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what is the significance of coughing during a rectal exam? | > what is it about coughing that gives the observer a better look?
It doesn't, but it increases abdominal pressure and may act to knock things loose which were stored "up there". More commonly the exam for a hernia involves coughing as the increased abdominal pressure would act to push organs out a tear in the abdominal wall. This is a hernia and makes them easier to spot. | [
"While traditional intervention for an acute episode has been to have the patient breathe into a paper bag, causing rebreathing and restoration of CO₂ levels, this is not advised. The same benefits can be obtained more safely from deliberately slowing down the breathing rate by counting or looking at the second han... |
the difference between string theory and quantum mechanics | Quantum mechanics explains odd phenomena found in nature. It allows us to precisely model how particles and systems of particles behave.
Key points to QM:
Particles act like waves (or probability distributions).
Particles are only allowed certain energy levels in certain situations.
String theory is a mathematical description of how particles work. It attempts to combine the standard model of particle behavior and gravity. In a broader sense, it is a "theory of everything".
Summary:
QM describes particles and systems. E.G. what happens if we bounce this particle off of a this wall?
String theory tries to make mathematical sense of QM and gravity. It tries to explain why different forces and particles behave differently.
| [
"String theory is a theoretical framework that attempts to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics. In string theory, the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how strings propagate through space and interact with each other. In a gi... |
why do people in some countries get punish for being raped? | Religion-based governments consider sex outside of wedlock illegal. They don't accommodate for common sense. | [
"Prisoners have two overarching reasons to rape a victim, one is to satisfy their overt sexual and need based desires that self pleasure can not. The second is to use the assault as a sort of intimidation factor to grant the rapist power in a place where these actions generally go unpunished. In prison, the phrase ... |
When condoms are listed as 99% effective, is that per use? How is that number determined? | This questions comes from a misinterpretation of that statistic. It isn't that there is a 1 in 100 chance each time you use a condom that it might fail. Instead, it's something much weirder than that, but eventually I'll explain why it's really the only way we can measure this.
That 2/100 number (actually not 1/100) refers to "number of couples, out of 100 couples regularly using condoms, who got pregnant in the first year of perfect use." This literally tells you nothing about how much risk a single condom has, or how many times you can use a condom before you're likely to get pregnant. A given couple could have had sex ten times or hundreds of times in a year. This literally only tells you how often it happens to couples annually. (In fact the rate for typical--imperfect or inconsistent--use is 18 out of 100 couples in a given year getting pregnant.)
How this measurement works--hundreds of couples are asked:
1. Have you been having sex with this other person for the last year?
2. What was your primary method of birth control that you used all year?
3. Did you use any other methods at the same time?
4. Honestly, did you ever forget to use it (even for a second, even once all year) or hastily use it imperfectly?
5. Did you get pregnant last year?
Now, the simplest real world example: Researchers collect the data for every couple who used only condoms all year and did it perfectly, and see that 2 out of every 100 couples still got pregnant. Then they look at people who only used condoms and did so with typical consistency, and found that 18 out of every hundred couples got pregnant.
That is useful data. You can look at rates for other methods and compare their effectiveness.
But you may still want to know the chances that _this condom right here_ will not work. Unfortunately, a study to determine that would need hundreds of couples to write down, after every sexual encounter during a long period: when it happened, whether a condom was used, if it was used correctly, what the nature of the encounter was (was there ejaculation, did it happen inside the woman, did it happen outside the woman, was it inside a condom whether it was inside or outside the woman, was a new condom used after ejaculation to continue having sex, etc.) when the event occurred in relation to the woman's menstrual cycle, and if a pregnancy occurred, identify when it happened if more than one encounter could have caused it. You're not getting that kind of journal out of very many people for very long, and dealing with the many potentially confounding factors will take a lot of work.
Further, that data couldn't be gathered for other methods which confer long-term protection, and for those, even imperfect use isn't a one-off event.
So, it doesn't mean that there is 2/100 chance this particular condom won't work. I couldn't tell you that chance if I wanted to, and it might not actually be the most useful data anyway. But above is what the number actually means. | [
"The effectiveness of condoms, as of most forms of contraception, can be assessed two ways. \"Perfect use\" or \"method\" effectiveness rates only include people who use condoms properly and consistently. \"Actual use\", or \"typical use\" effectiveness rates are of all condom users, including those who use condoms... |
why is it bad to eat the ground up bones/eyes/skin etc., that is present in things like chicken nuggets? | Chicken nuggets don't contain eyes are bones. At least in the USA. They have meat from the breast. Some also have meat from the ribs, thighs and legs.
The heads are cut off and thrown out or shipped to other parts of the world where people aren't so squeamish about such things. | [
"Eating deteriorated food could not be considered safe due to mycotoxins or microbial wastes. Some pathogenic bacteria, such as \"Clostridium perfringens\" and \"Bacillus cereus\", are capable of causing spoilage.\n",
"BULLET::::1. A rejection of potentially offensive food We are unlikely to touch foods that elic... |
why doesn’t hot weather cause more rain? | Air has many things in it. H2o in the form of vapor, O2, Nitrogen, C02 etc...
When that air is warm, the molecules move faster and push each other further apart.
When they are furthur apart, there is more space for H20 in Vapor form
When that same quantity of air cools, the molecules move closer together.
At one point or another, that air squeezes the vapor out as a liquid. That's condensation.
& #x200B;
Warm air has the ability to hold much more vapor than cold air. So, when its warm, that air can absorb much more water in gas form. Depending on the Relative humidity (A term that describes how much vapor air can hold at a given temperature) that warm air if almost saturated with vapor will condensate by cooling only a tiny amount.
Of that warm air is "relatively dry" for its temperature, it will act like a dry paper towel and keep absorbing until it cant any more or is squeezed 1st... | [
"The hot, dry season is caused by a vast low pressure area which extends over a large part of the Indian Ocean and Central Africa. This low pressure favours gusty winds and cyclones. The last cyclone was \"Gafilo\" which passed close to the Comoros on 5 March 2004 causing great material damage. During the hot and h... |
is a fruit or vegetable 'ripe' when humans deem it fit for consumption, or is it a biological state for the plant? | We eat most fruits when they're biologically ripe. We eat most vegetables early. Broccoli and cauliflower we eat the unopened buds of their flowers; cabbages, lettuces and mustards we eat the leaves before the plant buds. We eat peas young, but most beans we let mature. | [
"They allow many fruits to be picked prior to full ripening, which is useful, since ripened fruits do not ship well. For example, bananas are picked when green and artificially ripened after shipment by being gassed with ethylene.\n",
"There are two patterns of fruit ripening: climacteric that is induced by ethyl... |
Why does fat distribution seem to change as people get older? | Fat cells stored lipids as triglycerides and can't release them unless the enzymes necessary are present and active. If the cell loses its hormone receptors that normally trigger lipolysis, the fat stays there. So, fat accumulates in regions where lipocytes have been 'down regulated' for lipolytic hormones such as epinephrine.
"A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips." | [
"The economic effects of an aging population are considerable. Older people have higher accumulated savings per head than younger people, but spend less on consumer goods. Depending on the age ranges at which the changes occur, an aging population may thus result in lower interest rates and the economic benefits of... |
Can bleach expire/'go bad'? | Bleach is usually NaOCl, which is a relatively stable compound, but it does interact with air a bit, and this volatility is what gives it its strong smell of chlorine. If the lid is kept on and is hermetically sealed, the bleach inside will stay at a steady state indefinitely. The only way it can "expire" is through not putting the cap on and it all airs out. | [
"The safety of bleaches depends on the compounds present, and their concentration. Generally speaking, ingestion of bleaches will cause damage to the esophagus and stomach, possibly leading to death. On contact with the skin or eyes, it causes irritation, drying, and potentially burns. Inhalation of bleach fumes ca... |
is the amount of caffeine absorbed into the bloodstream dependant on the same variations that alcohol absorption is based upon? | Well, it's dependent on the same mechanisms in your GI tract. So all chemicals from food and drink end up in your blood stream the same way. There are a few differences specifically between caffeine and alcohol that I'll mention, but everything is a little different.
What you are ultimately talking about is something called bioavailability. That is the measure of something you put in your body that actually reaches where it has to go. So, alcohol and caffeine have to get to your brain, but not 100% of what you eat or drink of them makes it there. The amount that does, that bioavailability in percentage.
All the blood from your stomach and intestines flows out and immediately goes into your liver. This is a great setup because your liver is like a chemical processing plant. If you eat something toxic, it ends up in your liver and the liver might be able to break it down before it makes it to the rest of your body. Alcohol is heavily broken down by the liver so only a small portion of what you drink ends up available to make you "drunk."
About caffeine:
> Caffeine absorption is rapid and complete in humans, with 99% of orally ingested caffeine absorbed from the digestive tract within 45 minutes.2 Absorption is not modified by gender, genetics, liver disease, or the ingestion of drugs or alcohol.3 Caffeine crosses all biological membranes and is distributed in all body fluids.
And Alcohol:
> Orally ingested alcohol is rapidly absorbed into the human bloodstream from the stomach and small intestine and distributes into total body water. On an empty stomach, peak blood alcohol levels occur about 30 minutes following the oral ingestion of alcohol.7 For ingested liquids, the principal determinant of the gastric emptying rate is volume; large volumes empty at an exponentially faster rate than small volumes.8 Because alcohol absorption occurs more rapidly in the small intestine, delays in gastric emptying decrease the rate of alcohol absorption. Food in the gastrointestinal tract slows alcohol absorption; the higher the dietary fat content of a meal, the longer the absorption process takes.7 A small amount of alcohol is metabolized in the stomach by the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH). Compared with men, women have lower activity of ADH in their stomachs, causing a larger proportion of ingested alcohol to reach the bloodstream.
Obviously that a little dense for ELIM but let me know if you have any questions. | [
"During the initial absorption phase, arterial blood alcohol concentrations are higher than venous. After absorption, venous blood is higher. This is especially true with bolus dosing (Canadian term). With additional doses of alcohol, the body can reach a sustained equilibrium when absorption and elimination are pr... |
what makes the noise inside a can of guinness and what is it's purpose? | It's called a 'Widget', and it's job is to foam up the Guinness. It contains pressurized nitrogen and skims the top to make a head. | [
"The term likely dates from the late 19th century when fresh beer was carried from the local pub to one's home by means of a small galvanized pail. It is claimed the sound that the carbon dioxide made when it escaped from the lid as the beer sloshed around sounded like a growl.\n",
"When Guinness is poured, the g... |
why is it that when i look, for example, from the top of one hill to another in the distance the area between my location and the far point shifts from it's normal colour to a faded blue? | What you're seeing is sunlight scattered by the atmosphere. Blue light is scattered more than red light. Red light can pass through the atmosphere in a relatively straight line from the sun, but the blue light bounces around and hits your eye. It's also why the sun looks orange/red from earth but white from space. | [
"When viewed from the east or west, this mountain has the appearance of a (quite elongated) human profile, with distinct forehead, nose, lips, chin, and Adam's apple. These features are most distinct when viewed from the east; unlike most human faces, the chin is the highest point.\n",
"As a result of the accumul... |
I stand on Earth so that Sun is behind me and Moon is in front of me at the same time. How can it be that the Moon is NOT full? | Unless it's a lunar eclipse there is no way the moon can't be full if you are in line between the sun and the moon.
Humans are pretty bad at judging elevation, so if you have seen something like what you describe the chance is that the sun and/or the moon were higher in the sky than what you thought. | [
"When standing on the Earth looking up at the sky, it would appear that the Moon travels from east to west, just as the Sun and the stars do. In actual fact, the Moon orbits the Earth from west to east, as do the vast majority of manmade satellites such as the International Space Station. The apparent westward moti... |
why does netflix have so many great tv shows but has a poor selection of movies? | It's primarily due to licensing fees | [
"Netflix has been called out by some media organizations and competitors for only rarely and selectively releasing its ratings and viewer numbers. A notable instance of this involves the film \"Bird Box\". A week after its release, Netflix claimed that it had the biggest seven-day viewing record of any of its origi... |
could causality theoretically predict the future? | In classical physics, yes: a complete knowledge of the state of a system provides complete knowledge of all its future states. Once quantum effects come into play, our best current answer is "no": there appear to be truly random processes at play there. | [
"Prediction is similar to forecasting but is used more generally, for instance, to also include baseless claims on the future. Organized efforts to predict the future began with practices like astrology, haruspicy, and augury. These are all considered to be pseudoscience today, evolving from the human desire to kno... |
What is the most comprehensive, unbiased world history textbook you know of? | While I'm interested to see what people recommend, you should recognize the challenges of the terms "comprehensive" and "unbiased" when it comes to something as massive as world history. Contrary to how many people think about history, it is not a list of sequential events liked by a web of cause-and-effect connections.
The challenge of writing a "comprehensive" history is whose standard of comprehensive would you be using? At what point does the discussion of a particular group's experiences get to check the box of being "comprehensive"?
For example, does a comprehensive history of the US begin with the revolutionary war? Or does it begin with the first permanent European settlement? Or does it begin with Columbus reaching the New World? Or does it begin with the Native Americans who lives in what would be the United States for thousands of years before the modern country existed?
