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explain the american election system to me. what is the point of primaries, and why do we vote for individual presedential candidates if the president is decided based on electoral votes??? | Anyone who meets the qualifications can run for president, they just need to gather the required signatures in each state to get on the ballot (unless they're running as a write-in, in which case they just need to file some paperwork). A Republican or Democrat has won every election in the past 150 years or so, though, so you greatly increase your odds by appearing on the ballot as one or the other. However, the parties only allow one candidate to represent them in the general election, so there has to be a way to choose their official nominee. In the past, a bunch of party leaders just got together and picked someone. Today, it's done through the primaries. People who identify as Democrats vote for their favorite Democratic candidate, and likewise for Republicans (in general - sometimes people cross over, and some states allow independents to have a voice). The winner of each party's primary, along with third party choices and independent candidates, move on to run in the general election.
As for the electoral college question, I'm not 100% sure what you're getting at. Everyone votes for president, but the results are grouped together at the state level, not the national level, and the candidate who receives the most votes in a state gets all of that state's electoral votes (excluding Maine and Nebraska, who allow split votes). So, technically speaking, we're not voting for a president, we're voting for representatives to the electoral college, and in the past in many states, you actually marked votes for people running for the college, not for a president. But each presidential candidate chooses his slate of electoral college reps for each state, so it's basically the same thing (defections are relatively rare, especially in modern times). | [
"Like the general election, presidential caucuses or primaries are indirect elections. The major political parties officially vote for their presidential candidate at their respective nominating conventions, usually all held in the summer before the federal election. Depending on each state's law and state's politi... |
Could there be an object that casts shadow but is not visible ? | Technically, a shadow is an area where direct light from a light source cannot reach due to obstruction by an object. So, anything that blocks visible light and creates a shadow would also have to be visible.
However, in the spirit of your question, it is possible to use a lens (while not completely invisible) to create a "shadow". If you've ever used an incandescent flashlight, you've experienced this type of "shadowing". [Here's a picture to illustrate my point.](_URL_0_) I don't know if there's a name for this type of dark spot, but it isn't technically a shadow since the light is being refracted and not obstructed. | [
"BULLET::::- 2011 \"Silhouettes Are Shadows\", \"Acta Analytica\" 26 2:187-197. Here a solution is proposed to Sorensen’s problem about the eclipse of Near and Far. Since a silhouette is a shadow, what is seen is the silhouette or shadow of Far, into which Near has disappeared, as a smaller object might. Shadows ar... |
During/in the lead up to the US Civil War, were there any prominent people in the North who opposed the war on the grounds that the Union would be better off without the South? | During the Secession Crisis between December 1860 and April 1861, there were voices on both sides calling for "peaceable separation", "peaceable dissolution," and "peaceable disunion". One of the most powerful Northern voices on this matter was Horace Greeley, publisher and editor of the most widely read newspaper of the era, the *New York Tribune*. He was a longtime abolitionist and a founder of the Republican Party. When Lincoln's election had become apparent, Greeley wrote in a November 9, 1860, editorial under the headline "Going To Go":
> "The telegraph informs us that most of the Cotton States are meditating a withdrawal from the Union because of Lincoln's election...We have a chronic, invincible disbelief in Disunion as a remedy for either Northern or Southern grievance...[S]till, we say, if anybody sees fit to meditate Disunion, let them do so unmolested...[I]f the Cotton States shall become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace."
This would later be rephrased as ["Let the erring sisters go in peace"](_URL_0_) or ["Let the wayward sisters depart in peace"](_URL_5_), though the phrase doesn't actually appear in the editorial. Greeley's *New York Tribune* would write similar sentiments for most of the Secession Winter.
Many other Northerners took similar positions during the Secession Winter. Lincoln's soon-to-be Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, was [reported to have said](_URL_3_), "Oh, I would let the South go; they will be clamoring to get back in three years."
Future President Rutherford B. Hayes, then the outgoing Solicitor for the city of Cincinnati, and soon to be Union Army volunteer once the war broke out, [wrote in his diary on January 4, 1861](_URL_6_):
> "The free States alone, if we must go alone, will make a glorious nation. Twenty millions...stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, full of vigor, industry, inventive genius, educated, and moral; increasing by immigration rapidly, and, above all, free—all free—will form a confederacy of twenty States scarcely inferior in real power to the unfortunate Union of thirty-three States which we had on the first of November. I do not even feel gloomy when I look forward. The reality is less frightful than the apprehension which we have all had these many years."
In California, the state congressmen aligned with Breckinridge's Southern Democrats were led by Charles Lindley, who [declared during the Crisis](_URL_8_):
> "Let us have union if we can; peaceable dissolution if we must but conflict never."
But Lindley's speech pointed out the problems with "peaceable dissolution," because in the very next line he said, if the Union should be dissolved, why should California stay with the free states? He doesn't advocate that they should join the Confederates, either, but instead, California should establish a "Pacific nationality" all its own, as an independent country.
The issue facing everyone was what a "peaceable separation" would even entail. Greeley's stance in favor of it was only because it was preferable to compromise over Northern and Republican principles. U.S. Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio echoed this sentiment when [he wrote](_URL_2_):
> "The day of Compromises has past, and that Government which is moved to temporize by the threats of Traitors is not worth preserving."
The Southern political class wasn't really looking for "peaceable separation" as a first resort, either, as Lindley's speech makes clear. They wanted "compromise" that would entail the North recognizing the South's right to remain slave states forever and always and deny the North any constitutional ability to interfere with it, ever, which is what the "Corwin Amendment" to the Constitution attempted to do. They also wanted the North to cede some amount of Western land to become slave states, and any kind of "free soil" future for the West was a non-starter. The Republican Party refused to negotiate on such terms on either issue. So a "peaceable separation" really wasn't any more attainable than a compromise that kept the Confederate states within the Union, because those issues had to be resolved whether they stayed within the Union or not. As Constitutional scholar Nathan Dane had [written thirty years earlier](_URL_1_):
> "If there shall ever be a separation...the immense property of the United States will be a bone of contention and with other causes, will in time bring on hot contention or war, or prove a separation far worse than compromise...Secession, not assented to, draws the sword."
In addition, as author Charles Adams points out in his book *When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession*, a "peaceable separation" did not resolve outstanding tariff issues the two sides had, and was likely to lead to a trade war, with each side's ports trying to undercut the other in importing foreign goods. This was yet another issue that would need to be resolved to avoid an immediate or eventual war, to make "peaceable separation" possible.
And that's to say nothing of the effect on the legitimacy of the rule of law under the U.S. Constitution. If the South were allowed to go, there would be little to stop the remaining states to pull the same stunt during the next political battle. An editorial [from February 4, 1861](_URL_7_), first printed in the *Cincinnati Times* sarcastically painted "peaceable separation" as just such a failure to defend the Constitution:
> "[Disunion-supporting Republicans] have created the whirlwind and now flee from the storm. They have battled for national supremacy, and dare not seize the power they have won. They prefer, it seems, to rule over half the nation, than to defend the whole."
In other words, it wasn't enough to just say, "Hey, let's go our separate ways." Division of U.S. property within the Southern states, division of U.S. property out West, the division of national debts, treaties over the recovery of escaped slaves, treaties over control of the Mississippi River that interior Northern states depended on for commerce, treaties over international trade and tariffs, and so on and so on...These were all issues that a "peaceable separation" couldn't address any better than a compromise keeping the South part of the United States could.
In the few months between the time secession began and the time Fort Sumter was attacked, the Republican Party's majority position, then, was to not compromise on the South's terms in regards to slavery's Western expansion, fugitive slave laws, and more, while the South's majority position was to not allow any of these Republican positions be allowed to stand.
South Carolina opened fire on Fort Sumter, and pretty much immediately, most "moderates" were pushed one way or the other, as [this May 1861 editorial from the *Boston Daily Advertiser* makes clear](_URL_4_). Greeley and people like him dropped calls for "peaceable separation" and began calling for the U.S. to stand united against a movement that would destroy the Union entirely. Southerners who had called for "peaceable separation" now wanted to win that separation through war, so they could force the North to assent to all the positions on slave law that concerned the South.
Politicians in the North who continued to advocate "peaceable dissolution" very quickly found themselves in the minority. The more powerful voices in the North opposing the war did it more on the terms of "Let the South back into the Union and give them everything they want," rather than, "Let them go," because that would also give them everything they wanted anyway. There were "Copperheads"/"Peace Democrats" like Clement Vallandigham of Ohio who would have gladly taken a "peaceable separation" if it meant the end to the war. But he, and many others, lost re-election in 1862, as those voices became less popular. In fact, he was deported to the South for violating an ordinance in Ohio that forbade sympathizing with the enemy, after giving a pro-Southern speech in mid-1863. He was subject to a military trial, and then deported to the Confederacy, where he immediately surrendered as a prisoner of war, considering himself a U.S. citizen. He was then allowed to escape, made his way to Canada by an ocean voyage, and then ran for governor of Ohio from his place of exile. He lost in a landslide, getting less than 40% of the vote, though that still accounted for 187,000 votes of Ohioans.
But again, once the war started, Vallandigham and the types of people who supported him once the war broke out tended to want the North to compromise on the South's terms that would allow the South to rejoin the Union. "Peaceable separation" was secondary since it wasn't seen as any more attainable than reunion, despite basically requiring the same set of compromises either way. So other Copperheads like Franklin Pierce tended to play up national unity in advocating for the acceptance of the South's demands, as a more achievable peace than disunion was.
**FURTHER READING**:
*Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession* by Russell McClintock, 2010
*Northern Editorials on Secession, Vols. 1 and 2* ed. by Howard Cecil Perkins, 1942 | [
"During the American Civil War, the Poor White comprised a majority of the combatants in the Confederate Army; afterwards, many labored in the rural South as sharecroppers. During the nadir of American race relations at the turn of the 20th century, intense violence, defense of honor and white supremacy flourished ... |
What are the best primary sources we have from ancient Egypt, particularly from the Egyptian Empire period? | The New Kingdom period of Ancient Egypt is well documented at the temple of Amun-Re in what is commonly known as Karnak. This web-site gives you an over-view of this temple complex.
_URL_0_
I found James Henry Breasted to be helpful, in a pre-internet world. The founder of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Breasted was one of the better Egyptologists of the early twentieth century. His 1906 book "Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest. Collected, edited and translated with commentary." He can identify exactly where in Karnak are the actual historical inscriptions of more than thirty Egyptian pharaohs. In the 108 years since this book was published, more information has come to light for other periods of Egyptian history, but for the earlier parts of the New Kingdom, Breasted work still holds up. | [
"The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, edited by Donald B. Redford and published in three volumes by Oxford University Press in 2001, contains 600 articles that cover the 4,000 years of the history of Ancient Egypt, from the predynastic era to the seventh century CE. Articles cover art, architecture, religion, ... |
cricket!? | The basic idea in cricket is to get more runs (points) than the other team. The team that wins the coin toss at the start of the game decides whether they want to bat first (expecting to put up a large score), or bowl first (expect to restrict the batting team to a lower score).
The batting team has two players on the pitch at any time (a total of 11 players in the team). They stand at opposite ends of the pitch and attempt to hit the ball that is bowled by the bowler to the boundary (or at least away from any of the fielders). When the ball is live, the batsmen run between the two ends of the pitch called the wickets. Each time the batsmen cross each other, they score 1 run. If the ball crosses the boundary rope without hitting the ground, the batsman scores 6 runs for the team, but if it hits the ground even once before crossing the boundary, it is worth 4 runs.
The bowling, or fielding team's job is to get the batsmen out by any legal means necessary. These include
* Bowled - the ball hits the wicket before the batsman has a chance to hit for runs.
* Leg before wicket - the LBW is given when the umpire deems that the batsman would have been bowled out, if it had not been for his leg that got in between the ball and the wicket. Usually loudly appealed by the bowler and his teammates by screaming "Howzzat!"
* Caught out - The ball is caught by one of the fielding players after hitting the bat and before touching the ground. The batsman is not out if the ball simply bounced off his leg guard.
* Stumped - The batsman missed the ball, the wicket keeper caught it and used the ball to knock the bails off the wicket while the batsman was outside the batting crease.
* Run out - This happens when the fielding team uses the ball to knock the bails off the wicket while the batsmen are running between the wickets. The batsman is out only if any part of his bat or body are outside the crease.
If the team is batting second, they are referred to as chasing the score put up by the first team. They need to score at least one more run than the other in the given time to win.
Cricket is played in multiple forms - the longest called test cricket is played over a 5 day period and has 4 innings, two batting and two bowling for each team. The plays are much slower due to the long nature of the game. The most common form is limited-overs (an over being 6 balls) and usually limited to 20 or 50 overs and has only two innings (1 batting + 1 bowling). The 50-over form is referred to as one-day cricket, since it is usually played over a single day, starting in the morning and finishing before sunset or starting in the afternoon and going on into the night (with stadium lights). The 20-over form is called T20 and is modeled after faster paced games in order to finish a game within about 3 hours.
The most common reason that I have for yelling at players is for them getting run-out for being too greedy, or for a fielder dropping a catch.
Hopefully this should help you enjoy the game. | [
"Many theories exist about the origins of cricket. One suggests that the game began among shepherds hitting a stone or a ball of wool with their crooks and, at the same time, defending the wicket gate into the sheep-fold (from Anglo Saxon 'cricce', a crooked staff). A second theory suggests the name came from a low... |
While browsing for "home remedies" for various ailments, Apple Cider Vinegar shows up a lot. What makes ACV so magical? | ACV, and really just vinegar in general, has a long history of being a cheap and traditional remedy for many things. There is evidence (but usually not conclusive scientific proof) in favor of several of these uses. They are summarized well on the wikipedia page for [ACV](_URL_1_) and [Vinegar](_URL_0_), in that they cite studies that were conducted.
Most notably, the acid in vinegar makes it anti-microbial. Too much of it, on account of the acid, can also be harmful. Some research has been conducted in the area of weight loss/diabetes as well.
A couple to get you started:
[Effect of apple cider vinegar on delayed gastric emptying in patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus: a pilot study.]
(_URL_3_)
> Previous studies on healthy people show that vinegar delays gastric emptying and lowers postprandial blood glucose and insulin levels. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of apple cider vinegar on delayed gastric emptying rate on diabetes mellitus patients.
[Apple cider vinegar attenuates lipid profile in normal and diabetic rats.](_URL_2_)
> In normal rats fed with vinegar, significant reduction of low density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-c) (p < 0.005) and significant increase of high density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-c) levels (p < 0.005) were observed. Apple cider vinegar also reduced serum triglyceride (TG) levels (p < 0.005) and increased HDL-c (p < 0.005) in diabetic animals. These results indicate that apple cider vinegar improved the serum lipid profile in normal and diabetic rats by decreasing serum TG, LDL-c and increasing serum HDL-c and may be of great value in managing the diabetic complications.
