question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
|---|---|---|
what would be the ecologic result if geese were extinct? | I imagine there would be a gaggle of problems if you removed any species, the biosphere is a lot more interconnected than you might think. | [
"Extremely successful at living in human-altered areas, Canada geese have proven able to establish breeding colonies in urban and cultivated areas, which provide food and few natural predators. The success of this common park species has led to its often being considered a pest species because of its depredation of... |
why are little girls (as a horror trope) so terrifying? | Horror tries to make the seemingly safe, unsafe. What's more harmless than a little girl? Now make that little girl evil and capable of doing terrible things. It flips the perception. | [
"A teenage girl who loves horror movies watches them all the time, yet is never frightened. Despite never being frightened, she begins to sleepwalk out of her house, resulting in her parents getting angry. They forbid her to watch any more horror movies in an attempt to prevent her sleepwalking, however there's a n... |
Does the induced warming/cooling feeling of products like IcyHot actually do anything, or is it just a placebo? | The active ingredients in IcyHot are topical analgesics; they prevent you from feeling the pain. | [
"A cooling sensation is achieved through the chemical phenomenon of the negative enthalpy of dissolution that occurs with bulk sweeteners, such as the sugar alcohols. The enthalpy of dissolution refers to the overall amount of heat that is absorbed or released in the dissolving process. Because the bulk sweeteners ... |
why does a piece of butter spin when you put it in the middle of a pot of boiling water? | It should spin even if the pot isn't boiling, just might be imperceptible.
& #x200B;
See when we suspend something in water there will likely only be 3 forces acting on it.
1. is obvious, the force of gravity pulling it 'down'
2. is slightly less obvious, the force the water exerts 'upwards' on the butter
3. is nearly always forgotten, the force of the earth spinning
When moving an object that is spinning it encounters more resistance on one side than the other because one side is moving 'with' the earth's rotation, the other is moving 'against' the earth's rotation.
This is why toilets, under absolutely perfect conditions will flush clockwise or counter clockwise in the northern or southern hemisphere.
& #x200B;
In case of boiling water it might be simply because the butter is rarely even in size and the bubbles hit it imparting a bit of momentum, it builds up, and since water offers little resistance in terms of rotation, it just keeps on spinning.
But under absolutely still circumstances, everything tends to rotate one way or another depending on which hemisphere you're located in. | [
"BULLET::::3. The cream separates into butter and buttermilk. The buttermilk is drained off, and the remaining butter is kneaded to form a network of fat crystals that becomes the continuous phase, or dispersion medium, of a water-in-fat emulsion. Working the butter also creates its desired smoothness. Eventually, ... |
why don't planets orbiting stars eventually fall into them? | they do, or they drift off. the important part is that the decay rate is freakiskly low. not 0, but so remote that we don't really care. | [
"Most stars will not have their planets lined up and orientated so that they eclipse over the center of the star and give the viewer on earth a perfect transit. It is for this reason that when we often are only able to extrapolate a minimum mass when viewing a star’s wobble because we do not know the inclination ... |
Did everyone bite their nails before nail clippers were invented? | It is free to bite your nails and, more to the point, quite standard for nails to break off in the course of even light manual labor. So in some premodern societies where status is less based on conspicuous consumption than today, one of the things archaeologists have observed is that nail-grooming actually becomes a status symbol!
Eamon Kelly makes this case for early Ireland especially off the "bog bodies" found in Ireland and a few other places. Clonycavan Man, who was (archaeologists argue) sacrificed in the 300s, was found with nicely manicured nails and a sort of hair pomade made of materials probably imported from northeastern-ish Iberia. (Tollund Man and Graubelle Man, from Denmark, are two others frequently cited as having manicured fingernails.)
It's not unusual for later Bronze Age/early Iron Age northern European bodies to be buried with "hygiene kits"--razors for men, tweezers, and a sort of mortar-and-pestle set that may have been used to grind powder for makeup. Fair warning, I'm WAY out of my normal area here--reading AskHistorians has given me a side interest in how archaeologists interpret gender roles and practices from gravesites. But to my knowledge, we don't see specific tools used for nail *trimming*. Instead, there are [nail *cleaners*](_URL_0_).
These are particularly prevalent in grave sites in Britain: elite graves from the pre-Roman period, and then becoming more common during the formal Roman presence. They're found at all sorts of sites--villages, larger towns, military camps, Roman villas, suggesting a distribution across social strata. I should note, following Hella Eckhardt, that we can't be these are specifically nail cleaners. However, in British sites' hygiene kits they replace the type of pick more typically found in Gaul and have a tip type that seems more suited to be a *dedicated* nail cleaner versus the other major possibility, a tooth pick.
As far as nail *cutters* go, there are a few options. First, scissors in the sense of "two blades that slide past each other" are quite ancient. In ancient Rome proper, where nail hygiene was a defining element of style, barbers used a tool called a *cultellum tonsorium* (literally, "barber's little knife") to cut customers' nails. The tradition of using knives persisted in the Latin Middle Ages. I have read that archaeologists have found what they suspect are specialized nail-cutting tools in Romano-British grave sites, but I've not seen a clear description of how they functioned. | [
"Prior to the invention of the modern nail clipper, people would use small knives to trim or pare their nails. Descriptions of nail trimming in literature date as far back as the 8th century BC. The Book of Deuteronomy exhorts in 21:12 that a man, should he wish to take a captive as a wife, \"shall bring her home t... |
why do companies allow piracy to varying degrees? why do they tolerate being ripped off? | Very few companies condone any form of piracy. But it's very difficult to combat piracy on the scale it's normally seen. When you have hundreds of thousands of people stealing your content it's incredibly costly to try and get the people doing it into court. And not worth the payoff ultimately, unless the person being sued is used as an example, or operating one of the sites that allows piracy to take place, as we will see soon with one of the owners of Kickass Torrents.
So the primary reason they don't really combat piracy is because it isn't financially viable unless they can organize a class-action lawsuit, which often requires the bypassing of privacy rights, and therefore doesn't happen unless there's a very fair case made. Such as in the case of Dallas Buyer's Club in Australia last year, which resulted in legislative reform all but outlawing torrenting, and enabling courts to call for access to a user's internet history from their ISP.
Beyond this there are a few reasons why a company might not come out against piracy. Chiefly among these is that there are studies to suggest that about 60% of pirates at least will still buy what they pirate, and use the system to gauge quality before investing. And of these people about 50% apparently prove to be more reliable consumers than people who aren't pirates. I'm sadly unable to locate the sources for this presently, but if interest is there I'll try and hunt them down.
So the impact on the industry isn't entirely take-take-take. Which isn't me saying it's a good thing. I'm simply stating what research says.
Other than that the main reason a company might allow piracy is because the people who made the product might just want it to be seen, understand the futility of fighting the system, or see it as a very good opportunity to raise exposure for their product.
TL;DR: The legal system makes it a nightmare to combat piracy without losing more money than you stand to make by suing pirates, and in the long run they might not actually be getting ripped off entirely, because a decent amount of pirates are reliable consumers and they're really good at providing free publicity to a product. | [
"Rolls Royce have argued that low-tech piracy activities aimed towards ships and their crews will reduce as a result of ships becoming autonomous. Ships can be constructed so that it will be difficult to board them, with cargo access and manual controls being made unavailable. In the case of a piracy event, control... |
At what point in evolutionary history did life begin to consume other life as a source of energy? | I think any answer here would be pure conjecture. The origins of life are not known, and all theories have holes. Even knowing all we do about the inner workings of a cell, We still can’t replicate conditions that spontaneously produce any semblance of life.
That being said, it would be extremely unlikely that any early life would have been photosynthetic, as that energy pathway is very complex. So, I’d assume any life that existed would have to consume energy from it’s surroundings, and isn’t much of a leap from that to consuming other life. | [
"Until the 1970s, life was thought to be entirely dependent on energy from the Sun. Plants on Earth's surface capture energy from sunlight to photosynthesize sugars from carbon dioxide and water, releasing oxygen in the process that is then consumed by oxygen-respiring organisms, passing their energy up the food ch... |
Why did the Baron’s and Nobles support Stephen over Matilda during the Anarchy? | I plan on coming back to this, but in the meantime, I discussed the diplomatic history of the Anarchy [HERE](_URL_0_), which may shed some light on some of the frequent support shifts during the Anarchy. | [
"Henry I died in 1135, and Stephen and Matilda both had a claim to the throne. The monastic author describes the rebellion of the barons against Stephen, the escape of Matilda, and the tortures that the soldiers of the baronial powers inflicted upon the people. The author blames Stephen for the Anarchy for being \"... |
Say I just want to run into the convenient store. Does it use more gas to start my car or to leave it running? | For a modern car very little fuel is consumed doing startup. Don't leave it on. | [
"1.Invest in new technologies and develop new generation of cars would eventually help to use fuels or gas more efficiently. When buy a new products such as car, it is better to choose the one that has good gas mileage.\n",
"\" Gasoline is the main expense of the cars, practically on a weekly basis, or even more ... |
why when doing exercise do you tire relatively quickly, only to recover and regain stamina to continue? what causes this "second wind" effect? | Respiration.
When you exercise, your body respirates to keep your muscles going; this requires oxygen and is called aerobic respiration. When there isn't enough oxygen coming in, your body will start anaerobic (without oxygen) respiration. This is highly inefficient and causes lactic acid to build up in your muscles (which makes your muscles feel tired).
Once you've rested, you start to aerobically respirate again, which makes the lactic acid go away. Once its gone, your muscles don't feel as tired, so you get the "second wind". This pattern keeps repeating.
(I'm only 14 so I might be wrong) | [
"As a physical stressor, aerobic exercise stimulates cortisol secretion in an intensity-dependent manner; however, it does not result in long-term increases in cortisol production since this exercise-induced effect on cortisol is a response to transient negative energy balance. Individuals who have recently exercis... |
Why do we get 'Response Lag'? | It looks like the author is referring to a simple shift of focus.
In general, humans are very poor multitaskers -- in fact, some scientists think we don't multitask at all, and just switch rapidly between tasks (not the same things!). Short term memory is one aspect of this: you may need to "buffer" information in short term memory while working on a different problem, leading a person to seem like they have a gap in their response.
I've checked some of my textbooks for information on this, but most of them concentrate on visual or auditory attention. One suggestion is that attention can be split into two parts: "receiving" attention, where we take in stimulation, and "producing" attention, where we create an output, and that having one of those be particularly active can bottleneck the other (and having two of the same kind active leads to conflicts).
I'm thinking that the process you'd see for the topic in the comic would go something like this:
* Thinking hard about something -- errands to run, a math problem, etc.
* Someone says something to you -- this gets shoved into short term memory
* You finish your problem, and try to get on to the next thing in the queue, the comment you heard
* You respond to the comment, but the commenter perceives a delay because you were finishing your problem | [
"A possible explanation for lag-1 sparing is that this phenomenon is heavily interconnected with attentional blink, but does not operate on the same cognitive mechanisms and requires different stimuli to occur. Specifically, for lag-1 sparing to occur, it needs visual input as practice targets. These targets can be... |
how does quantum entanglement provide quantum key exchange? | I wonder the same thing. My current understanding is that both sides of the exchange are monitoring their particles constantly, and so part of the key exchange is the time of the observation made to generate the encryption. | [
"Quantum decoherence can occur when one qubit from a maximally entangled bell state is transmitted across a quantum network. Entanglement purification allows for the creation of nearly maximally entangled qubits from a large number of arbitrary weakly entangled qubits, and thus provides additional protection agains... |
Birds and dogs behave according to the Earth's magnetic field. Do humans have any behaviors like this? | Sorry this isn't a very scientific answer, but on [the most recent "Skeptics Guide to the Universe" podcast \(mp3 link\)](_URL_0_), Dr. Steven Novella was quite skeptical of the claim dogs have magnetic sense based on what I think he was saying was shoddy scientific method in that study. He repeated quite a few times that magnetic sense in some animals definitely exists, but that he thought that particular experiment didn't do a very good job of proving it existed in dogs. | [
"Animals including birds and turtles can detect the Earth's magnetic field, and use the field to navigate during migration. Some researchers have found that cows and wild deer tend to align their bodies north-south while relaxing, but not when the animals are under high-voltage power lines, suggesting that magnetis... |
why do chargers or power sources for some machines have a box in the middle of it's power cord and some don't? | The electricity coming out of the wall is AC (alternating current). Most electronics are powered using DC (direct current) which is entirely different from AC. The black boxes (typically known as transformers) act to convert the AC to DC as well as convert the voltage and clean up the electric signal. Some electronics, like your TV, have a transformer built inside to make it easier for you to plug in. Something like a laptop has a transformer on the outside in order to keep the size of the laptop smaller. Also, your cellphone charger uses the same transformer. | [
"A power box (USA) or feeder pillar (UK) is a cabinet for electrical equipment, mounted in the street and controlling the electrical supply to a number of houses in a neighborhood. A power box is simply a layman's term for a transformer, cutout enclosure, or other enclosure used in conjunction with underground elec... |
Why are there so few surviving Ancient Chinese ruins, compared to Rome and Greece? | Aside from the base, traditional Chinese structures were mostly constructed of wood, which made them more susceptible to corrosion. The Cultural Revolution as well as foreign invasions over the last few centuries also saw mass destruction as well as looting. The Porcelain Tower for example was destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion. Religious and cultural artifacts, especially large metal objects, were taken down for smelting during the Cultural Revolution. Most of the large city walls which used to guard Chinese cities were torn down to make room for construction. Sometimes simply because there weren't any resources to spare for repairs. Today Chinese archaeology is primarily one of tomb hunting, as these were built using stone, and aside from looting, left untarnished by human turmoils. | [
"Although mostly only ruins of brick and rammed earth walls and towers from ancient China (i.e. before the 6th century AD) have survived, information on ancient Chinese architecture (especially wooden architecture) can be discerned from more or less realistic clay models of buildings created by the ancient Chinese ... |
what is "cashback" when i use my debit card? and should i use it? | You should use it if you are low on cash at that moment, but there is no benefit beyond just taking cash from your account at an ATM. | [
"Debit card cashback (also known as cash out in Australia and New Zealand) is a service offered to retail customers whereby an amount is added to the total purchase price of a transaction paid by debit card and the customer receives that amount in cash along with the purchase. Debit card cashback is offered either ... |
What happens to old American flags when a state is added and the number of stars changes? | Unlike in Canada, there was actually a procedure in place for the most recent flag changeover. It was outlined in [Executive Order 10834](_URL_0_). The relevant part is in Section 25:
"Subject to such limited exceptions as the Secretary of Defense in respect of the Department of Defense, and the Administrator of General Services in respect of executive agencies other than the Department of Defense, may approve, **all national flags and union jacks now in the possession of executive agencies,** or hereafter acquired by executive agencies under contracts awarded prior to the date of this order, including those so possessed or so acquired by the General Services Administration for distribution to other agencies, **shall be utilized until unserviceable**."