For another example, whose experiences should be emphasized in this "comprehensive" historical account? To continue with US history, how much time should we spend on the experiences of different groups at different periods? At what point have we talked enough about the experiences of Native Americans, individuals of African descent (both slave and free), the white aristocratic class, the white working class, British loyalists, men/women, and every else inbetween to say that we have written a complete account of Charleston, Virginia, between 1750-1800?
Now expand that out to the entire world for the entirety of human history.
This discussion of what to include in a "comprehensive source" leads us to the second quality you are asking for: a "comprehensive" source that is also "unbiased". It's a mistake to think there is a single history book anywhere in the world that is "unbiased". Every single text is influenced by the personal perspectives and biases of its author and the context in which it is created. All other things being equal, the writer at some point had to make a decision about whether to include X or Y in their writing, and their process for making that decision is influenced by what they see as important, i.e. their biases.
To refer to my Charleston example from above, the decision the author makes about which of those experiences to emphasize is the result of their personal biases and the way in which they interpret "significance".
Historical theory is a real thing. Do you subscribe to a Marxist view of history, i.e. (to simplify) that it is a series of conflicts between the haves and the have nots? Do you subscribe to Great Man history, i.e. that history is the result of decisions made by particular people in positions of power? How do you study a colonized people when the majority of written records were created *after* the colonial power arrived by the colonizers themselves? These questions need to be dealt with by the historian when they attempt to weave cohesive narratives.
Of course, bias in the way you're thinking of it does exist: just look at the inherent tension between some Soviet and contemporary American narratives of the Cold War; they read as propaganda rather than an exercise in "unbiased" narrative construction. So there are "degrees" of bias to be on the look out for.
As such, good historical investigation does not seek out "unbiased" souces (since they don't exist in the way most people envision), but rather recognizes the varieties of bias that exist, identify which are present in a given text, and work to reconcile the information and perspectives with other collected sources.
So it will be interesting to see what recommendations you get. You'll probably have more luck if you ask for histories of particular times and places than a recommendation based on the criteria you've currently set for yourself. In which case, you should justcheck the recommended reading list on this sub, as that information is already collected.
Good luck with your project. | [
"Thus, the book presents an overview of the themes and lessons observed from 5,000 years of world history, examined from 12 perspectives: geography, biology, race, character, morals, religion, economics, socialism, government, war, growth and decay, and progress.\n",
"The Guide to Modern World Literature is a ref... |
How well and what style of swimming did Europeans have in the Medieval periods? | This is tangential, but it is clear from a copy of Bellisfortis included in Hans Talhoffer's 1459 manuscript on combat arts that human bouyancy was a subject of study; _URL_0_ Notably, an inner tube of stitched leather filled with air. | [
"In classical antiquity and in most cultures, swimming was either in the nude or the swimmer would merely strip to their underwear. In the Renaissance, swimming was strongly discouraged, and into the 18th century swimming was regarded as of doubtful morality, and had to be justified on health grounds. In the Victor... |
why is it so hard for veterans to find jobs? | Veterans like to write about the things they did in the army in their applications. They write about the planes they flew and the time they spent with their fellow soldiers and all the medals they got.
However, when a potential boss looks at that application, unless he was in the army or likes reading about the army, he probably wont know what half of those things mean. He knows they're good, but not how good. But what the boss does know is the value of experience in a similar job gained by another applicant. So he goes with what he knows and takes the regular civilian. | [
"The agency provides an important resources for veterans returning from war as well as retired military members who need health or other services that are provided by the government for their service to the state.\n",
"The veterans are also entitled to assistance with regards to finding employment and business op... |
If the atmosphere of Mars is less than 1% the density of Earth, why are there large dust devils and sand dunes? | Two factors are involved there. First, windblown sand is not like beach sand, it's much finer, almost like talcum powder. Desert sand dunes are not much like beach sand dunes, which is a very common mistake people make, as most people are more familiar with the latter rather than the former.
Second, since the grains of sand are very small, they don't take very much wind to get aloft. The faint whisper of the winds of Mars is sufficient to shift its very fine sands. | [
"On Mars, the near-surface wind is not only emitting dust but also modifying the geomorphology of Mars at large time scale. Although it was thought that the atmosphere of Mars is too thin for mobilizing the sandy features, observations made by HiRSE showed that the migration of dunes is not rare on Mars. The global... |
What's going on, at the chemical level, when you let a wine bottle "breathe"? What exactly is being oxidized, and how does it affect the taste of wine? | The conversion of ethanol to acetaldehyde is only the final step of wine oxidation, and it's actually phenolic compounds or "tannins" that are oxidized during intermediate reactions. These reactions cause them to combine with each other or with other wine constituents, e.g. thiols, consequently changing wine's flavor and mouthfeel. These reactions typically cause a decrease in astringency and bitterness; are you sure you're perceiving an increase in bitterness? I personally have always experienced the opposite after letting a wine breathe.
As for acidity, acetic acid does not come from the chemical oxidation of ethanol and acetaldehyde. Acetic acid comes from bacteria present in the wine or in the environment that are "activated" when provided oxygen, converting ethanol into acetic acid. I would guess that this acidity is more readily perceived in whites since they have relatively less phenolic compounds than reds that would otherwise "mask" this acidity.
-PhD student researching wine oxidation (what a coincidence!)
| [
"If the wine is completely on its side then this action will eject some wine through the cork. Through this \"breathing\" which can result from variations in temperature, oxygen may be repeatedly introduced into the bottle and as a result, can react with the wine. An appropriate and constant temperature is therefor... |
Why does WWII combat footage seem “tame” compared to reality? | The first thing I'd point out is that "compared to reality" is something of a strange baseline to make. I doubt that you are a World War II veteran, and neither am I, as you might suspect, but nevertheless, I would note that technically speaking, *actual* combat footage *is* reality, while "Saving Private Ryan" isn't. Now, that isn't to say that old newsreel footage is a closer approximation, by any stretch, but it is to say that using Hollywood films is problematic in several ways. They are striving to capture *authenticity*, and in some ways what feels authentic doesn't need to be what is actually accurate. We're getting more into film theory then history, but something like the opening scene of "Saving Private Ryan" is trying to transport us there, and this can mean it needs to be more real than reality. There is a quote attributed to Winston Churchill along the lines of *"There is no feeling more exhilarating than being shot at without result"*, which I think is fitting here. If you are *actually there*, all you need is a bullet or two whipping by your ear to know you're being shot at, while a film like 'SPR' needs to do a lot more than that to actually transport the viewer and make them feel like they are on the beach themselves. Again though, none of this is to say what 'reality' is, just more like some opening 'meta' commentary to remind you that you need to consider what 'reality' even means, and that one needs to consider the exigencies and aims of filmmakers in this context. Films can be more real than reality in some ways, and in other ways less.
*So*, that having all been pointed out, there are several factors which come into play here. The first is the censorship during the war. Images of dead Americans, or even those whose wounds were 'disturbing' were tightly controlled both by the government, as well as the press' own self-censorship. In fact, for almost the first two years of the war, the publication of images of dead American soldiers was simply prohibited. There was decided caution in the administration about what impact *grim* images would have on public morale. This view slowly was chipped away at, however. Careful, controlled release of images which included the badly wounded was allowed in 1942, and by the beginning of 1943, the negative side of the policy began to be much more closely evaluated. Images of the real war were quite bloodless, and even images of the fake war mostly lacked it too! The Office of War Information evaluated 62 war films released in 1942 and found that a mere *five* of them actually showed American soldiers being killed!
While it might have been implemented out of concern that the images could tank public morale, by this point, committed to the war for over a year, the new concern winning out was that the public was now lacked cognizance of the cost of the conflict. The allied countries, mainly the UK and the USSR, had shown considerably more willingness to release some images acknowledging the dead, and in turn it was decided that the US needed to follow suit and show the public images that "vividly portray the dangers, horrors, and grimness of War". Hundreds of photos were sifted over to find a set which could be released, including the American dead, and also the truly gut-wrenching injuries.
Finally, it was in September, 1943, that the first batch of pictures were put out. Incredibly, very few papers were willing to start running them immediately, outright declining, or at least refusing the most gruesome. The most famous, and one given credit generally as "first", was one in Life Magazine, who published George Strock's photo of [American dead at Buna Beach](_URL_0_) that most members of the public would be directly exposed to the mortal cost of the conflict on their own soldiery, and even then, it is hard not to see the photo and consider how *tame* it is: a fairly artistic composition if you distance yourself from the object of the camera's gaze, with the three bodies at the edge of the shore, one partially buried int he sand, no obvious wounds, let alone mutilation, nor even pooled blood, which no doubt long washed away. It is a picture of serene death, a carefully chosen one intended to show the people back home the cost of war, but hardly any of the brutality. To underline how big a deal the photo was, a full-page editorial on these "three units of freedom" accompanied the image, and Life, which would prove to be one of the most open publications in terms of these images for the remainder of the war, still declined to publish more shocking images such as one showing the mangled remains of a foot blown off.
For the rest of the war, toleration for these images of sacrifice increased with the media, and also became more encouraged by the government. Public opinion showed to be generally positive, and found that they were some of the most effective propaganda images in making an appeal to the population. Concerns about 'good taste', as well as the impact that seeing such images could have on the families of the fallen, remained a concern through the end of the war, and what was and wasn't released was *always* controlled. Many images of the fallen which were released echoed the 'Buna Beach' photo in obscuring the face, generalizing the fallen instead of singling out one man. By the tail end of the conflict, when more graphic material such as actual mutilations were being in limited material such as the propaganda film "Two and One-Half Minutes", which showed among other things, a body with a severed arm, the body was at the least not identifiable, being face down and in shadow. One of the first films which would include any actual combat footage would come out in early 1944, "[With the Marines at Tarawa](_URL_1_)", and included images of the dead and wounded, and the men in action too, but nevertheless it, and other similar combat footage, never showed the true extremes that the American dead and wounded at times lived. | [
"War journalism, combat films, and footage of World War II combat influenced the documentary-style camera work of the Battle of Geonosis, even to the point that hand-held shakes were digitally added to computer-generated sequences.\n",
"Kubrick’s vision of war was far bleaker than that of some other films of the ... |
What are the real world obstacles to tackling megafauna extinction through poaching by genetically modifying elephants/rhinos not to produce ivory? | I remember reading about a national park or some such in Africa where they removed the horns from some rhinos (or possibly de-tusked elephants) manually in an attempt to hinder poaching.
The poachers, presumably pissed off after spending a long time tracking down a rhino only to find it had no horn, shot and killed it anyway. So that's a possible problem.
Also we know little about the genetics of these species, it takes a long time for them to grow up (so it would be years before such a project could be successful) and we might negatively affect aspects of their biology (like breeding success, ability to defend from nonhuman predators, etc) | [
"Illegal poaching for African elephants has increased noticeably in 2008 and correlates with an increase in price for local black market ivory and with increased findings of illegal ivory headed to China. There is a probable species reduction of ~3% in 2011 alone. Estimates of over 25,000 to 35,000 African elephant... |
How do the different ways of medicine delivery (oral, nasal, IV, etc) affect treatment/symptom relief? | The most impactful mechanism is the first-pass effect. When you take drugs orally they eventually reach the liver which has a very diverse set of enzymes. The most important ones for the first pass effect are the cyp450 family of enzymes. They metabolize the drug and in most cases significantly reduce its subsequent bioavailability (in some cases it can lead to increased potency though metabolites which are more effective than the original drug). This effect is very notable in morphine and certain beta blockers.
Parentral administration avoids the first pass effect but is much more dangerous as generally overdosing is irreversible and more dangerous. Intravenous has to aseptic and most often drugs have to be administered by trained personnel.
Intramuscular and subcutaneous are slower ways of administration and have their negatives.
Another common route is inhalation. Drugs such as sevoflurane, isoflurane and n2o are administered though the lungs. They reach the brain rapidly.
Naloxone administered parenterally is a potent m-opioid receptor antagonist and can be used to treat opioid overdose (most commonly with heroine). However if it is administered orally it does not reach the central nervous system and only induces increased peristalsis of the bowels and has a laxative effect.
Another important factor for systematic drugs is whether they can pass the hematoencephalic barrier or not. This can significantly alter the effects of drugs. This depends more on the structure of the drug tho but it can be influenced by the route of admission.
There are a lot of other factors and I haven't reached side effects which can be very different for different routes of administration. But I think this should be enough if you have more questions please ask. | [
"Oral administration is a route of administration where a substance is taken through the mouth. Per os (P.O.) is sometimes used as an abbreviation for medication to be taken orally. Many medications are taken orally because they are intended to have a systemic effect, reaching different parts of the body via the bl... |
what are programming design patterns? | They are one of the reasons why some people drop out of CS programs in college, for one.
On a slightly more serious note: a design pattern is basically a sort of recipe to solve a common problem -- only it's a partial recipe. These problems aren't anything "big" like "write an application to do my taxes", but they are small parts that occur in many different contexts.
An easy example would be the `Publish/Subscribe` pattern. It describes how to be notified of a certain change or event. For instance, assume you're a chef. There's a cake in one oven, turkey in another oven, and a soufflé in a third oven. You don't want to walk around for an hour, constantly checking up on ("observing") each oven. No. Instead, you tell each oven to notify you when it's done cooking. While that's happening, you can go off and chop some vegetables or something.
