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why are some people against solar power? | What happens at night?
Solar cannot provide all of our energy needs right now because there are limited ways of storing energy. For example, when it's super sunny, you can generate 400% normal power, but if you don't use the extra 300%, it's wasted.
It's also currently not the cheapest form of power, but that is something that will change as technology improves.
We need a reliable way of providing base power - that is power that is reliable and works 24/7. That is either giant batteries to store power from day to night (technology doesn't exist yet) or an alternative source that can run 24/7 no matter the weather.
A lot of solar advocates are 100% renewable, nothing else - this is not possible. There has to be a MIX.
The most clean that we can do is nuclear to provide base load, and renewables to provide variable power. Nuclear is as green with respect to CO2, and gives off less radioactivity than coal power does. It just has an extremely bad public image.
TL;DR Solar power enthusiasts believe the world can be 100% renewable and dismiss EVERY other power generation mechanism. This is not currently feasible, and we need a MIX of technologies.
Edit: there is also 1 more point. The article probably made the claim that solar made some extremely high power output. However, this is misleading as that power output may have been the highest generated in 6 hours for an entire year - not very useful if you need to rely on that to power a country without blackouts! People don't like misleading articles, and the solar enthusiasts sometimes try and mislead to push their agenda. | [
"This is due to its own specific characteristics that enable individuals, even ordinary citizens to become energy producers and enjoy the economic returns that flow from it. All this even in the absence of a space just where achieve a common solar home.\n",
"According to a 2013 Gallup study “Americans want more E... |
(or 16): for and while loops in programming. | Here's a real-world analogy: suppose you have a box with 10 toys in it, and you want to take all of them out of the box.
One way to specify that is to say, "while the box has toys in it, remove a toy from the box". Once the box has no toys, the loop is done. That looks like this:
while (box has toys)
{
remove a toy from the box
}
The braces {} signify the contents of the loop: what is done each time. For loops are just while loops with some changed syntax, and are used mostly for counting. For example, you want to take 10 toys out of the box. You start the count of toys removed from the box at 0, and you keep taking toys out of the box until you have 10 of them. That looks like this:
for (toys removed = 0; toys removed < 10; toys removed ++)
{
remove toy from box
}
The ++ after toys removed signifies that it increases by 1 after each time through the loop. | [
"Contrary to other languages, in [[Smalltalk]] a for-loop is not a [[language construct]] but defined in the class Number as a method with two parameters, the end value and a [[Closure (computer science)|closure]], using self as start value.\n",
"In [[computer science]], a for-loop (or simply for loop) is a [[con... |
Would height ever be a factor of what you did in battle? | Yes!
Height was actually a major factor in armies in the late early modern and beginnings of the modern era. Notably, the Napoleonic Wars. I'll speak specifically about Napoleon's forces: There would be 6, give or take one, companies in a Napoleonic infantry battalion. These would be comprised of 1 of grenadiers, 4 of line infantry, and 1 of voltiguers. The give or take is in regards to the line infantry. Where you would end up in this setup would rely almost exclusively on your height.
**Voltiguers** are the tiniest fellows between 4'10 and 5'2 imperial inches (the one's we are familiar with). They are the skirmishers of the French army and would require to be fleet footed and quick thinkers. These are arguably some of the most intelligent men in the battalion as they are required to act in small teams and without much direction from an officer. That is because they were so spread out an officer, unlike with a compact line company, could not deliver orders to all his soldiers within one earshot. They have to be able to know when to seize initiative or when to retreat and where to take cover and when on their own.
**Fusiliers**, the line infantry, would be between 5'2 and 5'6. This was the average height at the time for most Europeans. You may think this is incredibly short, and it is for us, but back then they did have the same diet as us. Notably, a heavily meat based and vitamin packed one in their developmental years that would allow growth to our modern standards. These were by no means special men and just those packed into tight formations and kept under the watchful eye of their officers and NCO's. These are the guys you typically think of when you think of this era of warfare as standing in a line and firing off at each other.
**Grenadiers** were the "shock troops" of this period. They were required to be at least 5'6 and generally tended to be between 5'7 and 5'10. They would also wear tall [bear skin caps](_URL_0_), those things those often mocked British soldiers outside of Buckingham Palace wear. These would also add to the height and add an imposing nature -- giving them a "total" height of well over 6 foot. As you might imagine this would be intimidating to your average line infantry that they would be fighting against who would be on average around 5'4 or so. These men tended to favor the bayonet charge as you might imagine from their physical nature. These would be the first in and the last out in a sense, those meant to cause great damage early on and to salvage a battle late in if it's getting dicey.
A small note is that Grenadiers would in Napoleon's army require a certain number of campaigns participated in and years of service. Thus if you were 5'7 or whatever you were not immediately trained as a Grenadier, you would be put into a Fusilier company and required to serve there as likely the tallest guy until you are siphoned off into a Grenadier company. As such, newly formed Battalions had no Grenadier company as there were no experienced troops yet.
There would be similar systems, of course, for his adversaries across Europe with similar requirements.
------
Notes:
*"Swords Around a Throne: Napoleon's Grand Armee"* by John Elting is really the best source for this as it goes stupidly in depth for the specifics of each branch of Napoleon's army and the requirements, training, life, and tactics of them all. | [
"...Calpurnius Flamma, in the first Punic war, when we were young men, spoke to his three hundred volunteers whom he was leading to the capture of a height situated in the very centre of the enemy's position: 'Let us,' he exclaimed, 'die, my men, and by our death rescue our blockaded legions from their peril'...\n"... |
How many different languages were regionally accepted as "normal" in early America, and what caused English to become the dominant language? | Florida was not originally part of the United States. Neither was Louisiana. When they did become part of the US they were rapidly flooded with English speaking immigrants who outnumbered the speakers of Spanish or French.
There were never large areas where German was the majority language, so German speaking immigrants usually learned English (or the second generation did) (Not always. The 'Pennsylvania Dutch' (or some of them) still speak a German dialect as a native tongue).
Native American languages, of course, were common. Few are still spoken in the original 13 states (though more in other places in the US).
Dutch was originally spoken in New York and New Jersey (when they were both part of New Netherlands), but after the English captured them, English speaking immigrants soon outnumbered the Dutch speakers. This was well before the Revolution.
Swedish was spoken in parts of Delaware, when it was a Swedish colony, but even before it was taken by the Dutch (and then the English) there had probably become more English speakers than Swedish speakers there.
The main immigrants in the early history of what became the 13 original states were overwhelmingly English speaking. Their increasing numbers of descendants were English speaking. Those who spoke other languages found that their kids soon learned to speak English. | [
"Although English has been the majority language in the United States since independence in 1776, other languages were spoken first in large areas of the country. In addition to hundreds of aboriginal languages, French was once the primary language in Louisiana, Missouri, and areas along the border with Quebec, but... |
Was Carthage actually completely destroyed? | Rome defeated Carthage for the final time in 146 BCE. The tales of salting the fields are nonsense, and no ancient source supports this.
The Romans did, however, unleash their fury on the city and made a pretty big mess of the place. Polybius tells us that Scipio thought of the destruction of Troy as he watched Carthage burn (Polyb. 38.22).
The urban center of northern Tunisia became the nearby port city of Utica. The site of Carthage continued to be sporadically occupied in the years following 146, by refugees or looters or whatnot, but was no longer an important urban center. In 122 BCE, the Roman statesman Gaius Gracchus attempted to found a citizen colony atop the site of Carthage called *Colonia Iunonia,* but this effort was aborted by the Senate for political reasons. Seven decades later, Julius Caesar founded a veteran colony on the site (technically it was after his death, and the major work happened during the reign of Octavian).
This new city was *Colonia Concordia Iulia Karthago.* The ruins were cleared and the Romans undertook major building projects there right from the beginning. Old Carthage had a hill, called the Byrsa, upon which her most important temples sat. The Romans leveled the top of the hill when they founded the new colony, and 100,000 cubic meters of debris and dirt was pushed onto the flanks, creating a flat plateau on top. There a new forum and Roman temple complex was constructed. The flanks of the newly-shaped hill were held in place by massive Roman retaining walls. There has been some excavation in the spaces between these buried sections which has revealed "Hannibal's Quarter," a section of the Punic city's remains. I can hunt down some references for that, if people are interested (a lot of it is German language). We know virtually nothing about the Roman structures on top of the hill because there is no opportunity for excavation due to modern buildings.
A hundred years later, the new Carthage had become one of the largest and most important cities in the Mediterranean. Its port facilities were repaired and expanded, it had a circus and amphitheater, and opulent bath complexes. It remained an important city until late antiquity and the coming of the Islamic peoples, who founded Tunis nearby. Slowly Carthage was abandoned and forgotten. There has been a great deal of excavation in the modern period, usefully summarized by Serge Lancel in his book "Carthage" (helpfully translated to English!).
| [
"BULLET::::- Carthage – Initially a Phoenician city, destroyed and then rebuilt by Rome. Later served as the capital of the Vandal Kingdom of North Africa, before being destroyed by the Arabs after its capture in 697 CE. Now a UNESCO World Heritage site.\n",
"The ancient city was destroyed by the Roman Republic i... |
why do we need even isp's at this point? why not make everything peer to peer? | Well, the obvious question is, whose line do you use to connect yourself to someone on the other side of the atlantic ocean? Laying a cable across the pond costs about $200,000,000, so even if you and your friends all agree to pay for your share on the cable, you probably won't have enough friends to make this effort worthwhile. So you gotta find someone that has laid this cable, and is willing to share it. Next up, do you pay for them, or did they do this cable laying thing as a charity? You'd have to negotiate with them about that.
Even if we're just talking about connecting cities, it's still gonna be massive undertaking for someone. How do you organize this thing? You probably want to do some sort of sharing agreement where if someone else uses your cable, you can use their cable in return, and if you're sending traffic through someone a lot, then you should probably pay for them, right? Since otherwise they could just block you from sharing their internet.
ISPs do all this sorta thing for you, lay cables, negotiate with all the different companies so they get sweet deals on how you can borrow cables others have laid on ground, and all you need to do is pay your monthly fee to use all of the Internet. | [
"Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes.\n",
"Peer-to-peer (P2P) is not restricted to tech... |
How does Shazam work? | I actually worked with Shazam for a while when my employer at the time was partnering with them. They generate a "fingerprint" of the audio and then I assume they segment that in a way that you can then search on parts of songs.
It's probably similar to this project _URL_1_
More descriptive blog post: _URL_0_ | [
"Shazam! is a half-hour live-action television program that was produced by Filmation (the studio's first such program), based on the superhero Captain Marvel, also known as Shazam, of Fawcett Comics' comic book series Whiz Comics (now owned by DC Comics). The program starred Michael Gray as Billy Batson, a teenage... |
which's the most efficient metal for an ancient civilization to use for tools and weapons, copper or bronze? | Bronze is more durable, but it is harder to make. Bronze requires Tin to be added to molten copper and mixed into an alloy. This requires better refining techniques, as well as a source of both copper and tin. So this all matters on what you consider more efficient to be. Copper is more "efficient" to make, but bronze is more "efficient" to maintain. | [
"After the Bronze Age, the history of metallurgy was marked by armies seeking better weaponry. Countries in Eurasia prospered when they made the superior alloys, which, in turn, made better armor and better weapons. Significant progress in metallurgy and alchemy was made in ancient India.\n",
"An ancient civiliza... |
What has DNA testing taught us about the process and timeline of how the tiny islands of Pacific were populated? | You might also ask at r/AskAnthropology/, especially if you are particularly interested in the scientific evidence. | [
"There is evidence for a dual genetic origin of Pacific Islanders in Asia and Melanesia, which results from an analysis of Y chromosome (NRY) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) markers); This DNA evidence is supported by linguistic analysis. and archaeological evidence. There is also evidence that Fiji playing a pivotal... |
why does the smoke in a bong only enter the smoker's lungs once the carb is unblocked? | The bowl (and the contents) reduce smoke/airflow into the bong when the carb is blocked. When you open the carb you open up the airflow and the fresh air rushes in and pushes the remaining smoke into your lungs. | [
"Carbon monoxide (CO) in hookah smoke binds to hemoglobin in the blood to form carboxyhemoglobin, which reduces the amount of oxygen that can be transported to organs including the brain. There are several case reports in the medical literature of hookah smokers needing treatment in hospital emergency rooms for sym... |
why should france close a number of nuclear reactor ? aren't they "green" compared to other plants ? | Nuclear power is much cleaner than, say coal. But it's not without its own carbon emissions.
