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Why do the Pinkertons have their current reputations? | > there are examples of the freaking National Guard being just as brutal during the same era
Anyone familiar with the history of organized labor in the 19th century usually has similar opinions of the National Guard and the Pinkertons. When there were mentions of Gov. Walker possibly calling out the Guard in Wisconsin two years ago, almost any labor historian you talked to had something to say about the symbolism of such an act. I agree that popular memory does not put the Guard and the Pinkertons on the same level. I think that's mostly the fault of high school history text books. Also, the Guard has been a positive force in labor history on at least one occasion, during the Flint Sit Down Strike. The Pinkertons have no such redeeming claim.
> Combine that with how brutal the Labor Unions themselves were
Honestly, comparing the levels of violence between strikers and strikebreakers (not just the Pinkertons) is pretty disingenuous. Sure, there were things like [the Herrin massacre](_URL_0_), which were horrible crimes committed by union members. They were exceptions, however, and comparing those to the widespread systemic violence perpetrated against strikes is like comparing the actions of the U.S. Cavalry to those of the Native Americans.
> along with the times the Pinkertons themselves could be heroic (Molly Maguires)
This is a pretty contentious claim to make. The Molly Maguires were no saints, but the Pennsylvania coal fields of the 1870's were open industrial warfare. It doesn't make the Maguires always right, but it doesn't make the Pinkertons heroes either.
> how come the Pinkertons are the ones singled out as the worst of the lot?
First, I would say the Baldwin-Felts Agency was much worse. Second, I would reason that it has to do with their involvement in the Homestead Strike of 1892, which was a massive event in American labor history and one so large that you often lean about it even in high school if you take an AP level class. | [
"Red Mole was known for itsrough, political and experimental style. Its productions often combined a low life New Zealand style humour and sentiment with high-art European Modernism. Authorship of Red Mole works was complex as Brunton and Rodwell wrote for the company both individually and together, but many other ... |
How do people create "x-ray videos"? | It's called [fluoroscopy](_URL_0_); they used to use fluoroscopes in shoe stores for fitting shoes before they figured out what a terrible idea that was, and they used to do [crazy stuff like this](_URL_1_) before they realised the cancer risks. It's not fatal or guaranteed to give you cancer; it's just one of these things that gives you a good whack of radiation like a CAT scan, thus something that's not done unless there's a sufficiently good reason to do it and take that radiation dose. | [
"In medicine and dentistry, projectional radiography and computed tomography images generally use X-rays created by X-ray generators, which generate X-rays from X-ray tubes. The resultant images from the radiograph (X-ray generator/machine) or CT scanner are correctly referred to as \"radiograms\"/\"roentgenograms\... |
Why don't they remake the concorde jet | It's an economical issue. Especially with modern-day fuel prices, the price of a ticket would be too high to be economical. | [
"On 10 April 2003, Air France and British Airways simultaneously announced they would retire Concorde later that year. They cited low passenger numbers following the 25 July 2000 crash, the slump in air travel following the September 11 attacks, and rising maintenance costs: Airbus (the company that acquired Aerosp... |
what is the difference between mirrored and mirrorless lenses in dslrs? | The cameras are the ones with or without mirrors, and if they don't have a mirror they're not SLRs.
Digital Single Lens Reflex cameras have an optical viewfinder which uses a mirror and other elements inside the body to look out through the lens. Mirrorless cameras don't have this mirror system, and instead simulate looking through the lens using a digital viewfinder.
[For a more detailed, but good tutorial on the difference between the camera types, check out this article](_URL_0_). | [
"Cameras with fixed semi-transparent mirrors, also known as DSLT cameras, such as the Sony SLT cameras, are single-lens without a moving reflex mirror as in a conventional DSLR. A semi-transparent mirror transmits some of the light to the image sensor and reflects some of the light along the path to a pentaprism/pe... |
how do stylus pens with buttons (bamboo-wacom) never run out of battery? | The stylus doesn't need its own power source, so the battery doesn't run out because there is no battery to run out. The stylus instead uses a form of electromagnetic resonance technology. There's an article at _URL_0_ if you are interested in learning how the tech works. | [
"The electronic components generate wireless signals that are picked up by a proprietary digitizer and transmitted to its dedicated controller, providing data on pen location, pressure and other functionalities. Additional features enabled by the active pen's electronics include palm rejection to prevent unintended... |
the five lesser-known types of magnetism? | Basically, magnetic fields happen because electrons have small magnetic fields. There are various ways they can prefer to behave in a material, giving rise to their magnetic properties.
Diamagnetism is most noticeable when there are no unpaired electrons in a material. This negates the magnetic moment of the electrons (each one has a partner that negates it). It opposes any external magnetic fields by messing with the magnetic moment of the electrons' orbit. Every material will do this, but most of the time, other effects overwhelm it.
Paramagnetism is sort of the opposite, when there are unpaired electrons. Those unpaired ones can point any which way they please and thus, can line up with an external magnetic field, amplifying it. The magnetic moment of an electron is much greater than the magnetic moment of it's orbit, so this effect outweighs diamagnetism if there are unpaired electrons.
Ferromagnetism is like paramagnetism, except that it's so strong, the amplified field can sustain itself. The field generated by other electrons in the material is strong enough to get other electrons in the material to also line up, so it can keep the field by itself.
Antiferromagnetism is the opposite, the unpaired electrons want to oppose eachother, so they have no magnetic field. The reasons why this would happen instead of ferromagnetism have to do with complicated energy level nonsense in various materials.
Ferrimagnetism forms sheets, kind of. Antiferromagnetic materials have every electron trying to be opposite of it's neighbor, so it forms a checkerboard. Ferrimagnetic materials form rows as they try to be the same alignment in one direction but opposite alignment in the other direction. This usually results in a net magnetic field like a ferromagnet.
Superparamagnetism is only found in tiny pieces of ferro or ferrimagnetic materials. They're small enough that their temperature causes them to switch the alignment of their magnetic field too quickly to produce a stable magnetic field in any given direction. But when an external field is applied, they align. It's like paramagnetism, but because the material is a better magnet in the first place, it's stronger than normal paramagnetism. | [
"The idea of a close similarity between electricity and magnetism, going back to the time of André-Marie Ampère and Michael Faraday, was first made more precise with James Clerk Maxwell's formulation of his famous equations for a unified theory of electric and magnetic fields:\n",
"Ferromagnetism is the basic mec... |
Astronomy Question: If Dark matter's only interaction with matter is gravity, shouldn't a lot of it be in the gravity wells at the center of stars? | Well think about it for a minute. How do you imagine that dark matter would *get* there?
Okay, so here's a particle of dark matter. Poof. And way out there far away there's a star. The star is very, very large, so the particle of dark matter falls toward it.
As it falls, it moves faster and faster relative to the star. It has more kinetic energy, we say.
It keeps falling right up to the point where it "hits" the star, and then … well, it just *keeps falling.* Because dark matter is *collisionless,* you see. It doesn't interact. So all that kinetic energy it built up as it was falling toward the star? It *keeps* it. With no way to shed that kinetic energy, the particle just keeps oscillating through the star forever.
Except there isn't just a single particle of dark matter and a single star in the universe. There's *lots* of stars, and *lots more* particles of dark matter. So you don't get particles moving in perfect, eternal oscillation through gravitational potentials. You get particles moving along broad, slow orbits. At any given instant, most of the dark matter is pretty far from the centre of any galaxy, because it doesn't have any means of shedding its kinetic energy. That's why we observe dark-matter halos: because a dark-matter particle *can't slow down.*
(For the record? Dark matter is *not* "a very unknown subject." We've made *tons* of observations of it, we know its properties very well, it's just generally extremely well-understood stuff.) | [
"Dark matter is postulated in order to account for gravitational effects observed in very large-scale structures (the \"flat\" rotation curves of galaxies; the gravitational lensing of light by galaxy clusters; and enhanced clustering of galaxies) that cannot be accounted for by the quantity of observed matter.\n",... |
why does data cost anything and how much does it cost the companies to provide it? | You pay for the spectrum use. Other countries pay way less than the usa, but they have you by the balls. | [
"\"Cost of revenue. Our cost of revenue consists primarily of expenses associated with the delivery and distribution of our products. These include expenses related to the operation of our data centers, such as facility and server equipment depreciation, energy and bandwidth costs, and salaries, benefits, and share... |
How does the expansion of the universe transition light waves to infrared waves (redshifting)? | I'm no scientist so someone can correct me if I'm off the mark (actually please do if I'm wrong, I love learning :] ) but in layman's terms from what I've heard you can think of a light ray like a spring being stretched by the expansion of space. If you pull the spring out it stretches the wavelength out making it longer. Longer wavelengths of light are trending towards the red end of the spectrum so the farther they get stretched the redder they get until they shift from visible light into infrared and beyond. | [
"For nearby objects in the universe, spectral absorption lines are very sharp, as only photons with energies just sufficient to cause an atomic transition can cause that transition. However, the distances between quasars and the telescopes which detect them are large, which means that the expansion of the universe ... |
why does your nose get watery with some really hot sauces? | It is the result of capsaicin-sensitive nerves in the mouth and nose reacting and stimulating mucous flow. | [
"Both kinds, moistened with vinegar, have the effect of dispersing tumours and arresting defluxions. They are curative also of inflammatory swellings and imposthumes of the parotid glands; and, applied topically, they are good for affections of the spleen and pustules on the body. With the addition of aphronitrum, ... |
Why are there different types of dementias? | It isn't random death of neurons, different causes of dementia cause neuronal death in different areas of the brain.
Alzheimer's disease tends to have severe effects in temporal lobe, whereas say Parkinsons/Lewy body dementia's neuronal death occurs more in the the dopamine neurons of the substantia nigra. Obviously the neuronal death is not completely focussed in these areas, and there will be a wide overlap of other areas. | [
"Dementia is characterized by persistent, multiple cognitive deficits in the domains including, but not limited to, memory, language, and visuospatial skills and can result from central nervous system dysfunction. Two forms of dementia exist: degenerative and nondegenerative. The progression of nondegenerative deme... |
I was just outside watching the meteor shower. What would I see if two happened to collide? | You'd see yourself going down in history as the luckiest person who ever lived.
The meteors you see are roughly the size of a fingertip, and the area of upper atmosphere that you're observing (assuming a clear sky) covers *hundreds of thousands* of cubic kilometers. Given about one meteor per second passing through that volume, the likelihood of two colliding is beyond infinitesimal.
Also, they're all going in the same general direction, so they wouldn't strike each other head on anyway.
**Edit:** I didn't really answer your question though. Suppose they *did* collide....
Depending on their angle of impact and relative velocities and masses, as much as 75-80% of their kinetic energy might be converted directly to heat, vaporizing both meteors and converting them and the surrounding atmosphere into luminous plasma. You'd see a bright, then dimming glow at the point of impact that would likely persist for several seconds. | [
"The meteor made a fireball visible from three states as it streaked through the atmosphere, even though it fell early in the afternoon. There were also indications of an air blast, as witnesses described hearing \"explosions or loud booms\".\n",
"The fall was preceded by a bright bolide seen throughout what was ... |
I'm a gay man living 17th century England, Where do I go pick up other men? What are some of the repercussions for being caught? (x-post /r/askreddit) | One popular social space for homosexual men in late 17th- and early 18th-century England were [molly houses](_URL_0_).
A "molly" was thought of at the time to be a kind of third-sex identity; these men would still be considered biologically male but would take on the persona of a woman: wearing women's clothes, taking a woman's name, and mime the mannerisms associated with femininity in English society. Molly houses were private spaces where men could meet, socialize, and engage in sexual acts.
Molly houses became the eye of public concern when the authorities raided the establishment run by [Margaret Clap](_URL_4_) in 1726, arresting some 40 occupants. The house had been under surveillance for some time by [The Society for the Reformation of Manners](_URL_1_), an interest group dedicated to "suppressing vice," and several of the occupants were [tried, convicted, and executed for sodomy](_URL_3_).
Until this point, though, the molly houses were relatively tolerated within urban communities. In a [place like Philadelphia](_URL_2_), people knew of the existence of molly houses and the authorities did not target them specifically. | [
"In July 1889, the Metropolitan Police uncovered a male brothel operated by Charles Hammond in London's Cleveland Street. Under police interrogation, the male prostitutes and pimps revealed the names of their clients, who included Lord Arthur Somerset, an Extra Equerry to the Prince of Wales. At the time, all homos... |
Which development in technology led to colour TV? | I can talk about two things that were factors in the long development process of color TV: backwards compatibility and display technology.
These two topics are heavily linked together. For example, during the early days of color TV development, one system, CBS Color, was a filter that spun in front of the screen, sequentially showing red, green, and blue. With that system, each frame was transmitted three times sequentially; one time each as red, green, and blue. The TV would time the spinning of the disk to its reception of each colored frame; the red frame would be drawn on the screen while the red filter was in front, and so on.
However, to see why that wouldn't work very well, we need to take a step backwards to see how black and white TV worked. Reduced to a basic level, a stream of electrons was fired at the inside of a glass screen coated in phosphorus. When electrons struck the phosphorus, it lit up. By using electromagnets, that single beam of electrons could be moved to point at any part of the screen.
So, to form a picture on the screen, the electron beam would sweep across the screen, line by line, with the intensity of the beam determined by the amplitude of the TV signal arriving in the set at any given moment.
So, if you fed a CBS color signal into a black-and-white TV, it simply wouldn't work. TV at that point relied on the signals coming down exactly as the set expected them to, and on being able to "line up" those signals so that the first bit of a frame arrived at the TV when the electron beam was pointing at the top-left corner of the screen. CBS color just couldn't do that.
So, an alternate route needed to be taken. Color TV couldn't use an additive color space (composed of separate red, green, and blue signals), it needed a subtractive color space- one that started out as a complete monochrome picture (with equal amounts of red, green, and blue) that any black-and-white TV could read, but that had bits of extra information carried alongside it that could be used to turn that monochrome picture into color.
This introduced a new challenge, though. TVs at that point in time didn't have any "memory"- they were sending the signal from an antenna or cable directly to the picture tube. If what was coming in didn't get drawn on the screen immediately, it wasn't getting drawn at all. And, with a subtractive color space, all the color was coming in at once. Unlike with CBS color, a TV couldn't use a mechanical trick like a spinning wheel to alternate between colors being drawn by a single electron beam- it needed to draw all the colors at once.
So, the logical answer to that problem was to go from using one vacuum tube producing an electron beam to three; one for each of red, green, and blue. Each tube would fire only when aimed at a bit of phosophor designated specially for it; each bit of phosphor would have a tiny filter in front of it so that, from the front, it would appear to glow red, green or blue.
As you might guess, this arrangement introduced a new problem. Before, it didn't matter if your electron beam was aligned exactly right or if it was particularly fine; the entire tube of your TV was coated in phosphor, and the picture would show up no matter what, even if the electron beam was angled over to the left a bit.
With the new arrangement, the problem was that the electron beams weren't fine enough and couldn't be aligned exactly right 100% of the time. This meant that "blue" phosphor dots were being lit up by the "red" electron beam- and the same for every other color. A reliable color picture wasn't being produced.
That's where Werner Flechsig's shadow mask comes in. The concept is simple, but brilliant. Take a metal sheet, and poke thousands of tiny holes in it. Then, put it directly behind the screen, which has your pattern of differently-colored phosphor dots on it. Now, because you're using three different electron beams, they're each coming from a different location- and each will enter any particular hole in the shadow mask, as the metal sheet is called, at a different angle. This allows you to restrict where the electrons from each beam land on the screen.
