question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
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why are browsers still not able to have an effective pop-up blocker? (especially given the fact that they all implement and adhere to a standard rfc) | Obviously it would be possible to design a browser that simply didn't allow any pop-up windows. The problem is there are many genuine and legitimate uses for pop-up windows, and many existing websites depend on pop-up windows to function correctly.
Thus, the browser is given the almost impossible task of trying to distinguish between undesired (spam) pop-ups and legitimate pop-ups that the user wants to see.
Modern browsers now typically block websites from loading pop-ups from code which executes autonomously. For example, you can't tell the browser to simply open a pop-up window when a page loads any more -- most browsers will simply ignore such a request because it could be seriously abused.
In most cases, browsers only respond to pop-ups that are triggered by user input (e.g. clicking on a web page element like a button), because it is assumed that the user genuinely wants to see the pop-up if they are clicking the button.
The problem is that websites may exploit this as a vulnerability and simply put an invisible 'button' over the whole webpage (for example), and then as soon as the user clicks anywhere on the page, the browser opens the pop-up (assuming the user requested the pop-up by clicking a button).
So basically there is no easy solution. Some browsers block everything and notify you of any attempts to load pop-ups so you can choose which ones to allow yourself. Other browsers employ the method I described above where only pop-ups triggered by some user action are permitted. | [
"Box model hacks have proven unreliable because they rely on bugs in browsers' CSS support that may be fixed in later versions. For this reason, some Web developers have instead recommended either avoiding specifying both width and padding for the same element or using conditional comment and/or CSS filters to work... |
Is there any historical evidence that the Egyptians had Jewish slaves? | Not to discourage future answers, but this question has been addressed several times in the [FAQ](_URL_0_). | [
"It is apparent that Jews still owned Jewish slaves in the Talmudic era because Talmudic authorities tried to denounce the practice that Jews could sell themselves into slavery if they were poverty-stricken. In particular, the Talmud said that Jews should not sell themselves to non-Jews, and if they did, the Jewish... |
How do cells and genes "know" how to form the head, hands, etc.? | Its all about the genes, and more specifically the control of those genes. It varies by body part exactly how this works. One particularly cool example is how each of your fingers gets differentiated.
So your hand just starts as a nub during development, and it has one special node on one side. This thing starts emitting a certain protein, but as you can probably imagine, less of this protein gets to the middle of the hand than the starting side, and even less gets to the farthest side than that. The fingers know how exactly to grow depending on the concentration of this protein. So the starting side becomes the pinkie, the next highest concentration the ring finger, then the middle finger, the index, and the lowest concentration side becomes the thumb. | [
"Each cell type is defined by which genes are characteristically active in that cell type. A particular gene in a cell's genome codes for the production of a particular protein, that is, when that gene is turned on (active), the protein coded for by that gene is produced and present somewhere in the cell. Productio... |
why is the uae so amazing and secular when it comes to technology and engineering but poor when it comes to social justice? | American and European architects and engineers built those building. They just have a shit load of money from all the oil to throw at cool buildings | [
"In December 2009 however, a positive impact of UAE citizens in the workplace was identified in a newspaper article citing a yet unpublished study, this advantage being the use of networks within the evolving power structures.\n",
"In December 2009 however, a positive impact of UAE citizens in the workplace was i... |
Why doesn't beef jerky need to be refrigerated after opening? | The extremely low water content and extremely high salt content combine to make a very inhospitable environment for microorganism growth. | [
"After the arrival of refrigeration, dehydration was no longer needed for preservation. Most dried beef is sold in the U.S. as jerky. In Mexico, it is still sold for cooking and snacking; this is done mostly in the north and in small-scale operations. Most machaca dishes now are made from beef that has been well-co... |
how do we know so much about a planet by just looking at a picture | Well, we know a lot about planets and chemistry more broadly.
If we see a planet pass in front of its star relative to us, we can see how big it is. We can also see how much its gravity makes its star wobble to get an idea of the planet's mass. Together, these give us the planet's density (and, thus, whether it's a rocky planet or a gaseous one).
Additionally, if it passes in front of its star, we can look at what color light passes through its atmosphere. Different chemicals absorb different wavelengths of light, by looking at light that passes through an exoplanet's atmosphere, we can get a pretty good idea of what its atmosphere is made out of. | [
"Many pictures have been taken of the entire Earth by satellites launched by a variety of governments and private organizations. From high orbits, where half the planet can be seen at once, it is plainly spherical. The only way to piece together all the pictures taken of the ground from lower orbits so that all the... |
Does your voice sound slightly squeakier at higher elevations? | Helium changes the frequency of your voice because the speed of sound in helium is about 3 times higher than in air. Your vocal cords produce sound based on the resonance of sound waves bouncing back and forth in the air cavities in your body, so tripling the speed of sound has a similar effect to magically making your body 3 times smaller, producing a sound 3 times as high-pitched.
Low-pressure air actually has the *same* speed of sound as regular air, so your voice does not sound squeaky at high altitude.
If you are curious about the *reason* that helium has a high speed of sound, this involves some interesting physics: in a gas, the speed of sound is directly proportional to the speed of the individual molecules bouncing around. Molecules in a gas are fairly sparse, so for air to "communicate" between one end of a room and the other, the limiting factor is essentially how quickly an individual molecule can travel - if you make a disturbance at one end of a room, then the disturbance is propagated by some molecule, which will then bump into another molecule, and another molecule, with the ultimate speed of the propagation of the disturbance being similar (but slightly less than) the typical speed of individual molecules in the air.
How fast do molecules typically move in a gas? The equipartition theorem of thermodynamics roughly means that each molecule in a gas will have a kinetic energy proportional to its temperature, but *independent* of pressure or which type of molecule it is. Thus the speed of sound in a gas is proportional to the square root of temperature, and inversely proportional to the square root of the mass of each molecule in the gas. Helium atoms are substantially lighter than oxygen molecules or nitrogen molecules in air, so the speed of sound is a lot higher. See [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) for more details. | [
"Because of the large, vibrating pharyngo-esophageal segment, the pitch of esophageal speech is very low—between 50 and 100 Hz. In esophageal speech, pitch and intensity correlate: a low-pitched voice is produced with low intensity and a high-pitched voice is produced with high intensity. The production of the latt... |
If humans evolved from creatures which lived in trees, why is the fear of heights so prevalent? | Even modern tree climbing creatures will die from a high enough drop. The fear of heights is there to make sure we don't fall, doesn't stop us from climbing in the first place. | [
"Although many fears are learned, the capacity to fear is part of human nature. Many studies have found that certain fears (e.g. animals, heights) are much more common than others (e.g. flowers, clouds). These fears are also easier to induce in the laboratory. This phenomenon is known as preparedness. Because early... |
how can a woman's body be able to hold a baby inside without damaging her insides? | The abdomen has [muscles](_URL_1_) to "hold everything in", and the skin and abdominal muscles CAN grow and stretch over the 9 month period to [accommodate](_URL_0_) the baby's size.
But pregnancies are not easy, and neither is the birth process, so in a lot of cases there are complications and unsuccessful pregnancies or deliveries. | [
"4. To avoid having the baby aspirate the contents of the amniotic sac at the moment of birth. Most often, the amniotic sac will break of its own accord, most often by the beginning of the second stage of labor. If it remains intact, it is sure to break with maternal pushing efforts. But in a rare case, the baby ca... |
why does smoking cigarettes have a significantly higher chance of someone developing lung cancer as opposed to vaping e-liquid or smoking marijuana? | There are many many many other chemicals in cigarettes such as formaldehyde (that liquid your dissection frogs in high school sit in so they don’t rot), battery acid, rat poison, etc in them. If you were to grow tobacco dry it and roll your own cigarettes they would be significantly safer and less cancerous. | [
"Marijuana smoke contains many of the same carcinogens as those in tobacco smoke. However, the effect of smoking cannabis on lung cancer risk is not clear. A 2013 review did not find an increased risk from light to moderate use. A 2014 review found that smoking cannabis doubled the risk of lung cancer.\n",
"A 201... |
What keep a car form going forward while in reverse gear? | On manuals, it's the gear ratio combined with the work required to turn the engine.
In First and Reverse gears, the gear ratio is quite high, say 3:1. Along with a final drive ratio of roughly the same, the effective gear ratio is around 10:1, meaning that for each revolution of the wheels the engine revolves 10 times. This also has the effect of making the torque at the wheels 10x that at the engine (with a corresponding 10x slower rotational speed).
Engines require a fair amount of torque to turn over and the gear ratio only increases this. The long and short of it is that the torque required to turn the engine from the wheels is greater than that generated by the car's weight wanting to roll down the hill, so the car stays still.
In Automatics, I believe that the "Park" position engages a pawl with the driveshaft to lock it in place. Here, you're required to break the pawl before you can move the car. | [
"Pulling the car \"backward\" (hence the name) winds up an internal spiral spring; a flat spiral rather than a helical coil spring. When released, the car is propelled forward by the spring. When the spring has unwound and the car is moving, the motor is disengaged by a clutch or ratchet and the car then rolls free... |
How would the low thermal output of Chernobyl's reactor #4 on the night of the Chernobyl disaster have contributed to the reactor core's instability? | Some background on RBMK reactors to preface my answer to your question. RBMK reactors are graphite moderated and water cooled. Water acts as both a moderator and absorber, however in RBMK's the graphite carries the bulk of the moderating potential so the water tends to act mostly as an absorber. This is important because losing water or decreasing the density will reduce the absorption of neutrons. In critical operation, neutron population is in equilibrium (rate of neutrons born = rate of neutrons absorbed/lost). If the density of water in the RBMK decreases, less neutrons are absorbed, and the population of neutrons will increase, essentially inserting reactivity in the reactor. This is called a positive void reactivity coefficient (reactivity increases as voids increase).
Intuition would tell you that at lower power levels, less boiling occurs so the density is also expected to remain near constant. Indeed the 'predicted channel coolant density response is small at low power levels.' and 'the channel void nearly collapses.' Unfortunately it is not so simple. In reality, 'the density response exhibits a maximum at an intermediate low power,' which is to say contrary to expectation, the decrease in density is greatest at low power (see Fig. 5-2). This occurs because the density of coolant is not dependent on power level alone, but rather dependent on power-to-flow ratio instead. A physical interpretation would be fast-moving water flow needs more heat to boil while slow moving flow requires much less (boiling water in a pot while constantly stirring vs. boiling still water).
The result is instability at low power. At low power operation, the density response function is near the maximum. Since RBMK have a positive void reactivity coefficient, voids created at low power insert reactivity. Since the time constant of this behavior is on the order of seconds, it is far too quick for operators to react since RBMK's take ~10-20 seconds to fully insert control rods to for SCRAM.
[Source](_URL_1_)
Addressing your second question 'Supposing instead that the reactor was gradually brought down from its normal operating level to 200mw, could something still have gone wrong owing only to the low thermal output?' That's actually exactly what they did (or intended to at least); the reactor was gradually brought down from its normal operating level to the low thermal power required for the test (which was 700-800 MW, not 200 MW). The problem arose from the electrical operators in Kiev demanding Chernobyl's operators postpone their test to satisfy electricity demands for that evening. They ended up operating at ~1600 MW for 12+ hours, much longer than planned, giving time for xenon to build up and poisoning the reactor. When time came for the test, the operators began lowering the reactor that had been sitting at 1600 MW for far longer than intended to 700-800 MW for the test, but due to the xenon buildup, operators could not stabilize the reactor at 700-800 MW and power quickly dropped to 30 MW. You have it backwards in your post; xenon poisoning led to 30 MW power output, not the other way around. To address this, they should not have let the reactor sit at 1500-1600 MW for over 12 hours, far too much xenon buildup had occurred and there was no way for the test to be carried out successfully. If the operators were allowed to perform their test without this interruption, there would not have been enough xenon poisoning to have lowered thermal power to 30 MW in the first place.
[Source](_URL_0_) | [
"The Chernobyl reactor was a RBMK type. The disaster was caused by a power excursion that led to a steam explosion, meltdown and extensive offsite consequences. Operator error and a faulty shutdown system led to a sudden, massive spike in the neutron multiplication rate, a sudden decrease in the neutron period, and... |
What colors did vikings wear? | Well, the short answer is 'we don't really know, but probably a wide variety of naturally occurring colours and, for fancy stuff, man-made dyes.' The longer answer is that we know that in early medieval Scandinavia the use of dyes was fairly prevalent. In the sagas, we have mention of characters wearing brightly coloured clothes, like Ólafr pái (Olaf the Peacock) and others dressed all in black, like Egill Skallagrímsson (whose black cloak was lined in scarlet, just to remind you of how wealthy he was.)
Scarlet, in particular, seems to be a popular choice for wealthy Icelanders to wear (Egill, Gunnlaugr, etc.) as are embroidered tunics.
If you're interested in the symbolism of colour in Old Norse, Kirsten Wolf has done a lot of work on it, and you wouldn't be remiss in reading some of her articles. | [
"The Vikings home jersey is primarily white with a black trim, and red numbers. Their away jersey is reversed, being primarily black with a white trim. Their game pants are black, and their socks are red. Their kits are currently manufactured by Nike.\n",
"No.17 \"Viking\" was a deep green colour upon arrival in ... |
Are humans the only creatures that have sex for pleasure? | There are a few other animals that have been observed to engage in sexual activity not for breeding.
Bottlenose dolphins engage in sex for fun, and sometimes one-sided fun: Adolescent dolphins form small pods, then separate females from other pods and force sex with them.
Bonobos (similar to chimpanzees) use sex as casually as we use handshakes; they have sex as a greeting, to make up after a fight or a thank you for sharing some food, or just because there is nothing else to do. Bonobo sex crosses all ages (pre-pubescent bonobo kids are involved as well) and all positions, methods and orifices are involved.
Edit: Sometimes dogs start humping a human's leg, or the rear end of some other dog who is not at all in the mood. It is thought that this is a display of dominance. Pleasure or not, it does not appear to be for procreation. | [
"It is often assumed that animals do not have sex for pleasure, or alternatively that humans, pigs, bonobos (and perhaps dolphins and one or two more species of primates) are the only species that do. This is sometimes stated as \"animals mate only for reproduction\". This view is considered a misconception by some... |
how do businesses that are normally worth billions fail/file for bankruptcy after just a couple of months of being out of work? | Just as an example, let's take a look at Walmart. If we look at Walmart's [income statement](_URL_0_), they make about 523 billion dollars a year, but spend about 503 billion dollars, resulting in a profit (before taxes) of about 20 billion dollars.
