question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
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Does fanning yourself with a piece of paper actually make you hotter? | If it feels cool, it's making you cooler. We lose heat primarily by conduction of energy from our bodies to the surrounding air, and by cooling that results when your sweat evaporates into that same surrounding air. If you sat perfectly still and there were no air currents around you, the air around you would warm to your body temperature and essentially provide an envelope of insulation. Fanning yourself does two things--it removes this envelope of hot air, and increases the rate of evaporation, both of which result in net heat loss from the body.
I suppose, if you were outside in 100F+ air at 100% humidity, fanning yourself wouldn't do much for you, but if that were the case I'd imagine you'd be headed towards heatstroke pretty quickly in any case. | [
"BULLET::::- When the fan is used to speed up heat transfer, the air circulation will increase the amount of airborne dust in the heated room. This can be a problem for people with allergies. Therefore, central heating is a better source of heat for allergy sufferers. This can be avoided by not using the fan, but t... |
what is a proxy, how do i get one and why do i want to? | a proxy is where you have a computer look at web pages remotely and it then will send that web page to you. It is useful to do this when you would like to conceal the computer you are working on or just want content that is not available where you are (if you are in China you might want one in Africa to avoid censorship. Or anyone may want a proxy in the UK during the Olympics to get all the events live streamed that were not allowed to be viewed outside of the country).
_URL_0_
TOR appears to have a proxy within a proxy and so on that changes periodically. "Users of a Tor network run an onion proxy on their machine." the onion here referring to layers, you have multiple layers of proxies.
I wouldn't be too concerned with any proxy on your computer, unless you did not install it on there. If that is the case, you may want to ask about people who were using your computer.
| [
"Proxy is defined by supreme courts as \"an \"authority\" or power to \"do\" a certain thing.\" A person can confer on his proxy any power which he himself possesses. He may also give him secret instructions as to voting upon particular questions. But a proxy is ineffectual when it is contrary to law or public poli... |
what is jihadism? what do jihadists believe? | "Jihad" means struggle. Whether that be the struggle of nofap, depression, etc. Anything that a person is struggling with, becomes their jihad. Some uneducated people in the middle east think this means they can struggle against tyranny of government dictatorship by blowing up innocents rawr! But that's contradictory because in the Quran it states that it is forbidden to kill an innocent man, woman, child, wildlife or even plants when in a war situation. | [
"Jihad () is an Islamic term referring to the religious duty of Muslims to maintain the religion. In Arabic, the word \"jihād\" is a noun meaning \"to strive, to apply oneself, to struggle, to persevere\". A person engaged in jihad is called a \"mujahid\", the plural of which is \"mujahideen\" (). The word \"jihad\... |
I’m reading Founding Brothers, a book about the American Revolution and stories concerning the Founding Fathers, and I have a question that I can’t any stop thinking about... | You're on the right track. Ellis wrote a chapter about slavery which had a lot of moving parts and he wasn't quite as clear about them as he could have been.
There are two important parts here, one of which is reasonably easy to tease out and the other being quite murky. So let's start with the easy part: The Constitution prohibits any ban on the import of enslaved people from Africa or other points abroad until 1808. Until that time, Congress is forbidden to do any such thing. Afterwards, the option exists. It's take at the first available instant, the ban becoming legally (but not substantially) effective at 12:01 AM, 1 January 1808. Especially in the early years there is a lot of smuggling of people, including a notorious case where the former governor of Georgia was part of an illegal importation scheme that involved using a member of the Creek Nation as a potential fall guy and bringing people in through Spanish Florida, for transit through Creek territory and thence out to as far west as Texas where one of the financiers shows up as an early-ish American colonist. But enforcement does improve over time and smuggling of enslaved people falls of significantly around 1820.
That is the slave trade, but only in part. Any time one is buying and selling enslaved people one is engaged in the slave trade. Nothing in the laws above prohibited sale of humans between Americans within the bounds of the US. Indeed, even if one got caught breaking the ban on importation it meant you got fined but the people you enslaved remained enslaved and would be sold at auction down the road. *Technically* the matter was left to the states where the people were discovered and prosecution took place, but in practice that's always going to be an enslaving state and they are not in the general manumission business.
What Ellis is mainly talking about there is not the ban on importation or the slave trade general, except insofar as abolishing slavery would mean the end of both. Specifically the petitioners, including Ben Franklin, asked that Congress do something about slavery with an eye toward its eventual extinction. Assuming a majority for that existed (which, I should add, is a bad assumption for any congress until 1861 at the earliest) the next question would be how far Congress' powers reached? Could it pass a law requiring enslavers sell their enslaved people to the nation at a fixed rate, at which point the nation would then manumit them and (probably, because of vicious white supremacy) deport them back to Africa or to somewhere in the American West that white Americans choose to view as empty because no one they acknowledge as worthy of consideration, except genocidally, lives there? There's neither an explicit authorization for such a plan nor an explicit prohibition. What does that mean?
All texts, whether laws or otherwise, are perpetually under social construction. The words to not speak for themselves, but rather signify meanings that people frequently contest. The Constitution is no different, for all that some will try to claim that their preferred reading is simply the null interpretation and everyone else is doing politics. Actual "Constitutional" principles are essentially the speaker's policy preferences of the moment, which Americans for and against enslaving people demonstrate consistently for as long as slavery exists. So the argument for or against Congress' power to emancipate is couched in constitutional terms of what is allowed, it's really about which outcome a majority of Congress prefers. It is, lamentably and unsurprisingly, the horrifying one.
You can't just ignore a petition signed by the ailing Franklin and differences over slavery are so explosive that they disrupt the allegedly great business of the day regarding Alexander Hamilton's financial plan. This is about the pattern for slavery arguments: every other great issue, no matter how imperative, is a relative sideshow. Because the differences are stark and intractable, Congress decides to declare its hands tied on the matter. The report out of committee declares that Congress lacks constitutional power to do anything at all about slavery within the bounds of a state. That protects slavery everywhere that actually has representation, though it leaves an open question as to its statue in the territories. That in due course becomes the front on which the remainder of the question will be fought until 1863.
This is a capitulation presented as a compromise, which makes it marginally more acceptable to antislavery Americans and swiftly becomes the received wisdom of both white parties. Hence Ellis quotes Daniel Webster, decades down the line from 1790, declaring that no other notion had ever been entertained. Lincoln would argue the same, declaring that neither he nor his avowedly antislavery party intended to alter the situation within the enslaving states. That's the Silence to which Ellis' chapter speaks, though it turns out to not be remotely silent. Insofar as slavery is not debated, it is because powerful white men of both sections decide that antislavery sentiment must be contained and frustrated and they devote considerable energy to that project. Declaring Congress so powerless against slavery was a choice consciously made in just that vein. | [
"BULLET::::- Alexander Hamilton—Founding Father, American Revolutionary War officer and aide-de-camp to George Washington, initiator and co-author of \"The Federalist Papers\", the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, economist, one of the first U.S. constitutional lawyers (picture appears on U.S. ten dollar bill)... |
Does putting a drinking glass against a door amplify sound made on the other side? | Putting a glass against the wall or door creates a cavity for the pressure waves which make up sounds. The cavity has a quality factor: _URL_0_
This is the effective amount of amplification you will get. The reason it occurs is that waves at curtain wavelengths will constructively interfere with each other creating standing waves in the cavity of greater amplitude than the original wave.
Other frequencies will be damped. So people will sound different but louder.
This effect is not specific to cavities but generally applicable to anything that has a resonance frequency. In RF circuits the Q of a inductor and capacitor combination is often used to effectively create the amplification you want. Because it takes of order Q wavelengths for the standing wave to build up it isn't always desirable. A speaker is an example of a system where low Q is desired. A high Q speaker would mix sounds that played over a time scale cycles related to the Q therefore it would be desirable to have a minimum Q to have crisp high frequency sounds (IE a click, snap or pop that doesn't ring like a cymbal crash). | [
"BULLET::::11. Down in a Mirror\" from \"Chair Beside a Window\" (discussing the way to listen to Jandek—“having a few glasses of wine and sitting down with Jandek and just listening”. Sample lyric: “we can’t deny there’s spirits in this house you shut the door the wind closes two more”)\n",
"Because its sounding... |
where do all the fonts get their names from? | It's a little unclear what you mean, especially as you normally don't name fonts, but rather typefaces and within each typeface normally there are many fonts. Whoever created (or ordered) the typeface gets to name it. Some are named after their predecessors, the "fonts" which were made long before computers, in the dawn of movable type, and in some cases even long before that. Some are named after their creators, like Gill Sans named after Eric Gill. On top of that often comes descriptive qualifiers, like bold, narrow, condensed, italic, and many others, to describe the style of each individual font in the typeface.
It's kind of like having a child, you choose what you name it. For instance a font I made years and years ago I based off the letters on the Nintendo Entertainment System gamepad, I called that font Nentindo Consolic. | [
"Fonts originally consisted of a set of moveable type letterpunches purchased from a type foundry. As early as 1600, the sizes of these types—their \"bodies\"—acquired traditional names in English, French, German, and Dutch, usually from their principal early uses. These names were used relative to the others and t... |
How do recessive genes even exist? | Just because dominant genes are present doesn't stop the recessive gene from existing. You will still have the recessive gene, and still potentially pass it on, just in most cases the gene will be inactive, and not cause any traits to appear. | [
"Normally, two recessive alleles need to be inherited (one from each parent) for the recessive trait to be expressed but recessive merely means that the trait is only expressed in the absence of the dominant alleles. The pattern of inheritance in which a single recessive allele is inherited but is still expressed i... |
Do we know at what point in history the men's necktie was last used as a practical device rather than simply adornment? | Firstly, consider that what we think of as a necktie - a long, vaguely rectangular piece of fabric meant to be knotted (usually in a four-in-hand or a full- or half-Windsor) and allowed to hang down over the shirt front - is a product of the late 19th century, and only really displaced other forms (the bow tie, for instance) in the early 20th century, largely because it was more convenient to tie and wear. Human beings have been wearing neck adornment for a very long time. The English-speaking world has been wearing them on a more-or-less regular basis since the 16th century in the form of a *ruff*. Originally, they may have been intended to protect the shirt, but by the mid 17th century a new accessory, the cravat, had been introduced. Variations on the cravat would dominate western fashion for the next two hundred years or so, made from a bewildering variety of fabrics and colors and tied in innumerable ways. I think we can say with a fair degree of safety that the necktie has been a primarily fashionable garment for the last 250 years at least. | [
"With the industrial revolution, more people wanted neckwear that was easy to put on, was comfortable, and would last an entire workday. Neckties were designed to be long, thin and easy to knot, without accidentally coming undone. This is the necktie design still worn by millions of men.\n",
"The modern necktie t... |
where is drinkable water stored before it hits my taps (big city)? | at the water treatment plant.
it's like they make a batch of 1million gallons and put it in a pool somewhere. the plant is continuously running all the time to filter and make potable water. | [
"BULLET::::- Places for water collection: either water tanks where water is off-loaded from trucks (then filtered and potentially treated with disinfectant chemicals such as chlorine), or water tap stands that are connected to boreholes. UNHCR recommends 20 litres of water per person and one tap stand per 80 person... |
Is there any net difference in the way my body handles 1000 calories in one sitting vs. 1000 calories over the course of a day? | _URL_0_
The above link is a meta review of several different papers. At the bottom of the page there are 34 papers that were considered when the review was written.
Overall there is little difference. Remember that even a living thing obeys the laws of thermodynamics. Energy stored is equal to energy gained minus energy spent. | [
"According to nutritionix.com, the regular serving size of champurrado (1 cup/177g) contains approximately 163 calories and 57 calories from fat. Considering that the average calories a person to consume per day is approximately between 2000- 2500, 163 calories isn't bad at all. The calories from fat also aren’t ba... |
why is it that when rain falls, it doesn’t hurt us although it has an enormous potential energy as the water has a mass, and the height is unbelievable? | Water droplets don't have that much mass so they can't carry that much potential energy to begin with.
Since they are a liquid the energy is also dissipated upon impact. Compared to something like hail that is frozen and hard and has enough force to cause a lot of damage.
There is also terminal velocity, once an object reaches terminal velocity it can't accelerate anymore even if it still has a great distance to fall. So overall altitude isn't as big of a factor. | [
"If air near the surface becomes extremely warm and unstable, its upward motion can become quite explosive, resulting in towering cumulonimbiform clouds that can cause severe weather. As tiny water particles that make up the cloud group together to form droplets of rain, they are pulled down to earth by the force o... |
Why are serious sicknesses like the flu so rare while colds are so common? | The flu is an actual, identified, virus. The "cold" is not a real thing. It's just a word we use for a general infection that could be caused by any of billions of bacteria/viruses. The body has the same reaction though, so we just tend to use one name, instead of pointlessly trying to identify and name each and every minor occurance.
You get colds more often because it's almost never caused by the same thing, no immune tolerance for it. The flu strain stays relatively similar, and your body can actually fend it off for awhile after an attack. | [
"Common symptoms of the flu such as fever, headaches, and fatigue are the result of the huge amounts of proinflammatory cytokines and chemokines (such as interferon or tumor necrosis factor) produced from influenza-infected cells. In contrast to the rhinovirus that causes the common cold, influenza does cause tissu... |
how can sterility caused by a crispr gene drive spread when sterile mosquitoes can't breed? | One technique involves releasing large volumes of sterile male mosquitoes to reduce populations. Even though they can't breed successfully, they still *try,* and this means the sterile males are competing with their non-sterilized brethren, which means fewer female mosquitoes actually successfully mate and produce eggs.
