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why is it that people with alzheimer's can often hold a conversation and their language but can't remember or don't know answers to basic questions? | OP's question rephrased is essentially "why does brain damage sometimes have an effect on memory and not on cognitive function."
Which I answered before in a previous post.
See here:
_URL_0_ | [
"Language problems are mainly characterised by a shrinking vocabulary and decreased word fluency, leading to a general impoverishment of oral and written language. In this stage, the person with Alzheimer's is usually capable of communicating basic ideas adequately. While performing fine motor tasks such as writing... |
what would happen if the apollo rocket missed the moon? | Tangentially related: Nixon's speech in case Apollo 11 had died on the moon.
_URL_0_ | [
"While the engine failures experienced on Apollo 6 would have resulted in an abort of a crewed lunar mission, NASA considered the flight an invaluable engineering shakedown of the launch vehicle, and no similar major failures occurred on any of the eleven subsequent Saturn V flights.\n",
"BULLET::::- In Episode F... |
what has happened to this subreddit? | This submission is fine, but needs a [META] tag, not [ELI5].
This subreddit is not meant to be a creative-writing exercise, like /r/explainlikeiama, etc. People come in here with the mindset of this is a game where you pretend you're explaining complex stuff to a small child. That is the wrong mindset. The correct mindset is that you should come in here to *help* other redditors--the vast majority of which are between the ages of 15 and 35, I'd say--understand things that sincerely confound them, and all the sources they're finding really aren't helping them get a decent *grounding* of basic understanding. In other words, this subreddit is for explaining *complex and confusing* things to regular people. That is, without assuming they are particularly more knowledgable in math/science/history/whatever than the regular person, without using undefined jargon, without using highly elevated language and so on.
The problem with these Dr. Seuss stories is that analogies usually make things *worse* if you stretch too hard to make them. If you are trying to relate every aspect of, say, how the Internet works to a story of kids in treehouses with strings in cups connected between all of them, you are going to lose out a *lot* on understanding. More effort will be spent trying to figure out what represents what and not actually learning anything about what's going on. Analogies should be well-utilized and the person should *leave* the thread with an understanding of the main basics, instead of some contrived bullshit.
I, personally, discourage any explanations to actual five year olds whenever possible. Make it simple, but make it advanced enough to actually address the part the person is confused about. | [
"In April 2013, the subreddit was threatened with a shutdown by Reddit admins after r/MensRights subscribers gathered personal information on a supposed blogger of feminist issues, and the subreddit's moderators advised members of the subreddit on how to proceed with this 'doxing' without running afoul of site rule... |
Women actively participated in the Spanish Civil War. Just how exceptional were female soldiers at the time? Were there regional differences in their roles? How accepted were they by male colleagues? | [I answered a question](_URL_0_) touching on both *Mujeres Libres* and the *milicianas* a couple of months back, but it sounds like it is covering very similar ground to your class discussion and there is certainly plenty of room for further contributions. Happy to try and address follow ups, but my direct (ie research-led) knowledge here is not extensive, though it's a fascinating topic!
With regards to the specific additional questions you mentioned, I wouldn't necessarily expect vastly different outcomes in Catalonia compared to elsewhere in Spain, as anarchists were just as (or more) prone to seeing politics and war as inherently masculine spheres that excluded substantive female participation. There may be some exceptions - greater progress in collectivising agriculture and industry, for instance, might mean more progress in terms of collectivising childcare for women workers, but I don't know of any specific research looking at how this might have differed across regions. As for exceptionality, this is tricky. The participation of women as fighters was certainly distinctive - as the equally enthralled/horrified international media response makes clear - but was hardly completely unique (women's involvement in the Russian Revolution springs to mind), especially considering the more limited reality of women's involvement at the front. Women's participation in the broader revolution was, I think, less distinctive. Women had been in involved in revolutionary/anti-fascist movements throughout the interwar period across many contexts, though they often also had to struggle against entrenched gender norms that limited the perceived scope of women's political involvement. Broadly speaking though, those activists that went to Spain tended to be disappointed rather than inspired by the extent of women's participation in the Spanish revolution.
& #x200B; | [
"While women had been sporadically involved in combat in Spain, no large organized force of female fighters () had been mobilized prior to the Civil War. Notable women who had participated in the past included Napoleon resistance fighter Agustina de Aragón, Manuela Malasaña and Clara del Rey during the Peninsular W... |
from an evolutionary stance, why are humans bereft of basic defenses:claws, canines, thick hide..and instead runs with diverse body types, no fur, and exposed vital organs? | A common misconception about evolution is that it should "improve things".
In reality, though, it doesn't care where our organs are, or what defences we have. It simply favours animals that *learn to survive*. We have evolved from an ancestor of the Great Apes, for which this body structure was well-suited.
Humans have since done a remarkably good job of surviving/reproducing in our relatively-frail form, and so those are the genes that get passed on to the next generation. | [
"Predators are physically distinguished from humans by their greater height, arthropod-like mandibles and long, hair-like appendages on their heads that are set into their skulls (popularly perceived as \"dreadlocks\"). Their bodies are resilient to damage, capable of recovering from multiple gunshot wounds and rad... |
even if the us doesn't default on its debt, why can't our credit rating be downgraded anyway for coming so close to default? | I believe that it can be, and it was recently discussed that it may happen from one of the three (?) agencys that controls such things. | [
"Fitch Ratings warned that an extended shutdown might lead to a downgrade in the U.S.'s Triple-A credit rating if lawmakers were unable to pass a budget or manage the debt ceiling. That in turn would make borrowing more costly for companies and American households, because it is the benchmark for many other lines o... |
what does audio mastering exactly do to make music sound better on every sound system? | Audio is first recorded, processed and mixed.
Once the audio mixer has done her/his job; they will give the mixed audio files to the mastering engineer.
Well mastered audio should sound good on many different systems. So the one doing the mastering will listen on many different systems to see how it sounds. Most humans can tell if a song sounds bad, a mastering engineer needs to know what they can do to make a bad sounding song sound good.
As an example:
A band recorded a new song at a home studio. The studio does not absorb some audio frequencies well. These frequencies echo around the room a bit too long (this may be called room reverb).
Each track (vocals, guitar etc) will have a bit too much of this those frequencies due to the room reverb.
Listening to each track individually, there may be little or no problem.
The problem may become more noticeable when all the tracks are mixed together.
The engineer may decide that those particular frequencies should be reduced to increase the clarity of the overall mix.
Another part of the mastering process (particularly pop songs) is to make the music sound loud. People like loud music | [
"Daniel Hertz \"Master Class\" audio processing software (for use with Apple computers) provides more analog sound and feeling from digital sources, and allows the user to match the recordings to the system by a six-band equalizer (the digital version on the legendary Cello Audio Palette). Daniel Hertz position is ... |
Scythian Controversy | The trick is that the Scythians were a nomadic group. Their "homeland" was a wide swath of steppe north of the Black Sea, from the Danube to the Don. They did not settle in one place, but rather roamed around and occasionally raided neighboring territories.
Another problem is that we really don't have much in terms of Scythian texts, so we don't really have their origin story from their point of view, the way we do with other groups. Most of our information comes either from Greek historians such as Herodotus and Hesiod, as well as archaeology. What archaeology tells us is that the Scythians are very similar to (practically indistinguishable from) the Cimmerians, another steppe group that has linguistic ties to the Iranian language tree. Scholars believe the Iranian tie mainly because of the personal and place names of Cimmerian and Scythian people and places that have been recorded in other languages. We can see the names the Assyrians recorded of Cimmerians, and we see that they exhibit typical traits of Iranian languages, just like in modern times we can see the name John MacDonald and know that it's a Scottish name, or David Cohen and know that it's a Jewish name. That's how we figure out the language family of languages we don't have a ton of written evidence for, we compare the personal names we have in other languages and compare them to the language families we do know.
And because we have good evidence from this that the Cimmerians are derived from Iranian-speaking peoples, and good archaeological evidence that the Cimmerians and the Scythians share a very similar cultures, there are a number of very strong ties between the Scythians and the Iranian-speaking peoples.
The last point I want to make is that "Iranian language" does not necessarily mean that they came from the modern geographical region currently occupied by the political entity known as Iran. It's [an entire branch](_URL_3_) of the [Indo-European language tree](_URL_0_), which includes a lot of languages all over Central and Southern Asia. The specific part of the Indo-Iranian tree that Scythian falls under also includes Bactrian (spoken in ancient Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan) and Khwarezmian (spoken in ancient Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan). So it's not actually tied to the geographical area of Iran.
In terms of origins, the exact truth is unclear. There are many opinions because there just isn't enough evidence to be conclusive. There are a lot of Central Asian people groups who spoke Indo-Iranian languages. Where the Scythians were before they became Scythians is unclear. The three origin myths of them that we have are from Herodotus and are contradictory. The two strongest theories are that they either came from the steppes of Inner Asia or came from the area of the Volga-Ural steppes. Either way, I don't think it's accurate to say they came from "Asia" and that term has a lot of connotations with China and Mongolia, and the evidence seems to point to a much more central Asian origin for the Scythians. Same with Germanic and Celtic origins, I don't think the evidence is there. Israelite origins are ridiculous.
If you want to read about it, I recommend [The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, Volume 1 by Denis Sinor](_URL_1_) and [Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present](_URL_2_) | [
"Historically, the term Lothian referred to a province encompassing most of what is now southeastern Scotland. In the 7th century it came under the control of the Anglian kingdom of Bernicia, the northern part of the later kingdom of Northumbria, but the Angles' grip on Lothian was quickly weakened following the Ba... |
What is the surface of the moon made of? | Regolith is the correct term for the material covering the outer surface of the moon. It can be considered as soil, dust and broken rock typically 1.0cm or smaller. It is not bedrock which exists on the surface as well mainly where the regolith isn't able to hold due to the angle of the terrain.
It comprises of 42% oxygen, 21% silicon, 12% iron and other elements including calcium, aluminium and magnesium.
| [
"The surface of the Moon has many features, including mountains and valleys, craters, and \"maria\"—wide flat areas that look like seas from a distance but are probably solidified molten rock. Some of these features are listed.\n",
"The surface of the moon is covered with lunar regolith, a mixture of fine dust an... |
what does it mean to "re-mortgage" your home? | "re-mortgage" is not a commonly used term. You could be referring to two different things:
** Refinancing**
Years ago I bought a house at 7% interest, with a mortgage from Bank A. Since then, interest rates have gone down, so I went to Bank B and had them loan me enough money to pay off Bank A. So now I owe Bank B, but only at 4% interest. You have to pay fees (~$2000) to get a new loan, but a lower interest rate can make up for that quickly.
**Second Mortgage**
I wanted to pay off my car, but I needed a lot of money to do that. The value of my first house went up a lot since I bought it...this increase in value is called *equity*. I went to Bank C and have them give me a loan, using the equity of my house as collateral. I now have a two loans on my house, the second one at a higher interest rate. | [
"When refinancing, if the homeowner wants to refinance the first mortgage and keep the second mortgage, the homeowner has to request a subordination from the second lender to let the new first lender step into the first lien holder position.\n",
"The process of remortgaging does not usually involve moving house o... |
How did commoners become monarchs? | I would question your implied premise that hereditary rule is generally exceptional or regarded as oppressive. Hereditary chieftaincy is known from prehistory and observed in societies all around the world. It's about as close a thing to instinct as anyone could label anything in human social practice. Moreover, what people want from political systems is reliability and predictability -- hereditary systems have the fabulous virtues that you *don't have to fight over who is boss* and *the government has an inherent bias to long-term thinking*.
| [
"At the start of the 20th century, the first monarchs of several newly independent nations were elected by parliaments: Norway is the prime example. Previously, following precedent set in newly independent Greece, new nations without a well-established hereditary royal family often chose their own monarchs from amo... |
What are the historical origins of Easter? | There is no evidence that Easter is linked to Ishtar, this is a false etymology. Here is a previous [thread on the topic](_URL_0_). | [
"According to anthropologist Krystal D'Costa, there is no evidence to connect the tradition of Easter eggs with Ostara. Eggs became a symbol in Christianity associated with rebirth as early as the 1st century AD, via the iconography of the Phoenix egg. D'Costa theorizes that eggs became associated with Easter speci... |
why do vehicles with internal combustion engines have to be turned off when fueling to avoid explosions? | I think there have been cases of static sparks from clothing igniting the gas, but it's extremely rare. Chances are that nothing at all will happen if you refuel with your engine running, it's just that gas stations prefer to be cautious; that being said, it's best to just shut it off. | [
"Once ignited, combustion occurs very quickly. When auto-ignition occurs too early or with too much chemical energy, combustion is too fast and high in-cylinder pressures can destroy an engine. For this reason, HCCI is typically operated at lean overall fuel mixtures.\n",
"The combustion instabilities can be prov... |
If a four story building crushes, who is more likely to live: people on the 1st floor or the 4th? (xpost r/askreddit) | Sad to be cliche, but it depends..