You can try it yourself. Take a sheet of paper and poke a hole in it. Then, holding the paper still, look through that hole from different angles. You'll see different things through it. Similarly, even if the electron beams were too big to focus and align down to the sizes they needed to be, shooting them through a tiny hole from slightly different places resulted in precise control over which points on the screen they struck.
Those are the things that were necessary for color TV to take off. We needed a way to send a color TV signal that could be viewed by people with black-and-white TVs. We needed a way to put each component color of that color signal on the screen simultaneously. And we needed a way to keep each color at the point on the screen it needed to be. | [
"The basic idea of using three monochrome images to produce a colour image had been experimented with almost as soon as black-and-white televisions had first been built. Although he gave no practical details, among the earliest published proposals for television was one by Maurice Le Blanc, in 1880, for a color sys... |
how do monitors work? | They have small dots of colored light that they can turn on our off (and dim). These are caked pixels. By Turing the pixels on and off across the screen, they can build up pictures. | [
" A monitor displays information in visual form, using text and graphics. The portion of the monitor that displays the information is called the screen. Like a television screen, a computer screen can show still or moving pictures and It’s a part of Output Devices.\n",
"The monitor is the main device used to acce... |
Does the place where a tumor is created determine where it will spread out? | Short answer: Yes, but not always.
Tumor metastases (spreading) happens when a cancer cell breaks away from the primary tumour and implants elsewhere. That cancer cell can travel through the bloodstream (hematogenous), lymphatic system (transcoelomic), or through the extracellular matrix before settling in a new location. The new metastatic site is most likely to be in close proximity to the primary tumor because the cancer cell that "seeded" that secondary tumor wouldn't have to travel so far. Example: breast cancer often spreads to lymph nodes near the armpits and colon cancer often spreads to the liver.
But it is not quite that straight forward. Different tissues are composed of different cell types so a certain cancer cell may not me capable of implanting in or traveling in a mode that would allow it to reach a particular organ. Additionally, certain cancers may favor the spread to a particular secondary organ despite it being far away (organ-specific targets). Physiological barriers can also help prevent the spread to certain sites for example the blood-brain barrier would impair hematogenic metastases to the brain. Other cancers, like most skin cancers (melanoma being an exception) are rarely observed to spread elsewhere in the body. | [
"BULLET::::- Infiltration is the behavior of the tumor either to grow (microscopic) tentacles that push into the surrounding tissue (often making the outline of the tumor undefined or diffuse) or to have tumor cells \"seeded\" into the tissue beyond the circumference of the tumorous mass; this does not mean that an... |
how do hormone responses occur so rapidly? when people are frightened/surprised, they can almost immediately feel a rush of adrenaline and heart rates rise, faces flush, etc. how do hormones reach appropriate organs so quickly? why isn’t there more of a delay for the hormones to travel? | So there are already a ton of responses in this thread which explain it better than i can, i just want to add a reason why your heart can change its tune so quickly. You have a node in your heart which is called the sinus node. It has a "natural" tact of approximately 120 Beats per minute. As you know your resting heartrate is quite a bit lower (around 60-80). This is because your sinus node gets constantly throttled by your parasympathetic nervous system. Imagine someone who is pushing against a door -your sinus node- and someone holding against it from the other side -your nervous system-. If you experience a stimulus which needs a higher heartrate your parasympathetic system just stops blocking the door. Your sinus node suddenly has no resistance and burst through the door with full speed. This change can occur between two heartbeats so that this is the fastest way for your body to raise its heartrate. | [
"An increase in sympathetic nervous system stimulation causes the heart rate to increase, both by the direct action of sympathetic nerve fibers on the heart and by causing the endocrine system to release hormones such as epinephrine (adrenaline), which have a similar effect. Increased sympathetic stimulation is usu... |
[Sports - American Football] In light of the SEC Championship game today, what events and cultural factors have lead to football being such a dominant force in the large, public universities of the Southeast U.S.? | I'm procrastinating right now, so I won't say too much, but I think this article might be helpful:
_URL_0_
I think that the "South" is more unified as a region than other places in the US; you rarely hear people talking about their Northeastern or Western pride, but Southerners seem to feel a sort of kinship that probably dates back to the Civil War. And because their college football teams are so good, they get really obsessed with the sport and consider it to be a source of regional pride- "SEC" chants are commonly heard at games, whereas "Big Ten" or "Pac Twelve" chants don't really happen.
Why are SEC teams currently so good? I'm not a huge college football fan, so take my words with a grain of salt, but I think part of it is cyclical- conferences go through times of strength and weakness. I don't know how different the fanbases of Southern teams were twenty years ago when their conference wasn't so dominant, but it's possible that the same level of hysteria didn't exist. A second part of it might be the weather- teenagers are more likely to practice football all year-round when it isn't freezing outside, and since the South is warm, this gives them a stronger recruiting base.
Another reason for the immense popularity of the college teams is that a lot of southern states don't have any professional teams. South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas (maybe that's not "Southern" per se but it's in the SEC) are examples. Of course, the Big 12 and Big 10 also have states like this, so that's obviously not the only factor.
| [
"College football was the bigger attraction, but by the end of World War II, pro football began to rival the college game for fans' attention. Rule changes and innovations such as the T formation led to a faster-paced, higher-scoring game. The league also expanded out of its eastern and midwestern cradle; in 1945, ... |
To what extent is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism during the 90s caused by the cold war? | Well, its tricky to say. To what extent is anything "caused" by the Cold War? The Cold War is just the term we use for the political system post WWII until the end of the Soviet Union. The relationships that every country had with the dominant superpowers was affected by the adversarial relationship that they had, and this was true of the Middle East as well. Ill try to give a rundown on the topic, but remember this is a very general overview of a complex place, time, and theology. Ill be happy to clarify anything!
Another comment mentioned Sayyed Qutb, and I think he's probably the best man to start with when discussing the beginnings of the modern "fundamentalist" movement, however I take issue with several of his points, especially regarding Qutbs ideas and "radicalization".
First, Qutb, while influential, was by no means creating his ideas in a vacuum. He drew heavily on several previous Islamic thinkers, as will those who were in turn influenced by his ideas, such as Bin Laden; scholars such as Ibn Taymmiah, Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani, and Muhammad Abduh. It should be noted that these men would not be necessarily considered "fundamentalists". Taymmiah was writing mainly about the Mongol conquests and jihad in the sense of resisting the Mongols, and would contribute the early beginnings of "Takfiri" doctrine. Abduh and Afghani were progressive Muslim scholars of the Nahda (Arabic Renaissance) who believed that Islam and Islamic thought must adapt to keep up with the science of the western world; they would argue that a Muslim must not blindly accept the legalistic schools of Islam and instead use their own minds to read and interpret the Quran (within reason). Qutb will also, later in life become a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization which has existed since 1928 and had created its own sets of ideas about an "Islamic" state. The Muslim Brotherhood was frequently cracked down upon by the Egyptian state, both under the Farouk monarchy period as well as during the Nasser period after Gamal Abd El-Nasser's coup.
Qutb, as a prominent educator, was granted leave to study abroad in America and would recieve a masters from the University of Greely, Colorado. Upon his return from the west, he would write "The America I Have Seen", in which he describes America as a culturally decadent place. In it he is critical of many American values and pastimes, such as the comparatively loose women, individualism, racism, violent sports, etc. However, we need to keep in mind that, while the book is "Anti-American" in the sense that he does not like the culture, he is more writing as a warning to Egyptian audiences that this is not what we want our culture to become. After he returns to Egypt, he would join the brotherhood, so once again, these ideas he has developed happen in absence of a cold war context and come from a more cultural fear that Arab society will be polluted by western values.
Nasser's coup takes place in 1952, overthrowing the pro-West Farouq government. However, until 1967 Egypt will remain more or less unaligned in the Cold War, with Nasser skillfully playing off the superpowers against each other and accepting funds from both. At the same time, Nasser will enforce a brutal crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood who, as a secular leader and Arab Nationalist, he sees as a major threat. Qutb (though first offered a job by Nasser in an attempt to co-opt him towards the regime) was a part of a plot to assassinate Nasser, is imprisoned and brutally tortured. The assertion that the Egyptians were trained by the CIA at the time is ludicrous, as the Egyptian government was becoming more and more pro-Soviet at the time, especially following the Suez Crisis.
During this period, Qutb would write his two most important works, "In the Shade of the Quran" and "Milestones". Here he details his idea of an "Islamic State" ruled by sharia law. He is equally critical of Western democracy and Eastern communism and Arab secular nationalism, believing that the only way in which a society could ever be justly governed is with the principles of Islam. He also argues that all of the worlds regimes, Arab especially, are living in jahhaliya (Ignorance). He argues that the only way to free the world from jahhal is to aggressively, violently if necessary, spread Islam and Islamic values to the state level and form a true Islam. He would be released by Nasser in 1964, but arrested shortly afterward, tried, and executed.
So here with Qutb, a man who is generally credited with influencing and creating the ideas of violent, aggressive jihad, there is very little "Cold War" style involvement. Qutb is mainly commenting on the Arab body politic and the Arab state and Arab Nationalism. He does not like the West (or the East), but he does not concern himself with the Cold War per se.
However, the Cold War politics of the region will have a major influence on the development of jihadist groups over the next 40 years. Following the 1973 war, the Arab region as a whole will be fairly firmly in the US camp in the cold war. With the exception of some small communist movements in several countries such as Lebanon, and states such as South Yemen and Syria, communism will never gain a real foothold in the region. Especially following the peace treaties between Israel and Jordan and Egypt, the regimes of the region will receive massive amounts of US aid to shore up their authoritarian governments. They will all, as Arab secular states, continue to crack down upon Islamists of any form. However, after the Iranian Revolution, which quickly became a theocratic Islamist revolution, the Islamists of the region were inspired to rise up against their US backed leaders. The 1970s and early 80s would see a good deal of state vs Islamist unrest across the region. The Saudi state would also crack down upon Islamists in their own country, as these Islamists were generally affiliated with the generally more moderate Muslim Brotherhood and not the Wahhabism of the state.
The Soviet Union would invade Afghanistan to prop up the communist Afghanistan government in 1979. The United States would flood money into Afghanistan to Afghani mujahideen to fight Soviet troops. Now this is a topic which deserves its whole own answer, but as I said at the beginning this is a very general overview. The US would partner with the Pakistani ISI and the Saudi secret services led by Prince Turki Bin Faisal to run weapons and funds into Afghanistan. All of these intelligence forces would be working at somewhat cross purposes to each other with the same goal. The Muslim world was extremely galvanized by the Afghan War; many saw it as an existential crisis, with godless communist forces fighting a brave Islamic resistance. Many around the world would answer the call of Jihad in defense of Islam, and many of those who remained home would send funds independent of any state government.
Osama Bin Laden would be one of these. Bin Laden was extremely wealthy, and would form a group called the Arab Afghans to take part in the Afghan war. Bin Laden was largely self funded, however, he may have received some funds or assistance from Saudi officials due to his Saudi nationality and connections with the Saudi state. The Arab Afghans were not particularly effective in the war itself (in fact, many Afghan Mujhideen found them to be a nuisance overly concerned with becoming martyrs instead of fighting, and they were generally ignored except when funds were needed). However, it really needs to be emphasized that to many around the Middle East region these men were heroes, and those who went began to display a religious fervor commensurate with their growing reputation. After the war ended and the Soviets retreated in 1989, Bin Laden (and his partner Ayman Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian also heavily influenced by Qutb's work) were forced to decide what to do with the network they had built and those Arab mujahideen who wished to stay and fight. Many of the fighters, Zawahiri included, wished to go home and take a violent fight against their secular "godless" regimes at home such as Egypt. Bin Laden however would argue that to succeed in overthrowing the Arab States living in jahhal, the mujahideen must alter their goal. He would argue that they should not focus on the "Near Satan" of the Arab states, but instead focus on the "Great Satan" of the United States, which was the true power and backer of the Arab regimes. Due largely to the fact that Bin Laden was the primary financier, many of the other Mujahid would agree and form the beginnings of Al-Qaeda.
At this point we are getting fairly into 20 year territory, but I'll just leave it that Al-Qaeda (and the effects of the later US war against it) is the template organization and theology for much of the (violent) Islamic fundamentalism that we see today. I have brushed over a lot of more existential questions here, not the least of which is "What is Fundamentalism?" (do we count the vast majority of non-violent Salafis?). Ive also brushed over so much important history, but like I said, I can elaborate on specifics if asked. If you're looking for some reading on this, some recommendations:
"The Looming Tower" by Lawrence Wright - an excellent history of Al-Qaeda, beginning with Qutb and ending with the aftermath of 9-11
"Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Ideological and Political Discourse of Sayyd Qutb" by Ahmed Moussali - The go-to end-all-be all-book of the life and theological thought of Qutb.
"Ghost Wars" by Steve Coll - An excellent history of the CIA involvement in Afghanistan
Edits: Because I don't spell or grammar no good. | [
"The modern Islamic fundamentalist movements have their origins in the late 19th century. The Wahhabi movement, an Arabian fundamentalist movement that began in the 18th century, gained traction and spread during the 19th and 20th centuries. During the Cold War following World War II, some NATO governments, particu... |
how do young people from places like europe and australia afford to travel extensively not work? | Just like in America, there are people with rich parents who fund these sorts of things for them. And like in America, some people save up money so they can travel for a while. However, people in the U.S. are more likely to go to college right after high school, and may save travels for things like spring break and studying abroad.
You're not really getting a representative sample. Of course you're much more likely to meet people from other countries who are frequent travelers--you don't meet all the people who stay home! | [
"Another major source of tourists to Australia include backpackers, mostly young people from Western European countries (particularly Britain). Spending more time in Australia, these travelers tend to explore considerably more of the country. Many backpackers participate in working holidays enabling them to stay lo... |
why does more electronic storage cost more? | In some cases, the manufacturing process is a lot more complex to make the item that has more storage, even if it isn't physically any bigger.
In other cases, they make many storage devices, all with the higher amount of storage. Some of them are faulty, and can't store as much as they're supposed to, so they get re-configured as lower storage devices and sold off cheaper.
In the case of the iPhone (since you specifically mention it), the amount you pay for a bit of extra storage is far more than the cost of that extra storage. They charge this much purely because they know that some people will pay for it. At the end of the day, remember if you're asking "why does something cost X", the reason is usually because that's what people will pay for it, far more than because that's what it costs to make. But this is especially true in high-end devices like iPhones. | [
"While digital storage has become cheaper, the associated costs, from raw power to maintenance and from metadata to search engines, have not kept up with the proliferation of data. Although the power required to maintain a unit of data has fallen, the cost of facilities which house the digital storage has tended to... |
Dog eat dog? is there any scientific reason why stray cats and dogs can't be used in pet food? | Prion diseases took hold in cattle when dead cattle were fed to the same species. This has happened with humans as well. It would be bad for humans for prions to infect cats and dogs because that would make it easier for them to infect humans. | [
"Dogs are used for research because they can be domesticated, and because they have been used in studies concerning diabetes in the past. For example, dogs were used as subjects in a study of the effects of diet-induced obesity on insulin dispersion. In this experiment, it was found that a high-fat diet caused insu... |
how can a torrent that is said to have 0 seeds and 0 leechers download just as fast as a torrent with hundreds? | You can't download a file without and seeds or leechers. The seeds/leechers count in a BitTorrent client should be correct, but the count on sites are usually not for several reasons:
* The site probably only checks the trackers, while proper clients also use DHT and peer exchange.
