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I've heard a lot of people say that it is "unhealthy" to work nights and sleep in the daytime and could cause health problems later in life. But why? | Shift work is associated with increased risk of many diseases, notably obesity, metabolic syndrome and Type II diabetes, yet whether this is the result of physiological changes induced directly by disruption of the "body clock" or by confounding factors associated with shift work (for example, increased junk food consumption) is still up for debate.
What we do know is that the circadian rhythms that are upset by shift work are inherently linked to metabolic processes, providing a plausible biological mechanism for circadian disruption leading to metabolic disease. For example, changes to a core circadian rhythm protein, CLOCK, have been shown to [modulate weight loss efficacy](_URL_0_).
The central circadian clock is located in the brain, but peripheral clocks "trained" by the central clock are maintained in almost every organ in the body. These peripheral clocks are also trained by other stimuli - for example, the liver clock can be trained by nutrient signals, in order to anticipate, for example, feeding and fasting events. This training alters the relative "time" in the organ, and changes gene expression to best anticipate upcoming energy intake/reduction.
As the central clock in the brain is trained by light exposure from the optic nerve, there is a possibility for discord between central and peripheral clocks, resulting in sub-optimal tuning of metabolic processes from competing clock signals.
edit: spellings | [
"A survey by the National Sleep Foundation has found that 30% of participants have admitted to sleeping while on duty. More than 90% of Americans have experienced a problem at work because of a poor night's sleep. One in four admit to shirking duties on the job for the same reason, either calling in sick or napping... |
why is that when i choose random on a playlist of thousands of songs, the same few songs seem to play first every time? | The possibilities are:
* Bad luck, but the device does do "random" well enough.
* The device has a poor randomizing algorithm (because nothing in computing actually is random, it just looks that way)
* Observational bias - you only notice that when you start the playlist, songs X, Y, and Z play first. You don't notice when anything else plays first, or you forget.
Try starting with a different song, or rearranging the playlist first by hand. | [
"BULLET::::- Random (Four randomly selected songs (can be all the songs, limited to PENDUAL songs, or LEGGENDARIA (and alternate ANOTHER) songs) without revealing the songs until the course is selected. Locked Songs or Non-Time-Phase Exclusive Songs are excluded. Players may also spend two Time Hourglasses to chang... |
If a fast object, say 90% of the speed of light
travels around the earth, can it catch up to it's own
sound? If so, what happens? | In order for it to have sound, it would have to be travelling through the atmosphere. I guess "sound" is a mild way to describe what would be happening.
It would be a fireball. The air would be massively heated and if it was travelling at .9C and somehow remained in tact and travelled over the same area with each revolution.... I imagine it would almost be like having a solid object there. The air would not have much time to fill back in the space left from the previous passage. It would always collide with some air, but I imagine less than the first go around.
The less air it hits, the less sound there will be. | [
"According to simple emission theory, light thrown off by an object should move at a speed of formula_1 with respect to the emitting object. If there are no complicating dragging effects, the light would then be expected to move at this same speed until it eventually reached an observer. For an object moving direct... |
Greek/Roman Rhetoric - what sort of techniques would an orator utilize? | > In short, what sort of techniques were used by Greek or Roman orators?
There isn't really any short version. Oratory was, along with verse, the singlemost studied and complex literary form of the ancient world. Entire careers were spent perfecting particular styles or sub-styles, schools of rhetoric were the most sought-after educational institutions since at least the sophists. We have entire handbooks on rhetoric and oratory, most of them quite lengthy--Quintilian's surviving *Institutio Oratoria* (to say nothing of his many lost works on rhetoric) is 12 freaking books, and Cicero's *de Oratore* is three. That, without even mentioning later grammarians and the late rhetorical tradition under people like Augustine. To sum up rhetoric and oratory is like trying to sum up the entirety of Classical literature--in many ways it *is* Classical prose, since pretty much all prose writing used the rhetorical principles of oratory as its foundation. If you're interested in gesture there's an [old thread](_URL_0_) that *might* be of value to you, although it's really just asking whether gesture was used. The other thing you mention, saying things in triplicate, is what's known as a tricolon. A favorite technique of Cicero's was the tricolon crescendo, which he often combined with his *clausulae*--the tricolon crescendo consists of a tricolon in the final position of the sentence, often separated by periodicity from the rest of its mother clause, in which the orator doesn't just create a tricolon but with his prose rhythm, tone of voice, and gesture creates an enormous rise in tension to complete and hammer home a rhetorical point. Cicero often gets carried away with his, my adviser once described them as being the hysterical outbursts of a man who knows he has no argument but is going to argue anyway. But oratory is an entire field of study in and of itself, with a complex and specialized terminology, and it's really pretty hard to simply sum it up within the confines of reddit--Quintilian couldn't even do it in 12 books! Without some more specific point there's really not that much that I think we can help you with | [
"The orator, or student of rhetoric, was important in Roman society because of the constant political strife that occurred throughout Roman history. Young men who studied under a rhetor would not only focus on public speaking. These students also learned other subjects such as geography, music, philosophy, literatu... |
Gravity constant at single point on earth? | The gravity on a single spot varies by the second. This is how they measure magma-flows in areas where it's close to the surface (to predict eruptions). The difference in density of the magma causes the gravitational changes. The device to measure it is called a "gravimeter". It's all very small numbers though; Walking around the device during its 10-minute measurement or even wind/rain will make the measurement too noisy to use. | [
"Surface gravity is measured in units of acceleration, which, in the SI system, are meters per second squared. It may also be expressed as a multiple of the Earth's standard surface gravity, \"g\" = 9.80665 m/s². In astrophysics, the surface gravity may be expressed as log \"g\", which is obtained by first expressi... |
what constitutes a draw in chess? why does it seem as though a draw happens when it looks like a normal game going on? | There are several situations where a draw may occur, and while it may seem like a "normal" game is going on to the average person, a trained eye would identify them pretty easily usually:
* One player requests a draw and it is accepted. This may happen if both players want to play it safe and secure half of a point, or if a forced draw will foreseeably happen in the future.
* The same configuration of pieces comes up for 3 turns (a turn being both White and Black getting to move) ~~in a row~~. (Thank you /u/BallsAndAHalf for the correction)
* No pieces are taken for a whole 50 turns **[and no pawn is moved, corrected as pointed out below]**. This is usually not tracked unless it becomes painfully obvious that nothing is happening anymore or if one of the players may get desperate and try to draw out the game until 50 turns have passed.
* One player is caught in a situation where he cannot legitimately move any pieces, but is also not in check. When this happens, it usually comes to the dismay of the other side, as they would likely have a huge advantage over the opponent and got sloppy enough to let this situation happen.
* Checkmate cannot be achieved. This may happen if neither player owns any extra pieces in addition of the below combinations:
King,
King + Knight,
King + 2 Knights,
King + Bishop.
Contrary to what some may believe, King + Knight + Bishop is enough to checkmate, albeit only a skilled or trained player will accomplish this, since it will take ~30+ moves and making the wrong move at certain points will push you over the 50 move draw limit.
Edit: Added another piece of info
Edit2: Corrections | [
"For the most part, a draw occurs when it appears that neither side will win. Draws are codified by various rules of chess including stalemate (when the player to move is not in check but has no legal move), threefold repetition (when the same position occurs three times with the same player to move), and the fifty... |
How and why does toothpaste foam up when you brush your teeth? | Among the ingredients that toothpastes contain (the vast majority) is sodium lauryl sulfate, which is the detergent that creates the foam. The detergents are important 'cause they may help increase the solubility of plaque and accretions during brushing. | [
"Tooth powder (or 'toothpaste powder') is an alternative to toothpaste. It may be recommended for people with sensitive teeth. Tooth powder typically does not contain the chemical sodium lauryl sulphate which can be a skin irritant. The function of sodium lauryl sulphate is to form suds when teeth are brushed. It i... |
since saliva starts the digestion of food in our mouths, why is it that neither our tongue or any other parts of our bodies that get saliva on them are dissolved? | Saliva only contains amylase and lysozymes, which digests complex carbohydrates like that found in bread and carbohydrates found on the surface of bacteria.
| [
"Saliva contains digestive enzymes called amylase, and lingual lipase, secreted by the salivary glands and serous glands on the tongue. The enzymes start to break down the food in the mouth. Chewing, in which the food is mixed with saliva, begins the mechanical process of digestion. This produces a bolus which can ... |
Was the nazi party right in it's assertion that the treaty of Versailles was the primary cause of the economic decline of Germany? | From [an earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_)
> Was the nazi party right in it's assertion that the treaty of Versailles was the primary cause of the economic decline of Germany?
Not really. While the German economic situation after 1929 was quite dire, this was due to the Great Depression. The Treaty system no doubt contributed in *some* way to creating the preconditions for the Depression- the causes of the Depression are quite multifaceted- there is no direct line between the Treaty and Germany's economic woes. The Weimar economy had made a somewhat qualified recovery between 1925-29 and while the Depression halted this recovery, the German economy was not exactly one of dearth and hardship prior to the global economic downturn.
All too often, popular memory of the Third Reich conflates the hyperinflation of 1924 with the rise of the Nazis in 1930-33, which is wrong. There is also a popular view that Versailles was a Carthaginian peace in which the Treaty imposed undue and harsh levies upon a defeated Germany. This is an opinion that dates back to the 1919 with Keynes's argument that the peace terms were too severe and contrary to the wider interests of both the victors and defeated.
The Keynes model is somewhat discredited in current historiography despite its enduring popularity. Very *broadly* speaking, there are two contemporary historical camps about the nexus between hyperinflation and reparations. The first camp emerged in the late 1960s and challenged the Keynesian orthodoxy and argued that hyperinflation was self-sabotage on the part of the Germans to evade their responsibility for payments by undermining the system. Sally Marks in a highly influential 1969 essay, followed up by a stronger one in 1978, argued that the reparation demands were not too onerous and Germany had the resources to meet their Treaty obligations but elected not to for reasons of politics. Stephen Schuker would also likewise argued that the Germans were not acting in good faith and the French Ruhr policy was more rational than the Keynesian paradigm asserted. Marks in particular relied upon the opening of Allied archival sources which showed much of the Allied consternation over German actions.
This anti-Keynesian thesis did not go unchallenged though. In a spirited exchange in *Central European History*, David Felix questioned a number of the key precepts behind Marks's assertions. The German historian Peter Krüger also questioned the anti-Keynesian assumption that Germany had the ability to pay its reparations and maintain something resembling fiscal sanity. Two of the most forceful counterattacks upon the self-sabotage thesis were Niall Ferguson and Gerald Feldman. Ferguson, before he went down the dark path as a public intellectual, contended that finances in this time was a complex mishmash which included important data that Marks and the like ignored or minimized. Ferguson's first book, *Paper & Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897-1927* painted a much more complicated picture and argued that the German fiscal system was extremely vulnerable to inflation; the complicated relationship between Reich, *Lander*, and localities made inflationary public borrowing the norm. Feldman eschewed Ferguson's propensity for economic figures and data and instead argued that political restraints, both foreign and domestic, hemmed in German options.
Elements of Feldman's approach are worth repeating because it taps into the the larger issue of was hyperinflation a deliberate policy. Some of the more reddit types that uncritically cite Marks fall into a trap by contending that Germany could and should have paid and ignore the potential repercussions of such a course of action. One of the legacies of the war was the the Republic would have had to deal with inflation even if the Treaty had been magnanimous. German war finance relied overwhelmingly upon loans in the expectation that they would be paid off by reparations from the defeated Entente. One of the baleful legacies of the Bismarckian Reich was that it saddled the German government with an inefficient tax system; and the level of taxation on the German public was well below the other great powers in the war. While this might seem short-sighted on the part of the German government (and it was), it is important to understand that state financing was a third rail of *Kaiserreich* politics. The popularly-elected *Reichstag*'s most powerful tool against the Kaiser-appointed executive was the former's control of the budget and this habituated a generation of German politicians to avoid touching the tax system. To Weimar's credit, the central government did enact a major reform of the tax code, but such a reform took time. Therefore, deficit spending in the 1920s was necessary for the Weimar state. The fact that Weimar relied upon a narrow coalition for governance precluded more extreme options such as soaking the rich, or, as some German industrialists called for, workers donate an extra two hours of their shift without pay. The state could have cut spending to meet reparations, but such a strategy would have been politically dangerous to the extreme as the Republic was beset by insurgents on both the left and right. One of the immediate priorities for the Republic was a stabilization of the domestic economy to denude these insurgents of a mass base. This led to a curious phenomena in which inflationary policies fed exports so that German unemployment was actually somewhat better than in Allied countries in 1920-21. The problem was this was an unsustainable policy, albeit an understandable one, and Feldman notes that hyperinflation had actually begun to rear its head before the French demands of 1923. Additionally, the resurgence of political violence also created a disincentive for the Weimar government to pursue an alternative course of stabilization through cooperation with the Allies, especially after the Rhineland occupation. Allied reparation policy also played a role in this impasse. As J. P. Morgan noted at the time, the Allies were confused as "to whether they wanted a weak Germany who could not pay, or a strong Germany who could pay." The hyperinflation did not benefit any parties, and mass panic also played a role in sustaining the crisis. As the German economic historian Knut Borchard put it aptly in *Perspectives on Modern German Economic History and Policy*:
> The end of this witches' sabbath did not come immediately. Stabilization only succeeded after the money economy reached the verge of total collapse in 1923, and no one could any longer gain advantage from the situation: not the government or the employers, and not the organized and employed workers. In November 1923, the Mark was worth only 1/10 ~12 of the old gold Mark. But the real expropriation of monetary assets lay further back, and had nothing to do with the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, which had merely further accelerated the inflationary cycle. It is surely insignificant whether one retains a thousandth of one's assets, or only a millionth millionth.
The above of course is just a brief sketch of a complicated historiography on hyperinflation produced since the 1970s. Even for those that do not agree with Marks, her essays did shatter the vulgar Keynesian paradigm of excessive Allied demands and a hyperinflationary antithesis. It has become more or less accepted in the academy that the German methods of wartime financing hid inflation and defeat made things far worse. And she did put the focus back onto the Germans and did give them agency in creating the "witches' sabbath" of 1924. But the Marks interpretation does not have a good deal of traction within Germanist circles for the reason that Feldman, *et al* point out, namely that the solutions to meet reparations without risking inflation were politically unreachable in the early Republic.
As for why the idea of a Carthaginian Versailles has gained traction and proved, well, that's another complicated story. Part of the answer is that the Nazis certainly did use the Treaty as a scapegoat. The campaigns of the German right (not just the NSDAP) against the Treaty certainly did raise the visibility of the Treaty system as one of the causes of the Weimar's collapse. Keynes's Carthaginian paradigm also gave the thesis "Versailles did it" a veneer of respectability. But the Carthaginian model was not just limited to Keynes and there was a not an insignificant number of British elites like Lloyd George who felt the Treaty was too harsh. Such sentiments helped to underwrite appeasement, but they also cast a long shadow after 1945.
| [
"The humiliating peace terms in the Treaty of Versailles provoked bitter indignation throughout Germany, and seriously weakened the new democratic regime. The greatest enemies of democracy had already been constituted. In December 1918, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was founded, and in 1919 it tried and fail... |
Why is Chile shaped so oddly? ( i.e Why is it so long and narrow?) | It's borders almost exactly match the former captaincy general of Chile. If you look at the former Spanish administrative areas, they almost all have the same shapes as the current nations of South America. When they became independent, they merely kept the same territories.
| [
"The geography of Chile is extremely diverse as the country extends from a latitude of 17° South to Cape Horn at 56° (if Chilean claims on Antarctica are included Chile would extend to the South Pole) and from the ocean on the west to Andes on the east. Chile is situated in southern South America, bordering the Sou... |
Could we theoretically see outside the observable universe through observations on the matter within it? | It is not possible to make any observation of the region of the universe outside of the observable universe. See [this post](_URL_0_) for more details.