There are many ways to program something like this. But realizing that it's a common problem, and that there's a named design pattern for it, makes it easier to talk and reason about it. Kind of like two pastry chefs can talk about cake, without having to describe how to make a cake. They both have a pretty good idea of how a cake works. And because they both know about cake, they can say "this cake was really nice" or "it only took 20 minutes to make", or whatever the salient point is.
It's a common misconception that you "have" to "use" design patterns, or that there is a magical list with "all" design patterns. The "gang of four" has famously published a bunch of them. But that's by no means all of them. | [
"In software engineering, a software design pattern is a general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design. It is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into source or machine code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can... |
Why does cloning (extinct / prehistoric animals) require live cells? | DNA is a very complex molecule, and as you most likely known, it can be easily damaged or destroyed by ionizing radiation, various toxins or free radicals, even a sunburn damages your DNA. A living cell has many mechanism of reproducing new DNA and repairing the older DNA. Once these processes stop, the DNA will begin to degrade. I assume your question is in response to the recent mammoth discovery? That has had a long time to degrade. Also from my understanding, cloning is not done from an individual DNA sample, but from using the entire nucleus of a cell. | [
"Cloning may have uses in preserving endangered species and may become a viable tool for reviving extinct species. In January 2009, scientists from the Centre of Food Technology and Research of Aragon, in northern Spain announced the cloning of the Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, which was officially d... |
why does canada suck at cricket, unlike most other former british colonies? | There's no answer other than it's just not very popular here. I live in Vancouver and as far as I'm aware there are only two cricket pitches here. I live several blocks away from one of them and I've only ever seen people playing on it once. I think we're more occupied with hockey, football, and American football. Even skiing and curling are more popular than cricket here. | [
"Cricket is a minor sport in Canada. Canada is unusual among the former Dominions of the British Empire in not having adopted cricket as a major sport—in contrast with Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and South Africa.\n",
"Cricket has an equally strong influence on the culture of many nations, ... |
What was Byzantine Iconoclasm and what was it's effect on the Orthodox church? | Byzantine Iconoclasm was a period in the 8th and 9th centuries when intellectual discourse and political intrigue in the highest ecclesiastical and imperial circles was dominated by debate over whether icons (depictions of biblical scenes and figures that were meant to be venerated) and religious imagery in other artistic media constituted idolatry or served as intercessors to God.
One of this period's longest lasting effects was on the art historical remnants of the Byzantine Empire, which are relatively scarce in comparison to textual evidence of the grandeur of the empire. The major repercussion of the iconoclastic controversy was that the authority of the church in Constantinople over other sees became more of a formality than a reality. | [
"The Iconoclasm (730–787 and 813–843) was a movement within the Byzantine church to establish that the Christian culture of portraits (see icon) of the family of Christ and subsequent Christians and biblical scenes were not of a Christian origin and therefore heretical. The group destroyed much of the Christian chu... |
why aren't there stricter physical requirements for police officers? they have to be prepared to chase down and/or apprehend criminals daily, but few seem like they're in good shape. | At least where I'm from in Canada Police are required to meet physical fitness requriements when they are first hired which are pretty strict. Once you are hired on it's difficult to fire someone because of the Unions. The police do encourage physical fitness though with reward and acomidation programs, free gyms and ust basic encouragement from peirs. Generally our cops are in good shape. The only ones you see get doughy are older cops that largely work as detectives or chiefs. Even then they aren't slovenly | [
"Police officers are more likely to cover up certain kinds of crimes by their colleagues. One study showed that excessive use of force was the crime most commonly shielded by the code. Two studies suggest that some police feel that the code is applicable in cases of \"illegal brutality or bending of the rules in or... |
What was the FBI’s plan when they sent a letter to Martin Luther King Jr instructing him to commit suicide? Did they honestly believe he’d do it. | It's not every day that I get to answer two questions, one about Israel and the other about MLK, but it turns out I have the sources on this at hand.
The FBI's main goal was to discredit and shame him, something they had been trying to do for some time. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, had sought to discredit King for years with investigations that crossed the line into illegal, but failed to find a way to discredit King. The FBI's head of spying operations, William Sullivan, wrote to Hoover just two days after the March on Washington that:
> We must mark [King] now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security...
Sullivan was, apparently, the one who wrote the letter to King, seeking to try and make accusations of various indecencies he supposedly had dirt on. Writing as an angry African American, the letter contained accusations that King was a "great liability to all of us Negroes", and saying that King was "finished". The threat near the end, that King had "just 34 days" in which to commit suicide before his "filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation", was accompanied by audio recordings made by spying on King's hotel rooms, and were recordings of King talking to women other than his wife.
The FBI apparently did believe that the threat would lead King to commit suicide, but King rightly suspected that the threat was coming from the FBI, and obviously did not commit suicide. While Hoover loyalists always claimed that Sullivan acted on his own, the complexity of the package's contents, the traces of it in FBI files, and the "climate of fury" (according to Taylor Branch's *Pillar of Fire*) all suggest it was an institutional operation, not something Sullivan did on his own.
King's reaction was notable. Coretta, his wife, read it first, and King himself listened to the tape three times before rushing in his inner circle, for whom he played the tape numerous times. Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Joseph Lowery, and Bernard Lee "played the tape over and over", looking for clues in the wrapping and postmark for where it originated. They all agreed: they believed it came from the FBI. And the FBI knew it had an effect on him. King was recorded saying, for example, that "they are out to break me", and he kept word of the package quiet.
King's friends launched into the fray. They confronted the FBI, discussing malicious leaks and accusing the FBI of malintent. By all accounts, the FBI denied involvement, but still hoped King would be driven to suicide. The House committee, also known as the Stokes Committee, also suggested that it was sent as an institutional operation run by the FBI, but could not confirm it. | [
"The FBI–King suicide letter or blackmail package was an anonymous 1964 letter and package by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) meant to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. The phrase \"You Are Done\" is a noted warning from the letter.\n",
"The FBI frequently investigated Martin Luther King, Jr. In the mid-... |
In Game of Thrones, everyone knows The Bear and the maiden fair. Were there any universally popular songs in medieval England? | In the Continuation of John Fordun's *Scotichronicon* (c. 1440), [Walter Bowers](_URL_0_) notes the popularity of Robin Hood stories among the masses; he may or may not be referring to the rich tradition of Robin Hood ballads in Britain, some of which still survived in oral tradition [last century](_URL_1_).
There may be some other examples out there that I have never come across, but it's generally difficult to say much before the early modern period. In the last few centuries, there have been songs ubiquitous throughout English-speaking vernacular song cultures in North America and Great Britain (*Barbara Allen*, for instance) – although I would hesitate to say throughout the English-speaking world. Would this have been the case in the medieval period? Possibly, but I don’t think it likely until the establishment of the broadside ballad trade in the sixteenth century, which provided means of mass distribution.
Similarly, the representation of vernacular song in A Song of Ice and Fire is absolutely not realistic. GRRM treats songs like we might treat them today -- they have a set tune and a set text, and any deviation from these is in error. In Westeros, an almost entirely oral cultural with no culture of mass print or musical recording, there would be significant variance between different singers' versions, keyed into their own artistry, their source material, and their memory.
We can see dramatic variations in items from the same song family in the material collected from singers of Anglo-American "folk" singers over the last several centuries -- and these traditions have been often mediated through print culture (despite the characterizations of Victorian and post-Victorian scholars), which acts to homogenize texts. But as in medieval England, there’s no broadside trade in the Guttenbergless Westeros. Furthermore, mobile Gipsy and Traveller communities (and their kind) have played key roles in spreading songs in recent centuries – I’m not sure Westeros has an equivalent of this, either.
Without these mediating influences, it's not particularly likely that The Bear and the Maiden Fair would be ubiquitous throughout Westeros, *especially* not in a form that would allow someone from the Reach and someone from Winterfell (or even two strangers who only live a town apart) to sing together without first comparing notes.
| [
"\"The Bear and the Maiden Fair\" is a folk song in \"A Song of Ice and Fire\", and it is sung in the television series adaptation \"Game of Thrones\". The lyrics are provided by George R. R. Martin in the original novel; Ramin Djawadi composed the tune's music in 2012, at the request of the series creators David B... |
why do people code desktop apps in java when very few end users like it? | If you write in Java, your program will run on any system that is capable of running Java, which is basically every computer. Java certainly has its many flaws, but the ability to write a program that is guaranteed to be able to be run on anything is reason enough to overlook the flaws in many cases. | [
"A programmer could develop code on a PC and expect it to run on Java-enabled mobile phones, as well as on routers and mainframes equipped with Java, without any adjustments. This was intended to save software developers the effort of writing a different version of their software for each platform or operating syst... |
The surface of Venus sounds like hell. How comparable is it to the Hadean eon of Earth? | They both had/have lots of volcanos and an atmosphere rich in CO2 and water (both with a lot of pressure, 90 and 100x modern Earth, respectively). Both hot, but Venus is all the way at 462°C (we use temperatures lower than that for sterilization) and Earth only made it to 230 °C (and Venus is near that temperture constantly, regardless of latitude, day/night, or season). Venus also has no ozone layer or magnetosphere, so a lot more radiation.
Also, the Hadean may have had water oceans, but on Venus it's all evaporated. | [
"Without seismic data or knowledge of its moment of inertia, little direct information is available about the internal structure and geochemistry of Venus. The similarity in size and density between Venus and Earth suggests they share a similar internal structure: a core, mantle, and crust. Like that of Earth, the ... |
how would/does north carolina go about enforcing their gay rights laws? | It would be after the fact. Basically someone who uses the same restroom as you accuses you of being the wrong gender for the bathroom, calls the police, you get arrested and then it's hashed out in court. | [
"In April 2017 Representative Speciale along with Representatives Larry Pittman and Carl Ford filed a bill in the N.C. General Assembly that says gay marriage is not valid in North Carolina. The bill, H.B. 780, claimed the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allows gay marriage is not valid in North Carolina. The bill s... |
at which point does something move? | Motion is a change in position, so an object will move as soon as its position changes.
Mathematically, Zeno's Paradox is interesting history but not particularly useful. If you have one liter of water, and divide it into two halves, you will still have one liter of water. If you split the halves, you will still have one liter of water. If you split the quarters, you will still have one liter of water. No matter how many times you split the liter, it will still be exactly one liter. Splitting a length into small pieces -- even an infinite number of small pieces -- does not alter the length itself. If you learn calculus at some point, you'll perform this sort of operation regularly.
Theoretical physicists sometimes talk about the [Planck length](_URL_0_), as it becomes very difficult to distinguish any movement or distance below that length. | [
"A motion move is when a player moves one of their pieces vertically, horizontally, or diagonally along the lines of the board and into an unoccupied space. However, a piece’s move is limited by the direction(s) its indicator(s) are pointed, as well as the type of piece. A player may not move more than one piece on... |
why do scraps of paper stick to our fingers temporarily if we press hard? | Everything sticks to your fingers a little bit. When you press down your skin flattens and the surface area of your skin that's touching the paper increases. With more surface area there's more force holding the paper in place. After a bit your skin stretches back to normal and the paper falls off. | [
"Paper contrasts with papyrus in that the plant material is broken down through maceration or disintegration before the paper is pressed. This produces a much more even surface, and no natural weak direction in the material which falls apart over time.\n",
"One characteristic of machine-made paper is that it crea... |
why does a fan/cool air help in reducing motion sickness? | The nausea is caused by a disagreement between the inner ear, which detects movement, and the eyes, which see movement. If you watch a 3D movie you can get the visual sense of motion but the inner ear disagrees.
Due to an evolutionary trait most humans have, your body treats disagreements between those two sensory organs as if you have been poisoned (some toxins act on the eye or inner ear soon after being ingested) and the body will move to rid itself of perceived poison by puking.
Tl;dr your body thinks it's poisoned when 2 sensory organs disagree and makes you puke. | [
"On human skin, the airflow from handfans increases evaporation which has a cooling effect due to the latent heat of evaporation of water. It also increases heat convection by displacing the warmer air produced by body heat that surrounds the skin. Fans are convenient to carry around, especially folding fans.\n",
... |
Did the Milky Way ever have a quasar at its center? | I'll start with the second question. I [did some calculations](_URL_1_) and a quazar would be about 1000 times brighter than jupiter. This question seems to keep popping up, so if there is an error, I'm sure someone will notice ([Lq](_URL_0_) [Lj](_URL_2_)). I'm not really seeing how it could disrupt life on earth. It would probably be white in color. It would look like a really bright star.
EDIT: also, I'm not sure how we could tell if the milky way ever had a quasar in the past, so I can't help you there.
Well quasars aren't my specialty, but at least I tried... for SCIENCE! I'm having a few doubts about that calculation, but it sounds reasonable to me... | [
"The center of the Milky Way had long puzzled astronomers, and thick dust obscures the view of it in visible light. During the mid to late 1970s, Townes together with Eric Wollman, John Lacy, Thomas Geballe and Fred Baas studied Sagittarius A, the H II region at the galactic center, at infrared wavelengths. They ob... |
Why does Earth's orbit sync up with its rotational tilt? | This [video](_URL_0_) may help you understand the mechanics a bit better. The north pole and south pole remain pointed at fixed points in space year round, while the planet circles the sun on a different plane. This means the orbit naturally creates the same seasons year round.