* The seeds/leechers count on the site might be outdated. The tracker list on the site probably lists the last update time and lets you refresh the count.
* Some torrents have a link to the content on a regular file server so it can be downloaded using HTTP for example. This functions like a seed (aside from using a different protocol), but is rarely included in the seed count, even by the download client.
* Some trackers might be unreachable or unsupported by the site's software. | [
"The algorithm applies to a scenario in which there is only one seed in the swarm. By permitting each downloader to download only specific parts of the files listed in a torrent, it equips peers to begin seeding sooner. Peers attached to a seed with super-seeding enabled therefore distribute pieces of the torrent f... |
When I look at a source of light in the dark, I see a large halo around it. Why don't I see this effect in a well-lit environment? | You see the halo because of the contrast between the (presumably very dark) environment and the (presumably rather bright) light source. Your eyes actually scatter a significant amount of incoming light over a set pattern with broad wings -- so each bright point of light yields a halo-like image on the retina. The wings of the halo are faint enough that they get washed out in normal life, but at night there is high contrast between (say) a candle flame and a dark room around the candle. Your retinal response is logarithmic, which downplays how phenomenal the contrast ratio really is (can be a factor of 10,000 to 100,000 between a candle flame and the walls in a typical small candlelit room!). The stray light from the candle flame washes out the dark room and appears as a halo.
In a well-lit environment the contrast ratio between anything you're likely to view and its surroundings is not nearly so great, since 10,000 times brighter than "well lit" is "painful" or even "damaging". For example the Sun has a similar optical halo that can be seen on a clear day with dark skies, but you're not likely to have ever noticed it. (The optical halo there is also masked by a forward-scattering halo in the sky -- you have to use your thumb or something to obscure and reveal the Sun, and carefully observe how the sky around the Sun changes, to notice the optical halo there).
| [
"Although the focused (light) ray cones are actually more or less parallel to each other, the rays from the aureole effect appear to be radiating from the shadow of the viewer’s head due to perspective effects. The viewer's line of sight is parallel and lies within the cones, so from the viewer's perspective the ra... |
In America, was slavery reserved only for Africans? Could there be slaves of other races? White slaves? | There were many Indian slaves in America. Some were owned by white settlers. Others were owned by Indians of different tribes. It was very common for Indian tribes to take captives during battles and keep them as slaves. It was a measure of wealth and bravery in some cases.
Ken Burns "The West" covers this topic fairly well. He is focusing on the western territory of course, but it still gives some interesting insight into slavery outside of Africans. | [
"In the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, free people of color (French: \"gens de couleur libres\"; Spanish: \"gente de color libre\") were people of mixed African and European descent who were not enslaved. The term arose in the French colonies, including \"La Louisiane\" and settlements on Caribb... |
To what extent was the breakdown of the United States military in Vietnam a result of conscription? | As regards the aspect of your question about fragging, [this old answer](_URL_0_) might be of interest. | [
"Vietnamization of the war, however, created a dilemma for U.S. forces: the strategy required that U.S. troops fight long enough for the ARVN to improve enough to hold its own against Communist forces. Morale in the U.S. ranks rapidly declined during 1969–1972, as evidenced by declining discipline, worsening drug u... |
why do i feel sharp pains in my pelvis and ass when i see videos of people getting hurt? | Physical empathy?
_URL_0_ | [
"The pain may be provoked by contact with an object, such as with the insertion of a tampon or penis or with the pressure from sitting on a bicycle seat, \"provoked vestibulodynia\", or it may be constant, as in the case of unprovoked, generalized vestibulodynia. Some women have had pain since their first penetrati... |
Why didn't Hitler send the Jews to Palestine | No country would take them. Palestine would not take them. Palestine was administered by the British, and they were sensitive to the delicate balance of the population. They didn't want more Jews there because it would anger the Arabs there. So even though Jews lived there, they did not control the country. Britain's plan was to create two states based on population, but an influx of new people would upset the population percentages. Jews were turned away in ships that took them there. Hitler would likely have sent them anywhere anyone would take them. But it was manifestly clear that virtually no one would. In fact, there was a whole international conference on what people should do about Jewish refugees. It is called the Evian Conference. You can explore this further. Basically, the attendees agreed that they couldn't do anything to help. The Evian Conference has been thoroughly examined, but a few places to start are the US Holocaust Memorial summary of the key points: _URL_2_
You can delve into it in The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 by David Wyman.
Also check out The Holocaust Conspiracy: An International Policy of Genocide by William Perl.
To learn more about the British Mandate of Palestine and the fragile political situation there and why the British wouldn't let Jewish refugees in, check out the original source: The White Paper of 1939: _URL_1_
That no country wanted the Jews was made even more manifestly obvious by the propaganda event that was The Voyage of the Damned. Hitler sent a ship full of Jewish refugees around the world, seeking a place that would take them. No one would until finally some were taken in, though others were forced back to Germany and were killed in the Holocaust. There's a lot written about this, so you can start some research there, and with The Evian Conference. A quick study of the Voyage of the Damned can be read about here: _URL_0_
A more thorough examination is in Voyage of the Damned: A Shocking True Story of Hope, Betrayal, and Nazi Terror by Max Morgan Witts and Gordon Thomas.
I also recommend you read In the Garden of Beasts, which is an account of the American Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1936. You get insight into how Jews were turned away for visas, even though the visa quota for Jews hadn't been nearly close to being met, for example. | [
"Though Hitler hated Jewish people and wanted them expelled from Germany, in 1933 the Nazis were not willing to let a large number of Jewish refugees flee to the surrounding nations. This was because Reich officials were concerned that fleeing Jewish refugees would lend large numbers to a growing international move... |
why does an open wound/abrasion not hurt when touched underwater? | You’re overloading the nerves with water pressure so that a touch won’t be noticed like it would out of water. | [
"Divers, however, are far less vulnerable to damage by underwater explosion than common sense would dictate. Since the tissues of the body tend to transmit the shock waves with much the same characteristics as the water around, large distant shocks have little impact on divers. For this reason, the most effective \... |
how do immigrants just move to another country? how is this possible? | Between the late 40s and early 70s, a lot of people emigrated to Britain while their countries were still part of the empire. You'll notice that all of the Nations you mentioned are commonwealth countries.
Once you have family in the country it's a lot easier to get an immigration visa. | [
"Immigration is the international movement of people into a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle or reside there, especially as permanent residents or naturalized citizens, or to take-up employment as a migrant worker or temporarily as a forei... |
Is there a reason to discourage appropriate usage of antibiotics? | I’m glad you raised this question because it is extremely important to curb inappropriate antibiotic use for many reasons. Of course, inappropriate use of antibiotics leads to resistant bacteria, but like all medications, antibiotics have other side effects.
The side effects depend on the antibiotic. Just like there are different classes of blood pressure medications that work in different ways, different antibiotics kill or inhibit the growth of bacteria in different ways, and they all have their own side effects.
Among the different side effects include kidney damage, hearing loss, and seizures. Some can even cause discoloration of the teeth. These side effects can be permanent. By killing bacteria, antibiotics can also change the balance of natural bacteria in your intestines, leading to growth of an opportunistic bacterium such as *C. difficile*, which causes a very serious infection.
Another side effect that is not unusual is the destruction of bacteria that help produce clotting proteins. Believe it or not, bacteria in your intestines help produce Vitamin K, which is essential for blood clotting. This is why newborns are given a Vitamin K shot (having never been exposed to the environment, newborns initially have no bacteria in their gut and therefore cannot synthesize Vitamin K which puts them at risk for bleeding disorders). | [
"Though effective, antibiotics are not recommended for prevention of TD in most situations because of the risk of allergy or adverse reactions to the antibiotics, and because intake of preventive antibiotics may decrease effectiveness of such drugs should a serious infection develop subsequently. Antibiotics can al... |
Why Do Certain Chemicals Cause Different Individuals To Experience Similar Complex Thoughts/Hallucinations? Where Is The Information Coming From? | There might be confirmation bias going on here, just because "many report" is not necessarily indicative of the expereinces of most users. My own experience with DMT was like a kaleidoscope with no other "entities".
All brains are wired differently but pretty much all of them use the same chemical schematics to do the job, so shared expereinces can come from that. A chemical change that causes one person to perceive an unknown entity may cause the same effect in another, or it may not.
Keep in mind with altered states of conciousness it be difficult to perceive what is influencing you, one person may say "I'm bring eaten by butterflies!" And cause the rest to manifest the same hallucination. | [
"Entoptic Phenomena are interpreted in ways that can be understood, matched to objects or ideas that may be familiar in day-to-day life and may also be attributed to the individuals state such as hunger, sexual arousal, or anxiety and fear. Placing objects in reality from base shapes seen under influence from psych... |
Why did Germany attempt The Battle of the Bulge when it had virtually zero chance of success? | Planning for what ultimately became Operation Wacht am Rhein (Watch on the Rhine) began in August of 1944, with the aim that a major offensive would be launched against the Western Allies in November. During the month of September five plans were produced by General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations at OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, High Command of the Armed Forces), and his deputy operations officer, General Horst von Buttlar-Brandenfels; these covered the entirety of the Western Front. In mid-late September Hitler announced that he had decided that the offensive would take place in the Ardennes, with Antwerp as its objective, and on 11 October the first draft of Wacht am Rhein was delivered by OKW. The plan called for an attack by the Sixth SS and Fifth Panzer Armies along a sixty mile front that ranged from Monschau in the north to Echternach in the south; the Sixth SS Panzer Army, in the north, would constitute the main effort and drive across the Meuse near Liège before wheeling north to Antwerp, while Fifth Panzer Army attacked on their left, covering their flank the entire way to the Belgian port. It was estimated that under favorable conditions Antwerp could be seized in as little as a week, but in order for the plan to be successful it was conceded that Germany had to retain control of Holland, destroy SHAEF’s strategic reserve (estimated at five divisions), mobilize enough manpower and material to supply the effort, and experience approximately two weeks of bad weather in order to ground Allied airpower. Finally, the attack would have to take place during a period of stability along the Western Front. Hitler accepted the plan with only one major change, that the base of the offensive be widened in order to prevent the attackers from being pinched off and caught in a pocket. By 22 October the plan had been amended to include the Seventh Army, which would attack south of Fifth Panzer Army in order to protect that flank of the entire penetration. All three field armies would fall under Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B and would be attacking across a front of 100 miles or so.
From the outset the plan as it existed was opposed by Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, OB-West (Commander-in-Chief, West), his subordinate Model, and both of Model’s primary subordinates, General Hasso von Manteuffel of Fifth Panzer Army and General Sepp Dietrich of Sixth SS Panzer Army. All four felt that Antwerp was too ambitious an objective, and in response both OB-West and Army Group B crafted alternate plans. Operation Martin, OB-West’s plan, envisioned an attack along a 25-mile front near Simmerath with the goal of turning north and destroying all US forces in the vicinity of Aachen. Model’s plan, Operation Herbstnebel (Autumn Mist), was for all intents and purposes the same as von Rundstedt’s but drawn up along a 35-mile front southwest of Hürtgenwald. Both plans focused on destroying American forces east of the Meuse, as the difficulties involved in simply getting formations across the Meuse was one of the major headaches of Wacht am Rhein, and both were considered feasible with the manpower available. Eventually von Rundstedt ordered Model to amend his plan to be nearly identical to Martin in order to present a united front to Hitler; he did so, as he and von Rundstedt both shared the opinion that Wacht am Rhein lacked the manpower necessary to see it to completion, and both doubted that the forces that had been assigned to it would be fully assembled by the time the offensive was due to kick off. In late October von Rundstedt and Model held a meeting at the latter’s headquarters to discuss Hitler’s orders; both aforementioned army commanders as well as General Erich Brandenberger of Seventh Army and General Siegfried Westphal, Chief of Staff of OB-West, were present, and by the end all were in agreement that Antwerp was unattainable. So doubtful were they of the concept that von Rundstedt and Model invited Jodl to Model’s headquarters on November 3d to express their misgivings, and although Jodl listened and appeared to agree with some of their points there was nothing he could do to alter the situation.
Despite the fact that Hitler rejected their counter-proposals von Rundstedt and Model continued to plead their case. In mid-late November Model asked multiple times for permission to use troops earmarked for Wacht am Rhein in limited counterattacks around Aachen; this culminated in a request to conduct a limited double envelopment in the Aachen sector aimed at trapping and destroying fourteen American divisions. All were denied. In late November the generals were summoned to Berlin for a planning meeting, where Model harangued Hitler about the deficiencies in Wacht am Rhein; in response he was all but disregarded. A week later they tried again, as Model, Westphal, Manteuffel, and Dietrich returned to Berlin for another meeting in the first week of December, and again they failed, though Manteuffel succeeded in obtaining some minor tactical revisions to the plan. Four days later they made their last official attempt to sway Hitler’s mind when they submitted the final draft of their operations orders for the offensive, which included a maneuver by XII SS Corps that Hitler had shot down earlier; he shot it down again. Despite this Dietrich (with Model’s unspoken approval) remained undeterred, and as late as 15 December he and his chief of staff were planning to disregard Hitler’s orders surrounding Sixth SS Panzer Army’s route of advance near Liège in order to maintain the ability to drive north toward Aachen. This only ended when Hitler, seemingly aware of the plot, phoned Model and ordered him to ensure that Dietrich followed orders.
As it was both von Rundstedt and Model ended up giving formal approval for Wacht am Rhein, possibly hoping that if they did indeed reach the Meuse (von Rundstedt in particular felt that task alone would require a miracle) they could potentially talk Hitler out of continuing on to Antwerp. In any case both of their alternate plans contained many of the same flaws that Wacht am Rhein did, such as relying on bad weather to ground Allied airpower and underestimating the fighting capability of the Allies while overestimating that of the Germans. Hitler’s goal in seizing Antwerp was not operational in nature- it was political. If the American lines in the Ardennes were smashed and Antwerp was seized part of the US First Army and the entirety of the US Ninth Army and British/Canadian 21st Army Group would be cut off- not to mention the logistical nightmare that the loss of Antwerp would cause. Hitler was looking to inflict such a massive defeat on the Western Allies that the Anglo-American alliance, which he felt was tenuous, would collapse. All of the counter-proposals and requests submitted by OB-West and Army Group B were operational in nature: their objectives were the destruction of enemy forces, something that would buy Germany time but only delay the inevitable. Hitler wanted a turning point, and to get it he had to have Antwerp.
