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Did the common people during the Renaissance think highly of the art that being created at the time or was the general view how people tend to see contemporary art today? | Follow up, did Savonarola's revolt against the Medici include any criticism of art? | [
"Alongside this new, religious interpretation of the expression, there persisted the ancient view that art is not a domain of creativity. This is seen in two early and influential Christian writers, Pseudo-Dionysius and St. Augustine. Later medieval men such as Hraban the Moor, and Robert Grosseteste in the 13th ce... |
why does schizophrenia typically start to affect someone in their late teens or 20's? | There is still a lot to be studied in this area, and with the proper funding perhaps we will get more advanced knowledge; but, as far as theories go there exists a few that work in combination: The prefrontal cortex (executive functioning part of the brain) and connected areas are primarily in play in symptoms, this area of the brain often doesn't finish developing until your mid to late twenties. Gene expression and genetics overall are in constant play during this development, simple malfunctions can lead to the increased likelihood of developing the disorder. What often leads to this eventual development for those with the predisposition is stress. Often times the twenties have very dynamic and stressful days with many inconsistencies that can lead one to develop the disorder.
EDIT: I should also mention that my brother is also schizophrenic and was relatively normal up until his first "episode" so I can relate very well.
| [
"Older adults with schizophrenia are prone to extrapyramidal side effects, anticholinergic toxicity, and sedation due to increased body fat, decreased total body water, and decrease muscle mass. Older adults with late-onset schizophrenia usually take half of the typical dose for older adults with early-onset schizo... |
why some vegetarians to eat fish | By definition, they are not vegetarians. | [
"Semi-vegetarian diets consist largely of vegetarian foods but may include fish or poultry, or sometimes other meats, on an infrequent basis. Those with diets containing fish or poultry may define \"meat\" only as mammalian flesh and may identify with vegetarianism. A pescetarian diet has been described as \"fish b... |
How is posture affected by zero gravity? | Astronauts find their natural position by looking a bit lower than they normally would on Earth. See the diagram on the left [in this page](_URL_0_), the natural line of sight is shifted by about 15 degrees. In the long term this could cause an exaggeration of the cervical curvature of the spine. Therefore, it's not good and it doesn't correct the bad habits we have on Earth.
The reason why they naturally find this position is that all joints are at the half of their mobility range. This is a very relaxed position. | [
"Long-term on-orbit studies have proven that zero gravity weakens bones and muscles, and upsets calcium metabolism and immune systems. Most people have a continual stuffy nose or sinus problems, and a few people have dramatic, incurable motion sickness. Most colony designs would rotate in order to use inertial forc... |
Is gravitational acceleration on earth an exact value, or does it have a standard deviation from experiments that tried to measure it? | Any measurement of it will have a standard error associated with it, but the value itself [varies across the planet](_URL_0_) due to its rotation, shape, and composition. There is a "standard gravity" which is defined as 9.80665 m/s/s. | [
"\"g_0\", gravitational acceleration is used here as a constant, with same value as standard gravity (average acceleration due to gravity on the surface of the Earth or other big body). For the basis of simplicity it doesn't vary with latitude, altitude or location. The variation due to all these factors is about 1... |
How did the German nobility react to the rise of the Nazi party? | I asked a similar question in this sub which you might be interested in: "[How Did The Nazi Government Interact with Titled Land Owners in Germany?](_URL_0_)" | [
"Alarmed by the failure of their class to respond to the troubles occurring in Germany, many younger members of royal families joined the emerging Nazi party and other radical right-wing groups. In the beginning, many of them were women. Like the Hesse family, the Lippe dynasty joined the Nazi party in great number... |
How can we be sure that measuring one particle in a quantum entangled pair is actually eliciting a change in the other? | That's exactly the question [Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen](_URL_0_) asked in their original paper. It's the theory of "hidden variables". So they ask if it's possible to have the corresponding quantum states (they don't have to be the same, they could also be e.g. opposite, like two spins in opposite directions adding to zero) are determined at the point of creation and not transferred instantaneous from one particle to the other at the time of measurement. This paper was published in 1935. The question was then if it would ever be possible to determine whether quantum entanglement or hidden variables is true.
In 1964 [Bell published a paper](_URL_2_) where he showed there's a way to measure it. The "trick" is to not measure whether one spin is up and the other is down, but measure them at a certain angle, at which the result should be different for quantum entanglement and hidden variables. The [first experiments](_URL_1_) seem to have been done in 1982, and they showed indeed that quantum entanglement is a reality. | [
"The theory of quantum entanglement predicts that separated particles can briefly share common properties and respond to certain types of measurement as if they were a single particle. In particular, a measurement on one particle in one place can alter the probability distribution for the outcomes of a measurement ... |
Did the Western Roman Empire and Eastern Roman Empire ever go to war against each other? | It's not a dumb question because the split was mostly administrative and not an official breakup of the Empire.
They did go to civil war against each other but not in the sense they were two distinct entities and were vying for supremacy, but more so the old fashioned civil war in Ancient Roman history, an Emperor controlled the West with another controlling the East and they had disputations of one sort or another.
An example of when they went to war with each other was when Eugenius became Western Roman Emperor around 392 AD. The Eastern Empire suspected that the previous Western Roman Emperor Valentinian II was assassinated and the real power behind the throne was a Frankish general, as such, the Eastern Empire viewed Eugenius as a usurper. The war also had some other underpinnings such as the Italian Roman aristocracy in the West was still mostly Pagan, while the Eastern Emperor was Christian.
They went to war which actually lead to the Eastern Roman Emperor, Theodosius, becoming the last Roman Emperor to rule over a unified Roman Empire for under a year before his death. | [
"One of the earliest examples of a two-front war occurred in the third century BC, when the Roman Republic fought the First Macedonian War contemporaneously with the Second Punic War against Carthage. Also, after the consolidation of the Roman Empire's frontier in the reign of Augustus, the Roman forces had to cont... |
Cuteness as evolutionary trait? | If you look at [cuteness](_URL_0_) and [neoteny](_URL_1_) in Wikipedia, it says, "Human children have evolved to stay neotenized longer, so human adults will care for them longer due to their cuteness." There's also mention that "'adult mammals' are hard-wired to have their 'aggressive behavior' inhibited and exhibit 'caring' and 'nurturing' attitudes toward the appearance of 'mammalian infants'." | [
"Cuteness is a subjective term describing a type of attractiveness commonly associated with youth and appearance, as well as a scientific concept and analytical model in ethology, first introduced by Konrad Lorenz. Lorenz proposed the concept of baby schema (\"Kindchenschema\"), a set of facial and body features, t... |
why does my tv flicker on and off whenever my refrigerator cycles on? | Are they on the same circuit? Just like brown outs occur on a larger scale in big cities when a lot of electricity is being used at the same time like on a very hot summer day and every household is running the AC. When the fridge cycles on for a few seconds it pulls more electricity than normal to get the compressor to start. This will pull from other appliances on the same circuit. If too much is pulled then the breaker or fuse will trip to keep wiring form overheating and possibly causing a fire. Many other appliances will cause the same thing. I've noticed in my home that when the AC compressor starts or I turn on he vacuum my lights in that room will dim a little. If your TV is on the same circuit as your fridge you could run an extension cord to another room and wait to see if it occurs. You can kind of think of electricity as water. If you have water coming it to your house and you have one faucet running then you have plenty of pressure. Turn on every faucet take a shower and flush the toilet and you will see a significant reduction in pressure. Your tv flickering is the electrical equivalent of this. | [
"Many televisions and monitors automatically degauss their picture tube when switched on, before an image is displayed. The high current surge that takes place during this automatic degauss is the cause of an audible \"thunk\" or loud hum, which can be heard (and felt) when televisions and CRT computer monitors are... |
How did Mao react to the GMD betraying the United Front TWICE??? | This question needs some context in order to be answered and understood. While elements of the KMT split between centrists, rightists and leftists never got along, they were able to function well enough to initiate the 1926 Northern Expedition, which is very early in KMT history.
**Part I**
First, its very true that many members of the CCP did not wish to cooperate with the KMT, and vice versa. In fact, Sun Yat-sen was quite leery of including the CCP among the KMT in the early 1920s. They did so because they were forced to by the USSR, who was funding the KMT at this time. Any and all of the success of the KMT from 1919 to \~1941 relied on the bulwark of materiel and financial aid the party was receiving from the USSR, who perceived the KMT as a potential ally in the fight against Western imperialism. This aid only increased as Japan became more powerful, and the USSR was hoping to turn the China into a buffer state to prevent future Japanese expansion in East Asia. So without including the CCP by demand of the USSR, none of that rapid success the KMT experienced under Chiang would've happened. Combine this with an increasing existential threat coming from Japan, and that should answer any doubts as to why the United Front stayed together for so long despite a longstanding civil war.
It became increasingly clear to Chiang and other party members that most elements of the CCP were becoming radicalized throughout the 1920s. Even Wang Jingwei, the liaison between the leftist and rightist elements (and future collaborator with the Japanese in China), was distancing himself from the radicalized leftists of the CCP. There was even some fracture among the CCP itself. Founders of the CCP such as Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao were committed to different goals than the younger and more radical elements that arise post-Shanghai Massacre. I'll discuss later.
Now, I feel like this question assumes Mao was important for the entire history of the CCP. This is not exactly true. Mao's coming to power isn't solidified until the later 1930s, a decade later, during the Yan'an years. He was certainly out there, working as a sort of lower ranking propaganda officer in the KMT military, but the power of the party in the early 1920's was in Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao. Mao was recognized as important to the party; he came from a wealthy peasant family in Hunan and he was ambitious and well-spoken as well as organized.
That brings us to April, 1927 and the infamous Shanghai Massacre. This is generally used as the beginning date of the Civil War that ends in 1949. There was a lot of confusion in the midst of the massacre as it took many CCP leaders by surprise. And this is where Mao initially rises to prominence. In the aftermath, the CCP established a base in Wuhan and began sending feelers out to surrounding provinces, trying to establish support for the CCP and revolution against the KMT. Mao, being an accomplished young man from a wealthy family in Hunan, was sent there and it was here he wrote one of his first major pieces on communism: [Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan](_URL_3_).
**Part II**
The writing of the report is, in retrospect, quite momentous. At the time it was disregarded by many older leaders in the CCP. Throughout the summer of 1927, Mao spent time in rural Hunan, reporting on what the peasants complained of. How much of the report is true and how much embellished can be debated, but ultimately the conditions were, not surprisingly, awful. Caught between constant conflict and being economically deserted by the KMT, the rural peasantry of Hunan (and, one could assume, China) had plentiful complaints. In September, 1927, Mao organized and led the [Autumn Harvest Uprising](_URL_0_). **These two things, the report and the uprising, are Mao's responses to the betrayal.**
What's so momentous about the report and the uprising is how it shifted the ideology and leadership of the CCP. To address ideology, Mao stated that the CCP should stop focusing on urban centers and shift their backing of the rural peasantry. This is quite unorthodox for Marxism in general; Karl Marx himself famously referred to the peasants (of France) as a "sack of potatoes." This is where Maoism really forms as an independent ideology. Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao had both espoused the Marxian and Leninist practice of placing importance to the urban proletariat, while abandoning the rural peasant, who symbolized the old and feudal, submissive to their lords. Mao did not believe the CCP could succeed without the support of the rural peasantry. The peasants were just too important to Chinese history and society.
The Autumn Harvest Uprising signified the shift in leadership of the CCP from the older communists to younger, pro-Mao leaders. In 1931, Mao and Zhu De formed the [Jiangxi Soviet](_URL_2_) under their rule, practicing Maoist ideology. Mao was armed with a clear and organized ideology as well as supporters. The older communists had never been able to create any sort of definitive text outlying what the actual ultimate goals of communism in China were. Mao did, however, and his increasing hold over the CCP would lead to it becoming a Marxist-Leninist style vanguard party during the Jiangxi and [Yan'an](_URL_1_) period. As early as 1937, but certainly by 1942, Mao was the indisputable leader of communism in China, and a new key ally of the USSR against the KMT, who proved to be less loyal to the USSR than Stalin had hoped.
**To recap, for the 1927 betrayal, Mao's response was the total abandonment of KMT cooperation, leading an uprising in Nanchang, establishing a Soviet-style republic briefly, and consolidating his hold over the CCP as its indisputable leader. This is the first phase of the Civil War, from 1927-1936. In 1936, Chiang is captured and forced by internal and external pressure to recreate the Second United Front, which lasted from 1936-1945. In 1945 the Civil War resumes.** | [
"Mao initially clung to the Great Leap Forward, firing defense minister Peng Dehuai for objecting to the policy line at the Lushan Plenum in 1959. But as the scale of the disaster became more apparent, an extraordinary work conference for cadres from around the country was hastily convened in Beijing in early 1962.... |
why san francisco is an attractive place right now for tech startups | It's the major hub for technology. It's easier to network and connect with others who can help your startup. | [
"The tech sector's dominance in the Bay Area is internationally recognized and continues to attract new businesses and young entrepreneurs from all over the globe. San Francisco is now widely considered the most important city in the world for new technology startups. A recent high of 7 billion dollars in venture c... |
How much carbon dioxide have we released into the atmosphere since 1900? | The answer, you can find it here: [here](_URL_1_), or also [here](_URL_0_).
In total 1450Gt CO2 have been emitted since the beginning of the industrialisation. | [
"On 12 November 2015, NASA scientists reported that human-made carbon dioxide (CO) continues to increase above levels not seen in hundreds of thousands of years: currently, about half of the carbon dioxide released from the burning of fossil fuels remains in the atmosphere and is not absorbed by vegetation and the ... |
Why did the US test the atomic bomb before dropping it? | There were two designs for the first atomic bombs, using different fuel types and different mechanisms.
One of the bombs, the gun-type bomb, known as Little Boy, used highly-enriched uranium. This was a design that, for technical reasons, you could essentially "partially test" without blowing anything up — you could run experiments that would give you great confidence that, in the event of actual detonation, you'd know what would happen. They thought this would be the "big" bomb of the two, and did not think they'd need to test it before using it. The downside to this design is that it required a phenomenal amount of fuel: 64 kg of highly-enriched uranium. They could produce about 1 kg of highly-enriched uranium fuel per day by the summer of 1945. So even if the bomb worked as planned, they'd only be able to produce one bomb of this sort every two months or so.
The other design used plutonium, a man-made element that is a byproduct of running a nuclear reactor. Plutonium made in a reactor cannot be used in a gun-type design; because of unavoidable impurities in the fuel, it will pre-detonate in a very messy and not-very-explosive way if you try. They figured this out only in the summer of 1944, and so quickly rearranged their whole bomb-design effort around exploring a design that would work with plutonium: implosion. In the implosion design, you take a solid ball of plutonium metal (the pit) and you compress it on all sides with specially-shaped explosives that will, in a nanosecond or so, effectively reduce its volume (and thus increase its density) by a factor of about two and a half. This is incredibly difficult to accomplish with perfecting timing and symmetry: if one part of your compressive force fails to reach to pit at the same time as the other parts, the pit will just "squirt" out in the direction of the lacking force.