Another technique involves releasing a mutation that only impacts female offspring, while leaving male offspring virile. This means that, while the females born of the next generation are unlikely to pass on the gene, the males can still go out and reproduce with unrelated females, and potentially modify *their* lineage to also produce sterile females. Ultimately a population with only sterile females will collapse, even if the males could still theoretically reproduce. | [
"The inherited sterility in insects is induced by substerilizing doses of ionizing radiation. When partially sterile males mate with wild females, the radiation-induced deleterious effects are inherited by the F1 generation. As a result, egg hatch is reduced and the resulting offspring are both highly sterile and p... |
What happens when a cell becomes cancerous? | Cancer is a disease of uncontrolled cellular growth. Your body has many mechanisms in place to prevent a cell from dividing uncontrollably. But when the DNA of a cell is mutated, the proteins that govern cell cycle activity can be changed, and a cell may be able to circumvent the body's mechanisms.
For instance, let's say there is a protein in a cell that receives growth signals from the extracellular environment. This protein has two domains - part of it sits outside the cell, and part sits inside. Something happens to your body, and a signal is sent out to stimulate cell division. The outer domain of the protein receives this signal, causing a change in the inner domain. This inner domain releases a signal inside the cell that starts the process of cellular division.
Now let's say that the DNA that encodes for this protein becomes mutated. By rearranging the A's, G's, T's, and C's of the DNA, the amino acid sequence that makes up the protein gets scrambled. This causes the protein to fold in a different way, and suddenly the whole structure is changed. Perhaps it turns out that the protein is changed in such a way that the inner domain is always "on," regardless of whether or not the outer domain is receiving growth signals. So this cell has become *self- sufficient* with regards to growth - it doesn't need outside stimulation to start dividing.
This one mutation may seem like enough to cause cancer, but there are many redundant mechanisms which prevent this one mutation from causing a cancerous growth to form. The cell must also become *insensitive* to anti-growth signals and insensitive to cellular suicide signals. It also usually activates a protein that protects the end-caps on its DNA, and de-activates other DNA repair proteins. It also is able to recruit blood vessel growth, and becomes invasive. Collectively, these traits are called [the Hallmarks of Cancer](_URL_0_). | [
"Cancer cells are created when the genes responsible for regulating cell division are damaged. Carcinogenesis is caused by mutation and epimutation of the genetic material of normal cells, which upsets the normal balance between proliferation and cell death. This results in uncontrolled cell division and the evolut... |
If we can re-enact a scene in Interstellar and give everyone a 100% synced digital watch, would the time shown on the watch still be dilated? | Yes, time is dilated so all time-dependent processes are affected. | [
"Another technique, temporal imaging using a time lens, can also be used to slow down (mostly optical) signals in time. The time-lens concept relies on the mathematical equivalence between spatial diffraction and temporal dispersion, the so-called space-time duality. A lens held at fixed distance from an object pro... |
how does child lock work in cars? | From experience, on Toyotas, the child lock moves a guide pin out of position, causing the interior door handle to not be able to engage the lock latch. The outer door handle has a separate connection to the lock latch, allowing the two handles to have different functions. Other cars are probably about the same. | [
"The lock is typically engaged via a small switch on the edge of the door that is only accessible when the door is open. Some cars implement the child lock control as a rotary mechanism which can only be operated with a key. This design ensures the child lock remains in its intended state, and is invaluable for old... |
obama's new climate action plan. | The Clean Power Plan (as it is called) is a series of EPA regulations and budget proposals that look to reduce CO2 emissions by 32% (from 2005 levels) by 2030, increase renewable energy generation by 30% by 2030, and provide a framework to measure these efforts.
There will be a federal plan, but states are allowed to make their own plans (and submit them by Sept. 2016) as long as they meet the minimum goals stated above. The federal government will provide incentives for performance above the goals, as well as credits for renewable energy construction. The plan also establishes CO2 emissions standards for power plants, which is something new. | [
"President Obama's last Climate Action Plan, issued in June 2013, included regulations to industry with the ultimate goal of cutting domestic carbon emission, preparing the U.S. for impending effects of climate change, and working internationally to address climate change. Among the regulations outlined in the plan... |
Does windchill affect, say, the surface of a pond? | Wind chill is a measure of perception "how cold does it feel" which is in turn calculated from how much heat a person *with a normal body* temperature will lose for a given air temperature, humidity, and wind speed. Wind chill is expressed in term of what temperature would give the same heat loss in still air at some standard humidity. Wind blowing across a surface of a pond may similarly enhance the heat loss from the pond. You can see this when cold winds blowing across the surface of the water produce "arctic sea smoke" on the water. That heat of evaporation does cool the water, but the cooler water sinks allowing warmer water to rise to the surface. When the water reaches the same temperature as the air, generally there isn't going to be much heat transfer between them any more. If the air is above freezing, the cooling created through evaporation isn't going to be sufficient to extract enough heat to freeze the water.
TL;DR No | [
"Physicists Bacon \"et al.\" studying the phenomenon in 1996, informed by studies in Owens Dry Lake Playa, discovered that winds blowing on playa surfaces can be compressed and intensified because of a playa's smooth, flat surfaces. They also found that boundary layers (the region just above ground where winds are ... |
timeline of gaza/israel conflict pre-1967 | Ok, super simple version of the timeline
*bits before 500 BCE assume the bible is somewhat accurate in regards to the migrations of people groups*
~2000 BCE: Group of people migrate from Mesopotamia to what would become Israel (Abraham etc.)
~1700 BCE: These people move into Egypt due to a food shortage in Canaan (what Israel is called at this time)
~1200 BCE: These people leave Egypt and migrate back to Canaan and conquer it from the people who live there (the Hittites, the Amonites, the Moabites, etc.)
~1000 BCE: King Saul unifies the "Tribes of Israel" and creates the first Kingdom of Israel. This Kingdom fights with the Philistines who came from the sea and settled in South-West Israel (Gaza and surrounding areas)
~586 BCE: Babylonians conquer Israel and destroy Solomon's Temple. Israeli populace exiled to Babylon
~536 BCE: Persians kick Babylonian Ass and let the Israelites move back to Israel
~300 BCE: Alexander conquers it from the Persians, Then it passes to Ptolemy and then to the Selucids (the Maccabe revolt against the Greeks is during Selucid reign)
~165 BCE: Israelite population revolts against the Greeks and establishes a new Kingdom under the Hasmonean dynasty
~60 BCE: Romans conquer Israel.
~4 BCE: Jesus is born in Bethlehem (for some time context)
~70 CE: Israelite population revolts against the Romans, Second Temple is destroyed. Romans rename the Province from Judea to Palestine (after the ancient enemies of Israel the Philistines. Yeah, the Romans were pissed)
570 CE: Mohammad is born
638 CE: the Arab-Muslim empire that has been growing in the surrounding area conquers Israel. At this point it gets passed down through the different empires (Abassid, etc.) This is also where you would have had mass immigration of an Arab populace. In this time period the Jews were given "dhimmi" status as "people of the book". They were second class citizens but better off than in Christian Europe. During the Muslim and following Turkish rule many of the Jews leave for Europe, but some still stay.
In this time period: Jews move in and out of Israel to and from Europe.
1516 CE: Ottoman Empire gains control of the area.
Mid 1800s: Arab population starts throwing hissy fits about the Jewish immigrants.
Late 1800s: Mass immigration of Jews from Europe. These immigrants buy land from the Turkish governments and begin to settle.
1918: Western powers carve up the ottoman Empire following WW1. Mandatory Palestine is established containing Modern Israel, Jordan, and little bits of Syria and Lebanon
1917: Britain signs the Balfour Declaration, proclaiming: His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. Jewish immigration is increased under British rule
1921: A MASSIVE section of British Palestine is redefined as Transjordan. This land is ~80% of original Mandatory Palestine
1920s/30s: Arabs throw hissy fits about the Jews and Brits, Jews throw hissy fits about the British and Arab, Britain has no idea what the fuck to do and orders the Peel Commission. Both sides do INCREDIBLY awful things to each other and the British
1936: Peel Commission suggests breaking Mandatory Palestine into 2 states, a Jewish one along most of the Mediterranean Cost, the Galilee area, and Jerusalem. And an Arab state everywhere else (Gaza, the Negev, southern plains, Judea and Samaria. This suggestion is rejected whole-heartedly by the Arab population
1945: WWII ends
1947: UN proposes and adopts a partition of Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state with Jerusalem as international. Jewish leaders accept the plan, Arab leaders reject it.
May 14, 1948: Israel declares its independance from Britain in the land outlined in the 1947 Partition. (basically, they made life so awful for the British that Britain just gave up)
May 15, 1948: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq declare War on Israel. This war lasts for about a year and 700,000 Arab residents of Israel leave for a number of reasons and move to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt (fleeing Israeli army, told to leave by Arab states, kicked out by Israeli army, because Jordan is just so pretty in May, etc.)
1949: End of the war, Jordan Annexes the West Bank, Egypt annexes Gaza. Arabs who stayed in Israel find themselves as full citizens of the new country.
1949-1967: Mass Jewish immigration, specifically from Europe and the Arab states
1964: PLO is established. This is the point where the identity of "Palestinian" really starts to appear
1967: 6 day war, Israel captures the Sinai and Gaza from Egypt, West Bank from Jordan, and Golan Heights from Syria. Sinai is returned soon after.
1988: Jordan relinquishes its claim to the West Bank, which it lost to Israel in 1967, to the PLO
I think that more or less covers it | [
"Gaza was occupied by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War following the defeat of the Egyptian Army. Frequent conflicts have erupted between Palestinians and the Israeli authorities in the city since the 1970s. The tensions led to the First Intifada in 1987. Gaza was a center of confrontation during this uprising, a... |
Question about pressure | It depends on what pressure you want to calculate. When you calculate the pressure of water using that formula for 10 metres, for example, you get the pressure of the water above you. If you want the actual pressure, then you need to also add the air pressure above the water.
That formula also only works when the density is constant. This is true for water since it is incompressible. Atmosphere on the other hand gets gradually thinner so instead you need to do an integral, something like
int x goes from 0 to h: density(x) * gravity(x) * dx.
If density and gravity are constant, this becomes just height * density * gravity. | [
"Pressure is a force that can be measured absolutely, because the natural minimum of pressure is total vacuum. Pressure is frequently measured with reference to atmospheric pressure rather than on any absolute scale, relative to complete and perfect vacuum; it is technologically simpler and cheaper. It may also be ... |
if potassium is an alkali metal, why doesn't it violently react inside our bodies? | We do not have potassium metal in our bodies, we have potassium that is missing an electron, the potassium cation, K^+. It is very unreactive and stable in solution.
Potassium metal has one electron in it's outer shell that it wants to get rid of like crazy and have a nice stable low energy complete lower shell. Therefore it's high reactivity. But once it's gotten rid of it it is very happy as K^+. | [
"Potassium is an extremely active metal that reacts violently with oxygen in water and air. With oxygen it forms potassium peroxide, and with water potassium forms potassium hydroxide. The reaction of potassium with water is dangerous because of its violent exothermic character and the production of hydrogen gas. H... |
How does diet affect the risk of heart disease? | I don't have a lot of time to go into an in-depth answer, but cholesterol and fats were vilified mainly because when you looked at the hearts and blood vessels of people with cardiovascular disease, you see a lot of plaques which grow and harden and constrict the blood vessels around the heart and the rest of the body. And what are these plaques largely made of? Fats and cholesterol (and a bit of calcium). So naturally scientists looked into does the amount of fats (particularly saturated fats) consume affect the amount of fats and cholesterol blocking up their arteries? And they found that yes they did.
But fairly recently a group decided to look at weather a diet with increased saturated fats was worse for your health than a diet high in refined sugar. And surprisingly what they found is that actually the high sugar diet produced much a much more profoundly negative affect in the heart in just a few weeks. The high fat group had increased ldl levels (the "bad cholesterol"), they also had increased levels of hdl (the "good cholesterol") which would mitigate a lot of the bad consequences of the ldl cholesterol. The high sugar group on the other hand showed higher levels of total cholesterol, higher ldl levels and lower hdl levels. This is likely due to the sugar causing the liver to release a lot of harmful fats into the bloodstream.
Large amounts of sugars can also lead to insulin resistance and eventually can contribute to developing type 2 diabetes, which (amongst a lot of other things) increases your chances of developing heart disease. Sugar also increases your blood pressure.
So what about the studies before that linked high levels of fats in the diet to cardiovascular disease? Well it is true that people who eat more saturated fats are more likely to develope heart disease, what the researchers didn't take into account is that people eating a lot of saturated fats are much more likely to be consuming a lot more sugar, especially refined sugars.
So really the bottom line is to moderate your intake if refined/added sugars but you probably shouldn't load your diet up with high saturated-fat foods either, everything in moderation. Really avoiding any heavily processed foods which are usually very high in fats and sugars is a safe bet.
