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Is the vegan diet dangerous? | The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, AND (formerly ADA) is the United States' largest organization of food and nutrition professionals, with close to 72,000 members.
> It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.
_URL_1_
The author of the article you linked to is from the [Weston A. Price Foundation](_URL_0_) and they have a very anti-veganism heavy agenda.
I know who I would trust. | [
"One of the main differences between a vegan and a typical vegetarian diet is the avoidance of both eggs and dairy products such as milk, cheese, butter, and yogurt. Ethical vegans do not consume dairy or eggs because they believe their production causes animal suffering or premature death and because of the enviro... |
what is the difference between deductible and oop max? | After the deductible is met you will still have to pay 20% (typical) of the bill until you hit the OOP max. After that you pay nothing more. | [
"Deferred charge (or deferral) is cost that is accounted-for in latter accounting period for its anticipated future benefit, or to comply with the requirement of matching costs with revenues. \"Deferred charges\" include costs of starting up, obtaining long-term debt, advertising campaigns, etc., and are carried as... |
is an orb the only possible shape for a planet? | Yes, although of course they can have surface imperfections and equatorial bulges that make them not perfectly spherical.
By definition, a planet must be large enough that its own gravity pulls it into a spherical shape. Basically, the weight of all the "Stuff" (rocks, mountains, etc) is such that they tend to flow "downhill". A sphere has the least downhill left to flow to.
On smaller objects, gravity may not be strong enough, so that the strength of an object (like boulders) can resist this pull, and it can maintain a non-spherical shape. This object by definition would not be a planet. | [
"A planet's defining physical characteristic is that it is massive enough for the force of its own gravity to dominate over the electromagnetic forces binding its physical structure, leading to a state of hydrostatic equilibrium. This effectively means that all planets are spherical or spheroidal. Up to a certain m... |
What do you believe is the central theme that represents the Western Civilization from 1740 - Present? | The growth and development of modern capitalism. | [
"The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community is a book by University of Chicago historian William H. McNeill, first published in 1963 and enlarged with a retrospective preface in 1991. It explored world history in terms of the effect different old world civilizations had on one another, and especially th... |
why do most viruses destroy your computer with no reason whatsoever? do people just wanna be dicks? | Most malware doesn't destroy your computer.
The most common things malware does is either make your computer part of a "botnet" so it can send spam e-mail or help with DDoS attacks (both of which can earn the virus authors money), or scan your computer for personal details (which the virus owner can sell on for money).
The thing is, with these types of virus, you can be infected and never even know it.
Viruses which make themselves known are starting to become more common: one particular type of attack that's gaining popularity is one which encodes your data so you can't access it, but offers to decode it if you pay a sum of money. (If you're ever hit by this, don't pay up - they don't actually decode it even if you do pay.)
But a virus that destroys the computer? How would it spread? It needs to keep your computer working for long enough that you can spread the virus, then it usually needs to do something to earn the virus author some cash. | [
"BULLET::::- Explanation: Computer software can be used in ways that disturb other users or disrupt their work. Viruses, for example, are programs meant to harm useful computer programs or interfere with the normal functioning of a computer. Malicious software can disrupt the functioning of computers in more ways t... |
AMA: *Selling the Congo* and Belgian imperialism | So when the Congo was handed over from Leopold's personal control to the Belgian government what exactly changed in the colony? What improved, what didn't improve, etc?
Also how did the Belgians justify the takeover of the colony to their people? It seems like having your government step in because your monarch is being too homicidal would cause a bit of a scandal. | [
"Neither the Belgian government nor the Belgian people had any interest in imperialism at the time, and the land came to be personally owned by King Leopold II. At the Berlin Conference in 1884, he was allowed to have land named the Congo Free State. The other European countries at the conference allowed this to ha... |
ID this firearm possibly from civil war, no markings. | It's a flintlock that's been converted...like [this one](_URL_0_) but it's not this Harper's Ferry- the lock is flat, not rounded...nor one of the obvious ones: British, French, Austrian. It looks more like an early-style percussion lock ( like an 1842 Springfield) that's been altered and mated to a converted flintlock barrel... the whole gun could be an assemblage of parts. Best bet would be to remove the loose rust on the lockplate behind the hammer, and do the same for the underside of the barrel, near the breech, and see if you can find numbers, markings, proof-stamps.
The rear sight is rather odd, too, mounted on the tang, not further up on the barrel. It indicates it's a rifle, but I don't know of anything- like a Common Rifle- that had a sight like that.
| [
"The Old State House Museum in Little Rock Arkansas has in its collection of Civil War battle flags a Confederate First National pattern flag which has traditionally be ascribed to \"Hart's Battery,\" also known as the \"Dallas Artillery\". The flag was recovered on the field of Pea Ridge where Hart's battery lost ... |
What happened in the late Medieval period that allowed European military technology and arms production to far surpass the rest of the world? | I deal with the overall organization of armouring and the technology behind it in these previous answers. They cover the innovations in workshop organization, finance, metallurgy and metalworking technology that made the explosion of the armouring industry in the late middle ages possible. However, I'd echo the caution that nothing I have read indicates that this amount of armour production was unprecedented - I have no indication that Mughal India or Ming China didn't produce similar or even larger quantities of armour.
* [Manufacturing and Supplying the Armour of Weapons of a Late Medieval Army](_URL_7_)
* [From Ore to Harness: The Steps of Manufacturing Plate Armour](_URL_4_)
* [The Importance and Illusiveness of 'Good Steel' in Medieval and Early Modern Armour](_URL_5_)
* [Why were Milanese armourers so successful?](_URL_1_)
* [The Armour Industry of Milan, contd.](_URL_6_)
* [Manufacturing Munition Armour](_URL_0_)
* [Two Podcast Episodes](_URL_3_) [About the armour industry](_URL_2_)
* [The Innovators of Armouring](_URL_8_) | [
"Such technological import to medieval Europe include gunpowder, clock mechanisms, shipbuilding, paper and the windmill, however, in each of these cases Europeans not only adopted the technologies, but improved the manufacturing scale, inherent technology, and applications to a point clearly surpassing the evolutio... |
What are the biological differences between an 18 year old and a 22 year old male ? | There is significant brain development during that time: _URL_1_
_URL_0_
Plus, mens bodies continue to change as they incorporate more testosterone. That's why many men won't be able to grow a full beard until their mid-20s and the jawline continues to grow during that time.
But, hormones will continue to shift for the rest of your life, so your body will actually constantly be changing. | [
"Persons younger than 18 were 25.80% of the population; those 18–24, 11.70%; 25–44, 29.80%; 45–64, 20.90%; and 65 and older, 11.80%. The median age was 34 years. For every 100 females, there were 90.80 males. For every 100 females aged 18 and over, there were 86.70 males.\n",
"It appears that the male/female rati... |
How old is too old to get a PhD in history? | I think you might have some trouble getting accepted into a Ph.D. program, not necessarily because of your age, but because of your rationale. Schools want their graduates to get jobs. It makes them look good. I think they'd be cool towards accepting what they might perceive as a glorified hobbyist. Your application letter will make you sound more like a romantic than a realist, and that won't look good for you.
There's no part-time Ph.D. It will swallow your life. | [
"BULLET::::- American Historical Association Committee on Graduate Education. \"We Historians: the Golden Age and Beyond.\" \"Perspectives\" 2003 41(5): 18-22. Surveys the state of the history profession in 2003 and points out that numerous career options exist for persons with a Ph.D. in history, although the trad... |
Why is DT fusion better than TT? | You're taking the notion of a cross section too literally. The cross section is the *probabilistically weighted* area for a reaction to occur, not the geometric area. For example, scattering of a 1 eV neutron off of H-1 has a cross section of 20.7 barns whereas scattering off of H-2 has a cross section of only 3.4 barns (despite the fact that H-2 is a larger nucleus).
The key to cross section size is to consider stability: less stable nuclei 'want' to react to become more stable nuclei; highly stable ("magic") nuclei are perfectly content. You can think of it in analogy to the atomic shell model where electrons want to fill orbitals; the nuclear shell model works quite well in describing nuclear phenomenon. Instead of noble gasses, nuclei want to have "magic numbers" of neutrons and protons. Some of the magic numbers are: 2 and 8, which is why He-4 is highly stable (it has 2 protons and 2 neutrons) as is O-16 (8 protons and 8 neutrons).
The underlying mechanism is rigorously modeled by meson exchange (e.g. Yukawa coupling which is proportional to exp(-m x r)) and therefore what is happening is the stable nuclei are simply not sending out binding mesons with as much strength as less stable nuclei.
TL;DR *nuclear reaction cross section is proportional to stability of the product nucleus, not geometric size*.
I don't know enough about DT and TT fusion to help you with why, specifically, TT is slower, but I can assure you that it is due to the stability of the end products (recall He-4 is highly stable, neutrons are unstable).
Reference: ENDF (_URL_0_) is where I got the cross section data from. | [
"During TTIr, although it takes more energy per unit length to achieve fusion with QS than with CW, QS offers the advantage of achieving higher weld strength and weldability of low transmissive materials such as continuous glass fiber thermoplastics. Greater strength is imparted because full fusion is achieved with... |
Why didnt the German Army in WWII simply encirceled Stalingrad | The Germans did attempt to do that, to an extent. General Maximilian von Weichs' plan for Army Group B's assault on the city called for a simultaneous envelopment from the north and the south, using 6th Army as the northern pincer and 4th Panzer Army as the southern pincer. They hoped to avoid the desperate city fighting which had already cost them heavy casualties in sieges like Sevastopol. On August 23rd, at the very outset of the battle, General Hans Hube's 16th Panzer Division (the spearhead of 4th Panzer Army's XIV Panzer Corps) actually reached the Volga. However, XIV Panzer Corps' narrow corridor through the northern suburbs of the city was vulnerable and Hube's division was briefly encircled before being relieved by LI Corps. XXXXVIII Panzer Corps formed the mirror-image spearhead in the southern wing of the city, achieving similar results but without suffering the same hair-raising counterattacks as XIV Corps.
Why go through the city at all, though? Why not just go around it entirely and starve the city out? [Let's look at a map.](_URL_2_) Stalingrad was a long built-up strip of a city, bordered entirely on one side by the Volga river. Surrounding the city for a siege would have required crossing the Volga, which would have been a significant operation under the best of circumstances. The Germans had forded many rivers earlier in the Barbarossa and Blau campaigns, but the Volga would be different. It's up to 3 miles wide in the Stalingrad/Volgograd region, and the preparations for the crossing would be vulnerable to Soviet artillery on the other side as well as, potentially, Soviet bridgeheads at Serafimovich, Kremenskaya, and elsewhere on the River Don. These bridgeheads held down significant Italian and Hungarian forces, as left unchecked they were a dagger aimed at Army Group B's rear.
Crossing the Volga would also have meant an opposed river crossing directly into the teeth of significant reserve forces. [*Boevoi sostav Sovetskoi armii*](_URL_1_) *(The Combat Composition of the Soviet Army*, the official order of battle throughout the entire war as published by the Voroshilov Academy of the General Staff after the war) gives the forces of Stalingrad *front* on September 1st as:
* 1st Guards Army
* 21st Army
* 24th Army
* 63rd Army
* 64th Army
* 8th Air Army
I haven't yet looked deeper into manning numbers for those formations, so I don't know if they were paper tigers or if they were actually close to their *shtat*\-mandated strength. However, each formation is at least at its appropriate outfit of rifle divisions, engineering support elements, artillery, etc., even though I do not know if those subunits had their full allocation of manpower. The artillery alone would have posed a significant challenge for an opposed crossing, and a successful counterattack by Stalingrad *front* could have had severe consequences. Most importantly, though, and unlike previous river crossings in Barbarossa and Blau, the Soviet forces on the Volga had a major riverine flotilla at their disposal. Despite interdiction by the Luftwaffe, the gunboats and cutters of the Volga Flotilla would have been a thorn in the side of any river crossing. Even if they did not stop the crossing outright, they would likely have retreated to their camouflaged shelters on the east bank of the river and remained a persistent threat to Wehrmacht efforts to resupply their beachheads.
Crossing the Volga was also likely beyond the realistic abilities of the overextended Army Group B. The drive to Stalingrad had exhausted their logistics; 6th Army had to temporarily resort to air resupply even of hazardous items like fuel and ammunition during the summer, and neither 6th nor 4th Army ever fully resolved their supply shortages during the course of the battle. A bold drive onto the opposing bank of the Volga would have stretched these lines even further, and as I mentioned already, it would have put a wide and hostile river between the Wehrmacht's beachheads and their supply lines.
**Sources and Recommended Reading**:
[*Boevoi sostav Sovetskoi armii, chast' 2 (ianvar'-dekabr' 1942 goda) \[The combat composition of the Soviet Army, part 2 (January-December 1942)\]*](_URL_3_), Moscow: Voenizdat, 1966.
Citino, Robert. *Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942.* Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007.
Glantz, David M and Jonathan M. House.[ *When Titans Clashed: How The Red Army Stopped Hitler.*](_URL_0_) Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015.
Lester W. Grau (2016) "River Flotillas in Support of Defensive Ground Operations: The Soviet Experience," *The Journal of Slavic Military Studies*, 29:1, 73-98, DOI: 10.1080/13518046.2016.1129875
Hill, Alexander. *The Red Army and the Second World War*. Cambridge University Press, 2017. | [
"Indecision by Hitler, dissent among the higher-ranked Nazi German officers, and extended supply lines combined in a prolonged battle in the streets of Stalingrad. Germany eventually occupied over 90% of the city, but in an attempt to defeat the remaining Soviet defenders almost all German soldiers in the area were... |
Why is Tritium radioactive? | It's not due to electromagnetic repulsion; the decay is due to the weak interaction.
Decays occur if they can. Because the mass of the helium-3 nucleus is less than that of tritium, and the mass difference is greater than the mass of an electron, tritium can turn into an electron and a helium-3 nucleus without violating conservation of energy. Because it can happen, it does. | [
"Tritium is a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 12.355 years. Its main decay product is Helium-3, which is among the nuclides with the largest cross-section for neutron capture. Therefore, periodically the weapon must have its helium waste flushed out and its tritium supply recharged. This is because any heli... |
Besides Carbon Dating, what are the other techniques to determine the age of objects ? Organic or inorganic? | There are a huge number of dating techniques. To list some of them:
*Dendrochronology
*Sclerochronology
*Varve-chronology
*Radiocarbon/Uranium Series/Etc. (many, many dating techniques in this group)
*Cosmogenic Isotopes
*Fission Track Dating
*Thermo-luminescence and Optically Stimulated Luminescence and Infrared Simulated Luminescence
*Amino-Acid Racemization
*Obsidian Hydration and Tephra Hydration
*Rock-varnish cation ratio and development
*Lichenometry
*Soil chemistry chronology and soil profile development
*Rock and mineral weathering
*Scarp Morphology
*Depositional and deformational layering (seasonal layers in ice sheets, for example)
*Geomorphic position
*Calcium Carbonate dating
*Stratigraphy
*Paleomagnetism
*Tephrachronology
*Paleontology (huge field)
*Stable Isotopes dating (whole ton here)
*Tectites and microtectites
*And of course human historical records
Radiocarbon gets a lot of press, but it is very far from being the most reliable dating method, and it is not used nearly as often as most laymen will tend to think it is. | [
"Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon.\n",
"Carbon dating method can be used to determine the age of living trees in the past. ... |
Does latitude effect the density of water? | Latitude doesn't have a direct effect on seawater density but as you note there is a strong correlation between latitude and temperature and temperature certainly effects water's density. It's not a large effect however. For seawater (salinity 3.5%) in the tropics with temperature 28°C the density of surface water is 1022.4 kg/m^3 while for colder water (3°C) the density would be 1027.9 kg/m^3, a 0.5% increase in density. Perhaps this could cause differences in specialized racing boats. Cargo ships have a marked [Plimsoll line](_URL_0_) ensure that a ship loaded in warm waters is safe to cross oceans where the water is colder. | [
"The density of water causes ambient pressures that increase dramatically with depth. The atmospheric pressure at the surface is 14.7 pounds per square inch or around 100 kPa. A comparable hydrostatic pressure occurs at a depth of only ( for sea water). Thus, at about 10 m below the surface, the water exerts twice ... |
what is the difference between normal skin, a freckle, a mole, and melanoma? | normal skin is just... skin. Not sure what you want me to say about that. A freckle is a cluster of normal skin cells where the cells just have more pigment than the surrounding skin. A mole is a skin lesion that contains higher than usual concentrations of pigment and the pigment cells themselves are different than normal skin pigment cells. Moles can be congenital (existing at birth or acquired. They are usually harmless. Melanoma is a cancer of the pigment-containing cells in the skin. | [
"Polypoid melanoma, like all types of melanoma, starts in the cells that make melanin, which is the protective pigment that gives skin color. Polypoid melanoma is most commonly found on the torso but may be found in unexpected places like the nasal mucous membranes and the rectum. Sometimes polypoid melanoma may de... |
When coming down with a cold (or if you already have one), will working out help or hinder your recovery? | This is actually a pretty fascinating question because the answer is so complex. We're really only beginning to understand the interplay between exercise and immune function.