Nearly every aspect of the implosion design was brand-new engineering. They had to invent entirely new kinds of circuits for triggering the explosives with the required (nanosecond-level) simultaneity, and had to do some extraordinarily complex mathematics for the time (on very primitive calculation machines) in order to account for the three-dimensional interactions of the blast waves that were formed by the high explosives. They had to get new data on how many types of metals and materials even would behave under pressures as high as they were creating; they were creating conditions very different from what they were familiar with.
And worst of all, there was no easy way to tell if they had done it right without a full test. They could set off experimental high explosives without any plutonium inside, of course. But they couldn't tell if the simultaneous compression was occurring correctly, in three dimensions. They explored a lot of clever scientific to try and give them that information, but ultimately there remained large uncertainties. How much compression would occur? How much simultaneity would occur? How would the compressive force of the explosives interact with the expanding force of the nuclear reaction?
The variance in possibilities meant that they thought in May 1945 (only a few months before the test) that the implosion design, known as Fat Man, could vary from being 700 tons of TNT equivalent, upwards to 5,000 tons of TNT equivalent. There were very real fears, even at the time of the test, that it would not work at all. (This is in comparison with the Little Boy bomb which they thought would easily be in the range of 5,000-15,000 tons of TNT equivalent.)
Knowing whether this worked or not was not merely scientific. It was also tactical. Remember the question of how many uranium bombs they could produce over time: not very many. The implosion design only used 6.2 kg of plutonium — it was much more efficient in terms of fuel. And the reactors at Hanford could produce 21 kg of plutonium per month when operating at full power. So _if_ they could get the implosion method working, they could have 3-plus atomic bombs per month on average.
So knowing if the implosion method worked was about knowing what kind of threat they had, and what kind of approach they could take with the Japanese. If it didn't work, the atomic bomb was a "one and done" sort of weapon that would be used very rarely and sparingly. If it worked poorly, then they would have one "big" bomb every few months and much more moderate weapons afterwards. And if it worked _very_ well (which almost nobody expected; even up to the eve of the test, they thought 5,000 tons of TNT would be the upper-limit of its likely power), then they would have a weapon that could bring a nation to its knees, with the capability of wiping out 3-4 cities per month for the foreseeable future.
The implosion test was a success more than they expected. The Trinity "Gadget" detonated with the force of 20,000 tons of TNT — several times more powerful than they had thought likely. So they knew now what kind of bomb they had, and the Little Boy bomb went from being the "big bomb" to the bomb that they would never use after Hiroshima (at Hiroshima, it detonated with 15,000 tons of TNT), and in fact there was discussion about simply not dropping it, taking its fuel, and adapting it to the more efficient implosion bomb (and thus getting 8-10 bombs out of the same fuel amount; this was abandoned for strategic/time related reasons).
So, again, testing the implosion bomb was not just about scientific understanding. There was a distinct strategic element to it as well, and they wanted to be sure what kind of capabilities they had _before_ they announced to the world that atomic bombs were now a thing that existed. Learning that they had a real capability to produce city-destroying weapons on a regular basis greatly affected the American policymakers at Potsdam (Truman was completely elated), and changed how they interacted both with the Japanese (less willingness to compromise) and even the Russians (ditto). | [
"The test surprised the Western powers. American intelligence had estimated that the Soviets would not produce an atomic weapon until 1953, while the British did not expect it until 1954. When the nuclear fission products from the test were detected by the U.S. Air Force, the United States began to follow the trail... |
What are some lesser-known medieval torture devices? | I believe a lot of the more colourful "medieval" torture devices were 19th-century inventions anyway, like the chastity belt.
There are numerous "debunkatory" articles on the net, with varying levels of sourcing, for instance: _URL_0_
| [
"These torture devices were devices used in the Middle Ages or early modern period to cause pain, injury, and sometimes death, usually to extract information or a confession from criminals or prisoners, also as punishment for crimes.\n",
"Medieval torture devices were varied. One old English chronicle from the Ea... |
what does it actually mean when companies in the us say they support certain legislation? (e.g. godaddy with sopa) | It means they endorse it and agree with it. That way, when it's debated on the floor, people can say "X company agrees with this legislation, it's obviously the right move to make."
It doesn't necessarily (though *can*) mean they're contributing money/resources to it. | [
"Major corporations mostly opposed the law. Companies and trade associations that contributed to the campaign against the measure include, among others, Amazon.com, General Motors, Kroger/Fred Meyer, J.P. Morgan Chase, Wal-Mart, Costco, Safeway/Albertsons, the Oregon Association of Realtors, Jive Software, Comcast,... |
how can apple products be smoother and faster than others with less hardware capability. | On paper, Apple's laptops, desktops, but most importantly phones, appear to be weaker. Less cores, lower clockspeeds, and less RAM. But Apple controls everything about their phone's hardware and software. Software is designed in tandem with hardware teams, so optimization is the highest.
This is why Apple's A7 equipped iPhone's and iPads beat out the competition in almost every benchmark assessment, despite lower amount of cores and clockspeed. Apple's custom chipsets and integration of hardware and software teams allows them to produce greater results with unorthodox hardware.
tldr: Optimization and quality engineering beat out pure specs. | [
"\"inCider\" in November 1988 found that the Apple IIc Plus was faster than a IIGS, Laser 128EX/2, or Apple IIe with a Zip Chip. It favorably cited the improved keyboard, internal power supply, and Macintosh/IIGS-compatible serial port, but said that the computer \"isn't everything it could be\", criticizing the la... |
Could the moon be "bumped" out of orbit by a meteor strike and be sucked in by the Earth's gravity? | Right now the Moon is slowly spinning away from us, whether it'd come back and hit is or not is debatable, but I'm almost certain of one thing: Any impact large enough to move the moon into an orbit that ends with its impact with Earth is too large for the moon to sustain.
If the moon was hit with something that large, my guess is it'd simply break apart, and (eventually) reform. | [
"Lunar mascons make most low lunar orbits unstable ... As a satellite passes 50 or 60 miles overhead, the mascons pull it forward, back, left, right, or down, the exact direction and magnitude of the tugging depends on the satellite's trajectory. Absent any periodic boosts from onboard rockets to correct the orbit,... |
How chaotic, if at all, was the process of writing a letter or sending a message to someone in a different country in the 19th century and earlier? | Here's a tidbit from getting mail back from the exploration expeditions in the late 1700s and early 1800s back from, say, Africa, or at least Mungo Park did this when he set out looking for the Niger and many others under Joseph Banks did the same. On the back of these letters, they'd say that whoever delivered this back to London can draw a credit of five pounds. Five pounds at the time is enough to feed a whole family for a year in some of these parts, so the letters effectively became sort of like currency, traded away for value until it reached the Europeans on the coast, and then traded back to London for redemption on the credit. | [
"Handwritten correspondence, while once a major means of communications between distant people, is now used less frequently due to the advent of more immediate means of communication, such as the telephone or e-mail. Traditional letters, however, are often considered to harken back to a \"simpler time\" and are sti... |
how does russian in latin characters work? | We use alphabets, and combinations of letters to represent sounds. Some languages use the same alphabets, others use different ones. For translating between the different ones, we use agreed transliteration tables to represent broadly the same sound patterns.
If you want to represent the sound that you think of at the very beginning of the word "sound", a Latin character for that is "S". The Cyrillic character for that sound is "C". Sometimes you need multiple characters because the same sound isn't used as much. So the backwards letter "R" in Cyrillic can be closely approximated using Latin characters as "ya".
Using this transliteration, you can write Russian speech in Latin alphabet, and Google knows you're doing that. | [
"Transcription of Russian is based on the same standard, but deviates from it in order to consistently represent palatalization (always written with a following apostrophe, e.g. \"l', n', t', v\"') and the phoneme /j/ (always written \"j\"), both of which are spelled in multiple ways in Cyrillic. The following indi... |
why do potato chip companies put so much air in bags of chips? | It's not air, it's nitrogen - the oxygen in air contributes to chips going stale. So using nitrogen keeps the chips fresh.
As others have said, the inflation of the bag also acts as a cushion, reducing how much the bag can be crushed. | [
"In the 1920s, Laura Scudder, an entrepreneur in Monterey Park, California, started having her workers take home sheets of wax paper to iron into the form of bags, which were filled with chips at her factory the next day. This pioneering method reduced crumbling and kept the chips fresh and crisp longer. This innov... |
What do the indivisual lines in an atomic spectra represent? | The lines represent transitions between states. Each peak appears at the energy of the photon emitted by that transition. | [
"An atomic spectral line refers to emission and absorption events in a gas in which formula_1 is the density of atoms in the upper-energy state for the line, and formula_2 is the density of atoms in the lower-energy state for the line.\n",
"In atomic physics, the atomic spectral lines correspond to transitions (q... |
Will the NSA leaks and other recent high-profile leaks be useful to future historians or would they have easy access to all that information anyway? | I'm sorry, this is too current events for our subreddit, we only talk about events that happened 20 years ago (so 1994 and earlier.) | [
"However, for the general public, it was a series of detailed disclosures of internal NSA documents in June 2013 that first revealed the massive extent of the NSA's spying, both foreign and domestic. Most of these were leaked by an ex-contractor, Edward Snowden. Even so, a number of these older global surveillance ... |
How is the Schrödinger-equation only solvable for Hydrogen? | This isn't just a problem physicists have with the Schrodinger equation, this is a problem physicists have with any system of interacting particles when there are more than two particles interacting. In mechanics we call it the [n-body problem](_URL_0_), which is normally discussed as solving the position of where heavenly bodies will be when they are interacting only via gravity.
As an example, imagine a simplified solar system with just a Sun, Earth and Moon. It turns out, there is no equation we can write down which predicts the future locations of any of those bodies. For instance, the location of the Moon at some time in the future will be determined by the gravitational force on the Moon from the Earth and the Sun, but you can only know the gravitational pull from the Earth if you know where it is- but the Earth's location will partially be determined by the position of the Moon. So, you have a bit of a Catch-22, you can't know either one's position without knowing either one's position.
Of course, we do a very good job at predicting the future location of the Moon, so how do we get around it? Well- we solve it numerically. We break up the problem into tiny, tiny time steps under the assumption that "if we assume the force on each object a second from now would be the same as the force on the object is now, then we can calculate all the forces, move everything forward a second, and then repeat." And by doing this, with as small of time steps as we deem necessary for the precision we need, then we get a really good answer.
So, same thing with the Schrodinger equation and the Hydrogen atom. The Hydrogen atom is a 2-body problem, just one proton and one electron. But, as soon as you have a more complicated atom, suddenly there are more than two things, so we can't solve it anymore. However, we can still use the Schrodinger equation to numerically solve the problem, just like we do with our solar system. So, the equation still applies, it is still right, but instead of having a nice, neat solution, we have to use a computer to solve it.
| [
"The solutions to the Schrödinger equation for hydrogen are analytical, giving a simple expression for the hydrogen energy levels and thus the frequencies of the hydrogen spectral lines and fully reproduced the Bohr model and went beyond it. It also yields two other quantum numbers and the shape of the electron's w... |
how is inflation arrived at by a country if the gov't would print a lot of money? | More money = money is worth less (since everyone has more of it) = higher prices (inflation).
Printing more money doesn't actually fix anything. | [
"In the event of a government printing currency to discharge a portion of a significant amount of debt, the supply of money is increased, with an ultimate reduction in its value, aggravated by inflation. Furthermore, should a government be unable to service its deficit by way of selling domestic bonds, thereby incr... |
if the city of flint made the dercision to switch water supply, why is the governor being blamed while the mayor is the victim? | During the time in which the decision was made to switch the water supply, the city of Flint was under the emergency management of the state government. It was a state official who authorized and carried out the switch and so the Governor is the ultimately guilty party. The mayor was, in basic terms, suspended from duty during the time of the implementation of the water supply switch. | [
"In March 2015, Flint voted to switch back to the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. This vote was motivated by residential complaints and recommendations from Veolia North America to prevent the city from further violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. Jerry Ambrose, Flint's emergency manager and financial supe... |
stars blinking | The atmosphere consists of many many layers of air "pockets", and these pockets are constantly moving around in the atmosphere. What makes each pocket different from another is that they have slightly different temperatures and densities.
Here's why that's important: if you've ever looked at a straw in a glass of water, you've seen how it appears to be bent, even though you know the straw is straight. This is a result of an effect called 'refraction'. Essentially, light moves and different speeds in materials with different densities. To understand why this causes refraction, imagine if you were running with a bunch of your friends in a straight line, shoulder to shoulder. If people at one end of the line started slowing down, then the people at the other end would start moving past them, and your line would slowly wheel and change direction. Well, when the leading edge of the light ray hits the water, a similar effect happens, and the light ray "bends" and changes direction.
Just like with the water in the glass, light moves at different speeds through the different pockets of air, and so every time a light ray moves through a pocket, it changes direction slightly.
Now because those air pockets are all moving around, sometimes a bunch of light rays from a star get bent toward your eye, and the star appears brighter. Then the air pockets move around some more, and now most of the light rays from the star are being bent away from your eye, so the star appears dimmer. This constant brightening and dimming of the star is what we call "twinkling".
This also explains why the planets in our solar system don''t appear to twinkle: stars are so very far away from us that they are just tiny little pinpricks of light. This means that the apparent size of a star is much smaller than the size of one of these air pockets. But the planets are much closer to us, and so their apparent size is very big--much bigger even than the size of the air pockets. So the light from a planet passes through a bunch of air pockets instead of just one at a time, and this means that even though the light from one part of the planet is getting bent away from us, the light from another part is being towards us, and so as a whole, the planet doesn't appear to get brighter and dimmer. The brightening and dimming average out, and the planet's brightness stays roughly constant, which means no twinkling! | [
"Stars twinkle for the same reason. They are so far from Earth that they appear as point sources of light easily disturbed by Earth's atmospheric turbulence which acts like lenses and prisms diverting the light's path. Viewed toward the collimated light of a star, the shadows bands from atmospheric refraction pass ... |
how does replanting rainforest differ from regular forest? | They’re vastly different. Regular forest is “old growth forest”—it’s a vast ecosystem that has existed for perhaps millions of years. Thousands or millions of species have evolved to coexist in that environment. But then loggers come and clear cut the forest, chopping down the trees and destroying the habitats of all of those species that lived together in the forest—the animals that lives in the trees, the smaller plants that lived on the ground and were trampled by the tree’s destroyers, and then all of the smaller plants, animals, and fungi that lived in the ecosystem. If they then plant new trees,that doesn’t help all of the species killed off by the destruction of the whole ecosystem. | [
"Reforestation is another method to sustain forests by improving existing forested areas. Reforestation is a method of planting trees in an existing forested area. This method is used in reaction to deforestation. When forests are removed without reestablishment they can be reforested by planting trees in the same ... |
how does a computer recover corrupted data? | Tolerances, error detection and error correction.