The main reason countries are closing nuclear power plants is the 'scary' radiation and melt down fears. The publics poor understanding of nuclear power leads to fear and the government wants to please people by looking like they listen and close the plants. IMO it's a stupid idea because the green alternatives are not fully in place so they fall back on to fossil fuels again. Nuclear power is a good stop gap to a 100% renewable energy. | [
"Following the 2011 Fukushima I nuclear accidents, the head of France's nuclear safety agency has said that France needs to upgrade the protection of vital functions in all its nuclear reactors to avoid a disaster in the event of a natural calamity, adding there was no need to close any plants. \"There is a need to... |
how my 8gb ram can run files and games as large as 50gb? | Not all of the program is loaded into RAM at once. Only portions are loaded as needed from the disk. It is also possible to define portions of the disk as as being "virtual memory" where it is treated as if it was real RAM but is actually on the much slower disk drive. | [
"This computer has two DDR2 SODIMM slots and can be upgraded to 6GB of RAM, with a set of 2GB and 4GB modules. Both 667Mhz and 800Mhz modules are supported (PC2-5300 or PC2-6400). There's no reliable reference online of anyone properly testing a set of two 4GB modules, so it is unsure whether 8GB total RAM is possi... |
why do we tear up when we yawn | Not 100% sure if this is the correct answer, but the act of yawning presses against the glands which produce tears. These glands are like a sac, so pressing against these sacs make the tear flow regardless of if you need it or not | [
"Tearing (), lacrimation or lachrymation () is the secretion of tears, a body fluid which cleans and lubricates the eyes in response to irritation. Humans may display visible tears by crying when associated with strong internal emotions. These emotions can include sorrow, elation, love, awe, and pleasure. Laughing ... |
why do certain races of people tend to do similar lines of work? | The main thing here is that you get immigrants who start work in a certain field, and then they help their fellow immigrants get job in that field as well. You've just arrived to the US? Your friend works at a Nail Salon and she's willing to teach you the business and help you get one of your own.
It's mainly people helping friends and family out by giving them jobs. | [
"Race not only plays an important role in the way that employees act with each other, but also how employees act toward customers based on what race they are associated with. People expect others to behave in a certain manner due to what race they identify or associate with. Race influences and changes the way we s... |
the difference between lucifer, the devil, satan, mephistopheles, and beelzebub | Satan = the Devil. The Adversary -- the one who opposes God.
Mephistopheles is a familiar spirit sent by the Devil to serve the magician Faust to corrupt him, according to folklore that was used as the basis of a play by Marlowe and a play by Goethe.
Beelzebub is a corruption of the name of an ancient god of the Middle East, applied to one of the ruling demons of hell, according to Christian folklore. Beelzebub signifies "Lord of the Flies" but the original name of the god, Beelzeboul, signified "Lord of the Earth."
Lucifer is the name of the Morning Star, Venus when it is seen in the East. It is sometimes applied to the leader of the rebel angels who rose up against God and were cast down from heaven.
Christian folklore says that Lucifer was Satan before he was cast down into the Abyss. He was a beautiful angel while in heaven, but became a horrible demon after his Fall. | [
"Later, for unknown reasons, Christian demonologists appeared to designate \"Satan\", \"Lucifer\", and \"Beelzebub\" as different entities, each with a different rank in the demonic hierarchy. One hypothesis is that this might have been an attempt to establish a demonic trinity with the same person, akin to the Chr... |
how are the people that run churches/religions living such luxurious lifestyles? literally living in palaces. apart from collection plates, where is the money coming from? | I've been a pastor for 16 years. I have an undergrad degree in social work and purposefully worked in an area that served poorer communities for 8 of those years where I made less than $25k per year plus a small parsonage. The vast majority of people who work as ministers don't make much money at all and many denominations require a graduate degree. Now days I serve a church in a much wealthier area and make a middle class wage but our church still spends about 25% of our gross income on helping the poor and homeless. Most pastors work 60+ hours a week and don't make much money. This is pretty typical in my experience for most ministers and churches. Just like teachers or social workers we don't go into this work for money. I've do it because we love it.
Those ministers who you see on tv who have jets and make millions of dollars are probably less than 1%. I think they're scoundrels who manipulate people with fear and promises of future wealth if they just give in faith. They use all kinds of schemes - selling "blessed" handkerchiefs, tickets to healing rallies etc. It's a bunch of nonsense. | [
"Around the lifetime of Skjalm Hvide, it was common practice for the wealthy and powerful to found religious houses, most typically for the following reasons: Expiation of a sinful life; to gain a stage to arrange commemorative and religious masses and events; to have a venue to provide services for the poor; or ju... |
Were there ever any efforts to issue patents of nobility in the English-founded American colonies? | I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'American'. With regards to the colonies that later formed the US, then the answer is no. If you include the colonies that later became Canada, then from 1624 to 1707, baronetcies were sold in the newly created Baronetage of Nova Scotia in order to fund the plantation of that province. Some of these baronetcies are still extant to this day, although the baronetage itself was absorbed by the Baronetage of Great Britain after the Act of Union in 1707, which is why from that point onward, no new baronets of Nova Scotia were created.
ETA: Found the old source that gives a brief history of said baronetage. Ephraim Lockhart, *Statement with Reference to the Knights Baronets of Nova Scotia: Their Creations, Privileges, and Territorial Rights of Property in that Colony, & c., with an Appendix* (Edinburgh, 1831), p. 2. For a list of said baronets, it's worth consulting any of the old peerages and baronetages like Burke's or Debrett's. | [
"The English legal system became the foundation for patent law in countries with a common law heritage, including the United States, New Zealand and Australia. In the Thirteen Colonies, inventors could obtain patents through petition to a given colony's legislature. In 1641, Samuel Winslow was granted the first pat... |
how does reddit work with different languages? | While reddit is predominantly written in English, the are subreddits where you will find users communicating in other languages. I was just posting in /r/Italy with a tourist question. The are also subs dedicated to learning new languages, namely /r/languagelearning. Go ahead and search for a foreign country's sub and see how the discourse looks. | [
"BULLET::::- A \"Translator\" desklet, which uses an online language translator to translate text from one language to another, and is similar to its Mac OS X's Dashboard's counterpart, but can have its appearance changed through skins. Among the languages supported are the more commonly spoken languages in Europe ... |
is it really possible to break a glass with a high pitched note? if so, how? | Yes, it's possible, but wow that's a really tough one to explain at a five-year old level. The adult answer is [mechanical resonance](_URL_0_). But the obvious question from there is "how does mechanical resonance work?" I'll give it a shot:
Suppose you're a decent tennis player bouncing a tennis ball against a wall with your racket. The first time you hit the ball it flies to the wall normally, bounces off and comes back whereupon you hit it again- but it still has a lot of energy from your first hit, which you add to with your second hit. Now the ball is moving about 150% faster than your first hit. You hit it again, adding even more energy to the ball. Now it's really screaming along. If you're close enough to the wall and have superhuman reflexes then theoretically you can eventually get the ball moving fast enough to destroy either it or the racket.
The high pitched sound and the wine glass is a similar situation. When the sound first starts it excites the molecules of the glass into an elastic deformation, which works its way through and then "rebounds" back towards its rest shape. But, if the sound is the right frequency then it will cause additional excitation _just as that elastic rebounding is occurring_ thus adding to the amplitude of the overall mechanical excitation. This amplitude builds and builds until the glass shatters.
Nikola Tesla thought this could be used to make a machine capable of inducing earthquakes and leveling cities but Mythbusters episode 60 disagreed. | [
"Adam and Jamie investigate whether a human voice could shatter glass, as perpetuated in stories of opera singers and demonstrated by Ella Fitzgerald in a commercial for Memorex and Jim Gillette in the music video for Nitro's Freight Train.\n",
"This is a classic demonstration of resonance. A glass has a natural ... |
I often hear lay people saying Greeks and Romans did not really believe in Greek and Roman gods. It is obviously not true, but when did this attitude start appearing? Is it modern? Could it trace all the way from the Renaissance? | Well, it actually goes back to the Greeks. A number of Greek philosophers of the fourth century express skepticism about the traditional religion. Xenophanes famously mocked the anthropomorphic depictions of the gods, saying that if horses and cattle and lions could paint, they would paint their gods as horses and cattle and lions and pointing out that other peoples depict their gods so that they look like themselves.
Xenophanes is only a small part of a greater intellectual trend, one that can be seen in the negative depictions of the gods in (particularly Euripidean) tragedy, the mockery of gods in Aristophanic comedy, or the outright criticism of myth and beliefs in Plato.
Of course, this was - to some degree, at least - an intellectual pretension and probably not a genuine reflection of the life of the "average" person. Also, the survival of this type of argument was propagated in late antiquity by the early church fathers. In fact, it is probably a significant reason why some pagan texts escaped zealous early Christians, because there was already a precedent for reading them as "just stories" rather than as religion. | [
"Greek religion and philosophy have experienced a number of revivals, firstly in the arts, humanities and spirituality of Renaissance Neoplatonism, which was certainly believed by many to have effects in the real world. During the period of time (14th - 17th centuries) when the literature and philosophy of the anci... |
how is it that you can be looking for something (say, a pair of keys) that's in your peripheral vision, yet your brain still literally doesn't register it into view? | There's a part of our brain devoted to visual processing. It goes through and identifies the stuff in our vision, as well as flagging things that it thinks are important and brought to the attention of our conscious mind. If it does not flag your keys, then you don't notice them. | [
"We get our sense of direction when we match up spatial maps we have stored in the hippocampus, to the pattern of firing neurons when we are trying to find our way back or trying to find our car in the parking lot.\n",
"Ishigaki states that there are two types of eyesight, the typical check at the doctor's office... |
what is this purple/blue/whatever noise i sometimes see all around my vision, especially after staring at something. | It is usually the afterimage of whatever bright thing you were staring at. The color in your vision is the complementary color of the thing you looked at (e.g red and green or blue and orange or purple and yellow). You can have a look at the relations between colors [here](_URL_0_).
If your close your eyes and press them a little it is not really the same, here your brain interprets the unknown signals as random colors and shapes. | [
"For a person who tries to actively observe this closed-eye perception on a regular basis, there comes a point where if they look at a flat-shaded object with their eyes wide open, and try to actively look for this visual noise, they will become aware of it and see the random pointillistic disorganized motion as if... |
What is the most recent case of natural selection introducing a new widespread trait in any organism? | There's also the [famous example](_URL_0_) of a moth in the U.K. with light- and dark-colored phases. The dark phase became more common in sooty industrial areas because it was better camouflage, while the original light-colored phase remained common in cleaner more rural areas. | [
"Contemporary biologists accept that mutation and selection both play roles in evolution; the mainstream view is that while mutation supplies material for selection in the form of variation, all non-random outcomes are caused by natural selection. Masatoshi Nei argues instead that the production of more efficient g... |
How did the "right side up" view of the Earth, aka North = up, become the norm for all globes and maps? | This is a historical question, as Nowhere_Man_Forever points out. Generally, map makers oriented their maps towards what they thought was important. For example, some early maps were oriented east-west to aid navigation against the rising and setting sun. Later, North American explorers would make east-west oriented maps because those are the primary directions they traveled.
But, people since antiquity have thought that the Earth rotated and knew that pole stars (i.e. the North Star for us today) would maintain an apparent fixed position in the night sky. This imparted special navigational importance to the north-south axis.
Then, when the magnetic compass was invented that solidified the north-south axis as the primary axis for navigation. Since it makes a lot of technical sense to have all your maps use the same orientation, the north-south axis was the only orientation that made sense.
There's not a clear technical reason to use north=top instead of south=top. One theory is that at the time of the explorers there was no comparable pole star in the southern hemisphere like there is Polaris (which is exceptionally bright) in the northern hemisphere. However, that's a pretty weak theory.
It's probably just the case that the Europeans wanted to put Europe at the top of their maps, and their maps would end up having the largest sway over the future events to come. The other great powers in the world at the time didn't do as much exploration and weren't as imperial as the Europeans were, so their maps are the ones that stuck. | [
"The visible rotation of the night sky around the visible celestial pole provides a vivid metaphor of that direction corresponding to up. Thus the choice of the north as corresponding to up in the northern hemisphere, or of south in that role in the southern, is, prior to worldwide communication, anything but an ar... |
why does english have different suffixes for languages (-ese, -ish, -an)? | The "true" English demonym suffix is -ish, e.g. Spanish, Turkish, Welsh, Swedish.
However sometime in the last few centuries English speakers stopped applying that suffix, and instead started borrowing existing demonyms from other languages, mostly French. | [
"English derives from Old English (sometimes referred to as Anglo-Saxon), a West Germanic variety, although its current vocabulary includes words from many languages. The Old English roots may be seen in the similarity of numbers in English and German, particularly \"seven/sieben,\" \"eight/acht,\" \"nine/neun,\" a... |
when someone is a surrogate mother does any of their genetics or anything end up with the baby? does the baby technically have 3 birth parents then? | No. The surrogate only provides the environment for the foetus to develop. The fertilisation of the egg with the sperm ( which together carry all of the genetic makeup of a human ) is done outside her body. So, technically, the baby still has only two genetic parents. Semantically you could argue that since the baby came out of a second woman, she could be considered another parent, but that's upto the person. | [
"Pregnancy is typically initiated by artificial insemination in the case of sperm donation and by embryo transfer after in vitro fertilisation (IVF) in the case of egg donation, embryo donation, and surrogacy. Thus a child can have a genetic and social (non-genetic, non-biological) father, and a genetic, gestationa... |
According to Quantum Theory, is it true that if I toss a tennis ball enough times at my wall, eventually it will go right through? | Though the concept is right, the application to the macroscopic world becomes a bit more complicated. In essence, you can think of the world as behaving quantum-mechanically--it's determined by probability, it has uncertainty, etc. However, when you start to average quantum objects, the result is that you get expectation values--(think of them as "what would *most likely* happen.") What we see around us are averages of trillions of trillions of particles, each of which is acting quantum-mechanically.