A very thorough review of the literature was published in 2011. You can read the abstract of the findings [here](_URL_0_). If you have access to the full article, I highly recommend giving it a read. It's roughly 30 or so pages reviewing the current body of knowledge on this topic.
The old thinking (based on a couple of older studies of marathoners) was that exercise increased infection risk 2-6 times that of a sedentary person due to exercise "destroying" natural killer cells in the blood. We now know exercise doesn't destroy NK cells, but it does cause them to migrate elsewhere in the body. Current thinking is a lot murkier regarding whether exercise is beneficial or detrimental. There's still a lot to learn here!
But to summarize the current findings pertinent to your question:
Acutely after exercise, the blood sees an increase in white blood cells of multiple types. This is proportional to exercise intensity and duration and is mediated by two processes: 1) shear stress knocking white blood cells into the blood, along with catacholamine (think adrenaline) induced activation 2) a second wave of activation from cortisol. Some of these elements, like T-cells, work better after exercise. However, other elements don't fare as well. B-cells produce lower levels of antibodies, and the neutrophils (these act on the acute phase of an infection or inflammation) are less mature and have been theorized to work less effectively - though experimental studies haven't demonstrated any objective measure of decreased neutrophil activity after exercise.
After this acute rise, there is a subsequent drop below pre-exercise levels in blood titers of white blood cells and immunity elements, followed by a return to baseline around the 24 hour mark.
So what does all this mean regarding an upper respiratory infection like the cold? As I mentioned earlier, there is good evidence that exercise decreases antibody levels. Key to fighting off respiratory infections is a certain type of antibody called IgA. IgA is secreted in the mucous, and can be found in the nose, the mouth, and throughout the gut. During exercise, IgA levels drop off with long duration or high intensity workouts. However, short bouts of moderate intensity exercise with *plenty of rest* in between do not affect IgA levels and may even temporarily boost them. So, mucosal immunity may or may not be impaired depending on the type and quality of exercise.
Anecdotal reports imply that respiratory infections may be made worse by exercise, but little hard evidence has been found to support this (Depending on the pathogen). So the pathogen responsible for the illness also matters a great deal as to whether exercise is a good idea or not. Basically, if you have straightforward cold symptoms (sneezing, runny nose, congestion, cough) - it should be fine to continue exercising, just don't overdo it.If your symptoms also include body aches, fatigue, fever (consistently greater than 100.4 F / 38 C), this represents a more serious infection; then exercise is likely not a good idea, if for no other reason than to avoid the transient drop in antibody levels. Arguably though, we need more data!
EDIT: added metric units for temperature. | [
"Active recovery is recommended after participating in physical exercise because it removes lactate from the blood more quickly than inactive recovery. Removing lactate from circulation allows for an easy decline in body temperature, which can also benefit the immune system, as an individual may be vulnerable to mi... |
What were some distinct characteristics of Afghan Buddhism? | We have a mixture of information regarding Buddhism in that part of the world. On the one hand we do have lots of archaeology, on the other we do have survivals from this era in terms of texts and also in Chinese sources.
I've recently posted on this subject elsewhere, but Buddhism in what is now Afghanistan (at the time divided between several distinct regions) was part of a heterodox environment for its existence, much like in China. It grew up in an environment where Iranian, Mesopotamian and Greek religious practices had already merged with one another into a kind of fusion, and Buddhism simply became another element in that mixture.
The Kushan Emperor King Kanishka ruled in the first half of the 2nd century AD. The Kushan Empire at its height stretched from Central Asia to Northern India. The coinage alone tells you a lot about the environment in which Buddhism existed; the coinage was Greek style in terms of form and accoutrements, but the Greek script was being used to write a local Bactrian language; on that coinage we find Greek deities like Serapis, Zeus, Hephaestus, Hermes, but we also find Mitra, Nanaya, Ahura Mazda, and also the Buddha.
Kanishka has a lot of known historical information attached to him, or rather widely attested; it was he who convened the Fourth Buddhist Council, and had Mahayana texts translated into Sanskrit. He constructed Buddhist stupas, and we know that Greek artisans helped contribute to some of them. Mahayana texts were primarily transmitted to China by one Lokaksema, known in Chinese sources as *Zhi Loujiachen* or *Zhi Chen*. This monk was from Gandhara and was born in Kanishka's reign, and if the Chinese literature was to be believed he was part of the cultures making up the Yuezhi confederation (believed to be the rulers of the Kushan Empire, it's a little complicated). I have only come across limited information, but preceding him were a pair of Parthian Buddhists called *An Shigao* and *An Hsuan* earlier in the same century. The 'An' prefix marks them out as Parthians, just as 'Zhi' marks our previous friend out as Yuezhi.
Going back to archaeology, a village in Afghanistan named Hadda was the site of an enormous stupa complex that has been dated to the 3rd century BC. This combined what you'd call typical stupas of the period with Greek architectural styles, Hellenistic-era style statuary, and also Central Asian elements. In these stupas Atlas and Hercules are found every now and again as architectural elements, for example. It's a real representation of the unusual (and in my opinion gloriously eclectic) religious environment of this part of the world.
Even when we're in the 6th and 7th centuries AD we still have attestations from Chinese sources that Buddhism was thriving in this part of the world. The city that is now modern Balkh in particular was hailed by the Chinese visitor Xuangzang, claiming it had a hundred stupas and thousands of Buddhist monks.
To summarise, the Greek influence on Central Asia and North West India is very visible in Buddhist art of this period and in this place. Likewise, the fact that it interacted with Iranian religion/Zoroastrianism for so long likewise impacted on its outward expressions and the environment it existed in. But more concretely, Mahayana Buddhism seems to have found influence in this region from a relatively early date.
If you'd like me to go into the Greek background at all, post some visual sources, or post some references, I'd be happy to do so. I only left them out in the interest of time. | [
"Buddhism in Afghanistan was one of the major religious forces in the region during pre-Islamic era. The religion was widespread south of the Hindu Kush mountains. Buddhism first arrived in Afghanistan in 305 BC when the Greek Seleucid Empire made an alliance with the Indian Maurya Empire. The resulting Greco-Buddh... |
Parabola or Ellipse? | You are correct. Note that in your analysis of projectile motion, you assumed that the gravity is constant and acts purely and only in the *-y* direction. For most cannonballs and baseballs, this is sufficient. The result is mathematically a parabola.
But that assumption is, of course, an oversimplification. Gravity does not point in the same downwards direction for the entire flight of the cannonball. It points towards the center of the Earth.^* It is also slightly weaker at the apex of the journey than at the bottoms. If you were to factor this in, and calculate gravity as *g=GM/r^2* instead of *g=* constant, then you would get an elliptical orbit.
The ellipse, however, for most cannonballs, will have an eccentricity approaching 1. The limit of the apex of an ellipse with eccentricity approaching 1 is a parabola.
^* This is also, of course, an oversimplification. Physics is the art of oversimplification. | [
"A parabola is the set of points in a plane equidistant from a fixed point (the focus) and a fixed line (the directrix), where distance from the directrix is measured along a line perpendicular to the directrix.\n",
"In nature, approximations of parabolas and paraboloids are found in many diverse situations. The ... |
what does the us handing off the internet mean? also why do they control (part of) it in the first place? | The Internet was developed in the United States; it is an outgrowth of a military communications project called ARPAnet. Hence the crucial infrastructure was naturally in U.S. government hands. Over time the government has been transferring control of Internet infrastructure to international organizations set up for the purpose of administering parts of the Internet, which is somewhat controversial. | [
"The key policy issue is whether or not the United States has the right constitutionally to restrict or cut off access to the Internet. The powers granted to the presidency starting with the Communications Act of 1934 seem to be adequate in dealing with this threat, and is one of the major criticisms of legislation... |
What was West Germany's official policy on immigration/refugees from East Germany? Did they just take anyone and everyone who made it or did they deport some back? | They took everyone, but not everyone was supported financially by the government. It was kind of like the procedure when claiming asylum nowadays.
It was regulated in the "Bundesnotaufnahmegesetz" _URL_0_ | [
"The East German government eventually sought to defuse the situation by relaxing the country's border controls. The intention was to allow emigration to West Germany but only after an application had been approved, and similarly to allow thirty-day visas for travel to the West, again on application. Only four mill... |
how does a coin slot determine which coin is inserted? | It depends on the type of coin slot. In a vending machine such as those which have a [ball on top and dispense gumballs or bouncing balls](_URL_1_), the mechanism is usually based on size. There are some [washers](_URL_0_) produced that have a similar size to a specific coin (you just gotta look for the ones you want, somebody somewhere makes 'em). These are usually called ___slugs___ and often you can find them as the knockouts from [electrical panel boxes as well](_URL_2_).
When we get into the range of much larger machines, such as soda or snack machines, the mechanisms inside have a lot more room for more sensitive measuring equipment. Those often detect based on magnetic signature as well as size and weight.
What I wanted to find and don't see anywhere is a closeup of the top slot, to the right (since most turn clockwise) of the slot, showing the lever that measures size on the gumball size machines. If you look at those you can usually see where to insert a really thin pin to get the wheel to turn for free on older machines. | [
"BULLET::::- Coin slots, coin returns and the coin box, which allow for the exchange of money or tokens. They are usually below the control panel. Very often, translucent red plastic buttons are placed in between the coin return and the coin slot. When they are pressed, a coin or token that has become jammed in the... |
why do i get so nervous in class that i can't even say a full sentence out loud without feeling out of breath? | Not a doctor, this is not medical advice. However, you should see a therapist who is good at CBT - Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. There are medications too, but it's better to avoid their many and various side effects.
Try exposing yourself to the situation a bit at a time. First, just think about talking in front of people. Then, maybe a few weeks later, you might be okay with it. Then, you can ease into it with a group of friends. Over time, if you expose yourself to public speaking little by little, you might get more comfortable with it.
You might never be happy about public speaking, but you can probably make it into a chore rather than a fear, given time.
*edit: may be called glossophobia | [
"The concept of Public Speaking Anxiety comes from the students fear of embarrassment if they speak in front of different crowds of people. Students have a fear of making mistakes or messing up or just being judged in general by their audience. Most of the anxiety that students have of speaking publicly stems from ... |
why do some people in mental institutions refuse to take their medication? | Because when you're on mood stabilizing medication there is a constant and overpowering urge to get off it. No matter how much I know I need to be on this medication I always, always have these thoughts and feelings that I'd be better off without them. All medicine is basically targeted poison that gets up in you and forces your body to work a different way, a way that it might want to fight against. This goes doubly so if your brain is fucking broken, because it wants to stay broken. It's part of the disease. I don't want to stop taking my medication, but I really want to stop taking my medication.
Were I not on my phone I would make an effort post about this, and tell you some of the various times I've gone off and the flawed reasoning that got me to that point. Here are a few, simplified:
When you start feeling the effects of the correct medication you can begin to feel really fucking good, which is basically just bringing you up to the very base line Blah. Not Good, exactly, just not awful. Because you've been so dark, so deep, so long, that base like feels like you Jesus just jerked you off. Then you get used to that feeling, the mood base line, and you remember that's as far as it's ever going to go. You'll never truly be healed, so why bother? And then you stop taking your meds.
Meds don't start working right away. Some take days before you feel something, be it beneficial or deleterious. Some take weeks, months, to get a useful blood concentration worked up. Viibryd, for example, gave me really bad diarrhea - like five hours on the toilet every day - for almost a full month. Would your job allow you that kind of time? Would your patience? Would your tender asshole flesh be able to handle that much toilet paper, no matter how velvety soft, scraping against it over and over and over until it tears and bleeds like you've never seen your own asshole bleed before? And then you stop taking your meds, but you keep using neosporin because your asshole really hurts.
After being on the right meds for a long time and finally coming to terms with your illness and clawing your way back into some semblance of a normal life, you may start to wonder if you need to keep taking it. After all, you're feeling okay, you've got a job, maybe a partner, and life is looking like maybe it's not all hopeless bullshit. And then you stop taking your meds.
Or maybe you've tried every pill under the sun and not a single one does a god damned thing, but your doc keeps wanting to try something else. And then you stop taking your meds, because what's it really going to do, really?
What if you miss a day? Missing a day may not be a big deal or it may be the biggest deal. It all depends on you, the meds, your condition, etc. ((Why would you miss a day? Have you been reading this post or just skimming?)) Missing a single day might send you into a brutal nose dive, the kind where you can not pull up on your own. And then you stop taking your meds.
EDIT - Oh yeah, side effects. Sometimes you want a working penis or a mind that moves faster than a snail swimming through peanut butter or maybe you just want to fucking feel something, even if it's misery, because even misery is better than feeling absolutely fucking nothing. And then you stop taking your meds.
ALL OF THAT is in the context of major depression. Now, consider someone with a type of psychosis and imagine all the ways their brains will lie to them about the world in which they live. How will they view pills? How will they view doctors, medical professionals, etc.?
It's not a simple answer, but it's part of the disease. I don't want to stop taking my medication, but I really fucking want to stop taking my medication. My brain wants to stay broken and uses every dirty trick in the book, including lying to me about the existence I perceive, to stay that way. Fuck you, brain.
You dig? It's okay if you don't. These things aren't easy to understand if you've never gone through it yourself. | [
"Patients with mental health disorders, such as schizophrenia or bipolar affective disorder, may lack insight into their mental health symptoms. They refuse medication due to the belief it is not needed.\n",
"It can be inferred from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that all persons have the right to refu... |
how do websites determine whether or not you have a capital letter, a number, etc in your password if they never actually get the password, just its hash? | The cleartext is checked before it's submitted and hashed, usually by a client-side script. That's pretty normal behavior and there's no security risks there. Even if it's submitted in cleartext for validation and your connection is secure, then you've little to worry about. If they've broken the session encryption and can see the password cleartext then there's probably security breaches that make your password meaningless for validation anyway.
Overall, it's better to validate it on the client side.
Where you should see big warning signs is if you go to change your password and are told it's too similar to a previous one. That means they're storing the cleartext somewhere to compare it against and that's a Very Bad Thing. Catching exact matches to previous passwords isn't a warning sign (since identical passwords will have identical hashes they can compare).
Of course, password rules like are, in general, a bad idea. Passphrases consisting of several randomly-selected regular words ("bovine stoneware eatery drapery rimless nail ogle petty" for example) are much, much better options for passwords. | [
"BULLET::::1. Passwords are not case sensitive. All passwords are converted into uppercase before generating the hash value. Hence it takes password, PassWord, PaSsWoRd, PASSword and other similar combinations same as PASSWORD converting all characters to uppercase. Password characters are also limited to a subset ... |
How accurate is Dan Carlin in saying that medieval Chinese fortifications were the most advanced of the time? | The claim is spot on from what I have read. Let's look just at fortifications because that is the question of the OP.
