question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
|---|---|---|
Why are humans not symmetric (internally)? How can the information in our DNA distinguish left from right? | This will article will likely be over your head , _URL_0_, but someone may come in later and give a better TL;DR (Im short on time atm).
However, long story short, very early in embryogenesis, the embryo will have some cells that are roughly along the midline. These cells have cilia which beat or push in a predetermined direction (either left or right, i dont recall which off the top of my head). The effect of this is that at this stage, certain precurser cells to say the heart, are pushed across the midline and end up thus being on the "correct" side of the body.
This is also why often times patients who have diseases which cause dysfunction of their cilia in organs like their lungs will also have Situs inversus (Organs being on the wrong side of the body). | [
"Most humans are right-handed. Many are also right-sided in general (that is, they prefer to use their right eye, right foot and right ear if forced to make a choice between the two). The reasons for this are not fully understood, but it is thought that because the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain controls the... |
Good Books on Tenochtitlan? | I recommend Barbara E. Mundy's recent book *The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City* and also her article ["Mapping the Aztec Capital: The 1524 Nuremberg Map of Tenochtitlan, Its Sources and Meanings."](_URL_0_) | [
"The book is a work of historical fiction set in the late pre-Columbian age in Mexico City and depicts the daily life of the ancient Aztec people, both the commoners (servants, traders and warriors) and the upper classes (priests, nobles, and government officials). The \"Mexican\" section contains a great deal of M... |
How has the awkwardness of puberty and early teen years been viewed at different points in history? | I'd say a good deal of the awkwardness is relatively modern. You basically didn't have teenagers at all before the 19th century. You could argue that 'adolescence' is a social construct that arose when countries started to force people over the age of 13 or so to go to school. Suddenly, the West found itself with an entirely new type of person - a person who was a biological adult for all intents and purposes, but who was deemed not yet ready to be a contributing member of society. As a result, you get all the social quirks you associate with teenagers - questioning authority, trying on different identities, experimentation, rebellion, and so forth. None of this, of course, is helped by the puberty situation. | [
"\"\"Puberty had been unkind. Whereas it had come in the night and left the other boys with chiselled, stubbly chins and deep masculine voices, I'd been left with a huge pair of knockers and the voice of a pensioner.\"\"\n",
"During adolescence, there are gradual shifts in young people's attitudes and behaviours ... |
why can i keep butter at room temperature for days at a time, but not cream, when butter is made from cream? | The butter you're leaving on the counter is salted butter, which is therefore preserved. If you did that with unsalted butter, it'll spoil. You can prevent that if you store your butter in a [french butter dish](_URL_0_). It's an extremely simple device, The lid holds the butter in the cup. It's butter, it'll stick in there. The basin has just a little bit of water in it. When you place the lid on the basin, the water creates an air tight seal around the cup. It'll keep your butter fresh for a month. | [
"Butter is made from cream that has been separated from whole milk and then cooled; fat droplets clump more easily when hard rather than soft. However, making good butter also depends upon other factors, such as the fat content of the cream and its acidity.\n",
"Clarified butter is butter with almost all of its w... |
why do some plastic surgeries end up with the subject not being able to make expressions ? are there natural-looking procedures ? | A lot of people get botox which is literally paralyzing nerves. It's most common in the forehead so the person can't make proper expressions
The other reason is damage to the nerves which is also fairly common with any surgery although it often is temporary | [
"While many of these procedures are done for purely cosmetic benefit, many plastic surgeons work on these features (giving them a more normal appearance), while performing a surgery to improve function as the result of a congenital deformity.\n",
"Depending on the tumor type and location, open surgery may be pref... |
Have historians come to a consensus yet on the extent of the impact that stirrups had in Europe? | The “Great Stirrup Controversy,” was instigated by American historian Lynn White, Jr., in his 1966 book *Medieval Technology and Social Change.* White believed that, without stirrups, a mounted warrior was limited to only hurling javelins and shooting arrows, and that the stirrup enabled mounted heavy shock combat. In turn, this military innovation allowed Charles Martel and the Carolingian Dynasty in the 8th and 9th Centuries to dominate Europe militarily, and as a result prompted Martel to plant the seeds of feudalism to ensure loyalty, military support, and a continuous supply of horses for his cavalry.
However, the stirrup is far less important than one tends to assume. The popular assumption tends to be that stirrups provide a rigid platform, without which horsemanship is, if not impossible, a feat of elite skill. The stirrup, though, makes very few things categorically possible. What the stirrup does is make them easier. This common misconception, I would posit, is likely the result of scholars with little to no equitation experience. Indeed, White’s description of one’s seat on horseback without stirrups -- clinging by pressure of the knees -- belies a distinct lack of time spent in the saddle.
While the stirrup may have helped implement feudalism, it did not bring Europe into feudalism. The use of the stirrup correlated with the increased deployment of Frankish cavalry. However, the stirrup did not cause this increase. The Frankish cavalry coalesced after Charles Martel’s victory over Abd-er-Rahman at the Battle of Poiters in 732, where they encountered high quality Middle Eastern bloodstock that was used to revive the European horse breeding culture that had collapsed along with the Roman Empire. Nor did the stirrup create a radical shift in battlefield tactics that enabled the earliest vestiges of feudalism. Many of the battlefield tactics attributed to the stirrup, such as heavy shock cavalry, and the use of swords and lances, had already been used for centuries, or had been employed in a similar form.
The earliest record of stirrup-like equipment is found in carvings from the Deccan Plateau in India that date to the 2nd Century BCE. These implements were not true stirrups, but leather or rope loops that riders would stick their big toes into. These loops only kept the rider’s leg in its correct position; riders were not able to comfortably put weight into the loop.
Toe loops did not spread outside of India. What we’d recognize as stirrups originated in China, and our earliest depictions of these first stirrups in art date to 300 AD. They were perhaps invented to narrow the skill gap between Chinese and Nomadic horsemen. In fact, we have no evidence that Hunnish horsemen had stirrups.
The Avars brought the stirrup into Europe, where it influenced the Byzantine cavalry. Stirrups are mentioned in the late 6th Century AD *Strategikon* of Maurice as necessary equipment for the horse soldier. Sassanid Persians adopted the stirrup in the 7th Century, and Arabs adopted the stirrup in 694 on the orders of the general Al Muhallab. The adoption of the stirrup was not universal. Berber cavalry often continued to ride bareback until the 10th Century, and some Syrian tribes went without stirrups until the 11th Century.
The Franks likely adopted the stirrup directly from the Avars, perhaps in the late 7th Century. Stirrups started to show up in the graves of Frankish warriors around the reign of Charles Martel. However, of 700 Frankish warrior graves dated between the 7th and 9th Centuries, less than two percent contain stirrups. Other evidence suggests that stirrups were not universal in Early Medieval Europe. Our first pictorial evidence of stirrups in Europe, St. Gallen’s Psalter -- dated to the late 9th Century -- does not depict every rider with stirrups, yet depicts the arms and armor of the men on horseback as identical. Additionally, the revision of the Salian Frankish code of civil law lists compensation values for military equipment, including horses, saddles, and bridles. However, it makes no reference of stirrups, even though it was written in enough detail to list swords apart from their sheaths. Similarly, Rabanus Maurus, a 9th Century Bishop of Mainz, translated the Roman military treatise *De re militari,* editing it to only include those parts that were relevant to contemporary soldiers. One of the sections that Rabanus maintained was explicit instruction on how to jump on and off the horse without the aid of stirrups:
> The recruits at first try to mount unarmed, then they mount carrying shields and finally very large pole weapons. And this practice was so thorough that they were forced to learn how to jump on and off their horses not only from the right but from the left and from the rear, and in addition they learnt to jump on and off their horses even with an unsheathed sword.
Mounting with stirrups, even with arms, takes no special training, and can be taught to a beginner in a matter of minutes.
The stirrup, then, was not omnipresent during Carolingian expansion and empire. Nor does the stirrup facilitate stereotypically medieval cavalry tactics. Mounted shock troops, for instance, had been deployed since antiquity. Heavy cavalry first truly emerged during the Roman-Seleucid War in 2nd Century BC, although horses had been armored to some degree for one or two centuries before that. The Roman historian Livy describes the mail armor that covered the Seleucid shock cavalry in comparison with the other horses in the Seleucid army:
> On the right of the phalanx...were linked up 3000 cavalry, clad in mail armour and known as "cataphracti." These were supported by the "agema," another body of cavalry numbering about 1000; they were a select force, consisting of Medes and men drawn from many tribes in that part of the world….Then came the Dahae, mounted archers, 1200 strong....On the left of the phalanx were...3000 cataphracti and the king's personal cavalry, 1000 strong, with somewhat slighter protection for themselves and their horses, but otherwise closely resembling the cataphracti, made up mostly of Syrians with an admixture of Phrygians and Lydians.
The weight of head to hoof armor limited the horse’s maneuverability and endurance, such that heavy shock cavalry were deployed in massed charges. Despite the expense of heavy shock cavalry, in terms of both horses and armor, cataphracts were successfully deployed across the Middle East and the Mediterranean for almost 1,000 years.
White states accurately that cavalrymen fielded spears and lances before the invention of the stirrup. However, his description of what he perceived to be their only usage -- held to deliver blows overhand -- is not corroborated by modern testing. Using a 4.87 meter long reconstruction of a Macedonian lance, experienced horseman John Duckham, while riding bareback, was able to strike a test dummy at the canter and retrieve the lance, regardless of whether or not the lance was held overhand or underhand. Although fully couching the lance under the armpit was an impossibility due to the lack of saddle, Duckham remarked that the lance was even easier to handle underhand than overhand. A formation of Macedonian horsemen wielding their lances in such a way would have turned them into the equivalent of a mounted phalanx, providing a theory about the success of Alexander the Great’s companion cavalry.
*(Continued below)* | [
"The Great Stirrup Controversy is the academic debate about the Stirrup Thesis, the theory that feudalism in Europe developed largely as a result of the introduction of the stirrup to cavalry in the 8th century CE. It relates to the hypothesis suggested by Lynn Townsend White Jr. in his 1962 book, \"Medieval Techno... |
If I always double a bet on roulette, can I beat the house long term? | 1. Casinos usually impose a maximum bet you can make. If they won't let you bet more than, say, $300, then this strategy isn't going to work about 1/32 (3ish%) of the time.
2. Even if you find a casino with no maximum bet, you'll gain $10 every time you win and go bust 0.9% of the time. You're likely to go bust after using this strategy only 77 times (since (1 - 0.009) ^ 77 = 0.4985), and you'll have only made $770 in the meantime. This is to say, if you use this strategy 77 times, about half the time you'll be broke and half the time you'll have $1890, for an expected outcome of $945. You'd be better off not playing at all.
So, this is a subtly bad idea. You can beat the house long term if 1) the casino has no maximum bet limit, and 2) you have unlimited reserves and never go bust. If either or both of these conditions are violated (and they both are), you won't beat the house in the long run. Casinos stake their business on making sure that there isn't a way to beat them in the long term. | [
"In my opinion this argument is about as logical as saying that if one had been told, on entering a casino, that the odds on No 7 coming up at roulette were only 1 in 37, one would have gone away and come back next week or gone to a different casino. The question is whether one would have taken the opportunity to a... |
Why do American high schools and universities use the nomenclature "freshman, sophomore, junior, senior" instead of, e.g., 1st-year, 2nd-year, etc.? How did that develop? | A reasonable trawl through the Internet will inform you that American universities borrowed the terminology from Oxford and Cambridge, where they had come to describe different levels of "sophester" or sophist--someone who *thinks they are* wise. (Sophomore adds on either a simple Latin -or 'operator' ending, or *possibly* Greek *moros*/fool--either way, the meaning is clear; the adjective "sophomoric" means immature). In the sixteenth century, *sophister* sometimes had an additional connotation of someone who takes money for teaching wisdom instead of ~~being an exploited adjunct~~ living a pure life of the mind or something--basically, a philosopher who sold out. This would track with the use of more advanced students employed to tutor earlier ones.
What the OED and blog posts *won't* tell you, on the other hand, is why the labels for students are inherently *insults*.
Medieval universities incubated a tradition that early modern ones would carry on with pride: periodically awful student behavior. (Also, you know, excellent academics & drool-worthy libraries & the foundation for modern scientific research & c & c.) Most infamous is student violence, of course--right along with universities' determination to shelter their own from charges of murder and rape.
But more to the point with the classifications is that university students also had a reputation for living up to a somewhat lower standard than what Robert Lowth wanted to see in Oxford:
> [A place] where a liberal pursuit of knowledge, and a genuine freedom
of thought was raised encouraged and pushed forward by
example, by commendation, and by authority
and somewhat more along the lines of what Edward Gibbon (yes, [our Edward Gibbon!](_URL_0_)) remembered:
> To the university of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation;
and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months
at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the
most idle and unprofitable of my whole life...
> In the
university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors
have for these many years given up altogether even the
pretence of teaching.
> As
a gentleman commoner, I was admitted to the society of the
fellows, and fondly expected that some questions of literature
would be the amusing and instructive topics of their discourse.
Their conversation stagnated in a round of college business,
Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal...The names of Wenman and Dashwood were more frequently
pronounced, than those of Cicero and Chrysostom.
The point isn't that there were no deeply studious students making serious academic gains of their own and scientific progress overall, it's the *reputation* they had for being--well, *sophists*: more concerned with the social life of debate and politics and looking/acting smart to each other, than living up to some lofty ideal. Oxford opened its first coffeehouse in 1650. And by early modern coffeehouse, we should mean something like a literary salon--a place where the literati would gather to discuss intellectual topics and current events.
Of course, to contemporary eyes, this was a great deficit from what it should be. A 1901 investigation of Oxford in the 18th century summed up its findings in this description of freshman, freshly-minted college men:
> We see the public schoolman, just freed from the rod of
Busby’s successors, strutting about town for a week or so
before entrance, courting his schoolfellows’ envy...swaggering
at coffee-houses, and giving himself a scholar’s airs at the
bookshops.
and things did not improve over the years:
> A month or two sees them metamorphosed into complete smarts...The "smart's" breakfast is scarcely over by ten.
It's important to keep in mind that these attitudes were not only *external* in the sense of town-gown relations or alumni making a point about the quality of English universities compared to continental ones. Student university hazing could be absolutely brutal. Internal university hierarchy, built upon the idea that students with less experience were complete no-nothing fools, reigned supreme.
Most infamously, there's a late medieval sort of "Latin textbook" for university students that consists of a series of dialogues we think were meant to teach students useful Latin vocabulary for surviving uni daily life. One of the settings is a violent and humiliating initiation ritual in which the freshman or *beanus* is made into an animal that must be tamed. Well, scholars will continue to dispute whether in the 15th century this was a literary fantasy that drew on a solid tradition of hazing. On the other hand, there seems to be fairly solid evidence that early modern students at some universities took the *description* as *prescription*--and performed the hazing ceremony.
The straightforward etymologies of sophomore, junior (sophister), and senior (sophister) from Greek *sophia* and Greek/Latin *sophister*, in other words, aren't really the interesting part of the story--and a much funnier one for those of us who never attended college or have already graduated. | [
"Among high-school and college students in the United States, the words \"freshman\" (or the gender-neutral terms \"frosh\" or \"first year\", sometimes \"freshie\"), \"sophomore\", \"junior\" and \"senior\" refer to the first, second, third, and fourth years respectively. For first-year students, \"frosh\" and \"f... |
what is fractional reserve banking? | Fractional reserve banking, at its core, just means that when you give me $100 to keep in my vaults (me being the banker), I only have to keep a fraction of it, say $10. The other $90 I can invest in loans. In full-reserve banking I have to keep *all $100*. Let's expand this example though. Lets say ten people each put in ten dollars (the numbers will still be $10 "in reserves" and $90 left over for loans). Now, at any point, only one person can ever take out all of their money ($10), and this is one of the obvious problems that those against fractional reserve banking state. The central bank, like the Federal Reserve, can give loans to banks if they are in desperate need of money in order to avoid running out of cash, and there are other things like deposit insurance from the FDIC which are intended to protect depositors from losing any of their money.