If the building is crushing under controlled demolition, or if the building was structurally weak and was crushing for example in a quake, then it would most likely collapse in place. All the floors would be coming down in sandwich style, and you would be a lot more likely to survive if you were on top floor.
But, if the building was very rigid, the reverse is true. Maybe the ground liquidified during an earthquake, or maybe there was a landslide nearby, and the whole structure just topples down. Then the top floor habitants would be out of luck, and the bottom floor people would most likely come out with minor injuries.
| [
"One-plus-five, also known as five-over-one, is a type of multi-family residential building commonly found in urban areas of North America. The mid-rise buildings are normally constructed with four or five wood frame stories above a concrete podium (usually housing retail or resident amenity space). The one-plus-fi... |
how do car dealerships make money during "employee pricing sales"? | Not surprisingly its all BS. Not only are there at least 2 sets of numbers for the cost of every car they buy manufacturers pay them what is call "hold back". So after the dealer sells a car the company sends them a check for say $500. But it is unlikely the dealer is selling the car for what he paid in any event.
Add to that there are going to be a few folks that get suckered into paying more or getting those over-priced options added by the dealer. Then there is the finance scam. There have been periods of time I know GM made more profit from their finance division than from the manufacturer of cars. | [
"Employee pricing is a selling strategy launched in 2005 by the auto industry in order to attract customers by using the discounted prices that auto industry employees pay for new cars rather than the sticker price MSRP. The program was first offered that year by General Motors, and later followed by Ford, Chrysler... |
What did Roman Legionaries do in times of peace? | I am not an expert on this but I'll give it a go!
Unsurprisingly it depends not only on the time but also the place we are talking about, e.g. a soldier in a relatively peaceful province would have a different experience to someone stationed in uncharted territory like Wales or Northern England, but I'll try to outline some basic characteristics.
If I'm not mistaken legionaries were not officially allowed to marry or have families, and would spend most of their time as a relatively close-knit group (speaking a common dialect, the *servo militaris* or 'camp Latin') and not mingling much with the indigenous population of the province they were stationed in. In Roman Britain for example, the military was pretty much sealed off within a vast military zone governed by martial law that civilians generally weren't allowed to enter from outside. Within this zone there were a few smaller towns (*vici*) that were connected by a road network, and soldiers could be allowed leave (*commeatus*) to go there for trade or recreation, but that's pretty much it. (Similar to the area around the Wall in Game of Thrones, if that means anything to you.) It is important to remember that even in times of peace, Roman soldiers in the provinces were still occupying armies and often a tool of state control. They played an important role in administering the provinces throughout the Empire's existence because, crucially, they were a largely literate and already well-organized body.
Religious worship was an important part of military life and soldiers had their own religious culture, clearly favouring specific deities over others. [Mithraism](_URL_0_) is probably the best example for this; being a purely male oriental mystery cult made it a perfect match for tight-knit military communities in far away lands, and outside of Rome it was basically a purely military phenomenon. Thus worship and building shrines would fill some of a soldier's free time.
Building is a good keyword here: much of the Pax Romana was achieved by a strategy of pushing forward into foreign territory and consolidating gains by erecting garrisons (and also building forts over capacity as part of a 'smoke and mirrors' strategy), so legionaries spent a lot - and seriously, I mean A LOT of time building and maintaining forts and camps, day in and day out over weeks and months. (Edit: For example, it is estimated that constructing the fortress at Inchtuthil in Scotland alone required a total of 16.5 million man-hours) Within garrisons, soldiers also had specialised duty assignments such as working in workshops, building bath-houses, working at the hospital, working clay, etc.; because of this garrisons were surprisingly self-sufficient in some respects.
We also know from the [Vindolanda tablets](_URL_1_) - probably the single best source of military everyday life as seen 'from below' - that soldiers would maintain personal friendships: gambling together or sending letters to fellow soldiers who had been transferred to other posts. Soldiers also organized in patronage networks or social 'clubs' (*collegia*).
Finally, Roman legions were regularly rotated between provinces and thus soldiers would spend a considerable amount of time travelling.
I am sure there are many other factors but I think the ones I mentioned above - religious worship, administration, construction, duty assignments, interpersonal relationships, travelling, sometimes recreation - would fill a fair share of the average soldier's time while not engaged in actual fighting. Most of the information I used comes straight from David Mattingly's [*Imperial Possession*](_URL_2_), which draws together a wealth of information on life in Roman Britain from an everyday life perspective! I would highly recommend it.
**Edited for spelling and some additional information.** | [
"\"Optiones\", Roman officers at the rear of a formation, had many essential roles outside of battle. However, during battle, their task was to prevent legionaries from routing. Carrying a staff with a ball-end, an \"optio\" would force legionaries fleeing from battle back into formation. Leading at the front, \"ce... |
how did real estate segregation shape the history of the city of Detroit? | Strongly suggest reading Thomas Sugrue he writes extensively about including the building of the 8 Mile Wall
_URL_1_
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
_URL_0_ | [
"The 1950s and 1960s also marked a time of enormous social change. Thanks in-part to favorable Supreme Court decisions and subsequent federal fair housing legislation, Detroit's black citizenry was no longer restricted to the lower east side and near west end. Urban renewal and freeway construction resulted in the ... |
A better understanding of the movement of heavy industry and its effects within the Soviet Union during WWII. | Apologies for the rushed response but I'll expand on [an old comment](_URL_0_) to quickly address your points. Let me know if you've any questions on the below and I'll find time to respond to them.
Ultimately the evacuation campaign managed to salvage some 13% of the USSR's pre-war industrial assets. This is not an significant number. Yet before the war the occupied territories had accounted for a third (33%) of Soviet industrial production, meaning that, at a stroke, the invasion destroyed approximately 20% of the Soviet industrial base. These are the high-level figures, by key industries it was much worse: the lost lands had once contained 63% of all coal production, 68% of pig iron, 58% of steel, 60% of aluminium, 80% of sugar, 38% of grain, etc, etc. It was a devastating blow.
Re-establishing this industrial base obviously took time. In this there was also some success: on reaching their destinations (ie the Urals, Siberia or Central Asia) a factory could be operational again in a matter of 4-6 weeks. This is obviously the best case but most enterprises were producing again by mid-1942. The circumstance were obviously different but the rate of factory construction during the war years (approx 780 plants per year) was on par with the Second and Third Five Year Plans (900 and 860 respectively). The Soviets were well used to throwing up basic industrial towns.
Understandably, the actual state of the reconstructed factories was not ideal. Most were built from scratch and necessitated laying down of new infrastructure, allocation of new labour forces, etc. Accommodation and such comforts were not high on the priority list: cramped and unheated worker barracks would not have been the worst conditions. Some ten million (!) workers were evacuated alongside the machinery in 1941 but there was also a need to identify, train and deploy large workforces in these new, and often isolated, factory locations.
So the Soviet war machine did keep ticking along though, albeit only just. Munition production actually increased year on year throughout the war (and exceeded German production). If there was a shortage at the front then it was due to a transportation network on the brink of collapse and the sheer desperation of the fighting. This resilience was a product of the ability to mobilise the civilian economy: by 1942 the Soviets were devoting an astonishing 66% of GDP to defence *despite the overall total having shrunk by almost a third since the invasion began*. No other power came close to squeezing their civilian populations like this and ultimately it wasn't sustainable - military victories allowed Moscow to relax its grip on the economy in 1943.
What may have saved the Soviet Union was that by 1941 it was experienced in such large-scale mobilisation campaigns. Stalinist planning had always operated by crisis, the biggest difference was perhaps that this one wasn't self-inflicted. Grossly inefficient in peacetime, this chaotic 'planning' it came into its own in 1941. The dire conditions greeting workers in the new factory sites in Siberia 1941 would not have been much different from those encountered during the FFYP - hurriedly constructed sheds and cold, austere dormitories.
As for movement in the post-war years, it depends. The demobilisation phase unleashed a wave of movement across the country. Workers were probably more tied down in this than soldiers but the need for reconstruction and conversion to civilian production would have enabled many to travel back west. That said, many would have stayed as the Urals defence industry established during the war became a permanent feature of the Soviet economy. Similarly, the mass mobilisation of peasants into these factories (and the Red Army) produced a significant increase in urbanisation in post-war society.
Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any questions.
**Sources**
Mark Harrison has already been mentioned. Much of this was drawn from his essay on the war in Davies' *The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union*. Also relevant is his *Stalinism and the Economics of Wartime* and *Resource Mobilisation for WWII*. I also drew from Alec Nove's *An Economic History of the USSR* and Eugene Zaleski's *Stalinist Planning for Economic Growth* | [
"An economic turning point for the better came in 1943, when gross industrial production increased by 17% compared with 1942. In the Urals and Siberia, metallurgical plants were being built and expanded at an accelerated pace. In 1944, the volume of industrial production when compared with the volume of industrial ... |
Are there "dyes" for non-visible wavelengths? | [IR Dyes](_URL_1_)
[UV Dyes](_URL_0_) | [
"Many dyes make use of conjugated electron systems to absorb visible light, giving rise to strong colors. For example, the long conjugated hydrocarbon chain in beta-carotene leads to its strong orange color. When an electron in the system absorbs a photon of light of the right wavelength, it can be promoted to a hi... |
How long did it take Columbus to realize he wasn't in Asia? | The real issue is how good Columbus was at math. By the time of his voyage, it was well agreed upon that the world was round. The actual circumfrence of the world was still a matter of some debate.
See, Columbus wasn't just setting off west and hoping for the best. He knew the *latitude* at which some parts of the Indies were found (keep in mind that the continents were not all fully mapped, which would be centuries later - there were still vast unknown coastlines during the time of Newton). So he set off on a western heading, after traveling down to the latitude which he expected to hit Asia at, eventually (this was known as 'running down an westing'). He then tried his luck with the winds to reach Asia before mutiny or starvation or other disaster struck.
Other people, who estimated the circumference of the earth differently than him, thought this was crazy - because they *knew* the world was bigger than he thought it was, and they *knew* he just didn't have enough supplies to make it all the way across. What's more, they were right. Sailors barely survived the pacific leg of the Spanish treasure fleet's journeys, which were still occurring two and almost three centuries later (many died, and most would lose the majority of teeth in their head) - and because of the same longitude problem, they did the same thing in reverse - pick a latitude, push east along that latitude, and hope for the best (they were traveling from Asia to the Americas, however).
Had the New World not existed, and Columbus instead would have had to push through all the way to Asia, he would most certainly have perished.
Anyway, from this, you can surmise two things about him: One, he was pretty brave, and two, he was good at math for his time and place, but not great. So I think, at first, he believed himself to have discovered far-flung eastern shores of Asia, instead of eastern shores of a New World. He *would* have been able to determine longitude once he reached dry, stable land... probably. Without an accurate timepiece to travel across the sea with (an impossibility at the time), it's possible that even on dry land he couldn't determine longitude (this is the limits of my knowledge, wikipedia might have something on it though).
But, even having a way to calculate longitude, that assumes he knew something somewhat accurate about the circumference of the world, and even if he did know something somewhat accurate, he could have simply assumed that Asia was really, really big.
Odds are he was working off of the flawed calculations of Ptolemy (which, at the time, was what cartographers based their maps off of -ironic, because lots of other thinkers had figured it out to a much higher accuracy). Ptolemy's calculations were somewhere around 19k miles for the circumference of the world. Because of this, Columbus probably thought he had around 5k miles less to travel around the world than he actually did.
Most people who heard about his discoveries realized what he'd actually done, however, which was find a whole new place, with tons of natural resources to exploit. They surmised (correctly) that there must be a western side to this new land mass, with another ocean in between. I think it was around 20-25 years until the Pacific was actually discovered, though.
So did Columbus buy into the whole New World thing at some point? Maybe, but probably not for a while. And maybe not ever. He had such a long term desire to sail west to the Indies that he might never have allowed himself to realize he'd failed (in his mind) in accomplishing his goal.
EDIT: Just decided to fact check myself and apparently [there's a whole article on your question](_URL_0_). EDIT THE SECOND: Actually, it's not really about your question. After the first page it's more a discussion on how Columbus enslaved and pillaged in the name of bringing christ and civilization to a far off land. They don't really resolve the issue on his belief, and they don't even talk about the longitude issue (which I really think is the crux of your question).
**EDIT THE THIRD**: Okay, since being asked a few questions, I've been looking up this stuff, and I have found what I consider to be a *definitive* answer: Columbus *knew* it was not the Indies, but he *lied* to protect his fortune.
First, let me explain a bit more about longitude - which, as I thought, was really the heart of this whole thing. Before accurate timekeeping, you figured out longitude using lunar eclipses. If an eclipse starts at 10 PM in one city, and at 2 AM in another city, and they're on the same latitude, you know the cities are four hours apart. Viola, longitude! (How do you know what the times are, accurately? Using a Nocturnal, which, when you can see the North Star, can accurately tell you what time is midnight. Sailors used them all the time back then.) The problem with this method is you have to obtain data from two different locations, which is impossible when you're out in the middle of an ocean, five hundred years ago.