Having said all that, and that it may be promising for some things, it's not a magic panacea. Interestingly enough, it's not on the wiki page but I have had 2 friends use it successfully for dandruff. | [
"Jarvis promoted the idea that apple cider vinegar and honey could be used to cure arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and many others. Medical authorities dismissed these claims as nonsense and quackery.\n",
"Ingestion of apple cider vinegar in tablet form poses a risk of injury to soft tissu... |
Was the invention or production of the sewing machine a big deal? | The first functional sewing machine was invented by Elias Howe in 1846. It did drastically change the production of clothing, though not necessarily how you might expect. Prior to this point everything, of course, was hand-sewn. This doesn't mean it took a long time, an 18th century plain gown takes about ten hours and a full three piece suit about 40 hours, but it does mean that all fitted clothing was custom fit to a person. It would be a large enough waste of time to make something like a suit and wait for someone to come along that not only fit it well enough but liked the style and fabric. One size fits all/most items like kerchiefs and aprons could be ready made and some cities, like London, had a second-hand clothing market. But, the vast majority of clothing was made of fabric the customer purchased and took to a tailor or mantua maker to have sewn up to their specifications.
Once the sewing machine was invented, it was not immediately adopted. Just like we see computers as a potential threat to taking over jobs, it was a concern that many skilled workers would be put out of a job or receive lower wages. Sarah Hale wrote in 1867 that a hand-sewn shirt would take 10-14 hours. One by machine would take an hour. Seems great as a consumer who is now paying much cheaper prices. However, for women being payed by the shirt they have to quickly adapt to and purchase the machine, and even then Hale notes that their pay was still low. They are a much less skilled worker in the eyes of industry, simply operating a machine, despite the fact that it is an entirely new skill to be learned. [Here's an article about the adoption of sewing machines](_URL_0_).
What the machine allows for is mass-produced clothing. Which means that the clothing can now be made up without a specific customer in mind. So, we see a stock of off the rack clothing sitting in stores instead or advertised in catalogues. This really takes off in the 20th century when clothing is no longer fitted to the body, but is either loose or stretches to the wearers shape. For thousands of years prior clothing was custom fit by a professional and within a century of the invention of the sewing machine it was mostly pre made in general sizes or had to be made at home.
The way clothing is constructed also changed drastically. Different finishing, methods of fastening, and interior construction. I can honestly say that it takes me ten hours to make an 18th century gown by hand and it takes me six hours to make a modern style dress on a machine. Funny thing is it takes me ten hours to make an 18th century gown by machine. I've done dozens both ways and am very fast at both, but the way it's designed isn't condusive to machine work. | [
"The first machine to combine all the disparate elements of the previous half-century of innovation into the modern sewing machine was the device built by English inventor John Fisher in 1844, thus a little earlier than the very similar machines built by Isaac Merritt Singer in 1851, and the lesser known Elias Howe... |
How did Oklahoma end up with such a prominent panhandle? | I asked a similar question a while ago and got an incredibly thorough and awesome answer here: _URL_0_
props again to /u/khosikulu | [
"The Oklahoma Panhandle is the extreme northwestern region of the U.S. state of Oklahoma, consisting of Cimarron County, Texas County and Beaver County, from west to east. As with other salients in the United States, its name comes from the similarity of its shape to the handle of a pan.\n",
"Panhandle culture is... |
Does the brain invert the image percieved back upright if you wear inverted goggles for a certain period of time? | Yup! Some cool research done on this over a century again (G Stratton, if I’m remembering the name correctly). The brain adapts to prism glasses and similar input shifts relatively quickly. It also adjusts back (and if you changed back and forth over time, your brain would get quicker at “switching gears”.
Similar thing happens with changes to sound input. In a study they put molds into the pinna (outer ear that’s the visible part) which is the part that usually helps us determine up-down directional info from sound that we otherwise couldn’t figure out from inter-aural timing/volume. People sucked at localizing sound for a while, got good at it over time, but then upon removing the molds, the brain seems to shift back into “old mode” and was quickly able to properly and accurately determine location from the normal input. | [
"On a later experiment, Stratton wore the glasses for eight whole days. By day four, the images seen through the instrument were still upside down. However, on day five, images appeared upright until he concentrated on them; then they became inverted again. By having to concentrate on his vision to turn it upside d... |
Can a Magnetic Field Affect the pH of a Solution? | Not that I'm aware of. Strong magnetic fields can affect the orientation of magnetic dipoles and/or cause energy splittings between the spin states of electrons and nuclei, however these effects would not change the acidity of the molecule. | [
"In addition, pH and ionic strength have a great influence on electrostatic interactions because these affect the \"magnitude of electrical charge\" in solution. As can be seen from the above equation, the repulsion energy depends on the square of the Debye length. From the equation for the Debye length, it is demo... |
why is hydrogen and oxygen the most efficient rocket fuel? | I do recommend the book "Ignition" which is a humorous and informative book on the efforts into rocket fuel research during the pioneering years in rocketry. Hydrogen and oxygen does have some advantages and some disadvantages to other fuels. First of all you need an oxidizer and a fuel to get a reaction. (There are exceptions). Even on the ground there is not enough oxygen to work as an oxidizer for a rocket engine as they need a lot. The fuel and oxidizer needs to have high chemical energy and the resulting exhaust needs to have low chemical energy. In this case hydrogen and oxygen have a lot more energy then water. Secondly due to the laws of thermodynamics the number of exhaust molecules should be as high as possible for the rocket engine to be efficient. So a rocket engine burns a lot less hydrogen then it would burn hydrocarbons for the same thrust as water have almost a third of the molecular weight of carbon dioxide. So the specific impulse (similar to fuel mileage in a car) is much better for a hydrolox rocket then most other rockets.
The disadvantages are also there. Hydrogen is a lot less dense then other forms of rocket fuel. So you need a lot bigger tanks which adds weight and drag to the rocket. In addition hydrogen is much harder to pump though the engine and causes lots of issues for the engine so the engines tends to be much bigger and heavier. So when you add all the additional complexity and weight of the entire system hydrogen is might not be the most efficient fuel in your use case.
Edit: High Isp - > Better Isp | [
"In this conventional design, the fuel/oxidizer mixture is both the working mass and energy source that accelerates it. It is easy to demonstrate that the best performance is had if the working mass is as low as possible. Hydrogen, by itself, is the theoretical best rocket fuel. Mixing this with oxygen in order to ... |
if inbreeding causes congenital birth defects, how did the human population go from small to large over time? | Inbreeding increases the chance of defects being passed on. If the original population had the alleles (one version of a gene) for this genetic diseases, any offspring are more likely to have the disease. If the original population was large enough, had enough genetic variation and were lucky, then they could still expand.
Very basically, organisms like us have two alleles for a gene. If the alleles are different, it's heterozygous. If they are the same, it's homozygous. A lot of defects are only harmful when the alleles are homozygous.
We can have "Dominant" and "recessive" alleles. Basically, if one allele is dominant, it takes priority over the recessive one. So if (not a real example) the allele for brown eyes (call it "B") is dominant, and blue eyes (call it "b") is recessive, then someone with BB alleles will have brown eyes, Bb will have brown eyes (because B is dominant over b) and someone with bb will have blue eyes (because recessive alleles are generally only expressed when there is no dominant one). Inbreeding increases homozygosity, so there is the potential for deletarious recessive alleles to spread throughout the population.
There is the potential for deleterious alleles to be 'purged' from a population. Those suffering defects likely die, and are less likely to pass on genes. The surviving members are less likely to have these defects. Cheetahs have a very low level of genetic diversity (i.e. very inbred) and have probably suffered a population bottleneck (a great decrease in population sive) in the past like humans are supposed to have suffered. Cheetahs actually have very low levels of genetic disease, because most the harmful alleles were lost from the population. | [
"The increase in frequency of birth defects often attributed to inbreeding results directly from an increase in the frequency of homozygous alleles inherited by the offspring of inbred couples. This leads to an increase in homozygous allele frequency within a population, and results in diverging effects. Should a c... |
If our top biologists were given a human heart or brain. Could they tell the gender from which the organ came? | There are no visually apparent differences, if that's what you mean. Differences in brain or heart size are correlated with gender, but that's not enough to reliably determine wheter it belonged to a male or a female. However, just a little bit of tissue is enough to determine whether or not a Y-chromosome is present, answering your question. | [
"Physicians and philosophers often argued whether the heart or brain was formed first in the fetus, and this debate forms an important part of Mansur ibn Ilyas' written works. In his works, Mansur ibn Ilyas argues that the heart is the first organ to form, unlike Hippocrates who argued that the brain is the first o... |
Why do there seem to be so few (well-publicized, at least) archaeological finds from sub-Saharan Africa? | The work is being done and the finds are being made. It is largely a problem of publicizing the information to a public audience that by-and-large has very little information to contextualize the finds in.
For instance, the recent discovery of the burial place of Richard III. A moderately well read person likely has some familiarity with Shakespeare's play about that king. So, a reporter can have some fun writing an article busting some popular assumptions. "No, Richard III did not have a hump, but he did have scoliosis".
When it comes to African history, a western layman tends not to have much information. The fact that mankind originated in Africa is a well known bit of information, so discoveries of hominid remains lend themselves to articles of "discoveries shed light on human origins".
However, to make a hypothetical example, scholars found a site where the Benin Bronzes were found, a reporter might have to explain that Benin city is not related to the modern country of Benin, explain what the Benin Bronzes are, why they are important. Still, a newspaper reader in the West might not feel that discovery to be as relevant to him/her as the Richard III discovery.
| [
"Archaeological research has been scarce in Central Africa. One reason is that half of Central Africa is covered by rainforest. Because of this many archaeologists believed prehistoric occupation was improbable and, if there had been, preservation would be low. Because of the rainforest and the poverty in the area,... |
why do bodies emit radiation? | Temperature is essentially the vibrations of the molecules in the substance. That vibration goes down to the atomic level, vibrating the charged particles in the atoms, and moving them through each others' electromagnetic fields in the process. This can release a photon, which is essentially an electromagnetic "ripple". | [
"Some human-made radiation sources affect the body through direct radiation, known as effective dose (radiation) while others take the form of radioactive contamination and irradiate the body from within. The latter is known as committed dose.\n",
"If a gamma ray is emitted from a radioactive element within the h... |
salt water oceans, but fresh water ice caps? | Greenland in the north, and Antarctica in the south, are composed of solid land underneath the glaciers. The ice caps are not in the salty sea, they are on land, although they do border on the sea, and icebergs break off into the salty sea and float away.
Glaciers are formed by an accumulation of snow. If you have a cold, snowy climate where there is snow every year and the snow never melts, then you get an increasingly thick layer of snow, and then the weight of all this snow will compress the snow into ice, and when you have enough ice it constitutes a glacier.
Snow does not contain salt because the water has effectively been distilled. When water evaporates, it leaves the salt behind. This would happen just the same way if you put a pot of salty water on your stove and boiled it. The steam would not contain salt, and when all the water boiled away, you would have all the salt left behind as a residue in the bottom of your pot.
Sea water is salty because the sea has been around, here on planet Earth, for billions of years, and during that time various soluble salts have washed out of the continents and into the sea. It is a slow process but it builds up over time. | [
"As seawater freezes in the polar oceans, salt brine concentrates are expelled from the sea ice, creating a downward flow of dense, extremely cold and saline water with a lower freezing point than the surrounding water. When this plume comes into contact with the neighboring ocean water, its extremely cold temperat... |
why do nba big men struggle so much with free throws? | To make it in the NBA as a not-big-man you need a very impressive skill set including speed, jumping, passing and typically the ability to make points from a distance. Free throws use that making points from a distance skill.
Having a great deal of size is such an advantage in basketball that you can still be successful without an accurate distance shot. And indeed it isnt practiced that much because you don't usually shoot out there, so better to spend time perfecting your inside game.
In other words, NBA big men often struggle with fre throws because they can struggle and still be successful, and because once successful they don't spend as much of their time shooting from that distance. | [
"While the style of play does have advantages, there are several disadvantages. The addition of speed and agility comes at the cost of strength and height; the lack of traditional \"big men\" can make it more difficult to guard the space under the basket while on defense and can also prevent the team from having a ... |
because science and medicine has been wrong for so much of history, how do we know science today is correct? | We don't know, but at the same time, 'science has been wrong' tends to be a lot of cherry picking, that is, looking for the times it has been wrong, or generalizing off a few opinions and not a broad consensus.
Typing this on a computer that uses quantum mechanics to make small chips that work, likely communicating over fiber optics that carry data over the internet, and reading off a monitor who's pixel colors were designed based on human eye biology, and seeing everything looking nice, science has a good enough track record for me to consider it fairly reliable.
As a bonus, the best way to become a successful scientist is to demonstrate that other scientists are wrong in a clear and convincing way, so there is a lot more testing of stuff that becomes established as 'science' than most people see in most fields. | [
"Discovering how the human body works has always been a tremendous intellectual and scientific challenge. Knowledge has allowed scientists to carry out exhaustive research into illnesses, disorders, functional anomalies and deformities which have, for many years, caused suffering and death. The history of medicine ... |
the show: lost | Spoilers abound!
LOST is a show about a group of people who crash on an island, a remarkable and special island. See, the island is a mystical and magical place that is searched for and intentionally hidden by many different groups of people throughout time. But why is the island so special? The details are alluded to but never directly announced, all we know is the island acts as a cork that seals in an unforeseen force.
Jacob is the protector of the island along with his brother who is referred to as "The Man In Black," however, his brother wants off the island, while Jacob chooses to stay and protect the island. Again, never explained but announced is the idea that The Man in Black cannot directly kill Jacob, so he must have someone else do his dirty work for him. For over 2000 years Jacob and The Man in Black play a game where MIB brings people to the island to fuck with Jacob and attempt to kill him. Jacob always outsmarts MIB and thus continues their eternal struggle. So MIB lays out a long term plan in which he will bring multiple people to the island over thousands of years acting as a multilayered plan to kill Jacob. However, Jacob always has loyalist to his cause known as The Others, who are lead by different men throughout history,
Lets move to the 1970's! Using modern science, a group of researchers locate the island and set up a settlement there. Doing science shit they sort of fuck up and drill into an electric magnet hotspot, releasing a massive amount of radiation that has to be contained and maintained every 108 minutes. A few years later, some asshole kid with daddy issues decides to join up with the others and kill all of these scientists using chemical weapons.
Let's move to current day! Oceanic flight 815 is flying along (minding it's own business) when the island gets all OAG and pulls it down. The show centers around these survivors and focuses on their personal transformations on the island. We got a guy who used to be a drugged out rock star, a woman who had cancer (yet was cured on the island), a convict, and a cripple who can magically walk on the island. Since all these people have different life stories they all view the island different way. See, some of the people are r/christianity and some people are r/atheism, this eventually divides the survivors into two camps.
What is not immediately apparent is that all these survivors are actually hand chosen by Jacob and brought to the island with different purposes to play as pieces on a chess board, or backgammon, if you please. Jacob and MIB are playing a very carefully crafted game using these people for good and evil. If MIB wins then the cork comes out and the world ends, and if Jacob wins the world is protected. Black and white, light and dark, blah blah blah.