The light we receive now from galaxies near the edge of the observable universe was emitted many billions of years ago. We are not seeing these galaxies as they appear today. There is no way to detect the influence of anything outside of our observable universe. | [
"The observable universe can be thought of as a sphere that extends outwards from any observation point for 46.5 billion light years, going farther back in time and more redshifted the more distant away one looks. Ideally, one can continue to look back all the way to the Big Bang; in practice, however, the farthest... |
why are musical notes the pitches that they are? why not smaller or bigger increments in frequencies? and who decided this? | Let's start with what sound is. Sound waves are compression waves, which means that energy gets transferred from one chunk of matter (air, for our ears) to the neighboring matter in the form of pushing the particles slightly closer together (*compressing* them). If you do this process at certain frequencies, you get sounds of different pitches. That's all speakers do - move a piece of paper back and forth (very quickly) at different speeds to get different pitches. It simply transfers mechanical energy from the speaker cone to the air touching it.
Now on to the musical scale. As /u/lucaxx85 said, it appears to come from nature (it's a discovery, rather than an invention). A pure tone is said to have a "fundamental frequency" (its pitch is defined by that frequency). If you double that frequency, you're one octave above the fundamental frequency's pitch. If you triple it, you're a fifth above that. And so, if you go on and keep multiplying the original frequencies by integers, you fill in the scale most commonly used in Western music.
However, there are musical scales that do not use the standard solfege scale. On that basis, I argue that the whole-whole-half-etc scale sounds normal simply because it's what we're used to. After 10 years of choir growing up/through university, we sang an Indian raga that used 7 evenly spaced tones to form an octave (the octave was still mathematically the same), and had to spend a couple weeks only singing the scales to get acclimated to singing these "new" intervals. But then we were used to them.
I would guess the sound/feeling of resonance/dissonance has to do with how our auditory system works. A quick glance over [wikipedia](_URL_0_) confirms this, but adds that it's culturally conditioned. That is, all people can hear consonance/dissonance, but which intervals are consonant vs dissonant is determined by the musical tradition.
Source: physics bachelor's, many years in choir, and an in-progress master's in systems-level neuroscience
**TL;DR** Octaves/other intervals are mathematically defined, but how normal an interval, chord, or progression sounds is culturally determined | [
"The reason why the interval sizes vary throughout the scale is that the pitches forming the scale are unevenly spaced. Namely, as mentioned above, the frequencies defined by construction for the twelve notes determine two different kinds of semitones (i.e. intervals between adjacent notes):\n",
"The reason why t... |
why do certain body parts feel numb while drunk? | Alcohol is a depressant. It hinders the brain's ability to function properly and impedes neural messages from reaching the brain. | [
"The numbing effects of alcohol and narcotics can become a coping strategy for traumatized people who are unable to dissociate themselves from the trauma. However, the altered or intoxicated state of the abuser prevents the full consciousness necessary for healing.\n",
"Alcohol can also cause alterations in the v... |
How do we know that the Universe's law or constants never change? | If all of physics changes all of the time then we really have no basis for any of the research that we do because anything could be caused by anything.
However, we actually don't know that constants haven't changed but there have been attempt to measure or constrain how much they might have changed over [cosmic history](_URL_0_). For example, the fine-structure constant has been possibly shown to vary by study of quasars but the results are a bit controversial. The gravitational constant has been shown to not vary by both lunar laser ranging and pulsar timing experiments to very high precision. As you can see on that wiki page, there are a number of measurements that have been done to constrain variations in fundamental constants. Any true variation would allow us to understand how our current models of physics deviate from reality and allow us to develop new models. | [
"In a more philosophical context, the conclusion that these quantities are constant raises the question of why they have the specific value they do in what appears to be a \"fine-tuned Universe\", while their being variable would mean that their known values are merely an accident of the current time at which we ha... |
How was correspondence handled between Axis and Allied nations during World War II? | Typically, the Swiss Consul and the Red Cross handled mail for the over 35,000 German POWs held in Canada. the YMCA dealt with issues of mental and physical "salubrity". This generally falls in line with the developments found in other parts of the commonwealth that held substantial numbers of POWs. When the repatriation of sick or wounded POWs took place (and this rarely happened), they were often sent through Spain as opposed to Switzerland, since this required extra travel close to hostilities. The case of the *Arandora Star*, which was a vessel carrying POWs from Europe to Canada and sunk by a German U-Boat in July 1940, justified very rarely sending prisoners across the ocean. Neville Wiley has written a good book, *Barbed Wire Diplomacy* (Oxford, 2010) in which he investigates the politics of prisoners of war during the Second World War. I hope this helps. | [
"During World War II punched card equipment was used by the Allies in some of their efforts to decrypt Axis communications. See, for example, Central Bureau in Australia. At Bletchley Park in England, 2,000,000 punched cards were used each week for storing decrypted German messages.\n",
"Early in World War II com... |
how does closing our eyes signal to the brain that it's time to shut down (sleep)? | It's not necessarily so that closing your eyes makes you sleepy. Often it's the other way around: you feel and urge to close your eyes when you are tired and sleepy. Bu in a way it's like two sides to a coin - the two phenomena are interconnected and interdependent on eachother:
When you close your eyes very little meaningful information flows from the retinas to the brain. The stream of visual impressions stops. Quite a large part of the brain is at any time occupied with decoding and interpreting visual information. By stopping the flow the activity in the brain is diminished and this gives the brain "rest" (couldn't come up with a better word just now).
Also, as the retinas stop being exposed to light, both by closing the eyes and by the sun going down and darkness falling in the outside world, there is a signal from the retinas of the eyes, through some fibers of the optic nerve, to the pineal gland, a small gland buried deep in the brain. This signal (light has become darkness) gives rise to an increased production and release of the hormone melatonin which makes us sleepy. This is not an instant process, but happens over the course of maybe 15-30 minutes. Interestingly some people who are blind due to injuries or malfunctions in the central nervous system may still have functioning retinas that can give signals to the pineal gland through the optic nerve so that these people, even though they can't tell through sight if it's light or dark can have a circadian rythm (at least partly) that is controlled by the light conditions in the outside world. | [
"Nocturnal Lagophthalmos (where one’s eyelids don’t close enough to cover the eye completely during sleep) may be an exacerbating factor, in which case using surgical tape to keep the eye closed at night can help.\n",
"When awake, the lids spread the tear secretions over the corneal surface, on a typical basis of... |
the railgun | The bullet you're trying to fire is a piece of metal, that sits on 2 rails that are charged(like the ends of a battery). When the bullet sits on top, it connects them like a wire, so electrical current flows through. When current flows through a wire, theres a rule about how electromagnetism works where a magnetic field is generated around it, which is how electromagnets function.
So when the gun is operating, there is a magnetic field pointing up because of the current going through the rails at the same time as an electric current is going through the bullet horizontally(From one rail to the other). When this happens, it takes advantage of something called the "Lorentz force" which works like this:
F = qv x B
Meaning that the force thats pushing the bullet is equal to the current(qv) times the magnetic field(B) going in the direction perpindicular to both of those two. That's just how the cross product(x) works. Because 1 is going left and the other is going up, the direction perpindicular to both of those is forward, so thats the direction that the bullet accelerates. As long as the bullet is touching the rails to act as a wire, this force occurs, which pushes it down the rails till it shoots off. | [
"A railgun is a device that uses electromagnetic force to launch high velocity projectiles, by means of a sliding armature that is accelerated along a pair of conductive \"rails\". It is typically constructed as a weapon, and the projectile normally does not contain explosives, instead relying on the projectile's h... |
Let's say that I'm riding with Edward Longshanks in 1282 to combat some Welshmen. Naturally, I'm not going to exchange pleasantries with them. Would it be more expected of me to use swear words based on bodily fluids and genitals or religious themed ones? Any good examples of appropriate curses? | The problem with the Middle Ages in England is that there is much less writing in English than there is in French or Latin. However, we do have the *Canterbury Tales* which is a fairly extensive corpus for Middle English words and also has the benefit of being written in "vernacular" English, as Chaucer says himself (at lines 727-28 of the General Prologue):
> “I **pleynly speke** in this mateere / To telle yow hir wordes and hir cheere”
Admittedly the Tales are from the turn of the 15th century, so later than your question, but we see a lot of words that are related to our modern swear words and a fascination with toilet humour and genitals:
> [Absolon was] Of farting, and of speche daungerous (Miller's Tale, l. 235)
> And at the window out she putte hir hole
> And Absolon, him fil no bet ne wers,
> But with his mouth he kiste hir naked **ers** - (Miller's Tale, l. 628-32)
'Ers' is what we now say as 'arse/ass'.
We also see the ancestor of the word 'cunt':
> Pryvely he caught her by the **queynte** (Miller's Tale, l.175)
And furthermore:
> To see a **shitten** shepherd and clene sheep (General Prologue, l. 506)
This doesn't tell us whether these words were offensive and used as swear words at the time, but it makes it clear that genitals, scatological humour and so on were sources of humour and quite tittilating for your Middle Age reader. Chaucer's characters are purposefully vulgar and they use these kinds of words.
| [
"BULLET::::- ROTHWELL, William (1994), 'The trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer', Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 16, 45-67.*ROTHWELL, William (1996a), 'Adding insult to injury: the English who curse in borrowed French', in NIELSEN/SCHØSLER (1996), 41-54.\n",
"BULLET::::- In English-language material: in the Ro... |
how can cosmetic and otc drug companies get away with putting out duplicate products with strikingly similar boxes without getting sued? | The rules the FDA makes for drugs are highly complex, but the jist of it is that drug makers only have a certain period of time in which they can hold patents and protect their intellectual property before they effectively become public. Usually 10 years. | [
"Though consignment store is famous for its great varieties of products, products' qualities are always questioned. The common problem with cosmetic products would be the authorization. Some are found to be pirated. Even more, some models are found to be never circulated in the market by the brand. Not only do thes... |
Why did they need an algorithm to take a picture of the black hole and what did the algorithm even do? | Hey TheLordZee!!!
So the image of the black hole is not a simple optical image like you would take with your camera, or see through your telescope. It’s looking at radio frequency light.
Now one cool thing we can do in radio astronomy is called interferometery. The tldr of it is that we can use multiple radio dishes far away from each other to act as a single REALLY big radio dish.
But using multiple dishes causes many issues. Each dish will have different seeing conditions, gain differences, etc. but most importantly, the phase of the radio wave will be different at each dish, which needs to be calibrated to get information out of the measurement.
So the algorithm focuses on fixing the phases, considering the different seeing conditions, making sure that everything looks good in what’s called UV space in radio astronomy. Additionally, they had to do some really neat additional stuff to tease more information out of the measurements, as their longest baseline ( or furthest telescope distance) provides less angular resolution than what is seen in the image.
If you have any questions let me know, I’d be glad to help! I’m a Astrophysics PhD student that does a good deal of radio data reduction.
EDIT: As many people have pointed out, digital cameras do use algorithms. I did not mean to imply they didn’t, but rather that in the case of a Charged coupled device (CCD), it is more straight forward. More on this here...
An optical image in astronomy is taken using a CCD camera. This is a chip which utilizes the photoelectric effect to obtain an image. Incident photons strike the CCD and ‘knockloose’ an electron. The camera then counts how many electrons are knocked loose at that point and correlates that with an intensity.
But how does it correlate position on the CCD to position on the sky? The CCD is organized into a pixel grid, say 1024x1024. Each pixel has its own bin which can collect electrons from incident photons. Additionally, every column (some ccds use row separation, but the concept is the same) is isolated with p-doped(?i May have mixed this up, this area isn’t my forte) material to help prevent spill over from pixels side by side to each other. But this does not happen for the row separation. This is why when we see very bright sources in astronomical images, they streak up and down across the image much more than side by side.
To actually read the pixel counts, the ccd will move each row down one at a time, and the bottom row will be read out by each column entry. Am algorithm can then be used at this point to improve the observation for which ever mean you are trying to use it for.
To be totally honest, my knowledge of how a phone camera works is minimal and I’m sorry. The joke in astronomy is that people get so specialized that you can walk in a departmental talk about some complicated topic, but only a few people could tell you the order of the planets. :) | [
"She led the development of an algorithm for imaging black holes, known as Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors (CHIRP), and was a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team that captured the first image of a black hole.\n",
"The CHIRP algorithm was developed to process data collecte... |
how is thermal sensation measured/estimated? | The feels like takes humidity and windspeed into effect, both testable factors.
Generally objects heat or cool in an inverse exponential fashion shown [here](_URL_0_). Having humidity or wind will increase or decrease the rate of cooling, but the final temperature has to stay the same, you can't cool something down to 10 degrees using 20 degree air, no matter how hard you try, but you can alter the rate at which it cools.
The feels-like temperature is the no-humidity no-wind temperature at which a human (typically at 37^o C) would gain or lose heat at the same rate as the actual temperature including wind and humidity effects.
Why does this work? Humans don't sense an absolute temperature, but rely on the difference in temperature to create the sensation of heat. The reason cold feels cold and hot feels hot is that the body is trying to either lose heat or retain it to stay at 37 degrees. In that picture above you can see that the rate of cooling looks like 1 - the temp difference. So the closer you get to equalizing the temperatures, the slower the change in temperatures.
So if you find which no wind/humidity temperature gives the same cooling rate as the actual temperature with wind/humidity, you found the thermal sensation, and it works on a scientific basis, not on a "well it sorta kinda feels like it" basis. | [
"BULLET::::- Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of a sample of matter. Temperature is the unique physical property that determines the direction of heat flow between two objects placed in thermal contact. If no heat flow occurs, the two objects have the same temperature; otherwise heat flows from the ho... |
If other universes exist, is it possible that their laws of physics are different than ours? If so, how is this possible? | Here is a wikipedia article you might find interesting.
_URL_0_ | [
"Since the current laws of physics are only known to be valid in this universe, it is possible that the laws of physics are different in parallel universes, giving a God-like entity more power. If the number of universes is unlimited, then the power of a certain God-like entity is also unlimited, since the laws of ... |
Why is DNA considered an acid when it has mostly negative charges from phosphate groups? shouldn't that make it a base? | The "acid" part refers to the fact that it has a [phosphate group](_URL_0_), which can deprotonate - making it an acid, much like phosphoric acid. It does not refer to the form it takes under physiological conditions (that is, they're not splitting hairs on whether it is phosphoric acid or phosphate). They're also called phosphate nucleotides.
