question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
|---|---|---|
how does the mars rover send data(photos) from mars to earth? | It has a UHF radio that it uses to talk to the orbiter (the thing that brought it to Mars that stayed up in orbit.) The orbiter has more power and a bigger radio dish; it relays msgs to/from the rover and Earth.
It takes 14 minutes for the radio data to go between Mars and Earth. | [
"The \"Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter\" (MRO) is a multipurpose spacecraft launched in 2005 designed to conduct reconnaissance and exploration of Mars from orbit. The spacecraft is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The HiRISE camera onboard the MRO is at the forefront of the ongoing RSL studies as it hel... |
we read about libraries that are sinking due to the weight of the books they store. we build cities with huge skyscrapers weighting millions of tons all in one place. can this affect earth rotation, or make the earth wobble, even by a small amount? | Two different things here.
1) Library that are sinking is because of two variables. The pressure of the building on the ground and the resistance of that ground. If a building is sinking, that's just bad engineering. Either because the engineer that designed the building were unaware of the exact composition of the ground or they choose the wrong method for their fondation. If your building have too much mass for the ground you are building on, then you make a large fondation to spread the force or you find a way to build directly on rock. For a skyscraper, it's pratically impossible to build simply on the ground, you need to reach the bedrock either by digging deeper or more often pile foundation.
2) In theory if you build up mass on a particular side of a planet, then you could change the rotation of that planet. But the earth is big, a lot bigger than you can imagine. From the top of Mount Everest down to the Mariana Trench, you have a difference of 19.85km, but compare to the 12,735 km diameter on average of the earth that's just about 0.15% Compare that to a billiard ball which is 2.25 inches in diameer and has a tolerance of +/-0.005 inches or about 0.44%. A billiard ball if less smooth than the surface of the earth (but the earth isn't as spherical as a billiard ball).
Even the biggest building possible woudn't even make a difference. | [
"An oft-repeated urban legend holds that the library is sinking because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building. An article in the Indiana Daily Student newspaper debunks this myth, stating, among other things, that the building rests on a ... |
why is underwear "a pair"? |
Pants used to be made in two parts, one for each leg. A shirt was made from a single piece of cloth.
When pants became one piece, the plural usage persisted with shorts and underwear following suit.
Source: _URL_0_
Edit: thank you for the award! | [
"Similarly, in AmE the word \"pants\" is the common word for the BrE \"trousers\" and \"knickers\" refers to a variety of half-length trousers (though most AmE users would use the term \"shorts\" rather than knickers), while the majority of BrE speakers would understand \"pants\" to mean \"underpants\" and \"knicke... |
How long would an earth day be if there had never been a moon? | While it's true that the moon is slowing down the earth's rotation period, it's much slower than what's causing the leap seconds. Leap seconds have to do with a difference between how seconds are defined (in terms of atomic vibrations of cesium) and the number of seconds in a day. We need approximately .6 leap seconds per year, while the earth's rotation is slowing by .0016 s/century.
I'd also add that if there had never been a moon, there's no way to know how long the day on the earth would be. The day is a function of the earth's angular momentum. We believe that the moon was created during a collision between a young earth and a mars-sized object. We can't know if that collision sped the earth's rotation up or slowed it down, although it probably had a dramatic effect.
Check out: _URL_0_ | [
"For the earth-moon system, d\"r\"/d\"t\" gives 1.2x10 meter per second, or 3.7 cm per year. This is a 1% increase in the earth-moon distance in 100 million years. d\"n\"/d\"t\" is 1.3x10sec, and for a period of 29.5 days is equivalent to 7 minutes in 1 million years, or 1 day (i.e. lengthening of the lunar period ... |
Why are there no other species within the genus Homo still in existence while the genus Pan has two species that have stood the test of time? | In part because a lot of taxonomy is, essentially, artificial -- *we* created it; nature doesn't have genera and phyla and kingdoms, they're labels we came up with to classify things. Before DNA sequencing, it was even more arbitrary, and because of the long-held belief of a hierarchy of life there was an inherent need to classify humans as "different". The result with hominids is that there [has been a debate about how to classify chimps and bonobos for a while now.](_URL_0_) | [
"The genus Homo, which contains many extinct species, are grouped into sub-genera. The sub genus Homo contains species which are derived from each other within one million to 800 thousand years. Both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals are grouped within the Sub genus Homo, because of their ability to interbreed without ... |
Were Greek and Roman males shorter than they would be now? | The Romans and Greeks (and practically everyone else before the present time) were [much shorter than us generally](_URL_0_) ('The Biological Standard of Living in Europe During the Last Two Millennia', Nikola Koepke and Joerg Baten, European Review of Economic History / Volume / Issue 01 / April 2005').
However, [it is a myth that 'exercising before the body is finished growing' causes stunted growth](_URL_1_). There is no scientific basis for it. | [
"We find the ancients very fond of procuring the tallest men they could for the service, since the standard for the cavalry of the wings and for the infantry of the first legionary cohorts was fixed at six feet, or at least five feet ten inches. These requirements might easily be kept up in those times when such nu... |
kant's view on determinism | Someone has a paper due... | [
"Hannah Arendt adapted Kant's concept of as a faculty of aesthetic judgement that imagines the judgements of others, into something relevant for political judgement. Thus she created a \"Kantian\" political philosophy, which, as she said herself, Kant did not write. She argued that there was often a banality to evi... |
Underwater Cave/Air Pocket/Breaching | Water would flow down, and the air would bubble up the newly drilled tube. There's nothing particularly unusual about the scenario you describe. | [
"One deep underwater cave in the United States is \"Weeki Wachee Spring\". Due to its strong outflow, divers have had limited success penetrating this first magnitude spring until 2007, when drought conditions eased the out-flowing water allowing team divers from Karst Underwater Research to penetrate to depths of ... |
please eli5 the rules of magic: the gathering | There are 5 colours, red, blue, green, white , black.
You play “land” cards to gain mana of that colour. (Eg forests give green mana, islands give blue mana).
Minions and spell cards cost mana, some (or all) of that mana needs to be of a certain colour. There are also multi-coloured cards that cost multiple types of mana (eg a 4 cost minion of 1 red, 1 black, 2 any). There are also “artifact” cards that can use any mana.
During combat, you choose which minions to Attack with. Your minions may not Attack during the turn they are summoned (usually using mana). By default, all attacks go to the opponent’s life total, unless they choose to block.
When an opponent attacks, you choose which of your minions to block with, and which targets they should block (eg using an expendable minion to block their huge minion).
During blocking, each minion doing battle takes damage equal to the other minion’s Attack. This is deducted from their health.
After combat, minions with 0/negative health are destroyed. Minions which are not destroyed have their health “refreshed” during the end of turn (ie they recover to full health at the end of turn).
Spells and minions can only be cast during the “main phase”, and may not be cast in reaction to the opponent’s card, unless they have the property “instant” or “flash”. Chains work the same as in Yugioh, the last card in the chain resolves first. | [
"Magic: The Gathering is a video game published by MicroProse in April 1997 based on the collectible card game \"\". It is often referred to as \"Shandalar\" after the of , where the game takes place. The player must travel the land and fight random enemies to gain cards, and defeat five wizards representing the fi... |
when there is a holiday and trash pickup is delayed a day, how does the schedule right itself the following week? | In my city Friday is not usually a normal trash pick up day. It's reserved for special pick ups of large items or large amounts of junk. When there is a holiday Friday becomes a normal pick up day and the special pick ups are cancelled that week. | [
"Note that where a public holiday falls on a Saturday or a Sunday, or possibly coincides with another public holiday, it is generally observed (as a day off work) on the next available weekday, even though the public holiday itself does not move. In such cases, an employee is entitled to at least one of the followi... |
Can an expert on the history of Poland provide an exegesis of this video? | Please see: _URL_0_ | [
"It was also mentioned in a video game; \"\" (2004), which stirred up controversy in Poland where the game was briefly discussed in Polish media as anti-Polish falsification of history, before the issue was cleared up as a case of poor reporting.\n",
"This chronicle reflects the events in Kievan Rus from year 149... |
how do olympic athletes like ryan lochte fit 10,000 calories into their stomachs? | They eat a lot of high calorie foods, and they eat a lot of meals.
High tier swimmers might eat 4 or 5 big meals a day, plus snacks in between. They burn calories like crazy too. | [
"His daily diet included having a high protein diet that included lots of almonds, milk, fruits and Ghee (pasteurized butter). He had built such great stamina with his 3-4 hour workout, that many times he could swim across the Hoogly river, a distance of 0.75 Km (0.5 mile) with relative ease. His daily regimen also... |
how do icebreaker boats not get stuck in thick ice? | Below the water line they have massive weights on moveable carts on tracks. The ships power on to the ice. If they can't crack the ice with their thick hulls, they ride on over the ice with the ship's bow. Then the weight is moved from the back of the ship to the front and the extra weight breaks the ice. | [
"Icebreakers are often described as ships that drive their sloping bows onto the ice and break it under the weight of the ship. In reality, this only happens in very thick ice where the icebreaker will proceed at walking pace or may even have to repeatedly back down several ship lengths and ram the ice pack at full... |
What knockon effects did Edward VIII's abdication have on the British public's perception of royal duty? | I think if you're looking for a concrete "Edward VIII's abdication resulted in A, B, and C being changed in the monarchical system", you may be out of luck as this sort of symbolic system is very difficult to pin down.
In addition to that, George VI who succeeded Edward was extremely popular (obviously not among EVERYONE, but by the general public). Because of this, people could kind of ignore Edward VIII as just a "bad phase" which the monarchy grew out of.
For these reasons, it is very difficult to succinctly nail down any sort of immediate impact it had.
However, if we look at Edward's abdication as part of a larger trend in the history of "royal duty", it begins to make a clearer picture. In many ways, Edward VIII's abdication was a byproduct of the increasingly public role of the monarch.
The 20th century really brought an end to the Monarchy as a strictly aristocratic institution. Before the advent of radio, public newspapers, television, etc., British monarchs were really only visible to a small group of wealthy individuals. They would present themselves at royal balls, banquets, showings of the theatre, etc. These were, for the most part, strictly aristocratic events and most common people would never have seen the monarchs or their families in any real capacity.
When radio and newspapers were brought into the mix, this started to change. Common people could now here all the "gossip" about the monarchy. As the private lives of the monarchy became more and more common knowledge, their role in society changed. They had to start "representing the spirit of the nation" (a task which the current monarch Queen Elizabeth II has taken on to heart).
However, this role doesn't suit everyone. It is very emotionally demanding and the pressure of this extremely public presence really was too much for Edward VIII. Thus, it wasn't so much that Edward VIII CHANGED the nature of "royal duty", he just didn't FIT IN with the new role of the monarchy that had been blossoming since the turn of the century. He was too "wild" and "emotional" for such a role.
George VI fit this role perfectly; he acted as a stoic defender of Britain. During the Blitz he stayed in London with his daughters to show that the monarch was not above other Britons. He was a king who understood and succeeded in the new role of the monarchy.
| [
"George VI was said to have been horrified by his brother's entry into European political affairs at such a delicate time, particularly because, in his eyes, it was in direct contravention of his abdication oath to take a low profile (when he had sworn \"to quit public affairs altogether\"). Sarah Bradford has sugg... |
where do all these surveys saying "__% of americans approve/disapprove ____" get their info from? | You don't need particularly large sample sizes to get relatively good results. So if you go to [_URL_2_](_URL_0_) and just click on the first [poll available](_URL_0_/obama_ad.htm), you'll see a line that looks like this:
CBS News/New York Times Poll. Sept. 19-23, 2013. N=1,014 adults nationwide. Margin of error ± 3.
