"Sexual maturity is reached at around 20–25 years in captivity, possibly 40 years in the wild. Life expectancy in the wild is thought to be over 100 years, making it one of the longest-lived species in the animal kingdom. Harriet, a specimen kept in Australia Zoo, was the oldest known Galápagos tortoise, having rea... |
what happens when you're on a ship in the ocean and there's an earthquake below you? | Does the ship shake? No. Water would not transfer those vibrations.
However, depending on the type of quake, you could see some major waves or swells.
Earthquakes are created when two plates either rub together laterally or if one plate slips under the other. The second case would cause the sea to drop, causing a mammoth disturbance on the surface. This concept was the basis for the Poseidon Adventure. | [
"The cause, in my opinion, of this phenomenon must be sought in the earthquake. At the point where its shock has been the most violent the sea is driven back, and suddenly recoiling with redoubled force, causes the inundation. Without an earthquake I do not see how such an accident could happen.\n",
"The cause, i... |
why is the recommended pressure so small (to the point of being practically invisible) on my car tires? | Car tires typically only list a maximum pressure, which you should not be using.
The car itself lists a recommended pressure, typically on the driver's door or door jamb, as well as in the manual. This should be easy to find and read, and will list front/rear separately.
Two vehicles using exactly the same tires will have different recommendations based on their weight and purpose. You should always go by the manufacturer recommended pressure and not the maximum on the tire. | [
"The pressure rating of tires is usually stamped somewhere on the sidewall. This may be in psi (pounds per square inch) or bar. The pressure rating could be indicated as \"Maximum Pressure,\" or \"Inflate to . . . \" and will usually give a range (for example, 90-120 psi, or 35-60 psi). Inflating to the lower numbe... |
Is there a way of determining the boiling point of any(known) substance other than trying? | For a material we don't know the boiling point?
You can predict the melting point using [Lindemann's criterion](_URL_0_) (for crystalline solids) by looking at the how the vibrational frequency of atoms vary with temperature. At some temperature, the atoms could occupy the same space, so the material melts.
However, I am not sure of the accuracy of the estimate | [
"Boiling-point elevation describes the phenomenon that the boiling point of a liquid (a solvent) will be higher when another compound is added, meaning that a solution has a higher boiling point than a pure solvent. This happens whenever a non-volatile solute, such as a salt, is added to a pure solvent, such as wat... |
whats so great about the raspberry pi? what can you do with it?? | Everything a computer can. It's basically a cheap computer with decent processing power (though not as much as your average desktop PC).
I use mine (1st gen Pi) to download torrents, watch movies, host a couple of small websites and store backups on an external drive I hooked up to it. People I know use it to play simple games (NES emulator, etc), control stuff in their home like lights and heating, and even to record/watch footage from their security cameras, and all that is still pretty tame compared to what I've seen people on the interwebz do with it.
As long as you're okay with using Linux there is a very wide range possibilities, for just €35. | [
"The Raspberry Pi is a series of small single-board computers developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote teaching of basic computer science in schools and in developing countries. The original model became far more popular than anticipated, selling outside its target market for uses s... |
why is it easy to drink 6 pints of beer but not 6 pints or even 2 pints of water? | I think it's mostly psychological. As water is fairly tasteless, and beer is rich with taste.
And in nature, (mostly) the food with more flavor has more vitamins and nutrition, so your body responds more positively.
(Not a doctor or anything that has to do with anything at all) | [
"Those typically available are the 200 ml, 285 ml (10 fl oz) and 425 ml (15 fl oz), with increasingly many pubs also having pints (570 ml, 20 imp fl oz) available. It is also common for pubs and hotels to serve large jugs filled to 1140ml (i.e. two pints).\n",
"In Canada, the Weights and Measures Act (R.S. 1985),... |
why do i feel like i'm going to pass out when i become too anxious? | When you suffer from anxiety, feeling faint is almost exclusively caused by hyperventilation. Also known as "over-breathing," hyperventilation occurs when you breathe out too much carbon dioxide as a result of poor breathing habits.
Interestingly, hyperventilation feels like the exact opposite – when you're hyperventilating, it often feels as though you're not getting enough oxygen. So those that are hyperventilating have a tendency to try to take even deeper breaths – breathing in more oxygen to compensate.