Another common biological molecule you'll find is amino acid, which references the amino group and the carboxylic acid group, despite the fact that at physiological pH the carboxylic acid group is deprotonated and the amino group is protonated. I suppose you can attempt to call it an "ammonium carboxylate" if you really want to, but that's beyond the original spirit of the term's etymology. | [
"The phosphate groups in the phosphodiester bond are negatively charged. Because the phosphate groups have a pK near 0, they are negatively charged at pH 7. This repulsion forces the phosphates to take opposite sides of the DNA strands and is neutralized by proteins (histones), metal ions such as magnesium, and pol... |
is near term extinction really imminent? if so, what can we do as individuals to withstand it? | Humanity is a highly intelligent, spread-out and resilient species. Untold millions may die and civilizations crumble, but outright extinction is highly unlikely unless we're talking about truly extraordinary calamities, of which "just" climate change is not one. | [
"Human extinction can be prevented by improving the physical barrier or increasing the mean distance between people and the potential extinction event. For example, pandemics are controlled by placing exposed people in quarantine and evacuating healthy people away. The human lineage of genus \"Homo\" has reduced fr... |
why do swiss banks seem immune to all foreign legal obligations except for taxes? | Please do a search before you post. I did it for you this time because I'm nice:
_URL_0_
They have softened their stance in recent years, however. | [
"Many sovereign states do not legally require private bankers to confirm whether or not a client has or has not paid their taxes, in any capacity. On top of this, Switzerland's banking secrecy laws prohibit the disclosure of client information under a variety of federal, cantonal, and civil policies. Many foreign n... |
this statement from the federal reserve | We want to keep as many people employed as we can, without jacking with our prices. Right now it looks like we can do that. So far it looks like everything will be fine, but we're watching the global economic and financial indicators to make sure we stay ahead of any problems. Inflation is probably going to stay low for a while, but it won't be too long before it hits 2% with as the labor market gets better and the costs of energy and imports rise. We'll keep an eye on it. | [
"The Federal Reserve Act created the Federal Reserve System, consisting of twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks jointly responsible for managing the country's money supply, making loans and providing oversight to banks, and serving as a lender of last resort. To lead the Federal Reserve System, the act established... |
When I drink something with caffeine in it, how long does it affect my body? | There are a lot of variables that will affect how long caffeine will stay in your system; such as, whether you're a male or female, your weight, the actual amount of caffeine consumed, your current tolerance level, etc. There's simply no way to accurately say how long it will affect you.
For a typical male who weighs 180 lbs and drinks caffeine only on occasion, a can of Coke (a relatively small source of caffeine; a candy bar has more) will likely have noticeable effects for *about* 2-3 hours (after about 3 hours, the initial amount of caffeine in the blood will have been cut in half). Caffeine will remain in your system as it is metabolized for a while afterwards, but its noticeable effects will be gone.
Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors, a chemical in the brain that causes drowsiness. It won't necessarily prevent you from entering REM sleep, per se, but it makes falling asleep in general more difficult. | [
"The structure of caffeine allows the molecule to pass freely through biological membranes including the blood-brain barrier. Absorption in the gastrointestinal tract reaches near completion at about 99% after only 45 minutes. Half-life of caffeine for most adults is between 2.5 and 4.5 hours when consumption is li... |
why are people interested in tap-to-pay with cellphones? | 1 thing is more convenient to carry than 2 things. | [
"Payphones are often found in public places to contribute to the notion of universal access to basic communication services. One thesis, written as early as 2003, recognised this as a digital divide problem.\n",
"In recent years, deregulation in the United States has allowed payphone service provided by a variety... |
Does how my body is oriented while asleep(on my back/side/stomach) have any effect on my brain or body's circulation? | The majority of your blood while sleeping in a particular position would be pooled near the bed, meaning that the mileage closest to the ground would have more blood going through it, simply because of gravity.
Gravity has a pretty significant role in our circulation system, and I think a reason why we sleep in a laying-down position is because the energy required to pump blood to each section if the body (below and above the heart) would be balanced.
This question is dependent on the person, but it definitely has an effect. As for the brain, probably not much of an effect on its activities while asleep. Your brain and digestive system are already getting more blood while sleeping than other parts of the body anyways. | [
"The functions of the thalamus and midbrain include the regulation of consciousness, sleep and alertness. Occlusion of the artery of Percheron, for example by a clot, could result in a posterior circulation infarct impairing structures on both sides of the brain. This can produce a bizarre disturbance such as sleep... |
who are these "experts" we always hear about in the news or in sources of information? ex:"experts say..." | It depends on the topic as well as the source. For a biased media source pushing an agenda an "expert" might be anyone who says what they want, but for a more objective source "experts" might be people like researchers who have studies a particular topic. | [
"An expert is someone who has a prolonged or intense experience through practice and education in a particular field. Informally, an expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by pee... |
Why does sticking your head in the freezer provide relief for your eyes when chopping onions? | It's probably as simple as the fact that you're getting your face away from the onions. | [
"Eye irritation can be avoided by cutting onions under running water or submerged in a basin of water. Leaving the root end intact also reduces irritation as the onion base has a higher concentration of sulphur compounds than the rest of the bulb. Refrigerating the onions before use reduces the enzyme reaction rate... |
why do i get emails on my phone before they come through to outlook on my computer? | Without you giving more specifics about your mail server, it is probably because your phone is set to push, or to be immediately notified when mail arrives, while your desktop is set to pull, or to check on a timer or at certain time intervals for new messages. | [
"Email allows messages to be targeted at particular members of the audience by using the \"To\" and \"CC\" lines. However, some message systems do not have this option. As a result, it can be difficult to determine the intended recipient of a particular message. When messages are displayed hierarchically, it is eas... |
what toxins do those cleanse diets and pills remove. | None. We have organs in our bodies, as you mentioned, to do the job for us. The cleanse diets/pills are just woo. | [
"Detox diets can involve consuming extremely limited sets of foods (only water or juice, for example, a form of fasting known as juice fasting), eliminating certain foods (such as fats) from the diet, or eliminating processed foods and alleged irritants. Detox diets are often high in fiber. Proponents claim that th... |
why does food seem to taste different with different consistencies? | When you prepare and cook food, you are changing, removing, and creating new chemicals in the food. A piece of bread will have certain chemicals in it, but when it is toasted (via the Maillard reaction) you are changing the chemicals within the bread. Taste is based on what chemicals interact with your tastebuds, and then you perceive them however you like.
Feel free to ask any follow-up questions! | [
"Another universal phenomenon regarding food is the appeal of contrast in taste and presentation. For example, such opposite flavors as sweetness and saltiness tend to go well together, as in kettle corn and nuts.\n",
"Because each culture varies in how it treats some foods, a food may be a candy in one place and... |
why don't we ever learn about the 14 presidents before george washington? | None of them matter. Under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government only barely existed. Washington was the first President after the adoption of the Constitution, which means he was the first with any actual authority.
Indeed, even calling the other guys "President" is kind of misleading. They were presidents of the Continental Congress, not of the United States. It was a mostly ceremonial position without any real power. It certainly wasn't a position of leadership over the country.
A few of these guys actually are important to American history, but due to reasons other than their position as "president of the Continental Congress". | [
"George Washington's presidency has generally been viewed as one of the most successful, and he is often considered to be one of the three greatest American presidents ever. When historians began ranking the presidents in 1948, Washington ranked 2nd in Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.'s poll, and has subsequently been ran... |
why can't tissue like meniscus that fails or tears be replaced with an artificial substance that works just as well? | There are lots of materials we can use that the body will accept, and in some cases the material will even be able to encourage the body to heal faster or work in a way to help the intergration.
> an artificial substance that works just as well?
The working just as well part is the problem. Your body is very well suited to doing what it does at every level, producing a replacement that works in the same way is very hard. This is especially the case in ligaments and cartiliage where gradients of different tissues allow for highly controlled passing of forces without injury.
If it does not work as well then it might fail either over time or really quickly, it might damage the area if it is too weak or too strong, if it starts to wear and particles are given off that cause inflamation and other problems.
Fully synthetic repalcements made out of polymers like goretex as ligament replacements have a very high failure rate.
Engineered ones produced either from decelluarised scaffolds (taking a ligament from elsewhere, kicking the old cells out, and putting the patients ones in) or fully tissue engineered ones (making a template in the lab and adding the patients own cells to it) are in the works and are advancing through animal testing and I think some human testing. | [
"Artificial cartilage is a synthetic material made of hydrogels or polymers that aims to mimic the functional properties of natural cartilage in the human body. Tissue engineering principles are used in order to create a non-degradable and biocompatible material that can replace cartilage. While creating a useful s... |
How/Why does Intel have a higher IPC than AMD at the same clock frequency in their CPUs? | The other answer in this thread is a bit simplistic, and not quite correct in some cases.
First, let's look at where differences in IPC (instructions per cycle) can arise. In essence, all Intel and AMD CPUs are [Von Neumann](_URL_1_) machines, meaning, they perform computations by reading data from memory, performing an operation on that data, and then writing the result back to memory. Each of those actions take time, more specifically *cycles*, to perform. Computers can read from memory using **load** instructions. Computers operate on data through **logical** instructions (add, subtract, multiply, divide, bit shift, etc.) or **control** instructions (conditional/unconditional branches, jumps, calls... basically instructions to control what code gets executed). Computers write data to memory through **store** instructions. *All* useful programs will use all 4 types of instructions to some degree. So in order to improve IPC, you can implement features which will speed up the operation of those instructions, at least over the lifetime of the program (in other words, they improve *average* performance of an instruction)
So how can you improve the operation of these instructions? Here's a crash course in (some) major features of computer architectures:
1. **Pipelining**: Instead of doing an instruction in 1 cycle, you can do 1/*N*th of an instruction in 1 cycle, and the instruction will take *N* cycles to complete. Why do this? Let's say you split an instruction execution into 3 parts. Once the first 1/3 of the instruction 0 is completed on cycle 0, you can execute the 2/3 of instruction 0 in cycle 1 *as well as* the 1/3 of instruction 1. The overall benefit is that if you can execute 1 instruction in *t* time, you can execute 1/*n* of an instruction in *t*/*n* time. So our *3-stage pipeline* can now on average do 1 instruction per cycle, but it can run 3 times faster. Practical impact: the processor frequency can be greatly increased. In this case, by 3x.
2. **Caching**: Believe it or not, **loads** and **stores** to memory take *far far far* longer than **logical** or **control** instructions. Well, at least without the caching optimization. The idea of caching is to keep a _small, fast_ memory close to the processor and the *larger, slower* memory farther away. For example, if you sat down at your desk and wanted a pencil, where would you want to have it? On the desk? Inside the desk drawer? In your storage closet? Or down the street at the office supply store? You have a small number of things you can fit on top of your desk, but keeping your pencil there is the best if you use it frequently. Practical impact: the average time it takes to access RAM is somewhere between 50 and 120 cycles. The average time to access the L1 cache (the fastest and smallest cache) is 3-5 cycles.
2. **Superscalar processing**: Let's say that you have the following code:
a = b + c
d = e + f
This code will form two **add** instructions. One key thing to note is that *these two instructions are completely independent*, meaning that the instructions can be performed in any order, but the result will be the same. In fact, the two instructions *can be executed at the same time*. Therefore, a superscalar processor will detect independent instructions, and try to execute them simultaneously when possible. Practical impact: allows the processor to reach an IPC higher than 1. Code varies a lot, but the theoretical IPC maximum for most single-thread programs is somewhere between 2-5.
3. **Branch prediction**: When we introduce pipelining, we run into a problem where we might not be able to execute the first 1/3 of an instruction because we *don't know what it is yet*. Specifically, if we have a **control** instruction, we need to complete the control instruction before we can figure out what the next instruction to execute is. So instead of waiting to finish the **control** instruction, we can *predict* what the next instruction will be and start executing it immediately. The processor will check its prediction when the **control** instruction finishes. If the prediction is correct, then the processor didn't lose any time at all! If it guesses incorrectly, it can get rid of the work it did and restart from where it went guessed wrong. Practical impact: modern processors predict correctly 98+% of the time. This saves many, many cycles that would otherwise be spent waiting.
4. **Out of order / speculative processing**: Building on superscalar processing, processors can try to guess on *a lot* of things in advance. Let's say there's a **load** instruction 10 instructions ahead of where the processor is currently executing. But, it doesn't look like it depends on any of the previous 9 instructions? Let's execute it now! Or, what if it depends on instruction 5? Let's guess at the result of instruction 5 and use it to execute instruction 10 anyways! If the processor guesses wrong, it can always dump the incorrect work and restart from where it guessed wrong. Practical impact: it can increase IPC significantly by allowing instructions to be executed early and simultaneously.
5. **Prefetching**: A problem with caching is that the cache *can't hold everything*. So if the processor needs data that isn't in the cache, it has to go to the large, slow RAM to get it. Think of like when you look in your refrigerator for milk, but you don't have any, so you have to spend time going to the store. Well, processors can try to guess about the data it will need soon, and fetch that data from RAM to put it in the cache before it need it. Think of it like realizing your milk is low, so you stop by the store and pick some up on the way home from work. That way, when you actually need the milk it will already be there! Practical impacts: prefetching can significantly reduce the average time it takes to get data from RAM, this increasing IPC.
**The conclusion**
Knowing _exactly_ why AMD's architecture doesn't have the same IPC as Intel's is a bit difficult to tell, because there are necessarily no people who have access to the internal design details for both Intel and AMD simultaneously. It would be like trying to tell how someone got sick - you can come up with a lot of educated guesses and theories, but there's not really a way to tell for sure.
Another reason is that many of the inventions that go into CPU microarchitectures are patentable. So it could easily be that Intel has certain patents that they are unwilling to license or AMD doesn't want to license.
To put things in perspective, both Intel and AMD perform all of the above items I listed. The main difference between the two is *how* they are implemented. Their architectures will differ in how many pipeline stages they use, how many instructions they can execute at the same time, how far ahead they can look for independent instructions, how they decide which data to prefetch, etc. These will cause minor differences in IPC.
**The bottom line**
One of the larger differences between the two recently, in my opinion, has been small differences and techniques on how they implement speculation related to **load** instructions. Intel pulls more tricks related to trying to guess the value of a **load** before it is known for sure, and doing so quickly and correctly. It's hard for AMD to replicate these because the techniques are either trade secrets or patented.
Edit: many of these techniques can are described in the "bible" of computer architecture:
[J. Hennessy, and D. A. Patterson. *Computer architecture: a quantitative approach*. Elsevier, 2011.](_URL_0_) | [
"Most modern mainstream and value CPUs are made with a lower TDP to reduce heat, noise, and power consumption. Intel's dual-core Celeron, Pentium, and i3 CPUs generally have a TDP of 35–54 W, while the i5 and i7 are generally 64–84 W (newer versions, such as Haswell) or 95W (older versions, such as Sandy Bridge). O... |
Was there ever a 'Zionist'-type movement for African Americans? Did freed slaves ever think of building a new nation in Africa? | Yes, the Back-to-Africa movement, also called Black Zionism, was such a movement that saw popularity in pre-civil war times, reconstruction, and a brief revival in the 1920s.