So that tells you who conducted the poll, when it was conducted, how many people were surveyed (1014 in this case), and the margin of error. The margin of error tells you, statically, how far off from the true number the polling number is likely to be 95% of the time (95% is just a common confidence interval that most polls will use). That poll (on the Obama Administrations handling of foreign policy) suggests that the current approval rating is 40%. With 95% confidence we can say that if you polled the entire adult population of the US, that it's between 37% and 43% (plus or minus 3%, the margin of error). That still means 5% of the time it will be wrong by more that amount though (this is called an outlier). | [
"In December 2013, the Pew Research Center reported that their newest poll, \"American's Place in the World 2013,\" had revealed that 52 percent of respondents in the national poll said that the United States \"should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their... |
how do people get convicted of statutory rape? | Generally, what happens, based on my experience is that a 14 year old girl starts texting her friends that she had sex. Or she begins sneaking out at night, and mom finds out where she is going by asking her or her friends where she has been going. That may not be enough for a conviction, but it may be enough for probable cause.
With probable cause, the cops can get a warrant to search the car of the accused and seize his hard drive and cell phone. Usually there is enough evidence there to convince a grand jury that something is going on between this adult and the child. When the prosecutor shows that the accused has over 100gbs of child porn, has been sending pictures of his penis to the alleged victim, and her purse was found in the back seat of his minivan, most of the time the jury/judge will find the accused guilty. | [
"To sustain a conviction, rape might require proof that the defendant had sexual penetration with another person. Depending on the jurisdiction, the actus reus of rape may consist of \"having carnal knowledge of\" a woman, or \"having sexual intercourse with\" a woman (including a girl) specifically, or either a wo... |
why is protectionism (specifically in a us context) a bad idea? | Well if we put steep tariffs in place for their products, they'll do so for ours, in the end everyone ends up screwed. It might be an acceptable practice in very particular conditions or limited timeframes, but generally it just makes everything more expensive.
Also, it would definitely piss off countries that import a lot to us. | [
"Protectionism is a nationalistic viewpoint that contends that a healthy cultural industry is necessary to assert national sovereignty and identity. Countries with small domestic markets are often overwhelmed by imports from larger markets in which producers can make up their costs of production by dumping content ... |
How did the Scandinavian welfare state come into being? | ~~In short social democracy happened. Denmark have mostly had social democratic prime ministers in socialist/socialliberal coalitions since WWII.~~
The welfare state really started expanding in the 1950s with the danish public pension act of 1956. The public health care system got widely expanded from 1965 to 1976, which also included care for handicapped persons. In the same period, there was a wide range of policies intended to make education available to everyone(with the state paying students money and covering all costs of the university), a minimum standard of living. Kindergartens, after-school programs and similar projects were also implemented that allowed women to enter the workforce.
[Source(in Danish)](_URL_0_).
If you want to learn more about Denmark, the website _URL_1_ is a great source reviewed and managed by historian at Aarhus University. The site is in Danish though, but the results you get through Google Translate are decent.
EDIT: Please see [Fjosnisse's reply](_URL_2_). This comment regards only the actual policy implementations, not the reasons for their implementation. | [
"According to Finnish sociologist Erik Allardt, the hallmark of the Nordic welfare system was its comprehensiveness. Unlike the welfare systems of the United States or most West European countries, those of the Nordic countries cover the entire population, and they are not limited to those groups unable to care for... |
why are melting ice sheets such a big deal? | Of course, the threat can be exaggerated. But some considerations.
- The rise may well be non-sudden, but that doesn't somehow lower the cost of moving all of the people and things from areas that will be flooded, especially when this will have to happen in many places at once. Likewise, it doesn't erase the losses from things that can't be easily moved.
- In some cases it will be "sudden." Higher seas mean more flooding during storms, and so while the overall rise in sea levels may be slow, storms and other disasters might become disproportionately more damaging.
- Outside of the directly economic context, this will change the character of the oceans, which are already undergoing some pretty profound changes. This might shift weather patterns, harm sea life, and, though "slow" on the scale of, say, an earthquake, would be quick enough that species could have difficulty adapting.
Again, this threat can definitely be exaggerated and overblown and discussed without the needed scientific confidence. But it involves a massive change in a relatively short period of time, and there is good reason to believe that the costs of that kind of dislocation will be significant. | [
"The IPCC projects that ice mass loss from melting of the Greenland ice sheet will continue to outpace accumulation of snowfall. Accumulation of snowfall on the Antarctic ice sheet is projected to outpace losses from melting. However, in the words of the IPCC, \"\"Dynamical processes related to ice flow not include... |
why does "hard resetting" seem to fix just about anything like phones or gaming consoles? | All computers have memory. When they start up they copy the instructions they need to run into memory. If something goes wrong, the instructions in memory can break. Computers don't work when following broken instructions. When you turn off the computer, it removes all the instructions from memory. When it turns back on it copies the correct instructions back into memory, and everything works again. | [
"Operating the pixel via hard reset results in a Johnson–Nyquist noise on the photodiode of formula_3 or formula_4, but prevents image lag, sometimes a desirable tradeoff. One way to use hard reset is replace M with a p-type transistor and invert the polarity of the RST signal. The presence of the p-type device red... |
Does civilization lead to gene selection in humans? | Anything that influences humans is part of evolution. Some of that influence can be very indirect.
As such, death sentences and incarceration do have an influence on evolution - but not necessarily a predictable influence.
Criminal behaviour is subjective. Different societies have had different ideas about what is criminal.
Nor is criminal behaviour primarily genetically influenced. Education has a strong influence on criminality, for example.
Most criminal acts are not punished. In America, the vast majority of those who have consumed illegal drugs are never caught and prosecuted.
If, a country had consistent laws for an extended time, breach of those laws was genetically influenced, detection and punishment of those crimes was consistent, and such punishment reduced breeding.... then genetic based criminality might be reduced.
As it stands, modern society is part of the environment that affects the process of evolution, but it is nearly impossible to predict the nature of that influence. | [
"Mathematical models have established that cultural niche construction can modify natural selection on human genes and drive evolutionary events. This interaction is known as gene-culture coevolution. There is now little doubt that human cultural niche construction has co-directed human evolution. Humans have modif... |
what happens to old churches? | It's really going to vary widely between different denominations or religions.
Many evangelical churches don't meet in a specially-designated church: I lived in rural areas for a while and you'll find churches in shopping centers, in houses, etc. A local church in my hometown would rent out the auditorium at our high school on the weekends for their services.
Episcopals do. The Episcopal church in my town burned down and they held a ceremony a few weeks after the fire but before the clearing and rebuilding to de-consecrate what was left of the old building. Then they consecrated the new building. The deconsecration was held in the lawn because firefighters wouldn't let them into the building given that it was basically a shell. It's down the street from me so I went to watch out of curiosity. I'm not sure if this means that the Anglicans in general do. Catholics consecrate churches, but Googling out of curiosity suggests that there isn't a de-consecration ceremony - the church is considered de-consecrated when secular activities happen there. | [
"Some churches were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666 and never rebuilt due to the Rebuilding Act. Many were joined with other parishes. The remains in their churchyards were either left, moved to a new location or to this cemetery (sometimes at a later date). Among these were:\n",
"As a result, the o... |
If we we're to have the same Black Plague that happened in 1348 would we be able to create a cure and prevent it? | We have a [vaccine](_URL_0_), so I think we're good. | [
"Genotyping showed that it was [at that time] a newly evolved strain, ancestor of all modern strains and proved the Black Death was bubonic plague. Modern medical knowledge suggests that because it was a new strain, the human immune system would have had little or no defence against it, helping to explain the plagu... |
Does a black hole ever appear to collapse? | This is something of a paradox and I think you'll get different answers from different people, depending on their background.
You're right that in some sense, we (the external observer) never see anything cross the event horizon. Time gets dilated to shit and any infalling observer basically gets their last second of life frozen as an image on the event horizon. In our frame, we only ever see the infaller asymptotically approach the event horizon for all eternity, like some kind of twisted "Death by Zeno's paradox."
[Edit: This was also recently depicted in today's Kurz Gesagt video on black holes.](_URL_0_)
The infalling observer's frame actually makes sense - it crosses the event horizon without much ceremony before plunging into the singularity. In the infalling observer's frame he's constantly emitting photons back out towards the rest of the universe before he crosses the event horizon. If he's emitting like a black body, then we see that black body ever more redshifted as he approaches the event horizon.
This means that the 'image' of the infalling observer that we see on the event horizon isn't like a picture tacked to a bulletin board, but it's like a TV that just got turned off, growing dimmer. Additionally, in practice, there's a last photon that the observer will emit before crossing the event horizon, and it's not long before the image of the infaller has decayed to little more than noise. In this way, an isolated black hole really is *black.*
I've always believed that this interpretation makes the most sense, but again this is something that I think people will debate.
| [
"In fact, the collapse gets slower and slower, so a singularity could only form in an infinite future. Unlike a black hole, the MECO never fully collapses. Rather, according to the model it slows down and enters an eternal collapse.\n",
"On the other hand, the nature of the kind of singularity to be expected insi... |
What causes an iceberg to just tip over? | Iceberg is mostly made of frozen fresh water (not sea water, as it contains various salts).
Majority of the iceberg (approximately 90%) is below the waterline.
Thus when the iceberg melts, the balance of the iceberg changes, in some cases, tip over, | [
"An iceberg will flip in the water as it melts and breaks apart because gravity continually pulls the heavier side downward. Most flipping occurs when the iceberg is young and establishing balance. Flipping can occur anytime and without warning. Large icebergs that flip can give off as much energy as an atomic bomb... |
why is italy no longer a forward thinking and revolutionary civilization as they were in the past? | For the same reason they aren't conquering the Mediterranean any more: it's not the same culture and society. Peoples change over time, the Renaissance was four hundred years ago. On top of that, Italy (along with Germany) are not natural constructs, they have historically been divided or united by military/political force. Hell, when Italy was formed only 3% of the population spoke Italian. | [
"In terms of the entire period, Giovanni Federico has argued that Italy was not economically backward, for there was substantial development at various times between 1860 and 1940. Unlike most modern nations that relied on large corporations, industrial growth in Italy was a product of the entrepreneurial efforts o... |
what exactly happened in the russian revolution of 1917? | There were two major revolutions in 1917, the February and the October revolution (may differ because of calendars, but these are the most popular dates). The **February** revolution caused the abdication (stepping down) of the Tsar (Nicholas II) which ended the ~300 year rule of the Romanov dynasty. He was also captured on his train to Moscow?(not exactly sure) and later held captive and was executed a year later in 1918 (don't have the exact date).
This revolution also created a Provision Government which was VERY unstable due to the amount of parties inside the government, which meant that it was constantly changing, on the other side there was the Petrograd Soviet which was the PG's "rival" so to speak, which meant Russia was ruled with a "dual power" (two groups at the top). The Tsar himself was very weak as a leader, he was not ready to become a Tsar and was more the let's go out hunting type of guy.
So **February** Revolution
* Abdication of the Tsar (was not executed until later)
* Creation of a Provisional Government and the concept of "Dual Power"
* Gave citizens hope for a better Russia (this is important later)
Now the **October** revolution was led by Lenin, but the mastermind was Trotsky (who later got ice-picked in the head by Stalin) who planned everything, Lenin was just the face of the revolution, and thus the one who took charge and got all the credit.
The revolution revolved around the Bolshevik's Red Guards capturing the Winter Palace (in Petrograd, Russia's capital at the time) where most of the Provisional Government was seated, this allowed the Bolshevik (~~surprisingly, actual meaning is minority~~ Majority) to take control of Russia as the power house after the power vacuum left by the abdication of the Tsar. This is extremely important because it paves way for the Russian Civil war which was the Bolshevik's against every other party alongside allied forces, but since you didn't ask about this, I won't explain it.
The october revolution ultimately caused the Bolshevik to seize power, creat a civil war and destroy the idea of "Dual-Power". It also allowed Lenin to create the image of himself as a God.
**October** Revolution
* Bolshevik party takes power from all the other parties to become the governing group of Russia
* Russian Civil War starts, the Red (bolshevik) vs Whites (Anti-bolsheviks + allied forces) and Greens (Russians, not in Russia, Ukrainians, Czech? and so on)
* Dual Power no longer exists
EDIT: To answer your question directly.
It was caused by the social unrest in Russia at the time due to the unpopular leader, the Tsar, the terrible economy and the world war.