Fundamentally, this is the problem. If their revenue drops by 20%, or 100 billion, they go from profiting 20 billion dollars to losing about 80 billion dollars. Meanwhile, if we look at their [balance sheet](_URL_1_), they have about 10 billion in cash.
In general, businesses do not expect their revenue stream to dry up overnight. Businesses are "worth billions" because their investors expect their revenue streams to continue on like normal. For pretty much any business, if their annual revenue was 83% of what it was supposed to be (that's 10/12 months of revenue), they wouldn't be making money. | [
"BULLET::::- The Ministry of Commerce introduced strict deadlines for bankruptcy procedures in 2008. Auctions of debtors’ assets are expected to take place quicker than before. As a result, the process to determine the fate of a company in financial jeopardy (i.e., sale as going concern, piecemeal sale of assets, o... |
why does wal-marts "great value" brand ice cream not melt? | The milk and the cream part does melt but it's held in suspension by the various gum bases that they use, the same gums used in yogurt and shakes to give body and to act as a stabilizer. The gums act as a mesh. No sense getting upset that Wal-Mart uses a stabilizer in its product that in fact stabilizes the product. | [
"Cold Stone has entered into partnerships with other companies to promote brand name products inside its stores. The first major partnership the company entered into was with Kraft Foods for its Jell-O brand in 2009. Cold Stone introduced a series of flavors of ice cream based on popular Jell-O pudding flavors; Cho... |
what do companies like accenture exactly do? | LY5:
little jimmy wants to build a sandcastle...hes made a few but now wants to try his hand at a super-castle. That takes skill. and if he makes some mistakes it could fail completely. Jimmy would be embarrassed.
But wait: little tommy built a super sandcastle last year, and another one last month. Maybe he could give jimmy some tips?
Tommy agrees provided jimmy gives him some pogs (or whatever the heck kids are into these days :-)
Tommy hangs round for the time your building the super castle: and recommend to you how to start/what to watch out for/ where to put it. Tommy even suggests how you could make some money off it.
You listen and decide if you're going to take tommy's advice...which you do. (tommy still gets his pogs even if you dont).
once its built you thank tommy, and give him his pogs.
Turns out, tommy works for accenture.
Jimmy has been consulting tommy, and Tommy is a consultant.
---------------------------------
Accenture supplies all kinds of consultants (business experts), and is a Consultancy.
Consultancies (like Accenture) generally send experts (consultants) into a company in times of change.
You might run a company that realises that if it changes the way it does xyz it could lower price/improve quality/innovate quicker: i.e. compete better and be more successful.
but you're experts in doing xyz, not in the process of making business changes. That needs (maybe...) :
-A project manager (Project management consultant)
-IT expert in that fancy hardware/software you need. (IT consultant)
Maybe you're thinking of expanding abroad?
-foreign business consultant
or your tax management needs looking at, to get a nice efficient process, and not pay more than necessary:
-Tax consultant
For every part of business there's a consultant who can advise. Your business employs people to make those parts work, but you might need other expertise to help improve/change/develop.
Consultants have done the exact same change a dozen times in a dozen other companies. You pay them to help you do it right, as the costs/risks of screwing up are too great. They advise you - but you make your own final decisions.
once the change is done successfully, you can get rid of the consultant: he goes back to accenture where they tlel him his next assignment.
These days accenture dont only do consulting, they've used their various expertise to provide all kinds of services.
| [
"In 2011, Accenture launched a new campaign of results-based ads featuring clients such as Marriott, Unilever and the Royal Shakespeare Company alongside its slogan \"High performance Delivered\". As of 2018, Interbrand ranked Accenture No. 34 on its list of best global brands. The brand consultancy noted Accenture... |
how come some animals like dogs go in heat, while humans don't and why don't we? | The secret is we are always horny. Seriously... Animal need a function to tell them to procreate. We enjoy sex, so we want to do it. | [
"Animals, including humans, create heat as a result of metabolism. In warm conditions, this heat exceeds a level required for homeostasis in warm-blooded animals, and is disposed of by various thermoregulation methods such as sweating and panting. Fiala \"et al.\" modelled human thermoregulation.\n",
"Dogs are ev... |
Where can I find an encyclopedic article and further details on the newly discovered Amazon Basin Civilization? | Do you have any links to where you read it?
Sounds similar to the civilization being sought in 'The Lost City of Z'... maybe check out that book? | [
"The Mulford Biological Exploration of the Amazon Basin was a scientific expedition to the Amazon conducted in 1921. It was organized by Henry Hurd Rusby, who at age 64, was a well known explorer, a professor at Columbia University, and a staff member at the New York Botanical Garden. He hired Orland Emile White, a... |
with the technology available today, why would a u.s. congressman or senator ever have to miss a vote? | it is the rule. They must be present to vote. The cannot even be in a committee meeting down the hall. | [
"In practice, a \"low information voter\" may not be aware of legislation that their representative has sponsored in Congress. A low-information voter may base their ballot box decision on a media sound-bite, or a flier received in the mail. It is possible for a media sound-bite or campaign flier to present a polit... |
how/why did los angeles, the second-largest us city, not have a home nfl team for 20+ years? | 3 primary reasons. 1 - The NFL has TV blackouts in the area if the local team doesn't sell out their home game. LA had two teams in two different divisions, so games would be blacked out all the time when one of the teams wasn't great and didn't sell out. So when the two teams left, and LA could watch all the football it wanted, it was kind of nice.
2 - La refused to build a stadium. If someone wanted to move a team, the owner had to pay for it themselves. Smaller cities felt it was more important for civic reasons to keep a team, so they would help build a new stadium. When teams threatened to move to LA, the current city would offer help in building a brand new stadium and LA would not, so the teams would stay. And LA did not in part because...
3 - There's a ton to do in LA; lots of other professional teams, multiple high-level college teams, the beaches, hollywood, etc. So LA didn't care as much about having a team as a city that is more defined by its sporting program to get on the map. So in general, the attitude from LA was "sure, we'd like another team, but we're not going to make a huge effort over it because we're kind of too cool to show we care" | [
"Los Angeles is the second-largest city in the United States but hosted no NFL team between 1995 and 2015. At one time, the Los Angeles area hosted two NFL teams: the Rams and the Raiders. Both left the city in 1995, with the Rams moving to St. Louis, and the Raiders moving back to their original home of Oakland. A... |
True or false: you burn the same amount of calories running a mile at a 8 minute pace vs running a mile at a 6 minute pace? | This [Runner's World](_URL_0_) article summarizes the answer well and links to a couple of studies. In summary, they says that it is close but not exact. The difference is in the aerobic vs anaerobic percentages of your running, so the faster you go, the more anaerobic percentage you're using, and so the more calories you burn
If you're counting calories, however, longer is typically better because they are so close. Running an all out mile will burn you roughly 100 calories, modulo things like body weight. Running easy for two miles will burn you roughly 200 calories and you probably aren't going to be as beat at the end, assuming you're capable of both. | [
"The situation becomes slightly more complex when preferred walking speed is introduced. The faster the pace, the more calories burned if weight loss is a goal. Maximum heart rate for exercise (220 minus age), when compared to charts of \"fat burning goals\" support many of the references that give the average of 1... |
Is bark technically wood? | I think wood in the strict sense is [secondary xylem](_URL_0_). According to [this](_URL_1_) bark does not contain any xylem. Hence, bark is not wood (in the strict sense).
edit: links! | [
"Softwoods, such as the Australian eucalyptus, are highly valued, and are used mainly for construction, paper making, and cladding. The term \"roundwood\" describes all the wood that is removed from forests in log form and used for purposes other than fuel. Wood manufacturing residues, such as sawdust and chippings... |
If evolution occurs over a long period of time, how and why do the individual creatures adapt themselves? | > how does it occur in that specific giraffe's lifetime?
It doesn't.
> Since the evolution occurs over such a long period of time I don't understand how it occurs in individual creatures, and therefore at all.
Individuals in the population will have mutations that benefit them slightly, for instance, a giraffe precursor happens to be born with a slightly longer neck. He is more successful, and his genes are more widely spread. You now have a population of animals with a slightly longer neck. Continue that until neck reaches silly proportions.
> But then why did they develop those traits in the first place?
They develop randomly through mutation and recombination. Most mutations are deleterious, but occasionally one pops up that provides an advantage. | [
"Evolution influences every aspect of the form and behaviour of organisms. Most prominent are the specific behavioural and physical adaptations that are the outcome of natural selection. These adaptations increase fitness by aiding activities such as finding food, avoiding predators or attracting mates. Organisms c... |
what does "entropy decreasing in a closed system" mean? | Is [this](_URL_0_) the one you're talking about?
Basically, entropy is a measurement of chaos. If all the air in a room is moving in the same direction at the same time, it's both fairly well organized and has fairly low entropy. Since all the air is moving in the same direction, you could put a windmill in there and extract energy from it, but doing so would cause the air to scatter and start to go in different directions. Eventually, the air would no longer be at all organized, and you could no longer extract any energy from it. If you wanted to reorganize the air to make it useful again, it would require more energy than you took out of it.
Even if you didn't try to get energy out of the air in that room, it would eventually become more chaotic, just by bouncing off the walls or whatever. This is so well documented it's part of the laws of something called *thermodynamics*, which is all about heat and entropy. Basically what it has to say about this is that in any closed system, the overall entropy will only ever increase with time, and can only be decreased if provided energy by some outside influence.
Because of this, there are some processes that can't really be undone, like shattering a glass or, as the comic mentioned, scrambling an egg. | [
"BULLET::::- Second Law of Thermodynamics: The entropy of any closed system always tends to increase, and thus the nature of any given system is continuously changing even as efforts are directed toward maintaining it in its original form.\n",
"The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolat... |
Relativistic velocities and black holes | Everything is already moving that fast in another reference frame; say that of a neutrino zipping past something. What matters is the density in its own rest frame. | [
"Relativistic jets are beams of ionised matter accelerated close to the speed of light. Most have been observationally associated with central black holes of some active galaxies, radio galaxies or quasars, and also by galactic stellar black holes, neutron stars or pulsars. Beam lengths may extend between several t... |
why do men start accumulating more stomach fat at around the same age range? | Generally, as people get older they become less active and eat the same amount of calories or more and therefore gain weight. Men tend to gain more weight around the stomach than other areas as opposed to women who tend to put on more weight on their legs etc.
While, there is some decrease in metabolism with age, its fairly small. The main culprit is lack of activity compared to youth. | [
"Men are more likely to have fat stored in the abdomen due to sex hormone differences. Female sex hormone causes fat to be stored in the buttocks, thighs, and hips in women. When women reach menopause and the estrogen produced by the ovaries declines, fat migrates from the buttocks, hips and thighs to the waist; la... |
why my body can survive several weeks without food but i still am always hungry. | Can survive and optimal survival are two different things.
In the wild most animals have to put forth a lot of effort to obtain sufficient food. This was also true for our ancestors. In fact we have only had a stable consistent surplus of food for give or take 200 years as a species. As such we are designed to want to eat several times a day, be attracted to nutrient and energy rich foods (fatty meats, sugary fruits, salts), and our bodies are designed to store all surplus as body fat. There is absolutely no evolutionary benefit to stopping the impulse to eat once fat is being stored, there is benefit to being able to survive periods of famine off the stored reserves. | [
"Documented studies on the physiological effects of food restriction clearly show that fasting for extended periods leads to starvation, dehydration, and eventual death. In the absence of food intake, the body normally burns its own reserves of glycogen, body fat, and muscle. Breatharians claim that their bodies do... |
why do self posts take so long to load while imgur links load instantly? | Self posts are dynamic and imgur links are static. That is, self posts have to handle upvotes, loads of comments, comment upvotes, comment hierarchies (sorted variously), etc..., whereas imgur just serves you the file.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think I saw that on reddit somewhere. | [
"TTFB is often used by web search engines like Google and Yahoo to improve search rankings since a website will respond to the request faster and be usable before other websites would be able to. There are downsides to this metric since a web-server can send only the first part of the header before the content is e... |
[Ask] Book/article recommendations for anything about the Syrian people (history, religious rites, cultural identity, state formation, etc) in the period of between Roman times to the advent of Islam | Peter Brown's works on late antiquity (for instance "The World of Late Antiquity") cover much of this material, although he touches upon the Syrian region but is not exclusively focused on it.
Likewise the Oxford guide to late antiquity has an entry entitled "Syriac and the 'Syrians'" which is online.
You might also find the books of Glen Bowersock and Garth Fowden useful.
It's less that there'e little interest in the subject than that "Late Antiquity" is sort of a specialized field and most of the books I'm familiar with approach it holistically rather than in regards to a particular region. | [
"Syria is significant in the history of Christianity; Saulus of Tarsus, better known as the Apostle Paul, was converted on the Road to Damascus and emerged as a significant figure in the Christian Church at Antioch in ancient Syria, from which he left on many of his missionary journeys. ()\n",
"Ismail, Saad. (201... |
how is it that anti-dandruff shampoo can have “immediate results”? what’s it doing to my head in that short time during/after my shower? | There are multiple causes of dandruff. It can be caused by fungus, excess skin production, or something else interfering with the shedding of dead skin.
1) Coal tar shampoo like T-Gel work by slowing the scalp skin growth.
2) Salicylic Acid shampoos like Head and Shoulders work by applying a mild acid to aid breaking up dead skin.
3) Antifungal shampoos like Ketoconazole shampoo have agents that kill funguses.
My guess, given your experiences, would be that you had a build up of dead skin in spite of your T-Gel usage. You used some Salicylic acid that helped removed the excess dead skin. If you keep using the Salicylic acid shampoo, you run the risk of drying out the scalp. I'd stick with T-Gel for preventative usage and the other one when it builds up regardless. | [
"Antipruritic shampoos are intended to provide relief of itching due to conditions such as atopy and other allergies. These usually contain colloidal oatmeal, hydrocortisone, Aloe vera, pramoxine hydrochloride, menthol, diphenhydramine, sulfur or salicylic acid. These ingredients are aimed to reduce the inflammatio... |
why are plastics on one hand durable but on the other super easy to tear apart when a tiny incision is made? | This is a very complex question without you even realizing it. It depends on what plastic it is too. But assuming you're saying durable I think you're talking about hard plastics. These have very strong bonds on a molecular level. But once the bond is broken it can tear way easier through the rest of the material basically. | [
"Polymers (Plastics) have been used for a long time for both implants and piercings. Early piercers often used it as a healing jewelry. After the piercing was done, a product resembling a thick fishing line was inserted in the hole and its end was rivetted together. When the piercing was healed, the plastic was cut... |
i am somewhat aware that colours are the 'opposite' of what they appear, in that a green plant absorbs everything except green light, but where does the absorbed light go? how does the light/energy from the light just disappear into an object? | Heat mainly.