It started up in the 19th centuries, when many free blacks in both the North and South, in response to the hostility they faced when attempting to integrate into white American society. To some people in both racial groups,the idea of free blacks immigrating to the land of their ancestors seemed an attractive solution for these tensions. The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816, with the support of both slaveholder a who wanted to prevent rebellion agitated by freedmen, as well as those who believed that slavery wasn't economically viable, as well as abolitionist groups, notably Quakers, who believed that African Americans would see better, more full lives, in Africa, as well as the more religious abolitionists hoping to reduce pagan and Muslim presence in the US. From 1821 to 1847, when Liberia became independent, the ACS helped to move over 13,000 black Americans to Liberia, and continued to send more until 1867, when it effectively ceased operations save for continued publication of it's quartlerly journal, which continued until 1919. Among the black community, the ACS had a mixed reputation, with some supporting the movement, and others condemning it as a deception of a better life to trick blacks from leaving the land of opportunity to an uncertain future in a faraway land. Nevertheless, many freedmen did go to Liberia, especially after it's independence. Some notable ACS members included presidents Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Lincoln.
Another pre-civil war Back-to-Africa movement led to the creation of another African nation, Sierra Leone. Paul Cuffee, a wealthy black man from Massachusetts, helped the British resettle freed slaves, who had mostly fled to Nova Scotia following the American Revolution, in what is now Sierra Leone.
After the Civil War and the emancipation of American slaves, the Back-to-Africa movement saw a revival with the end of reconstruction, and the rise of the KKK and increased lynchings, the continued segregation and discrimination they faced in both north and south made many Afro-Americans skeptical that equality could ever be achieved, and made the concept of "returning to the motherland" all the more appealing, with immigration to Africa hitting a peak in the 1890s, which is also when lynchings reached a peak. The movement began to decline again around the turn of the century, due to a number of factors, primarily the growing sense of American identity among the black community, preferring to stay home rather than move to an alien land that they had no real connection to for generations.
The movement saw it's final revival in the 1920s, under the Jamaican-born Pan-African activist Marcus Garvey. Garvey founded the Black Star Line, a company that in addition to shipping goods, was also meant to serve as transport for African Americans across the Atlantic to their ancestral lands. However, due to the poor condition of the line's ships, financial difficulties, and research by the Bureau of Investigation, the FBIs forerunner, that BSL had committed mail fraud, by advertising a ship they intended to buy, but did not own, leading to Garvey, but none of the other BSL officials, being sentenced to five years in prison followed by deportation to Jamaica.
With Garvey's arrest, BSL, which was already in debt anywhere from $630,000 to $1.2 Million, ceased to function, however, it's legacy lives on in the flag of another African country, Ghana, which depicts a lack star in the center, partly as an homage to Garvey's movement.
| [
"BULLET::::- First major African-American Back-to-Africa movement: 3,000 Black Loyalist slaves, who had escaped to British lines during the American Revolutionary War for the promise of freedom, were relocated to Nova Scotia and given land. Later, 1,200 chose to migrate to West Africa and settle in the new British ... |
If silicon wafers can only be made round, why are the chips we make not hexagons instead of squares to cover the edges more efficient? | It would be very hard to cut the wafer in pieces if the die is not rectangular [although laser cutting seems to be able to cut any shape](_URL_0_).
Anyway, the arrangement of the logic gates on the die is mostly in a horizontal and/or vertical structure, so the natural boundaries will be a rectangular grid.
Regarding wafer utilization, the smaller the die is, the better the wafer is utilized. That is one factor in Moores law, which predicts the economy of chip manufacturing. The smaller the feature size is (e.g 90nm, 45nm etc), the more transistors will fit and the smaller the die will be for a circuit of a given complexity, with a smaller die the yield will be better and the chip will be cheaper to produce. | [
"Silicon wafers are cut from a solid ingot of nearly-pure (99.9999999%) silicon. This is done through the process of Czochralski growth, which is diagramed in the adjacent image, and produces a single intact diamond cubic silicon crystal. Due to its structure, monocrystalline silicon is anisotropic, which gives it ... |
How voltage travel in a wire at the fundamental level? | Voltage is not measured on a single conductor. Voltage is only measured as a difference *between* two things. When you are measuring 1.5V between the positive and negative conductor of a battery it means that there is a *potential*, should you connect the two conductors, for electrons to flow in that direction and at that rate.
This will be due to the number of electrons existing on the atoms at one conductor is different to the number of electrons existing on the atoms at the other. If they were to be connected, electrons will try to reach *equilibrium*, wanting to flow *from* the material with more electrons *to* the material with less for as long as this is the case.
Imagine a canal with a lock in it (a barrier). The water level is higher on one side than the other. From the difference in height we can tell how much and which direction the flow would be if we opened the lock. It doesn't matter how *absolutely* high either side is, just the difference between the two.
The flow of electrons would happen quickly and then stop once equilibrium is reached. However, a battery is a device which can store a large amount of differently charged particles apart from each other, positively charged at one end and negatively at the other, providing a relatively long continuous supply of charge should you connect the two, which lasts until the battery is depleted. | [
"In electrical wiring, the maximum current density can vary from 4 A⋅mm for a wire with no air circulation around it, to 6 A⋅mm for a wire in free air. Regulations for building wiring list the maximum allowed current of each size of cable in differing conditions. For compact designs, such as windings of SMPS transf... |
how are we able to send information through the air? | There are devices that encode and decode on either side of a transmitted signal. The encoder turns the signal in to a wave form, the decoder reassembles that wave form so the device can play it. | [
"In radio communication systems, information is carried across space using radio waves. At the sending end, the information to be sent, in the form of a time-varying electrical signal, is applied to a radio transmitter. The information signal can be an audio signal representing sound from a microphone, a video sign... |
why do hangnails hurt so much? | Here's a picture of a homunculus (a picture of the human body with each body part shrunk or expanded based on how much of the brain serves each area). You can see that the face/lips and hands are very large. This means there are lots of nerves that serve these areas. This makes sense, as you need to have very good control and sensing of these areas in order to speak/eat and manipulate objects with your hands.
_URL_0_
Injuries to your hands or face will hurt more simply because you have more ability to sense those areas in general. | [
"Hangnails can become infected and cause paronychia, a type of skin infection that occurs around the nails. Treatments for paronychia vary with severity, but may include soaking in hot salty water, the use of oral antibiotic medication, or clinical lancing. Paronychia itself rarely results in further complications ... |
During the eclipse this morning I noticed the shadow moved from top to bottom. Shouldn't it be the other way around? | The shadow of the Earth on the Moon appears to move that way because the Moon is actually orbiting our planet in a direction completely opposite of its apparent movement in the sky (the rotation of our planet makes it look like the Moon is travelling East to West when it's the other way around in reality). | [
"A tall pole vertically fixed in the ground casts a shadow on any sunny day. At one moment during the day, the shadow will point exactly north or south (or disappear when and if the Sun moves directly overhead). That instant is local apparent noon, or 12:00 local apparent time. About 24 hours later the shadow will ... |
Are there any US presidents who had a bad life after presidency? | Harry Truman was poor before and after his presidency.
"One of the saddest cases of presidential hardship, Truman, was relatively poor throughout his life. He borrowed against his meager future inheritance and invested in a zinc mining operation, which failed and lost him most of his investment. Truman later performed various menial jobs, which barely kept his family afloat. However, the real financial disaster occurred when the clothing store he owned with a friend went bankrupt in the wake of extreme deflation. Truman lost his $30,000 investment, but never declared bankruptcy, despite urgings from friends and family to do so. Truman continued to pay debts throughout his early career, and was still thousands of dollars in debt when he began his tenure as a senator. It was Truman’s sad financial state that inspired the doubling of the presidential salary, which he received after the fact. Truman and his wife were the first two official recipients of Medicare when Lyndon Johnson signed the program into law."
[Source](_URL_0_)
| [
"Some presidents have had significant careers after leaving office. Prominent examples include William Howard Taft's tenure as Chief Justice of the United States and Herbert Hoover's work on government reorganization after World War II. Grover Cleveland, whose bid for reelection failed in 1888, was elected presiden... |
why opening the task manager almost always seems to fix a non-responsive application | Because starting the task manager is like an astronaut calling in and saying "Houston, we have a problem". You've got your computers attention, it's sort of a "top level" instruction, everything else the pc is doing is frozen, and you get the task manager.
Often times that freezing is actually enough to unfreeze things, but if it isn't, it gives you enough control to kill off the offending task. | [
"The Quick Launch toolbar has been removed from the default configuration, but may be easily added. The Windows 7 taskbar is more application-oriented than window-oriented, and therefore doesn't show window titles (these are shown when an application icon is clicked or hovered over). Applications can now be pinned ... |
What is the general timeline of the evolution of English monarchic power from absolute to Queen Elizabeth II being a tourist attraction? | As [I've written before](_URL_1_), there's no single point. It was a series of events, over hundreds of years.
* The first loss of power was the signing of the Magna Carta, by King John. While his brother Richard was off fighting the Crusades, John was minding the store - and took the opportunity to raises taxes. The barons rebelled and, at the point of a sword, made John sign the Magna Carta, limiting his powers a bit. (I'm sorry, but I don't know the actual content of the Big Charter.)
* The next loss of power by the British monarchy would be the revolution in which the Parliament deposed and killed Charles I. The Scottish Stuarts were never popular monarchs, but they were all that was available after Elizabeth I died. However, the English were used to monarchs who had learned the lesson of King John, while the Scottish monarchs were used to having more absolute power. Eventually, it came to open conflict during Charles' reign, and... "Off with his head!"
* After the brief republican Protectorate period led by Cromwell, the renewed Parliament declared Charles' son Charles as king in the Restoration - but with some conditions attached. Charles II was not to be allowed to become another tyrant like his father and grandfather before him.
* On Charles II's death, the crown went to his brother, James II. Like all the Stuarts, James II was Catholic. This didn't sit well with the Protestant English, but they were limited in their choice of monarchs. However, when James started removing legal limitations on Catholics in England, the Parliament decided he'd overstepped his bounds. So, they invited his daughter Mary - who *was* a Protestant - to speed up the process of her inheriting the throne. The Glorious Revolution overthrew the last Catholic king and installed the Protestant Mary and William as co-monarchs - after they signed the first English [Bill of Rights](_URL_0_), further limiting the powers of the monarchy, and increasing the powers of the Parliament and the people.
* When Mary, then William, died, the throne went to Mary's sister, Anne. However, there were no more Protestant heirs on the horizon - all of Mary and Anne's relatives were Catholic. So the Parliament passed a law giving themselves the power to choose the heir to the throne, and banning any Catholic from ever sitting on the English throne. Eventually, they convinced Queen Anne to sign this (if she'd had any children who lived past infancy, this might have been different). So, when Anne died, the Parliament chose some far-distant relative who was about 50th in line for the throne to succeed her: Georg of Hanover became King George I.
The last time a monarch of England or Britain had the power to do anything without consulting the Parliament was King James II - and the Parliament overthrew him, in favour of two monarchs who agreed to rein in their powers.
| [
"\"Elizabeth: Renaissance Prince\" (2014) provides new insights into one of England's greatest monarchs. It uses new research in France, Italy, Russia and Turkey to present a fresh interpretation of Elizabeth as a queen who saw herself primarily as a Renaissance prince, delivering a very different perspective on El... |
where did the star shape originate? | It originates far back when we did not have telescopes or anything to see the stars with. When you look at the star, it really looks like the 5 pointy thing we know it as, because of the light beams.
More info: _URL_0_ | [
"The shape and arrangement of the stars varied widely throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, but the arrangement of stars in a circle has, since it first appeared, represented unity between the states, with no state more dominant than any other. The circular arrangement of the \"Betsy Ross\" design was seen as ear... |
Is mutation inevitable among living things? | I think the answer is yes. As others pointed out, you can reduce it to extremely low values if you're ready to expend more and more effort to do so, but the mutation rate can never be a full zero; this was proved by Claude Shannon and it's not just about biological mutations but a fundamental tenet of Information Theory itself. | [
"Mutations can have many different effects upon an organism. It is generally believed that the majority of non-neutral mutations are deleterious, which means that they will cause a decrease in the organism's overall fitness. If a mutation has a deleterious effect, it will then usually be removed from the population... |
Why did Romans use amphoras instead of barrels? | There is a certain aspect of path dependence here. Barrels and amphorae aren't just different in material, they are different in a lot of ways that have direct impact in their use. For example, to carry an amphora off a ship onto a dock you would pick it up by the handles and carry it, while a barrel would be rolled. Likewise, storing barrels and storing amphorae require different sorts of interior architecture in a ship. | [
"Amphorae, or amphoras, were used during Roman times to transport food on long and short distances. The content was generally liquid, olive oil or wine in most cases, but also \", the popular fish sauce, and fruit sauce. As a container, an amphora was supposed to be strong, not too heavy, shaped in a way suitable f... |
Why can we see Mercury and Venus in the sky if they are within our orbit? | The answer does have to do with geometry.
Consider the following arrangement:
Sun Venus
XXX
XXXXX
EARTH
XXX
Imagine you live at the 'H' on the above diagram of the Earth. In this configuration, the Sun will not be visible from that spot, so it'll be night time, but Venus will be -- so you'll be able to see Venus in the night sky.
Because Venus and Mercury have orbits inside that of the Earth, however, neither can be seen all night. At best, Mercury can be seen for about an hour after sunset or for about an hour before sunrise, whereas for Venus, the most is about 4 hours before sunrise or after sunset, if memory serves me correctly.
| [
"Because Mercury has little or no atmosphere, a view of the planet's skies would be no different from viewing space from orbit. Mercury has a southern pole star, α Pictoris, a magnitude 3.2 star. It is fainter than Earth's Polaris (α Ursae Minoris).\n",
"Like Venus, Mercury orbits the Sun within Earth's orbit as ... |
Did French nobility flee to Jamaica during the Revolution? | That's entirely possible. [A lot of _émigré_ aristocrats](_URL_1_) fled to London or other parts of the British empire, so it's equally possible some made their way to Jamaica. The planter class in Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe were likely to take refuge in the British Caribbean after the Haitian Revolution began in 1791.
There's some work you can check out regarding nobles fleeing France. The best books are Kristy Carpenter's [_Refugees of the French Revolution: The French Émigrés in London, 1789-1802_](_URL_0_) (1999) and a volume of essays she co-edited with Philip Mansel entitled [_The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle Against Revolution, 1789-1814_](_URL_2_) published the same year. I don't remember anything specifically about Jamaica, but there may be information in passing about French _émigrés_ in the Caribbean. | [
"In 1694, Jamaica came under attack by the French, led by Admiral Jean-Baptiste du Casse. The French far outnumbered their opponents, but were eventually turned back, after losing hundreds of men in the conflict; they were successful in damaging or destroying many sugar estates and plantations on Jamaica, however.\... |
What led the US to allow a conditional surrender of Japan after demanding unconditional surrender at the Potsdam Conference? | I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that Japan was allowed to surrender conditionally. They weren't. They accepted unconditional surrender... as for why much of the Japanese government was bureacratic mechanisms (and the Emperor) were allowed to remain in place... here's a bit from an earlier post I've made on the topic from [this](_URL_0_) thread:
> In short, America needed a Japan that was rebuilt and a friendly state as quickly as possible in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. This was in order to have a stable, undivided platform from which to counter what many high-ranking military experts understood was going to be the Third World War right on the Second’s heels: the looming confrontation between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers.