The main parties involved during this time period were the Socialist-Revolutionists Party (SRs), Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Constitutional Democratic party (cadets). | [
"The Russian revolution of 1917 was marked by two revolutions: the relatively spontaneous February 1917 revolution, and the 25 October 1917 seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, who had gained the leadership of the Petrograd soviet.\n",
"The Russian Revolution was a series of uprisings that led to the fall of the R... |
What's the difference between Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Buddhism? | Theravada is the oldest form still around.
Three important main ones is that in theravada, post enlightenment buddhas only retain form for a short while. After that the enter paranirvana and no longer have a causal relationship to anything in reality. The goal of those in theravada is just to likewise enter paranirvana. In mahayana, this is considered a lower goal. The higher goal is to stay in the world helping others get enlightened. And buddhas often stay in their own realms and incarnate repeatedly or bring you there. For this reason mahayana is much more likely to believe that everyone will get enlightened eventually.
A second important distinction is that the concept of emptiness is expanded. Theravada points out that distinct objects and composites are empty. Implying that what exists are just the parts in perpetual flowingness. Mahayana expands this by saying that even the pieces are empty of distinct existence.
The third is the dharmakaya. Theravada describes very little about what happens when you enter paranirvana. It only describes it by what its not. Like negative theology. Mahayana expands this into a kind of abstract... its not a thing, but an underlying reality. And is the true reality that in a sense "is" what buddhas become. Note that point #2 and 3 are not necessarily incompatible with what theravada believes per say, but rather expand on it. There are other things, but those are some major ones.
Vajrayana is a bit harder to place, since some consider it to just be part of mahayana. It is like mahayana, but often tries to expand it in esoteric ways, and tries to create special practices for liberation that is closer than the far off ones others hope for. It also sometimes believes in something called an adibuddha which is the closest there is to a monotheistic god in buddhism. Its kind of a collective group mind of all buddhas, but in reverse is the fundamental reality that all buddhas are by virtue of enlightenment. Vajrayana talks about esoteric things like underlying ability to tap into and channel buddhas. | [
"The core of Theravāda doctrine is contained in the Pāli Canon, the only complete collection of Early Buddhist texts surviving in a classical Indic language. These ideas are shared by other Early Buddhist schools as well as by Mahayana traditions. They include central concepts such as:\n",
"With the reign of the ... |
the relationship between hospitals and universities (when the two are associated with each other)? | Yeah, the hospital acts as a regular hospital for the community, while also being a research and training facility for the school. It is usually a subsidiary of the school in every way. | [
"A university hospital is an institution which combines the services of a hospital with the education of medical students and with medical research. These hospitals are typically affiliated with a medical school or university. The following is a list of such hospitals.\n",
"The university has six affiliated hospi... |
how are we able to tell which time is right or exact? | There's an organization called the International Bureau of Weights and Measures based in France that oversees this.
Pretty much they reference a number of highly accurate atomic time keeping methods and set a universal time, which computers from all across the world set themselves to, including you're phone. | [
"A clock position is the relative direction of an object described using the analogy of a 12-hour clock to describe angles and directions. One imagines a clock face lying either upright or flat in front of oneself, and identifies the twelve hour markings with the directions in which they point.\n",
"Presently, la... |
how does stuff get stuck up your anus and you need an doctor to get it out when your ass is made for stuff to come out | Your ass is made *specifically for fecal matter* to come out, not general 'stuff'. Your lower digestive tract is highly specialized to get that shit on outta there, and it does so with great efficiency.
Small muscles along the colon spasm to push poop down to the rectum, which has walls that stretch to accommodate it, and then on to the anal canal. The anal canal has *two* sphincters, and the inner anal sphincter is not under conscious control. It stays contracted to prevent leakage. The external anal sphincter surrounds that.
So all of this is specifically fine tuned to push out poop, which is normally fairly soft. When you shove a lightbulb or something up there, your body isn't equipped to handle that. Things stretch in ways they're not meant to, which creates trauma, and muscles designed to move stool aren't strong enough to propel a yankee candle. Also, your stool isn't solid enough to push something heavy out ahead of it.
It's kinda like putting diesel in a gas engine. It's just not what it's designed for. | [
"Insertion of foreign objects into the anus is not without dangers. This area is fragile, the intestinal walls do not feel pain and for objects pushed too far, surgery may be necessary for removal (even without injury). Unsafe anal masturbation methods cause harm and a potential trip to the hospital emergency room.... |
What did people think of William Tecumseh Sherman during and shortly after the war? | Sherman could quite possibly have been president in the 1880s. The main person stopping him was...William Tecumseh Sherman who rightly realized he would be a terrible president.But he's a beloved figure in the North especially before the southern historians get a hand on him given that he's clearly the #2 general crucial to securing the union victory.
look at his quotes about the 1884 election in his letters (including his famous "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected."
also the new york public library (and online) as a good collection of old newspapers from NYC. his 1890s eulogies could be an interesting way to get views of him (since you can't use the internet this might only be valid fi you live in nyc.
Brands' **American colossus** has a decent amount about him in it re: shortly after the war.
| [
"William Tecumseh Sherman (February 8, 1820 – February 14, 1891) was an American soldier, businessman, educator, and author. He served as a general in the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861–65), for which he received recognition for his outstanding command of military strategy as well as criticism for t... |
How are amounts of money from centuries ago adjusted for inflation in today's currency? | Real wages, prices and so on are calculated on the basis of currency/gold standard. Various datasets have been cropping up in the past two decades that list every conceivable currency's real value over time, generally starting with the late early modern period. See for instance those released by the [Global Price and Income History Group](_URL_1_), or those systhematized by the social history institute in Amsterdam (_URL_0_, datasets section). I know this doesn't entirely answer your question, but I am sure a real economic historian will come along soon. | [
"Reinhart and Rogoff trace inflation (to reduce debt) to Dionysius of Syracuse, of the 4th century BC, and begin their \"eight centuries\" in 1258; debasement of currency also occurred under the Roman empire and Byzantine empire.\n",
"The government began printing tremendous amounts of currency to pay reparations... |
if amber lensed computer glasses reflect the blue light, why aren't they blue? | They're not reflecting the blue light, they're absorbing it. And all other colours except amber. So amber is what you see coming through them as well as bouncing off them. When light is absorbed it is used to vibrate the molecules that make up the glass. This makes it slightly warmer, but not so much you'd notice, normally. | [
"Yellow tinted glasses are a type of glasses with a minor yellow tint. They perform minor color correction, on top of reducing eyestrain due to lack of blinking. They may also be considered minor corrective unprescribed glasses. Depending on the company, these computer or gaming glasses can also filter out high ene... |
How accurate is Caligula: 1400 Days of Terror and/or how much of the Caligula legend is bs? | Like with Nero, a lot of the allegations have to be taken with a grain of salt. Although a lot of the things brought up in the documentary are true, many of them are angled to make them look worse than they were. The orgies and such surely happened, but the sleeping around and all that is hard for us to proof and is common slander not only in Roman times, but all through history.
Essentially, figuring out what's true or not is what makes historians specialists. If one reads all of the slander against Caligula and blindly accepts it as true because it's written by contemporaries, he's going to look extremely bad - like he's remembered by many today. However, if you look at who the writers are: Suetonius, a senator, or Tacitus, also a senator, another picture emerges. Some of the stories can surely be accredited to youth (like the throwing coins from a height story), while others are fabricated to make the emperor look bad.
If you consider who Caligula was (told in the beginning of the documentary) it's not hard to understand that he's not very adept in the politics of Rome. He was brought up as a soldier, so he knows the soldier's life (and he's also very popular with the army). However, having your family eradicated would be a rather reasonable event to become paranoid.
They tell a story about Caligula ordering his soldiers to march on the sea. That, along with him participating in theatrical plays, is part of a bigger picture. He was brought up as a soldier away from Rome and thus may not fully have understood how unacceptable it was to participate in plays as the emperor. Theatre was for lowly born people, not the leader of Rome. Caligula ordering his soldiers to march on the sea could be complete slander, but there are other similar stories, which suggests *some* truth to it. Essentially, he was unable to differ between himself as the holder of *numen* and himself as an actual god.
To quote a couple of lines from the documentary:
> It's really hard to sift through and understand who Caligula was. We do know that he was excessive, we do know that he was vindictive, we do know that he was paranoid. (Darius Arya)
> But the senate is not happy with Caligula at all. He's hanging out with the kind of people that they really don't approve of. He's mixing with actors [...] this is not what they wanted from their emperor. (Valerie Higgins)
There was a similar question about the vomitorium a few months ago with a [humorous explanation](_URL_0_).
Sidenote: Drusilla was NOT the first Roman woman to be declared a goddess. Livia was deified when she died in 27 AD and thus was the first. Drusilla's deification is more for show than anything else, it's scarcely recognized, in part probably because Caligula wasn't deified. One would think that a Yale scholar wouldn't spread false facts...
If you'd choose to watch the documentary again, I'd suggest you pay close attention to what Valerie Higgins and Darius Arya says, and ignore most of what Amanda Ruggeri says. | [
"Terror Firma is a Big Finish Productions audio drama based on the long-running British science fiction television series \"Doctor Who\". The story follows on directly from the previous Eighth Doctor audio drama \"The Next Life\" and flashes back to scenes that takes place before (and lead into) the first Eighth Do... |
why do people say that you can break your neck if you crack it the wrong way? how does this happen? | Generally speaking, the casual neck popping shouldn't be an issue. The actual trouble is that our bodies are unpredictable and anything can happen. Some people use a lot of force to get their neck to pop and with too much pressure in the wrong place you could break something.
Case in point - when I was a kid my best friend's mom broke her wrist pressing trash down into the trash can. Broke it in 3 places and the Dr. just said that she happened to push down too hard in the right places. She didn't have any bone disease or anything. So just be careful. | [
"A neck crank (sometimes also referred to as a neck lock, and technically known as a cervical lock) is a spinal lock applied to the cervical spine causing hyperextension, hyperflexion, lateral hyperflexion, hyperrotation or extension-distraction. This happens either through bending, twisting or elongating. A neck c... |
What was early Christianity like? | It was not "High" church. There was no pomp, no celebrating Christmas or Easter. Until 70 AD, they would still have likely celebrated all the Jewish holidays of course, since the earliest Christians were nearly all Jewish, and important events in Jesus' life occurred on Jewish holidays (i.e. dying on Passover).
It was very countercultural. There would not be many people of high prominence who would openly identify with them.
Picture small groups of 10-20 people meeting wherever they can to study together and talk and share life. Picture a conversion happening in a storefront while a shop owner and a customer are chatting together. They might meet in the local Synagogue in one town, and be tolerated well enough, but then in the next town they might be thrown out of that town's Synagogue.
I would not expect the pomp and ceremony to be at max level until around 300 AD when Constantine made the official merger with the Roman religion[s].
Theologically, I think they were always diverse. If you read Augustine or Iraneus, or Tertullian or any of those guys, they agree on the basics, but beyond that, all bets are off.
As far as what it mostly looked like organizationally? I think structurally (not necessarily theologically) it would most resemble Paganism, New Age, or aggregated Protestantism today. That is, there is no central authority that presides over everybody. There may be a general movement as to what is, and is not acceptable. But most issues would be open ended with only 3 or so issues worth dying over. | [
"Early Christianity (generally considered the time period from its origin to the First Council of Nicaea in 325) spread from the Eastern Mediterranean throughout the Roman Empire and beyond. Originally, this progression was closely connected to already established Jewish centers in the Holy Land and the Jewish dias... |
why is the research done at high energy particle accelerators important for mankind? | Particle accelerators help scientists understand how the physical world works. Theoretical physicists can construct models of quantum mechanics and particle physics, but without experimental equipment like particle accelerators, they're flying blind.
High level physics is how we get the super high density computing in your smartphone. Or the radiotherapy to treat cancer. Or atomic clocks that let GPS work.
There are also spinoffs that come from developing the computers to analyse all the particle physics data. All websites run on HTTP, which was developed at CERN. | [
"High energy particle physicists began the project in 1995, because they needed to access large amounts of data at laboratories sometimes as far away as across an ocean. They needed to know how the Internet was performing, identify problems, and apply solutions.\n",
"The challenges in particle physics have furthe... |
why did the edward snowden ama drop from nearly 11,000 upvotes to 6,500 upvotes in under 5 minutes? | Yes. Reddit uses something called vote-fuzzing, which hides the number of total upvotes and downvotes on a thread, while internally keeping track, and while publicly displaying the overall ratio of upvotes to downvotes.