When you stand outside in the shade of a tree its significantly cooler because the tree is blocking all of that energy. Now step out and you start to feel your skin cooking. That excess energy gets turned into heat. | [
"Green light is mostly reflected, but is used in small amounts by plants for photosynthesis, seedling, leaf and flower development and can reach lower leaves. Green light has been shown to affect plant processes via both cryptochrome-dependent and cryptochrome-independent means. Generally, the effects of green ligh... |
based on my high school knowledge of genetics, if a black and white person have a baby together, why is the child more likely to be mixed instead of one or the other? | Let's say you have 20 cards, 10 black and 10 white. You take all of them, put them in a box and shake it. Then draw 10 at random without looking. Do you think there's a good probability that you'll pull 10 of only one color?
Like the cards, several genes control color, and when you get them mixed they move the over-all skin color towards a certain shade. It's not impossible to get all of the skin color genes from one parent, but it's less likely to happen. Thus, the color is most likely going to be a mix of the two. | [
"Many groups continue to argue that children put up for adoption should be matched with same race parents in an effort to better help the child assimilate culturally and racially. This idea is commonly known as race-matching, when the adoptee and adoptive parents are paired based on race. In 2008, the Evan B. Donal... |
why do you need to bring your temperature down? | Up to a point, having a fever is a good thing when you're fighting an infection as in the case of sepsis (infection in the blood). Many pathogens don't fare well in even a degree or two of average raised temperature, while your body is much more resilient. It's still a pretty serious condition on its own, and sepsis is frequently fatal regardless of the not only the body's attempts to fight it, but with medical intervention.
The problems in general however, start when the fever is too high, or just high for too long. Your body will release something called chaperone molecules that help your proteins fold correctly, but there will still be errors and it's more energetically expensive. This chaperone molecules also have limits, and past a certain point your body fails on a number of levels.
For one, a lot of what your cells do is interact with, transport, and produce proteins. The function of a protein is determined by its three dimensional structure, and it gets that through a process of folding. This is a process which can go wrong, and heat makes it far more likely to go wrong. Past a certain point critical proteins will start to unfold (denature) as in exposure to cooking methods. Needless to say, this does you no favors.
For another, most fevers are not in response to something like sepsis (outside of admissions in a hospital at least), they're the result of either the disease-causing organism (pathogen) releasing molecules which cause your body to develop a fever (pyrogens) or an immune response by your body. In the former case the magnitude of the infection can cause a release of these molecules so great that your temperature-regulating system is utterly overwhelmed. In the latter case your body's inflammatory signaling systems can go haywire, causing runaway inflammation and fever; this is called cytokine storm and it's a potentially fatal condition. Ebola is often thought to kill as a result of cytokine storm, in humans at least.
So you need to manage a fever, first and foremost by identifying its cause and treating it appropriately. This will inevitably take time, and the sicker the patient the more time it will take. During this time you could develop cardiac problems, your metabolism could be seriously disrupted leading to many bad side effects, and you could suffer lasting brain damage from seizures, even coma or death. As a result with a bad enough fever you treat the infection, modulate the immune system response if necessary/possible, and then just try to bring the temperature down. Alcohol, cold water baths, and even infusions of cold IV fluids can all be used.
tl;dr Unless you're septic, it isn't generally helpful for your immune system to suffer under a fever, and it can cause organ damage, damage to the blood, damage to the brain, and even death. | [
"If it is necessary to maintain low temperatures with full circulation, this may necessitate running the cooling instead of the heating. The vigorous circulation of air under pressure generates heat by itself, and this can be significant when attempting to operate at unusually low temperatures and high pressures.\n... |
How did Julius Caesar motivate his troops to cross the Rubicon river when this meant turning against their own republic (becoming traitors)? | Caesar incited his troops by arguing that his enemies in Rome were breaking the norms of Roman political life. Here's Plutarch, writing in the late 1st/early 2nd century AD:
> Pompey ... yielded everything else, but insisted on taking away Caesar's soldiers. Cicero also tried to persuade the friends of Caesar to compromise and come to a settlement on the basis of the provinces mentioned and only six thousand soldiers, and Pompey was ready to yield and grant so many. Lentulus the consul, however, would not let him, but actually heaped insults upon Antony and Curio and drove them disgracefully from the senate, thus himself contriving for Caesar the most specious of his pretexts, and **the one by means of which he most of all incited his soldiers, showing them men of repute and high office who had fled the city on hired carts and in the garb of slaves.** For thus they had arrayed themselves in their fear and stolen out of Rome.
Here's Appian, writing in the mid 2nd century AD, with a similar story. He adds the important detail that Antony was a tribune of the plebs and thus had the traditional privilege of sacrosanctity, i.e. they could not be threatened with violence or interfered with in any way.
> Since Antony and Cassius, who succeeded Curio as tribunes, agreed with him in opinion, the Senate became more bitter than ever and declared Pompey's army the protector of Rome, and that of Caesar a public enemy. The consuls, Marcellus and Lentulus, ordered Antony and his friends out of the Senate lest they should suffer some harm, tribunes though they were. Then Antony sprang from his chair in anger and with a loud voice called gods and men to witness the indignity put upon the sacred and inviolable office of tribune, saying that while they were expressing the opinion which they deemed best for the public interest, they were driven out with contumely though they had wrought no murder or outrage. Having spoken thus he rushed out like one possessed, predicting war, slaughter, proscription, banishment, confiscation, and various other impending evils, and invoking direful curses on the authors of them. Curio and Cassius rushed out with him, for a detachment of Pompey's army was already observed standing around the senate-house. The tribunes made their way to Caesar the next night with the utmost speed, concealing themselves in a hired carriage, and disguised as slaves. **Caesar showed them in this condition to his army, whom he excited by saying that his soldiers, after all their great deeds, had been stigmatized as public enemies and that distinguished men like these, who had dared to say a word for them, had been thus driven out with ignominy.**
More briefly, here's Cassius Dio, writing in the 3rd century AD:
> When Caesar was informed of this, he came to Ariminum ... and after assembling his soldiers he ordered Curio and the others who had come with him to relate to them what had been done. After this was over he further aroused them by adding such words as the occasion demanded.
(Sorry for the hokey old translations, I don't have access to better ones at my house. [Plutarch](_URL_2_), *Life of Caesar*, chapter 31; [Appian](_URL_3_), *Civil Wars*, book 2 chapter 33; [Cassius Dio](_URL_0_), *Roman History*, book 41 chapter 4.)
The immediate argument being made by Caesar was that the tribunes' sacrosanctity had been threatened, if not actually violated, by the anti-Caesarian faction. This seems to have been a strategy aimed at both his immediate audience of the soldiers and the wider audience of the Roman ruling class. It enabled him to present himself, not as a revolutionary who was planning to take over the Roman state - something hardly likely to be attractive to a Roman politician - but as a public servant intervening to restore the traditional order. (Caesar's adoptive son Octavian/Augustus would later pull off a similar rhetorical move. He presented his takeover of power as a defence of the republic and traditional republican values against his political enemies. "I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty to the republic, which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction" - [Augustus](_URL_1_), *Res Gestae*, chapter 1.) This also enabled his soldiers to think of themselves, not as traitors or revolutionaries, but as defenders of the republic and its traditional institutions.
It might also have been significant to the soldiers that the rights of a *tribune specifically* were being threatened. Tribunes were the direct representatives of the plebs, and they were here being disrespected by a consul, Cornelius Lentulus, who was a member of a very old patrician family. Lentulus had also been an enemy of the uber-populist tribune Clodius in the 60s-50s BC, so he had credentials as an anti-populist. If we assume that many of Caesar's soldiers were subscribers to his brand of quasi-populist politics, his framing of the invasion might have made it look like a war to restore the position of the 'populares' in Roman politics over against the 'optimates'. Again, not treason on behalf of a would-be king, but an intervention to restore political order.
Of course, all the above assumes that Caesar's soldiers *cared* about the state and the republic, and weren't first and foremost Caesar devotees. I think that is true, but many analyses of the collapse of the republic have argued that soldiers *weren't* primarily loyal to the state anymore. The most extreme versions of this position argue that Caesar, Pompey, and before them Marius, Sulla, and others had basically become leaders of private armies that fought for their interests rather than the republic's. This argument has a lot of merit. It's obviously true that, in crossing the Rubicon, Caesar's soldiers were declaring their preference for Caesar over the Roman government. But I think the evidence above about Caesar's persuasion tactics shows that they weren't just blindly loyal to their commander under any circumstances. It was necessary for their commanders to depict their actions in ways that highlighted their continuity with Roman tradition. | [
"With Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in January 49 BC, he plunged the Roman Republic into civil war with a clique of Roman senators who were determined to destroy him, under the military leadership of Pompey. Having pushed through Italy in an attempt to reach Pompey and detach him from the Republican leadership, ... |
how and how quickly does fat loss occur? during a day of eating on a deficit, is my body constantly taking energy from the fat? | Even while not in a deficit, fat is your primary avenue of energy consumption. Different intensities of exercise determine where energy is converted from. Easiest example I will use is track and field.
(anaerobic)100-200 meter sprint= ATP-PC (adenosine tri phosphate/ phosphocreatine)
(glycolytic)400-800 meter sprint= carbohydrates
(oxidative)1600 meter+ = fat (which is why distance runners are always super lean)
Now each of these metabolic pathways do have over lap. You will never burn purely one energy source at a time.
During a normal sedentary day, you are burning primarily fat but not very much. Same with while you are sleeping. Now on a low carb day, once your body uses up all its carbs (glycogen/ carbs that have been stored in the muscle) it will then resort to only breaking down muscle into to glucose. Lastly, breaking down fat will occur since it is the most abundant source of energy. In addition the process of gluconeogenesis occurs when there are non carb sources left which is the body's way of "creating sugar from sciency components such as lactate or glycerol because sugar in a more readily available form such as a carbohydrate does not exist" But I will need a bio chemist/ exercise physiologist to confirm that process because that is still foreign to me.
The average person can walk 500 miles on the fat energy stores alone. It is the primary source for energy, but the hardest to convert, which is why losing weight is so difficult.
Having a lot of fat is ideal for survival, so while it is the largest source of energy, it is the hardest to convert.
SOURCE- Kinesiology graduate
EDIT: hey neat, GOLD! Judging by comments and corrections, take this information as general explanation, all the reddit biochemists/med students are tearing me up! My degree has prepared me for "this is how you can lose weight" more so than "physiologically, this is HOW you lose weight" so I apologize for some misinformation | [
"An increase in fat metabolism can be the result of starvation or malabsorption, the inability to metabolize carbohydrates (as occurs, for example, in diabetes) or due to losses from frequent vomiting.\n",
"Other potentially detrimental effects of enlarged subcutaneous fat tissue relate to free fatty acids. Durin... |
who is allowed to marry into the royal family? who is not? | The rules are contained in the [Perth Agreement](_URL_0_) - and basically, there are very few rules. The first six people in line to the throne require permission of the current monarch in order to marry, and that's about it.
Prior to this, the number of people requiring permission was much bigger, and they were only allowed to marry protestants. | [
"Marriages of members of the royal family were formerly regulated by the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 (repealed 2015), which made it illegal for any member of the British royal family (defined as all descendants of King George II, excluding descendants of princesses who marry into \"foreign families\") under the age... |
Are there clear examples of self-destructive behavior, similar to alcoholism or overeating, in other species? | > Laboratory rats were given unlimited access to intravenous cocaine hydrochloride or heroin hydrochloride. Animals self-administering cocaine quickly developed a pattern of episodic drug intake, with periods of excessive cocaine self-administration alternating with brief periods of abstinence. Subjects allowed continuous access to intravenous heroin showed stable drug self-administration, with a gradual increase in daily heroin intake over the first two weeks of testing. The general health of the animals became markedly different: those self-administering heroin maintained grooming behavior, pretesting body weight, and a good state of general health; rats self-administering cocaine tended to cease grooming behavior, to lose up to 47% of their pretesting body weight, and to show a pronounced deterioration in general health. The mortality rate for 30 days of continuous testing was 36% for animals self-administering heroin and 90% for those self-administering cocaine. These results suggest that cocaine is a much more toxic compound than heroin when animals are given unlimited access to intravenous drug.
_URL_0_ | [
"Self-destructive behaviour is a broad set of extreme actions and emotions including self-harm and drug abuse. It can take a variety of forms, and may be undertaken for a variety of reasons. It tends to be most visible in young adults and adolescents, but may affect people of any age.\n",
"Furthermore, some think... |
how do texture files for 3d models work? they always look so weird. | The earth is a globe, but when we view it, we map it to a flat 2D plane like this, which may end up warping distances and shapes compared to how they look from space (and this is arguably not the best way to spread the 3D earth onto a 2D map):
_URL_0_
It's the same idea with textures in reverse, you have a 2D image, the texture, and you want to spread it out (map it) over a 3D thing, the model.
getting less eli5:
The way you do this is decide that each point on the surface of the 3D model corresponds to a point in a 2D image and you do a 1:1 map of what color you want at that point on the model to the image. The result is the texture file | [
"Image textures can be artificially created or found in natural scenes captured in an image. Image textures are one way that can be used to help in segmentation or classification of images. For more accurate segmentation the most useful features are spatial frequency and an average grey level. To analyze an image t... |
Was there a concept of pan-Greek identity in the pre-Alexander period? | There was absolutely a concept of pan-Greek identity.
Greeks never called themselves "Greek." This was a word which the Romans called Greek and has been adopted into western languages. Today Greece is officially called the Hellenic Republic. The ancient Greeks called themselves Hellenes. Amongst the Hellenes there was a further division into four distinct ethnic groups - Ionians, Dorians, Achaeans and Aeolians.
Examples of pan-Greek identity include: The Iliad, The Odyssey, the Panhellenic Games (a series of games held every four years which culminated in the Olympics. You had to be Greek to take part) and the Eleusinian Mysteries (for which you also had to be Greek).
Any shared Greek identity did not stop the Greek city states fighting numerous wars against each other. The Peloponnesian War was largely a war between the Ionian (Athens) and Dorian (Sparta) tribes.
The Greeks did fight together against the Persians. The Greco-Persian Wars (of which Marathon and Thermopylae are battles) were started because the Persians gained control of Ionia, a Greek region in modern Turkey. They instilled tyrants and the Ionians revolted with support from other Ionian peoples (Athens). Sparta didn't help the Ionians revolt because they themselves were Dorian.