Anyway, Columbus took with him a book accurately predicting eclipses, *along with the times of the eclipses*. So by his second voyage, he definitely *knew* what his longitude was, using an eclipse from 1493. But the primary sources conflict as to what he determined. In Columbus's *Book of Prophecies* - yes, [really](_URL_1_) - he says he was five and a half hours away. *However*, within less than a year, he testifies to the King and Queen that he was **nine** hours away!
Why lie about his longitude? Because the monarchs had made him Admiral and Viceroy of the newly discovered lands *in the Indies* - but that wasn't where he was, that wasn't what he had discovered. So he lied. And he even got everyone on board his second voyage to sign a document swearing that Cuba was on the coastline of Asia.
Sources: I knew most of this except a little of the particular facts I mention in the third edit, which I found in [this essay](_URL_2_) - and honestly, it goes into most of this in very particularized detail. | [
"Columbus had no accurate means to determine how far he had travelled West on the globe. He observed the lunar eclipses of 15 September 1494 near Hispaniola (Dominican Republic), and that of 29 February 1504 from Jamaica. In the latter case he reported in his journal that Jamaica was 7 hours and 15 minutes from Cad... |
why does this pattern appear when you microwave cd's? image included | CDs have an aluminum coating that acts as an antenna for the microwave radiation, ionizing particles around the CD and forming glowing plasma and sparks. The radiation causes a chemical reaction which causes the aluminum to retract. | [
"Though most of the pattern is removed from PAL and NTSC-encoded signals with a comb filter (designed to segregate the two signals where the luma spectrum may overlap into the spectral space used by the chroma) by modern displays, some can still be left in certain parts of the picture. Such parts are usually sharp ... |
Why do we need a Higgs boson to impart mass to particles? | So there are these things called *bosons.* What they are and now they work aren't important right now; just know that they're a thing.
Four elementary bosons have been conclusively identified. There's the photon, which is the boson of the electromagnetic field. Then there are the W and Z bosons, which are related to radioactivity. And finally there's the gluon about which we don't care right now.
The photon and the W and Z bosons are close cousins. They're actually part of the same underlying … well, *thing,* since going into more detail than that is more than we want to get into right now. Just consider the photon and the W and Z bosons to be the fruit of the same electroweak tree.
Except the photon is *massless,* while the W and Z bosons aren't. This is a mystery. Photons and W and Z bosons are very closely related, so there has to be some *reason* why the weak bosons have mass while the photon doesn't.
The Higgs mechanism is what gives the W and Z bosons mass. All of space is filled with a scalar field, called the Higgs field. The W and Z fields are coupled to the Higgs field; the electromagnetic field isn't. So the weak bosons have this property we call "mass" — which is distinct from all the *other* things we also call "mass" — while the photon doesn't.
The only way to detect the Higgs field experimentally is by looking for its excited state, which is what the Higgs boson is. | [
"It is worth noting that the Higgs field does not \"create\" mass out of nothing (which would violate the law of conservation of energy), nor is the Higgs field responsible for the mass of all particles. For example, approximately 99% of the mass of baryons (composite particles such as the proton and neutron), is d... |
why is whole wheat flour considered healthier than enriched flour? | 1.) Whole grain flour has a higher fiber content. It's much denser in nutrition.
2.) It has a much lower glycemic index rating. This means that it doesn't spike your blood sugar the way a white flour does.
3.) Vitamin content is much higher in riboflavin, folate, B-1, B-3, and B-5
This is a very easy topic to Google and because it's a health question most health websites are written toward the masses. There really is no reason to post this question on Reddit. | [
"There has been much controversy regarding the benefits of enriched flour in relation to those of whole-wheat flour. Although enriched flour has similar amounts of vitamins to unrefined flour products, it does not have the same nutritional benefits of whole-wheat flour. One of the most significant differences is th... |
[Physics] An astronaut leaves earth traveling at 0.9c, comes back, and he's aged less than everyone else. Since he and the Earthlings had identical speeds relative to one another, why is it that his clock experiences time dilation, as opposed to the Earthlings' clocks? | Because the astronaut is not in an inertial reference frame (he accelerates when he turns around to come back) which breaks the symmetry (so there's no basis for claiming the two perspectives are interchangeable). More discussion is [on wikipedia](_URL_0_) | [
"At higher speeds, the time on board will run even slower, so the astronaut could travel to the center of the Milky Way (30,000 light years from Earth) and back in 40 years ship-time. But the speed according to Earth clocks will always be less than 1 light year per Earth year, so, when back home, the astronaut will... |
Are there any other examples of race specific diseases? | There are literally a ton:
You already mentioned Tay-Sachs, Sickle cell disease, and hemophilia.
A couple more that I can think of off the top of my head...
Cystic fibrosis in Europeans, hemochromatosis in Celts, lactose intolerance in Asians, MS in Western Europeans as compared to Eastern, and I'm sure there are thousands of others.
Here's a wiki article where you can start further reading:
_URL_0_ | [
"Some diseases are more prevalent in some populations identified as races due to their common ancestry. Thus, people of African and Mediterranean descent are found to be more susceptible to sickle-cell disease while cystic fibrosis and hemochromatosis are more common among European populations. Some physicians clai... |
Are we seriously looking at all the possible "man-made" explanations for cancer? Should we be? | Not an expert etc. But think about this. We're living longer than we have in the past. Cancer is correlated with age. It seems only natural that as the population pushes to older ages of life (not dying from smallpox, polio, influenza, hunger.........) that more people will have cancer in their lifetime. What would be an interesting study, and I don't know how/if it could be carried out would be the rates of cancer for people under, say 40, throughout history. | [
"Steven Novella writes, in Skepticblog, about the general misunderstanding and sensationalizing of cancer research that typically accompanies a conspiratorial mindset. He points out that cures for cancer, rather than being hidden, are not the cures they are initially touted to be by the media and either result in a... |
where did the misconception that muscle pain after exercise caused by lactic acid originate? | The whole misunderstanding dates back to a 1922 study by two British scientists, Otto Meyerhoff and Archibald V. Hill. In their Nobel-Prize winning research investigating the energy capabilities of carbohydrate metabolism in skeletal muscle, they suggested that lactic acid is produced in humans as a side reaction to glycolysis (the breakdown of glucose to fuel muscle activity).
And that’s essentially how it’s been explained ever since: Lactic acid is a sort of residue from your muscles burning fuel, and its buildup is what causes the burn and ache athletes commonly experience during and after intense effort. Because after all, acid burns, right?
What recent studies have found fairly conclusively is that while lactic acid—or more accurately, lactate—coincides with “acidosis” in muscles, it’s not the cause | [
"The onset of acidosis during periods of intense exercise is commonly attributed to accumulation of lactic acid. From this reasoning, the idea of lactate production being a primary cause of muscle fatigue during exercise has been widely adopted. A closer, mechanistic analysis of lactate production under anaerobic c... |
what's the difference between stocks, bonds and mutual funds? | A stock is a share of a company. It changes in value as the company does.
A bond is where someone takes out a loan and promises to pay it back with interest. You buy part of the debt so that you get a share of their payments plus interest.
A mutual fund is where someone buys a bunch of different stocks and then sells shares of the pool. The value of the shares goes up and down with the value of the stocks that make up the fund. | [
"Stocks and bonds are competing asset classes for investors. When stocks yield more than bonds, investors are better off investing in stocks. When funds flow from bonds into stocks on a large scale, the yield on bonds should increase and the yield on stocks decrease, until the Fed model equilibrium is reached.\n",
... |
Why did the Voortrekkers establish separate republics in South Africa? | Hoo boy, this is a fairly big one (for me), and I don't have a huge amount of time to properly flesh it out. I'm also not in my office, so I ~~don't~~ [only now] have the ~~important page~~ cites in the Ross/Mbenga/Hamilton edited *Cambridge History of SA* (vol 1, 2009) and Hermann Giliomee's *The Afrikaners* (2009) to discuss it. [edit 3: Giliomee's chapter 6 touches on the political and social order, but oddly is silent on the failed union perhaps because it was so doomed and it doesn't make for a sympathetic nationalist story. Chapter 7 of the *Cambridge History* does as well, but is similarly quiet about ZAR/OVS relations though it details intra-ZAR issues. F. A. F. Wichmann's 1941 *Archives Year Book* on M. W. Pretorius and the creation of central government in the ZAR may still be relevant, but it's in Afrikaans.] But basically your question seems to be "why did they establish two republics and not one?" If you're asking why they established republics at all, that's another animal, but I am not reading this that way. I am sorry if this is a mess; I'm aware I am leaving out a few things (like the effect of the two different Conventions in 1852 and 1854, Hendrik Potgieter's quirks and leadership struggles in the 1840s, the wars with Moshoeshoe, and whatnot) but this should give you the heart of the matter:
So why were the Oranje Vrijstaat (OVS) and the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) the two entities? The first thing to realize is that the ZAR didn't even exist until relatively late--not meaningfully until after the Burgher Wars, honestly--and the OVS didn't cover all of the same lands it would later; it lost some and gained others. Effectively, the various trek parties initially actually produced a LOT of republics, and occasionally cleft off of one another to produce more. Lydenburg (Ohrigstad) and Zoutpansberg (Schoemansdal) were the most notable in the Transvaal outside of Potchefstroom itself. So the entire apparatus was rickety and fractious in the best of times. For an administration at Bloemfontein or Potchefstroom (later Pretoria) to claim control was more notional than real. What's more, each Republic existed around one or another trek leader or sub-leader, and so each had its own pecking order, which made assigning or imposing subordinate roles really difficult given the massive size of the Highveld. There is another factor, in that many of the later arrivals north of the Vaal had trekked secondarily from Natal, so they weren't quite as established or centralized as their brethren to the south.
[edit 2/sidebar: The concept of unified "Boer nationalism" or "Afrikaner identity" simply did not exist in the sense it would after the SA War. Keep in mind that the *Voortrekker* parties were not only smaller than the Afrikaner population who elected to stay put in the Cape Colony, but they were even smaller than the aggregate numbers of much-maligned *natrekkers* who moved up to the Republics *after* the work of establishment was complete. So there were a lot of fault lines within Boer societies, as well as between them.]
So holding control over long distances with so many independent authorities was a bit of a problem. But despite that highly devolved system, the OVS and ZAR *did* have a period where they flirted with unification. They even had the same chief executive, M. W. Pretorius [edit: son of Trek party leader Andries Pretorius], for a while in 1860 following a period when there was actually shooting between them, and when Lydenburg and Zoutpansberg initially supported the Free Staters against Potchefstroom! The representatives of the outlying Republics and communities were mainly concerned that the Free State Boers would basically take over any union through numbers and superior access to the Cape; within the ZAR however trade routes ran via Ohrigstad and south of the Zoutpansberg towards Lourenco Marques (Maputo) which promised more influence within an abbreviated Transvaal for those two centers (ZPB and Lydenburg).
What's more, Pretorius got his office in the Free State in part by colluding with certain local mercantile interests and even engaging in military raids (with Commandant Paul Kruger, no less) in 1857 and 1858--which did not endear him to many south of the Vaal. The ZAR parties forced him to give up an executive post in 1860, which he did for three years, before returning to the ZAR and again taking up its executive post (and later Presidency). Although Pretorius tried to complete the union while president of the OVS, by 1863 the position of the Free State area had improved to the point that the grievances on both sides were further heightened, so the effort was abandoned. Effectively the only way to satisfy the two parties was to agree to respect the division of territory between the two states.
It may feel a bit weird, in light of the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand and the defense arrangements of the 1890s, to think of the ZAR as the weak and dilapidated entity compared to a strong and vibrant Free State, but that was the case in the 1860s and 1870s. The "Old Transvaal" is probably my favorite period and region in SA history, because the ZAR was an utterly inefficient, corrupt, combative, and misaligned contraption that had boundless ambition but very little real power until the gold came along and made them *'n bietjie gek* (a little crazy). It is therefore very, very entertaining to study.
[Addendum: There were other republics, too. Natal (Natalia) started as another Republic, and its dispersal led to Zoutpansberg arguably. Boer landhunters were also good at making additional republics (Stellaland, Goshen, De Nieuwe Republiek) in odd places, as late as the 1890s (the *second* "Klein Vry Staat" in Swaziland on that one). Making extra republics, and then trying to graft them onto the ZAR, was something of a sport in the late 19th century. I blame the fact that the Boers hadn't yet discovered "the rugby."]
[Addendum 2: If there are specific questions connected to Pretorius and the very dis-unified Transvaal of the 1845-1865 period, I can probably answer them. In particular, the various parties in the area were often little more than appendages of much more powerful African kingdoms--Venda and Pedi "used" Boer allies in their conflicts, and Boers couldn't do anything in the east and north without Swazi help until after 1895, and even then they usually enlisted it anyway. It was a really really weird world, and often didn't have much in common with the Free State other than simple origins and status claims relative to Britain and its SA colonies.]