This is because votes from spammers and other cheaters are blocked by reddit's system, but if the publicly displayed vote count was perfectly accurate, it would be easy for spammers to know when their accounts had been blocked, or 'shadow-banned' | [
"The 2008 PollyVote was launched in August 2007 and forecast a victory for Barack Obama over the 14 months that it was making daily forecasts. On Election Eve, it predicted that Obama would receive 53.0% of the popular two-party vote, an error of 0.7 percentage points.\n",
"The 2012 PollyVote was launched in Janu... |
Why does water jump around on a hot grill? | You're observing (quite astutely) a cool phenomenon called the [Leidenfrost effect](_URL_0_). Because the grill is so hot, the water vaporizes and cushions the droplet, so it glides very easily. It also acts to insulate the water so it vaporizes slower than you might expect. | [
"Cooking grates used over gas or charcoal barbecues will allow fat and oil to drop between the grill bars. This can cause the fat or oil to ignite in a 'flare-up', the flames from which can blacken or burn the food on the grate. In an attempt to combat this problem, some barbecues are fitted with plates, baffles or... |
Why does French use so many silent letters? | The simple answer is that they weren't silent at some point in the past, and spelling didn't change as quickly as pronunciation.
French spelling is based on old French pronunciation. When the spelling of, e.g., *veulent* (Latin *volunt*) was fossilized around 1100-1200, we can see that the vowels were no longer pronounced as o and e were during that time period and were thus changed. The consonants remained the same. Now, despite the fact the *nt* isn't pronounced, we know it was in the Latin and can confidently guess it was in Old French. | [
"Silent letters are common in French, including the last letter of most words. Ignoring auxiliary letters that create digraphs (such as , , , , , , and , and and as signals for nasalized vowels), they include almost every possible letter except , , , , , and .\n",
"In most dialects, the letter is almost always si... |
why are there so many rats in new york city? | Where there are people, there will be rats.
Where there is garbage, there will be rats.
The more you have of either, the more rats you will have.
New York has a LOT of both. | [
"In 2014, the television channel Animal Planet named New York City the \"Worst Rat City in the World,\" and rodentologist Bobby Corrigan called New York City the \"USA's No. 1 Pestropolis.\" Compared to other cities within the United States, studies indicate New York is particularly well-suited for rats. This concl... |
Did people other than royalty ever really have titles like 'Steve the strong' or 'Craig the wise' and if so, how did they get them? | Yes, that kind of last name is called a "byname" or an "epithet".
People have been using that kind of last name for thousands of years. Most of the non-Roman last names you see in the Bible, for example, are of this variety, including John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene (who is also known as Mary of Magdelena).
By the Middle Ages in Europe, these type of bynames had become a little bit more formal. Since a lord might have five different "John"s living on his manor, these bynames helped avoid confusion when it came to tax collecting and inheritence and other such matters. So, a byname was usually attached to a peasant around the time they became an adult/got married/started their own farm, and that name would be attached to that person their entire life. So even if "John at the Wood" later moved to a new farm by the creek, he'd still be known as "John at the Wood" for the rest of his life, because that's what the tax collector knew him as.
Fixed family surnames didn't arise until the Normans invaded England in 1066. There is some evidence that fixed surnames were in use shortly before that in France and Ireland, but not much longer--maybe a generation or two.
In much of the rest of Europe, the populations didn't go straight down the "fixed surnames" road. Instead, some adopted a "patronymic" naming system, such as in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, parts of northern Germany, Russia, Italy, and elsewhere. One by one, these populations adopted the modern "fixed surname" system, though that process played out over hundreds of years, and in Iceland, they still use the old patronymic system to this day.
How this system worked is that your father's first name became your last name. Your name is John and your dad's name is Peter? Then your last name is Peterson, and your kids' last name will be Johnson.
The problem with this system was that it led to a lot of people having the same first and last name as someone else who lived nearby, so these societies still kept using bynames as well. A full Dutch name up until the 1700s was something like "John Peterson the Smith" (or "Jan Pietersen de Smid"). In day to day conversation, people would usually just call you "Jan Pietersen", but the tax collector would insist on using your full name because three other "Jan Pietersen"s lived in the same town.
There were three kinds of bynames: geographical, occupational, or physical, e.g. "John by the Hill", "John the Tanner", or "John the Red".
Again, this byname was given to you around the time you got married or moved out on your own. Until that point, you would be using your father's. You'd be known as "Peter, son of John on the Hill" or else "Peter on the Hill".
Once you established your own home and family, your new byname was settled upon by your community. It wasn't something you chose yourself.
And you were stuck with it, unless you became very famous and got to be known as "the Great" or something, or else if you immigrated somewhere else. If "John on the Hill" who lives near Paris moved to London, he'd be "John of Paris" by the time he got there. It was *possible* for a peasant to end up with a byname such as "the Wise" or "the Strong" but it was relatively rare. Most often, peasants ended up with a more conventional geographical or occupational byname.
I have [written on this topic before](_URL_4_) and my previous answer may be of some use as well.
And [here](_URL_3_) is a book of transcriptions of documents relating to the King of Scotland in the 1100s and 1200s. Perusing the document, you can see that in the earlier entries, many of the last names still in use were not yet fixed surnames, but bynames. But by the end of the 1200s, at the end of that book, most people in the British isles had made the switch to the "fixed surname" system.
Sources:
[Personal and Family Names](_URL_6_)
[Family Names And Their Story](_URL_2_)
[The History of the Norman Conquest of England](_URL_1_)
[English Surnames: Essays on Family Nomenclature](_URL_0_)
[The World's Great Classics: The History of Europe In the Middle Ages](_URL_5_) | [
"Llywelyn dominated Wales for more than 40 years, and was one of only two Welsh rulers to be called \"the Great\", the other being his ancestor Rhodri the Great. The first person to give Llywelyn the title \"the Great\" seems to have been his near-contemporary, the English chronicler Matthew Paris.\n",
"In Persia... |
why is walmart known as asda in the uk? | Asda existed before Walmart was even a thing. Walmart bought them (including their well-known name). They feel the Asda brand is valuable and well known in the UK, so they wanted to keep it. | [
"Walmart's UK subsidiary Asda (which retained its name after being acquired by Walmart) is based in Leeds and accounted for 42.7percent of 2006 sales of Walmart's international division. In contrast to the U.S. operations, Asda was originally and still remains primarily a grocery chain, but with a stronger focus on... |
why do witches carry broomsticks? | It's thought to have been connected with drug use.
One of the earliest accounts of the trial of a "witch" in the 14th century says that one of the things found in her possession was some "ointment" with which she "greased her staff upon which she ambled".
It's thought to have happened like this: during the Middle Ages, Europeans discovered some plants that had hallucinogenic properties, such as henbane or deadly nightshade. Some of these happened also to be poisonous, so it was quite a bit more dangerous than LSD, but otherwise... well, it made you feel good and gave you some awesome hallucinations, including a feeling of flying. This theory also has the benefit of explaining the image of witches hunched around a cauldron, brewing up their potions -- they were actually making their drugs, in a sort of mediaeval version of a meth lab.
The best way to apply the resulting "ointment" was to smear it on a smooth stick, like a broomstick, and push that into an orifice where it is easily absorbed into the bloodstream. For women, application through the -- let's not mince words -- vagina was an excellent method, and probably also... particularly pleasurable.
And there you have it: women straddling broomsticks and "flying". | [
"Broomsticks are used for transportation by witches and wizards of all ages, and for participating in the game of Quidditch. Their use is similar to that of flying carpets, although the latter are banned in Great Britain by the Ministry of Magic. However, they are uncomfortable for extended trips, even with a cushi... |
why do certain artists have hits but then go into obscurity? | Making a hit song is really, really hard. Especially if you don't have a huge industry backer.
Some bands just absolutely nail it with one or two albums and then just can't make it happen again. It might be because the band changes lineups or styles, or just because the public has moved on and they can't adapt to new popular styles.
It takes a while to make an album, even if you can afford to spend all your time in the studio, and the public moves on fast. You have to keep hitting a new sweet spot every time, and that takes a lot of skill and some luck. | [
"BULLET::::- Allmusic (4.5/5) – states that \"not only does the music stand on its own (there's a reason why thousands of young DJs and vinyl hounds collapsed in confoundment upon finding out that these rare gems were being issued together), but the liner notes provide a story behind each song, only adding to the m... |
how realistic is the shot and the recovery from the bullet "into the lung" in the movie focus (2015)? | I don't know what kind of firearm and bullet were supposed to be used, but no, it's not realistic. A through and through wound would leave massive cavitation and other tissue damage as well as blowing a large exit hole - typically. It's a movies, they frequently are inaccurate . | [
"The Eyemo takes an internal load of 100 feet (30,5 m) of film, which lasts just over one minute when filming at 24 fps. Some models also accept a 400 ft or 1000 ft magazine that is attached to the back, and can hold 4⅓ and 11 minutes of film respectively. When used with a 400 ft magazine, the Eyemo is cumbersome (... |
what is happening with az sb1062 and hb2153 (relating to the free exercise of religion)? | So basically, Free Exercise of Religion is the issue here.
At it's simplest form, Free Exercise of Religion means that for example, I can't make a law that says "You can't worship Jesus Christ."
That's a CLEAR violation of Free Exercise.
However, there is a concept called a "Neutral Law of General Applicability"
There's a US Supreme Court case (Employment Division vs. Smith) that addressed the issue. Basically, the state in question had laws banning a certain psychoactive drug called Peyote. A Native American man was fired for using Peyote and he argued that his religion required the use of Peyote in a religious ritual.
The court basically said that if the law doesn't target a religion specifically, but is instead applicable to the general population equally, it's ok that it otherwise burdens the religious freedoms of people.
And this is a GOOD thing. If you could just ignore any law because it infringed on your religion, you become, as Scalia wrote, "A law unto [yourself]"
Lets say I want to make my own religion. As a part of my religion, I MUST murder one person who annoys me each day. You can't do anything about it, if you do, you're infringing on my religious beliefs.
Does that sound like a world you want to live in? It's a hyperbolic example for humor's effect, but basically this prevents people from using their religion as an excuse to break the law. If the law doesn't single out your religion, then you can't use religious freedom to get around it.
What SB1062 does is specifically state that people are protected from even laws of general applicability if the law violates a sincerely held religious belief.
The caveat is that the state may restrict their religious belief if the government can prove two things:
1: There is a compelling government interest in restricting the religious freedom
2: The methods used are the least restrictive of furthering that compelling interest.
For this reason, the Arizona bill doesn't suddenly legalize the situation I described above, where I get to make my "I get to murder anyone I dislike religion" and get away with it. Preventing murder is a compelling government interest and stopping me from murdering people I don't like is the least restrictive means to do so.
But what if my religious belief isn't murder...but something else.
You see, the problem with the compelling state interest test is that it's incredibly difficult (read: Nearly Impossible) to pass that test.
It's the test lawmakers and courts use when they want the government to lose. It's INCREDIBLY hard to prove that a law is a compelling government interest and that you are using the least restrictive means to accomplish that goal.
| [
"The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), , codified as et seq., is a United States federal law that prohibits the imposition of burdens on the ability of prisoners to worship as they please and gives churches and other religious institutions a way to avoid zoning law restrictions on their... |
how do erasable pens work? and why is the ink usually lighter than conventional ball and gel pens? | The ink is actually temperature sensitive, when it gets heated up, it becomes white, so when you erase, the friction from the eraser heats the paper and it becomes white
This is also why it looks lighter, because it has to turn white
Interestingly enough, if you put it in the freezer the ink that has been erased will come back | [
"Ballpoint pens with erasable ink were pioneered by the Paper Mate pen company. The ink formulas of erasable ballpoints have properties similar to rubber cement, allowing the ink to be literally rubbed clean from the writing surface before drying and eventually becoming permanent. Erasable ink is much thicker than ... |
why do the inside of your ears get sweaty and itchy if you have earbuds in after a while? | Your ears, nose, and throat are all connected. Earbuds plug your ears, so your normally open ear canal is now closed. It then gets warm in there like a room on a summer day, causing the skin inside your ear to sweat in an attempt to cool down. Not sure why it gets itchy. Hope this helps. | [
"Signs of ear infection include shaking of the head, and scratching at or under the ear. Some animals may also paw the ear or try to rub it on other objects to relieve pain and discomfort. Ear infections often result in a darker red ear, dirt in the ear, or a general inflamed appearance.\n",
"Sinus infections can... |
why do car companies produce new models every year? could you produce the same car, save design and development expense, and make super cheap cars? | While car makers produce new models every year, they only make substantial changes every 6-7 years or so that require significant design and development costs.