In other words the old 48 and 49-star flags were used until they wore out, at which point they were destroyed in a dignified manner in accordance with the U.S. Flag Code and replaced by a 50-star one. The government also issued a statement saying it was appropriate for citizens to do the same.
In the past, Americans often updated their old flags by sewing new stars right onto them. Some flags were made with a bit of extra blank space for just this purpose. [There are some great examples of modified flags here.](_URL_1_)
There was no official arrangement for the stars on the flag until 1912, so that kind of modification was much more common before then. Nowadays flag manufacturers tend to follow or at least come close to the government specifications ("G-Spec"), so everyone's flag pretty much looks the same. | [
"Since 1818, a star for each new state has been added to the flag on the Fourth of July immediately following each state's admission. In years which multiple states were admitted, the number of stars on the flag jumped correspondingly; the most pronounced example of this is 1890, when five states were admitted with... |
why does heroin withdrawal cause convulsions/seizures? | Think of your brain like a factory. Your employees are opioid receptors in your brain. You've got enough to take care of just about any day to day business that comes your way, and everything goes pretty smoothly.
Then you get a new client, heroin. He needs A LOT more, so you hire a bunch of new employees to keep up with his demand. His money is great, his business is easy, and you've got to keep up to keep getting his business. As time goes on, heroin becomes basically your only costumer. Your factory is straining to keep up. A conveyor built wears out, the lights start burning out, but you've still got to do business. Small problems don't matter, you're still in business! The more heroin spends, the more employees you've got to hire.
THEN...heroin leaves town. You've suddenly got a HUGE workforce with no work to give them, and they're angry. All of those small problems you've been neglecting while doing work? Turns out, they got a lot bigger as you were trying to keep up. All of these new employees start rioting. The factories worn down. You can't handle the stress and start freaking out...and thus...a seizure.
TLDR: Your brain suddenly has a ton of opioid receptors that aren't doing anything. Heroin was masking a bunch of problems that tend to get worse. Take heroin away, and your brain literally can't handle the "riot." | [
"Both medication and drug overdoses can result in seizures, as may certain medication and drug withdrawal. Common drugs involved include: antidepressants, antipsychotics, cocaine, insulin, and the local anaesthetic lidocaine. Difficulties with withdrawal seizures commonly occurs after prolonged alcohol or sedative ... |
why is it that human offspring are so helpless and fragile for several years. wouldn't a person who matures the fastest be most likely to survive since they can survive on their own? | The human brain is too big and complex to be formed quickly, and the human body, by growing slowly, doesn't need a lot of food to continue healthy development.
Growing really quickly would necessarily require that we dumb humans down and that our offspring would need to eat a great deal to support all the bodily growth. As it is humans can become very intelligent and only need a modest amount of food in their day-to-day. | [
"Prenatal malnutrition and early life growth patterns can alter metabolism and physiological patterns and have lifelong effects on the risk of cardiovascular disease. Children who are undernourished are more likely to be short in adulthood, have lower educational achievement and economic status, and give birth to s... |
Engine efficiency | You're right that using another heat engine to lower the temperature of the first heat engine's output reservoir wouldn't increase efficiency of the whole system, because you would have to power that second engine.
Think of the output reservoir as a big heat exchanger outside somewhere. It has to be a little hotter than the environment in order to get rid of its heat. If you add some more cooling fins to it, you might be able to lower its temperature without spending energy. | [
"Volumetric efficiency in an internal combustion engine design refers to the efficiency with which the engine can move the \"charge\" of fuel and air into and out of the cylinders. It also denotes the ratio of air volume drawn into the cylinder to the cylinder's swept volume.\n",
"Any engine will have different B... |
Did people from New York City's 5 boroughs originally consider themselves to be part of the same city? | They did not. They were separate cities through much of the 19th century. City agglomeration became a tend in the 19th century, as advances in public transit (e.g. steam ships and street cards) helped tie metro areas together and create new suburbs and increased municipal services (fire to departments, water, etc) gave incentives for towns to consolidate. Read, for example, Walt Whitman’s poem “[Crossing Brooklyn Ferry](_URL_5_)”—the poem was written when Brooklyn and New York (Manhattan) were separate entities. Where Brooklyn-native Whitman’s ferry crossed is apparently today where the Brooklyn Bridge is. (I’m going to guess you live in New York—the bomb ice cream shop Ample Hills takes their name from a line in the poem.) To give you a sense of how different Whitman’s Manhattan was, he wrote the poem in 1855, two years before Central Park was established. The first consolidated institution, the Metropolitan Fire District, between Brooklyn and New York came not long after in 1865. Both were still decades before consolidation.
Today we know *the* Twin Cities as Minneapolis and St. Paul, but for much of the 19th century this was used to refer to other cities, including New York and Brooklyn. The first reference to them as the twin cities in the NYT is from 1859, but refers to Pittsburgh and Allegheny City ([Allegheny](_URL_3_) became a part of Pittsburgh in 1907), comparing them to New York and Brooklyn. The first use of twin cities in the NYT to refer to explicitly refer to New York and Brooklyn in the *Times* comes only slightly later, in [1860](_URL_7_):
> For instance, Mr. CONKLING presented a memorial from New-York, asking for the passage of a law creating a Health Department for the Cities of New-York and Brooklyn, (a Metropolitan dodging of the Constitution,) and that provision be made for the formation and enforcement of a sanitary system, proved to be so necessary by the increased bills of mortality […] I wonder not that they are solicitous for the health of **the good people of the twin cities**. It is in the public health -- and the consequent ability to pay -- that these gentlemen find their reward.
In an 1872 article called “[A Tale of Three Cities](_URL_1_)”, the *Times* compares mortality rates for New York, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn (I believe during a particularly severe heatwave). Again, though, we see the fairly common attribution of “the twin cities of New-York and Brooklyn” (there was als an 1870 article in the *Times* about elections that search says mentions “twin cites” but I couldn’t find. Interestingly, it broke down election results for New York, for Brooklyn, then “Returns from Cities and Towns”, which covered the rest of the state. For whatever reason, there’s no returns from Queens County or Richmond County reported, but you’ll notice there are returns for Kings County that aren’t listed with Brooklyn. Why?
At that time, Brooklyn did not cover all of Kings County and there were several other towns in the county. [Curbed](_URL_4_) actually has a really fun little history of Brooklyn and Kings County, but have you ever heard someone refer to “[South Brooklyn](_URL_0_)” and mean like Cobbel Hill, Park Slope, Red Hook areas and not the parts of Brooklyn that are actually furthest south? That’s because in the 19th century, before consolidation (the consolidation of all of Kings County into Brooklyn was a process separate from but related to the consolidation of all of the Five Boroughs into New York City), this was the southern limit of Brooklyn. Williamsburg(h) and Bushwick were also separate municipalities. Where was that border? Not surprisingly, at *Division* Ave. There were several splits in the 19th century (for example, New Lots breaking off from Flatbush and Williamsburg(h) breaking off from Bushwick), peaking in the period 1852-1854: the cities of Brooklyn and Williamsburg(h), and the towns of Bushwick, New Lots, Flatlands, Gravesend, New Ultrecht, and Flatbush.
In 1854, Brooklyn started swallowing up its smaller neighbors, Bushwick and Williamsburg(h) first. They then tried unsuccessfully to annex the rest of the county in 1873, but successfully annexed New Lots in 1886, everything but Flatlands in 1894, and finally Flatlands 1896. But, other than Williamsburg and Bushwick, these areas were small and still largely rural. In the big 1894 annexation, for instance, Brooklyn had a population of nearly a million. The biggest town they annexed was Flatbush, which had a population of just 12,625.
By the time New York and Brooklyn (and the rest of the Five Boroughs) consolidated, Brooklyn was either the fourth largest city in the county, behind only New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, but much much larger than Boston and St. Louis, which only had about half a million residents each. This is actually a slight step down for Brooklyn due to Chicago’s rapid growth. In the 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, Brooklyn was the third largest city (in the 1840 and 1850 censuses, before the Bushwick consolidation, it was the 7th largest city). Fun fact: before Philadelphia consolidated in 1854 (before that, Philadelphia was just today’s Center City), two of its future neighborhoods (Northern Liberties in 1840, Spring Garden in 1850) are among the ten largest cities in the country.
New York was actually consolidated in 1898, which was before the subway. The main mass transit was still ferries (which may help somewhat explain why Staten Island was included, /u/aamirislam) and street cars. But look at a city that didn’t consolidate as aggressively, Boston. The MBTA serves all the “inner ring” suburbs (once known as “[street car suburbs](_URL_6_)”) like Cambridge, Brookline, and Somerville. The first streetcars, interestingly, were horse-drawn rather than electric or internal combustion and, in the Boston area, actually connecting Boston to Cambridge from the very start. Here, I think the difference from San Francisco and New York were more bridges than municipal boundaries: there were long bridges across the Charles, but the East River was harder to navigate, never mind San Fransisco Bay. The first bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan was of course the Brooklyn Bridge, which was started in 1869 and only finished in 1883. The next bridge to tie Manhattan to what are now the outer boroughs (the Williamsburg Bridge) wasn’t started until shortly before consolidation (1896) and wasn’t finished until after consolidation (1903). The first bridge across the San Francisco Bay didn’t open until 1937. By that point, there were six bridges connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens and I think maybe eight connecting Manhattan to the Bronx, with another bridge set to open in 1939 connecting the Bronx and Queens. The biggest period of subway growth was in the early 20th century. After 1950’s, there was less of an emphasis on rail travel and more of an emphasis on cars. Americans often take New York’s subway as typical, but it is really quite extraordinary, not just compared to other American cities, but compared to the rest of the world. For a long period of time, it was the only (or at least one of the very few) subway which ran 24 hours a day.
So, getting back to the original question, while of course the residents of what became the outer boroughs knew they were in the New York area, they didn’t always want to be part of New York (or even Brooklyn). When Brooklyn tried to annex the rest of Kings County in 1873, a local official from New Ultrech was quoted in the *Times* as saying:
> The government of New-Utrecht, he said, was the least expensive; it was only an agricultural village, a long way from Brooklyn, and not in need of being included in the expenses of municipal government, at least not for the present.
The soon to be consolidated towns of Kings County were small and, very often, still dominated by old Dutch farming families. Brooklyn often had similar cultural reasons for their reticence to join with Manhattan: Brooklyn was largely Protestant, whereas Manhattan had many more recent immigrants like Jews, Italians, and the Irish. These fears were particularly pronounced mid-century, closer to things like the 1863 Draft Riots, but they lingered on. The title of one 1894 NYT article: “[Greater New York in Doubt: the City Votes For It but Brooklyn is Uncertain](_URL_2_)” (then, in smaller type, the City of Churches’ [Brooklyn] Figures Held Back, It Is Said, By Politicians Who Want To Keep Their Power, Long Island City Gives a Majority of 2376, and All Richmond County [Staten Island] Is Willing to Join the City). To give a sense of how small the other boroughs were at the time, while New York was 1.8 million in 1890, and Brooklyn over 950k, Long Island City (the largest town in what would become Queens) was 30.5k, Flushing was 19.8k, Jamacaia was 14.4k, etc. Its worth noting that in this same period, much of Westchester was considered for consolidation, but ultimately decided against it.
While other areas seem to want access to both services and the future growth potential (making their real estate more valuable), as far as I can tell one major reason the already developed city of Brooklyn finally decided to join New York was water: New York City had already built an extensive system to bring in water from upstate, but Brooklyn still relied on local aquifers on Long Island. | [
"On January 1, 1898, the consolidated City of New York was born, including the Bronx as one of the five distinct boroughs (at the same time, the Bronx's territory moved from Westchester County into New York County, which already contained Manhattan and the rest of pre-1874 New York City).\n",
"On February 1, 1984... |
Why can't I look at a word without reading it? | Because the human mind is an expert at pattern and relationship/structure detection and recognition. That is essentially how we think.
We are masters of pattern recognition, so when you glance at a word your pattern mind kicks in and you have no conscious choice but to 'decode' that pattern. (you read the word).
But if you create a 'word' without those familiar patters, you will not 'read' it. So do you read **kzbuudccq**? | [
"BULLET::::- Sight word reading: reading words of increasing difficulty until they become unable to read or understand the words presented to them. Difficulty is manipulated by using words that have more letters or syllables, are less common and have more complicated spelling–sound relationships.\n",
"The field o... |
Reading recommendations on al-Andalus (Moorish Spain) | In my opinion, the two critical works are David Nirenberg's [*Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages*](_URL_1_) (1996) and Maria Rosa Menocal's [*Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain*](_URL_2_) (2002). Both books are beautiful reads and sure to evoke a strong reaction.
This article seems to be Rothstein's reaction: a rejection of Menocal's then-recent book about tolerance (what he means by "this image") in preference for views earlier established by Nirenberg and others about violence. But both Nirenberg and Menocal were making scholarly arguments full of nuance. In my opinion, both authors leave space for tolerance and violence to coexist in their visions of medieval Spain. I'd recommend reading both, probably starting with Nirenberg.
Rothstein only wants to see one side of things. He cherry picks examples of Muslim violence from almost 800 years of history to argue that medieval Spanish Islam was intolerant. This argument has methodological problems. I'm uncertain that his examples are a representative sample of Andalusian history. Rothstein doesn't show how these acts of intolerance are in fact symptomatic of Islam, so there's no "smoking gun" to show how these examples demonstrate specifically *Islamic* intolerance. And he doesn't attempt a comparative analysis, which would quickly show that these acts of intolerance were not in fact uniquely Muslim. His handling of both evidence and argument are therefore insufficient to provide a reliable answer to his question: "Was the Islam of Old Spain Truly Tolerant?"
I was, however, a bit perplexed at the supporting evidence he adduces. He cites Joel Kraemer, whose career seems to have been more narrowly focused on Greek and Judaic theological influences on medieval Islam. And he gives a rather thought-provoking analysis of the [Alahambra](_URL_0_) palace/fortress in Granada. But I'm not sure how either of these actually connects to his main arguments. I don't know whether Kraemer ever wrote specifically to consider issues of tolerance, or whether Rothstein's analysis of the Alhambra was rooted in or supported by scholarly study. There might be literature here that I simply haven't seen. | [
"Al-Andalus, also known as Muslim Spain, Muslim Iberia, or Islamic Iberia, was a medieval Muslim territory and cultural domain that in its early period included most of Iberia, today's Portugal and Spain. At its greatest geographical extent, it occupied the northwest of the Iberian peninsula and a part of present-d... |
nasa's announcement today. what is boeing and spacex and why is it all important? | Boeing is a major aerospace company, meaning they make spacecraft (and airplanes but let's stick with spacecraft), but they make them for governments. SpaceX is a newer company that is trying to manufacture reusable spacecraft that are affordable to private businesses.
Two important parts: Right now, the US doesn't have a space shuttle, so we have to rely on other countries to get our astronauts up to the space station. Since the country we've relied on is Russia and things are a little awkward right now, we're kind of stuck on the ground. So having a SpaceX craft operated by private companies would restore our ability to send our own astronauts up.