If the poles were pointing directly perpendicular to the plane of orbit, we'd have only one season year round, if they were pointing directly at the sun on the two equinoxes, we'd have really crazy swings in seasons year round. | [
"Orbitals spin to mimic the effects of gravity and are sized so that the rate of rotation necessary to produce a comfortable gravity level is approximately equal to one day. In the case of the standard Culture day and gravity, this diameter is around three million kilometres. For such an orbital to reproduce the eq... |
why we can´t "see" atoms or small particles using some kind of microoscope. | Ultimately to see something you have to bounce something off of it. For big things this is easy—we can bounce photons (i.e. light) off of it and detect where those photons land.
However, a typical red photon may be 430 nanometers, while a hydrogen atom is about 1.1 Angstroms (about 4,000 times smaller). "Seeing" a hydrogen atom by bouncing photons off of it would be like trying to find a marble on the floor by throwing beach balls at it and seeing where they land.
You can try using smaller photons, but the smaller the wavelength of a photon the more energy it has. Now instead of lobbing beach balls at your marble on the floor you're shooting at it with a handgun and seeing where the bullets land. Once again you have difficulty.
We do have incredibly sensitive devices that are able to image tiny objects (say, electron microscopes), but the job is very difficult when you're trying to see atoms while using things made of atoms to shoot things bigger than atoms at the thing that you're trying to look at. | [
"BULLET::::- Optical tweezers use light to manipulate microscopic objects as small as a single atom. The momentum transfer from a focused laser beam is able to trap small particles. In the biological sciences, these instruments have been used to apply forces in the pico Newton range and to measure displacements in ... |
Are there planets with mountains so high they extend past the atmosphere so you could literally climb your way into zero gravity looking over the curvature of the entire planet? | Atmosphere and gravity are two different things!
In terms of atmosphere, there isn't a hard cut-off where the gas just disappears - it slowly gets less and less dense as you go up. The International Space Station actually feels drag from the atmosphere and has to boost itself a little bit every now and again, or else it will slowly drift down and eventually crash into Earth.
But you can have a mountain so big that the atmosphere at the top is much much less dense than the atmosphere at the bottom. On Mars, the huge Olympus Mons is big enough that the atmosphere at the top is 1/20th of the pressure of the atmosphere on the surface. By comparison, the atmosphere on Mt Everest is about 1/3rd of the pressure of the sea level atmosphere on Earth. So if you climbed to the top of Olympus Mons, you are kinda getting close to being in a vacuum - although the atmosphere of Mars is pretty thin to start with.
Gravity is quite different though. The atmosphere is typically a thin layer on the surface, but gravity extends forever, just getting weaker with distance. Satellites stay up not because they are "outside" of Earth's gravity, but because they're going fast enough to counter the Earth's gravity. You wouldn't expect mountains to form so large that their peaks are moving so fast that they're escaping a planet's gravity, because planets *form* by gravity, and the top of the mountain wouldn't really be attached very well. This mountain would have to extend to geosynchronous orbit, which is about a tenth of the way to the Moon. You'd only expect this to happen with artificial constructs like a space elevator. | [
"\"This Mortal Mountain\" is also about future extreme sports, concerning mountain climbing on an asymmetric planet with a mountain tens of kilometers high, extending far beyond any breathable atmosphere.\n",
"They visit a high gravity planet, where they encounter many insect-like aliens who have adapted to 1.5 t... |
what do professional painting restorers do beyond being good painters and having an eye for color? | They paint pictures in the same way the original artist did and they have a good eye for colour.
Can you do that? if so, go get a job as a painting restorer | [
"The conservation of paintings varies for the different types of oil, acrylic and fresco paintings. These techniques include cleaning, removal and replacement of degraded varnish and the restoration of paint losses. The Tate Museum described that \"Cleaning is a particularly delicate and demanding part of conservin... |
Why don't we send satellites upwards out of the solar system? Why always through the planetary pathway? | Another point is that since the solar system lies mostly in a plane, it's more interesting to send probes along it instead of out of it. Even if we somehow managed to set something on an escape trajectory perpendicular to the solar system plane, it would be a long time before it ran into anything else. | [
"All other planetary bodies in the Solar System also appear to periodically switch direction as they cross Earth's sky. Though all stars and planets appear to move from east to west on a nightly basis in response to the rotation of Earth, the outer planets generally drift slowly eastward relative to the stars. Aste... |
why are marshmallows white? | Gelatin is almost nothing but protein, that's why it's sticky and behaves the way it does.
So yes, it's the proteins changing after heating then cooling that cause it to turn white. | [
"Marshmallows (, ) are a type of confectionery which is typically made from sugar, water and gelatin whipped to a squishy consistency, molded into small cylindrical pieces, and coated with corn starch. Some marshmallow recipes call for eggs. This is the modern version of a medicinal confection made from \"Althaea o... |
Can jet engines function underwater? | An airplane engine will not work under water. Jet, piston, it doesn’t matter. The entire design is based around use in air and it has no way of producing power without air.
However, if you look at the engines that are usually called “jets” nowadays you’ll find they are most often “turbofans”. That means turbine powered ducted fan.
The ducted fan is common in underwater propulsion. Not literally the same ones used in airplanes, but the same core concept. A motor-driven fan that is surrounded by a duct to improve efficiency compared to propellers. Look at any underwater robot and you’ll see a bunch of electric ducted fans.
There are boats that use gas turbines (generally helicopter engines, but they run on the same principles as the power plant you’ll find at the core of a turbofan) to power ducted fans. The gas turbine part runs in air like an airplane engine, and a spinning shaft connects it to the ducted fan part that runs in water. It can only run on the surface though.
So... the answer is “no” for the question as asked, but if you deconstruct what is generally called a “jet engine” nowadays you’ll find boats that use the same system - most parts completely reengineered for use with water instead of air - to do the same job in water. And if you move away from the gas turbine part and just look at the ducted fan, you’ll find a lot more. | [
"Water jet- Essentially a waterjet drive is like an aircraft turbojet with the difference that the operating fluid is water instead of air. Water jets are best suited to fast vessels and are thus used often by the military. Water jet propulsion has many advantages over other forms of marine propulsion, such as ster... |
how important are the visual chart questions when you're having an eye exam? | Which line you start to have trouble on gives them a good idea of the range they're shooting for -- and don't assume that one option is obviously better than another. Sometimes, there's intentionally little or no difference just to keep the patient honest. But... the doctor already knows where you're going to stumble before you start reading, because...
They actually get a pretty good idea of what your prescription will be before they use the machine with lenses, which is called a Phoropter. Before that, they use a Retinascope, which shines a light into your eye and determines the strength of the lens needed to focus it on the retina. This can either be done manually or by computer.
That info is the actual prescription strength. The doctor just uses the Phoropter to fine-tune the prescription, especially for things like astigmatism or slight differences between the two eyes.
So, basically, the first machine may tell him or her that the prescription is generally +2. In the second machine, the number is refined so that the final answer might be something like +1.965 at a 23 degree angle, or 2.135 at a 90 degree angle, etc. (All numbers pulled out of my ass just for example of the general idea.) | [
"An eye chart is a chart used to measure visual acuity. Eye charts are often used by health care professionals, such as optometrists, physicians or nurses, to screen persons for vision impairment. Ophthalmologists, physicians who specialize in the eye, also use eye charts to monitor the visual acuity of their patie... |
why is appearing "desperate" socially unacceptable? | If you're desperate, it's because you have few, or no, options. If you have no options, it's because nobody wants you. If nobody wants you, you are not very desirable. | [
"BULLET::::- The Elite-Engineered Model explains that social panics are exaggerated or invented problems created by elites or people who are considered higher among others in society. These type of people produce fear among the other classes over an issue that is not considered dangerous to the society. The reason ... |
How does an internet server know at what speed to transmit you data? | > Is that extra data lost and resent?
This depends on the size of the buffer. When data is incoming at a higher rate than outgoing it must be buffered and those buffers are not infinite. If the buffer overflows, data is silently discarded. When the original sender (the server) does not receive an acknowledgement from the destination node, it will retransmit the data. Since the server will have to buffer all data that has not been acknowledged for a possible retransmission, its buffers already limit the amount of in flight data that is being transported in the network.
> does the server 'test' your internet connection and then sends data at a slower rate
the server will adapt. When there are lots of retransmission events, the server will throttle its outgoing bandwidth. Some protocols also allow explicit negotiation of connection parameters (such as TCP window), but this adaption happens simultaneous to a data transfer and does not precede it. Default (usually conservative) values are assumed for the TCP window size and changed over time to optimize the performance. | [
"One process sending data primarily in the downstream direction is downloading. However, the overall download speed depends on the downstream speed of the user, the upstream speed of the server, and the network between them.\n",
"Speed, for the purpose of this article, is how quickly a server can deliver an artic... |
What is exactly happening at the molecular level and in terms of thermodynamics when acid is added to water that make it safer than doing the reverse? | The reasoning isn't based on molecular or thermodynamic effects per se. If you combine too much water and acid and the resulting exothermic reaction causes boiling and spraying, would you rather be covered with (1) a solution of water with a little acid added or (2) a solution of acid with a little water added?
(Incidentally, I always heard the mnemonic "AAA" (Always Add Acid) until I moved to Cambridge, MA to do microfabrication work. There it was "Do what you oughta, add the acid to the watta.") | [
"Preparation of the diluted acid can be dangerous due to the heat released in the dilution process. To avoid splattering, the concentrated acid is usually added to water and not the other way around. Water has a higher heat capacity than the acid, and so a vessel of cold water will absorb heat as acid is added.\n",... |
why are corporations, especially the larger ones already worth billions, always so concerned with growth? | Because you grow or die.
Consider a CEOs position, he is beholden to the share holders of the company and the board of directors. The share price at any point in time factors in future growth, if the company falls short is these, the share price drops and the share holders lose money. People who lose money generally aren't happy....
Consider also, company's should be able to grow just at the rate of inflation, if thy don't, then technically they are shrinking.
A capitalist economy is also designed for companies to die and be replaced. If you any do things cheaper, or sell more products, someone else will be able to, and they will take market share. It is this continued improvement in process and technology that keeps the economy evolving.
Tldr: need to grow or other people will | [
"Companies range from the very small to the very large. There are no very large businesses which are not companies. (Even the John Lewis Partnership in the United Kingdom, which promotes itself as \"the world's largest partnership,\" is in fact a company.) Part of what allows companies to become so much bigger than... |
the difference between advertisement and propaganda. | advertisement sells a product/service. propaganda *'sells'* an ideal.
can't be put simpler than that.
**Note** that the *'sells'* in propaganda is just a term used to equate the two; you're not actually sold anything but theoretically you can 'buy' into it.
Examples: a poster for CocaCola is an advertisement. A poster telling you be a republican is propaganda. | [
"Propaganda is a form of persuasion that is often used in media to further some sort of agenda, such as a personal, political, or business agenda, by evoking an emotional or obligable response from the audience. It includes the deliberate sharing of realities, views, and philosophies intended to alter behavior and ... |
how are trickshots filmed? | There is 3 ways to go about making a “trick shot” video is 3 methods
Extreme practice, this is the most grueling way to make this genre of videos, but it is possible, for example the popular channel “dude perfect” is a group of people who whole career is dedicated to making these videos, they have practiced for years on gaining the skills to do it.
Trail and error, this is a medium difficultly way to make a video, if you throw a hundred balls from the other side of the field, and only once does it hit the goal, you can use video editing software like after effects to just cut all of the fat of the video down it the singular example.
Video manipulation, in short, this is a way to make these videos without the skill of doing the trick, you can film yourself throwing the ball from far away and missing, remove the ball from the shot and then simple throw it from a easy point and get a still of the area, and with a hour in Adobe you have a trick shot that is reliables believable, for more explanation I recommend the channel of “doctor dissolution” for a deeper explanations of video manipulation. | [
"Trickjumps are video game techniques that are used to enhance the mobility of the player when jumping. These methods are sometimes unforeseen by the creator of the game. However, they can also be placed in the game on purpose, often to reward players who practice more.\n",
"Trick shots appear frequently in films... |
do we age faster if we don't sleep as much? | There's a couple of things that need to be separated:
1. Pulling an allnighter occasionally shouldn't be much of a problem if you catch up a bit soon after. But structurally skipping sleep is very unhealthy. Your brain needs sleep to process information and "get rested". If you don't do that, it will function sub-optimally and effects get worse the longer you deprive it of sleep.
2. Looking older doesn't have to mean you are "aging faster". The signs of too little sleep can make you look older. But if you start sticking to a healthy sleep/wake pattern you'll probably be fine in a couple of weeks.
3. Allnighters are rarely an effective way of getting your stuff done. You are much, much more productive if you get enough sleep. So it might seem counterproductive, but maybe it's better to get some sleep and do your work in less time than staying up all night. Second: planning. Start planning your work better if your health is important to you. | [
"They are present in the sleep of 5-month-old infants, and develop with age. Between 3 and 5 years of age a faster negative component appears and continues to increase until adolescence. Another change occurs in adults: before 30 years of age their frequency and amplitude is higher than in older people particularly... |
How much power did the Queens and Kings in Europe have in the 18th and 19th century when Parliaments were gaining strength? | In England, it varied, really. The story of the 18th century in England is the decline of the powers of the House of Lords and the monarch, but George III took an active interest in playing parliamentary politics and, I think, halted (or at least slowed) said decline for a few decades.