Tolerance: In TTL logic if the voltage on a data line is between 2V and 5V that's a logical 1, and between 0V and 0.8V is a logical 0. This means that the hardware can take a bit of variation and it makes no difference. This is by the way why expensive cables for digital data are nonsense -- unlike with analog, 4.5V and 5V are exactly just as good.
Error detection: Take 8 bits, let's say 10011100. Then add an extra parity bit. When the number of 1s in the byte is even, parity is 0. When odd, parity is 1. If one bit flips now parity is wrong, and we know something went wrong somewhere.
Error correction: With a slightly more complex system we can detect where something has gone wrong. Since we know the position, we know that the bit must have flipped, so we flip it back and problem solved. Easy example of error correction:
We take a group of 8 bytes and write them down on one line each, then we calculate the parity for both rows and columns:
01100011 0
01101111 0
01101101 1
01110000 1
01110101 1
01110100 0
01100101 0
01110010 0
00000111
Now flip a bit somewhere:
01100011 0
01101111 0
01101101 1
01110010 1 < --
01110101 1
01110100 0
01100101 0
01110010 0
00000111
^
Now if you check the parity it'll be wrong on one row and one column, so we know where in the table the error can be found. Flip it around, and fixed! There are better methods of course, but this one is easy to explain.
CDs and DVDs specifically have several levels of error correction, so that it can handle both small local mistakes, and large scratches on the surface.
Now if that wasn't enough, then it really doesn't really deal with it, and you have corruption for good. Some programs can deal with an amount of it (eg, it can be tolerable for audio or video), some break badly. | [
"Sometimes, data present in the physical drives (Internal/External Hard disk, Pen Drive, etc.) gets lost, deleted and formatted due to circumstances like virus attack, accidental deletion or accidental use of SHIFT+DELETE. In these cases, data recovery software are used to recover/restore the data files.\n",
"If ... |
Why do larger displacement engines get worse mileage than smaller displacement engines (in the same vehicle)? | The short answer is an engine runs most efficiently near peak torque output with a completely open throttle. To say cruise along at 55mph, a more powerful engine will be running at a lower % of maximum load and be less efficient. The science behind this is that at a partial throttle opening you are taking in a less than maximum amount of air. Less air means less fuel, and a lower pressure in the piston *per unit of fuel used*.
By shutting down cylinders, you are in effect allow the say 4 working cylinders to closer to their best efficiency instead of running 8 at terrible efficiency.
This is why hyper-milers use an accelerate hard, coast, accelerate hard, coast driving pattern instead of cruising at a consistent RPM. It is also why varying the boost on a small displacement turbo-charged engine works so well for fuel mileage. You can the the engine at WOT almost all the time, and vary the amount of power generated by the engine simply by modifying the boost level. | [
"Thus, a high-powered, large-displacement engine is highly inefficient and wasteful when being used for normal driving conditions. This is the motivation for cylinder deactivation, to effectively spread the work load of the engine over fewer active cylinders which then operate under higher individual loads and ther... |
how does an unknown music artist's song become a major hit? | Record companies scout for talent and then promote specific new artists relentlessly in many cases. | [
"Many of his songs have been hits for other artists, including SR-71, Avril Lavigne, Sevendust, Injected, The Donnas, Hot Hot Heat, American Hi-Fi, Default, Gob, Midtown, Puffy AmiYumi, Pink, Katy Perry, Pete Yorn, Quietdrive, The All-American Rejects, The Academy Is..., The Cab, Saosin, Never Shout Never, and most... |
why does meat to stick to cooking surfaces? | Anything that goes from being viscous to being rigid will act like glue, because it'll first conform to whatever surface it's touching, getting into all the nooks and crannies. Once it hardens, it'll grab on to said nooks and crannies, and be more or less difficult to remove. | [
"When meat cooks, the proteins on the surface of the meat denature because of the heat. This means that many of the secondary bonds that give the proteins their shape are broken. The protein molecules want to reform those interactions to return to their most thermodynamically stable state. Two opportune locations f... |
why are reading books more beneficial to your mind than reading the internet? | I am squarely in the "read what you love as long as you read" category.
However, the is a slightly different relationship with long form writing. There is a greater ability to build and maintain more complex visuals, a level of exercise in deep reading (context, anticipating direction, making connections to other parts of the story, ability to develop complex arguments, themes, or evidence support) that lots of reddit posts in a row doesn't quite mimick. I have also seen my own level of patience and capacity for extended focus to decrease in times that i replace extended reading with online list-icles and threads. | [
"In an August 2008 article in \"The Atlantic\" (\"Is Google Making Us Stupid?\"), Nicholas Carr experientially asserts that using the Internet can lead to lower attention span and make it more difficult to read in the traditional sense (that is, read a book at length without mental interruptions). He says that he a... |
what is the difference between code and script. | Some people make a distinction between "compiled" languages that produce executable machine code & "scripting" languages that are either interpreted or compiled to a VM at runtime. Either way, it's still "coding" and the only difference is how the language is implemented.
Compiled languages tend to be lower level & require more lines of code to get something done but you generally have faster execution times. Scripting languages are faster to develop in but run more slowly.
There's not really any fundamental difference in the languages themselves & the distinction is generally made by people who are trying to inflate their ego & say the languages they work in are somehow superior to the "scripting languages". | [
"BULLET::::- Different \"scripts\" in different writing systems use different characters – a different set of letters, syllograms, logograms, or symbols. Modern systems use the Unicode standard to represent many different languages with a single character encoding.\n",
"Unlike binary executable files, the same sc... |
why does the president of the united states need to be born in the united states to be eligible to run? | It's not a matter of their leadership ability, it's intended to guarantee loyalty. The idea is that most people are loyal to their birth country, so you'd want someone born in the US to be the one acting as commander in chief of the US armed forces, among other things.
May not be perfect logic, but it's tradition at this point. Nobody has made a big enough deal of it accompanied by a strong enough argument to get it changed. | [
"The eligibility requirements to be President of the United States are such that the individual must be a \"natural born citizen\" of the United States ... It is well settled that those born in the United States are considered natural born citizens. See, e.g. \"United States v. Ark\" [sic] ...\n",
" of the United... |
why is it necessary for artificial sweeteners to be hundreds upon hundreds of times more sweet than sucrose? | It isn't "necessary" per se but it is useful. For example if you have a sweetener which is 1000 times sweeter than sugar then you can get the same flavor by using only one thousandth as much of the sweetener than sugar. That means even if the sweetener has calories you can drop it to basically nothing while keeping the flavor. | [
"The world's most commonly used artificial sweetener, sucralose is a chlorinated sugar that is about 600 times as sweet as sugar. It is produced from sucrose when three chlorine atoms replace three hydroxyl groups. It is used in beverages, frozen desserts, chewing gum, baked goods, and other foods. Unlike other art... |
What is the process leading to death when you spray an insect with an insecticide? | It depends on the insecticide, different ones affect different things. For example, I have an antiacetacholinase spray at home. Acetacholine is a neurotransmitter involved with muscle contraction. Acetacholinase is the enzyme which allows "reuse" of the acetacholine. Antiacetachonase, prevents that enzyme from working, causing paralysis, including respiratory failure.
I imagine most insecticides target the insect's respiratory.system, an insect's respiratory system is fairly inefficient, and exposed directly to the atmosphere, so I imagine they make an easy target. | [
"Some insect repellents are insecticides (bug killers), but most simply discourage insects and send them flying or crawling away. Almost any might kill at a massive dose without reprieve, but classification as an insecticide implies death even at lower doses .\n",
"Verifying an insect's death from chemical inject... |
what is the history behind boys hiding their emotion? | The expression of emotion (though not necessarily emotions themselves) is influenced by the culture of the society the person is born into. Both Americans and Russians experience happiness, but it's not normal in Russian culture to smile at strangers, while in America it is. What emotions are "allowed" to be expressed by what gender, and how they can be expressed, is also largely a cultural thing.
So in our culture, logic and reason are seen as the opposites of emotion (think Spock), even though emotion is fundamental to making decisions. This comes from a couple of different historical influences, particularly Greek philosophy. Being logical and reasonable is seen as a good thing: thus, being outwardly emotional and allowing emotions to dictate your decisions is not seen as a good thing.
However, we still feel emotions. And we do on some level recognize emotions are necessary. So how do we reconcile "logic good, emotions bad" with "emotions exist"? We say that logic is important for big decisions (affairs of state, money, war, etc.) and emotions are good for smaller, more personal decisions (friendship, romance, honor, and insult). Notice that the former is dominated by men while the latter is dominated by women.
So over time you get this dichotomy where women are taught to express emotion more, while men are taught to suppress it... except in the case of anger and insult, because those things are tied to honor, and until very recently, honor was a male thing (women couldn't duel over an insult, for example, but two men could duel if one insulted the other's lady). Add to this a healthy serving of Victorian gender ideals (women are sweet pure homemakers, men are dirty politicians given to vice) and you get the modern idea of emotional expression by gender. | [
"Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood is a 1998 book about boyhood and boy culture by William S. Pollack, in which the author asserts that toxic conceptions of masculinity in boy culture leads to boys doing poorly in education and health and having higher involvement in violent crimes and suicide ... |
Why didn't Roosevelt inform Stalin of the Manhattan Project? | There was an extensive international network of scientists that included New Zealanders, British, Japanese, Australian, and German scientists (an incomplete list) that discussed nuclear chemistry and energy extraction.
It was in fact a Japanese scientist that first conceived the idea of a multi stage *fusion* weapon before a fission weapon was even built.
The Australian scientist [Mark Oliphant](_URL_0_) was requested by the British to visit the Americans and push them to start a MAUD project and evolve that into the Manhatten project. The initial American reaction was to discount the idea and not pursue it.
The Germans, the Russians, and the Japanese *all* had their own nuclear weapons development projects. Due to the *massive* amounts of resources required to develop weapons from exceptionally trace isotopes in rare ores all these projects petered out due to diverted resource requirements.
The Russians restarted their weapons program on the back of refined ore seized from the Germans.
Yes. They all knew of each others projects, the international science community was [fairly porous](_URL_2_) on the matter.
[Partial Chronology](_URL_1_). | [
"In fact Stalin had long been aware of the program, despite the Manhattan Project having a secret classification so high that, even as Vice President, Truman did not know about it or the development of the weapons (Truman was not informed until shortly after he became president). A ring of spies operating within th... |
What is gaseous iron like, and can it rust? | The problem is that Iron's boiling temperature is so high ([2861°C](_URL_1_)) that you will pretty much never actually encounter it outside of a controlled environment. If you were to introduce oxygen to it, it would oxidize easily and create iron oxide (which is a gas above [1565°C](_URL_0_)). | [
"When iron metal is exposed to air and water, usually it turns into rust, a mixure of oxides and oxide-hydroxides. However, in some environments the metal forms a mixed iron(II) and iron(III) salt with hydroxide and other anions, called green rust.\n",
"Rust is a mixture of iron(III) oxide and oxide-hydroxide tha... |
During slavery in the US, were the slavers liable for a slaves crimes? | Though laws regarding slavery varied from state to state, the answer is that slaveholders were not criminally liable for their enslaved property but were subjected to limited civil liability. Enslaved property is treated like any other significant property, such as a horse or land. If harm resulted from your negligent use of that property than a lawsuit was warranted. As for criminal law, enslaved people were tried in the regular courts but generally through a much more attenuated criminal process. If they were convicted of capital crimes they were executed and their owners would receive a significant portion of their value from the state treasury. | [
"The disputes with non-slaves and the manslaughter cases were dealt by the state judiciary system. Slaves were not allowed to defend themselves or bear witness in front of a court, but they were also not responsible to damage done to free men, the owner being accountable for any such damages, the compensation being... |
Can an average consumer find/afford solar panels that easily "plug in" to regular appliances (i.e. window air conditioner) AND provide adequate power? | There are two problems with what you want to do.
1. Solar panels generate direct current, your air conditioner needs alternating current. There are electronic devices called inverters that can create approximations of alternating current from direct current, so at the very minimum you'd need one of those.
2. The amount of voltage that the solar panels put out varies greatly, depending on the angle of the sun, the amount of cloud cover, how much haze/dust is in the air, etc. Your air conditioner expects a certain constant voltage (constant in the AC sense.) This can be overcome to a certain extent by inverter design, but there is a bigger problem: your air conditioner requires a WHOLE LOT of power to run, likely much more than your panels can produce. Or if they can produce enough, maybe they can only do it at high noon or only when there's no clouds. But at other times/conditions, they can still produce *some* power.
To solve that second problem there are two approaches:
1. An offline system, which means you have a large bank of batteries that are charged by the panels. Much like a bank account, this lets you accumulate energy while you aren't running any electronic devices and then withdraw it when you need it, for example at night, or when you have a high load device like an air conditioner that you want to run for a short amount of time.
2. An online system, where you are still connected to the power company. Here you should visualize a Y-type connection: you have your solar panels on one branch of the Y, the power company's line on another branch, and everything else in your home on the third branch. The total current of all three branches has to sum to zero. If your panels generate more than you are currently using, the extra flows back onto the grid, and your utility pays you for that power. If you use more than your panels generate, then the difference is made up by taking from the grid, which you pay for as normal. This is convenient because at night you don't have to worry about running out of stored battery power but you can still reduce your dependence on the grid when there's available light, all without having to worry about storing any yourself through expensive batteries -- the grid becomes your battery.
Unfortunately number 2 does require participation of the electric company which is not guaranteed everywhere. I don't have a link handy but I think something like a third of utility companies nationwide currently have rules that allow you to do this.