EDIT: It was quarter after midnight when I finished this last night, and after reading over it I realize I didn’t really directly address your question so I will do so now. As you can see from what I wrote above the officers tasked with carrying out Wacht am Rhein did indeed protest their orders and went to great lengths to try to persuade Hitler to settle for a more limited and feasible objective, to no avail. A key point that I failed to emphasize was the nature of who these men were. Gerd von Rundstedt was one of the most senior men in the German Army with over half a century spent in its service, and was a perfect representative of the Prussian military aristocracy. He despised Hitler, and had so opposed the Nazi regime that he had resigned from the army just prior to the outbreak of war, though he was shortly recalled. He and Hitler enjoyed a relationship that one would describe as “correct”- each gave the other the respect his positions afforded him, but it is not really a surprise that Hitler might ignore von Rundstedt’s opinion. Model, on the other hand, was an ardent Nazi, had earned a reputation as an exemplary defensive general, and had become one of Hitler’s favorites. Known as the “Führer’s fireman,” the abilities he had displayed in the east led to him being sent west to stop the Western Allies as they ran up against the German frontier in the early fall of 1944. It is more surprising that Hitler disregarded Model’s opinion on the feasibility of Wacht am Rhein, considering that Model had successfully swayed him on several occasions throughout the course of the war. Dietrich was a hard charger, a Nazi dating back to the 1920’s, and an old friend that had risen through the ranks of the SS. He was a tenacious fighter, described as having the instincts of a barroom brawler. Manteuffel, finally, was one of the army’s rising stars- he had acquitted himself so well in combat in the east that he had jumped from commanding a division to a field army, skipping corps command entirely. The relations between these men were as varied as their backgrounds- von Rundstedt and Model were not friendly, and Sepp Dietrich, as a “self made street brawler,”was more or less simply tolerated for his abilities by most rather than embraced. In short, these were all capable men who didn’t always see eye to eye, and yet all of them coordinated together to repeatedly profess doubt in the plan to Hitler, with Dietrich even trying to sneak one by him. Hitler simply did not listen. | [
"The Battle of the Bulge was the last major German offensive campaign launched through the densely forested Ardennes region. It eventually was gradually pushed back by the Allied until the Germans retreated behind the Siegfried Line.\n",
"Author Alex Kershaw said, \"Had they not stood and held the Germans and hal... |
why should i believe the accuracy of any national poll, if i (or anybody i know) has never participated in any of them? | > Can they possibly have a sample size large enough to generalize an entire nation?
That's the beauty of random samples. It doesn't matter how large the population is, just how large the sample is, and you can get results with small margins of error with sample sizes in the hundreds or thousands.
Think about it this way: you know that one of your friends flipped a coin 100,000 times, and another did it 100,000,000 times. If you ask them both for the results of 100 random flips, will you have a more accurate idea of what your first friend got overall, since you get a larger percentage of his flips? No, they're equally likely to be close to 50/50, which should be what both got.
Now, pollsters can vary in how they draw their samples (true random samples of the nation aren't possible), as well as how they design their surveys, so there can be variation, and it's always good to look at more than one poll. Even with perfect polling, there can be weird results through random chance. The reality, though, is that many of these pollsters base their reputation on accurate results, and they'd lose business if they were consistently wrong. | [
"The 2004 poll was conducted by telephone with 1,042 adults nationwide in the United States, with a 3 percent margin of error. The 2006 poll was conducted by telephone on 983 randomly selected citizens of the United States, with a 4 percent margin of error. One of the questions was the following:\n",
"Polls basic... |
Was Walt Disney a bad person? | I apologize if this reads as a bit cobbled-together but I hope it's at least in the direction of what you're looking for. My main sources are Nicholas Sammond's Babes in Tomorrowland and Steven Watts' The Magic Kingdom, but most criticism of "classic" Disney films usually has a lot of interesting history as well. I also recommend Richard Schickel.
The image of Disney that both he and his company worked so hard to perpetuate is that the man embodied "essentially American values." Sammond includes a very interesting quote from Fortune magazine in 1934, which profiled Disney and described him as combining Abraham Lincoln's humble origins and work ethic, Horatio Alger's entrepreneurial determination, and Henry Ford's industrial efficiency and management. His early animation-- here I'm referencing everything from the 1920s until 1937-- is characterized by a number of conventions, particularly sentimentality and the satirization of high cultural signifiers. Essentially, the themes of Disney's films were populist. Disney was "one of us"-- he didn't go in for the highbrow and elitist, his interests and preoccupations were folksy, humorous, and common, and the sources of much of his stories were popular folklore. (Even the phrase "Silly Symphonies" suggests highbrow entertainment being brought to a popular level.)
Consider the role of the movie theater in 1920s and 1930s America: this was a cheap form of entertainment that was not only accessible by, but hugely popular with, every class. The most popular stars of the era were those who frequently played down-on-their-luck characters: Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Shirley Temple (a bit later). This was a format that was constructing "American-ness" while simultaneously perpetuating it: self-denial and delayed gratification, hard work, consistent humour supplemented by emotional depth. However, early films were "immoral," the lives of movie stars famously dissolute (Fatty Arbuckle in 1922, the introduction of the Hays Code in 1930), and there was a tremendous debate about the role and influence of these films on the minds of young people (a particularly influential study from 1932 compared the effect of movies on the minds of young people to the effect of World War I on the minds of combatants). What's important here is that people believed that the types of films children saw would influence the type of people those children would become.
Enter Disney, who provides reliably moral, genuinely entertaining film that quickly becomes very technologically sophisticated and appears to perpetuate real American values: not only of the success of scrappy underdogs and the virtues of thrift and perseverance in his films, but also through the image of himself perpetuated through a staggering amount of product licensing, even in the mid-thirties. Disney characters were mischievous, certainly, but they were clean and happy, romantic yet sexless. Mickey Mouse's eyeballs never popped out of his head when big titted Minnie sang jazz, for example. Basically, if your kids went to see Disney films, they might grow up to become like him, so you were quite happy to let them spend their afternoons at the theater. Magazines like Photoplay profiled him quite breathlessly. It also really is hard to overstate his influence on film and animation technology, but also on the general shape of film narrative: if you take a bit of time to watch pre-1928 animation on Youtube (1928 = the release of Steamboat Willie), it really is astonishing how, well, primitive and even amateur it appears compared to even Disney's earliest work. Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, who worked on Looney Tunes for Warner Bros in the thirties, did great work, but in general it was a case of other studios desperately trying to keep up with Disney. Max Fleischer (Betty Boop) is pretty much the only person who could come close, and he didn't have the marketing strength of the Disney Studio behind him.
Also, the image the studio perpetuated of itself in the thirties played a significant role in the public perception of Disney the man. The studio workers were simultaneously depicted as (I'm borrowing Sammond's words here) "models of industrial efficiency [and] members of one big, happy family, with Walt as their avuncular leader." The Fordist philosophy of manufacturing was of course still very much the ideal at that time, so imagine the significance of the Disney Studio during the Great Depression: a success story both in terms of industrial output and the warmth and sentimentality of family life. The release of Snow White sort of cemented everything, too: it was a huge artistic gamble, and still remains one of the most successful animated films of all time in terms of artistic influence (Sergei Eisenstein and Orson Welles both cited it as an influence).
Basically, what you have so far is: Disney's concept of himself as a quintessential American artist-manufacturer, relentlessly marketed. He undoubtedly believed it himself, and for the most part it was true.
Continuing briefly into the fifties and sixties, when the Studio's animated films were uneven and sometimes floundering, Disney himself hosted tv shows like The Wonderful World of Disney. His various nature shows were testaments to the ideas of the Wild West and the American frontier, helping cement Disney's image as a real American treasure, and his Buckminster Fuller-ful vision for the future of America (geodesic domes everywhere!) were popular and, people believed, only a matter of time. Disney intended to be at the forefront of that development. He was both visionary and traditional.
Despite his apparently populist thematic preoccupations, however, people like to talk about Disney's anti-union leanings. To be sure, he was very anti-union. After the success of Snow White, Disney didn't promote or give raises but gave "salary adjustments" to the animators he considered the most exceptional. In 1941, his animators went on strike (after, but not because, he accused the union leader of being a Bolshevik). After the strike was finally resolved, Disney (the individual) largely gave up on pushing the "big happy family" picture of the Studio; everyone knew it wasn't true, but mostly Disney didn't feel like he could trust anyone anymore. Later full-length films aren't directed by him; instead he later committed himself to television. There's no question that he was immensely unpopular among the animators that left after the strike, although a few of them eventually came back.
What is interesting to note here is that, despite the glee of the other studios at the apparent crumbling of the Disney Family, the animators' union was first formed when Max Fleischer fired every one of his staff animators who had signed with an artists' union. Warner Bros was also very unhappy with the new union and tried to lock them out but failed. Disney's animators, pre-Snow White, were among the best paid in the industry, but the production of Snow White was so risky and bloated that they all had to take large paycuts and work overtime; when the film was successful, they were understandably bitter that things weren't put back to rights. Being anti-union was pretty par for the course in the late thirties and forties, sadly. Disney was not the exception to the rule.
Anyway that's all I can tell you about the man himself. I haven't read Neal Gabler's biography which is supposed to be fantastic, but I do know that his daughter was infuriated by its publication and the negative image of him she believed it portrayed. Insofar as he can be judged good or bad, Disney was one of a breed of American industrial capitalist-- comparisons to Henry Ford and Rockefeller are apt-- ruthless but determined. I don't know if it's true whether or not he'd go around randomly accusing his dissident workers of being Communist, but it's certainly true that he was a founding member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in the 1950s, along with prominent film industry right wingers like John Wayne and Clark Gable (and Hedda Hopper!) (and Ayn Rand!!), which was extremely anti-Communist and a big support of the House Un-American Activities Committee (the blacklist). I think it's important to judge him independently of what the Disney Studio has become; you can chalk up a lot of the "evil" commonly associated with it now to Michael Eisner, who arguably was trying to follow in Walt's footsteps, but obviously was about sixty years out of date.
Hope that helps!
Edit: breaking up the wall of text, but also, in response to charges of anti-Semitism and racism: I've heard the anti-Semitic stuff before-- mostly that he and Leni Riefenstahl were "good friends," and that he was bitter because a Jewish producer had stolen his Oswald character (both of these are unsubstantiated although he did like Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will pre-1938) but Neal Gabler denies that he was any more anti-Semitic than his contemporaries. As for racism, again, all the evidence I've read or seen doesn't suggest tendencies any more racist than his contemporaries. People point to Song of the South and the crows in Dumbo but these works seem to me to be motivated by a (obviously woefully misguided) attempt at humour rather than to denigrate Blacks. In many ways, Walt was way ahead of his times; in others, he was very much a product of them. | [
"76-year-old Diane Disney Miller, Mickey Mouse creator Walt Disney's last surviving child, commented to the press that, \"What we're dealing with here is pure evil and you can't ignore that.\" She further commented that, \"It's not just [about] Mickey, it's [about] indoctrinating children like this, teaching them t... |
Why were there no large-scale reform movements in the Orthodox church as compared to, rather famously, its Catholic counterpart? | I think it would be difficult to establish a specific reason, but two factors that were probably important were:
A) that the national Orthodox churches maintain some degree of autonomy, whereas in the Catholic Church the center exerts a much larger influence. The local Orthodox churches were more flexible and more easily able to deal with local challenges.
B) that the national Orthodox churches are *national*. The religious identity and the national identity have some amount of overlap there. It's not a church controlled from some foreign remote location, it's described in those countries as "our church". The combination of religion and nationalism is always very powerful.
I'm speaking mostly about East European countries, although Orthodoxy is not limited to that area. Also, those two factors alone are probably not sufficient. | [
"The origins of Renovationism can be traced to wide debates concerning possible church reforms, among both clergy and laity, of the Russian Orthodox Church in the beginning of the 20th century. These debates obviously stemmed from dissatisfaction with the position of the Church in the Russian Empire, where it was s... |
how can crocodiles never stop growing? | Some animals - like humans - will stop growing (mostly) once they enter adult hood. This is simply ingrained into their biology. Other animals do not have this built-in limitation and will grow as much as their environment and diet allow.
However, there are still physical limitations mainly as a result of the [Squar-Cube Law](_URL_0_). Mostly, as organisms grow, the grow proportionately. However, proportionate growth is limited in the sense that the weight of the organism will increase faster than its strength.
This happens because the weight is related to the total volume of the organism (which increases by the cube of the growth factor; if its size increases by a factor of 2, its weight increases by 8) but its strength is related to the cross-sectional area of its muscles and bones (which only increases by the square of the growth factor; if its size increases by a factor of 2, its strength increases by 4). | [
"Since crocodiles have 100+ years life-span and breeding centre lacks infrastructure to cater for large population of crocodiles, overcrowding is a problem. As a result, caretakers have stopped the external intervention e.g. artificial incubation of the eggs. Though female crocodiles eat the weak youngs and this ke... |
Why is blue light heavier than red light? | E=hf gives the energy of a photon, where h is Planck's constant and f is the frequency. So a "blue photon" has more energy than a red one, since blue light has a higher frequency. However this does not make a blue photon "heavier". You can't do a E - > m - > mg to get a "weight" of a photon, basically because a photon cannot sit still on a balance for you to measure its weight. You could do this with a box of photons though.
I'd check out _URL_1_
and
_URL_0_ | [
"Eigengrau is perceived as lighter than a black object in normal lighting conditions, because contrast is more important to the visual system than absolute brightness. For example, the night sky looks darker than eigengrau because of the contrast provided by the stars.\n",
"The reflectivity of aluminum (Al), silv... |
Why did the Holy Roman Empire fall to Napoleon? | Great source for this is *The War of Wars: The Great European Conflict* by Robert Harvey, but better, more indepth books to read *The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire* by Andrew Wheatcroft, though you best get used to cousins marrying each other, and Friedrich Heer's *Holy Roman Empire*.
But the simple truth is, by this point, the Empire had ceased to exist as a military body or a political state. It was primarily a ceremonial title, and this was due to a gradual lessening of power - this was turned into terminal decline (in the authority of the HRE) by the Thirty Years War and the Ottoman Invasion into Hungary and, eventually, Austria.
Put simply, the HRE wasn't really conquered, it was abolished. Francis II was a genuinely kind family man, but a second rate administrator and ruler. He abolished the title in 1806, not long after the legendary Battle of Austerlitz, through fear that Napoleon might assume the title; the Confederation of the Rhine had a great deal of power (in the region) and there was little to stand in the way of Napoleon should he choose to assume the title.
In terms of why the Habsburg Empire failed to defeat Napoleon, that is less complicated, and in many ways the crux of the question. In brief, a combination of exemplary leadership (provided just as much by a semi-meritocratic army structure as by any Marechal), huge manpower reserves contributed by the Grand Armee and the Levee En Masse, a genuine and quite high esprit de corps and aggressive campaigning on the French side, and old fashioned tactics, poor recruiting doctrine and internal politics led to Austrian defeats not only in the Italian Alps but at the Battle of Hohenlinden, complete encirclement at the Ulm, and Austerlitz.
This paints the Austrian Army in a bad light, but it is unfair; it had some of the finest cavalry in Europe, and Archduke Charles was a skilled and competent commander who would go on to hold his own against Napoleon at Aspern-Essling and Wagram. They were simply taken aback by the reforms in the French Army, and forced to adapt too quickly.
The Holy Roman Empire's decline is a book unto itself, but I hope I've given you some ground to stand on.
Edit: Misspellings and incorrect sourcing - *The War of Wars* by Robert Harvey, not *The War of All Wars*. | [
"The defeat meant the end of the old Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon's satellite states in southern and Western Germany seceded from the Empire in the summer of 1806, forming the Confederation of the Rhine, and a few days later Francis proclaimed the Empire dissolved, and renounced the old imperial crown on 6 August 18... |
why do city border street signs often list the city's elevation? who cares? | A lot of cooking instructions, particularly baking or other things involving the oven, are effected(or affected, can't remember) by the elevation. I don't understand how or why, I just remember seeing it quite often in cooking instructions. | [
"In some cities in the United States (San Francisco, Houston, Detroit, Cleveland, Memphis), streets have official suffixes, but they are not generally given on street signs or used in postal addresses. In Chicago, suffixes are given on street signs but often ignored in popular speech and in postal addresses.\n",
... |
why do american toilets clog up so much? | The US passed the Energy Policy Act of 1992 which determined that after 1994, common toilets can only use 1.6 gallons of water per flush.