George III was ultimately, a conservative, so, he was in conflict with the more reformist members of the House of Commons for the entirety of his reign. He had his supporters, most notably, [William Pitt "the Younger"](_URL_0_) in comparison to more "radical" reformists like [Charles Fox](_URL_2_), who George III hated both on a personal and a political level.
So, to make a very long (and complicated) story short. The monarch in England had not so much direct power anymore, but he could, if clever, wield indirect power through his supporters within parliament. George III was active in politics for most of his life, apart from his bouts of madness (Which led to political crises of their own, such as the [Regency Crisis](_URL_1_))
It was a very gradual shift, for the most part. There were periods when it shifted radically, most notably, the [Glorious Rebellion of 1688](_URL_6_), which severely limited the powers of the English monarch. But, beyond that, it was gradual changes in Parliament. The House of Commons, throughout the century, slowly began to become more independent of the monarch, even if George III did slow the process throughout his long reign.
The French Revolution, strangely enough, both accelerated the decline of the monarchy, but also provoked a conservative backlash, too. The revolution encouraged reformists in Britain, at least at first (especially Fox), but once the Terror kicked into full swing and floods of *emigres* came to England, the British (As well as the other monarchies of England) were terrified, and the British feeling about it can most accurately be seen through the writings of [Edmund Burke](_URL_3_), who wrote his [*Reflections on the Revolution in France](_URL_7_) is one of the most important pieces of political writing in the English language, I think, where he lambasted the French revolutionaries for a number of reasons and really set the tone of English conservatism for a good, long while.
I think, though, ultimately, the Revolution did more damage to the monarchy than conservative backlashes against reform could stifle. Parliamentary reform (Such as expanding the franchise, the elimination of "rotten buroughs", a written constitution, and so on), was an issue that popped up from time to time throughout the eighteenth century. Supporters, though, were really galvanized by the French Revolution, and I think the powers-that-be were more inclined to give concessions out of fear of the same thing happening at home. So, a number of years later, the British got the ["Great Reform Act of 1832"](_URL_4_) which granted a good number of the concessions that reformists wanted.
England is a unique case, though. As compared to continental monarchies, such as the pre-Revolutionary French and the various German states, the British monarch was relatively weak and powerless.
If you are interested in the subject or the period, I would recommend the movie "The Madness of King George". It is a great film on its own, and you get to see a good bit of the political wrangling, especially with Pitt the Younger. A personal favorite, too, is [John Wilkes, a prominent radical during the 18th century and an interesting character in general.](_URL_5_)
I don't think I can do the subject justice in such a format as this. There are tons and tons of books written on the subject. Last I remember, there were several rows at my library devoted to the subject. ;) I hope it was coherent, too. I just woke up! | [
"The influence of the Crown was increased by the civil wars of the late fifteenth century, which destroyed the power of the great noblemen. Both houses of Parliament held little power during the ensuing years, and the absolute supremacy of the Sovereign was restored. The domination of the monarch grew further under... |
Why were Charlemagne and the Abbasids able to command huge armies compared to later feudal states in Europe? | Not really an answer, but I'm just wondering where you've got the idea of 'huge' Carolingian armies from? Almost all of what I've read on Carolingian warfare suggests very small army sizes, certainly never really going over 5 figures in terms of manpower. The only scholar who seems to take a different direction is Bernard Bachrach, and his stuff isn't [entirely](_URL_1_) [unproblematic...](_URL_0_)
(Hat-tip to /u/textandtrowel so that the bot doesn't ping me!) | [
"In the feudal system, new princes and kings arose, the most powerful of which was arguably the Frankish ruler Charlemagne. In 800, Charlemagne, reinforced by his massive territorial conquests, was crowned Emperor of the Romans (Imperator Romanorum) by Pope Leo III, effectively solidifying his power in western Euro... |
What limits the amount of ram a computer supports? | There are a number of limits. They come in, for x86, a few levels: software, architecture, cpu, motherboard.
Software limits should be obvious. You need an operating system that supports the amount of RAM you're using. This is why you are recommended a 64-bit operating system if you have more than ~3GB of RAM - most 32-bit operating systems simply don't support handling more. For instance, Windows has the following limits: _URL_0_
Architecture and CPU are limits imposed by AMD and Intel. The current iteration of x86 using 64-bit virtual addresses (that is, they are internally stored as 64-bits) and can thus access 2^64 bytes of data. This is an unfathomably large amount. The CPU limits are much more modest. Since every wire and pin costs money, and nobody needs 64 bits of addressing, most current processors implement 48 bits or less at the physical level. This limits you to 2^48 bytes, or 256 TiB. See _URL_1_
The most limiting factor is exactly what you're asking about. This comes mainly from trying to again save costs. Every pin you wire from the CPU to the memory costs money. Nobody will need anywhere near the even the physical limit of the CPU in the consumer market. Thus, only a portion of the address bits are routed.
There's a little more to it, though. Say you put 8GB in each of the slots. When you access memory from software, it doesn't see the individual sticks of RAM, each with bytes number 0 ... 2^33 - 1. There's some circuitry and software intialization that happens so that if you access from 0 to 2^33 - 1, you read from stick A. If you read from the next region, you start carrying over to stick B. Something has to handle this configuration, so they needed to have taken this into consideration in the design of the motherboard (mainly on the BIOS/software side; the CPU on modern processors controls RAM directly). This is slightly more complicated in the case of multiple channels, but the basic premise is the same.
Although a lot of times it's just a matter of guarantees. They didn't see that particular motherboard being used often with > 8GB of RAM, so they didn't test it, and they don't want to advertise falsely if it for some reason didn't work. | [
"While not a RAM-based storage system, a CDBMS is designed to use as much RAM as the operating system can provide. For large databases, additional RAM improves performance. Generally, 4GB of RAM will provide optimized access times up to about 100 million records. 8GB of RAM is adequate for databases up to 10 times ... |
Can someone explain what a "Memresistor" does in a circuit? | Assuming you are asking about a *memristor*, this started out as a theoretical concept: if resistors impose a relationship between voltage and current, capacitors impose a relationship between voltage and charge (charge being the integral of current), and inductors impose a relationship between current and flux linkage (flux linkage being the integral of voltage), shouldn't there be a a fourth possibility & mdash; a component that imposes a relatioship between flux linkage and charge? This fourth type of electrical element was [proposed in 1971 by Chua](_URL_0_).
-
Mathematically, by differentiating the memristor equation, one can show that the behavior of the hypothesized memristor element is like that of a linear resistor, in which the value of the resistance depends on the time-integral of the current that has passed through the element. Therefore, this resistance has memory, in the sense that its properties depend on the past history of the electrical current. Hence, the name memristor is a combination of "memory" and "resistor".
-
In 2008, scientists at HP laboratories [demonstrated the first physical realization of memristor circuit elements](_URL_2_).
-
Several applications of memristor elements have been proposed in a [review by Marani et al.](_URL_1_), including non-volatile memory, image processing circuits, and reconfigurable RF antennas, all of which take advantage of
the memristor's ability to store digital and analog information in a simple and power efficient manner. | [
"An electronic oscillator is an electronic circuit that produces a periodic, oscillating electronic signal, often a sine wave or a square wave. Oscillators convert direct current (DC) from a power supply to an alternating current signal. They are widely used in many electronic devices. Common examples of signals ge... |
How exactly does a microscopic organism become airborne? | I have a two part answer:
The general spirit of the factoid is true: If you have water that has bacteria in it, they will stay in the liquid water as the water vapor escapes. This is because evaporation is a molecular process: molecules leave essentially one at a time. And you must realize that, while we thing that both bacteria and water molecules are "very small", bacteria are *gigantic* compared to water molecules: The average bacterium is [about 1 micrometer](_URL_1_) (0.0001 centimeters, or 0.00004 inches) across, while water molecules are [0.3 nm across](_URL_3_) (0.00000003 centimeters, or 0.00000001 inches). That's about 10,000 times smaller! So you can see why bacteria don't "float away" with evaporating water: they're just way too big!
However, condensation, as well as rain and snow, are by no means devoid of life. There is actually [a species of airborne bacteria](_URL_2_) that is quite important as a form of [ice nuclei](_URL_0_), sort of acting as "seeds" which cause ice crystals to grow rapidly an them, eventually becoming snow, rain, or some other form of precipitation. They can actually be quite harmful to plants, causing frost to form a lot easier than it would otherwise, potentially killing the plant. So bacteria in condensation and falling rain are actually quite common, but only because those bacteria were already there, and the water condensed *onto* them. But that amount of bacteria is relatively quite small, so for all intents and purposes, condensation is sterile.
| [
"Sessile organisms can move via external forces (such as water currents), but are usually permanently attached to something. Organisms such as corals lay down their own substrate from which they grow. Other sessile organisms grow from a solid such as a rock, dead tree trunk, or a manmade object such as a buoy or sh... |
When and why did New England Puritanism fall out of fashion? | It was basically driven out of control by commerce and trade. The Pilgrims landed in the New World and immediately decided to set things up how they wanted. They tried to control things with their laws, starting immediately with the Mayflower Compact. For example you had to be a member of their church to be a citizen of Plymouth. There were laws about behavior and certain punishments. This works as long as you don't have rival communities.
Rhode Island and Connecticut were founded as refuge communities for people looking for a place to live free of the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth. Fishing communities in Marblehead, Nantucket, and off the coast of New Hampshire started being created right near the Puritans and were all about trade. Eventually their numbers started growing, along with their wealth and influence and the Puritans lost control. The merger of colonies also hurt their numbers as they had to accept more diverse citizens thanks to the Crown. All of this happened over the course of the 17th century.
Please see *Conceived in Liberty*, **Vol 1 Part III** *The Founding of New England* which describes the settlement and change in the New England states over the course of the 17th century. It is [freely available](_URL_0_).
| [
"While Puritans were consolidating their domination of religious, political and intellectual life in New England, elsewhere in America, during the period immediately before the American Revolution, many newly arrived settlers became dissatisfied with theology, preaching, liturgy, and ecclesiology inherited from Eur... |
how exactly does someone code an app such as 'shazam'? | I do not know the specifics, but am pretty sure the app uses a centralized server that houses all of the music and relates that information back to the app. If my thoughts are true, then the app doesn't actually figure out what the song is.
Think of it this way: Just like when we google something, that's what the app is doing, googling the music. | [
"Shazam is an application owned and developed by Apple Inc. The application can identify music, movies, advertising, and television shows, based on a short sample played and using the microphone on the device. The software is available for Android, macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Windows. \n",
"BULLET::::- Shazam ... |
deliberate homelessness - just why? | It's hard to have a definite answer as it's obviously a complicated situation. My guess would be some degree of mental illness (severe clinical depression, bipolar disorder, etc.). Maybe he feels like a complete failure for failing out if university. I know people who under-performed and was penalized for it and ended up withdrawing in and getting depressed, feeling like they were worthless or a waste. Borrowing money may have been his only means to survive at the time, and while he probably knew he wouldn't be able to repay it he felt it was the only way he could continue to live. Maybe he feels tremendous guilt about it which could exasperbate his depression.
That's all pure speculation. I think if you care about him it'd be worth trying to have a heart to heart. Who knows what his reason is, or if he even knows. | [
"The criminalization of homelessness can be defined as the passage of laws or ordinances that prohibit sitting, sleeping, panhandling, sharing food, or religious practice in public spaces. Over half a million people are homeless on any given night in the United States, and a third of them are unsheltered. The growi... |
how game devs avoid people stealing their games. | They don't really care, the people buying games is more than enough. Video games are worth more and more each year. Games now make more per year than movies, the profits are going up and up, there is insane growth year on year, even with piracy, for indie and big studio alike. if anything having your games be popular stolen games can make them popular retail games, if 90% of people can't be bothered pirating then when a game becomes popular then 90% of the people wanting in on it will pay for it, provided it's been priced appropriately. The rising tide raises all ships. | [
"In defense of these behaviors are arguments that the rules of the game allow it and that players might not know they are behaving against the designer's intention. So-called exploits, in this view, are not cheats because they do not change the game in any way and therefore could be accessible to all players if the... |
Why didn't Hitler invade Iran for Oil instead of the Soviet Union? | The short answer would be that the oilfields of Grosny and Maikop, later on Baku were easier accessable than Irans. For this there are two reasons, logistical prakticality and availibilty.
On the one side the it is the logistical side. We can see in the North African campaign that the Germans were already running on last the reserves. This logistic issues were caused by the Royal Navy dominance of the Medditerreain Sea. Even if the Germans would focus on Middle East they would not have the naval resources to contest British. So the supply situation would be terrible, even worse than the German standard. An option would to go through Turkey. Yet this but Germany in the problem that Turkey might not allow it. They accept the invasion of Greece through Bulgaria but had thier demands and sceptism about the Germans at the borders. So, if the Turks joins axis they have to face Allies (they saw that the axis werent the winning team) and all thier trade, so joing would cost them making it unlikely. If the Turks resited the germans have to fight them through Anatolia and Allies could re-enforce them. Furthermore, Anatolia is hill and mountainous country, not ideal for armoured warfare. If the Germans broke through they had fight further through the middle east to Iran, supplies had to come from Beirut or Palestina, and the infrastructure of the region is worst than that of the soviet union. Taking not away that they had to run thier supplies from Germany over the Balkans, Turkey etc. To supply the front. Than we come the Mountainous region of Iran. Even the British and Soviet with abbanous supplies and logistics system had thier hardships. The Germans haf terrible logistics, not speaking about the lack of material. So, at the end it was not worth the effort extending the fronts to a large extent and weaking thier defense against the soviets in the east and uk/us in the west. Yes, the germans would invade the soviets in this senario but it does not take away that the soviets would invade the germans after 1942/1943.