Also unfortunately is that these systems cost a lot of money. Ballpark, maybe $5000 - $10000 parts and $2500 - $5000 labor to install them. There are a lot of tax breaks and incentives that can bring that down, and prices are always dropping. But it's currently something that's still an investment. | [
"Retrofit examples include sealing air leaks, installing building insulation, and replacing or repairing windows. A utility can help homeowners install solar panels, either directly at their homes or indirectly at a community solar farm. \n",
"Due to the above efficiencies, and their ability to boost the amount... |
why do cameras have so many mega-pixels when screens only display a few hundred thousand? what's the point? | You are forgetting printing. The more pixels you have, the larger, sharper prints you can make. | [
"While CRT monitors can usually display images at various resolutions, an LCD monitor has to rely on interpolation (scaling of the image), which causes a loss of image quality. An LCD has to scale up a smaller image to fit into the area of the native resolution. This is the same principle as taking a smaller image ... |
what would happen if nato broke up? | Well nothing immediately. But obviously each member state would be more vulnerable to attack, with a particular problem to the Eastern European countries. | [
"At the end of August 2017, NATO declared that NATO's four multinational battlegroups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland were fully operational, a move that was implemented pursuant to the decision taken at the 2016 Warsaw summit.\n",
"The first post-Cold War expansion of NATO came with German reunification... |
Attempted up-risings and resultant deaths in WW2 PoW Camps? | There were a few examples, most notably the Cowra Breakout in August 1944. Japanese PoWs in Cowra, Australia made a mass escape attempt, crossing barbed wire with the aid of blankets, attacking guards with improvised weapons and setting huts on fire. 231 Japanese prisoners died, either killed in the process of escaping or committing suicide rather than be recaptured, another 108 were wounded; none remained at liberty. Three Australian soldiers were killed during the breakout itself, another was ambushed and killed two days later during the roundup. (See ["Cowra Breakout Factsheet"] (_URL_1_), and Appendix 5 of Volume VII of [Australia in the War of 1939–1945] (_URL_3_).) In a previous incident in Featherston, New Zealand, 48 Japanese prisoners and one New Zealand guard died; the incident was precipitated by the prisoners refusing to work (the Geneva Convention permitted other ranks to be employed in non-military work), the exact circumstances that resulted in escalation and the guards opening fire are disputed (["POW deaths still stir debate 70 years on"] (_URL_0_), The Dominion Post).
With German prisoners, much of the violence and disorder within camps was between dedicated Nazis and more moderate or anti-Nazi factions. Officers and NCOs tended towards the former, establishing control within the camps through existing hierarchies, a situation that was at least initially accepted by Allied authorities to keep camps running efficiently. Nazi ideology was enforced through kangaroo courts, internal security dealing out "Holy Ghost" beatings or in the most extreme cases forced suicides. Towards the end of the war there were efforts to divide prisoners into "white" (anti-Nazi), "black" (ardent Nazis) and "gray" (somewhere between the two), the "black" Nazis being segregated into separate compounds or camps to limit their influence on the others. Concerted violence towards the guards would have been futile, though the "Shackling Crisis" of 1942 (operational orders to Allied troops to bind the hands of prisoners to prevent them destroying documents, resulting in Allied PoWs being shackled in Germany, in turn leading to German PoWs being shackled in Britain and Canada) did cause a riot in Bowmanville, Canada; German prisoners refused to be handcuffed and barricaded themselves in the mess hall, eventually being driven out with clubs and fire hoses with numerous injuries on both side, though no deaths. Some of the ringleaders ended up at Grand Liege, Quebec, where, near the end of the war, "black" Nazis were planning a mass violent breakout with the aim of sabotaging nearby power stations and military facilities, a last act of *Götterdämmerung*, but the authorities were tipped off and transferred the ringleaders to a more isolated facility (["The HARIKARI Club: German Prisoners of War and the Mass Escape Scare of 1944-45 at Internment Camp Grande Ligne, Quebec"] (_URL_2_), Martin F. Auger).
For US and Commonwealth solders in German hands there was never such a level of desperation on a grand scale. Germany broadly adhered to the Geneva Convention so life in the camps was generally tolerable, if hardly pleasant. There wasn't the fanaticism to form something like the "HARIKARI Club" with Germany ascendant, and as Allied victory drew closer it would have thrown away lives when liberation was in prospect. Had there been a danger of mass executions in the final months of the war, as was occasionally mooted in German circles, it might have been a different story, but thankfully that was not the case. (*Barbed Wire Diplomacy: Britain, Germany, and the Politics of Prisoners of War 1939-1945*, Neville Wylie). | [
"BULLET::::- 1942 – The Selarang Barracks incident in the summer of 1942 during World War II involved the forced crowding of 17,000 Anglo-Australian prisoners-of-war (POWs) by their Japanese captors in the areas around the barracks square for nearly five days with little water and no sanitation after the Selarang B... |
Looking for Sources (Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica) | I *love* Miguel León-Portilla! You might consider reading his:
* [Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind](_URL_0_)
* [In the Language of Kings: An Anthology of Mesoamerican Literature, Pre-Columbian to the Present](_URL_2_).
For visual art, the show catalog, [Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya](_URL_1_) is amazing. | [
"The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures is a three-volume set of articles by many specialists under the general editorship of David Carrasco. Published in 2001, the encyclopedia builds on and updates the sixteen-volume \"Handbook of Middle American Indians\" (1964–76). The work’s coverage spans Mesoameric... |
how do snipers calibrate their scopes while on assignment? | It is the life of a designated marksman unit to keep their weapon NOT banged up.
And they use the previously logged data at home practice range where they've fired thousands if not tens of thousands of rounds and recorded consistency hits and conditions.
| [
"Friendly snipers can be used to hunt the enemy sniper. Besides direct observation, defending forces can use other techniques. These include calculating the trajectory of a bullet by triangulation. Traditionally, triangulation of a sniper's position was done manually, though radar-based technology has recently beco... |
when dying naturally, does the body manually shut itself off, or does the person's life just end abruptly? | It doesn't shuts itself off. This would serve no evolutionary purpose.
When someone dies of natural causes, they suffer a major failure of a critical system that they require to continue living (e.g. a stroke or a heart attack). We refer to it as "natural causes" because as people age, it becomes inevitable that eventually one of these systems will fail, so it's considered a natural part of the life cycle. But the human body doesn't intentionally shut anything down; it just succumbs to an increasingly likely system failure. | [
"Death is followed by a period of 'half-life', a short amount of time which can be rationed out over long periods in which the dead can be revived—so that, potentially, they can 'live' on for a long time. When attempts to bring back important businessman Louis Sarapis fail, it's clearly more than mere negligence. S... |
When the Vandals controlled North Africa, were their armies composed of mostly German warriors or ones with a more North African heritage? | 'Germanic' groups like the Vandals and Visigoths were, historians almost all agree, mutli-ethnic groups composed of recruits from a variety of backgrounds. Many of the Vandals would have had ancestors from across the northern frontier (what the Romans called 'Germania'), but they also certainly would have picked up recruits from other parts of the Roman empire before they conquered Africa.
We know less about the Vandals than we'd like to, and much of what we do know is based on unreliable autors who drew heavily on 'barbarian' stereotypes that clash with available archaeological evidence. But the narrative we have says that the Vandals settled in Spain for 40 years before resettling in (and conquering) N. Africa. During those 40 years, the group's initially multi-ethnic character would have had a long time to further change as any 'Germanic' soldiers and their children married locals, and as some of the Vandals' Roman neighbors decided to join Geiseric's retinue.
By the time the Vandals settled in N. Africa, they were so Roman that almost no traces of 'Germanic' art or material culture can be found to evidence their presence. This cultural assimilation into Roman society was probably just as thoroughly reflected in their demographic constitution; having spent two generations away from the northern frontier, the N. African Vandals were likely Germanic in little more than name.
We might be able to say more if we had evidence for the Vandals as an intrusive cultural group (say, people in Tunisia being buried with a foreign/intrusive burial rite, or separate cemeteries in which the conquerors preserved distinctions beween themselves and their Roman subjects). The abscence of this evidence makes it very difficult to say anything about cultural distinctions between conquerors and conquered; and indeed, the lack of any trace of auch distinctions suggests the Vandals had become so Roman as to be materially identical to their Roman neighbors. | [
"\"Nothing could have been more unexpected in North Africa than these conquerors of Germanic origin.\" Initially many Berbers fought the Vandals as they arrived; after the Vandals' conquest, Berber forces remained the only military threat against them. Yet in governing their kingdom the Vandals did not maintain in ... |
how do shows and videos have the same person in the shot at multiple places within the same scene? | From my basic knowledge they put the camera on a tripod so it doesn't shake or move at all and then film it twice and then layer the shots together so that there are 2 of the same person on there :) | [
"In some productions, a scene calls for two characters in the same shot, both of whom are portrayed by a single actor. A body double can portray one of the characters, while the credited actor plays the other, thus enabling both characters to appear simultaneously on camera. An example of this is the identical cous... |
speech recognition | By being really fucking amazing, that's how.
When you speak, your lungs and vocal chords cause the air inside your body to vibrate. This creates a domino chain -- the vibrating air inside your body bumps against the air outside your body, which makes it vibrate too. These vibrations travel as a chain until they bump against the microphone on your phone or computer.
Now when something vibrates against something else, it is really exerting pressure on it, and then easing the pressure, and then exerting it again (put your hand on your leg and vibrate it. You'll see what I mean). The microphone wants to measure the speed and intensity of the vibrations of your voice. To do that, it needs to measure the air pressure of the world around it and how quickly that changes.
Your phone does that by taking a lot of air pressure samples. Here's the cool part. In order to adequately understand speech, your phone might take 44 100 samples EVERY SECOND.
At this point, your phone has recorded your speech... but how does it know what you are saying? Well, first, it helps to know that your voice makes one big soundwave, but that big soundwave is actually composed of a bunch of smaller soundwaves (like a chord on a piano is really several distinct notes). Your phone uses mathematical formulas to figure out just what smaller soundwaves are involved. Every speech sound will use a different combination of small soundwaves.
But hold on! You don't pronounce letters the *exact same way* every time you speak! And the way you say the letter "p" won't sound 100% the same as someone else's letter "p"!
So now the computer has to just figure out the message. First, it will compare the soundwaves you're making to a vast selection of what different letters sound like when pronounced by different people under different circumstances. It will also consider what words and sentences people are most likely to say. If you say "hellobob," the computer has to use statistical analysis to figure out that "Hello, Bob" a more likely message than "Hell O'Bob" or "Heh lobe ob."
And all of this fits in a compact package right inside your pocket. | [
"Speech recognition is a interdisciplinary subfield of computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enables the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition or speech to text ... |
Prior to World War II, did Japan have a formalized, titled aristocracy under the Emperor? If so, how was it structured and what happened to it? | Following the Meiji restoration, the former "daimyō" - the landed nobility of Japan - were merged with the "kuge" - the aristocratic families that held positions in the Imperial Court - to form a class known as the "kazoku." Many members of the kazoku were appointed to positions in the new Meiji government (which initially ruled through the Great Council, or Daijō-kan, of the Imperial Court, before that was replaced by a Cabinet in 1885).
In 1884, the kazoku was formally divided into five ranks:
1. 公爵 - Kōshaku = Prince/Duke
2. 侯爵 - Kōshaku (note the different kanji than the above rank) = Marquis
3. 伯爵 - Hakushaku = Count
4. 子爵 - Shishaku = Viscount
5. 男爵 - Danshaku = Baron
The ranks are inspired by British nobility, whilst the titles were based on ancient Chinese ranks.
The heirs to the houses that made up the kuge were ranked as either princes or marquis, based on whether their houses had held the title of regent (technically, "sesshō & kampaku") or not in the past. Heirs to those that did became princes, heirs those that didn't became marquis.
The Meiji Restoration was largely the work of men from the Chōshū and Satsuma domains, and as such the ruling daimyō of those domains became princes as well. The former Tokugawa shōgun was also allowed the rank of prince and the "shinpan" - houses that had branched off of the Tokugawa - heirs became marquis. Remaining daimyō heirs were given ranks from marquis to baron based on the agricultural output of their land.
Prior to the Restoration, these daimyō had controlled domains known as "han," (two examples being the aforementioned Satsuma and Chōshū han) but in 1871 this system had been phased out. Domains were turned into prefectures, and daimyō (or, well, kazoku, as the title of daimyō was phased out as well) became non-heriditary governors. The kazoku system ensured the continued political importance of these landed families, albeit at a reduced level. They still got a better deal than the samurai, who were organized into a new class called the shizoku, which retained few of the rights they once possessed.
In 1889, the first Japanese Constitution was approved by the Emperor, and it entered into force in 1890. Among other things, it created a legislature, the Imperial Diet, consisting of a House of Peers and a House of Representatives. The House of Peers was the upper house, and was modeled after the Prussian House of Lords, as German advisors had assisted in drafting the constitution.
Here are the relevant articles of the [Meiji Constitution:](_URL_0_)
> Article 33. The Imperial Diet shall consist of two Houses, a House of Peers and a House of Representatives.
> Article 34. The House of Peers shall, in accordance with the ordinance concerning the House of Peers, be composed of the members of the Imperial Family, of the orders of nobility, and of those who have been nominated thereto by the Emperor.
> Article 35. The House of Representatives shall be composed of members elected by the people, according to the provisions of the law of Election.
Princes and marquis were members of he House of Peers in their own right, whilst counts, viscounts, and barons elected representatives from amongst their own ranks to sit in the House. Members of the Imperial family and individuals appointed by the Emperor formed the rest of the House of Peers.
The Meiji Constitution was replaced by the current Japanese Constitution in 1947. In this Constitution, the role of the upper house in the Diet was taken by the democratically elected House of Councillors. This ended the political role of the peerage. The kazoku class and the various ranks also ceased to exist.
Sources: Wikipedia, *A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present*, and the Meiji Constitution. | [
"From the 12th century until 1868, Japan was ruled by successive feudal military \"shōguns\" who ruled in the name of the Emperor. Japan entered into a long period of isolation in the early 17th century, which was ended in 1853 when a United States fleet pressured Japan to open to the West. After nearly two decades... |
why do chewing noises annoy me? | Misophoniac to the rescue!
I have exactly the same problem. it's called Misophonia and not considered as a disease or something like that. There are research on the phenomenon since 2003 or so.
I've found a lot of informations on the internet, especially on /r/misophonia. It's a very complicate thing: when you hear people chewing, you are not disgusted, and do not want to throw up. Indeed, you feel pain in your ears, like if something was poking the inside of your ear. I have the same triggering sound as you: mastication. I've known a girl who suffered from misophonia when people said the word "cheese" (not in English) so triggers can be different according to the person.
The fact is, when I hear someone chewing, I don't feel disgusted, as I said. I am just completly lost, I feel aggressed, attacked. My ears hurt and I feel forced to move them so they produce a very discrete sound.
I'm currently on vacations at my grandma and everyone here chews loudly and it's horrible for me. Even if it's not polite I spend each meal with ear plugs, but that's not enough. Each time we go to eat I want to break down and cry. It's horrible.
I've also noticed that misophonia depends on the person who chews. I like my dad very much and when he masticates it doesn't disturb me. But I hate the manners of some persons I know and I can't stand to hear them chew.
I think it's closely related to the opinion you have on people and how you like them, but also on their manners. A lot.