The more complicated issue with fractional reserve banking is that, in a way, it actually *creates more money*. You see, when A puts $100 in, I can loan $90 to B, and B can then put his money in my bank and I can loan out $81 to C, and so on and so forth. What ends up happening is that the money that is in their accounts is more than the actual cash currency (physical bills). This is something called *money multiplication* and it is one of the more serious dangers that skeptics of fractional reserves point out. | [
"Fractional-reserve banking allows banks to create credit in the form of bank deposits, which represent immediate liquidity to depositors. The banks also provide longer-term loans to borrowers, and act as financial intermediaries for those funds. Less liquid forms of deposit (such as time deposits) or riskier class... |
Does the length and shape of a lightning strike affect the pitch and/or timbre of its thunder? | The pitch and timbre of thunder from a lightning strike is more affected by the surrounding topological features, such as hills, vegetation, and valleys. Anthropogenic structures made of varying materials can absorb shock waves or sound waves well, or poorly. They may also reflect sound back and forth, such as when you hear a lightning strike on the street of NYC even if you're on the west side looking east, as it strikes near the UN Embassy, for example.
Lightning is a rapid expansion of gases caused by rapid heating. This heat is generated by the electricity generated by the potential difference from the negatively-charged bottom of the cloud and the positively-charged surface. Lightning does not necessarily take the path of least resistance either. Shape would have little to do with the sound, as would length. Distance and surrounding topography are much more important for determining changes in pitch and/or timbre in the sound of thunder after a lightning stroke. | [
"Thunder is the sound caused by lightning. Depending on the distance from and nature of the lightning, it can range from a sharp, loud crack to a long, low rumble (brontide). The sudden increase in pressure and temperature from lightning produces rapid expansion of the air within and surrounding the path of a light... |
Did the Confederacy ever try to establish overseas colonies, or did it have any such plans? | During the 1840s-1850s period, there were several 'filibustres' the most famous of which was William Walker, who briefly won control of Nicaragua.
Senator Jefferson Davis favored annexing even more of the territory of Mexico in 1848, but his proposal was defeated in the US Senate.
So most of the adventurism/colonialism was more of a component of pre-Confederate slave owners.
| [
"British reaction to the Confederacy was mixed. Originally, the British had little interest in directly administering the region themselves and some felt a self-governing European style state was a positive development. However, other British representatives in the region and in London saw the Confederacy as a dang... |
"due process of law," "substantive due process" | Procedural Due Process = Did the government go through the correct *procedures* when depriving you of your life, liberty or property? Example: if you were thrown in prison for life without being given a trial, this violates PDP.
Substantive Due Process: Does the government have adequate *reason* to deprive you of your life, liberty or property? Example: if the government threw you in jail because you were the 5th person to walk past the police station that morning, that is a violation of SDP, even if they gave you a full trial and went through all the correct procedures.
Hope this helps! The examples are off the top of my head so as to keep it simple, so someone let me know if they're incorrect.
Source: My Con Law outline. | [
"In United States constitutional law, substantive due process is a principle allowing courts to protect certain fundamental rights from government interference, even if procedural protections are present or the rights are not specifically mentioned elsewhere in the US Constitution. Courts have identified the basis ... |
what's the point of the hidden track at the end of a lot of albums? | As a musician who has been guilty of the "secret track", I guess I can only speak for my motivations and what I know from musician friends who have done it.
It's sort of hard to explain to younger people, because today's world is all about single songs, shuffle play, mashups, mixes and remixes, but to a more oldschool musician, an album is a pretty painstaking process. Everything is obsessed over, from the obvious things like sound to the album art, but the biggest issue is the song order. Your songs are ordered in a way to create a distinct flow or musical journey. Some songs just do not sound as good when preceded by other certain songs. You want a very cohesive flow, whether it be a slow song offering reprieve after a really rockin song, or vice versa, something to wake the listener up. To us, you are supposed to listen to the whole album.
So let's say you have another song you reeeeaaalllly want on your album, but it doesn't *quite* fit the flow or the feeling, or maybe it's something that's really good, but not something you really want to pursue or save for a later album. Or hell, maybe you wrote it in the actual studio while recording. It's cool to throw it in there as a little extra. Like, hey, this song exists, but it's not PART OF THE ALBUM. | [
"In the field of recorded music, a hidden track (sometimes called a secret track) is a piece of music that has been placed on a CD, audio cassette, LP record or other recorded medium in such a way as to avoid detection by the casual listener. In some cases, the piece of music may simply have been left off the track... |
What would happen to a tachyon in a black hole? | Yes, a tachyon would exit a black hole. That is, there are space-like paths connecting the inside to the outside, and tachyons would follow space-like paths.
However, tachyons do not exist. | [
"As the ship approaches the black hole, Nansen prepares to take a shuttle into the black hole. Unbeknownst to the other prisoners, Boyse kills Nansen with a shovel and takes her place. The shuttle travels through a molecular cloud inside the black hole causing Boyse to explode from the effects of spaghettification.... |
Why is tritium radioactive, even though it's nucleus is not dense at all? | Radioactivity doesn't depend on density. It depends on stability of the nucleus (which does depend on density a bit but there are other factors). Basically can the neutrons and protons stay bonded together. If they can't, then some form of decay will occur to make it more stable. Tritium is not as stable as He-3, so the neutron decays into a proton in order for the system to reach a stable arrangement. | [
"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... |
what do animals feel when their young are taken away (to be adopted)? | I've heard with cats, the mother cat will search the house for a couple hours, then completely forget about the kitten, drink some water then find a sunbeam to lie in.
Cats are assholes. | [
"Once the animals are rehabilitated, cleaned, and healthy, they get a behavior check to determine if they are adoptable. They frequently go to foster homes before they are adopted into forever homes. When they are ready to be adopted, they go back to the same shelter where they were first evaluated so they can find... |
Can you tell a sunrise from a sunset just from looking at a photograph? | _URL_0_
Based on this we can conclude that no. It gives an interesting way to tell that from a video though.
However, let's assume that there is a little difference between RGB images of sunset and sunrise that these guys weren't aware of. Since our best tools at the moment (deep networks) for measuring the distance between the two still have a lot of trouble telling the difference with similar images or even come up with really robust features (most of what you see in papers/youtube/etc is cherry picked), I'd say there is very little chance that we'd be able to discriminate between sunset/sunrise with enough confidence.
Not sure though what happens if your image is multispectral, but intuitively I'd expect the answer to stay negative, although maybe there can be an impact from I dunno... pollution levels at 6am vs 21pm? | [
"A third correction for the visual observation of a sunrise (or sunset) is the angle between the apparent horizon as seen by an observer and the geometric (or sensible) horizon. This is known as the dip of the horizon and varies from 3 arcminutes for a viewer standing on the sea shore to 160 arcminutes for a mounta... |
how does tempered glass work? how does it stop the actual screen from cracking? | The idea of tempered glass is that they make it so that the surface of the glass is squeezed hard - it is under compression. To balance this, the inside of the glass is being pulled apart, or 'under tension'
This means that it takes a lot of force to break the surface of the glass, because that would involve pulling it apart, but you can't pull it apart, because it is being pushed together.
They do this generally in one of two ways - either they cool the glass down quickly, so the outside sets before the inside cools and contracts; or they use chemistry to stuff big atoms into the glass. These big atoms take up more space, pushing on their neighbours, squashing them and making that compression. | [
"Tempered glass must be cut to size or pressed to shape before tempering, and cannot be re-worked once tempered. Polishing the edges or drilling holes in the glass is carried out before the tempering process starts. Because of the balanced stresses in the glass, damage to any portion will eventually result in the g... |
[medicine] how come you can't just cut off a wart? | HPV causes warts by infecting the cells of stratum basale (Basal layer) of epidermis which is the very bottom layer of skin at the epidermal dermal junction. These basal cells are stem cells that continuously divide and form new keratinocytes (Skin cells) that migrate upwards as new cells are continuously created. When you cut off a wart, you are generally only getting rid of the upper cell layer (Stratum corneum) which consists of dead cells filled with keratin. But the HPV infected basal cells are still intact and are still actively causing epithelial hyperplasia (Increase in the number of cells). | [
"Another product available over-the-counter that can aid in wart removal is silver nitrate in the form of a caustic pencil, which is also available at drug stores. In a placebo-controlled study of 70 patients, silver nitrate given over nine days resulted in clearance of all warts in 43% and improvement in warts in ... |
Is it really ever possible to "see" a galaxy, nebula, etc. as it appears in photographs? | I think the question is more like if we were a planet orbiting a star which has been ejected from a galaxy and is say a 100,000 ly above that galaxy, would someone on the planet see something like [this](_URL_0_) in the night sky?
*edit: [Carl Sagan quote](_URL_1_):
> ...But from a planet orbiting a star in a distant globular cluster, a still more glorious dawn awaits, not a sun-rise, but a galaxy rise. | [
"BULLET::::- Scientists have revealed the most detailed picture of the Milky Way galaxy ever produced, with over a billion stars visible in a mosaic combined from thousands of individual images. (BBC) (The Royal Observatory, Edinburgh)\n",
"Images were taken using a photometric system of five filters (named \"u\"... |
If nothing is random, does that mean fate is true? | The existence of true randomness is one of those big open questions. Currently, [it seems mathematically impossible to prove that something is truly random.](_URL_0_) | [
"Everything that happens, happens necessarily. Denial of necessity leads one back to the idea of absolute randomness, which can hardly be thought of; the world without universal causation would be \"randomness with no sense in it\".\n",
"In a random sequence of numbers, a number may be said to be cursed because i... |
why do android phone manufacturers make carrier-specific phone models instead of releasing only one universal model that works on all carriers? | Europe is mostly all GSM. It's interesting how this Chagres the phone market over here. You might give this of interest: _URL_0_ | [
"Although it was once a leading manufacturer of smartphones in terms of market share, HTC has recently struggled in the wake of other vendors such as Samsung and Apple, due particularly to their wider marketing reach. As was common during the early years of Android, HTC manufactured a large number of exclusive devi... |
why do really muscular guys appear to take more hits before they get knocked out, even by equally large guys? | Muscle mass and strength.
Punch a pencil neck, and he's a bobble head. That brain is bouncing around inside the skull like a superball in a racquetball court.
Strong neck muscles can prevent much of that.
Being knocked out is a brain injury. | [
"An unusual percentage of his body mass is stored in the upper half of his body, causing him to appear top-heavy and thus very imposing. Strong Guy's powers first appeared after being beaten by bullies and hit by a bus; unable to expel the energy, his body was permanently warped. Strong Guy's maximum strength level... |
Who ultimately gave the order to have Nicholas II of Russia and his family executed? What reasons led up to this happening? | Although the details of who exactly ordered the execution and when are incredibly murky and clouded by various politicized accusations, the decision to execute the imperial family in Yekaterinburg was very heavily predicated on exigent factors. Despite his abdication, Nicholas II was still a highly potent symbol inside the splintering Russian state.
The Bolshevik government in Moscow favored putting Nicholas on a show trial. Although Nicholas II often found himself led by events through his reign, he was still the autocrat of Russia and bore some responsibility for the actions of his government. His qualities as a father and husband was actually a facet of his life that was quite hidden from the public. Both Lenin and Trotsky favored a public trial that would be broadcast via radio, but there was also a significant pressure from below to put Nicholas II to task for his alleged crimes. There were a number of petitions generated by the Petrograd Soviet calling for "Nicholas the Bloody" to be put on trial and this Soviet was responsible for pressuring the Provisional Government in March 1917 from allowing the tsar to leave for Britain. Letting the tsar and his family flee in exile to Britain or another Allied country was off the table for the Bolsheviks after the November Revolution as much of their constituency on the left wanted to see Nicholas II pay for events like "Bloody Sunday" of 1905, the activities of the Black Hundred ultranationalists, and his responsibility for Russia's entry into the First World War.
But the events of the Russian Civil War precluded the option of a show trial. The war created both chaos and a danger that the imperial family would be liberated. Yekaterinburg was in between both Omsk, where a provisional government of various White forces (Kadets, SRs and monarchists) and Samara where the White-allied Czech Legion was operating in 1918. The fear that animated the Romanovs' captors was that any member of the imperial family could be used as a rallying figure for the Whites. Although Moscow had held out hope for the possibility of a trail as late as July, the fear was that White forces would take the decision out of their hands.
Whether or not Moscow directly ordered the execution or if the chain of command extended to Lenin himself, or was the decision of the Ural Regional Soviet is still unclear. It is telling though that the first Bolshevik official pronouncements of the execution justified the execution on the basis of advancing Czechoslovak forces and lied by saying only the tsar was executed while his "wife and son have been sent to a secure place." This helped fuel the myth that some of the royal family escaped.
*Source*
Steinberg, Mark D., and Vladimir M. Khrustalëv. *The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution*. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. | [
"Developments in Russia posed another set of issues for the monarchy. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia was King George's first cousin and the two monarchs looked very much alike. When Nicholas was overthrown in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the liberal Russian Government asked that the tsar and his family be given asyl... |
We have examples of kings having children with their mistresses, are there any examples of royal women (rumored or confirmed) having children out of wedlock with their suitors? | Queen Caroline Mathilde of Denmark is probably the most prominent example, at least in the west, of a queen who actually became pregnant. Her lover was Struensee, the king's physician and adviser. When the affair was revealed, the parentage of both of her children was called into question, but only her younger, a daughter named Louise, was probably actually Struensee's. Christian VII/his family exiled her to Germany.
Aside from queens who actually had children with their lovers, many were suspected or proved to be having affairs. This was potentially a huge problem both for their husbands and for their countries/crowns. Because producing an heir is intrinsically tied to queenship, it was a deeper betrayal than just a wife cheating on her husband. The misconduct of the queen could mean that the crown passed to the wrong person. Further, kingship was tied to ideas of fertility. The fertility of the King represented the fertility of the realm. The queen was the vehicle of the king's fertility. A queen subverting that fertility was robbing her husband, but also her King and her country. Therefore queens accused of adultery could be met with severe punishment, up to and including execution (most famously Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard). | [
"BULLET::::- In monarchies where the throne was inherited by male offspring, male descendents of deposed rulers were sometimes dressed as female so that they would be allowed to live. One example was the son of Korean Princess Gyeonghye, herself the daughter of a former king, who was dressed in female clothes in hi... |
What are the earliest known acts of human violence? | I'd say it depends what you mean by "Earliest known". Is it the earliest recorded? In that case, you have Neolithic depictions of battles:
> Neolithic cave paintings show warriors forming a line, firing on command, and marching in column behind a leader who was wearing a distinctive uniform that distinguished him from the rest of his troops.
Original text is [here.](_URL_1_).
Otherwise, one of my "favorite" early depictions of violence is the [Narmer Palette](_URL_2_) attributed to the pre-Dynastic Egyptian king Narmer, that could be considered "the first pharaoh" (although these things are debated by much better minds than mine and I'm pretty sure calling him "First Pharaoh" is a terrible oversimplification.)
The Narmer Palette's obverse side shows a scene of Narmer smiting an enemy. The pose - left arm holding an enemy's head, right arm raised to strike - is consistent with similar scenes in much later Egyptian art: Thutmosis III, Ramesses II have been depicted in similar poses in art that commemorates a victory, so we can imagine it's an early record of a battle.
If you mean the earliest act of human violence we know occurred, without more details, we can go even farther.
The earliest event of violence I know of comes from the mass grave of Wadi Halfa, dated 10,000 - 12,000 years ago. It's a site in modern Sudan, formerly Nubia among other things, which...
> ... contain[ed] 59 burials was located on a hill overlooking the Nile. Twenty-four skeletons had flint projectile points that were either embedded in the bones or found within the grave fill in positions which indicated they had penetrated the bodies. (...) In total, more than 40% of the men, woman and children in the commentary had died by violence.
Source is [here](_URL_0_). I was unable to find the actual texts, but the blog post cites its own sources, I hope this is acceptable... | [
"Marta Mirazón Lahr discovered the earliest evidence of human warfare at the site of Nataruk, located near the shore of an ancient and larger Lake Turkana, and where numerous human skeletons showing major traumatic injuries to the head, neck, ribs, knees and hands are evidence of inter-group conflict between nomadi... |
How much computing power would be necessary to simulate our universe? | The main problem with this simulation is the question of how accurate you want your universe to be.
Hard to tell how many atoms there are in the universe, but let's say 10^80. To describe each one, you need to store a set of variables, describing its position and momentum. To describe the observable universe to a resolution of 1 pm, you need 128 bits for each co-ordinate, plus as many again for each momentum direction. So, ballpark, 1*10^83 bits. Then, you can simply propagate each particle by choosing some small time-step, and modifying their position based on their velocity. Easy enough - lets say this takes 2 [FLOPS](_URL_0_) per particle.
So, we have 10^83 bits of storage, and 2*10^80 FLOPS needed. Hard to find convincing numbers, but total storage currently existing is on the order of 10^21 bytes, and total processor power is probably on the order of 10^18 flops (ish?).