On the other side, if they manage it, they would be surrounded by UK territory and airfields given the RAF a field day in targetting German oilsupplies. In theory they could do that too with Maikop and Baku, but the caucasus mountains formed a natural barier that limited its effectiveness.
However the bigger issue is that for the Germans, the Soviet were not just another target, they were the big enemy, the large show down of the war. The germans would invade the soviet union, independent of its resources. The invasion was ideologicaly motivated, the lack of resource of the Germans and soviet re-armment forced the Germans to invade earilier. However in the mind of Hitler and rest of the German leadership every thing, every campaign, every invasion had the purpose of making germany ready to invade the soviets. So taking away troops from the east was not an option. Especially as the Germans were already spread thing. Sicily and Normandy, took away little but to much troops from the east weaking the Germans tremendous. The invasion of the middle east would need a large mount of troop, not only to conquer it, but to hold and defend it.
It was simple impossible to carry out and even it was successful the costs to hold it to much for thier gains | [
"Albert Speer said that oil had been a major factor in the decision to invade the Soviet Union. Hitler believed that Bakus oil resources were essential for the survival of the Third Reich, as a dearth of oil resources was a vulnerability for Germany's military.\n",
"Following Germany's invasion of the USSR in Jun... |
why is it okay to eat sushi at a sushi restaurant, but it's bad to go to the store and get raw fish to eat? | In the US, the FDA guidelines for fish intended for raw consumption are that it "must be frozen and stored at a temperature of -20°C (-4°F) or below for a minimum of 168 hours (7 days)”.
If you do intend to buy and freeze your own fish for raw consumption, just be sure that when defrosting you keep it free of other possible contaminants; don't store it in the same place as other raw meats not intended for raw consumption, etc. | [
"Per Food and Drug Administration regulations, raw fish served in the United States must be frozen prior to serving in order to kill parasites. Because of this and the relative difficulty of acquiring fresh seafood compared to Japan, raw seafood (e.g., sashimi) is not as prevalent a component in American-style sush... |
Is “like dissolves like” always true? | "Like dissolves like" is generally true, but a broad oversimplification. What dissolves/mixes with what depends on how the chemical/functional groups present in each compound interact.
Polar and non-polar are generalized terms to describe how evenly electrons are distributed between different parts of a given molecule. "Polar" refers to molecules with uneven electron distribution (e.g. oxygen attracting most of the electron density away from hydrogen in an -OH group).
All interactions between molecules are governed by attraction/repulsion of electric charge. The more unevenly electrons are distributed across a molecule, the greater the magnitude of the electronic charge each part of the molecule has. Negatively charged parts of molecules (those with greater electron density) will be attracted to the positively charged parts (those with less electron density) of other molecules. The greater the difference between charges, the stronger the interaction.
To keep things in context, things with stronger interactions will dissolve/mix together better. So, polar will mix with polar because the relatively large charge differences present in those molecules will attract to one another.
Non-polar mixing/dissolving is actually more complex. Non-polar compounds have relatively even charge distribution across the molecule, and thus there are no areas of strong charge to attract each other. One factor, and a very oversimplified way to think about it, is that the lack of strong charges also means that non-polar molecules/groups will also not repel each other (i.e. like charge repulsion) and can be happy sitting next to each other in a solution. The actual principles involved get pretty complex, but a good place to start would be to look up the terms "hydrophobic effect" and "Van der Waals or London dispersion forces".
As you've discovered, there are compounds that can mix well with both polar and non-polar molecules. These types of molecules are also called amphipathic molecules. They have parts (functional groups) that are non-polar in nature and others that are polar in nature. These molecules sometimes form interesting arrangements/structures to satisfy the charge/charge interactions that will make each part of the molecule "happy" in a given solution (look up micelles as an example).
When a molecule has both non-polar and polar parts/qualities, whether it will dissolve in a given solvent or not depends on the balance between how favorable one set of interactions is vs the other. (i.e. if you're trying to dissolve the molecule in a polar solvent, will the interactions from the polar parts of the molecule that make it favorable to dissolve outweigh the properties of the non-polar parts that make it unfavorable, or vice versa?)
What the answer actually ends up being depends on a lot of factors including what exactly the molecules and their component parts are, just how much you're trying to dissolve, and other things like the temperature and pressure of the surrounding environment.
tldr: Yeah, pretty much, but some molecules are "like" both kinds and it gets complicated. | [
"Many substances dissolve congruently; i.e., the composition of the solid and the dissolved solute stoichiometrically match. However, some substances may dissolve incongruently, whereby the composition of the solute in solution does not match that of the solid. This solubilization is accompanied by alteration of th... |
How can beta particles travel faster than the speed of light? | Rounding to 300,000,000 m/s is very commonly done with the speed of light, since you rarely need to be exact enough for the rounding to matter, and 3x10^8 is a lot more elegant than 299,792,458 m/s.
Beta rays do not travel faster than light. Having mass, they travel slower than it (an initial speed of about .6C to .95C, depending on energy). That's considerably different than the speed of light, so that wasn't a rounding error and was a legitimate mistake by the book. | [
"Shengwang Du claims in a peer-reviewed journal to have observed single photons' precursors, saying that they travel no faster than \"c\" in a vacuum. His experiment involved slow light as well as passing light through a vacuum. He generated two single photons, passing one through rubidium atoms that had been coole... |
Why does it seem that skin is the only human organ unable to adapt to weight loss? | Skin does adapt. You're much larger/heavier when you're 20 years old than when you were 2 years old. If you *rapidly* gain weight you exceed the elastic limit of your skin (stretch marks).
If you *rapidly* lose weight, you will end up with extra skin. If you lose 10 pounds in a year, you won't have a problem. Lose 50 pounds in a month and you'll have too much skin to fill it in | [
"As the body is unable to store fat correctly this leads to fat around all the vital organs and in the blood (triglycerides). This results in heart problems, cirrhosis of the liver, lipoatrophic diabetes, and pancreatitis, along with various other complications.\n",
"Serious weight loss may reduce quality of life... |
reactive hypoglycemia | Hypoglycemia means low blood sugar so you don't have any immediately available energy to do things.
A very simplified version of that article suggests that it happens after eating a lot of sugar or sugar-producing food. The body produces a lot of insulin to use or store the energy from the sugar but overdoes it, leaving you in a low-sugar (hypoglycemic) state. | [
"Reactive hypoglycemia, postprandial hypoglycemia, or sugar crash is a term describing recurrent episodes of symptomatic hypoglycemia occurring within four hours after a high carbohydrate meal in people with and without diabetes. The term is not necessarily a diagnosis since it requires an evaluation to determine t... |
where does all the rock salt for keeping the roads clear go? why haven't so many areas near roads become too salty for grass, trees etc. ? | You're on the right track of thinking.
The reason areas near roads don't become too salty right away is because when it rains most of that water enters a drainage system and makes its way towards rivers and lakes. That's where the biggest issues occur as you often see fish, algae, pretty much any aquatic organism get affected. Another factor to note is the frequency at which salt is being deposited. Salting the roads one time for a single snow storm won't have as much of an effect as areas further north (or south, depending) which require salting roads once a week or more.
Some municipalities have started switching to beet juice for just this reason. | [
"As a result of Canada's icy winters, salt is needed in order to deice slippery roads. The primary ingredient of road salt is sodium chloride. Road salt, while helping cars and people to gain traction in the winter, can have serious consequences for soil. As National Geographic found, \"Road salt can pollute soil a... |
- what people mean when they claim the civil war was not about slavery. | As the north became more industrialized the south became more and more a one crop economy-cotton- which depended heavily on slave labor to be popular. Balancing the needs of two such different economic systems became almost impossible especially as most of the newer states were free states. So yes, it was about slavery, but more from an economic point of view than a moral one. | [
"\"Slavery and States' Rights\" was a speech given by former Confederate States Army general Joseph Wheeler on July 31, 1894. The speech deals with the American Civil War and is considered to be a \"Lost Cause\" view at the war's causation. It is generally understood to argue that the Union (or the North) was to bl... |
How much do sports affect our physical structure? | Veins and nerves already come adapted to these issues. Veins and arteries are very elastic and stand up to compressive forces very well. They may collapse briefly but the collagen and elastin they are composed of will not be destroyed by compressive force. If a person is hit hard enough with a stiff enough object it may cause a bruise. This is when the capillary beds are damaged but this is a different story entirely.
Nerves again won't be damaged by force unless it is enough to sever the. They are basically thin threadlike structures throughout the body (think trying to crush a string of dental floss).
The biggest changes you would notices from recreational sports would be in the muscles, bones and cartilage of the joints. Muscles is obvious and you already touched on bones but cartilage can be damaged and it does not easily repair itself as it doesn't have a very good blood supply. | [
"Sports injuries are often the result of overuse or trauma to a part of the body. An issue unique to youth athletics is that the participants’ bones are still growing, making them especially at risk for injury. Around 8,000 children are rushed to the emergency room daily because of sports injuries. High school athl... |
why is it so socially acceptable to refer to someone as 'white' or 'black', but never 'yellow' or 'red'? | Because white and black have become socially acceptable identifiers.
Yellow or Red have not. Those people say I'm asian [insert particular country/region] or I'm native american [insert particular tribe]
It's just a thing about the vernacular. Not unlike how 'gay' is an acceptable descriptor, but 'faggot' is not. It's just about what is socially acceptable and what is not. People still know what you mean when you call a gay person a faggot.
The chromatism (word? probably not lol) of a descriptor is not relevant, It's all just about descriptors. | [
"The term \"coloured\" was generally used in preference to \"black\" as anyone who was of wholly European ancestry (at least Northern European) was defined as white, leaving everyone else as coloured. This included the multi-racial descendants of the previous minority demographic groups (Black, Irish and Native Ame... |
what exactly is a "share" / "share price"? | > Why can one buy/sell "share" from companies?
They are referred to as "shares" in plural but someone can buy a share or more *of* a company or *from* a company under different circumstances. Usually when purchasing a share of a company it is from other people who own said shares, and it is just what it sounds like: A share of the company is partial ownership of said company. If there are a million shares in existence and you own one of them then you own one millionth part of the company.
> What can one do with it?
Usually not a whole lot other than sell it, but if you own a lot of the right kind of shares you can vote on the composition of the Board of Directors who control the company. The Board is who the CEO answers to and they decide the direction the company takes, serving the interests of the shareholders (those people who own shares of the company).
The share price is the market price of shares. | [
"In financial markets, a share is a unit used as mutual funds, limited partnerships, and real estate investment trusts. The owner of shares in the corporation/company is a shareholder (or stockholder) of the corporation. A share is an indivisible unit of capital, expressing the ownership relationship between the co... |
when there was a constitutional disagreement in early u.s. history, were the writers of the constitution, like james madison, constantly consulted what they meant by a certain clause given they were still alive? if they weren't, why not? | Yes and no. During the debates about ratification, for example, they traveled to their home states as well as neighbors to make the case for ratification. They expounded on the proper interpretation of the clauses as they understood them, so the states would not misunderstand. Records of these debates are a very common source of evidence for constitutional interpretation.
In the time when many of the Founders were in government, they frequently disagreed with each other on the proper roles, and often published articles for or against the constitutionality of particular policies. In this era, many precedents were set about how the constitution would be interpreted in practice.
In the cases reviewed by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall, when the principles of judicial review were strongly asserted, major figures offered their opinion on several notable cases. But since they didn't agree with each other, even if they had both attended the convention, it wasn't as easy as just finding someone and asking them what they really meant--there was still a need for interpretation. | [
"James Madison, principal author of the U.S. Constitution and often called the \"Father of the Constitution,\" said this in argument for original intent and against changing the Constitution by evolving language:\n",
"The first written U.S. constitution was the Articles of Confederation. Under the Articles, Virgi... |
why is that although lakes/ponds freeze on the surface first, they melt off the surface last? or does it just appear this way because water leaks around and back to below the ice? | You've basically got it. Water is weird in that its solid form is less dense then its liquid one. Which is why ice floats. Now when ice starts to melt the water will start to pool on the the ice and depending how thick the ice is, it will either continue to pool until it melts through to the water or if the ice is thinner the water will run off the sides or into cracks of the ice. And the thinner the ice gets it will keep on floating to the top of the lake or part of ocean its on | [
"When meltwater pools on the surface rather than flowing, it forms melt ponds. As the weather gets colder meltwater will often re-freeze. Meltwater can collect or melt under the ice's surface. These pools of water, known as subglacial lakes can form due to geothermal heat and friction.\n",
"When the water surface... |
Would it be fair to call the Albigensian crusade a genocide? | From a historian's point of view, 'The Perfect Heresy' by Sean O'Shea is considered popular history - and I can see how from that book's spin one could get the idea that the Albigensian Crusade was a genocide. But the Crusade really doesn't meet even the loosest definition of the term; it was a war of Christians on other Christians under the claim of 'heresy'. Certainly heresy was persecuted at a mass scale (whether heresy actually existed independent of the Catholic Church's view of what constituted orthodox Christianity in the 13th c is another matter) but I would suggest it was closer to a Red Scare than a Holocaust.