Second: think about the discovery and development of the New World. The original expeditions were funded by governments -- Spain, England, The Netherlands, etc. It wasn't until privately funded expeditions started heading out that it became possible to have long term colonies and regular trade between the Old and New Worlds.
Same thing with space. Once it's affordable for non-governmental entities to send missions and people up there, then we'll start to see things like bases on the Moon and Mars, mining of asteroids, much more extensive exploration, etc., and all of those things have enormous benefits both down here on Earth and for the future of humankind. | [
"In 2006, SpaceX was awarded a contract from NASA to continue the development and test of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft in order to transport cargo to the International Space Station, followed by a NASA Commercial Resupply Services program contract on December 23, 2008, for 12 flights of ... |
How did they introduce leap year in 45 BC? | > Were they technologically advanced back then to determine that the calendar needed a leap year?
Yes and people had been for some time. I assume you're talking about the introduction of the Julian calendar as you mention 45BC.
Greek astronomers had long known (for at least a century by 45BC) that the year was not exactly 365 days long, but more like 365.25. The original Roman calendar dealt with this by having a normal year of 365 days and occasionally adding an extra month between February and March called the *Mensis Intercalaris*. This extended the year and brought the calendar back into line with the solstice, at least in theory.
Unfortunately, how long the extra month was and what years it occurred in was determined by priests, who were often also politicians. Since Roman elections were based on the calendar it was not unheard of for priests to lengthen a year when their friends were in power, or refuse to when their enemies were. If no months were added for several years, or if they were added back to back, the calendar drifted out of sync with the seasons, causing no end of confusion, especially as the calendars were often published quite late.
Julius Caesar decided to fix this by reforming the calendar and removing the need for human intervention. And it worked for over a millennium until the introduction of the still more accurate Gregorian Calendar in 1582. | [
"The set leap day was introduced in Rome as a part of the Julian reform in the 1st century BC. As before, the intercalation was made after February 23. The day following the Terminalia (February 23) was doubled, forming the \"\"bis sextum\"\"—literally 'twice sixth', since February 24 was 'the sixth day before the ... |
why cant we use computers to solve the unsolved maths problems like the millennium prize problems etc? | Let's take the Riemann hypothesis. It's statement about *all* primes. The naive approach is to let a computer run through all primes, one by one, and check if the hypothesis is correct for that prime.
You know how many primes there are? It's a lot. Like a lot a lot. Infinitely many primes, in fact. Such a computer would need to do infinitely many calculations. Neither normal or quantum computers are capable of such a thing.
So unless we discover more exotic forms of computation, this approach will never work. | [
"Since around 1997 chess engines have been able to defeat even the strongest human players. Nevertheless, it is considered unlikely that computers will ever solve chess due to its computational complexity.\n",
"Recent advances in computer science have not significantly changed that assessment. The game of checker... |
why is counting cards in blackjack so heavily frowned against or punished if all you're using is your mind. are you not allowed to calculate with your brain when playing a game? | The only reason the house exists is because the odds are stacked for them. Learning to count shifts the odds to you. If everyone did it they'd lose money and eventually cease to exist. This obviously takes the liberty of suggesting everyone possesses the intellect to do it, which they don't. But coming down on the few who can discourages other from trying and increases their profits.
TLDR: they want more money | [
"Blackjack can be legally beaten by a skilled player. Beyond the basic strategy of when to hit and when to stand, individual players can use card counting, shuffle tracking or hole carding to improve their odds. Since the early 1960s a large number of card counting schemes have been published, and casinos have adju... |
What did a typical day of 17th century philosophers look like? Where did they get their income from? | The 17th century? Presuming you're referring to European philosophy, and sampling on the substantially eminent: while I'm not sure it makes much sense to speak of a 'typical day', elite philosophers i) very commonly held lecturerships or professorships at universities, ii) were engaged to tutor and guide eminent folks and their children, including monarchs, and iii) were awarded state pensions in recognition of their work by monarchs. For example:
* Hobbes was tutor to the Prince of Wales (later Charles II of England), who later made him a state pensioner of England.
* Descartes taught at the University of Utrecht and was awarded (though never actually received) a French state pension by Louis XIV; he also variously advised and/or tutored the Elector of Bavaria, Prince of Orange, and Queen (regnant) of Sweden, as well as Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia.
* Leibniz counseled the Elector of Mainz, the Electors of Brunswick-Lüneberg/Hanover, the Queen of Prussia, the Princess of Wales, and the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors
Then there's Spinoza, who declined the above kind of life in favor of remaining a lens grinder his entire life. | [
"Most of the important astronomers and natural philosophers (as well as artists) in the 16th and 17th centuries depended on the patronage of powerful religious or political figures to fund their work. Patronage networks extended all the way from Emperors and Popes to regional nobles to artisans to peasants; even un... |
How come the Middle Eastern world didn't undergo a "Muslim enlightenment" period, similar to the Christian enlightenment period in Western Europe? | First we need to recognize that this is an out and out counterfactual question which will not have a satisfactory answer. Explaining causality is difficult enough, explaining something as complex as why an entire intellectual movement *didn't* happen is impossible.
That being said I think I can point to the discussion of some things that might be pertinent. Unfortunately a good amount of this post, perhaps even a majority, will be about the European enlightenment which is *not* a specialty of mine, so if any of our European historians want to chime on any mistakes I make please do.
With that being said, let's answer a few preliminary questions:
**What was the European enlightenment?**
The Enlightenment refers to a period in roughly the 18th century. It takes its name from the cultural, political and intellectual legacy of the period in which, as the name would suggest, self-identified virtues of "enlightenment" were given cultural force: reason, liberalism, liberty, limited government, religious toleration.
On the one hand, while we can quite clearly identify a lot of Good Things that came out of the enlightenment, it was hardly an unblemished success. While we often think of "Science" as a good in and of itself, 18th century scientism also gave us the very *un*-scientific practice of [scientific racism.](_URL_4_) At the same time that Thomas Jefferson was writing about how all men were created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with, among other things, liberty, Jefferson was also a slave owner. The age of Rousseau was also an age of absolute monarchy. And so on.
On balance however we take these positions as enlightened not only because they form a jumping off point for modern liberalism, modern science, and so on, but also in contrast to what came before.
**Why did Europe undergo an enlightenment?**
The time period between when Luther publishes his 95 Theses in 1517 and the end of the European Wars of Religion is a pretty disastrous time period all around. In the 30 Years War in the German states you have territories that lose 30-40% of their population. They're closely followed in death toll by the French Wars of Religion. Then you have the English civil war which entailed not only battlefield slaughter but the political upheaval of regicide as well.
What's more, even after the worst of the violence subsides by the end of the ~~18~~17th century, it's clear that intellectually Europe is still in a bit of chaos. Once the edifice of the Universal Church is torn down, there is nothing obvious in Christian religion that could replace it. This was true even in Catholic Europe, which was changed, I won't say as much as the reformation, but to a very great extent by the counter-reformation.
All of that being said, it's clear that if we go with our earlier definition of what the enlightenment was, it's clear that the intellectual pre-cursors of the enlightenment come out of or are a reaction to the reformation. Whether it's the science of the Baconian method, the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, the state system and religious "toleration" of the Peace of Westphalia, we can see the Enlightenment as a reaction to a particular set of circumstances that came out of the tumult of the reformation and the wars of religion. i.e. Locke's toleration is only necessary if you have such an intense multiplicity of conflicting viewpoints that they are in need of toleration (also remember that Locke's toleration did not extend to atheists and Catholics).
**What was going on in the Middle East?**
Well, frankly, nothing like that. The mass internecine religious slaughter that was going on in Europe had no parallel in the Islamic world. Certainly Islam was *incredibly* diverse in its practices during this period. The advent of Sufi orders in the later middle ages and their spread meant that practically the entire male urban population of the Islamic world may have been members of a particular "tariqa" Sufi order, of which there were thousands. But all of this was perfectly *orthodox*. "Toleration" of a basic kind was baked in the cake, even if it was not raised to a cultural or intellectual virtue as with Locke. In other words, Muslims were more tolerant of their differences with other faiths than Christians were of one another in this period, but they did not pat themselves on the back and say "look how tolerant we're being to the Dhimmis." It was just the law.
**Ok but surely something had to change over time in reaction to Europe, no?**
Oh definitely. Islamdom was not ignorant of what was going on in Christendom. Let's look at one concrete outcome of this time period, the European scientific revolution and the [Military Revolution](_URL_0_) (which is itself a controversial idea, but let's discuss it as-is).
The Ottomans (I'm more familiar with them than I am with the other gunpowder empires, the Safavids/Qajars and the Mughals but I believe this would apply equally) took an approach to scientific development that I think is more pragmatic than most 21st century people might think would be possible.
So for instance, they were perfectly happy to adopt the latest and greatest scientific developments in military hardware. But they also successfully suppressed the advent of the printing press in the Arab world for 300 years.
Now, if you're a technological determinist you might end the story right there. It's hard to imagine the Enlightenment, which involved such an enormous volume of *discourse*, without the advent of the printing press to facilitate that discourse. Imagine if *The Social Contract* had to be hand copied and disseminated with the permission of the state. It's impossible.
I, personally, am *not* a technological determinist but it nonetheless strikes me as obvious that there were technological developments in Europe, like the printing press, that when combined with proximate but diverse states that allowed some degree of press freedom (e.g. the Netherlands for England) that allowed for cultural developments that are hard to imagine in the absence of those specific factors.
**How did the Middle East/Islamic world react to the Enlightenment?**
Well, it's interesting. Absent the printing press and a systematic market for translation of European texts, these ideas, to my knowledge, did not disseminate during the period of the Enlightenment itself (at least in the Arab world, I'm less familiar with Turkish discourse, it's possible that the intellectual life of Istanbul may have been different than that of Cairo).
It's therefore almost hilariously ironic (given 200 years of temporal distance) that the ideas of the enlightenment were unavoidably introduced into Middle Easter and Islamic history in the most *un*enlightened way imaginable: at gunpoint.
Specifically, when Napoleon decides in 1798 to take the French revolution global and invades Egypt, he does so on the basis of liberating the Egyptians from the Mamelukes, introducing them to the Rights of Man and bringing them all of the intellectual, cultural, scientific and political fruits of the enlightenment (at least ostensibly. In reality Napoleon probably just wanted a route to India.) Moreover, they paid far more than lip service to these ideas. Napoleon brought with him the [Commission des Sciences et des Arts](_URL_1_) which included what we would today describe as linguists, botanists, ethnologists, geographers, artists, chemists, engineers, historians, archaeologists, etc. etc. They found the [Institut d'Egypte](_URL_2_) and eventually publish the monumental [Description de l'Égypte](_URL_3_). Bonaparte brings with him the first Arabic language printing press. Upon landing he announces the ideological intentions of his campaign in enlightenment terms.
The best (indeed, to my knowledge, the only full-length) native Egyptian reaction we have to this is the chronicle of al-Jabarti. Jabarti was a bonafide member of the religious scholarly elite establishment in Egypt. What did he think of all this?
Well, first of all, he was savvy enough to see that Napoleon's statement to the Egyptian people of his intentions was unbelievably patronizing and cynical. In that declaration, Napoleon stated:
> O ye Qadis, Shaykhs and Imams; O ye Shurbajiyya and men of circumstance tell your nation that the French are also faithful Muslims, and in confirmation of this they invaded Rome and destroyed there the Papal See, which was always exhorting the Christians to make war with Islam. And then they went to the island of Malta, from where they expelled the Knights, who claimed that God the Exalted required them to fight the Muslims. Furthermore, the French at all times have declared themselves to be the most sincere friends of the Ottoman Sultan and the enemy of his enemies, may God ever perpetuate his empire!
Jabarti (rightly) recognizes this for the opportunism that it is:
> As for his statement ‘and destroyed there the Papal See’, by this deed they have gone against the Christians as has already been pointed out. So those people are opposed to both Christians and Muslims, and do not hold fast to any religion. You see that they are materialists, who deny all God’s attributes, the Hereafter and Resurrection, and who reject Prophethood and Messengership.
On the face of the French Revolutionary claims of Egalite, Jabarti found the claim to be ridiculous:
> His saying ‘[all people] are equal in the eyes of God’ the Almighty, this is a lie and stupidity. How can this be when God has made some superior to others as is testified by the dwellers in the Heavens and on the Earth?
I'm running out of characters in this post so I'll continue in a Part II.
edit: typos | [
"After Muhammad introduced Islam, it jump-started Middle Eastern culture into an Islamic Golden Age, inspiring achievements in architecture, the revival of old advances in science and technology, and the formation of a distinct way of life. Muslims saved and spread Greek advances in medicine, algebra, geometry, ast... |
Is quantum entanglement really as cool and mysterious as people make it out to be or are they misinterpreting the idea? | As a layman, I found [this](_URL_1_) article to be a very clear and helpful explanation of quantum entanglement. In particular, [ page 5](_URL_0_) describes Bell's inequality and exactly what is so unintuitive about it.
As for evidence for souls, it's not the first thing kooks have wilfully misinterpreted to fit their claims, and it won't be the last. | [
"Many quantum information applications, such as quantum teleportation, quantum error correction, and superdense coding, rely on entanglement. However, entanglement is a fragile quantum property between particles and can be easily destroyed by loss and noise arising from interaction with the environment, leading to ... |
how does a pimp have so much control over a prostitute? (nsfw) | For the type of pimping you're talking about, its not physical bondage, it's a state of mind.
There's a girl.
She's predisposed to be needy, impressionable. Maybe she's young, maybe she's from out of town, maybe she has low self esteem, but she definitely is missing something in her life. She wants a rock.
She meets a guy.
God, he's confident. He seems to know everybody, and he's got a lot of money. He's got it all figured out.
He takes an interest in her.
She's into him and he returns the interest. As they talk, he learns why she's vulnerable. She's been thrown out, or her last boyfriend left her for a pretty girl.
The guy is unflappable.
You've been going about this all wrong. Stick with me, girl. I'll show how to live life.
They party. Have sex. She could get used to this.
Then he tells her that the party is just getting started. He wants her to have sex with his friend.
The girl thinks it's weird, but Jesus he's certain. Insistent. Convincing. He's not the kinda guy you say no to.
She does it, and he doesn't disown her. He rewards her obedience.
Then he has her do it again. It's weird, but easier, and the lifestyle continues.
She meets other girls that do the same thing for him. They're like a team. No one says no to him.
Now go outside/take these pictures for craigslist, and fuck who I tell you to fuck.
What? You don't want to?? Where you going to go? You gonna run back to your parents after you've been out here sucking strange dicks bitch? You're a whore. Nobody wants you coming home to them, kissing them with that mouth. No one can love someone like you.
No one except me.
Aren't you lucky I found you?
Edit:
In response to a lot of the replies---yes, physical violence is a tool, yes drugs are sometimes involved, yes passports can be confiscated.
But none of that is essential.
There are pimps that don't beat their women, pimps that don't permit their girls to use drugs, pimps that pimp girls in their home town, no passport required.
What is ALWAYS there in the form of pimping I've described, is that the woman feels as though she'd be lost without him, and that if he doesn't love her, no one else will. And the longer she's in "the life", the more she debases herself, the luckier she is to have this man who'll love her despite the fact that she's a whore (the lowest slot for a woman in society).