*However*, everything there needs giant, giant caveats. I talked about atoms - of course, atoms are made up of a number of electrons, protons, and neutrons, so multiply the storage and FLOPs numbers by a few. And I neglected interactions between particles, which is a doozy - to describe this, you need a bunch more bits of data for each electron/proton/neutron, describing various properties (mass, charge, spin, etc) to allow for the calculation of the various forces acting upon them. Every single massive particle in the universe exerts forces on every other particle (in principle), meaning that you need to computer gravitational and possibly electromagnetic forces acting between every possible particle pairing. That FLOPs number is tarting to go through the roof already - even if you could do it in 1 FLOP per particle pair, that's on the order of 10^161 flops. But we haven't even mentioned photons and their interactions yet!
Mentioning photons of course, brings in quantum mechanics, which is where things actually start to get difficult. Now individual particles don't have well-defined positions, but probability distributions which evolve over time, needing a bunch more parameters to describe them, and, more challengingly, involving interactions with groups of neighbouring particles at all times. QM simulations are heavy-duty, with serious CPU power required to even model relatively small groups of particles - I would hesitate to put a benchmark on what would be a sensible speed for one of these simulations or the data load, as I'm not that familiar with them. But it's a fair increase on our simple interaction model above, for sure.
And you can continue down a rabbit-hole of ever-increasing complexity, pretty much till you hit the extremes of our current physical knowledge.
And, of course, there's the fact that all the numbers I outlined above are for a *single*, smallest-scale timestep. That is, this much CPU power would simulation one small sliver of time per second - if it's, say, a picosecond, that would mean simulating 1 (non-quantum mechanical) second would take about 30,000 years. So, if you want to simulate a universe in real-time, you need to multiply up those numbers a bit more.
So... to *really* simulate all the details of the universe, the computing powers absolutely dwarf what we can currently carry out, and indeed the likely computing power of the entire universe (10^161 flops, for example, requires every atom in the universe to complete 10^80 floating point operations per second, which seems challenging). So, if you want to simulate the universe, then the easiest way is probably just to build a universe.
But if you want to simulate someone interacting with the universe, then you can obviously cheat - the simulation just has to present the "intelligence" with appropriate inputs, and can make all sorts of slap-dash approximations to trick them into thinking its right. Do full simulations where the person is looking, and just hand-wave the rest. Putting a benchmark on that is much, much lower, and probably only marginally higher than actually building a working AI, as we're already getting very good at generating content (see: Video games). Of course, we don't really know what the requirements are for the AI are, either - maybe it's easier to just build a universe!
(Can you tell I'm trying to avoid getting down to work today?) | [
"The \"Graphics Turing Scale\" of computer power is then defined as the computing power necessary to achieve success in the test. It was estimated in as 1036.8 TFlops peak and 518.4 TFlops sustained. Actual rendering tests with a Blue Gene supercomputer showed that current supercomputers are not up to the task scal... |
what is lorem ipsum ? | Lorem Ipsum is bogus text in (more or less accurate) latin. It is used by designers as a placeholder for text that they don't have yet.
Say you're designing an ad. You know there will be two paragraphs of text but the text is not finalized yet. But you already want to see what it would look like. So you replace the two paragraphs with bogus text.
Lorem ipsum is used because it looks like a real text would. It's not like you wrote "blah blah blah" on and on, which wouldn't look real.
You can find numerous "lorem ipsum" generators online, and I hear the new version of Adobe softwares will come with their own generator built-in. | [
"The Animorphs Chronicles is a series of 4 books written by K. A. Applegate alongside the main series as a companion collection to detail the backstories of characters introduced in the series, and help explain and expand upon concepts that were briefly defined in the series, but, as the series is told from a human... |
What is the earliest evidence found of language education? | I'm not sure whether I understand the question correctly, however, if you asking what is the earliest evidence of people learnig non-native language, then apparently answer is Sumerian-Akkadian glossaries.
Sumerian was language of culture and religion in ancient Mesopotamia, however this language became extinct and people, who were now speaking Semitic language, Akkadian, had to learn Sumerian. There are numerous evidence for that, for example Sumerian-Akkadian dictionaries, like this one: _URL_0_
It's dated by early 2nd millenium BC. | [
"The first language documented by R. H. Mathews was Gundungurra in a paper co-authored with Mary Everitt, a Sydney school teacher, dated 1900 From that time, linguistic study was a major part of his research. Language elicitation can be found in 36 of his 171 works of anthropology. His linguistic writings describe ... |
Historians, how was getting your PHD? | 1. Don't go for a PhD if you have to pay for it yourself. Most good programs will give you a stipend (and use you as labour) that should minimise your accrual of debt.
2. The job market is not good, but it depends on where you go and what field you're in. If you study Islamic history at Michigan, for example, you'll have no trouble. If you do a PhD in 20th century US at Southern Mississippi or Western Michigan, you're in trouble. The quality/situation of your work can mitigate or exacerbate that somewhat but only so much.
I decided to go to grad school in history because I could, and because I had a plan B and a plan C in place in case I didn't like it or washed out. (I even had a plan B when on the job market.) I ended up succeeding and climbing into a top-flight program, but I didn't put all my eggs in the basket of history grad school. You will however watch your friends making real money, getting married, even having kids, while you slog by on starvation wages to possibly land a job that pays less than they were making fresh out of college. It can be intensely demoralizing and isolating. If you're OK with that, if your love of subject moves you that much, then it may be for you. But don't jump without a safety net. | [
"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... |
At the end of the 19th century/early 20th century did people really take in orphans to assist them on farms and if so what happened when these children reached majority? | It certainly did happen quite a bit, in the US as well as in Canada – and, in the cases I have come across, the system does seem to have worked in relatively informal and unstructured ways and was clearly often open to abuse (as, incidentally, was the parallel and equivalent inner city "Industrial School" system that produced the likes of Babe Ruth).
Hopefully your query will attract a response from someone who's able to cite a general study of the phenomenon, but while you're waiting, I can offer a couple of - I'm sure highly atypical - case studies that popped up in the course of my own research into sundry topics and which do shed some light on the way these systems worked.
**1. Bernard MacFadden**
[MacFadden](_URL_0_) was born in 1868 in Missouri to an alcoholic father and chronically ill mother. He was orphaned at 11, though his parents were so incapable of caring for him that he had by that point already spent several years of his childhood boarding with relatives, and one living in an orphanage.
After his parents' death, [MacFadden was](_URL_2_)
> placed with a farmer who was looking for someone to do all his work. The boy quickly and proudly learned to do a man's portion of the labor. It was here, working outdoors doing all the jobs around the farm (including heavy work such as plowing, slaughtering pigs, and cutting down trees), that he began to grow strong and healthy. To him it was a miracle to see his body grow... He worked on the farm for two years.
> After that he found work as an office boy and for two years advanced in office work. The problem was that he was losing the strength he had gained. By sixteen, he was starting to look and feel sickly again. He described himself as "a physical wreck".
As a result of this unusual background, MacFadden became obsessed with the possibilities of self-improvement – both mental and physical. He designed himself a programme of lifting weights and stamina-enhancing exercise, with the result that while he
> was not tall - only 5ft - 6 and weighed around 145 lbs. ... he developed powerful upper body muscles, a strong chest, and incredible stamina and energy. In addition to physical strength, he also developed a forceful and take-charge personality, unshakeable self-confidence, mental tenacity and determination. Those who met him for the first time were usually shocked to see how short he was. Because of his muscular appearance, he always looked taller in photographs than he actually was.
From his inauspicious early start, MacFadden went on to reinvent himself utterly, changing his name to the more memorable Bernarr Macfadden (chosen because he thought the new first name sounded like a lion's roar), becoming the founding father of American bodybuilding, establishing several successful businesses selling fitness equipment, and then, in order to promote his own wares, moving into publishing, setting up what became *Physical Culture* magazine, and eventually, in the 1920s, stumbling onto the formula for "confessional journalism" - first-person stories of triumph over adversity that offered a
> compelling mix of sex and sin, covering hitherto barely mentionable topics such as illegitimacy, adultery, unemployment and crime – a mix readily satirised by critics as “I’m ruined!” journalism.
MacFadden went on to become the most successful independent magazine publisher in the US in the 1920s and 1930s, launched the careers of Walter Winchell, Charles Atlas and Ed Sullivan, and was a self-made millionaire. From your perspective however, I think the key takeaways are that his placement with the farmer who took him in at 11 was an entirely informal one, arranged privately between his family and the potential employer. It was unpaid, but MacFadden received board and lodging in exchange for his labour. There was no sort of formal contract or indenture that specified how long he had to stay on the farm. When he reached 13 or 14 and it suited him to leave, he was able to do so without apparent impediment – though, it should be said, he achieved this not by negotiation, but by running away, and he was by then already an unusually self-confident and independent character. The majority of children in his position did not display such reserves of independence and self-belief, and in many cases went on working as farm labourers for the remainder of their lives.
**2. Herschel Geguzin**
Geguzin was born in 1890 in Vilnius, Lithuania – then part of imperial Russia. He was the son of a Jewish dried-goods merchant who died before he was born, and as a result of the intermittent pogroms that were scarring the country at that time, his family took the decision to send him, alone, as an immigrant to the US when he was only 10.
As was not uncommon in such cases, Geguzin was supposed to live with a distant family member/family friend who was already established in New York, but it was not unusual for children placed in such unfamiliar situations to run relatively wild and be rejected by their hosts. Geguzin passed most of what was left of his childhood being shunted from children’s asylum to reform school in the poorer districts of New York. According to an obituary, he "compiled a record of petit larceny, was found incorrigible by the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, was arrested as a vagrant, and peddled newspapers on East Broadway." When, eventually, this “celebrated bad boy of six New York orphan homes to which he was successively committed” became too much for even these institutions to handle, he was packed off to Illinois to work as a child farmhand on a property owned by one Judge Kronk, of Hillsboro.
Such arrangements did not work quite as portrayed in *Anne of Green Gables* - Geguzin (by now known by the Anglicised name of Harry F. Gerguson) was never "adopted" by Kronk and, like MacFadden, essentially supplied labour in exchange for food. He seems to have been generally treated as a - perhaps rather less privileged - member of the family, rather than as a servant, though, eating with his employer for example.
Like MacFadden, Geguzin's ambitions soon moved beyond farm labour, and - having lived several years in New York - he was comfortable in big city environments. He ran away, "because of chores", and found work in a Chicago hotel as a bellhop, but his relationship with the farmer he was living with was such that he returned at least once to the farm to live there. Ultimately, however, and like MacFadden, Geguzin found rural life too limiting for him. By the early 1930s he was in New York, working as a salesman for bootleg liquor, and in the mid 30s he travelled overland to Los Angeles.
Like MacFadden, Geguzin found it too limiting to be who he actually was - an immigrant orphan, if not actually the son of a whore and a Scotsman. So, like MacFadden, he reinvented himself, but in a far less restrained way. He adopted the personal of [Prince Michael Romanoff](_URL_1_), claiming to be an exiled Russian aristocrat, and used his new persona to gain (temporary) admittance to Harvard and, eventually, to set himself up as a successful, and legitimate, Hollywood restaurateur. Using a combination of incredible charm, immense likability and the grifting skills he had picked up in his youth, "Prince Mike" eventually became a fixture on the Hollywood scene, and was a close friend of both David Niven and of Humphrey Bogart. His is thus
> a great American story: a triumph of grit, chutzpah and good humour over the sort of grim circumstance that destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of less remarkable individuals. What lends his story true greatness, though, is the sheer vivacity and style with which Geguzin persisted in playing his part, despite repeated exposures and the occasional jail sentence.
Here, then, is an example of a more complex and institutional placement. Geguzin was a product of a large scale city-based system that was capable of finding him work and a place to live in a state half way across America.
But it's also interesting to speculate on the extent that Romanoff's re-invention, and eventual success, was a product of, and reaction against, his youth. For Alva Johnston – a *New Yorker* journalist who wrote in an early (and highly influential) profile of him in the early 1930s – it was his subject’s very transparency that made him both interesting, and a success. Mike was a fraud whom everyone knew was a fraud, but had great fun pretending not to. “He is widely admired today, not for his title, but for his own sake," Johnston wrote. "He has convinced a fairly large public that a good imposter is preferable to an average prince.” But the one thing that Romanoff was *never* transparent about was the straitened circumstances of his youth, the details of which only emerged in court or after his death. He persisted with the charade of claiming aristocratic birth, never letting that facade drop even on the few occasions when his friends saw him drunk. Being a penniless aristocrat-in-exile was one thing, but being a former child farm-hand, evidently, was quite another. | [
"The demands that urbanization, industrialization, and immigration placed on poor and working-class families in the late 19th century left many children unattended. Rural states relied on family placements to care for their own homeless or dependent children. This was a precursor for today's foster care system.\n",... |
STD's and their longevity | HIV infects your CD4 T cells and prevents your immune system from effectively clearing the virus from your body. After the initial infection, herpes simplex virus 2 lies dormant in nerve cells, and can flare up again when some sort of stress triggers them. (This is the same mechanism for varicella zoster virus- the reactivation of the chicken pox virus from the dorsal root ganglion.) Secondary syphilis (treponema pallidum) is due to dissemination of the spirochete (which has low antigenicity, and thus is difficult for the immune system to clear). Modern antibiotics have mostly eliminated tertiary syphilis (aside from the immunocompromised population).
So it's not that there's anything inherently special about STDs - it's just that the organisms we deal with have some mechanisms for avoiding host defenses. There are plenty of STDs that are treated very well (eg Neisseria gonorrhea, Chlamydia trachomatis, Trichomonas vaginalis etc). Similarly, there are non-STDs that are difficult to clear and result in latent infections (eg Mycoplasma tuberculosis, VZV, HSV-1). | [
"Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) remain a major public health challenge in the United States. CDC estimates that there are approximately 19 million new STD infections yearly. The two most commonly reported infectious diseases with 1.5 million total cases (2009) are chlamydia and gonorrhea. Adolescent girls (15... |
Where did the concept of suicide attacks come from? | **The concept of a suicidal attack, whether conducted by individuals or groups working in tandem, that was meant to cause as much chaos, harm, confusion, sometimes even to buy time and/or distract, has been around for a long time.**
The problem with discussing suicide attacks is that not every seemingly hopeless situation was necessarily an intentional suicide attack. A good example is bayonet charges by Japanese forces during World War II, which I wrote about in detail [here](_URL_0_). Long story short, **not every bayonet charge was a banzai charge**. Bayonet charges were tactical decisions made with victory in mind. Banzai charges were deliberately suicidal and there was no intention of seizing victory, only causing as much damage as possible before perishing.
When talking specifically about suicidal attacks, this distinction of intentions is certainly something to consider, especially with hindsight of knowing which attacks succeeded and which failed being potentially misleading.
Let's get to it shall we.
Modern conceptions of suicide attacks that involved explosives, vehicles, etc are heavily informed by the past successes, and indeed in some military traditions, the glorification of suicide attacks.
Pre-gunpowder suicide attacks were not limited to simply try to stab enemies or arrows. **Fire, flood, sapping, poison, and even contagious disease were utilized by suicide attackers in history.**
Suicidal assassinations were also a big thing but that doesn't seem to be what you're looking for so we'll ignore that.
Suicidal corps have certainly existed throughout military history before the introduction of gunpowder, giving precedent for suicide attacks in military doctrine, where it is an intentional strategy instead of a improvised or opportunistic, desperate one time tactic.
These suicide attacks in pre-gunpowder military history have certainly had their share of successes but the entrance of gunpowder and explosives really made suicidal attacks, particularly by lone individuals, a much more viable, accessible way to reliably harm enemy forces.
I would wager that suicidal explosive attacks by individuals have been around as long as the military application of explosives themselves. It doesn't take much of a leap in logic to see how it would be useful that way. It was also used simply as a way to commit suicide in general as well.
**The very first suicide bomber is easy.** It was a young Ignacy Hryniewiecki, 25 years old, radical member of the People's Will organization in late 19th century Russia. His target: Alexander II, Emperor of Russia. From his letters that he left behind, he very clearly intended to die as a result of the attack, writing the night before
> "Alexander II must die...he will die, and with him, we, his enemies, his executioners, shall die too...It is my lot to die young, I shall not see our victory, I shall not live one day, one hour in the bright season of our triumph, but I believe that with my death I shall do all that it is my duty to do, and no one in the world can demand more of me"
**But as an official military doctrine?**
Some might think the Japanese kamikaze, banzai, and various other species of suicide corps but there is in fact an earlier example, and very close by indeed.
The first doctrine integrated suicide attacks by explosives come 30 years after the fateful assassination of Alexander II.
It is now 1911. China is in turmoil. The Qing Dynasty is in its final hours as what would come to be known as the 1911 Revolution sets the country ablaze.