> As per the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences, though Japan had studiously (and much to Hitler’s dismay and ultimate downfall) refrained from declaring war on the USSR, Stalin had agreed with Churchill and Roosevelt to declare war on the Japanese Empire and invade, first their colonies in Manchuria and Korea, and then the home islands. What that meant in terms of the Western postwar outlook would be much the same as what was already shaping up in Europe: the division of such states into Soviet and Western blocs. Such a state of affairs was wholly undesirable to the US, who looking beyond 1945 saw the policy on containment of Soviet influence to be its top priority.
> As late as August 10th, 1945 – after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima but before the destruction of Nagasaki – the Japanese government was still sending its request to conditionally surrender to the Allies, with their one and only condition: “that the stipulations of [the Potsdam Declaration] do not include any demand for alteration of the authority of the Emperor to rule the state.” Such a precondition were deemed unacceptable by both the US and the USSR, with Commissar of Foreign Affairs Molotov being described as “skeptical,” and thus the war carried on until September 2nd when unconditional surrender was at last accepted.
> There were trials, and members of the Japanese military and civilian government were tried and between the IMTFE and the prosecutions conducted by independent nations, according to Dower some 5,700 people were convicted of Class A, B, and/or C war crimes, resulting in almost 1,000 death sentences, nearly 500 life sentences, and more than 2,900 lesser sentences. Yet some of the worst criminals, it is true, did essentially get away scot-free, most notably the commanders of the infamous Unit 731, which had been given immunity from prosecution for their human experimentation and biological weapons research in exchange for that research, and at least as important, denying the Soviets access to that research (which would prove at least partially futile).
> Crucially, though [...], the Japanese monarchy and government was left largely institutionally intact. Unlike West Germany, there was no corollary to “de-Nazification” in Japan. Yes, there were purges of the extreme ultranationalists and right-wingers, but they were often allowed back ‘into the fold’ rather quickly. Why? Because especially after the shocking fall of the Republic of China to the Maoists in 1949, it seemed to most that Asia was on the cusp of toppling like dominos to communist influence. The US determined at a fundamental policy level that a stable, united, friendly, and anti-Communist Japan was absolute priority. That meant people with a proven track record of industrial, business, and managerial success – lo and behold: it was often the very same rightists.
> The Emperor was declared by MacArthur and Co. to be not responsible for what had happened over the course of the war, with the blame instead falling squarely on the military brass like Tojo. Symbolically, this was significant because it allowed the people as a whole to say, in essence, that the militarists had taken over and done bad stuff, but that was them, not us, and they were already held responsible
> ______________________________
> Dower, John. (1999) Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.
> Translation of intercepted Japanese messages, circa 10 August 10, 1945, Top Secret Ultra
> Memorandum of Conversation, "Japanese Surrender Negotiations," August 10, 1945, Top Secret | [
"On 26 July 1945, United States President Harry S. Truman, United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Government Chiang Kai-shek issued the Potsdam Declaration, which outlined the terms of surrender for the Empire of Japan as agreed upon at the Potsdam Conference. This ... |
Finding Newspaper Sources | Libraries usually offer access to newspaper archives which you can search. Often this requires a login of some type if used online, or physical presence at the library.
These archives usually aren't publicly available since it takes a lot of effort to digitize newspapers from the past, and it is difficult and expensive to keep the archive up to date. The entity running the archive will want some compensation for that. So libraries subscribe to the archive for a fee, and they in turn give their members access to it. For instance many university libraries offer access to LexisNexis News. | [
"Information ranging from a wide variety of sources, such as reporters, political scientists, historians, art historians, as well as critics are published in the newspaper. The newspaper also offers eight supplements and covers the issues of politics, society, culture and art.\n",
"The newspaper published very li... |
how come junk food tastes so good? | High fat, sugar, and sodium content activates dopamine receptors in the brain that promote stimulation which creates the sensation of happiness and satisfaction. This effect is almost immediate, but certainly not lasting. | [
"As for junk food's appeal, there is no definitive scientific answer, both physiological and psychological factors are cited. Food manufacturers spend billions of dollars on research and development to create flavor profiles that trigger the human affinity for sugar, salt, and fat. Consumption results in pleasurabl... |
Why can't they make the "perfect computer language?" A language that is higher level language that has a super intelligent compiler to create efficient machine code from that level? | Finally a question in my area of expertise! Time to put my PhD in PL to use :)
The problem is abstraction: abstraction makes life easier by hiding details from the programmer, say about memory management, and managing them automatically. Unfortunately, abstraction has a cost: turns out the computer often doesn't the best way to do something for you, it will be "correct" but not necessarily optimal.
Now a language like C abstracts very little: there is no garbage collection, you manage memory yourself with perhaps malloc (or whatever else you want to use); there is no class system, you get structs; there are no closures, you just get function pointers. C doesn't do much for you, but then you have lots of control and can make your code go as fast as you are willing to work at it.
So compilers/runtimes are getting smarter while hardware is getting much faster. It wasn't that long ago that even the minimal abstractions provided by C was too much, and you would have to break down into assembly code to create some highly optimized code or manipulate the machine directly. However, these days, compilers are good enough that there isn't much benefit to doing this. Heck, these days there isn't much advantage in using C over C++, which provides classes along with libraries that manage memory automatically (ref counting!).
You often don't need to sweat performance-sucking abstractions because of [Amdahl's law](_URL_1_), which is basically an observation about bottlenecks. If you are writing code that does IO or interacts with the user, the time that computation contributes to total execution time is insignificant; using performance-sucking abstractions like interpretation, dynamic evaluation, and garbage collection really doesn't matter. But sometimes you are writing high performance code or code that runs in a limited (embedded) environment, so you'll have to break out some C++/CUDA/C code.
Finally, the computer will probably eventually be able to beat us in performance, but by this time we might have hit [singularity](_URL_0_) anyways and it won't matter much (think: post human-level AI). Additionally, there are all sorts of fun meta-programming techniques that attempt to subvert the cost of abstraction, but nothing so far has stuck beyond a few templates and macros. | [
"Low-level languages can convert to machine code without a compiler or interpreter – second-generation programming languages use a simpler processor called an assembler – and the resulting code runs directly on the processor. A program written in a low-level language can be made to run very quickly, with a small me... |
Are onions toxic to all dogs? I just read a thread in r/dogs about a dog dying a (horrific) death from eating 3oz of onions, but I've fed onions to all of my dogs, (golden and two shih tzus) who all lived to at least 15 years. What's the difference? | sure, but did your dogs eat 3oz of onions at once? Dosage is probably an important factor. | [
"Onions cause hemolytic anemia in dogs (and cats). Allyl propyl disulfide has been reported as being considered to be the main cause of onion poisoning in dogs. Thiosulfate has also been implicated. Thiosulfate levels are not affected by cooking or processing. Occasional exposure to small amounts is usually not a p... |
i've read when you hit the water after jumping off of a bridge it's the same as concrete, why isn't rain the same as having gravel dropped on you from miles in the air? | according to sources, terminal velocity of raindrops is about 10m/s, for human body it's 50m/s or so. | [
"Concrete exposed to seawater is susceptible to its corrosive effects. The effects are more pronounced above the tidal zone than where the concrete is permanently submerged. In the submerged zone, magnesium and hydrogen carbonate ions precipitate a layer of brucite, about 30 micrometers thick, on which a slower dep... |
- what is the difference between the usa supporting "contras" and "mujahideen" and moscow supporting ukrainian separatists? | Nothing. There is no difference. The United States was and is an imperialist power, meddling in the affairs of other countries, and Russia was and is an imperialist power, meddling in the affairs of other countries. | [
"While Lavrov acknowledged that Russia is in contact with the Ukrainian separatist rebels he denied US and EU allegations that Moscow sponsored the rebellion and accused the United States of aggravating the conflict. \"Our American colleagues still prefer to push the Ukrainian leadership toward a confrontational pa... |
Why did lager become so prevalent in the United States? | You probably can't point out a single factor as to why lager is so popular, but it started displacing ale at the turn of the 19th century. Some possible reasons:
1. Many German and Czech immigrants were settling the Midwest during this period and brought their brewing techniques and preferences with them. A lot of the huge breweries like Anheuser-Busch, Coors, Miller, Pabst, etc. around today were founded by immigrants from Germany or Bohemia.
1. Lager yeast couldn't be transported across the Atlantic in the past without spoiling, whereas ale yeast was much hardier. With the advent of refrigerators and trucks, lager could be kept longer and distributed further. Anheuser-Busch in particular used these new technologies to create efficient supply chains and corner the market.
1. People considered lager a special kind of drink, as it was less intoxicating than darker beer or liquor. Harder drinks were more likely to be frowned upon in public, whereas lager was seen as healthy and fashionable - which meant it was consumed more often at social events and by a wider range of people. | [
"American lager or North American lager is pale lager that is produced in the United States. The pale lager-style beer originated in Europe in the mid-19th century, and moved to the USA with German immigrants. As a general trend outside of Bavaria and the Czech Republic where the beers may be firmly hopped, pale la... |
If an English medieval king wants something built who is the first person he would go to for help? | This is a pretty interesting question. The first person an English king would probably talk to would be someone from Parliament. English Kings were still under the Magna Carta for a good portion of the Medieval Ages. The King would need to get the approval for the funds, if he didn’t want to pay out of pocket, for the construction. A new tax, tariff or levy may have to be imposed. Tariffs on Wool exports was a common way to pick up extra revenue for England during the medieval ages.
There was a medieval version of engineers and architects. While their trade and understanding was a lot cruder than it is today, they still had a concept for certain things. Some of these medieval architects were a lot more skilled than others as well, so depending on the grandeur of the project, the King may even have a famous architect brought in. I’m not exactly sure of the name at the time for it.
One of the most famous medieval architects was actually the Englishman Saint James of Mark, responsible for the Tower of London.
These architects would assemble teams of skilled laborers, masons, stone and woodworkers from all over, again depending on the grandeur of the project. Local magistrates may have also helped with supplying manpower for the construction of these projects as well. | [
"The player must control a lord as he tries to develop an army of knights and soldiers in order to challenge the king for the throne of England. Travelling on the medieval roads is not like traveling on today's superhighways (and requires months to get from one end of England to the other). Rivers also provide a qu... |
how can someone survive with just 1/4 of a liver in the case of a transplant? | Simple answer is that the liver regenerates slowly over time. As long as you don't stress it out you could live a fairly healthy life, while you wait for it to grow back. If you ever did you would only be able to drink water and would have to monitor your diet very carefully. | [
"More recently, adult-to-adult liver transplantation has been done using the donor's right hepatic lobe, which amounts to 60 percent of the liver. Due to the ability of the liver to regenerate, both the donor and recipient end up with normal liver function if all goes well. This procedure is more controversial, as ... |
how does micellar water work? | So imagine a molecule. One end likes water. One end likes oil. Oil and water don't like touching each other so try to touch as little as possible. Micelles are these molecules bunched together. They form spheres so all the oil loving parts are on the inside. Whenever they find something oily like on the skin it goes into the middle of the sphere. This happens with a bunch of oil. Then these spheres can be washed off with water cause the outside of the spheres still like water and move with it easily. | [
"A micellar solution consists of a dispersion of micelles in a solvent (most usually water). Micelles consist of aggregated amphiphiles, and in a micellar solution these are in equilibrium with free, unaggregated amphiphiles. Micellar solutions form when the concentration of amphiphile exceeds the critical micellar... |
Western films often purport a stark difference between Southwestern "village Indians" like the Pueblo and Yuma, and "warrior Indians" like the Apache and Comanche. Were these cultures really so distinct in lifestyle? | Your assertion that this idea is much more complicated than Hollywood portrays is absolutely correct. This idea of Navajos, Comanches, Apaches, etc. as especially violent comes out of the Indian Wars fought by the U.S. Military against these groups from the end of the Mexican-American war in 1848 up to to early 20th century (around 1924). During this time, sedentary agricultural groups like the Pueblos and the O'odham (the "Pima") largely did not mount violent campaigns against the U.S. This idea of the pacifist Southwestern farmers was further bolstered by early anthropologists working the early 20th century (like Ruth Benedict) who portrayed especially the Pueblos as incredibly peaceful and egalitarian societies.
**The Myth of Peaceful Pueblos**
This perception of pacifist Pueblo people has a precedent all the way back to the Spanish rule of New Mexico (beginning in 1598), wherein the (especially missionary) perspective was of the "peaceable" Pueblo people - docile, civil, and ideal converts to Christianity. This was in contrast to the savage, violent, and heathen nomadic people living on the periphery of the new colony of New Mexico, generally glossed as "Apaches" though this could include just about any non-Pueblo group. Similar sentiments are expressed by missionaries colonizing southern Arizona later on at the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century.
To quote from Knaut (1995: 33-34):
> As daily contacts between Europeans and Pueblos increased, the Spaniards found themselves astounded by the Indians' unwillingness to challenge the newcomers, and several chose to perceive this as evidence of an unusual civility inherent among New Mexico's aboriginal inhabitants. Fray Francisco de Escobar called the Pueblos 'very affable and docile,' noting that 'they all live in pueblos which, for Indian dwellings, are very well arranged... They are satisfied with little, but they do not have enough.'
Yet, not all Spaniards shared this perception, and the historical record casts it in doubt. It was clear (and is clear from a modern historical perspective) that the Pueblos were willing to challenge the newcomers on multiple fronts. The very first interaction between Pueblo people and Europeans was between the Zunis in the village of Hawikkuh and Esteban, the dark-skinned moorish member of the Spanish expedition led by Fray Marcos de Niza in 1539. The story from the Zunis goes that they killed Esteban after he made arrogant demands of them and threatened them with violence (Knaut 1995: 21-22).
Just a year after claiming the colony of New Mexico for the Spanish crown in 1598, the new governor Juan de Onate sent a siege against the famous fortress town of Acoma Pueblo after the soldiers he sent to collect tribute where killed by the Acoma as an act of resistance. The Spanish ultimately won the siege and captured 500 of the inhabitants of the town, 80 of whom where men. Onate then sentence each man over the age of 25 to have a foot cut off and serve as labor for Spanish encomenderos for twenty years.
At least eight other rebellions against Spanish authority occurred following the siege of Acoma (Liebmann 2012: 47). In 1680 the largest rebellion yet actually forced the Spanish out of the colony, not to return until their second conquest of New Mexico in 1692. This Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was a mass rebellion against the Spanish coordinated among nearly all the different Pueblo groups in New Mexico.
Importantly, many of these revolts (including the 1680 Revolt) were conducted cooperatively between the Pueblos and "Apaches" (a term used generally by the Spanish to refer to any number of nomadic groups living along the edges of the colony of New Mexico).
I should stress that this is true of other sedentary groups in the Southwest. For instance, the Pima Revolt of 1751 was a 3 month long rebellion in southern Arizona of O'odham people against the Spanish that resulted in around 100 Spanish deaths. I focus here only on the Pueblos because that is where the majority of my expertise is.