Her family would be ashamed of her.
The police want to arrest her.
Other men buy and use her.
Her whole life is Shame.
But this guy, who's smooth and cool and gets shit done, he'll still have her, as long as she pays her way.
His love is the drug. Withholding it is the violence.
It's the same things cults do: i know the way. You are unclean, but if you're obedient, I'll lead you. Hand me your self worth, I'll give you acceptance.
This is how a person's self is obliterated, and they are brought under the complete command of another.
Pimping is everywhere.
| [
"In street prostitution, the prostitute solicits customers while waiting at street corners, sometimes called \"the track\" by pimps and prostitutes alike. They usually dress in skimpy, provocative clothing, regardless of the weather. Street prostitutes are often called \"streetwalkers\" while their customers are re... |
What kind of tea would have been thrown into Boston harbor during the Boston Tea Party? | As it happens, there is a document reprinted in Benjamin Labree’s [*The Boston Tea Party, 1773*](_URL_5_), which details the exact composition of the crates of tea that were dumped into Boston Harbor in December 1773. The official report, filed in February 1774, lists the following: out of 340 crates carried on the Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver, 240 contained Bohea, 215 were Congou, 10 were Souchong, 60 were Singlo, and 15 were Hyson.
So what exactly were these varieties of tea? Even though the tea monopoly belonged to the East India Company, all the tea leaves were imported from China. While the Chinese themselves had a sophisticated system of classifying tea – defining tea varieties primarily on the place of origin, as well as by mode of preparation and quality of the leaves – English merchants had a cruder method of defining tea by color and appearance.
In the early years of the tea trade, dominated by the Dutch, green teas dominated, but by the mid-18th century the Dutch had innovated methods of exporting a kind of black tea commonly known as [Bohea]( _URL_4_), which was a cheap, low-quality variety that allowed tea-drinking to become popular in both Europe and among American colonists.
The tea took its name from the Wuyi mountains between Fujian and Hokkien province; “Bohea” was the English pronunciation of the Fujianese word. The superior grade of Bohea, also from the Fujian area, was known as [Congou]( _URL_0_), derived from the word *kung fu*, meaning “skill”. By the 19th century, this variety became the basis of English breakfast tea.
[Souchong]( _URL_1_) was another high-grade black tea variety from the Wuyi mountains, often made by roasting leaves in a bamboo basket. The word simply meant “variety of leaf”.
Singlo and [Hyson](_URL_3_) were varieties of green tea, grown in the Anhui province. Hyson was possibly named after Philip Hyson, director the East India Company, although a high-quality variety picked in the spring was known as yu-tsien, meaning “before the rains”.
Singlo was also a green tea, with larger leaves than Hyson, which was typically picked later in the seaon. According to [this 1813 source](_URL_2_), Singlo was “more dusty than Hyson tea… twice tossed in baskets: Hyson only once.”
For more on the 18th-century tea trade, see Chris Nierstrasz, *Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles: The English and Dutch East India companies (1700–1800)*; Markman Ellis, ed., *Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England*
| [
"The Boston Tea Party was an act of protest by the American colonists against Great Britain for the Tea Act in which they dumped many chests of tea into Boston Harbor. The cuts to taxation on tea undermined American smugglers, who destroyed the tea in retaliation for its exemption from taxes. Britain reacted harshl... |
why are we so obsessed with being lazy? | Hard work pays off eventually but laziness pays off immediately. | [
"One near contemporary presentation of lazy reason is the theme of the 1956 popular song \"Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)\". In the song, a young child repeatedly asks questions about her future, but is advised that \"Whatever will be, will be\":\n",
"\"The Right to be Lazy\" is an essay by Cuban-born... |
why is metal coins cheaper than paper/bills? | The initial cost of printing a bill may be cheaper than minting a coin, but coins can last much longer in currency because they are more durable. Paper notes get torn, washed, or crinkled and need to be replaced every few years, whereas coins will last decades. When was the last time you saw a paper bill from 1970 vs a coin from the same year?
While the production cost of an individual bill is cheaper than a coin, the longevity of a coin will make it cheaper over the lifetime (amount of years you can use it for) versus a paper bill. | [
"This has been a particular problem with nickels and dimes (and with some comparable coins in other currencies) because of their relatively low face value and unstable commodity prices. For a while, the copper in US pennies was worth more than one cent, so people would hoard pennies and then melt them down for thei... |
Are there examples of equations being right mathematically but wrong practically? | Yes, all the time. But it's never the equations fault. It's our fault for assuming simplifications that don't work.
IE the electrostatic force is proportional to 1/r^(2), but at r=0 we get infinity. The true answer isn't infinity, we just modeled the situation of r=0 improperly.
As to a black hole, there is a lot of belief that the event horizon of a black hole is the failure point of general relativity. At least, we have 0 evidence that GR should work in that region. All we know is that GR provides no contradictory observations when we look at black holes, and that's mainly because we can't look at anything besides the exterior of one. So trying to decide whether it works on the interior is just blind guessing. But the equations get weird. Plus, at that point, quantum mechanical behavior becomes more important and our lack of a quantum mechanical description of gravity further confuses this.
At any rate, we KNOW something weird happens at the event horizon. Observation tells us this and our equations agree with it. But the likelihood is that beyond the event horizon, our equations are wrong and probably don't work. | [
"and so forth. The expressions on the right (with no parentheses whatsoever) are allowed to be written unambiguously \"because\" of the equalities on the left. Note that the associative property does \"not\" hold for expressions that include nonlinear operators, such as the antilinear time reversal operator in phys... |
who created the orcs? | Tolkien did.
There was a term 'Orcus' in Latin which was a deity of the underworld. This is where Tolkien likely got it from, but he was the first to use the word "orc" in reference to evil, humanoid creatures. | [
"The origin of Orcs is an open question. Tolkien developed various origins for his Orcs throughout his life but died before he could fully revise \"The Silmarillion\" with his final view on their origins and nature.\n",
"Orcs were a race first bred by Morgoth, which mostly lived in mountain caves and disliked sun... |
what is the difference between a voice played digitally versus a voice produced in person? | The folks at Amazon know the exact sound pattern of every time they use the word "Alexa" in an ad. They check the digital signature sent by your Echo, and if it's a commercial they ignore it. For a laugh, watch an old episode of the Castle TV show. The main character's daughter is named Alexa, and your Echo will get super confused in the episodes including her. | [
"In film, the filmmaker places the sound of a human voice (or voices) over images shown on the screen that may or may not be related to the words that are being spoken. Consequently, voiceovers are sometimes used to create ironic counterpoint. Also, sometimes they can be random voices not directly connected to the ... |
stereotypes of us cities/regions | San Francisco: Gay
Los Angeles: Shallow
Seattle: Hipster
Portland: Even more hipster
Washington DC: Corrupt
New York: Asshole
Philadelphia: Low class | [
"In 2004, the city was named one of the top 100 places to live, according to HomeRoute, a national real estate marketing company which identifies top American cities each year through its Relocate-America program. Cities are selected based on educational opportunities, crime rates, employment and housing data. The ... |
why are people getting arrested for peacefully protesting? | To hold a rally near the White House, you need a permit. This is for safety of everyone involved and to let the city know how many police to have available to assists/control...close roads, keep it safe. Without a permit, you are in violation of city law and get arrested.
This most recent event had no permit. | [
"The Ministry of Safety and Security issued a statement that read while protesting is legal, \"these rights do not imply that people should be barbaric, intimidating and hold illegal gatherings.\" The ministry defended the police's actions, saying that this was a situation in which people were heavily armed and att... |
what differences in brain structure/function cause depression, and how do antidepressants help? i've been told we don't *fully* understand the science yet, but what do we know so far? | Generally speaking, depression is associated with low levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin in certain parts of the brain. Having a balance of each is essential to “normal” functioning. Antidepressants such as SSRIs handle the serotonin, MAOIs prevent the breakdown of dopamine, and tricyclic antidepressants help balance both serotonin and norepinephrine.
Think of dopamine as the brain’s motivation and reward-seeking neurotransmitter. We need it to put effort into life goals and to also feel rewarded from achieving goals and positive feedback from the environment. Too little dopamine=little/no motivation and pleasure seeking.
Norepinephrine can be loosely thought of as adrenaline. We need it for attention, awareness, and responding. Similar to those with ADHD, people with depression may also have low levels of norepinephrine, and experience similar problems with attention and concentration. “Pseudodementia,” for example, refers to the attention and memory impairments caused by depression that would otherwise seem like dementia.
Serotonin does a lot of different things, but in terms of depression, serotonin is responsible for balancing mood, appetite, sex drive, sociability, sleep, etc. Depressed people with low serotonin levels usually have problems with eating too much/little, sleeping too much/little, not wanting to even get out of bed most days.
In terms of brain structure changes, depression can cause our hippocampus to wither and shrink. This part of our brain is vital for learning and converting short term memory to long term memory. Fortunately, we are able to “exercise” our hippocampus’ back to health (i.e. solving puzzles, spatial awareness activities). This is a big part of why depression includes a lot of problems with thinking speed, concentrating, and recalling memories.
I apologize for no sources. I’m currently an unlicensed psychologist working towards licensure and this is my first ELI5 response.
| [
"Some studies have hypothesized that learning and memory are linked to depression, and that neurogenesis may promote neuroplasticity. One study proposes that mood may be regulated, at a base level, by plasticity, and thus \"not chemistry\". Accordingly, the effects of antidepressant treatment would only be secondar... |
North Korea's July 4th missile reached an altitude of 1700 miles. Why are scientists saying its range is only 4160 miles? Why couldn't it orbit/deorbit to anywhere on earth? | Note that NK is testing a *ballistic* missile. By definition, a ballistic missile follows a ballistic trajectory, e.g., it burns its fuel immediately, and the just goes where gravity (and air resistance, etc.) take it.
Getting an object into orbit, and deorbiting it accurately, is a considerably more complex task. There isn't a ballistic trajectory into orbit - either it escapes, or it comes back down, unless you're able to fire a second stage once you're in space to circularize the orbit. But orbits are (basically) stable, so to get it back *out* of orbit, you need a third stage.
It's not impossible, but it's a much harder task. Especially if you need to aim precisely and keep your payload intact. | [
"North Korea stated that the missile reached an altitude of around 4,475 km and traveled some 950 km downrange with a flight time of 53 minutes. Based on its trajectory and distance, the missile would have a range of more than 13,000 km (8,100 miles) – more than enough to reach Washington D.C. and the rest of the U... |
Why does the the cosmic background radiation have a uniform temperature of 2.7 K? | The light is redshifted not because it has traveled, but because the universe has expanded.
In the early universe, the photons were in thermal equilibrium with matter. When the universe was about 375000 years old, atoms formed, and the light *decoupled*, meaning that, generally speaking, it was no longer regularly interacting with other things.
At that time, the light was in thermal equilibrium at a temperature of 3000K. As the universe expanded, as you suspected, the redshift keeps the spectrum a thermal spectrum, just at gradually lower temperatures.
| [
"The cosmic microwave background radiation is an emission of uniform, black body thermal energy coming from all parts of the sky. The radiation is isotropic to roughly one part in 100,000: the root mean square variations are only 18 µK, after subtracting out a dipole anisotropy from the Doppler shift of the backgro... |
how long would it take to see the stars when you take light pollution away? | As long as it takes for your eyes to adjust—light pollution isn’t a physical substance, so it doesn’t “linger”. So probably about 30 minutes. | [
"As noted below, such a cloud of collectors would alter the light emitted by the star system. However, the disruption compared to a star's overall natural emitted spectrum would most likely be too small for Earth-based astronomers to observe.\n",
"Light pollution is an ever-increasing source of sky brightness in ... |
what does "synthetic" really mean and why isn't everything synthetic? | It can mean that it was created in a lab rather than by natural process, or it can mean the thing that was created does not exist in nature and so was created in a lab. This applies to things that are changed chemically. A fruit mashed into jam by a human is not synthetic jam. It's not a very good definition, since cooking technically changes things chemically. Vague definitions like this are the reason we need court cases to determine if something is or is not synthetic | [
"The term \"synthetic\" is also used incorrectly by lay \"experts\" in two different ways - to refer to the process used to manufacture all estrogens, including bioidentical estrogens, and to compounds that interact with estrogen receptors similarly to estrogen molecules, but that are not found in nature. Examples ... |
thyroid hormones and their individual purposes. | The thyroid gland uses iodine from food to produce two hormones: triiodothyronine, known as T3, and thyroxine, known as T4. These hormones affect every cell and organ in the body. They do everything from regulate the rate at which calories are burned to regulate our body temperature. They control the rate at which dying cells are replaced. They speed up and slow down the heartbeat. They control the way our muscles expand and contract. They even control the rate at which we digest food. These hormones regulate all of our most important body functions, from heartrate and respiration to digestion, menstrual cycles, cholesterol levels, weight, muscle strength, and more. It is a vital part of our endocrine system.
It is important that the T3 and T4 levels are neither too high nor too low. Two glands in our brains, the hypothalmus and the pituitary glands, work in conjunction to regulate the levels of T3 and T4. The hypothalamus produces TSH Releasing Hormone (TRH) that signals the pituitary to tell the thyroid gland to produce more or less of T3 and T4 by either increasing or decreasing the release of a hormone called thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH).
If you have too much T3 and/or T4, you have *hyperthyroidism*, leading to:
* Anxiety
* Irritability or moodiness
* Nervousness, hyperactivity
* Sweating or sensitivity to high temperatures
* Hand trembling (shaking)
* Hair loss
* Missed or light menstrual periods
If you have too little T3 and/or T4, you have *hypothyroidism*, leading to:
* Trouble sleeping
* Tiredness and fatigue
* Difficulty concentrating
* Dry skin and hair
* Depression
* Sensitivity to cold temperature
* Frequent, heavy periods
* Joint and muscle pain
Since the thyroid uses iodine to produce the hormones, not getting enough iodine can be troublesome. It can cause either hyper- or hypo-thyroidism, or a goiter (which is an abnormally large thyroid, visible in the neck). Other problems that affect the thyroid are Grave's disease, which is an autoimmune disorder that causes hyperthyroidism, and Hashimoto's disease, which causes hypothyroidism. | [
"The thyroid hormones act on nearly every cell in the body. They act to increase the basal metabolic rate, affect protein synthesis, help regulate long bone growth (synergy with growth hormone) and neural maturation, and increase the body's sensitivity to catecholamines (such as adrenaline) by permissiveness. The t... |
why does israel continue to build/expand settlements in palestinian lands despite international condemnation? | Cause it does not care.