After Alexander died, the resulting period become known as the Hellenistic Period. This period was marked by Hellenistic monarchy as Alexander's empire was split up into four different kingdoms. The city states of Athens and Sparta had no more political importance. Ptolemaic Egypt became a great sponsor of Hellenistic culture and many learned Greeks moved to Alexandria. I would say that the conquests of Phillip and Alexander strengthened pan-Hellenism because they spread Greek culture around the Mediterranean. They also diminished the power of the traditional city states who liked to fight among themselves. Since the Macedonians did not belong to any ethnic group, ethnic conflicts lessened. | [
"The ethnogenesis of the Greek nation is linked to the development of Pan-Hellenism in the 8th century BC. According to some scholars, the foundational event was the Olympic Games in 776 BC, when the idea of a common Hellenism among the Greek tribes was first translated into a shared cultural experience and Helleni... |
How and when did the modern Romance languages take form? | You might want to ask this in /r/linguistics, as they're a more language-oriented sub than us. | [
"Romances in the Spanish language had been a form of popular narrative poetry since the Middle Ages. They were almost entirely orally transmitted, changing as they passed on, and had as their themes the deeds of legendary heroes, the kings and knights of history. In the early 16th century, several compilations of t... |
Was Mother Teresa really saintly or are her critics closer to the truth? | You might be interested in [this previous question on Teresa](_URL_0_), which generated a *lot* of debate. | [
"She was sometimes accused by Hindus in her adopted country of trying to convert the poor to Catholicism by \"stealth\". Christopher Hitchens described Mother Teresa's organisation as a cult that promoted suffering and did not help those in need. He said that Mother Teresa's own words on poverty proved that her int... |
How does resonance destroy a structure? | Let's start by agreeing that vibrations are bad for a structure. Of course, this means that one *part* of the structure is shaking with respect to another part. (So, for example, any amount of shaking a single Lego piece does nothing to it, because the piece itself is moving as a whole, but shake a Lego structure, and you might break it, because now the pieces are shaking with respect to each other.) The stronger the vibrations, the worse it is.
Now, every structure has particular frequencies that it "likes" vibrating in. Think of a person on a swing. The swing goes higher and higher on each swing *only* if you push the swing at the right time intervals. If you push at the wrong time (i.e. in wrong time intervals) the swing doesn't go very high up. This is because that time period defines the *natural frequency* of the swing, i.e. the frequency that the swing "likes".
Resonance occurs when a structure is vibrated at or very close to the frequencies that it "likes". When the vibration occurs at other frequencies, the structure does vibrate, but just like the swing pushed at "wrong" times, the vibration isn't large. But at the resonant frequency, the structure does vibrate most, and hence is most likely to be damaged.
Of course, the above assumes that the energy provided to the structure is the same, only the frequency differs. (With the swing analogy, you can make the swing go higher even at the wrong timing intervals if you push the swing much much harder.) So at the same input energy, the resonant frequency causes the most vibration in the structure, and thus causes most damage. | [
"In mechanics and construction a resonance disaster describes the destruction of a building or a technical mechanism by induced vibrations at a system's resonance frequency, which causes it to oscillate. Periodic excitation optimally transfers to the system the energy of the vibration and stores it there. Because o... |
During late World War II, the US authorized an operation with the express purpose of killing Isoroku Yamamoto. Were such targeted assassinations of high-level officials common during World War II? | This is a great question, but I want to clear up a mischaracterization; saying that the US authorized an operation to kill a high-level official *isn't exactly right.* In the case of (aptly named) *Operation Vengeance*, the target was an enemy military commander - the equivalent of Chester Nimitz, perhaps. Your question makes it sound like a targeted assassination of someone in the Japanese government - the line is thin, but it's there. Also, his interception and death was more opportunistic than it was deliberate. He died April 18; the intelligence that he'd be conducting a morale tour was only picked up four days prior by Magic stations. According to Maffeo, there's some confusion as to whether or not President Roosevelt gave the order to execute the operations, though he was certainly aware. Ultimately the decision came down to the military commanders - Nimitz made the choice after conferring with Bull Halsey.
It's probably more apt to look at the death of Yamamoto as a military operation carried out to kill an important field commander, and I can't imagine any military in any war not *jumping* at the chance to decapitate enemy command and control.
Source:
Steven Maffeo, U.S. Navy codebreakers, linguists, and
intelligence officers against Japan, 1910-1941 | [
"On 18 April 1943, the United States executed Operation \"Vengeance\", in which Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was shot down and killed by a United States P-38 Lightning over south Bougainville. Yamamoto had taken off from Rabaul on an inspection tour, and United Sta... |
how do wild cards in the nfl work? | Each conference sends six teams to the playoffs. Four of those teams are the four division champions. The other two are wild-cards, which are the two best teams that didn't win their division.
For example, right now the NFC's wild-cards are the Seahawks at 8-6 and the Vikings at 8-6-1. | [
"As with much of the NFL's nomenclature, the \"wild card\" was not initially referred to as such and was instead referred as the \"Best Second-Place Team\" (or sometimes simply as the \"Fourth Qualifier\"). The media, however, began referring to the qualifying teams as \"wild cards\". Eventually, the NFL officially... |
what are crypto-miners, and why are they so interested in certain graphics cards? | Cryptocurrency can be bought, by exchanging for a real currency, or it can be mined. I'm no expert on mining, but I know that the first coins are very easy to find, and as you find more they get more difficult. You mine by doing sums. The more coins have been mined, the more maths needs doing. This maths is pretty repetitive, add, multiply, square, etc.. Processors are very good at doing lots of obscure things, but GPUs are better for just doing lots of simple maths quickly. Some miners use what are called ASICs, which are devices specially designed for a specific task, in this case mining. Graphics cards are expensive right now as bitcoin mining just became more profitable, so they need to buy more cards. | [
"An increase in cryptocurrency mining increased the demand of graphics cards (GPU) in 2017. Popular favorites of cryptocurrency miners such as Nvidia's GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 graphics cards, as well as AMD's RX 570 and RX 580 GPUs, doubled or tripled in price or were out of stock. A GTX 1070 Ti which was released at... |
why is price fixing considered morally wrong? | When the competition is completely eliminated, the remaining companies that agreed to price fix can then charge outrageous prices later with no alternatives. This is the main argument against price fixing and other conglomerate strengthening practices.
OPEC is an example of a conglomerate. It is not regulated by antitrust practices, because by definition, it is an association of nations that agree to price fix.
In the 70s, OPEC decided that it didn't like US and European policy and cut off supply entirely. The western powers couldn't do anything about it and it caused a worldwide recession.
This is what happens when you let price fixing happen with critical resources, and why the US (among other nations) outlaws it. | [
"Price fixing is thought to be unethical and socially irresponsible as it breaks laws that are specifically put into place to promote regular competition between companies . With competition between companies, business will be likely to keep costs low at affordable prices, in order to compete.\n",
"Price Collusio... |
at night sounds are always louder, because of the fewer disturbances around, but why is it that sounds make even more noise, once you turn off the lights? isn't light not supposed to affect sound. | Far as I understand the darkness does not effect the sound, but our brain pays more attention at night because our sight is limited. Think of the difference when people walk in your house vs when you’re trying to play hide and seek and can’t see them. You can hear so much better even though they aren’t walking louder.
Your brain actually blocks out a lot of stimulation (the feel of clothes on your body, if the breath in your nose is cold or warm, etc) so it can focus on what’s relevant. Maybe at night we know instinctively there is more possibility of danger, and so noises are more relevant (a knock on your door at 2 AM vs one at 2 PM...2 AM is scarier/more noticeable).
Also, contrast makes things more noticeable (orange hunting vest in the woods). With fewer sounds at night (less traffic, no birds singing), we notice what sounds ARE there all the more.
Noise at night contradicts our expectations of night being quiet, and so we notice it more that way too. | [
"Urban areas typically exhibit diurnal noise patterns where background noise is higher during the daytime and lower at night, where the noise floor directly correlates to urban activity (e.g., automobile traffic, airplane traffic, construction, and so on). During the day, when the noise floor is higher, a typical h... |
Since the universe is expanding, is the space of an atom also expanding? | I'm just thinking here: if everything expanded along with space equally, how would we know the universe is expanding? | [
"Even if the overall spatial extent is infinite and thus the universe cannot get any \"larger\", we still say that space is expanding because, locally, the characteristic distance between objects is increasing. As an infinite space grows, it remains infinite.\n",
"Based on large quantities of experimental observa... |
Is it true that there are sexual parts left out of published Anne Frank dairy and if so why did Anne father do that? | According to the [New York Times](_URL_2_) and the [Anne Frank House](_URL_1_) there were 5 pages that were missing when the diary was originally published. The five pages have been authenticated as a part of Anne's diary ([Anne Frank House](_URL_0_))
It seems like there were three versions. Version A is the original diary that Anne wrote. Version B is a version of the diary that Anne rewrote. And Version C is a version that her father put together. In 1998 five pages were found, that Otto, Anne's father had. These pages (at least according to the Anne Frank House and the New York Times article linked above) were not sexual in nature but it is where Anne thought about and criticized her parent's relationship.
According to the New York Times:
> In the new-found entries -- actually five pages of diary revisions > censored by Anne's father, Otto -- Anne picks apart her parents' strained marriage, analyzes her own difficult relations with her > mother, Edith, and vows to keep the diary out of her family's hands as ''none of their business.''
So according to these two sources there were parts left out of the diary but they don't seem to be sexual. However, *The Diary of Anne Frank* is challenged and attempted to be banned as recently as [2010] (_URL_3_) (see page 5) due to:
> ...the complaint that the book includes sexual material and homosexual themes.
(Edit Formatting) | [
"Mary Anne wrote \"A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery\" (1850) at her father's request, and in parallel with his own composition of a lengthy poem on the same subject. Thomas South paid for the book to be published anonymously in 1850, but without having read it, trusting his daughter's judgement. Readi... |
What are the comparisons between Britain and the US under the Gold standard and the Bretton Woods exchange rate system respectively? | I'll give another plug for this article, which I quite enjoyed, and which may be of use to you:
> This brief review of the history of the gold standard in the U.S. explains both how the standard came into being, despite not having been present at the country’s inception, and of how it eventually came to an end.
Selgin, George, The Rise and Fall of the Gold Standard in the United States (August 27, 2012). Available at SSRN: _URL_1_ or _URL_0_
| [
"The exchange rate of the pound sterling against the US dollar is referred to as \"cable\" in the wholesale foreign exchange markets. The origins of this term are attributed to the fact that in the 1800s, the GBP/USD exchange rate was transmitted via transatlantic cable. Forex traders of GBP/USD are sometimes refer... |
How was homosexuality viewed in colonial and revolutionary war times in the United States? | There were several indigenous populations of North America that had more same sex sexual behavior such as the two-spirit or at the time what the Europeans named the "berdache" which were anatomical males who lived and dressed as women and had sex with other men. Recently some historians have argued that their role was as "sexual servicers to a community's male elite... [because] they had violated social norms or had been captured in war."
The Catholic church generally viewed all sexual expression as being sinful whereas protestants thought that sex and sexuality were acceptable when confined to marriage. However, neither believed that what we know called homosexual sex and sexuality was permissible and sodomy was a capital offense throughout the European colonies in north America. While executions rare with only 6 men being killed for sodomy throughout the European colonies of North America there were other punishments such as banishment, whipping, and branding.
An interesting aspect of punishments for homosexual activity, and one that continued for a couple of centuries, was that men were much more likely to be punished for sex with someone of the same gender. English colonists generally thought of sex between two women as being the result of "hermaphroditism" or in modern terms being intersex. Only New Haven specifically made sex between women against the law. However, the only two women brought before New England Colonial courts for same sex sex was for lewd behavior. Also Puritan religious leaders said male-male sex and female-female sex were equally sinful.
The historian Richard Godbeer thinks that the common person was more accepting of homosexual behavior than the courts or religious leaders because of how few people were brought before the courts, suggesting that many cases occurred without being reported to the authorities. This might be especially true when taking into account of the gender imbalances in some of the colonies such as in the Chesapeake where there were only one woman for every four men.
Enlightenment ideas help to reduce some of the state's control over sexual behavior as well as to a more liberal understanding of sexual gratification, but sodomy remained outlined despite the reasoning behind these laws shifting from religious arguments to arguments that same sex sexuality could destabilize society.
One really interesting thing about the eighteenth century is the emergence of the "heroic friend." During the enlightenment there was an increased respect for extremely close, affectionate male friendships. These were well educated, upper class men who felt strong bonds with another man. Often these would result in romantic or even erotic letters and thoughts and words and actions, but to say they were gay would be difficult, nonetheless there were probably some heroic friendships that resulted in same sex sexual behavior.
I hope that helped. If you have anymore specific questions or follow ups, or an additional question I might be able to help, although I will be slow to respond. My source was Interpreting LBGT History at Museums and Historic Sites by the wonderful Susan Ferentinos | [
"Though gay and lesbians struggled to go public with their efforts in the U.S, they still were met with opposition. Despite participating in very few public activities in the early 19th century, many gays and lesbians were targeted by police who kept list of the bars and restaurants that were known to cater to the ... |
I heard today that H.P. Lovecraft was very anti-Semitic. How much truth is there to that, and what evidence do we have of it? | > **I heard today that H.P. Lovecraft was very anti-Semitic. How much truth is there to that, and what evidence do we have of it?**
Anti-Semitism was fairly widespread and accepted in the United States during Lovecraft's lifetime (1890-1937), and involved variously religious and ethnic prejudices, ignorance, stereotypes, and social, economic, and political discrimination. Lovecraft prejudices regarding Jews, while not universally held, were fairly common and typical - I'll give some examples in a moment.
It's worth noting that almost all of Lovecraft's fiction and verse is free of Jewish characters. Most of what we know regarding Lovecraft's prejudices regarding Jews comes from his letters, and to a lesser extant the memoir of his wife Sonia Haft Davis (who was ethnically Jewish), *The Private Life of H. P. Lovecraft*. The body of Lovecraft's surviving letters, which far outstrip his fiction in sheer volume and cover practically the whole extant of his life, give a very good sense of what his prejudices were and how they developed.
Lovecraft's antisemitic prejudices were showcased very early, and suggest an environment where such views were widely accepted. At around the age of 10 or 12, he wrote and illustrated two volumes of juvenile verse titled the *Poemata Minora*; the illustration for “On the Vanity of Human Ambition” is a Jewish caricature with the inscription: “HIC. HOMO. EST. AVARISSIMVS. ET. TVRPISSIMVS. IUDEVS” (“This man is a greedy and filthy Jew”); and the inscription for “On the Ruin of Rome” reads:
> “ROMA.REGINA.ORBIS. TERRARVM. DECEDEBAT. CVM.ROMANI.SVCCEDEBANTVR.A. GENTIBVS. INFERIRORIBVS” (“Rome, queen of the world, declined when the Romans were succeeded by inferior peoples.”)