Sun Yatsen, hailed as the founding father of the modern Chinese state(s), was one of many revolutionaries who promoted violent martyrdom for the cause of nationalism, republicanism, and revolution. This resulted in the creation of 敢死隊 which Wikipedia translates commonly as "dare to die corps". It can also be translated as "courageous death corps".
Either way, the intention was quite apparent. Sadly, or bravely, perhaps both, many of these suicide bombers were very young, many recruits being students. Young women were recruited with the same alacrity as men.
Suicidal attacks with explosives, both in military engagements as well as in guerilla warfare were parts of official revolutionary doctrine. Anything for the success of overthrowing the Qing.
This tradition carried on into the war against the Japanese some 20 years later. Suicide bombings of both military and colonial targets were widespread. As far as I know, there were no suicide bombings on the mainland of Japan itself. As for military application of suicide bombings, throwing themselves under tanks, suicide vests, laying wounded and detonating when surrounded by Japanese forces, etc were all used long before the Japanese began doing the same in the Pacific several years later.
**As a side note, some people characterize the suicide attacks that the Japanese forces conducted in the Pacific against the Allies as a distinctly Japanese thing, whether by reasons of culture, tradition, history, race, etc.**
But it is telling that the Japanese did not use suicidal attacks when they were fighting with great superiority in the Chinese theater. Indeed, they were the targets themselves of vigorous suicide attacks, which they later emulated near the end of World War II.
It was only when they were desperate and lacking the resources and manpower, particularly trained soldiers, pilots, and sailors, that the Japanese military resorted to using suicidal corps as a part of doctrine. They were indeed rationalized and ideologically backed by the IJA's modern inception of bushido, State Shinto, as well as an ancient military tradition of suicide, but they were not a given.
The Japanese of course adapted their suicide corps to the realities of the Pacific Theater, which involved a great deal of water and an enemy that primarily moved around via air and ship. This lead to the creation of kamikaze pilots, manned torpedoes and bombs, suicide subs or ships, etc. More mundane conceptions of suicide attacks, very much like the ones they faced in China, were used on the ground by dedicated suicide corps as well as desperate, inflexible field command.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask! Cheers | [
"A suicide attack is any violent attack in which the attacker accepts their own death as a direct result of the method used to harm, damage or destroy the target. Suicide attacks have occurred throughout history, often as part of a military campaign such as the Japanese \"kamikaze\" pilots of World War II, and more... |
What happened to all the little Kings when all their little Germanies became the German Empire? | The scope of this question runs from 1866 with the defeat of the Austrians in the Austro-Prussian war of the same year through to the split of Germany in 1945 after Hitler's defeat.
As a side note before I begin, the 'little' German nations, such as Hanover, Saxony, and Bavaria were not inconsiderable nations in their own rights. That Prussia, through the will of Bismark, was able to unify them under one flag was due in part to a nationalist zeal ignited in the post-Napoleonic period, and also in part to the declining influence of Austria/Austria-Hungary in the corresponding period. There was a desire by the rulers of the smaller constituent parts of the Germanies to avoid outright conquest by Prussia, as well as a desire to enact social reforms without a revolutionary bloodbath that had swept up France in 1792. The 1830 and 1848 revolutions stoked German liberalism and nationalism, and it took all of Bismark's political acumen to convince the disparate German nation states that the Prussian constitution and military might were worth binding under, vis-a-vie Austrian hegemony (which is why the Prussians fought the Austrian-Prussian war).
Prussian desire for hegemony arose after the 1815 Vienna settlement in part because Prussia feared Austrian, French, and Russian encirclement. The treaty had two outcomes that would shape the rest of 19th century German history: 1) The establishment of the German Confederation, made up of 39 independent states, and 2) the treaty had ceded territory on the Rhine to Prussia. This had put Prussia under considerable internal strain, as geographically, culturally, and politically the west of the new nation was far removed from the Berlin Prussian monarchy. Napoleon's sparking of nascent German nationalism during his conquest of the Rhineland was fanned by the liberalisation of Europe during the period 1820-1848, which the Austrians under Metternich attempted to suppress. Prussia was kept in check by Austrian military and political supremacy during this period, but as Austria lost political prestige Prussia began to reassert herself, especially when Otto von Bismark became Prussian Chancellor in 1862. Prussia, with the suport and aid of Austria, fought the 1864 Second Schleswig war against Denmark, which gave them control Schleswig-Holstein. Prussia then went to war with the German Confederation, led by Austria, in 1866, with led to the defeat of the Confederation and then to it dissolving as a political entity. in 1867 the Prussians unified the northern german states into the North German Confederation, which had a federal constitution with Prussian monarch as the head of state.
The German empire was formally declared at the Palace of Versailles on 18th January 1871, at which point the independent principalities and kingdoms of the North German Confederation, led by Prussia, merged with the south German kingdoms and principalities. At this point the various independent entities that had formally been part of the Germanies became states within the new German Reich, with their own laws, customs, and state legislatures. Central authority in the empire rested with the Emperor and the Reichtag, though the democracy that Bismark, the Prussian prime minister, envisaged was of a limited form, with ultimate power resting in the hands of the German Kaiser, who was also the King of Prussia.
Initially the 27 constituent states that formed the newly unified Germany were left to manage their own internal affairs without too much interference from Berlin, as Bismark did not wish to empower the Reichtag with too much power. Over the course of the period between 1871 and 1900 the German state centralised federal control in the hands of the civil service through the State Secretaries, with the effect that even though there was near-universal suffrage in Germany for most adult males, the power of their elected representatives was muted when compared to the bureaucrats who controlled the affairs of state at the behest of the Kaiser.
The effect for the 27 state rulers was that their pre-1871 powers were constrained by the 1871 German constitution. All states sent deputies to the the upper house called the Bundesrat, and although all states were nominally equal in the eyes of the law, as Prussia was the largest state in terms of both population and size they had 17 of the 58 seats, which meant they had little difficulty in obtaining the majority they needed to pass favourable legislation.
One key area the 27 states maintained their own control was the armed forces, so that the larger states, such as Prussia and Saxony, had their own armies, which in turn was modelled on the Prussian army. This had the consequence that during WW1 many regiments were led, or had a titular head, by members of the royal families from the various states.
In terms of the pre-1871 monarchs, Saxony's monarch Fredrick Augustus III abdicated in 1918, turning Saxony into a free state in the Wiemar republic; the same happened with Bavaria, and by the declaration of the armistice on 11th November 1918 all the monarchs who remained in power after 1871 had been removed from power in favour of republican ideals. The reasons for the loss of power are varied, ranging from a general disdain for support of Prussian policies during WWI (in the case of Bavaria and Saxony), to a ground-swell of desire to reform the country after the catastrophic defeat caused by the allies. The monarchical principals of power were discredited in the eyes of the German public by the actions of the ruling elite during the war, even to the point where the Bavarian's sought a separate peace with the allies.
Dues to this, many royal titles were abrogated in 1918, with all temporal power being transferred into the hands the people. The Wiemar government did not removed smaller titles, though, and those landowners, including the Prussian Junker class, were still classed as nobility through the Wiemar and Nazi governments. The fall of Germany in 1945 resulted in a complete overhauling of the governance of Germany in the East and West, with the nobility loosing all their privileges in the process. It is also worth remembering that many of the Prussian noble houses were absorbed into present day Poland and the Baltic states, were their estates were seized by the Communists and turned over to state control.
So, in summation to your question:
Most of the German monarchs, Dukes, and princelings of the pre-1871 era were allowed to remain as heads of state of their respective German state (much like a US governor). Due to the actions of the various monarchies during WW1 when the German Republic was declared in 1918 the states transitioned from monarchies and hereditary rulers to directly elected state legislatures, and the former monarchs either went into exile or were settled into civilian life.
If you would like to read further, please check out the books below.
Source material:
'The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914' by Richard Evans
'The Army of the German Empire 1870-1888' by Albert Seaton
'Contesting the German Empire 1871 – 1918' by Matthew Jefferies
*Edits tidying up grammar, punctuation, and readability | [
"Through its minor German principalities, the Swedish kings in their roles as princes and dukes, or \"Reichsfürsten\", of the Holy Roman Empire took part in the German diets from 1648 until the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.\n",
"At the end of World War I during the German Revolution all the monarc... |
what happened in jonestown and how did it start? | Jim Jones, a student of Marxism, started an organized temple in the 1950s in Indiana. It combined the rhetoric of the Bible with the rhetoric of Marxism, and grew to over 10,000 followers. In the mid-1960s Jones had visions of a nuclear holocaust and predicted it would occur in 1967. So in 1965, he moved a small portion of his congregation (about 200 people) to California, to prepare for the nuclear holocaust.
In California, he rejected the Bible, and started preaching from a text he wrote himself. By the 1970s, he had expanded his temple into Los Angeles and San Francisco. Turns out, he was using mind control tactics he'd somehow learned the North Koreans and Chinese had used before. Also, he was raping women and men in the congregation.
To get away from California investigations of his finances and of his psychological abuse of his followers, he started (mid-1970s) transferring the temple to Guyana, and called it Jonestown. By 1978 there were nearly 1000 people there. But there were also some reports of abuse. So a US Congressman representing San Francisco went down to Jonestown with a team to investigate. During the visit, a few people asked to go back with the team to California.
As the team and the defectors were going to their plane, Jonestown security shot them all to death. The next day (or later that day?), before more authorities could get there, Jones ordered his entire congregation to drink a concoction of cyanide-laced, grape flavored Flavor Aid. Parents were instructed to poison their children. 918 people died, including 276 children.
| [
"Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, is a 2006 documentary film made by Firelight Media, produced and directed by Stanley Nelson. The documentary reveals new footage of the incidents surrounding the Peoples Temple and its leader Jim Jones who led over 900 members of his religious group to a settlement ... |
[Engineering/Physics] How do thermonuclear warheads get decommissioned, without anything blowing up? | They were put together somehow, so you'd just take them apart the same way. It's not like they're sealed in a solid metal container or anything, you just remove the bolts and open the thing.
Even if you did open it with a cutting torch, it wouldn't set off a nuclear explosion. Depending on the conventional explosives, they might not even explode either (many conventional explosives are very stable and require another smaller explosion to set them off).
Even if the conventional explosives did go off, there would not be a nuclear explosion. Nuclear weapons, especially thermonuclear (or any other warhead that uses an implosion-type fission stage), are exceedingly hard to get to work properly (this is why it's decidedly nontrival to build them, and why it took countries like North Korea so long to get them to work at all). If they were easy to set off, they wouldn't be hard to design.
Modern nuclear weapons typically work by using explosive "lenses" that, when triggered as simultaneously as is possible, form a symmetrical shock front that compresses the fissile material in the center, causing it to go supercritical and rapidly fission. [Here](_URL_0_) is a gif from high speed shots of an implosion test. If the explosion starts from one side of the bomb, this shock front will not be symmetric and the nuke will "fizzle," which is when the fissile material squirts out one side, which stops the reaction from continuing. Only if the explosives are all triggered simultaneously by the bomb's trigger will a successful detonation even be possible. | [
"By 1999, all the warhead's various parts had been dismantled. The high explosives were removed from around the plutonium pits at the Pantex Plant and the pits were put into secure storage. Non-nuclear components were taken to the Savannah River Site and the National Security Campus. The canned subassemblies were m... |
Why don't we define units of length and time in terms of Planck length and Planck time? | A few reasons.
First of all, units are meant to be useful. A meter is about half as big as a person so a human can familiarize themselves with how big 7 meters or whatever is, because they can picture a meter and can picture 7 of something. Not so with 10^35 of something that is 10^-35 times their size.
Units also have to be reproducible, so if I make blueprints in meters in North America and send them over to Europe, I know that the right length will be used. Our current method of doing that is similar to what you're suggesting: the meter is fixed to the speed of light, the second is fixed to a transition wavelength in cesium, and as of last summer the kilogram is fixed to Planck's constant. These constants were all measured with such extreme precision that we could declare them to be exact. This is not the case for the Gravitational Constant, which is part of the definition of the Planck units. It has only been measured to 22 parts-per-million accuracy, which is not sufficient for use as a system of measurements. A precise measurement is challenging in part because gravity is so weak and we also live in a giant gravitational field.
That being said, the Planck units are not as fundamental as some are lead to believe, there are several options for which constants to normalize (e.g. h vs hbar, epsilon vs k vs e) and the way have been chosen makes the Planck charge equal to about 11.7 times the actual fundamental charge. | [
"In physics, the Planck length, denoted , is a unit of length, equal to . It is a base unit in the system of Planck units, developed by physicist Max Planck. The Planck length can be defined from three fundamental physical constants: the speed of light in a vacuum, the Planck constant, and the gravitational constan... |
if i send a letter internationally through usps, do the other countries who process and deliver the letter get a cut of the postage i pay in the us? is there any revenue sharing between the postal agencies? | The pay is portioned out by a really complex equation, which is run by a UN organization called the [Universal Postal Union](_URL_0_). Almost every country is a member of this and this organization deals with rates and lots of stuff regarding international shipping.
Their rates are currently a bit controversial, as they tend to offer low rates for developing nations (even China) to ship internationally, so the developed nations are a bit mad that about that. As a result, the US was just about to leave the UPU, but negotiated a different deal about 2 weeks ago that allows the US to be able to set their own inbound rates, instead of having it set by the UPU. Basically the deal was that China could ship stuff really cheap to the US because of the low UPU rates for China, which was a substantial advantage in international trade for China with sending goods to the US, but now the US can set the rate instead. | [
"In response to a US Supreme Court ruling (Rowan v. Post Office Dept., 397 U.S. 728 (1970)), the United States Postal Service enables an applicant to obtain a Prohibitory Order, which gives people the power to stop non-governmental organizations from sending them mail, and to demand such organizations remove the co... |
what's the legal basis for the rulings on judge judy? | The people appearing in the "court" have signed an legally binding agreement giving Judge Judy the power of arbitration.
Basically, because before they could appear on the show, they had to sign a contract saying they will follow the instructions given by her | [
"Judge Judy is an American arbitration-based reality court show presided over by Judge Judy Sheindlin, a retired Manhattan family court judge. The show features Sheindlin adjudicating real-life small claim disputes within a simulated courtroom set. Prior to the proceedings, all parties involved must sign arbitratio... |
Is there a maximum temperature a microwave oven can heat up a piece of food? | [Grape plasma!](_URL_0_) Heat common produce until it glows like an arc welder!
Grapes are mildly electrically conductive and their size is close to the wavelength of the microwave. Induced current moving back and forth over the narrow connection between the halves of the split grape drives it to enormous temperatures. Plasma is also conductive so the oven continues to drive fucktons of current through it keeping it twisting around in there at several thousand degrees.
Caution, vaporized organic matter has a unique smell and may cause your microwave oven to melt or make the glass parts shatter. | [
"Microwave ovens produce heat directly within the food, but despite the common misconception that microwaved food cooks from the inside out, 2.45 GHz microwaves can only penetrate approximately into most foods. The inside portions of thicker foods are mainly heated by heat conducted from the outer .\n",
"BULLET::... |
Why do siblings who grow up together nearly the same vary so differently in personalities? | Ah, the science of birth order. This is something that intrigues me greatly, and I wish I was better read on the subject.
The best explanation that I've seen, which mind you is only barely scratching the surface, is that you and each of your siblings were all born into different families.
A relationship between two people in a family is referred to as a dyad (diad?). Mom-Dad = dyad1. When the first child is born, you now have 3 dyads (Mom-Dad, Mom-Baby, Dad-Baby). The parents give their utmost attention to baby and the baby begins to adapt to this concept of have all of the attention.
When baby 2 comes along, it's born into a family of 3. Suddenly there are 6 dyads. (Mom-Dad, Mom-Baby1, Dad-Baby1, Mom-Baby2, Dad-Baby2, Baby1-Baby2). Parents are now suddenly giving lots of attention to the baby with many needs while simultaneously not trying to totally "ignore" the first child, who still has its own unique needs depending on its stage in development.
When baby 3 comes along, it's a different family once again with even more dyads. So on, and so forth.
With each new child born, it not only changes the environment that this new child has been introduced to and is being raised in compared to previous children, but it also affects the previous children and their pre-existing relationships with the rest of the family.