It gets the USA to veto any action against it at the UN. The P5 countries: US/RUSSIA/CHINA/UK/FRANCE can put a magic veto on any action they don't like against a country they support. So the UN has really no power at all, just puppet bullshit and more money wasting. The are also the biggest weapons dealers in the world BTW
Pretty much the same way Israel has nuclear weapons, still gets tons of money from the USA (which is illegal, can't give aid to nuclear armed countries) AND still tells Iran they can't have nuclear, although they themselves did not sign the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty AND do not let the UN/International agency inspect their nuclear installations (pretends they don't have any weapons
and if you think Israel is doing anything wrong you are a Nazi anti-semite. | [
"Palestinians claim that Israel has undermined the Oslo accords and peace process by continuing to expand the settlements. Settlements in the Sinai Peninsula were evacuated and razed in the wake of the peace agreement with Egypt. The 27 ministers of foreign affairs of the European Union published a report in May 20... |
why can't most humans squat as fully and as deep as when we were babies/very young? | Sorry, the title should say adults, not humans haha. | [
"Young children squat instinctively as a continuous movement from standing up whenever they want to lower themselves to ground level. One- and two-year-olds can commonly be seen playing in a stable squatting position, with feet wide apart and bottom not quite touching the floor, although at first they need to hold ... |
difference between malware and viruses? | 'Malware' is just short for malicious software and 'virus' is a program that replicates itself and infects other files/systems. A virus is a form of malware.
What is malicious is open for interpretation though, I despise stuff like toolbars for your browser and other spyware while some crazy people like them. As such we have anti-viruses because we know that all viruses are bad. | [
"The best-known types of malware, viruses and worms, are known for the manner in which they spread, rather than any specific types of behavior. A computer virus is software that embeds itself in some other executable software (including the operating system itself) on the target system without the user's knowledge ... |
Can someone talk about the spread of Buddhism? | hi! here are a few previous threads to get you started
[Spread of Buddhism](_URL_0_)
[AMA: Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, the Three Great Traditions of China](_URL_5_)
[How did Hinduism, Buddhism & Indian culture spread through SE Asia?](_URL_1_)
[How did Buddhism spread to Japan and why it didn't spread to Europe?](_URL_3_)
[When did Buddhism become the dominant religion in japan?](_URL_2_)
[Why didn't Buddhism spread west to the Mediterranean like it spread east into China?](_URL_4_)
[Why didn't Buddhism spread westward towards Europe despite the contact between the Greeks and the Indoiranians after the conquests of Alexander the Great?](_URL_6_) | [
"Buddhism is a world religion, which arose in and around the ancient Kingdom of Magadha (now in Bihar, India), and is based on the teachings of Siddhārtha Gautama who was deemed a \"Buddha\" (\"Awakened One\"). Buddhism spread outside of Magadha starting in the Buddha's lifetime.\n",
"Buddhism was founded in 500 ... |
Which shape will yield the greatest ratio of area to perimeter? | Given any closed curve of length L in a plane, the area A it encloses satisfies the *isoperimetic inequality*
> 4πA ≤ L^(2)
Equality holds if and only if the curve is a circle. So if you fix the perimeter of an area, the greatest area is achieved if the perimeter is a circle.
This inequality has higher dimensional generalizations, e.g., for a fixed surface area, the sphere encloses the largest volume. They can be proved using some standard graduate analysis. (The n-dimensional analog is equivalent to the Sobolev inequality, for instance.) There are also generalizations to arbitrary measure spaces, which are studied in detail in a branch of math called *geometric measure theory*. | [
"The measures for it are approximately 2,15m x 10,11m x 10,11m (6 ft 6 inches x 33 ft 4.25 inches x 33ft4.25in), thus having the perimeter of ≈32,48m (≈106,56ft) and the area of ≈219,75m² (≈730,96ft²).\n",
"The perimeter is the distance around a shape. Perimeters for more general shapes can be calculated, as any ... |
What was the Anglo-Saxon hierarchy like? How did the nobility function and what were similarities and differences with the nobles of continental Western Europe? | At the bottom you've got your serf, these are essentially slaves to the land they are on (and its landowner). There are a few distinctions between them and slaves but in practice there is little difference.
Your next highest are Ceorls. These are free men but lowest of the low. They are you peasant farmers, they will form the rank and file of the Fyrd armies.
Thegns are above Ceorls, they are families the Eardermen rely on to govern their land. In the most part they were important military leaders but they could also be civic leaders or the premier family in a village.
Ealdormen were next. These men ruled a patch of land in the name of the King. You are right to point out there is a change in this during Canute's reign. Under Athelstan there were a lot of Ealdormen controlling a patchwork of burghs or shires. They usually ruled for life and the sons of ealdormen almost always were ealdormen themselves but not necessarily of the same area as their fathers. Often they were given a different region. This was to reinforce the notion that they did not inherit the land but were appointees of the King, who also had the power to revoke ealdoms. Now these are a lot of ealdormen for a king to manage and it does appear the system was prone to factionalism. Canute decides to simplify things. He creates Earls (an imported Danish term for Ealdermen) above the old Ealdermen who now act more like Thegns of their land. Instead of small shire sized areas these far fewer earls rule roughly what were the boundaries of the old anglo-saxon seven kingdoms. Map below
_URL_0_
Earls were massive powerful rulers. Canute is this great powerful leader with an empire behind him so he was more than capable of keeping the Earls in line and was happy with how much simpler these changes made ruling England, but he'd created a real difficulty for his successors. Edward the Confessor can not get himself out of control of the Godwins who have sown up the majority of ealdoms. William the conqueror's solution is to bring back the patchwork of little lords directly answerable to him and get rid of these big powerful Earls.
The King you know.
Reeves are the King's officials with a role specifically of administering the King's Justice and collecting taxation. | [
"Traditional rank amongst European royalty, peers, and nobility is rooted in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Although they vary over time and among geographic regions (for example, one region's prince might be equal to another's grand duke), the following is a reasonably comprehensive list that provides informa... |
from where the light photons get energy to move at such a high speed?do they keep on moving forever? | You do not need energy to keep moving if you are already moving and are not affected by friction, resistance etc. You need energy to gain speed, that is, to accelerate, the more mass you have, the more energy you need. Photons do not have a rest mass. This is why they do not need energy to move at all and move forever. | [
"Light particles, or photons, travel at the speed of \"c\", the constant that is conventionally known as the \"speed of light\". This statement is not a tautology, since many modern formulations of relativity do not start with constant speed of light as a postulate. Photons therefore propagate along a light-like wo... |
Why do allergies seasonal or otherwise make people so tired? What is happening here? | Remember that Allergies are an activation of your immune system. Your body believes that it is under attack and is trying to fight it. It's the same tiredness that you feel when you're actually sick. Your body is using a lot of energy to attempt to remove the pathogen that it thinks is going to do harm.
From wikipedia, "Activated mast cells and basophils undergo a process called degranulation, during which they release histamine and other inflammatory chemical mediators (cytokines, interleukins, leukotrienes, and prostaglandins) from their granules into the surrounding tissue causing several systemic effects, such as vasodilation, mucous secretion, nerve stimulation, and smooth muscle contraction. This results in rhinorrhea, itchiness, dyspnea, and anaphylaxis."
| [
"Seasonal allergy symptoms are commonly experienced during specific parts of the year, usually during spring, summer or fall when certain trees or grasses pollinate. This depends on the kind of tree or grass. For instance, some trees such as oak, elm, and maple pollinate in the spring, while grasses such as Bermuda... |
why does lightning make these funny fractal lines when passing through mediums of high resistance? | It's for the same reason that river systems have that same pattern. Electrons are not flowing out of the source of electricity, but rather the electrons are being pulled towards the source. The electrons naturally move along the paths of least resistance, in the same way that water flowing from the ground naturally flows where the descent is steepest. These paths start at all different points, but keep converging. This is also natural. Think about driving from NYC to San Francisco, vs. NYC to Los Angeles. The shortest routes would likely be very similar at first, and only diverge as you got farther west.
The reason you see the scorch marks propagating out is because it's not until the flow of electrons actually reaches the lead that the scorching occurs. Naturally, the paths that began closer to it will reach it first. | [
"Although the electrical breakdown mechanisms of air and PMMA plastic are considerably different, the branching discharges turn out to be related. So, it should not be surprising that the branching forms taken by natural lightning also have fractal characteristics.\n",
"This characteristic ensures the reliability... |
How tall will a human grow if raised in a zero gravity environment | Osteoperosis from a young age. I don't think this is possible. Bone loss is one of the effects of zero gravity. I imagine one born in space wouldn't live very long. | [
"In January 2018 Kanai received publicity after mistakenly tweeting that he had grown \"as much as 9 cm\" taller due to the absence of gravity. Microgravity allows the vertebrae in astronauts' spines to spread apart; typical growth for astronauts in zero-gravity is two to five centimeters. A 9 cm growth spurt might... |
can someone explain what happens if euro is dissolved and we go back to europe having individual currencies per country? | Given that this is ELI5 -- Bad stuff.
All countries need a currency in which to trade, and some currencies are more attractive to international traders than others. For example, you can't buy a jet engine with the Malaysian ringgit, rice with the Icelandic krona, or robotic factory equipment with the Saudi riyal. By contrast, you need Australian dollars in order to purchase Australian minerals, Canadian dollars in order to purchase oil from Alberta, and the Indian rupee to purchase Varanasi silk.
(This is glossing heavily because you *can* buy commodities and products on the world market just about anywhere that's someone's willing to export them, particularly with currencies like the American dollar or the Euro. However, that still means that the person who got them in the first place had to pay for them in the original currency. Australian opal miners don't want to be paid for their work in Japanese yen, because they don't *use* Japanese yen.)
So. If the EU dumps the Euro and all of the countries involved go back to their individual currencies, this is what's most *likely* to happen:
- **The PIIGS go back to their own currencies and massive inflation results:** Greece is obviously the biggest problem here, so let's tackle them first. They have huge debts to pay off, and one of the reasons that it's actually been *suggested* that they return to the drachma is that they could inflate their way out of the debt.
Let's say you're ten years old and running a sidewalk lemonade stand, and you've been paying Mom and Dad for your lemons, sugar, and cups with some of the profits you're making. You decide that you want to keep all the money instead and pay for your materials in another way, so you approach them with a deal in mind. Instead of paying them in money, you'll collect firewood instead. Mom and Dad agree and you congratulate yourself on your cleverness. That first night, you give them a stick and ask for the next day's lemons with it.
"Hell no," says Dad. "One stick is not worth 100 lemons. Come back with half a cord or just go back to paying me like you were."
"But one stick is the same as the $5 I was paying you for the lemons yesterday," you protest.
"Fuck no it isn't."
"Dear, don't swear in front of our son," says Mom.
"I'll swear if I want to. He's trying to pull a fast one. The labor represented by one stick is not worth $5 to me. That means *I* still need to go collect firewood on top of paying for his lemonade materials. That's a terrible deal. Half a cord of firewood is worth $5 to me."
So you trudge off to go collect half a cord of firewood because if Dad isn't willing to give you 100 lemons in return for a stick, then he's right -- one stick isn't worth 100 lemons. So your day-to-day costs have just "inflated" to the point where you have to spend 45 minutes every day collecting half a cord of firewood, or the equivalent of like 500 sticks. Now, you *could* go back to just paying Dad the $5 for your daily costs, but either way, you have to pay him something he's willing to accept as good value.
Now, inflation isn't always a bad thing, and a certain amount of it is basically guaranteed to each economy as it grows. But a lot of inflation tends to be really bad for individuals who've saved. For example, retirees tend to be heavily penalized by inflation, because if there's a lot of it, than the $50 they saved forty years ago doesn't buy anywhere near as much as they want it to now. With bad inflation, maybe in fifty years the $20,000 I have in the bank will buy a stick of gum or something. So while the Greek government can return to the drachma, start the printing presses, and print enough drachmas to pay off its debts, the drachma would inflate to the point of being almost worthless as a currency because ... well, it's basically the stick you were trying to pay Dad with earlier. And nobody wants sticks.
- **Oh, right, the rest of the PIIGS:** As for the rest of the PIIGS, that's a little tougher to predict. Spain was actually doing pretty well before the Euro hit, and they've been struggling ever since because the Euro is a more expensive currency than the peseta. This is one of the reasons there's a lot of resentment directed at the Germans for forcing austerity on countries who don't feel they did anything to deserve it. The German manufacturing sector (and thus the German government, which is sitting on a pile of tax revenue, throwing it in the air and yelling, "Whee!") is making money hand over fist because they get to export in a Euro that's weaker than the deutsche mark used to be. The Spanish manufacturing sector is gasping because they have to export in a Euro that's stronger than the peseta used to be. So other countries dislike Germany for its heavy-handedness here because they see themselves as the reason that the German economy's doing so well in the first place -- and they're kinda right.
- **The German economy takes an equally massive hit:** Germany is getting more out of the Euro than anyone else on the planet, which is why they're desperate to keep the currency even with all the problems it's created. It gives the German manufacturing sector a huge "internal" market in which to export without worrying about currency exchange, and it's also like a permanent 20-30% discount on their products internationally while not affecting their bottom line in any way. I wrote this on Reddit months ago and got an endless stream of shit about it. Imagine my smugness when both [Paul Krugman](_URL_0_) and [Robert Reich](_URL_1_) said the exact same thing in their AMAs recently.
A lot of Redditors are too young to remember this, but the German economy has not always been wine and roses -- as a matter of fact, they had some really severe problems in the 90s especially, and probably will for a while due to the continuing costs of reintegrating East Germany (to the tune of $1 trillion per decade, although this is decreasing).
Also of note here is that the only two countries that can realistically compete with the American manufacturing sector -- China and Germany -- are both exporting in devalued currencies. China devalues the yuan deliberately for competitive advantage. Germany gets it by having a currency yoked to basket cases like Greece and Italy.
- **Business in Europe becomes more expensive:** All of a sudden, you don't need just the Euro in order to import and export across most of Europe -- you need all the currencies in order to engage in the pan-European market. This gets expensive for businesses quickly because Europe's political map is basically Kibbles-n-Bits, and no one country represents the kind of market that, say, the United States or Japan represent.
When you're exporting to the States, dollars mean doing business with 314 million people with a uniform set of import regulations. When you're exporting to Japan, yen means doing business with 127 million people with a uniform set of import regulations. When you're exporting to Europe and the Euro's gone bye-bye, the largest market is Germany with 81 million people with its own set of import regulations, and an entirely different set and a different currency once you cross the border elsewhere. So to exporters, a Europe without a common currency (even now, because import/export regulations still aren't uniform across the continent) is just an endless series of headaches in order to make money.
There's more to it than this, but I think this comment's long enough. Splenetic's also addressed some stuff I haven't.
**EDIT:** Fixed a mistake. The Malaysian currency is the ringgit, not the rupee. | [
"The concept has been identified as a potential problem if the Eurozone breaks up or a member state decides to leave it, since debts in euros may turn into debts owed in another currency. Conversion would be at a rate determined by the nation in question, and no party to a contract or transaction will have the righ... |
If you had a lake full of gasoline and dropped a match into it, would it all immediately explode? | Liquid gasoline isn't explosive, but gasoline vapor is. If you dropped a match on it the vapors above the lake would explode. You need the right mixture of fuel and air combined with an ignition source, but you would presumably have that for some portion of the match's path while falling.