Until the 15th century star-shaped "Rennaissance Fort" (Tonio Andrade's name for it), Chinese forts were the best in the world in terms of defense. Walls were immensely thick and high. They could be overcome by a sustained siege, with digging/sapping and siege towers, but only with tremendous effort. Cannon barrage was meaningless against them. The rennaissance forts were much smaller by comparison, but their strength lay in their shape - there were no more blindspots and crossfire could be utilized to devastating effect. The name of the game then became competing *add-on* siege works to expose weaknesses in the forts. But, theoretically, a perfectly constructed and well-manned fort could hold against immensely larger forces, if the stores were full. But, these were not around in the 13th or 14th centuries, so Chinese forts win the competition for that period. They were still relatively impervious to cannon barrage well into the 17th century if not later. | [
"Chinese walls were bigger than medieval European walls. In the mid-twentieth century a European expert in fortification commented on their immensity: \"in China … the principal towns are surrounded to the present day by walls so substantial, lofty, and formidable that the medieval fortifications of Europe are puny... |
How long does it take for a beer to cool? | For a mathematical treatment of cooling, one can use [Newton's law of cooling](_URL_0_). However, terms in that equation usually are empirically derived, so for your purposes you should set up the scenario and try to measure the coefficients.
But of course, if you're going to do that anyways, you wouldn't need the equation. | [
"Cask beer should be stored and served at a cellar temperature of . Once a cask is opened, it should be consumed within three days. Keg beer is given additional cooling just prior to being served either by flash coolers or a remote cooler in the cellar. This chills the beer down to temperatures between .\n",
"Fre... |
Why has the west become more secular than the Muslim world? | This is a big question but a lot of it boils down to what we think of today as "secular." I took a course in fall of 2015 in grad school on the history of Christianity and secularism so I think I'm somewhat qualified to answer this and will provide references where I can. Secularity is a messy term but the most common definition for it is that it is an epistemological category which is in some way irreligious. Secularity is not the same as secularism, which refers to a political doctrine that seeks to separate religious ideas and ideologies from public policy in the nation state, though the terms secularity and secularism often get confused in modern discourses (for a decent anthropology of "the secular" see Talal Asad's Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, and Modernity, p. 1-2). It's important to note that before the late eighteenth century and indeed well after it, people in the west did not conceive of themselves as "religious." They understood that they belonged to a certain community like Christendom as was the case in the medieval period. They knew there were other communities such as the Islamic world after the seventh century but there was no conceptual space in peoples' minds of "secularity" or irreligion. Indeed the Roman pagans in late antiquity understood that the Christians were a discreet community but there was no such thing as someone who was "secular" and certainly not atheist or agnostic, which didn't come around until the late eighteenth century.
As an ideology, Secularism arose in Euro-America in the eighteenth century but came to fruition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries out of the teachings of enlightenment philosophers like I. Kant, who promoted the use of natural reason and empirical observations of evidence to explain observable phenomena rather than resorting to scriptural authority (for more, see ch. 4 of Jeffrey Bloechl (ed.) Christianity and Secular Reason: Classical Themes and Modern Developments). Kant did not feel that religion or reason are competitors but instead they are related epistemological ways of thinking about principles and they have tensions with one another so he tried to separate them in order to make the scriptures appear more exceptional and appear less problematic when linked with natural reason. All this to say, Kant helped to lay the foundation for creating the very idea of "religion" as we understand it today (again, see the chapter in Bloechl). Religion, as an idea, came to refer to a collection of ideas regarding morality, social norms, and cultural customs for 18th and 19th thinkers.
We see competition in medieval and early modern high politics between secular jurisdictions (kings and emperors) and episcopal ones (popes and bishops) but these competitions are about who makes money off of land taxes. It's complicated by the problem that bishops were both episcopal (loyal to the pope and the clerical hierarchy) and also secular land owners (part of a king's retinue of land lords) for much of medieval history (see Thomas Brady "The Holy Roman Empire's Bishops on the Eve of the Reformation" in Robert Bast and Andrew Gow (eds.) Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History, p. 21-2). To radically oversimplify due to time, secular lords became more influential throughout the early modern period (~1500-1800) on account of things like the Reformation which resulted in the break up of a common sense of identity in the west (although Christianity had never been fully unified on account of the east vs. west church split, the emergence of heretical groups like the French Cathars and Bohemian Hussites, and the rise of African and Asian sects of Christianity long before the Reformation). This increased disunity meant that people began to find greater unity in their national orders (i.e. England, France, Scotland, etc...). By the time of the American Revolution and their constitution, there were increased senses of nationhood within many western societies that were not directly related to their faiths. That said, America was the first country to consider itself purely "secular." However, today most Americans are still very religious with evangelical Protestants making up around 25% of the population so it's unclear how successful this secular enterprise really was (_URL_0_).
To come back to your original question, there's a lot going on here. Historical events have formed the contexts that make the rise of secularity and secularism in the west possible. The rise of European empires granted them a huge income of resources and wealth while the Muslim world was unable to keep up with the resource harvesting that Europeans were doing by the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. These resources helped individual nations forge their own national imagined communities irrespective of their religious identities (see Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, p. 11). In the Muslim world, the idea of the nation state did not really emerge until the 20th century and it's been a very rocky story ever since as these nations are still dealing with cultural tensions and turmoil within (just look at the situation in Syria right now). Many people in the Middle East derive their identity from their faith of Islam simply because nations don't mean the same thing to them as they do to us here in the west (for the most part).
I know I've talked a lot about the west here but it's important to note that both secularity and secularism are western constructions. It's not shocking that western liberal secular democracies, even though they claim to be secular and value free in terms of religion, don't often square well with other cultural norms. India is a hugely successful nation that is very secular in its constitution yet has had all sorts of trouble with religious violence and riots since it became independent in the 40s. Today if you're Jewish or Muslim in a country like the US you need to take your customary holidays off from work as a special case because they don't square well with the Christian calendar which makes life very easy for Christians to continue their customary norms even though they live in a "secular" country. Our daily work schedules also make prayer five times a day very challenging. Many secular folks find that people who express their faith openly are being "too in my face" even though there's no way to not wear a hijab for many Muslims. In short, secularism privileges certain groups who have historically been from western cultures (i.e. it's easy to keep your religion outside of other peoples' gaze if you're Anglo/German Protestant, not so easy if you have to pray five times per day).
In short, historical factors matter a lot. That's not to say that the scriptures have little part in this but 18th-century thinkers like Kant came to see ways of separating church from state and faith from reason following centuries of long and complicated debates and controversies surrounding these ideas. In the Muslim scriptures, there isn't that same level of tension between faith and reason as their scriptures don't make as big of a deal about it (Asad's Formations of the Secular, p.196-7). I'd say that the religions themselves have not been deterministic and that people have shaped the ideas to where we are now more than anything but this is a huge topic and hard to cover in a short post. | [
"According to the same book, the Muslim world fell behind the West, (or other non-Muslim societies) not because it has failed to borrow some political, cultural or social concepts these civilizations had to offer, but because it did:\n",
"West (despite being geographically in the east), while Islamic nations are,... |
how does file transfer work over remote desktop connections? | the rdp listening server on the target pc and the rdp client on the host pc establish communications. then when this connection is established it opens up another port for file transfers. as long as you are connected to the RDP server from a RDP client, it can do file transfers regardless of where the pc's are located. you are limited by the internet speeds of the server pc and the client pc. | [
"Connect:Direct file transfers can be done in two formats: Binary mode (where no translation occurs) or in a mode where translation is used to convert an ASCII file to EBCDIC as it is moved to a mainframe or vice versa. These conversions are handled automatically based on the local systems, which is a significant c... |
Why doesn't tidal friction caused by gravity defy the laws of thermodynamics? | Nope. It's balanced by a frictional slowing of earths rotation, and an increase in lunar distance | [
"The tidal force is a force that stretches a body towards and away from the center of mass of another body due to a gradient (difference in strength) in gravitational field from the other body; it is responsible for diverse phenomena, including tides, tidal locking, breaking apart of celestial bodies and formation ... |
the genius of franz kafka | I'm not a writer or a literary scholar. And I don't know much about the general opinion on Kafka. But I remember when/how I realized that Kafka is awesome. Maybe this will help you find the answer to your question:
In "The Metamorphosis", the main character wakes up one day to find that he can't get to work; he can barely get out of bed. He has turned into a giant bug. His family cares for him. His situation does not improve. His family cares a bit less, starts not cleaning the room as much, starts storing extra furniture in there, starts barely visiting him. They eventually injure him. He dies. His family members are relieved and can finally move on with their lives.
This is exactly the same as when my in-laws moved in with my family. They were ok. We were friendly with them. They got sicker. We went to their part of the house less, and they couldn't get up the stairs. We felt guilty, so we avoided them. Their health declined and declined. When they finally passed away, we were relieved, and our lives got better.
It's horrible, but it's real. And he figured out how to use the absurdity of a man turning into a giant bug to artfully communicate that awful situation in a way that people can hear and connect to on an emotional level. It's so weird, but it works so well. It's telling a story that is obviously not true (man turns into bug) but also clearly deeply true (how we deal with the fatally ill). Part of your answer will probably lie in Kafka's ability to tell real, deep truth. | [
"Gustav Kafka (July 23, 1883, Vienna – February 12, 1953, Veitshöchheim bei Würzburg) was an Austrian philosopher, psychologist. One of Kafka's most outstanding contributions to the realms of psychology have been his critique of fundamentals and methods, such as his criticism of behaviorism, and other articles in w... |
If the sun were to completely disappear, which of the following would happen first: The loss of light on Earth, or the loss of the pull of the Sun's gravity on Earth? | The speed of gravitational waves is equal to the speed of light in a vacuum. So, assuming space is a perfect vacuum the loss of gravity and loss of light would occur at the same time. | [
"The vanishing Sun model is a thought experiment in physics which imagines the physical consequences to the light and gravity if the Sun were to disappear. In these models, the Earth is the primary subject, and the light and the Sun's gravitational attraction are the primary focus.\n",
"In theory, the loss of ene... |
How did ancient Europeans do tattoos? | Not to discourage other answers, but this might be a better question for /r/AskAnthropology. Otzi isn't ancient, he's *pre-historic*, so they might well know this better than any of us here.
As it is, the oldest tattooing practices I'm familiar with are, unsurprisingly given my flair, in the near east. It became relatively common for Christian pilgrims going to Jerusalem to get a tattoo while en route in Egypt as proof of their time in the Holy Land. Traditional tattooing practices were described by Edward William Lane in his ethnographic classic *An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians.* You can see the relevant pages if you scroll up a bit from [here](_URL_0_).
There's little reason to think that this practice or methods would have radically different in previous centuries given how simple it is. The basic method involves piercing the skin with some amount of soot or ash mixed with milk (or presumably other liquid or oil), and potentially including other common and ancient dyes like indigo to alter the coloration.
As I understand it, these basic implements, some form of ash-based ink, and simple needles are the basis for most traditional forms of tattooing, for example, in [Polynesian tattooing as well](_URL_1_). | [
"The earliest possible evidence for tattooing in Europe appears on ancient art from the Upper Paleolithic period as incised designs on the bodies of humanoid figurines. The Löwenmensch figurine from the Aurignacian culture dates to approximately 40,000 years ago and features a series of parallel lines on its left s... |
Evidence suggests that the classical Western world knew of the existence of China as early as the 5th century BCE. Why did it take until the second century CE for Romans to make official contact with China? Did the Romans know the full extent of the power of the Chinese Empire? | Not to derail the thread, but could you explain what evidence there is that the existence of China was known to Mediterranean peoples that early? To my knowledge, the Greeks right down to the end of the 4th century BCE thought that beyond India lay the eastern edge of the world. | [
"The first diplomatic contact between China and the West occurred with the expansion of the Roman Empire in the Middle-East during the 2nd century, the Romans gained the capability to develop shipping and trade in the Indian Ocean. The first group of people claiming to be an embassy of Romans to China is recorded i... |
As an object approaches the speed of light, would it have a massive gravitational pull? | Relativistic mass is a misleading concept. There's no actual change in mass for fast-moving objects, rather, an increase in energy and momentum as a result of a fundamental change in the geometry of spacetime.
That said, the object would affect gravity differently than the same object at rest, but not because it has more mass, rather, because it affects spacetime.
_URL_0_ | [
"As speeds approach that of light, the acceleration produced by a given force decreases, becoming infinitesimally small as light speed is approached; an object with mass can approach this speed asymptotically, but never reach it.\n",
"It is in fact not very easy to construct a self-consistent gravity theory in wh... |
is the heart stopped for heart surgery, and how is blood flow controlled for the rest of the body? | The answer is [cardiopulmonary bypass](_URL_0_); they hook up pumps for blood and ventilator machines that transfer oxygen directly to the blood (with membranes, sort of like the lungs), and once that's hooked up they can stop the heart and breathing so there's no movement in the chest, and operate.
EDIT: Re: your uncle, it wasn't the surgery that caused the brain damage, it was the heart attack. If the heart stops beating, the brain doesn't get blood, and neurons start dying very fast, within a couple minutes, causing irreversible loss of mental function.
This is why CPR is so important, to compress the chest to push at least a little bit of blood to the brain; CPR often breaks the patient's ribs because of the forces required, but it's still recommended because even a little bit of blood to the brain can help (and ribs can heal later).
EDIT2: Regarding the temperature, doctors can't afford to sweat / have sweat drop into the patient, so the temperatures are chilly, usually 65 - 62 F in the room to offset the fact that everyone is wearing heavy duty surgical gowns and aprons over their scrubs over their under-shirts. Those things are designed to protect against contamination / liquids, and you get very hot in them at the normal office temperature. | [
"Dr. Wilfred G. Bigelow of the University of Toronto found that procedures involving opening the patient's heart could be performed better in a bloodless and motionless environment. Therefore, during such surgery, the heart is temporarily stopped, and the patient is placed on cardiopulmonary bypass, meaning a machi... |
How did the Vandals, a landlocked Germanic tribe, immediately form a powerful naval kingdom after taking over the Africa diocese? | Well, there are a few other things that happen. We know from the Chronicle of Hydatius that they were involved in maritime raiding before they moved/completed their move (depending whether you think it happened all at once) to N Africa from Spain; the Balearic islands, for instance, were raiding heavily by the Vandals in 425. The process isn't overnight--it takes a while. You can learn a lot about sailing in 1, 2, 5 or 10 years...
Also, I believe that large elements of the Roman fleet (both military and civilian/private merchants ships/grain fleet) was captured in the harbor. It also probably wasn't only ethnic Vandals who were crewing the ships, either. There probably weren't too many Vandals, maybe 10,000 or so MAX, and I doubt that they were all fighting in the fleet... | [
"The Vandals were a large East Germanic tribe or group of tribes that first appear in history inhabiting present-day southern Poland. Some later moved in large numbers, including most notably the group which successively established Vandal kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula, on western Mediterranean islands and in N... |
What made the Germanic region such a powerhouse in mathematics in the 18th-20th centuries? | I'd say a major reason is that Germany had a cheap standard German language canon of high quality mathematics school textbooks, [thanks to this guy](_URL_0_) and a vivid, liberal not very controlled publishing scene. | [
"By the middle of the 17th century, European mathematics had changed its primary repository of knowledge. In comparison to the last century which maintained Hellenistic mathematics as the starting point for research, Newton, Leibniz and their contemporaries increasingly looked towards the works of more modern think... |
What are some books concerning medieval monasticism as preserver of western civilization? | The Benedictines being the primary monastic order of the Early Middle Ages, see: Clark, James G. *The Benedictines in the Middle Ages*. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011.
The classic on the history of writing and documentation is: Clancy, M. T., *From Memory to Written Record, England, 1066-1307*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979.
A few others on the literacy/documentation side:
Gameson, Richard. *The Early Medieval Bible: Its Production, Decoration and Use*. Cambridge, 2009.