The worst is when you tell that to people and they say "But I don't chew loudly!" or "But everybody does!". I am a very calm person but situations like this one drive me insane. I quickly can become violent if I feel "attacked" like that.
People usually say that you can cure misophonia by associating the triggering sound with a feeling you like but it takes at least 9 months. I've tried but it's almost impossible.
I hope I helped you out - I know your pain. | [
"The tensor tympani acts to dampen the noise produced by chewing. When tensed, the muscle pulls the malleus medially, tensing the tympanic membrane and damping vibration in the ear ossicles and thereby reducing the perceived amplitude of sounds.\n",
"Many popular aquarium fish such as goldfish and loaches have th... |
how can we control our arms and legs but not control our heart, stomach and nerves | You don't have full (i.e. "conscious") control over your body.
You have multiple nervous systems in your body, some of which are voluntary (the somatic nervous system governs movement) and you control those. Some of which aren't (the autonomic nervous system which governs organs and the enteric nervous system which governs digestion and gastrointestinal stuff) and are involuntary..
I presume it's an evolutionary efficiency thing: if you had to consciously make a decision to keep your heart beating or consciously decide "Ooh, time for adrenalin" when a panther is bearing down on you, you probably wouldn't live very long. | [
"Humans have demonstrated the ability to aim eye movement toward the hand without vision, using the sense of proprioception, with only minor errors related to internal knowledge of limb position. It has been shown the proprioception of limbs, in both active and passive movement, result in eye saccade overshoots whe... |
How does functional magnetic resonance imaging work? | A while back, rupert gave a great description of how [NMR works](_URL_0_). It is pretty technical, but you may want to give it a look. NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) are effectively the same technique and many of the principles of NMR can be applied to MRI. While I am no expert on the details, I have a general working knowledge of the technique if you would like me to try to explain how it works on more basic terms. | [
"Functional magnetic resonance imaging is a technique used for multiple purposes which shows the uses of oxygen by the brain, allowing for the identification of which portions of the brain are using more oxygen, and thus being used during a specific task. This is called the Blood Oxygen Level Dependent or BOLD hemo... |
alien megastructure | You are correct: it is entirely possible that it isn't there any more. If they had amazing telescopes, and are still around right now, they would be seeing the events around the fall of Rome right now.
That said, what is interesting is the fact that it was there at some point in time. | [
"The term \"megadeus\" is officially used to refer to all giant robots and monsters seen in the series, though the term is often used to refer solely to the four \"Big\" robots. The \"Bigs\" are unique among the other megadeuses in that they are implied to be at least semi-sentient and have the ability to judge a p... |
Given the barbarity of both world wars, what restricted various actors from using chemical and biological agents in WW2 (especially E. front)? | The Germans were still using horses to a great extent for moving supplies and equipment around, while the Allies (Soviets included) were mostly using trucks. It's possible to protect a soldier from the effects of gas at least to a certain extent; but a horse is always going to be vulnerable especially when it comes to something like sarin which is absorbed directly through the skin. First use for the Germans would have left the other side's trucks intact while the Allied retaliation would have really put a dent in the German's horseflesh.
Also, most of the German R & D facilities for gas weapons were in occupied territory; and so by the time Germany got really desperate they'd already been overrun by the Soviets. Nerve gas is so incredibly poisonous that one of the biggest challenges the weapons designer faces is how to make it in any quantity without accidentally killing your whole work force. Restarting production inside Germany on short notice would have been challenging to say the least.
As far as the Soviets go, I'm not aware of any sources detailing their discussions about first use. However, during the early part of the war when desperation might have made first use seem attractive the Germans had a huge advantage both in bombers and in heavy artillery. It doesn't make a lot of sense to use gas weapons first if the enemy retaliation is going to be able to throw substantially more back at you.
Once the Soviets gained the initiative on the ground gas weapons still didn't really make much sense for them. Their goal was basically to steamroller west as rapidly as was feasible in order to keep the Germans off balance and to put themselves in the best possible position post-war. The use of gas slows things down tremendously as your soldiers now have to fight wearing masks and chemical suits, have to be decontaminated before they can move outside of the area where gas was being used in order to eat and what not, and you also have to work out some way to keep moving supplies forward through the areas where gas was used. Even after they were in a position to gas the Germans without the Germans being able to do much back gas would still have been a loser for the Soviets.
I've got to head off to work, but I hope this little bit helps. | [
"Many chemical weapons also produce toxic effects on any personnel in an affected area. However, this usually has no tactical value, as the effects of indirect exposure do not develop fast or substantially enough - though again, the psychological effect upon an enemy aware of the chemical usage may be considerable.... |
How big are the pieces of "dust" when a star explodes? | [A few microns](_URL_0_). Heavier elements are fairly well-mixed by the combination of stellar winds and supernovae. | [
"The dust is thought to be generated by collisions among comets and asteroids. Radiation pressure from the star will push the dust particles away into interstellar space over a relatively short timescale. Therefore, the detection of dust indicates continual replenishment by new collisions, and provides strong indir... |
Are there any "oscillations" in the expansion of space of the universe, or is it completely constant? | On cosmic scale, the expansion is constant. On "smaller" ( < 300 Mpc) distance scales there are very large differences, yes. That's why we get the structure we have in the universe ( [click](_URL_0_) ). The universe expands a lot faster in the voids (Where gravity isn't "holding it together") and slower in the high density clusters.
I dunno if this was the answer you wanted... but yes, gravity counteracts the expansion of the Universe. | [
"The Hubble constant, named for astronomer Edwin Hubble, whose work made clear the expansion of the universe, measures the rate at which expansion occurs. In accordance with the Copernican principle that the Earth is not in a central, specially favored position, one would expect that measuring this constant at any ... |
Did Saint Thomas Christians (Kerala, India) Celebrate Christmas before British Colonisation? | The St. Thomas Christians use a Syriac Christian liturgy. Syriac
Christians have Christmas traditions and rituals dating from the late
2nd century AD. During British rule St. Thomas Christians were resistant to attempts to anglicanize their traditions and liturgy. Asiatic
and North African christianity pre date Rome becoming a christian empire by 300 years and they all celebrated the birth of Christ. Robert Frykenberg's Christianity in India is a readable source. | [
"Being a British colony until 1947, many British traditions stayed on in India. Christmas is a state holiday in India, although Christianity in India is a minority with only 2.3% (of 1.237 Billion) of the population. Most of the Christians, especially Catholics in India attend the midnight mass. Many Christian hous... |
How does the body figure out what sort of antibody it needs to produce for a new threat it has never encountered before? | The body doesn't figure anything out. When immune cells are produced they randomly rearrange genes to produce different antibodies. If the antibody matches a pathogen, then that cell can clone itself to produce large numbers of cells that can produce the same antibody. | [
"While antibodies can only be directed at macromolecules such as proteins and at small molecules (haptens) only if bound to macromolecules, Anticalin proteins are able to selectively bind to small molecules as well.\n",
"An antibody is used by the acquired immune system to identify and neutralize foreign objects ... |
There seem to be a lot of large, widespread language families in Afroeurasia (Indo-European, Bantu, Afroasiatic, Turkic, etc.), while the Americas have lots of smaller language families. Why is this? | This is a bit of a misconception. Larger-scale Paleoamerican language families absolutely do exist, but I can see what you're getting at. In my answer here, I'll try to explain the various points.
Firstly, there *are* widespread language families indigenous to the Americas. I call these "Paleoamerican" to group together the Native Americans and the Inuit peoples, who are not related to one another by geography and are classified as legally distinct categories by the United States government.
Examples of widespread Native American language families would be the [Algic](_URL_1_), [Na-Dene](_URL_4_) and [Uto-Aztecan](_URL_0_) families, if I had to summon ones immediately from memory relevant to North America. In South America, there exists the [Arawakan](_URL_3_), [Cariban](_URL_7_), [Tupian](_URL_5_), and [Macro-Je](_URL_2_) language families, with a ***fairly disputed*** possible connection between these, sans Arawak, into a macro-family. The languages of the indigenous Caribbean typically were Arawak or Carib as well, though the links do not show these. These are all fairly geographically widespread language families, and would be comparable to Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, or Sino-Tibetan in scope.
There are also language families that have many bits and pieces within them despite not covering a particularly large area. The key example of all the ones I could pick for this would have to be the Mayan languages, which overall cover an area traditionally about the size of the Yucatan, Guatemala, Belize, and a bit further beyond the borders, with the exception of the more distant Huastec who have their own later establishment in history. The Mayan languages are incredibly plentiful given the size of the area they occupy, and this is what I would call the Papua Effect. Essentially, when a group is highly isolated, such as the Mayans being separated into competing city-states surrounded by dense jungle and rocky highlands, they will split into a great many small pieces. As you can see [here](_URL_6_), the Mayan languages are most diverse where communities are most likely to be isolated- where the jungles and mountains are thickest. Remember this habit, because it becomes important in the next paragraph.
So, why are there so many small, independent language families across the New World? It's that Papua effect in action again. In a world that tended to lack long-lasting empires the likes of Rome or Britain, it was particularly difficult for one group to surpass another to such a degree it might cause total extinction. You might be able to pin this on the (generally) stone age conditions of indigenous America, where although the Andes might've been copper-and-bronze, and the Pacific Northwest might cold-hammer iron tools, the urban centers are largely using Neolithic technology, and some tribes live in Meso- and Paleolithic conditions. The sort of technological stagnation, though I hesitate to call it such since indigenous ingenuity meant it never properly *stagnated*, contributed greatly to the preservation of massive diversity, as it did in many other tribal, underdeveloped, or otherwise isolated parts of the world to this day.
The Old World likely once had this same level of diversity in times never recorded. By the time writing reaches Europe, things are already in the bronze age, and statehood is invented. Furthermore, the Indo-Europeans, once a group of horse nomads, manage to assimilate much of the prehistoric European population into their ranks by the time writing rolls around. What we're left with are Finns, Basques, Minoans, and Etruscans as far as the written record is concerned.
To finalize the point I'm making- in summary, Native America was so incredibly diverse because that is, generally speaking, the natural state of humanity. Many tribes of many languages and cultures grouped together tends to create regional similarities, but when analyzed on the individual level can be incredibly diverse. They retain this diversity perhaps because they often cannot sustain a large enough population for the scale of conflicts, empires, and organization we see in places like Europe and the Middle East. They are instead small, but stable, and because so many are in this situation it ultimately means none of them can dominate over the others. Without this domination, diversity will generally fail to disappear.
This is not to say that Native Americans were "primitive", and indeed the population of the precolumbian Americas was actually very comparable and fair given its relative size to the rest of the world. No, it was not so much the total population that was the reason- but instead, it was the decentralized nature of the population. Where population is centralized and urban, you see flourishing civilizations- the kingdoms of Mesoamerica, the Andean empires, both of which have absolutely led to the decline of other cultures and the creation of larger blocs as we see in the Old World. Along the Mississippi, the trade hubs formed large urban settlements that, despite being city-states of various ethnic origins, came to absolutely dominate the regional culture to such a degree that, when unforeseen disaster collapsed their system, the Mississippian cultural and religious legacy was never abandoned. Things like the Yaupon Tea are still present in many cultures, and the old Mississippian burial mounds are considered particularly holy by contemporary relatives. Some Mississippian cultures turned to nomadism after their collapse, becoming groups like the Lakota, who, as is the nature of nomads, claim a large geographical space for a **relatively** limited number of cultures, much as city-states and isolation breed massive internal diversity in a small area. | [
"Afroasiatic (Afro-Asiatic), also known as Afrasian and in older sources as Hamito-Semitic (Chamito-Semitic) or Semito-Hamitic, is a large language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel. Though estimations vary widely, it is... |
If earth already has a decent amount of space debris orbiting it, why doesn't it flatten out and become an artificial ring; likewise, How much more would it need to be visible? | Rings form because of two basic rules: conservation of angular momentum, and conservation of energy. Let's consider a cloud of gas, dust, rocks, etc, orbiting a planet. This cloud will have some total energy and some total angular momentum. The cloud is generally not orbiting uniformly in any sense of the word, every orbit is essentially random, and there is a vanishingly small chance of the total angular momentum summing to zero.
There are two ways angular momentum can leave the cloud: objects either impacting with the planet itself, or being flung out of orbit and leaving the system entirely. Impacts between objects in the cloud **do not** alter the total angular momentum, they only transfer momentum from one object to another.
Ultimately, the disk that forms is formed from the objects that do not leave the cloud by either of these two methods.
Energy, on the other hand, **can** escape the cloud without carrying any mass with it. Every time two objects collide, they cause some amount of heat, light, deformation, perhaps molecular bonds, and yes sound, and these processes all convert kinetic energy into other forms.
If you take a randomly orbiting cloud and slowly drain its energy while keeping its angular momentum constant (or simply non-zero), you will turn that cloud into a disk or a ring.
Now of course this process is **slow** because it depends on random interactions within the cloud venting off tiny bits of energy in a very large system. The *density* of the cloud is a major factor in how quickly these interactions will occur. Random space debris orbiting with average separation of say 1 km will not produce a lot of collisions, therefore those objects will not quickly tend toward lower energy configurations. | [
"\"Space debris\" usually refers to the remains of spacecraft that have either fallen to Earth or are still orbiting Earth. Space debris may also consist of natural components such as chunks of rock and ice. The problem of space debris has grown as various space programs have left legacies of launches, explosions, ... |
how come rapists get longer sentences than murderers in the us? | Could you clarify how you know your assertion to be true, with a link to the source of that statistic? It sounds like a loaded question, so I've removed the question for now until you can reply with a link. | [
"Serial rapists are more likely to be convicted than a rapist who is known by the victim. Unlike those convicted for a single case of rape, serial rapists often go unrecognized due to the slow process of analyzing the backlog of rape kits. It may take many years for a past rape to be identified as being committed b... |
why do toddlers have an instinct to throw themselves on the ground then kick and cry/scream when they don't get what they want? why not just stand/sit and cry? | I don't think i've ever seen a child do the laying kicking and screaming outside of movies/TV
| [
"In infants, some babies may be hypotonia, a loose and floppy baby, or hypertonia, a stiff and rigid baby. Toddlers may have trouble feeding themselves or may stand, sit or walk later than what is developmentally normal. Other signs of motor skills disorders may be children that are clumsy or have excessive acciden... |
How much carbon dioxide and nitrogen would you need to create an atmosphere for mars. | You might want some oxygen in that mix - unless you don't care whether the atmosphere is breathable by humans.
See [Composition of Earth's atmosphere](_URL_0_). Carbon dioxide is a distant fourth on the list, after nitrogen, oxygen, and argon. Those three together add up to about 99% of the Earth's atmosphere, and carbon dioxide brings that up to 99.96%.