That explosion would end up vaporizing more gasoline which would then continue to burn in a very large fire. It wouldn't explode all at once though. It will also burn only as fast as oxygen can get to it. | [
"It is believed that the fountain caused fumes of the fuel to fill the air which later ignited in a huge fireball that consumed the surrounding fields which had been soaked with fuel. The pipeline at the rupture point was estimated to carry around 10,000 barrels of gasoline at . The exact cause of the fire that ign... |
When did Germany and France become historical rivals and why? | The most reductive answer to this question is 1871, when Germany as a country came into existence on the basis of a humiliating defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War. Not only was there no such thing as a country called "Germany" before then, but the harsh feelings and especially territorial losses the nascent Germany inflicted on France (Alsace-Lorraine) made a desire for "*revanche*" or revenge against Germany a dominant factor in French politics until the Franco-German rivalry boiled over into World War I (in conjunction with English-German naval race tensions, Balkan nationalism, and a host of other factors.
But I think a more interesting answer to this question, allowing for some ambiguity in the term "Germany," is October 14, 1806. That's when Napoleon's Grande Armée encountered the Prussian army in a pair of battles in east-central Germany. The French won both the Battle of Jena, where Napoleon's 40,000-man army defeated 53,000 Prussians, and the Battle of Auerstadt, where Napoleon's "Iron Marshal" Nicolas Davout, in a tour de force, crushed more than 60,000 Prussians with his single corps of 27,000 men.
In the aftermath of Jena and Auerstadt, Napoleon swiftly captured Berlin, then defeated the Prussians' Russian ally to triumph in the [War of the Fourth Coalition](_URL_2_). The [Treaties of Tilsit](_URL_0_) that concluded that war were very generous to Russia, but devastating to Prussia, which lost half its territory, had to pay a huge war indemnity, was reduced to a veritable French puppet state, and subject to occupation by French garrisons, who Prussians were required to support.
Unsurprisingly (and now we move from the broad strokes of history into my particular expertise), the Prussians didn't take this well. When the fortunes of war turned and they found themselves part of the victorious coalition to defeat Napoleon in 1814 and again in 1815, the Prussians (or at least, some prominent Prussians) were widely noted in Europe for their vehement anti-French attitude. While Britain and Austria wanted to punish France for the war, cut her down to size a little bit, and prevent any future French aggression, Prussians advocated ([particularly in 1815](_URL_1_)) for dismembering French territory; their soldiers were particularly brutal when occupying France after Waterloo; the Prussians even tried to blow up the Parisian bridge named after the battle of Jena as symbolic revenge for that humiliating loss. (They were finally talked out of it by some combination of the Duke of Wellington, Russian Tsar Alexander I, and the restored French King Louis XVIII, who is reported to have threatened to sit on the bridge himself to keep it safe.)
The Prussians largely didn't get any of the big punishments they wanted of France, though the French felt plenty aggrieved by the treatment they received at the hands of the Prussians (especially in those parts of northern France that the Prussian army occupied). And though more than 60 years would pass between Jena-Auerstadt and the Franco-Prussian War, it clearly had not been forgotten. The [headline of the New York Times on Sept. 4, 1870](_URL_3_), after Napoleon III's defeat by the Prussian-led armies at the Battle of Sedan, was "JENA AVENGED." The 5 billion-franc war indemnity France was required to pay in the Franco-Prussian War's peace treaty was explicitly designed to be proportional, based on population, to Prussia's 1807 indemnity.
The Franco-Prussian War, as we've already discussed, created the German Empire (ruled by the Prussian royal family) and shifted the now Franco-German rivalry into a new gear. Both sides would engage in an arms race, a diplomatic struggle for position, and constant military espionage (with famous consequences in the Dreyfus Affair) for decades to come, with the tug-of-war over Alsace-Lorraine the festering sore at the heart of the issue. But arguably the emotional root of the entire struggle goes back to Napoleon and Davout at Jena and Auerstadt. | [
"Beginning with the French invasions of Germany in the late 18th century, France became the century-long rival of Germany. The rising German nationalist movement also considered France their greatest enemy because France not only had temporarily conquered much of Western Germany during the Napoleonic Wars but also ... |
why do linux things use .tar.gz so much? | /u/Caiobrz is mostly right, and I would just like to add a few things.
`tar` was using in the UNIX world for a long, long time just to, as you say, "tarball" things together. They were not compressed at all. `gzip` is relatively new - we used to use a different compression program long, long ago. Then we'd have .tar.Z files. When `gzip` showed up (and proved to be much better), we started using that.
The funny thing is that bzip2 showed up and was better than gzip, but it just never really caught on to that extent (possibly because huge, cheap storage and much faster broadband followed shortly).
Now, `zip` became available for UNIX systems fairly early on, but here's the thing - *it didn't know the difference between ASCII and binary files*. In fact, it defaulted to ASCII, which would destroy binary files. Basically, to get `zip` to work the same way as a compressed `tar` file you had to go through annoying procedures, which, when you already know how to do something with `tar` and all your scripts and cron jobs already use it, and `zip` doesn't offer you any advantages... why would you?
I would like to point out that in the Olden Days, `tar` didn't support adding the compression like it does now (i.e., you couldn't go `tar zcvf`) - that's a GNU tar feature (which is why you see it in Linux). But the beauty of UNIX is that you can chain commands together, so you'd go `tar cvf directory/ | gzip > directory.tar.gz`.
On the PC/MSDOS side, we did have many compression programs, too. `lha`, `arj`, etc. `zip` won out for a while. `rar` came along and became useful when we needed to split things into smaller packages - that's it's real strength. Before that we used to zip files and then used a separate program to split (and recombine).
Also worth noting that most PC archive programs can handle `.tar.gz` files with no problem. | [
"Like other Linux distributions, Yellow Dog Linux supports software development with GCC (compiled with support for C, C++, Java, and Fortran), the GNU C Library, GDB, GLib, the GTK+ toolkit, Python, the Qt toolkit, Ruby and Tcl. Standard text editors such as Vim and Emacs are complemented with IDEs such as Eclipse... |
what is the practical use for integration? | They undo differentiation. So to use your examples, if derivatives let you find acceleration from velocity from position, integrals let you find position from velocity from acceleration. | [
"Integration by parts is a heuristic rather than a purely mechanical process for solving integrals; given a single function to integrate, the typical strategy is to carefully separate this single function into a product of two functions \"u\"(\"x\")\"v\"(\"x\") such that the residual integral from the integration b... |
what would happen if prince george of cambridge or any other future heir to the british throne turned out to be gay? | I'm sure it has already happened, but in the past it would have been kept a secret and married a woman anyway.
If it happened now and they came out, we'd probably just have a gay king. Not that big a deal if they don't produce an heir, it would just pass to the next in line. | [
"When King George III succeeded to the throne of Great Britain upon the death of his grandfather, George II, he was 22 years old and unmarried. His mother and advisors were anxious to have him settled in marriage. The 17-year-old Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz appealed to him as a prospective consort pa... |
why do people often worry that rape victims are actually lying? | The policy isn't to assume that there wasn't an issue or that someone was lying, but to assume (like we do in our legal system) that the accused is innocent until shown otherwise. | [
"The prevalence of rape myths is a major reason for rape victim blaming and stigmatization. Rape myths can cause victims of rape to blame themselves for their rape, or to not report their assault, and they can also shape the responses of judges and juries, causing a negative impact on rape victims. Some studies hav... |
people have been eating cheese for ages, way before refrigerators and airtight containers, but if i leave cheese on my table for a few hours it becomes inedible; how were they keeping it fresh in the past? | The cheesemonger would store large cheeses, that keep because they are sealed (with wax or muslin etc.) then serve smaller pieces cut from this to customers, who buy regularly and eat soon. Simple. | [
"Most “fresh” cheeses, unlike aged cheeses held for weeks or months, are aged for only days. This is not enough time to change the pH of the cheese enough to kill any harmful bacteria that may have been in the (unpasteurized) milk at the beginning of the process. The use of raw milk has led to a number of instances... |
When and why did the Spartan identity die out in Greece? | The fall of Sparta was a complicated issue involving their first ever land battle loss (with an army at full strength) to Thebes and spartan population decline. essentially they had so few natural born Spartans they had to allow helots to bolster their standing army.
check out: _URL_0_
and excerpt:
" The Spartans were again too few to prevent the Thebans from building a new fortified capital city for the Messenians on the slopes of Mount Ithome. The great stone walls of Messene, which still stand as a monument to Greek military engineering, were the seal of Sparta's doom. The Thebans liberated the Messenians, and Messene became an independent city-state–a state intransigently hostile toward its former master. Without the forced labor of the Helots of Messenia, Sparta could not maintain its military traditions and quickly became just another second-tier polis, capable of winning occasional border skirmishes with its neighbors, but never again a player on the larger Greek scene.
By the Roman era, Sparta had devolved to little more than an antiquarian theme-park; tourists flocked from around the Greek world to watch Spartan boys endure savage whippings in old-fashioned endurance contests–conveniently held in an outdoor theater to accommodate the jaded, bloodthirsty crowds. " | [
"Mycenaean Sparta, like much of Greece, was engulfed in the Dorian invasions, which ended the Mycenaean civilization and ushered in the so-called \"Greek Dark Ages\". During this time, Sparta (or Lacedaemon) was merely a Doric village on the banks of the river Eurotas in Laconia. However, in the early 8th century B... |
How do different octaves of the same musical note compare in frequency, and how does it compare to different notes? | It is a very fundamental function of the frequency.
An octave is a doubling (or halving) of frequency. If we consider A above middle C, we've got a frequency of 440Hz. The A one octave lower is 220Hz. The A one octave higher is 880Hz. Another octave up is 1760Hz.
All of the other notes are based (roughly) on harmonic relationships. Consider the ratios 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4. 1:2 is easy to figure out in terms of our A. If A is 440, then 2/1 times that is 880, or A one octave higher.
But here: Consider the second ratio, 2:3. In other words, (3/2)*440 = 660. What's at 660, you may ask? Why, it's E, a perfect fifth above A.
The next ratio is 4:3. (4/3)*440 = 587Hz, which is D - a perfect fourth above the A.
Go through all of the rest of the ratios (5:4, 6:5, 7:6, etc.) and you'll eventually get all twelve notes of the chromatic scale.
(but then you find that you don't *exactly* get the notes, and we have an issue of tempering, which we'll not get into right now)
| [
"For this reason, notes an octave apart are given the same note name in the Western system of music notation—the name of a note an octave above A is also A. This is called \"octave equivalence\", the assumption that pitches one or more octaves apart are musically equivalent in many ways, leading to the convention \... |
how do pension plans work? | A pension is what's called a defined-benefit plan. Defined-benefit means that the plan is going to pay out an amount of money that is set, and nothing that happens short of a default on the plan will stop that from happening. This is different than, for example, a 401k or IRA where the plan will only pay out what the account balance is - based on the value of the investments the plan holds (a 401k or IRA is an investment account (basically a bank account that instead of holding cash holds stocks, bonds and other investments) that allows you to invest money while you're working, then withdraw it when you retire).
Basically, a pension is an agreement between an employer and an employee - if the employee meets certain requirements (works X years, usually, with X a large number like > 10 years; be over the age of 60; etc) then when the employee retires, she will be paid a fixed sum of money every year, until she dies.
This is funded basically in the same way that the 401k is, by the employer and employee kicking in a share of money (I think the most traditional way of doing this is that the employer pays all of it - but in that case it can really be thought of as part of the employee's salary). The money is poured into, instead of an account for a single employee, a huge pool called a Pension Fund that supports all the employees of the company. The Pension Fund works just like a mutual fund run by an investment back - it picks stocks and other investments, and invests the money in the fund to earn a rate of return. As people retire, it sells assets and uses the proceeds to pay the penions.
The problem is that companies are notoriously irresponsible about how they run the funds. There are insurance company estimates called actuarial tables that can be used to determine how much money will have to be paid out (basically how many people will live for how long) to employees. These can be combined with historical rates of return of conservative investment funds, and and an annual requirement for funding of the pension can be derived. Companies consistently fail to make these payments, to the extent that the government had to set up a bureaucracy to backstand the pension funds because companies were so awful and keeping their word and funding the pensions correctly. They also would try to steal from their pension funds, but forcing them to invest inappropriately large amount of money in the company itself, instead of in a broad, diversified portfolio.
All of that is actually not a problem, if the companies are then willing to accept the responsibility for their bad decisions. But they aren't, they'd rather make employees take the risk of their retirement (which is actually stupid - you want to pool your retirement for the same reason you want to pool your health care costs in insurance - so that you can afford them by paying a little bit over time).
Hope that answered your question, plus a little commentary at that end. | [
"There are many ways to finance a pension and save for retirement. Pension plans can be set up by an employer, matching a monetary contribution each month, by the state or personally through a pension scheme with a financial institution, such as a bank or brokerage firm. Pension plans often come with a tax break de... |
what is postmodern ethics? | Postmodern ethics is way of approaching ethical dilemmas by examing the context and narrative. Generally speaking postmodernists tend to have a much narrower belief in freewill and so they feel that true questions of ethics need to be adressed at a higher more contextual level.
This would mean that theren
is no absolute or objective right or wrong, but rather many different rightnesses or wrongnesses depending on culture, situation, and narrative understandings which can change over time.
To help understand, this stands in contrast to a modernist. view of the world, which sees a continuing thread of objectivity running through the fabric of society and culture stretching back centuries. A moral story that occurs in many different situations and can be multifaceted, but is ultimately objective and unchanging.
Postmodernists also are descriptivist and tend to explain the way in which choices that are made can become moral or immoral. Modernists prefer to prescribe the correct view of morality in different situations, and evaluate the correctness of choices.
Postmodern ethics also spends a lot of time concerned with how powerless ppl make ethical decisions against ppl in power.