Sources: Undergrad in biochemistry, currently doing a PhD in Diabetes Complications. | [
"There is a correlation between adherence to a healthy diet, like the Mediterranean diet, and a lower risk of depression. Studies on which these correlations are made, are observational and do not prove cause and effect.\n",
"The diet may increase the risk of heart disease. A medical report issued by the New York... |
Since we see stars as they were some billions of years ago, if I picked out one that had already died, and travelled toward it at a reasonable speed, at some point would I see it explode? | The other answers you are getting are right (yes), but I want to contrast them by pointing out that the stars you can see with your eyes are only dozens of light years away, not billions. There are a handful that are hundreds, they are ALL within out galaxy. Even with a very impressive backyard telescope you are still limited to the galactic neighbourhood.
Our nearest major neighbouring galaxy is 2 million light years away (Andromeda), far from a billion, and the individual stars are basically not discernible unless there is a major event like a supernova, or a specific pulsar we can detect. Hubble can pick out individual stars near the edges, but the middle is just too cluttered.
_URL_0_
So, given that the average star [light] you see is only a couple dozen years old, and the average [star] life is many orders of magnitude greater, the chance of a single star we can see with our eyes having already expired and we just don't know it yet is extremely low. For reference I think there are around 5-6 thousand visible stars in total, maybe 9k with great eyes, and only around 1500-2000 at a given moment when looking up in perfect conditions.
On the opposite hand, I believe a large galaxy (ours) averages about 1 supernova every 100 years or so, and has a diameter of about 100k light years. Thus there are hundreds of supernovas (of stars that aren't visible pre-explosion) that have already happened in our galaxy where the light just hasn't reached us yet. | [
"BULLET::::- In the region of the constellation \"Perseus\", a star not visible to the naked eye, and 1,533 light years distant from Earth, explodes in a nova. The light from the star, now called GK Persei, will first be seen on Earth on February 21, 1901\n",
"In 185 CE, Chinese astronomers recorded the appearanc... |
why is it important that animal should not become extinct? i don't see how it would have a major impact on the earth overall. | Some animals are indirectly helping us by keeping the environment clean, or are at the start of our food cycle. Take Bees for example, and Coral. | [
"Scientists assert that human activity has pushed the earth into a sixth mass extinction event. The loss of biodiversity has been attributed in particular to human overpopulation, continued human population growth and overconsumption of natural resources by the world's wealthy. The \"Global Assessment Report on Bio... |
how do routers know where to send outgoing packets if it has never before encountered the destination address? | It doesn't. Your computer kicks it up the chain.
We'll take IPv4 since it's easier to visualize.
Your address is 32.12.25.17. The destination address is 85.42.36.78.
So your computer sends a packet to your local ISP, the ISP says "uh.. 85.42.36?, that's not me and sends the packet to the regional hub. It says "uh.. 85.42? That's not me." And sends it up to the national hub. It says "uh... 85? That's not me, that's *over there* and sends it over to the 85. hub. It says "yeah, 85, that's totally me!" and then send it down to the regional hub, which says "yeah, 85.42! I know that guy!" and sends it down to the local hub. It says "yeah, 85.42.36? You betcha thats me!" and send it down to the destination, 85.42.36.78
---------
Well, okay, that's not *really* how it goes, there are route tables which are constantly updated, so it doesn't usually have to get routing information at every hop, it can just send it on the route it needs to go from the tables. But if it doesn't know, that's *mostly* how it happens. It's a close enough visualization. | [
"When a router receives a packet it normally decides where to forward it based on the destination address in the packet, which is then used to look up an entry in a routing table. However, in some cases, there may be a need to forward the packet based on other criteria. For example, a network administrator might wa... |
what is a musical scale? | basically it's like an alphabet, for musicians. D,E,F,G,A,B,C,D... and it goes in a circle. a scale is when you start on one note, and you play through let's say a D, until you get to the next D. That's simplified. | [
"A musical scale is a discrete set of pitches used in making or describing music. The most important scale in the Western tradition is the diatonic scale but many others have been used and proposed in various historical eras and parts of the world. Each pitch corresponds to a particular frequency, expressed in hert... |
how come my feet will hurt after a while in flat shoes, but not when barefoot? | Pressure from the shoes. | [
"Patients with painful disorders of sensation (dysesthesia) of the soles of the feet may have a similar gait but do not have foot drop. Because of the extreme pain evoked by even the slightest pressure on the feet, the patient walks as if walking barefoot on hot sand.\n",
"Issues that can develop as a result of s... |
how can mother ducks have 6 and more ducklings of the same age follow them if they have to lay an egg for each one of them? | When a duck breeds, there is more than one embryo available to be fertilized, so all the eggs being laid technically have the same (or nearly the same) gestational age despite not having been laid at the same time and will therefore hatch around the same time. | [
"Both sexes incubate, changing over once a day, with the male often taking the greater share of this duty. The eggs hatch in about 24–29 days, The downy ducklings are grey, with paler upperparts, and a white band on the neck, and weigh within a day of hatching. Like all ducklings, they are precocial and leave the n... |
who doesn't 911 services not have a way to contact them through text? | Some areas *do* have that feature, as a matter of fact.
However, text is very difficult to convey important information with, and doesn't allow dispatchers to ask questions to get that important information. | [
"In some countries, text messages can be used to contact emergency services. In the UK, text messages can be used to call emergency services only after registering with the emergency SMS service. This service is primarily aimed at people who, by reason of disability, are unable to make a voice call. It has recently... |
what would happen to an economy if inflation was always at 0%? | Inflation encourages people to spend money now as they know prices will get higher. People not spending money is one of the biggest threats to a capitalist economy, as it starts a vicious circle that ends with lots of people being unemployed, so a low level of inflation is encouraged to promote expenditure.
Another use of Inflation is to lower people's wages without them knowing. It sounds sinister but some ordinary people are overpaid for what they do, so eventually they must either accept lower pay or lose the job. People will strongly protest against either option but inflation allows this pay cut to be stealthy as the number you are paid stays the same but everything else increases in price. | [
"Inflation averaged 30.1% between 2005 and 2007. Inflation is a serious problem for the economy. In April 2007, the National League for Democracy organised a two-day workshop on the economy. The workshop concluded that skyrocketing inflation was impeding economic growth. \"Basic commodity prices have increased from... |
how do usb splitter hubs work? how do multiple devices simultaneously transmit signals through a single port without stuttering? | They don't simultaneously transmit. Rather, they transmit one at a time.
However, USB transmits so quickly that you'll rarely run across situations where it matters. Most USB peripherals - your mouse/keyboard, for example - use a tiny fraction of the available bandwidth. Even mass storage devices don't generally reach the limits of USB transmission speed. | [
"Physically separate USB hubs come in a wide variety of form factors: from external boxes (looking similar to an Ethernet or network hub) connectable with a cable, to small designs that can be directly plugged into a USB port (see the \"compact design\" picture). In the middle case, there are \"short cable\" hubs w... |
If gravity is a wave, is it possible to create standing gravity waves? | While in principle possible, the problem here is that gravity couples extremely weakly.
Let's say you wanted to make a standing wave in a tank of water. Well, the waves reflect off of the sides of the tank (that is some pretty strong coupling), so all you have to do is drive the water at some point (not a node) at one of the normal mode frequencies of water waves in the tank. Easy.
Ok, now let's say you wanted to make a standing wave in the ocean. That's harder, because if you drive the water in one place, the waves are not confined. But don't let that stop you! You can still do it, but now you have to do something like have a wave generator that's a ring and drive this ring up and down to generate a standing wave in the interior. Harder but since you can generate waves wherever you want, you can still do it.
What if you didn't get to generate waves wherever you wanted to? Well then you'd be pretty hard pressed to create standing waves. This is the case with gravitational waves.
Sure, you can generate ridiculously tiny gravitational waves wherever you want -- you are already doing that all the time. But to generate any sizable gravitational waves takes a very large time varying mass quadrupole moment -- that is, enormous mass, very compact[1], moving a significant fraction of the speed of light, and accelerating. Basically you're asking for a compact binary system, which you can't just choose to put anywhere you want in space.
Finally, this would not create "anti-gravity". A gravitational wave is a propagating degree of freedom, just like a radio wave is a propagating degree of freedom. A radio wave is not the same thing as charging up a balloon so that it sticks to your hair. Similarly, a gravitational wave is not that part of gravity that makes you fall toward the Earth. They are different *components* of the metric (or curvature)[2].
[1] Compactness can be measured dimensionlessly as GM/(Rc^2) for some object of mass M, radius R, with G being Newton's constant and c being the speed of light in vacuum. This is O(1) for black holes, O(0.1) for neutron stars, and tiny for basically everything else in the universe.
[2] Ask if you want to know more about this.
EDIT: Just some typos. | [
"In general terms, gravitational waves are radiated by objects whose motion involves acceleration and its change, provided that the motion is not perfectly spherically symmetric (like an expanding or contracting sphere) or rotationally symmetric (like a spinning disk or sphere). A simple example of this principle i... |
why would a solar storm's sustained magnetic field not destroy all data-even tape drives? if a degausser wipes data with powerful sustained magnetic fields, why would a weeklong solar storm not have the same effect on our data? | A really strong solar storm causes changes of > 250 nanoTesla in the magnetic field. The absolutely worst geomagnetic storm is estimated to have peaked at 1760 nanoTeslas. For reference, the Earth's magnetic field is around 50 microTesla or around 25x stronger than the strongest storm
Those degaussers use electromagnets that can put out magnetic field strengths in the 1-10 Tesla range, or 20,000-200,000x stronger than the Earth's magnetic field | [
"The most severe effect of the radiation were current leakages somewhere in the spacecraft's power bus, most likely across brushes at a spin bearing connecting rotor and stator sections of the orbiter. These current leakages triggered a reset of the onboard computer and caused it to go into safe mode. The resets oc... |
how are dictionaries compiled? how do words get picked to be in a dictionary? how do they not 'forget' to put in a word? | Nowadays they take help of computers. With the computer you can basically count all the words occurring in all newspapers and all of last year's released books within a very reasonable timeframe (hours?). Sort the counts and you have a long list of all the most common words, remove all the words you already had in last year's edition and you have a shorter list of words you might consider adding to this year's edition.
I imagine they can do a whole lot more with those statistics, this was just to explain the basics, and I hope you see how no words go forgotten this way! (unless there are computer bugs :D). For example they can also look at how old words change in popularity, if a word increases in popularity, perhaps it has gained another meaning? Or if it loses popularity, perhaps it's an old word that has become replaced by synonym to the extent that it's time to take it out of the dictionary.
| [
"Words are rarely listed in dictionaries on the basis of their inflectional morphemes (in which case they would be lexical items). However, they often are listed on the basis of their derivational morphemes. For instance, English dictionaries list \"readable\" and \"readability\", words with derivational suffixes, ... |
Theoretically, if you had a chunk of dark matter and put it on Earth, what would it look like? | The basic idea behind dark matter is that it's basically like normal matter, *but more boring*.
Matter interacts with other matter through the four fundamental forces: the weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism.
The nuclear forces hold atoms together and control nuclear fission and fusion and radioactive half-lifes and so on. This is hard to notice in our day-to-day lives because nuclear forces are so strong that atoms tend to be very stable: you don't get nuclear fission happening when you drop a banana. You do get a slow nuclear decay of some of the potassium etc, but it's weak enough that you need special equipment to notice is.
Gravity on the other hand, is a very weak force. It has to add up over very large amounts of mass, which means it tends to be only really be significant on big scales, and tends to be fairly smooth and featureless. This is why galaxies end up with simple geometric shapes - spheroids, discs, etc. It's why gravity is close to uniform across the surface of Earth - it just pulls you towards Earth's centre from everywhere.
But the *electromagnetic* force is different. It's a strong force, and can be attractive or repulsive. This means you can build up really complex structures with molecular bonds, and even with intermolecular forces. Electromagnetic forces are how the ground holds you up, how the table stays in place, and even how your computer works. They allow a huge amount of complexity, enough complexity to produce life itself. Electromagnetism is the most important force for normal life (gravity is second place). Light is an electromagnetic force too. Sound is transmitted through electromagnetic interactions between nearby atoms. Touch, sight, and sound - all of our senses - are based on electromagnetism.
But not every particle interacts with all these forces! Neutrinos don't interact electromagnetically, for example. We have to detect them via nuclear reactions. Neutrinos can't form complex molecules, and you can't touch them, or see them. They just flow straight through things, occasionally having a nuclear reaction with an atom.
The idea of dark matter is that it's made of particles that are just like neutrinos, but more massive. So you can't see it or touch it. Gravity causes it to form big galaxy-sized blobs, but there's not a lot of complex structure - there's just blobs in blobs.