(Quoted from S.T. Joshi's *I Am Providence* 1.79) These works were inspired in large part by Lovecraft's early identification with pagan Rome, and his antipathy toward Christian doctrine (although it should be remembered that some of his recollections were given decades afterwards, and may have been influenced by much later thought, reading, and experience.)
Here it is clear that by the age of twelve, despite little contact with other races, several of Lovecraft’s ideas of race and prejudices were in place. Likewise, by 1902, Lovecraft’s explorations in science had evaporated his patience with Christianity, remarking “Close reasoning was something new in their little world of Semitic mythology.” and his mother permitted him to cease attending Sunday school. (*Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner* 184)
In 1904, Lovecraft's grandfather died, and he entered public high school for the first time:
> Here I was confronted for the first time with cosmopolitanism. Slater Avenue School is public, but it is rather a neighbourhood affair, with most of its pupils drawn from the old families. But Hope Street is near enough to the "North End" to have considerable Jewish attendance. It was there that I formed my ineradicable aversion to the Semitic race. The Jews were brilliant in their classes—calculatingly & schemingly brilliant—but their ideals were sordid & their manners coarse. I became rather well known as an anti-Semitic before I had been at Hope Street many days. (*Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner* 74-75)
This was basically Lovecraft's first exposure to actual Jews outside of books - he having been educated mainly at home, in a predominantly homogenous part of Providence, Rhode Island. For their part, the teachers at Hope St. appear to have tolerated this attitude without disciplining Lovecraft. He never graduated high school, however; due to a "near-breakdown," and so never went to college. For several years he lived at home with his mother, unwilling or unable to find employment or formal education. As Europe spiraled into World War I, Lovecraft became involved with amateur journalism (a large and organized endeavor with two national-level societies, dues, elected officers, etc.)
In early 1915, Lovecraft issued his own amateur periodical, *The Conservative*, whose political tone was cause for a rebuttal by a Jewish amateur journalist, Charles D. Isaacson, in his own journal *In A Minor Key*. Lovecraft responded:
> Charles D. Isaacson, the animating essence of the publication, is a character of remarkable quality. Descended from the race that produced a Mendelssohn, he is himself a musician of no ordinary talent, whilst as a man of literature he is worthy of comparison with his co-religionists Moses Mendez and Isaac D'Israeli. But the very spirituality which gives elevation to the Semitic mind partially unfits it for the consideration of tastes and trends in Aryan thought and writings, hence it is not surprising that he is a radical of the extremest sort. (*The Conservative* 43-44)
Isaacson accused Lovecraft of antisemitism; Lovecraft's private response to this was uncouth:
> A Jew is capable of infinite nastiness when he seeks revenge, & I believe I shall have ample grounds for making this particular Israelite the hero of a spirited Dunciad. I can almost predict his line of attack. He will call me superficial, crude, barbaric in thought, imperfect in education, offensively arrogant & bigoted, filled with venomous prejudice, wanting in good taste, & c. & c. & c. [...] Peace is the ideal of a dying nation; a broken race. Isaacson belongs to a stock wholly broken & emasculated by two thousand years of cringing at the feet of Aryan masters. But I, thank the Gods, am an Aryan, & can rejoice in the glorious victory of T. Flavius Vespasianus, under whose legions the Jewish race & their capital were trodden out of national existence! I am an anti-Semitic by nature, but thought I had concealed my prejudice in my remarks concerning Isaacson. I showed him every consideration in my article, carefully saying that I attacked not the man, but the ideas. However, if Jerusalem wishes to start trouble, he will find in me a new Titus, eager to inscribe on my eagles the triumphant legend IUVDAEA CAPTA! I might here remark that my anti-Semitism is not entirely due to blind prejudice. The Jews are fundamentally Orientals, whilst the rising civilization of the world is Western—Teutonic—Anglo-Saxon. The struggle between the East & the West dates back to Marathon & Salamis, & it is the West which has ever represented progress & superior culture. The Jew is an adverse influence, since he insidiously degrades or Orientalizes our robust Aryan civilization. The intellect of the race is indisputably great, but its nature is not such that it may be safely employed in forming Western political & social ideas. Oppressive as it seems, the Jew must be muzzled. Wherefore Isaacson has reason to expect a warfare of the bitterest kind if he uses his revengeful sarcasm on me. I shall not utter the first word, but shall hold the CONSERVATIVE until the serpent strikes. Then—LET HIM BEWARE. Like old Marcus Fabius on his mission to Carthage, I come with folded toga, ready for peace or war.
- H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 10 Aug 1915 (*Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner* 19)
Lot to unpack there, but the short version is that Lovecraft believed in a number of popular and academic prejudices regarding Jews. Culturally, he considered them "foreign" to Anglo-American/Teutonic/Aryan/Nordic culture, and with values that didn't accord with those he attributed to himself and his own people - and biologically, he proscribed to the scientific racialism that held Jews were a people apart.
This particular idea of a scientific explanation of race was complicated, often contradictory and arbitrary, and in the very process of being undercut by researchers like Franz Boas who showed the essential biological uniformity of human beings. Lovecraft would continue to refine the idea all his life. Amateur journalism also brought him into contact, in 1919, with his first Jewish friend, the homosexual poet Samuel Loveman:
> Loveman has become reinstated in the United through me. Jew or not, I am rather proud to be his sponsor for the second advent to the Association. His poetical gifts are of the highest order, & I doubt if the amateur world can boast his superior. (*Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner* 119)
Loveman’s gifts as a poet almost eclipsed his ethnicity in Lovecraft’s eyes; though Loveman’s apparent ambivalence in 1918 about being called into military service, caused Lovecraft to write: “If I were Loveman I should enlist. [...] But Jews will be Jews, & I will judge neither harshly nor hastily.” (*Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner* 129-130) Lovecraft’s published correspondence with Loveman shows no references to anti-semitism, and there is evidence from the rest of his correspondence that Lovecraft made a deliberate attempt to avoid offending his friend.
In 1921, Lovecraft's mother died. Lovecraft continued his association with amateur journalism, however, which led eventually to his meeting with Sonia Haft Greene - a White Russian immigrant from the Ukraine who was seven years older, and ethnically Jewish. Lovecraft eloped to New York and they were married in 1924.
| [
"\"An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia\" describes this story as \"manifestly racist\". According to Daniel Harms, author of \"The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana\", \"If someone came up to me and said, 'Hey Daniel, I think H. P. Lovecraft was a wordy, overly-sentimental bigot whose stories don't make much sense,' this would b... |
Women in Ancient Rome/Greece were NOT allowed to flaunt their sexuality in public, and were expected to cover up in a way not unlike women in Saudi Arabia. Given this, where did the tradition in classical painting of showing women of antiquity casually exposing themselves in public originate from? | Could you perhaps share some sources for women in Ancient Rome and Greece being expected to cover up? Is this restricted to certain areas/time periods/social classes? | [
"In Western countries, there is generally no objection to either sex posing nude for or drawing members of the opposite sex. However, this was not always so. In 1886, Thomas Eakins was famously dismissed from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art for removing the loincloth from a male model in a mixed classroom. Sim... |
Did minorities have the same rights as Russians in the USSR? | Per the memoirs of Jewish Ex Soviets :"Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking" and "A Backpack, A Bear, and 8 Crates of Vodka" There were quotas of which particular minorities were permitted to have particular jobs and Jews and other "less desirable ethic groups" were therefore on lower social economic standings and denied opportunities. There were very ugly names given to persons of these races and cultures. Various ethnic groups were oppressed during various times during different phases of Soviet statehood. The USSR was a HUGE territory uniting many people from many different social and ethic groups together. Those ethic groups were fairly diverse thought the country. Lots of them did not get along before the Soviets or very well afterwards. The west largely thinks of as one unified country of similar heritage persons. Which is not true. Persons were oppressed under some regimes and restored under others. Families were oppressed for political and other supposed crimes committed by family members sometimes even generations removed. As persons were largely prohibited from moving about within their geographic region (sometimes even neighborhood) new and diverse populations did not relocate except under orders. Families frequently knew each other for generations. Persons of particular ethic groups were prohibited from joining the Communist party which offered specific rights and privileges. As for specific "rights" the soviets pretended everyone was on an equal footing as comrades to the west- but discrimination was rampant and mistreatment the norm.
edit: expansion of idea to make sense, spelling | [
"Members of various ethnicities participated in the legislative bodies of Soviet Union. Organs of power like the Politburo, the Secretariat of the Central Committee etc., were formally ethnically neutral, but in reality ethnic Russians were overrepresented, although there were also non-Russian leaders in the Soviet... |
World War II Germans | The plain SS officially the 'Allgemeine SS" was the basis for all other parts of the organisation.
The Waffen SS was fomred from the Politische Bereitschaften (Political Readiness Squads) and it became the Military SS, the SS army. Members of the Waffen SS generally had to be members of the Allgemeine SS, but members of the Allgemeine SS did not have to be members of the Waffen SS.
This is a very simplified explanation.
| [
"The following is a list of German military equipment of World War II which includes artillery, vehicles and vessels. World War II was a global war that was under way by 1939 and ended in 1945. Following political instability build-up in Europe from 1930, the Germans, which aimed to dominate Europe, attacked Poland... |
how does a busted hard drive that won’t boot anymore get its data recovered when you take it to the magic computer repair shop? | There are some tricks to it. If you only lost your MBR, the drive can be dropped into another machine and the data recovered.
If the drive is truly dead, as in it does not spin, it can be sent into a shop that will remove the platters and place them into an identical drive and then recover the data. That method is expensive and takes a while. | [
"Data can sometimes be recovered from a broken hard drive. However, if the platters on a hard drive are damaged, such as by drilling a hole through the drive (and the platters inside), then the data can only theoretically be recovered by bit-by-bit analysis of each platter with advanced forensic technology.\n",
"... |
how are night sky pictures with nebulas and lots of stars taken? | A dark clear sky, Tripod, Long exposure time up to a min, and photo editors like Adobe Photoshop. Use _URL_0_ to find the least amount of light pollution. Tripod to eliminate shake. Long exposure to allow enough light to come in. Photo editor to enhance your photos. That is exactly what I did in the Great Sand Dunes National Monument. | [
"The cluster of stars is visible in binoculars and quite well seen in small telescopes while the nebula itself is more difficult to spot visually and requires a telescope with a low magnification. A dark site is a must to see it. Photographically the Rosette Nebula is easier to record and it is the only way to reco... |
do citizens filming police make any difference to rates of brutality and corruption at all? | Nope! The only thing that would cause for the police who have been exposed as a corrupt cop or using unnecessary force is for the system to punish them as harsh as we are punished for our crimes. I see a lot more cops getting of easy especially because the police themselves and even when they do get put on trial the legal system takes care of their own. | [
"Incidents of police brutality seem to still be occurring at a consistent rate, however it is yet to be seen whether the trial of body cameras will make a difference to the number of incidents occurring or to the number of police who are prosecuted for misconduct. Additionally, there needs to be more work done by t... |
why are mobile games so shallow and bad compared to even the much older pc/console games? | How many of those old console and pc games were free?
Mobile games generally are simply thinly veiled skinner boxes. Get you hooked on shallow expectation-reward cycle and tease you with micro transactions. There is no incentive to make them GOOD, no incentive to make them a story based game to play for hours on end.
There are some fun ones out there but they're being made for a new market with different "play patterns", they are built to suit many short bursts of play time and built to encourage micro transactions to support an otherwise free game. | [
"Mobile games tend to be small in scope (in relation to mainstream PC and console games) and many prioritise innovative design and ease of play over visual spectacle. Storage and memory limitations (sometimes dictated at the platform level) place constraints on file size that presently rule out the direct migration... |
"if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." | I think what he's implying is that you can never do something truly from scratch, that everything has a source, and if you go back far enough, you'd end up creating the universe.
For example, you want to make an apple pie. Normally, you'd go buy the supplies you need, let's just say apples - but if you're doing it from scratch, you'd have planted the trees that the apples were picked from. Except that's not 'scratch' enough. You'd have to have genetically engineered that particular strain of apple - usually granny smith for pies - to grow. Even that wouldn't be truly 'from scratch', you'd have to keep going further and further back, etc. | [
"Apple Pie encourages more students to have interest in astronomy and deep sky objects. Simultaneously, ApplePie try to make an open space for students interested in space to interact and exchange ideas with each other.\n",
"\"Well first you get out an ordinary apple. You place the apple between the patented pans... |
What insect or bird can stay in flight for the longest amount of time? | There is a thread from last year about this, with respect to birds, at least.
_URL_0_
My comment from that thread is below.
> Pelagic birds would be the ones that come to mind. Sheerwaters, petrals, gannets, boobies, any birds in the [tubenoses](_URL_6_) really.
> However, the one that sticks out is the frigatebird. These birds have an impressive 2.4m (7.9 ft) wingspan that is designed for long, sustained flight on winds and thermals. They like tropical waters where trade winds produce thermals for them to coast on. One study found they reach altitudes of 2.5km. These are also what help them stay aloft for long periods, day and night (I've never seen anything about birds staying in the air for years, and the only other bird known to fly day and night like the Frigatebird is the Swift).
> The birds spend most of their time foraging for food, and return to a colony to rest, nest, or feed their young, simply referred to as foraging trips. Migration behaviors don't appear to differ from these. These foraging trips have been observed to last 92 hours long (or as short as 8 hours), covering an average of 223km (+/- 208km). They might last longer.
> They follow predatory fish around and like to pick off the fish they're feeding off of, they force fish into a ball and will jump out of the water.
> Fun fact, whales are attracted to these feeding frenzies that birds create, not the other way around. [Source if anyone is interested - [Role of feeding strategies in seabird–minke whale
associations](_URL_2_)]
> Another one that comes to mind is the albatross. One study I know of found a 14 day foraging trip for one individual, with the others coming in at 0.72d, 4d, 9.7d, 10d. This however contained times resting on the water, so total time in flight only measured into a max of 14 hours per day. - [[Foraging strategies of grey-headed albatrosses Thalassarche chrysostoma: integration of movements, activity and feeding events](_URL_5_)]
> * [Flight performance: Frigatebirds ride high on thermals](_URL_7_)
> * [Wing Morphology and Flight Behavior of Pelecaniform
Seabirds](_URL_3_) - **Paywalled PDF**
> * [SATELLITE TELEMETRY OF GREAT FRIGATEBIRDS FREGATA MINOR
REARING CHICKS ON TERN ISLAND, NORTH CENTRAL PACIFIC OCEAN](_URL_1_)
> * [Foraging strategy of a top predator in tropical
waters: great frigatebirds in the Mozambique
Channel](_URL_4_) | [
"Except when nesting, swifts spend their lives in the air, living on the insects caught in flight; they drink, feed, and often mate and sleep on the wing. Some individuals go 10 months without landing. No other bird spends as much of its life in flight. Their maximum horizontal flying speed is 111.6 km/h. Over a li... |
why do cans of spray paint have balls inside of them? | It shakes up the mixture of the paint before it sprays. In just about every store that has a paint section, they have machines to shake up a can to evenly mix whats inside of it (especially if its been sitting for awhile. Paint is a heterogeneous mixture, so letting it sit will separate the molecules).