If you want to pursue this line though, as university-level scholarship goes, O'Shea's book should really be avoided. My [AH wiki page](_URL_1_) has a number of posts on the subject of the 'Cathars' which might give you counter-point for your ideas, and it includes some reading recommendations. This weekend [I wrote extensively about the origins of the medieval inquisition](_URL_0_) which you might find interesting. In terms of the most recent scholarship, you should have a look at R.I. Moore's *The War On Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe* and Mark Gregory Pegg's *A Most Holy War : The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom*. Pegg's book should be interesting to you because he does pursue some questions of cultural difference in the South, mostly in the context of how inquisitor's interpreted heretical activity, but there's no argument even on that foundation for genocide. | [
"Raphael Lemkin, who in the 20th century coined the word \"genocide\", referred to the Albigensian Crusade as \"one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history\". Mark Gregory Pegg writes that \"The Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to mass murder, by m... |
Why is the letter "S" so drastically different in 16th and 17th century English? Also, why is there still the "normal" s in some words, but the old alteration in others? | Linguistically speaking, there is an, albeit small, difference between the two different forms of the minuscule S. The long S, 'ſ' is an allographic variant of the grapheme < s > , which can also be represented as 'S', 's' and so on, depending on language, position and the type of the word. Practically, this makes little difference since they can or could be used pretty interchangeably, depending on language and stylistic considerations. In German, for example, 'ſ' was used for a long time to represent < s > unless at the end of a word or a syllable. So it was pretty easy to differentiate Wachſtube from Wachstube (Wach-Stube, guard's office vs. Wachs-tube, wax-tube). Incidentally, this is where the German alphabet got one of its unique glyphs, the 'ß' from, as a ligature of ſs or ſz. In English, it was used unless at the end of a word, and sometimes in ligatures such as aſseſs, but the opera score you linked doesn't use the 's' inside of words but only at the end. This is not a 100% rule, as in the beginning the 'ſ' was sometimes used at the end of the word, and by italian printers even later sometimes, but those exceptions are rare.
Such an allographic difference dependent on the position of the glyph is not unheard of, and any educated European of the time would have known that the minuscule Greek alphabet also makes a distinction between the allographs 'σ' and 'ς' for *sigma*, the former used word-internally while the latter is used exclusively at the end of a word.
So where did it come from? Most of our modern alphabets go directly back to the caroligian minuscule, a script that developed out of the earlier Roman cursive forms of handwriting. They gradually developed some elongated forms of the letters with ascenders and descenders. One letter that got elongated in that way was the 'S', which gradually came to resemble a simple, elongated and rather flat angle. [Here](_URL_3_) is an example showing idealized versions of the older (top) and younger (bottom) forms of Roman cursive handwriting, where you can see pretty well how the S became an elongated and barely recognizable version of itself. This development continued in the so-called half-uncial script, which originated in North Africa and was the direct precursor to the carolingian minuscule. [Here](_URL_1_) is an example of blind text comparing the uncial to the half-uncial script; you can see how the uncial, much more oriented on the Roman capital script, keeps the traditional S, while the half-uncial approaches the form used in the carolingian minuscule, the 'ſ'. [This](_URL_0_) is another practical example of the half-uncial script.
Then, you have the [carolingian minuscule](_URL_2_), which uses the long-s. This example actually has the first two lines of the IIII chapter written in an uncial script, so you can see that the practical application left a lot of freedom to the scribe; you can see the long-s in the third line of that chapter 'dum dioceses visitata agebamus', here still used at the end of the word. This is a good example because it also shows where the 's' survived in its more traditional form alongside the carolingian minuscule, and the two were used according to the formula 's' at the end, 'ſ' inside the word from late carolingian and early gothic scripts on, until the 19th and in some cases 20th and even 21st century (especially German 'gothic' Fraktur typefaces, which is where it still survives, as well as in the German 'ß'). | [
"The use of the letters I and V for both consonants and vowels proved inconvenient as the Latin alphabet was adapted to Germanic and Romance languages. W originated as a doubled V (VV) used to represent the sound found in Old English as early as the 7th century. It came into common use in the later 11th century, re... |
how does kinetic energy play a role in chemical reactions? | When molecules collide with each other they may react with each other. So if you increase the kinetic energy of the molecules, you increase the number of collisions that occur in a given time interval. So you are increasing the rate of the overall reaction. | [
"Chemical kinetics, also known as reaction kinetics, is the branch of physical chemistry that is concerned with understanding the rates of chemical reactions. It is to be contrasted with thermodynamics, which deals with the direction in which a process occurs but in itself tells nothing about its rate. Chemical kin... |
what does the "e-i-e-i-o"stand for in the old macdonald song? | It doesn't mean anything. It's like "Rama Lama Ding-Dong" or "Give Peace a Chance."
--Homer Simpson
| [
"\"Ë\" is a phonetic symbol also used in the transcription of Abruzzese dialects and in the Province of Ascoli Piceno (the ascolano dialect). It is called \"mute E\" and sounds like a hummed \"é\". It is important for the prosody of the dialect itself.\n",
"Ẽ, ẽ is a letter in which the tilde indicates a nasal vo... |
difference between references and bibliography | References are specific citations, whereas a biblography covers works that were read as part of generalized research.
That's it, pretty much. | [
"A bibliography may be arranged by author, topic, or some other scheme. Annotated bibliographies give descriptions about how each source is useful to an author in constructing a paper or argument. These descriptions, usually a few sentences long, provide a summary of the source and describe its relevance. Reference... |
why is torture not an effective tool for information extraction? | The victim is not rewarded for telling the truth, because the torturer doesn't know the truth - instead the victim is rewarded for saying things that make the torturer feel vindicated. So basically it's a process of a torturer forcing someone to say what they have already decided is true.
That's why it's used by terrorist police states to force confessions and implicate political enemies, but not used by professional organizations to discover actual facts. | [
"FM 34-52 Intelligence Interrogation, the United States Army field manual, explains that torture \"is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.\" Not only is torture ineffective at gather... |
what exactly is cobalt used for in lithium batteries and why can't we use more abundant materials instead? | In lithium ion batteries, part of the process is chemically moving the Lithium ions from one end, to the other (cathode and anode). That means you need to physically "fit" those Lithium ions somewhere.
Cobalt oxide happens to have a crystal structure that handles those ions well. Not many materials can handle having stuff shoved in and out of it easily- either they're more susceptible to degrading (falling apart), or shoving the ions in completely changes the crystal.
Cobalt has a nice mix of being (relatively) abundant/cheap, and very efficient at this process. Other transition metals can do a similar thing, but they tend to be much less resilient. Similarly, there are probably some complex compounds that are roughly as efficient, but are more expensive/less abundant.
Historically, cobalt is pretty cheap, only like $15/lb. Expensive compared to say, copper (~$3), but way cheaper than say, rare earths or whatever. It also happens to often be a byproduct in Copper/Nickel mining.
If demand surges (and it likely will, as battery tech improves, unless a whole new technique is discovered. And there aren't that many cobalt mines, it's basically only in the Congo), you'll start to see people looking harder for alternatives. But it's hard to find something that's both effective and cheap. | [
"Lithium cobalt oxide (LiCoO) is widely used in lithium-ion battery cathodes. The material is composed of cobalt oxide layers with the lithium intercalated. During discharge, the lithium is released as lithium ions. Nickel-cadmium (NiCd) and nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries also include cobalt to improve the o... |
Why is the grade school teacher traditionally a male profession in the UK, and a female one in America? | I don't think the British half of the premise is true either. At least not for decades. Not one of my primary school teachers was a man, and I think it's fair to see teaching in general is seen a more female than male profession in the UK today (to the extent that these type of stereotypes still have any currency). | [
"A male teacher should take heed that he does not become overly familiar with the girls. A male teacher who is single should not teach young children of either sex, since he may associate with their mothers when they come and pick up their children. In schools with many staff members, however, one may be lenient, a... |
Is it truth that Kuomintang did majority of fighting against Japanese forces during the Second Sino-Japanese War? | The Kuomintang did the majority of the conventional fighting against the Japanese, whereas the Communists were far more interested in guerilla warfare. One of the main complaints of the US representative in China, general Joseph Stilwell, was that the Kuomintang was actually less enthusiastic about fighting the Japanese than than they were about fighting the communists. Oftentimes, Chiang Kai Shek would refuse to commit his best troops to fighting the Japanese, believing "the Japanese are a disease of the skin, the communists are a disease of the heart." Stilwell went so far as to say that if the KMT had fought as hard as the CCP against the Japanese, that they could have defeated the Kwantung Army.
My source for this is Stilwell's book on his experiences in China, which for the life of me I cannot find my copy of right this second. | [
"The Kuomintang official history of the Second Sino-Japanese War deals with it in a sentence, without any credit to the communists. Communist accounts, on the other hand, describe Pingxingguan as a typical example of \"Red\" guerrilla tactics, inspired by Mao Zedong's conceptualization of \"People's war\". Japanese... |
what is the deal with games over 60 fps? is there a difference between 60 and 300 fps. and what does interlacing and tearing have to do with this? | 60 fps is usually the standard that people aim for when it comes to frames per second in games. 60 is the standard because most common monitors are 60 hertz, meaning they refresh 60 times per second. They display 60 different images in a second. 60 fps also feels very smooth.
30 fps is generally seen as acceptable, but the minimum for a fluid gaming experience. At 30 fps with a monitor that refreshes 60 times per second, each frame is shown for two refresh periods. This brings us into tearing.
Tearing happens when you have an fps that is not divisible by 60. This is because monitors refresh from the top down, and it might not refresh enough times per second to display every frame.
Vsync is a setting that sets the maximum fps to 60, which eliminates screen tearing, but it usually results in mouse lag as a side effect.
If you are getting 300fps, but your monitor is 60 hertz, you'll still only be seeing 60 different frames per second. But I find that very high fps (121+) makes the game feel a lot smoother and more responsive. | [
"It is clear that a fast response time and high refresh rate is desired in order to display smooth motion. A framerate of 60 frames per second (FPS) is generally the minimum acceptable framerate in a video game for enthusiasts, with some enthusiasts preferring 144 FPS or even 165 FPS, to match the refresh rate of t... |
Shortages and Use of Resources during WWII | Hey there -- while our historians here may be able to offer some more suggestions, *A World at Arms* and *Why the Allies Won* jump out to me from our [WWII books list](_URL_0_). | [
"During the Second World War, by 1943, shortages in food and resources begin to affect all warring nations. In Nazi Germany, conditions harken back to the desperate years in the First World War and shortly after, when ordinary citizens were impoverished and forced to severely curtail their food intake. In Russia, f... |
Is there any way to build up an immunity to commonly used murderous poisons like strychnine or arsenic? | You are misusing the word 'immunity', I think you mean something like 'tolerance'.
This would be very complicated to answer and would need to be looked at case by case.
The body can break down or excrete some 'bad substances' and can even adapt and get better at breaking them down into less harmful chemicals, or excreting them.
But there will still be a limit to what you can have - water will kill you if you manage to drink enough. Depending on what this poison does it may cause you a lot of harm just trying to get more tolerant to it.
There are some things the body just can't deal with, can't break down and/or can't excrete either at all, or quickly enough. | [
"These methods do not work for all non-biological poisons. Exposure to certain toxic substances, such as hydrofluoric acid and heavy metals, is either lethal or has little to no effect, and thus cannot be used in this way at all. Arsenic is a notable exception with some people actually having a genetic adaptation g... |
What happens if your eye lids are removed? | Not an ophthalmologist, so I may be wrong:
If the surface of the eye dries out, it will be extremely difficult and painful, if not downright impossible, for the eye to move in the socket.
Yes, you could lubricate with saline solution or some other artificial tears.
Bright light and dust would be major issues; tinted goggles would be necessary. Sleep may also be rather difficult; sleep mask would be worn over goggles.
I'm also not a herpetologist, so take this with a grain of salt, too (just try not to get it in your eye):
I believe most snakes have nictitating membranes to cover the eyes, which serve essentially the same function as eyelids. | [
"Iatrogenic injury of the eyelids is also common. Bruising (frequently) and tearing (rarely) of the eyelid can occur when the adhesive dressing used to hold the eye closed is removed. Removal of eyelashes can also occur.\n",
"If they continue to enlarge or fail to settle within a few months, smaller lesions may b... |
the photoelectric effect, and how light can behave both as a wave and as a particle | Light behaving like both a wave and a particle is because it is neither of those things. In our macroscopic lives, we can observe waves and particles, but in the very small quantum world things are not exactly like either. They act somewhat like both.
The photoelectric effect occurs when light is absorbed by an atom and causes it to emit ("kick out") an electron. The thing that is surprising about this is that you would think that this would be proportional just to the intensity of the light...."stronger" light, more electrons. But that isn't quite true. It is also proportional to the frequency (color) of the light, and if the light is the wrong color, there is virtually *no* emission.