Typically mid-cycle (3 years after introduction), they will freshen up the design, maybe by tweaking the bumper/grill, tail lights, etc. which are all relatively minor updates. Maybe update the engines offered, if they've developed a new one that is better suited.
And the annual changes are typically updates to problem parts, such as a part that experiences a high rate of failure (switching an engine component that breaks after 20k mi) or that's unpopular/hard to use (too small cup holders); or updates to more current technology (add Apple Car Play); and perhaps some cosmetic updates like new paint colors, wheel designs. | [
"In automotive industry, the product lifecycle of mass-produced productions is always 4 to 6 years, and during that period, the competitor company will introduce new product to hold more market share. When new cars have launched into the market for 2 and 3 years, to keep their strength in the market, company will p... |
why do we jump when we get excited? | Is it because we get a surge of adrenaline which gives us energy? | [
"Jump is a disorientating experience for those using it, although the degree of discomfort varies depending on the species. Most humans experience extreme psychological distress, potentially resulting in madness, and need to \"trank down\" or tranquilize themselves prior to each jump. The oxygen-breathing species n... |
why do some countries (soviet union, china, north korea, etc.) call themselves communist even though all they really were only dictatorships? | The answer is relatively simple if you look at the conditions prior to these countries 'revolutions.' In every instance that you've mentioned; Korea, China and the USSR the same cultural conditions existed. Prior to the revolutions conditions were poor and the people were poorer. Before to the 1917 October Revolution Russia was a monarchy and essentially a primitive, poor and peasant society consisting of mainly subsistence farmers. China in 1949 was the same thing minus the monarchy and even poorer than Russia in fact & North Korea was basically pushed into the so called 'communism' by the expansionist Soviet Union in 1948 and it like all the others during their inception was a very poor and under-developed country.
And that is why a lot of the population took side with the communist parties in all these countries because throughout all of this the Soviet Union was not only behind most communist struggles, but it stood as a trophy for the 'soviet socialist model' having shown that it is possible to transform a country from a completely undeveloped agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse. And that is the answer to your question, every single party used the very real moral force of socialism and communism that was alive in the general population and exploited it for their own benefit. "Their own" being the intelligentsia of the party which had their own plans for the direction of the society.
Just to clarify something none of these countries you've listed have ever had anything remotely close to socialism despite what you may have been told in your high school social studies classroom. The very core, foundational idea of socialism and communism alike is the workers control over production, workers deciding what to produce, how much to produce and have the decision making powers in their own communities. In every single one of the countries you've mentioned that has never existed. In Russia it was destroyed once the idea of a "Labor Army" was
theorized and actualized, as well as Stalin's top down Five Year Plan system, it was destroyed in China with Mao's Great Leap Forward. But to be completely truthful socialism was denigrated by the mere structure of these societies governance, the central committee utilized in the Soviet Union, China and DPRK alike was as far from socialism as you can get, it is comparable to what an executive board of corporation is. The Central Committee would decide everything, and everyone under the CCCP would follow the orders given. That is as far from traditional socialism that you can possible get.
*Just as a side remark:*
If you look at the ideas written by Marx and Engels outlining what communism is, in their minds, you'll notice that communism has never existed in any nation state. Ideologically the words "communism" and "state" are contradictory in terms when considering fundamental communist writing. Communism, idealistically, was described as a moneyless, stateless and classless society, which no "communist nation" has ever been. There has only been interpretations of original writings to fit cultural and national conditions, and of course the direction the intelligentsia of the communist parties wanted the country to go in. But in most instances the parties only made it about half way into the transition Marx & Engels outlined, the transitional phase, the dictatorship of the proletariat. [\(you can find out more about this here\)](_URL_0_)
Hope this helps cut through some of the fallacies you may have been taught to believe.
**tl;dr** "Communist Parties" exploited the moral force of socialism and communism for their own benefits. Espousing egalitarianism to garner popular support, while actually being hegemonic and dictatorial in practice. | [
"There have been several instances of Communist states with functioning political participation processes involving several other non-party organisations, such as trade unions, factory committees and direct democratic participation. The term \"Communist state\" is used by Western historians, political scientists an... |
what makes processed meat carcinogenic? | Certain chemicals that are used to keep it fresh for longer, as well as some that are produced when cooking meat at very high temperatures, can be carcinogenic. This is why the statement 'processed meat causes cancer' is simply wrong, because it depends how it's processed. Also the red pigment in red meat has been categorised as 'probable carcinogen'. | [
"Some methods of food preservation are known to create carcinogens. In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization classified processed meat, i.e. meat that has undergone salting, curing, fermenting, and smoking, as \"carcinogenic to humans\".\n",
"In 2015, the Internati... |
does wealth require poverty? | If *wealth* means having more than everyone else, then yes.
If wealth simply means having a lot of resources, then no. The amount of available resources depend on how much we produce (essentially, how efficient we are). For instance, the industrial revolution greatly increased productivity in many sectors, thus giving lots of people access to things that previously could only be owned by few.
However, at present the super rich have far more resources than the earth could possibly sustain if we all lived the same life style. | [
"Asset poverty is an economic and social condition that is more persistent and prevalent than income poverty. It is a household’s inability to access wealth resources that are sufficient to provide for basic needs for a period of three months. Basic needs refer to the minimum standards for consumption and acceptabl... |
Why is the radiation from Chernobyl and Fukushima so intense, when Uranium has a half life of billions of years? Shouldn't it be minimal? | Nuclear power plants make energy by splitting uranium nuclei in two: "nuclear fission". The two new nuclei made, "fission products", are almost always radioactive and under go beta decay. [A wide variety of fission products are made](_URL_0_) with a wide span of half-lives, down to sub-second and up to many years. Most will undergo multiple beta-decays on their way to becoming stable nuclei.
It's these fission products which dominate the radioactivity in used nuclear fuel, rather than the uranium directly.
Further, the energy released by these beta decays accounts for about 7% of the total energy produced in the reactor, and the heat produced is what's usually responsible for meltdowns: even after you stop fission in a reactor, it's still initially putting out about 7% power from this ["decay heat"](_URL_1_), and that heat needs to be removed from the reactor or it will continue to heat up and eventually melt. This is what happened at Fukushima and Three Mile Island. | [
"Radiation is a carcinogen and causes numerous effects on living organisms and systems. The environmental impacts of nuclear power plant disasters such as the Chernobyl disaster, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and the Three Mile Island accident, among others, persist indefinitely, though several other facto... |
why does africa not have the same cocaine production problem that south america faces? | You need to think in more than two dimensions, grasshopper. Altitude is a major factor in production of the coca plant. Additionally, generations of knowledge are missing in Africa. | [
"Cocaine is another drug emerging on the continent. While most of the trade comes from North Africa, there is a growing presence in East Africa. Starting in 2004, there have been numerous high-profile seizures in East Africa. In the intervening years, cocaine seizures have increased by four times. While each of the... |
how can we "see" other galaxies? | We use a big telescope that we aim at a tiny piece of blackness in the sky. [This](_URL_1_) is an image we received from the Hubble telescope. We see these galaxies in the piece of blackness because we use a long exposure time. For example, [this](_URL_0_) is what happens if you take a long exposure photo at night. Yes, this picture is taking at night. | [
"Currently, astronomers know little about the shape and size of our galaxy relative to what they know about other galaxies; it is difficult to observe the entire Milky Way from the inside. A good analogy is trying to observe a marching band as a member of the band. Observing other galaxies is much easier because hu... |
how does download / upload speed affect online game play-ability? | There's no direct correlation.
As long as you meet the requirements for uploading/receeving the game data (which is almost certainly FAR below 3MBit), the speed wont matter.
What *will* matter is the latency, or how long it takes a single packet of information to get from your computer to the server. But the latency number is not directly related to the throughput number.
Now, some (not all) high speed connections tend to be on better designed networks with lower latencies and less over subscription, which can mean that a higher speed connection would get you the lower latency, but its a side effect (and one thats not guarenteed). | [
"Faster website download speeds have been shown to increase visitor retention and loyalty and user satisfaction, especially for users with slow internet connections and those on mobile devices. Web performance also leads to less data travelling across the web, which in turn lowers a website's power consumption and ... |
How do we construct objects on a nanoscopic scale? | Two ways: Bottom-up and Top-down [fabrication](_URL_4_). Top-down fab involves starting with a chunk of material and etching away parts until you have the design you want. This method can make complex shapes^[1](_URL_2_) ^[2](_URL_6_) but is limited to relatively large objects (~ tens of nanometers). For the molecular scale most people think of when imagining nanobots, you need bottom-up fab, where you start with small objects and connect them into larger objects. To connect them, engineers use [self-assembly](_URL_3_). This usually involves chemically [functionalizing](_URL_0_) the building block molecules on one end so they attach in a particular manner. In reality, we are years away from [nanobots](_URL_5_) in the form you are probably imagining them in. We can make arrangements of atoms that act like atomic motors^[3](_URL_1_) but attaching a power source and method of direction control has not, to my knowledge, been achieved at the atomic scale. | [
"BULLET::::- Nanotechnology – The study of manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally, nanotechnology deals with structures sized between 1 and 100 nanometre in at least one dimension, and involves developing materials or devices possessing at least one dimension within that size.\n",
"The na... |
How much does body fat influence our perception of temperature? | TL;DR heat dissipation is roughly proportional to surface area, while heat production is on volume. As weight goes up, surface area doesn't go up as quickly, and so the heavier people dissipate heat more slowly. That's good for them in the cold and really bad for them in the heat.
Let's make some simplifications to the model to show how this works.
1. We will model the people as cylinders with the density and heat properties of water. Cue some joke about "spherical cows in a vacuum."
2. We'll say 1.5 m tall and 50, 75, and 100 kg. Because 1 kg of water has a volume of 1 L, these people have volumes of 50 L, 75 L, and 100 L.
3. Calculating surface area and rounding to the nearest 1000, the surface areas of the people are about 10000, 13000, and 15000 cm^3
4. The ratio of area to volume for the people is therefore 200, 173, and 150.
5. These ratios determine how much relative heat can be dissipated, and therefore the lighter person here is going to dissipate more heat relative to volume than the heavier person is -- good in heat; probably bad in cold.
| [
"Both energy metabolism and body temperature increases are observed in humans following extracted capsinoids or CH-19 Sweet administration. Animal studies also demonstrate these increases, as well as suppressed in body fat accumulation following capsinoids intake. The exact mechanisms and the relative importance of... |
what legitament ties do fraternity groups have to what is considered "greek life"? | The term "Greek Life" literally refers to the activities of fraternities and sororities. It's called Greek Life because most fraternities and sororities are named with three greek letters (Phi Kappa Alpha, Delta Iota Kappa, etc). | [
"Fraternities and sororities, or Greek letter organizations (GLOs) (collectively referred to as \"Greek life\"), are social organizations at colleges and universities. A form of the social fraternity, they are prominent in the United States and the Philippines, with much smaller numbers existing in France, Canada, ... |
how do slumps and streaks work? | Nothing. Usually what you see when there are "streaks" and "slumps" is just random variation. There's no more mental change in a player when he hits six 3-pointers in a row than there's a mental change in a coin when it comes up heads 7 times in a row. It's just something that happens.