While this saved water, it made the toilets less powerful at flushing large amounts of solid waste, resulting in higher rates of clogging. | [
"BULLET::::- Fear of the pit getting filled: In some places, people are scared that their toilet pits will get filled very fast if all family members use it everyday. So they continue to go out to delay the toilet pit filling up. This is especially true in the case of a pit latrine.\n",
"Because it is a developme... |
how do postal services between two nations work? since postage is paid in the originating country, who pays for the movement within the destination country? | The destination country essentially delivers the mail for free. At the end of the year, if the mail exchanged between countries was about the same, they call it a wash. Both countries benefit from being able to easily exchange mail, and it is not worth the effort to figure out exactly who owe who what.
If there is a large imbalance, like there is between the US and China, the country sending more mail will pay the other one at the end of the year. There is a UN organization that manages this, although some countries come to their own agreements.
| [
"Parcel Post service began with the introduction of International Parcel Post between the US and foreign countries in 1887. That same year, the U.S. Post Office (predecessor of the USPS) and the Postmaster General of Canada established parcel-post service between the two nations. A bilateral parcel-post treaty betw... |
-in all my science classes i've been taught "like dissolves like" referring to polar and non-polar solvents. what causes this effect? | Polar molecules are attracted to each other due to their dipoles. Therefore it's easy for them to combine into one homogeneous substance.
So it's really hard for a non-polar molecule to dissolve in polar solvents because they're not attracted to the solvent at all (whereas the solvent is attracted to itself since all the molecules are polar) so there's no real connecting the two to create a mixture/solution.
It's also hard for a polar molecule to dissolve in a non-polar solvent because of the same reason (no attraction forces between the two substances).
As for why non-polar can dissolve non-polar, that's due to the LACK of attraction forces between ANY of the molecules, so you can mix them all up with no resistance.
You can visualize all this by imagining a bunch of magnets as polar molecules and a bunch of plastic balls as non-polar molecules.
If I throw a bunch of magnets into a group of more magnets, all the magnets are going to stick to each other.
If I throw a bunch of magnets into a ball pit, the magnets will stay together, but not attract any of the balls.
Similarly, if i throw a bunch of balls into a tub of magnets, the balls will just sit there and not break apart the magnets.
But if I throw a bunch of balls into a ball pit, all the balls will mix together.
| [
"The polarity, dipole moment, polarizability and hydrogen bonding of a solvent determines what type of compounds it is able to dissolve and with what other solvents or liquid compounds it is miscible. Generally, polar solvents dissolve polar compounds best and non-polar solvents dissolve non-polar compounds best: \... |
how doctor can guide a catheter through your body | Different catheters have slightly different shapes. They usually have some form of curve at the tip, which causes the tip to point in a certain direction. They also contain markers which show up on X-ray, because plastic doesn't usually show up (typically heavy metals like platinum or gold).
The catheter is also designed to be flexible when bent, but very stiff when twisted. This allows the doctor to roll the catheter between their fingers, so that the tip can be pointed in a specific direction. There are many different shapes available: straight, 45 degree angle at the tip (1-2 cm long), right angle, hairpin turn, "shepherd's crook" and others; and these are all available in different tip lengths/radius to suit the requirement.
The property of the catheter can be affected by inserting a fine wire through the catheter, so it pops out the other end. These wires have different stiffness, different shapes of tip and different coatings which can cause them to catch on edges or follow blood vessels.
Knowing where to go and where the wire/catheter is requires a detailed knowledge of anatomy. An X-ray opaque dye can also be injected via the catheter to show up the blood vessel where it is, and to see the blood vessel you want. Once you have an X-ray image showing the way you want to go, you can freeze frame it and use it as a reference. Put the wire back, move it around, until it catches and goes in the direction you want.
So the typical process would go as follows:
Large artery is punctured and a wide, short catheter (often called a sheath) inserted, with a rubber seal designed to stay in place, and allow smaller catheters to be inserted, without blood pouring out.
A stiff guide wire is inserted, and guided using X-ray until it gets close to the destination, or until a tight turn needs to be made.
A suitable shaped catheter is selected, and inserted onto the back end of the wire. The catheter is then pushed over the wire, until the tip of the catheter reaches the tip of the wire.
The shape of the catheter can steer the wire in one direction or another. The wire can be retracted and advanced to change the stiffness and shape of the catheter tip, to help with positioning.
The wire can then be removed, and dye injected through the catheter to see where the appropiate arteries are.
The catheter and, optionally, the wire are then adjusted to try and "catch" one of the arteries.
The wire is then pushed into the desired artery. Once it is advanced far enough up the artery that it is held in the artery by friction, the catheter can be pushed up along the wire, with the wire guiding it into the artery.
The wire is then removed, and the catheter is now in place with access to the artery of interest. | [
"A catheter is a very thin tube that is inserted into a vein in the patient’s leg and threaded to the heart where it delivers energy to treat the patient’s arrhythmia. In surgical procedures, a flexible probe is used directly on an exposed heart to apply the energy that interrupts the arrhythmia. By cooling the tip... |
What was on the bank notes and coins during Hitler's regime in Germany? | The German Reichsmark, which was used throughout Hitler's regime from 1933 to 1945, had surprisingly small amount of Nazi images used on their banknotes.
As opposed to the Reichspfenning coins that widely used the Nazi-German eagle and swastika, there is only particular banknote that had anything Nazi related on them. The 5 Reichsmark banknote features a blonde young man looking sternly into the distance with the eagle and swastika featured as well. Some post-1933 banknotes do have a large swastika behind the currency value but that only applied to the newer banknotes and not those that were in wide circulation by 1933.
Other banknotes that were used during this period were the 10, 20, 50, 100 and 1000 Reichsmark banknotes. The 10 Reichsmark features Albrecht Thaer, the 20 Reichsmark features Ernst Werner von Siemens, the 50 Reichsmark features David Ganfemann, the 100 Reichsmark features Justus von Liebig and finally, the 1000 Reichsmark features Karl Friedrich Schinkel. | [
"Coins and banknotes for circulation in the occupied territories during the war were issued by the \"Reichskreditkassen\". Holed, zinc coins in 5 and 10 Reichspfennig denominations were struck in 1940 and 1941. Banknotes were issued between 1939 and 1945 in denominations of 50 Reichspfennig, 1, 2, 5, 20, and 50 Rei... |
if a flight's overbooked, why would a seated passenger be forced to leave for someone who isn't seated? wouldn't it be first come first serve? | With regards to the [recent situation involving United Airlines](_URL_0_) it wasn't that the flight was overbooked, but rather it was full and United needed to transfer four employees to another airport and therefore needed space on the plane.
They took ~~the last four passengers to book the flight~~ four passengers chosen randomly by a computer and asked them to leave. They are allowed to do this.
This is my understanding, anyway. | [
"According to aviation analyst Henry Harteveldt, the airline's Contract of carriage favors the company, not the passenger. Involuntary denial of boarding is not uncommon but removal after boarding because the seat is needed by others is \"exceedingly rare\". Nonetheless, an airline has a right to do so based on the... |
why do artists (musicians, photographers, graphic designers etc.) predominantly use macs to produce their work? | Nowadays, there really isn't a good reason to use macs over pcs, unless one only knows how to use the mac exclusive software. Its largely a holdover from the past. A lot of the best creative software was only available on macs, or had mac exclusive features. Not the case anymore. Macs also tended to use relatively high end components, thats not to say you couldn't build an equivalently powered pc. It has pretty much been the case for a very long time that you could build an equivalent pc for less than a mac. However apple simply had a reputation for customer service and quality components, that was important to people who were less tech savvy but still needed good performance out of your machine. | [
"The inkjet printer is useful to individuals in creative industries like designers, photographers, and artists who need to produce visually compelling discs. It also provides a smaller carbon footprint by consumers creating personalized CD covers at a time when downloading music was a new technology, which was hurt... |
Why does the battery of my cellphone die faster during festivals? | The phone was struggling to deal with the interference from all the other phones. It needs to send a stronger signal to the mast to make itself "heard".
Either that, or you called your mum and talked rubbish to her for hours while you were high. | [
"The band were forced to cancel their show at the London Astoria on Tuesday December 2, due to a power cut caused by road maintenance outside the building and the accidental severance of a major power conduit. One worker died as a result of electrocution. As a result, the performance of was rescheduled for Friday D... |
how am i able to eat a bag of salty chips so easily without it being 'too salty' for my body to handle? | Excess "salt" is expelled by your body in the urine your kidneys produce. Therefore the level of salt in your body is always regulated and never too high or too low. You could even eat a tablespoon of pure salt and your body will be able to expell most of it, as long as you drink enough water which can carry the extra salt away once it becomes urine. | [
"Preservation, processing, and preparation: Limit consumption of salt; Avoid mouldy cereals (grains) or pulses (legumes). It has been found that high levels of salt content can increase the risk of stomach cancer. According to the report, “Most people in the United States currently consume more than 2,400 mg.” Alth... |
Is there any truth to the phrase "it's always darkest before the dawn?" I would have guessed the middle point between dusk and dawn would be the darkest point of night. | No. It's purely a figure of speech. The sky is equally bright X hours after sunset and X hours before sunrise, assuming identical atmospheric conditions. Certain factors like [Zodiacal Light](_URL_0_) could theoretically affect the brightness of the night, but they will be vastly outshined by the waxing and waning of the Moon.
Sunsets are often redder than sunrises because there are more aerosols (suspended solids or liquids) in the evening due to the evaporation and pollution emissions that occur during the day. These aerosols induce Rayleigh Scattering, the resulting color of which varies based on the size of the particle that is doing the scattering.
This is related to the nautical/biblical phrase "Red sky at night, sailors take delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning." At latitudes where westerly weather dominates (i.e. weather moves from west to east), a red sky in the evening indicates high aerosol conditions are probably arriving, which are associated with the entrance of high pressure systems (i.e. good weather). A red sky in the morning indicates high aerosol conditions are probably exiting, which is associated with the exit of high pressure systems and the entrance of low pressure systems (i.e. bad weather). | [
"\"Darkness at Noon\" was written in German while Koestler was living in Paris. Its title may be a quotation from Victor Hugo, in his book \"Napoleon le Petit\": \"\"il fait nuit en plein midi\"\" (it is dark in full noon), which, in turn, is an allusion to the unnatural darkness that occurred at midday in the stor... |
how does monopolistic competition differ from a regular monopoly / oligopoly? | Here's the various environments in roughly the order you can/should learn them
**Perfect Competition:** In this environment, several producers make *the exact same good*. Because the output from any firm is a perfect substitute for the output from any other firm, no producer has any leeway to charge a price above exactly what it cost to produce the good.
**Monopoly:** In this environment, only one firm produces the good. Because they don't face any competition, they are free to set a price above cost and will typically do so. An industry dominated by a monopoly will have higher prices and less output than if that industry were competitive.
**Oligopoly:** In this environment, a very small number of producers make *the exact same good*. The consequences of this can vary depending on how exactly you model the "game" the companies play (see for example Cournot competition vs. Bertrand competition).
**Monopolistic Competition:** In this environment, several producers make *slightly different goods*. This is a departure from all of the models above. In anything above, we're thinking about a good like concrete. All concrete is basically the same, and the different firms that make concrete don't offer special "flavors" of it. Monopolistic competition applies more to the market for sodas. Some people just don't consider Coke and Pepsi to be perfect substitutes, so their producers can charge those people a bit more than it cost to make the sodas. The term "monopolistic competition" comes from the idea that each firm is a monopoly in its extremely specific market sector, but the markets are related enough that their choices are constrained by some competitive forces. Coke can charge *a bit more* than cost, but it can't charge a crazy high price and still expect to sell soda. | [
"A monopoly is a market structure in which a market or industry is dominated by a single supplier of a particular good or service. Because monopolies have no competition they tend to sell goods and services at a higher price and produce below the socially optimal output level. However, not all monopolies are a bad ... |
What was the nature of Joseph Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria's relationship? | Beria not only aspired to be Stalin, he in a way epitomized the intense paranoia that Stalin had that his closest confidantes were out to kill him and take from him what he had in turn taken in gaining power after Lenin's death. We talk about Beria's loyalties as something others in Stalin's "circle" aspired to, but we have to suspect that his loyalty was either 1. genuine and true or 2. a way to gain Stalin's power base. Once Stalin had passed, Beria's true colors seemed to emerge-had he wanted all along to push Stalin aside and take over, or had he BECOME Stalin, taking the life of the leader and planning to lead in a new, more powerful way?
| [
"Though Yagoda appears to have known Joseph Stalin since 1918, when they were both stationed in Tsaritsyn during the civil war, \"he was never Stalin's man\" When Stalin ordered that the Soviet Union's entire rural population were to be forced onto collective farms, Yagoda is reputed to have sympathised with Bukhar... |
why software developers use error codes and not just say exactly what is wrong? | Error codes report on the specific fault or symptom, not "what is wrong".
An error code that translates to "Couldn't connect to server" for example, means that *for some reason* the program couldn't connect.
What exactly is wrong in that scenario? It could be that your internet connection is down, the server is down, both are down, you turned off your wifi antenna, there's a memory leak in the program's net code, the net code is poorly written, and many, many more possibilities.
So often, the error will be accompanied by *common* "what is wrong" causes of the error code "Check your internet connection, check your firewall, server busy/try again later, etc." | [
"Error codes can also be used to specify an error, and simplify research into the cause and how to fix it. This is commonly used by consumer products when something goes wrong, such as the cause of a Blue Screen of Death, to make it easier to pinpoint the exact problem the product is having. \n",
"In software dev... |
why a candle wick doesn't burn right to the bottom of the candle | It is not the wick or even the wax that is burning. It is the vapor of the melted wax in the wick. The part of the wick that actually burns no longer has wax in it. | [
"Candle wicks are normally made out of braided cotton. Wicks are sometimes braided flat, so that as they burn they also curl back into the flame, thus making them self-consuming. Prior to the introduction of these wicks special scissors were used to trim the excess wick without extinguishing the flame.\n",
"At th... |
When someone is diabetic, does that mean their bodies don't have the ability to produce insulin or is it their brains that don't give the signal to produce insulin? | Roughly speaking, type 1 generally means that their pancreas does not produce enough insulin and type 2 generally means that the body cells are resistant to insulin. Brain signals aren't part of the hormone regulation. | [
"Diabetes mellitus type 1 is a chronic autoimmune disorder in which the immune system attacks the insulin-secreting cells of the pancreas. Insulin is needed to keep blood sugar levels within optimal ranges, and its lack can lead to high blood sugar. As an untreated chronic condition, diabetic neuropathy can result.... |
why don’t we have sprinklers in single family homes in the us? | It's not worth it
A multifamily dwelling is significantly more likely to have a fire than a single family home, the greater likelihood and greater potential damage justifies the increased cost
Sprinklers also require regular maintenance to function properly. If you don't drain your sprinklers every few months then they'll fail when you need them. Putting them in a home where you can't ensure maintenance is wasting money as they won't work when needed
There are about a thousand house fires per day in the US, there are 126 million homes. If sprinklers cost $10k and a burned down house costs $1M then it would take 34 years to pay back the investment. That's not remotely worth it to insurance companies so they don't push for it | [
"Renewed interest in and support for sprinkler systems in the UK has resulted in sprinkler systems being more widely installed. In schools, for example, the government has issued recommendations through Building Bulletin 100 that most new schools should be constructed with sprinkler protection. In 2011 Wales became... |
If the Phoenicians introduced the alphabet to the Greeks, what kind of writing - if any - did the Greeks and others around them use before the Phoenicians? | There are two known writing systems used on the island of Crete during the Minoan period (27th to 15th century BC). One is called Linear A and the other is Cretan hieroglyphics.