This history of rebellion by the Pueblos continued even after the second Spanish conquest of New Mexico, but largely diminished after 1700 due largely to two factors. First, that the lessons of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt meant the Spanish were largely more lenient in their policy towards the Pueblos subsequent to their second conquest in 1692. The two primary concerns that had driven the Pueblo revolt was Spanish persecution of Native religious practices (and insistence on conversion to Catholicism) and economic hardship resulting largely from excessive tribute demands and the use of unfree Pueblo labor by Spanish elites and missionaries (Knaut 1995; Liebmann 2012; Preucel 2002).
Both the tribute and labor demands of the Spanish on the Pueblos were diminished following the 1680 Revolt, and further by the mid-18th century Bourbon reforms. Likewise, religious persecution was significantly lessened following the 1680 Revolt and the church in New Mexico was far more lenient towards secretive practices of Pueblo religion as well as syncretic beliefs.
Second, changing demography made outright violent revolt by the Pueblos increasingly nonviable. During most of the 17th century, the Pueblos significantly outnumbered the Spanish in New Mexico. This advantage in numbers allowed for their success in the 1680 Revolt. However, from the first conquest of New Mexico in 1598 and up into the American period, Pueblo populations steadily declined from a combination of Spanish exploitation, introduced disease, and famine due to excessive tribute and drought. In contrast, Spanish settler populations (and mestizos) increased over this time period. These changes made overt rebellion less and less viable.
Edit: Typos | [
"The film was one of the first to present an authentic and sympathetic view of the Native Americans. In his review of the DVD release of \"Fort Apache\" in 2012, \"New York Times\" movie critic Dave Kehr called it \"one of the great achievements of classical American cinema, a film of immense complexity that never ... |
iran vs israel | Back in the early part of the 20th century there was the Zionist movement. This was the idea that the Jews needed a country to call their own. One of the most popular ideas was to create this in the biblical region of Judea, what was then called Palestine and what we now call Israel.
Jews starting moving to the area and setting up settlements. After World War II this land was controlled by the British. One of the first things the newly-formed United Nations did was to declare that part of the area of Palestine should be devoted to a new Jewish state. The Arabs that were already living there were not too happy to hear that they were going to be living under Jewish rule.
The same day that the British gave up rule of the region to the new state, all of Israel's neighbors simultaneously declared war and invaded. Israel was able to hold them off and eventually an uneasy truce was formed.
Ever since then the Arab nations in the Middle East have been unhappy with Israel. They believe that the land was taken away from its rightful owners, the Palestinian Arabs. Israel, for the most part, simply wants to exist.
Many Muslim leaders, including the leaders of Iran, use hatred of Israel to redirect their people's focus away from the economic and social problems at home. | [
"Iranian–Israeli relations have shifted from close ties between Israel and Iran during the era of the Pahlavi dynasty to hostility since the Islamic Revolution. Iran has severed all diplomatic and commercial ties with Israel, and its government has not recognized Israel as a state, referring to its government as th... |
why do human bodies build up tolerance to alcohol/drugs but not daily medications like antidepressants/cardiac/etc meds? | I can't speak for the other meds, but you absolutely can build up a tolerance to antidepressants and painkillers and the like | [
"Certain types of drugs affect self-controls. Stimulants, such as methylphenidate and amphetamine, improve inhibitory control in general and are used to treat ADHD. Similarly, depressants, such as alcohol, represent barriers to self-control through sluggishness, slower brain function, poor concentration, depression... |
Would a Roman from the 1st-2nd century AD recognize anything in the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) in the 11th-12th century as "Roman"? | In religion, language, and many other respects, the Byzantine Empire of the Comnenian period was very different from its Roman ancestor. It continued, however, to preserve many of the cultural traditions, some of the institutions, and one of the great cities of the Roman world.
In the second century, the Roman provinces that made up the future heart of the Byzantine world were linguistically divided. In the Balkans, heavily influenced by the legions along the Danube, the lingua franca was Latin. Greece and Asia Minor, however, were almost entirely Greek-speaking. A Roman time-traveler to the Byzantine world would find that Greek (albeit a very different-sounding Greek) had persisted in Greece and Asia Minor, but that Slavic languages had replaced Latin in the Balkans. He would also discover that - despite a modest tenth- and eleventh-century revival in Byzantine legal circles - knowledge of Latin had virtually disappeared. But if, like many educated Romans, he was a fluent reader of Greek, he would be gratified to find that knowledge of the Greek classics was alive and well among the Byzantine elite, and that many Byzantine authors continued to use a classicizing literary style quite similar to that employed by educated speakers of his own day.
If a Roman time traveler found himself in court, he would also discover that Byzantine civil law was still based on the Code of Justinian (and thus on the legal traditions of his own day). That law had of course been translated into Greek, and modified by the various later compilations; but it was very clearly, and proudly, part of the Roman legal tradition.
A visit to the imperial palace, with its cadres of officials and pneumatic throne, might disconcert a time traveler accustomed to the pseudo-republican governing style of Trajan or Hadrian. The autocratic and bureaucratic Byzantine court, however, was far from being un-Roman; it just late Roman, based on a model of imperial rule pioneered by Diocletian and Constantine.
Perhaps the most impressive demonstration the Byzantines were still Romans, however, was the city of Constantinople itself. Before it was burned and pillaged by the crusaders, Constantinople - alone among the cities of the medieval Mediterranean world - continued to look like a classical city. Our Roman visitor would of course have been baffled by the churches; but the grand public squares and impressive galleries of bronze and marble statues would have reminded him of Rome - just as Constantine intended. | [
"The Eastern Roman Empire, governed from Constantinople, is usually referred to as the Byzantine Empire after AD 476, the traditional date for the \"fall of the Western Roman Empire\" and beginning of the Early Middle Ages. The Eastern Roman Empire surviving the fall of the Western, protected Roman legal and cultur... |
what is the psychology behind humans wanting rare/exclusive things so badly? | Well, it seems barter system economies predate monetary ones all the way back to the point where chimpanzees have them. Where males have been known to bribe females for sex with fruits and berries that are difficult to get.
In the case of humans, those who were able to get these things were then later able to trade them for things they needed. Those who did not, were not. Being able to get the things you need because you've accumulated stuff you don't; but that someone else wants/needs, is a solid social tactic.
It carries on today, say you want to marry a girl. Kind of have to put a ring on it. Basically a boast - "I'm a good enough provider to get this much bling." Of course works the other way too. Oscasio-Cortez' out might cost a ridiculous $3500, but i think mot guys will agree that she does look great in it. | [
"BULLET::::- Do we know, or have good reason to believe, that all natural desires have possible satisfactions? Is this Aristotelian claim still plausible in the light of modern evolutionary theory? Don’t humans naturally desire many things that don’t seem to be attainable (e.g., to possess superhuman or magical pow... |
What was Spain's relationship with Northern Africa in the late 15th and early 16th centuries? | Spain as we understand it now only really comes into existence in 1472 with the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabelle of Castille, and the union of those two kingdoms.
The kingdom of Aragon under Ferdinand not only controlled the mediterranean coast of the Iberian peninsula, but also ruled over the islands of Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia. Therefore, the kings of Aragon and subsequent Spanish monarchs had strong interest in Mediterranean affairs throughout the late 15th century and early 16th.
This influence only increased when the kingdoms were united, making a more powerful Spanish kingdom. Beginning in 1501, Ferdinand waged a successful war against Louis XII for control of the [kingdom of Naples](_URL_1_). However, Ferdinand II formally took control of Naples as a possession of the crown of Aragon.
At this time, the Hafsid rulers of Tunisia were becoming more and more alarmed with increasing Aragonese influence in the Mediterranean. In 1509, a Spanish force took over the city of Oran on the coast of Algeria. In 1517, an army marched from Oran east to try and take the city of Tlemcen.
Concurrently, the Ottoman empire was expanding its influence in the eastern Mediterranean, conquering the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt in 1517. After this success, the eyes of the Sublime Porte looked to incorporate the North African coast into the Ottoman Realm.
Into this mix walked the brothers Khayr ad-Din and Aruj, who is better known as Barbarossa^1. Both were Aegean muslim privateers who had previous dealings defending the citizens of Tunis and Tlemcen against the Aragonese threat. In 1519, the Sultan Selim I would appoint Khayr ad-Din to lead his Jannisary forces in bringing that section of the North African coast under Ottoman protection, with the title of Governor as his reward.
From this position, Khayr ad-Din and Aruj would build up a Corsair fleet to threaten the security of Aragonese possessions. This threat would push Ferdinand's successor Charles I to dispatch an army to successfully capture Tunis in the 1535 as a part of Charles' larger war against the Ottoman sultan. In addition to being king of Spain, Charles was the leader of the Holy Roman Empire, and this era saw naval engagements throughout the Aegean and Mediterranean between Christian and Ottoman forces.
Spain would continue to control Tunis until 1574 when the Ottoman's recaptured the city for the last time.
---
1- The name Barbarossa comes from the phrase Baba Aruj, meaning Father Aruj or Old Man Aruj. Interestingly, after Aruj was killed in battle with the Spanish, the name Barbarossa was passed on to his younger brother Khayr ad-Din, who would become known as Hayreddin Barbarossa by his christian opponents.
[Empire of the Sea](_URL_0_) is a readable account of the ottoman-christian clash in the mediterranean in the middle decades of the 16th century. It gives some relevant information about Hayreddin Barbarossa and the 1535 capture of Tunis.
| [
"In the 16th century, control of the western Mediterranean was contested between Spaniard and Turk. Both were confident due to recent triumphs and consequent expansion. In 1492, Spain had completed her centuries-long \"reconquista\" of the Iberian peninsula, which was followed by the first Spanish settlements in Am... |
[Neurology] Layman wants to know: Why do games like Portal give me motion sickness? And why doesn't this affect everyone? | Just a friendly reminder, please keep the discussion to the scientific phenomenon of motion sickness and avoid sharing your personal anecdote.
Thanks! | [
"Another trigger of virtual reality sickness is when there is disparity in apparent motion between the visual and vestibular stimuli. This disparity occurs if there is a disagreement between what the stimuli from the eyes and inner ear are sending to the brain. This is a fundamental cause of both simulator and moti... |
Why does an electron emit or absorb energy when it goes up or down a level? | > Why does an electron emit or absorb energy when it goes up or down a level?
Conservation of energy. An electron (bound within an atom) goes up a level when it absorbs a photon. So imagine the electron has an energy of 10 (in some unit) before absorbing the photon. If I shine in a photon of energy 3.4, the total "electron+photon" energy is 13.4. If there is an available energy level at 13.4, the electron will jump up to that level, and sit there with an energy of 13.4. The reverse process applies for jumping down a level; the electron will emit a photon.
> Furthermore what does it mean for an electron do go down or up a level?
In everyday life, we're used to quantities being continuous. I can drive my car (legally) at any speed between 0mph and 70mph. What happens in the quantum world, is that these values could be *quantised*. This means the quantity can only take on specific values. So, carrying on with the car analogy, it would be like if I was only allowed to drive at, say, 10mph, 30mph or 70mph. In the context of electrons within atoms, we find that electrons can only have certain specific energies; energies in between are not allowed. This is what is meant by the "levels"; you need photons of *specific* energies in order to stimulate jumps.
> Can an electron always emit energy or is there a level cap,
There is indeed a lower limit, called the [ground state](_URL_0_).
> can it absorb an infinite amount of energy or it reaches a certain level when it can't absorb anymore?
Once the electron has enough energy, it will leave the atom completely, becoming a free electron. The energy of a free electron is not quantised. | [
"If the electron absorbs a quantity of energy less than the binding energy, it will be transferred to an excited state. After a certain time, the electron in an excited state will \"jump\" (undergo a transition) to a lower state. In a neutral atom, the system will emit a photon of the difference in energy, since en... |
When taking human body temperature, is there a location/method that gets closest to one's "real" temperature ("real" for medical purposes, i.e. identifying fever or other issues)? | They are all real as long as you understand how they all differ from the core body temperature.
Rectal, ear, and temporal artery temperatures are closest to core body temperature but more importantly they are less likely to be affected by environmental conditions.
For comparison, stick with the same method of measurement each time. | [
"Temperature can be recorded in order to establish a baseline for the individual's normal body temperature for the site and measuring conditions. The main reason for checking body temperature is to solicit any signs of systemic infection or inflammation in the presence of a fever (temp 38.5 °C/101.3 °F or sustaine... |
why is north considered up? is there any practical reason why north won the right to point towards the top of the page and not the south? | North is a direction, before maps there was no up, just four directions, we just happened to draw it as up and it stuck. [This should help too.](_URL_0_) | [
"BULLET::::- Up is a metaphor for north. The notion that north should always be up and east at the right was established by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy. The historian Daniel Boorstin suggests that perhaps this was because the better-known places in his world were in the northern hemisphere, and on a flat map these... |
does sound get louder when multiplied? | Sound waves carry energy that physically makes the air particles (or any medium that it travels through) viabrate as the sound moves. If you have more things making noise the total amount of particles viabrateing in the air is a lot more thus a louder noise. | [
"An increase of 6 dB represents a doubling of the SPL, or energy of the sound wave, and therefore its propensity to cause ear damage. Because human ears hear logarithmically, not linearly, it takes an increase of 10 dB to produce a sound that is perceived to be twice as loud. Ear damage due to noise is proportional... |
If I were to condense an entire 20" pizza to the size of a penny and ate it, would I feel full? | The enzymes in your stomach will have a rather difficult time breaking down something that is 20 times higher in density than what they are used to. It might very well be discarded as waste, like an actual penny. | [
"At this stage, the thin dough top has a rounded, domed appearance. Pizza makers often poke a small hole in the top of the \"lid\" to allow air and steam to escape while cooking, so that the pizza does not explode. Usually, but not always, tomato sauce is ladled over the top crust before the pizza is baked.\n",
"... |
In light of Pearl Harbor Day tomorrow, to what extent was Japanese internment in America a land-grab by white farmers? | The simple answer is yes and no. While those who would economically benefit from internment were not silent about their support for the policy, it would likely be more accurate to say internment was the result of widespread Japanese prejudice rather than a singular group.
For some background, President Roosevelt did not specifically authorize internment, but instead through E.O. 9066 gave wide authority to General DeWitt, the military commander of the Western Defense Command, to "prescribe military areas... from which any and all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Commander might impose".^1
Having been given such wide authority, General DeWitt was not shy about his feelings towards those who had been interned, and in his Final Report described those of Japanese descent as "subversives" who belonged to an "enemy race" and represented "112,000 potential enemies."^2 His views were not a secret, and Justice Murphy would later quote extensively from the report in his dissent in *Korematsu* while arguing that the policy was driven by racial animus.^3
Furthermore, internment itself was chosen in part over relocation eastward because of the vocal opposition by interior states. The sitting governor of Wyoming was *publicly* quoted as saying that if those of Japanese descent were relocated to their state, "there would be Japs hanging from every pine tree". ^4
To conclude, I wouldn't dispute the characterization of White farmers support for internment in California, but internment was ultinately driven by public animus that went far beyond that. This animus went to the highest reaches of military command, and far beyond the local concerns of California Farmers.