Just a week ago [a study came out](_URL_0_) saying that the odds of a basketball player hitting the 2nd Free Throw after making the first was improved. IMO, though, I don't think two in a row is enough to satisfy a "streak." I'd love to see if the "streak" continued from the back end of a 2-shot foul to the next trip to the line. I'd say that's likely muscle memory more than anything. | [
"The physical process that produces dark slope streaks is still uncertain. They are most likely caused by the mass movement of loose, fine-grained material on oversteepened slopes (i.e., dust avalanches). The avalanching disturbs and removes a bright surface layer of dust to expose a darker substrate.\n",
"A slum... |
why it's possible for a 'brain dead' person to wake up while being prepped for an organ donation? | It is a cause for concern. Generally a brain scan will be performed which will show if there is electrical activity in the brain.
Doctors do want the freshest most viable organs, the ones least dead.
When your brain is dead can be debated to a certain extent. There is an ancient part of the brain buried deep with our brains which resembles the brain of reptiles. In it are basic functions necessary for us to live. This part can be compared to reflex centers in the spinal cord. If stimulated, the reflex centers can cause the legs to walk.
Walking legs do not mean a conscious brain. Nor does breathing although this does include relays in the brain.
I do not know what your criteria for being alive is. If I cannot change the channels on a TV I want someone to pull the plug unless I am blinking in Morse Code.
We lose brain cells every day. How many we need to function I do not know.
The last step of organ donation probably includes turning off the breathing machine. This means the brain cells go hypoxic. Any that are alive will fire in a generalized discharge. This will cause a squeezing of the voluntary muscles, a last gasp, a last grasp. It does not mean that her brain was alive.
You can probably find cases where a brain dead individual will actually sit up when the machinery is turned off. It does not mean the brain was alive or they were alive in any sense we know. | [
"After someone has died, a person’s organs can be donated after “brain stem death” or “cardiac death.” Brain stem death is when there is no brain function, with no blood flow or oxygen to the brain. Cardiac death is when the person is injured beyond recovery and will not survive without the support of a ventilator.... |
why do i feel more out of breath after i stop running than while i'm running? | It's an illusion. I want to show you a chart but can't find it. The oxygen that you use, is depending on your needs (howstrong is your cardio excercise). So if you look at the chart of the level of the cardio excercise and the input oxygen, you would see a straight line syarting from (0,0) and suddenly it would go parallel to the level of the cardio ie. The oxygen levels would be the same and stop increasing. That's because your body can't get more, and is at its limits of oxygen. That's when you feel out of breathe. Your muscles want oxygen but you just can't provide it. So after you stop the excercise, your body continues breathing at its limits to use the oxygen that it wanted.
Tl;dr: you are as out of breathe while excercising and right after you stop, just because your body wants more oxygen tries to make you stop for a while and have a break. | [
"He had indicated that although every child developed by learning how to sit, crawl, walk and run, the situation in which the Gas found themselves demanded, that \"we run immediately because we are lagging behind\".\n",
"Running is an effective way to reduce stress, anxiety, depression, and tension. It helps peop... |
Need advice on potentially going to grad school for history | I'm just typing this from mobile and will add more to it later, but if you suffer from anxiety and depression, academia may not be the best choice for you. And I say this not to be discouraging, but because it can be *tough*. I'm currently doing my PhD in medical history and definitely wished I listened to everyone telling me that PhD's are incredibly isolating and are emotionally taxing.
I'm in the UK so I can't speak too much about American PhD programmes, but I needed relatively high undergrad grades and a Master's degree with similar grades. If you're able, finding a history-related Master's degree would probably be your first step in pursuing a history PhD. There's always hope of funding, but arts degrees typically have less funding than STEM subjects.
EDIT: spelling | [
"The College Board recommends a one-year preparatory course in World History, as well as independent reading on material related to historical content. However, the questions are very similar to the AP World History Exam, and it is recommended a student do significant outside study by reading and working questions ... |
trees, how do new trees grow? | When mama tree and papa tree love each other very much, insects or winds take pollen from papa tree flowers and put them on the stamen of mama tree flowers. Then the little egg cell turns into a seed, which has all the genetic information needed to produce a new tree, and has a food reserve, a few cells that will grow into a root and a few more that will grow into leaves. Once the seed is in favorable conditions (warm enough, wet enough etc) it will start to develop a miniature tree. Then it grows from there by adding new cells, some that make leaves, some for the trunk, some for the root - etc. Of course, some trees are selfish and don’t share their genetic material so they self-pollinate and make seeds without other trees. And some can just clone themselves into new copies, either from a branch or root system. | [
"It reproduces rapidly and spreads its seeds via wind. It reaches maturity and begins seeding in 4 years. Growing at a rate of 1–2 m per year, it quickly reaches a tall height where it can shade out the rest of the native plants. Adult trees grow much slower than juveniles.\n",
"Over the centuries, the tree grows... |
would it be possible to charge our smartphone batteries using wi-fi waves "power"? | Technically speaking yes.
Practically speaking, no.
We can extract a charge, but it will be so small it would dissipate almost immediately. | [
"Wi-Charge claims to deliver power using focused beams of invisible infrared light. The system consists of a transmitter and a receiver. Transmitter connects to a standard power outlet and converts electricity into infrared laser beam. Receivers use a miniature photo-voltaic cell to convert transmitted light into e... |
Could the gravitational pull of one black hole pull you out past the event horizon of a second? | no. Gravity of a blackhole is like gravity of any massive object.. It varies with distance from the object. On the other hand, the event horizon is a surface which when you/anything crosses, it cannot come back. | [
"This \"slingshot\" effect has been explored in theoretical physics: it is hypothetically possible to slingshot oneself \"around\" the event horizon of a black hole. As a result of the black hole's extreme gravitation, time would pass at a slower rate near the event horizon, relative to the outside universe; the tr... |
how were the spaniards able to ally with the rival tribes to beat the aztecs, when they didn't know a single word of their language? | Geronimo de Aguilar was a monk who was shipwrecked in the Yucatan before Cortes went to present day Mexico. While there, he was able to learn a lot of the Mayan language; his learning as a monk made it a lot easier to pick up. The Spanish later found him and took him with them.
When they landed in present day Mexico, they met La Malinche, a woman who was given to them as a slave. She could speak Mayan and the Aztec language, Nahuatl. So, until La Malinche learned Spanish fluently, Cortes would talk to Aguilar who would talk to La Malinche. | [
"The Alliance ambushed indigenous ceremonies, such as during The Feast of Huitzilopochtli, which allowed the superior Spanish conquerors to avoid fighting the best Aztec warriors in direct armed battle.\n",
"Further battles awaited the Spaniards and their allies as they fought their way around the north end of La... |
Including animals that no longer exist, what animal is the largest ever? | The blue whale is the largest known to have existed. Largest doesn’t mean longest. A 2 meter snake is pretty small compared to a 1.8 meter human.
One candidate for largest dinosaur (Argentinosaurus) is estimated to have weighed about 70 metric tons. Blue whales can get up to about 170 tons. The dinosaur was longer than a whale but much of that was skinny neck and tail. | [
"The blue whale (\"Balaenoptera musculus\") is the largest animal that has ever lived, weighing up to 190 metric tonnes and measuring up to long. The largest extant terrestrial animal is the African bush elephant (\"Loxodonta africana\"), weighing up to 12.25 tonnes and measuring up to long. The largest terrestrial... |
Do man-made electronics cumulatively make a significant contribution to the Earth's magnetic field? | [There has definitely been human impact on the Magnetosphere](_URL_0_), though I'm not sure if that's strictly considered the same as the Earth's magnetic field (this is not my field of research, at all), and a large chunk of that comes from things like Atmospheric Nuclear testing.
That said, a couple of excerpts from above that are particularly relevant; it's likely there's at least some effect from radio transmission.
> Given ambient terrestrial ionosphere and magnetosphere magnetic field and electron density values, VLF fixed frequency transmissions can not only pass through the medium but can under certain conditions trigger a variety of natural stimulated wave emissions, often interacting with existing particle populations in these regions. Observations exploring these physical mechanisms have been and continue to be conducted both from the ground and in-situ within the ionosphere and magnetosphere. Sect. 3 of Parrot and Zaslavski (1996) provides a mid 1990s snapshot review of observations and mechanisms.
Additionally, from the above ref, there's debate over the specific contribution from the use of electronics not intended for EMF radiation emssion;
> The possible effects on the space environment of human activities via use of electrical power sources in industrial activities have also been reported from statistical analyses of weekly variations in geomagnetic activity (e.g. Park and Miller 1979; Fraser-Smith 1979), and refuted from other analyses (e.g. Karinen et al. 2002). | [
"The Earth's magnetic field is believed to be generated by electric currents in the conductive iron alloys of its core, created by convection currents due to heat escaping from the core. However the process is complex, and computer models that reproduce some of its features have only been developed in the last few ... |
Did Native Americans independently invent agriculture? And what does that mean about human culture before then? | Yes, agriculture was independently invented in the Americas.
To copy/paste an answer I gave [previously](_URL_0_)
> There's a number of factors that can contribute to this answer and the debate has raged on for 100 years. Factors such as population density and a dwindling food supply are often mentioned, but I am of the mind that it was the weather. Up until 12,000 years ago the climate around the world fluctuated from hot to cold and back again in intervals as small as a decade in some cases. This makes it extremely difficult to cultivate plants to grow in a certain climate if the climate is never stable. 12,000 years ago marks the Holocene and we have had a relatively stable climate that allowed people to settle down and begin farming. Whether that is, in fact, the case or not is still up for debate but the fact remains that people just were not able to farm before the Holocene.
> [Richerson, Peter J., Robert Boyd, and Robert L. Bettinger
2001, Was Agriculture Impossible During the Pleistocene But Mandatory During the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis. American Antiquity 66(3):387-411.](_URL_1_)
To quote the source cited
> "Might we not expect agriculture to have emerged in the last interglacial 130,000 years ago or even during one of the older interglacials? No archaeological evidence has come to light suggesting the presence of technologies that might be expected to accompany forays into intensive plant collecting or agriculture at this time. Anatomically modern humans may have appeared in Africa as early as 130,000 years ago, but they were not behaviorally modern. Humans of the last interglacial were uniformly archaic in behavior. Very likely, then, the humans of the last interglacial were neither cognitively nor culturally capable of evolving agricultural subsistence. However, climate might also explain the lack of marked subsistence intensification during previous interglacials. Ice cores from the thick Antarctic ice cap at Vostok show that each of the last four interglacials over the last 420,000 years were characteristic by a short, sharp peak of warmth rather than the 11,600 year long stable plateau of the Holocene. Further, the GRIP ice core suggests the last interglacial (130,000-80,000 BP) was more variable than the Holocene, although its lack of agreement with a nearby replicate for for this time period makes this interpretation tenuous. On the other than, the atmospheric concentration of C02 was higher in the three previous interglacials than during the Holocene, and was stable at high levels for about 20,000 years following the warm peak during the last interglacial. The highly continental Vostok site unfortunately does not record the same high-frequency variation in the climate as most other proxy climate records, even those in the southern hemisphere. Some northern hemisphere marine and terrestrial records suggest that the last interglacial was highly variable while other data suggest a Holocene-length period of stable climates ca. 127,000-117,000 BP. Better data on the high frequency part of the Pleistocene beyond the reach of the Greenland ice cores is needed to test hypotheses about events antedating the latest Pleistocene. Long marine cores from areas of rapid sediment accumulation are beginning to reveal the millennial scale record from previous glacial-interglacial cycles. At least the last five glacials have millennial-scale variations like the last glacial. The degree of fluctuations during previous interglacials is still not clear, but at least some proxy data suggest that the Holocene has been less variable than earlier interglacials." | [
"Agriculture was invented independently in two regions of North America: the Eastern Woodlands and Mesoamerica. The more southern cultural groups of North America were responsible for the domestication of many common crops now used around the world, such as tomatoes and squash. Perhaps most importantly they domesti... |
How accurate was Upton Sinclair's The Jungle | > ... but a creek that’s constantly bubbling because of chemicals...