"The Sibling Effect" by Jeffrey Kluger is ~~I wish I could remember~~ the book that I read that covered the concepts of the science of birth order, and how it affects your personal development~~, but unfortunately the title eludes me; however~~ here's a link that contains some references to studies on family dyads and what role they play in development:
_URL_0_ | [
"Siblings play a unique role in one another’s lives that simulates the companionship of parents as well as the influence and assistance of friends. Because siblings often grow up in the same household, they have a large amount of exposure to one another, like other members of the immediate family. However, though a... |
what is the 'fed rate hike decision' and why is it so important i hear about it almost everyday? | One of the most important roles that The US Federal Reserve had is to set the interest rate. The interest rate has an impact on the amount of money it costs to service a loan and the amount of money that you receive in interest for keeping your money in the bank.
The Federal Reserve have not increased interest rates in 9 years and because they have not increased interest rates in so long, it is believed that it would cause volatility in both the US and international markets when they do so. | [
"While Bullard has supported the Fed's use of quantitative easing, he argues that it is rarely optimal for the Fed to use the \"shock and awe\" approach to this policy, wherein the Fed announces a large purchase with a predetermined purchase size and fixed duration like QE2. Rather, he has stated he favors a \"stat... |
Post WW1, there was work towards a universal language. Why did that stop? | There is certainly more to the story, and I write this at risk of accidentally writing a lecture about Esperanto and other conlangs, but they do play into the story: when the League of Nations was formed, Esperantists *did* try to make Esperanto an official language recognized and utilized by the League, and this measure was discussed, but it ultimately failed.
For a long time, humans have dreamed of there being a universal language, one that everyone can speak. (In the 1993 play "The Universal Language" by David Ives, a character says “I don’t think language is just music. I believe language is the opposite of loneliness. And if everybody in the world spoke the same language, who would ever be lonely?” Which I think is a pretty neat sentiment.) There is of course the legend of Babel: in Genesis, following the Great Flood, all humans spoke the same language, and tried to build a tower to Heaven; seeing this, God destroyed the Tower, split up the people into different nations, and they all spoke different languages ([Genesis Chapter 11](_URL_0_)). Since then, there have been people hoping to find a way to restore the unity of humanity, and some people have tried to do that by creating new languages. Particularly in the 19th century, there was a trend of constructing new *international auxiliary languages* (or *auxlangs*), languages designed to be secondary languages that are accessible to people regardless of their native language, so that people of wildly different cultures that don't share a primary language still have a common language they can communicate with. Until the 1880s/90s, the most popular auxlang was Volapük, a language designed by Johann Martin Schleyer, but a schism developed in the Volapük community and it lost popularity.
In the 1887, Ludwig Zamenhof published *Unua Libro* ("First Book"), the first book on the grammar of Esperanto. The book was also titled *Dr. Esperanto's International Language*; Zamenhof called himself Dr. Esperanto because the word literally means "the one who hopes", and eventually that became the name of the language (in Esperanto it would be referred to as *la lingvo internacional* until Esperanto caught on). Zamenhof sought to make a language as easy to learn as possible, regardless of your native language, so he gave Esperanto vocabulary and grammar rules familiar to many different kinds of languages. The philosophy of Esperanto, both as a language and a movement, had three components:
> 1) To render the study of the language so easy as to make its acquisition mere play to the learner.
> 2) To enable the learner to make direct use of his knowledge with persons of any nationality, whether the language be universally accepted or not; in other words, the language is to be directly a means of international communication.
> 3) To find some means of overcoming the natural indifference of mankind, and disposing them, in the quickest manner possible, and en masse, to learn and use the proposed language as a living one, and not only in last extremities, and with the key at hand.
Again, at risk of this becoming a lecture about the history of Esperanto when it shouldn't be, I'll try to summarize the next couple decades in a few quick sentences. Esperanto is published in 1887, and it develops a decent following, bigger than most conlangs had acquired (to this day, Esperanto is one of the most successful conlangs, the only competition being languages used in fictional works like Lord of the Rings and Star Trek). Various groups, such as the *Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda* (World Anational Association), tried to use Esperanto promote international communication and relations, but—much like most Esperanto efforts—were not as successful as they'd hoped. Esperantists developed *finavenkismo*, the belief in the "final victory" where Esperanto succeeds at becoming the lingua franca of the world, and everyone is speaking it as a secondary language. There were two methods of achieving this, as Zamenhof noted in a 1910 speech: privately promoting self-study, or getting governments on board; Esperantists tried both.
World War I happens shortly after Zamenhof's death, and following its conclusion, the League of Nations was founded in 1920. And the League did discuss Esperanto in some capacity; Inazo Nitobe, Japan's undersecretary for the League, noted that Esperanto could be good "for meeting the demands of science and commerce and the still higher needs of an instrument for higher understanding." The League didn't decide to make Esperanto an international language, or an official one used for their purposes (their official language became French and English), but they did consider encouraging Esperanto study. They sent out surveys to member countries, and found relatively decent activity in countries across Eurasia. Countries were on board to support Esperanto education in schools. However, fears of anti-nationalism and communism led to countries trying to shut it down internally, and this lead to efforts that would further bad-mouth Esperanto, shutting down the effort—and in turn, *finavenkismo*—for good in August 1923.
I'm not sure what happened with the League after that, or the United Nations later on when it replaced the league in the '40s. I will note that Esperanto was not the last attempt at creating an auxlang: the International Auxiliary Language Association was founded in 1924, and published Interlingua in 1951. Interlingua is designed to be easily understandable by speakers of any Romance language, but it it has never reached the popularity or impact of Esperanto.
I know this doesn't give you the whole picture, but I hope it gives some insight into the goals of a universal language.
**Main Sources:**
Okrent, Arika. *In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language*. Spiegel & Grau, 2009.
Schor, Esther H. *Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language*. Metropolitan Books, 2016.
Zamenhof, Ludwig. *Dr. Esperanto's International Language*. Edited by Gene Keys. Translated by Richard H. Geoghegan, Oxford, 1889, _URL_1_. | [
"The World War II and the expulsion of Germans from many European countries between 1945 and 1950 had a disastrous effect on the use of the German language in Central and Eastern Europe, where it was often suppressed and eventually dropped as a lingua franca by the mid-to-late 20th century being replaced by Russian... |
What attitudes did the Spartans have toward writing? | Apparently at least the aristocracy was literate, as evidenced by the story related by Plutarch(?) about Gorgo telling the courtiers to scrape away the wax from the tablet to find the writing carved into the wood beneath. Also their iconic Lambda on the Lakedaimonian shields bears witness to at least some familiarity with letters. [This paper](_URL_0_) makes the case that literacy among Spartiates was far more widespread than what centuries of Athenian propaganda have made many believe. | [
"In \"Panathenaicus,\" Isocrates argues with a student about the literacy of the Spartans. In section 250, the student claims that the most intelligent of the Spartans admired and owned copies of some of Isocrates' speeches. The implication is that some Spartans had books, were able to read them and were eager to d... |
What causes a redwood tree that has lived for a thousand years to "die"? | There was a nice discussion [here](_URL_0_) about a similar subject.
Essentially, trees grow. And they don't know when to quit. We often measure how old a tree is by counting its rings. More rings means older bigger trees. Most trees - like Redwoods - rely on their leaves for energy via photosynthesis. As the trees get bigger they require more energy, so they need more leaves. However, there is a limited area where leaves can grow. A large Redwood (~200+ft tall) can't have leaves close to the ground, because the sunlight will be blocked by the individual tree and the trees around it. The tree must grow upwards above the other trees to ensure that it maintains enough space for new leaves. Yet there is a physical limitation to how tall any tree can grow - the height to which it can pump up water and other nutrients. For Redwoods, the absolute maximum of this height was found to be just over 400ft. You'll notice that the tallest trees on earth struggle to crack 300ft because of a medley of other limitations, such as environmental factors and disease. But barring these factors, at some point the core would starve to death and rot, and the tree will eventually fall over from a fierce wind or collapse under it's own weight.
Your question raises all kinds of philosophical questions, like what constitutes a natural death in the first place? But I hope I answered what you wanted to know! | [
"The tree has survived for so long due to vegetative cloning. The visible tree is relatively young, but it is part of an older root system that dates back thousands of years. The trunk of the tree may die and regrow multiple times, but the tree's root system remains intact and in turn sprouts another trunk. The tru... |
What do people mean when they say there's a "chemical/biological aspect to some people's anxiety?" | You're trying to separate things that are overlapped, which is where some of the confusion comes from.
If I drop a bear in the middle of your room, even though we know why you are afraid and can remove the bear to remove your fear, your biological fear system (autonomic stimulation, cortisol release, amygdala lighting up, etc.) is still going to fire. Our brains are well developed to respond to fearful situations, and these systems are heavily implicated in anxiety disorders.
The basics of cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety include direct teaching of the biology of anxiety and fear.
While many people benefit from therapy (which can change the brain physically), many also can benefit from medication, which can actually change therapy outcomes (particularly if the anxiety is too strong to allow for someone to tolerate therapy or to concentrate/sleep well). Some people are very receptive to therapy and others aren't. First line treatment for many anxiety disorders is therapy but medication can and should be used for severe anxiety or anxiety that does not respond to therapy.
There are many biological causes of fear and anxiety , many psychological reasons, and a holistic view of anxiety incorporates the brain and body, which are interconnected.
TL;dr: there are no sharp divisions between the physical body/brain and our "mind" for an evolutionarily developed system like our fear system | [
"The biological basis for anxiety disorders is rooted in the consistent activation of the stress response. Fear, which is the defining emotion of an anxiety disorder, occurs when someone perceives a situation (a stressor) as threatening. This activates the stress response. If a person has difficulty regulating this... |
why do some casinos won't allow a person to join a game or take home the money after a big winning? | The casino doesnt ever have to let you play at any specific table if for some reason they dont want to. They can kick you out for any reason as its a private establishment. That said they absolutely CANNOT keep you from leaving any time you want and taking your winnings with you, but it is their job to make money, when someone wins a jackpot they will do everything they can to make that person stay and lose some of it back to the casino. | [
"As casinos have a house advantage in games of chance, a casino is more likely over time to take a player's money than a player is to win money from the casino, and thus it is to the casino's advantage to keep a winning player playing. Casinos thus frequently encourage winning players to continue playing. An exampl... |
How worldly inclined were people before internet and television? | The typical American would definitely have known about the French Revolution. There were many interactions between the two countries, with the American Founding Fathers supporting and hoping for a French victory in Europe to allow them to push away from British impressment of sailors in the Atlantic, amongst other things. Interestingly they hated Britain, a democracy, so much that they sided with the military despot and tyrant Napoleon, even when founding their new country on the principles of democracy and freedom!
Particularly in those days, the 18th/19th century, many countries depended enormously on overseas trade, and as such the fluctuating state of war, peace and trade between maritime countries made everything everyone's business. It's worth bearing in mind that before the war of 1812 America was largely dependent on the east coast maritime ports for revenue (around 70% of federal income from taxes), whilst having no notable naval force, and so the state of the rest of the world was very important. James Madison/Thomas Jefferson didn't like this and tried hard to isolate America and force trade inwards. They *wanted* the coast to be the final frontier, no one coming in, no one going out.
The press of the time was just as fickle as it is now and reported on the success and failures of national interests abroad, and the governments had to extend their reach and influence around the globe in order to keep the support of the voting public back home.
On top of this, a lot of the developed western world was, if not a significant global power of their own, a vassal state or colony of a nation that was, and so obviously had a lot of contact and interest in overseas situations.
Obviously the average member of the public wouldn't know the minutiae of the lives of foreigners, but at that time a lot of news and gossip would have focused on the state of the world at large - through war and trade.
| [
"The internet itself is a huge positive for people of all ages, as it now is a personal library for anyone who has access. The number of educational websites and services offered are so immense that research has become a task much easier than it was in the past. Social media has also provided many benefits for peop... |
ontological, phenomenological | They are philosophical terms. Ontology refers to the study of the nature of being and existence, and Phenomenology to first person experience and consciousness. What they mean in a sentence depends largely on the rest of the sentence, but that's a start. | [
"Phenomenology is the study of the phenomena of experience. It is a broad philosophical movement founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on, and study of, the structures of consciousness and the p... |
why do so many critically acclaimed, well made video games fail commercially? | They're not AAA titles and as heavily advertised, or they're niche genres not many people play. Lot of story heavy or puzzle heavy games make people think, and a lot of people just want mindless action. Also most people won't invest in new titles, and would rather buy what they know. Call of Action XXX and such. Need for Acceleration Sport. | [
"Low-budget, poor-quality games, released in the hopes of being purchased by unsuspecting customers, are often referred to as \"shovelware\". This can lead to discoverability issues when a platform has no quality control. Several well-known examples were released for the Wii, including ports of PlayStation 2 games ... |
What happens to bodily waste in people who have very infrequent bowel movements? | My experience here comes from human gross anatomy, so stuff at small scales may be best explained by someone else.
There's a pretty wide range in defecation frequency in humans. [Here is one study](_URL_3_) looking at a limited demographic in a single city that found a lot of variation in bowel movement habits that were otherwise considered normal. So when we talk about these rates being "infrequent" it's kind of a relative thing, and it doesn't necessarily mean constipation, which is I think what most people are assuming in their responses. As that source notes, defecation rate is also not a great measure of intestinal transit time, because the rates of movement through the parts of the digestive system can vary.
In these instances food is going through the normal digestive process, with some portions of digestion taking longer. [Here is a brief explanation of various transit times](_URL_0_) within different parts of the digestive tract. It takes long enough that several meals are moving through at a time, and again each portion of the digestive tract takes different amounts of time.
The gut tract is long enough to accommodate this, because the small intestine averages ~22 feet long, while the large intestine averages ~5 feet. This can vary from person to person, or can even change based on how muscles in the intestines are contracting.
The main thing about the lower digestive tract is how much water gets absorbed. Even if a large portion of a meal can't be broken down, it contains a lot of water. Our intestines absorb a lot of that, both passively (via diffusion) and actively. Exactly how much depends on the osmotic gradient, particularly in the small intestine. [Here's the water content in fruits and vegetables](_URL_1_) and [meat](_URL_2_). So by the end you've still lost mass in the form of water even if there was a lot of indigestible material.
Of course as others have mentioned, there can also be health issues that lead to infrequent defecation that is not due to normal variation. | [
"A common gastrointestinal problem is constipation—infrequent bowel movements, hard stools, or strain during the movements—which causes serious cases of bloating. Since most cases of constipation are temporary, simple lifestyle changes, such as getting more exercise and increasing one's intake of fiber, can go a lo... |
What were Otto Van Bismarck's internal policy? How did he contribute to the Unification of Germany? | The main contributions of the unification was as minister of Prussia he provoked wars against Austria in 1866, this pushed many German states out of Austria's sphere of influence and allowed Prussia to take hold of what was going to be Germany. Bismark considered France as an aggressor to the German states and a war with France would unite the German states behind the Prussian king. Bismark sparked this war by editing a letter of a conversation with the Franch ambassador and the Prussian king to make it appear that the ambassador was insulted, there was already tension as a German prince was offered the Spanish throne and France blocked the offer and demanded assurances that no German prince would be become King.
The Franco-Prussian war was a massive defeat for the French, with the German states united by nationalism and patriotism they won battle after battle and even capturing the French King Napoleon III. During the war Bismark continued his effort for a united Germany and negotiated with southern states such as Bavaria with special concessions with the agreement of unification. It is also interesting to note that Bismark was against the annexing of Alcase-Lorraine during the peace deal as he did not want to make France a permanent enemy.
His powerful in his policies gave him the nickname "The Iron Chancellor" and also gave his famous speech about the unification "By blood and Iron" which has become a description of his forgein policy.
Also by showing Prussian dominance over Austria and France he lined up the German states and in 1871 Emperor Wilhelm of Prussia became German emperor in Versailles.