Also, there is a Dog named Vincent who is owned by a magical black child who gets too old to be on the show so is promptly written off.
Any-hoo, MIB actually convinces that little bitch with daddy issues to stab Jacob in the heart and kill him (just his physical body, baby, he's still Soul Jacob), thus releasing the lock on MIB!
So the survivors get all "hell no" about this and do everything they can to stop him, but he's all immortal-n-shit, turning into black smoke and killing people, so,they're fucked. That is, until an Irish bloke who likes to say "Brother" every line goes down into a cave and (I am NOT making this up) pulls a giant cork out, rendering MIB mortal, thus allowing him to get shot and killed by Kate, a shit-tier character. The cork is placed back and all returns to normal.
After killing MIB, some characters get off the island while others stay back to protect the island. Eventually, they all die and meet up in the after life and are all happy about being tied together in saving the world.
TL;DR: A God'ish guy and a Devil'ish guy play a game of chess with actual people and a shit-tier character kills the Devil'ish guy.
NOTE: I left specific characters out and just focused on the overall plot line. If you want I can break down season by season, event by event, character by character.
| [
"Lost is an American drama television series that originally aired on ABC from September 22, 2004, to May 23, 2010, over six seasons, comprising a total of 121 episodes. The show contains elements of supernatural and science fiction, and follows the survivors of a commercial jet airliner flying between Sydney and L... |
how does thc interact with the brains of individuals diagnosed with autism? | Is this a medically/scientifically recognised phenomenon, or is it just something your Girlfriend complains of? Anecdotal evidence isn't particularly easy to work with. If you could provide a link to some studies, it might make it easier to explain. | [
"DMN is thought to be disrupted in individuals with autism spectrum disorder. These individual are impaired in social interaction and communication which are tasks central to this network. Studies have shown worse connections between areas of the DMN in individuals with autism, especially between the mPFC (involved... |
Does the brain record every little piece of information it gets from its sensory organs? How do we decode it? | Memory is a very funny thing. To answer the title question in short, "probably not". Mechanisms which "filter out" unnecessary information exist at every step in the nervous system, from sensory axons in the periphery being desensitized, to several types of inhibition in the spinal cord, and finally to many more complex systems in the brain. The reason for this is fairly obvious: if you registered every piece of sensory information in the environment, your brain wouldn't be able to handle everything and you'd go insane.
As for the multimodal aspects of memories, such as smells, sounds, etc. After a stimulus has reached a certain level in its coding in the brain, e.g. once a myriad of retinal ganglion cells project some very rudimentary information to the LGN, then to primary visual cortex, and from there to "higher" visual processing areas, and from a diffuse signal becomes something meaningful, such as a curve or a whole object, its next "step" in processing is to project to the hippocampus, so that the brain can figure out if the given object (say a car) has been seen before and if so, what it could be. Meanwhile, in every step, information has been manipulated with a degree of selectivity, in a complicated (and not really understood) mash of top-down and bottom-up processing. Similarly, sound information undergoes similar processing, from intensity and frequency to pitch, rhythm, etc, and projects to the hippocampus. In short, the answer is that all the information that gets past the brain's "gatekeepers" makes it to the hippocampus, and in there all types of wondrous things happen. For example, if you know who Halle Berry is, [you probably have a cell in your hippocampus that fires whenever anything related to her is experienced](_URL_0_). The idea behind this is called "sparse coding", meaning that sensory information is coded in such away that neurons along the path receive more complex information and in turn, give a more complex signal, down to the point where you have one neuron somewhere in your brain that responds selectively to your grandmother. Similarly, for a given memory, perhaps all the sounds, smells and other feelings of the moment are captured in a small group of neurons somewhere. Probably not the hippocampus, because it's thought that it acts mainly to consolidate memories rather than store them.
Now, say you have this process of consolidation according to sparse code and other peculiarities. The thing is, once you "access" a memory, you change several things about it, meaning that it's not the same memory anymore. It might seem the same to you, but something about it will have changed. For example, if you have a memory of a black Audi running past you on a highway, if you recall that memory a few days later, the highway will likely be different, you might be standing from a different vantage point, etc. This is because, when a memory is being formed, bits of it are selected to be represented more than others according to their value (for example the fact that it was a black Audi is more important than the details on the highway). This is regulated by synaptic plasticity, exactly long-term potentiation and long-term depression. The inputs with the more relevant information tend to become stronger, and the other ones weaker. Thus, in the off-chance that you have a "black Audi speeding by" cell or group thereof in your brain somewhere, the information your brain deemed more important will likely be encoded in more and stronger synapses. Over time, many of them will be weakened if they are of no use - e.g. if the Audi passing by didn't affect you in any way, or if you haven't seen an Audi pass by you in the future. But when you access that memory for whatever reason, you are again tapping into the synaptic plasticity of the connections that form it. For example, you see another black car speeding past you, and you remember that Audi. This time, the previous event will not only have less information in it, but bits of the new experience will likely be added onto it.
For people who suddenly remember obscure things once some brain region of theirs is tickled, one can guess that they are tapping into the circuitry that concerns that memory. The memories never fully "leave", they are just usually too weak to come around often if you have no use for them. Accessing them strengthens the wiring that creates the memory (if memories are actually manifested in this way, nobody is really certain), but only the "more important" bits.
To conclude, memory is extremely plastic and shifty. What you think you remember in perfect detail probably has little to do with the event you are remembering. When you tap into a memory, I can't say if the same "patterns" of neuronal firing are observed, but definitely a lot of exciting things happen on the synaptic level that mediate its plasticity.
Hope this helped. | [
"Information from the sense organs is collected in the brain. There it is used to determine what actions the organism is to take. The brain processes the raw data to extract information about the structure of the environment. Next it combines the processed information with information about the current needs of the... |
To what extent did cotton help to launch the US economy? | I'm generally skeptical of attempts to explain the economic development of a single country, or a single brief time period. There's so much going on in any large economy at a single point of time, large amounts of which we have only the crudest measures even with all our modern statistical collections that I suspect mostly people are seeing what they already believed - we're interpreting ink blots. (I'm certainly not immune to this bias.)
There are some exceptions to my skepticism, there are ways of destroying a country's economy, such as a long-running civil war or hyperinflation. And if a country is highly dependent on one or a handful of products then its easier to understand - oil is about 40% of Saudi Arabia's GDP, so oil price change * oil volume change explains a lot of changes in the Saudian economy.
But for more diverse economies, every simple rule proposed seems to have an exception. Germany managed to industrialise without an empire. Japan managed to industrialise without being full of Europeans. Switzerland managed to industrialise while being land-locked. Singapore thrived as an independent state. Ireland, meanwhile stayed poor for decades post independence in 1921, despite an educated population, electrification and being an island. Then Ireland took off in the 1980s. Economic growth is really about people seeing more and more valuable (to themselves) ways to use resources (I mean, really, that's at the core of GDP), and that sort of human ingenuity can operate in a wide variety of circumstances.
Economic history of the 18th and 19th centuries also tends to involve studying trade. This is because customs duties was an important source of government revenue so there's significant statistics on imports and exports (though surviving data is incomplete and of course people sought to avoid duties so the numbers aren't fully reliable). This creates a bias in what stories are told, and can be told. The economic historian Deidre McCloskey argues that historians and policy makers alike tend to place too much importance on trade and the main causes of growth for large economies are domestic (large economies: obviously Luxembourg is a different story!).
Another factor is that of opportunity cost: if the USA hadn't had cotton and the cotton gin presumably it would have found some use for most of the resources that went into cotton. Presumably a bit less profitable use, but that means that we can't just measure the contribution of cotton by measuring the associated flows, we need to estimate the next-best alternative. This is an important issue in economic history, at least ever since the work of Robert Fogel in 1962, who set out to measure the contribution of railways to American economic growth and wound up concluding that:
> that the level of [American] per capita income achieved by January 1, 1890 would have been reached by March 31, 1890, if railroads had never been invented. (Quote from Lance Davis's review.)
Basically railways could almost entirely be replaced by canals and better roads. Robert Fogel's work sparked a lot of debate and criticisms but the broad picture of relative un-importance of railways remains standing.
A third factor is that these debates tend to be very Anglo-centric: what was the USA and the UK doing? Sometimes France is mentioned. But the Atlantic slave trade affected Africa too. I'm no expert on any African country's history but I understand that the African slave trade not just affected the people directly taken and ripped from their families but also the Africans who remained. Firstly every human taken from Africa to labour in American cotton fields was a human taken from the African labour force. And, given the death rates of the Atlantic crossing the numbers of Africans taken were higher than that. Beyond the direct costs of fewer humans, African peoples naturally struggled valiantly to avoid enslavement. However the role of Africans in slave-raiding parties meant that this was not just a struggle against Europeans and Americans but also an internal intra-African struggle. There's been a strand of economic history research into the impact of the slave trade on Africa, which tends to the conclusion that the slave trade harmed West Africa's economic development by harming social capital and political functioning and that these effects are still visible today. It is better to have a richer, more productive trading partner than otherwise, the gains to the northern states and Western Europe from US cotton needs to be offset by the losses from African potential production to form a view about whether US cotton and slavery was an overall positive or negative to industrial capitalism. But a question like "how much would Africa have exported in the absence of slavery" is a counter-factual beyond the tools of economic history.
In short, it is pretty implausible that any single commodity or technology or institution was essential to the economic development of industrial capitalism.
On the other hand, the argument that slavery affected and continued to affect American politics, as well as African politics, is a much stronger argument and the USA has been a major global player since the 20th century so to some extent there's a route there for slavery to affect world development. On the third hand I'm also a skeptic about the ability of American politicians to influence what happens in economic development, but that's an argument for another day.
**Sources**
This answer mostly draws on years of reading. The two specific sources I used are:
Davis, Lance, _URL_0_ [Review of Robert Fogel's Railroads and American Economic Growth](_URL_1_)
Whatley, Warren & Gillezeau, Rob. (2011). *The Impact of the Slave Trade on African Economies.* 10.11126/stanford/9780804771856.003.0004.
For some more general skepticism about our ability to explain economic developments, see
McCloskey, Deidre, 2010, *Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World,*, and much of her work at _URL_2_ (her theory that it was actually about ethics and rhetoric is more dicey, but she's good at critiquing other theories).
Also
Easterly, William, 2006, *The White Man's Burden:
Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good*, Penguin Publishing Group | [
"Before the Industrial Revolution most cotton was spun and woven near where it was grown, leaving little raw cotton for the international marketplace. World cotton demand experienced strong growth due to mechanized spinning and weaving technologies of the Industrial Revolution. Although cotton was grown in India, C... |
Has there ever been a stronger weapon/bomb created than a TSAR bomba? | No one has ever claimed to have _built_ a weapon larger than the Tsar Bomba.
In the US, there were investigations into Tsar-bomba sized weapons (100-150 Mt) and even studies into whether significantly larger weapons could be produced — e.g., on the order of 1,000 to 10,000 megatons (1-10 Gt). ([See here](_URL_0_).) But they were never developed. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s US Presidents declined to move into "very high yield" weapon ranges and actually at times prohibited the laboratories from investigating them (Eisenhower put a cap of 60 Mt). After the Limited Test Ban Treaty all such efforts essentially ended because you can't really do development of very high yield weapons without testing (and the advantages of compact, lower-yield weapons became clear).
The main difficulty with very high yield weapons is that while the damage from a nuclear weapon increases roughly as a cubic root with yield, the weight is more or less linear. So a 100 Mt weapon not ten times more destructive than a 10 Mt bomb (it is a little over twice as destructive), but it does weigh about 10X more. The heavier your warhead, the harder it is to get to a target. It became clear in the 1960s that it was better to have thousands of lower-yield weapons (which are still 10-30X more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb) that could be fired in an instant on missiles than to have an arsenal made of very heavy weapons that required a single plane to get to their target and could be possibly shot down.
There is no inherent limit on the size of the weapon you can make, but even the Tsar Bomba was fairly ridiculous in terms of its destructive power to weight. | [
"The Tsar Bomba (Царь-бомба) was the largest, most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever detonated. It was a three-stage hydrogen bomb with a yield of about 50 megatons. This is equivalent to ten times the amount of all the explosives used in World War II combined. It was detonated on October 30, 1961, in the Novaya Z... |
marketing terminology | * A product is something you buy. A car is a product.
* A corporation is an organization that creates a product. Toyota is a corporation.
* A brand is a name associated with the product, to differentiate it from other products. Prius is a brand.
* The company's name is also often a brand. Toyota is a brand.
* A product can have more than one brand. A Prius is also a Toyota.
* A company can make products that do not carry its brand. Toyota makes the Lexus brand, but a Lexus is not part of the Toyota brand.
Confusing? Just remember that a brand is how marketers identify their products to the public. When you hear "Toyota", you think "moderately priced, reliable, practical car". That's not what something that is going to make someone want to buy a luxury car, so Toyota created the Lexus brand for that.
| [
"Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as \"the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large\". The term developed from the original meaning which referred li... |
When did men start wearing black tuxes at their weddings? | I am not by any means a historian, however I do work in the apparel industry and am fairly well versed in fashion history. My menswear knowledge is pretty limited; from what I can recall the tux originated in the late mid to late 1800s. I know they were considered a *less formal* alternative to the tailcoat, so they were probably not suitable wedding attire until sometime in the 20th century. I believe Newland Archer wore a tailcoat to his wedding in The Age of Innocence, and that was written in 1920 and implied to be set sometime in the 1910s. My best guess is (I will look this up later, please do not kill me...*everyone*) that the tux replaced the tailcoat in the 1920s with the middle class partly for the sake of being *American* and *modern* and carried through 1930s due to budgetary constraints.
**EDIT**
This is from the [wikipedia article on "Black Tie"](_URL_10_), and is the closest to a concise answer to the original question I could find:
> *After World War I, the tuxedo became de facto evening wear, while the [evening tailcoat](_URL_2_) was limited to extremely formal or ceremonial occasions. During this interwar period, double-breasted jackets, turndown-collar shirts and cummerbunds became popular for black-tie evenings as did white and colored jackets in warm-weather.
In the decades following World War II, black tie became special occasion attire rather than standard evening wear.*
This doesn't have much of a "why", but I think the comment about the black formal suit coming into vogue as wedding attire following Queen Victoria's wedding is pretty spot on. I would also like to mention that the groom wearing a tux that was *not black* was a big trend in America in the 1970s and 1980s (my dad's wedding tux was grey). Colorful or printed bow ties, cummerbunds and waistcoats are still sometimes in fashion, that started in the 1950s.
What we would now consider staple menswear (dark suit with collared shirt, waistcoat and tie) originated in the 1800s in England. ["Morning dress"](_URL_4_) was the daytime counterpart to full evening dress (tailcoat with white waistcoat and bow tie), which originated at this time as well. The "morning coat" was very similar to a contemporary suit jacket, with a longer back. The ["lounge suit"](_URL_8_), the immediate origin of the contemporary short jacket suit (both a "regular suit" and a tux) came into fashion in the later 1800s. Most of Continental Europe and America adopted these trends at this point. These suits, like contemporary men's suiting, were usually made from wool (or other textiles made from animal hair like mohair).