Though there is a probability of the tennis ball passing through the wall (if every nucleus in it simultaneously tunneled--and that could be calculated), it turns out that, even if you bounced your tennis ball against the wall from the start of the big bang to the heat death of the universe, it's still more likely that it will never go through the wall (quantum-mechanically) than that it will. In common parlance, we tend to call that "impossible." | [
"\"(vii)\" Some conventions and general remarks about the play:—A player can never win a point by “sneaking”, i.e. by hitting the ball very low on the wall or very gently on purpose: he should always try to hit the ball hard and as high on the wall as possible; if he cannot hit the ball hard owing to the risk of it... |
why is a keyboard/mouse preferred over a controller in gaming? | You have access to smaller iterations of motion, thus allowing you to have much finer precision when moving your crosshairs. Think about it this way, how much motion does it require to move the crosshairs one screen inch with your controller vs how much with a mouse? Because you need to move the mouse farther than you need to move your thumb, there are that many more spots to stop moving the mouse between point a and point b. the counter argument to this has typically been that you have sort a motion speed control with the thumbstick but this is flawed in that it doesn't have that quick 'stop on a dime' ability that the mouse has allowing precision and less lagg between motion and aim adjustment.
Hope this was helpful. As a last note, on a computer first person games should always be played with a mouse, but pretty much all third person games play more relaxed with a controller. Exceptions to that are games that require you to over the shoulder aim. Head shots are just easier with a mouse. | [
"The mouse, over the years, has had better adaptation and incorporation into gaming than the keyboard has. This could easily be attributed to the fact that the mouse is a much more simplified device. The mouse has had many advances to make it a much more adapted device for gaming. It has been upgraded from a rollin... |
why it sometimes takes 60+ days to receive a postal shipping? | The 1-3 week shipping you are used to is by plane and it’s cheaper to ship via sea than air.
A cargo ship from China to London takes 6 weeks of sailing time, not to mention port stops along the way to load/unload/exchange containers. Some ships might wait in port to collect more cargo and maximise load, which can add more time. | [
"The sender should also include their return address. In the United Kingdom, the Royal Mail will hold mail posted from within the UK for two weeks, whereas mail posted from abroad is normally held for one month. If the recipient is at sea however, it will be held for two months. Where mail is not collected within t... |
Why does the Earth not spiral to the Sun if it emits gravitational waves during its revolution? | Because the power output from gravitational waves is ***incredibly*** tiny for systems other than say rapidly spinning neutron stars. The [power](_URL_0_) radiated has a factor of G^4 / c^5 out front which is incredibly tiny and it drops off in output by 1/r^5 with distance. | [
"If the Earth was tidally locked to the Sun, solar heating would cause winds across the mid-latitudes to blow in a poleward direction, away from the subtropical ridge. However, the Coriolis effect caused by the rotation of Earth causes winds to steer to the right of what would otherwise be expected across the North... |
Were there any grand-scale conspiracies with a direct effect on history? | surely the most well known 'conspiracy' with a direct effect on history was the assassination of Julius Caesar. | [
"Conspiracy theorists, including writer John Robinson, have attempted to explain alleged flaws in mainstream historical accounts of the events of 1381, such as the speed with which the rebellion was coordinated. Theories include that the revolt was led by a secret, occult organisation called \"the Great Society\", ... |
What are the fundamental differences between the bonds in a coordination complex and covalent bonds? | They're all just bonds. Coordination bonds are about one half to one third as strong as your typical carbon-carbon single bond. They tend to be more polar than typical covalent bonds, but it isn't really appropriate to call them ionic bonds, either. This is especially the case for more electronegative late metals like cobalt, nickel, and copper.
| [
"The symmetric combination (called a bonding orbital) is lower in energy than the basis orbitals, and the antisymmetric combination (called an antibonding orbital) is higher. Because the H molecule has two electrons, they can both go in the bonding orbital, making the system lower in energy (hence more stable) than... |
How does AC travel further than DC? | Tesla did not discover or invent AC at all. That done well before he was even born, and he learned about AC studying electrical engineering at university. Nor did he build the first full AC generator or [transformer](_URL_0_), motor (Ferraris) or distribution network. (Dolivo-Dobrovolsky)
AC does not "travel further" than DC. On the contrary the skin effect you're referring means a DC cable can carry a larger current than AC with the same heating losses. DC also doesn't suffer from losses due to capacitance and dielectric like AC does.
As DaffGrind says : The reason AC is used and is more practical is that you can easily transform it up to high voltages for transmission and back down for use. The investment cost and losses in conversion, mean it's not usually worth transmitting power as DC. However, many [HVDC transmission systems](_URL_1_) exist, and are used where AC costs/losses are greater, for instance undersea cables (higher dielectric losses) and connecting unsynchronized grids,.
| [
"Direct current (DC) is constant current that flows in one direction. Alternating current (AC) is a current that switches direction according to a sinusoidal function, typically. Power grids use alternating current, and so residences and appliances are generally powered by AC.\n",
"DC was used on earlier systems.... |
Are there any organisms that don’t need carbon dioxide or oxygen to survive? | I had a small debate on another thread about this but with H2O. Apparently all known organisms use water even when life in supercritical fluids is considered, it’s part of their cell structure. If you count H20 as oxygen, then the answer is no. If you don’t, then yes there are organisms that don’t need 02 or CO2 to survive, they are mostly microbial. | [
"Since Ward & Brownlee's assertion that \"there is irrefutable evidence that oxygen is a necessary ingredient for animal life\", anaerobic metazoa have been found that indeed do metabolise without oxygen. Spinoloricus nov. sp., for example, a species discovered in the hypersaline anoxic L'Atalante basin at the bott... |
why is a woman often her horniest right before she menstruates? | If I'm not mistaken that's when she is most fertile, so it's her bodies way of saying "NOWS THE TIME GO GO GO". Given that during menstruation the lining that would have accepted the fertilized egg is lost, I'm pretty sure that's the reason. | [
"Also, during the week following ovulation, progesterone levels increase, resulting in a woman experiencing difficulty achieving orgasm. Although the last days of the menstrual cycle are marked by a constant testosterone level, women's libido may get a boost as a result of the thickening of the uterine lining which... |
i've always hear of china reverse-engineering russian or american military technology, how exactly is this done with no schematics and reference points? | In a nutshell, you just take something apart and figure out how it works.
It can be challenging, yes, but it's usually a lot easier than designing something from scratch if you can just copy a successful model.
| [
"BULLET::::- China has reversed engineered many examples of Western and Russian hardware, from fighter aircraft to missiles and HMMWV cars, such as the MiG-15 (which became the J-7) and the Su-33 (which became the J-15).. More recent analyses of China's military growth have pointed to the inherent limitations of re... |
Do communication waves interfere with each other? | Yes, signals interfere with each other. [Any receiver generally sees a superposition of all transmitted signals.](_URL_2_) That is, if transmitter 1 sends X(t), and transmitter 2 sends Y(t) then the received signal is Z(t) = *a* X(t) + *b* Y(t) + N(t), where *a* and *b* are constants and N(t) is a random noise term.
While signals do interfere, this does not mean that they can not be decoded. There are a few different factors in play, some more art than science. In general, we use [multiplexing](_URL_3_) to allow multiple devices to transmit simultaneously. The two most basic and common (and suboptimal) methods of multiplexing are [time division multiplexing (TDM or TDMA)](_URL_4_) and [frequency division multiplexing (FDM or FDMA)](_URL_1_). TDMA divides up time into discrete increments, and assigns each user a specific set of times corresponding to their signals. In other words, Alice sends to Bob during times 0 to 1 and 3 to 4, Charlie sends to Bob during 1 to 2, and Bob sends to Daniel during 2 to 3. FDMA on the other hand gives each user a specific portion of the frequency spectrum. One common example of this is radio, where each radio station is given a specific center frequency and bandwidth they use for transmission. Both of these methods it is pretty straightforward that each signal is given some defined ordering by which a receiver can eliminate all other interfering signals.
The next method is code division multiplexing, and in contrast to the prior two is in fact optimal. Code division allows everyone to transmit simultaneously on the different frequencies and time slots, but uses clever coding techniques to recover the signal. The most common place deployment of CDMA is cell phones, which use CDMA codes to transmit to the cell tower. How and why CDMA works is a little more complicated than FDMA and TDMA though. I am going to focus on the many to one case (actually 2 to 1, but it scales), since it is the only case which we design codes for. In fact, the cases of one to many, and many one to ones are open problems and until solved we will probably just continue to use the two suboptimal methods (TDMA and FDMA) described earlier.
CDMA works by ensuring that nearly all possible pairing of transmitted messages are different enough so that both can be decoded. Consider this, lets say Alice and Bob send a message to Charlie. Alice adds a large amount of error correction to her signal. Charlie begins by first decoding Alice's signal by treating Bob's signal as noise. Having obtained Alice's signal, Charlie then "subtracts" it from his received signal, and begins the process of decoding Bob's signal. The real magic here is knowing the exact amount of error correction that is needed for the codes to work.
Using the above method, the maximum possible combined rate for a band limited added white gaussian noise channel is
B log( 1 + (P+Q)/N)
where B is the bandwidth, P and Q are the transmitter powers and N the noise power. This may look familiar, as it is very similar to that of the [Shannon Hartley theorem](_URL_6_), which is a theorem that applies to band-limited additive white gaussian noise channels with one transmitter and one receiver. More specifically, writing transmitter 1's rate as R1 and transmitter 2's rate as R2, any rate pair (R1, R2) such that
R1 < B log (1+P/N)
R2 < B log (1+Q/N)
R1 + R2 < B log (1 + (P+Q)/N),
can be achieved. In contrast, FDMA can at most achieve
R1 < W log ( 1 + P/(NW) )
R2 < (B-W) log ( 1 + Q/(N(B-W))),
which only achieves the capacity outer bound at a single point. TDMA is just hopeless.
Obviously I skipped calculations on these values, but [here you can find a good overview of multiple access (technical term for many to one) channels (PDF).](_URL_7_) Similarly for the unsolved problems mentioned earlier, [the broadcast channel (one to many) (PDF)](_URL_0_) and [the interference channel (many one to ones)(PDF)](_URL_5_). | [
"The phenomenon of interference between waves is based on this idea. When two or more waves traverse the same space, the net amplitude at each point is the sum of the amplitudes of the individual waves. In some cases, such as in noise-cancelling headphones, the summed variation has a smaller amplitude than the comp... |
Why are there no meat pies in American cuisine? The UK still has meat pies as a regular staple but despite being former British colonies with access to lots of meat, the meat pie doesn't feature much in American cooking at all. | This has been asked here before a few times. You might find these older answers interesting while you wait for a new one:
_URL_0_
_URL_1_ | [
"Australian meat pies were introduced into the United States in 1994 by Mark Allen, of Boort, Victoria, when he and his wife, Wendy, began operation of Pacific Products, Inc. in Marietta, Georgia. Pacific Products was a wholesale only business, selling their pies to chain retailers throughout the United States. Alt... |
Samurai RPG trope? | The Final Fantasy wiki says:
"Gil Toss references a popular series of Japanese novels from the 1930s about a policeman in the Edo period named Zenigata Heiji, who captured criminals by throwing coins at them."
Wikipedia has more information on this policeman character, but doesn't explain why he threw coins as a weapon or why this feature became part of the Samurai job in FF5. | [
"Samurai Shodown (known as Samurai Spirits in Japan) is a 2019 fighting video game developed and published by SNK for Arcade, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, and Google Stadia as the 12th main entry in the \"Samurai Shodown\" series.\n",
"Samurai Shodown IV: Amakusa's Revenge, also kn... |
why are asian language scripts much more complex than european scripts? | different culture, different way of doing things. All cultures have their quirks. English for example is an odd language in that it's grammar rules are complex and have a lot of exceptions.
East Asian languages (Japanese, Vietmanese, Chinese, etc) all have roots in the Chinese script (Except Korea, they're weird). This stems from China at some point owning pretty much everything around them at various points in history. They were also the cultural dominator in the region for a very long time - Think ancient times US level of cultural dominance. Written Chinese was the universal language, the English of today, back then. Everyone knew how to read and write it, even if when they spoke different languages.
That said, written Chinese is pictographic. It's just how the cultures chose to write and that evolved. To those unfamiliar with it it's incredibly complex and makes no sense. To those that are familiar with it there's a system behind it. It's not as simple as an alphabet, but it has advantages.
Since they are pictures, the characters represent what they actually are. For example, the character for person looks like a torso and 2 legs. Fire and water are stylized fire and water. The character for door looks like a door. One of the symbols used in the characters for student looks like a person wearing a hat.