Clemens, Raymond, and Timothy Graham. *Introduction to Manuscript Studies*. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2007. | [
"Western Monasticism, as first practiced by the followers of Saint Benedict, born in Nursia in 480 AD, spread from Italy to all parts of Europe. The Benedictine monks were a very important factor in preserving Greco-Roman culture and learning for later centuries.\n",
"Isolated monastic communities were the only p... |
why do american airports not have smoking sections?! | Having a smoking section in an indoor building is like having a peeing section in a pool. America has largely moved on from smoking. About two decades ago, there was a huge movement to get smoking banned in indoor public places, and that's what was done in most places. Basically, my right to not inhale secondhand smoke and breathe clean air trumps your right to smoke indoors. | [
"Although Congress has not attempted to enact a general nationwide federal smoking ban in workplaces, several federal regulations do concern indoor smoking. Effective April 1998, inflight smoking is banned by the United States Department of Transportation on all commercial passenger flights in the United States, an... |
how can my heart rate be low but blood pressure high? | Your heart is a pump. The heart rate is how many times a minute it pumps. Higher means it's faster. You're under one beat a second so that's pretty healthy.
Your blood pressure is a measure of how much pressure your heart is needing to push. Higher means it has to work harder. The top number is how much the heart pushes when it pumps, and the bottom number is how much pressure there is when the heart rests between pumps. You don't want the thing that keeps you alive to be under a lot of pressure when 'resting' so your blood pressure numbers are a bit concerning. The numbers you gave are telling me that you heart is under 25% more pressure in the moments of rest than what's considered normal for a 20 year old, and 43% more pressure when it's working. (generally a 20 year old has a 'normal' bp of 120/80)
So how can your heart rate be low (good) and your BP be high (bad)? The heart is the pump, but the BP is a measure of pressure, which is a combination of the force of the pump, and the size of the pathways it's trying to move blood through. If your heart is pushing hard and slow you might be a great athlete, but if the pathways (your arteries) are narrow, you're working your heart a lot more than is healthy.
If you ever use a pressure washer, you can hear the motor changing sounds when you turn the water on/off, your heart is going through things just like that, and if the hose out is getting squished or kinked, it makes the motor work harder.
This can be cause by lots of things. I'm going to talk about probably the most common: a buildup of junk on the inside walls of the pathways. Smaller pathway, means working harder, so your BP goes up without effecting your heart rate. This buildup of junk is cholesterol.
So if you are an athlete with a buildup of cholesterol, but otherwise healthy, what can you do to prevent overworking your heart? There are three big things you need to know:
1) Cholesterol is filtered/processed by your liver primarily and there is only so much your liver can do at one time. You can help it out by not giving your liver too much to do at once. Body fat, alcohol, medications, and many other things are processed by your liver, so if you can cut some of that down, your liver can have more time to work on cholesterol.
2) Your diet is the most important factor in your control. Exercise all you want, it's not going to do jack shit. There is a set rate you can process what you eat, and if you are eating lots of the bad versions of cholesterol, your body wont keep up. If you want your cholesterol level to go down, you need to be paying a lot more attention to what you eat.
3) It's a Genetic lottery. My whole family has a history of very low cholesterol and low blood pressure going back at least 5 generations. Most people didn't get so lucky, and some people have exactly the opposite situation, it's called [familial hypercholesterolemia](_URL_0_). Just like families who have a pre-disposition to diabetes, you might be genetically prone to cholesterol and blood pressure problems. Start talking with your genetic family and find out if they are having trouble too, it might save your life (or theirs) | [
"Increasing the heart rate serves to decrease the pressure in the superior and inferior venae cavae by drawing more blood out of the right atrium. This results in a decrease in atrial pressure, which serves to bring in more blood from the vena cavae, resulting in a decrease in the venous pressure of the great veins... |
Researchers have resumed the search for Amelia Earhart's body.
Why is finding her remains so important? | "Because it's there"
- George Mallory on climbing Mount Everest
Its not because it's vitally important to history to know what happened to her, it's just a damn good mystery that's fun to solve. | [
"Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence is a 2017 documentary by The History Channel that purported to have new evidence supporting the Japanese capture hypothesis of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan. Its main piece of evidence, a photograph purportedly showing the two still alive after their 1937 dis... |
What's up with this circle of rain? Is this a radar phenomenon or a meteorological phenomenon? | Doppler radar is located in Pleasant Hill, which is the center of the circle. Doppler radar scans 19.5 degrees from the horizontal, so there's a blind spot above and surrounding the radar known as the "Cone of Silence"
_URL_0_
| [
"As already mentioned, a weather signal is a composite of echoes coming from a very large number of hydrometeors. Such echoes are received continuously at the radar antenna after a delay equal to the time taken by the wave to reach the target and come back to the radar. Since individual echoes are impossible to be ... |
How do vibrations form geometric patterns in the sand in this video | The patterns do not align into the troughs as previously wrongly answered. [This question was asked just yesterday](_URL_4_), and also answered wrong.
> The sand is falling into the vallies of the standing wave shape in the plate.
> So since the troughs don't move, the sand on the speaker can fall into the troughs and stay in the same place.
Both of these statements are not true.
[As can be seen in this animated gif](_URL_2_) the trough of a standing wave changes position at twice the vibrational frequency (the position will change two times every period). [In this animated gif of a 2D standing wave](_URL_3_) you can see this is also true in 2D planar vibration. The sand on the plate seeks to minimize its total energy, which occurs at the lines of minimum amplitude - or the **nodes** (_URL_0_). The trough is the point of maximum amplitude, not minimum amplitude, and the sand at these locations will have the maximum total energy, and will very quickly seek to minimize its energy by migrating to the nodal lines on the plate.
In the [2D animation](_URL_3_) it is difficult to pick out the nodal lines, but they are indeed there. [The 1D standing wave](_URL_2_) is very easy to see the nodes, and they are even marked out as red dots in the animation. It is at these points (or along these nodal lines in a 2D plate) that the sand will agglomerate, not into the troughs.
[Here is a video that isn't all edited, chopped, with pointless music overlayed.](_URL_1_) | [
"BULLET::::- hour-glass projection: the projection of a flattened hourglass showed the sand flowing upwards. Extreme magnification made the effect extra impressive, with the grains of sand forming a wave-like pattern.\n",
"From the physical-mathematical standpoint, the form of the nodal patterns is predetermined ... |
why are "weeds" more fertile than other plants? | This is essentially *why* we classify them as weeds. The defining trait of weeds is "they grow where we don't want them to" and fairly typically this involves invasive growth, tolerance for disturbed earth, and rapid spread/growth. In other words, "they show up where we're doing yard work, and won't go away"
Biologically, the plants we call weeds aren't necessarily all that closely related, they just share traits a particular population finds annoying. So the mechanisms for how, and even the environments they prosper in, can vary widely.
Beyond that, many of the plants we *do* want, we are growing outside of their natural environment. We choose them for ornamentation, not suitability. So they may require specialized care and be relatively incapable of spreading in the garden, even though they could spread all over the place they call "Home." | [
"A very important point to consider is that weeds would undergo the same acceleration of cycle as cultivated crops, and would also benefit from carbonaceous fertilization. Since most weeds are C3 plants, they are likely to compete even more than now against C4 crops such as corn. However, on the other hand, some re... |
is there a maximum [sound] volume the brain can interpret? | The concept of "Sound" is actually created by our brains in a response to the stimulus it receives from the vibrating ear drum. This vibrating is known as "Frequency." It would be possible to simulate the illusion of sound in the brain; however, the brain wouldn't be able to make sense of a stimulus that was "louder" than that which you could physically hear. To answer your question, no. Providing a raw signal to the brain would not allow you to hear any louder. Trust me, I'm your doctor. | [
"In traditional morphometry, volume of the whole brain or its subparts is measured by drawing regions of interest (ROIs) on images from brain scanning and calculating the volume enclosed. However, this is time consuming and can only provide measures of rather large areas. Smaller differences in volume may be overlo... |
Is there any history of major agency conflict in the U.S. government? | While less flashy the inter-service conflicts between the branches of the armed services have been with us since the founding of the nation.
Though perhaps got no more heated than in 1949 with the "Revolt of the Admirals". Essentially when an anti Navy and Marine Corps SECDEF took charge the tensions between the Navy and the Air Force over unification as the DoD and the future structure of the military boiled over.
The cancellation of the first large postwar carrier, the USS AMERICA, caused outrage in the fleet and led the SECNAV to resign. In very public hearings before Congress the Admirals questioned the ability of the Air Force to effectively protect the nation through nukes alone, while the Truman Administration saw this as disloyalty.
While Congressional hearings found no outright wrongdoing they rebuked Secretary Johnson fro not including Congress in the decision to can the ship and for his ham fisted handling of balancing the services budgets.
The Navy would in large part be vindicated less than a year later when the Korean War broke out. Due to the budget cuts Army and marine formations were woefully under prepared for combat, and the Navy was so short of ships that they couldn't even enforce a blockade of the limited coastline of Korea. | [
"Bureau 13 (the 13th Bureau of the U.S. Department of Justice) was founded in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln to deal with supernatural and paranormal threats to the Union (and to suppress public knowledge of them). Its first agents were a motley crew of military personnel, Pinkerton detectives, civilian consultants, freed... |
why is it that china's government can devalue their currency at a moments notice while the dollar can't be by the us? | The US can, and sometimes does, devalue the dollar. But that comes with downsides as well as upsides. There's a time to devalue the dollar and a time to strengthen it based on the needs of the economy. | [
"Paul Krugman argued in 2010, that China intentionally devalued its currency to boost its exports to the United States and as a result, widening its trade deficit with the US. Krugman suggested at that time, that the United States should impose tariffs on Chinese goods. Krugman stated:\n",
"Martin Wolf has argued... |
discrimination in hiring | In the United States, you can't make hiring decisions based on whether someone is a member of a [protected class](_URL_0_). That means you _can_ make decisions based on things like:
* What school they went to
* What sports team they support
* Whether they are left-handed | [
"Hiring discrimination is similar to wage discrimination in its pattern. It typically consists of employers choosing to hire a certain race candidate over a minority candidate, or a male candidate over a female candidate, to fill a position. A study of employment patterns in the US indicated that the number of hiri... |
how does ddosing work? | Think of the internet like the roads going everywhere.
On a normal day traffic. Moves fine and people to to places on time and without issue.
Now think of getting thousands or millions of people to all visit the local coffee shop at the same time.... Your going to get a traffic jam, and the coffee shop is going to struggle to get anything done trying to deal with everyone at once. | [
"DDS is networking middleware that simplifies complex network programming. It implements a publish–subscribe pattern for sending and receiving data, events, and commands among the nodes. Nodes that produce information (publishers) create \"topics\" (e.g., temperature, location, pressure) and publish \"samples\". DD... |
Why was the Macedonian style of warfare that proved so effective since Phillip implemented it powerless against the roman style and why didn't the Hellenic states adapt to counter it? | Disclaimer: I'm not a historian and and I have picked up knowledge on this just in bits and pieces. Also please forgive my spelling
To answer your question. There were several changes in the Greek world that had occurred in the intervening years between the death of Alexander the Great and the subjugation of the Greek world by Rome. First the Greeks (I'll be using Greek as a catchall for Greek, Macedonian, and their subjects) had fought a series of exhausting wars between the various successor states of Alexander (the wars of the Diadochi) and with some exception their states were weaker than they had been in quite some time. Greece had also suffered invasions by migratory Celts who ended up settling in central Asia Minor in what was called Galatia after their settlement there. This political and economic exhaustion and the influence of other cultures on their societies had some interesting effects on the Greek approach to warfare. The first and most obvious was the phalanx, as you know the use of the sarissa revolutionized Greek warfare and broke the primacy of the hoplite (already changed drastically from their heyday in the Persian wars). However where these troops excelled and what made Phillip and Alexander so proficient in their use was their combination within a larger combined arms approach. Alexander actually only had roughly 9,000 phalangites when he invaded the persian empire initially. Along with them he included elite Hypaspists, loads of light infantry, supporting formations of hoplites, and elite Thessalian and Macedonian heavy cavalry. He, and Phillip, were amazingly proficient at using these weapons in concert to maximize their strengths. The battle of Gaugamela is a perfect example where Alexander was able to pin the persian front with the phalangites, then create and opening and storm through with his Companion Cavalry and supporting units willing the victory.
So what happened? Well after years of fighting other Greeks, the competing successor kingdoms appear to have either a) learned the wrong lessons, b) been too weak to sustain the varied army that Alexander did, c) have fallen victim to political intrigue even in their own courts, or d) some combination of the above. A and B in some ways go hand in hand. The weight of the phalanx became paramount to Greek military thinking, and more and more resources were devoted to larger numbers of phalangites at the expense of other troop types. Remember the 9,000 pezhetairoi that Alexander had? Phillip V had 16,000 at Cynoscephalae (a famous defeat versus the Romans) and Perseus had more than 20,000 at the Battle of Pydna. Further these men were armed with massive 22ft pikes, dwarfing the already impressive 16ft pikes Alexander and Phillip had used, and were generally not trained to be able to complete the maneuvers that Alexander's could. It should be noted however that the phalangites did their job, at Pydna they attacked the Romans and drove them from the plain that they were engaged on, but as soon as the ground became broken the phalanx became disordered and there were too few supporting units to protect them. The Romans, whose legions would have still contained veterans of their battles with Carthage and who were in general better trained, ate them alive. The Macedonian cavalry was suspiciously absent from the field.
So did the Greeks just totally miss the boat on army reforms? Yes and no, during the years we are talking about some other unit types were being experimented with, although their adoption by the Seleucids or the Antigonids in Macedon was either too few, or too little too late. The Thureophoroi (named for their shields, the thureos) were a medium infantry style that would have looked very similar to the roman hastati, they were armored and carried javelins was well as a spear for close fighting. They were a jack or all trades troop type, able to support skirmishers, or hold a place in the line of battle. Even heavier, but also more expensive, were the Thorakitai, the same style of troops but more heavily armored. Roman accounts of "imitation legionaries" were probably these troops. Who except for the style of dress and armor, and their use of a thrusting spear, would have looked exactly like a roman legionary. Some Greek cities experimented heavily with these types of troops, but for a kingdom like Macedon, the phalanx was already seen as a winning solution. They had been fighting enemies with exactly the same approach to warfare as themselves and their ability to think outside the box was impacted. So adoption of these troop types was more limited than it should have been. As somewhat of a counterpoint the battle of Magnesia saw a capable Seleucid commander Anitochus the Great face an equally capable Roman commander the two Scipios. The Seleucid army could make the claim of being better balanced than any other the Romans had faced but the reliance on several exotic unit types (namely scythed chariots) and the Greek tradition of the General leading the decisive cavalry charge seems to have thrown away an opportunity to truly test the Romans against the heirs of Alexander.
Lastly it's important to give credit where it's due, the Romans had a better system. The Greeks were reliant, especially after Alexander on level plains to field their heavy infantry, and while the Romans preferred it, they did not need it. Also roman cohorts were essentially modular in that one spot in the line was as good as the next for. Greeks fielded much more varied unit types with much more limited roles. The phalanx did it's job, going forward, better than the romans could hope to do themselves, but it could only do that job unless trained to a higher level than they were typically trained to at the time of the Greek and Roman clashes. Quick thinking and the ability to have the right troops at the right place won the romans at least two decisive victories as their troops could adapt to adversity or good fortune in a way that the phalangites could not. But its also important to remember that excepting Phyrrus of Epirus, the romans never really faced the true Alexandrian system of combined arms battle. And when they had it had fought them to a standstill. At Pydna the Macedonians clearly over relied on the phalanx and could not cope with the change in terrain. At Cynoscephalae one wing of the Macedonian army was still in marching formation when attacked, and the other wing then outnumbered and surrounded, was destroyed. At Magnesia the Seleucid formations were disordered by their own chariots on one wing, the King led a successful attack on the other but then proceeded to attack the Roman camp, and the Romans surrounded the Elephants and Phalanx in the center before they truly got the chance to engage, and when the Seleucid infantry tried to extract itself the panicking of its own Elephants destroyed their ability to fight in a cohesive formation. It is very possible, and perhaps likely, that if facing a commander who truly knew how to fight the combined arms battle that Alexander did, a Greek phalanx style army could have given the Romans a run for their money in an open field battle.