Eighteenth century formal menswear was either military (or influenced by military uniforms, many British wool suit jackets from this time look remarkably similar to the military uniform jackets) or a colorful "French style" [suit](_URL_11_) or [coat](_URL_4_). These jackets were longer and were usually very colorful and embellished. "The Orient" was a big fad at this time, so silk brocades from China were very popular for both men and women. The pants of these suits stopped at the knee, unlike the full length pants of the English suits a century later. The [tailcoat](_URL_6_) became popular in continental fashion around 1800, but looked a little different than the English one, as with most French menswear it was more colorful and often made of silk rather than wool. [Colorful patterned silk waistcoats](_URL_0_) remained popular in England through the 1800s.
I wish I had more on the 1600s and before. One older and famous wedding picture I can think of is the [Arnolfini Portrait](_URL_7_), painted in 1434. He is wearing a "dark suit", sort of, but I'm not sure if they're wearing their "wedding costumes" in the picture or not.
Most of this info was pulled from the catalogue for the [*Fashioning Fashion:European Dress in Detail, 1700–1915*](_URL_1_) exhibition at LACMA a couple years back and a bit from [*Fashion: A History from the 18th to 20th Century*](_URL_9_) from the Kyoto Costume Institute. Fashioning Fashion did a lovely job of showing the evolution of menswear (and womenswear too) and way that style trends on the continent and in England influenced one another. [This photo](_URL_5_) from the exhibition is kind of tiny, but it does show a nice timeline of how menswear changed over those two centuries. The LACMA site also has a [wonderful collection of images](_URL_3_) from the exhibit.
| [
"The first documented instance of a princess who wore a white wedding dress for a royal wedding ceremony is that of Philippa of England, who wore a tunic with a cloak in white silk bordered with squirrel and ermine in 1406, when she married Eric of Pomerania. Mary, Queen of Scots, wore a white wedding dress in 1559... |
How does food rarely make it's way into the nasal cavity? | So in order for food (or liquids) to enter your esophagus and make their way to the stomach, you swallow. Swallowing is actually a very complex maneuver controlled by the brain. When you swallow, the soft palette elevates, and a piece of tissue called the epiglottis moves to cover the glottis, which is the entry to the trachea or windpipe. This motion effectively closes off the respiratory system to ensure that food heads into the stomach.
If you are eating very quickly (without really swallowing), are extremely sick, or if the swallowing motion is disrupted in some way, it is entirely possible to get food into the nasal cavity, but it still isn't likely. Unchewed food doesn't hang out for too long in your mouth (i hope). Furthermore, it is usually swallowed (gravity helps) or broken down by salivary amylase. It may not necessarily be a small piece, and if it was a small piece, you might not even feel it move around.
Liquids on the other hand, are small enough to enter the respiratory system, especially if the swallowing reflex is interrupted and the proper motions do not occur. This is why making someone laugh while they are in the middle of drinking chocolate milk produces results. | [
"The oral cavity opens into a muscular, sucking pharynx, also lined with cuticle. Digestive glands are found in this region of the gut, producing enzymes that start to break down the food. In stylet-bearing species, these may even be injected into the prey.\n",
"In most vertebrates, digestion is a four-stage proc... |
Why is the heat capacity of liquid water so much higher than its solid and gaseous forms? | All liquids generally have a higher heat capacity than their solids. The heat capacity is the amount of heat needed to raise a gram (or mol) of solid by 1 degree. In a molecular solid the heat goes to making the bonds vibrate faster. In a liquid the heat goes towards making the bonds vibrate faster but also to rotating and moving the molecules - you need extra energy to do this | [
"Liquids in general, expand on heating. However water is an exception to this general behaviour: below 4 °C it contracts on heating. For higher temperature it shows the normal positive thermal expansion. The thermal expansion of liquids is usually higher than in solids because of weak intermolecular forces present ... |
why is salt sour? | With our taste buds detecting sweetness, bitterness,sourness,saltiness and umami it's hard to understand why you would detect sourness in your salt? Is it basic table salt? | [
"Because the salt has a purer flavor due to the lack of metallic or bitter-tasting additives such as iodine, fluoride or dextrose, it is often used in the kitchen instead of additive-containing table salt, so such flavors are not introduced to prepared food. Estimating the amount of salt when salting by hand can al... |
Good sources to learn about celts? | Have you checked our [book list](_URL_0_) located in the sidebar? | [
"Archaeology provides much information regarding the material culture of the Celts, but the significance of these finds in determining how the ancient Celts actually fought is the subject of much speculation. It was long thought, for instance, that the Celts were headhunters but recent research from France has indi... |
why do restaurants serve "lobster rolls" at a fixed price, but ordering the lobster itself is priced at current market value? | "Market value" does not really fluctuate that much on a day-to-day basis. Maybe it is different season-to-season, but the main reason that whole lobster is sold at "market value" is because the weight of each lobster differs. If lobster is $12/lb, there's a big difference between buying a 1 lb lobster and a 2 lbs lobster. "Market value" is also a marketing term; it increases the customer's perception of fresh-caught, straight-from-market seafood.
Lobster rolls always contain more or less the same amount of meat. The restaurant can prepare huge quantities of lobster salad each morning, enough to meet their anticipated needs. Any minor fluctuations in price are canceled out by the sheer volume and consistency of roll size. | [
"\"Lobster\" is published not-for-profit. The \"Independent on Sunday\" quoted Ramsay that the magazine \".. always broke even, as I would put the price up if it started losing money. The readers paid whatever I asked\", which the newspaper commented \"Sounds a fine business model\". Robert McCrum in \"The Guardian... |
as someone who doesn't live in america, why do black people seem to always call each other 'niger'? | First off, the black people who refer to each other as nigger are generally younger, uneducated, poor (or grew up poor), and grew up in predominantly poor, black neighborhoods.
The use of the word nigger is them trying to turn the word around into something positive and bonding. It's like a badge of honor.
For example, bitch is generally a derogatory term. It denotes a woman who is rude, mean, aggressive, etc. However, many women are starting to call themselves bitches as a term of empowerment because being a powerful, assertive woman should be seen as a positive thing. _URL_0_
Older black people (say 40+) and middle and upper class educated black people still see nigger as a highly offensive term. Beyond the history of the word, there's the fact that the people who use it positively do not improve the reputation of black people. | [
"Black and African Americans are citizens and residents of the United States with origins in Sub-Saharan Africa. According to the Office of Management and Budget, the grouping includes individuals who self-identify as African American, as well as persons who emigrated from nations in the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan A... |
A Question On Extremophiles | Abiogenesis experiments have been done in different conditions as our understanding of the early earth has evolved. It appears possilble to form organic molecules under several of these conditions (and the early earth was a pretty "extreme" environment). So it's entirely possible that abiogenesis can occur under myriad conditions.
Conditions for abiogenesis and cellular life are both important steps in the development of life. Both need to be considered, but they can be examined separately. One important thing to remember is that conditions are not always uniform in a given area. Say, for example, there was a planet with some areas suitable for abiogenesis, and other areas suitable for cellular life. Macromolecules may form in the first area, and move (by chance) to the other. Or conditions may change over time. Or a planet may be seeded with organic molecules from a comet.
So, considering abiogenesis is good, but considering extemophiles isn't wrong.
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"There are many classes of extremophiles that range all around the globe; each corresponding to the way its environmental niche differs from mesophilic conditions. These classifications are not exclusive. Many extremophiles fall under multiple categories and are classified as polyextremophiles. For example, organis... |
if there is so much water on earth, why do we have so much drought and desert land? | Earth is surrounded by water yes, but only a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny not enough tiny's tiny portion of that is clean drinkable water.
In order to make salt water drinkable requires large expensive plants to do that. Sadly those that can afford such methods don't need it, and those that need it cannot afford it.
| [
"Droughts have been occurring more frequently because of global warming and they are expected to become more frequent and intense in Africa, southern Europe, the Middle East, most of the Americas, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Their impacts are aggravated because of increased water demand, population growth, urban... |
why haven't nuclear weapons been used in war again after the usa used two in wwii? | Simple answer is a concept called mutually assured destruction or MAD that was observed by the us and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The idea is that if a nuclear weapon is used then everyone else will use their nuclear weapons.
This doesn't account for attacks on countries without nukes and that breaks down to their allies (who may have nukes) and the overall destructiveness of the weapon. You have to realize that the nukes of today are exponentially bigger than the nukes dropped on Japan. The destruction and fallout would be astronomical. Also using a nuke on a country that doesn't have a nuke would be viewed as slaughter by the international community.
Basically people aren't evil enough to destroy the world. | [
"The use of nuclear weapons first came into being during the last months of WWII, with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was the only use of nuclear weapons in combat. For a decade after World War II, the United States and later the Soviet Union (and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom ... |
Just a theory, and I'm not very knowledgeable in science or terminology so I apologize in advance. | Organisms don't conciously evolve to improve themselves in certain aspects - rather, natural selection 'weeds out' those with traits that make them worse suited to reproduction.
In your scenario, you would need to have some people with a genetic trait causing them to like fattening foods less, and you would need that trait to be selected for by having those without it have a higher likelihood of dying before being able to reproduce, or have a lower likelihood of being able to find a mate. Only then would you see an evolutionary change. | [
"A theory is a contemplative and rational type of abstract or generalizing thinking about a phenomenon, or the results of such thinking. The process of contemplative and rational thinking often is associated with such processes like observational study, research. Theories may either be scientific or other than scie... |
why do finger/toe nails never grow back the same if they've been damaged? | The fingernail is actually produced by a section of tissue called the "nail matrix" which is back up under the cuticle. Injury to that tissue can lead to persistent problems in growing future nails, as if a scar is left the nail matrix won't grow as before. | [
"Human nails grow at a rate which varies with many factors: age, and the finger or toe in question as well as nutrition. However, typically in healthy populations fingernails grow at about 0.1mm/day and toenails at about 0.05mm/day. With this in mind the date of the stress causing Beau's lines and other identifiabl... |
What is the mass of the universe and how is it calculated? | The amount of mass in the universe is calculated by how it affects (ie slows down) the expansion of space which is measured by the speed with which galaxies are receding from us. If there was a lot of mass in the universe the expansion would slow down and ultimately reverse ("big crunch") as gravity wins the cosmic tug of war. If there is "just enough" mass around, gravity and expansion would balance each other and the universe would come to a standstill. This years Nobel in physics was given to the discovery that in fact the universal expansion is accelerating, implying that there is way too little mass in the universe
What's actually measured when looking at the rate of the expansion is the density of the universe with respect to the "critical" value where the expansion is perfectly balanced by gravity. Mass can then be inferred by multiplying by the size (volume) of the universe. The critical density is around 1e-28 kg/m3. Assuming the radius of the universe is 14 giga light years (1e26m) the mass is estimated to be at least 1e50 kg. In fact this is a lower limit since the radius of the universe is greater than 14Giga light years. | [
"The mass of the observable universe is often quoted as 10 tonnes or 10 kg. In this context, mass refers to ordinary matter and includes the interstellar medium (ISM) and the intergalactic medium (IGM). However, it excludes dark matter and dark energy. This quoted value for the mass of ordinary matter in the univer... |
why did blu-ray win the war over hd-dvd? | Sony owned blu Ray. They ps3 released in 2007 I think came w a blu Ray player... That ended that. But Sony did let you bring your hddvds back and paid for blu Ray replacements. And hddvds players also you could return for bluray. I only remember that because a friend of mine at the time bought an hdvd player for his dad. And he returned it for a bluray no charge. | [
"Blu-ray and HD DVD players became commercially available starting in 2006. In early 2008, the war ended when several studios and distributors shifted to Blu-ray disc. On February 19, 2008, Toshiba officially announced that it would stop the development of the HD DVD players, conceding the format war to the Blu-ray... |
the possible effects of lowering/raising taxes (in america), with as little bias as possible, please. | This is the [Laffer Curve](_URL_0_). It is a graph that shows a very important thing: if you raise taxes too far, your total tax revenue begins to **decrease**, because you start killing off the economy. So you want to target the tax rate to the point in the curve where the revenue is maximal.
The Republicans and Democrats disagree at where this point is. And the Republicans would prefer to err on the side of less taxation. | [
"Excessive tax rates increase black money and tax evasion.When tax rates approach 100 per cent, tax revenues approach zero, because higher is the incentive for tax evasion and greater the propensity to generate black money. The report finds that punitive taxes create an economic environment where economic agents ar... |
why do followers of the catholic faith address the pope, or other priests, as "father" when the bible says not to? | Former Catholic here (not religious, raised Catholic). Catholics aren't literalists and this passage is seen as part of Jesus's call for humility among religious leaders, given the behavior of the Pharisees. It is calling out hypocrisy rather than a literal rule that people not call anyone "father" (or "master" or "teacher" etc)
All of Matthew 23:
> 23 Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, 2 “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; 3 therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. 4 They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear,[a] and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. 5 They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. 6 They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, 7 and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi. 8 But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students.[b] 9 And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven. 10 Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah.[c] 11 The greatest among you will be your servant. 12 All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted. (_URL_0_)
Re: Mary (and saints), Catholics pray for the intercession of these holy figures on their behalf, with the belief that as a person on earth can pray for you, so could Mary. They are also seen as models for how to live life in a holy way. | [
"BULLET::::1. The Fathers profess their allegiance to the pope as the divinely constituted head of the Church, whose office it is to confirm his brethren in the Faith. They also declare their belief in the entire Catholic Faith as explained by the ecumenical councils and the constitutions of the Roman pontiffs.\n",... |
Can sugar directly cause diabetes? | Yes it can increase the risk for type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is not caused by weight gain, but by a resistance to insulin. Insulin controls the uptake of glucose (sugar) into cells from the blood stream. Therefore the more sugar you eat, the higher your blood sugar becomes, causing increasing amounts of insulin to be released. Over time your body can become resistant to the insulin being released which is type 2 diabetes. Being overweight is also a risk factor for diabetes; however, there are plenty of individuals who are not overweight and still have diabetes (type 1 or 2). | [
"Sugars such as glucose and fructose can react with certain amino acids such as lysine and arginine and certain DNA bases such as guanine to produce sugar adducts, in a process called \"glycation\". These adducts can further rearrange to form reactive species, which can then cross-link the structural proteins or DN... |
Did "kapos," Nazi concentration camp inmates tasked with meting out often-brutal punishments to their fellow captives, punished after the Second World War? | From [an earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_)
Trials for collaboration were one of the hot-button issues in European politics postwar, but Jewish collaboration was somewhat unique. Unlike other forms of collaboration, Jews that collaborated with the German authorities or their lieutenants did so in very moderated circumstances like ghettos or various camps. This meant that the collaborators were themselves prisoners of the same system. Collaboration did not erase the stigma of Jewish identity and it was not uncommon for the *Prominenten* to end up murdered along with their charges. Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Lodz ghetto, for example died at the hands of the Germans in 1944 when there was no purpose in having a Jewish council for a now liquidated ghetto. For those collaborators that did survive the war, attempts to bring them to justice in the courts was a difficult legal process that fractured around problematic questions about agency and responsibility.