Built on this, more complex characters are usually made up of other characters. A word describing a type of person may contain a modified person character in it. Basically, the parts of the character conveys meaning about what the character is. As a result, you can often figure out what a character is based off of the parts of the character and the context of the sentence around it. There are a number of these common elements and they are used in Chinese dictionaries to look up the meaning of characters. | [
"There are numerous languages in South Asia. The spoken languages of the region are largely based on geography and shared across religious boundaries, but the written script is sharply divided by religious boundaries. In particular, Muslims of South Asia such as in Afghanistan and Pakistan use the Arabic alphabet a... |
nothing is ever truly gone on the internet. why is that? | Contrary to that saying, lots and lots "goes" from the internet all of the time, it's actually a huge problem for people who care about preserving information and history. Fortunately there are more and more archival sites, but they still struggle for funding and manpower. The saying though just reflects that you should never assume (or expect) that something you say or do online will be forgotten or lost. Odds are it will be preserved in some form, but this isn't actually a guarantee. | [
"The Internet Ruined My Life is an American reality television series that was made by Atomic Entertainment and Left/Right Productions for the Syfy Network in the United States that \"exposes the unexpected perils of living in a social media obsessed world.\"\n",
"Kevin Ashton, digital innovation expert who is cr... |
How do photons, frequencies, and quanta work? | > How is light able to knock off electrons from metals without changing the metal in the photoelectric effect?
Because the metal has **a lot** of electrons.
> What does the equation E=hv by Planck mean and how was it found?
It's the relationship between the energy and frequency of a photon.
> Where does Planck's constant come from?
It's a constant of proportionality. Energy and frequency are linearly related for a photon, but they have different units. So you need some multiplicative factor to make the units match.
> How can the amount of energy of a particular photon depend on the frequency of the radiation if they carry only one quantum of energy?
The energy of a photon is not quantized, it can have any frequency and therefore any energy. What is quantized is the *amount* of photons. You can only have an integer number of photons rather than an arbitrary "amount" of light. | [
"In quantum theory, photons describe quantized electromagnetic radiation. Specifically, a photon is an elementary excitation of a normal mode of the electromagnetic field. Thus a single-photon state is the quantum state of a radiation mode that contains a single excitation.\n",
"Photon is the quanta of electromag... |
Why is there no successful socialist societies? If there is some why haven't I heard of them? | Woah woah woah, loaded question alert. "Socialism" is a highly subjective word, with dozens of conflicting definitions. In fact, the definition of socialism has often been the subject of vicious arguments; in certain far-left circles, questions like 'was Stalin a socialist?' can lead to a debate that goes down in flames quicker than an Israel vs. Palestine discussion.
"Successful" is an even more subjective term. Successful at what?
In short, I don't think this is the kind of question /r/askhistorians can help you with. That being said, some examples you might want to look into are the Paris Commune (1871), the "Free Territory" in the Ukraine (1918-'21) and revolutionary Catalonia (1936-'37). All of those are frequently held up as evidence that 'see, it *is* possible to have a society based on workers' control and still maintain political freedom and a functioning economy' – though it's worth noting that all these experiments quickly collapsed because of outside pressure before they could prove or disprove much. | [
"One of the reasons for the unsuccessful construction of socialism in some countries is that they failed to build a social structure conforming to the fundamental requirements of the popular masses and build socialism suited to the demand of the theory of scientific socialism.\n",
"\"Socialist Appeal\" is in broa... |
that feeling you get when you're accelerating uphill and you suddenly go downhill. | Your body is still moving uphill, so there is a law between when the roller coaster (or whatever your riding) starts to drop, and for a split second you're still moving up and the coaster is going down so you separate, then gravity catches up and you keep on chugging.
It's the same thing that happens when you jump in an elevator right when it starts. | [
"G-forces (gravitational forces) create the so-called \"butterfly\" sensation felt as a car goes down a gradient. An acceleration of is the usual force of Earth’s gravitational pull exerted on a person while standing still. The measurement of a person's normal weight incorporates this gravitational acceleration. Wh... |
what would happen if you were being legitimately brutalised by police and fought back and won? | yould probably get shot by the rest of their gang members | [
"So there might only be a summary offence or no offence; you don’t have to tell them anything; you don’t have to wait for the police. But like arrest, it does have to be to prevent crime or escape. You don’t have to retreat (although that is a factor in assessing reasonableness), or wait for the first blow, but mus... |
Did Cyrus the Great outlaw slavery in his empire? Could he be considerd a humanitarian ruler? | Hello! Cyrus did not outlaw slavery throughout his realms; in fact, he (or at least his subordinates) did enslave some rebellious Lydians. This idea stems from a [false translation of the so-called "Cyrus Cylinder,"](_URL_0_) while the actual text reflects a work of propaganda as well. I hope you find this information helpful! :D | [
"Cyrus the Great, the founder of Persian Empire temporarily prohibited the systematic enslavement of conquered non-combatant population. Cyrus also freed slaves and allowed all deported peoples who were enslaved by preceding Assyrian and Babylonian kings, to return home. It is said that he freed up to 40,000 Jews a... |
How did the average American think of Alaska and Hawaii in the years prior to their statehood? | I can't speak for Alaska, but I do know a little about Hawaii.
* Hawaii was annexed in **1898** and became a state in 1959. There was no assurance that it would become a state, and this achievement was due to persistence on the part of Hawaiian politicians, e.g. every Hawaiian delegate to Congress since 1936 had introduced statehood resolutions, which gradually weakened any objections (see below). Undoubtedly, Hawaii's role in WWII also aided this cause.
* Arguments for Hawaiian statehood, presented by a Statehood Commission to Congress in the early 1950s, were as follows: Hawaii paid more taxes to the federal government than nine existing states, yet had no say in how the money was spent; the islands' population was approximately 500,000, which was larger than four states at the time, and all former territories at their time of statehood except Oklahoma; ninety per cent of Hawaiian residents were already US citizens; Hawaiians themselves were already in favour of statehood (see below). Other arguments in favour included its strategically advantageous location already exploited by the armed forces.
* Arguments against statehood were that Hawaii would challenge the "Western traditions" of the US mainland, e.g. Strom Thurmond stated that "the US is the maximum development of Western culture - at the opposite extreme is Eastern culture which is dominant in Hawaii [...] East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet [quoting Rudyard Kipling]"; the ethnically diverse yet generally integrated demographics of Hawaii would challenge the contemporary segregated status quo of the mainland; distrust at the number of Hawaiians of Japanese descent after WWII; and (politically) that Hawaii was progressive and liberal, and certain to elect Democratic representatives in a decade with a Republic President and Congress (although Eisenhower was in favour of Hawaiian statehood).
* Ironically, it was mostly Southern Democrats who opposed Hawaiian statehood at this point (as they had opposed the earlier annexation), whereas a revolution in the territory's internal politics in 1954 saw the island's Democrats swept to power in both the territorial legislatures after almost continuous Republican domination since annexation. In contrast to their Southern mainland counterparts, Hawaiian Democrats were liberal and progressive, with a base of working-class/labour union support of all ethnicities, and also featured an ethnically diverse mix amongst its own members (e.g. Daniel Inouye was a rising star at this time). Thus Hawaii's aspirations for statehood faced the dual challenge of potential opposition from both parties, but this was overcome.
* Polls on the US mainland showed 60% in favour of Hawaiian statehood in 1946, rising to 78% in 1954. The first Hawaiian poll on the issue in 1940 showed 75% in support of statehood, which rose to a ratio of 17:1 in favour when an election was held to formally ratify statehood. Opposition to statehood from within Hawaii came mostly from indigenous monarchists who believed that the original annexation was illegal.
* There was initially a rivalry between Hawaii and Alaska (both states that had no land border with the existing states, and had a sizeable non-white population) to achieve statehood first, but both sides realised that if one territory became a state, then the federal government would be placed under even greater pressure to admit the other, so they joined forces to share lobbying strategies.
All of this information is from Dr Phil Barnes, *A Concise History of the Hawaiian Islands*, Hilo: The Petroglyph Press (1999). | [
"Because Alaska was not granted statehood until 1959, Native American issues played out differently there. The discovery of oil in the Kenai Peninsula and Cook Inlet regions in 1957, and along the North Slope in 1968, brought the issue of native land ownership to the forefront of a conflict over state land selectio... |
Are there still undiscovered compounds in common foods? | There are many, many undiscovered compounds in food. When looking at food nutritionally, you're looking for basic components like proteins, fats, vitamins or sugars. Small molecules are somewhat more difficult to positively identify, and there are a myriad of them in food, so you really have to go looking for them.
Using one of your examples, [sulforaphane](_URL_0_) in broccoli was only discovered two decades ago and is still being actively studied. | [
"While many food contaminants have been known for decades, the formation and presence of certain chemicals in foods has been discovered relatively recently. These are the so-called emerging food contaminants like acrylamide, furan, benzene, perchlorate, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), 3-monochloropropane-1,3-diol (3... |
is the god for christianity, judaism, and islam the same "person." | Some people believe it is the same god, but I do not.
Many Christians believe in the Holy Trinity, which means Jesus is a part (or fully) god. The whole trinity thing is confusing, but just know that Jesus is intertwined with God in a lot of Christianity.
Jews and Muslims do not believe that Jesus is divine. In fact, Jews believe Jesus is a false prophet. If Christians are worshiping a god that contains Jesus, and Jews and Muslims are not, then it can't be the same god. | [
"Islam teaches that God is the same god worshipped by the members of other Abrahamic religions such as Christianity and Judaism (). This is not universally accepted by non-Muslims, as Islam denies the divinity of Jesus Christ as a son of God, Islam views that God does not have any offspring or descendants, he creat... |
does declaring war on a nation impact the debt either nation holds of the other? | The U.S. sells treasuries to whoever buys them. They honor those when they become mature. To do otherwise destroys the confidence in the U.S. government which is needed to sell more treasuries.
If the U.S. sold a lot of them to China and went to war with China, China does one of two things:
* Holds on to them until the war if over at which point everything operates as normal
* Sells them to a 3rd party which can redeem them
The treasuries themselves are not exclusive to Chinese ownership and can easily be traded around. The U.S. has no official record of who owns treasuries to tear them up and there is a vast secondary market for them.
China can't try and redeem its treasuries directly during a war. It has no legal representation in the U.S. It would have to involve a third party and yes if the U.S. felt that the 3rd party was just a front for the money going to China we might hold off payment until the end of the war. However by not paying those they still accrue interest and would be worth more at the end of the war. | [
"BULLET::::- Five countries (France, Poland, Belgium, Estonia and Hungary) defaulted on their war debt payments to the United States in response to the U.S. Congress' rejection of the debt reduction plan agreed to at the Lausanne Conference.\n",
"Lost wars significantly accelerate sovereign default. Nevertheless,... |
why do criminals flee to canada? | Probably more because they happen to be closer to the canadian border than to the mexican one. But it would be pretty dumb to run to canada because their law enforcement has a much higher standard than mexico's. You would get caught and deported within a few days. | [
"Canada is a safe haven for fugitives from Italy who have allies on the other side of the Atlantic. One of them, Antonio Commisso, was arrested on June 28, 2005 in Woodbridge, Ontario. According to the Siderno police force, \"the criminal minds of Siderno are in Canada\".\n",
"Special cases are when one flees a c... |
do ni-mh batteries need to be charged for 8 hours on the first charge? | Ni-MH batteries are actually shipped from the factory charged. The unique design of Ni-MH batteries causes them to lose their charge rapidly over time, even when not in use. So by the time you buy them and take them home, they could have anything from no charge to near fully charged depending on how long they've been sitting on the shelf.
To prevent confusion, they just write on the packaging that the batteries need to be charged before use. This is so that you can plan accordingly instead of expecting the batteries to just work right out of the package.
You'd be surprised at the number of people that expect things to just work out of the package and will take it back to the store immediately if it doesn't. That's why "charge before use" needs to be written on the package to reduce the number of people returning the item to the store.
So yes, you can use your Ni-MH batteries without charging them first, but don't expect them to have much power in them.
Again, this all only applies to Ni-MH.. Different battery chemistry must be treated accordingly. (ie: Li-Ion needs a full charge before first use for calibration purposes so it can properly report it's remaining charge to the device. It's a very different situation than Ni-MH since Ni-MH batteries don't report their charge to the device. So it's not really that important that Ni-MH batteries are charged before first use, other than the case of people bringing brand-new batteries back to the store because they don't "work".
Edit: As for it specifically saying to charge for 7 hours, I find that strange/deceptive. The batteries really shouldn't say that because 1: It's not always true and 2: There are rapid chargers for Ni-MH that can do a full charge in considerably less time. I think what you're looking at is a case of a battery manuf. going a bit too far in a futile attempt to reduce the number of people returning perfectly good batteries to the store. ... Or perhaps the battery manuf. expects their batteries to sit on the shelves for so long that they're almost always completely out of power by the time somebody buys them. Whatever the case, printing like that on a package just adds to the confusion.
| [
"Ni–Cd batteries can be charged at several different rates, depending on how the cell was manufactured. The charge rate is measured based on the percentage of the amp-hour capacity the battery is fed as a steady current over the duration of the charge. Regardless of the charge speed, more energy must be supplied to... |
why do cameras struggle so much with scenes that have both bright and dark spots, but the human eye has no problem? | Dynamic range of a camera is usually determined by the sensor/pixel size, a full-frame DSLR that shoots in RAW has excellent contrast, but a cheap point and shoot will have pretty crummy dynamic range. There are ways that improve the dynamic range without enlarging the pixel size too much, modern flagship phones have much better dynamic range than just 2 generations ago.