Postmodern view of ethics read the novel Things Fall Apart | [
"Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or a mode of discourse that rejects the possibility of reliable knowledge, denies the existence of a universal, stable reality, and frames aesthetics and beauty as arbitrary and subjective. It can be described as a reaction against scientific attempts to explain reality with... |
Was the pike really the most used weapon in the Medieval Age? If so, why do movies depict the sword as the most used weapon? And why did european armies still use heavy cavalry as the main striking force if it was so easy countered? | Are you specifically talking about pikes or polearms in general? | [
"Pike and shot became a military standard in the 16th and 17th century. With the development of the bayonet the last major use of pike was the early 18th century with the weapon rapidly disappearing in Western European armies by the time of the Battle of Blenheim. A few pikes or half pikes and a few halberds were r... |
how come extremities can get below 98.6 f and be fine, but our core is much more sensitive to temperature change? | Because your core contains your organs that are essential to the process of life. Your limbs are expendible and don't contribute to these processes. Your heart still needs to pump blood, and muscles need to be warm to operate effectively, your liver needs to produce enzymes to metabolize toxins in your blood and it needs to be warm to do so... | [
"The core temperature of a human is regulated and stabilized primarily by the hypothalamus, a region of the brain linking the endocrine system to the nervous system, and more specifically by the anterior hypothalamic nucleus and the adjacent preoptic area regions of the hypothalamus. As core temperature varies from... |
why are we more sleepy when doing something as opposed to trying to sleep? | Sleepiness comes in waves. If you went to bed when you were sleepy, you'd be fine. But most people decide to go to bed when they are sleepy. Then they brush their teeth and dick around on their phone for an hour, and the moment is past. | [
"BULLET::::- Researchers have shown that a fundamental reason for sleep is to clean the brain of toxins. This is achieved by brain cells shrinking to create gaps between neurons, allowing fluid to wash through.\n",
"The need and function of sleep are among the least clearly understood areas in sleep research. Whe... |
A Question Concerning Anglo-American Relations | I've never heard of the United States pushing for Britain to take such extreme financial measures to purchase goods. Where did you read this? My recollection is that the British were more worried about finding enough tonnage that could actually visit American ports to trade because the neutrality laws prevented United States flagged ships from trading with belligerent powers. When money started to become a problem, you had Congress pass the Lend Lease Act to get rid of the pesky old dollar sign in anglo-american trade matters. | [
"The Anglo-American Special Relationship proved mutually beneficial, although it was never one of equals; the United States was far larger than Britain both militarily and economically. Lorna Arnold noted that:\n",
"The British relationship with the United States did not suffer lasting consequences from the crisi... |
When speaking in a foreign language, why does most people's accent remains their native? | It has to do with the sound sets of their native language. Some sounds exist in certain languages that do not in others. So when learning a language, people usually cannot emulate the sounds perfectly.
The reason some people will 'never' be able to speak like a native, is because by time a person reaches adult hood, all their neurological connections dedicated to the muscle memory of sounds are fairly set in stone, and it is almost impossible to learn a new sound.
This also depends on the language being learned. Most people can learn to speak a language with relatively few sounds, like japanese, much like a native, because most sounds of that language will already exist their native language.
Languages like arabic, russian, and chinese have very complex sound sets, and it's almost impossible for a foreigner to emulate these accents perfectly, because there are simply too many new sounds to learn.
| [
"When speakers have a foreign accent, they are often perceived to be less intelligent and are less likely to be hired. It is the same with an accent from a peripheral area, rather than the accent from the urbanized core: a peripheral person is typically perceived as speaking a \"less correct\" by those who are more... |
why are there no laws circumventing that prevent national media from outright lying on their headlines? | Simple; it's not worth it to go to the trouble of making what would be a difficult if not impossible to enforce law to prevent such minor damage. Anyone who can't be bothered to read the facts and come to reasonable conclusions is so foolish that no law is going to make them immune to manipulation. | [
"Major American newspapers, such as \"The Washington Post,\" have been criticized for deliberately withholding publication of articles reporting locations of Black Sites. The Post defended its decision to suppress this news on the ground that such revelations \"could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, pa... |
A late mediaeval knight is travellíng through an area he knows to be dangerous but in which an attack is not guaranteed. Does he wear his armour all day? | He'd probably be wearing an "Arming doublet", under a rather more dressy garment. It was a sort of padded jacket worn under armour, with mail gussets to protect armpits etc. See the illustrations here: _URL_0_ | [
"BULLET::::- Knight: A giant armored warrior. His thick armor & reflective shield force players to nullify his defenses with a dash attack before hurting him, lest they get cut down by a blow of his sword.\n",
"The Shining Knight is a master of the arts of combat of Arthurian times. Wearing his enchanted bulletpr... |
Was there any attempts to unify Italy or Germany prior to the 19th Century? | The Holy Roman Empire was, in many ways, a unified Germany (albeit a very loosely unified one).
[Here](_URL_0_) is a map of the empire around 1800.
Also worth listening to: the HRE national anthem - [Gott Erhalte Franz den Kaiser](_URL_2_) - which was composed by Haydn in 1794 for Franz II Holy Roman Emperor (who dissolved the empire after the battle of Austerlitz and created the new Austrian Empire as Franz I). The melody has been used both as a family hymn by the Habsburgs ever since, and is today the German national anthem. [Here](_URL_1_) it is being sung at Otto von Habsburg's funeral in Vienna a couple of years ago.
| [
"As the Allies had decided that the province should remain a part of Italy, Italy and Austria negotiated an agreement in 1946, recognizing the rights of the German minority. This led to the creation of the \"Trentino-Alto Adige/Tiroler Etschland\" region, a new name for \"Venezia Tridentina\". German and Italian we... |
what is the purpose of robo calls that hang up on you right after you speak? | Not sure if this is always the case but I've read that they're just machines that call random phone numbers and if you answer, it will hang up and add you to a spam list. | [
"It does this by using ‘dial-out’ functionality, which allows users to join a conference call by clicking a link, rather than dialing in with phone numbers and access codes. Users are guided to a webpage where they can see who’s on their call and who’s speaking. With one click, they can share their screen, transfor... |
How do above ground power lines keep from shorting out in a rain storm? | In order for there to be a short to ground or to another phase, there would have to be a continuous path of water between the two (or the two would need to be so close that the air in between suffers a dielectric breakdown). The insulators that the wires are mounted on are designed such that the water does not flow off in a continuous path. | [
"Since overhead transmission wires depend on air for insulation, the design of these lines requires minimum clearances to be observed to maintain safety. Adverse weather conditions, such as high winds and low temperatures, can lead to power outages. Wind speeds as low as can permit conductors to encroach operating ... |
In all science fiction books and movies, they always say they are "___ earth years old. " Do we have a calendar yet for mars or any other planet that can coincide with earths systems? | [Searched](_URL_4_)
Relevant [discussion](_URL_5_)
Original question by [Greasy](_URL_3_)
> I mean, concepts such as years, months, days, time zones, daylight savings time, etc. would lose their meaning. I predict that we will use as a standard of time measurement something that will remain constant regardless of location, such as the half-life of a given isotope. That would be our "year;" a fraction of that, probably 1 over a power of 2 or 10, would be a "month;" and so on. Are there other, more practical ways to go about this? (Note: I have never bothered to learn about "stardates.")
Top comment courtesy [foretopsail](_URL_0_)
> Somewhere there was another person who asked this question. Obviously, it's rampant speculation. But I would guess they'd do the same thing ships at sea do: set a "ship's local time" at the discretion of the master. Why do something as unintuitive as use half-lives when you can just use the same calendar and second we already have? Everyone living on your spaceship would already know how to use it, and it'd lessen the feeling of "not being a part of humanity" that they'd get if they switched over entirely to something new. Morale and tastes of home are big issues when dealing with long distance sea travel, it'd be the same on long distance space travel.
> In fact, we already have a time measurement standard that doesn't rely on one location: the second.
Relevant follow-up courtesy [HappyMeep](_URL_1_)
> This is what they did in Star Trek: Voyager - they still have hours and nights and 24-hour days, and even yearly holidays, even though their ship is a bazillion miles away from Earth. They keep running on their own clock. Presumably an atomic clock.
> Now, if Star trek was realistic, then once they get back to Earth on "May 1," Earth could actually be on, say, September 1 of a different year, due to relativity and whatnot. Right? And you might get jet-lagged, too.
> Edit:
> However, you also see the dudes in Star trek figuring out what time/century it is based on the positions of the stars in the sky. I guess it makes sense that this would be pretty much the same for all observers, wouldn't it? Stars would simply appear to move faster for those traveling at great speeds. Or is that slower? Errrgh.
> Also, would you have to compensate for where you know the stars must be, because if you look at Alpha Centari, you're looking at where it was 4 years ago? It seems like a galactic calendar would have to compensate for that stuff.
> OP: I looked up [stardate](_URL_2_) on wikipedia and it seems the writers pretty much just chose arbitrary numbers - there was never that much method to the madness other than an increase between each episode. | [
"BULLET::::- 1999 – Larry Niven published the science fiction novel \"Rainbow Mars\". In this novel, in the 31st century, Earth uses a dating system based on what is called the \"Atomic Era\", in which the year one is 1945. Thus, what we call the year 3053 A.D. (the year the novel begins) is in the novel the year 1... |
Does reading or otherwise learning cause new brain cells to grow or new connections to form? | Yes, that's how learning works. If you learn something new and for a longer period of time, your brain "stores" this new information by creating new nerve connections - and/or removing old ones, depending on what you learned. | [
"New neurons are constantly formed from stem cells in parts of the adult brain throughout adulthood, a process called adult neurogenesis. The hippocampus is the area of the brain that is most active in neurogenesis. Research shows that thousands of new neurons are produced in the hippocampus every day. The brain co... |
the ammunition shortage | One theory, Obama is going to ban guns and ammunition so people are buying as much as they can.
Another theory, gun and ammunition manufacturers have convinced people that Obama is going to ban guns and ammunition so people should buy as much as they can. | [
"The 2008–13 United States ammunition shortage refers to a shortage of civilian small arms ammunition in the United States that started in late 2008 and continued through most or all of 2010, with an additional shortage beginning in December 2012 and continuing throughout 2013.\n",
"Most people attributed the amm... |
what makes a tree knot so tough to cut through? | A previous answer gives what happens when you SPLIT through using an axe - the wood grain isn't all lined up so it's much harder to cause the wood to fracture in a straight line. But what about when you CUT through using a saw?
The answer to this one is in how a tree grows. When sprouting from seed, it starts off as a shoot, and then very soon after, starts forking off twigs.
Every year, there's a thin layer of living cells between the baby tree trunk's dead outer bark and dead inner wood that creates more of both, so you get a ring in the wood for each year as the tree grows up and out. That ring of wood would be a perfect cylinder if the tree were just a pole... but it's not - it has those twigs that grow into branches too. And those have their own bark and their own rings and so on.
Where those branches connect to the trunk you don't get perfect ring growth. The tree's inner bark cells deposit "around" where that twig jams into the wood, in a curve instead of a straight line. Add in its vertical growth too, and this double-layers that area as well as deforms it. So it's much more dense than the rest of the wood.
So 10 years and 10 growth rings later where twig/branch butts up against trunk/straight, you end up with a much more compact area of double-laid wood, which means a hard knot, often a slightly different colour. And because it's harder and more dense due to the double-growth, saws have a harder time cutting through it.
| [
"As a tree grows, lower branches often die, and their bases may become overgrown and enclosed by subsequent layers of trunk wood, forming a type of imperfection known as a knot. The dead branch may not be attached to the trunk wood except at its base, and can drop out after the tree has been sawn into boards. Knots... |
enforcing travel bans | Usually the US find someone travelled to a banned country via passport stamps or banking transactions. At that point the federal government fines the person. The easy way to avoid this is to only use cash and ask border agents not to stamp your passport. Cuba has a reputation for not stamping the passports of Americans entering from non USA nations.
The DPRK travel ban is partly symbolic. If Americans know that they aren’t legally allowed to travel to the DPRK they might not expect help from the government when they get arrested for proselytizing, taking photos, or just because the DPRK likes arresting Americans. | [
"The Travel Ban was a preventative measure with the purpose to stop individuals, who were on the Consolidated List, from entering or transitting through the territories of United Nations member states. With the overall aim to limit the mobility of listed individuals and decrease likelihood of an attack by the liste... |
Do cats view humans as fellow cats or as separate creatures? What about dogs? | Cats look at humans as servants.
On a serious note:
I don't know about cats, but dogs do have an interesting relationship with humans. [This](_URL_0_) is a really interesting documentary called "Dogs Decoded" that I watched in my neuropsychology course. One of the more interesting things I learned is that dogs look at people in the same way that people look at people - looking at the human face from left to right (or right to left, whichever). Scientists hypothesize that this gives them the ability to better read and interpret emotions on our faces. Other animals just take in a face at a the whole. | [
"The cultural assumption that cats are distant from people and lack affection compared to dogs has complications. Animals have individual characteristics based on their environment, particularly their past interactions with people.\n",
"Friendships between household Cats (\"Felis catus\") and humans is also very ... |
Why is it brighter and the colors are more vivid when it is cold outside? | As an amateur photographer I can say that humidity does have an effect on brightness and color. Especially for long distance scenery pictures. There is a correlation between humidity and temperature, so that would explain why there tends to be less haze when it is cooler outside. | [
"Lighter colors and also whites and metallic substances absorb less illuminating light, and thus heat up less; but otherwise color makes small difference as regards heat transfer between an object at everyday temperatures and its surroundings, since the dominant emitted wavelengths are nowhere near the visible spec... |
what does it take for the world to officially announce the beginning of a world war? | There is no such thing as "officially" announcing the beginning of a world war. The label "world war" is applied by the press, historians and the common people when they think it is appropriate.
If you are referring to recent events, they are not at all comparable to a world war. The world's major powers are involved, yes, but they are united against a mostly regional enemy. Economies are not being mobilized, there is no conscription, freight ships are not being sunk...for the man in the street, life goes on as usual. By mid-20th century standards, it is barely a war, let alone a world war. | [
"Announcements that \"The War of the Worlds\" is a dramatization of a work of fiction were made on the full CBS network at four points during the broadcast October 30, 1938: at the beginning, before the middle break, after the middle break, and at the end. The middle break was delayed 10 minutes to accommodate the ... |
why do doors at businesses open outward, but residential doors open inwards? | If your house door opened outward, the hinges would be on the outside, and a thief could just take the door off the hinges and walk right in. So it's a security thing. | [
"Today, the exterior doors of most large (especially public) buildings open outward, while interior doors such as doors to individual rooms, offices, suites, etc. open inward, as do many exterior doors of houses, particularly in North America.\n",
"Inward opening doors are doors that can only be opened (or forced... |
Does body hair really have a significant impact on swim speed? | Significant is relative. In a sport where the difference between setting a record and coming in third place can be fractions of a second *everything* helps.
Hair does increase drag. In fact, the material that the swimsuit is woven out of makes a difference. Everything that can be done to give someone an edge is done. | [
"Athletes may depilate as an enhancement to their abilities. For example, male and female competitive swimmers may remove their body and pubic hair in order to help streamline their bodies and to allow their swimsuits to fit more closely to their bodies. Bicyclists also remove body hair to decrease the effects of \... |
why do some of my bed sheets feel super silky smooth and cool, whilst others are rougher and warmer, despite both being 100% cotton? | Thread count will have a lot to do with it. Higher thread counts should typically be smoother (also more expensive). | [
"The quality of bed sheets is often conveyed by the thread count—the number of threads per square inch of material. In general, the higher the thread count, the softer the sheet, but the weave and type of thread may affect the \"hand\" of the material so that a sheet with a lower thread count may actually be softer... |
What would a Tudor kitchen look like? | I'm going to speak specifically about Henry VIII, as it's him and his court who I am most familiar with on this particular topic, and because I personally think it's the perfect example of the height of Tudor opulence.