Using spray paint, you dont have time to shake for long periods of time and mix up the paint; the ball is meant to help aid and speed up this process | [
"Cans can be made with easy open features. Some cans have screw caps for pouring liquids and resealing. Some have hinged covers or slip-on covers for easy access. Paint cans often have a removable plug on the top for access and for reclosing.\n",
"U.S. SWAT teams often use paintball-like balls, also known as pepp... |
Can an individual axon release more than one type of neurotransmitter? | Absolutely! It's not too terribly new of an idea...
For example, norepinephrine, NPY, and ATP are all released from some sympathetic nerve terminals... [ref, 1995](_URL_0_)
or GABA and glycine... [ref, 1999](_URL_1_)
the list goes on...
They don't generally have opposing effects as far as I know (that wouldn't make much sense would it?) More likely a cotransmitter is released as a modulatory factor for the primary neurotransmitter. | [
"According to a rule called Dale's principle, which has only a few known exceptions, a neuron releases the same neurotransmitters at all of its synapses. This does not mean, though, that a neuron exerts the same effect on all of its targets, because the effect of a synapse depends not on the neurotransmitter, but o... |
When Joseph Goebbels becamse Minister of Propaganda, was his job title and description kept secret from the German public or was this widely known and accepted by the German people? | We must remember that the word 'propaganda' itself did not originally have negative connnotations. These only appeared between the beginning of the First and end of the Second World War, by which time 'propaganda' came to be seen as entirely negative.
The word itself came about in the 17th century with an institution called Sacra Congregatio de **Propaganda** Fide (see: _URL_0_ - if you're interested). So at the time you are asking about being a professional propagandist was nothing to be secretive about. Try to forget about our contemporary associations, think not 'propagandist', but 'propagator.' You could, with a degree of simplification, equate it to being a spokesperson for the government nowadays. You know that the person's job is to present only one side of the general picture. The issue with Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was that it not only served as the spokes...person(?) for Hitler's government, but was also responsible for filtering Germany's media and culture through a national-socialistic sieve. | [
"During World War II, he was a member of the Nazi party and worked closely with Joseph Goebbels and The Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment. And as an ardent nationalist, indicated by his work for the government during both World Wars, he urged other artist to join the effort when Hitler came to power in 1933.... |
I once heard about Arizona briefly going to war with California over water. Can anyone tell me more? | I studied this briefly in a class specifically about Arizona but unfortunately cannot recall most of it. I do remember Arizona "deploying" a Navy due to tensions regarding water rights.
Edit:
[This article](_URL_1_) has some information including a picture of one of the sweet naval warships.
[Here](_URL_0_) is a short write-up of the event. | [
"\"Arizona v. California\" was a set of 11 United States Supreme Court cases dealing with water rights. These cases took place between the years of 1931 and 2006. The initial question of this case was to determine how much water from the Colorado river Arizona was entitled to. Many western states became involved in... |
why is it that the fly population is not exponentially growing with the seemingly endless supply of food humans are throwing away to negate natural selection? | Limiting factors control the population. Cold weather can kill off insects. Flies have to survive the maggot stage. Food and habitat are limited. Predators eat them.
Like mosquitoes, the reproduction stage is a major limiting factor. | [
"Due to the abundance of insects and a worldwide concern of food shortages, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations considers that the world may have to, in the future, regard the prospects of eating insects as a food staple. Insects are noted for their nutrients, having a high content of protei... |
Can you predict with what colour flame an element or compound will burn? | Yes, though the more complex the thing you're burning is, the harder (I suspect) it would be to calculate. The color of a flame comes either from blackbody radiation, or from emission spectra of the molecules themselves, if the flame is hot enough to ionize them, and the absorption spectra. These can all be calculated, and I'm sure there's tables and tables of this stuff (I.e. emission and absorption bands) for most common materials. Probably someone who's in physical chemistry could give more specifics on the models they'd use, but that's the principle.
For instance, calculating the spectrum for hydrogen is something a second year undergraduate could do, though I think actually figuring out the likelihood of transitions would be a bit harder. But it can definitely be done. | [
"Some of the more common color-producing compounds are tabulated here. The color of a compound in a firework will be the same as its color in a flame test (shown at right). Not all compounds that produce a colored flame are appropriate for coloring fireworks, however. Ideal colorants will produce a pure, intense co... |
what makes a scavenger able to ingest bacteria and parasite infested corpses without getting sick? | Very strong stomach acid and a strong immune system specifically adapted to deal with bacteria and parasites that the scavenger encounters.
Natural selection leads to these features. A scavenger that got sick eating dead animals would be a pretty terrible scavenger and wouldn't survive. | [
"Scavengers play a fundamental role in the environment through the removal of decaying organisms, serving as a natural sanitation service. While microscopic and invertebrate decomposers break down dead organisms into simple organic matter which are used by nearby autotrophs, scavengers help conserve energy and nutr... |
the heartbleed bug and what, if any, actions i should take as a consumer and netizen. | You can access any website now. They all should be safe. Really, this is more of an after-the-fact news nugget than a crisis. Banks and major websites were notified immediately of the error and patched up their security.
Essentially, someone was looking around a wall surrounding a giant information pit and found a 8" gap behind a tree. No trails led to the gap and there was no indication that anyone had ever gone through. The tree was promptly cut down and the gap was filled with concrete. Then the media was told about it.
You're safe, but changing passwords to bank websites isn't a bad idea. Actually, to be safe you should change them multiple times a year, but no one cared about that before so it's not likely to change now. :P | [
"ILOVEYOU, sometimes referred to as Love Bug or Love pak, is a computer worm that attacked tens of millions of Windows personal computers on and after 5 May 2000 local time in the Philippines when it started spreading as an email message with the subject line \"ILOVEYOU\" and the attachment \"LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.tx... |
what rights did women have under the reign of kleopatra? | /r/AskHistorians might be a good place for this. | [
"In ancient Sparta, women had extensive rights, including the right to inherit property and to manage their own and their spouse's property. The comparable term to \"epikleros\" in Sparta was \"patrouchoi\", occasionally rendered as \"patrouchos\". In Sparta the law of \"epikleros\" only applied to unmarried girls,... |
if we have to help animals like horses give birth, then how did they manage it themselves before humans started animal husbandry? | We don't "have to help" them, but in the case of horses, a lot of time we help in the birthing process because we're invested in the animal (emotionally or financially) and want to see the animal and it's offspring do good so we benefit from it as well. | [
"Animal husbandry is the breeding and raising of animals for meat, milk, eggs, or wool), and for work and transport. Working animals, including horses, mules, oxen, water buffalo, camels, llamas, alpacas, donkeys, and dogs, have for centuries been used to help cultivate fields, harvest crops, wrangle other animals,... |
Is there any historical explanation as to why political ideology is so varied in Europe compared to North America? | This isn't really a historic answer, and I may be answering a different question, but I believe it has a lot to do with the winner-take-all system we have here. When the candidate with a majority of the vote takes all of the votes, instead of just a proportion, it makes it hard for more than two parties to exist. Since we can only have two parties, neither of them can be very hard left or right. Not only are they comparatively moderate because we have a small option, but if they want to put candidates in positions, they need to win a majority of the vote. In order to do this, they have to stay pretty centrist. | [
"Linguist Ruth Wodak has stated that the populist parties rising across Europe do so for different reasons in different countries. In an article published in March 2014, she divided these political parties into four groups: \"parties [which] gain support via an ambivalent relationship with fascist and Nazi pasts\" ... |
Could you reasonably create Helium through alpha decay? | Actually that is how most of the helium on earth arose. The uranium and thorium in the earth has been undergoing alpha decay for billions of years and collected underground in the same place where natural gas deposits are. The natural gas extracted from the ground contains a good percentage (some up to 10%) helium.
And the early experiments which found helium did so from the alpha particles from radioactive decay which gained electrons and were collected.
Now is this viable for large quantities? No. Any naturally decaying element will either be too long lived or too low in abundance to collect enough helium.
Also let's look at the energy emitted by the decay. It is going to be around 1 MeV/alpha particle. If you want 1 liter of liquid helium per day, you'll need 2 x 10^25 He atoms. Meaning 3 x 10^12 Joules or 800,000 kWh of energy will be emitted. If you had something emitting that much energy, it would be a great power plant. We can't get that from a fission plant since it doesn't make alpha particles and we don't have any viable fusion plants yet. | [
"The alpha process, also known as the alpha ladder, is one of two classes of nuclear fusion reactions by which stars convert helium into heavier elements, the other being the triple-alpha process. The triple-alpha process consumes only helium, and produces carbon. After enough carbon has accumulated, the reactions ... |
what would the world would have been like if russia landed on the moon before the us? | The US would have come up with something else to do first and then still have claimed it won the spacerace. | [
"Motivation for the United States to engage the Soviet Union in a Space Race can be traced to the then on-going Cold War. Landing on the Moon was viewed as a national and technological accomplishment that would generate world-wide acclaim. But going to the Moon would be risky and expensive, as exemplified by Presid... |
From what I understand, objects in space orbit around a centre of mass, normally a star or a planet. Does there have to be a physical object to orbit around? | I guess your question boils down to whether there has to be "stuff" at the center of mass, and the answer is no. You don't have to invoke a weird bubble planet to see this, if two objects of similar mass, or of great separation, orbit each other, the center of mass (barycenter) is outside either object. An example of this is the Pluto-Charon system. | [
"In the case of planets orbiting a star, the mass of the star and all its satellites are calculated to be at a single point called the barycenter. The paths of all the star's satellites are elliptical orbits about that barycenter. Each satellite in that system will have its own elliptical orbit with the barycenter ... |
difference when heart is working hard from cardio vs obesity. | During cardio the heart increases its workload and all the body's other systems adjust to help support that endeavor. The blood vessels dilate, the muscles do their best to help the blood along, hormone levels change, some non-critical processes stop or slow down to redirect blood flow to main channels.
It's all hands on deck to keep the heart cruising powerfully and efficiently. Over time, those support processes will get even better at their job and further decrease the load on the heart.
When the heart is just resting at an elevated rate due to obesity none of that support structure is active. Instead of a wide open pipe with pumping stations along the way, the heart is now trying to force blood through hundreds of miles of constricted tubing all by itself. Over time that excessive workload damages the heart. | [
"Athlete's heart is a result of dynamic physical activity, such as aerobic training more than 5 hours a week rather than static training such as weightlifting. During intensive prolonged endurance or strength training, the body signals the heart to pump more blood through the body to counteract the oxygen deficit b... |
What exactly are they changing when they increase storage space on a micro SD? | Basically the number of floating-gate transistors per chip:
_URL_0_ | [
"While previous system updates have been stored on internal memory, this is the first update to require a storage device. The update requires at least 128 MB free space on either a memory card or a hard drive. Microsoft has stated that many Core or Arcade users will not have sufficient space on their limited memory... |
why aren't humans naturally good at anything like many other animals? | Actually, when it comes to covering long distances quickly, humans are second only to horses believe it or not.
So we got that going for us. | [
"I can express something [with animals] that is different from what I put into my work about humans ... I can put more nonsense, more satire and fantasy into the animals ... they're also easier to do than people ... With people I try more for realism, which is probably why I'm generally better with animals.\n",
"... |
what's the deal with traffic light cams? | As with most "is this legal" questions, the answer is "It depends entirely on where you are."
In my state they are not legal. | [
"Lane control lights are a specific type of traffic light used to manage traffic on a multi-way road or highway. Typically they allow or forbid traffic to use one or more of the available lanes by the use of Green lights or arrows (to permit) or by red lights or crosses (to prohibit). When used, they are usually re... |
Fossils of the Archaeopteryx with clearly preserved feather imprints were discovered in the 1870s. Why did it take for so long to be accepted that other dinosaurs were also feathered? | The first purported "feathered dinosaur" known after *Archaeopteryx lithographica* was *Sinosauropteryx prima*, described in 1998 (Chen et al., 1998).
Previously, assumptions of affinity to birds had been made, and in some cases backed up by mathematical based parsimony analyses of character-taxon datasets. If it was close to birds, if they have hips like birds, shoulders like them, and it seemed a folding arm mechanism argued John Ostrom in the mid-1960s, they should also have feathers.
But this idea was heavily resisted by stalwart ornithologists who maintained the earlier position that birds were probably descended from some more lizard-like animal.
One reason was the idea that feathers developed from a segmented scale morphology, there were numerous Triassic lizards that seemed arboreal, and it meant all those pesky dinosaurs could stay their normal, cold-blooded selves, giant lizards in the muck.
This is all a bit rhetorical, but is pretty well covered in Pat Shipman's [*Taking Wing*](_URL_0_), perhaps the best introductory book out there on the subject. The gist of it is, that early ornithologists resisted, through the 1960s into the early 2000s the very *idea* that fully developed feathers found on various fossil dinosaurs were of in fact *dinosaurs* instead of birds; and if the data were ambiguous, instead they were just *dinosaurs* and not birds.
Though many dinosaurs have been described with simple, down-like basally branching feather-like tufts, like *Sinosauropteryx* (Currie and Chen, 2001), the sheer seeming unavian-ness of the animal (short, squat forelimbs, forward-directed pubis, LONG tail, etc.) implied that maybe, just maybe, the integument was mistaken, or convergent.
The resistance to the spread of the idea is largely limited to certain ornithologists, creationists, and only a few workers who have more of a beef to methodology than conclusion, unlike the others listed. Several workers, especially Alan Feduccia and later Theagarten Lingham-Soliar would start floating the idea that perhaps these weren't feathers at all, but the remains of a thickened dermis, the remnants of which were a cross-hatch of collagen fibers that just managed to look like feathers.
While evidence continues to rule this out (these structures are clearly distinct and not an irregular cross-hatch, form bundles with distinct central raches, melanosomes discovered on them show color, and that there's no evidence whatsoever of aquatic habits, among a few others) [(Smithwick & al 2017)](_URL_1_).