So to recap, the dynamic range of cameras is mainly on how large the pixels are, the more light it can "hold", the less sensitive it is to light, as it needs more luminance (brightness) to become blownout. In our eyes, our retina is larger than a full-frame sensor, giving us better dynamic range. | [
"Professional photographers prefer to use ambient light or indirect flash, as the red-eye reduction system does not always prevent red eyes — for example, if people look away during the pre-flash. In addition, people do not look natural with small pupils, and direct lighting from close to the camera lens is conside... |
why do video games need the original source code file to be further worked on or remastered? why can’t this be extracted from a copy of the game? | Okay. So let's say that you want to bake a cookie just like the ones that grandma makes. You could try to eat her cookie, and then using your knowledge of baking sort of reverse engineer it, but it would be an incredible hassle and very hard to do. But if you had the recipe she used, it would be very easy to figure out how to make it and then make your own.
A finished game is like a cookie. The source code is complied and turned into the finished product, sort of how the recipe is baked into a cookie. Because of how the source code is transformed into a working game, it is very difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to reverse the process and figure out the code. | [
"BULLET::::- Software re-compilation or porting: The original source code for the game is re-compiled for a newer platform, making necessary changes to work on the newer hardware. This requires that the source code for the original game is available for this purpose.\n",
"Once games, or software in general, becom... |
how chemical sunscreen absorbs uv ?light? | Instead of physically deflecting UV light, these molecules absorb UV radiation through their chemical bonds. As the bonds absorb UV radiation, the components of thesunscreen slowly break down and release heat.
~_URL_0_~ | [
"In sunscreen, ingredients that absorb UVA/UVB rays, such as avobenzone, oxybenzone and octyl methoxycinnamate, are organic chemical absorbers or \"blockers\". They are contrasted with inorganic absorbers/\"blockers\" of UV radiation such as carbon black, titanium dioxide and zinc oxide.\n",
"UV filters are indiv... |
why don't we breed elephants for their ivory to prevent the poaching of wild elephants? | Ivory is expensive, but not that expensive. The amount of time and money it would take to raise an elephant for a few pounds of ivory wouldn't be a good investment.
It's much more cost effective (albeit cruel) to let mother nature do the first part and just take the ivory after | [
"Forest elephants are suffering a sharp decline due to poaching for bush meat and ivory for the international ivory trade. Thousands upon thousands of elephants are killed every year to satisfy the illegal international demand for ivory. Around 62% of forest elephants have been slaughtered for their ivory in the la... |
why aren't animals given a vasectomy instead of being neutered? | Most of the time it's to do with behavioral modification. A vasectomy doesn't remove any of the male hormones or change behavior at all.
Intact male dogs will go wandering looking for females in heat, and also tend to be a little more argumentative. It also can be hard to keep weight on intact males. Dogs "tie" during sex, and can be severely injured if one partner breaks the tie. And of course all animals get STDs. Testicular cancer is also extremely common in intact males.
Toms are much more likely to get in fights, and they will spray everything in your house.
Stallions can be aggressive, very mouthy, and difficult to handle. They also tend not to grow as tall as geldings. Also difficult to keep weight on them, and need to be housed completely separately from mares. Mares will kick the crap out of stallions, so gelding them is a good way to avoid injury all around.
Testosterone also ruins the taste and smell of meat, particularly pork. Meat animals are castrated early to maintain the value of the meat. | [
"Like other forms of neutering, vasectomy and tubal ligation eliminate the ability to produce offspring. They differ from neutering in that they leave the animal's levels and patterns of sex hormone unchanged. Both sexes will retain their normal reproductive behavior, and other than birth control, none of the advan... |
Anyone know why Byzantium is neglected in popular history? For as awesome as their history is, they seem to be the forgotten Empire... | Mainstream historiography was, until quite recently, dominated by the biases of western europeans, and there were a number of cultural, political, and religious biases against Byzantium.
Lingering animosity from the Fourth Crusade and the East/West Christian schism skewed early sources and perceptions, in addition to a long-standing stereotype of Byzantines/Greeks being decadent, effeminate and ineffectual schemers.
Gibbon's personal dislike of the Byzantines probably also played a part in how dismissive historians have been towards them up until the 20th century, influential on the field as he was. | [
"Byzantium! is a BBC Books original novel written by Keith Topping and based on the long-running British science fiction television series \"Doctor Who\". It features the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Vicki.\n",
"Byzantium has been often identified with absolutism, orthodox spirituality, orientalism and exotici... |
Is Easter really a Roman Pagan tradition that celebrates fertility of nature? | The short answer to your question is no. Easter is pretty obviously not an absorbed Pagan tradition. It's a celebration of a specific historical event the date of which is given explicitly in the New Testament, and it's directly tied to the Jewish Passover. It's also being celebrated very early. Fun fact, the dating of Easter was one of the first big controversies of the early Church.
On "Easter", Eostre was a Germanic (not Roman) fertility goddess whose existence is only attested to by the Venerable Bede, -- 8th century English monk, Doctor of the Catholic Church, and possessor of one of history's great names -- in his work on time, which you can check out [here](_URL_0_). Bede says in a passage describing the conventions of the English:
> Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated "Paschal month", and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honor feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate the Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honored name of the old observance.
So, Easter isn't a pagan holiday, but the name was taken the name of a month which was derived from the name of a goddess. Think Thor--- > Thursday, Woden-- > Wednesday. This is also written at least 600 years after our first recorded celebrations of Easter and, as noted above, exclusively talking about English people.
| [
"The Easter festival is kept in many different ways among Western Christians. The traditional, liturgical observation of Easter, as practised among Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and some Anglicans begins on the night of Holy Saturday with the Easter Vigil which follows an ancient liturgy involving symbols of light, c... |
If people's bank accounts are stored on computers, isn't it possible for someone to just go into a bank's database and manually change the values in order to create money? | Except in particular cases, like national banks or reserve banks, banks aren't allowed to create money "out of thin air". Money is typically transferred into or out of accounts from other accounts, often at other banks. If you faked a transfer, it'd show up under even a rudimentary audit.
Essentially, all the money going into or out of the bank has a corresponding entry on a balance sheet somewhere else, which makes it difficult to cheat. | [
"For example, consider a typical banking transaction that involves moving $700 from a customer's savings account to a customer's checking account. This transaction involves at least two separate operations in computer terms: debiting the savings account by $700, and crediting the checking account by $700. If one op... |
What influences did Russia have on India and/or vice versa | George McDonald Fraser's book Flashman in the Great Game covers the Indian/Russian/English intrigues on the subcontinent. It is fiction but nevertheless well researched and the broad backdrop to Flashman's misadventures pretty accurate. See also Flashman at the Charge. | [
"In the fourteenth century Muscovite Russia served as the intermediary in the trade between Europe and Persia as well as Turkey. During all this time, Russian culture had not only strong cultural links and exchanges with Central Europe and Asia, but also with its many ethnic minorities which exist until today in Ru... |
Would Cardinal Peter Turkson actually be the first black pope? | There have absolutely been [popes from North Africa](_URL_2_).
However, it's likely these men were descended from the Mediterranean population of the region. [Here are some Libyan men, for comparison](_URL_0_). Take a look at the [genetic history of the region](_URL_1_): it's extremely complex.
Basically, there's no sharp line between "white" and "black" in North Africa, or between "European" and "Middle Eastern." (These lines are, of course, dubious in even the most seemingly clearcut circumstances.) The "blackness" of a North African pope is a matter of individual judgment.
But to come back to the intention of your question, there has never been a pope who came directly from *sub-Saharan* Africa or who identified culturally with a sub-Saharan society or nation. | [
"Pope Martin IV (; c. 1210/1220 – 28 March 1285), born Simon de Brion, was Pope from 22 February 1281 to his death in 1285. He was the last French pope to have held court in Rome; all subsequent French popes held court in Avignon (the Avignon Papacy).\n",
"This Pope was from the nobles of Cairo, and was a writer,... |
What is that little squiggly line that we all see float into our field of view from time to time? | From what I can tell, it sounds like you're referring to [floaters](_URL_0_). Essentially, they are tiny clumps that form in the jelly-like vitreous humour (within the eye) and cause shadows/refraction. They aren't all that noticeable until they float across your central vision or you look at light-coloured areas (e.g. sky, white walls).
Conditions affecting the surface of eye such as corneal abrasions tend to cause blurriness rather squiggly lines. They also would likely be associated with pain, a foreign body sensation, and wouldn't float into view intermittently. | [
"BULLET::::- Floaters or \"muscae volitantes\" are slowly drifting blobs of varying size, shape, and transparency, which are particularly noticeable when viewing a bright, featureless background (such as the sky) or a point source of diffuse light very close to the eye. They are all shadow images of objects suspend... |
why do i get "chills" all over my body when i see or hear something beautiful? moreover, what are those chills and why aren't they just felt all the time? | Frisson is the sudden feeling of excitement. There is a subreddit for it _URL_0_
Quoted from their sidebar "Have you ever felt a sudden, passing sensation of excitement, a shudder of emotion from an epic moment of a song, or a climax of a movie? That is what is called "frisson". It has been linked to rises in dopamine levels. Feel free to discuss frisson, and post links that give you some really great vibes. :)" | [
"Another common emotional response is that of chills when viewing a work of art. The feeling is predicted to be related to similar aesthetic experiences such as awe, feeling touched, or absorption. Personality traits along the Big 5 Inventory have been shown to be predictors of a person's experience of aesthetic ch... |
How are water resources impacted by climate change? | This is a very broad question. I'll rattle off a few ways that come to mind, but a thorough answer would fill a book.
- Many people get their water from glaciers; the world's glaciers are shrinking, and if they disappear, many people will lose their supply of fresh water.
- Rising sea level due to warming of the oceans means that ocean water will find its way further inland, turning some coastal wells brackish.
- As global weather patterns change, precipitation will change in many places. The Sahara will get even less rain, whereas areas like the Caribbean and the west coast of the US will get more. | [
"Climate change could have significant impacts on water resources around the world because of the close connections between the climate and hydrological cycle. Rising temperatures will increase evaporation and lead to increases in precipitation, though there will be regional variations in rainfall. Both droughts an... |
why does nuclear energy result in harmful radiation? | When uranium 235 undergoes fission (nuclei splitting apart) the resulting fission products are not always stable nuclei. Some may be stable, others my decay almost instantly, but there are quite a few products that decay slowly, remaining radioactive for a very long time | [
"Radiation is a carcinogen and causes numerous effects on living organisms and systems. The environmental impacts of nuclear power plant disasters such as the Chernobyl disaster, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and the Three Mile Island accident, among others, persist indefinitely, though several other facto... |
why is it unhealthy to use phones before sleeping? | The bright LCD mimics sunlight to your eyes, making your body think that its daytime and throwing off your natural sleep hormones | [
"The use of computers (including devices such as smartphones, tablet computers and laptops) by children and adolescents before bed has been associated with a reduction in the hours of sleep experienced by frequent users, along with a decreased quality of sleep, in most cases. The results of computer use at night ha... |
why aren't we more energetic when it's very hot outside? shouldn't we have more energy because we don't have to waste it on heating our bodies up? | Unless it's very cold, we aren't really "wasting" energy to warm ourselves up. The energy we're expending to do other things (move, think, digest, etc.) produces heat as a by-product. This is why we shiver when cold; that extra muscle activity produces a bit more heat so it warms you up. Ordinarily though, there isn't a mechanism in the body that is expending energy just to keep us warm like central heating in a house.
When it's hot out we actually have to expend energy *to keep cool*, and we're less energetic because activity can more easily cause us to overheat. | [
"Since wasted electrical energy is released as heat, an inefficient power supply is hot to the touch, as is one that wastes power without an electrical load. This waste heat is itself a problem in warm weather, since it may require additional air conditioning to prevent overheating, and even to remove the unwanted ... |
Could the Earth get a ring? | Earth did have a ring, it turned into the moon (by one theory) [one semi-credible, I was laze source](_URL_0_)
Edit: [A video!](_URL_1_) | [
"The anime \"Mobile Suit Gundam 00\" also prominently features an orbital ring, which consists primarily of linked solar panels. The ring is connected to earth via three space elevators. This ring effectively provides near unlimited power to earth. Later in the series the ring also shows space stations mounted on i... |
what is a root of an equation? | The ‘root’ is the number that satisfies the equation. When solving for the root on an equation, the root is the solution. In _x+3=4_, for example, the root _x_ is 1, which is the “solution” you’re looking for.
And the root can be assigned any letter variable, the default is usually x by standard usage, is all. | [
"For every equation the roots may be expressed in terms of radicals and of a root of a resolvent for a resoluble group, because, the Galois group of the equation over the field generated by this root is resoluble.\n",
"with [[root of an equation|roots]] \"p\" = 0 (obvious) and \"p\" = (1 + \"u\") / (1 + \"u\" + \... |
Coriolis effect on objects travelling between hemispheres? | The deflection will indeed switch directions when the rocket crosses the equator. However, the effects will not cancel out because they are applied at different times. The result will be a rocket with a dog-leg path. The endpoint of the path will be substantially further west than it would be if the Earth was not spinning.