This makes it worse. The abundance of oxygen and the depletion of CO2 causes your blood vessels to constrict, which reduces blood flow to the brain. When your brain doesn't feel like it's getting enough blood, it prepares you for passing out, because the easiest way to make sure blood flow reaches your brain is when you're on the floor. | [
"People feel less anxious when close to their attachments because their attachments can provide support during difficult situations. Support includes the comfort, assistance, and information people receive from their attachments.\n",
"People with anxious-preoccupied attachment tend to be hypervigilant to signs of... |
Jews were expelled and banned from England in 1290 by Edward I until Cromwell began to readmit them in 1655. Given medieval era Jews' roles as lenders and merchant bankers did their 366 year absence have any noticeable affect on the English economy? | After the expulsion of the Jews in the middle ages the vacuum was filled by Italian merchants, Lombard Street in the 'City of London' (the financial district of London) is named after Lombardy where many hailed from.
The laws against usury prevented them from charging interest on loans until 1546, when Henry VIII repealed them, but they had other means of making profits such as skimming some off the top when they exchanged foreign currencies for clients.
There were in fact ethnic Jewish communities reintroduced to England from the late 15th c, the 'conversos' Iberian Jews who had been converted to Christianity, were allowed to settle. Many worshipped as Jews in secret, despite being publicly Christian and evidence of this is still found in Street names such as 'Jacob's Well'
There is not consensus on whether Cromwell officially readmitted the Jews allowing them to worship openly, although he was petitioned to do so the first formal declarations to that effect were issued by Charles II, not Cromwell.
As to whether it affected the economy - it does not seem so, England experienced periods of substantial economic growth throughout this period, with major set-backs being accounted for by environmental factors such as epidemic disease affecting the workforce and famine reducing productivity. The expulsion of the Jews happened at a time when the Crown and Parliament was already shifting their money raising activities from acquiring loans to relying on direct taxation based on land tenure (tallage), because of this, along with the use of tactics such as blatant extortion, the Jewish community did not have the profits that money lending to the government had brought in previous generations and so they were declining financially and running out of money to lend. This meant that there was little incentive for the government to keep them in England with an anti-semitic general population.
_URL_3_
_URL_2_
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_URL_1_ | [
"In 1656, Oliver Cromwell made it clear that the ban on Jewish settlement in England and Wales would no longer be enforced, although when Rabbi Manasseh Ben Israel brought a petition to allow Jews to return, the majority of the Protectorate Government turned it down. Gradually Jews eased back into England, first vi... |
why do some judges ask a person to pay more alimony/child support, than what they make in a month? or a extremely high % of what they make in a month? | A lot of it is based on previous employment. Say you had a job that made 6000 a month last year, well your wife and you split, and you get depressed and lose the job because of whatever reason.
The judge will assume that your previous income is your earning potential and charge accordingly. In most cases this is complete fudge nuggets for the father and he gets hosed on the arrangement.
This was probably *and i have no source for this* brought in because of some fathers trying to skip out on alimony by claiming a lower income immediately after a divorce just to stiff the wife while hiding their current income. | [
"In September 2008, the Delhi High Court in a verdict said that a woman earning sufficient income is not entitled to maintenance from her divorced husband. The verdict came after a man challenged a family court's decision to grant monthly alimony to his wife. The man had pointed out that his wife was earning for mo... |
Can cats see in Infrared? Like being able to see if something is hot or not... | Not an answer to your main question, but just to nail a misconception: it's not true that infrared = heat. All types of electromagnetic radiation are capable of heating things if they are sufficiently strong.
You yourself can see if something is hot - heat up metal, for example, and it starts to glow, first red, then orange, then yellow, and then white, as it gets hotter. What's happening here is that the average frequency of the electromagnetic radiation it is giving off is shifting from lower frequencies (infrared before it is heated) to higher (red, orange, yellow, etc). When it is giving off radiation at all visual frequencies, the metal is white-hot. | [
"Pit vipers, pythons and some boas have organs that allow them to detect infrared light, such that these snakes are able to sense the body heat of their prey. The common vampire bat may also have an infrared sensor on its nose. It has been found that birds and some other animals are tetrachromats and have the abili... |
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