Overall, there were very few prosecutions of *Kapos* (ward captains in the camps) or other Jewish collaborators. One problem was that many of these individuals did not survive the war or its immediate aftermath. These individuals could easily end up as victims in the highly mercurial nature of camp life. Those that did survive sometimes ended up the victims of extrajudicial justice within the camps after liberation. For those that did survive, their dual status as oppressors/oppressed made prosecutions rare and difficult. [Benjamin Murmelstein](_URL_1_), the last Jewish council elder of Theresienstadt had his postwar prosecution by the Czechoslovakians fall apart. Murmelstein himself became a controversial figure among survivors as some Theresienstadt Jews claimed he profitted from his collaboration while he argued he did what he did for the survival of the larger community.
Israel did conduct a series of trials of 38 prosecutions of Jewish *Kapos* between 1951-1964. However, details on these trials are very sketchy as the Israeli courts have sealed their records for 70 years and they have been only opened quite recently. Even though the Israeli law these individuals were prosecuted under, the *Nazi and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law* (1950), could have resulted in a death sentence, the sentences for the 15 defendants convicted under this law were relatively mild. Else Tarnek, a female *Kapo* and block commander at Auschwitz-Birkenau, received a two year sentence in 1951 but since it had been two years since her arrest, she was released the same day. The Israeli judge said of Tarnek:
> We must take the circumstances under consideration: the defendant was placed in charge, against her will, of a block of 1000 persecuted women lived. She herself was a persecuted person, just as they were.
Rather than focus on collaboration itself as a crime, the prosecution in these trials instead focused on violent acts committed by the defendant while collaborating. Witnesses the prosecution called to the stand tended to foreground instances of torture and other physical abuse which the prosecution in turn used to argue that the defendants exceeded the norms of a compelled collaboration.
The Israeli judges in the *Kapo* trials tried to parse out *mens rea* (mental state) of the defendants and try to determine if the situation they found themselves in the camp was the compelling rationale for their behavior. The appeals process for *Kapos* and other collaborators tended to lessen sentences and the judges were often at pains to walk a fine line between condemnation of wartime actions and acknowledging that the defendents were compelled towards them. The *Kapos* and other Jewish "helpers" such as ghetto policemen did not lend themselves well to standard legal prosecutions because they themselves were often victims of a genocidal regime that loaned them a small amount of power to abuse.
*Sources*
Bazyler, Michael J., and Frank M. Tuerkheimer. *Forgotten Trials of the Holocaust*. New York: NYU Press, 2014.
Wolf, René. "Judgement in the Grey Zone: the Third Auschwitz (Kapo) Trial in Frankfurt 1968." *Journal of Genocide Research* 9, no. 4 (2007): 617-635. | [
"The camp rules, constant threat of beatings, humiliation, punishment and the practice of punishing whole groups for the actions of one prisoner were psychological and physical torments on top of the starvation, and physical exhaustion from back-breaking labor. Prisoner functionaries were used to push the prisoners... |
Do sports like football/gymnastics affect skeletal growth? | Your maximum height is determined by genetics and gravity. Everything else will modify bone structure and length, and tend to make you shorter.
Gymnastics will frequently make long-term participants shorter as the frequent landings compress the cartilage in their spines. I imagine tackles in american football or rugby can do the same.
Bones that are frequently stressed will tend to be denser and stronger, but not necessarily longer. Hard impacts, like in football or gymnastics, can possibly fracture the growth plates, leading to premature cessation of growth for that particular bone.
Like everything else, moderation is key to optimal outcomes. | [
"Altering the biomechanics of training and training schedules may reduce the prevalence of stress fractures. Orthotic insoles have been found to decrease the rate of stress fractures in military recruits, but it is unclear whether this can be extrapolated to the general population or athletes. On the other hand, so... |
why can foreign car companies like honda (japanese), volkswagen (german), and hyundai (south korean) make successful sedan-type cars in the united states, but domestic companies gm and ford struggle to make good-selling sedans. | There's a columnist in Bloomberg [who argues](_URL_0_) that during the oil embargo in the 1970s Americans turned to fuel efficient sedans like Hondas, and were impressed with how infrequently they broke down.
When the Big Three in the US tried to catch up, their sedans were trash. They got better, but :
> The Big Three have never been able to convince the reviewers — or, more importantly, the car-buying public — that their sedans were as good as their Japanese competition. To put it another way, the American car companies have never been able to shed the reputation they gained in the 1970s for making lousy sedans.
I experienced this bias when I was buying a new car after driving American my whole life. Choice between the Chevy Cobalt and a Honda Civic, and I went with No 2 because of the reputation for longevity and gas mileage.
14 years later, the old beast is still with me, and I believe I may die before it does. | [
"The South Korean automobile industry is today the sixth largest in the World in terms of production volume (concedes to China, United States, Japan, Germany and India only) and the sixth largest in terms of export volume, achieved more than 4.6 million vehicles produced in 2011. South Korea produced more than 4.2 ... |
Questions on spacecrafts - is it possible to actually take off and land back onto a planet in one? | With current technology, what you saw in sci-fi movies is just not possible. Fuel requirements are calculated based on the speed change (delta-v) you need to achieve, and since the relation between speed and fuel is exponential, it turn out the rockets you need are huge as you noticed. Off the top of my head, ESA's Ariane 5 launcher has a gross mass of 770 tons at take off just to take a payload of 20 tons into orbit. The situation becomes even worse because rockets are expendable. In very few cases the first stages are reused (e.g. the Space Shuttle used to recover the boosters, now SpaceX is starting to land the first stage safely).
In order to have a small spacecraft achieve orbit, land, and get to orbit again without a giant rocket we would need much more advanced propulsion technologies. Rockets in theory could get much smaller (and in theory even fit in a small spacecraft) if we could achieve much faster exhaust speeds. That would not work with chemical rockets because they are limited by the energy released during combustion, which is small. We have ion thrusters which expel ionized gas by electric forces 10 times faster, but those require a lot of electrical power for a ver small acceleration, and they only work in orbit (using those to take off would require an unrealistic power source).
Then there's the concept of the Skylon spacecraft, which would use air breathing jet engines to accelerate up to Mach 5 and then continue with rockets. A lot of fuel would be saved this way. But the technology to do that is not ready because that's getting into the hypersonic regime, the air getting into the engines would just be too hot.
Obviously Hollywood doesn't care much about realism.
For your second question about taking off your helmet in an alien planet, yes, it's definitely a bad idea. The atmospheres of planets in the solar system (and who knows about other systems) differ a lot in pressure, temperature and composition, and humans require very specific conditions to breathe normally.
| [
"If non-nuclear, conventional propulsion technologies are used, the flight of a spacecraft to a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri would probably require thousands of years. For example, \"Voyager 1\", which is now travelling relative to the Sun, would reach Proxima in 73,775 years, were the spacecraft travelling in ... |
the appeal behind watching sports and why it's a multi-billion dollar industry. | It's people performing at the top level of their sport or discipline which is interesting and, depending on the sport, incredibly aesthetic. Also sports provides truly unscripted drama. You can also find community in the form of fan base and shared experience if you watch live. | [
"The peculiarity of sports is that “sports is the only entertainment where, no matter how many times you go back, you never know the ending.” This singular fact is used by marketing companies as an advantage: every time the audience attends an event it will see the advertisements again and again, providing a wide r... |
The World War II Battlefield V Panel AMA | From my limited knowledge, it seems that Soviet women were much more active in combat roles than in the militaries of the other combatants. If that is the case, would the main reason be the desperation of the Russian military situation or is it representative of different attitudes to gender in the USSR? | [
"Battlefield V is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA DICE and published by Electronic Arts. \"Battlefield V\" is the sixteenth installment in the \"Battlefield\" series. It was released worldwide for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on November 20, 2018. Those who pre-ordered the Deluxe... |
how do non-profits make salaries for employees? | Profit is the money that is left after expenses. They spend all the money they take in on expenses like employee salaries, office space, resources and so on, so they have zero profit. | [
"Wages and salaries in kind consist of remuneration in the form of goods or services that are not necessary for work and can be used by employees in their own time, and at their own discretion, for the satisfaction of their own needs or wants or those of other members of their households.\n",
"There are many ways... |
what causes 'teflon sh*ts'? | I mastered this at a young age. Provided you don't have the runs, this is easy. When you sit down, put one thigh down first at an angle. Like you are going to sit with half of your leg hanging off the toilet. Dig in, scoot your butt over like you are trying to spread your cheeks, because you are. After it is stretched as far open on that side as you can, put the other cheek down. Equalize. This is known as the spread - cheek starting position. Lean forward just a bit, torso forms a 70-80 degree angle with your lap.
Next step, let the shit flow. It will take a few tries to master, but assuming the position is quick once you get it. Alternatively, you can manually spread your ass cheeks before you sit.
Source: I have been doing this since I was 10 when I am in a hurry.
Edit: it is because your cheeks are spread and you aren't smearing shit all over the innards of your grand Canyon. | [
"The precise mechanism of action of tetrabenazine is unknown. Its anti-chorea effect is believed to be due to a reversible depletion of monoamines such as dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, and histamine from nerve terminals. Tetrabenazine reversibly inhibits vesicular monoamine transporter 2, resulting in decrea... |
How do plants prevent UVB damage (sunburn) to their DNA? | Here is a relevant [paper](_URL_0_) on the subject (pdf warning!)
Basically,
(1) They don't completely prevent UVB damage, and damage to cellular components, including DNA, does happen in plant cells to varying degrees
(2) However there are mechanisms in place to partially prevent this, such as hairs, trichomes and/or waxes on the plant surface with UV absorbing compounds, mechanisms of controlling the refractive/scattering path UV rays take through the plant tissue, enzymes that repair UV damage to DNA and proteins, free radical scavengers, and other UV absorbing chemicals | [
"In regions continuously exposed to sunlight, UV rays can cause biochemical damage to plants, and eventually lead to DNA mutations and damages in the long run. When one of the main molecules involved in photosynthesis, photosystem II (PSII) is damaged by UV rays, it induces responses in the plant, leading to the sy... |
if fine motor skills can be improved by practice and repetition, why can handwriting remain messy, despite writing hundreds of words every day? | Because most of the time when people are writing they're simply trying to get words on a page. If their handwriting doesn't prevent their message from becoming legible then there's no reason to try to improve their technical handwriting. | [
"It is critical to understand the development of children's fine motor skills to understand the reasoning behind why they complete certain tasks in a certain way. For example, it is important to understand the development of fine motor skills when a paper is handed in by a child in grade one and the writing is larg... |
What was the Vandal administration of North Africa like? | There's a tendency to dismiss entirely the Vandal regime in North Africa on account of the hostile literary record from writers including Victor of Vita and Isidore of Seville, as well as the relative paucity of written evidence (and of legal documentation) from the period of their rule. This is, however, misleading to an extent. The Vandals were a much smaller ruling elite than other Barbarian successor states (estimates vary but are usually below 20,000 men, women, and children), and their control over North Africa wad gained only gradually. But the numismatic record attests to the fact that the Vandals were issuing coins much in the same way as their Roman predecessors; It is the opinion of scholars such as Merill & Miles (whose co-authored work, The Vandals, is an excellent introduction to the topic) that there was a significant amount of continuity with the previous regime.
However, with regard to the control of the Vandals, I'd further highlight the fact of the Vandal persecution, the focus of Catholic denunciation. While such authors (Victor of Vita is the chief example) denounce the barbarity of the Vandal persecution of non-Arian Christians, I'd argue that the very fact that their persecution (although almost certainly overstated) is so well documented attests to their success in carrying it out: in other words, despite their weakness in numbers, they were clearly able to decisively assert their authority, at least in the later fifth century (as problems began to emerge in the sixth).
Like most barbarian kingdoms, there does appear to have been some tension with the previous ruling aristocratic class: again this is a focus (although certainly exaggerated) of Vita. But the Vandals had been living in a semi-settled state in eastern Spain for several decades at the time of their migration: though we can only hypothesise as to their adaption to settled rule, it seems likely that they were at the very least accustomed to the pattern of North African life at the time of their arrival there: about their experience in Spain in the early fourth century, we don't really have an appropriate amount of evidence to speculate.
Unfortunately it's difficult to give any comprehensive answer concerning the Vandals given the lack of documentary evidence: but I hope this provides some food for thought on the topic! | [
"The Vandals under their king Genseric crossed to Africa in 429, either as a request of Bonifacius, a Roman general and the governor of the Diocese of Africa, or as migrants in search of safety. They subsequently fought against the Roman forces there and by 435 had defeated the Roman forces in Africa and establishe... |
the difference between capitalism, objectivism, neo-/libertarianism. | Capitalism is a term which solely identifies an economic system. It is generally used pretty broadly to describe a "free-market" system. This means that there are little to no government controls over the economy. Most real-world economies are nowhere near a pure capitalist system, but first world countries are still usually deemed to be capitalist. If you are interested in more, start with Adam Smith, then read some Hayek and Milton Friedman.
Objectivism is a moral philosophy developed by Ayn Rand. Although it is related to capitalism, Objectivism was intended to be an all-encompassing philosophical system, including answering questions about human knowledge and morality, along with economics and political philosophy. Boiling it down to its most simplest form, Objectivism claims to be able to deduce objective claims about the world as "axioms", and from these we can derive moral principles, the core of which are centered upon human freedom and an understanding of the objectivity of nature. Some common beliefs espoused by Objectivists are that selfishness is a virtue, that governance is derived from the self, and that capitalism is the best economic system. Most objectivists are usually minarchists, but are sometimes anarchists (they believe in SOME government, and don't want to eliminate it completely). Rand wrote both fiction and non-fiction works about her philosophy; I'd recommend reading Atlas Shrugged or The Virtue of Selfishness if you want to learn more.
Neolibertarianism is a less commonly-used term, and has been used to stand for multiple viewpoints. Neo means "new", and the common understanding nowadays is that neo-libertarianism is more interventionist than more classical libertarianism (which is usually more isolationist, or non-interventionist). Like Neo-conservativism, neo-libertarians believe that sometimes intervention is necessary to protect individual rights, so they may support stronger military, active involvement in world affairs, and pragmatic involvement in military operations. | [
"Left-libertarians, libertarian socialists and anarchists believe in a decentralized economy run by trade unions, workers' councils, cooperatives, municipalities and communes and oppose both state and private control of the economy, preferring social ownership and local control, in which a nation of decentralized r... |
Is there scientific evidence showing a relation between climate change and volcanic activity? | There are 2 ways which come to mind where a relation may exist between global warming and volcanism:
1 - Global warming may accelerate the dissapearance of alpine glaciers. This would disrupt the equilibrium deriving from critical taper (*sensu* [Dahlen, F. A. (1990)](_URL_1_)\) of mountain chains along subduction zones such as those along the so-called "Ring of Fire". These mountain chains contain numerous volcanic centers, and any significant change in the weight distribution of their host mountain chains might affect pressure conditions in their magmatic chamber, at least untilll a new equilibrium profile was attained.