After the Unification, Bismark set his goal of maintaining peace and the balance of power in Europe until his removal from office in 1890 by Emperor Wilhelm II. | [
"Chancellor Otto von Bismarck determined the political course of the German Empire until 1890. He fostered alliances in Europe to contain France on the one hand and aspired to consolidate Germany's influence in Europe on the other. His principal domestic policies focused on the suppression of socialism and the redu... |
RPG research. | Check out Frances and Joseph Gies' series of books on daily life in the Middle Ages: _URL_0_
They're very readable and accurate. | [
"The Official RPGA Handbook is an adventure module for the \"Dungeons & Dragons\" fantasy role-playing game, set in the game's World of Greyhawk campaign setting. TSR, Inc. published the module in 1987 for the first edition \"Advanced Dungeons & Dragons\" rules. It is part of the \"C\" series of modules, a set of u... |
why are phone noises so unrealistic on screen? | The sounds and ringtones of phones are protected by copyright. It’s to avoid having to pay royalties to the respective companies. | [
"In video and television, noise refers to the random dot pattern that is superimposed on the picture as a result of electronic noise, the 'snow' that is seen with poor (analog) television reception or on VHS tapes. Interference and static are other forms of noise, in the sense that they are unwanted, though not ran... |
why do supercars redline at 10-12 thousand rpm, but my truck redlines at 4 thousand rpm? | Trucks need mainly torque, because they tow stuff and weigh a lot. They need that instant power to get going. Torque is how hard you're turning the wheels more than how fast. Horsepower is usually made higher in rpm range. Trucks make a lot of torque with larger bigger engines. The engine doesnt turn as fast but each time it does its more powerful. Sports cars have smaller engines that turn faster. Faster engine turns, faster you go. They need torque as well but can get by on mostly horsepower. So revving out to 10k rpm they can go really fast. Also if your truck redlines that low it is probably a diesel. Diesels make almost instant power but die off in high rpm so revving them higher is a waiste. Ferrari is opposite it loves high rpms and makes a ton of power near redline. | [
"The engine had to be slightly de-tuned to meet European emissions laws, although its at 7,200 rpm and of torque at 4,250 rpm proved to be more than adequate; the car could accelerate to from a standstill in 3.9 seconds on its way to a top speed of .\n",
"To match the new engine, the rear axle ratio was raised to... |
what does it feel like to be in a multiple days/weeks coma ? are you still "awake" in your head during this time ? | As far as i have read about this the main comment about being in a coma is unconsciousness. Ie no consciousness. Aka being in a coma. | [
"People may emerge from a coma with a combination of physical, intellectual, and psychological difficulties that need special attention. It is common for coma patients to awaken in a profound state of confusion and suffer from dysarthria, the inability to articulate any speech. Recovery usually occurs gradually. In... |
arbitrage | Let's say you have an apple. Bob really likes apples, so he'll give you 2 oranges for an apple. Chuck really likes oranges, and will give you 2 pears for one (Bob hates pears). Maxine likes pears, and will give you 2 apples for one (Chuck is allergic to apples).
So you start out with 1 apple, and after three trades, you have 8 apples, without having to give anything up. What's more, you can go through the whole process, and get 64 apples, 512 apples, as many as you want, until someone runs out of fruit or changes the exchange rate.
That's arbitrage...you find a loop in exchange rates that gets you something for nothing, they you run around that loop as often as you can, to get a lot of something for nothing. | [
"In economics and finance, arbitrage (, ) is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. When used by academics, an arbitrage is a (imagined... |
What would a Roman Gladiator fight Be like? | At least as far as the colosseum there was a basic idea of tickets and assigned seats. The colosseum was divided into multiple sections which as the seating grew lower, the seats would belong to people of higher classes. Men and women would no sit together, so if you came as a family to watch the games you probably wouldnt sit with your family.
Death rates for gladiators are definitely not as high as you would think they are, as based on hollywood's portrayal of the games. Many gladiators were free men and signed contracts much like the contracts that big athletes sign today. Men were drawn to becoming gladiators because of the high pay and the luxurious lifestyle that comes with it, outside of the battling of course. Gladiators were privately owned and financed, so why would the owners want to risk losing their expensive investments.
The games would usually be conducted in manners similar to sporting games today. There would usually be ground rules set before as well as usually having a referee-of-sorts to officiate the games. Games would be ended, sometimes by death, but often times with both sides surviving. Even with flesh wounds and deep cuts a gladiator had a chance of survival, as the romans were experts in pioneering medical treatments towards these sorts of wounds. Between games, the bloodied sand floor would be cleared away, while putting in fresh new sand.
Sometimes food and concessions would be provided for the fans, for holidays such as the inauguration of the colosseum under Titus. However concessions and trinkets would be sold likewise. | [
"The Romans thought gladiator contests had originated with funeral games and sacrifices in which select captive warriors were forced to fight to expiate the deaths of noble Romans. Some of the earliest styles of gladiator fighting had ethnic designations such as \"Thracian\" or \"Gallic\". The staged combats were c... |
How often does the influenza vaccine match up to the strain of winter flu? | The flu shot has 3 vaccines basically in one. 2 for subtypes of A and 1 for type B. But as explained in immunology even if its not 100% correct for the specific flu it can build immunity to certain factors that are common with a large percentage of subtypes, thus making a mild case of flu. You have to understand that the virus can have antigenic drift which can happen even during the season. Someone who works in flu statics might be able to add in the data about specific % match, but I just wanted to let you know that it doesnt have to be 100% match to help. | [
"The usual seasonal flu vaccines give little or no immunity against the new strain of flu. There is an international program to produce a vaccine which will be effective against the new H1N1 strain. The chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson said on 25 June that it seemed likely that the UK would receive the firs... |
Are there any lesser-known shipwrecks currently being searched for that would be incredibly significant for world history? | The go to source for news of archaeological work on shipwrecks is the IJNA. [Here's a link to the journal](_URL_7_). You'll need to have a subscription to get past the paywall unfortunately. A university library might also have a subscription or could get loaned copies. [The Mariners Mirror is another major journal](_URL_4_).
The Queen Anne's Revenge folks are pretty much sure of their find at this point and the site is somewhere over 60% excavated. Could be more I haven't talked to any of them in a while. They are not 100% sure its the QAR, and probably never will be, but they are maybe 90% sure and they aren't many serious objections left. Last I heard this was the final season of excavation as well and the active digging was winding down. Look's like their [website got a long overdue overhaul as well](_URL_3_)
There has been an ongoing search for the *Santa Maria*, Columbus' flagship for a long time for obvious reasons. I saw a news article not long ago that a team think they found it. It's way to early to call it, and the with the ambiguities surrounding IDing sunken vessels they never know for sure. [Here's the article anyways](_URL_5_) but don't get your hopes up. Like Dr. Beeker notes nothing is sure until an excavation is conducted. See above about the QAR where they have been working for almost 10 years and still cannot say with 100% certainty they are correct.
In the Great Lakes there is a long running effort to locate the *Le Griffin.* *Le Griffin* was a vessel built by French Explorer de La Salle and one of the first large vessels built in the Great Lakes. There are persistent claims that it has been found but none has been confirmed to date. The most recent is a large beam some say is a bowsprit from *Le Griffin.* Other say that testing has shown it to be much more recent. At this point there is nothing definite to be said really.
There is, or was, I haven't seen anything about it recently, an effort to find Henry Morgan's vessels. The media made a bit of a stir about it when Henry Morgan Rum backed the project. [Here's a short article about it](_URL_1_).
That's a few examples of high profile ships that are currently being looked for. You seem to be interested in ongoing projects so here are a few of those as well.
The [*Vasa*](_URL_2_) is probably the most famous ship recovery ever. She sank as a result of a combination of under loading and poor ship handling. The harbor where she sank is extremely cold so preservation of the wreck was excellent. In 1961 she was recovered and a museum built around her. Conservation and study of the *Vasa* is ongoing. A few years back she was the subject of an extensive (84,000+) point total station survey. As the pride of the Swedish Museum system there is a 1000 year conservation plan.
The *Mary Rose* occupies a similar position in England. She was the pride of the fleet until she was lost in battle. Unfortunately she was sunk in warmer water and the sea scour and teredo worms had their way with her. Everything that was not buried was eventually destroyed. What was left was eventually discovered and now resides at the [Mary Rose Museum](_URL_0_). Because she tipped over after sinking one entire side has survived. There have been a number of documentaries and the double monograph on finds from the wreck came out not long ago.
The [Viking Ship Museum in Roskild](_URL_6_) also has an excellent collection. They are the home to The five [Skuldelev ships](_URL_6_exhibitions/the-skuldelev-ships/) a series of Viking vessels recovered from Fjords in beautiful condition. They have been conserved and are now on display. The Viking Museum also has some of the best museum placement in the world because it sits on the waterfront. When the Danes went to expand the museum they chose to do so out over the water and when they went to place pilings they found MORE Viking ships UNDER the proposed museum. I think the last count was at 9 new ships.
These three projects also have a ton of articles in the IJNA for you to read if you're into the more technical aspects of their conservation, recovery, and discovery. | [
"In addition, another 2018 find was a 2,400-year-old, -long, Greek merchant vessel sunk off the coast of the Mykolaiv region of the Ukraine, is considered the world's oldest intact shipwreck discovered to date.\n",
"To date, the oldest identified shipwreck discovered in St. Augustine waters is the sloop \"Industr... |
why do motels/hotels frequently have numbers in their names? | Well, Motel 6 was called that because it's room rate was $6 per night.
I'm going to guess that Super 8 was $8 per night.
Source: Wikipedia page on Motel 6 | [
"Unlike Ireland, where the names of pubs tend to be based on the name of the owner, or a former owner, in mainland Britain this has been unusual, probably because pubs wanted names that could be related to an image on their pub sign, a key means of identifying them in an age of restricted literacy. In Australia a h... |
Was the idea that the loss of World War I was caused by Jews around before Hitler? | It was at least fleetingly popular with at least one major figure, yes -- though one must naturally be cautious in taking a single example as definitive of an epoch.
The deposed German Kaiser Wilhelm II, in exile in December of 1919, wrote to Field Marshal August Von Mackensen that he believed he had only been forced to abdicate because the German people "had been egged on and misled by the tribe of Judah." He went on to refer to the Jewish population of Germany generally and Europe broadly as "parasites," and hoped that the German people would not rest until the Jews "have been destroyed and exterminated from German soil."
It got worse, incredibly, as the deposed emperor called for a global pogrom against the Jews, denouncing them as "a nuisance that humanity must get rid of some way or other." Chillingly: "I believe," he concluded, "the best thing would be gas!"
This material can be found in *Kaiser Wilhelm II: New Interpretations -- The Corfu Papers* (1982), edited by John Rohl and Nicholaus Sombart. It should also be noted that the deposed Kaiser's relationship with the German Nazis was ambivalent and complex, and that he seems to have viewed their excesses in this direction with distaste. He died in 1941, in any event, so we will never know what he might have thought of how things eventually turned out. | [
"The experience of the Holocaust, which wiped out some six million Jews in Europe under Nazi occupation, and left millions more homeless and displaced, contributed to growing concern about the situation of the Jewish people worldwide. However, the trauma breathed new life into the traditional idea of a common Jewis... |
When traveling near the speed of light, would blueshift likely kill you? | Sure, but there's other stuff to worry about when you get to those speeds, like interstellar hydrogen, dust particles, and the like. In practical terms, a spaceship running into high-energy photons is less of a danger than running into high-energy protons- because at the same speed, the protons will have a lot more energy.
A related quantity is called the [GKZ Limit](_URL_0_) for cosmic ray protons. It's a limit on the energy, or equivalently, the velocity of the proton. If a proton is travelling with enough energy, then it can collide with a cosmic ray photon to emit a pion. In the process the proton loses a large fraction of its energy. As such, protons are effectively stopped from travelling faster than this limit for long distances. | [
"In \"Redshift Rendezvous\" (1990) by John E. Stith hyperspace is a layer of space in which the speed of light is ten meters per second. People aboard a passenger craft in this region experience relativistic effects in daily life. Flick a light switch and the room slowly fills with light. Run, and you can create so... |
Chemistry Behind Smelly Protein Bottles? | Some protein smells are caused by degradation of sulfur containing amino acids (e.g. cysteine). It's especially true if degradation takes place in an anoxic environment (no oxygen) like a closed container. Then you'll end up with reduced sulfur compounds (other thiols/mercaptans, or even H2S) which are especially smelly. But even without a lot of sulfur compounds anaerobic degradation is 'smelly.'
One way to get the smell out is to use a strong oxidizer like bleach that will destroy most organics (odor causing or not). If you google protein smell you'll find a whole bunch of anecdotal discussion on the topic. | [
"Odorant-binding proteins (OBPs) are small (10 to 30 kDa) soluble proteins secreted by auxiliary cells surrounding olfactory receptor neurons, including the nasal mucus of many vertebrate species and in the sensillar lymph of chemosensory sensilla of insects. OBPs are characterized by a specific protein domain that... |
Were all ancient Greek sculptures painted? What about the Hellenistic period? | In my Greek art and architecture class, our professor told us that all Greek sculpture was originally painted, period. I am, however, far from an expert in sculpture, and I can't really say anything beyond that. | [
"Some scholars have speculated a possible Hellenistic link to these sculptures, because of the lack of life-sized and realistic sculptures before the Qin dynasty. They argued that potential Greek influence is particularly evident in some terracotta figures such as those of acrobats, combined with findings of Europe... |
Were there any civilizations that had museums and a great interest in antiquity and history like we have today? | [Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum](_URL_0_) was built circa 520 BCE. It contained artefacts from centuries before then, all with labels in three languages. | [
"Early museums began as the private collections of wealthy individuals, families or institutions of art and rare or curious natural objects and artifacts. These were often displayed in so-called wonder rooms or cabinets of curiosities. One of the oldest museums known is Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum, built by Princess E... |
how does the anatomy of conjoined twins work? | It's different depending on each case. Usually they have separate organs but share a circulatory system. It's not uncommon for them to only have 1 heart and liver shared between the two. | [
"During embryonic development, twins can form from the splitting of a single embryo (monozygotic) which forms identical twins or the twins can arise from separate oocytes in the same menstrual cycle (dizygotic) which forms fraternal twins. Although the latter is more frequent, monozygotic is the reason conjoined tw... |
What evidence do we have that Mars once had a hydrosphere? | The evidence of Mars' hydrosphere come from across the planet. Most it later than the LHB though. We have satelite images of coastlines, meandering rivers, deltas, cataclysmic deluge sites as has occurred on Earth in Washington but much larger as well as tge aquatic dunes they caused, uncountable number of gullies, fans and braiding rivers. Of course there are also the two vast polar ice caps which are to a large extent water ice (CO2 ice makes up the majority though) as well as radar measurements of the ice in the subsurface which is a heck of a lot. Finally we also have actual mineral samples by rovers of minerals we know can only be created in the presence of water. Basically there isn't a place on Mars that doesn't bear witness to its now mostly gone hydrosphere if we had the means to study it in the field as we would here on Earth.
The question isn't if Mars had a hydrosphere that is now almost gone. The question is how large was it? Given the massive outbursts of subsurface aquifers which are the largest cataclysmic deluges yet discovered anywhere we have to assume very large. But whether the Vastitas Borealis was filled with an ocean is still under debate.
As for Hellas Planitia and the LHB. Hellas Planitia is 7 kilometers deep and more than 2000 kilometers in diameter. Even with a massive hydrosphere there is no way such a large basin could have been filled in by erosion. The only processes we know that could equalize such large relief differences are plate tectonics and planetary collision. Both of which did not occur.
The northern ocean hypothesis is not mutually exclusive with the Hellas Planitia impact since it impacted on the opposite side of the planet it therefore is not required to have evaporated the ocean. The rest of the LHB may actually have been beneficial to establishing an ocean. Mars is much further from the sun and only receives half of the radiation. It would have needed a very strong green house effect or some other energy source (like impacts) to raise the temperature from the average of -55C to above 0C. | [
"Lake Vostok in Antarctica may have implications for liquid water still existing on Mars, because if water existed before the polar ice caps on Mars, so it is thought possible that there is still liquid water below the ice caps. Then in July 2018, scientists from the Italian Space Agency reported the detection of a... |
is a predisposition to substance abuse based on family history mainly due to environment or genetics? how could genes make you more likely to abuse drugs/alcohol? | Addiction researcher here. **Yes**, your genes predispose you to addiction.
There are genes that control how strongly you react to drugs – not only the physical and mental effects, but its reinforcing effects. Every time your brain performs an action (in this case drinking) and it likes the result, it will reprogram your brain to increase the likelihood you'll do it again. Addictive drugs hijack that system. Addicts brains reprogram to a greater extent. Also theres a lot of overlap with people who are depressed or anxious, which also encourages drinking.
Heres the kicker, environment can act on genes to encourage addiction. Second, we also need to consider social values. If you get bad hangovers, sometimes get angry, and drink > 5 drinks in less than 2 hours 5x per month, you could be classified as having a substance abuse disorder. That is not to say you're a hopeless addict, but medicine might categorize you as such. Depending on where you come from, this kind of drinking might not be too much a problem (e.g. college).
As a parting note, addiction medicine is an emerging field with many complicated unanswered questions. Environmental, cultural, and biological factors all contribute a critical role in addiction.
| [
"In terms of psychoses, most researchers and clinicians believe that genetics remains a causative risk factor but \"genes alone do not cause the illness\". Modern views of genetics see genes more like dimmer switches, with environmental factors switching the genes on; the more severe the environmental stress, the m... |
What Are Some Major Text That Were Around During Jesus's Time? | The only texts from Jesus' province that were potentially written during his lifetime are a handful of inscriptions, and a subset of the Dead Sea scrolls. The inscriptions are things like public official dedications, names on statues, etc.; the Dead Sea scrolls are thought to be mostly collections of older texts, not so much freshly written Essene texts.