^1 Ex.O. 9066 (1944)
^2 *Korematsu v. U.S.*, 323 U.S. 214 (1944)(Murphy, J., diseenting)(quoting Final Report, Japanese Evacuation of the West Coast)
^3 *Id.*
^4 David Kennedy, *Freedom from Fear: American People in Depression and War*, 1929-1945 (1999). | [
"At the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, many of the farmers selling in Pike Place Market were Japanese-Americans. The late Seattle historian Walt Crowley estimated that they might have been as many as four-fifths of the farmers selling produce from stalls. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signe... |
how is the pattern on a key chosen? and how are they all different so that two keys cannot open the same door? | In mass produced locks, there might be, say, five pins in the lock. A key will open that lock if each pin is at the right height when it rests on the key, and the key is turned. For each of the pins, a manufacturer will have a set number of lengths that they make. They are numbered 1 to 6 or 1 to 7 for common locks. These are called bitting numbers, with 1 being a short pin and a shallow cut in the key, and 6 or 7 being the longest pin they make and the deepest cut in the key.
To make a lock, then, they pick a sequence of numbers like 34125, put pins of those lengths in the lock, and dial that number into a machine that cuts a key with the right depths in the right places. The convention is that the number is read left to right, and the first number (3 in the example) is closest to the part of the key you hold when using it. Now, they can't choose just any number. If you had 34**16**5 you might not be able to get the key in the lock because the slope between the 6 and the 1 is so steep. Nor could you have 3**61**25. The key would go in just fine, but it might never come out.
So, how do they choose these so that keys don't open multiple locks? They don't. They just make enough that it's somewhat unlikely that the key to your house is~~n't~~ the same as your nextdoor neighbor's. It helps that there are different shapes to the keyways, that is, the wiggly shape of the hole the key goes into. A key might not even go in to a lock it wasn't made for.
Here comes the bad news: it's cheaper to make identical locks and identical keys. Many manufactures do. Have you ever seen those little beige cash boxes with a black handle? The ones you've seen probably all have the same key. Electrical panels in a business with a little lock on them so that kids and bored customers don't fiddle with them? Same key as the cash boxes. Locks tend to be a really good psychological deterrent to the average Joe, but terrible at ~~supping~~ stopping someone who is reasonably determined to get past them.
EDIT: double negative, oops.
EDIT2: I have got to stop posting from my phone. Supping? Seriously, autocorrect? | [
"In master locksmithing, key relevance is the measurable difference between an original key and a copy made of that key, either from a wax impression or directly from the original, and how similar the two keys are in size and shape. It can also refer to the measurable difference between a key and the size required ... |
- why do some plants, tomatoes for example, almost immediately droop when transplanted? | Their roots get damaged, and they can't pull enough water to remain stiff. Sometimes they droop because they aren't sure what to make of the new environment yet too. But if you transplant carefully enough, they won't do that. | [
"Overwatering or excessive rainfall can cause the flowers to drop and fruit to rot. Also, extended over-watering can cause maturing fruit to split on the branch. Birds can be a nuisance. The bacterium \"Xanthomonas campestris\" causes the stems to rot. \"Dothiorella\" fungi can cause brown spots on the fruit, but t... |
What does an electron "absorbing" a photon actually mean? | Quantum field theory literally says that you destroy the old electron and photon and create a new electron in a state that conserves energy, momentum, etc. This process takes no time. An equivalent description is that the electron and photon change their states instantaneously.
Your descriptions are too classical. I think the actual interaction cannot be looked at in those ways. | [
"Absorption is the process by which a photon is absorbed by the atom, causing an electron to jump from a lower energy level to a higher one. The process is described by the Einstein coefficient formula_11 (J m s), which gives the probability per unit time per unit spectral energy density of the radiation field that... |
Spectrum of an antimatter star? | The measured spectral lines would be the same in both cases. | [
"Although the star's spectrum shows the spectral features of zirconium oxide which define spectral class S, BD Cam shows no technetium lines in its spectrum. It is believed to be an \"extrinsic\" S star, one whose s-process element excesses originate in a binary companion star. The system displays only minimal vari... |
Regarding Robert E. Lee during Reconstruction | While I cannot offer much on Lee himself, many Virginians were not enthusiastic supporters of slavery. Like nearly all Americans they believed society either should or naturally would be divided based on race, but the institution of slavery itself had become something of a liability by the outbreak of the Civil War.
Certainly the most influential families in Virginia were major slaveholders. They had built their slave economy on tobacco, and despite its decline relative to cotton slaves functioned as a store of wealth. But this asset could only be liquidated by "selling South," to the Cotton Belt, where the real profits from slavery now were. In effect this meant that the states of the Upper South were tied to the Deep South: abolition would literally destroy much of their wealth, but they weren't particularly profiting from it, either.
An excellent overview of the changing nature of slavery up to the Civil War is by Steven Deyle:
> [p. 834] The domestic slave trade transformed southern society, making human chattel the most valuable form of property in the South. But this wealth came with a price. The slave trade tied Virginia slaveholders' own fortunes to the new southwestern empire for slavery. As enslaved Virginians poured into he Southwest via this trade, southern political power followed in their wake. When Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election threatened the security of the South's largest capital asset, politicians from the Deep South, not Virginians, took the lead in responding to this crisis with secession. In the end Virginia (and several other Upper South states) had little choice but to follow because of the bond that the slave trade had cemented between them and their Deep South compatriots.
"An 'Abominable' New Trade: The Closing of the African Slave Trade and the Changing Patterns of U.S. Political Power, 1808-60." The William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2009): 833-50. | [
"Freeman's \"R. E. Lee: A Biography\" established the Virginia School of Civil War scholarship, an approach to writing Civil War history that concentrated on the Eastern Theater of the war, focused the narrative on generals over the common soldier, centered the analysis on military campaigns over social and politic... |
why are so few low-wage service sector workers unionized in the u.s.? | Unionization works when the workers have the threat of going on strike. And that's only a threat if they are hard to replace.
If a fast food restaurants workers go on strike, management can easily replace the striking workers. All of them.
This is why entry level jobs aren't usually unionized. | [
"Although the service sector has the highest rate of working poverty, a significant portion of the working poor are blue-collar workers in the manufacturing, agriculture, and construction industries. Most manufacturing jobs used to offer generous wages and benefits, but manufacturing job quality has declined over t... |
why do music artists usually have 1-2 "singles" per album? why don't they just make 10 singles | Because you'd start ignoring them if they released too many singles. They release a couple leading up to the album with the hope that it will entice you into purchasing it. | [
"Despite being referred to as a single, singles can include up to as many as three tracks. The biggest digital music distributor, iTunes Store, accepts as many as three tracks less than ten minutes each as a single, as does popular music player Spotify. Any more than three tracks on a musical release or thirty minu... |
I am looking for a comprehensive source of African folklore/legends/myths what have you. Can anyone point me in the direction of one or several books? | The African continent is huge and complex, so works of synthesis are necessarily superficial. There are several works by Harold Courlander and by Jan Knappert that might of use to them. Search for titles by these authors, and you may find something that is of interest to you. | [
"Examples of pre-colonial African literature are numerous. In Ethiopia, there is a substantial literature written in Ge'ez going back at least to the fourth century AD; the best-known work in this tradition is the \"Kebra Negast\", or \"Book of Kings.\" One popular form of traditional African folktale is the \"tric... |
Has anyone ever determined how Hermann Göring was able to commit suicide before his execution? | I was thinking of asking this same thing. Any chance anyone can answer this, please? | [
"Finally on demand of Meinhof's attorney Klaus Croissant and the International Committee for Political Prisoners, an international investigation commission was created in order to examine the conditions surrounding Meinhof's death. Once more the German authorities refused to give the complete (first) autopsy report... |
Book recommendations for history of interwar Europe | - Stalin Volume 1 Paradox of Power 1878-1928
- Stalin Volume 2 Waiting for Hitler 1928-1941
The cover it from the Russian side in quite a bit of detail and contain some original research on the pact and its practice
- The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order - Adam Tooze
- The Wages of Destruction: The making and breaking of the Nazi Economy - Adam Tooze
- Paris 1919: Six minth that changed the World - Margaret MacMillan
- The Great Interwar Crisis and the collapse of Globalization - Robert Boyce
These are some that I found interesting. Specially about Russia/Stalin.
I dont know great books about France or Britain during this time. | [
"BULLET::::- \"Interwar Southeastern Europe Confronts the West: The New Generation: Cioran, Yanev, Popović\", in Costică Brădățan (ed.), \"Philosophy, Society and the Cunning of History in Eastern Europe\". Routledge, London, 2013.\n",
"Another Open Access publication, \"On site, in time - Negotiating differences... |
what is the use of the brush-like thing on the side of the escalators that we use to "clean shoes" ? | They're to make people less likely to stand close to the edge of the step and to keep clothing, laces, and such away from the gap between the step and the skirt guard. | [
"BULLET::::- The Handi Sani is a self-cleaning toilet brush. It works by attaching the Handi Sani brush holder to the side of the tank with one small hose running into the tank to take advantage of clean water, and another hose running into the toilet bowl for proper draining. The brush is placed inside the Handi S... |
why states don't have perfect borders? | Sometimes the borders follow rivers. Sometimes they are arbitrary lines created by surveyors. Occasionally they follow some other natural feature. | [
"Because of its unique history, many of the boundaries of the political divisions of the United States were artificially constructed (rather than being permitted to evolve and drawn using natural features of the landscape). Therefore, many U.S. states have straight lines as boundaries, especially in the West. Howev... |
Why are there so few large flying animals today? | Not an expert by far, but I had a lecture on animal flight last semester that showed us a study that covered some of this.
The study that looked at the albatross, and tried to extrapolate that data into a graph that showed maximum weight/wingspan a flying animal could have while still being able to truly fly. After correlating the predicted flight strength with supposed strength of ancient feathers, it proposed a maximum weight/wingspan of 41kg/5.1m in order for flight to be possible.
An albatross' wingspan can be up to 3.5m, and when you see the way it takes off, it already needs help - [they paddle quite vigorously for liftoff](_URL_0_), like a plane needs a runway, and they largely live in areas with strong winds for additional lift.
Given that the largest pterosaurs had a body mass of up to 70kg, and a wingspan of 10m+, the study concluded that these massive flying dinosaurs at most glided only occasionally, and presumably also with the help of strong headwinds.
There was also another study that examined size of feather rachises (shaft of the feather) in *Archaeopteryx* and *Confuciusornis*, and concluded that they too were too thin to have supported flight, which means they would've instead glided/jumped from branch to branch.
Basically, that lecture ruined about 30% of Jurassic Park for me. Thank god for velociraptors ey.
**Edit:** Some really good discussion going on down below, including a better video of an albatross taking off, the way pterosaurs are theorised to have taken off (vaulting), the atmosphere/oxygen concentration/metabolism debate... and I know about the Deinonychus now :( | [
"The evolution of flight is one of the most striking and demanding in animal evolution, and has attracted the attention of many prominent scientists and generated many theories. Additionally, because flying animals tend to be small and have a low mass (both of which increase the surface-area-to-mass ratio), they te... |
why do we have to restart our pc after uninstalling an app? | Depends on the OS, most times, a restart is unnecessary, but in some cases it may be required.
###Windows:
On windows, applications are stored as files and registry keys. Registry keys are never cleaned properly, and an unnecessary large amount(talking a hundred uninstalled apps) may slow down your PC a bit (not by much though, it's just that windows loads every registry key on startup, even empty ones).
A restart is necessary if :
- The app has a daemon running, as executables that are currently run on your machine cannot be deleted
- the app has stored data in protected areas of your system (system32 for example)
- The app installed shared DLLs that are currently run by the system
###Unix:
Unix based operating systems use only files to store app data, and the executable files, restarts are only necessary if a daemon is running, even though linux kills pending processes to not interfere with the uninstall.
###And in general :
It's always a good idea since it may free up some RAM, and don't forget to defragment your HDD afterwards. | [
"In a review of the product, Lifehacker wrote, \"There's nothing worse than rebooting your computer thinking everything is fine only to find out something's busted and you need to troubleshoot it. It's especially bad if you start having problems after a driver update or a series of Windows updates, and you're stuck... |
HIV vaccine: how viable would it be to create one using FIV? | It's not particularly viable, and there are a few reasons why.
First, is something we call "tropism," that is, what types of cells viruses can infect. Viruses don't just push themselves into any old cell, they have receptors that have evolved to bind to particular proteins on host cells to enable entry. Some viruses can infect lots of different cell types in lots of different organisms, whereas some only infect very specific cell types and/or very specific organisms. FIV will not infect human cells. In fact, viruses even more closely related to HIV (like SIV - simian immunodeficiency virus) also won't infect human cells (at least not very well).
The second reason has to do with a misunderstanding of how vaccines work in modern times. When Jenner managed to use cowpox to vaccinate against small pox, they did not have the same biological tools we have today. These days, we can genetically alter viruses to remove or add genes, or wel can passage them in tissue culture for several generations to reduce their virulence etc, giving us much more closely related (and safer) viruses to put into vaccines.
Unfortunately, despite these modern tools, HIV is still outsmarting us (I can go into the reasons for that if you like), and it's unlikely that using a very unrelated virus like FIV would give us better results. | [
"Currently, there is no licensed HIV vaccine on the market, but multiple research projects are trying to find an effective vaccine. There is evidence from humans that a vaccine may be possible. Some, but certainly not all, HIV-infected individuals naturally produce broadly neutralizing antibodies which keep the vir... |
Is there a temperature where water will never freeze or evaporate? | Take an enclosed volume at 100% relative humidity, apply higher pressure and cool the air and the puddle would conceivably never evaporate. In fact, under those conditions additional condensation would form as the water vapor is 'squeezed out of the air', so to speak. | [
"Water droplets commonly remain as liquid water and do not freeze, even well below . Ice nuclei that may be present in an atmospheric droplet become active for ice formation at specific temperatures in between and , depending on nucleus geometry and composition. Without ice nuclei, supercooled water droplets (as we... |
AskScience AMA: We are the authors of a recent paper on genetic genealogy and relatedness among the people of Europe. Ask us anything about our paper! | Are you concerned that the Italian samples within POPRES might reflect an homogeneous subsample of Italy instead of a representative sample? Have you considered using the HGDP samples? Their Italians from North Italy are really close to their French samples, for example (closer than in POPRES it would seem). | [
"Early studies by Cavalli-Sforza used polymorphisms from proteins found within human blood (such as the ABO blood groups, Rhesus blood antigens, HLA loci, immunoglobulins, G6PD isoenzymes, amongst others). One of the lasting proposals of this study with regards to Europe is that within most of the continent, the ma... |
what ever happened to kony, and the #stopkony2012 movement? | The filmmaker took some drugs then took his clothes off then took a stroll down a public street and got arrested. | [
"Kony 2012 is a short documentary film produced by Invisible Children, Inc. (authors of \"Invisible Children\"). It was released on March 5, 2012. The film's purpose was to promote the charity's \"Stop Kony\" movement to make Ugandan cult and militia leader, indicted war criminal and the International Criminal Cour... |
why is the ending of a tv show or movie suspenseful even if i know the ending? | Good shows, movies, books, etc, craft themselves in such a way that the spectator becomes emotionally invested in the characters. This is why conclusions to such things end up being rather satisfying, or perhaps disappointing, depending on what you might have come to expect. | [
"The \"final\" episode of a television series often concludes the entire premise of the show, wrapping up any loose ends and storylines. On occasion, the season finale has become the series finale due to cancellation of the series, sometimes unexpectedly so, leaving plot points unresolved.\n",
"Television series ... |
Where did modern military structure come from? | This is a *very* complex question. I'll try to cut down to the bare basics of your question - why it's all so similar.