Visualize it like so:
* The rocket is launched from the northern hemisphere on a trajectory due south.
* As it travels it is deflected to the right, causing it to curve west. (The magnitude of the deflection smoothly decreases as the rocket approaches the equator, but that doesn't matter. There could be a discontinuity; the visualization works as long as the coriolis force is symmetric about the equator).
* The rocket crosses the equator travelling southwest.
* *Starting from this initial southwest trajectory*, the rocket is now deflected to the left, causing it to curve back towards the east.
* Because the coriolis force is symmetric about the equator, the deflection in **direction** (not displacement) that the rocket experienced in the southern hemisphere will exactly cancel the deflection experienced in the nourthern hemisphere. The rocket arrives at its destination pointed due south.
**This means that the rocket was travelling southwest throughout its trajectory.** The only points when it was travelling due south were at the instant of launch and impact. **At no point was it travelling southeast.** Therefore, it will impact a point to the west of where it was launched. | [
"A consequence of the Coriolis effect, Ekman theory explains that oceanic flow at the surface is directed at 45 degrees to the right of the wind stress in the Northern Hemisphere. Thus, winds blowing from the southwest result in eastward currents, while winds blowing from the northeast result in westward currents.\... |
what is it like to have multiple personality disorder? | Though I'm not one, I dated a girl with dis-associative identity disorder for almost a year (Though the breakup was over something semi-unrelated). I asked her all the time what it was like, and she confirmed that movies play it up completely the wrong way. She always told me it was like watching a movie when her other personas took over (I forget the term that is used for the other personalities... alters maybe?). It was described to me like it was like being at a theater by yourself, and telling the main character what to do, but just as effective. You had no control, but you could watch to a degree.. like you were in almost a haze I guess?
As for the way movies show it, there are no funny twitches or tells that a person switches personalities. It just happens... though you can see slight differences in mannerisms, vocabulary, mood, etc. I got to the point where I could identify who she was and when she changed. But.. thats all I got. | [
"The term 'personality disorder' encompasses a wide range of issues, each with a different level of severity or disability; thus, personality disorders can require fundamentally different approaches and understandings. To illustrate the scope of the matter, consider that while some disorders or individuals are char... |
What was the role of the French Southern Flank during the first day of the Somme offensive? | Sorry for the delay, basically yes, the Wikipedia page covering the French offensive on the southern Somme front is largely accurate (honestly I haven't had time to scrutinise it but the basics are correct). The sector assaulted by the French lay on both sides of the Somme River and thenGerman defenders were not expecting anFrench attack in such strength (most likely due to the strain Verdun was placing on the French Army at that point). The French were in a more advantageous position then the British, the past 18 months had forced France to adjust their offensive doctrine and their troops were very experienced when it came to attacking. In comparison, the British Army was comprised of new troops that hadn't had the benefit of extensive experience or training.
The French artillery played a critically important role in the success on the southern Somme front and was really the reason behind the French success. Like the British, the French laid down an extensive preliminary bombardment on the German front. Unlike the British, the French were supplied with a greater number of heavier guns which lent the weight of their shells to the destruction of German trenches. They were also able to allocate a greater number of guns per length of front then the British were, giving them greater firepower throughout their stretch of line. Also unlike the British, the French allocated more of their guns to the neutralisation of German artillery batteries. In a war where artillery is the queen of the battlefield, knocking out your enemy's strongest piece gives you an incredible advantage. The superior French artillery successfully neutralised the German artillery and also neutralised a large number of machine guns meaning the French didn't face the same heavy machine gun fire that their British allies to the north were facing. Interestingly, the French were concerned about the lack of priority placed on counter battery operations by the British and where the two armies met, the French allocated their own guns to neutralise German guns in the sector to be assaulted by the British as they were worried that surviving guns would threaten their own advance.
Gas shells were used but the information I currently have available to me does not state of which type. These were used against German artillery batteries, aiding in the successful neutralisation of those batteries.
When the French did attack (later then the British in order to cause confusion) their infantry smashed through the German defences and successfully achieved their objectives. The new French positions were subject to heavy German counterattack but these were largely fought off. Due to the slow progress being made by the British to the north, the French delayed advancing further, allowing the Germans to dig in and create a new front line.
That's a basic overview and I know it doesn't answer all your questions. Any other questions you have, let me know and I'll do my best to answer them as soon as I can
Source:
The Great War - Peter Hart
Battle Tactics of the Western Front - Paddy Griffith
Artillery in the Great War - Sanders Marble
More that I can't remember the names of at the moment | [
"The Attack on the Gommecourt Salient was a British operation against the northern flank of the German 2nd Army that took place on 1 July 1916, on the Western Front in France, during the First World War. The attack was conducted by the British Third Army (Lieutenant-General Edmund Allenby) as a diversion, to protec... |
How does grounding (electrically) work? | This might be a crude explanation compared to what others may be able to provide, but I'll give it a shot.
Short version: By grounding something it is connected to the Earth and current will flow from the object to the Earth until the object's electric potential is equal to that of the Earth.
Analogous to an object such as a ball at the top of a slope, objects can acquire an electrical potential energy. Whereas the ball has a tendency to roll due to gravitational potential energy, electric particles have a tendency to "roll" due to a potential energy found within the electric field. Just as slopes can have varying steepness, electric fields have a similar effect. The "steepness" of the electric field between any two points is due to the DIFFERENCE in electric potential energy of the respective particles, as well as the superposition of all other surrounding electric potentials. The ball on a slope might have a tendency to roll but there can also be other forces that oppose the object's movement. For electric particles, this mechanism is known as resistance and has a reciprocal referred to as conductance. Resistivity and conductivity are characteristics of the medium through which the electric field exists. Current is the result when the difference in the electric potential between two points becomes great enough to overcome the resistive element of the material that the particles must travel through. Although it is typically the negatively charged electrons that flow more so than positively charged particles, sign conventions were decided upon before this was known and it is general conceptualized as positive particles flowing "downhill" towards the lower potential energy levels. The important concept to understand is that there are only reference values in electric potential energy, and therefore measurements (voltage) are relative to what you choose to reference as zero or more popularly "ground." For reasons having to do with electrical equilibrium and net charge, the Earth can be modeled as the reference point, the lowest net potential energy. Because of this, the Earth is modeled as "downhill" from most else everything on the planet and therefore if the resistivity of a path between the Earth and an electric potential is small enough, current will flow. This current is the electrically charged particles moving toward equilibrium, and when the particle's potential difference to Earth becomes small enough the resistance of the path will bring the current to a halt (although never truly static) and we consider the particle discharged. At this point the particle still has charge, and so does the earth, but the net charges of the two are approaching equal. The Earth has discharged the particle.
If you are wondering how the Earth continually provides the lowest net charge, think of how many electrically charged particles reside within the Earth compared to the number within some electronic device. If every single particle within the electronic device discharged to the Earth, the percent of particles added compared to the number of particles already held by the earth would be virtually 0.
Too tired to revise. I hope that I made no errors and that it satisfies your curiosities while creating more. | [
"Ground or earth in a mains (AC power) electrical wiring system is a conductor that provides a low-impedance path to the earth to prevent hazardous voltages from appearing on equipment (high voltage spikes). The terms and are used synonymously in this section; is more common in North American English, and is more c... |
at what level of severity does a mentally disabled person no longer realize they have a disability? | This isn’t really a question that has an answer, because intellectual disability doesn’t function on a linear scale, no matter how much we try to fit it to one. There’s no IQ cutoff point for this, because our brains are far too complex for that. You can have people with severe Alzheimer’s who are blissfully unaware of their declining cognitive abilities, you can have people with pseudo-dementia (which is caused by depression in the elderly) with similar levels of deficit that are acutely well aware of those deficits. You can have people at all ends of the autism spectrum with no understanding or incredibly good understanding of their own differences. | [
"Referencing \"Crime Against Persons with Disabilities\" table 8, it is evident that persons with disabilities are at risk of a higher rate of violence committed against them than their non-disabled peers. Additionally, according to the data, individuals who have some form of disability are at a higher risk of bein... |
why do people join church cults? | Nobody ever joins a cult.
You meet a new friend who's really nice to you, in a way that maybe your family or friends aren't. After a while, they start talking to you about spirituality, or community service, and maybe you go with them to a meditation retreat or to hear a spiritual leader speak. Everyone there is really nice and accepting too, so it's only natural that you'd want to spend more time with them. You start to feel like maybe that's what you've been missing all this time.
Eventually, you're spending all your free time with these people, until one day you're invited to start working directly for the organization helping people the way they helped you. Actually, you know what? It turns out they've got a spare bedroom at the spiritual center, and I know your roommate's been a real jerk lately, why don't you just come join us there?
Your girlfriend doesn't want you coming to live with us? Look, I know this kind of growth can be really hard sometimes, but she's afraid to break out of her suburban routine and be truly free, and she's afraid that if you experience this kind of freedom with us, you'll leave her behind. Don't worry, she'll come around after you've been here for a while, and if not, then maybe you two weren't meant to be, you know? Besides, and you totally can't say I told you this, but you know Susan from the ultimate frisbee team at the centre? She's totally got a crush on you... | [
"By sociological typology, \"cults\" are, like sects, new religious groups. But, unlike sects, they can form without breaking off from another religious group, though this is by no means always the case. The characteristic that most distinguishes cults from sects is that they are not advocating a return to \"pure\"... |
Why isn't acetaminophen (e.g. Tylenol) formulated with N-acetylcysteine? | I doubt anybody will be able to answer that question in a specific manner. It just hasn't come to be. It also really is not that necessary.
APAP toxicity is a significant issue but it is far from a public health crisis such as the opiate one. The cost increase and unnecessary nature of the dual formulation in the vast majority of uses just makes it so it doesn't make sense.
It is a good idea and out-of-the-box thinking. It just isn't that necessary. | [
"Methapyrilene is an antihistamine and anticholinergic of the pyridine chemical class which was developed in the early 1950s. It was sold under the trade names Co-Pyronil and Histadyl EC. It has relatively strong sedative effects, to the extent that its primary use was as a medication for insomnia rather than for i... |
eli: why do i get the shivers when someone is standing behind me? | likely because you noticed them and it makes you nervous. It's the same reaction that cats get when they're scared and their hair stands up, except your hair is shorter and less dense then theirs. | [
"Titchener rejected the telepathic explanation. He instead suggested that when a subject experienced the feeling that they were being watched and turned to check, a second person who already had the subject in their field of vision might notice the subject starting to turn their head, and shift their gaze to the su... |
why do we still pay for phone and text messages when it could all be done over the internet? | Well, if you're stranded at a place without internet and have to call somebody, the carrier gets money.
If you don't want calls and texts, you buy a package with 4g. And where does the money go? To the carrier.
Answer to your real question: because we don't always have an internet connection. If you do want an internet connection, you have to pay the carrier. | [
"Pay phones may still be used by mobile/cellular phone users if their phones become unusable, get stolen, or for other emergency uses. These uses may make the complete disappearance of pay phones in the near future less likely. Often, at least in emergency, a phone call can be made from a hotel or a shop, making pu... |
Chilean History: By Council or by Sword, By Reason or by Force? | The original coat of arms, approved in 1819, featured an indigenous man and woman standing above the quote with weapons in their hands (lance and bow), and due to the fact that it was drafted during the presidency of José Miguel Carrera, who many claim to be the founder of independent Chile, I think the words very much mean "By any means necessary."
This design was replaced in June of 1834 after a contest was held, with the winning design by Carlos Wood Taylor. The animals were drafted to replaced the indigenous figures due to controversy.
Additionally, the top of the coat of arms says "After Darkness, Light" (Post Tenebras Lux). I can only guess this is in reference to their struggle for independence, and eventual liberation.
Here is a photo of the original: _URL_0_
Source: The History of Chile, John L. Rector, Palgrave MacMillan, New York, NY, 2003.
| [
"In Chilean historiography, Colonial Chile () is the period from 1600 to 1810, beginning with the Destruction of the Seven Cities and ending with the onset of the Chilean War of Independence. During this time the Chilean heartland was ruled by Captaincy General of Chile. The period was characterized by a lengthy co... |
I don't understand gravity... at all. | Gravity does not stop.
If you're asking why astronauts experience weightlessness in earth's orbit, it's because they're... well, orbiting around the earth. [NASA's website explains this quite well](_URL_0_).
This quote in particular:
> If you drop an apple on Earth, it falls at 1g. If an astronaut on the space station drops an apple, it falls too. It just doesn't look like it's falling. That's because they're all falling together: the apple, the astronaut and the station. But they're not falling towards Earth, they're falling around it. Because they're all falling at the same rate, objects inside of the station appear to float in a state we call "zero gravity" (0g), or more accurately microgravity (1x10-6 g.)