There is no conceivable reason why anyone might expect public inscriptions to mention a contemporary cult leader -- though if you're interested, there's one that mentions the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate in connection with a temple giving divine honours to the (ex?-)emperor Tiberius -- and no reason to expect the Dead Sea scrolls to mention the leader of a competing sect.
Testimony about ancient individuals and events is very rarely contemporaneous with those events and individuals. When you're looking at figures who aren't generals, senators, or emperors, you get an even more pronounced lag in the literary testimony -- and, in addition, normally you get much *less* testimony.
I mean, that's unless you're expecting a record of Jesus' death to appear in Seneca the Elder's rhetorical exercises, or Velleius Paterculus' history of Rome -- those are the only *literary* writers in the Mediterranean world who were writing at the time of Jesus' ministry and whose works survive in anything more than tiny fragments. But of course that would be insane.
[**Edit.** Though as a curiosity, I now see that one of Seneca's *sons*, L. Junius Gallio Annaeanus, actually gets mentioned in a New Testament text, at *Acts* 18.12-17, as a proconsul (ἀνθύπατος). But of course that's got nothing to do with Jesus himself, it's a couple of decades after Jesus' death, and it's in Corinth, not Jerusalem.] | [
"Biblical scholar Frederick Fyvie Bruce says the earliest mention of Jesus outside the New Testament occurs around 55 CE from a historian named Thallos. Thallos' history, like the vast majority of ancient literature, has been lost but not before it was quoted by Sextus Julius Africanus (ca.160-ca.240 CE), a Christi... |
how are fbi profilers so accurate (or are they?) and how do they do it? | They aren't. Forensic profiling, like almost all forms of forensic science, has never been demonstrated to be particularly accurate, and there are no rigorous standards for how it must be done.
At least it's not like firearms analysis, which is *known* to be inaccurate, and yet still admitted in courts. | [
"The FBI Indexes are a system used to track American citizens and other people by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) before the adoption by the FBI of computerized databases. The name signifies that the lists were originally made on paper index cards, compiled by J. Edgar Hoover before he became director of ... |
why are glasses associated with intelligence in culture? | In the past, literacy (the ability to read and write) was uncommon but a very useful skill to have. If you were illiterate, you would have to hire someone who was literate to write letters or documents for you. Performing merchant trades that involve large but accurate sums of money would be impossible for someone who could not read and write.
However, someone who was literate but had bad or declining eyesight would want to invest in glasses to continue using their skill. Thus, there was a link between people who wear glasses and literacy. People who were literate were generally considered more educated and intelligent in the culture.
Nowadays, the link is more due to the conditions children go through when growing up. Having a lack of exposure to sunlight for children and teenagers makes you more likely to become near-sighted. Kids who end up studying in their room all day generally do not have enough exposure to sunlight. This makes the children who study more have a higher chance of wearing glasses. | [
"Since eyeglasses have become an acceptable fashion item and often act as a key component in individuals' personal image. Musicians Buddy Holly and John Lennon became synonymous with the styles of eye-glasses they wore to the point that thick, black horn-rimmed glasses are often called \"Buddy Holly glasses\" and p... |
What is the main difference between organic PVs and inorganic PVs? | The main problem with organics is that to separate the positive and negative charges takes a lot of energy (0.7-1.0 V). This means your output voltage is down by that much (so instead of say 1.8 V you are only getting say 0.7-1.0 V). This is partially because of their low dielectric constant. Whereas in say silicon it costs almost nothing to separate the charges.
The mobility of charges is usually much better in inorganics, so it is easier to get the charges out, meaning less resistive losses and more charges out. Organics cant be too thick otherwise they lose too much charge, but then they have trouble absorbing all the light.
The main advantage of organics is that they can be printed on at low temperatures, instead of high temperature processes. However max efficiencies have plateaued over the last 5 years at about 12 %, vs silicon 30 % and above. | [
"PVC comes in two basic forms: rigid (sometimes abbreviated as RPVC) and flexible. The rigid form of PVC is used in construction for pipe and in profile applications such as doors and windows. It is also used in making bottles, non-food packaging, food-covering sheets, and cards (such as bank or membership cards). ... |
why do never hear of people having two infections (viral or bacterial) at once. is it simply rare or is there another reason? | It is not rare. In fact a lot of people who die of pneumonia got the pneumonia because they already had some other infection that was weakening them.
An extreme case: lots of people with untreated AIDS. | [
"Often, people have regular outbreaks of anywhere from 1 to 10 times per year, but stress (because the virus lies next to the nerve cells), or a weakened immune system due to a temporary or permanent illness can also spark outbreaks. Some people become infected but fail to ever have a single outbreak, although they... |
To what extend did record labels shape blues music in the 1920s? | The American record industry in the 1920s was fundamentally owned by not only white people, but those from cities in the north of America. And those people did have to alter the blues in order to record it using the technology they had at the time, and they did have a set of preconceptions about what the public wanted - the blues recordings of the 1920s were released by record companies aiming to have hits.
But first some context. Let's take W.C. Handy, the writer of the song 'St Louis Blues', and the person who first spread the idea of 'the blues' in American popular culture. Living in an era when sheet music was still more important than the then infant recording industry, he wrote ‘St Louis Blues’ which was prominently published in a sheet music form that sounds more like ragtime to us today. Did Handy take liberties with the form of the blues in his version of it? Sure - but which ones?
In his autobiography, he famously told a story about first hearing the blues played on the train platform in Tutwiler, Mississippi in 1903. As a result, these days, there's a certain mythological importance attached to the Mississippi Delta blues, with a general belief that it's the closest that we get to the original 'pure' blues - Tutwiler isn't very far away from the sharecropping farms where many of the Delta blues musicians grew up.
A couple of years earlier, Charles Peabody, an archaeologist, was fascinated by the songs sung by workers on one of his digs in Coahoma County, Mississippi, and wrote a paper on it in 1901, where he appears to be describing the blues - however, Peabody was discussing the music from memory, and there were no recordings at the time, so it's hard to be sure. Handy’s and Peabody’s accounts are essentially most of the historical record on the earliest origins of the blues - nobody was really interested in the opinions of the generally illiterate actual blues musicians making the music at that point, what with the deeply systemic racism of the Jim Crow era in the South.
So it seems as if Mississippi might be the origin of the blues as we know it (there are commonalities with some African musics but the blues are a distinctively American form). But remember that this is a folk music of a people who were enslaved, and that the grandparents of the first crop of recorded blues musicians might well have been bought and sold and transported states away on a whim. In the antebellum period, plantation owners did not like to hear their slaves singing mournful songs, and if the blues already existed at this point, it was something of a private music. So we simply don’t know much about its history in the 19th century. This also means that we don’t really know what it ‘really’ sounded like before the recordings or where it really came from, and so we’re taking educated guesses on the kinds of changes than white record company producers would have made to the music.
Initial blues recordings (like [Mamie Smith doing 'Crazy Blues' in 1920](_URL_4_) or [Bessie Smith doing 'Downhearted Blues' in 1923, one of the first big blues hits](_URL_2_)), were typically sung by strong-voiced female singers - Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Lucille Bogan being the most prominent. The lines between jazz and blues were often blurred during this period, and these blues recordings usually had jazzy backing; for example, Ma Rainey recorded with Louis Armstrong in 1924 (see ['See See Rider'](_URL_5_)).
There's a few possible reasons for this jazziness, related to the record labels. Perhaps the record companies couldn't quite understand that there was an audience for more rural forms of the blues at this period, given their dim understanding of black people in the South, or perhaps they were just trying to give it more of a pop sound, seeing that jazz was just pop music in 1923. But also it’s entirely possible that these recordings were simply a pretty good indication of what the music typically sounded like in this period, unless you lived on a farm in Mississippi - plenty of black people lived in cities or course. We have a tendency to idolise the acoustic blues recorded by men a few years later, for our own reasons that often misunderstand some of the intent of the music. And distinctions between blues and jazz weren't something that black audiences necessarily cared about when they just wanted entertainment and something to dance to.
It would take until 1926 for what we’d now see as ‘purer’ blues music to be recorded - i.e., black men playing acoustic guitar and singing. Initially this was Blind Lemon Jefferson, from Texas - his first big hit being ['Long Lonesome Blues' in 1926](_URL_1_). Blind Lemon Jefferson's success led to a search for more rural Southern music, which the record companies saw as being 'down home' music - they could package it as sell it to northern audiences with roots in the south - down home.
This wasn't a specific craze for the rural blues of black people, and included white musicians too. In August 1927, Ralph Peer, who had recorded Mamie Smith in 1920, did a session in Bristol, Tennessee recording white rural folk musicians Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family; these artists turned out to be so popular that they developed into what we know call country music. It's also in this period - around 1928 - that you get the first recordings of blues musicians from the Mississippi Delta like Tommy Johnson (['Canned Heat Blues'](_URL_6_)) and Charley Patton (['High Water Everywhere'](_URL_0_)).
Because these recordings were made during a period where there was something of a craze for down home music, and because the record company by 1927 was well aware of the thirst for novelty, these acoustic blues artists like Jefferson or Tommy Johnson or Son House were very much encouraged to record a) new material that hadn't already been heard by blues audiences, and b) the portion of their repertoire that sounded most downhome, that was the most rural (i.e., that was the most primitive). Additionally, one big difference between the recorded blues and what the blues might have sounded like live in a jook joint in Mississippi in 1932 is that 78rpm records had a very limited length; no Robert Johnson song is longer than 3 minutes. However, live recordings of, say, Son House, in the 1960s show him very much stretching out his recordings to become over ten minutes long in some cases. It's very likely - especially from the quite abrupt endings of 1920s blues recordings - that music that unfolded over a longer period of time was necessarily truncated for recordings.
Modern blues scholars like Marybeth Hamilton or Elijah Wald argue that much of the repertoire of the Delta musicians who recorded the blues was *not* the blues - they would have played the hits of the day, including Tin Pan Alley showtunes and versions of ragtime and jazz (you can hear Robert Johnson do a rag like ['They're Red Hot'](_URL_3_) which is a world away from the grim 'down at the crossroads with the devil' stuff). Ted Gioia points out that many of the slicker blues musicians - Charley Patton, for example - likely played in minstrel shows or medicine shows, playing deeply racist songs like 'Jim Crow'; W.C. Handy himself spent time playing in a group that attempted to subvert blackface minstrel shows by actually having, you know, genuinely black faces. And because as professional musicians they would have very often been making party music, chances are that 'They're Red Hot' is more indicative of Johnson's live repertoire than some of the slower blues that sound more 'pure' to us.
However, these musicians were very happy indeed to record what the record companies wanted, because a hit might have been a ticket out of the Delta to somewhere like 'Sweet Home Chicago' (as Robert Johnson titled one of his songs). That hit might mean they could escape the backbreaking cottonpicking work that they had to do outside of their music career (to quote Ted Gioia, 'B.B. King once estimated that he had journeyed some sixty thousand miles behind a plow before his music freed him from bondage to the land').
All of which is to say that it's hard to tell the difference between what is actually the most 'pure' Delta blues and what white people wanted the most pure Delta blues to sound like, given their exoticisation of the Mississippi Delta blues as the most purely African-American music. So there are debates in the literature as to whether the narrative of bluesmen selling the soul to the devil is something that white record company owners pushed in order to sell the music - as Marybeth Hamilton argues - or whether the idea had roots in rural black culture of the era - as Ted Gioia argues). Ultimately we don’t really know what the music in its ‘true’ form sounded like - there’s no live recordings of Robert Johnson or Son House performing for their usual audiences in 1932, but it *is* a mistake to think that they were one trick ponies, or that their music was necessarily a purer form than what you hear Bessie Smith sing - it’s of course possible that blues music started in urban areas and spread to the country, and that country people simply adapted it to the instruments they had at hand.
Sources:
* *Escaping The Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention Of The Blues* - Elijah Wald
* *In Search Of The Blues* - Marybeth Hamilton
* *Delta Blues: Life And Times Of The Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized Music* - Ted Gioia
| [
"It was the emergence of local record labels in Detroit in the 1940s and 1950s which helped the blues scene to flourish, compared to the 1920s, when blues artists generally emigrated to Chicago to record their music. Some small labels, including Staff, Holiday, Modern, and Prize Records, only existed for a brief ti... |
If a neutron star is as dense or more then an atomic nucleus can it be considered one giant atom? | No. Atoms are specific things with specific properties, that behave in specific ways. Neutron stars (or as is more fashionable, "neutron-degenerate stellar remnants") have none of the properties of atoms, nor do they behave anything like atoms. | [
"Neutron stars have overall densities of to ( to times the density of the Sun), which is comparable to the approximate density of an atomic nucleus of . The neutron star's density varies from about in the crust—increasing with depth—to about or (denser than an atomic nucleus) deeper inside. A neutron star is so den... |
what decides the noises/pattern of noises emergency vehicles make? | My sister is a paramedic... There are buttons for different sounds. The main siren is a constant repeating pattern, but the are buttons for chirps, warbles, honks, trills and others. Usually police and fire have distinct sounds, police being higher pitch and faster and fire being lower pitch and slower but there are some ambulances in my city with the same sound as the police cars, so it just depends on where you are.
[_URL_0_](_URL_1_) | [
"In addition to visual warnings, most appliances are also fitted with audible warnings, sometimes known as sirens, which can alert people to the presence of an emergency vehicle before they can be seen. The first audible warnings were mechanical bells, mounted on the front or roof of the truck. Most vehicles are no... |
Is there undeniable proof that the dark ages didn't happen? | There are a few threads regarding this in the FAQ, [found here.](_URL_0_) [This thread](_URL_1_) in particular should answer your question. | [
"The questions mentioned above remain to be answered because now we enter the period that used to be called the Dark Ages, due to the lack of archaeological and paleobotanical finds, (although the last few decades have provided more in the way of archaeological evidence due to the improvement in dating, especially ... |
What was the biggest city in Pre-Columbia North America? | There's always room for discussion, but perhaps the section [Cities and Monumental Architecture](_URL_0_) in our FAQ will answer your inquiry. | [
"Teotihuacan, flourishing from 200 BC to AD 750, was the largest American city of the pre-Columbian era, possibly reaching a population of 125,000 in AD 200. The city's grid plan originated with the \"Avenue of the Dead\", connecting the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and the Pyramid of the Moon. Beyond its ceremo... |
What do we mean when we say we want to find "a quantum theory of gravity"? | The problem with quantum gravity is really a problem with high energies. There are descriptions of quantum gravity at low energies that are completely consistent with general relativity, but since gravity is so weak the quantum corrections are totally negligible (there's no way we could ever measure the quantum effects). However, at high energies (~ Planck energy), while the quantum corrections appear to become larger, the standard theory of quantum gravity begins to make very little sense: the number of relevant terms in your equations goes to infinity and the theory has zero predictability.
However, in GR we can predict high-energy phenomena such as singularities in a black hole or at the big bang. We expect that these descriptions should be fundamentally altered by quantum physics, but at these high energies the quantum theory doesn't work.
Basically, where quantum gravity works, the effects are too weak to detect, but when quantum effects begin to become important (high energies) standard quantum gravity breaks down. There are many proposals for going forward, with the most popular proposal where I am (a large American university) being string theory. String theory works by unifying all of the forces, introducing a number of symmetries which cause all of the infinite terms mentioned above to becomes highly constrained with each other so that the number of adjustable constants becomes finite again. This is similar to how the weak force (which had the same problem as quantum gravity) was fixed: unification with the electromagnetic force.
EDIT: Maybe I should mention that some of the other forces also have issues at high energies, but since these energies appear to be higher than where gravity has issues, there is some hope that working on QG will help with those problems as well (maybe a particle physicist can correct me on the philosophy of this though). | [
"Quantum gravity refers to the imagined merger between the twin pillars of physical science which are quantum mechanics, the study of the microscopic (e.g., electrons), and general relativity, the science of the macroscopic (e.g., galaxies). Currently, these two great domains of science cannot be effectively interw... |
how does sunscreen make you stay longer in the sun? how does the higher number change things. | > Does it block a certain percentage of UV rays?
That's exactly what it does, more specifically it blocks UV-B rays, which are the type that cause sunburns. To my knowledge it doesn't "last" a certain amount of time, but rather it is worn away due to water, sweat, etc over time, which is why you need to reapply it.
[Here's](_URL_0_) a pretty good video that shows the UV protection of sunscreen.