The early 1970s into the 1990s were the strongest era of resistance, but this all changed with the discovery of a siltstone quarry near Sihetun in Liaoning Province, where apart from *Sinosauropteryx* a clear progression of diverse feathered clearly-non-avian dinosaurs were found, as well as birds, showing that similar preservation reveals similar integument in diverse groups of near-avian and basal avian dinosaurs. | [
"The first complete specimen was announced in 1861, and ten more \"Archaeopteryx\" fossils have been found since then. Most of the eleven known fossils include impressions of feathers—among the oldest direct evidence of such structures. Moreover, because these feathers take the advanced form of flight feathers, \"A... |
World/Military Historians: What was the Battle of Cannae and why was it such a big deal? | The year was 218 B.C. The Roman Republic at this point ecompassed all of Italy, including Corsica, Sicily, and Sardinia. Those three islands were won in the First Punic War, a massive war raged from 264 - 241 B.C. against the Mediterranean's greatest power, the Carthaginian Empire. After an exhuastive war in which Rome was forced to learn the arts of naval warfare (and mastering it), the stubborn Romans were able to beat all odds and defeat Carthage.
After the war, while Rome was rolling around in its new position as the strongest city in the Mediterranean, Carthage was gearing up for the next battle. Hamilcar Barca, a veteran general of the First Punic War, was annexing territory in Spain to use for extraction of wealth (Spain had lots and lots of silver) and as a base of manpower (Carthage used mostly mercenaries in its wars, not Carthaginian citizens). Hamilcar had brought his son, Hannibal, who took over the campaign after Hamilcar's death.
Hannibal displayed his brilliance in his wars against the Spanish tribes, eventually encroaching upon a Roman ally. Rome asked Hannibal to stop, and when he did not, Rome went straight to Carthage. The Carthaginians opted for war.
Hannibal with a massive mercenary army (including his famous elephants) travelled through Iberia, the south of France, and over the Alps in his famous crossing. The Romans, expecting a naval invasion, had been preparing for an invasion of Africa in Sicily. When news reached a paniced Rome that Hannibal was entering Italy, an army was sent north commanded by T. Sempronius Longus and P. Cornelius Scipio.
Hannibal defeated this army at the Battle of Ticinus, then finishing it off at the Battle of the River Trebia. The next year, Rome sent another consular legion (large army) under G. Flaminius, which was ambushed and devastated at the Battle of Transimene. Now, in 216, Rome sent both their executive generals (consuls) Varro and Paullus with an army numbering 86,000 against Hannibal's, which numbered roughly half of that.
The Romans lined up for battle and Hannibal did the same. He placed his weakest troops in the center, then as the army marched, the center marched way ahead of the flanks so the army looked like this from above: ^
Hannibal's weak troops in the center were the first to meet the Romans because of this and after some fighting they began to flee. The Romans followed and soon the massive Roman army was pouring into the gap, following Hannibal's center. The Romans lost their organization, which was the greatest advantage of their "manipular legion", which revolved around cohesion of troops in disciplined groups which could be manuevered before and during battle. Now, the Roman army resembled a horde of soldiers rather than an organized or disciplined army. Hannibal had kept his crack Libyan spearmen as reserves and sent them to head off the Romans, while Hannibal's flanks surrounded the Romans on all other sides. What followed was the greatest disaster of Republican Roman history. Livy says that 50,000 of the Romans were slaughtered (with another 20,000 being captured) while Polybius claims only 5,700 of the Carthaginians were killed. Paullus was killed, however Varro was able to escape with a large portion of the survivors.
After three massive victories, Hannibal had secured himself as one of the greatest generals in classical history, Cannae being his greatest moment. Although he would go on to lose the war, Hannibal would forever remain legendary in the eyes of the Romans he had nearly defeated.
Sources:
Adrian Goldsworthy's "The Punic Wars".
Polybius' "Histories". | [
"The Battle of Cannae () was a major battle of the Second Punic War that took place on 2 August 216 BC in Apulia, in southeast Italy. The army of Carthage, under Hannibal, surrounded and decisively defeated a larger army of the Roman Republic under the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro. It i... |
How would a paramilitary group in the Weimar Republic acquire weapons to arm themselves? | In many cases, German paramilitary groups were maintained by conservatives in the German government/military to keep order and engage in street fights with radical socialist groups in the general disorder that occurred in 1919. In most cases, these paramilitary groups were composed of former soldiers who had fought in the First World War and found themselves out of the army following Versailles. The treaty severely reduced the size of the German military from many millions of men to, as you note, less than one million. During this period of upheaval, the paramilitary groups (such as the Freikorps or Stahlhelm) were organized by private interests as militia or unofficially by the government/military as a reserve force.
They would have armed themselves accordingly depending on how they were organized. Many, constituting the Schwarze Reichswehr, were armed unofficially by the German government - they would have been armed from the weapons that the German army and government already controlled. Even though the army's "official" size had diminished, this did not mean that the massive armaments the German Empire had stockpiled were gone, nor did it mean that the conservative leaders of Germany had any intention of following the Treaty of Versailles.
Otherwise, many Germans would have owned hunting or sport rifles, so finding the basic armaments for militia would not have been too difficult. Schuetzenverein (marksmen's clubs) had existed for several decades already in Germany, and some men in paramilitary groups would have been members of a club.
Sources:
1. _URL_0_
2. Hagen, William. *German History in Modern Times: Four Lives of the Nation*. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Page 250. | [
"Paramilitary groups were formed throughout the Weimar Republic in the wake of Germany's defeat in World War I and the ensuing German Revolution. Some were created by political parties to help in recruiting, discipline and in preparation for seizing power. Some were created before World War I. Others were formed by... |
how come it feels so good to get some fresh air after you've been inside all day? | There are a couple factors at play. The one that no one thinks about but has been proven, buildings trap a lot of carbon dioxide. I know it seems obvious, but the amount they trap is surprising. Often times throughout the day the levels of carbon dioxide will rise to the point that medical proffesionals determine cause headaches, irritability, and slight impairment of cognitive ability.
That's not to say all buildings are like that, and some are worse than others. However the data supports it. More CO2 means less oxygen and more work per breath. So when you step outside your lungs have instant relief. | [
"Human comfort depends on five criteria, two of which concern one’s clothing and metabolism, and three others which focus on air temperature, air humidity and airflow speed. The faster the airflow is on someone the cooler he feels. Moreover, natural ventilation brings sound fresh air into the building when well-des... |
if my skin never touches my eyeglasses, where does the oil on my glasses come from? | They do contact skin at points and by putting them on when you touch them.
OR from frying bacon | [
"Contact lenses usually serve the same corrective purpose as glasses, but are lightweight and virtually invisible—many commercial lenses are tinted a faint blue to make them more visible when immersed in cleaning and storage solutions. Some cosmetic lenses are deliberately colored to alter the appearance of the eye... |
how does a viral infection turn into a bacterial infection? | Your immune system is not on high alert, your immune system is under a lot of stress and weakened by the effort to fight the virus. That is a good time for secondary infections by bacterias which usually are easily picked off by your immune system. | [
"Infection is initiated when a viral particle contacts a cell with specific types of receptor molecules on the cell surface. Following binding of viral envelope glycoproteins to cell membrane receptors, the virion is internalized and dismantled, allowing viral DNA to migrate to the cell nucleus. Within the nucleus,... |
why some electronics, like old tvs, start working again after they're hit. | Percussive maintenance causes all of the parts to jiggle around. Many problems arise when a connection somewhere is shoddy and has slid out of place, but the jiggling can knock this connection back into place. | [
"Although consumer electronics such as the radio have been popular since the 1920s, recycling was almost unheard of until the early 1990s. At the end of the 1970s the accelerating pace of domestic consumer electronics drastically shortened the lifespan of electronics such as TVs, VCRs and audio. New innovations app... |
what is the shape of the earth? | The shape is an oblate spheroid. Basically a globe.
It's not a case of having to trust one side or another, like each side is equal, because one side is made up of people saying the earth is flat because "water finds a level" and the other side is made up of scientists and engineers. [At this point I want to point out that the argument that scientists will all be in on the con doesn't make sense. Scientists LOVE proving other scientists wrong. If there was a way to prove the earth was flat, someone would do it, because it would make them very famous]. The statement " mass being lighter than air determines how things fall" doesn't make sense. That's not what happens: heavy things don't fall faster than light things. And it doesn't make sense anyway. In zero gravity, boyancy doesn't exist. "lighter than air" only makes sense in gravity. Things have inertia without gravity, but inertia isn't why things float.
So question 1. It is not possible that the earth is flat, because of the vast number of observations made daily that prove it's spherical nature. From pilots to ships captains. From people working in IT to shipping logistics. From physicists doing experiments, to people using GPS. The spherical globe is demonstrated all the time.
2. Extremely difficult. Because of the above.
3. This is the real question. If you are serious there are several things you can do:
a) Buy a good telescope. You can prove to yourself that the moon, mars, Saturn and Jupiter are all spherical. You can see it with your own eyes/camera after several days of observation. Why would earth be flat when all the other planets are spheres?
b) If you have a car and a good watch, and are willing to remind yourself of high school trigonometry, you can perform the classical "round earth" experiment, and not only show that the earth is a sphere, but estimate it's radius quite accurately, the same way [Eratosthenes](_URL_0_) did. The distance between San Diego and Seattle is more than enough.
c) If you live somewhere where the sea sets or rises over some water, lie down, and watch the sun set. The second you are convinced it has dipped under the horizon, get somewhere high, like up a tree, or up a ladder. You'll see you can see the sun again. This effect does not make sense if the earth is flat. If you are watching the sun rise, wait to see the first sliver of the sun somewhere high. Then lie down. You will see you can't see the sun anymore. Again, this cannot be explained by a flat earth.
d) Talk to someone in another country (or just far away if you live in a big country), or travel there yourself. People further towards the poles than you have longer days in summer, and shorter days in winter. People on the other side of the globe have sun when you have darkness. This is very difficult to explain using a flat earth, and most of the explanations involve the sun working like a spot light, rather than radiating light in all directions. Something you can prove isn't the case by looking at how the moon is illuminated.
Some of these results can be explained under a flat earth hypothesis, however, it is my understanding that know single flat earth hypothesis can explain all of them | [
"Horizontally, the earth is conceived in various ways: as a square with its four directional or, perhaps, solstice points, or as a circle without such fixed points. The square earth is sometimes imagined as a maize field, the circular earth as a turtle floating on the waters. Each direction has its own tree, bird, ... |
Were the pre-Columbian civilizations in Mesoamerica and the Andes aware of each other's existence? If so, how extensive was their contact? | There's always room for discussion, but perhaps the section [Pre-Columbian Trade and Contact](_URL_0_) in our FAQ will answer your inquiry. | [
"Some similarities between the Mesoamerican and the Andean cultures suggest that the two regions became a part of a wider world system, as a result of trade, by the 1st millennium BCE. The current academic view is that the flow of goods across the Andean slopes was controlled by institutions distributing locations ... |
Cold fusion again? Is there enough info in the article and at their 'journal' website to show this is bunk? | Well, let's do the math and find out for ourselves:
The amount of energy required to heat one gram of water 1 degree celsius at room temperature is about 4.182 J, so the amount of energy to heat 292 grams of water 80 degrees celsius is:
292 g * 80 K * 4.184 J / (g * K) = 97,692 J
A watt is a unit of power (specifically, 1 J/s), which measures energy per unit of time, thus to calculate the power, we'd need to know over what time interval that energy is generated. For it to be 12,000, the time interval would need to be:
97.692 J / 12,000 W = 8.14 s
I don't know what the actual time interval was, so I can't further judge the validity of that statement.
Watts are a perfectly legitimate unit for heat power. Watts only measure power and are independent of what kind of power it is.
Edit: I made a mistake and forgot to include the enthalpy of vaporization of water, which would raise the value significantly. | [
"A small community of researchers continues to investigate cold fusion, now often preferring the designation low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR) or condensed matter nuclear science (CMNS). Since articles about cold fusion are rarely published in peer-reviewed mainstream scientific journals anymore, they do not attr... |
When paint fades in sunlight over time, where does the pigment go? | I think the [chromophores](_URL_0_) just degrade over time from exposure to UV light. | [
"Light encountering a painted surface can either alter or break the chemical bonds of the pigment, causing the colors to bleach or change in a process known as photodegradation. Materials that resist this effect are said to be lightfast. The electromagnetic spectrum of the sun contains wavelengths from gamma waves ... |
Which other plans were suggested for the partition of the Ottoman empire after its fall and why were they rejected? Why are the borders in the Middle East the borders they are today if they cause a lot of conflict? | I suggest reading David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.
Mr. Fromkin describes how and why the Allies, through the Sykes-Picot agreement, drew the lines of the Middle East. He also points to imperial ambitions and Europe's lack of understanding of the region's politics, religion, and culture.
_URL_0_
| [
"The plans for partitioning of the Ottoman Empire needed to be solidified. At the Conference of London on March 4, 1920, the Triple Entente decided to implement its previous (secret) agreements and form what would be the Treaty of Sèvres. In doing so, all forms of resistance originating from the Ottoman Empire (reb... |
If I could somehow stand, unhindered, on the surface of a black hole, and look into the night sky: how would everything appear? | Assuming it was physically possible to stand on the event horizon:
Gravity will always distort the path of light. The key is that the effect scales with the magnitude of the gravitational field in question. The gravitational field of Earth, the Sun, or even a single atom will exert some influence on the path of a streams of photons.
Imagine you are on the "surface" of the event horizon of a black hole with a mass equal to Earth. It wouldn't be exactly the same as standing on the surface of Earth since you'd be either 9 cm above the center of mass, the singularity, while you're 6371 meters above the center of the Earth at sea level. The lensing effect has a greater magnitude the closer one is to the center of mass. The gravitational field where you are standing will be 4.921×10^16 m/s^2, which is significantly higher than the 9.8 m/s^2 you'd experience on the surface of the Earth.
Now, if you were standing at the surface of the event horizon of a big black hole, say [Sagittarius A*](_URL_0_), you would be 1,270,000 meters from the center of mass. Due to this the gravitational field will be 8.230×10^13 m/s^2 where you are standing.
The interesting thing to note here is that the gravitational field is higher on the event horizon of an Earth-mass black hole than it is on the event horizon of the gigantic black hole at the center of our galaxy.
Right, so imagine you're standing on the surface, looking out into the star field. First, we'll imagine what you'd see if you could shut off the gravity momentarily. We'll call it the default image and alter it to demonstrate the effects of lensing. Imagine you're looking directly "up", where the singularity is 180 degrees from the center of your vision.