**TL;DR Local and regional rivalries around major centers of Trek party authority eventually coalesced into two main camps, although a few people did seek to unify them in the 1850s and 1860s.** | [
"The Treaty of Vereeniging was signed on 31 May 1902. The treaty ended the existence of the ZAR and the Orange Free State as independent Boer republics and placed them within the British Empire. On 20 May 1903, an Inter Colonial Council was established to manage the colonies of the British Government. The Boers wer... |
¿Is there a reason why there isn't planets with orbits closer to the sun than Mercury? | No there is no real reason why one system or another will have closer in planets or not. It is dictated by the chaotic behaviour (short term close encounters or long term secular variations) of planetary migration which is not very well understood (at least as far as I am concerned) or constrained.
You do have to be careful though in the bias of observed close in planets. Radial velocity and transit methods favour close in planets (due to larger wobble of the star and shorter orbital period respectively). So we have more observations of close in than far out.
| [
"Despite being closer to the Sun than Venus, Mercury is not tidally locked because it has entered a 3:2 spin–orbit resonance due to the eccentricity of its orbit. Mercury's prograde rotation is slow enough that due to its eccentricity, its angular orbital velocity exceeds its angular rotational velocity near perihe... |
What happened to the German WW1 "Paris gun" after the war? | The Pariskanone was supposed to be turned over to the Allies following the armistice but never was. The design was eventually modified as a railway-gun for use in the East during the Second World War, and this cannon was call "Big Gustav." Here's a really interesting excerpt from William Manchester's 'The Arms of Krupp' about the Pariskanone:
"What made the Pariskanone extraordinary was its range. Originally it had been designed as a naval gun. In the autumn of 1914 Rausenberger, working at Meppen with a primitive model, had perfected a barrel which would fire thirty-one miles. In forty-one months of experimentation he had increased this to eighty-one miles. At the same time he had improved its accuracy, so that although the Laon sailient was seventy-seven miles northeast of the capital, the first shell burst in the very center of the Place de la Republique. The German navy still regarded the weapon as its own, and it was serviced by a crew of sixty seamen commanded by a full admiral. All had been carefully trained for this one task, for their 150-ton prodigy required exceptional care. The thirty-pount disparity in shells was deliberate. The sailors had been taught that each projectile must be "vorgewarmt" (pre-heated) in an underground chamber before firing, and that after every round the barrel must be slung from blocks and "gerade gebogen" (straightened). But even the most painstaking attention to detail could not repeal metallurgical laws. Firing expanded the bore slightly. Therefore the tapered projectiles were numbered, each slightly longer and thicker than the last. The caliber was never constant. Although officially listed at 8.3 inches, in practice it varied between 8.2 and 8.4 inches. After 65 firings a barrel was useless and had to be replaced. Appointing a flag officer to one gun may seem absurd, but he presided over an instrument panel as large as a warship's. Extensive exercises in higher mathematics preceded the launching of every shell. The commanding officer and his staff pored over last-minute data on atmospheric pressure, humidity, temperature, and the curvature of the earth's surface. Because no artillery observer could see eighty miles, reports from spies within Paris told them whether or not they were enjoying good shooting, and if not, where they were off. When countdown time came, a special telephone alerted thirty sounding batteries, who opened fire to confuse Allied teams trying to pinpoint the Pariskanone's location, and forty Fokker pursuit planes were held in readiness on a nearby airfield against the possibility that the teams might succeed anyhow and send bombers over."
The gun was devastating but militarily ineffective. It ate up resources for little gain, and because its target was civilians, in the words of Gert von Klass "it only made Germany more hated than ever." | [
"The Paris Gun () was the name given to a type of German long-range siege gun, several of which were used to bombard Paris during World War I. They were in service from March to August 1918. When the guns were first employed, Parisians believed they had been bombed by a high-altitude Zeppelin, as the sound of neith... |
how do film cameras work and how do you edit film? | Old school film editing used to involve physical manipulation of the film. Splicing, compositing, overlays; all of these are terms brought over from the days of analogue editing.
Using the Hateful 8 as a more modern example; they will shoot the whole film with a 70mm camera; get the film digitised into the computer for editing and compositing; then, possibly; print it BACK to 70mm film for the Master print...
I will probably have buggered something up in the process, so feel free to correct me, fellow redditors :) | [
"Before the film is edited, the images themselves may be altered to create special effects frame-by-frame. Editing can be accomplished with almost any digital video program. However, most seasoned brickfilmers prefer to use dedicated stop motion software, such as the free MonkeyJam, Helium Frog Animator, and Heron ... |
why is it difficult for microsoft or other organizations to track down highly wanted hacking groups such as lizard squad, known for turning off the xbox live network and forcing a plane to land? | A lot of proxy servers are standing between Microsoft and the hackers. They'd have to gain acces to every single proxy while the hack is going on to figure out where the signal is coming from. By then the hackers have most likely detected there aproach and paused there attack. | [
"Professional hackers, either working on their own or employed by the government or military service, can find computer systems with vulnerabilities lacking the appropriate security software. Once those vulnerabilities are found, they can infect systems with malicious code and then remotely control the system or co... |
how many volts and amps are going through a body's nerves when the brain sends signals to move muscles? | About 110 mV. This is independent of how fast or how much muscle is moving. For more muscle contractions, you send more action potentials.
_URL_0_ | [
"These neurons connect the brain to the appropriate level in the spinal cord, from which point nerve signals continue to the muscles by means of the lower motor neurons. The neurotransmitter glutamate transmits the nerve impulses from upper to lower motor neurons, where it is detected by glutamatergic receptors.\n"... |
how come the price of some items can only be seen in the cart and who thought that was a good idea? | Some manufacturers limit what a retailer can advertise the price of their product at. Constant advertising too low a price can make consumers feel your product is "cheap." Retailers get around this by requiring you put the product in your cart before telling you how much it costs. | [
"\"Objects that in themselves are no commodities, such as conscience, honour and the like, are capable of being offered for sale by their holders, and of thus acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities. Hence an object may have a price without having value. The price in that case is imaginary, like cer... |
how come when you tune to a radio frequency that no station broadcasts at, you get static instead of silence? | There's a circuit in the radio called the automatic gain control. What it does is turn a second volume control inside the radio up and down so that the same amount of power is coming through, no matter what the signal is out how strong it is. This is important to make sure that the radio doesn't miss signals, and so that you don't surprise yourself with a sudden loud channel and hurt your ears. If there is no signal for the radio to pick up, it will turn up the nothing, until you hear random bits of radiation, electronic noise, and other not-music. | [
"Many radio stations broadcast birdsong, city-traffic or other atmospheric comfort noise during periods of deliberate silence. For example, in the UK, silence is observed on Remembrance Sunday, and London's quiet city ambiance is used. This is to reassure the listener that the station is on-air, but primarily to pr... |
Do animals see each other with a wide array of diversity? | There is an area in the human brain called the [fusiform face area (FFA)](_URL_3_) that is thought to be specialized for human facial recognition (as well as recognizing face-like objects). Damage to this area causes a disorder called prosopagnosia, where a person cannot recognize or distinguish between faces.
[Macaques](_URL_1_) also have a distinct brain area dedicated for facial recognition, and behavioral studies of [sheep](_URL_0_) and [dogs](_URL_2_) show that they can recognize individuals of their species. I'm speculating that any species of animal with complex social structures require that individuals be able to recognize other individuals, and this ability is even more prominent in animals with complex visual systems (humans, primates, sheep, etc.). Animals that rely more on smell (e.g., rodents and cats) probably use this mechanism instead to recognize members of their species. | [
"Research shows that animals sensitive to more than three color channels are likely to see the world in a very different way from humans. These animals are likely to experience different and more numerous unique hues, along with additional ways of mixing them.\n",
"A common image is the \"scala naturae\", the lad... |
Why did Nasa not send the rovers to the icecaps? | Ice caps are pretty dangerous environments, with rough terrain, lots of crevasses, etc. The number one priority with landers is finding a spot safe enough to be sure they can get to the ground in one piece. Then they pick the most scientifically interesting spot out of those. Ice caps are difficult. I'm sure they'll try to send a rover one day, and hopefully it will have better luck than the Mars Polar Lander. But for now, it hasn't happened. Remember, we've only sent what, four rovers to Mars? It's a big planet. | [
"Previous NASA Mars rovers became active only after the successful entry, descent and landing on the Martian surface. \"Curiosity\", on the other hand, was active when it touched down on the surface of Mars, employing the rover suspension system for the final set-down.\n",
"On October 1, 2007, both \"Spirit\" and... |
What would our world look like if the collision which ejected the material from which formed the Moon had not occurred? Would there be liquid water? What kind of atmosphere if any? Active geological processes? Life? | Mostly the same. The lack of a moon would lead to a less stable climate in the long term, with more frequent ice ages, and these might interrupt the development of complex life--especially on land--but probably wouldn't completely prevent it. | [
"Liquid water cannot persist on the lunar surface. When exposed to solar radiation, water quickly decomposes through a process known as photodissociation and is lost to space. However, since the 1960s, scientists have hypothesized that water ice may be deposited by impacting comets or possibly produced by the react... |
why aren't men's testes protected by bone like how the lungs are protected by the ribcage or the brain is protected by the skull? | They need the freedom to move around to stay the right temperature. A bone protecting them would prevent that | [
"Recent skull trauma potentially allows nasal cavity bacteria to enter the meningeal space. Similarly, devices in the brain and meninges, such as cerebral shunts, extraventricular drains or Ommaya reservoirs, carry an increased risk of meningitis. In these cases, the persons are more likely to be infected with Stap... |
Where do the mitochondria come from in a cloned animal? | Classically, the nucleus with a complete complement of nuclear DNA is placed into an egg cell which has had its nucleus removed (enucleated). However, the egg will still have mitochondrial DNA. So, the vast majority of the DNA in the resulting organism comes from the donor cell (nuclear DNA), but a little bit comes from the recipient egg (mitochondrial DNA).
[This](_URL_0_) gives a bit more detail. | [
"Mitochondria are organelles that synthesize ATP for the cell by metabolizing carbon-based macromolecules. The presence of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in mitochondria and proteins, derived from mtDNA, suggest that this organelle may have been a prokaryote prior to its integration into the proto-eukaryote. Mitochond... |
Would filling the tires of different racing vehicles (cars, bikes, etc.) with a lighter-than-air gas like helium give the racer any kind of significant advantage? | The size of the back tire is 325/45 R13. Unless google is lying to me.
Or 325mm wide x 660mm diameter - 13" (330mm) rim.
Which I'm pretty sure is .83 cubic meters unless I suck at math. And if I do someone will correct me.
And air weighs 1.225 kg/m3. So the air in each of the back tires weighs about 1 kilo. So call it 4 kilos for all four tires. Slightly less because the front tires are smaller. Well, more than that because it is higher than atmospheric pressure, so more than 1.225 kg/m3 but you get the point.
It wouldn't make much of a difference at all. | [
"BULLET::::4. Using low rolling resistance tires (tires were often made to give a quiet, smooth ride, high grip, etc., but efficiency was a lower priority). Tires cause mechanical drag, once again making the engine work harder, consuming more fuel. Hybrid cars may use special tires that are more inflated than regul... |
How did earthquakes affect Native Americans? | Earthquakes were indeed a problem for Mesoamerican engineers. The Aztecs even believed that the 5th sun would be destroyed by an earthquake. Considering how vulnerable the Valley of Mexico is to shockwaves their concerns were justified. And we can see there responses in their architectural style. Larger buildings, such as pyramids, often used architectural features intended to limit earthquake damage. For example, Teotihuacano architecture utilised the talud-tablero style which helped dampen the effect of tremors, and many cultures built their palaces on platforms that ensured strong foundations. Furthermore, Mesoamericans tended not to build up too much, so their buildings were not as top-heavy. Common houses, being built of much lighter material, were likely resistant to earthquakes as well. However, they were ultimately simple constructions, and were easy to repair.
All this seems to have worked. The 2017 earthquakes in Mexico seriously damaged a large number of buildings. But most archaeological sites suffered either minor damage, or no damage at all. | [
"It is estimated that approximately one-third of the U.S. population might have felt the earthquake, more than any other earthquake in U.S. history. People in certain areas of Pennsylvania, however, did not feel the earthquake at all despite being relatively close to the epicenter. About 148,000 people reported the... |
why in asian countries people sleep on mattresses on the floor, but western countries sleep on beds well above the ground? | I can't answer for 'most Asian countries' but in Japan the Futon (mattress placed on the floor for sleeping) is used because houses and apartments are small. The space a bed takes up can't easily be used for any other purpose while a futon can be put away during non-sleep time. This becomes really important in a tiny [Japanese Apartment](_URL_0_). Be aware that futons in Japan are not those cloth-covered cheap foam-rubber things that American students buy. I purchased one from a specialty futon shop while I lived in Tokyo. It was filled with a careful mix of cotton, wool, feathers, goose down, and no doubt a few weird Japanese things. It was extremely comfortable, but then, for roughly $750, it damn well should have been. | [
"Indoor sleeping bags, sometimes called slumber bags, are widely available, often for use particularly by children. These are usually not designed to be weatherproof and are often made of natural fabrics instead of the synthetic fabrics commonly used for outdoor sleeping bags. Children's sleeping bags in particular... |
why are most pills without protective film bitter? | So people (and especially kids) won't put them in their mouth only because they taste good. | [
"Pharmaceutical companies are fond of the product as a means of reducing the bitterness of pharmacological drugs in tablet form, and it has been used for livestock feed as a means of reducing feeding time. It is also widely favoured for use in otherwise naturally bitter products.\n",
"Pills such as prescription o... |
why is it not a great idea to buy a house outright if you have the cash? | This is an ongoing debate. Some think that it is wise to hang onto a mortgage, because the interest you pay to the bank is tax deferable in the U.S. (for the time being, there is some talk of eliminating this tax break). This means that if you paid $5K in interest in a year, you write that money off at the end of the year, so if you made 30K, you only get taxed like you made 25K. So to make a long story short, you get taxed less.