Here are some Links to look at about this topic:
[Macedonian Infantry](_URL_4_)
[Battle of Cynoscephalae](_URL_1_)
[Battle of Pydna](_URL_2_)
[Battle of Magnesia](_URL_0_)
[A great site for all things Roman](_URL_5_)
A great but somewhat offbeat site is the Europa Barbarorum [website](_URL_3_). It's a mod for the Rome Total War game that attempts to accurately recreate the Roman and Greek world at the time, based on a long study of historical texts and findings.
Lastly Plutarch and Livy are great resources and worth the read if you have the inclination, along with any modern biography of Alexander.
Thank you for posting the question, I hope you enjoy reading my answer as much as I enjoyed writing it. | [
"The Greek political balance between Macedon under Philip V and the Aetolian League was upset by the war between Rome and Carthage. Philip, seeking to enhance his position, raised a fleet and sent emissaries to Hannibal, then occupying part of Italy. Fearing that Philip could offer overt military assistance, Rome h... |
Is the vacuum energy constant under all conditions? | Basically, the vacuum has a nonzero variance. Think of a sine wave, on average it has zero amplitude, but the variance (which you get from squaring the sine wave) is nonzero. The vacuum has a similar property.
~~The vacuum (from a quantum POV) does not have a "constant" energy, in the sense that it's energy is not well-defined. If you are talking about averages, then the answer is they still can vary.~~ As a real example of the vacuum energy differing, see the [Casimir force](_URL_0_). To put it very simple, this force comes up because the vacuum energy is different between the metals than in a pure vacuum.
When you introduce a field into the picture, I wouldn't say you have a true vacuum anymore (in the QFT sense).
TLDR: No, the vacuum can be affected by it's surroundings | [
"The calculated vacuum energy is a positive, rather than negative, contribution to the cosmological constant because the existing vacuum has negative quantum-mechanical \"pressure\", and in general relativity, the gravitational effect of negative pressure is a kind of repulsion. (Pressure here is defined as the flu... |
Did "Italians" in the early middle ages still think of themselves as Roman? | *"The Romans in Lombard Italy virtually disappear from history, so much so that it could be seriously argued in the 19th century that every one of them was reduced to slavery. Even in the 8th century, when our documentation begins, we find scarcely a reference to them: 3 or 4 citations in the lombard laws, 2 or 3 in the charters. We tend to refer to all inhabitants of Lombard Italy as 'Lombards'; our evidence certainly allows us to.*
*But we know that the great mass of the Italians must have been ethnically Roman. Assuming (on weak evidence) that there were far more Lombards than there had been Ostrogoths, say about 200,000, the Lombards cannot have made up more than 5%-8% of the population of the parts of Italy they occupied, and the percentage may have been less."*
-- Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society 400-1000, Chris Wickham, now professor of medieval history at Oxford University.
Basically, Romans stopped thinking themselves as Romans (in Lombard Italy, which was the geographically larger 2/3 of the peninsula) roughly around 700 AD, 150 years after the Lombard invasion. They were certainly ETHNICALLY Romans, in the same way many "turks" in the Ottoman Empire were ethnically greeks, but the italian "romans" had been absorbed culturally into the culture of their occupiers/overlords, the Lombards.
This is excepting of course, the parts of Italy still under control by the Byzantine Empire, the urban centers of Ravenna, Rome, Naples, and the island of Sicily. They obviously still thought of themselves as Romans, and this is the reason why the region around Ravenna is called "Romagna."
But once the lombard conquest of Italy was complete (when they captured Ravenna in 751), coupled by the subsequent frankish conquest and papal state usurpation of former byzantine italy territories, that identity break was complete.
This was aided in no short part by iconoclasm in constantinople, which the byzantine italians were not interested in following (which is why we have some of the best preserved "images" from pre-iconoclasm in ravenna, but not in constantinople). This provided the catalyst and excuse for a cultural seperation from the east.
After charlemagne, they were more italians (a geographic identity) under this german "roman" emperor. I'm sure the thought process went along the lines of, if a german was a roman, and the greeks were roman, what were they? They were trapped between two cultures claiming to be Roman that didn't involve Italy at all. Its not hard to imagine a local (and fractured) identity emerging along urban and geographic lines, in opposition to the two forces claiming to be Roman that would tussle on the peninsula for the next 400 years.
The lombard conquest of Italy ultimately is the true genesis of the fractured Italy for the next 1000 years. Even with Charlemagne, Otto, the Normans, and the Renaissance, the political contours of Italy, were shaped by the lombard conquest, which was when a unitary Roman Italy finally stopped being Roman.
As for city states, I think around 1300, after the failure of the Italian commune system. I am not, however, an expert on high middle ages Italy.
tl;dr - No later than 700 AD for the Lombard 2/3 of Italy (possibly earlier). 800 AD for the rest of Italy. | [
"In the 1st and 2nd centuries, the vast majority (80–90%) of the empire's inhabitants were \"peregrini\". By 49 BC, all Italians were Roman citizens. Outside Italy, those provinces with the most intensive Roman colonisation over the approximately two centuries of Roman rule probably had a Roman citizen majority by ... |
If the Germans captured Moskow or Stalingrad would the Soviet Union have any chance of victory ? | We simply do not know since it never happened. In this sub, we only talk about what *actually* happened. We kindly request that you take this to /r/HistoricalWhatIf. | [
"The Third Panzer Army captured Klin after heavy fighting on Sunday, 23 November, and by Monday, 24 November, Solnechnogorsk as well. Soviet resistance was still strong, and the outcome of the battle was by no means certain. Reportedly, Stalin asked Zhukov whether Moscow could be successfully defended and ordered h... |
can one country steal wealth from another country ? | Yes stealing resources is the main motivation behind most wars. It's famously said that the Spanish invasions of South America empires brought them so much gold that it lead to inflation in Spain.
In the past one of the incentives that would be offered to soldiers would be booty from war campaigns. Nowadays we have permanent armies so that incentive is no longer required. Nevertheless corporate interests do lobby for wars so that they can get access to the victim country's natural resources.
| [
"You want to be the richest man in the world? I can make you rich. I have the only currency that doesn't go down ... People think I'm a smuggler. You betcha I am. I smuggle peace and truth from one country to another. This currency is really rich. But if you think I'm a smuggler then Jesus Christ was a smuggler and... |
Does my body have to feel bad to fight off a cold? | So in general the symptoms that you get with a cold are actually due to the bodies immune response. This is obviously not true of all diseases nor all symptoms, but I'll go over some specifics below.
The answer to your question is a tough one. If you were infected with a pathogen, be it virus or bacteria, and your body defeated it (never mind how for now) without experiencing any symptoms, then you would never have known you were infected in the first place.
Does that happen? Absolutely. Especially if you already have an immunity to whatever pathogen you come in contact with. This was the basis for the discovery of immunization. We noticed that once you got sick from something, if you came into contact with it again you might not have any symptoms at all. The pathogen still gets inside you, but your immune system is ready for it this time and defeats it with little or no symptoms.
If you get a flu shot, it does not keep you from physically coming in contact with the flu virus. But you may not "feel bad" if you do come in to contact with it as your body fights it off without symptoms.
Let's look at some specific symptoms:
**Sore Throat** - Medically about %80 of the time a sore throat is caused by *acute viral pharyngitis*. Sometimes it could be the famous bacterial *streptococcal pharyngitis*, which is the notorious "Strep Throat".
What all that means is that you have a bacteria or virus infecting the tissue of the throat. When your body notices this it initiates an immune response. Now, immune responses are complicate but one of the hallmarks is inflammation. Your body sends extra blood to the area, and capillary membranes become more permeable so that things like white blood cells can get out of your blood stream and to the site of infection. This inflammation causes you some pain directly, buy putting pressure on mechanical nociceptors (cells that cause pain). That's why your throat hurts, but hurts more acutely when you swallow, because swallowing adds even more pressure on the inflamed area. Additionally some of those chemical mediators of the immune system activate chemical nociceptors directly causing pain, this happens to alert you that you are having an immune response so that you can respond consciously.
Many symptoms of things like a "cold" work this way, with the immune system causing what you experience as "being sick".
As you can see it is the immune response that is causing you to feel "bad", not the pathogen itself. The only way to "fight off a cold" without feeling bad would be for your immune system to do so quickly enough that you never notice symptoms (this is called sub-clinical). An example of that is immunization (although just because you are immunized does not mean you will have NO symptoms, sometimes you still get the flu after a flu shot, it is just not nearly as sever as it would have been), or getting the same illness twice (must be the same strain in that case).
The problem with your question is that if and when the body fights things off without making you feel bad, you don't notice and never consider yourself having been sick. Therefore the only time you notice being sick is when you feel it. It's a catch 22 for being sick, but not feeling sick.
Hope that cleared things up for you, let me know if you have any additional questions. | [
"Cold has numerous physiological and pathological effects on the human body, as well as on other organisms. Cold environments may promote certain psychological traits, as well as having direct effects on the ability to move. Shivering is one of the first physiological responses to cold. Extreme cold temperatures ma... |
Does the Earth's gravity diminish noticeably before reaching the edge of the atmosphere? | No it doesn't. Gravity diminishes as the square of the distance from the centre, but you have to go up a significant fraction of Earth's radius before it starts to fall off a lot. Even 100 km up, where space officially starts, it just diminishes by (6380 km /6480 km)^2 or about 3%. | [
"Having been used up to a large degree, the Earth has shrunk, the polar ice caps have melted and the Earth's mass and therefore gravity has declined. This leads to the sudden loss of the atmosphere and hydrosphere, which wander outwards towards the new World. Globus Cassus' equator zones are equipped with a system ... |
sony's $2.5 billion loss | It's caused by a slow down in their mobile division, not some new hardware that they're eating early costs on still. The overall trend is increased competition in the mid-range from other Asian phone manufacturers.
I wouldn't call this a drop in the bucket, but it's not the end of the world. They'll probably just refocus their phones to a higher end market and try to compete with Apple and Samsung. In the worst case scenario they find themselves unable to compete at any range and drop out of making mobile electronics. They've already dropped their computer and spun off their television groups this year. | [
"\"The Hollywood Reporter\" estimated the film's financial losses would be over $70 million. A representative of Sony found this loss estimate to be \"way off,\" saying: \"With multiple revenue streams [...] the bottom line, even before co-financing, is not even remotely close to that number.\" According to \"Varie... |
Can you tell if it is above or below freezing by looking at clouds? | Temperature changes as you move upward through the atmosphere, so the temperature of the clouds you see may or may not (most likely not) be the same as the temperature you are experiencing near the ground. You may be able to tell whether or not the clouds are below freezing, but that won't tell you much about the temperature on the ground. | [
"The method of detection is based on the fact that the clouds tend to appear brighter and colder than the land surface. Because of this, difficulties rise in detecting clouds above bright (highly reflective) surfaces, such as oceans and ice.\n",
"Ice clouds are composed of ice crystals, the most notable being cir... |
Why, in Britain, do we "School Dinners" at "Lunchtime"? | This actually has a rather simple and mundane answer: because until fairly recently, the standard set of meals went breakfast, then dinner, then supper.
In the eighteenth century, breakfast was a light meal; people who worked ate it as soon as they got up, while the more leisured might wait until several hours into the morning. Then dinner, the main and largest meal of the day, was held at midday or a little after, and in the evening one ate a lighter supper - sometimes the leftovers of the dinner plus a little extra. A final tea might be consumed by people who stayed up late.
By the end of the century, this was changing. Among the fashionable and affluent, dinner was pushed into the afternoon; by the early decades of the nineteenth century, it could be after three. The more fashionable the family, the later dinner was pushed. The interesting thing about this is that "morning" was at this time still typically used to label all of the day before dinner - even after noon - so what is labeled as "morning dress" in fashion magazines of the period was considered suitable for wearing until you changed into half or full dress for dinner despite the fact that you would be wearing it after the morning technically was finished. The less fashionable and less affluent middle class would imitate the *ton*, which prompted the rich to push their dinners even later. By the middle of the century, there was a range of normal times for dinner, from noon for laboring farm families, to two or three in the afternoon for artisans, to five or six for white-collar workers, to seven or eight for the idle rich.
Obviously, this left a gap in meals for the latter two categories - with breakfast at the beginning of the day and dinner in the evening, something was needed in the middle of the day. From the beginning of the century, people who pushed dinner later were bringing out cold meats and cakes (and other things that didn't have to be immediately cooked and brought out hot) for themselves and callers around the middle of the day. "Luncheon" had long been a word for a snack or a small meal, and it became attached to this one specifically.
As you might have guessed by some of the description above, the working classes tended to keep the earlier pattern through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (breakfast, dinner, and tea or supper) while the middle and upper classes switched to the new breakfast-lunch-dinner. The earlier terminology particularly persisted in British English, where midday "dinner" and evening "tea" still often turn up as class markers. I cannot answer exactly why "dinner" is widespread across classes in the British school system, but hopefully this goes some way to explaining why it's not random. | [
"Lunchtime consists of a \"family lunch\" of pescatarian dishes, where pupils sit at tables of six, plus one teacher or guest, and take responsibility for serving each other. They lay the table together, one pours the water, and another brings the food and serves it. Someone else serves dessert, and two pupils clea... |
Has global warming had any noticeable changes in animal migration patterns? | Dude, yes. US marine scientist here. Estimates say half of **all** species (plants, animals, insects) have altered migration patterns. Technical reports can be explored at the Public Library of Science's collection: "[Ecological Impacts of Climate Change](_URL_3_)".
*Examples:*
\-Gray whales are ranging further around Arctic in search of food in order to get fat enough to trek down to Baja Mexico.
\-[Mackerel](_URL_0_) (fish) have moved North giving Iceland a brand new multi-million dollar fishery. French and British fishermen are literally warring over target species moving into different territories. Look up the Scallop Wars.
\-Lobsters as a fishing stock have crawled North (migrated). Rutgers University has [a cool tool](_URL_2_) to visualize marine species distributions based on NOAA data.
\- [Salmon](_URL_1_) are migrating further North and abundance in Southern ranges of California are dwindling as the species like Chinook (the fancy restaurant and sushi variety) are trying to stay in mandatory cold water.
\-Bull sharks are [breeding off North Carolina](_URL_4_) instead of wandering down to South Florida.
& #x200B; | [
"Large scale climatic changes are expected to have an effect on the timing of migration. Studies have shown a variety of effects including timing changes in migration, breeding as well as population declines. Many species have been expanding their range as a likely consequence of climate change. This is sometimes i... |
how can builders put up a house in a couple weeks, but it has taken my state 25 years to? construct a 67 mile stretch of road in a loop around charlotte? | The house doesn't have to withstand millions of tons of traffic a day. You can't build a freeway with 2x4s and drywall. Houses are built, freeways are engineered. | [
"The houses would take advantage of a range of new technologies and processes involving prefabrication and off-site assembly. This would reduce the construction time, but also reduce waste and energy in the transportation of materials to site. Each house would have a timber frame. The cladding panel would mean that... |
what were the problems with "earmarks" and why was their ban so controversial, should i be concerned about the possibility of a ban being lifted as is being proposed? | Earmarks in and of themselves are not always bad. You might have one earmark where say--Michigan--wants to bring the Mackinaw Bridge up to date.
Because the bridge is in Michigan (a state), but carries Interstate 75 (a federal infrastructure project) across the gap between the Upper/Lower Peninsulas both entities get involved.
Now if say a Minnesota legislator were to say "ok, I can support that, but let's add a rider that I-94 across the Mississippi is also brought up to date" in the same budget...it is unlikely that anyone would raise an eyebrow. This is an earmark, but it's related and one item is not necessarily holding the other hostage.