Henry's own personal favorite foods included:
> venison, game pies stuffed with oranges, haggis, eels, baked lampreys, salmon, sturgeon, ling, and an early version of beef olives (beef stuffed with forcemeat and vegetables). For the void, he preferred custards, fritters, tarts, jelly and cream of almonds. (1)
Court meals would have been several courses with multiple dishes. The diet would have been quite meat heavy, even considering that no meat was to be eaten on a Friday, only fish. Luckily for the Tudors, "fish" included eel, crab, whale, most poultry (chicken, swan, peacock dressed in its own feathers), porpoise, and seal. (2)
> The royal court’s annual provision of meat consisted of:
>
> • 1,240 oxen
>
> • 8,200 sheep
>
> • 2,330 deer
>
> • 760 calves
>
> • 1,870 pigs
>
> • 53 wild boar (3)
And:
> And if they [the nobles and many of their servants] do not have 20 varied meat dishes at dinner and supper, they consider themselves slighted.’
> (‘A dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset, Lecturer in Rhetoric at Oxford’, 1529-32)(3)
Spices were very popular, and an indicator of ones wealth as they were very expensive at this time, so you can imagine a lavish court like Henry's would have a truly abundant amount of spices. Henry had a special staff of servants responsible for his spicery. He also had servants of the pantry, cellar, lardar, scullery (dishwashers), and woodyard, overseen and managed by clerks and underclerks of the kitchen - a truly enormous staff was needed to take care of the king and his court. (2)
As to how things tasted, well, here's a few recipes:
> Chykonys in bruette. — Take an Sethe Chykonys, & smyte
hem to gobettys ; þan take Pepir, Gyngere, an Brede y-grounde, & temper it
vppe wyth þe self brothe, an with Ale ; an coloure it with Safrouw, an sethe
an serue forth. (4)
More or less translates to:
Chickens in broth - take and seethe chickens, and smite them to gobbets, then take pepper, ginger, and bread ground, and temper it with the same broth, and with ale, and color it with saffron, and seethe and serve forth.
Or
> Sauce for shulder of moton.— Take percely, and oynons, and mynce þem and þe rostyde shulder of Moton; and take vynegre, and poudre gingre, salt and cas a-pon þe mynced shulder, and ete hym so. (4)
Again, translation is more or less:
Sauce for a shoulder of mutton - take parsley, and onions, and mince them and the roast shoulder of mutton, and take vinegar, and powdered ginger, salt and cast upon the mince shoulder, and eat him so.
Other recipes use mace, almonds, garlic, wine sauces, and cloves. They might not be your mom's meatloaf, but probably would be mostly edible to modern diners. Though we would probably take a pass on the lamprey.
Sources:
1. Henry VIII: The King and His Court - Allison Weir
2. A collection of ordinances and regulations for the government of the royal household, made in divers reigns : from King Edward III to King William and Queen Mary, also receipts in ancient cookery - Society of Antiquaries of London
3. A History of Royal Food and Feasting - University of Reading via _URL_0_
4. Two fifteenth-century cookery-books - Thomas Austin
| [
"Today, the Hall with its elaborate timber roof survives as well as the kitchen—possibly the most complete medieval kitchen in England. The kitchen still contains many original features, including two open fireplaces, each large enough to roast an ox, and two bread ovens served by a third chimney. The Hall is over ... |
why do contact lenses weaken the muscles of the eyelid over time? | They don't. Is there a reason that you think this is the case? | [
"Eye strain can also be a result of the distortion caused by the refractive properties of certain types of spectacle lenses. The subtle blurriness caused by this distortion in peripheral vision, requires eye muscles to strain in order to retain clear vision. Such prolonged distortion can lead to an increase in stra... |
Why does my body/legs/knees ache when I don't get enough sleep? | There are a few reasons why you need to sleep. Your lymph system is 10x as active when your body is in it's resting phase. And during that phase, your cells go through a giant waste removal process. Just like your own body, every single cell in your body has its own butthole, and they all create shit, and need to remove it at some point, or else it builds up and causes problems. Besides that, your body also needs to do deep cell recovery. Like, repairing damaged DNA, refueling tired cells, remove the dead body cells, remove foreign bacteria and other foreign objects, all of that good stuff.
So when you lose more and more sleep, more and more of your body gets swelled up with cellular waste, harmful bacteria, just a bunch of shit that's more and more overdue for removal, and then more and more of your cells need repair or replacement, and that just simply doesn't get done fast enough when while you are awake, because your body can only efficiently allocate its fluid/neural activity for locomotive activity, like fight or flight, eating and digesting, being active in general, being on standby to do active things, etc, vs being in a state where it's doing nothing but waste removal and cell repair/replacement.
Sources:
_URL_3_
_URL_1_
_URL_5_
_URL_2_
_URL_4_
_URL_0_ | [
"Pain is typically related to tensing the abdominal wall muscles, so any type of movement is prone to aggravate pain. Lying quietly can be the least painful position. Most patients report that they cannot sleep on the painful side.\n",
"Restless legs syndrome (RLS) is generally a long term disorder that causes a ... |
If sound can be cancelled by producing another sound-wave in anti-phase, and light is packets of waves, is it possible that light can be cancelled out using anti phase? | Yes, all waves, including sound and light, experience destructive interference when two coherent waves meet out of phase. This is what leads to optical interference effects such as the swirling colors on soap bubbles, the colors on peacock tails, the color patterns on the bottom of a CD, etc. The reason that you see color patterns when interference happens is because different colors have different wavelengths and experience destructive interference at different points. So at one point on the soap bubble, the green light has the right wavelength so that the reflection of the front surface of the bubble's thin film interferes with the reflection from the back surface of the thing film, destroying the green light, and leaving the red/blue light to reflect back into your eye.
Note that in wave interference (true for both sound and light), energy is never really destroyed. Rather, energy is redirected by the interference effect to the areas of constructive interference (and/or absorbed by materials and turned into heat).
Also note that unlike sound-cancellation headphones, light cancellation goggles (i.e. sunglasses) don't use wave interference as the mechanism to block light since it is so much easier and practical to use simple absorption.
UPDATE: As others have wisely noted, mostly only low-end optical filters use simple absorption, whereas high-end filters indeed use the interference that happens between the multiple reflections of the incident light off of the layers of optical coatings. | [
"Interference is the process by which two waves superimpose to form a resultant wave of greater or less amplitude. Interference usually refers to the interaction of waves that are correlated or coherent with each other. In constructive interference, the two waves are of the same phase interfere in a way such that t... |
what happens when a power company generates too much power? | When you take electricity from a generator, it becomes stiffer to turn. If the engine turning the generator keeps producing the same amount of power, then if the electricity taken from the generator reduces, then the generator (and engine) will speed up - like how if you are driving a car at steady speed with the accelerator pedal still, but then reach a downhill slope, the car will speed up, unless you release the accelerator.
If you connect two generators together, then they will lock their rotation together. So all the rotation of all the generators in a grid are locked together in perfect sync. This means all the generators start speeding up.
The grid manager will give instructions to all the power plants telling them how much power to produce, but they will also give out instructions telling the power plants what to do if the speed of the generator changes. In the US, power plants aim for 1800 rpm generator speed, but the grid manager might tell some power plants that they should automatically start reducing power if the speed goes over 1802 rpm, and, for example, drop down to 50% by 1806 rpm. The exact instructions depend on what the power plant is capable of doing, and whether the power plant operator wants some compensation payments for reducing power.
The power plant operators will try to sell power in advance to utilities in an auction system. Then, they'll tell the grid manager, how much power generation they have booked, and whether they are fully booked, and what price their spare capacity is, as well as whether they are willing to reduce power, and how much compensation they they want if they have to reduce power.
The job of the grid manager is then to try to work out which power plants give the best value for handling sudden unexpected power shortages or power excesses, and let them handle the fluctuations.
Just be glad you don't have to work out all the billing between these different companies, trying to match what was pre-arranged, with what actually happened, and all the billing for the automatic controls, compensation for reduced output, etc. | [
"Commercial and industrial power users might impose load shedding on themselves, without a request from the utility. Some businesses generate their own power and wish to stay within their energy production capacity to avoid buying power from the grid. Some utilities have commercial tariff structures that set a cust... |
What's the history of the term "Judeo-Christian?" Why don't we talk about "Abrahamic _____s?" | Well, I think it has a bit to do with the history of the usage. It used to be just "Christian". People talked about Christian history, and Christian values, and Christian morality, and Christian tradition. If you look at the Google ngram viewer, "Judeo-Christian" doesn't even register until 1933, and gradually picked up popularity through time. Basically, it was a way to often be historically correct as well as inclusive of the history of the Bible, to add "Judeo-" before "Christian" in certain circumstances. The Old Testament is Jewish, so referring to values, traditions, and history of both Old and New Testament as Christian leaves out the Jewish aspects of it. Some continue to say "Christian," while others have modified the term with "Judeo-". It's less of a modification than using the completely different word of "Abrahamic". But "Abrahamic" isn't necessarily the correct term, anyway. Typically, when the words are used, they are genuinely talking about only Jewish and Christian issues, not Muslim. Abrahamic refers to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, so should be used when talking about all 3, not when talking about a tradition that doesn't include Islam, for example. In any case, if you look at google ngram viewer, Abrahamic has a longer history than Judeo-Christian. For some reason, Abrahamic starts being used a lot in 1828, and has gradual spikes in popularity followed by no use. But around 1965, it started to grow in popularity in English, and its usage continues to rise, though has not reached the heights in usage of Judeo-Christian (in English).
| [
"The current American use of \"Judeo-Christian\" — to refer to a value system common to Jews and Christians — first appeared in print in a book review by the English writer George Orwell in 1939, with the phrase \"the Judaeo-Christian scheme of morals.\" Orwell's usage of the term followed at least a decade of effo... |
Why are the people of American Samoa not born American citizens? How did the US acquire American Samoa? | The American Samoa is an unincorporated territory of the United States. In 1901 the case Downes v Bidwell the Supreme Court held that the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment does not extend birthright citizenship to U.S. nationals who are born in unincorporated territories. Here is a link to the court's decision- _URL_0_ | [
"American Samoa officially became a U.S. territory in 1900 with the Treaty of Cession of Tutuila and in 1904 with the Treaty of Cession of Manu'a. Since the end of World War II, persons born in American Samoa are United States nationals, but not United States citizens. This has allowed Samoans from American Samoa t... |
Were the Vikings that raided Britain and elsewhere all elite warriors, or were they common folk? | *Víking* just means pirate. Apart from the few specifically named heroes (saga-characters like Egill Skallagrímsson, Gunnar Hámundarson, etc.) there's no suggestion that they were in any way or form part of an elite. Some may have been very wealthy (the ones in charge of expeditions, ships, and the like) but on the whole, they were just dudes who showed up when people weren't expecting it, killed some folk, stole a lot of things, burned some stuff, and took off again.
When you get into armies of Scandinavians invading and settling in places, then you have elite retinues around petty-kings or princes (like the *húskarlar* of the Loðbroksýnir during the Danish invasion of Britain) but they were, of course, less common than your standard land- and plunder-hungry soldier.
When Scandinavians went to settle places, they went as, well, settlers; generally after an army had already secured the area. Iceland and Greenland were exceptions, as they were very sparsely populated, so explorers just set up shop where they landed and went from there. | [
"Viking raids began in England in the late 8th century, and were largely of the 'hit and run' sort. However, in 865 various Viking armies combined and landed in East Anglia, not to raid but to conquer the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. The annals described the combined force as the Great Heathen Army. In 871... |
Do airplane seatbelts do anything? | I've been in severe turbulence with the seat belt sign on.
Even the stewardess was strapped in.
A guy two rows up was not buckled in.
All of a sudden the plane dropped and unbuckled guy smashed his melon on the overhead carrier. He was not only a danger to himself but had he hit another person, he could've caused some real damage.
There's also take off and landing. Most crashes occur on take off or on landing. If you are not buckled up you just become a flying projectile. | [
"Seats are attached to rails underneath the floor which run along the aircraft fuselage. If the airline wants to reconfigure the seating, this is a minor operation. For passenger safety, all airline seats are equipped with seatbelts.\n",
"The seat-belt airbag is designed to better distribute the forces experience... |
How do scientists determine if a rock sample or metal sample had and extraterrestrial origin? | This can be done in any number of ways depending on the object. The easiest way is to get an established meteorite researcher to look at the sample (though this is hardly perfect). A better way is to make a thin section from which meteorite researchers can then look and see what it is. Now if you have an iron meteorite this is easy because if you can expose a clean face you can see the Widmanstätten patterns (wiki: _URL_0_).
Now there are more bulletproof ways and one way to do it is to do a bulk oxygen isotope analysis to see where it is (terrestrial samples all lie on the same line and in general meteorite samples are not on this line). | [
"This last point is very difficult to prove. Before the Ediacaran, the biostratigraphic markers usually used to correlate rocks are absent; therefore there is no way to prove that rocks in different places across the globe were deposited at precisely the same time. The best that can be done is to estimate the age o... |
How were Czechs treated within Austria-Hungary? | It's complicated. It was basically the industrial center, out of the five older carmakers [two are Czech](_URL_1_). So nobody would have said they cannot work right. Still, the working class Czech immigrants in Vienna were generally looked down upon, [despite their numbers being large](_URL_4_) (and there was not really such a thing as a "welfare queen" back then, people had to work), I remember faintly that there is a term in Viennese German something like "czech noodle restaurant" which means "chaotic, unruly, disorganized". However their numbers were so large, and so concentrated on Vienna that they kind of became part of the identity in the sense that if you meet a Hans Podhola somewhere in Austria, you just know he must be Viennese.
The Monarchy was created by Hungarians having an uprising against Habsburg rule in 1848, they could only crush it with Russian help and basically offered the dualism in 1867 as a compromise. So many Hungarians thought the dual monarchy is a hard won thing that should not be shared with those people who have not fought for it. Then again, [Palacky](_URL_3_) pushed the literal opposite, a a Germanic-Slavic confeferation leaving Hungarians out. Then again some Hungarians supported Czech rights as a natural ally against German-Austrian or pan-German nationalism.
The complexity of it is demonstrated by the fact that there were a lot of debates around whether to make Czech an official language, but the Emperor [learned it anway](_URL_0_) which is obviously a sign of respect.
Discrimination or first or second class are too modern concepts. People were more like subjects than citizens (and the Emperor Franz Josef was a King of Bohemia from 1848, while he became King of Hungary only in 1867), the language was certainly not first class but then again quite some Czech had German as their mother tongue e.g. Franz Kafka, as they had a really long history inside the German-Roman Empire. Czechs played important roles in the imperial administration, in the army (famous general Radetzky), and of course in industry, basically if you say that aside from the language question it was not a particularly bad, repressed or humiliating thing to be a middle class subject in Prague as long as you could speak German (and if you were middle class, you could, period) that would be roughly close to reality. But they clearly weren't happy with it, clearly not seen as full equals and being basically the most industialized, [best educated](_URL_2_), most efficient of the minorities, they played an important role in blowing up the empire, I would say if the empire managed to keep Czechs happy (fully equality) then the empire could have survived. | [
"In 1867, the Austro-Hungarian Compromise and the introduction of the dual monarchy left the Czechs and their aristocracy without the recognition of Bohemian state rights for which they had hoped. Instead of celebrating a coronation in Prague, they had to witness the coronation in Budapest (8 June 1867). In Bohemia... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.