Now on the other hand, say you decide to pay for the house out-right and not get a loan. Now you are only paying for the house and not all the interest over the life of the loan (that can be substantial, depending on your interest rate and how long of a loan term you have). This frees up that money that you would have been paying in interest for other things, like say investing in Apple stock or something, which means that money could be making you money instead of going to a fat-cat banker.
Anyway, like I said, it's debatable. I wish I had the luxury of deciding it for myself, but I'm too poor to pay for my house outright, so here I am with a mortgage. I for one would pay my house off tomorrow if I had the cash, just because I don't like borrowing money and living in a house that isn't really mine, it's a security thing for me. If I loose my job it would be nice to know some bank isn't going to kick me out of their house if I don't pay them.
| [
"A 2007 \"Forbes\" article titled \"Don't Buy That House\" invokes similar arguments and concludes that for now, \"resist the pressure [to buy]. There may be no place like home, but there's no reason you can't rent it.\"\n",
"Other problems include the inability to move merchandise, or the little money produced b... |
If an electromagnetic wave's penetrating power is proportional to its frequency, why can visible light penetrate glass, yet UV light, with a higher frequency cannot? | The energy of a photon is proportional to frequency, but this energy must match the energy of some transition in the absorbing matter. The electrons in bonds in glass have transitions in the UV, but not the visible range.
This is the same reason why high energy X-rays are used for imaging: muscle and tissue are mostly transparent to X-rays, while the calcium in bones absorbs them. | [
"Because the frequency of light waves (~10 Hz) is too high to be detected by currently available detectors, it is possible to observe only the intensity of an optical interference pattern. The intensity of the light at a given point is proportional to the square of the average amplitude of the wave. This can be exp... |
what is the psychological reason for humans who enjoy trolling or offending people on purpose? | it's the only way some essentially weak and powerless people can feel a sense of power, by deliberately yanking people's chains and then feeling amused by the chaos and distress they've created.
Once you see trolls as weak, pathetic, pitiable people, you cease to care what they think, say or do.
Unfortunately, there are always suckers in the world, ready to let a troll yank their chain and give them the attention and power they crave. | [
"A troll’s intention will also influence actions and outcomes ranging from casual sex in a more private area to exhibitionism like masturbating to group sex, fulfilling a sexual fantasy or even the voyeuristic thrill of watching someone else have public sex. Some are looking to: perform fellatio either directly or ... |
If I release the gas pedal on a car while moving, only braking on the gears, would the car use any fuel? | It's... A lot more complicated than that.
When using the engine to slow the car, the braking comes from the vacuum formed by the closed throttle body. The throttle body does not form a perfect seal, and some air does move through the airflow sensor, so some fuel will be produced by the fuel injector.
In older cars, a vacuum and rpm sensor would be used to determine if the DFCO (deceleration fuel cut-off) solenoid should be activated. The old DFCO circuits were actually pretty simple.
Then, as with all great technological changes in engine design, emissions came into play. It turns out, if you simply cut the fuel, then the catalytic converter can cool too much, rendering it momentarily ineffective. This results in the car producing more CO and UHC than regulators are comfortable with.
Newer cars also monitor the temperature of the catalytic converter. If its temperatures get too low, the DFCO circuit opens the fuel, and possibly uses the idle control valve to permit more airflow, to raise the temperature of the catalytic converter.
On even newer cars, all of this is done with software, but the principles remain the same.
| [
"To perform a burnout in a rear wheel drive vehicle the driver has to simultaneously engage the gas and brake pedals. The brake pedal will require modulation, as the goal is to allow the rear tires to spin while holding the car in place with the front wheels remaining motionless. At a certain point of balance, the ... |
what should i know before opening a bank account? | I'm gonna tell you more than you *need* to know, because when it comes to personal banking, the gap between what you *need* to know and what's *good* to know is pretty wide.
First thing to know: There are different types of bank accounts.
Generally speaking, there are two kinds of bank accounts: savings accounts and transaction accounts. The practical distinctions between them have gotten really blurry over the years, but there are still a few that matter.
A transaction account is an account that's set up to give you unrestricted access to your money for the purpose of making transactions — hence the name. Transaction accounts are usually called checking accounts, because historically the way you used your transaction account was to write and hand over a check; a check is a piece of paper that represents a sum of money, and that's backed by the transaction account against which the check is drawn. The person you give the check to can take it to your bank — or another bank; banks work together on this stuff — and deposit it into their own account just like it was money.
Over the years, we've added additional types of transactions to transaction accounts, like offline and online debit transactions at the point of sale, and bill payment services. But we still call 'em "checking" accounts, because that name is as good as any.
A savings account, on the other hand, does not give you unlimited access to your money. The precise in and outs of the limitations vary from bank to bank, but as a general rule of thumb, you are *strongly discouraged* — by the imposition of onerous fees — from making too many withdrawals from your savings account in a given period of time.
Historically, the practical difference between savings and transaction accounts — apart from the fact that you couldn't write a check against your savings account — was that savings accounts paid interest and transaction accounts did not. This was part of banking law, a clause called "regulation Q". Bank accounts were *prohibited* from paying interest on transaction accounts. So what everybody did was use two bank accounts: a savings account and a transaction account. All your deposits went into your savings account, then once a month or so you moved the money you intended to spend from your savings account to your transaction account, then you spent it. This gave you the convenience of having a transaction account and all that implies, plus the ability to earn interest on your cash reserves.
But that got super-complicated over the years, with the advent of the negotiable-order-of-withdrawl account. NOW accounts are transaction accounts, but they're not covered under regulation Q, so banks could pay interest on them. This gave banks that offered NOW accounts a huge competitive advantage for personal banking — because you're getting *interest* where you weren't before! — so everybody adopted them. Finally the Congress threw up its hands and said "fuck it", and just this past summer regulation Q finally went the way of the dodo. So now there are NOW accounts which act like transaction accounts but bear interest … and there are also actual transaction accounts which can also bear interest.
It's still useful to use the two-account system, though, if you're in a positive-cash-flow situation. If you bring in more money than you spend every month, consider depositing it all into a savings account, then moving the part you do want to spend into a checking account. This is a good way to manage your finances and grow your cash reserve, though because it requires extra effort it's also easier to get things screwed up and overdraw your spending account. On the *other* hand, many banks offer a type of overdraft protection that links your spending and cash reserve accounts together, such that any transaction that would overdraw your spending account automatically transfers the necessary funds from your cash reserve account to cover the debit. On the *other other* hand, doing this usually carries a small fee, so you wouldn't want to rely on it.
Beyond those basics — the types of accounts and how to use them — it really comes down to the icing. Different banks offer different interest rates on different types of accounts. They often have minimum balances on interest-bearing transaction accounts which discourage you from filling and draining your account every month. (Another good reason to use the two-account system, keeping your cash reserve earning you a higher level of interest and using an account with no minimum balance as your transaction account.) There are often other fees and things that you need to take into account, but *in general* these are pretty trivial. It may come down to a case where using the bank that's all the way across town and that has no app will only save you 85¢ a month over the bank that's got two branches within a five-block radius of your house and that has an awesome app that lets you do all your banking while standing in line for movie tickets. Or whatever.
So basically, decide *how* you want to bank — one account, two, linked accounts or unlinked, whatever — and then shop around, weighing fees and such inconveniences against interest rates and little perks that make your banking easier and more convenient. | [
"For the client, there is no difference in accessing his or her bank account at the agent or in a branch or at an ATM. However, besides signing a contract with the financial institution it will be working for, the banking agent also has to open a bank account at the same. In addition, the store has to deposit a cer... |
if the notion that electrons orbit around a nucleus is a misconception, what type of motion do electrons have? do they just float in one position? | Just a warning for OP: like most questions about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, this thread is currently standing at about an even mix of informative and useful info, unhelpful pop-science analogies, and outright wrong answers. I don't teach this branch of physics so I don't have the expertise to fix the situation, but I know it well enough to say "here there be dragons."
"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." -- Richard Feynman | [
"Electrons in an atom are sometimes described as \"orbiting\" its nucleus, following an early conjecture of Niels Bohr (this is the source of the term \"orbital\"). However, electrons don't actually orbit nuclei in any meaningful sense, and quantum mechanics are necessary for any useful understanding of the electro... |
how do we know nothing can go faster than the speed of light? | [Here](_URL_0_) is a comment from /u/Corpuscle634 that I saved a while back. It really changed the way that I think about how light interacts with the universe and how things move through spacetime. | [
"This is not to say that \"all\" faster than light speeds are impossible. Various trivial situations can be described where some \"things\" (not actual matter or energy) move faster than light. For example, the location where the beam of a search light hits the bottom of a cloud can move faster than light when the ... |
how is plasma made/ extracted from blood? | Plasma is the portion of the blood that is not red blood cells or white blood cells. Think of it as the liquid part of the blood. Plasma is made up of a large number of components, including water, proteins, electrolytes, nutrients, and waste products.
Plasma is extracted from blood cells by putting blood through a centrifuge. The centrifuge organizes the blood into layers based on the components density. Plasma is on top, white blood cells are in the middle, red blood cells are in the bottom. The plasma is then siphoned off the top.
The reason plasma donation needles are larger than other blood drawing needles is because since plasma needles are in your arm for so long, blood clots may form that could block a smaller needle. | [
"Blood plasma is the liquid component of blood, which contains dissolved proteins, nutrients, ions, and other soluble components. In whole blood, red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets are suspended within the plasma. The goal of plasma purification and processing is to extract specific materials that ar... |
before diapers and the like, how the heck did early man keep babies from ruining everyone's day with their angry baby excretions? | This doesn't really answer your question. But in regard to people in poor and remote countries, I saw a documentary about British women going to live with remote tribes for a month. So obviously the topic of periods came up. The british women took pads and tampons with them and showed the tribeswomen. The tribeswomen in one of the places went around pretty much naked constantly. Even at that time of the month. They just let it drip everywhere. One of them had been sat on a bench and when they got up it was dirty and then a small child sat down. | [
"In actuality, when the show aired in the UK, few parents intervened even when their babies were extremely upset, and the nannies gave controversial advice, including letting babies \"cry it out\". One older baby was refused a clean nappy because he had been potty-trained before the show started.\n",
"Babies with... |
why do european languages generally use the same alphabet, but asia has many alphabets? | The most obvious answer is "Asia is really big and has lots of people."
Civilization in Asia is also older than European civilization. Writing had a chance to evolve in multiple places in Asia independently, while a lot of Europe only became literate in the Middle Ages via the efforts of a couple of established languages and alphabets - the Latin and the Greek (which produced Cyrillic).
The Roman Empire introduced a continent full of illiterate barbarian tribes to the Latin characters, and their people adapted them to their own languages. The Byzantine Empire (i.e., Eastern Roman Empire) was mainly Greek-speaking, and the efforts of its Orthodox Christian church brought the Greek and Greek-based letters to large parts of Eastern Europe. | [
"European alphabets, especially Latin and Cyrillic, have been adapted for many languages of Asia. Arabic is also widely used, sometimes as an abjad (as with Urdu and Persian) and sometimes as a complete alphabet (as with Kurdish and Uyghur).\n",
"As late as 1492, the Latin alphabet was limited primarily to the la... |
james joyce's "finnegan's wake" | It's not really a book for reading. It's a lot of stream of consciousness writing, he makes up a lot of words, and just doesn't stick to any conventions of traditional writing.
I would suggest reading a little [on Wikipedia](_URL_0_) ~~and definitely picking up an annotated version of the novel.~~ Edit: It seems as though it's too incomprehensible for an annotated version to exist. Stick with the guide and don't feel bad about it. | [
"Finnegans Wake is a work of fiction by Irish writer James Joyce. It is significant for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years and published in 1939 (two years before the author's death), \"Finneg... |
What's up with the results from Princeton's PEAR Lab? | You might want to consider x-posting this to /r/AskScienceDiscussion. They typically support more speculative discussion which is what your answers will inevitably be, since I don't think there's any real answer to your question (yet). | [
"Two German independent scientific groups have failed to replicate the PEAR results. Pigliucci has written this was \"yet another indication that the simplest hypothesis is likely to be true: there was nothing to replicate.\" The physicist Milton Rothman wrote that most of the faculty at Princeton considered the wo... |
Would a Neutron star be out of place on the periodic table? If they are, in a way, just big atoms? | Nuclei are bound states of nucleons held by the residual strong force.