Chicagoan here. I can confirm this portion of your question. "[Bubbly Creek](_URL_0_)" is a local nickname for the South Fork of the South Branch of the Chicago River. As the name implies, it constantly bubbled up methane after being used as an open sewer by the Union Stock Yards. [Efforts have been made](_URL_1_) in recent years to re-oxygenate the stream. The smell has been reduced and fish have begun to return. The city and the Army Corps of Engineers have conducted feasibility studies to improve water flow and restore local wetlands, but local industry fouled it up pretty badly in previous generations (as the book suggests) and restoration will take a lot of time and money. Luckily the money now exists due to significant residential development in the area.
Edit: Changed second link to USACE website. Previously linked to a pay site. | [
"Upton Sinclair published \"The Jungle\" in 1906, which revealed conditions in the meat packing industry in the United States and was a major factor in the establishment of the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act. Sinclair wrote the book with the intent of addressing unsafe working conditions in that ind... |
why do they put lightning rods on trees? | A lightning rod directs the electricity safely into the ground rather than into the tree itself, which normally outright kills the tree. | [
"Trees are frequent conductors of lightning to the ground. Since sap is a relatively poor conductor, its electrical resistance causes it to be heated explosively into steam, which blows off the bark outside the lightning's path. In following seasons trees overgrow the damaged area and may cover it completely, leavi... |
can you literally die from not sleeping too long? | We don't know, really. Some people will mention Fatal Familial Insomnia, however that is a prion disease, and current thinking is that it is the prion disease that leads to death, not the insomnia. In rat studies, rats will die after certain periods, but it's unclear why/what actually kills them (some studies have suggested thermoregulation). In humans, however, when deprived of sleep long enough, we start having microsleeps where the brain has involuntary short bursts of sleep to compensate (meaning you sleep no matter what you try to do to stop it), but we don't know how long microsleeps will actually be sufficient'to keep a person alive. | [
"The lowest mortality was seen in individuals who slept between six and a half and seven and a half hours per night. Even sleeping only 4.5 hours per night is associated with very little increase in mortality. Thus, mild to moderate insomnia for most people is associated with increased longevity and severe insomnia... |
what happens in time sensitive jobs during the daylight saving time hour? | We use the current time regardless in hospital settings. Obviously this can result in 2 events happening at 1 am but occurring an hour apart. It isn't a problem cause we can just communicate until we have an understanding and besides, everyone working already knows what's going on anyway.
Source: I work in the medical field and had a 13 hour shift that night. | [
"Daylight saving time (DST), also daylight savings time or daylight time (United States) and summer time (United Kingdom, European Union, and others), is the practice of advancing clocks during summer months so that evening daylight lasts longer, while sacrificing normal sunrise times. Typically, regions that use d... |
obama's state of the union address? | The US Constitution requires that the President give an update to Congress about the "state of the Union". It's done in the form of a speech every year, and it's a big moment in US politics because everyone gets to get out their grindstone for their particular axes.
Edit: Every year, not every two. | [
"The 2012 State of the Union Address was a speech given by former President Barack Obama, from 9 p.m. to 10:17 p.m. EST on Tuesday, January 24, 2012, in the chamber of the United States House of Representatives. In his speech, he focused on education reform, repairing America's infrastructure with money not used on... |
why is the rate that technology improves rising. | Because once the knowledge is acquired to create new technologies, those technologies can be used for more in-depth research and thus speeding up the researching process. | [
"Paul Christiano believes that while accelerating technological progress appears to be one of the best ways to improve human welfare in the next few decades, a faster rate of growth cannot be equally important for the far future because growth must eventually saturate due to physical limits. Hence, from the perspec... |
why are there always big fluctuations in the stock after a major national/world event? (e.g brexit, the election) | The stock market is based entirely on sentiment or human perception of data and events. (Stock price = current market valuation driven largely by sentiment)
Company A reports record breaking earnings, people believe Company A may continue to do so in the future, people buy Company A stock and it rises.
Now with a large geo-political event that has unknown repercussions for nearly every aspect of the economy (Brexit, US Election), sentiment changes with each and every piece of data that is released.
Ask yourself why the FBI announcement to investigate Hillary on new emails caused the market to tank. It's because that info increased the odds of an outcome that had not been priced in by most of the market. Sentiment shifted, and this shift was represented by the price shift. | [
"The \"New York Times\" identifies March 2009 as the \"nadir of the crisis\" and noted in 2011 that \"Most stock markets around the world are at least 75 percent higher than they were then. Financial stocks, which led the markets down, have also led them up.\" Nevertheless, the lack of fundamental changes in bankin... |
How does the body react to cauterized vessels during surgery? | There are lots and lots of anastomoses in vessels supplying virtually any part of your body and almost no vascularized tissue is dependent on a single individual vessel for blood supply. The microvasculature in tissue also has adaptation mechanisms for both long term and short term changes in blood supply, blood pressure and perfusion of tissue, so even if the blood supplied to the tissue by the remaining vessels are inadequate, the remaining vasculature can compensate for it quite well. If you are looking for a more specific explanation of the adaptation mechanisms or some examples of anastomoses in major vessels I can explain more. | [
"The internal sutures usually are permanent (non-absorbable), but the surgical wound or wounds can be sutured with either absorbable sutures or with non-absorbable sutures that the plastic surgeon removes when the surgical wound has healed. Depending upon the deformity to be corrected, the otoplasty can be performe... |
Would it be more accurate to apply the "Bloody" title to Queen Elizabeth instead of Queen Mary? | It's important to consider how long their reigns were. Queen Mary I reigned for 5 years, from 1553-1558. By contrast Queen Elizabeth I reigned for 45 years, from 1558-1603. Even if Queen Elizabeth I was responsible for more deaths, it doesn't necessarily make for a particularly 'bloody' reign.
| [
"The name \"Bloody Mary\" is associated with a number of historical figures—particularly Queen Mary I of England, who was nicknamed as such in \"Foxe's Book of Martyrs\" for attempting to re-establish the Catholic Church in England—and fictional women from folklore.\n",
"BULLET::::- Mary of Teck (1936–1952): wido... |
why is the average height so much greater in certain parts of the world? why aren't people in general about the same height? | Genetically, almost all have similar potential.
But nutrition plays a big part. Nutrition in them, their parents and even grandparents affects height.
Ever notice that second and third generation immigrants to Western countries are usually a lot taller than their first generation grandparents? | [
"The average height in genetically and environmentally homogeneous populations is often proportional across a large number of individuals. Exceptional height variation (around 20% deviation from a population's average) within such a population is sometimes due to gigantism or dwarfism, which are caused by specific ... |
Are there any non-toxic mercury compounds? | Toxicity is much more complicated than y/n... all molecules technically have some level of human toxicity (even water, called dilutional hyponatremia) depending on application (ex:topical, sublingual, inhaled) and quantity. It is even more complicated if you consider toxicity of byproducts (in both synthesis and degradation) to water systems (for example), after a molecule is urinated out of your body (pharmaceuticals). | [
"Mercury, known to be highly toxic, has been found in various forms in Idria: elemental mercury (Hg(0)), inorganic mercury (Hg(II)) and monomethyl mercury(CHHg, also called MMHg). MMHg, a potent neurotoxin, poses the greatest threat to organisms. Measurements were taken by collecting water samples, which were later... |
Time and absolute zero speed... | There is no absolute reference for the universe. Time dilation occurs relative to an observer. There's no such thing as absolutely still. If you're moving identically to another observer, time will pass at the exact same rate. | [
"BULLET::::- A speed of 1 Planck length per Planck time is the speed of light in a vacuum, the maximum possible physical speed in special relativity; 1 nano-(Planck length per Planck time) is about 1.079 km/h.\n",
"The standard measurement of speed on an ergometer is generally known as the \"split\", or the amoun... |
how travel sickness medication works (e.g. kwells)? | Believe it or not, your brain has an area that tells you to throw up. Unsurprisingly, it's called the "vomit center" of the brain and is located in the medulla obongata. There are multiple pathways to activate the vomit center, but since you asked about motion sickness we will talk about that one. Basically, your inner ear plays a big role in how you balance and orient yourself. When you have motion sickness, it can be because there is a disconnect between what your inner ear feels and what your eyes see. When this happens, your body panics and says "oh no, I've been poisoned!" and sends a signal to your vomit center, which in turn makes you nauseous and puke. Of course you haven't been poisoned, but your body can be stupid sometimes and can't differentiate between certain stimuli and just assumes that if two of your systems don't agree that there is something in your body that shouldn't be. Ergo, the vomit.
So how do the medications work? Basically, the inner ear and the brain don't "talk" directly to each other; the inner ear sends a messenger to the brain to tell it what's going on. This messenger's name is acetylcholine. Acetylcholine travels up to the vomiting center, says "stuff is all messed up yo," the brain says "no problem, I got you" and then you barf. Medications like Kwells (which is hyoscine or scopolamine) are called anticholinergics, as in anti-acetylcholine (technically they're antimuscarinics, but that's not important). Acetylcholine takes a message from the inner ear and tries to go to the brain, but the anticholinergic medication says "sorry bro, can't let you talk to the brain." The message doesn't get delivered and you don't end up praying to the porcelain gods. | [
"Travel medicine can primarily be divided into four main topics: prevention (vaccination and travel advice), assistance (dealing with repatriation and medical treatment of travelers), wilderness medicine (e.g. high-altitude medicine, cruise ship medicine, expedition medicine, etc.) and access to health care, provid... |
Have diseases ever crossed the species barrier between plants and animals? | Plants and animals differ all the way to the kingdom level so there are drastic differences in both genetics and cellular composition and given that pathogens tend to be highly specialized there are very few diseases that affect both. However, there are generalist opportunistic pathogens that can basically infect everything. [Pseudomonas aeruginosa](_URL_0_) is one of these and is a remarkable bacterium. In a War of the Worlds type situation I imagine these are what would kill off the aliens. | [
"Many invasive plant species interfere with native plants through allelopathy. A famous case of purported allelopathy is in desert shrubs. One of the most widely known early examples was \"Salvia leucophylla\", because it was on the cover of the journal \"Science\" in 1964. Bare zones around the shrubs were hypothe... |
how is it possible for a baby beast to grow in the womb and be born without an umbilical cord? | The umbilical cord usually breaks while the animal is passing through the birth canal. If it doesn't, it probably shrivels up and falls off on its own. | [
"Human embryos have a tail that measures about one-sixth of the size of the embryo itself. As the embryo develops into a fetus, the tail is absorbed by the growing body. Infrequently, a child is born with a ’\"soft tail\", which contains no vertebrae, but only blood vessels, muscles, and nerves, but this is regarde... |
why do spacecraft and satellite components need to be assembled in a sterile environment? | Most satellite components are not. Spacecraft that are likely to land on other planets are clean ed thoroughly to minimize the transfer of life to other bodies.
In space with no atmospheric even oils from your skin can boil and condense to ruin lenses and other electronics equipment. Foreign object debris are one of the largest killers of satellites and to minimize this satellites are often assembled in clean rooms. | [
"Artificial satellites are first launched into the desired altitude by conventional liquid/solid propelled rockets after which the satellite may use onboard propulsion systems for orbital stationkeeping. Once in the desired orbit, they often need some form of attitude control so that they are correctly pointed with... |
What were the strategic interests of France and Britain w.r.t. the Sykes-Picot Agreement? Why did they want spheres of influence in that region? | I will have to be brief as I am waiting for guests.
Essentially Britain and France had mutual suspicions of each other's intentions in the Middle East since the 19th Century. The 1904 Entente Cordiale papered over these cracks and pushed the issue into dormancy against a common broader strategic interest.
Britain had been happy to see the removal of the Ottomans from Europe well before 1914, however preferred their status quo domination of the Middle East to avoid opportunistic Germans or Russians taking the land to threaten the trade routes to India or access the maritime frontier of India through the Persian Gulf.
The stagnation on the Middle Eastern Front following Gallipoli and the subsequent ruminations in Whitehall that some sort of olive branch to the various Arab groups would be required to alleviate the pronounced shortfall in troops in this second-rung theatre brought this back to the table. Certainly a fear was that a victory for the Entente an opportunistic Russia would loot these possessions (particularly Constantinople and the Straits, an avowed objective for generations) and harm Britain's strategic imperial position.