The problem arises when the earmarks are overdone. A third representative may refuse to vote on the bill unless money is included to build a school or community center, a fourth may ask for money for health care, a fifth may decide their district doesn't really need anything but there is a need for jobs (pressure from voters) and add on some unnecessary project on the side. They are taking advantage of the likelihood that this bill will pass in an effort to ride their own project (which should really have its own bill) through on the coat-tails of the title project.
This becomes an even bigger issue if they hold hostage a must-pass bill for a military or other critical item *that has nothing to do with their earmark at all*.
So for now I vote that each rep pull together their various related projects with other similar projects and propose them as smaller bills on their own rather than trying to tack on every little thing to something that they think will or must pass.
Yeah, some things will get bypassed, but those can be dealt with individually (and passed other ways) vs something that no one cares about being attached to something that everyone cares about simply for the sake of "advantage" or "blackmail" or "hostage" or "coat-tailing" or whatever you want to call it. | [
"The arguments against earmarking come mostly from the traditional way of viewing the taxes where they were confined to compulsory, unrequited payments to the general government as defined by the OECD in 1988. Firstly, public spending should be determined by policies and not by the amount of the revenue raised. Wit... |
how does moving electrons power an appliance? | The energy is either in the motion of the electrons, or in their interaction with the atoms of the material they pass through.
First, the power plant uses the energy of falling water, or of boiled water (steam) to get the electrons moving (by way of an intermediary magnetic field in the generators). Then, this energy that's stored in the movement of electrons is converted back to useful forms of energy at your house:
* Various motors transform the movement of electrons, again by using an intermediary magnetic field, into motion, to power your dishwasher, clothes washer, and various devices that have moving parts.
* Electrons flowing through a metal and hitting the atoms / transferring their movement to the atoms cause these atoms to heat up, and that's how you get incandescent light-bulbs and electric stoves, heaters, and water heaters.
* For the old cathode ray TV's, a beam of electrons would hit the surface of the TV, which was coated on the inside with phosphorus. Phosphorus atoms absorb the energy from the electron movement, and this energy bumps one of the phosphorus electrons to a higher orbital. This electron then falls back down to its regular orbital, releasing a visible light photon. So the screen would glow at the spot where the beam of electron was hitting it.
* For new LCD displays, there are lamps behind the screen (again powered by electricity that excites a phosphorus or other coating that emits light), and a liquid crystal matrix that aligns itself in an electrical flow field to either let light through or not. For plasma displays, plasma ions glow when electricity passes through them (same principle as the phosphorus, atoms get hit by electrons, which bumps some of their own electrons to higher orbitals, which then return to their regular orbitals and release the energy by emitting a photon of light).
Basically, electricity is a very convenient way to transmit power / energy, because all of chemistry and the interaction between atoms happens through the electrons that surround the nucleus of the atoms, and electricity can interact with them, producing motion, heat, light, chemical reactions, and various other very useful effects.
The electrons don't get used up, but their motion carries the power/energy. They're pushed into motion at the power plant, and their motion is "consumed" at the various appliances at your house. | [
"A more recent development is the electric action which uses low voltage DC to control the key and/or stop mechanisms. Electricity may control the action indirectly through air pressure valves (pneumatics), in which case the action is electro-pneumatic. In such actions, an electromagnet attracts a small pilot valve... |
how is carbon monoxide able to pass through walls? | It doesn't have a special ability and it's no different in how it behaves than any other gas. The ability of any gas to pass through something has to do with the size of the gas molecules and how big the gaps in the material it might pass through are. The difference between these two affects how fast the gas can move through something.
Most houses have walls made of drywall, and the pores (holes) in the drywall are about 1,000,000 times larger than a carbon monoxide molecule, so it can easily seep through walls.
If you had walls made out of something a lot more dense (like stone) you wouldn't have the same effect. | [
"Carbon monoxide is a product of combustion of organic matter under conditions of restricted oxygen supply, which prevents complete oxidation to carbon dioxide (CO). Sources of carbon monoxide include cigarette smoke, house fires, faulty furnaces, heaters, wood-burning stoves, internal combustion vehicle exhaust, e... |
Today I read that a consideration while designing the mythical Montana Class Battleship was that it had to be less than 35k lbs based on previous treaties. Why was a warships weight ever considered as a stipulation to be included as a rule of war? | So while your question is perfectly fine there was some bad info given. In that there were several treaties limiting the size of warships, but that the Montana's were not impacted by them!
1. The treaties. After WW1 it was widely acknowledged that the dreadnought race, particularly between Britain and Germany was a contributing factor. And that building ever more expensive and larger capital ships would both increase tension with each new launch, and potentially bankrupt nations struggling with war debt. In 1922 then after a conference in Washington brought together the major naval powers of the US, UK, France, Italy, and Japan to address the concerns.
From this came the Washington Naval Treaty, which among other provisions included the limit of 35k tons on battleships you mentioned! It also fixed a ratio of tonnage at 5:5:3 for the US:UK;and Japan, this ratio was helped made by signals intelligence to know the worst deal Japan would accept. This seemingly second class status also helped increase resentment in the Japanese public as the treaty also required a 10 year halt on new construction except for certain provisions to replace existing ships, and limiting main armaments to 16in. The 3 major signatories all scrapped ships under production and designs on the table while also using a provision to convert some unfinished ships to aircraft carriers, the US converted 2 unfinished battlecruiser hulls to the carriers *Lexington* and *Saratoga* while the IJN got *Kaga* and *Akagi* along with setting some general other restrictions on the type and arms of warships built under the treaty. The first reaty battleships, the Nelson class, owe their 16in main armament to an exception made to allow each main nation 1 class of 16in armed battleships, and unique design to a desire to maximize armor protection over as small an area as possible to save weight, and built on designs proposed for ships prior to the treaty like the N3 BB or G3 BC.
In 1930 then the parties met in London to follow up on the treaty system building on a previous effort in Geneva. This treaty extended the ratio limits and set tonnage allowed for newly defined Heavy (guns of 8in) Cruisers, Light(guns of 6in or less), and destroyers and subs. Then in 1936 came the Second London Conference to again extend the system. Japan however walked out as it was already in the process of aggressive expansion and had in general sought every means to get around the treaty restrictions in many ships. However the remaining signatories, mainly the UK and US, sought to make it work, in particular retaining the 35k ton individual ship limit, and now a 14in restriction on main guns, but with an escalator clause to push it to 16in should Japan not sign the new treaty. When that came to pass the new US battleships of the *North Carolina* class were able to be adjusted for the new guns, however the British *King George V* class were not and were constructed with their 14in guns. The follow on USN design in the *South Dakota* class still adhered to the tonnage limit and were essentially *North Carolina's* that traded some speed for being armored to resist shells equal to their own.
2. The post treaty battleships. The *Iowa* class then int he late 30's was still very much in the early stages of design. However a major factor was achieving a higher speed than the previous 2 Treaty classes. Thus a provision which treaty powers were allowed to use allowed them to ignore limitations if non signatories began building ships not in compliance with the limitations, namely the *Yamato* and *Bismarck* classes then early in construction. By stretching the hull, avoiding adding more armor, a newer lighter gun design, and adding 10k tons the *Iowa's* could reach 33knots, while the USN wasnt exactly thrilled it took that much just for 6 knots it was still an improvement and the ships ordered. A main motivator in the design was the fear of Japan's large number of very large cruisers, hence early designs even shaved off some armor for extra speed or guns. Japan's main battleline was even older than the USN's and while it had some very good ships it was outnumbered and had only begun a single new class of battleships whereas the USN would have 3 at once under construction and 12 shisp ordered under the Vinson and 2 Ocean Navy acts.
By the time it was appropriate to begin work on the *Iowa's* follow on the Treaty system had broken down completely with the coming of war. So all bets were off and funding had already begun to be set aside for the ships. With more info and rumors of the size of the *Yamato's* filtering out something truly massive would be needed to fight them. Enter the *Montana* adding additional armor, and a 4th turret to the *Iowa* and sacrificing speed it would not be as good a hunter and couldnt work in concert with the carriers easily, but would be the equal of anything Japan was building as the design bloated from 45k, to 58k to nearly 70k tons. The main size restriction then was that it could not fit through the Panama canal as all USN ship could at the time, but the US had developed plans immediately pre war for a new set of locks to expand the size limit which the *Montana* if completed could fit through.
As a caveat we should also note other naval treaties occuring in the interwar. Namely the Anglo-German treaty which set a 35:100 ratio of the new rearming Kriegsmarine to the ROyal Navy. ANd in particular accepted construction of new U-Boats.
[Text of the Washington Treaty](_URL_0_).
[First London](_URL_2_)
[Second London](_URL_1_) | [
"Intended armament would have been twelve Mark 7 guns in four 3-gun turrets, up from the \"Iowa\"s three 3-gun 16s. Unlike the three preceding classes of battleships, the \"Montana\" class was designed without any restrictions from treaty limitations. With an increased anti-aircraft capability and substantially thi... |
Given that the migration takes longer than their lifespan, how does the butterfly migration works? | Which butterflies are you referring to? Monarchs migrate, but migratory monarchs live longer than non-migratory ones, [link](_URL_0_), so they can travel the full distance.
Note: don't actually answer my question, I don't know anything about other butterflies. | [
"In some migratory butterflies, such as the monarch butterfly and the painted lady, no individual completes the whole migration. Instead the butterflies mate and reproduce on the journey, and successive generations travel the next stage of the migration.\n",
"Large white butterfly migration patterns are typically... |
loaded question, but what exactly is money? | Money is just a physical token that represents the abstract concept of "value". Different goods and services have different values to people.
What would you give up to get a loaf of bread? Would you give someone your car? Clearly not. What about a pack of gum? That sounds fairly reasonable.
Different good and services have different values. We use money as a way to represent value as if it were a physical item. Then, instead of trading bread for gum, we can trade bread for some token (money) that represents the value of the bread, and later trade that token for something of equal value, or save up tokens and trade them for something more valuable. It prevents us from having to constantly barter to get the goods and services that we need. | [
"BULLET::::- \"\"...but money has become by convention a sort of representative of demand; and this is why it has the name 'money' (nomisma)-because it exists not by nature but by law (nomos) and it is in our power to change it and make it useless.\"\" Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics [1133b 1].\n",
"Money is a \"me... |
During the 1973 Arab Israeli War, did Arab armies fast because it was Ramadan? Wouldn't that hurt their fighting ability? | There are exemptions to certain groups of people for fasting in Islam. These exemptions are for women who are menstruating, pregnant, the elderly who are sick or are not able to fast, those who are traveling, pre-pubescent children, mentally challenged, and those who are engaged in battle.
Some of those people who fall in the categories mentioned above (including soldiers) would either have to make up their missed fasts throughout the rest of the year or give a certain amount of money away in charity. These are the Islamic principles as outlined in Orthodox Sunni and Shi'ite Islam.
As far as Arab soldiers during the October War, as far as I know, these soldiers from exempt from fasting which didn't hinder their fighting ability. | [
"On the night of 21 March, the IDF attacked Karameh with heavy weaponry, armored vehicles and fighter jets. Fatah held its ground, surprising the Israeli military. As Israel's forces intensified their campaign, the Jordanian Army became involved, causing the Israelis to retreat in order to avoid a full-scale war. B... |
Why do depictions of black holes show a 2d accretion disk? why isn't it an accretion sphere? | [Angular momentum again](_URL_0_). It's the same reason solar systems have (most of) their planets lined up in one plane rather than orbiting all over the place (and why spiral galaxies are flat spirals). A rotating cloud of matter tends to collapse into a plane perpendicular to the axis of rotation. | [
"An accretion disk is a structure (often a circumstellar disk) formed by diffuse material in orbital motion around a massive central body. The central body is typically a star. Friction causes orbiting material in the disk to spiral inward towards the central body. Gravitational and frictional forces compress and r... |
Why did some civilizations develop a logographic writing system as compared to an alphabetic one? What causes these discrepancies? | Before answering your question, there are several things that should be pointed out.
First, the opposite of 'logographic' is not 'alphabetic' but 'phonographic'. There are phonographic scripts that are not alphabetic. Japanese *kana* is an example; every *kana* glyph more or less represents a syllable.
Second, there are no writing systems that are purely phonographic or logographic. (See *Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning* by James Unger) A purely phonographic writing system would be something like narrow IPA transcription with no punctuation and no spaces between words. On the other hand, a purely logographic writing system would resemble something like a code book, where every word would have its own symbol and there would be no pronunciation clues in the symbol. Both of these systems would be far too onerous for everyday use.
In reality all writing systems are clustered somewhere in the middle of a scale between purely phonographic and purely logographic. Toward the phonographic end of the cluster are more "phonetic" alphabets like the Spanish alphabet, in which every letter more or less stands for a phoneme in spoken Spanish. But even the Spanish writing system has logographic elements like using spaces to divide words and capital letters for proper nouns.
On the logographic end of the cluster is Chinese characters. However, even Chinese characters have phonographic characteristics. First, with very few exceptions, every character represents exactly one syllable. In addition, approximately 80% of all Chinese characters are a combination of a semantic element and a phonetic element that, respectively, give a hint as to the meaning and pronunciation of the word the character is used to write. (See *Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy* by John DeFrancis) Finally, as spelling becomes increasingly divorced from pronunciation in languages like English and French, those writing systems move toward Chinese at the logographic end of the cluster.
**Now that that's out of the way, back to your question.** First, all writing systems started out as incomplete pictographic writing systems. Pictographic writing systems are 'incomplete' because cannot be used to write ~~any~~every possible sentence or phrase in the language. The writing systems then become complete when their users discover the rebus principle, i.e. they realize that they can use the pictographs to represent only pronunciations rather than just the original referent depicted by the pictograph. To my knowledge, this discovery was only made three (correction: or more likely four) times independently in human history: (edit: once) in Central America, (edit: twice) in the Middle East, and (edit: once) in China. By using the rebus principle, the pictographic writing system ceases to be pictographic, and instead becomes a phonographic syllabic writing system. From there alphabetic and other phonographic writing systems developed. (I am going to stop here about development of writing systems in the West, Middle East, and India because it's out of my specialization. If anyone could fill in the details or correct me where I am mistaken, that would be greatly appreciated.)
However, in the Chinese writing system, the rebus principle was not the only one at play. There also appears to have been a principle that different words or morphemes should be written with different glyphs. A good example of this is character 來, which originated as a pictograph for barley (now pronounced 'mai4'), but came to be used for the word meaning 'come' (now pronounced 'lai2') which was originally pronounced the same. The word for barley then came to be written with 麥 instead of just using the same character. Other principles were used to develop more characters (detailed in *Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy* by John DeFrancis), namely doubling or tripling the original character (e.g. 木 - > word for wood/tree; 森/林 - > words for forest), or combining a sematic element with a phonetic element (e.g. semantic element 米 'rice' + phonetic element 唐 tang2 'Tang (dynasty)' - > 糖 tang2 'sugar').
**TL;DR** Complete application of the rebus principle allowed the development of phonographic writing systems. Incomplete application of the rebus principle with formulas for developing more characters led to tens of thousands of Chinese characters where generally one character represents one morpheme.
Recommended readings:
DeFrancis, John. *The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy*
DeFrancis, John. *Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems*
Unger, James. *Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning* | [
"The most important (and, to a degree, the only surviving) modern logographic writing system is the Chinese one, whose characters have been used with varying degrees of modification in varieties of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other east Asian languages. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Mayan writ... |
Is there a actual psychological concept behind desperately wanting something you can't have? If so, what is it? | I would consider this an issue of expectancy theory. The theory has three parts.
Effort-- > Performance (expectancy)
Performance-- > Outcomes (instrumentality)
Value of Outcomes (valence)
Let's say you want a promotion (high valence). Under normal circumstances, high performers get promotions (high instrumentality), and people who work hard improve their performance (high expectancy).