A neutron star is not held by strong interaction, moreover it's not entirely composed of neutrons.
A neutron star is in a completely different region of the QCD phase diagram. It's very different from normal matter, in fact I think they live spreaded on the edge between hadronic matter and the "colour superconductor" phases, at high baryon chemical potential. | [
"A neutron star is a highly dense remnant of a star that is primarily composed of neutrons—a particle that is found in most atomic nuclei and has no net electrical charge. The mass of a neutron star is in the range of 1.2 to 2.1 times the mass of the Sun. As a result of the collapse, a newly formed neutron star can... |
Are there animals that have a concept of "punishment"? | Yes, absolutely.
For example, in vervet monkeys, there are various 'alarm calls' for identifying aerial predators, ground predators, etc. If a monkey falsely uses these calls, some in the group will punish them through slapping and fighting.
Why would a monkey misuse the calls in the first place? Well, by doing an alarm call and causing everyone in the area to flee, you may have unimpeded access to *better* food in the area, so there's a definite opportunity for deception on their parts. | [
"Punishment is sometimes called \"retaliatory\" or \"moralistic aggression\"; it has been observed in all species of social animals,leading evolutionary biologists to conclude that it is an evolutionarily stable strategy, selected because it favors cooperative behavior.\n",
"Punishment is operationally defined as... |
What is the largest, most comprehensive, and generally accepted to be the best Unitrd States history museum? | I would just like to point out what I believe to be a flaw in your premise. You combine largest, most comprehensive, and best. These are three very different things.
I know some very good local history museums that have 3 rooms, 5000 objects, and survive off of less than $50,000 a year operating budget. They aren't comprehensive, and they aren't large, but they are great at speaking about United States history from a local perspective.
I mean, the Smithsonian Museum of American History is generally considered to be a museum of good quality. They are also relatively comprehensive (as much as any one museum can tell a couple hundred years of history). Due to the relatively visible nature of the Smithsonian Museums though, they occasionally are subject to political pressures ([here is an article from the Air and Space Museum of an issue that was pretty well publicized](_URL_0_).)
Apart from that, it really is a solid institution, with an excellent reputation, at least among the museum folk that I work with. That being said, the little museum down the street might give you history just as solid.
TL;DR (In this case) Bigger doesn't always mean better. | [
"\"The museum is the largest, most valuable, and best arranged in the United States. It comprises no less than seven different museums, to which has been added the present year, besides the constant daily accumulation of articles, one half of the celebrated Peale's Philadelphia Museum, swelling the already immense ... |
What was the importance of St. Francis on the catholic church? | Do you mean
Saint Francis Xavier, 1506 – 1552, or Saint Francis of Assissi, 1181 – 1226 or one of the many other Saints Francis? _URL_0_
| [
"Francis preached the Christian doctrine that the world was created good and beautiful by God but suffers a need for redemption because of human sin. He believed that all creatures should praise God (a common theme in the Psalms) and the people have a duty to protect and enjoy nature as both the stewards of God's c... |
george bush's 90% post-9/11 approval rating. | The "rally round the flag effect." Anytime there is a crisis that clearly is not the president's fault, it is common for citizens to band together and support the decisions being made.
_URL_0_ | [
"BULLET::::- Following the September 11 attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush received an unprecedented increase in his approval rating. On September 10, Bush had a Gallup Poll rating of 51%. By September 15, his approval rate had increased by 34 percentage points to 85%. Just a week later, Bush was at 90%, the... |
How come we never see historical people depicted with acne? | Also, why no hairy armpits in all the nude paintings?
(I asked my art history professor this and she said something about they were going for a more idealized form and so left off unflattering details but I wasn't fully satisfied with her answer) | [
"In the 16th century, the French physician and botanist François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix provided one of the earlier descriptions of acne. He used the term \"psydracia achne\" to describe small, red and hard tubercles that altered a person's facial appearance during adolescence, and were neither itchy nor p... |
Is someone that likes to sleep in or take naps more susceptible to depression? | Just another point to keep in mind: A (possible) correlation between sleeping in and depression need not mean that someone who likes to sleep in would be more susceptible to depression - it could also mean that someone who suffers of depression is more susceptible to sleeping in. | [
"Due to symptoms of low mood and energy, individuals with depression may be likely to have behaviors that are counter to good sleep hygiene, such as taking naps during the day, consuming alcohol near bedtime, and consuming large amounts of caffeine during the day. In addition to sleep hygiene education, bright ligh... |
when you take a shower, why do your nails get soft, making them easier to be cut? | The water softens the keratin. Thats about it. What's easier to cut a hard cookie or the same cookie after you soak it in milk. | [
"The best way to care for nails is to trim them regularly. Filing is also recommended, as to keep nails from becoming too rough and to remove any small bumps or ridges that may cause the nail to get tangled up in materials such as cloth.\n",
"Nail polish remover has the ability to enter bodies of water and soil a... |
Why has evolution on land led to more intelligent animals than in water? | It should be noted that dolphins are widely believed to be more intelligent than most apes. It's been proven that they are self-aware and are very intricate social lives. There is even evidence of dolphins in captivity committing suicide by going under the surface and refusing to breath.
Perhaps it's just a primates ability to manipulate things with those handy opposable thumbs that inclines us to give them an advantage in a discussion about intelligence. | [
"Scientists believe that a long period of time where biotic and abiotic factors in the aquatic environment were unfavourable to certain aquatic organisms is what pushed their transition to shallower waters. Some of these push factors are environmental hypoxia, unfavourable aquatic temperatures, and increased salini... |
How can two different species, living in different habitats develop similar patterns? | Similar pressures. This is called [analogous structures](_URL_0_). For example, you can imagine a rodent and a deer that find themselves in an area that has, say, grey barked trees will over time find grey coloration to be advantageous for avoiding predation. Successful offspring will probably be those that are grey in coloration. Over time, both will develop grey patterning.
Neither share a common grey ancestor, but both resulted in grey patterning. | [
"Species forming a complex have typically diverged very recently from each other, allowing in some cases to retrace the process of speciation. Species with differentiated populations such as ring species are sometimes seen as an example of early, ongoing speciation, i.e. a species complex in formation. Nevertheless... |
how do fiber optics work? why can light enter but not exit? are there any practical applications of this technology? | given the shallow angle the light hits the edge, it gets reflected back into the glass, and propogates all the way to the other end of the glass.
thin this rod out to hair thickness and surround it with an insulator and you have a fiber optic cable. shine a light on and off at one end to represent 1s and 0s and the other end will pick up the received data. Fiber optics are the backbone of the modern internet. | [
"BULLET::::- Fiber Optics- Fiber optic lights use plastic or glass fibers to distribute light. The heat source is removed from the end of the fiber and the longer the length of the fiber, the more loss of heat at the end. Glass fibers dissipate UV light, but plastic fibers need UV filtering.\n",
"Fiber-optic cabl... |
The Moon orbits Earth. Earth orbits the Sun. The Sun travels around the center of our galaxy. Is the Milky Way moving around something? If so, how far does this pattern go, and would there be a final "center"? | The Milky Way is the second biggest member of a galaxy cluster, the so called [Local Group](_URL_2_). It's currently on a crash course with its biggest member, the [Andromeda Galaxy M31](_URL_1_). The Milky Way isn't orbiting anything, but similar to its greater neighbor it has small satellite galaxies orbiting it. So yeah, galaxies can orbit other galaxies, it's just not the case for ours, because we live in a relatively big one.
> If so, how far does this pattern go
The whole Local Group is attracted to the Virgo Cluster, amd both are members of the Virgo Supercluster. The Virgo Cluster is the center of that supercluster, while the local group is at its outer rim. The whole supercluster is attracted toward the [Great Attractor](_URL_0_), the local filament of galaxies.
However, then strength of gravity is exceeded in anything bigger than the local group by the expansion of the universe. That means, the universe is expanding at a slower rate than you would expect within these structures, due to the gravity of their members. However, they will not get the chance to coalesce with each other in the future.
> and would there be a final "center"?
The universe has no center, it is a flat and very likely an infinite one. It is homogenous and isotropical, which means it looks all the same on the great scales. Even if it should be finite, it still has no center. It would behave like a retro computer game, when you leave one side, you would enter the screen on the other side. | [
"When standing on the Earth looking up at the sky, it would appear that the Moon travels from east to west, just as the Sun and the stars do. In actual fact, the Moon orbits the Earth from west to east, as do the vast majority of manmade satellites such as the International Space Station. The apparent westward moti... |
why are clothes still made by people? | Nearly all the work is done by machines. If you buy a shirt or a pair of pants, the total human labor that's gone into it is around two minutes — just the few parts that are hardest to automate. If you buy a pair of socks, the total human labor is under 25 seconds. | [
"Historically, clothing is, and has been, made from many clothing materials. These range from grasses and furs to much more elaborate and exotic materials. Some cultures, such as the various people of the Arctic Circle, have made their clothing entirely of prepared and decorated furs and skins. Other cultures have ... |
why can machines - like computer processors - process information and do calculations much faster than a human brain? or any animal's brain, for that matter. | They're not really comparable. Brains are capable of integrating huge quantities of data on the fly, they can process language, movement, sensory input, thought, and calculations all at once. Computers can do calculations faster because we built them that way. In fact, that's *all* computers can do: perform calculations and produce an output. All the other fancy stuff is just more calculations that interpret the result of previous calculations in to something specific. | [
"A computer program that faithfully emulates a human brain, or that otherwise runs algorithms that are equally powerful as the human brain's algorithms, could still become a \"speed superintelligence\" if it can think many orders of magnitude faster than a human, due to being made of silicon rather than flesh, or d... |
what actually happen when a computer erasing a file 'permanently' and give more space to save another file? | It means you erase the description of the house from the phone book. The house itself is still there, but common people can't find it anymore, since there's no mention of the house in the phone book. Next time something gets built there, a new house is just built on top of the old one and the phone book is updated. But before a new house is built, you could still go look for the old house if you have an idea where to look for. There are ways to completely demolish the house on delete if you have the need for it, but it's slower and for a typical user it's not needed. | [
"Some programs create temporary files and then leave them behind - they do not delete them. This can happen because the program crashed or the developer of the program simply forgot to add the code needed to delete the temporary files after the program is done with them. The temporary files left behind can accumula... |
Why don't plants use ATP from photosynthesis for cellular function? | ATP is pretty unstable, which is part of why it's used to power cellular processes; because it's very easy to liberate energy from. But for that same reason it's not easy to store for long periods. So unless the plant cell wants to use the energy from photosynthesis immediately, and then lack it later on when photosynthesis starts, it has to store that energy in a more stable form in sugar. | [
"The formation of ATP from ADP and P is energetically unfavorable and would normally proceed in the reverse direction. In order to drive this reaction forward, ATP synthase couples ATP synthesis during cellular respiration to an electrochemical gradient created by the difference in proton (H) concentration across t... |
why does a guitar have harmonics only on certain parts of the fretboard/string? | First you need to understand the concept of overtones.
Let's say you play the open E string. The main and strongest tone you're going to hear is the E note, because that's the main frequency the string is vibrating at. But because the string isn't vibrating at exactly the same speed across the whole string \(the middle of the string will travel further in the middle of the string than it will closer to the nut or bridge\) the string will also produce a variety of overtones \(different frequencies to the main note\).
This is what gives instruments \(and even individual strings on instruments\) their characteristic sound. If you play the open top E string on a guitar, you can play the same note at the same pitch by playing the B string fretted at the fifth fret...but even though they're the same note at the same frequency, they sound subtly different...and the reason for that because you're 'shortening' the B string, and the B string has a different mass, so it's producing different overtones.
A harmonic is an overtone that is a multiple of the base frequency of the string. For example, if a string vibrates at 100hz, its first harmonic will be 200hz, the next, 300hz and so on.
Now, a guitar string has 'dead spots' where the string doesn't move \(the nut and the bridge saddle\), and the area it can move \(the rest of the string\). When the string is particular thickness and tension it 'wants' to vibrate at a specific frequency \(the note you've tuned it to\).
If you lightly touch the string at the 12th fret, you're creating a new 'dead spot' on the string, the same as the dead spot at the nut and saddle. Now, because the main frequency, the note you'd get if you played the string open, doesn't have a dead spot at the 12th fret, the main note won't sound. Basically, physics won't allow the string to vibrate at the main frequency... but the harmonic *does* have a dead spot at the 12th fret. In essence, it's like we've moved the nut up to the 12th fret, so while we don't hear the main note, we do hear the harmonic.
Basically, what we're doing is cancelling out the main frequency so we only hear the overtones, and at that spot on the string, the only overtone that can be produced is the harmonic.