Dark matter also doesn't do anything special with gravity. A kilogram of dark matter has the same gravity as a kilogram of potatoes. So unless you have a huge amount of dark matter you wouldn't see light bending around a concentration of dark matter either. On a *galactic* scale we can start to see "gravitational lensing" though. But even for a whole galaxy, it's still considered "weak lensing". It's only when you get up to a whole *cluster* of galaxies that you get lensing that's strong enough to see with the naked eye. | [
"If dark matter is composed of weakly-interacting particles, an obvious question is whether it can form objects equivalent to planets, stars, or black holes. Historically, the answer has been it cannot,ref name=\"siegel\"\n",
"Dark matter can refer to any substance which interacts predominantly via gravity with v... |
How did the wooden buildings of Japanese cities/towns withstand things like rot and different wood diseases. | This is an interesting question; the answer, however, is just as rooted in Eastern vs Western culture as it is in construction techniques. Please also take into account that, as a Westerner, I can only give a partial answer based on second-hand studies.
First, take into account than on top of rot, Japanese constructions wer also subjected to earthquakes, typhoons and other weather conditions that could destroy a dwelling just as surely as mold would, and quicker. This, in general, led to a preference for structures that could be quickly rebuilt, and that upon collapse would carry a (slightly) lesser chance of causing death. I’ll return to this point later.
Now, construction-wise:
Wood is actually not as feeble a material as common wisdom would have you believe. In fact, a wooden beam is actually *more* resistant to fire than a steel beam, and the reason it’s not as used today has more to do with quality controls, prices and the impossibility of serialization.
Wood diseases are, in general, linked to humidity or certain types of insects, which made the problem more critical as Japan has rather stable temperatures, high humidity and a period of rains. To combat humidity in the absence of current retardants and varnishes, the solution was to provide ample ventilation, including what is known as **crossed ventilation,** that is, to ensure that the air flows through openings on opposite sides of the room lessening the areas with stagnant atmosphere.
Another way to ensure proper ventilation, and this one is not only traditionally but pretty much universally used everywhere, is to **elevate the building from ground level**. This not only allows for air to flow underneath, it also reduces the process of capillarity that would mean the building was absorbing water directly from the ground. Traditional Japanese buildings tended to reduce the weight of the dwelling, using little furniture and very light floor pieces and door mechanisms so they could further reduce the number of supports between the house and the ground; and didn’t otherwise close these open spaces.
And finally, there is the process known as **micro-ventilation**, which is also present in pretty much every modern window frame you see too; this is accomplished by purposefully creating gaps between the elements of the window or opening; while they are small enough to prevent rain, wind or even small objects, they still allow for further air and heat exchange.
Returning, however, to my first point, it is interesting that you asked about “withstanding” in relation to buildings, and here is where we come to the finer differences between cultures. Eastern cultures, such as Japan, weren’t as concerned with leaving a lasting legacy for the ages in the same sense Western cultures were. The idea of a building that physically outlasts its inhabitants is purely European, leading to the stone castles and cathedrals we are more familiar with; in contrast, Eastern cultures had the belief that the *spirit* of the building rather than its materiality was the one carrying value.
It is, basically, the paradox of the Ship of Theseus: “If you have a ship, and then you steadily repair and change pieces of it until not one element of the original exists, is it still the same ship? Even if it maintains its image and purpose?” From a traditionally Western approach to architecture, it isn’t; for an Eastern one, it is.
The result is that no element of Japanese architecture —from houses to temples or palaces— was expected to last more than a few years, two or three decades at most; it was even perfectly normal to bring them down and rebuild them as a matter of course. So the effects of mold would then, well, reset on a completely healthy wood structure.
For more information, I'd recommend you search Architectural or Art journals. Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, apparently had a deep fascination with Eastern methods of construction. Otherwise there is:
[_URL_0_](_URL_2_)
[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)
Schweitzer, Roland: "Traditional Japanese wood construction" in *Internationales Holzbau-Forum 2004*
Tanizaki Junichiro: *In Praise of Shadows*
& #x200B; | [
"Heavy materials like stone, mortar and clay were abandoned as building elements, with simple wooden walls, floors and partitions becoming prevalent. Native species like cedar (\"sugi\") were popular as an interior finish because of its prominent grain, while pine (\"matsu\") and larch (\"aka matsu\") were common f... |
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing." Stephen Hawking | Right now, nobody knows the answer to your question. | [
"It argues that invoking God is not necessary to explain the origins of the universe, and that the Big Bang is a consequence of the laws of physics alone. In response to criticism, Hawking said: \"One can't prove that God doesn't exist, but science makes God unnecessary.\" When pressed on his own religious views by... |
Were there calls to polish the Statue of Liberty, when it was turning green? | [This older answer might be of interest for you](_URL_0_). | [
"In covering these comments, multiple publications noted that the distinction Miller made between the Statue of Liberty and Lazarus's poem has been a popular talking point among the white supremacist segments of the alt-right. \"The Washington Post\"s Michelle Ye Hee Lee stated that \"Neither got it quite right abo... |
Why are pressure cookers affected by altitude? | The limiting factor isn't the pressure inside the pressure cooker. It's the difference in pressure between the inside and the outside. If you open the pressure cooker completely, the inside will still be at the same pressure at the outside. Since the air is at higher pressure in lower altitudes, the pressure cooker doesn't have to add as much extra pressure to get the same total pressure. | [
"At higher altitudes, the boiling point of liquid in the pressure cooker will be slightly lower than it would be at sea level. When pressure cooking at high altitudes, cooking times need to be increased by approximately 5% for every above elevation. The absolute pressure in a pressure cooker will always be lower at... |
stone age | The Stone Age is the period of time, believed to be around a few million years, between when humans figured out how to use tools made out of stone and when humans figured out how to make tools out of metal instead. Metal tools were a big turning point in history because they are stronger and last longer than stone ones, which made it easier to build more and better buildings, grow more food, and so on.
EDIT: check out _URL_0_ | [
"The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used in the manufacture of implements with a sharp edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted roughly 2.5 million years, from the time of early hominids to \"Homo sapiens\" in the later Pleistocene era, and largely ended betwe... |
how open source projects/developers make money | Companies like Canonical and Red Hat give away their software, and just charge for support. Red Hat actually does pretty well. | [
"BULLET::::- Open source is a development model using the internet to cooperate on projects. It is most notable in the development of software and widely used software, which has been developed and maintained by large numbers of people, including many home-based amateurs with high level expertise.\n",
"Open sourc... |
Why is dangerous radiation only dangerous within a certain distance of the radioactive source? (more in description) | I think you are confusing a few different ideas in regards to radiation.
1. Intensity from a point source decreases at rate of r^2 away from the source. For this purpose think of the radioactive source as a light bulb. The further you are away, the much less radiation you will be hit with.
2. Radiation itself does NOT have a half life; as it runs through the world it bumps into other things and will eventually be absorbed. For this reason the initial radiation blast of a bomb will be non existant in the 65 year timescale you are looking at.
3. Radioactive elements DO have a half life. Here is where a balancing act exists. Elements with short half-lifes would emit lots of radiation but only for a short time; elements with long half-lifes would emit low radiation but for a long time. Although transport of these radioactive materials is a concern, they are usually very heavy elements and not as prone to mass transport as some other elements. Additionally, more recent tests have been conducted underground/underwater where they are more contained by layers of clay/earth/water.
Hope that clears some things up. | [
"In summary, not all radiation is harmful. The radiation can be absorbed through multiple pathways, varying due to the circumstances of the situation. If the radioactive material is necessary, it can be ingested orally via stable isotopes of specific elements. This is only suggested to those that have a lack of the... |
Is it theoretically possible to be able to access Internet on Mars? | The light delay between Mars and Earth is 3 minutes at best and 21 minutes in the worst case, which is most of the year. Space is *very* big.
Any request you'd make to the Earth's internet (like, give me the Wiktionary entry for "lonely") would take at the very least 6 minutes to get an answer. | [
"SpaceX intends to provide broadband internet connectivity to underserved areas of the planet, as well as provide competitively-priced service to urban areas. The company has stated that the positive cashflow from selling satellite internet services would be necessary to fund their Mars plans.\n",
"The Mars Telec... |
how are vortexes in water created? image in description | The vortex in that gif is caused by the interaction of a body of cold water with one of warmer water. The cold water is denser (I think) so it gets pushed down, while the warm water goes up. These opposing currents create that vortex. | [
"In the dynamics of fluid, a vortex is fluid that revolves around the axis line. This fluid might be curved or straight. Vortices form from stirred liquids they might be observed in smoke rings, whirlpools, in the wake of a boat or the winds around a tornado or dust devil.\n",
"In fluid dynamics, a vortex (plural... |
why all of a sudden are insect populations on the decline globally? is it just a climate thing? | Insects have been on the decline for a while now but only recently has this information become more readily available to the public.
The main factor that is causing insect populations to decline is the use of non-targeted pesticides that are lethal to a wide range of insect species. Farmers use these because they are cheap and using pesticides gives them better crop yields. Which equals more money.
Climate change has also been playing a role as some insects are adapted for very specific climatic conditions. So even small changes in climate due to climate change can have negative impacts on these species. | [
"The decline has been attributed to habitat destruction caused by intensive farming and urbanisation, pesticide use, introduced species, climate change, and artificial lighting. The use of increased quantities of insecticides and herbicides on crops have affected not only non-target insect species, but also the pla... |
why do wireless companies treat tethering data differently than mobile data? | There is no technical reason for this, and a few years back they did *not*. The bottom line is that they can make more money selling you an additional service. | [
"Depending on the wireless carrier, a user's cellular device may have restricted functionality. While tethering may be allowed at no extra cost, some carriers impose a one-time charge to enable tethering and others forbid tethering or impose added data charges. Contracts that advertise \"unlimited\" data usage ofte... |
Did Hitler's top generals realize that Operation Barbarossa was going lead to the defeat of Germany? | Expanded from an [earlier answer](_URL_0_)
**Part I**
The short answer is that they really did not see this as the brass in both OKH and OKW were the ones responsible for planning the invasion itself. Although Hitler was decisive in reorientating German military power towards the USSR, many German military thinkers were thinking along those same lines in parallel to the *Fuhrer*.
For the most part, a lot of German decision makers perceived the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as a necessary evil, not as a new turn in German foreign policy. Both Göring and Rosenberg thought the Pact represented the baleful influence of von Ribbentrop whose anti-British biases made Hitler sign a deal with the *Feind*. The diary of Staff Colonel Eduard Wagner, OKH's Quartermaster-General, noted that the Pact strengthened the Soviet's strategic position at very little cost to them, and the Pact would only be useful if the Germans could prod the Soviets southwards into India and the Middle East, a move the Soviets were clearly not making. Other members of the German military were alarmed by the scale of Soviet occupation of the Baltics, which denied Germany its traditional strategic route into Russia. Soviet gains and Western intransigence by having the temerity to keep in the war after Poland's fall fostered an increasingly dour and pessimistic attitude about Germany's future in OKH circles. By October 1939, OKH was drawing up plans for an *Ostwall* of fortifications inside the General Government, one in which the SS claimed it would build using Jewish ghetto labor. Soviet insistence on Germany meeting its end of the economic pact also grew increasingly louder, isolating the few German proponents of a Rapallo-style rapprochement from mainstream opinion in these policy circles.
The Fall of France reversed this pessimism within OKH and the German decision-making establishment as a whole. In a June 1940 meeting with Lieutenant Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, who was tasked with constructing the *Ostwall*, OKH head Franz Halder noted that defensive measures should be minimal and "Whatever one has must be used for attack." Halder also tasked Artillery General Georg von Küchler in June to draw up contingency plans for a Soviet invasion. Halder's choice of von Küchler as well as von Küchler's chief of staff, Major-General Erich Marcks, is instructive. Both were quite senior Heer officers who had wartime experience on the Eastern Front during the First World War. In short, Halder entrusted the initial planning for an invasion of the Soviet Union not to the young turk officers promoted by National Socialism, but traditional officers that would make a sound operational plan. Küchler and Marcks's initial plan called for creating a German strike force in Poland that could be used in any contingency while larger preparations continued.
Thus by the time Hitler convened a meeting of senior military heads on 31 July at the Berghof to discuss a future invasion of the USSR, OKH had already formed solid plans in that direction. Although Hitler had likely conceived of a Soviet invasion independently of OKH, the Berghof meeting unchained the German military to expand its preexisting plans. The disastrous performance of the Red Army in Finland and captured Polish intelligence on the Soviet military led OKH to fatally underestimate the military capabilities of the Soviets. For an army whose operational culture that stressed boldness and offensive encirclement battles, the fact that the Soviets had deployed large parts of their military in their newly-won gains ahead of their lines of supply and lacked fortifications made the Soviets a very tempting target for the Germans in 1941. By August 1940, Marcks had outlined the draft of his plans and they were quite ambitious:
> After we take Kharkiv, Moscow and Leningrad, cohesive Russian armed forces will no longer exist. Complete occupation of this territory is not possible and not necessary. Rapid troops and inf. div. advancing by train will be chiefly responsible for maintaining the pursuit. Time required: 2–4 weeks. Total time required for the campaign until the eventual objective will be between 9 and 17 weeks. If the Soviet regime does not collapse or sue for peace, it could become necessary to continue advancing up to the Urals. Even if Russia is not capable of actively waging war after the destruction of its armed forces and the loss of its most valuable European regions, it could still, supported by Asia, remain in a state of war for an unforeseeable length of time.
For its part, OKW drew up a set of parallel plans for a Soviet invasion, but after the 31 July meeting and by Lieutenant Colonel Bernhard von Loßberg. The result was Operational Directive No. 21 which meshed somewhat with the plans developed under Küchler and Marcks's aegis, but OKH had misgivings about the main thrust of the attack and the overall strategic orientation of the German advance.