They experience 'weightlessness' for the same reason we don't feel a gravitational pull towards the sun: we're in orbit around it. | [
"For example, when a pen falls off a desk, that seems to be proof that gravity exists, because gravity made it fall. But what is \"gravity\"? In 1500, \"gravity\" was the pen's desire to go to the center of the earth; in 1700 \"gravity\" was a force that acted at a distance according to mathematical laws; in the 19... |
How do depression and anxiety cause memory loss? | [Here is a short article regarding a recent study](_URL_6_)
"A study, published in [*Molecular Psychiatry*](_URL_3_) and co-authored by University of Sydney scholars at the Brain and Mind Research Institute, comprised data from nearly 9,000 people. Utilizing magnetic resonance imaging ([MRI](_URL_2_)) brain scans, as well as clinical data from 1,728 people with depression and using 7,199 healthy individuals as a control, the researchers were able to compare brain volumes in people with and without major depression.
Individuals with recurrent [depression](_URL_0_) made up 65 percent of the study subjects with major depression, and as a result, made up the amount with a smaller hippocampus than those without recurrent depression. Those who had early-age depression (before the age of 21) had a smaller hippocampus than healthy individuals, while 34 percent of those who had their first episode of major depression and didn’t have a smaller hippocampus than healthy individuals were in the minority.
According to the study, hippocampal volume reduction was something that had frequently been found in studies for sufferers of depression. However, what the study found is that the relationship between hippocampal volume reduction and major depression disorder, while complex, shows that those with recurrent depression have a smaller hippocampus than those with early-stage major depression disorder. As shown in [other studies](_URL_1_), the longer the depression had plagued a person, the greater the decrease in size of the hippocampus, limiting its ability to operate.
While the hippocampus is mostly associated with forming new memories, it's also associated with controlling [emotions and learning](_URL_4_) because of its link to memory. Consider your experiences, especially experiences you've had with friends and family, or things that you learned that made you happy or sad — the hippocampus forms these memories, interacting with the amygdala to process memories and emotions. It actually makes sense that these things would be connected. In a 2013 [study](_URL_5_) from Brigham Young University, researchers found a link between depression and [blurred memory](_URL_7_), which can be the case due to a decreasing hippocampus. The researchers found that because of the condition, the subjects conflated details as well as blurred distinctions in their memory, which, of course, can alter a memory completely."
tl;dr - There is a part of your brain which is responsible for forming and accessing memories. It also plays a big part in emotions and learning. This part is like a muscle, if not exercised enough, it will get smaller and weaker. Also, hormones like cortisol can negatively influence the functionality of your brain. | [
"Depression is associated with overly generalized memories and individuals with depression perform more poorly on source memory attribution tasks as compared to non-depressed individuals. These individuals show a memory bias for remembering negative information, possibly due to enhanced amygdala activity during the... |
if soiled paper is not allowed in the recycling bin, then why can paper and used beverage cans go together? | Most municipalities allow recyclables to be grouped together to encourage recycling, because they receive more money from federal and local governments by having a large recycling program than it costs them to have the items mechanically sorted.
Soiled materials taint the end product, for example if you recycle a cardboard box with grease on it, the college-ruled paper that box might go into some day would have grease in it as well. There is no way to mechanically separate soil from materials, it could probably be done via chemical reactions but is not worth the cost it would take. | [
"In North West England, all the glass collected for recycling is used within the UK, around half of the plastics and cans are used in the UK; the rest is sent further afield to continental Europe or China to be made into new products, and paper and cardboard collected is sent to local paper mills to be reprocessed ... |
why do so many sci-fi aliens have british accents? | Because people call it racist if it's anything other than british or american.
See Also: Nute Gunray and Jar Jar Binks | [
"The series was also notable for the fact that Saunders devised a special language that the aliens spoke amongst themselves and, like later science fiction series such as \"Babylon 5\", they spoke English with a 'foreign' accent; in the story this leads to the children's initial assumption that the alien character,... |
- why is everything in the universe always moving? | There is no such thing as "stopped" in space because everything is relative. | [
"Aristotle argues that, although motion is eternal, there cannot be an infinite series of movers and of things moved. Therefore, there must be some, who are not the first in such a series, that inspire the eternal motion without themselves being moved \"as the soul is moved by beauty\". Because the planetary sphere... |
Neurologically what is the difference between physical and psychological addiction? | It's a little easier to explain as "chemical addiction" versus "behavioral addiction" rather than physical and psychological, which are very broad ways to look at it. They are also not entirely disconnected, as you can gain behavioral addiction to a chemically addictive substance (think of smokers who quit, but keep wanting to hold a cigarette despite not craving one), or start an addiction for behavioral reasons (a need to escape reality) and become chemically addicted. But they do work with different mechanisms at the most basic level, only to become incredibly complicated when you look at them from a little further away.
A chemical addiction upsets the balance of naturally occurring chemicals within the body, which then reach a new equilibrium, requiring escalating amounts of the outside chemical to achieve the same effects such as euphoria, adrenaline rush, etc, and in turn causing a deficit when there is an absence of those chemicals. This deficit takes awhile to work its way out of the body's natural system for equalizing, which is the source of many withdrawal symptoms. Heroine dependency slowly replaces your body's ability to produce natural 'pain killing' agents. At first, the surplus of the pain killers is euphoric, then as the equilibrium hits, you need more, and in the absence of the drug, you experience crippling pain and physical torment until your body recovers. This will drive you to seek out more of the drug. Then, if you are off of it for a really long time and go back, you could *die* from the dosage you were last adjusted to, as you OD on even... half of it, possibly, because your body has regained its natural equilibrium.
A behavioral addiction is based on using a behavior as an outlet which reinforces that behavior as a source of release. So for example, a behavioral addiction to MMORPGs (not as common as people claim, but not unheard-of) could begin as an attempt to find a social outlet while under the stress of chronic social anxiety, self-esteem problems, or agoraphobia. Then, as it fills a role as a social outlet and the person doesn't experience social anxiety doing it, they reinforce their attraction to that outlet as a coping mechanism. They then slowly become behaviorally dependent on it as an outlet, and it replaces all need for offline socialization in some extreme cases. Then, if removed from it, they panic like they've been cut off from their entire world. This brings out a sort of behavioral "withdrawal" that can drag out extreme anxiety, both buried from before the addiction and newly created by separation from the coping mechanism.
But you will rarely see one without some measure of the other, at least where a controlled substance is involved. On a neuroscience level, it would become more complicated as you get into dopamine reactions involved in learning, which are active in any process involving rewards. Both a chemical outlet (like euphoric escapism) and a behavioral outlet (like cutting as a pain inducer) will involved learn behavior, but the chemical addiction will have the more easily quantifiable methods for detection during withdrawal. | [
"Personality theories of addiction are psychological models that associate personality traits or modes of thinking (i.e., affective states) with an individual's proclivity for developing an addiction. Data analysis demonstrates that there is a significant difference in the psychological profiles of drug users and n... |
how is daemon tools used for business applications? | For mounting iso/disk image on a virtual disk drive when there is no physical disk drive or perhaps there is no disk. | [
"DAEMON tools was originally a successor of \"Generic SafeDisc emulator\" and incorporated all of its features. The program claims to be able to defeat most copy protection schemes such as SafeDisc and SecuROM. It is currently compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10. DAEMON T... |
Canada West - Opposition to Confederation? | There is an older pair of books that can still be found on Amazon called **British Columbia Chronicles** by George and Helen Akrigg that covers most of the recorded debates about us joining Confederation.
I am away from home so am not able to look them up and get you the info but perhaps you can find it online somewheres. | [
"In Canada West (Ontario), the confederation process was promoted as the act of foundation of a new British nation. The project generally received wide support in the press and in the political class. It is primarily the politicians of Canada West that, with the Great Coalition, orchestrated the process which led t... |
When did the use of aircraft by emergency services start and what changed since these early days? | Although the Wright brothers did not first fly their first heavier-
than-air aircraft until 17 December 1903, they had been preceded by the concept of air evacuation! As early as March 1784, following the balloon flight demonstrations of the Montgolfier Brothers before the Medical Faculty of Montpelier, physicians began to consider the benefits their patients could gain from flight. Jean-Francois Picot edited the results of this first medical investigation into flight in a work entitled "Testamen Medicum de Aerostatum ust Medicinae applicando," which theorized that not only could patients tolerate flight, but that they would in fact benefit from the purer air encountered. Although there is no evidence of the actual use of balloons for patient
evacuation, during the euphoria over flight which was rampant in Europe at the time, in 1895 Charles Richet, a Frenchman, prophesised the eventual wide-spread use and acceptance of
this form of transporting the sick and wounded. This prophesy was
enriched and expanded during the 1895-1910 period by Doctor DeMooy of the Dutch military, whose espousal of the concept of the evacuation of casualties by horse-drawn tethered balloons earned him the sobriquet of "the Jules Verne of aeromedical evacuation". The initiation of air ambulance services using heavier-than-air
machines followed soon after the Wrights' feat. The first known
practical proposal to transport patients by airplane was made in 1910, when Captain George Gosman, Medical Corps, and Lieutenant A.L. Rhodes, Coast Artillery Corps, built an airplane specifically for the purpose at Fort Barrancas, Florida (now part of Pensacola Naval Air Station). They were, however, unsuccessful in obtaining backing for the concept from the government. During 1912 and 1913, there was some non-governmental interest in the concept in America, but in Europe, Sanitary airships, as air ambulances were called in Europe, were discussed by the League of Nations, which, on 21 November, 1912, voted to sponsor an international conference on protection of the sanitary airships in time of war. France especially became enamored of the concept of the air ambulance, and by the onset of World War I had done much research into the subject, although again, as in the United States, mostly without government support. The enthusiasm over the ability to move patients by air was not restricted to Europe and the United States. In 1912, John Flynn, an Australian, saw an airplane fly and subsequently made known a vision of combining medicine, aviation, and radio to provide medical services. This dream later achieved fruition as the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia.World War I interrupted the theoretical and civilian
development of air ambulance systems, but gave us our first examples of true combat evacuation of casualties by air. The use of aircraft as ambulances were rare, due primarily to the need for the aircraft in other roles although the traditional conservatism of the military obviously also played a significant role. So far as is known, aircraft were utilised tor evacuation to a significant degree only by the French during the war, although recommendations to this effect had been, as previously mentioned, made in the United States, as well as by Captain R.H. Cordner of the Royal Army Medical Corps. He had urged their use in an air ambulance role in the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps as early as 1913. In 1916, Dr. Chassaing of the French Chamber of Deputies (concurrently serving in the French Army Medical Department) supervised the conversion of a few Brequet aircraft for use as air ambulances. In 1917, he convinced the French government to build an airplane ambulance (Type Dorand AER), which was capable of carrying two litter patients and which was successfully used in evacuating patients from the Amiens front. One opponent to this development demanded to know of the Chamber of Deputies, in a comment, "are there not enough dead in France today without killing the wounded in airplanes? Sporadic, non-organised use of aircraft in an ambulance role by the British Air Service was reported in contemporary reports. Although their efforts were not utilized in the war, several physicians serving at airfields in the United States independently developed modifications of the Curtis JN-4 (''Jenny'') training aircraft to enable them to carry patients. Probably the first actual use of an aircraft to carry patients in the United States was in February 1918, when Major Nelson Driver, Medical Corps, and Captain William Ocker, Air Service, carried the survivor of an aircraft accident at Gerstner Field, Louisiana, to the hospital. Other conversions of the basic JN4-D air craft to an ambulance configuration were made at Ellington Field, Texas, (two versions, commissioned 1 April and 6 July 1918)22 and at Eberts Field, Lonoke, Arkansas, as well as at several other fields. On 23 July 1918, the Director of the Air Service ordered the conversion of an air ambulance at all airfields for use in responding to aircraft accidents.Such utilization was, however, only in isolated instances, and while these conversions proved the practicality of the concept of air evacuation, the only two instances of larger scale, systematic
evacuation were carried out by the French. During the Serbian retreat of 1915, Captain Dangelzer and Lieuten ant Paulhan of the French Air Service evacuated over a dozen wounded men distances of 50 to 120 miles using converted service-type aircraft, and during the Riff Campaign in the Sahara (January 1918), the French used both service type and specially constructed ambulance aircraft both to carry physicians to 26 the wounded and to bring out the wounded from the nearly impenetrable mountains.