Einstein explained this by describing how light acts not just like a wave, but also as discrete particles. Some people describe this as the key discovery in kicking off what we now call "quantum physics", where we understand that energy (and matter) is by its nature in small, discrete amounts rather than a continuous range. And that they act like both particles and waves.
Fun fact: Einstein won his Nobel Prize in physics for this discovery of the photoelectric effect. (Technically, for "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect"). | [
"The photoelectric effect helped to propel the then-emerging concept of wave–particle duality in the nature of light. Light simultaneously possesses the characteristics of both waves and particles, each being manifested according to the circumstances. The effect was impossible to understand in terms of the classica... |
What does Hollywood get wrong about Historical melee battles. | Sorry, we don't allow [throughout history questions](_URL_0_). These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for. If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory. | [
"CNN.com put the battle on a list of best and worst battle scenes in film, where it appeared twice: one of the best before the Army of the Dead arrives, and one of the worst after that, dubbing the battle's climax an \"oversimplified cop out\" as a result of their involvement.\n",
"Movies often give wrongful depi... |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, humans received AIDs from monkeys. Do species other than humans have sexually transmitted diseases? | Yes, [koalas for example have a terrible problem with chlamydia](_URL_0_) which is having severe negative effects on the population in the wild. The disease is transmitted not just in male-to-female sexual activity but indirectly as well (such as from nursing mothers to their children), and some koalas engage in homosexual activity which is also contributing to transmission. In this case it is a severe problem for the wild population. | [
"While HIV is most likely a mutated form of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a disease present only in chimpanzees and African monkeys, highly plausible explanations for the transfer of the disease between species (zoonosis) exist not involving sexual intercourse. In particular, the African chimpanzees and monk... |
When did Globalisation REALLY start? | Well, the problem with treating globalization as starting before 1492 is that any system of international trade is necessarily going to be limited to either Africa+Eurasia or the Americas. So "Global" is a bit of a misnomer. | [
"The modern form of globalization began to take form during the 19th century. The evolving beginnings of this period were largely responsible for the expansion of the West, capitalism and imperialism backed up by the nation-state and industrial technology. This began to emerge during the 1500s, continuing to expand... |
what's up with those "buy gold" ads you see all over conservative media? | An older audience that is distrustful of the government and the currency backed by that government? People that can remember when the dollar came off the gold standard? Extremely conservative people that want a return to the good old days? People that scare easily?
**Perfect** targets for these commercials. The commercials don't even need to scare you into buying gold - the normal programming has already done that. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. | [
"Gold (stylised as WIN GOLD) is an Australian advertorial datacasting channel that launched on 1 May 2012 by the WIN Corporation. It is available to homes in most regional WIN Television viewing areas on LCN 85. The channel broadcasts mostly infomercials, as well as education, lifestyle, community programming as we... |
Have stories from Greek mythology been directly connected to or metaphorically connected to actual happenings? | Warning: long answer coming up. The TL;DR is: sort of, but not the ones you're probably thinking of I'm afraid.
First up, myths about the gods. As long ago as the 4th century BCE people started having the idea that the gods of story were heavily mythologised versions of kings of the distant past. The figure who came up with the idea was [Euhemeros](_URL_3_), who wrote up a fictionalised account of his travels, the *Sacred History*, in which he claimed among other things that he had visited a fictional island called Panchaia where he saw a temple of Zeus with an inscription on a pillar recording the transformation of cults to dead kings into cults of gods. In particular, he's famous for arguing that Zeus had been an ancient king of Crete.
Euhemerism is perfectly reasonable as a *possible* account of how myths came to be, but as a methodology it's totally unreliable: there are many possible models for where belief in gods comes from, and euhemerism is just one possibility. That is: myths provide exactly zero evidence in and of themselves. It's not really even a case of needing corroboration to back up a euhemeristic reconstruction: you still need definite evidence.
Those who do like euhemerism tend to follow this procedure: (1) identify a myth; (2) subtract all the completely fantastic bits, like monsters or talking animals; (3) whatever's left over is historical truth. That's a rather unfavourable picture of it, of course. In fact Euhemeros himself had a slightly stronger basis for suspecting a historical reality underlying Zeus: the fact that there was in fact a cult surrounding the supposed grave of Zeus in Crete, to him, implied that Zeus had been a mortal man. (This is moderately peculiar as Greek religion goes, but only moderately, so I'm afraid even here the methodology doesn't work.)
Next, heroic legends. The idea of a historical reality behind these is a little bit more intrinsically plausible, since for the most part they don't feature *too* much of the fantastic. However, the methodology is exactly the same: it's just the fact that heroic legends look a little bit more down-to-earth that lends them some plausibility. As a result, it's exactly as unreliable as the euhemeristic procedure applied to myths about the gods. The myth still provides zero evidence in and of itself; you still need external evidence.
The Trojan War is a particularly popular one for euhemerists of heroic legend. The fact that Troy happens to have been a real place was enormously overblown by Schliemann, who was a PR master of the first order, and who wanted to take credit for discovering "Homer's Troy": he made out that he was fighting against a deeply entrenched consensus that Troy had been totally fictional, so when he presented his discoveries, it was as though the truth value of everything could simply be flipped over: "Troy is real", to him, implied "everything in Homer is true". I hope it doesn't need to be shown at length that there was, in fact, no such entrenched consensus, and that the site where he dug had always been the usual spot identified as Troy. In reality, all the existence of Troy shows is... Troy existed.
You don't catch people arguing "Thebes is real, therefore everything in the Oedipus legend is true", or "Nottingham is real, therefore Robin Hood is historical fact". Schliemann's fallacy is of the same order. It still pops up now and then, though: back in 2008 a couple of astronomers published an argument that *Odyssey* book 21 contains a reference to a genuine solar eclipse that took place on 16 April 1178 BCE. [Here's a news report](_URL_0_) where one of them commits Schliemann's fallacy on top of this supposed finding:
> "If we take it as a given that the death of the suitors happened on this particular eclipse date, then everything else described in "The Odyssey" happens exactly as is described," Magnasco said.
The eclipse identification is bollocks, as it happens, but that's not the reason why this quotation is wrong. It's wrong because it's the same logical fallacy as "Nottingham is real, therefore Robin Hood was real".
So are there *any* cases of Greek myths matching up to things that are likely to be historical realities? Not until you start looking at foundation legends of the 8th century BCE onwards, I'm afraid. At that time many Greek states started sending out colonies all over Asia Minor, the Black Sea, Italy, France, and northern Africa. The early colonisations often had legends tied up with the founding of cities: for example, [Battos](_URL_1_) the semi-legendary founder of Cyrene, who genuinely did found Cyrene in 631 BCE; [Taras,](_URL_2_) supposedly founded by men born out of wedlock and non-citizen residents of Sparta in 707/6 BCE; and so on. We know of a number of elegiac poems (epic-like, but not epic) that were written about some of these foundations by the poets Mimnermos, Tyrtaios, Semonides, Xenophanes, and Ion.
Often these foundation legends are more myth than reality: for example, in the 6th century BCE the Romans founded the colony of Circeii on the supposed site of Circe's island; Naples was supposedly the site where one of the Sirens washed ashore after committing suicide; and various cities claimed to have been founded by figures out of heroic legends like Odysseus or Diomedes. These ones can be confidently rejected. But there are lots of grey areas where it's hard to tell. Maybe Taras *was* founded by illegitimate children and peroikoi -- who knows?
EDIT: a couple more examples added in a few places. | [
"Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the ancient Greeks. These stories concern the origin and the nature of the world, the lives and activities of deities, heroes, and mythological creatures, and the origins and significance of the ancient Greeks' own cult and ritual practices. Modern scholars s... |
Can/is there a green or black star? | The Sun actually [emits more light in the green than in any other part of the spectrum](_URL_0_), but the net result of this to the human eye is that the colors mix to look white (and then our atmosphere scatters some of that light, making it look yellow). So no, even a star that peaks at green wavelengths will not look green.
All stars have spectra that look sort of like the spectrum in the image I’ve linked above, with the peak in different parts of the spectrum, depending on the star’s temperature. The peaks of hotter stars are more toward the left in that diagram (in the blue, UV, etc.), while cooler stars peak more toward the right (red, infrared, etc.). So hotter stars emit more blue than red and this look bluer. *Note that no star is cool enough to peak so far to the right in that diagram as to not emit a significant amount of visible light. Thus, every star is visible to the human eye, provided we are close enough to it that it is not too dim to see. (Some will argue about black dwarfs, but those are cold, dead stellar remnants, not true stars undergoing nuclear fusion.)*
Also, a star cannot appear black, since there is no combination of colors that appears black. Black is the result when no significant amount of light from the visible spectrum is present.
Edit: added the second paragraph for more information and proved a little bit more clarity. | [
"In astronomy, a green star is a white or blue star that appears green due to an optical illusion. There are no truly green stars, because the color of a star is more or less given by a black-body spectrum and this never looks green. However, there are a few stars that appear green to some observers. This is usuall... |
why are big companies (like google, yahoo, facebook) buying small ones for a fortune, even if they could develop the whole service themselves? | They get rid of the competition and acquire the user base all in one move instead of the development time and building a base of people to actually use/buy the services while competing with the original company they are trying to oust. | [
"Companies range from the very small to the very large. There are no very large businesses which are not companies. (Even the John Lewis Partnership in the United Kingdom, which promotes itself as \"the world's largest partnership,\" is in fact a company.) Part of what allows companies to become so much bigger than... |
How can a guitar amplifier pick up radio waves and play them? | This isn't all that uncommon. It used to happen to me quite a lot when I had my old Marshall JMP out on tour. It has something to do with the broadcast being picked up in the internal wiring of the amplifier. Think of the wires inside as an antenna. After the antenna picks up the signal, the amp simply does it's job. It makes the signal more powerful and sends it to the speaker. | [
"A radio pack is mainly used for musicians such as guitarists and singers for live performances. It is a small radio transmitter that is either placed in the strap or in the pocket. The receiver is connected to an amp or PA system and the user simply connects the transmitter into the instrument. This means that the... |
Nutrition and Diet "science" seems so confusing and filled with contradiction or bias. What are some cold hard facts that you have learned about diets and food in general. | If you want to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you eat. | [
"Ben Goldacre wrote that nutritionism, or its attribution to scientists, is the \"bollocks du jour\", and that it is \"driven by a set of first year undergraduate errors in interpreting scientific data.\" In his opinion, professional researchers and medical experts bear some blame for nutritionism because they at t... |
What would happen if the global production of oil stopped today? | 90% road vehicles out of service;
10-100% trains out of service (depending on region);
100% of air travel compromised;
99% of sea travel compromised (nuke powered civilian transport could pick up fairly early);
10-100% power generation compromised (depending on region);
Industrial production disrupted due to lack or oil-based polymers (polyethylene, etc...).
That of course does not take into account the current immobilised and flowing stocks, as well as strategic reserve. Everything would be going from sweet to sour (applause) gradually as stocks wither, unless of course governement decided to appropriate all remaining barrels for their own purposes. Beyond the purely technical aspects, you could expect global disorder on a scale the world has never seen.
As for the synthetic oil, it's very dirty and innefficient, we would be using an innefficient process for making a fuel used in mostly innefficient machinery. Not yay.
| [
"CERA does not believe there will be an endless abundance of oil, but instead believes that global production will eventually follow an \"undulating plateau\" for one or more decades before declining slowly, and that production will reach 40 Mb/d by 2015.\n",
"According to the Hirsch report prepared for the U.S. ... |
Are there galaxies that form spherically around a black hole? | Elliptical galaxies like [M105](_URL_1_) or [M87](_URL_0_) can be close to spherical, and have quite large black holes at the center. It's probably more accurate to say that they form *with* the black hole instead of *around* the black hole, though - the gravity of the black hole is a small thing compared to the gravity of the rest of the galaxy. The black hole only dominates the region very near the center, where most of the stars have gravitational pulls in different directions that cancel one another out. When you move away from the center, there are more stars in the direction "towards the center" than "away from the center" and their gravity pulls you that way. It does not take long for there to be more mass in stars pulling on you than there is in the black hole.
Galaxies [merging with one another](_URL_2_) also play a pretty big role in how elliptical galaxies are formed. [This short video](_URL_3_) has a nice explanation and simulation of how the merging can shape the galaxies. | [
"A black hole, surrounded by a ring of dust, is thought to exist at the heart of the spiral. The dust ring stands almost perpendicular to the relatively flat spiral nebula. A secondary ring crosses the primary ring on a different axis, a phenomenon that is contrary to expectations. A pair of ionization cones extend... |
the difference between eukaryotes and prokaryotes. | Eukaryotes - which include animals and plants - have cells that have a lot of internal structure. In particular, they have "organs" that are sealed off from the rest of the environment of the cell by membranes similar to the one that contains the cell itself. The nucleus (which contains the cell's genetic material) is one such organelle, but there are others, like the mitochondria (which burn sugar to produce energy for the cell) and chloroplasts (where photosynthesis takes place).
Prokarya is not generally viewed as a domain. The three domains are Eukarya (eukayotes), Bacteria (prokaryotes), and Archaea (prokaryotes). | [
"The division between prokaryotes and eukaryotes is usually considered the most important distinction or difference among organisms. The distinction is that eukaryotic cells have a \"true\" nucleus containing their DNA, whereas prokaryotic cells do not have a nucleus. Both eukaryotes and prokaryotes contain large R... |
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