While this disagreement played a part in Barbarossa's failure, there was a general consensus by the summer of 1940 within German military circles that a war on the Soviet Union was necessary either to knock Britain out of the war by depriving her of her last hope of challenging German hegemony (the USSR) or to secure Germany from the Bolshevik threat. The dissension that existed within the German military was mostly about the direction of the attack on the USSR, not the actual attack itself. The polycentric administration of the Third Reich sharpened this dissension as multiple power blocs worked to achieve their own ends and found that "working towards the Fuhrer" was a means to achieve victory over their rivals. Because of this murkiness, Halder's selectively edited diaries and postwar memoirs allowed the onus for the genesis of the Barbarossa to be placed directly upon Hitler's shoulders and 31 July meeting, but in reality OKH had been thinking along those lines for quite some time without direct prodding by Hitler.
The only real power bloc inside OKW that voiced any real apprehension about Barbarossa was the *Kriegsmarine*. Much of the Naval Staff's planning was directed towards defeating Britain and the various war material the Soviets provided severely weakened the British blockade of the continent. *Kriegsmarine* head Erich Raeder expressed "serious doubts" about Operational Directive No. 21 given that Germany was undertaking a massive military operation before the British had been defeated. But Raeder's doubts about Barbarossa need to seen within the context of the polycratic *Reich*. The navy had been pushing for its own grand reorientation of the German war effort towards the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and looked with alarm the increasing likelihood that America would join the war. The Naval Staff felt that by destroying Britain's Middle East position, they would be able to knock Britain out of the war and further isolate the US. Naval discouragement of Barbarossa does not equate to doubts about the whole enterprise or its justifications. The Naval Staff's chief of operations Rear-Admiral Kurt Fricke produced a memorandum "Observations on Russia" in 28 July 1940 that Soviet expansion in the Baltic was an existential threat to the *Reich*:
> The safety of our homeland, however, also demands in the future the development of
spatial unassailability, i.e. an expansion that would prevent any unchecked surprise
penetration of vital parts of German soil, a deep forefield . . . which would at the same
time provide the necessary living-space for the German nation in the future. . . It
moreover demands the greatest possible economic autarky, especially in commodities
vital in wartime (e.g. oil, foodstuffs). The further development of Germany requires
raw materials and also, to the same extent, markets for her manufactures. For both
these purposes Russia is ideally suited . . . The Baltic must become Germany's "*Mare
nostrum*".
Fricke's conflating economic security with national socialist paradigms like *Lebensraum* was emblematic of much military thinking throughout OKW when considering the USSR. Küchler would claim that the ideological and racial "abyss" that separated the USSR and Germany meant it was necessary to invade to bring "about a long-term pacification of Europe, in which the German people controls a space that will ensure its food supplies and those of the other European states." For many of these German planners, war with the Soviet Union was both strategically necessary and just according to the racialist precepts espoused by National Socialism. Chief of *Luftflotte* 4, Colonel-General Wolfram von Richthofen's wrote in his diary in January 1943 that he was rereading *Mein Kampf*'s chapters on *Lebensraum* and that they were:
> Still very interesting and, even in today's situation, providing the answers to nearly all questions. Shall see to it that these observations are given greater prominence among the forces in the whole area.
| [
"In Lukacs’s view, Operation Barbarossa was not inspired by anti-Communism or any long-term plan to conquer the Soviet Union as suggested by historians such as Andreas Hillgruber, who claims that Hitler had a \"stufenplan\" (stage-by-stage plan), but it was rather an \"ad hoc\" reaction forced on Hitler in 1940–194... |
what causes a cowlick? | It more so depends on your hair follicle. This is what determines which way the hair grows out of the scalp. So essentially cowlicks are tufts of hair where their follicles cause them to grow in such a fashion.
Also, considering this is an internal thing, we can't change our follicles, so you can't really "fix" a cowlick. People will tell you you can train your hair, which is true, but only to a certain extent. Truly the only thing you can do is work with what you got and get some appropriate products and a knowledgeable hair dresser to help you work around it.
I can talk more about your scalp if that didn't answer the question the extent to which you were looking. But that's the quick answer.
TL:DR Your Hair follicles determine the growth direction of your hair which sometimes results in cowlicks. | [
"A cowlick is a section of hair that stands straight up or lies at an angle at odds with the style in which the rest of an individual's hair is worn. Cowlicks appear when the growth direction of the hair forms in (against) the spiral pattern. The term \"cowlick\" originates from the domestic bovine's habit of licki... |
why does the water used for tea and many instant meals have to be boiling? | Instant meals are designed for the water to be a specific optimal temperature. Boiling water has the convenient property that it's always at the same temperature, so you don't have to fiddle with a thermometer to figure out when to put the water in.
The water used for tea *doesn't* have to be boiling, and in fact the vast majority of teas aren't supposed to be made with boiling water. (This is a large part of why green tea isn't popular in the West; people try to steep it in boiling water, and the result is pretty horrible.) | [
"Instant tea is a powder in which water is added, in order to reconstitute it into a cup of tea. The earliest form of instant tea was developed in the United Kingdom in 1885. A patent was granted for a paste made of concentrated tea extract, sugar, and evaporated milk, which became tea when hot water was added. How... |
How do scientists collect so much data on planets that are hundreds+ light years away? | Much of what I've seen in papers is done via light spectrum analysis. By analyzing the light colors you can find chemical compositions of atmospheres for example because passing through an atmosphere will filter certain light bands out.
[de Wit, J., Wakeford, H., Gillon, M. et al. A combined transmission spectrum of the Earth-sized exoplanets TRAPPIST-1 b and c. Nature 537, 69–72 (2016) doi:10.1038/nature18641](_URL_2_)
[Constraining Exoplanet Mass from Transmission Spectroscopy, By Julien de Wit, Sara Seager, Science20 Dec 2013 : 1473-1477](_URL_0_)
They also can compare the light of stars against standard candles to give a baseline of what is expected (for example age range) and go from there.
[Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 425, Issue 2, September 2012, Pages 1007–1012](_URL_1_)
I've also seen papers looking at the movement of stars that wiggle in their observed motion and can thus be inferred what mass must be close by to cause that kind of movement. Though it's worth noting this wouldn't be very effective on exoplanets. I've mostly heard this used for binary black hole systems. | [
"Based on data from the NASA exoplanet archive, Eyes on the Exoplanet enables uses to zoom in on more than 1000 planets orbiting distant stars. Exoplanets can be filtered by relevant criteria such as Earth-sized, large rocky planets, gas giants, etc. Distances to these planets are expressed in travel time by car, p... |
Did history smell bad? | I'm having a hard time hunting down the exact quote, but an observer observing the women traveling with the British Army at the surrender of Saratoga mentions something to the effect of "had they not been smoking, I would have gotten sick from the miasma swirling off them."
EDIT: Found it!
"I never had the least Idea that the Creation produced such a sordid set of creatures in human Figure - poor, dirty, emaciated men, great numbers of women, who seemed to be the beasts of burthen, having a bushel basket on their back, by which they were bent double, the contents seemed to be Pots and Kettles, various sorts of Furniture, children peeping thro' gridirons and other utensils, some very young infants who were born on the road, the women bare feet, cloathed in dirty rags, such effluvia filled the air while they were passing, had they not been smoaking at the time, I should have been apprehensive of being contaminated by them" ~Hannah Winthrop. | [
"Smelly Old History is a series of illustrated books published by Oxford University Press. The books contain aromatic scratch and sniff panels to provide the reader with an aroma of different smells to represent the ages. The series was written by Mary J. Dobson and has sold over a million copies around the world.\... |
what is the survival instinct? | You’re really asking a nature vs nurture question. With humans, we live in relative safety and usually almost never experience anything that requires our survival instincts to kick in, and on top of that, even if they did, our brains are able to overwrite it in the moment.
With animals, they’re constantly living in a live or die situation, as well as being taught survival by their mothers/parents at the same time.
Edit:
To add to this, survival skills and survival instinct is not the same thing.
Survival skills is having the skills necessary to survive in the wild. Example being: knowing what’s edible and what isn’t, knowing how to hunt, knowing how to find water, knowing how to find or build a shelter.
Survival instinct is a fight or flight response. Example being faced down by a bear, you either run or you fight to stay alive. It also involves other things but that’s the large majority of it. | [
"Survival skills are techniques that a person may use in order to sustain life in any type of natural environment or built environment. These techniques are meant to provide basic necessities for human life which include water, food, and shelter. The skills also support proper knowledge and interactions with animal... |
Question about second sons and noble titles/inheritance... | Whereas in the early medieval period, when inheritances would be shared amongst several sons and daughters, male primogeniture granted the *entire* estate to the eldest son.
Male primogeniture became the norm in England in the late medieval period, and has stuck with the aristocracy ever since. Noble titles were part of the estate, and passed to a single heir. It was about this time when a noble family's name began to refer to his estate- Lancaster, Gloucester, Norfolk for example- beforehand names which included place-names were anomalous.
Second sons were very important however. They were back-up heirs, and so could not be left to roam free, just incase they were needed to fill the shoes of their deceased elder brother. For this reason they were usually trained as soldiers, and the third son traditionally entered the church.
Soldiering and clerical positions meant that the son would be required to move away from the familial house; either to a barracks or a parsonage, and whilst these could be owned by the elder brother, they weren't necessarily in constant contact over the dinner table.
In short, second and third sons needed to be kept busy, and soldiering/the church was the traditional method. They were not given free reign however, just incase the eldest son died before his father, or he failed to produce his own heir etc... | [
"The noble titles were inherited through a system of loose primogeniture: The eldest son from the peer's first wife was usually the heir apparent, but inheritance by a younger son, a son of a concubine, or brother of the peer was not uncommon. Non-heir sons of imperial princes were entitled to petition for a lower ... |
If relativity theory rejects absolute space, does that mean an empirically adequate geocentric model of the solar system is as "legitimate" as a heliocentric one? | To answer your explicit question, yes.
That said, the first thing to realize is that the universe doesn't care how we model and label things. Earth is gravitationally bound to the sun and our trajectories are such that both objects orbit a common point somewhere deep inside the sun. What those orbits *look like* if, for example, you want to plot them in a program of some sort will depend on your model.
Basically, the question of what's "at the center" and what's "going around" what only matters when you decide to calculate something. For instance, if you want to figure out "what Earth's orbit looks like" or "what the sun's orbit looks like", you need to do some sort of calculation that's going to require (usually) a choice of coördinates. Now, let's say you want to calculate the path of Earth around the sun. Asking that question *implied* that you're working in coördinates with the sun at the center, so you probably want to do that. You *could* try to figure it out with the coördinates having Earth at the center, but you'd be a gorram idiot if you did.
On the other hand, if you want to figure out the path of the sun as seen from Earth, you might decide to work it in coördinates where Earth is at the center. You might also decide to still work it out with the sun in the center and then do some sort of transformation, but in the end, *describing* the path of the sun as seen from Earth should really be done treating Earth as the origin. | [
"Despite giving more respectability to the geocentric view than Newtonian physics does, relativity is not geocentric. Rather, relativity states that the Sun, the Earth, the Moon, Jupiter, or any other point for that matter could be chosen as a center of the Solar System with equal validity. For this reason Robert S... |
how do doctors know when a limb has to be amputated? | It's mostly based on the prognosis, or what is likely going to happen to the limb if they don't cut it off. If you have gas gangrene, nothing anyone can do will save it. It's better to cut if off to stop the infection from spreading. If there is a ton of shrapnel from an IED, it's the same situation. The danger won't spread, but it's very very unlikely that the leg will ever be functional again. If someone has diabetes, and the neurons are all dead (so the muscles don't work) or the blood vessels are working so poorly that ulcers and infection are inevitable, they may decide to amputate.