What has changed since the early days? Aircraft are more reliable and thus safer, medical equipment has been added to the aircraft contents, and perhaps most importantly, we now have trained personnel providing care in flight, rather than simply plopping a casualty into the dark interior of the fuselage of an aircraft and hoping they are still alive upon arrival. This is a fascinating story: some references are: "From Balloon to Black Hawk, Part I: The Origins"; Army Aviation Digest, 27(6): 41-48, June 1981.-- Parts II-IV in the next three issues. "Wings of Life and Hope--a History of Aeromedical Evacuation"; Problems in Critical Care, 4(4): 477-494, December 1990. "Kelly's Hospital Ship"; Aviation, Space, & Environmental Medicine, 63(12): 1115-1117, December 1992."Marie Marvingt and the Development of Aeromedical Evacuation", Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine, 74:863-868, August 2003. “The Aerochir: The First ‘Flying Hospital’”, Aviation Space and Environmental Medicine, 76:1174-1179, 2005. If you have more specific questions, please don't hesitate to ask-- I've been studying air ambulances around the world for many years. | [
"After World War I, aviation began to expand its role into the civilian arena, starting with airmail flights. It soon became apparent that for reliable mail delivery, as well as the passenger flights which were soon to follow, a solution was required for navigation at night and in poor visibility. In the U.S., a ne... |
why does it take so long for new video game consoles to be produced? | They have assembly lines producing the console and any changes require the assembly line to be changed & also games to be coded to take advantage of the upgraded hardware | [
"When development began, Sony expected the game to be completed in a year, rather than the more than three it finally took. Thatgamecompany always expected to need an extension; according to Hunicke, they believed finishing the game within a year was \"unrealistic\". Development ended up taking even longer than ant... |
how does anti-venom work, and why does it require more venom to be produced (or is this a misconception)? | Anti-venom is made by injecting small amounts of the venom collected from the venomous animal into another animal. The animal's body creates antibodies(things in the blood which attack foreign things in your body that shouldn't be there) to fight off the venom. Then those venom fighting antibodies are extracted from the animals blood and presto. You can now give them to a person who has been bitten and give their body a huge amount of antibodies to help neutralize the venom in their blood before it does more damage. There are some antivenoms that can be used to treat multiple different venoms and also ones that are specific to one kind.
If you ever saw the princess bride you might remember that a character fed himself tiny amounts of a deadly poison to build up an immunity to it. We are doing the same thing but instead of making ourselves resistant to the venom (there are people who have done this though it's stupidity dangerous) we make another animal resistant and then use their blood to extract the antibodies and give them to people who have been bitten. | [
"Venom is any poisonous compound secreted by an animal intended to harm or disable another. When an organism produces a venom, its final form may contain hundreds of different bioactive elements that interact with each other inevitably producing its toxic effects. This mixture of ingredients includes various protei... |
Why do elementary particles have angular momentum? | *Who knows!* I sure don't, but it's an exciting question isn't it. As far as we can tell, spin is a fundamental aspect of a particle, as much a fiber of it's being as a triangle having three sides. | [
"In quantum mechanics, angular momentum (like other quantities) is expressed as an operator, and its one-dimensional projections have quantized eigenvalues. Angular momentum is subject to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, implying that at any time, only one projection (also called \"component\") can be measured... |
how does supermarket sandwiches has 10days expiration date when homemade sandwiches spoils the next day? | Believe it or not they are usually packed in a low oxygen environment. | [
"Limited product availability incentivises customers to buy; items are reserved for 15 minutes once customers place them in their basket, after which they are released to other shoppers. Delivery lead times vary between 2–28 days depending on how the logistics for sales are handled.\n",
"\"Sell by date\" is a les... |
Would the loss of a planet in our solar system affect us(Earth) in any way? | Of course it would. We would lose the gravitational attraction towards that planet, which would subtly change the wobble of our orbit. It wouldn't make any noticeable changes to our everyday lives, but they'd be there. | [
"If Earth is not destroyed by the expanding red giant Sun in 7.6 billion years, then on a time scale of 10 (10 quintillion) years the remaining planets in the Solar System will be ejected from the system by violent relaxation. If this does not occur to the Earth, the ultimate fate of the planet will be that it coll... |
why does my ass get sore after sitting for too long? how can i prevent it? | Your butt gets sore from sitting on it too long because your butt is designed to be muscles used for walking and running, not so much a cushion for getting compressed by supporting all your body's weight. Prevention: sit on your butt less.
**Edit:** Alternate prevention: sit on a cushion more.
**Edit 2:** [A more advanced explanation](_URL_0_) by [/u/Bedpans](_URL_1_) | [
"As the duration of the punishment increases, the tiredness becomes increasingly unbearable. At some point, one may feel compelled to raise one's bottom to try and get some relief. However, that only brings temporary relief as keeping the buttocks raised is painful (similar to standing murgha), so one soon lowers t... |
Do we travel at the speed of light respectively to a photon? | Photons do not travel in a valid inertial reference frame. In every valid reference frame photons travel at the speed of light, and since a photon is not moving with respect to it's self, it wouldn't be moving at the speed of light...which it must be.
No matter how fast you go, a photon is always traveling 300million m/s faster than you. If two people are moving relative to each other, in a photon's reference frame you would need to say they both are moving at the speed of light, but you can't think that they're both moving at the same speed because they're moving apart. Things just don't work so it's not a valid reference frame. | [
"Virtual photons in some calculations in quantum field theory may also travel at a different speed for short distances; however, this doesn't imply that anything can travel faster than light. While it has been claimed (see VSL criticism below) that no meaning can be ascribed to a dimensional quantity such as the sp... |
Accuracy on bombs dropped on Britain during WWII? Trying to do some math on the subject. | I'm a little confused; are you asking about the accuracy of German bombing, or the total weight of bombs dropped? If the latter, I'm not sure where you get the figure of 100 tons from, the only reference I can find on the wikipedia article on the Blitz is where that's used as the threshold for what constitutes a major raid. Later on it states "The military effectiveness of bombing varied. The Luftwaffe dropped around 45,000 short tons (41,000 t) of bombs during the Blitz" (no specific citation). There's also a table of raids by city, from *The Night Blitz* by John Ray, with tonnage of HE dropped in major raids totalling 30,101 t.
[An article in The Independent](_URL_0_), referring I believe to the whole war rather than just The Blitz, has "The Luftwaffe's total of 74,000 tons of bombs dropped on Britain was utterly eclipsed by the nearly two million tons dropped by RAF Bomber Command and the US 8th Air Force by the end of the war in 1945."
German medium bombers (the Do 17, Ju 88 and He 111) typically carried 1 - 2,000kg bomb loads, and the Luftwaffe attacked with over 400 aircraft on seven occasions (Terraine, *The Right of the Line*), the largest force being 712 bombers, so even if you have a modern aircraft with twenty times the payload you'd need 36 of them to replicate that single day (in terms of raw weight). | [
"The British military undertook several analyses of the attack. In December 1944, No. 5 Group's headquarters investigated the accuracy of the bombing. This analysis found that No. 617 Squadron's bombing had been much more accurate than that of No. 9 Squadron's, possibly due to the latter squadron's bombardiers inpu... |
Why is Norse mythology so similar to Greek? | They are similar because the Norsemen and the Greeks were distant cousins, and their cultures derived from the same ultimate source: Proto-Indo-European, the very ancient "mother" culture which dwelt (probably) on the Eurasian steppes in the 4th and 3rd millennium BCE, innovated the plow and the domesticated horse, and spread into every corner of the then-known world, east to the deserts of China, southeast into India, southwest into the Caucauses and the Middle East, and westward into Europe and the Mediterranean littoral. The PIE culture birthed those who would eventually [develop to speak](_URL_0_) many ancient and modern languages, including Norse and Greek.
Virtually everything we know about PIE culture is derived from her daughter cultures, especially the daughter languages. By comparing the languages which survive, we can reconstruct aspects of the PIE language, and from there infer aspects of PIE culture. This is called historical linguistics.
This is what we learn when we examine various daughter cultures' words for divinity: PIE associated gods (plural) with the sky, the world up there, and we find a word associated with this very basic concept in virtually every one of the dozens of daughter languages. The PIE root was `diw/dyu`"sky, light" and we find that word or its derivatives associated with a sky god *everywhere* the Indo-Europeans roamed (for example: Vedic `devá-`; Latin `deus`; proto-Germanic `tīwaz`; Old Irish `día`; Mycenaean `de-wi-jo`). Some languages brought alternate, but still related terms. This includes the Norse of your question, who do not cooperate and give us Old Norse `goð`, a cognate of that PIE root but not the same word. We see it also in Old High German `got`, English ‘god’. It seems to be a neuter collective term for the gods as a group, rather than the (usually male) sky god in particular. Greek also, by the way, does not cooperate, giving us *theos*. Still, all these examples are related to each other directly in their origin, and their subsequent developments as far as mythology are ultimately from the same PIE source.
Some other commonalities: with very few exceptions, PIE gods are immortal, in direct contrast to those who dwell on the Earth (humans, mortals). They are male and female, and there is a strong association with "mother" gods and their offspring. And there are often male-female pairs, as you have noticed. They are associated with domains (sky, fire, water, love, liminal space, animals/hunt, motherhood, death, justice, ruling power, etc).
The similarities you detect are due to their common origin, but we don't have a primer of Proto-Indo-European myth to start us off. We have to reconstruct it as best as we can, from what is left, and that is a *very* messy and difficult process. Here's an example, quoting M.L. West:
> "Of course, many of the purposes for which people require gods are universal. If we find a god of healing here, there, and everywhere, we cannot assume them to be historically connected unless they show more distinctive identifying features. Nor is it remarkable if many peoples have a god of war to help them to victory or defend them against defeat; war is a critical event, and success must depend on divine support as well as military prowess. We find war-gods, for instance, among the Indians (Indra), Greeks (Enyalios, Ares), Scythians (‘Ares’, Herodotus 4. 62), Romans (Mars), Gauls (‘Mars’, Caes. Bell. Gall. 6. 17. 2–5), Germans (‘Mars’, Tac. Germ. 9. 1, Ann. 13. 57, Hist. 4. 64), and Goths (‘Mars’, Jordanes, Getica 41). Perhaps it is more noteworthy when the war-god is also an agrarian deity, a protector of the fields, as is the case with the Roman Mars, the Celtic ‘Mars’ Teutates, and the Slavonic Svętovit. Enemy action is of course one thing that the fields need to be saved from, but these gods are also concerned with successful harvests and with protection from blight. As for healing gods, they do occur everywhere, but again there are sometimes other coincident features. The Greek Apollo, a rather complex figure, has probably taken over the characteristics of more than one older divinity, including the healer Paiawon (Paieon, Paion, Paian). He has points of contact on the one hand with the Indian Rudra, on the other with Celtic and Germanic deities. His power over sickness and health is dramatically portrayed in the first book of the Iliad, where he first shoots his arrows to bring plague upon cattle and men, and then relieves it in response to prayer. The image has striking parallels in Ugaritic and the Old Testament. But Rudra too is pictured in the Veda as an archer whose missiles send disease and death upon humans, cattle, and horses. Prayers are directed to him imploring him to spare his worshippers and their animals. He is said to have a thousand remedies at his disposal, and a healing hand."
This is from the very excellent: M.L. West, *Indo-European Myth and Poetry* (Oxford, 2007), from chapter 3 "Gods and Goddesses."
| [
"Norse mythology is the body of myths of the North Germanic peoples, stemming from Norse paganism and continuing after the Christianization of Scandinavia, and into the Scandinavian folklore of the modern period. The northernmost extension of Germanic mythology, Norse mythology consists of tales of various deities,... |
Theory Thursday | Most Scathing Reviews | MY GOSH. Have you guys read the **review of Niall Ferguson's *Civilisation: The West and the Rest* in the *London Review of Books*?** It is the most wonderful review I've read in my life. It's called **"[Watch This Man](_URL_0_)" and is by Pankaj Mishra.**
It's brilliant written, full of quotable lines trashing almost the entirety of Ferguson's career (on the UK-born Ferguson's move to the US, Mishra says "he became a wise Greek counsellor to many aspiring Romans"), and all but outright calls him a racist and an imperialist fascist. This paragraph sums up the tone of the review very well:
> Ferguson did not entirely ignore the more egregious crimes of imperialism: the slave trade, the treatment of Australian aborigines or the famines that killed tens of millions across Asia. But he offered a robust defence of British motives, which apparently were humanitarian as much as economic. Transporting millions of indentured Asian labourers to far-off colonies (Indians to the Malay Peninsula, Chinese to Trinidad) was terrible, but ‘we cannot pretend that this mobilisation of cheap and probably underemployed Asian labour to grow rubber and dig gold had no economic value.’ And he challenged the ‘fashionable’ allegation that ‘the British authorities did nothing to relieve the drought-induced famines of the period.’ In any case, ‘whenever the British were behaving despotically, there was almost always a liberal critique of that behaviour from within British society.’ He sounds like the Europeans described by V.S. Naipaul – the grandson of indentured labourers – in *A Bend in the River*, who ‘wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else’, but also ‘wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves’.
*Ouch*. It's paragraph after paragraph of crisp, very British prose providing variations on the general theme of Ferguson's barely-closeted racism and open imperialist ambition, all the while making him sound small-minded, unread, and parochial rather than like a dangerous, jack-booted thug. I end the review almost feeling bad for Ferguson. The most fun I had reading a review all last year. | [
"Ruppert was termed a \"conspiracy theorist\", to which he has said he \"deals with 'conspiracy fact' rather than theory.\" According to \"The Wall Street Journal\", his book \"Crossing the Rubicon\" was a \"favorite among conspiracy theorists.\" After writing it, and subsequently moving on to peak oil, he said \"I... |
why do we cut our hair? is it purely for style and looks or is there health benefits to it? | The only health benefit that immediately comes to mind is cleanliness. Keeping copious amounts of hair clean is difficult, and you don't want to let it become a repository for bacteria and germs. | [
"The cuticle is responsible for much of the mechanical strength of the hair fiber. A healthy cuticle is more than just a protective layer, as the cuticle also controls the water content of the fiber. Much of the shine that makes healthy hair so attractive is due to the cuticle. In the hair industry, the only way to... |
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