In the later Mycenaean period, a script derived from Linear A was used. It is called Linear B. It was deciphered by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris in the 1940's and 50's. It turns out that Linear B was used to write the Greek language, a task to which it was poorly suited. It was a syllabary, meaning that each character represents a syllable rather than a phoneme. There were around 200 characters.
Linear A probably was used to write a different language than Greek. Even though the symbols are mostly the same, it doesn't make sense in Greek if you try to use the same phonetic interpretation as Linear B. It is likely that it represents an older language, now extinct, that was once spoken on Crete.
Source: Language and the Ancient Greeks, Richard E McDorman
I also recommend The Decipherment of Linear B by John Chadwick | [
"The Phoenician phonetic alphabet was adopted and modified by the Greeks probably in the 8th century BC (around the time of the \"\" depictions). This most likely did not come from a single instance but from a culmination of commercial exchange. This means that before the 8th century, there was a relationship betwe... |
mitochondrial dna can be inherited from fathers, what is the cell and why did we assume it was only inherited from our mothers given that the statement is true. | From the study:
> Our results suggest that, although the central dogma of maternal inheritance of mtDNA remains valid, there are some exceptional cases where paternal mtDNA could be passed to the offspring. | [
"Mitochondrial diseases are inherited from the mother, not from the father: mitochondria with their mitochondrial DNA from the mother's egg cell are incorporated into the zygote and passed to daughter cells, whereas those from the sperm are not.\n",
"An individual's mitochondrial genes are not inherited by the sa... |
why does sticky tape stick so well to materials such as paper, but so poorly to others such as concrete or human skin? | It's the porousness of the object. Paper has less pores than concrete and the oils of skin are what make certain types of tape less sticky to skin. I.e scotch and packing won't adhere to skin as well as duct tape will due to the type of adhesive. Less pores means more adhesion due to extra room to stick to. More pores means less room. | [
"Pressure-sensitive tape, PSA tape, self-stick tape or sticky tape consists of a pressure-sensitive adhesive coated onto a backing material such as paper, plastic film, cloth, or metal foil. It is sticky (tacky) without any heat or solvent for activation and adheres with light pressure. These tapes usually require ... |
what is market economy? | In a market economy, prices are set by supply and demand, without an gov't influence.
No country has a pure market economy, as there are always some form of gov't subsidies or price controls.
Market economies can go wrong, resulting in price bubbles and collapses. The financial crisis of the late 2000s is a good example. | [
"A market economy is an economic system in which the decisions regarding investment, production and distribution are guided by the price signals created by the forces of supply and demand. The major characteristic of a market economy is the existence of factor markets that play a dominant role in the allocation of ... |
how music travels through wires into speakers | Speakers only have two wires leading to them. A positive and a negative. So this is easy to be confused by how this shit actually works, when only two wires are used.
Simply put, if you're listening to music (like I am right now), your computer takes the tune and transfers it into a bunch of pulses (like on off pulses, yes/no idea). These pulses travel through the wire to the speakers. The speaker has a magnet at the back, and the magnet takes these pulses and causes the cone to vibrate. The vibrating cone makes the noise, and then you hear John Mayer!
More complicated explanation, the magnet in the back of the speaker is an electromagnet. As the audio signal (the pulses) travel to the magnet, they increase of decrease the magnetism around the voice coil, which allows the diaphragm or cone to move and create noise. A speaker is a simple transducer, as it turns electric signal into something else: noise. | [
"In his own words (1992): \"\"Music on a Long Thin Wire\" is constructed as follows: the wire is extended across a large room, clamped to tables at both ends. The ends of the wire are connected to the loudspeaker terminals of a power amplifier placed under one of the tables. A sine wave oscillator is connected to t... |
How did the state(polity) come into existence? | From a rise of civilization in the near east class I took:
In the Fertile Crescent, you had your agriculture develop, and in the north rainfall was sufficient to keep shit growing, so that was hunky dory, but down south, agriculture was harder and so there was pressure to develop irrigation (they couldn't stay without, because agriculture = more people, and so without agriculture you'd just swamped and conquered). So, your hunter-gatherer band would settle down, dig ditches and build canals.
So, early Mesopotamia would have been a collection of little tribal villages with kin-networks building and maintaining irrigation networks - but there's still no polity, just clans and tribes and everyone vaguely working together with chieftains and elders and what not, but the village literally a mile away could be entirely disassociated from you and your enemy.
So what happens next is that, people up-stream from you, can hog all the irrigation water, and control how much water you get. That's not good! So how do you make sure your water isn't being stolen? You and your neighboring villages down-stream, who were previously not affiliated at all, get together and march up-river and kick the shit out of your northerly neighbors.
But now the northerners are coming down south for revenge raids, so you gotta build walls and a city and all that shit. Then slowly, your loose tribal affiliation, in response to both military pressure and organizational necessity - larger and larger irrigation networks need the labor of several villages, for example - becomes hierarchical. And suddenly, your chieftain is now a king, and commands the allegiance of several tribes, several villages, lives in walled fortress where he has a bunch of professional soldiers on duty all the time whom you have to feed to ensure your safety from enemies (and them).
This is also why the first cities were in southern Mesopotamia - downstream/without necessary rainfall - rather than in northern Mesopotamia.
Egypt developed into a polity for similar reasons, but was able to form a large state instead of a city-state for geographical reasons - the Nile is basically a straight-line, while Mesopotamia had a large alluvial plain with branches and shit everywhere.
Basically, this is why, according to my textbook and professor from that class, the first civilizations were built around rivers. Areas with rain-fed agriculture had no pressure to develop into states. | [
"According to Gil Stein, the earliest known state organizations emerged in Mesopotamia (3700 BC), Egypt (3300 BC), the Indus Valley (2500 BC) and China (1400 BC). In various parts of the world, e.g. Africa and Australasia, tribal societies and chiefdoms persisted for much longer before state formation occurred. Man... |
why are english accents used in most film/shows that are set in ancient times? | Because America started in 1776, so there is no "ancient times" with an American accent. | [
"In film, English-language accents can be part of acting performances. Actors use dialect coaches to speak in an accent other than their own. Accents can vary by locality, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and other factors. In film, accents are scrutinized by film critics and film audiences alike. Throughout film h... |
evergreening of pharmaceutical patents. | In order to manufacture a generic drug in the US, you have to prove that your version is just as effective as the original (while the drug may be the same, the fillers may be different and those can have an impact on things like absorption rates). Generic drug manufacturers in the US *can* make generic versions of the decades-old drugs, but often times they don't think they'll make enough money to justify the cost of getting the "we're just as good as the other guys " certification. | [
"Evergreening is not a formal concept of patent law; it is best understood as a social idea used to refer to the myriad ways in which pharmaceutical patent owners use the law and related regulatory processes to extend their high rent-earning intellectual property rights particularly over highly profitable (either i... |
why can language encode vastly more abstraction or context than imagery? | Because in that context language encodes next to no actual data and just works as a tag referring to a bunch of related stuff already in the brain. It's like seeing an image of a beach compared to writing "beach" in google search. | [
"Dr. Landau has also participated in research on the question of the time frame in which language has the potential to modify spatial representations. There are several mechanisms by which this modification can occur. The first, selectivity, is that language only encodes certain aspects of space, not all of them. B... |
how do reward systems make you addicted? | Excitement and anticipation are powerful motivators. If you repeat an activity, and get rewarded for it, your brain releases endorphins and other chemicals. Keep doing it and you begin to react with pleasurable chemicals *before* you open the box, the anticipation starts the cycle of your brain's reward center.
It's basically addiction, which is just how our brains naturally respond to repeated fun activity. | [
"The reward pathway, also called the mesolimbic system of the brain, is the part of the brain that registers reward and pleasure. This circuit reinforces the behavior that leads to a positive and pleasurable outcome. In drug addiction, the drug-seeking behaviors become reinforced by the rush of dopamine that follow... |
Why did Mongolia not rename Ulaanbaatar after the fall of Communism? | Ulaanbaatar got its current name in 1924 (formerly Örgöö), so by the time of the fall of communism the name had been there for almost a century. There's also the matter of the city being built mostly from that time onwards, there are very few buildings and areas from the Örgöö era, in a lot of ways its difficult to say they're the same city, since before 1921 the city was mainly a monastery town with some tradeposts.
That said, a lot of stuff in the city was renamed. Districts (then called Raion, a Russian term), which had names like October, Friendship, Worker's, and Partisan, were restructured and renamed by Parliament decree. This can be read here (in Mongolian, though): _URL_0_
As far as I've been able to find, no serious attempts have ever been made to rename the city itself, although there have been calls to move the capital to Kharkhorin, site of the ancient Karakorum. Indeed the 1992 Constitution explicitly names Ulaanbaatar as the capital city. | [
"After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the country underwent large reforms. Mongolia became a unitary semi-presidential republic in 1992 and a new constitution was made. Mongolia became a member of the World Bank in 1992.\n",
"With the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Outer Mongolia declared independen... |
Did Knights target their opponent's horses on the battlefield? | As a related question, in Bernard Cornwell's Azincourt (french spelling of Agincourt) novel, he basically states that even among knights the idea was that chivalry had no place on the battlefield. I.e, kill when and how you can, no letting fallen opponents up, etc. Is that accurate? | [
"Many knights during Medieval battles fought on foot. Attacks would be carried out on horseback only under favorable conditions. If the enemy infantry was equipped with polearms and fought in tight formations it was not possible to charge without heavy losses. A fairly common solution to this was for the men-at-arm... |
How far from the sun does a spacecraft have to for the sun's light to have decreased to the point where solar power is no longer viable | From a physics persepctive, it is indeed just that power falls off as 1/R^2. From an engineering perspective, I can imagine that there might be some threshold below which it is unfeasible to run the system waiting to collect individual photons.
People who talk about traveling between the stars are certainly not counting on solar cells. Check out these folks:
_URL_0_ | [
"If it happens that the spacecraft is launched into a sun-synchronous orbit, the amount of eclipse time will dwindle, allowing fewer interruptions of continuous solar irradiation for the PV cells and thus reducing the battery capacity requirements. In LEO sun-synchronous orbits, however, the spacecraft will not alw... |
what the hell do windows updates actually do? | Windows updates typically fix issues so that you never see them in the first place. A lot of their updates are security related, so the only time you'd see their effect, or lack thereof, is if they failed to protect your computer from a security risk. They do produce minor performance upgrades, but they are typically small and hard to notice.
Edit: If you want a description of what each update is actually doing, try clicking on it, then searching on windows' website to see the details of the update. | [
"Windows Update is a Microsoft service for the Windows 9x and Windows NT families of operating system, which automates downloading and installing Microsoft Windows software updates over the Internet. The service delivers software updates for Windows, as well as the various Microsoft antivirus products, including Wi... |
when drummers hold one drumstick like a chopstick (in lack of a better term), how and/or why is that better? | [Do you mean like this?](_URL_0_) Its called a traditional grip. Think about drummer boys in the civil war era. They carried a drum over one shoulder so they could match without the drum hitting their knees, and it was a better way to hold the stick in order to play. | [
"Besides drumsticks, drummers will also use brushes and rutes in jazz and similar softer music. More rarely, other beaters such as cartwheel mallets (known to kit drummers as \"soft sticks\") may be used. It is not uncommon for rock drummers to use the \"wrong\" (butt) end of a stick for a heavier sound; some maker... |
in a box of tissue paper, how does the next piece of tissue come out when you pull out the one above it? | Some fairly clever origami. Each tissue in the box is folded both to fit better in the box and to have a little flap that connects to the next tissue. When you grab the top tissue, the next tissue starts to come too. Eventually the friction force holding the next tissue to the tissue that you are pulling is smaller than the friction force of it being dragged through the opening. When this happens, the next tissue stops partway out of the box and separates from the tissue that you are pulling, leaving one tissue in your hand and the next tissue poking out of the box for convenient grabbing. | [
"A strip of tissue is torn away from the main sheet using a water tear. This is done by wetting the paper along the area to be torn and then pulling sideways with the fingers to separate the strip from the rest of the sheet of tissue, so that it will have feathered edges. The fibers in these feathered edges will al... |
why does gmc as a brand exist? they sell nearly identical models as chevrolet. | Back in the day, Chevrolet was "consumer grade" and GMC was "professional grade".
Quite a few older work trucks have GMC badges. Some minor changes, like boxed frames or beefier suspension, were in place.
With Cadillac under the same umbrella (a Chevy Tahoe, Caddy Escalade, and GMC Yukon are all essentially the same), the lines got a bit blurred between the brands. GMC and Chevy were essentially the same thing for a few years.
Today, Chevy is the professional/consumer grade and Cadillac is the luxury brand. GMC falls somewhere in the middle with their base versions coming better equipped than Chevy, and offering packages/trim levels (Denali) or features (rear wheel steering on the Sierra) not available through Chevy.
EDIT: Since so many of you are interested in the car manufacturer relationships, check _URL_0_ for an in-depth reference. | [
"Beginning in 1920, GMC and Chevrolet trucks became largely similar, built as variants of the same platform, sharing much the same body sheetwork, except for nameplates and grilles – though their differences, especially engines, have varied over the years. GMC advertising marketed its trucks to commercial buyers an... |
Would it be possible to manipulate gravitation the way we do electricity? | We primary manipulate electricity in two ways: (1) by converting the potential energy in chemical bonds into charged separated charged ions, as in batteries, and (2) by converting kinetic energy to electric current using magnets and "electromotive force", as in generators.
There is no gravitational analog of chemical bonds on a human scale, and it's questionable whether there could be one in principle considering the fact that gravity is never repulsive (I'm inclined to think it's impossible, but I've never thought about it before). It is, however, possible in principle to use kinetic energy to create gravitational attraction. This essentially follows from the equivalence between mass and energy: low mass objects with a great deal of kinetic energy will bend spacetime to an appreciable degree and can therefore yield large gravitational forces. But since m = E/c^2, and c is large in human units, the amount of energy required to match the force between appreciable masses would be astronomical. More formally than E = m c^2, it is possible to linearize Einstein's equations of General Relativity, for the regime when the masses and energies are not relativistically extreme (i.e. not near a black hole singularity), and this results in [gravitoelectromagnetism](_URL_0_), which is mathematically isomorphic to Maxwell's theory of classical electromagnetism, aside from the caveat that "negative masses" do not exist as negative charges do. | [
"Stable magnetic levitation can be achieved by measuring the position and speed of the object being levitated, and using a feedback loop which continuously adjusts one or more electromagnets to correct the object's motion, thus forming a servomechanism.\n",
"A possible torsion-like effect in the coupling between ... |
what is a near death experience? | Your brain is deprived of oxygen and fires off certain synapses (bridges between your thoughts) and makes you experience something peaceful to take away from the fact that you're dying.
This also depends on your religious belief. I had a near death experience, but mine (being an atheist) was just floating above my body, watching it be beat almost to death. Religious people tend to experience what we generally refer to as a near death experience; they see a guiding light because they're taught that it will be there for them. Maybe it is.