Ultimately, it's about seeing if anything can be done to save the limb. Cutting off limbs leads to much worse quality of life, so the only reasons surgeons do it is to prevent death or other poor outcomes. There is a lot of detail (above knee/below knee, when to do it, etc.) The surgery itself is quite detailed. It's not like the whiskey+hacksaws they used during the American Civil War. | [
"People who have a limb amputated may still have a confused sense of that limb's existence on their body, known as phantom limb syndrome. Phantom sensations can occur as passive proprioceptive sensations of the limb's presence, or more active sensations such as perceived movement, pressure, pain, itching, or temper... |
what causes us to pe attracted to a specific race? | I've wondered this. I think Freud would bring the parents into it, but even from my own experience this doesn't quite stack up. My 5c would be that it might have *something* to do with our early experiences though- a figure of care and love that stuck in our subconscious (or the opposite- a person treating us like shit causing us to favour another race). I'd be interested to see an answer on this. | [
"Race can be used as an example of in-group and out-group tendencies because society often categorizes individuals into groups based on race (Caucasian, African American, Latino, etc.). One study that examined race and empathy found that participants receiving nasally administered oxytocin had stronger reactions to... |
why do women sometimes get urinary tract infections from intercourse? | Women have a very short urinary tracts. This gives UTIs an easier path to cover. | [
"A Urinary Tract Infection is an infection that involves any part of the urinary system, being the kidneys, urethra, bladder, or ureters. Although women are more susceptible to getting UTI’s, men may also develop them. The infection causes pain while urinating, the urge to urinate often, and pelvic pain. UTIs may b... |
how exactly do skateboarders manage to keep their balance when going up the side of a halfpipe? | The black thing on top of our boards is called griptape which helps us keep our shoes on the board when we go up. It's also a little bit like a swing, when we go down or up the transitions we bend our knees and lean either forward or back to keep our center of gravity on the board. | [
"When a skateboarder drops in, they stand on the deck of a half-pipe, put their back foot on the tail of the skateboard, and push it so that the back wheels just roll over the coping into a position like in a tail stall. They then put their front foot on the deck, which now hangs over the half-pipe, lean forward, a... |
It's possible to create artificial diamonds but, is it possible to convert real diamonds to graphite? | Sure. Just wait long enough. The stable state of carbon under ambient conditions is graphite, meaning that all other forms will spontaneously decompose to graphite, eeleasing energy. This process ia very, very slow, though. But given enough time all diamonds at any temperature and pressure you could live through will convert to graphite. | [
"Synthetic diamonds can be grown from high-purity carbon under high pressures and temperatures or from hydrocarbon gas by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Imitation diamonds can also be made out of materials such as cubic zirconia and silicon carbide. Natural, synthetic and imitation diamonds are most commonly dist... |
how do radio waves for cell phone signals penetrate into buildings if light can't travel around corners or visible light can't shine through opaque objects? wouldn't you need a direct line of sight to the tower? | Light and radio waves are all part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
They don't all behave or interact with stuff the same. Xrays, infrared and microwaves are also part of that spectrum. They, like radio waves can be reflected like visible light but can penetrate certain materials. | [
"If unobstructed and in a perfect environment, radio waves will travel in a relatively straight line from the transmitter to the receiver. But if there are reflective surfaces that interact with a stray transmitted wave, such as bodies of water, smooth terrain, roof tops, sides of buildings, etc., the radio waves d... |
how do different forms of mass communication work worldwide, when we're all so seperated by oceans? (we don't connect to internet servers across the globe through satellites, right?) | There's huge cables running across the oceans.
[Here's](_URL_0_) all the connections. | [
"When all factors are at their optimum, worldwide communication is possible on HF. At many other times it is possible to make contact across and between continents or oceans. At worst, when a band is \"dead\", no communication beyond the limited groundwave paths is possible no matter what powers, antennas or other ... |
What's the difference between an allergen and a poison or venom? | An allergen is typically a harmless substance like tree pollen or peanut butter. But some people get sensitized to it, so that the immune system over-reacts. This over-reaction causes the symptoms of allergy, not the harmless substance.
A venom is a type of poison substance that is made by animals like insects (spiders, bees, ants, etc.), reptiles (snakes and some lizards) or other animals (jellyfish, fish, frogs, etc.).
A poison is any substance that is poisonous. It could be a venom made by an animal, but is most often something that is not animal-made, such as bleach, Drano, nail polish remover, many drugs (in excess), gasoline, paint thinner and many, many other substances. | [
"The fields of medicine (particularly veterinary) and zoology often distinguish a poison from a toxin, and from a venom. Toxins are poisons produced by organisms in nature, and venoms are toxins injected by a bite or sting (this is exclusive to animals). The difference between venom and other poisons is the deliver... |
why do companies need to put the ® or ™ symbols beside their product names every time it is written? | The "TM" symbol is generally used for unregistered trademarks (including those that are still in the process of being registered) and doesn't do anything significant legally when it comes to violations.
The ® symbol on the other hand is used for trademarks registered with the federal government, and does have some legal importance. Specifically if you fail to use it then you forfeit the right to sue for damages unless you can prove that the defendant knew your mark was registered. This is a pretty high burden to meet. | [
"Because the ® symbol is not commonly available on typewriters (or ASCII), it is common to approximate it with the characters (R) (or (r)); for example the Python programming language Trademark Usage Policy advocates this usage. Example of legal equivalents are the phrase \"Registered, U.S. Patent and Trademark Off... |
how does the nintendo 3ds display work? | The trick with 3D is to make each eye see a different picture.
The Nintendo screen does this by having a series of pointy 'ridges' on the screen with a different picture on each side. Your right eye sees the right side of all the ridges, and your left eye sees the left side of all the ridges, so each eye sees a different image.
The non-ELI5 explanation: It uses a 'lenticular' display: _URL_0_ | [
"The Nintendo 3DS is a handheld video game console, revealed at Nintendo's E3 2010 press conference. Released in Japan in February 2011, it was released worldwide less than a month later. It uses autostereoscopic 3D to produce a 3D effect on-screen.\n",
"Nintendo's Virtual Boy (also known as the VR-32 during deve... |
Was either of the World Wars seen as the beginning of the biblical apocalypse by significant numbers of people at the time? | The biblical connotations were often applied in regards to international politics during the first and second world wars. Religious affiliations as always were espoused by nearly all sides and often played well into their political or diplomatic situations at the time.
Nazi Germany during the second world war for many of the common soldiers was a war against Bolshevism, which since it's emergence in the first world war was viewed as an inevitable, powerful and existential threat to the western world and Christianity. On every enlisted German soldier for all their armed forces was the words "Gott mitt uns" on their belt buckles as the words God with us always held an intensely connected part of Prussian traditional and heraldry.
Many in Germany during the second world war fought as hard as they did as increasingly propaganda reflected that the victory of Soviet Communism would be the end of Christianity in Germany. The mysticism of the National Socialist elite and the outright paganism of others are unique situations but as a mean the religious center of Germany remained Christianity, and Hitler worked with the Protestant and occasionally the Catholic churches in National Socialist Germany to assure the Christians did not oppose Nazism on the basis where people would oppose him religiously on a widespread basis during the war in Germany.
But politics of the apocalypse did intensely define the end days of the Third Reich, the mass suicide of so many Nazi stalwarts was intensely connected with the belief there was no world following National Socialism's eradication. And this was a feeling accentuated by the policies of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.
Apocalyptic context took on non Christian terms in the end of the Nazi regime as well, Götterdämmerung or the Twilight of the Gods held an intense connotation for the Nazi Regime as the imminent end and was rooted in Hitler's personal affinity for Richard Wagner and the encapsulation of many Nazis in Norse Paganism. An excerpt from the Newspaper Das Reich encapsulated the sentiment Goebbels was distributing among the German people: "If the German people lay down their arms the whole of Eastern and Southern Europe, together with the Reich, will come under Russian occupation. Behind an iron curtain mass butcheries of people would begin." To the Nazis and many Germans, the end was the end of their society and civilization.
Albert Speer wrote in his diary that the last performance of the Berlin Philharmonic before the end of the war was the final scene of Wagners Der Ring des Nibelungen of which Götterdämmerung was the penultimate piece. This final scene that was preformed was Brünnhilde's Immolation which in an essence captured the apocalyptic sentiments of the end for Germany.
Apocalyptic connotations were not exclusive during these times to the world wars however, the end of the First World War was a uniquely stark period to which the beginning of the apocalypse as written in the bible could also be occurring. The political unrest and suffering that followed the end of the great war was almost as bad as when it was raging, the Spanish flu was chasing across Europe taking nearly as many lives as the war did. The Russian civil war was now being raged with the forces of "Godless atheism" on the rise all over Europe. Germany descended into anarchy and as the Americans withdrew European societies, even the victorious Allies had to confront the cost of the conflict.
The return for many to a weakening economy, tremendous social unrest, communist revolutions and the deposing of institutions in power and place since before Napoleon in many instances lead to wild uncertainty of the worlds direction, and for many it was not a leap to see the world beginning to unravel.
One work that captured this uncertainty was from W. B. Yeats, an Irish poet who used imagery of the Second Coming and the Apocalypse to write of occurrences across the world and his native Ireland. Where the British government had just begun debating the dispatching of the black and tans; and the Irish War of independence was just beginning. Here is that poem:
> Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
> Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The answer to that question put forth is therefore unequivocally yes. The world wars were periods of tremendous change, unrest and suffering. For many the deaths of so many people and the destruction of so many things had to give and some grand event must be afoot. Of course the world did not end with these conflicts, but as poems like *The Second Coming* show there was most certainly an apocalyptic feel to what happened and what followed.
Childs, Peter (2007). Modernism. The New Critical Idiom (2nd ed.). Routledge. p. 39.
Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich, The Macmillan Company. 1970
Haughey, Jim (2002). The First World War in Irish Poetry. Bucknell University Press. p. 161.
Thacker, Toby (2010) [2009]. Joseph Goebbels: Life and Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. | [
"\"The Apocalypse War\" is a storyline from the comic strip \"Judge Dredd\", first published in British comic \"2000 AD\" in 1982. It directly followed \"Block Mania\" which had set the stage without revealing the reasons until the last episode. It was written by John Wagner and Alan Grant and illustrated by Carlos... |
What causes hair to turn grey? | Pigment cells called melanocytes naturally die as people age. These cells are part of the hair follicle which produces the individual hair strands. When the melanocytes die, the pigment that affected the color of the hair will be present in a less or non existent concentration, which makes hair translucent or, when coupled with 100,000 other hairs, appear grey. | [
"In some cases, gray hair may be caused by thyroid deficiencies, Waardenburg syndrome or a vitamin B deficiency. At some point in the human life cycle, cells that are located in the base of the hair's follicles slow, and eventually stop producing pigment. Piebaldism is a rare autosomal dominant disorder of melanocy... |
We speak in different languages, so why do we all make "ha ha" or "ho ho" sounds when we laugh? | Isn't laughter a physiological response? Kind of like saying "why do all coughs and sneezes sound the same"
'Laughter is anatomically mediated by the epiglottis constricting the larynx' | [
"The difference in language often results in miscommunication, as seen in an onomatopoeic example, \"555\", which sounds like \"crying\" in Chinese, and \"laughing\" in Thai. A similar example is between the English \"haha\" and the Spanish \"jaja\", where both are onomatopoeic expressions of laughter, but the diff... |
n95 masks and how they work | It's the same principle as a coffee filter, you have the layers in the mask itself that are very fine as to catch anything in the air that passes through it like dust, harmful bacteria, fine moisture droplets that may harbour virus particles, harmful chemicals from various sprays etc. This prevents said things from entering the respiratory system, hence protecting the wearer.
What differs these say from say generic surgical masks is they are generally designed to make a close 'seal' with the face of the wearer and has much better filtration quality as well as providing much better protection to the wearer. A generic looser surgical mask offers little protection to a wearer from outside contaminants and it used usually for the reverse purpose, stopping someone from distributing potentiontial contaminants into a sterile enviroment or to other people. | [
"Masking was one of the first techniques developed for the synthesis of Janus nanoparticles. This technique was developed by simply taking synthesis techniques of larger Janus particles and scaling down to the nanoscale. Masking, as the name suggests, involves the protection of one side of a nanoparticle followed b... |
disk frag/defragmentation | Every time you access a program or file, think of it like an overflowing folder of paper work, while you are moving with it from point A, to point B, you drop a few pages in different places, and when you bring it back from B to A, you forget to pick up those pages that fell out. Defragging your hard drive is like picking up all those dropped papers and putting them back where they should be.
**tl;dr:** Open program > bits get lost in between thus creating fragments > defragmenting returns those bits to their original place. | [
"Diskeeper is a defragmentation program designed for Microsoft Windows. It was developed by Executive Software International, Inc., which later changed its name to Diskeeper Corporation, and is now called Condusiv Technologies.\n",
"Windows Disk Defragmenter was updated to alleviate several restrictions. It no lo... |
how is ceramic dinnerware so durable? | It has to do with hardness. Some materials like steel are very strong, but not terribly hard. You can scratch steel with most rocks, which we don't regard as being nearly as "tough" as steel. Wear tends to be an accumulation of small scratches.
Ceramics can be very hard and thus scratch resistant. Ceramic glazes are actually a form of glass which melts and fuses to the surface of the ceramic. Glass is also very hard and scratch resistant. So you have a wear resistant plate covered with a wear resistant glaze.
So ceramic dishware will be more wear resistant than metal or plastic dishware. Glass dishware is also fairly wear resistant, but clear glass shows scratches much better than opaque ceramics. | [
"Ceramic cookware (as in pans, not baking dishes) is not made of a solid ceramic, but rather is a metal pan, typically aluminum, with a nano-particle ceramic coating. This makes the surface rough on a small-scale and causes solutions to bead up more and not stick to the surface.\n",
"In the 1970s, glass-ceramic c... |
How much did the Mongols invasion of China affect Japan? | The effect was somewhere from somewhat important to absolutely vital. There is disagreement in the field, but it is generally accepted that the Mongols were an existential threat that hardened the Shogunate's control of the Honshu-Kyushu-Shikoku regions. This threat began in the 1220's when Korea fell under mongol control. The Kamakura shogunate was the first truly powerful shogunate, and represented the fundamental shift in Japan's political center away from the Heian region (modern Kyoto) to Kamakura (modern Tokyo).
The Kamakura set the mold for power in the core of Japan, and that mold was fired in the crucible that was the existential threat of Mongol invasion.