In fact, [Mars already has an atmosphere](_URL_2_), composed mainly of carbon dioxide with a total mass of 25 teratonnes (25 million billion kgs), which is about 1/200th of the mass of Earth's atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere includes about 1000 teratonnes of oxygen alone.
So since Mars already has an atmosphere, what aspects of that atmosphere are you looking to change? If you want to make it breathable by humans anywhere on the planet, you're going to need to add teratonnes of oxygen, to start with. The problem is that in order to create pressure levels similar to Earth, and thus breathable unassisted by humans, you're going to need a similar mass of atmosphere as on Earth. The total mass of Earth's atmosphere is 5148 teratonnes.
Here are some answers to the question [Is it possible to colonize mars to the extent that human beings could
live there?](_URL_1_)
In general, in the absence of terraforming technology which doesn't currently exist and is well beyond the scale of anything achieved by humans to date, any human presence on Mars in the foreseeable future would have to be confined to enclosed spaces with an artificial atmosphere.
(Edited to correct teratonne/kg conversion) | [
"The atmosphere of Mars is the layer of gas surrounding Mars. It is primarily composed of carbon dioxide (94.9%), molecular nitrogen (2.6%) and argon (1.9%). It also contains trace levels of water vapor, oxygen, carbon monoxide, hydrogen and other noble gases. The atmosphere of Mars is much thinner than Earth's. Th... |
how do sun rays stay hot? | The sun's rays that make it to you aren't heat rays. They are radiation energy. When that radiation hits you, your shirt, the ground, etc it absorbs the energy and gives off heat. | [
"As described in the Sun article, the Sun has a radiative core and a convective outer envelope. In the core, the luminosity due to nuclear reactions is transmitted to outer layers principally by radiation. However, in the outer layers the temperature gradient is so great that radiation cannot transport enough energ... |
Are there other cultures/time period treatises on war, other than "Art of War" and "On War"? If there are, why are they not as famous? | You're going to want to check out Vegetius' *De Re Militari*, a fourth-century guide to warfare that remained hugely influential and popular well into the middle ages. [Check it out here](_URL_0_)!
Also, you may be surprised to learn that Clausewitz's ideas were frequently contrasted with those of Antoine-Henri Jomini, who was similarly popular at the time (and often hailed as the father of modern strategy, or at least one of them) without having the same sort of mass-memory staying power that sees Clausewitz still remain something of a household name. His *Traité de Grande Tactique* (1805) and *Précis de l'Art de la Guerre* (1838) are well worth checking out, if you can find them. | [
"The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the Late Spring and Autumn Period (roughly 5th century BC). The work, which is attributed to the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu (\"Master Sun\", also spelled Sunzi), is composed of 13 chapters. Each one is devoted to an aspect of warfa... |
what is inertia and why does it happen? | Inertia is the resistance of a physical object to any change in how it’s moving. If the object is stationary, it doesn’t want to start moving. If the object is already moving, it doesn’t want to change how fast it’s moving or what direction it’s going. To get the object to start moving, or to change how it’s moving, we have to apply a force. The force we apply, and the resulting change in the way the object moves, can be used to define and measure the object’s “mass”, which is the amount of physical stuff in an object.
(The other way we define and measure an object’s mass is by the gravitational effect the object has on other objects. This connection between inertia and gravity seems weird and surprising, but it’s a really important feature of how the universe works.)
Edit: grammar/clarity. | [
"In common usage, the term \"inertia\" may refer to an object's \"amount of resistance to change in velocity\" (which is quantified by its mass), or sometimes to its momentum, depending on the context. The term \"inertia\" is more properly understood as shorthand for \"the principle of inertia\" as described by New... |
why do americans dye their cheese orange? | What color is cheddar cheese where you come from? All cheese is naturally white, or off white, or even a golden yellow, depending on the type of milk used. But you'll never find a cow that gives orange milk. The color instead comes from the flavorless Annatto seed, which gives Wisconsin cheddar that pumpkin orange hue.
Found this cool article explaining the history which actually started in England by the way.
_URL_0_ | [
"Orange B was first listed as an approved food dye by the FDA in 1966. In 1978, the FDA proposed removing it from the list due to concerns about the presence of carcinogenic contaminants (specifically 2-naphthylamine). The only supplier in the United States, the William J. Stange Company, subsequently stopped manuf... |
why does it seem like almost nobody in the world wears socks? | I have no idea what planet you are from, but here on Earth we men regularly wear socks. While I admit to working from anecdotal evidence I can't think of a signle friend who doesn't
Is it possible some of these men you're seeing are wearing below-ankle socks and therefore it's hidden by the shoe? | [
"A sock is an item of clothing worn on the feet and often covering the ankle or some part of the calf. Some type of shoe or boot is typically worn over socks. In ancient times, socks were made from leather or matted animal hair. In the late 16th century, machine-knit socks were first produced. Until 1800 both hand ... |
why do i have to press ctrl+alt+del to log log into my window's computer? | Ctrl-Alt-Del is called a trusted keyboard sequence. No other program can hijack or use that sequence. So, when Windows asks you to use that keyboard sequence, you know for sure that Windows is the only program asking for it. Otherwise, any old program could pretend to look like the login screen, and then steal your credentials.
| [
"\"Remote log-in\" allows users to connect to their own desktop while being physically away from their computer. Systems that support the X Window System, typically Unix-based ones, have this ability \"built in\". Windows versions starting from Windows 2000 have a built-in solution for remote access as well in the ... |
why does laying in bed help when you’re feeling unwell, how does resting help with the recovery? | Fighting disease or healing from an injury takes a tremendous amount of energy. Basically any and all metabolic output that’s not necessary for basic survival is going to killing germs or rebuilding tissue. So trying to do anything else is either asking your body to try and produce more energy while it’s already fighting off attack or it’s stealing energy from the healing process and prolonging the recovery time. | [
"BULLET::::- Get enough rest. Rest allows body tissues and joints the time they need to repair. Sleeping is a great way to maintain health and helps both body and mind. Lack of sleep, stress levels and symptoms might get worsen. Immunity to other infections or diseases is reduced when sleep is not adequate. Rest co... |
why do we whistle? | Uh to attract women? | [
"The word is linked to the use of a whistle to alert the public or a crowd about a bad situation, such as the commission of a crime or the breaking of rules during a game. The phrase \"whistle blower\" attached itself to law enforcement officials in the 19th century because they used a whistle to alert the public o... |
why did google succeed and aol crumble? | AOL's main business model in their heyday was to make the internet easier to use by creating their own proprietary environment with a graphic interface, one-stop dialup-service, etc. Pretty soon the internet became as easy to use as AOL (and it was never all that hard anyway if you weren't a grandparent at the time) just by using a browser, and you could get basic dial-up access for about half the price of AOL or eventually higher-speed access for about the same price.
Google actually provides valuable services to this day - it's a very good search engine that hasn't clogged itself up with too much content (I'm looking at you, Yahoo. You used to be cool.) and keeps its advertising fairly unobtrusive. They've also branched out and diversified in smart ways like buying Youtube, whereas AOL/Time-Warner's attempts at similar diversification have largely been blunders. | [
"On 10 November 2010, the European Commission opened a formal investigation into Google's search algorithm, following a number of complaints issued by smaller web companies that Google was downgrading their placement in results returned in Google's search results, and that Google was preferentially favoring their o... |
Could a marine fish be eventually acclimatized to fresh water? | If you do this your fish will most likely die. Marine fish have evolved to produce very concentrated urine while absorbing most of the water they take. While some marine fish may be able to tolerate a freshwater environment (called euryhaline fish), most will absorb too much water, creating a hypotonic solution within the fish, effectively killing it. My advice to you is to do some research on your particular fish and see if they can tolerate living in a freshwater environment. If they can be sure not to place them directly in freshwater because it will shock and kill them. | [
"Some marine fish, like sharks, have adopted a different, efficient mechanism to conserve water, i.e., osmoregulation. They retain urea in their blood in relatively higher concentration. Urea is damaging to living tissue so, to cope with this problem, some fish retain \"trimethylamine oxide\". This provides a bette... |
if the average digestion process takes about 24 - 72 hours, why certain things (like taco bell) seem to feel like they "go right through you". | This is certainly not the case with all foods, but I think there's a few things at play here. Disclaimer: I'm no doctor:
1) Eating gets your digestive system going in general. I'm not an expert, and couldn't find anything about this in a quick search on Wikipedia. But anecdotally, I think this rings true / is generally accepted. This means if anything you eat manages to sneak through via #2 and #3, it's more likely to come out shortly after you've eaten (and thus seem like 'it went right through you').
1.5) I'd wager that you're not having Taco Bell for breakfast, but rather, more mild food. Probabilistically, most of these big Taco Bell, Chinese Take-out, etc meals center in one 6ish hour period around lunch and dinner. Since the bulk of your food intake is around this time window, that all comes out centered in a similarly-sized window of time. In other words, if you graphed all peoples' pooping times, they're not equally likely to poop at all times in the day. You're likely to eat an abnormal meal and then *around* the same time, poop something else out.
2) 24-72hrs is an average, and it's the solid matter that takes the most time to break down. Liquids can go through more quickly, and can more readily seep through the various 'blockers' your digestive system sets up to compartmentalize itself (like the sphincter between stomach and small intestine). Hot sauces especially (chile oils for instance) are good at this, since they can also irritate those 'blockers'. So when #1/1.5 happens, some parts of what you recently ate can already be close to the finish line.
3) Foods your digestive system isn't used to can throw it off. Gut bacteria are used to 'eating' a certain type of food you're throwing down your gullet, and switching it up can mess with that 'ecosystem'. (Ones used to eating what YOU'RE used to eating will be useless, and you won't have much help from bacteria that are good at eating what you just switched to, since until now, there wasn't anything for them to thrive on.) | [
"The human gastrointestinal tract is around 9 meters long. Food digestion physiology varies between individuals and upon other factors such as the characteristics of the food and size of the meal, and the process of digestion normally takes between 24 and 72 hours.\n",
"The time taken for food or other ingested o... |
why are people so judgmental in highschool? | This isn't what you'll want to hear, but... because you're children. You haven't lived much, you haven't done much or experienced much, you've never been independent, and you're still learning the basics about almost everything. To add to that, you have all of the physical changes, and the whole "figuring out who I am and where I fit into the world around me," thing.
As you may have noticed, all of this is pretty stressful and sometimes worse and *everyone* has coping mechanisms for that. Those mechanisms can range from utterly benign, through the kind of judgmental closed-mindedness you're describing, to extremes of social aversion, self-harm, and violence. People like to feel like they have some kind of control, and "hey just wait until you grow up a bit," is cold comfort.
If you need an analogy, think of how anxious people get on airplanes, even though airplanes are incredibly safe. By contrast people don't even shrug when they make the decision to drive, despite the tens of thousands of people killed each year doing so in this country alone. What's the difference? Well, the biggest difference is the perception of personal control over the situation. | [
"In elementary school, grades may represent rewards from teachers \"for being friendly, prepared, compliant, a good school citizen, well-organized and hard-working\" rather than mastering the subject material. Schools in the United States have been accused of using academic grades to penalize students for being bor... |
why is the pope so important? do his quotes and views really change the whole catholic church? | The catholic church has a structure to it that you don't see as much of in other christian religons. All priests report to a local Bishop. All bishops report to an Archbishop. The Archbishop's are overseen by Cardinal's and the Cardinal's report to the pope.
So the pope is like the head of the government that is the Catholic church. Everyone below has to do what he says. In addition, a Catholic believes that god speaks through the pope (not all the time, just on occasion). So in addition to literally being in charge, the pope's attitudes tend to set the tone for the church as a whole.
Now, the Pope saying something might not change people's worldviews over night. But his direction will trickle down to the individual congregations eventually. It stirs discussion inside churches and helps direct the sermons that people hear every Sunday. | [
"The Pope had one more objective: The introduction of the Gospel does not mean the destruction of local cultures. Not all seem to understand this point. He wrote in Summi Pontificatus that a deeper appreciations into the various civilizations and their good qualities are necessary to the preaching of the Gospel of ... |
Exactly how do you hook up new organs in the body to the blood vessels during a transplant? | The blood vessels from the host and the donor organ are clamped then sewn together with very fine sutures (thread) and then blood flow is allowed to return.
One of the big complications of transplant surgery is that the place where the vessels are sutured can clot (thrombose) and destroy the graft. | [
"When a liver is being transplanted in conjunction with the intestine, the recipient must first have their own liver removed. Following this, the aorta, cava, and portal veins of the donor and recipient are anastomosed. The graft is then flushed before the caval clamps are removed. The intestine is then reconstruct... |
What is your area of specialization, and what would you consider to be an essential text that someone new to the field should read? | My area of specialisation is *[imperium](_URL_0_)* in the Roman Middle Republic, particularly the use and abuse of it by consuls and praetors sent abroad. Turns out these guys did everything, with at the extreme end stuff like starting unprovoked wars for profit and signing a peace just to prevent the next guy from being able to profit.
I consider A.M. Eckstein's book *Senate and General: Individual Decision-making and Roman Foreign Relations 264-194 BC* (Berkeley 1987) to be essential in this regard. | [
"BULLET::::- Enjoy reading materials for all your information & recreation needs including bestsellers, large print books, audiobooks, music, DVDs and videos for all ages, magazines, language kits, adult literacy materials, talking books for the visually and physically challenged and braille books for children.\n",... |
how are carbon nanotubes similar to/different from carbon fiber? | Let's say you have a bunch of sheets of paper.
If you lay them all flat on top of one another, and glue them all together, you'll pretty much get a big block of paper. If you push hard enough from the side, you might be able to separate the papers again, though it'll be tough...but if you try to rip the whole thing, good luck. You probably can't. So you have a material that's pretty strong, at least if you're trying to rip it. However, the papers are packed pretty tightly together, so nothing can really get through them. If you tried to drop a tiny little bead through them, nothing would happen. It's sealed off. If you use sheets of carbon instead of paper, this is **carbon fiber.**
Now suppose instead you rolled the sheets of paper up into tubes, and connected the tubes end-to-end. It would definitely be weaker than your big brick of paper, since you could just crush the tubes flat, but now you can drop that small bead through them and it'll fall through easily. So while you have something made of the same basic stuff, it behaves way differently; instead of being strong but allowing nothing through, it's (comparatively) weaker, but in the right direction, things can easily pass through! This new tube structure is **carbon nanotubes.**
In real life, the "glue" in the big block of papers is actually more carbon that chemically bonds them together, and the "beads" in the tube example are actually electricity. Also, carbon nanotubes aren't anywhere near as weak as a tube of paper. | [
"Carbon nanobuds are a newly created material combining two previously discovered allotropes of carbon: carbon nanotubes and fullerenes. In this new material, fullerene-like \"buds\" are covalently bonded to the outer sidewalls of the underlying carbon nanotube. This hybrid material has useful properties of both fu... |
Magnet pushed into an open circuit solenoid | That's right. An open circuit has practically infinite resistance, so the finite emf (which comes from -d(BA)/dt) will result in zero current and therefore zero induced magnetic field. | [
"In his investigations of the peculiar manner in which iron filings arrange themselves on a cardboard or glass in proximity to the poles of a magnet, Faraday conceived the idea of magnetic \"lines of force\" extending from pole to pole of the magnet and along which the filings tend to place themselves. On the disco... |
how do podcasts insert advertisements that are unique to my location? | A podcast is a single file when you get it but is it not necessarily a single file on the server.