Whether the net effect would be to increase or decrease activity, is hard to tell - there are a lot of tricky feedback loops in those systems due to the interplay of meltwater availability, erosion, plant growth etc , but I suppose the overall net effect of removing that weight would be to probably decrease activity slightly, maybe.
2 - The other loop is that volcanism releases large amounts of gas and ash in the atmosphere, and the balance of gasses varies from time to time. Most of the gas is either CO2, SO4 or H2O, but there are others. Adding CO2 raises the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Releasing SO4 aerosol into the stratosphere [lowered global temperatures for a few years last time Mt Pinatubo blew its top, in 1991](_URL_0_). | [
"Volcanoes are a large natural source of aerosol and have been linked to changes in the earth's climate often with consequences for the human population. Eruptions linked to changes in climate include the 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina which was linked to the Russian famine of 1601 - 1603, leading to the deaths of t... |
what's the purpose of having 87, 89, 91 type of gasoline? | There is no *benefit* for most vehicles. Your vehicle was designed with a specific octane in mind, most modern vehicles can run on other octanes, but may suffer inefficiencies for it (especially if you put lower octane in a car that requires higher).
If you're not sure, look in your owners manual or call the manufacturer of the car, they'll tell you what the best octane to use is.
Older cars can knock with the wrong octane, but modern cars with computers can compensate for the differences.
Higher end sports cars will perform better, for instance, with higher octane gasoline. | [
"The octane rating of typical commercially available gasoline varies by country. In Finland, Sweden and Norway, 95 RON is the standard for regular unleaded gasoline and 98 RON is also available as a more expensive option. \n",
"Gasoline contains about 46.7 MJ/kg (127 MJ/US gal; 35.3 kWh/US gal; 13.0 kWh/kg; 120,4... |
What are the effects of high sodium diets in healthy individuals? | Zilch, basically. The body controls sodium very well, so a high sodium diet results in high sodium excretion. There *may* be a small effect on potassium levels, i.e. a slight reduction, but that's about it. | [
"On the other hand, groups concerned with cardiovascular health and nutrition emphasize the overall negative effects of high levels of sodium in the North American diet. Based upon a study carried out in the US in 1991 on a total of 62 people, the presumption made is that most of the sodium Canadians consume (77%) ... |
why do we still see things that fall under a shadow? | They're still getting light, just LESS light. Light is reflecting off of everything else in the environment, providing some illumination to the area in shadow, just less than if it wasn't blocked.
| [
"A shadow is an incorporeal creature of sentient darkness. Its touch saps the strength of living creatures and, if the living creatures are afflicted for long enough, they can turn into a shadow themselves.\n",
"A shadow is a demon like creature born in the world of darkness. They have no dimensions and no form. ... |
why will a severe headache usually go away if i take a hot shower? is this some sort of placebo effect? | Most likely you have a tension headache. The muscles in your neck pull on muscles that wrap up to your temples. Relaxing the neck relaxes the head.
I can feel mine pulling the whole way like a band on each side of my head.
The cluster headaches I used to get were not alleviated by a hot shower | [
"Like other types of pain, headaches can serve as warning signals of more serious disorders. This is particularly true for headaches caused by inflammation, including those related to meningitis as well as those resulting from diseases of the sinuses, spine, neck, ears, and teeth.\n",
"Medication overuse headache... |
would drugs like alcohol or marijuana affect animals like it does humans? | Give a dog a beer.
They have incredibly efficient livers, so they get drunk and sober up quickly.
It helps their coat, helps them keep on weight, and can act as a flea repellent (bad tasting blood). | [
"Psychoactive drugs, such as caffeine, amphetamine, mescaline, LSD, marijuana, chloral hydrate, theophylline, IBMX and others, can have strong effects on certain animals. At small concentrations, some psychoactive drugs reduce the feeding rate of insects and molluscs, and at higher doses some can kill them. Spiders... |
Looking for the name of a French battle | The most famous "last stand" in modern French military history is probably the Battle of Camerón, where 65 Foreign Legionnaires held an abandoned building against 3,000 Mexican soldiers for roughly 10 hours. The Legionnaires were whittled down to roughly 2 combat-effective soldiers at the time of their surrender, with the remainder killed or wounded. This was in 1868, which predates your timeframe by a significant margin, but again - it is the most famous.
I say that it is "the most famous" because the French have a storied military history littered with episodes equally as courageous - the Second World War is as rife with potential candidates for your question as any other era. The French divisions charged with protecting the Dunkirk evacuations fought themselves effectively to death covering the roads leading to the beachhead. The Free French fought with great distinction especially in Africa.
It would be helpful to answerers if you had more details to give; technically this doesn't break AskHistorians rules, as you are not asking for examples... but the vagueness of the particulars leads us down that path. Could you elaborate please? | [
"The Battle of Frenchtown took place in an around the Frenchtown Settlement, founded in 1784 on the River Raisin in the Michigan Territory. The land it was fought on is now incorporated into the city of Monroe. Some sources apply the name only to the encounter on January 22, 1813, and refer to the engagement on Jan... |
when a lot of people die in one event, such as a natural disaster or 9/11, how do insurance companies pay everybody? | They don't
_URL_0_ | [
"Private insurance company does not pay insurance money when the cause for the damage is consider to be an act of aggression (מעשה איבה)(war/terrorism etc), as such people who had lost property and funds had not been able to receive funds to rebuild and fix their properties. \n",
"In the event of an accidental de... |
How historically accurate is Mulan? | The Chinese really did fight the Huns some time around 150 BC (kinda sorta maybe... there's debate as to whether the Xiongu are really related to the Huns but that's not really the movie's problem) but other than that... I think it's mostly a work of fiction. | [
"BULLET::::- Dong, Lan. \"Mulan's Legend and Legacy in China and the United States\" (Temple University Press; 2010) 263 pages; Traces literary and other images of Mulan from premodern China to contemporary China and the United States.\n",
"The film is based on a legend, but it is given credence by at least two t... |
Is it possible to "add" protons to an atom in a lab/accelerator and discover new elements? And why does an atom having just an extra proton than another atom make the two completely different elements? What property of protons causes this, if any? | Atoms, for us humans anyway, are fundamentally electronic in nature, their nuclear structure more or less doesn't matter.
Take a pile of positive charge and stack up electrons in standing waves on top of that positive charge, and you get atoms. Electrons arranged in orbitals (spherical harmonics) basically stacked on top of the positive charge as densely as possible. Because they are waves they have a characteristic minimum size which is a standing wave of different periodicity et al that we know as orbitals. From our perspective it almost doesn't matter what is in the nucleus of an atom. It could be made of anything, as it happens compact positively charged clumps of baryonic matter is actually stable according to our Universe, so atomic nuclei are possible. They naturally attract electrons to them due to the strength of the electrostatic force, and then you have atoms.
The reason why different amounts of positive charge on the atomic nucleus makes such a big difference is because it impacts the structure and behavior of the clump of electrons that is attempting to sit on top of the nucleus. As the spherical harmonics increase in the number of lobes they have you also increase the number of different orientations that are separate from each other, and these essentially form a set of different places where electrons can "live" in an atom. Each of them end up with naturally different energy levels, and because of the nature of spherical harmonics this means that the energy levels are not evenly spaced.
This is where orbitals and shells and chemical behavior comes in. Each spherical harmonic can essentially hold two electrons, because electrons have spin and if their spins are opposite each other in the same spherical harmonic that means they still end up with different quantum numbers overall. If they attempted to be in the same spherical harmonic around the same atom (the same orbital) with the same spin orientation then they'd have the same quantum numbers, which isn't allowed due to quantum mechanical reasons (electrons are fermions and obey the Pauli exclusion principle).
Anyway, what this means is that you end up with different behavior of the electrons around an atom depending on the charge of the nucleus. For example, if you have a nucleus with a charge of two (like Helium) then two electrons can sit on top of that atom in their standing wave orbitals and exist quite happily in the lowest energy state for those electrons possible, the 1s orbital. Helium is a very stable and non-reactive atom precisely because any changes to its electrons would require a lot of energy. In contrast, Lithium has a nuclear charge of 3, so a neutral Lithium atom would have not only those 1s electrons in a tightly bound spherically shaped orbital but another electron in a larger 2s spherical orbital that has a node at the center. The outer solitary 2s electron is much less tightly bound to the Lithium nucleus so the amount of energy it takes to ionize Lithium to Li+ is comparatively little. In fact, it takes 4.5x as much energy to ionize Helium as it does to ionize Lithium. This is why Lithium will more readily form ionic bonds, because it's relatively stable in a configuration where it has a solitary positive charge.
Depending on their electronic configuration, atoms can sometimes end up sharing electrons with each other. This is where the "electron standing wave" (in this case a molecular orbital) encompasses two or more atomic nuclei. So, for example, if you have two Hydrogen atoms, each with a nuclear charge of 1, they can form a molecular orbital together (a so-called sigma s-s bond) which is effectively equivalent to overlapping 1s atomic orbitals. The single molecular orbital can house 2 electrons (because of the opposite spins thing) and that ends up with an "average" of only one electron per atom, leaving the molecule still neutrally charged. This forms a bond because if one of the nuclei at one end of the molecular orbital were to move it would experience an electrostatic force. If it were to move closer to the other nucleus then not as much of the electrons would shield the positive charge of the other nucleus and would experience a repulsive force due to like charges repelling. If it were to move outside of the molecular orbital "electron cloud" (or electron wave) then the other nucleus plus the two electrons would be overall negatively charged, which would result in an attractive force toward the other nucleus. This is how molecular bonds keep atomic nuclei "connected" to each other even though they are nestled inside electron waves.
These mechanisms give rise to the entirety of chemistry. Differently charged atoms result in different forces and different energy levels for electrons in various atomic and molecular orbitals, and that's what favors or disfavors the formation of ions, covalent molecular bonds, or the behavior of "noble gases". | [
"Proton-rich nuclides can be produced by sequentially adding one or more protons to an atomic nucleus. Such a nuclear reaction of type (p,γ) is called \"proton capture reaction\". By adding a proton to a nucleus, the element is changed because the chemical element is defined by the proton number of a nucleus. At th... |
Would a thorium reactor be a better alternative for emerging nations, such as Iran that want to harness the power of the atam? | One of the advantages of thorium reactors is that thorium does not make bombs.
Thorium reactors though are breeder reactor making U-233 from thorium through neutron capture that then breaks up giving the energy that the reactor uses to produce power. Thorium itself is not fissile and this conversion is a required step to produce power.
The produced U-233 can be used in bombs, not the standard isotope but a usuable one.
but U-232 that is also produced is not suitable for bombs and the U-232 and U-233 that arises cannot be chemically separated and there is no use for uranium isotope separation in common thorium reactors models. So if someone with a thorium reactor starts to build isotope separators you get a pretty good idea of what they are up to.
But the U-233 goes through a step in the fuel chain as protactinium-233 which can be separated chemically, and has a halflife of 26.9days so there is time to do the separation in.
So to make bombs from a thorium reactor your start with thorium, get a neutron source like plutonium or uranium to start the fuel cycle, let the reactor produce power like normal for a while. Then you take out a chunk of the fuel, chemically separate the protactinium, wait for it to become U-233 and build a bomb from that. This separation stage is not required for regular operation unlike the isotopic enrichment required for U and Pu reactors that can be used to make either fuel or bombs depending on how far the enrichment goes.
So thorium reactors are more bomb resistant than proof, and since the technology required to build the bombs is not part of the regular process it can be monitored for.
One of the big reasons preventing their use anywhere is there are currently no proven designs. Research and development is still underway to get a cost competitive thorium reactor built. | [
"The second option, and perhaps the more interesting one, is that India can choose to access the third stage of thorium reactors by skipping the more difficult second stage of the plan through some appropriately selected parallel approach such as the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, the molten salt reactor, or ... |
How did people sharpen knives in the ancient and medieval periods? | I'm not sure I follow. Carefully made whetstones long predate modern times, we find them in prehistoric sites, let alone ancient or medieval ones. And it's not as though you need a perfectly machined stone to sharpen a blade, any reasonably fine-grained stone with a good surface will work, especially since whetstones tend to become polished over time by the action of sharpening. My grandmother in Taiwan, for example, still sharpens her knives with naturally-occurring stones that she finds and it works just fine... | [
"Knife sharpening is the process of making a knife or similar tool sharp by grinding against a hard, rough surface, typically a stone, or a flexible surface with hard particles, such as sandpaper. Additionally, a leather razor strop, or strop, is often used to straighten and polish an edge. See simple sharpening tu... |
Does the temperature change from summer to fall happen faster than spring to summer? | I think this question is incomplete without naming a location on Earth. Even within the temperate zones, seasonality varies significantly place-to-place.
Here's a website that gives monthly average highs and lows for different places in the US (which I'm guessing you're from by the month/date style in the question). This is Seattle's, for example, where the fall temperature drop looks faster than the spring temperature rise. [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) | [
"Temperatures and the likelihood of precipitation both tend to increase as Spring progresses. Rapid and substantial swings in temperature, associated with wind shifts and the passage of weather fronts, are common through the Spring, with hot daytime temperatures possible as early as the month of March, and freezing... |
why textbook puiblishers make different versions (us version, international version) of the same book? is that beneficial to who? | I suspect some students would appreciate their textbook being written in their native language. | [
"Quia Books is currently used by language textbook publishers to bring computer learning and traditional classroom instruction together. More than 450 secondary- and higher-education language textbooks have been published on the Quia Books platform. The platform supports 11 languages, including Spanish, French, Chi... |
In the past few hundred years, has there ever been a country that asked to join another country? | Depends on what you mean. Including both mergers and joining as a subordinate territory:
Spain remained a de jure personal union of Castille and Aragon until ~1715. So they didn't technically become a single country until then.
There is, of course, the United States (the 13 colonies) itself, as well as the Republic of Texas joining the Union.
Yemen from North and South Yemen in 1990.
The United Arab Emirates in 1971.
Tanzania in 1964.
The UK in 1707 (England and Scotland) as per the 1707 Acts of Union.
There is also the German Empire of course. As well as the East Germany joining West Germany.
Newfoundland joining Canada in 1949.
Unification of India/Pakistain as they incorporated the former princely states of the British Raj into their new nations.