Even if the wars with the mongols were not as major as japanese sources suggest, the sources can be read in another way, as propaganda. Which again, supports the idea that the mongol threat was formative - as it was a real or mythologized story that encouraged greater central control and power. | [
"In 1274, the Mongol-founded Yuan dynasty in China sent a force of some 40,000 men and 900 ships to invade Japan in northern Kyūshū. Japan mustered a mere 10,000 samurai to meet this threat. The invading army was harassed by major thunderstorms throughout the invasion, which aided the defenders by inflicting heavy ... |
what exactly causes this kind of rainbow coloration on stainless steel pots | Heating forms a thin layer of oxide over the steel, which causes the color effect by means of an optical process known as [thin-film interference](_URL_2_): basically the same effect that you can see in [soap](_URL_1_) [bubbles](_URL_0_) and [oil puddles](_URL_3_). | [
"Like many lake pigments, the exact colors produced depends on the pH of the mixture and the fixative used. Aluminum mordants used with brazilin produce the standard red colors, while the use of a tin mordant, in the form of SnCl or SnCl added to the extract is capable of yielding a pink color.\n",
"Tarbuttite is... |
Questions about Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria | There was a documentary on BBC 4 that dealt with this, tracking his life and the castles he built.
_URL_0_
It's been a few months since I've watched it but the castles are thought to be a part of his escapism from the realities of the loss of power Bavaria saw as Prussia moved towards unifying Germany. As well as this is his love of opera (specifically Wagner) and German mythology. The documentary is very interesting and covers much of his life and the castles he built. The castles put him in a lot of debt and if I remember right adjusting for inflation it is roughly €3 billion.
This documentary is all I really have learned about him but it covers the questions about his homosexuality and death to some degree. Sorry if this isn't enough but I do highly recommend it if you can get all the parts | [
"Ludwig II, King of Bavaria (German: Ludwig der Zweite, König von Bayern) is a 1929 German silent historical film directed by William Dieterle and starring Dieterle, Theodor Loos and Eugen Burg. It portrays the life and reign of the monarch Ludwig II who ruled Bavaria from 1864 to 1886. It was made at the Bavaria S... |
Why are atoms depicted as spherical in our science textbooks? [Chemistry] | The actual structure is a bunch of probability distributions of electrons that are really hard to draw, and it doesn't give you a significant advantage over thinking of them as spheres. It explains why valance electrons matter, but it's a lot simpler just to think of atoms as a black box when dealing with chemical structures. | [
"In pure and applied mathematics, particularly quantum mechanics and computer graphics and their applications, a spherical basis is the basis used to express spherical tensors. The spherical basis closely relates to the description of angular momentum in quantum mechanics and spherical harmonic functions.\n",
"Wh... |
stealing home base. | It's also done so that the team can get a run in before the batter can possibly strike out, ending the inning with a third out.
Other bases also have advantages when stolen, because then if the ball is hit to that base, the runner is already there and isn't forced to run into in easy out. | [
"Stealing Home is a 1988 American coming of age romantic drama film, written and directed by Steven Kampmann and William Porter (billed as Will Aldis). The film stars Mark Harmon, Jodie Foster, Blair Brown, Jonathan Silverman, Harold Ramis and William McNamara. In the film; Billy Wyatt, a washed-up baseball player,... |
how does the earth’s magnetism work if metals lose their properties with intense heat? | Earth's magnetic field is generated by moving currents in the outer core. In that sense, it's more like a gargantuan electromagnet than a permanent magnet.
Moving charge generates a magnetic field, and the liquid outer core moves in circular currents due to the intense temperature difference between the inner core and the mantle. It's really hot down there, the inner core is as hot as the sun's surface. | [
"Metallic properties increase down groups as decreasing attraction between the nuclei and the outermost electrons causes the outermost electrons to be loosely bound and thus able to conduct heat and electricity. Across the period, from left to right, increasing attraction between the nuclei and the outermost electr... |
Are there any real instances of incredibly skilled soldiers in the ancient world? | Caesar likes to point out the occasional act of heroism and although one should expect him to embellish somewhat it seems likely that his stories are broadly factual (given the overall character of the work). He recounts the following event in *De bello Gallico* V 44:
> In that legion there were two very brave men, centurions, who were now approaching the first ranks, T. Pulfio, and L. Varenus. These used to have continual disputes between them which of them should be preferred, and every year used to contend for promotion with the utmost animosity. When the fight was going on most vigorously before the fortifications, Pulfio, one of them, says, "Why do you hesitate, Varenus? or what [better] opportunity of signalizing your valor do you seek? This very day shall decide our disputes." When he had uttered these words, he proceeds beyond the fortifications, and rushes on that part of the enemy which appeared the thickest. Nor does Varenus remain within the rampart, but respecting the high opinion of all, follows close after. Then, when an inconsiderable space intervened, Pulfio throws his javelin at the enemy, and pierces one of the multitude who was running up, and while the latter was wounded and slain, the enemy cover him with their shields, and all throw their weapons at the other and afford him no opportunity of retreating. The shield of Pulfio is pierced and a javelin is fastened in his belt. This circumstance turns aside his scabbard and obstructs his right hand when attempting to draw his sword: the enemy crowd around him when [thus] embarrassed. His rival runs up to him and succors him in this emergency. Immediately the whole host turn from Pulfio to him, supposing the other to be pierced through by the javelin. Varenus rushes on briskly with his sword and carries on the combat hand to hand, and having slain one man, for a short time drove back the rest: while he urges on too eagerly, slipping into a hollow, he fell. To him, in his turn, when surrounded, Pulfio brings relief; and both having slain a great number, retreat into the fortifications amid the highest applause. Fortune so dealt with both in this rivalry and conflict, that the one competitor was a succor and a safeguard to the other, nor could it be determined which of the two appeared worthy of being preferred to the other.
(translation by McDevitte & Bohn)
| [
"Greek mercenary soldiers from northwestern India are mentioned in the accounts of the Pandyan Kingdom in Madurai, and described in admiring terms: \"The valiant-eyed Yavanas, whose bodies were strong and of terrible aspect\".\n",
" were four skilled soldiers in Honest's employ. All four were highly trained and a... |
Did North American wolves “learn” guns are bad? | Follow up question; would a biologist or similar be able to give different / more in depth information within Reddit? | [
"Proponents for wolf hunting often point out the apparently adverse effects large wolf populations have on game herds. An example occurred in 2008, in which the Alaska Board of Game approved plans calling for department staff to shoot wolves from helicopters on the southern Alaska Peninsula in order to assist the s... |
why are there more two headed animals being born than two headed humans? | Two headed babies is a form of Siamese twins. This can only happen when there is twins. The probability of a twin birth depend on the mothers genes which is different between species. For humans this is quite rare but most animals give birth to twins, triplets or even more babies at once. This is also a feature that can be bread. When there is twins in almost every birth the chances of Siamese twins is much greater which again causes the chance of two headed babies to be quite much higher. | [
"Two-headed animals (called bicephalic or dicephalic) and three-headed (tricephalic) animals are the only type of multi-headed creatures seen in the real world, and form by the same process as conjoined twins from monozygotic twin embryos.\n",
"In humans, as in other animals, partial twinning can result in format... |
If you were to scream in the vacuum of space, would you be able to hear your own voice through the vibrations in your head? Or would you just hear silence? | Barring the other physical consequences of being exposed to space vacuum unprotected....if you had air in your lungs to exhale and 'scream' with, the vibrations from your vocal chords would propagate through your bodily tissue/matter and you'd 'hear' it--just like you already do in an atmosphere (except you probably 'hear' more of your voice projection/reflection vs. internal conduction). Of course, if you didn't have a nice lungful of air to exhale in the first place, there would be no vibrating of your vocal chords because they require the pressure from the air in your lungs to vibrate. | [
"BULLET::::- Hearing - In the space station and spacecraft there are only mechanical noises. There can be no environmental noise; there is no medium that can transmit the sound waves. Although there are other team members who can talk to each other, their voices stop stimulating the sense of hearing, since they get... |
Seeing as how Constantinople was the capital of the Byzantine Empire, why didn't the Greeks retake the city upon regaining their independence from the Ottoman Empire? | Constantinople was a major goal of Greek nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Greek ambition for territory in Anatolia, whether Istanbul/Constantinople or Izmir/Smyrna, pretty much ended after the Greco-Turkish War, one of several wars in the region in th wake of WWI. During this war, Greece occupied and administered Izmir for several years and had their armies reach the Istanbul suburbs. The tides turned decisively, however: In Turkey, the war is seen as the most important part of the Kurtuluş Savaşı, the Turkish War for Independence (literally the War of National Salvation), whereas in Greece it’s know as the “Asia Minor Disaster” (Asia Minor is the Greek term for Anatolia).
For more on both this and the larger context, see my old post:
* [Was there ever a serious effort to retake Constantinople after 1453 by the West?](_URL_0_) | [
"Constantinople was considered as a bastion of Christianity that defended Europe from the advancing forces of Islam, and the Fourth Crusade's sack of the city dealt an irreparable blow to this eastern bulwark. Although the Greeks retook Constantinople after 57 years of Latin rule, the Byzantine Empire had been crip... |
Is ADHD something someone either has or doesn't have? Or is it a spectrum, and we only call it ADHD if a subject crosses some threshold? | There's a difference between theory and practice here. In theory, either you have ADHD or you don't -- kind of like syphilis. You have it or you don't. So there is a definition of ADHD you can find in the DSM V, and in theory, if you meet the definition you have ADHD, and if you don't, you don't.
In reality, it's a spectrum. People can have a little of it, or a lot of it. And fundamentally, how much ADHD you have is inversely proportional to how much dopamine function you have in the pre-frontal cortex. If you have high dopamine function, you can pay attention to boring things, catch your own mistakes, sit still for long periods of time, etc. If you have low dopamine function, you can't pay attention to boring stuff, you miss your own mistakes, and when you sit still for very long, you get more and more restless. Since dopamine function varies along a spectrum from low to moderate to high, ADHD symptoms vary on a spectrum from major to minor to nonexistent. | [
"ADHD is diagnosed by an assessment of a child's behavioral and mental development, including ruling out the effects of drugs, medications and other medical or psychiatric problems as explanations for the symptoms. It often takes into account feedback from parents and teachers with most diagnoses begun after a teac... |
why does air cool when it's pressure decreases? (conversely, why does air heat up when it's pressure increases?) | Temperature is caused by atoms and molecules whizzing around and hitting off each other. The more collisions, the higher the temperature. If you hold a finite volume of air in a container (say 1 mole, a unit of measurement for atoms and molecules) and change the size of the container, that effects whether the molecules bounce off each other and the sides of the container more or less. If it expands (decrease in pressure) there's more space for the molecules to move around and they bounce off each other less. If it gets smaller (more pressure) they bounce off each other more. | [
"However, when air is hot, it tends to expand, which lowers its density. Thus, hot air tends to rise and transfer heat upward. This is the process of convection. Convection comes to equilibrium when a parcel of air at a given altitude has the same density as its surroundings. Air is a poor conductor of heat, so a p... |
ukip had over three million votes, why did they only get 1 mp ? | Let me explain with a really simplified version of the election:
2 Parties run in 100 local elections, each local election gets 201 votes.
By sheer luck; Party 1 wins EVERY election 101 votes to 100. That means they win every seat.
The end result is > 51% of total votes but 100% of the total seats.
The number of votes is not strictly relevant to the number of seats, it's the way the votes are distributed. Proportional voting (the way of overcoming this) was proposed in 2011 in a referendum, but the vote was that the current system is fine the way it is. | [
"UKIP received the greatest number of votes (27.49%) of any British party in the 2014 European Parliament election and gained 11 extra MEPs for a total of 24. The party won seats in every region of Great Britain, including its first in Scotland. It was the first time in over a century that a party other than Labour... |
Why are Asia and Africa so big while Europe only occupies a small part of the world? | The naming of Europe goes back to the Greeks. They divided the world with a line through the Aegean Sea, The Dardanelles, the Bosporus and the black sea leaving the crimean peninsula in Europe. Originally the term only applied to Greece but eventually came to designate pretty much anything north of the Mediterranean and west of the line I described. Anything East of the line was Asia and the landmass south of the Mediterranean was Egypt for the land Surrounding and east of the Nile Delta and Libya for the land west of the Nile Delta.
The Romans borrowed this same general description pattern. They named Africa and set up the idea of continents as they exist now.
You have to remember that when Greeks and even Romans were dividing up the world they would have had no idea about the shape of the entire world. For all they knew the three continents were just about the same size.
The naming convention was passed to modern people through the languages based on Latin. The naming convention is in popular use throughout the world owing mostly to European colonialism and dominance in the 18th 19th and early 20th century. | [
"Geographically, Asia is the major eastern constituent of the continent of Eurasia with Europe being a northwestern peninsula of the landmass. Asia, Europe and Africa make up a single continuous landmass—Afro-Eurasia (except for the Suez Canal)—and share a common continental shelf. Almost all of Europe and the bett... |
why are airplanes and other aircrafts forward facing tips rounded instead of arrow shaped? | > Wouldn’t it cut through the air more efficiently if it was sharp?