So, the reason we can only produce harmonics at certain parts of the string is because those are the areas where we can create a dead spot that will allow the string to produce an overtone that is a multiple of the base frequency of the string. It's why every string has a harmonic at the 12th fret, because the 12th fret is the halfway point of the string, so by creating a dead spot there, we're halving the length, which doubles the frequency.. | [
"In contrast, a third bridge divides the string into two pieces. When played at one part of a string, the opposed part can resonate in a subharmonic of the struck part, depending on a predictable mathematical ratio of the strings' lengths. On harmonic positions the created multiphonic tone is consonant and increase... |
When did the divergence between the people that would become Spanish and Portuguese begin in medieval Iberia? What caused the two identities to become very separate? | Followup: was there *ever* a cohesive Iberian identity?
It appears that you've had various disparate groups fighting themselves, each other, and invaders throughout the entire history of Iberia. And when you look at various movements in Catalonia, The Basque Country, Galicia, etc. it seems like Spanish identity is more of a Pan-Iberian thing of dubious unity. So I'm curious about the wider divisions within modern Spain as well.
Why it is that Portugal is a separate nation, but those other places aren't? | [
"West Iberian languages such as Spanish and Portuguese had similar changes to those of French, but they were less common: Latin became \"autro\" and later (Spanish) or (Portuguese), while remained , and there were also some less regular shifts, like to (Spanish) or (Portuguese).\n",
"Vocabulary differences betwee... |
for 99.5% of humanity's history, a baby that wouldn't breastfeed, would die. simple as that. so, for modern babies, why is a problem with babies not "latching on" such a common post-pregnancy problem? shouldn't natural selection have fixed that? | Breastfeeding got a lot harder to figure out when an alternative was created...ultimately hunger and mother-worry prevail. "Latching on" would still be a problem, and babies would died, but...lots of latching on problems would resolve themselves.
And...lets not forget that human ingenuity - including the creation of formula - is to be considered, not ignored, in thinking about natural selection. | [
"Children, especially those under two years old, were most affected by both the famine and the poverty of the period. The World Health Organization reported death rates for children at 93 out of every 1000, while those of infants were cited at 23 out of every 1000. Undernourished mothers found it difficult to breas... |
Are there any languages that entirely lack grammatical gender -- including as to pronouns? | Chinese pretty much doesn't acknowledge grammatical gender. The word 'she' (她) is only a more recent invention. Originally 'he' and 'she' was just 他. | [
"Many of the world's languages do not have gender-specific pronouns. A number of the ones with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a traditional grammatical gender system, where all or the vast majority of nouns are assigned to gender classes and adjectives and other modifiers must agree with them in that... |
why are us street numbers so random? | Many places in the US (though not NYC) houses are numbered by the cross street, so between 6th and 7th avenue (or what would be if they haven't been given other names) the houses go from 600 to 700. So if you're going to use this system it makes a certain amount of sense to space the numbering out so that 650 is in the middle of the block. Armed with an address I can reason out the best way to get there without knowing much about the area (though one way streets can get in the way).
782 3rd st? Take 8th ave down to third! | [
"Houses with odd numbers are on the east side of a street or the south side of an avenue. Dropping the last two digits of a house number tells what two streets or avenues the house lies between, for example 8023 135A Avenue is between 80 Street and 81 Street, and 13602 100 Street is between 136 Avenue and 137 Avenu... |
Have there been any documented cases of humans with significant beneficial genetic mutations? | Sickle-cell gives a pretty significant benefit - resistance to malaria. Of course, there are other problems associated with sickle-cell, especially if you get both alleles instead of just one. | [
"Research by Awadalla (with Matthew Hurles of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute) was first to directly estimate the number of mutations passed on by individual parents to human offspring, fewer than was previously estimated. Other discoveries include large scale RNA methylation and its genetic control in human mi... |
what is the explanation for one country being on the top economically but still not having good standards of living for it's people? | Economic indicators and social indicators are related but not the same.
For example : China has higher GDP (and economic indicator) than Japan. But per capita Japan is way ahead than China.
Similarly many countries in Scandinavia are less wealthy than US but they are perceived to have a better standard of living.
Even more so, Qatar has one of the highest per capita in the world but because of their social structures (mercilessly exploiting immigrants ), censorship they don't count as a top standard of living..
In short: economic strength is an aggregate strength so if a country is big or resource rich it has some advantages. Standard of living depends in economic strength but also on other factors : economic inequality, social policy, social mobility etc. | [
"Bad Governance in a Small Country: Terrible governance and policies can destroy an economy with alarming speed. The reason small countries are at a disadvantage is that though they may have a low cost-of-living, and therefore be ideal for labor-intensive work, their smallness discourages potential investors, who a... |
Has nuclear propulsion ever been researched or considered in launching rockets? Is it feasible? In terms of weight vs. propulsion, would a nuclear rocket have the best performance if it was possible? | Google Project Orion. | [
"Because they can harness the power of what is essentially a continuous nuclear fission explosion, NSWRs would have both very high thrust and very high exhaust velocity, meaning that the rocket would be able to accelerate quickly as well as be extremely efficient in terms of propellant usage. The combination of hig... |
Is it possible to visualize subatomic particles? | It is kinda impossible to visualise them because our sense, especialy the eyes are only tuned to perceive only a small fraction of the light spectrum. You could not 'see' these particles because they are so damm small that a regular lightwave (which we can see) is so large that it will ignore a single quantum particle. Hence, light will never bounce of it and thus will we never 'see' it. If we can not see it, we can not give it a color.... Kinda like radio waves are the same as light waves just alot longer but they also have no color.
Motion/location is also a strange concept for quantum particles since they can not have a fixed location, their location is described by a probability cloud. The only thing we can say about their location is that we can calculate the probability of where they might be at a certain point in time. Once we measure where the particle is, we will know its exact location (but not its speed) and once you stop looking, it will become a probability cloud again....
The smallest particle from which we have managed to get a shape from is the electron, which is surprisingly round.
_URL_0_ | [
"Single particle analysis is a group of related computerized image processing techniques used to analyze images from transmission electron microscopy (TEM). These methods were developed to improve and extend the information obtainable from TEM images of particulate samples, typically proteins or other large biologi... |
why don't the animals of the chernobyl disaster zone die of radiation poisoning? | In order to overdose on tylenol, you have to take a large amount in a short period of time.
Similarly, "radiation sickness" or acute radiation injury requires a large dose of radiation in a short amount of time. The radiation dose rate isn't high enough inside the disaster zone to trigger this effect (with the exception of areas inside the reactor building itself *edit* and a few other localized areas of high contamination). Ionizing radiation damages DNA, and your body has many DNA repair mechanisms. A large dose of radiation in a short period of time can overload those mechanisms, leading to radiation injury.
The reason humans aren't allowed to live there isn't because of radiation sickness. It is because the elevated amounts of radiation would lead to slightly increased cancer risks. Many people ignore the orders and continue to live there. You can read about them [here](_URL_0_). | [
"It is unknown whether fallout contamination will have any long-term adverse effect on the flora and fauna of the region, as plants and animals have significantly different and varying radiologic tolerance compared with humans. Some birds are reported with stunted tail feathers (which interferes with breeding). The... |
Prior to the introduction of firearms, did militaries ever have archers, slingers, etc. that acted as "snipers" or marksmen? | Alright, I've had to remove a lot of answers in this thread for the same reason: one sentence, speculative responses are not welcome on this subreddit. If all you can say about this topic can fit into a single sentence, we'd prefer it if you just don't post. | [
"Archers, whether on foot, in chariots or on horseback were a major part of most militaries until about 1500 when they began to be replaced by firearms, first in Europe, and then progressively elsewhere.\n",
"The sling (\"sphendone\") and the bow (\"toxon\") were the weapons used by light soldiers. Slings were th... |
How are organ transplant even possible? | They give you immunosuppressants.
Immunosuppressants are drugs or medicines that lower the body's ability to reject a transplanted organ. Another term for these drugs is anti-rejection drugs. There are 2 types of immunosuppressants:
Induction drugs: Powerful antirejection medicine used at the time of transplant
Maintenance drugs: Antirejection medications used for the long term. | [
"Organ transplantation is a medical procedure in which an organ is removed from one body and placed in the body of a recipient, to replace a damaged or missing organ. The donor and recipient may be at the same location, or organs may be transported from a donor site to another location. Organs and/or tissues that a... |
what is scandinavian socialism, and why is it so great? | I'm getting this from Wikipedia so this may be a bit dubious, but I'll my best.
The thing about Scandinavian Socialism, or the Nordic Model as it's normally called, it's that it's comparatively light on the Socialism part. They're Capitalist free-markets, but with a large public sector (i.e. state-run operations) and high tax rates that result in things such as higher education and healthcare requiring little if any out-of-pocket expenses for citizens.
Unlike comparatively heavy-handed Socialist nations such as the Soviet Union and Mao-era China it has a Capitalist market that promotes innovation and ambition but with no guarantee of employment, opposed to Command economies with guaranteed employment where nobody tries because they don't have to. They do, however, have robust systems that help the unemployed get by and find work. | [
"The [[Nordic model]] is a term for a form of [[social democracy]] common to the [[Nordic countries]] (Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland). During most of the post-war era, Sweden was governed by the [[Swedish Social Democratic Party]] largely in cooperation with [[Swedish Trade Union Confederation|trade ... |
why does facebook censor anything that resembles a nipple but not horrific scenes of violence and/or religious videos inciting violence? | Because Facebook is an American company and has the American puritanical idea that sex is bad and violence is good. It's something that is deeply ingrained in our society. | [
"In July 2017, \"GMA News\" reported that \"a number\" of secret Facebook groups that had been engaging in illegal activity of sharing \"obscene\" photos of women had been exposed, with the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation warning group members of the possibility of being liable for violating child porno... |
how did the octopus do this? | They have special pigment cells on their skin called chromatophores. They use muscles to contract and expand the cells which lead to various colors being seen. They can also use the muscles in their skin to contort pieces of their body, making it look jagged like coral.
Also, they have excellent eyesight, which allows them to get an accurate picture of an object to mimic. | [
"At least four veined octopus (\"Amphioctopus marginatus\") individuals were witnessed retrieving coconut shells, manipulating them, stacking them, transporting them some distance (up to 20 metres), and then reassembling them to use as a shelter. The octopuses use coconut shells discarded by humans which have event... |
In the Roman Empire, was there ever any significant debate about the moral issues with slavery? | The focus of my response will be on Christian points of view. Part of my post will look at Rome overall but it will mainly be focused on Christianity and the Late Roman Empire, especially the mid-fourth to early fifth centuries.
Short answer: no.
Long answer. No, there was not any significant debate about the morality of slavery in the Roman Empire. Slavery was vital to the Roman economy and political system. Although the number of slaves in the Empire fluctuated over time, estimates suggest that around thirty percent of Italy and ten percent of the rest of the Empire was slaves. Slaves would have been found in all sectors of the economy; from agriculture and mining to domestic housework and finance. Slavery was also incredibly common. Historian Kyle Harper (who wrote *the* book on Roman slavery FYI) estimates that those in the highest social classes would have owned hundreds of slaves. It wasn't uncommon for poor people to own slaves as well. Slaves were just another important asset to own, alongside land or livestock.
Now, on to the heart of your question. The Mediterranean gradually became more and more Christian throughout the first few centuries of the first millennium. Most Christians were fine with the practice and many owned slaves. There is no evidence to suggest that the average Christian owned fewer slaves or treated them better than any other Roman. The Bible mentions slaves many times and apostles interact with slaves at several points and no mention is made of slavery being negative or of the slaves being freed upon conversion. The apostle Paul writes about an escaped slave in Philemon and tells the master not to free the slave, but to not mistreat him when he returns.
The vast majority of Christians may have participated in, or at least been supportive, of the practice, there were Christians who spoke out against slavery. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) believed that slavery was a divine judgement from God onto humanity for the sins of Adam. But to Augustine, freedom was an innate quality that a person either possessed or did not, so slavery became wrong when free individuals were forcibly kidnapped and sold into slavery. In a letter sent to a bishop that was visiting Italy, he told of many cases where bandits kidnapped people in North Africa and transported them overseas where they would be disguised as "legitimate" slaves. And Augustine wasn't just complaining about this to a friend. He cited legal precedents and laws; imploring his friend to take up the issue with the emperor so action could be taken. But at the end of the day, he still supported slavery. In his letter he writes of an incident where members of his own church raided a ship that would be carrying these false slaves overseas.
> Scarcely five or six were found to have been sold by their parents [note that it was legal for parents to sell their kids into slavery]; of all the others, hardly a person could keep himself from tears on hearing all the various ways by which they were brought to the Galatians by trickery or kidnapping.
The handful of individuals that were properly sold into slavery did not warrant any tears, but the others did.
To find a more definitive condemnation of slavery we must travel further east and several decades earlier. In a region of modern day Turkey, there lived three church officials that are now known as the Cappadocian Fathers. Two of them, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus, critiqued aspects of slavery. They thought that slavery itself was fine, but one should take care not to own too many or else one would live too excessive of a lifestyle. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335- c. 395) was different. In a sermon titled *Homilies on Ecclesiastes* he goes on what can only be classified as a tirade against slavery. It is remarkably similar to the type of language used by abolitionists in more recent history. Citing Genesis, he says that God did not give humanity ownership over other humans, only plants and animals.