But the science says it's just your brain trying to compensate for the horror of the possibility that you will no longer exist. | [
" A near-death experience (NDE) is an experience reported by a person who nearly died, or who experienced clinical death and then revived. NDEs include one or more of the following experiences: a sense of being dead; an out-of-body experience; a sensation of floating above one's body and seeing the surrounding area... |
Why do high voltage powerlines in the forest buzz and hiss? | The sound you are hearing is a [corona discharge](_URL_1_). These form around sharp points on conductors in electrical contact with the power line where charge can build up, amplifying natural plasma-forming mechanisms (from ionizing radiation) but not producing full-blown dielectric breakdown of air. This will produce a 120 Hz tone (plus some harmonics of this) known as the [mains hum](_URL_0_) as the plasma heats the surrounding air (which then expands) twice per 60Hz cycle.
Now, you could be hearing these in the forest because:
1) The lines were high voltage lines, whereas most power lines you encounter are not.
2) Higher moisture content in the air (moist air produces more plasma, and therefore more sound)
3) Lack of much louder ambient noises
4) You were near a transformer (but did not realize it). Transformers create large enough fluctuating magnetic fields in their solenoid cores that the resulting dissipation currents (induced by the changing magnetic field) cause vibrations. | [
"The above peak voltage is only achieved in coils in which air discharges do not occur; in coils which produce sparks, like entertainment coils, the peak voltage on the terminal is limited to the voltage at which the air breaks down and becomes conductive. As the output voltage increases during each voltage pulse, ... |
Is the DNA X-chromosome sperm donate comparable to the DNA of an egg cell? | Both of the X chromosomes carried by the sperm and egg will be similar, but just as there are differences in the other chromosomes based on heredity, there will be differences in these two chromosomes.
This isn't exactly what you asked, but I think your thinking is heading there. Humans aren't setup to handle two copies of an X chromosome per cell, so what ends up happening is one of the X chromosomes becomes inactivated, it forms a [Barr body](_URL_0_). This way, both male and female cells have the same 'amount' of active X chromosome. | [
"In female organisms, a sperm containing an X chromosome fertilizes the egg, giving the embryo two copies of the X chromosome. Females, however, do not initially require both copies of the X chromosome as it would only double the amount of protein products transcribed as shown by the hypothesis of dosage compensati... |
why does my pee stream appear to rotate like a spiral? | Imagine a droplet of water in free-fall. It is held together by surface tension, and if it is disturbed it will wobble back and forth as the waves travel through it.
Imagine that drop being squeezed between two vertical plates until it is a thin oval of water. When it is released it will pull back toward round, but its momentum will cause it to overshoot. The vertical ends will collide and the drop will flatten out horizontally, then oscillate between the two states as it gradually stabilizes into a sphere.
This is sort of what is happening in a stream of urine, although instead of discrete droplets we have a stream of fluid. It comes out of the urethra from between flaps of tissue that squeeze it somewhat flat. As the stream continues it tries to pull itself into a cylinder but overshoots, flattening out horizontally and oscillating as it travels. The resulting shape of the stream isn't a spiral, but might be mistaken for one. | [
"In other words, when it is held with the spout (siphonal canal) pointed up, this conch's spiral twists rightwards (dakshinavarti) rather than very much more common form, which twists leftwards (vamavarti).\n",
"Lastly, the pattern of dimples plays a role. By regulation, the arrangement of the dimples on the ball... |
why is it tradition for brides' families to pay for the wedding? | because back in the day women were seen as a burden they didn't work in the fields or hunt so the brides family was like thanks for taking this useless person off our hands this is the least we could do, this obviously an over simplification | [
"At traditional wedding ceremonies, the groom's relatives give money, food and other gifts to the bride's relatives. This bride price is an act of buying the bride from her family, who now has responsibilities looking after her husband's relatives. Today's weddings have a combination of modern and traditional style... |
how a subway system is built in an already developed city. | They use a [tunnel boring machine](_URL_0_). It's eats whatever is in its path, then pushes forward while adding supporting walls behind it. | [
"Unlike many other subway systems (such as that of London), this system was designed from the outset as a system of (initially) nine lines. Such a large project required a private-public arrangement right from the outset – the city would build most of the permanent way, while a private concessionaire company would ... |
why do insects often leave us feeling itchy all over? | Related, though doesn't give an explanation for the physical sensation of the itching: _URL_0_ | [
"A variety of itching, often encountered in the eczema of elderly people, is formication; this is described as exactly like the crawling of myriads of animals over the skin. It is probably due to the successive irritation of nerve fibrils in the skin. At times patients who suffer from it will scarcely be persuaded ... |
When barometric pressure goes up or down right before a storm or cold front and people get stiff joints, what exactly is the correlation between the pressure and our bodies that causes the stiffness? | joints have a lot of fluid and gas, and when a when those are compressed they becomes relatively less viscous, due to expansion in a confined space. I believe there is also an inflamatory effect on the cartiledge, due to the pressure, but this is just a continuation of the fluid and gas viscosity change because the cartiledge has fluid in it too. | [
"Countering the 1929 barometric pressure claim, in a 2016 article entitled \"Do Your Aches, Pains Predict Rain?\" professor of atmospheric sciences Dennis Driscoll is reported as stating: \"People need to realize that the pressure changes associated with storms are rather small.\" In fact, Driscoll observes that th... |
Mobility in ancient societies? | Your question is quite broad so I'm going to limit my answer to the Northeast of North America and give a brief summary of mobility. Archaeologists look at a number of differences in artifact raw material and type to determine how mobile people were before the introduction of agriculture and sedentary life.
During the Paleoindian tradition that ends around 10,000 B.P. people are assumed to have been highly mobile. The stone tools we find are generally constructed out of one or two types of stone and can be found hundreds of kilometres away from the source. This implies that the people were highly mobile as they would range from the lithic source and migrate over large areas before returning to replenish their stone tools.
Gradually we see mobility decrease before the rise of agriculture in the Northeast as stone tool sources become more local and pottery is developed. It is difficult to travel hundreds of kilometres with a pot strapped to your back. We also see the rise of mound building and cemeteries, which may imply a type of ownership over the land.
Finally once non-indigenous cultigens (maize, squash, and beans) are introduced we see the first villages. These are generally associated with Iroquoian speakers and these peak around A.D. 1000. However Iroquoian villages were still mobile. Every generation or so the First Nations groups would pack up and move to a different location. Meanwhile Algonquian speaking groups maintained a seasonal round even though they were practicing agriculture. I'm unclear as to if they were planting maize in the spring, leaving, and then returning in the fall or if they settled to plant cultigens throughout the summer and leave during the winter months.
So in conclusion, generally as more and more people occupied Northeastern North America mobility also decreased. However, the evidence suggests that although mobility was decreased First Nations groups in the area were still very mobile even after the introduction of agriculture. So agriculture does not necessarily inhibit mobility.
For further reading:
Birch and Williamson 2015 Navigating ancestral landscapes in the Northern Iroquoian world. Journal of Anthropological Anthropology
Munoz et al. 2010 Synchronous environmental and cultural change in the prehistory of the northeastern United States. PNAS
Before Ontario: The Archaeology of a Province. Edited by Marit Munson and Susan Jameison | [
"While social mobility was not unknown in Byzantium the order of society was thought of as more enduring, with the average man regarding the court of Heaven to be the archetype of the imperial court in Constantinople. This society included various classes of people that were neither exclusive nor immutable. The mos... |
what would happen if the president forgave all student loan debt? | Banks would probably stop giving student loans altogether for pretty much any student not guaranteed to make money. | [
"Student loan debtors have appealed to the US Department of Education for debt cancellation through defense to repayment claims. These efforts are premised on the allegations that they were defrauded. Students who attended the school during the time it closed may also be eligible for student loan cancellation. Howe... |
what goes on in our brain that lets us sing songs out of memory and in no effort needed? | Music is a natural inclination for memories. I used to wish there were popular songs for the periodic table of the elements or algebra formulas! | [
"Music influences many regions of the brain including those associated with emotional and creative areas has the power to evoke emotion and memories from deep in the past, so it is understandable that Alzheimer's patients can recall musical memories from many decades prior given the richness and vividness of these ... |
if a human grew up with absolutely no other human contact other than the initial infant stage how would they behave? | _URL_0_
It's literally too complex to explain. | [
"Physical affection and intimacy appear to have a profoundly important role during infancy and childhood. The skin is the largest sensory organ and is the first to develop. Humans experience touch as early as fetal development, when the fetus begins receiving sensory information from coming in contact with the moth... |
what is a superconductor ring used for? | At small scale they can be used to make circuit elements. In a superconducting ring magnetic flux is quantized. You can use the flux in the ring for different hardware purposes, for example data storage where flux = 1, no flux = 0. If you break the loop with a Josephson junction or two you can produce an incredibly sensitive magnetometer. | [
"Power rings are able to give off electromagnetic radiation of various frequencies. This radiation can be focused by the wearer into a beam, similar in appearance and effect to a powerful laser. They also allow real-time communication between the different alien species of the Corps, translating all languages in th... |
what is neuroplasticity and what can i achieve through exercising it? | It refers to the brain's ability to rewire itself in response to experiences or injury. For example, people who lose a portion of their brain (to cancer, for example) can sometimes redevelop the functions of that part of the brain in another part of their brain. It effects are greatest in children, but continue throughout life.
It's also become a bit of a pseudo-scientific new-agey "unleash your inner Crystal Warrior" sort of thing lately. | [
"Neuroplasticity, also known as brain plasticity, neuroelasticity, or neural plasticity, is the ability of the brain to change continuously throughout an individual's life, e.g., brain activity associated with a given function can be transferred to a different location, the proportion of grey matter can change, and... |
why has botswana done so well compared to the rest of sub-saharan africa? | Tiny country with giant diamond reserves and made a deal with DeBeers early on where Botswana gets 70% of the money and DeBeers runs the diamond mines for them.
A lot of African countries kicked all the whites out after independence and that hurt their economies. That wasn't likely to happen in Botswana as their first leader was married to a white woman.
The Tswana tribe that dominates the country is known for having their act together. Most Tswana live in South Africa and their Homelands were the most successful ones during Apartheid. | [
"Since independence, Botswana has had one of the fastest growth rates in per capita income in the world. Botswana has transformed itself from one of the poorest countries in the world to an upper middle-income country. GDP per capita grew from $1,344 in 1950 to $15,015 in 2016. Although Botswana was resource-abunda... |
Is there any plausibility with the theory that trolls in northern European folklore have roots in interactions with the last of Neatherdal tribes? | You might get some good answers here, but you also might want to keep an eye on this recent thread in /r/AskAnthropology : [Given that for thousands of years Homo sapiens coexisted with multiple subspecies of archaic humans, to what extent, if any, do you think cultural memories of our extinct cousins have been preserved in our folklore/mythologies?](_URL_0_) | [
"Dey (1991) speculates that the folklore of the troll-like trows, and perhaps that of the selkie may be based in part on the Norse invasions of the Northern Isles. She states that the conquest by the Vikings sent the indigenous, dark-haired Picts into hiding and that \"many stories exist in Shetland of these strang... |
how voyager 1 and 2 are able to send us signals so detailed about what they are finding from so far away? | In theory, radio waves travel forever because they are just a form of light. However, just like a star, they get really faint and hard to detect the farther away the source is. Most stars in the sky are at least as bright as the sun but they appear much dimmer because they are so far away.
In my opinion, one of the most impressive things about the Voyager mission is what they are doing on the ground to capture this incredibly weak signal.
[From NASA](_URL_0_):
> The sensitivity of our deep-space tracking antennas located around the world is truly amazing. The antennas must capture Voyager information from a signal so weak that the power striking the antenna is only 10 exponent -16 watts (1 part in 10 quadrillion). A modern-day electronic digital watch operates at a power level 20 billion times greater than this feeble level. | [
"Meanwhile, the real \"Voyager\", far in the Delta Quadrant, detects the micro-wormhole and a communication signal which Seven of Nine disbelievingly identifies as Federation in origin on a Starfleet Emergency Channel. The crew attempts to clear up the signal while back on Earth, the jubilant officers and Barclay a... |
Was magic as feared in Europe before Christianity? | Yes, magic was feared in Europe before Christianity became the dominant religion. That's the quick and easy answer, but there's much more to it once we start getting into the detail. The two biggest (and most interesting I think) sub-questions here are:
1) what kinds of magic were people afraid of?
2) who practiced this magic, and were they ever 'hunted'?
I'm not going to deal with the question of "what is magic?" in too much detail - it's a huge question, and an unresolved debate that stretches across a number of academic fields. Far too much for a Reddit post!
My expertise is on Roman magic, so that's where I'll be concentrating, but the answer would likely be different if you shifted the focus to other social and cultural contexts. I should also state right from the start that evidence for attitudes to magic in the Roman world is fairly sparse, and is very much coloured by social and cultural prejudices. All of the authors of the surviving literary texts that discuss magic were wealthy, free males, based in or around the city of Rome. This presents a very specific view of ancient magical practices - something I'll come on to discuss in more detail later. I have also talked about it in another answer [here](_URL_0_), which you might also find interesting.
Question 1 first. As a start, let's look at a quote from Pliny the Elder, writing in the mid-1st century AD:
> *Defigi quidem diris precationibus nemo non metuit*
> there is nobody who does not fear to be bound by dreadful curses (*HN* 28.4.19).
Now, that seems like a pretty clear answer to your question: Pliny says that everyone is scared of being bound by 'dreadful curses.' But what kind of magic is he talking about? Odds are he means curse tablets and binding spells, which were an incredibly common phenomena in the Graeco-Roman world. These were written on small pieces of lead, and were used to control the actions or well-being of other people or animals. By way of an example, here's one from London (*Roman Inscriptions of Britain* no. 7, see [here](_URL_2_) for more info), possibly dated around the same time as Pliny was writing:
> I curse (*defigo*) Tretia Maria and her life and mind and memory and liver and lungs mixed up together, and her words, thoughts and memory; thus may she be unable to speak what things are concealed, nor be able to love...
It uses the same word for 'binding' (the Latin verb *defigo*), which is common on these kinds of spells, hence why I think this is what Pliny is talking about. Curses like this have been found from across the Roman empire, and were usual used to attack wrong-doers (especially thieves) or rivals (in love, law courts, sporting competition or business). They may have been produced with the help of ritual specialists, but I think in most cases the curses were made directly by those who were involved - the love rivals, the parties involved in the trial, the victims of crime etc.
Cursing was part of the category of magical practice that was most fearful to the elite male authors of our literary texts: "love magic", or curses, potions, charms and other rituals that attempted to influence sexual and romantic relationships. They probably wouldn't have admitted it, but for Roman elite men, their dominance in sexual relationships was one of the most significant elements of their social and cultural privilege. Total control over when, where and with whom they had sex was a core part of their identity, and to suggest there was any compromise in that was a serious thing. They were paranoid about any subordinate group (women, slaves, foreigners etc) challenging this control, especially through nefarious or supernatural means. It's worth remembering that elite men were also in total control of the official religious system, as the priests and magistrates who communicated with the gods on the community's behalf. Love magic challenged elite male dominance in two ways then - it subverted their control of both their sexual and religious lives. There's a fabulous passage in a poem by Ovid that sums this up really nicely (*Amores* 3.7.27-36, you can read the whole poem [here](_URL_1_)). The poem is a complaint about not being able to perform for his lover, and one of the things he thinks might be causing his erectile dysfunction is malicious magic:
> Has some Thessalian poison weakened my cursed body?
> Do charms and herbs hurt my poor self now,
> some witch transfixes my name in scarlet wax
> and sticks fine needles right into my liver?
> Charms turn the stricken wheat to barren grasses,
> charms stop the stricken waters at their source,
> through incantations oaks drop acorns, vines their grapes,
> and the apples fall down without being shaken.