Only if the air only comes in perfectly straight. Otherwise it creates zones of low pressure which causes drag. A rounded nose allows the pressure wave which extends forward for subsonic aircraft to modify the flow of incoming air to work better with varying angles of approach.
Supersonic aircraft don't have any impact on incoming air until it arrives, so minimizing the charge in air direction is best. This means a pointy tip. | [
"A rectangular planform wing produces stronger wingtip vortices than does a tapered or elliptical wing, therefore many modern wings are tapered. However, an elliptical planform is more efficient as the induced downwash (and therefore the effective angle of attack) is constant across the whole of the wingspan. Few a... |
how do criminal bonds work? | Bail isn't used for anything ideally. It's held by the court, and then given back to you when you show up at the required time. The bondsman just loans you the amount necessary to pay bail, and you agree to have the court pay him back directly.
This only breaks down if you decide to not show up to court. Then you don't get the bail back; problem is, the government is now angry at you, and you owe the bondsman a lot of money for the loan they don't get back. You'll probably be rearrested fairly quickly, and if you live in some states the bondsman can send a bounty hunter after you. | [
"The \"bond\" is a term used for the softness or hardness of the powder metal being used to form the segments. The powdered metals hold the diamonds in place. The bond controls the rate at which the diamond segments wear down allowing new diamonds to become exposed at the surface to continue grinding with a \"sharp... |
what exactly are co-op apartments and how are they legal? | Co-ops (at least New York style) are a type of apartment ownership that have a purpose similar to condominiums, but with some differences.
With a condo, you own your unit outright but have a shared ownership of the common land, roof, and similar areas.
With a co-op, all you own is a share of a corporation which has attached to it the right to occupy a specific unit in a building owned by the corporation, subject to the approval of the corporation. The end result is that in a co-op, depending on how the by-laws are written, the board of directors might have more authority than would be possible with a condo.
Since you're asking how they're legal, I'm guessing you're referring to the board's right to approve new co-op members. The answer is that it's the same as any other privately held corporation, which is allowed to put limits on the transfer of shares, as long as they're not impacting a protected class (race, religion, etc.) Just like when I worked for a start-up, before it went public, I couldn't sell my shares to anyone without the permission of the board of directors. | [
"A housing cooperative, or co-op, is a legal entity, usually a corporation, which owns real estate, consisting of one or more residential buildings; it is one type of housing tenure. Housing cooperatives are a distinctive form of home ownership that have many characteristics that differ from other residential arran... |
Do any photographs exist of a Naval broadside hitting its target? | This should give you an idea of what these battles looked like: [the Bismarck in her final battle.](_URL_1_) There seem to be numerous photos of the battle of Jutland too, but this one is clearer. It doesn't quite capture what it was like for a ship to be hit by an armor-piercing shell though. I don't know if any sailor ever managed to shoot color video of that. (Let alone live to develop the film.) [This is what these guns were capable of doing against land](_URL_0_) with explosive rounds, though. | [
"The film contains several accurate depictions of torpedo attacks being arranged with periscope sightings, range and bearing calculations, and use of a Torpedo Data Computer to achieve a shooting solution. On the surface, the Captain uses a Target Bearing Transmitter mounted on the bridge to acquire a target visual... |
why do solid-state drives work more efficiently? | Let me begin by explaining how regular hard drives work. Imagine a record player. Replace the physical grooves on the record with a magnetic charge. Now make it really really tiny and spin very very fast. This is in essence a hard drive. You have a spinning disk containing information stored as magnetic charges and you have an arm (like a record needle, but magnetic) to read and write the data.
Now, onto solid-state drives. These are composed of flash memory. These function the exact same as a USB (flash) drive. Flash memory drives consist of an array of transistors to store the data bits and a small computer chip to read and write data to these transistors.
A lot of the energy savings flash drives exhibit is because they don't have any moving parts, which is also why they're called "solid-state". Another advantage, because there are no moving parts, and therefor no physical limitations on movement speed, is that solid-state hard drives perform faster.
As a side note, hard drives aren't always spinning. If they aren't being used while you're on the computer, they will spin down after a certain amount of time, requiring them to be spun back up before reading or writing anything. Solid-state drives are always ready. | [
"Most of the advantages of solid-state drives over traditional hard drives are due to their ability to access data completely electronically instead of electromechanically, resulting in superior transfer speeds and mechanical ruggedness. On the other hand, hard disk drives offer significantly higher capacity for th... |
What prompted the erection of all these confederate statues? | I've written in the past about Civil War memory, so [this previous post of mine](_URL_0_) might be of interest for you. | [
"In 1916, the University of Texas at Austin recognized several confederate veterans (including Johnston) with statues on its South Mall. On August 21, 2017, as part of the wave of confederate monument removals in America, Johnston's statue was taken down. Plans were announced to add it to the Briscoe Center for Ame... |
Cave Diving vs. Open Sea Diving Pressure Difference? | Layman here.
No, there's no difference. Distance below the water line is the only thing that matters; it doesn't matter if there's rock over your head or not.
Related: fresh water is slightly less dense than seawater. (no salt) So you can dive slightly deeper in a fresh water than you could in the ocean. But the difference is only a few percentage points. | [
"Two regions have had particular influence on cave diving techniques and equipment due to their very different cave diving environments. These are the United Kingdom, and the United States, mainly Florida.\n",
"Deep cave diving (as in the WKPP) has significant differences in hazards and environmental conditions f... |
Are the planets in our solar system charged? Do electric fields exist between them? | The total charge of the planets is negligible. Any relevant net charge would be neutralized quickly. | [
"Of the eight planets in the Solar System, only Venus and Mars lack such a magnetic field. In addition, the moon of Jupiter Ganymede also has one. Of the magnetized planets the magnetic field of Mercury is the weakest, and is barely able to deflect the solar wind. Ganymede's magnetic field is several times larger, ... |
why did people used to believe in witches, and why did things like 'wearing red lipstick' increase your chance of being one? | Witches were women (and, little known fact, in some cases men) who practiced pagan traditions and rituals (the name stemming from the german term 'wicca'). The church saw them as heretics and opposed them and their ways. After a while they began pinning things they didn't like on witchcraft and to subjugate the masses.
It's a common misconception that people were greatly terrified and paranoid of witches in some mass hysteria. It was mostly one man named Matthew Hopkins (aka The Witchfinder General) and his men who perpetrated the witch hunts later on and he was heavily criticized and despised. It's also assumed that he knew many of the women weren't witches, or possibly didn't even believe in witches to begin with, and that he was just a sadist who enjoyed torturing and killing people. | [
"Folklore, mythology and literature associate red with fertility, and women are thought to have worn the equivalent of a red lipstick as early as 10,000 B.C. and so sexual receptiveness and red may be a result of social conditioning. However, this social conditioning may have originated for biological and evolution... |
why are tunnels round? | Following a simple Google search I found: Tunnels usually have a circular cross section because the stresses around a circular opening are more evenly distributed. ... So the short answer is: they're circular because it's convenient and there is usually no significant reason to make them any other shape.
_URL_0_ | [
"Tunnels are either square or round, depending on the method of their construction: Square tunnels were built with the cut and cover method of digging trenches down from the surface, constructing the tunnel structure, and then backfilling. Round tunnels are bored using a tunnel boring machine (TBM). The cut and cov... |
what does the 'cosmic microwave background radiation' picture show and why is it oval-shaped? | This is the visual representation of the map of remnant radiation left over from the big bang (or shortly thereafter.)
It is oval because it is a flat representation of what the sensors recorded from Earth looking outwards in all directions.
The areas of higher temperature correspond to areas in the universe (again, from Earth looking outwards) that have a greater density of mass.
This map shows that there is a correlation between the state of the very early universe (in terms of matter density) and the current state. | [
"The Cosmic Background Explorer satellite produces a detailed map of the background radiation remaining from the Big Bang. The map shows \"ripples\", caused by slight variations in the density of the early universe – the seeds of galaxies and galaxy clusters.\n",
"The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation s... |
How do you go from anecdotal evidence to scientific study? | You need to do a scientific experiment where you have two equal groups and manipulate one independent variable to determine causation then publish your findings in a Peer-reviewed journal. | [
"Sometimes, a researcher may conduct exploratory research but report it as if it had been confirmatory ('Hypothesizing After the Results are Known', HARKing—see Hypotheses suggested by the data); this is a questionable research practice bordering on fraud.\n",
"The results of exploratory research are not usually ... |
what is the difference between atp and nad? | ATP is the energy molecule, which you're aware of. I don't know the full role of NAD, but it is part of the production of ATP. NAD becomes NADH when it accepts an electron, as glucose is broken down in multiple steps. Anyway, that accepted electron eventually gets placed in the Electron Transport Chain in the mitochondrial membrane which ultimately culminates with the production of ATP.
Hopefully someone will come along with a better answer than mine, | [
"From the perspective of biochemistry, ATP is classified as a nucleoside triphosphate, which indicates that it consists of three components: a nitrogenous base (adenine), the sugar ribose, and the triphosphate.\n",
"In terms of its structure, ATP consists of an adenine attached by the 9-nitrogen atom to the 1′ ca... |
Why didn't Germany take the rest of France in WW2 they seemed happy to stop after taking Paris? | The simple answer boils down to a couple of factors:
* Military occupations can be very costly and expensive. For a country as densely populated as France, Germany would have had to commit a decent chunk of it's army to keep the annexed territory in line. This is expensive and costly, as Germany needed all of the soldiers that it could get. Examples of occupation soldiers being trapped in places such as Norway and Estonia later in the war helped prove how useful said soldiers could have been on the front-line rather than used idly or to hold down an occupied country.
* France was a major country. Establishing a puppet government that could give the illusion of legitimacy was very beneficial to Germany. By letting France *appear* to remain legitimate, Germany can benefit from puppeting Vichy and letting countries like the United States and the USSR to recognise the Vichy Government.
* Another minor reason might've been the fact that since France was in the West and bordered by Germany's allies, it wasn't strategically necessary to occupy the entirety of the nation, since there was nobody to protect the country from. This is why Germany took the North and Western coasts. Once the Allies began to threaten French North Africa, the Mediterranean, and France in the early 40's, the rest of France *would* become strategically significant, leading to the full occupation of the country in 1942.
* Germany took over 2 million French soldiers hostage after the Fall of France, using them as labourers and as leverage to keep France in line. Since France didn't have a foundation of manpower to quickly rebuild it's army, occupying France wasn't entirely necessary and the hostages could be used instead to encourage Vichy to cooperate. It's worth noting that these French prisoners could have made up as much as 10% of the French adult male population at the time.
All in all, in the end, Vichy France only lasted for ~2 years from 1940 to 1942 anyways, as Germany eventually occupied the entirety of the country in 1942. Occupations however can be costly and dangerous, especially for previously wealthy, powerful, and relevant countries like France that even in defeat could swing their weight in resistance. | [
"Paris fell to the Germans on 14 June 1940, and the government surrendered on 24 June 1940. Nazi Germany occupied three-fifths of France's territory, leaving the rest in the southeast to the new Vichy government, which was a bit more than a puppet state since it still had a navy. However nearly 2 million French sol... |
When was the modern conception of romantic love developed? How long before it displaced ancient notions of marriage and love? | What do you mean, exactly, as a distinction between "romantic love" and "ancient notions of marriage and love"? Are we talking about rejecting marriages as a practical tool, and turning towards a 'I'll get married when I'm ready" modern attitude? It's difficult to draw the line... women have been more or less required by social constraint to marry in western society up until *very* recently ( < 50 years). It's also not a universal concept - many societies (eastern europeans in general, ashkenazic jews in particular spring to mind. I'm certain there are thousands of other examples) have relied heavily on matchmakers for centuries.
Courtship practices evolved a great deal in the 17th-19th centuries; you can see testament of this in literary works such as Francis Burney's Evelina (1778), Opie's Adeline Mowbry (1804, a cautionary tale about the dangers of allowing your desire to override your family's wishes), and Jane Austen's complete body of work (1811-1817, though written prior). Self-interest in marriage was gaining increasing acceptance, especially outside of the upper class.
The Victorians (I use the term broadly, not just to refer to the English/British, but also the Anglosphere as a whole) were among the first to accept the 'necessity' of romance in a happy marriage. American parents in the Victorian age were especially keen on allowing their children to socialise across gender lines (highly chaperoned, of course).
While marriage continued to be used as a tool of social advancement for the British aristocracy/American upper class, there was a prevailing shift in attitudes both on the part of those being wed and their families that love, desire, romance and other warm, fuzzy feelings should be involved in matrimony, and not simply 'family ties', bank accounts, and inheritances.
**Non-historical aside:** I would hold that the notion of marriage needing to involve love is still in relative infancy. You can continue to see vestiges of old thinking in our modern society - whose grandmother wouldn't like them to marry a nice Jewish doctor (insert other ethnically appropriate cliché)? People often have a hard time accepting "but I love him" as a reason for being in a relationship that they can see is flawed, and social position continues to play a very big part in our courtship practices (even if we don't like to think of 'casual dating' as courtship) | [
"Some believe that romantic love evolved independently in multiple cultures. For example, in an article presented by Henry Grunebaum, he argues \"therapists mistakenly believe that romantic love is a phenomenon unique to Western cultures and first expressed by the troubadours of the Middle Ages.\"\n",
"American h... |
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