> Why do you go beyond what is subject to you and raise yourself up against the very species which is free, counting your own kind on a level with four-footed things and even footless things?
Humanity was made in the image of God, and God is free, therefore humans are free. To Gregory, freedom was an innate quality to all humans and to own another human in bondage was to go against God. Humans were slaves to God (it sounds bad but it just means to worship devotedly) but humans could not own slaves.
Perhaps the most rhetorically impressive portion of Gregory's rant is his section on the purchasing of a human.
> For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols [currency] did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God?
The context of this admonition against slavery needs to be taken into account. Gregory is preaching a sermon about the sin of pride. In this instance, Gregory tells us that for a person to own a slave is for them to think they are at the same level of God.
Despite the harsh language, however, Gregory does not actually go so far as to call for the abolition of slavery. As mentioned above, slavery was a critical aspect of the Roman economy, so abolition would have been seen as absurd. His sermon was trying to influence their behavior, perhaps get his audience to treat their slaves better or even free them.
There was no such thing as abolitionism in the Roman Empire but that does not mean we do not hear voices of those decrying aspects of the brutal institution.
---
Sources
Augustine of Hippo. “Letter 10,” in Saint Augustine: Letters, translated by Robert B. Eno. Washington, D.C., The Catholic University of America Press, 1989.
Augustine of Hippo. “The City of God (Book IV).” New Advent. 2017.
Secondary Sources
Conley, Aaron D. “Augustine and Slavery: Freedom for the Free.” In Augustine and Social Justice, edited by Teresa Delgado, John Doody and Kim Paffenroth. New York: Lexington Books, 2015. 131-144.
De Wet, Chris L. "The Cappadocian Fathers on Slave Management." Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae 39, no. 1 (2013): 1-7.
De Wet, Chris L. The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Garnsey, Peter. Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Glancy, Jennifer. “Slavery and the Rise of Christianity.” In The Cambridge World History of Slavery, edited by Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 456-481.
Grey, Cam. “Slavery in the Late Roman World.” In The Cambridge World History of Slavery, edited by Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 482-509.
Harper, Kyle. Slavery in the Late Roman World: AD 275-425. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Meredith, Anthony S.J. Gregory of Nyssa. New York: Routledge, 1999.
[Here's a short video](_URL_0_) of Kyle Harper talking about Gregory of Nyssa. It covers this whole question really well.
I love talking about this so please ask follow-up questions if you have any. I'll do my best. | [
"According to Jennifer Glancy, sexual exploitation of slaves in Roman Empire, was helped by Christian morality. Jesus urged his followers to act like slaves, implementing a slave morality. The early Christian theologians were unconcerned about slave morals.\n",
"The social and legal status of slaves in the Roman ... |
why do salted soft pretzels sweat if left out over night? | Nothing to do with the pretzel itself, but the salt on it.
The air is full of tiny particles of water just floating around, and soft pretzels have a ton of water in them. Water is very "sticky" - it easily makes bonds with many types of substances. Substances which very readily make new bonds with the water around them are known as *hygroscopic* (yes, hy**g**ro not hy**d**ro).
Salt is highly hygroscopic, so it basically sucks water out of the air and out of the pretzel and leaves it in droplet form on your pretzel - hence the "sweat." | [
"Chafing may be caused by the salt and residue left behind after sweat evaporates. If sweat is allowed to dry, and exercise is resumed, the salt may intensify the friction and cause further irritation. Other contributing factors include hot weather, sensitive skin, sand from the beach getting into problem areas, an... |
every month we see studies talking about how they have successfully found a cure for cancer but they just vanish after sometime. | Click bait is one of the main things, what sounds better "Experimental Cancer treatment shown to be 5% more effective than chemotherapy."/"New Cancer research shows promise in mice" or "New research finds cure for cancer!"
And as the other poster said many types of cancer. | [
"BULLET::::- Scientists achieve a breakthrough in finding a general cure for cancer by attaching malaria proteins to cancer cells, which appears effective on 90% of cancer types. Human trials are expected to begin within four years.\n",
"Steven Novella writes, in Skepticblog, about the general misunderstanding an... |
[religious] if (a)in the begining god created adam and eve but doesn't mention the creation of anyone else, and (b) god commanded noah to save his family and various animals from a flood that was to wipe out the earth.... are we twice inbred as a species? | The bible isn't really clear on this.
It mentions the creation of Adam and Eve, and then their two named sons who are presumably the next two people.
However, it then suggests that the son Cain located a wife and founded a city in another land. Where the wife came from and who populated this city is not explained. | [
"It is said that Adam and Eve were the first of God’s children to come to Earth. They were created in God’s image, with bodies of flesh and bones. God placed them in the Garden of Eden. Here they did not remember their former existence though they were still able to enjoy God's presence and could have lived forever... |
why do video game developers take so long to come out with their game when it seems as though they have a nearly complete product at events such as e3? in essence, what takes them so long to revise that they need months after releasing game play footage? | Are you talking about a video or a demo?
It's easy to make the 'in-game' videos look great even with a half finished product, so long as the engine and a couple of major features are ready to run. In a video you won't be running into any bugs and you're not dealing with users who wind up trying things out that aren't fully implemented yet. You just show off exactly what's ready to be shown off and you make it look good. You don't even need any artificial intelligence, as you can simply script everything to play out in an exact way you want it to.
A demo generally requires the game to be much farther into development, because here you'll be dealing with actual users intentionally or (usually) accidentally abusing your game and your system in every way possible. Depending on the demo, you probably want most of your base systems to be in place. For video games this could be a fairly fleshed out combat system, collision detection, artificial intelligence, decent optimization and so forth.
But even when you have a demo, you might not have implemented most of the content into the game already. Adding new areas or levels to a game isn't as simple as just loading up a level editor and throwing new things down. You often need new scripts, new enemies and encounters to design and balance, play-testing, to debug 428390572409572490472098572094 lines of code for every single new line you actually write and so on. Some of the systems working in a demo's background might also be little more than quickly hacked together code, made solely for the purpose of bringing a demo out in time. So you might not realize just how much of a mess the system really is at that point.
In closing, I must point out that marketing departments in the video game industry have absolutely no clue what an 'alpha' or a 'pre-alpha' is. -.- | [
"When games come out, that's the end of development, but we don't consider our game done - it won't be done for years, because there's so much stuff we can do. So after release we have tons of new quests we want to come out with, we're going to be adding new factions to the game to help liven things up further, we ... |
Are our fingernails attached to the skin under it? If so, how do they grow without slowly and painfully ripping our skin off? | Yes, they are atached to the skin under it. If you've ever lost a fingernail, you can see the skin underneath is frayed where it was loosely attached. It doesn't grow out painfully precisely because it is so slow. | [
"In human anatomy, the eponychium, or cuticle, is the thickened layer of skin surrounding fingernails and toenails. It can also be called the medial or proximal nail fold. Its function is to protect the area between the nail and epidermis from exposure to bacteria. The vascularization pattern is similar to that of ... |
is it possible to develop illnesses like ptsd from viewing disturbing images? | PTSD is a mental health problem that can occur after someone goes through a traumatic event like war, assault, an accident or disaster.
That being said, and since suffering is relative to the person, you can have something that triggers and overwhelms their emotional breaking point to get PTSD. Car wreck, divorce, child dying, war, natural disasters, lots of things can trigger it in people. | [
"Links to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and dreaming have been made in studying the flashbacks or nightmares the victims would suffer. Measurement of the brain waves exhibited by the subjects experiencing these episodes showed great similarity between those of dreaming. The drugs used to treat those sufferi... |
Why do so many schoolbooks say the Romans copied the Greek religion? That seems like a simplistic and superficial assumption. Is it really true? | It is nearly completely untrue. Your interpretation
> The way i saw it was that Jupiter was identified with Zeus the same way the Jewish Yahweh and the Muslim Allah are regarded as the same god.
is a much more correct understanding. The Romans identified their gods with the Greek ones, where there was enough overlap for the identification to be useful; they did the same with other pantheons around Europe, so if you read Caesar's *Gallic War* you'll see him referring to Gaulish gods by Roman names like Mars and Mercury. We may as well call this practice *interpretatio Romana* (as it happens the Greeks did the same thing, equating Egyptian and Phoenician gods with their own; there it's called *interpretatio graeca*).
But it's not *totally* untrue. Or rather, there are some complications.
1. The Roman pantheon and Greek pantheon both have a lot of common ground in their origins. There's a very good reason why some of the gods look so similar. Even the names have common origins in some cases: the *i̯u-* element in Jupiter and the *sdeu-, di(w)-* of Zeus both come from Proto-Indo-European \**diēus*, genitive \**diu̯os*.
2. In the very early days of Rome, when Greeks first settled southern Italy and Sicily starting in the 800s BCE, there was a lot of cultural contact between the Greeks and the Tyrrhenian natives (especially the Etruscans) which led to a number of Greek mythological figures being adopted by the Italians. In this sense, there *was* some copying. A number of these elements subsequently got erased from the Roman mythological landscape for various reasons, but some stuck around: the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux, who were very important in early Roman religion) and Hercules, for example, genuinely were imports.
3. Once *interpretatio Romana* took hold, the Romans took the further step of seeing their own gods as involved in Greek mythological stories. Poets, in particular, enthusiastically adopted Greek stories as their own. So, in a sense, this was copying too: but only in the same way that Hollywood "copies" English mythology when making a film about Robin Hood. This has nearly nothing to do with religion as such. | [
"Christianity was a new force in Europe and many of the faithful saw Hellenistic culture as pagan. As such, many classical Greek works, written on scrolls, were left to decay as only Christian texts were thought fit for preservation in a codex, the progenitor of the modern book. In the East, however, this was not t... |
how in the world is formula 1 profitable for the teams? | F1 is actually one of the biggest spectator sports in the world with a viewership of 490 million people. TV channels across the world pay to show the races, and a cut of the money goes to the teams. There’s also a massive amount of ticket sales - 4 million people went to the 21 races last year.
On top of that, the teams themselves sell merchandise and have sponsorship deals that bring in plenty of money - the cars are covered in logos that get seen by all those people.
Finally, the companies that own the teams often see F1 as advertising for their product - ‘Win on Sunday, sell on Monday’. The classic example of this is that Ferrari don’t run TV/online/print advertising of any kind - their famous F1 team and winning reputation is enough to sell their road cars. | [
"While Europe is the sport's traditional base, the championship operates globally, with 11 of the 21 races in the 2019 season taking place outside Europe. With the annual cost of running a mid-tier team—designing, building, and maintaining cars, pay, transport—being US$120 million, Formula One has a significant eco... |
Can you transplant organs across genders? | Gender is not a relevant criterium to judge possible organ donors. I only know about live organ donation, for example kidneys, but I assume that it is very similar with recently deceased donors. Your blood is tested for the amount of reactive antibodies, indicating how many of your white blood cells will recognize the foreign tissue as foreign and attack it. If your reactivitiy is under a certain limit the transplant will probably work. This reactivity is determined by how different HLA (human leukocyte antigen, a kind of molecular passport of your immune system) is between donor and recipient. The sex of the people involved isn't relevant. So to finally really answer your question: yes, absolutely, men and women can donate organs to each other, if they are a immunological fit. | [
"The uterine transplant is the surgical procedure whereby a healthy uterus is transplanted into an organism of which the uterus is absent or diseased. As part of normal mammalian sexual reproduction, a diseased or absent uterus does not allow normal embryonic implantation, effectively rendering the female infertile... |
why don’t birds have teeth? | Yes, Birds are descended from dinosaurs who had teeth, but teeth and jaws became beaks. Birds lost their teeth because they lost the bone structure needed for chewing. Bones are heavy, and birds have sacrificed a lot of bone strength in order to be able to fly well. If a modern bird had teeth, it would break its jaw if it tried to crush or tear with them. Teeth have been replaced by a variety of specialized beaks, some of which are actually quite sturdy. Others use their beaks for reaching into things, and then swallow their prey whole, which they then crush using muscles in the crop. | [
"Birds do not have teeth, relying instead on other means of gripping and macerating their food. Their beaks have a range of sizes and shapes according to their diet and are composed of elongated mandibles. The upper mandible may have a nasofrontal hinge allowing the beak to open wider than would otherwise be possib... |
If I keep doing an action that creates bruises in the same general area (giving them time to heal in between), why does that area eventually stop bruising? | Bruises are created by popped blood vessels internally bleeding right under the surface of your skin. To heal from the ruptures in the vessel, you release clotting factors and such to block the hole. The platelets and such that replace the blood vessel walls are stronger, but less flexible than the original lining of the blood vessel. This makes it more difficult to bruise a second or third time. | [
"Bruise shapes may correspond directly to the instrument of injury or be modified by additional factors. Bruises often become more prominent as time lapses, resulting in additional size and swelling, and may grow to a large size over the course of the hours after the injury that caused the bruise was inflicted. As ... |
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