Your situation seems to be a lack of instrumentality, and perhaps low expectancy as well. I say perhaps because if it is TRULY unattainable, then no matter what sort of things you do (i.e. your performance), the outcome cannot be obtained (low instrumentality). Also, it would seem that high levels of effort might not even get you high performance (low expectancy), which would also affect your motivation.
Or, maybe I'm misreading your question, and you are asking what we call it when people want something more PRECISELY BECAUSE they can't have it. We must also then ask if they would want it if they could have it. There is some research in decision-making regarding how when we are choosing something among alternatives, we tend to look for negatives among options, whereas if we are given something to have, we tend to convince ourselves of the positives, since we're stuck with the outcome. It's an interesting question, but maybe I've answered your original one anyway already. | [
"Barry Long defined desire as stress or strain. It is a tension between an individual and the thing or state that that individual desires. As the thing does not feel this stress, the desiring is a one-way tension within the individual, an apparent reaching out towards the desired object or person.\n",
"While desi... |
why do i get lightheaded when i stretch my body? | Stretching tells your body to put more blood in a certain area. This decreases the pressure in other parts, like your head. Imagine your body is a long, semi-inflated balloon that's almost completely deflated at one end. When the balloon sends some of the air to the deflated portion, the rest of the balloon bets slightly less inflated as a result.
The lightheadedness is caused by a slight drop in blood pressure. Eventually, your brain gets used to it and you get back to normal thinking abilities.
IANADoctor, so there's probably a more in-depth explanation, but this is ELI5. | [
"Lightheadedness can be simply (and most commonly) an indication of a temporary shortage of blood or oxygen to the brain due to a drop in blood pressure, rapid dehydration from vomiting, diarrhea, or fever. Other causes are: altitude sickness, low blood sugar, hyperventilation, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Synd... |
Does the size of Israel's nuclear stockpile indicate that it | I like Bulliet, but I think he's missing missing something about the logic of MAD. This is partially cannibalizing off a post I made in another forum, so excuse the jocular tone (I'm not a cold war historian, but nuclear deterrence has come up in most of the political science classes I've taken as an undergraduate and graduate student--they love this stuff, so I'll at least start it off).
So this is actually more complicated than you think. Nuclear strategy is funny, and for most of the time nuclear weapons been around, the strategy has been MAD--mutually assured destruction. Let's say the ole USSR decided to finally extinguish freedom and launches a first strike on 'Murica (or vice verse). What happens? Even if the Soviets irradiated every square inch of liberty-loving loam in the lower 48, they'd still be reduced to rubble because the U.S. has tremendous second strike capability. Even if the Soviets destroyed every ICBM in its silo before they could be launched, Uncle Sam would still have enough nuclear-armed bombers in the air and nuclear submarines (and allies with ICBMs, bombers, and subs) to nuke the hell out of USSR. That's why you always hear "the U.S. (/USSR) has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world X times over"--it's not because they can, it's because they need to be able to lose a lot of their weapons and still be able to have a "second strike capability". Even if half the US's weapons were knocked out in a Soviet first strike, strategy demands that the US stockpile enough to still mount a crushing second strike. Ideally, leads to a kind of equilibrium where no one attacks each other because, well, destruction, even if it's mutually assured, isn't a great outcome.
Which gets to Israel; because the U.S. has ballistic missile armed that are always out in the water, even a perfectly surprise attack would be met with a massive second strike. This is an effective deterrence. It's impossible to "win" a nuclear against the U.S. because of this. Israel did not have nuclear-armed subs always out there until 1999, it only had bombers and missiles, so at the first warning they'd need to get the bombers in the air (so they'd survive the first strike and could make the retaliatory second strike against the Soviets or whoever attacked them) and start fueling their missiles in their silos immediately (if liquid fueled--I don't know when Israel switched to solid fuel, but liquid fuel is corrosive, so it can't just be left in the gas tank, ready to go; Israel's missiles are buried deep enough underground today to survive a first strike, but I don't know since when this was, but it might not have been until Jericho II missiles in the late 80's). Further, because of its distance hostile countries, there'd be less advanced warning for Israel to consider its options before a first strike. In planning a second strike (this is the actual deterrence part), you have to assume that a significant portion of your arsenal will be destroyed in a first strike. This where I think Bulliet is wrong: let's say Israel has 50ish targets they need to hit to deter attack, and assume that 75%ish of their arsenal will be destroyed in a first strike, they need 200 weapons (obviously the calculation is more complicated and involves probabilities and maximums and minimums, but you get the idea).
Early on, Israel would have had no where near enough weapons for a second strike. This means that the entire logic changes. Let's say the Soviets might attack, and that attack would knocks out Israel's nuclear arsenal. Well, then a first strike becomes attractive logically. An Israeli first strike would, you know, start a nuclear war, so the U.S. wouldn't be excited that this is an option. [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) has a list of stockpiles at various times and it just doesn't look like Bulliet's logic doesn't make sense--by the time Israel had enough weapons to be part of a retaliatory second strike, the U.S. already had a strong second strike capability. It wouldn't have needed Israel.
Secondly, Israel's strategic logic also involved a deterrence of conventional warfare (the U.S. strategy in Europe did, too, as the U.S. couldn't win a conventional war in Europe) because, should Israel be "driven into the sea" in a conventional war, they'd presumably launch a nuclear strike (the words allegedly welded on to the first Israel nuclear weapon were "Never Again"--the famous post-Holocaust slogan). Especially in the early years of Israeli's program, this was specifically the point of the program, not a second strike capability. Good for Israel, but possibly bad for the U.S. because if Israel is being destroyed, and starts a nuclear war--well, last just say the dominant thinking is there's no such thing as a "limited nuclear war". Many strategist believes that if Israel were to be faced with imminent destruction and launch nuclear weapons, it would be likely to bring about more or less the eschaton (someone would retaliate and then the U.S. couldn't just let one of its allies be nuked so...). Israel's military doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons is secret (officially "ambiguous"), but is widely believed to be (and remember, in nuclear strategy, you want your enemy to know when you'll launch so you don't get there):
* A successful military penetration into populated areas within Israel's post-1949 (pre-1967) borders [the "never again"]
* The destruction of the Israeli Air Force [removing second strike capability]
* The exposure of Israeli cities to massive and devastating air attacks or to possible chemical or biological attacks. [again, the never again]
* The use of nuclear weapons against Israeli territory [conventional MAD]
Notice that a lot of these involve preemptive nuclear war (that is, first strike rather than second strike). It gives Israel a lot more bargaining chips. Look at the Yom Kippur War. It's widely believed Israel had it's nuclear weapons on aircraft on alert. This was for three reasons i) deter the Arab countries from totally destroying Israel, ii) convince the Soviets to "reign in" their allies (they, like the U.S. don't necessarily believe there can be a "limited nuclear war"--if Israel launches nukes, they'd have to launch back), iii) convince the Americans to massively resupply them (if they have more supplies, they aren't near destruction, don't launch their weapons, don't start World War III). It's less clear if i. and ii. worked (ii. at least probably did), but point iii. definitely worked (see [Operation Nickel Grass](_URL_1_)). Obviously Israel was "siked" about this, but the U.S. was probably less thrilled to have their hand forced.
As another example, in the first Gulf War, U.S. made clear to Saddam that if he used biological weapons "all options were on the table" (this was understood to include nuclear options). I haven't explicitly read this, but this was in part likely related to Israel's nuclear arsenal being on full alert (I know less about this incident).
tl;dr It wouldn't really make strategic sense for Israel to have a retaliatory capacity against the USSR, because the U.S. had it's own second strike capabilities. Israel has a lot of weapons because it wants a second strike capability of its own. No one likes even an ally having nuclear weapons because it changes how you have to behave with them, especially if you know they'd use nuclear weapons in situations where it's not in your interest for them to use nuclear weapons (say, if Israel were being "driven in to the sea"). | [
"The State of Israel has never made public any details of its nuclear capability or arsenal. The following is a history of estimates by many different sources on the size and strength of Israel's nuclear arsenal. Estimates may vary due to the amount of material Israel has on store versus assembled weapons, and esti... |
Is this description of the Iroquois Confederacy accurate? | The Iroquois were the dominant and most powerful Indian force in the North East of North America from before colonization until the Revolution.
They seem to have formed their confederacy in pre-colonial times. By the time the French settled Quebec in 1608, the tribes Cartier had found in the area in 1541 were gone, driven out by the Iroquois.
The Iroquois, from their homelands in New York State, eventually raided and dominated the whole Great Lakes area west to the Mississippi.
Champlain made alliance with the Algonquin and Hurons against the Iroquois in 1609, and this was probably good for the English colonies that came later, as the Iroquois hostility with the French lasted until the Great Treaty of Montreal in 1701. This meant that the Iroquois tended to be Dutch and then English allies, and they were well supplied from Albany with firearms.
Through the colonial period, the Iroquois defeated all other Indian groups around them. They held their own against the French settlers. Only the French regulars could put them on the defensive militarily.
The Iroquois had problems keeping up the numbers of their tribes, even though they captured, enslaved, and eventually adopted thousands of the women and children of their defeated enemies. This was due to repeated small pox epidemics sweeping through the population from contact with European colonists. The Iroquois were never able to settle and populate the vast areas of North America which they dominated militarily.
Eventually, most of the confederation (but not all. This conflict did divide the Confederacy, as the Wikipedia page implies, but could state more clearly) ended up on the losing British side in the American Revolution, and many removed from New York State to Canada after that war.
Many anthropologists and historians have also been interested in the Iroquois society as an example of egalitarianism, especially women's egalitarianism, which is thought to have influenced the American Suffrage movement. The political constitution of the Iroquois is also thought to have had some influence on American constitutional thought.
Source: _URL_1_
_URL_0_
The Wikipedia page is correct in identifying the Iroquois as uniquely powerful among Eastern Indian groups. | [
"The Iroquois Confederacy was an alliance of tribes, originally from the upstate New York area consisting of the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and, later, Tuscarora. In pre-revolutionary war days, their confederacy expanded to areas from Kentucky and Virginia north. All of the members of the Confederacy... |
How much power do appliances or chargers use when not on? | Yes, a battery charger has a transformer in it, and a transformer will continue to draw current when it's not charging a battery.
It's called no load losses. _URL_0_ | [
"The charger is a small box, usually powered by a battery. It contains an electronic circuit that steps the battery voltage up to the high voltage needed for charging. The box has a fixture that requires one to press the end of the dosimeter on the charging electrode. Some chargers include a light to illuminate the... |
What happens genetically when you get an incomplete chromosome? How does this happen initially? At what point does this happen? | Incomplete chromosome can occur during gamete meiosis and result from errors such as non-disjunction. Turner syndrome for example is an incomplete X chromosome with a karyotype of 45X. For chromosome 13, the more classic presentation is Patau syndrome which is a trisomy. I'm assuming what you're referring to is a monosomy of 13. | [
"Other chromosomes, autosomes and X chromosomes in women, share their genetic material (called crossing over leading to recombination) during meiosis (a special type of cell division that occurs for the purposes of sexual reproduction). Effectively this means that the genetic material from these chromosomes gets mi... |
why is it that when you yawn and hum at the same time the sound amplifies x100 directly in your ear? | The Tensor tympani muscle.
Your mouth, ear and nose are all connected and sounds travel easily between them. There is a tube that connects the middle ear to the back of your throat ([Eustachian tube](_URL_0_))
At the top the tube is the [tensor tympani muscle](_URL_1_) and it can dampen sound like a valve.
Yawning opens the valve. That's also why yawning helps balancing pressure in the middle ear when taking off in an airplane. | [
"During a yawn, the tensor tympani muscle in the middle ear contracts, creating a rumbling noise from within the head. Yawning is sometimes accompanied, in humans and other animals, by an instinctive act of stretching several parts of the body, including arms, neck, shoulders and back.\n",
"Some individuals can v... |
Can someone give me a basic definition of the views of Whig, Revisionist and Marxist historians? | Whig and Marxist interpretations of history are both teleological. Whigs see history as a progression towards liberal capitalist democracy, while Marxists see history as the progress towards Communism. For both, the English Civil War (or English Revolution) is integral. Whigs see it as the moment when parliament overthrew primitive monarchy for Liberty and freedom. England made a decisive move from tyranny. Early historians include S.R. Gardiner and Trevelyan. Lawrence Stone continued the Whig interpretation through the 1970s and 80s (although he started as a Marxist in a generation that included the Titan E. P. Thompson). Whigs tend to stress politics over economics.
Marxists see it as the revolution of the bourgeoise. This event, however, was a necessary moment. This may seem contradictory, but it is not. History moves in stages, and capitalism must proceed communism (at least as far as British historiography is concerned). Important Marxist historians include R. H. Tawny and Hill. Marxists stress economics over politics.
Both of these interpretations have fallen out of favor, and we've witnessed the rise of revisionism. It's influenced by theories increasing rejection of the meta-narrative. They stress there was no single or ascendant cause for war, and *war or revolution was by no means inevitable.* Much of revisionist work focuses on local or county monographs that examine facts on the ground. After all, if history moves according to logical, deterministic principles then facts on the ground should adhere to Whig or Marxist ideology. They are very much concerned with how contemporaries saw the war, and that is the lens through which we should understand these events. Revisionists do no seem the development of history as teleological. Just because history happened a certain way does not mean that is the way it had to happen.
My favorite early-modern British Revisionist historian is Alastair Bellany. T.C.W Blanning is an important historian as well.