> Why shouldn’t I be stopped, and my vigour numbed
> by magic arts, my body by that made unable to endure?
In Roman literature, the trope of evil old women attacking the sexual abilities of young men was very common. As I've said, I think this is a symptom of the paranoia in elite men that those they considered inferior might find ways to challenge the social order. Whether other groups of people would have found these kinds of practices so fearful is a really interesting question, and not one we can easily answer. However, I think the widespread finds of curses, amulets, charms and other magical objects across the Roman world suggests that below the level of the aristocracy people held a much more pragmatic attitude towards magical practice, especially rituals that addressed things like agricultural production and personal safety. At this level of society, anything that could protect livelihoods from the difficult conditions most people lived in would have been welcome. Sometimes that would have been rituals and practices that the elite recognised as 'acceptable' religion, but at other times it seems very likely that they would have resorted to rituals that the elite would have found much more problematic.
On to question 2: who practiced this stuff, and where they hunted?
Outside of literature written by the likes of Ovid and Pliny, the evidence for real magical practitioners is incredibly thin. The curses I began with are usually anonymous, with the only names being the victims. Scholars have usually followed the prejudices of the elite male writers, and have assumed that there really were witch-type figures practicing this kind of magic in the Roman world. Their domain seems to have been herb-lore, potions and other charms: the kind of rituals and practices that seamlessly blend religion, magic, medicine and science that should make us moderns question where and how we make distinctions between those categories. Roman law might give some hints too. I quoted this section of a legal text in the other post I linked above, but it's worth looking at here too. It's written by Paulus (*Opinions* 5.23.14-19), a Roman jurist writing in the second century AD, talking about the *lex Cornelia sicariis et veneficis*, first passed around 82 BC, but probably added to later:
> Those who administer a potion to cause an abortion or as an aphrodisiac, even if they do not act maliciously, nevertheless because their action is a bad example, those of inferior rank are sentenced to the mines, and those of superior rank are banished to an island, after part of their property has been confiscated. But if a woman or a man dies from the potion, they receive the supreme penalty. Those who perform or have performed for them impious or nocturnal rites for the purpose of enchanting, bewitching or binding someone, are either crucified or thrown to the beasts. Those who sacrifice human beings or take auspices with human blood or pollute a shrine or temple, are thrown to the beasts or, if they are of superior rank, executed. Those who are knowledgeable in the art of magic are to receive the supreme penalty, that is, to be thrown to the beasts or crucified. The magicians themselves are burnt alive. No one may possess books on the art of magic; and those found in possession have their property confiscated and their books burnt in public; they are deported to an island or, if of inferior rank, executed. Not only the practices of this art, but also the knowledge of it, is prohibited. If someone dies from a drug which was administered for their health or as a cure, the person who administered it is, if of superior rank, banished to an island or, if of inferior rank, executed.
It doesn't tell us exactly who was practicing these magical rituals, but certainly helps answer the 'hunting' aspect of your question. Certain kinds of magical ritual were clearly illegal - again we see love magic, as well as other forms of cursing, poisoning and so on. Importantly, even knowing about this stuff, or even owning books about it was illegal. Again, I think we're seeing the fear of challenges to elite power here.
Quite how often people were prosecuted under these laws is uncertain. We don't have that kind of detailed record from the Roman world, so ultimately we'll never know. However, there is very good evidence that various magical practitioners, especially astrologers, were expelled from Rome on certain occasions. As an illustrative example, the emperor Tiberius expelled "astrologers and magicians" from Italy after uncovering a conspiracy against him that had potentially had some magical or supernatural elements (see [Tacitus, *Annals* 2.27-32](_URL_3_) for the full story). I suppose this is the closest thing the Roman world had to witch-hunts before the advent of Christianity. | [
"In early medieval Europe, \"magia\" was a term of condemnation. In medieval Europe, Christians often suspected Muslims and Jews of engaging in magical practices; in certain cases, these perceived magical rites—including the alleged Jewish sacrifice of Christian children—resulted in Christians massacring these reli... |
What were the 3.5 million or so African Americans living in the Southern States of the USA doing before the Civil War? | The US census of 1860 counted a total population of the United States to be 31.4m people. This population included 3.95m slaves (12.7% of the population). There were also 0.488m ‘free colored’ people counted in the census. Slightly more of the ‘free colored’ were living in slave states (262k) than in non-slave states (226k).
So, the total African American population was 4.44m or 14.1% of the population. Virginia still had the highest African American population (549,000), followed by Georgia (466,000), Alabama (438,000), Mississippi (437,000) and South Carolina (412,000). The states with the lowest African American Population were: Oregon (128), Minnesota (259), New Hampshire (494), Vermont (709).
The population of the Confederate States was 5.45m whites, 3.52m slaves, 133,000 ‘free colored (Total Population 9.1m vs. Total Union Population 22.3m). (The other 430,000 slaves and 129,000 'free colored' living in slave states, were in slave states that did not join the Confederacy.)
Source: _URL_4_
In 1860, the 3,950,000 slaves were owned by 394,000 different people. So, on average, a slaveholder owned 10 slaves. About 1% of slaveholders owned more than 200 slaves, so that would mean about 4,000 people owned more than 200 slaves. These large slave holders are estimated to have owned about 30% of all the slaves. So they owned circa 1,200,000 slaves (average 300 slaves each). That meant that the remaining 354,000 slave owners owned 2,750,000 slaves (average 7.8 slaves each). 50% of slave owners owned less than 5 slaves.
Source: _URL_2_
Slave ownership was more widespread in the South than in the border states. In Mississippi and South Carolina, almost half of white families owned slaves (49% in Mississippi, 46% in S. Carolina). Delaware (3%), Maryland (12%), Missouri (13%) and Arkansas (20%) were the slave states with the lowest percent of families owning slaves. For the Confederate states as a whole, about one third of families (30.8%) owned at least one slave.
Source: _URL_1_
Some slave owners were free blacks and American Indians. In 1860 there were six free blacks in Louisiana (mostly sugar planters) who owned more than 65 slaves. There were said to be 3,000 free blacks in New Orleans who owned slaves (out of a total free black population of 11,000). Louisiana was an exception, only 125 free blacks in Charleston owned slaves, and 69 in North Carolina. American Indians were also slave owners. In 1860, the “Five Civilized Tribes” in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) owned 9,950 slaves.
Sources:
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So, although there were about 4,000 very wealthy people who owned over 200 slaves, there were another 354,000 slave owners owning an average of 8 slaves apiece. About one third of families in the Confederate States owned slaves. Whites owned the vast majority of slaves but some free blacks and American Indians were slave owners as well.
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"Before the American Civil War (1861 to 1865), African Americans comprised the majority of the population in the state, with most being enslaved and working as laborers on sugar cane and cotton plantations.\n",
"The history of African Americans in the Civil War is marked by 186,097 (7,122 officers, 178,975 enlist... |
What drives stellar nurseries to expand outwards and the stars to separate instead of remaining in a cluster? | Short answer to part 1: stellar winds from the new stars push the materials away from those stars (the materials not already captured by the gravity of those stars, anyway, and material "blown away" by one star may already be orbiting another star).
Short answer to part 2: the vast majority of space, even in stellar nurseries is exactly that - space. While stars could certainly collide in the sense of running into each other, but it is rather unlikely given the distances involved (even relative to the immense size of a star). However, most stars seem to form as part of a binary system (two stars orbiting each other) and in some cases one star will cannibalize another (such as a larger star leeching material off of a smaller star).
Bonus: some binary systems are a star with a black hole or neutron star for a partner instead of another star (presumably the black hole used to be a star). These systems are called low mass x-ray binary systems and here's a link: _URL_0_ | [
"Many open clusters are inherently unstable, with a small enough mass that the escape velocity of the system is lower than the average velocity of the constituent stars. These clusters will rapidly disperse within a few million years. In many cases, the stripping away of the gas from which the cluster formed by the... |
Is the Christmas tree in my living room right now dead, alive, or somewhere in between? | It is in the process of dying. It is only alive in the sense that it's still respirating and carrying out activity at a cellular level, but there's a biological limit to how long it can keep that up--since it's lacking roots to draw nutrients from soil that it can use for its cellular processes, it's being forced to use carbohydrate reserves that are stored in stem and needles for the energy to carry out those cellular processes of life. When those energy stores are all used up, it will die, same as a cut flower.
It's "dead" when it's no longer carrying out cellular activity, and in plants this is generally indicated by turning brown and crispy as the cells no longer pump water through the plant and it dries out.
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"By December 1976, it was clear that the National Christmas Tree planted just three years earlier was dying. The appearance of the tree had deteriorated significantly, with many of the lower branches dead or damaged and many parts of the tree showing large areas of dead needles. Government horticulturalists said th... |
How did Medieval European princes find a spouse? | That I know, there was no actual structured pan-european system. While the running of the affairs of state, rulers encountered a whole host of people; when the topic of marriage came up, a number of considerations were made, and a match with a viable candidate from the ruler's social network was attempted. Sometimes considerations were political, other times they were personal, and more often than you'd expect they were a little bit of both.
Now, it's fair to say that monarchies in medieval and early modern Italy was particularly unstructured; a structured courtship system might have developed elsewhere at some point for all I know. Individual rulers could also choose to be more or less intrusive on their children's romantic considerations; one ruler might have a spouse imposed on them, while his or her successor might choose his own partner.
The influence a monarch's parents might have on the choice of their children's spouse also depended on when the match was being made; Galeazzo Maria Sforza was twenty-two and unmarried in 1466 when his father, the Duke of Milan, dropped dead. His mother, Bianca Maria Visconti, had set up a match with Dorotea Gonzaga, the daughter of the Marquis of Mantua. Although Mantua was a small but influential state pivotal to the balance of power in Northeast Italy, Galeazzo Maria categorically opposed the match. Galeazzo (and his mother) had participated in the Milanese delegation to an ecclesiastic council in Mantua and probably knew Dorotea, Galeazzo did not like Dorotea much at all.
Why? Well, Galeazzo Maria had spent a year in France which had evidently been a character defining moment: he would from then on be smitten by all things French and francophile. Probably unable, or unwilling, to go so far as to to secure a marriage to a French princess, he instead settled for the Paris-raised daughter of the Duke of Savoy. Galeazzo also appointed his brother Ludovico ambassador to the French King; it would seem that his mother Bianca Maria could do nothing to stop his rampant francophilia. Although Galeazzo's father, the previous Duke Francesco Sforza, had late in his life acquiesced to his son's requests and opened up a tentative negotiation to formalize a marriage with a dependent of the King of France to be framed within a broader arrangement of an alliance, on his ascension Galeazzo Maria rushed to complete these arrangements while his mother, realizing that her son would not hear her council, rather than have her decisions as Duchess constantly undermined resolved to retire to the palace at Lodi, where she would spend the rest of her days.
Why was the Duchess Bianca Maria opposed to the match? The Savoyard state, which did not yet include the foothills of the Monferrat and was only a marginal (albeit large) border terretory encompassing the mountains between France and Italy, was placed squarely in the French sphere of influence. The Duchy's rulers spent more time in Paris than in their castles perched the Alpine passes, and even the Duchy's lowlands are hummocky and in no way comparable to the rich floodplain of the Po basin; to make matters worse, a gang of barons had even attempted to kidnap Galeazzo Maria as he was returning to Italy from France. Bianca Maria, who had actively assisted her husband in the government of Milan, was extremely upset about her son's willingness to throw political considerations to the wind and marry the daughter of such a politically unimportant state (Bona's father, Ludovico, was also not historically very warm with the Visconti or Sforza, another disincentive). However, Bianca Maria ultimately could do nothing to stop him.
So that gives you a very colorful example of how complicated a marriage could be, balancing personal and political considerations: Galeazzo Maria wanted to position his Duchy closer to the Kingdom of France, marry a Francophone, and avoid marrying Dorotea Gonzaga if he could help it. Interestingly, Galeazzo Maria engineered a match for his son Gian Galeazzo to the daughter of the King of Naples almost as soon as the boy was born; a testament to the fact that even if one ruler made sure he had input in his own marriage, he might have different plans for his children. So again, this reinforces the point that there really wasn't a codified procedure.
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"Marriages among ruling dynasties and their subjects have at times been common, with such alliances as that of Edward the Confessor, King of England with Edith of Wessex and Władysław II Jagiełło, King of Poland with Elizabeth Granowska being far from unheard of in medieval Europe. However, as dynasties approached ... |
Is it possible to apply active noise cancelling to light? | The idea behind active noise control is that electrical signals can travel much much faster than sound waves, so that when noise is detected, an out-of-phase signal can quickly be routed to speakers before the signal itself changes appreciably. The same cannot be done with light, because nothing can travel faster than light. Once you detect the light signal and create an out-of-phase signal and send it to a laser, the original signal has already moved on. | [
"However, these concepts are controversial because a muzzle blast creates broadband noise rather than pure tones, and phase cancellation in particular is therefore extremely difficult (if not impossible) to achieve. Some suppressor manufacturers claim to use phase cancellation in their designs.\n",
"BULLET::::- E... |
exactly, *how* are we running out of bandwidth? | **TL;DR**: *Bandwidth is not an infinite resource in and of itself. You can add to it by laying more cable and the various computing resources that control it - but that's not free.*
Picture two computers talking on the internet. One sends a request for a webpage. This gets transformed into electric or light or radio pulses by the computer's connection, depending on what internet connection you have, and then various other devices transform that into signals that can ride the connections to the broader world. The same thing on the other side.
Somewhere in that set-up there's a series of cable (with the networking hardware to run them), usually fibre-optic in nature, with a WHOLE BUNCH of individual strands, each handling a maximum number of pulses per second that carry the information in your request and its response. But even that ultrafast fibreoptic cable with its amazing capacity to handle information has limits based on number of strands.
So you have to lay more cables and build more management devices to juggle all of those signals to increase that ceiling bandwidth. And that's expensive, so telecommunications companies are careful only to expand this capacity when they have to or when it gives them a competitive edge... and some of them deliberately create the impression that bandwidth is a 'finite resource' so they can charge more for it and place caps on it. | [
"Bandwidth management is the process of measuring and controlling the communications (traffic, packets) on a network link, to avoid filling the link to capacity or overfilling the link, which would result in network congestion and poor performance of the network. Bandwidth is measured in bits per second (bit/s) or ... |
are we able to make edible products from the sap of trees other than the maple tree? | Yes! Birch sap is probably the most popular, used to make birch beer and other drinks. You can also make a wintergreen-like candy out of it.
The resin or sap of pine trees can be chewed like a gum, or mixed with water for a pine-y tea.
Many other trees produce edible sap, like sycamore or walnut, which can be boiled into a syrup - it's just not as plentiful and perhaps not as tasty as maple. | [
"A few other (but not all) species of maple (\"Acer\") are also sometimes used as sources of sap for producing maple syrup, including the box elder or Manitoba maple (\"Acer negundo\"), the silver maple (\"A. saccharinum\"), and the bigleaf maple (\"A. macrophyllum\"). Similar syrups may also be produced from walnu... |
Why can't we chemically produce food? | We can to some extent but a lot of the things in food like proteins, vitamins, amino acids etc. are quite complex and instead of trying to make, purify and mix hundreds of complex chemicals it's easier and cheaper by far to just let plants and animals grow them for us. | [
"Berthelot was convinced that chemical synthesis would revolutionize the food industry by the year 2000, and that synthesized foods would replace farms and pastures. \"Why not\", he asked, \"if it proved cheaper and better to make the same materials than to grow them?\"\n",
"Another form of upcycling food would b... |
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