So you have podcast files that are split into multiple parts and you put them together with the ads into a single file when you download it. What is selected depending on your IP address. Perhaps cookies and other similar data if it is available.
You can combine multiple sound files into one with needing to encode the sound. Look up "mp3 merger" and you find a lot of software and website that do that. I suppose you can do the same in other audio formats.
Another option if fewer ad alternative is needed you can just upload multiple files and the server just select one.
[_URL_0_](_URL_0_) | [
"The podcasts use no advertisement and most incoming links on the internet are from comments by users. The hosts have done talks in schools such as Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and Kellogg School of Management.\n",
"Over the course of the podcast run, advertisements for various pr... |
why are the great plains of north america nearly treeless? there doesn't seem to be a problem with growing plants in this region. | A combination of a few things:
* The plains are more prone to drought than more wooded areas and grasses can handle this better
* The flat terrain means lightning and fires are bigger threats, which again, favors grasses over trees
* The area actually did have quite a few trees, it's just that most have been removed | [
"European settlers found extensive areas of open game habitat throughout the East, commonly called \"barrens\". The American Indians used fire to maintain such areas as rangeland. Open barrens are now rare and imperiled globally. Suppression of wildfires has allowed larger climax forest vegetation to take over in m... |
The Origins of Primogeniture | Primogeniture doesn't show up all around the world, actually. It's a fairly culturally specific way of managing inheritance. In Europe, primogeniture arose about the time the feudal system was adopted. Prior to that, Frankish/Germanic kings or chieftains would often divide their land amongst all of their male heirs. That's actually what happened to Charlemagne's empire.
Other cultures had radically different ways of managing successions. Both the Mongol Empire and the Aztec Empire (despite being on opposite ends of the globe) managed succession by having all potential heirs vote on who was most qualified. Many West African kingdoms had succession go from uncle to nephew (they had a matrilineal kin system). The Turks famously had a practice where all of the heirs assassinated each other until the last man standing took the crown. Ethiopia had a similar system until it became common practice for the preferred heir to imprison all of his siblings until after the coronation.
The list goes on... but basically yeah. Primogeniture is culturally specific. | [
"The earliest account of primogeniture to be known widely in modern times is that of Isaac's sons Esau, who was born first, and Jacob, who was born second. Esau was entitled to the \"birthright\" (\"bekhorah\" בְּכוֹרָה), but he sold the right to Jacob for a mess of pottage, i. e. a small amount of food. Although t... |
How did moving into or between cities "legally" look like in High Middle Ages, e.g. 15th century Western Europe | An interesting book with a lot to say on this subject is Robert Bartlett's *The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350*.
It is best read alongside R. I. Moore's *The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215*.
But in short, the answer is: it depends. It depends on the person (i.e. their birth/legal status) and the places they were moving to and from. It depends on the types of institutions in the new place (if any), the languages spoken, the receptiveness of the ruling class to immigration. It depends on whether they knew anyone already in the new place, and whether they were migrating to a new (unsettled) area.
It just isn't possible to give Europe-wide answers to these kinds of questions. | [
"European Medieval cities are often, and often erroneously, regarded as exemplars of undesigned or 'organic' city development. There are many examples of considered urban design in the Middle Ages (see, e.g., David Friedman, \"Florentine New Towns: Urban Design in the Late Middle Ages\", MIT 1988). In England, many... |
How was the Qing dynasty formed? And how did it manage to last as long as it did? | In terms of origins, the Qing Empire was the result of a weakened Ming state and an opportunistic and highly militarized Manchu Confederation to the north.
The early decades of the 17th century saw the unification of the Jurchen tribes and other semi-nomadic Tugusic peoples of Manchuria under Nurhaci (postumously recognized as the first Qing Emperor). Nurhaci created a highly militarized confederation, largely aided by his Eight Banners system, which created a society designed entirely to support Nurhaci's armies. After Nurhaci's death, his son Hong Taiji succeeded him and began laying the framework for a more centralized Qing state (note, this is still prior to the fall of the Ming). In the 1630's Hong Taiji officially declared the establishment of the Jin Dynasty (金朝), harking back to the Later Jin Jurchen Dynasty founded during the Song Dynasty. Hong Taiji began artifically constructing a new "Manchu" identity to unite the various Jurchen and Mongol tribes that were under his rule. Soon after, he changed the name of the Dynasty to Qing (清朝).^1
By the 1640's, the Ming Dynasty was severely weakened by internal rebellion and incompetent emperors. In 1644, the rebel Li Zicheng and his army seized Beijing. Through a series of intrigues, the Ming garrison commander Wu Sangui at Shanhaiguan (a heavily guarded passage through the great wall along the sea Northeast of Beijing) sided with the Manchu armies outside the Great Wall in order to drive Li Zicheng out of Beijing. The Manchu entered Northern China, and with Wu Sangui soundly defeated Li Zicheng. The Manchus entered Beijing in 1644, the date traditionally considered by historians to be the start of the Qing Dynasty. But 1644 was not the end of the Ming. After the Qing entered Beijing in 1644, Ming forces still controlled vast territories in the south. For forty years the Manchus battled various Ming princes and their forces for control of China. The last Ming hold outs in Taiwan, lead by Koxinga's successors, were not defeated until the 1680's.^2
The Qing suffered a tremendous about of internal unrest during it's first half century of rule. Before the total conquest of the Ming was complete, the nascent Qing state faced its first and greatest threat, the Revolt of the Three Feudatories. The Three Feudatories were very independent Chinese states (one ruled by Wu Sangui) that paid tribute to the Manchus and nominally belonged to the Qing state. Their large degree of autonomy is indicative of the immense decentralization of the early Qing. One of China's most impressive rulers, the Kangxi Emperor, sought to bring the Feudatories more directly under his control. The result was a brutal civil war (1673-1681) that lasted nearly a decade. Kangxi and the Qing were victorious, however, and Kangxi was subsequently able to create a highly centralized and strong Qing state ruled by a powerful Manchu emperor.
The strength and stability created by Kangxi ushered in a century of unprecedented territorial expansion. Following the success over the Three Feudatories, Kangxi (who reigned for 60 years), confronted a Mongol threat lead by Galden Tseren. Kangxi's campaign against Galdern Tseren lasted years, and Kangxi (perhaps the last true Manchu) personally lead many battles against his nemesis. Kangxi resulting victory resulted in the Qing Empire's formal incorporation of both Outer and Inner Mongolia. More importantly, it created a longstanding policy geared toward securing China's borderlands and ending the threat of nomadic attack once and for all. Consequently, Kangxi's succesors, Yongzheng and Qianlong, continued to add large territories of Central Asia to the Qing state during their reigns. By the 1760, the Qing State included Mongolia, Qinghai, Tibet, and Xinjiang, making it the largest China-based state in history.^3
It's worth delving into Qing Imperial ideology to explain how they were able to successfully rule such a large territory with so many diverse cultures, peoples, and religions. By the reign of Qianlong (r. 1735-1796), the Qing state had reached its immense territorial apex. Qianlong ruled over Chinese, Manchus, Xinjiang Turks, Tibetans, and many smaller ethnic minorities. To rule this vast and diverse empire, the Qing prudently adopted different policies of administration and imperial legitimization best suited to each region. To the Mongols and Manchus, the Emperors were decedents of the Great Khan and patrons of traditional shamanistic rituals. To the Chinese, the Qing styled themselves as Confucian sage rulers and promoters of Chinese cultures and traditions. To the Tibetans and the Llamas, the Emperor was a reincarnated Bodhisattva and imperial defender of the Buddhist faith. To cater to the Muslims of Xinjiang, Qianlong frequented various Mosques and took a Muslim concubine. In fact, Qianlong and other Qing Emperors all followed many different faiths to satisfy the many peoples under their rule. The Muslims were not satisified, however, and so Qianlong found it prudent to rule Xinjiang through the existing local Begs and other elites.^4
Importantly, the Qing Emperors did not consider themselves Chinese, nor did they consider their state to be a Chinese state. Instead, the Qing rulers viewed their domain as a cosmopolitan empire of which China proper was merely a part. Whether or not the Qing were a Chinese state is still hotly debated in many circles. It is clear, however, that the Qing Emperors were very flexible in how they were willing to present themselves. They were many different things to many different people. The system worked fantastically well, and the Empire maintained relative cohesion even during its greatest upheavals during the 19th century until its fall in 1911.^5
1. Mark Elliot, *The Manchu Way*
2. William T. Rowe, *China's Last Empire: The Great Qing*
3. Peter C. Purde, *China Marches West*
4. Evelyn Rawski, *The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions*
5. Pamela Crossley, *A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology*
| [
"The Qing dynasty, officially the Great Qing (), was the last imperial dynasty of China. It was established in 1636, and ruled China proper from 1644 to 1912. It was preceded by the Ming dynasty and succeeded by the Republic of China. The Qing multi-cultural empire lasted for almost three centuries and formed the t... |
why do things get so much cheaper the more you buy? | It is due to a marketing method called [price differentiation](_URL_0_). Also, when you sell an individual ticket to an individual person, you must take a number of steps (agreeing the sale, accepting payment, delivering the goods). Some of these steps require no additional effort when you sell multiple tickets in one go to the same person (agreeing the sale, accepting payment, delivering the goods).
So when you sell 1 ticket, it will cost you 4 dollars to process the sale for 1 ticket. You need to sell the ticket at 10 dollars to have a 6 dollar profit
When you sell 40 tickets at the same time, it will cost you maybe 7 dollars to process the sale for all 40 tickets. The only thing you need to do extra is print some more tickets, and reserve the seating. In this case, you could sell 40 tickets at 5 dollars, grossing you 200 dollars, and your cost will be 7 dollars, netting you 193 dollars for just a slight bit more of your time.
tl;dr: you offer the same basic product with varying perks to different target markets, at a different price. | [
"This statement is also found in this lengthier version: \"There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person's lawful prey. It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too m... |
how does zimbabwe concurrently use the us dollar, chinese yuan, indian rupee, japanese yen, etc. do citizens of zimbabwe have to carry around currencies of all kinds? do stores accept any currency? | It's not so much that they use all those different currencies, it's that they don't use their own.
Zimbabwe's dollar lost so much value that they at one point printed a 10 trillion dollar bill. So, as it became financially pointless to continue printing money that had practically no value, they opted to instead allow citizens to simply use other nation's currency instead.
Now, as for how this works. In the US, my dollar is worth $1 when I go to spend it because the person/company/etc. I am buying from knows that when they go to spend it it will also be worth $1 to whomever they are paying. I have never been there so I don't know this firsthand, but so long as you're paying in a currency that the person/business knows it can use when it comes time for them to pay someone, they'll take it.
Things may cost different prices based on what currency you use, an example being a can of soda being $1USD, or .99€, or $1,000,000,000,000,000,000 Zimbabwe dollars. | [
"The Zimbabwean dollar (sign: $, or Z$ to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies) was the official currency of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 12 April 2009. During this time, it was subject to periods of above-average inflation, followed by a period of hyperinflation.\n",
"In December 2008, the Reserve Ba... |
Is it possible to build a nuclear powered space shuttle with enough fuel to last centuries, similar to a nuclear powered submarine? | _URL_0_
Related, would only last until you ran out of nukes, but has a higher theoretical speed than any other kind of spacecraft, and the fuel has a MUCH higher energy density. | [
"Due to the much higher temperatures achievable by the gaseous core design, it can deliver higher specific impulse and thrust than most other conventional nuclear designs. This translates into shorter mission transit times for future astronauts or larger payload fractions. It may also be possible to use partially i... |
while both minorities have faced oppression in u.s history, why do asian americans seem to be "better off" compared to african americans? | The following is my opinion and I'll preface it with my own background.
I'm a Blasian American male. curly hair. Raised with a caucasian step father.
In my experience asian families tend to have a mindset of growth. when i say that its saving many times with the mindset of "i took care of you where young, you take care of me when i am old" Its a cyclical way of living that allows reinvestment. and fosters cultural growth by having (sometimes) 2-3 generations in one household. Its the strong family bond and tradition that breeds success over time.
In contrast
By and large the african american community has been fractured for an extended period of time. first by color hue. (perpetuations that continue to this day in the form of (#teamlightskin,#teambrownskin,#teamdarkskin) as a group the mindset tends to be "whats in it for me?" or where can i get "my piece" and normally this mindset would foster self growth and embodies the competitive spirit that we all enjoy but with old beliefs what beauty and what holds value it is somewhat rare to see african americans put money back into their communities (in large quantities) my uncle used to say that nobody wanted to watch anyone else "get out" if i'm stuck here you should be too mindset. so the money is spent elsewhere maybe at a more expensive non ethnic market down the street. because "i'm black but i'm not going to shop at that store thats 'ghetto' "
living above your means is something extremely common the world over. but culturally the idea that you should save and hold onto money isn't what is popular. the popular idea that is emulated throughout the masses is
" Get money, Look nice - Because its all about appearance"
Expensive clothes, Expensive Car. "
Its not as cool to have 50,000 in the bank saved for your house as it is to say I just blew 3,000 "I didn't even feel it. I'm "ballin"
socioeconomically i would say that there are still instances where predominantly black schools don't get the perks and newest books or software,hardware and best teachers. But in order for that to change you have to be willing to put money into the environment you so desperately want to escape. (via taxes) so that other kids, youth and the people around you can contribute to the overall betterment.
Instead you have a group of "Food Stamp Entrepreneurs"
(Knows everything about how to work the system, and very little about how to stay out of it)
| [
"Additionally, apart from the historical racial incidents including anti-Asian movements and anti-immigration legislation, Asian Americans are also victims of racism in the United States. According to the Annual Audit of Violence Against Asian Pacific Americans conducted by the NAPALC in 2003, Asian Americans are o... |
why isn't it easier for immigrants to become a u.s. citizens? | There's no particular incentive for a country to make migrants intro citizens. While they wait for their papers to come through, they contribute just like citizens do, but get fewer benefits in exchange.