The light from a star that forms a direct line between the singularity, yourself, and the distant star will not move when you turn gravity back on. The star will move toward the center star. Other stars further from the center star will move closer into it and you would see stars that weren't in your fields of view formerly creep in from the edges.
Also, if you were to look to the side you'd see quite a bit of distortion as you turned your head. As you vision became perpendicular to the surface of the event horizon you'd see light that was almost able to avoid the event horizon in a slow death spiral orbiting the body. | [
"A black hole, known as Cygnus X-1 (an X-ray source believed to be an actual black hole), lies in the constellation Cygnus. An explorer aboard the spaceship \"Rocinante\" journeys toward the black hole, believing there may be something beyond it. As he moves closer, it becomes increasingly difficult to control the ... |
Brazil and Argentina saw well over a million Italians emigrate to their countries in the late 19th century. In America, notorious mafia families took root in America. Were there any openings for Italian crime families in South America? | Short answer: More *Nostromo*, less *Godfather,* there's more political and less mafia activity among the very large Italian immigrant populations in South America. Different pressures, different opportunities, different regional origins within Italy, different politics made South America less fertile ground for the growth of Italian mafia.
Discussion:
First note that "Italian crime families" is anachronistic for the late 19th and early 20th century. The mafia in the US isn't a transplant of some existing Sicilian family organization-- the US "crime family" is a local 20th century development for the most part. In 19th century Sicily this was more about landless peasants from agricultural communities and their relations with absentee landowners, rather than a family's criminal enterprise.
The rise of the mafia in the US is associated specifically with Sicilian and (later) Neapolitan immigrants, not Italians generally. Taking just Argentina as an example, before 1900, Italian immigration is largely from Northern Italy (Parma, Veneto & Lombardy)-- immigration from southern Italy and Sicily does occur, but it's after 1900 and the Italian-Argentine population is historically much more influenced by the politics and culture of Northern Italy, than the South.
Italians become the largest country of origin in Argentina, so much so that Argentine Spanish is very distinct of the influence of the Italian language. Because Italians were so numerous in Argentina -- more than half the population is of Italian descent today (including such notable figures as Pope Francis), Italians weren't a minority.
Italian immigrants to Argentina and their children had the opportunity to participate in a wealthy and quickly growing nation on reasonably non-discriminatory terms; organized crime tends to rise among communities with less legitimate access to power and opportunity.
Giuseppe Garibaldi himself comes to the New World, first to Brazil and then to Uruguay, and drew young men to his banner in the Italian Legion (aka "Redshirts"). The politics and passions of Italian nationalism are more important to Italian populations in South America than in the US; that's where the regional origin of the Italian immigrants is important. Remember that Sicily has an ambivalent relationship with Italian unification-- Sicilians weren't consistently enthusiastic about the Risorgimento; Palermo revolts against Italy in 1866, a revolt which is put down with considerable violence, spurring Sicilian resentments. While its painting with a broad brush, one can say that the American mafia tends to be drawn from the Sicilian peasantry which is disappointed with what they view as unfulfilled promises of Unification; indeed that's one of the drivers of Sicilian migration to the US in that latter part of the 19th century.
The politics of Italians in South America were quite different from the US; much less attached to the Church, much more to Garibaldi, Italian nationalism and to Freemasonry. Italian mutual aid societies (*Unione e Benevolenza* for example, founded in 1869) had a powerful civic role, the place an immigrant might look to for assistance that didn't have an equivalent in North America. It was a proportionally larger community, drawn from different places in Italy, with different institutions, politics and opportunities than in the US. Italo-Argentine organizations are even today very significant constituents of Argentine politics, FEDITALIA represents Italo-Argentine interests in a way that doesn't have a similarly weighty parallel in the US.
So we don't see the kinds of Italian organized crime organizations in South America that you find in the US in the early and mid-20th century.
NB -- this is answer is mostly specific to Uruguay and Argentina, where Italians were the largest ethnicity or nearly so; I know less about Brazil, other than to say that Italians were a smaller portion of the population and that there's no obvious sign of a *Cosa Nostra* like mafia among the immigrants there either.
Sources
[Immigrazione Italiana nell’America del Sud](_URL_4_)
[Garibaldi in Uruguay: A Reputation Reconsidered](_URL_3_)
[Italian Revolutionaries in the Empire of Brazil](_URL_5_)
[GAUCHOS, GRINGOS ANO GALLEGOS: THE ASSIMILATION OF ITALIAN AND SPANISH IMMIGRANTS IN THE MAKING OF MODERN URUGUAY 1880-1930](_URL_6_)
[ORGANIZING ETHNICITY: THREE EPISODES IN THE POLITICS OF ITALIAN ASSOCIATIONS IN ARGENTINA, 1947-1989](_URL_1_)
[Peasants, Patrons, and Brokers in Western Sicily](_URL_2_)
[Mafia and peasant rebellion as contrasting factors in Sicilian latifundism](_URL_0_) | [
"Italian immigrants to the United States in the early 19th century formed various small-time gangs which gradually evolved into sophisticated crime syndicates which dominated organized crime in America for several decades. Although government crackdowns and a less-tightly knit Italian-American community have largel... |
If all the matter (excluding dark matter) was
spread evenly throughout the universe, what would
the density of matter be? | Because the universe is pretty close to being flat, its density is close to what's known as the critical density, about 9.3 x 10^-27 kg/m^3 , or about 6 proton masses per cubic meter. | [
"Dark matter constitutes about 26.8% (2013 estimate) of the mass-energy density of the universe. The remaining 4.8% (2013 estimate) comprises all ordinary matter observed as atoms, chemical elements, gas and plasma, the stuff of which visible planets, stars and galaxies are made. The great majority of ordinary matt... |
Why does puberty happen, evolutionarily speaking? | 1) Resources: giving birth and providing for offspring requires an immense amount of resources. The more a mother has, the more she can pass on to his offspring, and those offspring will then have a better chance at surviving and reproducing than offspring from a younger mother who was not able to care for them as much.
2) Knowledge/skills. Getting good enough at avoiding predators, making nests/dens, finding the aforementioned resources, and taking care of offspring takes practice and time. Young vertebrates have to learn these things. If they try to reproduce without this knowledge (and therefore without the resources), they're likely to lose their offspring and/or their own lives in the process.
Animals that reproduce earlier in life (compared to others in their own species) have lowered lifetime reproductive success compared to those that delay reproduction until later. I can rummage through my bookshelf and dig up a few good studies on LRS vs age of first reproduction in birds if you're interested. | [
"Puberty occurs through a long process and begins with a surge in hormone production, which in turn causes a number of physical changes. It is the stage of life characterized by the appearance and development of secondary sex characteristics (for example, a deeper voice and larger adam's apple in boys, and developm... |
how come we can hold on to our bladders while asleep better than when we were kids? | Also, it’s a muscle. The older you get the more use it gets, making it stronger. Well.. ya know, until you get too old. But that’s a different topic. | [
"The urinary bladder is a hollow muscular organ in humans and some other animals that collects and stores urine from the kidneys before disposal by urination. In the human the bladder is a hollow muscular, and distensible (or elastic) organ, that sits on the pelvic floor. Urine enters the bladder via the ureters an... |
Who was the superior Commander, Grant or Lee? | As an aside, Lee absolutely supported slavery; a certain performed distaste for the institution was quite a la mode for Virginia planters, but it certainly didn't stop them from making money off the institution or fighting to defend it.
As to who was the better general, it's a complicated question. It's not like when you're testing the acidity of a substance, where you can just put a chemical strip in it and see what color it turns; we can analyze their tactical and operational performance, but there's no way to conduct controlled experiments or quantify results. As historians, we're limited to what happened, and we never got an even matchup between Grant and Lee.
That said, I think the Overland campaign was an extremely strong tactical showing from Lee, and that Grant made some highly questionable decisions during it.
For one, I am not convinced of the superiority of an overland approach compared to the Peninsular campaign. The Union had almost total control over the rivers and ocean, so it's basically an invulnerable supply line, and it heads straight into Richmond. Lee's army is dead in the water if Richmond falls; the next place the army could be supplied would be along the Roanoke river in North Carolina. Barreling straight for Lee's army shows rather simplistic thinking on Lincoln's part, and Grant should have argued more strongly for his planned raid/amphibious turning movement through North Carolina.
I think Grant did not manage his subordinate commanders as well as he could. Things quickly soured between him and Meade, especially since Grant undermined Meade's authority over Sheridan. Meade wanted to keep the cavalry with the army to screen his movements and Lee's while Sheridan wanted to go off on raids into the enemy rear area. To me, the experience of the Civil War shows the value of having the cavalry operate with the army; Lee had it with him and won Chancellorsville, and when he let Stuart ride off on his own, he lost Gettysburg. Hooker at Chancellorsville had his cavalry off on a raid, and lost, and Meade had it with him for Gettysburg, and won. Undermining a key subordinate's authority for operationally unsound reasons is a black mark next to a commander's name in my book.
Furthermore, when the campaign actually commenced, Grant took too long crossing The Wilderness, against the advice of the men planning the army's movements in detail. This allowed Lee to nullify the Union's artillery advantage with a close in knife fight. Lee set his corps commanders up for victory, but A.P. Hill fumbled his defense astride the Orange Plank Road, and Longstreet was badly wounded when the battle was at its height. He had 'rolled [Hancock's corps] up like a wet blanket', and was poised turn the U.S. flank and drive into their rear along the Brock Road, but the attack lost momentum with his wounding, and the battle ended as a tactical stalemate.
What strikes me most about the campaign as a whole was how many good commanders Lee lost. Jackson was killed last year, and Longstreet was wounded only a couple miles from the same spot. Jeb Stuart was killed, A.P. Hill had a habit of falling ill at inopportune moments like thee Battle of the North Anna, (prostatitis, result of a 'youthful indiscretion' at West Point), where Ewell suffered a mental breakdown at the same time Lee fell ill. The North Anna is a river with a notable bend in it; when Grant's army crossed, the bend divided it into three elements, which a bold commander could attack and defeat individually. He repeated from his cot that they needed to 'strike a blow', but there was no one to strike it. Not only was Lee commanding an army in desperate straights, but he also had to manage his corps commanders quite closely, and with Stuart's death, he had to command the cavalry in some detail as well. It's said that during the Overland Campaign, Lee never got more than two consecutive hours of sleep; under that kind of strain, and without your best lieutenants, it's hard to get the most out of an army.
Coming from the West, Grant seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the tactics that evolved in the east. In his experience, resorting to defensive works was a sign of an army's weakness or timidity; an entrenched army to him was already half beaten. Commanders in the east, however, used field fortifications as simple economy of force measures; this led to costly miscalculations like the assault at Cold Harbor, where the U.S. suffered thousands of casualties to no end. To me, this flaw was of grave importance; 1864 was an election year, and immense bloodshed without decisive results could seriously endanger Lincoln's prospects of reelection, and thus the whole war effort. In the end, this approach did not prove fatal to the political side of the war, but it can't be ignored when assessing the two.
This is not to say it was pure chance that decided the campaign; Lee made errors of judgement, and Grant had a great grasp of maneuver principles, which he had earlier demonstrated in the campaigns in the west. The Overland campaign tends to get portrayed as direct and purely attritional, but Grant consistently tried to outflank Lee. He did not get a crushing flank attack on the tactical level, but these turning movements were able to lever Lee out of strong defensive positions. Lee made a serious error when he misread the signs at the Battle of Spotsylvania; his army was deployed in a long salient called 'the Mule Shoe', and after driving back the U.S. attack on May 10, believed they were planning on withdrawing. He ordered Johnson's division to prepare to march for a possible counteroffensive, packing up their artillery; Lee did not know that rather than a withdraw, Grant was planning an all out attack on Johnson's division and Ewell's corps in the Mule Shoe. As a result, on May 12, Hancock's attack broke into Confederate defensive works, though desperate counterattacks prevented them from breaking through. A hefty share of total Confederate casualties from the battle were prisoners captured during Hancock's assault on May 12.
Furthermore, Grant did an excellent job setting up his crossing of the James river, which allowed him to threaten Richmond and Petersburg. He used the Army of the Shenandoah to threaten Lee's supply line and divide his army, and used Sheridan's cavalry to draw off Lee's. He then stealthily withdrew from his positions outside Cold Harbor, and had a really well engineered bridge constructed over the James. Beauregard's strong defensive performance in Petersburg prevented it from being captured in the first assault, but the U.S. settled into a siege, and maintained it despite all attempts by Lee to break the stalemate.
In the final analysis, Grant pursued an ultimately successful strategy, using maneuver, deception, and the operational art to contain Lee's army in Richmond and Petersburg, which led to its eventual collapse. This strategy ultimately depended on having superior numbers; he needed to have enough men to block a counteroffensive towards Richmond as well as enough for a credible turning movement. He needed to have substantial field armies in the Shenandoah, the Peninsula, and northern Virginia to successfully divide Lee's army. It's important to keep in mind, though, that generals employ strategies based on what they have; there's no reason to strategize like you have a smaller army when you don't.
Fate also played a role; the loss of so many experienced senior officers in the Army of Northern Virginia seriously hindered its performance. Ultimately, Lee proved unequal to the task, while Grant accomplished his. Lee's was the greater task, and he had less with which to accomplish his, while Grant's was more modest, and he had greater means at his disposal. In terms of who was the better general, that's an ultimately unknowable question.
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"Based on Lee's familiarity with the three major arms of a Civil War-era army, military historian Ezra J. Warner summarized him as an able and versatile corps commander, saying \"Despite his youth and comparative lack of experience, Lee's prior close acquaintanceship with all three branches of the service —artiller... |
why do most bugs have green or different colored blood than humans? | I believe the colour of an animal's blood is based upon which metal the animal uses to transport oxygen and other gases. Mammals have red blood because we use haemoglobin which contains iron. Much like rust (iron oxide) is red, the haemoglobin is red. Some crustaceans have blue blood because they use haemocyanin to transport oxygen, and this contains copper. Insects, however, do not use their blood to transport oxygen around, instead they have many hollow tubes that rely on the diffusion of oxygen for respiration. Instead, the green or yellow colour comes from the nutrients, amino acids and pigments that the bugs transport in their blood. | [
"Vertebrate blood is bright red when its hemoglobin is oxygenated and dark red when it is deoxygenated. Some animals, such as crustaceans and mollusks, use hemocyanin to carry oxygen, instead of hemoglobin. Insects and some mollusks use a fluid called hemolymph instead of blood, the difference being that hemolymph ... |
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