Furthermore with the planned fall of the Ottoman Empire it was recognised, particularly in the British Foreign Office, that this could reopen the stagnant tensions between Britain and France. This was rightly predicted to be less than ideal during the existential threat of WW1.
Therefore a preemptive 'management' of the situation during the war, as to allow little in the way of opportunities of unsanctioned land grabs to chance after the war was preferential. It was assumed that the old imperial rivalries would open up almost straight after peace so if the situation was agreed while they were allies in such a way and extent to allow little room for subsequent opportunism then Britain's imperial interests would be the most secured.
The first preference for decentralised zones within a continuity Ottoman Empire was considered too risky by late 1915. To this end the comprehensive Sykes-Picot agreement thrashed out the respective sphere of influence and allocated possessions between the big three powers.
A large part of the logic (evident when you look at the possessions) was that Britain hoped for a 'buffer' of French land between Britain and its greatest threat, Russia. The era of the Great Game was certainly not vanquished from the collective memory of the British diplomats so this arrangement would best suit their true asset, India.
Overall the area was already hotly contested and despite being allies in WW1 imperial tensions between the Entente powers were simmering in face against a collective aggressor. The situation had been kept at bay for decades previously with the existence of the Ottoman Empire as a barrier to wandering expansionist eyes between the major powers. However WW1 made clear that this arrangement would likely be scuppered in the event of a Central Powers victory. The Sykes-Picot agreement was an attempt by relatively conservative British officials to avoid Russian and to a much lesser extent French expansionism in the face of a collapsed Ottoman Empire post-victory. It was as much an attempt to protect India and its vital trade routes from the Russians than simply a desire to divide the spoils of the Middle East, though it is important not to understate that this was in itself a nice reward. Overall it is a long-term piece of diplomacy aimed very much at addressing the realpolitik of a future post-Ottoman world while things could be sorted amicably and in a way somewhat controlled by the British.
**Sources**
Darwin *The Empire Project* ISBN 9780521317894
Porter *The Lions Share* ISBN 0582089433 | [
"During the First World War, the Sykes–Picot Agreement was struck between the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom and France on behalf of their respective governments on a vision of a post war division of the Ottoman Empire in which the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire (south and west of Anatolia) would be ... |
We're looking for new moderators and we want you! | Can I join! | [
"The moderator is normally a minister or elder of considerable experience and held in high esteem in the Church of Scotland. The moderator is nominated by the \"Committee to Nominate the Moderator\", which consists of fifteen people elected annually by the General Assembly. The moderator must, however, also be form... |
Can a liver from an organ donor be shared and transplanted into two new recipients? | Livers are special among human organs. They can regenerate themselves. So liver transplants don't require transplanting the entire liver. Yes, it is theoretically possible a single donor could donate to two people and then also have a fully functioning liver after a period of recovery. | [
"More recently, adult-to-adult liver transplantation has been done using the donor's right hepatic lobe, which amounts to 60 percent of the liver. Due to the ability of the liver to regenerate, both the donor and recipient end up with normal liver function if all goes well. This procedure is more controversial, as ... |
why isn't chrome the standard browser on android? | It is on the newer nexus devices. On non-nexus devices, the manufacturer decides what goes on the phone, and it doesn't have to be chrome if they don't like it. Especially since the stock android browser seems to run better, and supports flash. | [
"Chrome is available on Apple's mobile iOS operating system as \"Google Chrome for iOS.\" Released in the Apple App Store on June 26, 2012, it supports the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, and requires that the device has iOS 11.0 or greater installed. In accordance with Apple's requirements for browsers released thro... |
Can anyone offer any insight into this Nazi identification card? | This looks like they were both from an exhibiton held in 1945/46 in Amsterdam, called 'Weerbare Democratie', the resilient democracy, an exhibition that apparently dealt with dutch resistance against German occupation. The card reads, essentially, as far as my very limited dutch will carry: "This is proof that the dutch citizen(s) [Name] [Born] [ID] have visited the exhibition over the resistance 'Weerbare Democratie' on [date]. It has not been possible during the occupation to educate him/her to a National Socialist or Fascist orientation."
The combination of the stamps makes no sense, I'd venture a guess that they are either war trophies or props for the exhibition to make the visitor feel like someone having their papers checked and stamped by the German occupiers. They read (front): Labour Exchange Karlsruhe/Baden; (back) Labour Exchange Münster/Westphalia; The Chief of Police, Karlsruhe; The German Work Front (the labour union of the NS-state), Gau-Bureau, Baden [mid, faded], Labour Exchange Karlsruhe/Baden [again]; and finally a field postal address (a kind of zip code for units at the front), 21535B, which apparently belonged to II/JG 52, the second group of Jagdgeschwader 52, a fighter unit; plus a bunch of dutch stamps.
The second item seems to be a humorous recollection of the ways the dutch people outwitted their occupiers and collaborateurs, such as taking a diamond ring from a soldier, then buying aid packages for dutch PoWs with it and sending them via the Red Cross; marking the progress of the war on maps (this was often done by listening to stations like the BBC, which was heavily punished), hiding and supplying fugitives and the like.
These are to very interesting artifacts, thanks for posting! I would myself be pretty interested in a translation (I can make out the gist of it, but no more). | [
"Prosecutors based part of these allegations on an ID card referred to as the \"Trawnicki card\". This ID card was obtained from the USSR and provided to Israel by American industrialist Armand Hammer, a close associate of several Kremlin leaders, including Lenin and Stalin. The defense claimed that the card was fo... |
Puzzle doors are common feature of ancient temples in fiction. Has there been ANY ancient puzzle door found? | This is probably not the answer you're looking for, but in Cairo there is a Coptic church - the "hanging church" I think - whose doors are made of tiny, interlocking pieces that fit only one way. Because wood is expensive in Egypt, and there were occasional attacks upon churches which often included breaking doors down, the church elders constructed those doors so that a) the attackers wouldn't permanently destroy the doors and b) they'd be fooled into thinking they'd done some serious damage. | [
"In Etruscan tombs the false door has a Doric design and is always depicted closed. Most often it is painted, but on some occasions it is carved in relief, like in the Tomb of the Charontes at Tarquinia. Unlike the false door in ancient Egyptian tombs, the Etruscan false door has given rise to a diversity of interp... |
In what order did the kingdoms become multicellular? And, are symbionts ubiquitous? | Multicellularity has evolved several times, independently in plants and animals for sure, and perhaps more than once within the fungi. A key point is that all true multicellular organisms are made fron eukaryotic cells (as opposed to prokaryotes), and eukaryotes evolved only once (i.e. all eukaryotes can be traced back to a single common ancestor that was most likely a symbiont between an archaon and a bacterium). This is the endosymbiosis theory originally from Lyn Margulis, but its now widely accepted that mitochondria and cholorplasts (and perhaps other organelles) had a bacterial origin.
Nick Lane has argued quite convincingly that the key to becoming multicellular is having mitochondria so that we can do respiration internally rather than across our plasma membrane (like bacteria do). This allows us to maintain control over much larger membrane areas over which we do respiration (I'm talking about Peter Mitchell and chemiosmosis here). Bacteria, no matter how much they evolve, simply can't get big and complex in the way that eukaryotes have done, because they are constrained by surface area:volume ratio as they have been unable to 'internalise' their respiration.
Since eukaryotes have done this with mitochondria, they were able to become bigger and more predatory (to eat other things - phagocytosis), and this put them on the road to complexity and ultimately multicellularity. Bacteria don't do this because it would break their outer membrane and disrupt their respiration. It is definitely worth noting that ALL modern eukaryotes either have or once had mitochondria. The origin of the eukaryotic cell may have been indistinguishable from the unity between two prokaryotes that eventually gave rise to mitochondria in larger cells.
Hopefully that answers some of your questions | [
"The \"Four Kingdoms\" was the name given to those portions of the former Province of Anacreon which broke away from the Galactic Empire in the early years of the Foundational Era, to form independent and short-lived kingdoms. The largest and most powerful was Anacreon itself.\n",
"The Pergamene kingdom founded b... |
elit: why germany is such a strong world power | Germany is an industrious, educated nation with an excellent social infrastructure and minimal internal strife. They excel in manufacturing and management. In short, per the cliche, they're efficient. | [
"From 1890 on, Germany did pursue world power. This bid arose from deep roots within Germany's economic, political, and social structures. Once the war broke out, world power became Germany's essential goal.\n",
"In 1871, Germany became united and established themselves as the leading industrial nation on the Eur... |
why don’t countries just put nicotine on the list of forbidden drugs if they want people to quit smoking? | Banning things that lots of people want instantly creates a black market for those things.
Alcohol prohibition is the easiest comparison because that actually happened, and the reasons for its failure are well known. In particular, it caused organized crime to reach its all time peak in America. That whole "1930s mobster mafioso" thing happened because of prohibition. Organized crime got its claws deep into the government and judiciary because of the money they made from illegal booze.
When you make a high-demand substance illegal, you give gangs a new source of revenue that they will use to commit more crime and kill more people.
Smoking is ready becoming a lot less popular in North America. The trend is going in the right direction. At this point, it would be unwise to change course--why fix something that is working?
| [
"Traditionally, the UN has been reluctant to control nicotine and other drugs traditionally legal in Europe and North America, citing tolerance of a wide range of lifestyles. This contrasts with the regulatory regime for other highly addictive drugs. Gabriel G. Nahas, in a Bulletin on Narcotics report, noted:\n",
... |
why are trains in india so crowded? why not just have more trains? | It's not just the trains - everywhere in India is crowded. | [
"The frequency of public transport service is usually higher in the rush hour, and longer trains or larger vehicles are often used. However, the increase in capacity is often less than the increased number of passengers, due to the limits on available vehicles, staff and, in the case of rail transport, track capaci... |
How far away are we from a supercomputer being able to simulate the entire universe? | Infinitely far, basically.
This is a question Laplace would have recognized. Well. I mean, he would have stumbled over the "computer" thing, since in those days "computer" meant a person who performed calculations. Also, your question is insensitively not written in French. But setting those things aside, Laplace would be pumping his fist and saying things like "Oui! Oui!"
Only problem with that is that Laplace was wrong. Not about much! He doesn't have his name smeared all over modern maths and physics for nothing. But in this respect, Laplace was just pants-on-head wrong.
You see, Laplace believed that the universe was deterministic. He believed that the future state of a system was solely and completely determined by the initial state of that system. He famously wrote, in his essay on probability, that if we knew the initial positions of every particle, and could describe all the forces acting on those particles, that an individual of sufficient mathematical acumen — a "computer," in the terminology of the day — could calculate the entire history of the universe to infinite precision.
Except he was wrong. Like completely wrong. Because you see, the universe is *not* deterministic. The future state of a system is, in fact, determined by the initial state of that system, but not *fully.* There are multiple possible outcomes for any given interaction, and those possible outcomes can only be predicted probabilistically. When a photon scatters off an atom, for example, you can say that the possible outcomes of the interaction are *A,* *B,* *C* and *D,* and maybe you can compute the probabilities for those outcomes — .1, .3, .2 and .4 respectively. That allows you to make a prediction that's good for *a billion* scatterings. But as far as predicting the outcome of a *single* scattering event? No chance. All you can do is make a guess.
So Laplace had it wrong. Given complete knowledge of the initial state of the universe — which is itself unobtainable, but that's another story — it's possible to compute the *probability* that the universe will evolve into each of the possible final states over some span of time. But the breadth of time over which you can make useful predictions is a function of the size of the system you're considering … and the universe is a system of limitless size. So it's impossible to make *any* useful predictions *at all* about the evolution of the universe as a whole, beyond the broadest strokes.
So it's not so much that we're "far away" from what you asked. It's that we understand for a fact that what you asked is completely impossible. | [
"A supercomputer was unveiled at the university in 2011. It was made by Isfahan University of Technology scientists and is among the 500 fastest in the world. It has a calculation ability of 34000 billion operations per second and its graphics processing units are able to perform more than 32 billion operations per... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.