It's a bit like "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?". | [
"Immigration to the United States can be difficult due to immigrants' lack of access to legal documents and the expensive nature of immigration. The United States has historically been a major target destination for people seeking work and continues to be so today.. As Graciela, a 47-year-old married woman who had ... |
Curious about the current position of Germany- just how did it become an internationally accepte forefront of the Eurozone after being demolished two times in a row from the World Wars? | That's a doozy; my short answer would be to recommend 'Post War' by Tony Judt and 'Europe: A History' by Norman Davies.
Long answer:
Before WWI, Germany was the greatest industrial power in Europe; second in the world to the United States, with the third, fourth and fifth being Britain, France and Russia respectively. In 1914, Germany was France's most important trade partner on the continent, and had similar relations with Britain; economically that is, politically things were dicey, as subsequent events showed.
EDIT: Germany was only demolished in the Second World War; Hyper-inflation, stemming from rash economic policies and deliberate attempts to sabotage reparations, came to a head in 1923. Following this, in 1924, the Young/Dawes Plan was set up, to help Germany recover and pay it's reparations. Incidentally, adjusted for 1948 dollars, the United States had provided more capital to Germany in the 1920s under the Young/Dawes Plan, than it did with the Marshall Plan; the only difference was, no Great Depression followed the Marshall plan 5 years after it's implementation!
After WWII ended, the initial Allied response was to de-industrialize Germany, as per the Morgenthau Plan. France and the Soviet Union, as well as Poland, Yugoslavia and many other nations, claimed factories, machine tools, etc. As reparations, and sent these back to their countries. However, as tensions grew between the Capitalist, Democratic western allies (USA, Britain, France) and the Communist, authoritarian Soviet Union, the aim became one of rebuilding western Germany (occupied by the Western Allies) as a Capitalist Democracy. At the forefront of this was the Marshall Plan, which stimulated Europe's economies through massive foreign loans, which were offered to ALL countries (the soviet's pressured their 'allies' to refuse).
The process of rebuilding was well underway by 1949, and efforts at de-nazification were effective on the surface, but would lead to social tensions and youth rebellion in the 60s. In 1955, the French, American and British zones of occupation in Western Germany, and in West Berlin, were combined to form the 'Bundes Republik Deutschland', the Federal Republic of Germany. It's first Chancellor was Konrad Adenauer, of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU, a centre-right party).
The steps towards German re-integration had, however, already begun. In 1951, the Treaty of Paris was signed, leading to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community. Comprising France, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Italy, it would create a common market for coal and steel in western Europe, eliminating/reducing competition between the neighbour states. The brain child of French Christian Democrat Robert Schumann, one of the founding fathers of the EU, it also had the support of Alcide de Gasperi of Italy, and Konrad Adenauer. Incidentally, they were all born in Europe before WWI. Schumann's father was from Alsace-Lorraine, De Gasperi was born in Trento, southern Tyrol in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Adenauer was from the Rhineland; when they first met, they spoke the common language between them: German!
The ECSC was preceded in 1949 by the Atlantic Charter, creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A military organization, it was designed, or so it's first chief Lord Ismay of Britain said, "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down"! It served to unite the western democracies against the USSR, which followed with it's own alliance, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955. In 1957, West Germany joined NATO, and became the key continental member, providing much of the forces in NATO's CENTAG (Central Army Group) in Southern Germany.
1957 also saw the creation of the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the EU. West Germany, along with France, was the key member of the EEC, which came to encompass most of western Europe.
Under the Kaiser and Hitler, Germany had sought to assert itself OVER the continent. Now, after the 'chastening' experiences of two world wars and the sting of the division (East and West Germany), the goal was to utilize Germany's immense economic potential to cooperate with it's neighbours in leading Europe into a new future.
Hope that answer's your question! | [
"In August 1940, the Reich unilaterally announced the dissolution of the European Commission, noting that Germany and Italy had withdrawn and Britain and France were nonfunctioning members. \"German quarters noted with satisfaction that this ends the existence of a valuable source of information for the Allies on t... |
The city of Rome had a population of over one million people at its apex, but by the year 1000 CE it had fallen to less than 20,000. Are there any surviving accounts of persons living in Rome from that period and what they thought of the massive ruins around them? | Textually, we have an incredibly rich trove of accounts of visitors to Rome. On one hand, the collection is perhaps not quite as interesting as we might want: the Venn diagram of "people who were both literate and whose writings are likely to have survived" and "people with an awareness of a basic history of the Roman Empire and its decline" is basically the first circle inside the second, especially from the mid-11th century on. On the other hand, their shared knowledge of and appreciation for ancient Rome offers a good basis for comparison of different perspectives.
Benjamin of Tudela is a good place to start for an important reason: in the face of Rome's role at the heart of medieval Christianity, Benjamin was Jewish! He came from Navarre in Iberia, and his meandering travel account catalogues the Jewish communities he traveled among around the Mediterranean. You can read his full account of Rome and Roman Jews [here](_URL_0_) (Cntl/Cmd+F for "Rome" is easiest if the link target doesn't work), but to excerpt a few bits:
> There are many wonderful structures in the city, different from any others in the world. **Including both its inhabited and ruined parts,** Rome is about twenty-four miles in circumference. In the midst thereof there are eighty palaces belonging to eighty kings who lived there, each called Imperator, commencing from King Tarquinius down to Nero and Tiberius, who lived at the time of Jesus the Nazarene, ending with Pepin, who freed the land of Sepharad from Islam, and was father of Charlemagne.
> There is a palace outside Rome (said to be of Titus). The Consul and his 300 Senators treated him with disfavour, because he failed to take Jerusalem till after three years, though they had bidden him to capture it within two.
> In Rome is also the palace of Vespasianus, a great and very strong building; also the Colosseum...There were battles fought here in olden times, and in the palace more than 100,000 men were slain, and there their bones remain piled up to the present day. The king caused to be engraved a representation of the battle and of the forces on either side facing one another, both warriors and horses, all in marble, to exhibit to the world the war of the days of old.
> In Rome there is a cave which runs underground, and catacombs...In the church of St. John in the Lateran there are two bronze columns taken from the Temple, the handiwork of King Solomon, each column being engraved "Solomon the son of David." The Jews of Rome told me that every year upon the 9th of Ab they found the columns exuding moisture like water.
Although Benjamin observes that some of Rome is standing/inhabited and some is ruins, he does not distinguish which is which in his description (nor does that distinction allow for, as we will see, inhabited ruins). However, he is keenly aware of the history of the ancient Roman buildings and those who lived in them. Those stories--what Rome *was*--matter more than what they *are*. He takes note of great buildings, natural features, and smaller monuments. I also think the detail about the columns of the Temple seized and appropriated into a Christian church are fascinating and significant. Especially in recounting the miracle story of the local Jewish community, Benjamin shows that Rome could have a sacred geography for *non*-Christians--something I, at least, am not used to thinking of.
Notably absent from Benjamin's record, on the other hand, is commentary on the *fall* of Rome. For this, believe it or not, we have to turn to Christian writers. In their stylings, a very real admiration for classical antiquity aligns with the medieval Christian theology of history that saw a "world grown old," decaying towards apocalypse and only ever renewable by God. 11th-12th century cleric Hildebert of Lavardin, eventually archbishop of Tours, wrote two famous poems *de Roma* which both celebrate and mourn the ancient city as he found it at the very end of the 11th century. Here's an excerpt from one:
> The city now is fallen; I can find
> No worthier epitaph than “this was Rome.”
> Yet neither the flight of years, nor flame nor sword
> Could fully wipe away its loveliness
> […] Bring wealth, new marble, and the help of gods
> Let craftsmen’s hands be active in their work—
> Yet shall these standing walls no equal find,
> Nor can these ruins even be restored
> The care of men once built so great a Rome
> The care of gods could not dissolve its stones
> Divinities admire their faces carved,
> And wish themselves the equal of these forms
> Nature could not make gods as fair of face
> As man created images of gods
With Hildebert, praises of Rome move into a more emotional register, but also a more intellectual one rather than practical/geographical. His words are grounded in ancient Rome's buildings and especially its art but he evokes the splendor of a lost civilization rather than the immediate materiality of buildings rooted in history. It's also significant that Hildebert's praise, while overtly of the artistic qualities of ancient Roman art, is actually directed at the *human artists*. He elevates the abilities of humans of old especially compared to present ones, whose skills and vision could never possibly measure up.
A few years later, the English traveler known as Master Gregory famously followed Hildebert's footsteps to Rome. Gregory actually knew one of Hildebert's poems--he quotes it in his own little travel guide-like account!--but takes his commentary a step further.
> The sight of the whole city is, I think, most wonderful, where there is such a multitude of towers, so great a number of palaces, as none can count. When I first saw the city from far off, I was overwhelmed and remembered Caesar's view of it, when having conquered the Gauls and crossed the Alps, he exclaimed *substantial quote from Caesar*...
> This beauty passing understanding I long admired, and I thanked God who...yet has magnified there the works of man with immeasurable beauty. For even if Rome falls into complete ruin, nothing that is intact can be compared with it. As has been said [by Hildebert, in fact]:
> *Nothing can equal Rome, Rome even in ruins*
> *Your ruins speak aloud your former greatness*
> **The ruin of Rome shows clearly, I think, that all temporal things are near their end, especially when the worldly center of all things, Rome, daily languishes and decays.**
Rome as the "worldly" center of the word is one of those little noteworthy turns of phrase. In medieval Christian *sacred* geography, the center of the world was Jerusalem. Here, though, Gregory focuses on the human component in Christian world/salvation history--and he is even more explicit than Hildebert about the decline of the present from earlier greatness.
We're used to a "decline and fall of Rome" narrative as Christians supposedly ruining the great rationality/progress/technology of pagan/philosophical Rome. Medieval Christians actually took part in the view of a Roman golden age compared to their own; for them, however, the rise of Christianity was less a *cause* of decline than an inevitable step towards ultimate divine redemption.
Gregory relates one more detail I want to highlight here: he tells us that many of the statues from the days of pagan Roman glory were dismantled by (very important) Pope Gregory I! We can agree on one hand it's quite noteable that he's repeating a story about Christians actively opposing the preservation of pagan art, and not very approvingly. On the other, this Gregory projects the 'desecration' onto another Gregory several centuries in the past.
In fact, the appropriation and remixing of ancient Rome into a Christian city was *ongoing* throughout the Middle Ages. Even in the later 15th century, with "Renaissance" adulation of classical antiquity building to a fever pitch, prelates in Rome were still plunder the Colosseum and deserted palaces for stones for their own lavish building projects!
This brings us to the last thing I want to talk about: archaeological evidence for "what people thought" of Roman ruins, evidence that perhaps helps us get beyond the view of the absolute elite of the elite of high medieval society. The Colosseum is the famous example here, since it enjoyed many afterlives throughout the Middle Ages. Most famously, it eventually became a little neighborhood for artisans! Quarrymen and blacksmiths set up residence, even building the occasional shop for horseshoes and other goods. Eventually, a monastery was constructed in and around part of it. And all the while, tantalizing blocks of stone were usurped for building projects elsewhere.
Visitors to Rome saw "ruins" and "desertion," and the ashes of of past splendor. People who lived in Rome may well have seen that, too. But they also saw promise for the present and the future: what could be out of what had been. | [
"The population of the city of Rome peaked at possibly more than one million people from the late 1st century to the 3rd century CE and thereafter declined by 400 CE to 700,000-800,000, between 400,000 and 500,000 in 452, and thereafter to a population estimated at only 100,000 in 500 CE, declining still further th... |
Do wild animals breed with their siblings? | As always with animal based questions that ought to have a simple answer for our ease of understanding, it depends. From what i know a large majority of mammals at least, (land dwelling mammals) leave their young at a certain age, to allow them to fend for themselves. This is a natural instinct, and greatly reduces the likelihood of animals meeting members of their own family, pack, litter or otherwise. But that's mainly in the case of animals that survive alone like wild horses n such.
Interestingly, as I understand it, the lack of interbreeding witnessed by biologist and other specialists in the wild has helped to form and reinforce the details of the Evolution theory, in that it seems a number of animals have developed natural mechanisms which rid them of sexual attraction, or emotional attachments for/towards members of the same family, thereby avoiding interbreeding which has been known to increase the likelihood of genetic defects.
Insects, especially creatures hatched from a single queen, often have no such instincts, they're priorities are work and social efficiency, and the few mating males whos job it is to fertilise the queen's eggs are often her own offspring.
It's a big question, as simple as it seems, and i'm sure there are a number of biological studies and essays from those more informed than me which could help you further. I'm not an expert. The internet is. | [
"BULLET::::- \"Cross-breed\" animals : Genetic hybrids of wild and domestic parents. They may be forms intermediate between both parents, forms more similar to one parent than the other, or unique forms distinct from both parents. Hybrids can be intentionally bred for specific characteristics or can arise unintenti... |
Are zero net dipole moment molecules always non-polar? | When you talk about a molecule being polar or non-polar, you're talking about the dipole moment. So yes, zero net dipole moment is always non-polar, they're the same thing.
| [
"Likewise, a molecule with more than one C axis will not possess dipole moment because dipole moments cannot lie in more than one dimension. As a consequence of that constraint, all molecules with D symmetry (Schönflies notation) will, therefore, not have dipole moment because, by definition, D point groups have tw... |
why are sexual fetishes so much more common in men than they are in women? | What evidence do you have that this is the case? I've certainly never seen data that suggests it. | [
"The female erotic plasticity hypothesis states that women have higher erotic plasticity than men, and therefore their sex drives are more socially flexible and responsive than those of men (factors such as religion, culture and education have a greater effect on women's sexual behaviors). Men, on the other hand, r... |
how can the stock market grow at an average of 7% when gdp only grows at 2%? | This is just a guess, but globalization maybe.
GDP is money spent in inside the country. The stock market goes up when companies are expected to be more profitable. When companies cut costs by outsourcing labor and buying from cheaper markets they become more profitable (good for stock market), but they spend less inside the country (bad for GDP).
Would appreciate any corrections. | [
"The growth rate is expressed as a percent value, and should use real growth only, to correct for inflation. E.g. if a company is growing at 30% a year, in real terms, and has a P/E of 30, it would have a PEG of 1.\n",
"The large impact of a relatively small growth rate over a long period of time is due to the po... |
if minimum wage goes up to $15, what happens to those only earning marginally more than that at present? | It would probably be up to the individual employers. A lot of people would demand higher wages, I'm sure. I make just over $40K a year, and I'd be fine staying here, even if minimum wage went up. | [
"He believes that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would have devastating economic consequences and destroy job opportunities for poor, low-skilled workers. Schiff stated \"it's not a question of having a job at $7 an hour versus $15 an hour, it's you can be employed at $7 an hour or unemployed at $15 an hou... |
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