This answer is extremely simplified, and I'd love for someone at a desktop to chime in here. Writing on mobile is not east. | [
"The Whig consensus was steadily undermined during the post-World War I re-evaluation of European history, and Butterfield's critique exemplified this trend. Intellectuals no longer believed the world was automatically getting better and better. Subsequent generations of academic historians have similarly rejected ... |
Sonic booms from sub-sonic vehicles travelling past
each other | The sonic boom comes from the speed of an object with respect to the air around it. If it's moving faster than sound, the air can't "move out of the way" fast enough and builds up a shock wave. So let's apply to this thought to your system. Each of these trains is going sub sonic, and so have some pressure waves around them from pushing/dragging air along with them, but they're not shock waves. As they pass, these pressure waves will collide, and probably be very turbulent. There may be some regions that have air moving in a super-sonic region, but if we average the motion of the air all together, we have a mass of air moving each way, so it probably goes to zero on average (though that could also be pretty loud, two colliding masses of air). But again, sonic boom? I don't think so. | [
"A sonic boom is a shock-wave, or pressure disturbance, caused by the movement of the plane through the air, much like the wave produced by the bow of a ship as it moves through water: just as the bow wave is produced for the entire journey of the ship, so the sonic shockwave occurs throughout the duration of a sup... |
what does the rpmx1000 meter in a car show? | It's called a tachometer, and it depends on what car you drive, but most just show how many rotations per minute the engine is doing. | [
"Actual production cars yielded 1/4 mile results in the high 14 to 15.0 second/98 mph range (sources: \"Motor Trend Magazine\", July '73 and Roger Huntington's book, \"American Supercar\") – results that are consistent with a 3,850 pound car (plus driver) and the engine equipped with a 4-barrel Rochester Quadrajet ... |
what would china, japan, or wherever do if they wanted to collect u.s. debt? | They would buy the government bonds and then wait for their money. That's how it works. You can't just go, "Give me my money!" just like how a bank can't give you a loan and then a week later decide it wants all $200k back. | [
"A significant number of economists and analysts dismiss any and all concerns over foreign holdings of United States government debt denominated in U.S. Dollars, including China's holdings. Critics of the \"excessive\" amount of US debt held by China acknowledge that the \"biggest effect of a broad-scale dump of US... |
Do we just not have the technology do bring something down to a temperature of 0°K, or is it a matter of scientific impossibility? | It would be a violation of the Third Law of Thermodynamics. | [
"Modern materials however are often not designed to handle such temperatures, especially since modern spacecraft often use \"commercial off the shelf\" components. Problems encountered include nanoscale features only a few atoms thick, plastic packaging, and conductive epoxy attachment methods. Also many instrument... |
compartmentalization. | You are going to have to be more [specific.](_URL_0_) | [
"\"Compartmentalization\" refers to the separation of spaces in the living system that allow for separate environments for necessary chemical processes. Compartmentalization is necessary to protect the concentration of the ingredients for a reaction from outside environments.\n",
"When referring to engineering, c... |
why can food or drink of temperatures that are clearly sufficient to scald my lips seem to elicit no pain response whatsoever once within the mouth? | When you sip a hot drink, two important things happen;
1. You draw air quickly over the surface of the hot liquid, cooling it more quickly than if the air against the surface were still, and
2. You separate out a much smaller volume of hot liquid than if you were to simply pour it into your mouth like a glass of water. This means that as you spread a small volume of hot liquid over a large area of your mouth, only a small bit of heat gets transferred to any portion of your mouth, ideally not enough to burn you. | [
"Some causes of a burning mouth sensation may be accompanied by clinical signs in the mouth or elsewhere on the body. For example, burning mouth pain may be a symptom of allergic contact stomatitis. This is a contact sensitivity (type IV hypersensitivity reaction) in the oral tissues to common substances such as so... |
What causes sunlight breaking through the leaves in a tree, to resolve in such distinct circular patterns when it hits the ground? | The gaps in the leaves are acting as very wide pinhole cameras, projecting blurry images of the sun. During a partial solar eclipse, sunlight breaking through trees resolves into [crescent shaped patters.](_URL_0_) | [
"When sun scald appears on trees it is most frequently a result of reflected light off the snow during winter months. The damage in this case will appear as sunken or dead bark on the trunk of the tree, then later in the tree’s life the bark might fall away revealing dead tissue in the tree's cambium layer. This da... |
If the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon, is the Mississippi River doing the same? | Canyon formation fundamentally requires uplift. This can mean either vertical movement of rock with respect to a fixed reference frame (e.g. sea level) or a drop in the base level to which the river drains. The materials that the river flows over can play a role, with generally more competent (i.e. resistant to erosion) rocks promoting canyon development as steeper walls can be maintained, but without uplift, a canyon will not form. Comparing the Colorado and the Mississippi, the fundamental difference is that the Colorado Plateau, through which the Grand Canyon has incised, has experienced significant uplilft, where as the center of the North American continent is not experiencing significant uplift. | [
"There are multiple explanations for the origin of Unaweep Canyon. In the late 19th century, members of the Hayden Survey recognized the oddity of a canyon with two outlets, and suggested it was carved by the ancestral Colorado or Gunnison river. Many others have also suggested it was carved by either the Gunnison ... |
Roman/Military Historians: Who can I attribute this anecdote to? | This story comes not from a Roman but from one of Rome's most formidable early enemies, namely Pyrrhus of Epirus. If you've ever heard the expression "Pyrrhic victory" then you've heard of him. From 280 to 275 BC he prosecuted an on - and - off war with Rome, invading on behalf of a southern Italian Greek city called Tarentum. In the several battles Pyrrhus fought with Rome, he achieved tactical victories but suffered heavy losses that undermined his expedition.
This anecdote in question is found in Plutarch, a Greek intellectual of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD who wrote biographies of great men. In the relevant passage, Pyrrhus is talking with a learned man named Cineas about his forthcoming war with Rome
> It was this Cineas, then, who, seeing that Pyrrhus was eagerly preparing an expedition at this time to Italy, and finding him at leisure for the moment, drew him into the following discourse. "The Romans, O Pyrrhus, are said to be good fighters, and to be rulers of many warlike nations; if, then, Heaven should permit us to conquer these men, how should we use our victory?" And Pyrrhus said: "Thy question, O Cineas, really needs no answer; the Romans once conquered, there is neither barbarian nor Greek city there which is a match for us, but we shall at once possess all Italy, the great size and richness and importance of which no man should know better than thyself." After a little pause, then, Cineas said: "And after taking Italy, O King, what are we to do?" And Pyrrhus, not yet perceiving his intention, replied: "Sicily is near, and holds out her hands to us, an island abounding in wealth and men, and very easy to capture, for all is faction there, her cities have no government, and demagogues are rampant now that Agathocles is gone." "What thou sayest," replied Cineas, "is probably true; but will our expedition stop with the taking of Sicily?" "Heaven grant us," said Pyrrhus, "victory and success so far; and we will make these contests but the preliminaries of great enterprises. For who could keep his hands off Libya, or Carthage, when that city got within his reach, a city which Agathocles, slipping stealthily out of Syracuse and crossing the sea with a few ships, narrowly missed taking? And when we have become masters here, no one of the enemies who now treat us with scorn will offer further resistance; there is no need of saying that." "None whatever," said Cineas, "for it is plain that with so great a power we shall be able to recover Macedonia and rule Greece securely. But when we have got everything subject to us, what are we going to do?" Then Pyrrhus smiled upon him and said: "We shall be much at ease, and we'll drink bumpers, my good man, every day, and we'll gladden one another's hearts with confidential talks." And now that Cineas had brought Pyrrhus to this point in the argument, he said: "Then what stands in our way now if we want to drink bumpers and while away the time with one another? Surely this privilege is ours already, and we have at hand, without taking any trouble, those things to which we hope to attain by bloodshed and great toils and perils, after doing much harm to others and suffering much ourselves."
While Plutarch is an important source he was, by his own admission, writing moralistic stories more than he was composing serious history. His work is dotted with fanciful anecdotes like this and it's probable that many didn't happen. Even so, they provide windows into the minds of the men Plutarch wrote about and this one is particularly indicative of Pyrrhus' nature. The man was relentless in his pursuit of glory and while his many wild adventures ended in failure, his drive and ambition are truly impressive.
If you want to learn more about Pyrrhus then you can read Plutarch's full biography of him [here](_URL_0_). | [
"The following is a list of all known references to the battle from the literary sources of classical antiquity. Though the account provided in the \"Roman History\" is the most detailed of these, Dio Cassius' almost two-century removal from the event and his use of detail mentioned by no earlier author render it m... |
why electricity from fish like electric eel doesn't electrocute everything in sea considering salt water is a good conductor of electricity? | If you throw a rock into the ocean in california the ripples dont make it to japan. They get smaller each ripple till they are gone. Each time the electricity jumps from one salt molecule to another it gets weaker till theres nothing left.
Pure water doesn't conduct electricity at all. Its the salt or impurities in the water that does. | [
"BULLET::::- Strongly electric marine fish gives low voltage, high current electric discharges. In salt water, a small voltage can drive a large current limited by the internal resistance of the electric organ. Hence, the electric organ consists of many electrocytes in parallel.\n",
"Electric fish are capable of ... |
How often did soldiers in WWI go "over the top?" | Large assaults were rare, but that didn't mean the soldiers would be safe in their trenches. There was constant patrolling, and work in the wire in no mans land, as well as sniping and artillery harassment, which meant that even in quiet sectors units would suffer regular casualties. There was always the risk of enemy raids on exposed positions and working parties.
When left alone by higher command, opposing units would mostly leave each other alone after a while (Tony Ashworth showed this in his study [Trench warfare, 1914-1918: The live and let live system](_URL_0_)). The Higher Commands, Division, Corps and Army Commanders and their staffs were aware of this un-aggressive behaviour, and in some cases used to analyse casualty statistics to detect it. As a counter, raids or patrols were often ordered to foster the correct "offensive spirit" in the troops. | [
"BULLET::::- Many of the generals of World War I had experience in combat, but only from the days before trench warfare became widespread. Because of this, officers lacked the experience that in the past had made it viable to command troops from a distance.\n",
"He served as a Captain in the 5th Royal Scots durin... |
Are there any poisons/toxins which, if taken separately, are fatal, but if taken simultaneously, are not? | Atropine and physostigmine, in the right combination.
Physostigmine causes dangerously high levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Atropine prevents cells from sensing acetylcholine.
Atropine is actually used as an antidote for acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (like physostigmine and sarin), but it is poisonous in its own right. | [
"Some other toxins have no known antidote. For example, the poison aconitine – a highly poisonous alkaloid derived from various aconite species – has no antidote, and as a result, is often fatal if it enters the human body in sufficient quantities.\n",
"Some poisons are also toxins, which is any poison produced b... |
How do we know the history of the Earth's CO2 levels? | For the most part, because we know nothing would have interacted with the sample since then. Logically, then, any CO2 in the sample must have been there when it formed. As for the other side of the equation, figuring out the relationship between CO2 in a sample and the CO2 in the atmosphere at the time, we can recreate the formation conditions in a lab and measure the outcome. | [
"The data collection started by Keeling and continued at Mauna Loa is the longest continuous record of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the world and is considered a reliable indicator of the global trend in the mid-level troposphere. Keeling's research showed that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide grew ... |
how efficient are igloos? are they really that helpful for anything other than a fragile shelter? | I see a lot of comments here mentioning making an igloo out of ice. This isn't really correct. A proper igloo uses blocks of snow, which has a ton of minuscule air-pockets in them. This makes snow an excellent insulator. You would also prefer to put the entrance tunnel lower than the sleeping space. This way as the air inside the igloo is warmed by your body temperature it rises to the top, and not out of the structure. It also stops cold air from entering.
In an ideally built igloo one could expect a temperature of about 0 degrees celsius.(32f) And that's a significant improvement if it's say -25 outside.(-13f) | [
"Recently, there has also been use of eco-efficiency in more non-traditional ways, such as a use in banks to integrate environmental criteria into their credit-approval process; looking at “eco-integrated economic risks of a customer.” And is also being implemented as marketing advantages where, “eco-efficient choi... |
what's the biggest difference between judaism and christianity besides the matter of jesus? | I am Jewish and went to Hebrew school 3 days per week to learn about my religion and prepare for my Bar Mitzvah.
We learned the biblical stories of Adam, Even, Cain, Abel, Moses, Isaac, Jacob, Noah etc. We learned about the holidays - Hanukkah, Passover, Sukkot, Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Purim.
All of this content is from the Old Testament, pre-Jesus. In fact we learned nothing about Jesus or his followers or Christianity.
As for the afterlife, we learned nothing of this. As far as I was taught, Jews do not believe in Heaven or Hell.
Jews believe the Messiah will arrive at some point. It's not that we are taught that Jesus is not the Messiah, we are simply not taught anything about him.
So from my perspective, there are similarities in that both religions share the old Testament, but then move in different directions after those events. | [
"Belief in Jesus as deity, son of God, or even a non-divine Christ/Messiah or Prophet (as in Islam), is held as incompatible with Judaism by all Jewish religious movements. In a 2013 Pew Forum study, 60% of American Jews said that belief in Jesus as the Messiah was not \"compatible with being Jewish\", while 34% fo... |
In the days of early Christianity was it commonplace to have more than one church of the same sect within the same city/municipality/urban area? | I am not sure that "church" at that time had the same meaning or existed in the same concept that you are using it. It wasn't until after Constantine that Christian services would have been held in public building across the empire. Prior to that, services would have been held mostly in homes, in private, and largely in secret. So if by "church" you mean building where services were held, I think it would be equally true to say that there were many as to say that there were none. Sorry I have no sources to cite. | [
"There is a sole meeting of the early Christian Church the New Testament period which has been generally regarded as a council and which is included in the traditional Catholic reckoning as the first of the ecumenical councils, whereas other denominations usually count the First Council of Nicaea as such.\n",
"Th... |
How do disinfectants and sanitizers kill germs but not human cells? | The hand sanitizers are mostly ethanol. It kills cells by denaturing the proteins and removing the water from the cell. They would kill human cells, but the outer epidermis is mostly dead cells, so there is nothing to kill. If you ever put hand sanitizer on a cut, it would sting like the dickens, but on the regular hands, there is no exposed area. Meanwhile the bacteria are on the surface and exposed to the ethanol, so they are killed. The one nice thing is that the bacteria can't really evolve a way to combat this unlike antibiotics.
Other disinfectants might operate on a particular metabolic pathway present only in bacteria, or bind to their cell membranes so it kills them but doesn't impact the human cells. | [
"Sanitizers are substances that simultaneously clean and disinfect. Disinfectants kill more germs than sanitizers. Disinfectants are frequently used in hospitals, dental surgeries, kitchens, and bathrooms to kill infectious organisms.\n",
"A perfect disinfectant would also offer complete and full microbiological ... |
Physics - Frame dragging and space/time? | 1. No. Nothing ever moves faster than light; nothing made of matter moves as fast as light.
2. No. There are some models that suggest closed timelike curves could exist inside the *event horizon,* but not outside of it. And those models are probably not physically significant anyway.
3. I don't understand the question. Try again?
4. No. That's just plain old conservation of angular momentum. | [
"Frame-dragging may be illustrated most readily using the Kerr metric, which describes the geometry of spacetime in the vicinity of a mass \"M\" rotating with angular momentum \"J\", and Boyer–Lindquist coordinates, where an unphysical, but mathematically more elegant radial coordinate \"r\" (see the link for the t... |
Stepping up two stairs at once | Energy from going up the stairs:
Mass*gravity*height=Energy
There's no way to use up more energy in the pure sense of climbing stairs. Same height, same mass, same gravity.
So why is going up the stairs two at a time harder? Well, let's say you burn 6 Calories climbing 12 stairs. If you take one at a time, you're going through 0.5 Calories a step. If you take 2 at a time, you're going through 1 Calorie a step.
Now, if you take the same amount of time to go up the stairs by doing them one at a time compared to two at a time, you may be using more power to do them two at a time.
What's power?
power=energy/time
Now, the overall power will still be the same for both cases since the total energy is the same and the total time is the same (let's say 12 seconds). It's just that when you're taking those double steps, you're probably doing a quick leg burst, then going slower when you reach that step, then a quick burst...etc. So, during the quick bursts, you could be doing something like 200 watts (of power), then slower you're at 100 watts.
Assuming equal time in between bursts and slower section, average watt (power)=(200+100)/2=150 watts.
I feel like my answer is a bit fuzzy still.
[I drew a graph!](_URL_0_) Think of the humps as stairs.
Now, the humps are probably different, but the idea is that you still may have the same average watt output (so you take the stairs in the same time), but you'll have to use more power to take 2 at a time. What health benefits would you get? I'd suspect you'd get stronger tendons+muscles due to this higher power output needed. Now! That is a very, very unsupported assumption. It's also possible taking 2 at a time could be awful for your bio mechanics and may injure your legs.
But in the end, you'll probably end going faster if you're doing 2 stairs at a time, meaning you'll have a higher average watt output and probably have better health for doing that.
I can't believe I just analyzed walking up stairs.
| [
"Just as in ascending stairs, two crutches or a cane may be used to descend a flight of stairs, and use of a walker is not recommended for climbing more than 2 or 3 steps. Both crutches should be used if the handrail is unstable or if the two crutches are not able to be held securely in one hand. The crutches or ca... |
What did the myth of werewolves stem from? | [This](_URL_0_) was a previous discussion addressing this topic. The idea of people being able to change into animals is ancient in western Europe. Understanding the origin of the belief is as unapproachable as understanding the origin of any other belief in the supernatural. It is easier to talk about the occurrence of the belief geographically and historically. As you'll see with the link, the original belief was that the transformation was voluntary.
If you have more questions, let me know and I'll do what I can. | [
"In folklore the werewolves represent the cycle of legends of essentially shamanistic content - a man turning into animal and reverse - that were modified by the xenophobic in-group/out-group hatred and the witch-hunt of the Baroque era church's inquisition, fighting against the loss of power after the scientific p... |
If Water Evaporates at 100 Celsius, How does the Ground Dry Off In the Sunlight? | Water boils at 100C. Water evaporates at any temperature, and will even evaporate as ice (actually, it's called sublimation).
wikipedia: _URL_0_ | [
"Under certain conditions, such as when the boiling temperature of water is reached, a net evaporation will always occur during standard atmospheric conditions regardless of the percent of relative humidity. This immediate process will dispel massive amounts of water vapor into a cooler atmosphere.\n",
"After wat... |
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