In the vast majority of cases these are nations that share a border, yes. However, that is completely to be expected, as nations that share borders are the ones most likely to share cultural and economic/strategic/political structures and interests which would facilitate merging/incorporation. That is why, for example, the thought of Canada joining the US is, although very unlikely, not nearly as ridiculous as the thought of Russia joining the US. | [
"The first meeting of interested countries took place in Berchtesgaden in December 1989. On the Framework Convention was signed by Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Slovenia signed on and Monaco on . Ratification occurred between 1994 and 1999.\n",
"On 1 January 1973, Denmark, Irelan... |
Past his public image, what was Gandhi really like? | What people generally misunderstand is that he very strongly believed in what he said. He had absolute faith in nonviolent but active resistance, far beyond what we consider feasible today. That is why people are shocked when they hear that his answer to the Hitler Counter (that is, how do you stop Hitler with nonviolence) was that if the Jews in Europe had banded together and practiced his brand of mass, active nonviolent resistance the massacres would have never happened. His faith in humanity ran very deeply, and he firmly believed that the German people would not have been able to carry out the Holocaust if they had been forced to confront the full barbarism inherent in it.
He was also very religious, and the religious an spiritual tradition that he came from is very different from what we are familiar to. This strikes many in the West as weird and deplorable, which really just reveals the biases inherent in them. | [
"The thematic attention to Gandhi's theories in \"Lage Raho Munna Bhai\" revived an interest in \"Gandhism\" in India under the new term \"Gandhigiri\" and \"made Gandhi suddenly hip\" with Indians \"staging nonviolent protests, starting Web sites, handing out roses to enemies and putting on peaked white caps from ... |
Could we build 'space windmills' to generate electricity? | Just of the top of my head would be that straight solar panels would be a better option with fewer moving parts.
I do not know enough about solar sails to determine if your idea is feasible. | [
"In a paper delivered to the Philosophical Society of Glasgow on 2 May 1888, Blyth described the wind turbine as being \"of a tripod design, with a 33-foot windshaft, four arms of 13 feet with canvas sails, and a Burgin dynamo driven from the flywheel using a rope\". The turbine produced enough power to light ten 2... |
When did England stop claiming the throne of France? | England (and later the United Kingdom) never did stop claiming the throne of France - France stopped having a throne to claim.
When the UK formally recognised the France as a republic and not a kingdom (I think this was in the late 1790s or early 1800s) the claim became redundant.
Although no English ruler after Henry VI (who actually was actually crowned King of France in Notre Dame in Paris) seriously attempted to press the claim, the title of King/Queen of France remained in the official stylings of monarchs.
| [
"Nonetheless the kings and queens of England (and, later, of Great Britain) continued to claim the French throne for centuries, through the early modern period. The words \"of France\" was prominently included among their realms as listed in their titles and styles, and the French fleur-de-lys was included in the r... |
How does matter create a "smell"? If both Iron and a rose have a smell, how exactly do these things "give off" odor? | Your nose works by receptors in your nasal passages detecting various airborne compounds. Different compounds produce different signals and different smells. What you're actually smelling from things like iron and sulphur are various compounds that become airborne and that you inhale through your nose. In the case of sulphur, you're not smelling pure sulphur but usually hydrogen sulphide, a gas which has a rotten eggs kind of smell, which is formed from hydrogen in the air reacting with sulphur. A higher concentration of the compound you're smelling produces a more intense smell, i.e. if you smell pure hydrogen sulphide (which I don't recommend trying since its poisonous) it will smell stronger than if you were just smelling it in the air after heating some sulphur for example. | [
"The study of odors is complicated by the complex chemistry taking place at the moment of a smell sensation. For example, iron-containing metallic objects are perceived to have a distinctive odor when touched, although iron's vapor pressure is negligible. According to a 2006 study, this smell is the result of aldeh... |
What was the state of math in engineering during the 1400s and 1500s? | They knew about algebra, could do quadratic equations, could do geometry as seen by usage of things like sextants in navigation, this technology and the math involved probably was not too far from what was required to sight a cannon during the time period. No calculus, that came in the 1600's with Newton. They were also able to calculate out how to distribute out the forces using various shapes involved in creating some of the larger churches during the time period. While a lot of this was around during the roman era it was improved upon durring medieval era allowing them to go past the limits roman engineers faced. | [
"At the end of the 16th century, mathematics was placed under the dual aegis of the Greeks, from whom it borrowed the tools of geometry, and the Arabs, who provided procedures for the resolution. At the time of Vieta, algebra therefore oscillated between arithmetic, which gave the appearance of a list of rules, and... |
How long would a steak stay good for if it was frozen to absolute zero? | Well, it might not be "good" after you unfroze it, but it would essentially stay unspoiled forever assuming you could actually get it to absolute zero.
Food goes bad due to microbes that are naturally present using it as a food source and multiplying like crazy. Refrigeration slows (but doesn't stop) microbial metabolism and reproduction, which is both why we use it and why stuff still goes bad in the fridge. But at absolute zero, theoretically no life (and no life processes) are possible. | [
"To prevent trichinellosis, an official European directive recommends the freezing of meat at for at least 10 days for pieces of meat less than in thickness. Patients froze wild boar steaks at for seven days, but this freezing time appears insufficient to kill larvae, since \"T. britovi\" is a species relatively re... |
Why am I able to hear a demodulated commercial FM radio signal through my computer speakers? | EE here, a rf low pass filter followed by a Rf detector forms a crude fm demodulator. In this case the wiring and passive components form the filter, and nonlinearity in the audio amp causes it to act like a rf detector. | [
"Radio transmitter amplifiers in most telecommunications systems are required to be \"linear\", in that they must accurately reproduce the signal present at their input. An amplifier that compresses its input or has a non-linear input/output relationship causes the output signal to splatter onto adjacent radio freq... |
The popular depiction of Ancient Greek / Roman clothing sounds really not suitable for the winters those countries have today. Not even for the autumns. What gives? | They did not wear sandals except indoors. Outdoors, they wore leather shoes, often with socks.
The toga was not like a sheet, either--it was a heavy wool garment, about 5 feet by 15 feet in size.
Also, I think you may be underestimating human tolerance for cold temperatures. | [
"Ancient Greece is famous for its philosophy, art, literature, and politics. As a result, classical period Greek style in dress often has been revived when later societies wished to evoke some revered aspect of ancient Greek civilization, such as democratic government. A Greek style in dress became fashionable in F... |
Is it true, that the capitalism in the form we know it, has not be designed to function more than 50 years? [Time-Frame should be after WWII (1945-1950] | It's hard to answer your question.
Capitalism is the absence of design in an economy. It's determined by natural (market) forces and not economic central planners (such as [Soviet Union](_URL_2_), [Nazi Germany](_URL_1_), [Maoist China](_URL_0_)). Theoretically, there's no limit on how long Capitalism would function.
According to [Marxist economic theory](_URL_3_), capitalism is just a stage in a larger progression. Maybe that's what you're thinking of?
| [
"So although it might “seem like” the end of capitalism is nigh, it could also be merely a transition to a new kind of capitalism – a new capitalist regime, which evolved out of what was there before, but which few people had thought of, before it emerged. As an allocation principle, the forms of value could possib... |
how and where do websites store their massive amounts of content? | Websites like Facebook store their content on Content Delivery Networks (CDN's), these are companies like Akamai, Amazon, or Cloudflare who own thousands of servers in dozens or hundreds of places around the world. Websites pay these companies to host their content for them, so when you upload photos for example to facebook, they will actually be put on an Akamai server somewhere (close to where you live), then Akamai will copy this information to all its other data centres.
This means that if someone on the other side of the world wants to look at your photo, it will actually come from a data centre to close to where they live, so they don't have to wait for it to come for the other side of the world (it may seem like a small difference to us, but when you handle billions of data requests every day, the energy and time savings starts to add)
So why don't websites just make their own servers? having dedicated companies that already have infrastructure all over the world is more efficient, you don't have to worry about building the server, or buying a building, or how you're going to support millions of users around the world. its much easier for these companies to increase the number of servers they have, than for a new company to gain a world wide presence. This means its better for the CDN's because they have a business, it's better for large websites, because they don't have to worry about expanding their infrastructure as much, and its much better for small websites. Small websites and companies would never be able to build servers in different countries, but CDN's give them a moderately cheap way of giving there audience a much better experience. | [
"Multiple web resources with a common theme, a common domain name, or both, make up a website. Websites are stored in computers that are running a program called a web server that responds to requests made over the Internet from web browsers running on a user's computer. Website content can be largely provided by a... |
Why does high contrast on pictures of faces make people look more attractive? | Typically, a face with higher contrast is considered more feminine, while a face with less contrast is viewed as masculine.
Look at [this picture](_URL_0_), and distinguish the sexes of the two faces. The one on the left appears to be female and the right male. However, both images feature the same face, the only difference being contrast.
A study published by Psychology Professor Richard Russell helps to explain this phenomenon. By examining photographs of female and male faces, Russell concluded that females faces contain higher contrast; their lips and eyes are often darker in value than the surrounding skin tones.
Here's a quote from Russell that answers your question:
"Cosmetics are typically used in precisely the correct way to exaggerate this difference. Making the eyes and lips darker without changing the surrounding skin increases the facial contrast. Femininity and attractiveness are highly correlated, so making a face more feminine also makes it more attractive."
[Source](_URL_1_)
| [
"This effect occurs with male-only, female-only and mixed gender groups, and both small and large groups. The effect occurs to the same extent with groups of four and 16 people. Participants in studies looked more at the attractive people than the unattractive people in the group. The effect does not occur because ... |
Does anything in biology use quantum physics to perform calculations | > I was simply curious if it were possible that evolution has already made use of quantum physics for processing.
Well I think this question is too vague to answer in a precise way. What counts as "computation" and what counts as "quantum physics"?
There are many biochemical processes that take place at the microscopic level, and some of them are incredibly subtle.
[Take this light harvesting antenna for example](_URL_0_) -- this beautiful arrangement of molecules has 9-fold symmetry. This is not an accident at all -- it turns out that it is optimized for energy transfer.
In this example, the appropriate framework to think about these things includes quantum mechanics. I'm less certain that it would be appropriate to say that this group of molecules is doing any "computation". | [
"Quantum biology refers to applications of quantum mechanics and theoretical chemistry to biological objects and problems. Many biological processes involve the conversion of energy into forms that are usable for chemical transformations, and are quantum mechanical in nature. Such processes involve chemical reactio... |
mortgage interest. | Compound Interest
It's not 4.5% of what you borrowed over the 30 years of the loan, it's 4.5% interest per year based on how much you still owe.
So let's say your mortgage is $100,000 and you make month payments of $500, just for the sake of simplicity.
The way the bank calculates the payment is as follows:
In January of the first year you owe $100,000
$100,000 x 4.5% = 4500 / 12 months = $375
So your first payment is $500 ($375 interest + $125 principal)
February rolls around and you now owe $100,000 - $125 = $99875
99875 x 4.5% = $4494.38 / 12 months = $374.53
So your second payment is $500 ($374.53 interest + $125.47 principal)
So as the months go by, even though you are paying the same "convenient" monthly amount, the amount of your payment that's interest vs principal is constantly changing in your favor.
This is why people say that you pay more interest at the start of your loan than at the end. As you owe less money on the total money borrowed the actual interest you pay is less and the principal is more so you pay off your house more quickly. | [
"The interest rate charged on a Foreign currency mortgage is based on the interest rates applicable to the currency in which the mortgage is denominated and not the interest rates applicable to the borrower's own domestic currency. Therefore, a Foreign currency mortgage should only be considered when the interest r... |
is boiling point a definite point or a range of temperatures? | It's a range, but that's not what your seeing.
It's a range because the boiling point also depends on the air pressure in the room. At lower pressure, the boiling point is also lower.
However, what you're seeing with some bubbles forming before it starts boiling in earnest is a combination of two things:
* Some water molecules reach the boiling point faster than others
* The water needs what's called a "nucleation point," basically a rough edge of something where the water molecules can more easily rearrange themselves out of the semi-organized structure they make up with other water molecules and escape as a gas.
The water is technically boiling when you see the first bubble, just not all of it. | [
"Guldberg has found that a rough estimate of the normal boiling point \"T\", when expressed in kelvins (i.e., as an absolute temperature), is approximately two-thirds of the critical temperature \"T\". Lydersen uses this basic idea but calculates more accurate values.\n",
"Boiling-point elevation describes the ph... |
the whole cliven bundy ranch situation in nevada. | OK, so, the Bureau of Land Management is a government agency that owns a lot of land out in the west. In Nevada especially, where the BLM literally owns most of the land in the state.
Ranchers use BLM land to graze cattle. It's a good deal: the ranchers don't have to purchase lots of land, and the government gets grazing fees from the ranchers.
There's a rancher out in Nevada who grazed on BLM land. There was some dispute 20 years ago, regarding the habitat of an endangered tortoise that lived where he was grazing. Back about 15 years ago, the BLM revoked his grazing permit. But, he continues to graze his cattle on BLM land without a permit. Eventually, the government got fed up with it, went to court, and got an order to impound the cattle that had been illegally grazing on federal property.
The rancher has made claims that this is really his land, his birthright, from before the BLM owned the land (so, before the 1870s). He doesn't seem to have any legal claim that a court will recognize.
He has a lot of support, mostly from other ranchers who don't like the idea that a tortoise habitat can take precedence over their livelihoods. So, there's protests and the like, but the basic issue is this: he's already had his day in court, he's already lost, and he doesn't like the result. | [
"On March 27, 2014, 145,604 acres of federal land in Clark County, Nevada were temporarily closed for the \"capture, impound, and removal of trespass cattle\". A trespass cattle roundup commenced on April 5, an arrest was made on April 6. On April 12, a group of protesters, some of whom were armed advanced on what ... |
What was revolutionary about the Scientific Revolution? How did the study of nature in the 16th century differ from the study of nature in the Middle Ages? | Disclaimer: I can only write with confidence about paradigm shifts between medieval and Renaissance alchemy.
Here's what Robert Boyle wrote in *The Sceptical Chymist (1661)*:
> And, to prevent mistakes, I must advertize you, that I now mean by elements, **as those chymists that speak plainest do by their principles**, certain primitive or simple, or perfectly unmingled bodies; which not being made of any other bodies, or of one another, are the ingredients of which all those called perfectly mixt bodies are immediately compounded, and into which they are ultimately resolved: now whether there be any such body to be constantly met with in all, and each, of those that are said to be elemented bodies, is the thing I now question.
[Note: I realize this is not from the 16th Century, but the 16th Century is just too soon if you want solid answers about the differences you are inquiring about.]
Bear with me here because this might get a bit out of hand.
In *The Birth of the Clinic*, Michel Foucault explains in great detail what he refers to as the "medical gaze" of the 19th Century. According to Foucault, the "medical gaze" was a state of mind in which physicians at the time were able to "gaze" upon any number of patients and read and interpret the various signs in order to determine the symptoms.
For example, let's say two patients have pneumonia, but one patient coughs violently whereas the other patient simply wheezes. Both possess the symptom of fluid in the lungs, but the signs are completely different.
For Foucault, the "medical gaze" represents a newfound perception of nature anticipating the advent of what we now call structural linguistics. In structural linguistics, language consists of two elements--the sign and the signified, where the sign is the symbol or word on the page and the signified is the meaning. According to Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics, the sign is completely arbitrary: we agree to call red "red", but we could just as easily agree to call red "farfignuggen" and none would be the wiser.