Modern military traditions can be traced back to the "early modern period", also known as the renaissance in Europe. At the time, the feudal system was breaking down as monarchs concentrated power, urban centers grew, and new technologies changed economics and warfare. All of these phenomena fed into each other, leading to greater and greater change.
Old feudal armies were simply not going to work anymore. Monarchs, ranging from emperors to powerful dukes, princes, etc., build semi-professional mercenary armies instead. The cultural boundaries of Europe were **not** as clear-cut as they are today, so military systems blended into each other. For example, the Holy Roman Emperor, Spanish king, duke of the Netherlands, and monarch Hungary were all the same man in the early 16th century, so those distant places influenced each other.
As armies professionalized and nation-states formed, different military systems emerged. The Swiss pike block was extraordinarily successful in the 15th century. The Spanish Trecio dominated the battlefield in the 16th century until the Dutch developed something new with greater articulation and forward firepower. The Swedish increased firepower even more. Each successful system inspired imitation and adaptation.
The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) also had a **big** impact. The war became chaotic as rulers lost control of mercenaries and entire armies rampaged across Germany looting and pillaging, sometimes just to survive. After that, practices changed to prevent something similar. I'm terribly sorry but I don't have many details on that. Ask for more information and I'll go through my notes from my modern warfare class.
By the 18th century, armies across Europe were very similar. Officers and rulers figured out what worked for the technology and political/economic system available to them, and these ideas radiated throughout Europe. Officers frequently fought in armies other than that of their home nation as nations allied with each other or as officers in peaceful areas went looking for action. War was very limited in this time period and somewhat separated from the rest of society, so military culture across nations developed somewhat independently.
The 19th century changed a **lot** of things, particularly with the advent of nationalism and total war thanks to the French Revolution. Still, European nations were very interconnected. When one nation developed a new idea, others responded to it in *some* way. There was a great deal of variation in some ways as different nations responded to new military technology differently in the rapidly changing industrial age, but basic ideas laid down in the 18th century and certain developments were just "common sense" to officers at the time.
**This is when it all started to look the same** because Europe's influence spread around the globe in the 19th century. When nations like Japan, China, Turkey, and Persia tried to modernize and industrialize, they imported European weapons and officers to modernize their armies. Nations like Mexico and Brazil were former European colonies, so they inherited the same military traditions. Other places, like India, southeast Asia, and Africa were conquered and colonized by Europe, so when they gained independence in the mid-20th century, they inherited that military tradition, too.
Again, there were numerous variations because of different responses to technological advances and different lessons learned from the same wars. If you scrutinize 19th and 20th century armies closely, you'll find that despite outward appearances they could be *very* different. The French, German, and British armies all had their own ideas on how to best organize and deploy their armies that could be very different. Others played "follow the leader" and imitated the most powerful and successful armies.
So if you look closely, there are numerous similarities because the armies of the world essentially draw from the same traditions, but there are numerous differences as well. Just how much these different armies look the same or look different depends on how closely you look at them, and what you compare them to. Compare the French and Prussian armies of the Napoleonic wars and they're worlds apart. Compare them both to the armies of the World War Two and they're practically identical.
Goddamn, I meant to write a short paragraph and gave you an essay. This always happens when I talk history. I hope it made sense and wasn't just me rambling! If anything at all seems confusing, ask for clarification. I wrote all this from memory, but if I go back through my notes or check any of my books I can be much clearer on any details. | [
"Elements of military constructions can be found in the original fortifications such as the three forts, the seven gates and the large outer walls that surround the old media. They have survived despite the changes that occurred through the expansions known to the city during multiple periods.\n",
"Elements of mi... |
How efficient is respiration? | _URL_1_
_URL_0_
The 2nd law of thermodynamics does guarantee energy loss, but the number is wrong. It's about a 60% loss (meaning 4 times as much energy is recovered as your teacher claimed). Of course more energy will be lost when the ATP gets used, but that isn't respiratory efficiency. | [
"Aerobic respiration proceeds in a series of steps, which also increases efficiency - since glucose is broken down gradually and ATP is produced as needed, less energy is wasted as heat. This strategy results in the waste products HO and CO being formed in different amounts at different phases of respiration. CO is... |
What is the earliest example of someone researching a potential trip to the moon? | Cyrano de Bergerac was probably the first to describe in detail the theoretical science needed to build a rocket to the moon in his book "Les états et empires de la lune" (The States and Empires of the Moon) of 1657.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that he does explicitly call it a "chemical machine" and briefly describe the physical difficulties of overcoming gravity, there is nothing really precise enough about the machine to be able to recreate it. He doesn't give you a blueprint!
The book is of course pure fiction, so the point is not to hypothesize about the means by which one would get to the moon, but instead what kinds of lifeforms one would find once you get there. For example, the narrator claims that an angel came to him and told him to eat from the Tree of Science in a sort of new Eden on Earth, after which he had the knowledge necessary to build his machine and begin his journey.
That being said, there is an [engraving](_URL_0_) that was produced based on de Bergerac's description.
And yes: this is the same Cyrano de Bergerac made famous by the play by Edmond de Rostand. This is the same Cyrano in love with his cousin Roxanne but whose schnoz gets in the way of his love. | [
"The Man in the Moone is a book by the English divine and Church of England bishop Francis Godwin (1562–1633), describing a \"voyage of utopian discovery\". Long considered to be one of his early works, it is now generally thought to have been written in the late 1620s. It was first published posthumously in 1638 u... |
How hygenic were prostitutes of 19th century London? | ###Firstly: what do we mean by prostitutes?
Some 19th century writers use the word in an expansive sense -- a prostitute could be any woman who had any sort of sexual contact outside of lawful marriage, any mistress of a wealthy man whether financially supported by her partner or not, any girl whose virginity was damaged by past sexual abuse, any working woman who was suspected of being less than entirely chaste. (It's this kind of ambiguity that has led some recent authors like Hallie Rubenhold in her book *The Five* to question the Ripper victims' involvement in sex work, though I'm not super convinced by what I've seen of her historical methology.) Others, especially social reformers, drew careful distinctions between types of prostitution defined not so much by working conditions or economic status as how the women involved became "fallen" and who was to blame for it -- a wicked mother, a devious aristocratic seducer, or the fallen woman herself. Police estimates of the number of suspected prostitutes in any given region were necessarily imprecise, reflecting only the number of women known to police through arrests regardless of individual case history. In the late 19th century, some working-class women sold sex only part of the time such as during parts of the working year where other forms of employment were scarce; others for a part of their career, such as for a limited span before marriage or after the failure of marriage and employment to sustain their economic needs. These part-timers likely made up the majority of the sexual workforce. Street prostitution and brothel prostitution both took place alongside other arrangements that 19th century contemporaries would have also grouped under prostitution, like mistresses and purveyors of sexual services other than intercourse; men as well as women engaged in sex work, boys as well as girls, but for the purpose of this answer I'll be focusing on British women and girls in the second half of the 19th century.
###Secondly: what do we mean by hygiene?
Late 19th century medical and legal authorities in England were definitely concerned about venereal disease transmission and its enduring association with prostitution. Some of this concern was a practical response to rising urbanization of the English population and associated public-health challenges not limited to STIs. But some of it was a response to what venereal disease represented -- not _just_ a painful, humiliating, potentially lethal disease with uncertain transmission routes and unpredictable manifestations but a symbol for moral deterioration and atavistic filth. A range of sexually-transmitted illnesses were known to the Victorians to one degree or another, but the two conditions that commanded the greatest public fear and alarm were gonorrhea and syphilis -- not least of all because the two were popularly misunderstood to be expressions of the same underlying condition.
The Contagious Diseases Act of 1864 had authorized the arrest of women suspected of selling sex in port and army towns due to a perception that increasing female prostitution in proximity to centers for the armed forces endangered the health not of the women and girls engaging in paid sex but of the soldiers and sailors with whom they had sex. Despite this, the prescribed consequence was not enforced medical inspections for soldiers and sailors, but compulsory and physically invasive inspections of suspected prostitutes -- which necessitated the examination of the interior of women's genitals with a steel speculum, far before such inspections were commonplace -- followed by indeterminate detention if found guilty of having a disease. By 1888, the year of the first canonical attack on a woman by the Ripper killer, the CD Act had been repealed, and the scope of its enforcement was deliberately limited in the first place, but this regulatory approach to sexually-transmitted disease as a public health hazard would be echoed and amplified in later medical and social approaches to prostitution. Formal regulation of prostitution would be enforced more stringently in some English colonial holdings like Malta, and these same attitudes about sexuality would be compounded with contemporary racial thought in similar regulatory action in Hong Kong and India.
The legislation of the Contagious Diseases Act, however brief-lived, illustrates an ongoing Victorian double standard regarding sexuality -- this punitive focus on women as the transmitters of sexually-transmitted disease and the omission of their male sexual partners was evident not only to the modern student of history but to contemporary feminists and social reformers like Josephine Butler. The perception of promiscuous women as the primary carriers and sole blameworthy agents of sexually-transmitted disease was in part facilitated by the still-developing medical understanding of venereal disease in women -- male fears that the inconspicuous location of sores and discharges inside the vagina and on the cervix (relative to the comparative visibility of chancres on the penis) and the appearance of hereditary syphilis in children born to mothers not visibly affected might suggest even a seemingly well woman transmitting such a condition to her unwitting sexual partners and offspring, out of ignorance or malice. This coincided neatly with preexisting contemporary understandings of female sexuality and the female body, especially the bodies of working-class women -- bodies and persons already stigmatized in medicine and society as dirty and leaky.
###Okay but how *physically* dirty were the prostitutes of 19th century London?
That would have varied wildly with income and housing situation. Sex workers in high-end workplaces would have been as well-washed and carefully-styled as circumstances allowed. Many sex workers in working-class environments were likely no more visibly dirty or unkempt than a random sampling of other working men and women; others were effectively homeless or living in dramatically under-served neighborhoods with little access to laundry facilities or basic sanitation. Life in crowded conditions under extreme poverty did not lend itself easily to rigorous personal cleanliness, even for individuals who strove for it, and many English residences had little or no access to running water even as late as the 1880s and 1890s. This isn't to say that *all* of London was filthy -- on the contrary, the differences between conditions in slum neighborhoods like Whitechapel and those in other areas, even other working-class enclaves, were striking to contemporary viewers -- or that the men and women who lived in slum neighborhoods didn't care about what they wore, how they smelled, or what they looked like; they followed fashion, maintained their appearances, observed conventions of modesty, and strove to protect themselves from the rigors of their environment. The same went for people who weren't prostitutes as well as people who were. Nor is it to say that all sex workers operated in slum areas, or came from backgrounds of abject poverty, or that poverty was a single enduring state without shades of gray or levels of distinction; a survey of the biographies of the Ripper murder victims and their contemporaries speaks to different degrees of social mobility and work histories that could vary all over the map. The Ripper murder victims have been so enduringly understood in terms of both physical filth and the monolithic idea of the filthy fallen woman, the irretrievably lost and morally degenerate Victorian prostitute -- in terms of understanding why, it's helpful to think about the idea of these different types of "filth" (the corruption of contagious disease, the conditions of grinding poverty, physical dirt and grime, bad morals, sexual promiscuity) and how such stigmatizing associations muddled them all up into one. The repair of diseased women's bodies in isolated wards and venereal hospitals necessitated the repair of their morals through religious education, hard work, and physical scrutiny; the enforcement of institutional standards regarding bodily hygiene, appearance, and dress was meant to correct the perceived moral hazards of the prostitute's workaday appearance as well as the practical hygienic and environmental concerns of adequate attire. Becoming clean after being dirty didn't just mean a good wash and a fresh set of clothes but a total overhaul of one's habits, relationships, housing, and employment -- not a small thing for women who were already economically and socially vulnerable.
Simply wearing dirty clothes or living in a neighborhood with stinking streets won't give you syphilis, but the popular association between filthy slum conditions and contagious disease sometimes took a further toll. Poverty proved a barrier to access to medical care, and misconceptions regarding STI symptoms and transmission were wide-ranging even among physicians, leading to misdiagnosis and incorrect treatment even for those who could afford care, and often conflated the moral filth and visible dirt of poverty with specific individual diseases -- diseases not transmitted by any old dirt or fecal matter but by exposure to specific bacteria under specific conditions. Sexually-transmitted infections and injuries from sexual abuse were misdiagnosed in young girls of the lower classes as consequences of their natural uncleanliness.
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"The presence of prostitution in London during the 17th and 18th centuries is demonstrated by the publication of directories. \"The Wandering Whore\" was published during the Restoration period, and listed streets where prostitutes might be found and the locations of brothels. \"A Catalogue of Jilts, Cracks & Prost... |
difference between apy and apr? | So say you have a 12% interest rate per year.
On the surface, that would seem to indicate that if you owed $1000, you would be charged 12% or $120 per year because of interest.
But generally, that 12% per year is split into 1% per month.
Now, if you imagine that you didn't actually pay anything, and just let that build up over a year, then on month 1 you would be charged $10 dollars, an exact 1% of $1000.
But on month 2, you would be charged 1% of $1010, or $10.10, because you are now paying interest on not only the initial $1000, but also the additional $10.
Month 3 you are charged 1% of $1020.10 or $10.20.
So on and so forth.
In the end, what you end up paying is the same as 12.7% interest applied all at once at the very end ($127), rather than what seemed to be 12%.
APR is that tricky way of doing things, where you have to break payments into months and then compound the interest each month. APY is the "honest" way of displaying how much interest you'll actually be paying.
-----Side Tangent------
The actual formula for this compound interest is P x (r/n)^nt
Where P is the initial loan or investment
r is the interest rate (1% = 0.01)
n is the number of times the interest is compounded in a given time period (12 times for once per month for one year)
and t is the number of times the compounding occurs.
So for example, 2 years of month compounding at 12% annually would appear as
P x (0.12/12)^(12 x 2) or P x (0.01)^24
The interesting thing I find about this is that if you decrease that month down to weeks or days or hours or minutes, all the way down to *continuously*, the total interest does not approach infinity, but instead approaches
Pe^rt
Where e is Eulers number, or about 2.7.
This also appears *everywhere* in science and in the natural world when describing how things grow or decay over time. | [
"APR is dependent on the time period for which the loan is calculated. That is, the APR for a 30-year loan cannot be compared to the APR for a 20-year loan. APR \"can\" be used to show the relative impact of different payment schedules (such as balloon payments or biweekly payments instead of straight monthly payme... |
Why does soft plastic packaging leak when thawed? | Are you sure it is not water condensing on a cold surface or a layer of ice on the surface melting? | [
"Plastic wrap, cling film, shrink wrap, Saran wrap, cling wrap or food wrap is a thin plastic film typically used for sealing food items in containers to keep them fresh over a longer period of time. Plastic wrap, typically sold on rolls in boxes with a cutting edge, clings to many smooth surfaces and can thus rema... |
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