EDIT: A little more research - SPF tells you how much longer it takes for the UV rays to burn your skin when used properly. SPF 30 means it takes 30 times longer to burn the protected areas than the unprotected. | [
"This can reduce the skin's elasticity and encourage sagging and wrinkle formation. Sunscreen can protect the skin from sun damage; sunscreen should be applied at least 20 minutes before exposure, and should be re-applied every four hours. Sunscreen should be applied to all areas of the skin that will be exposed to... |
What was the significance (value) of military marching songs and music even during battle? I am surprised to read about them during ww1 and of course there is that famous bagpipes at Normandy ... I know these were anachronisms ... What were they trying to re-create? | From what I've read, a lot of it was to keep up morale. If you think about how music impacts your mood now, this would have been exactly the same for the soldiers during World War One. Music really does have the power to brighten your mood when you're low.
I think you might be referring to the bagpipes that were played on the first day of the Somme. It was supposed to symbolise patriotism and rally the men as they went over the top, although I'm not sure how effective this actually was.
There's actually been some news about bagpipes in the news recently. A bagpipe that was played on the first day of the Somme was actually uncovered late last year. [Here's](_URL_0_) a news article about it.
You might also be interested in a young man named James Cleland Richardson, who was a member of the 16th (Canadian Scottish) Battalion. His bagpipes that he played on the first day of the Somme as the Newfoundland Regiment went over the top were unearthed in 2002. He also earned a Victoria Cross.
If you have any other specific questions, I can try to answer them. :-) | [
"Many of his war compositions have been grouped and published by the Belgian army singer Ernest GENVAL. Amongst his compositions from during World War I, which were songs used by the soldiers, we find:\n",
"The Anglo-French Wars of the 17th and 18th centuries saw more descriptive works, usually couched in patriot... |
why is everything in the universe so far apart? | Far apart compared to what? On a universal scale, it's pretty crowded. Our point of reference is just unimaginably small. | [
"The dimensional universe known as the Other Side of the World was created in a different way from any other known universe. There was no Big Bang, but all was created in a steady state flow of primal matter, resulting in a place where time - as we know it - doesn't exist. There, nothing ages or dies; and if someth... |
Why is the battle at Argonaut a renowned part of English history? | Do you perchance mean [Agincourt](_URL_0_)? | [
"The battle gained its name because the supplies of the English, largely hard biscuits, were left scattered and floating in the river. The battle was an early engagement of the Nine Years' War, and exposed the vulnerability of the English to ambushes in the wilder parts of Ulster with its thick woods and bogs.\n",
... |
what are dryer sheets made out of? | The actual fabric is just a non-woven polyester, and the chemicals are mostly just postively charged chemicals to grab the negative charges from the clothing so they don't cling with some smelly chemicals to make the clothing smell good. Remember that static is negative charge and opposites attract. | [
"The finished dried sheets are made by a shredding and rack-drying process that resembles papermaking. They are sold in packs in grocery stores for culinary purposes. Since \"nori\" sheets easily absorb water from the air and degrade, a desiccant is needed when storing \"nori\" for any significant time.\n",
"The ... |
Why doesn’t the iron cross have as much of a negative connotation as the swastika in the US? | What do you mean by the 'Iron Cross'? The term really refers to a German military decoration, which is not particular to the Nazis, it was in use a century before them, even if abolished after WWII.
Or are you referring to the black-on-white cross of the Teutonic Order, which the Iron Cross was an example of? Because that goes back to the aforementioned medieval order, and is still the symbol of the German Army (Bundeswehr) to this day.
Or do you just mean the Cross pattée _shape_ that the Iron Cross had? Because that was not specific to the Iron Cross in the least, it's been used in many contexts for many different things, by many different countries, including on French and British orders and medals.
The swastika was not in broad use like that; the idea of it as a 'Germanic' symbol only dates back to the Vöklisch movement a few decades before the Nazis, and the Nazi movement basically supplanted them. Thus, it was the logo of the Nazis and in a German context its use as a Nazi symbol made it far more associated with them than anything else.
| [
"In the United States, the Iron Cross also became one of several Nazi-era symbols adopted by outlaw bikers, more to signify rebellion or to shock than for any white supremacist ideology. By the early 2000s, this other use of the Iron Cross had spread from bikers to skateboarders and many extreme sports enthusiasts ... |
what are the straight up facts on quality of life for today's young adults than young adults in e.g. the 60s? | Your job opportunities now, believe it or not, are about the same level of awful as when I graduated from university in the early 1970s. Housing costs are equally horrifying (there was a reason so many of us lived in communes-- both urban and rural.) The idea of ever being able to own our own home was so remote as to be fantastical. And the rents were too damned high-- so much so that many college grads lived in streets and parks during the summer months-- especially in California.
Women who wished to work could be secretaries, nurses, school teachers, librarians or nuns. Period. All job applications for women began with "WPM" (meaning how many words-per-minute do you type?)
Repressive sexuality rivaled the Middle East's (you could be arrested and imprisoned for "living in sin" without "benefit of wedlock." You could be arrested and imprisoned for "sodomy." You could even be arrested and imprisoned for giving or getting a blow job. And no birth control unless you were married and had the permission of your husband. Women couldn't even buy condoms. Single mothers were called "widows." Unmarried girls who found themselves pregnant "went to live with their Aunt _______" for a time.
Religion in the public sphere, public prayer, so-called "moral clauses" in employment contracts were enforced-- and rampant. Oh, and Christian. Television stations signed off with prayers. Presidents led us in national days of prayer. Public school cafeterias could not serve meat on Fridays -- a sap to the Catholic church. Jews? (We'd heard about those, but didn't know any personally.) Negroes were exotics who lived "elsewhere. Mexicans were "braceros" who came and went seasonally following the crops. They certainly weren't enrolled in our "white" school system.
Cigarette smoke was everywhere you went-- including elevators and airplanes.
"Fine dining" consisted of steak, potatoes, canned vegetables, and two martinis. The wine was dreck. Fresh fruits and vegetables were only available seasonally in stores. Bottled water only came in 5 gallon jugs that cost a fortune -- and the water (and air, for that matter,) were literally hazardous to your health in many American cities.
Dress codes --for women especially --were halfway between Sunday School and Sharia. No trousers allowed in restaurants or in school, skirts no more than mid-knee level-- you'd be sent home or denied service if you showed up in pants. No cleavage, no sleeveless except at the beach. Hats, gloves, nylon stockings were required on public transportation. Men wearing tee shirts as outerwear were generally found only in prisons or in their own bedroom. Denim jeans weren't allowed in the classroom.
Women could not dine alone or get a room alone in hotels. Nor could they get credit of any sort without the co-signature of a man.
A telephone call from LA to NYC cost $1 a minute (in 1960s dollars.)
There were three television stations to choose from, all with politically and morally censored content.
There was no interactive electronic media other than ham radio and AM call-in-- both of which were highly restricted.
Commies (*shudder*) threatened to take over the world and were to be found in every closet and under every bed. National paranoia was palpable --and of days-following -9/11 intensity -- for years on end. People were literally blacklisted as unhirable for suspected "communist" sympathies.
All-in-all, this sixty-something woman is *extremely* happy to have survived all that to see the relative ease, convenience, and VERY COOL technologies we enjoy today. And I laugh in the face of anyone who longs for the good old days of the 1950s.
Good luck, OP!
| [
"BULLET::::- 2006 Disch, W. B., Schensul, J. J., Radda, K. E., & Robison, J. T. Perceived environmental stress, depression, and quality of life in older, low income, minority urban adults, in H. Mollenkopf & A. Walker (Eds.), Quality of life in old age: International and multidisciplinary perspectives. The Netherla... |
why do screws loosen over time? | Because of the way screws work - basically a wedge, but wrapped round into a spiral - they're always far more likely to loosen than tighten up with any kind of disturbance. Think of it as being more likely to slide downhill than uphill.
As for what you can do about it - plenty. If you're talking about woodscrews you can use makes with a more aggressive cut - I use [these](_URL_0_) a lot - they have lots of roughnesses on the thread which stop them coming loose.
If you're talking about machine screws - what many people call bolts, then you can use thread-locking compoud, which is basically glue which locks the threads together. You can use nylon locknuts, which grip the thread, or aerotight nuts, which do the same, or you can use shake-proof washers, or spring washers, or wired castellated nuts, or split-pins, or stake-nuts.... | [
"This self-locking property is one reason for the very large use of the screw in threaded fasteners such as wood screws, sheet metal screws, studs and bolts. Tightening the fastener by turning it puts compression force on the materials or parts being fastened together, but no amount of force from the parts will cau... |
how do you measure and describe "direction" when standing at the north or south pole? | Latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates can be used to describe a location regardless of position on Earth. They are unique points. If you want to tell someone where to go *relative* to you, you could always use degrees from a reference. | [
"In many deeds, the direction is described not by azimuth (a clockwise degree measure out of 360 degrees), but instead by bearing (a direction north or south followed by a degree measure out of 90 degrees and another direction west or east). For example, such a bearing might be listed as \"N 42°35' W\", which means... |
Why does superluminal communication violate causality? | If something travels faster than the speed of light in your frame of reference, there are other frames of reference (for observers who are not traveling faster than the speed of light relative to you) in which that object will be traveling backwards in time. That is why there would be causality violation. | [
"Causality is a fundamental principle of physics. If tachyons can transmit information faster than light, then according to relativity they violate causality, leading to logical paradoxes of the \"kill your own grandfather\" type. This is often illustrated with thought experiments such as the \"tachyon telephone pa... |
Did Dr. Mengele actually make any significant contributions to science or medicine with his experiments on Jews in Nazi Concentration Camps? | I'm not sure who in WWII Germany generated the data but there is a wealth of design data about the limits of the human body which was instrumental in laying the groundwork for manned spaceflight. Basically it's a set of data that tells you how many G's a person can be expected to survive in addition to temperatures, pressures, gas partial pressures (how much Oxygen and Nitrogen you need etc...), some of which I've been told before came from these experiments in WWII Germany.
It's the sort of data that you'd rather just not have -- that it's not worth suffering over, but begrudgingly you make use of any data available. Particularly when you have no data to start from.
I don't have any of the data off-hand or know where to reference it because it isn't typically used from that old a resource (we have other standards for man-rating vehicles today), but it's somewhat common knowledge that some of the older standards originated from Nazi-era experiments.
One other interesting note: von Braun's labor force at [Peenemunde](_URL_1_) during WWII (where he did all his early Rocketry work on the V-2 which later turned into the American A-2 and Redstone Rockets that carried our first capsules) was mostly slave-labor pulled from the concentration camps. That's not to say they were "rescued" in the way you might think from Schindler's List -- they were forced laborers.
If you've got access to JSTOR articles (going to a university usually provides free access), there's more [here](_URL_2_). There is some public info [here](_URL_0_) | [
"Plötner participated in a series of research tasks involving human experimentation at the Dachau concentration camp during the Second World War II. These included participation in the malaria experiments of Claus Schilling, in which prisoners were injected with drugs at lethal doses. In 1944, he was given Dachau p... |
what's the difference between "individual rights" and "government powers." | I assume that you're asking in the context of the United States because A) I'm from there and a chauvinist and B) I don't know as many specifics about other countries.
So, in that context, I think that you're a little confused about how rights and powers were first framed in the constitution. The constitution was set up explicitly to limit the things that the government could do. It aimed to do that my strictly listing the exact things that the federal government had the power to do. These are the "enumerated powers", because they are specifically listed.
This is again made explicit in the Tenth Amendment, which says "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
So the people and the states have all the rights, and the federal government can only do the things listed. The rights of the people are not enumerated. They are many and unennumerable, uncountable. That is why we have the 9th amendment, which says "he enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
So, the people have these rights listed in the Bill of Rights, but those are not just the only rights the people have, unlike the powers listed for the federal government, which is a list of the *only* things that it can do.
Now obviously, this hasn't worked out in practice, but that was how it was written and intended at the time. | [
"In American political discourse, states' rights are political powers held for the state governments rather than the federal government according to the United States Constitution, reflecting especially the enumerated powers of Congress and the Tenth Amendment. The enumerated powers that are listed in the Constitut... |
what role did surveillance play in the cold war? which side(s) used it and how did it effect the events of the war? | Probably the most important aspect of surveillance were American spy satellite photos taken of Soviet nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba. This triggered the Cuban missile crisis and almost caused a nuclear war. | [
"Historically, mass surveillance was used as part of wartime censorship to control communications that could damage the war effort and aid the enemy. For example, during the world wars, every international telegram from or to the United States sent through companies such as Western Union was reviewed by the US mili... |
how do stock markets calculate value? | The exchange doesn't calculate value. It just records that someone bought shares for such and such price. If for some reason someone today is willing to pay more than was paid yesterday, the price will rise. | [
"In finance, market data is price and trade-related data for a financial instrument reported by a trading venue such as a stock exchange. Market data allows traders and investors to know the latest price and see historical trends for instruments such as equities, fixed-income products, derivatives, and currencies.\... |
Do larger blacks holes have a stronger gravitational pull? Could a larger black hole suck mass off of a smaller one, similar to what a black hole does to a star? Could an infinitely powerful bomb magically placed at the center of a black hole disperse it? | The bomb in the black hole would have no effect other than adding to it's total mass. Once the bomb passes the event horizon, the total mass + energy of the bomb is now a part of the black hole and indistinguishable from it. An infinitely powerful bomb would create an infinitely massive black hole. | [
"Since primordial black holes did not form from stellar gravitational collapse, their masses can be far below stellar mass (c. ). Hawking calculated that primordial black holes could weigh as little as .\n",
"BULLET::::- Black holes have the same gravitational effects as any other equal mass in their place. They ... |
Why were slave ships so bad? | We've deleted several brief answers to this question. We ask that answers in this subreddit be in-depth and comprehensive, and highly suggest that comments include citations for the information. In the future, please take the time to better familiarize yourself with [the rules](_URL_3_), and be sure that your answer demonstrates these four key points:
* [Do I have the expertise needed to answer this question?](_URL_1_)
* [Have I done research on this question?](_URL_0_)
* [Can I cite my sources?](_URL_2_)
* Can I answer follow-up questions?
Thank you! | [
"Shipboard discipline aboard merchant and naval vessels was notoriously harsh, and, more often than not, violent. Pirates, having suffered under these measures, used a more democratic process when determining how aberrant sailors would be punished, and there were fewer transgressions that were considered punishable... |
why are leaves just turning brown and falling off in midwest rather than showing the beautiful fall color we all crave? | I caught this picture a couple days ago from my front window. The trees in Minnesota seem to be providing us with some amazing color. Maybe someone with more biology experience can explain your phenomenon.
_URL_0_ | [
"The leaves start as a burgundy color when they first emerge in the spring but as they grow and mature into summer, they turn into a deep green which indicates their increasing ability to photosynthesize. When nearing fall the colors turn back into a red to purple color.\n",
"Native to the nearby mountains, maple... |
why do we have glands in our armpits to produce hormones and scents, and what is their purpose? | They release pheromones that are attractive to the opposite sex, subconsciously. They help stimulate sexual arrousal/desire. Humans are extremely social animals, and anything that can increase the bond of sex is hugely important for us. In today's society we associate the smell of sweat with poor hygiene, but nonetheless during sex our instincts return and the effects are still very much active on your brain | [
"The preorbital gland serves different roles in different species. Pheromone-containing secretions from the preorbital gland may serve to establish an animal's dominance (especially in preparation for breeding), mark its territory, or simply to produce a pleasurable sensation to the animal. Because of its critical ... |
can empirical rule be applied to discreet variables? | The empirical rule applies only to normally distributed values. The normal distribution does imply a continuous distribution, however the common binomial distribution for discrete trials approaches a normal distribution for large enough sampling. For the probability of a single day having rain based on previous samplings on that day and location, I would imagine you would use the mean and standard deviation from those trials, but I'm not sure if it would be normally distributed. | [
"In statistics, econometrics, epidemiology and related disciplines, the method of instrumental variables (IV) is used to estimate causal relationships when controlled experiments are not feasible or when a treatment is not successfully delivered to every unit in a randomized experiment. Intuitively, IVs are used wh... |
period hormones | It's not actually your period specifically, but the PMS that happens before and during it. This video can probably explain it a lot better than I can. _URL_0_ | [
"BULLET::::- In the endocrine system, many hormones are released by their releasing hormones binding to G protein coupled receptors coupled to the G alpha subunit, activating the IP3/DAG pathway to increase Ca. Examples of this mechanism include:\n",
"The Hormones were a rock band formed in London in 1996. Carrol... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.