So the signified is static, but the sign can be dynamic. This is the crux of the "medical gaze": regardless of how many different signs there are (coughing, wheezing, heaving breathing), the physician can still read and interpret those signs in order to determine the symptom (fluid in the lungs). The signs are dynamic, the symptom is static.
Now let's answer your question.
Up until Robert Boyle wrote *The Sceptical Chymist*, alchemists approached nature the same way physicians approached symptoms in the 19th Century.
During the Middle Ages, every aspect of nature--from wood to metal to the planets themselves--consisted of two opposing elements, Mercury and Sulphur. The problem is that the signs alchemists used to signify those elements changed as if based on the time of day. For one alchemist, Mercury was a woman bearing buckets of water from a well. For another, Mercury was a green lion. For others, Mercury was simply Quicksilver. The element remained the same (for the most part) all the way into the Renaissance, but the signs (woman with water, green lion, quicksilver, etc) changed constantly.
While the signs of symptoms changed based on patients' immune systems, the signs of Mercury changed based on which alchemist was writing about Mercury.
And while Foucault called attention to the "medical gaze" of the 19th Century, one could just as easily call attention to an "alchemist's gaze" of the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance.
**Robert Boyle changed all of that.** He came out and he said, "Forget this fickleness! We need one sign and one sign only. And we need to agree! No more calling this element by ten different names. No more correspondence systems. We need to agree and we need to do it now."
Of course, I am paraphrasing in a rather silly way, but that's the gist of what he meant when he wrote the passage I quoted at the beginning. What eventually became a rising trend in medicine was an old trend in alchemy that needed to be quashed for completely different reasons.
So it's not a matter of how the 16th Century differed from the Middle Ages, but how the Late Renaissance called an end to the fickleness of the Natural Philosophy that preceded it.
I hope that all makes sense. It's kind of late here in Thailand and I've had a long day. | [
"A suitable environment had developed to question scientific doctrine. The discovery in 1492 of the New World by Christopher Columbus challenged the classical worldview. The works of Ptolemy (in geography) and Galen (in medicine) were found to not always match everyday observations. As the Protestant Reformation an... |
how or why the set of all real numbers is larger than the set of all integers | You could count the integers, if you had an infinite amount of time. You could sit down and go "1,2,3,4...". It would take an infinite amount of time, but you could list every single integer. But you *cannot* do this with the real numbers. If you give me a list of real numbers, even an infinitely long list, I can tell you a real number that is not on the list.
Integers are countable, real numbers are uncountable. | [
"What about sets being naturally \"larger than\" N? For instance, Z the set of all integers or Q, the set of all rational numbers, which intuitively may seem much bigger than N. But looks can be deceiving, for we assert:\n",
"Heuristically, this series converges because most large integers contain every digit. Fo... |
Human wave attacks were decisively repulsed in both World Wars. But they made a resurgence in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. What changed to make them effective again? | Its not correct to say that human wave was rendered obsolete during ww1.
Unsupported infantry bayonet charges against prepared trench works were rendered obsolete, but by the end of the war only the method of artillery preparation, the armament of the infantryman, and the tactic of feeding men into breakthrough sectors while encircling holdout positions had changed.
The stormtroopers, while representing the first real breakthrough in offensive technology together with the tank, still attacked in human wave.
Fast forward to ww2, and now we have the birth of modern infantry tactics. Using a fire and flank team in unison to suppress and eliminate defensive positions was indeed a huge step forward in putting an end to hundreds of men charging over a field to bayonet a defender to death.
However, such tactics don't work when the density of troops is high. If, as in ww1, there is no way to flank an enemy because no flank exists, human wave was still the only way to push ahead without armor.
The soviet army was a HUGE user of human wave tactics right up until the battle of Seelow Heights at the end of the war. The infantry now had submachine guns instead of rifles, the artillery was much more accurate, and tanks often supported the assault, but the basic idea was still the same.
In the slow allied advance up the Italian peninsula, the same thing happened. The concentration of men was so high, there was no way to advance but to charge.
In the desert campaign, tanks were the emperors of combat, but the infantry still had to charge in human wave in support of those tanks.
In river crossings, human wave was the ONLY tactic against an entrenched enemy.
The only exception was when artillery was available to provide smoke to cover the advance, but this was not always possible. The russians also experimented with blinding searchlights in nighttime assaults, but with poor outcomes.
In the eastasian theater, the japanese initially used human wave tactics very effectively, but in the end suffered greatly because unlike the russians, they lacked the heavy fire support, armor support, and firepower per infantryman that submachineguns provided.
So, by the time the war you're talking about came around, the only thing that had really changed was that infantry usually performed the hu,an wave in concert with tanks, gumships, and heavy fire support.
The iranian army was able to achieve some success without all of these by using overwhelming numbers alone. Their high morale broke some iraqi unit's will to fight, and many MG positions simply ran out of ammo.
So imagine you are an iraqi soldier. You and about six of your buddies are holding a position when you see fifty iranian troops charging at you. They are coming fast. You shoot, you miss, you shoot again, some die, but you become acutely aware that they are getting closer, they don't seem to be stopping, and god knows what's happening on your flanks. What if they've overrun the position to your left? You panic. you lookaround, and you see fear in the eyes of your squad. You abandon your MG and get the hell out of there while the going is good.
Thats how human wave works. | [
"During war Iranians used human wave attacks (people walking to certain death including child soldiers) on Iraq, with his promise that they would automatically go to paradise—alJanna— if they died in battle, and his pursuit of victory in the Iran–Iraq War that ultimately proved futile. By March 1984, Iran's populat... |
When did animal Sacrifices become antiquated in Jewish religion? | My understanding is that animal sacrifice was centered around the Temple in Jerusalem. The Romans destroyed this Temple at the end of the First Jewish Revolt in 70 C.E. Without access to the central holy site where sacrifices were to be made, Judaism ceased to become a sacrificial religion. This eventually led to modern-day rabbinical Judaism, which is based upon local synagogues rather than one central Temple. | [
"Animal sacrifices played a big role in Yahwism and Judaism (prior to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE) on altars, with the subsequent burning and the sprinkling of their blood, a practice described in the Bible and a daily Temple ritual for the Jewish people. Sacrifice was presumably complemented by t... |
why in every zombie movie has no one ever heard of zombies? it's never an issue with other horror monsters (vampires, ghosts, aliens, etc). so what makes zombies so special? | Because really the zombie plague represents an unknown pathogen that spreads rapidly. Like a pandemic. It is the visual representation of something taking hold and killing many, spreading rapidly, and breaking down modern society.
There are movies that actual deal with real illnesses and uncontrolled spread, but it's far less exciting. The unexpected initial onset is important for the plots because they represent our fear of the government withholding information or trying to reduce panic.
At least, in one of my college classes, that's what we came up with. Like ten years ago. | [
"Zombies are creatures usually portrayed as either reanimated corpses or mindless human beings, in both cases cannibalistic or more widely as undead bodies, ghouls, mummies, reanimated corpses, vampires and so on. While zombie films generally fall into the horror genre, some cross over into other genres, such as co... |
Does placing a magnetic metal on a magnet affect its magnetic field? | Magnetic materials amplify magnetic fields, because the constituents of the material align to produce a magnetic field in line with the external one. Another type of material, called a diamagnet, cancels magnetic fields. The only really good diagmagnetic materials are superconductors; pyrolytic carbon and bismuth are good diamagnets as well. | [
"Application of an external magnetic field causes the domains that are magnetized in the same general direction to grow at the expense of adjacent ones that point in other directions, reinforcing the external field. This effect is exploited in devices that needs to channel magnetic fields, such as electrical transf... |
if i subscribe to a sub reddit, why does it stop showing up on my feed? | Your front page only shows a certain number of subbed subreddits at a time (I think it is 5, but I'm not sure.)
People joke about how reddit gold is worthless, but one of the benefits is you get 100 subreddits on your front page. (Also, myrandom is pretty cool.) | [
"Feeds are more often subscribed to directly by users with aggregators or feed readers which combine the contents of multiple web feeds for display on a single screen or series of screens. Some modern web browsers incorporate aggregator features. Users typically subscribe to a feed by manually entering the URL of a... |
is there any particular reason that, on a 2-d world map, the pacific ocean is the "cutoff"? | You must be from the west (I am, too!). The reason that I can tell this is that maps have a 'focus' that tend to be where they were produced.
Take a look at [this Japanese world map](_URL_0_) and tell me what seems different about it? | [
"The Pacific War is a series of alternate history novels written by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen with Albert S. Hanser. The series deals with the Pacific War between the United States of America and the Empire of Japan. The point of divergence is the decision of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chie... |
why do they handicap horse races, and not just let them race to find the fastest horse? | The goal for the handicapper in a handicap race is to assign the proper amount of weight to eat horse so that ideally they all end in a straight line. This obviously never happens.
The goal for the people who are betting is to outguess the handicapper. If you know some horse is carrying underweight or overweight than you put that into your guess and use that. This makes it more exciting so you aren't just choosing the horse that always wins.
Most horse racing isn't about finding the fastest horse. It's about gambling. | [
"BULLET::::- A handicap race is one in which the runners have been \"handicapped\" by carrying more weight, also called an impost, according to their performance in other races. Theoretically, all horses have a chance of being competitive in a race that is correctly handicapped. Examples include the Melbourne Cup, ... |
Is there a universal unit for measurement of mass? | The kilogram is not related to Earth's gravity. It is the same amount of mass no matter where you are. While it is based on the mass of one litre of water, there are issues with using that as its definition, e.g. fluctuations in density due to temperature, isotopic content, etc. The current solution is to say that the kilogram is defined as the mass of [this brick in France](_URL_0_), which is clearly not ideal but for a long time is the least-not-ideal. However, in the near future the definition will be changed such that the mass of the kilogram will be determined by fixing the value of Planck's constant, similar to how the meter is defined by fixing the speed of light. | [
"In physical science, one may distinguish conceptually between at least seven different aspects of \"mass\", or seven physical notions that involve the concept of \"mass\". Every experiment to date has shown these seven values to be proportional, and in some cases equal, and this proportionality gives rise to the a... |
why is it almost impossible to change someone's mind on any given topic - even when there is clear proof they are wrong? | Cognitive dissonance... Your mind literally does everything it can NOT to change opinion. It doesn't want to believe it's wrong, so it'll do everything possible to not believe it | [
"One may wonder why we continue to think in counterfactual ways if these thoughts tend to make us feel guilty or negatively about an outcome. One of the functional reasons for this is to correct for mistakes and to avoid making them again in the future. If a person is able to consider another outcome based on a dif... |
why is it so hard for our world's nations to sign a climate agreement? what interests comes in the way? | We've already got one, [The Kyoto Protocol](_URL_0_). I believe the aim is to cut CO2 emissions to 40% of the 1990 levels by 2100 in order to stabilise the atmosphere. But generally they just set targets about 5 years at a time. It's a bit rubbish to be honest because China hasn't signed up because it's still developing; Clinton signed the treaty for the US but then the senate stopped it; and Canada have pulled out because they aimed for lower targets but then failed to reduce their emissions and would have been faced with huge fines. Also about 80% of the world isn't in on it. | [
" all countries in the world are parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), but 12 countries have not ratified it, which means they are not legally bound by the agreement. The ultimate objective of the Convention is to prevent dangerous human interference to the climate system. A... |
The Duke of Wellington famously declined to use his artillery against Napoleon (as in the person, not his forces) at Waterloo. Was this common for commanders not to directly fire at each other? | To my own knowledge, I don't know but it would be wasteful to fire on commanders or what is thought to be a commander. Generally, artillery would be fired at formations and general areas due to a combination of poor optics (as in a Spyglass doesn't magnify that greatly to see an exact person) and inaccuracy of guns, which can change due to an innumerable number of reasons. So, when artillery is used, it is used to fire on a general formation or area in order to use accuracy by volume and ensure that the shot isn't wasted.
However, whenever a general did die or get injured, it was due to a random shot bouncing across the field. Jean Lannes got his legs swept from under him during Aspern-Essling by a random shot rolling across the field and Massena got his horse shot from under him. This is generally due to the inaccuracy and randomness of the battlefield.
I haven't heard an order to avoid or target generals though. | [
"Napoleon's forces fought two Coalition armies, commanded by the British Duke of Wellington and the Prussian Prince Blücher, at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. Wellington's army withstood repeated attacks by the French and drove them from the field while the Prussians arrived in force and broke through Napo... |
u.s. health insurance terms | * Monthly payment - How much you are paying your insurance each month.
* Copay - This is how much you will pay for a medical service. For example you go to get your ear looked at, the bill comes out to $200. You insurance will put in $100, and you copay the rest.
* Deductible - This is how much you have to pay before insurance kicks in. You are hit by a car and rushed to the ER, your bill is say $2,000. Your deductible is $3,000. That means you are paying that bill out of pocket. Lets say the bill was $5,000 then you have to pay the first 3,000 and your insurance kicks in to cover the rest. | [
"Health insurance in the United States is any program that helps pay for medical expenses, whether through privately purchased insurance, social insurance, or a social welfare program funded by the government. Synonyms for this usage include \"health coverage\", \"health care coverage\", and \"health benefits\".\n"... |
how does g2a shady system works? | The keys are purchased with stolen credit card information. G2A makes no effort to validate the sources of their keys.
When the card holder finds out and their bank reverses the transaction, the key becomes invalid. Bye-bye game. | [
"Darktrace was founded in 2013 by mathematicians from the University of Cambridge and individuals with cyber operations experience at intelligence agencies. Its Enterprise Immune System technology uses AI and unsupervised machine learning to autonomously detect and take action against cyber-threats across all diver... |
I've just started watching Spartacus. In it, there are black men and women mixed in with fellow humans (as it should be). In Ancient Rome, was it really like this? | Yes. Slavery in Rome was not tied to race/skin color like it was in the United States during the 1700-1800s | [
"The Gaul woman Varinia (Rhona Mitra) and her village are attacked by the Romans. Her entire village is taken into slavery, and she is sold to Lentulus Batiatus (Ian McNeice). Spartacus (Goran Višnjić), a Thracian slave condemned to the mines, attempts to protect another slave. Spartacus is nearly crucified before ... |
Today, we see that the Roman gods were obvious copies of the Greek pantheon (e.g. Mars being Ares, Apollo being Hermes, Jupiter being Zeus) But was this distinction noticed by the ancient world? | I answered a similar question a few years ago here: _URL_0_
tl;dr, Roman and Greek gods are both derived from a common source, rather than the Romans copying the Greeks (although in their long history interacting they of course influenced one another). | [
"The Roman pantheon had numerous deities, both Greek and non-Greek. The more famed deities, found in the mythologies and the 2nd millennium CE European arts, have been the anthropomorphic deities syncretized with the Greek deities. These include the six gods and six goddesses: Venus, Apollo, Mars, Diana, Minerva, C... |
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