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Why do we not hear about the 6,000,000 Jews who were about to die in Russia? | The website you linked and all the other websites out there who cite real and alleged news paper articles referring to this number are all Holocaust denial sites and they represent a classic tactic of Holocaust deniers. They go: "Well here are some real newspapers and some I made up who mention six million Jews being in peril before WWII. Isn't that ~weird~? It can only mean that obviously the Holocaust is made up!!!1!!1"
This tactic which works with the assumption that if doubt can be cast upon a certain detail through real or made up evidence, the whole Holocaust is somehow in doubt is what is deployed here. Two things about this though:
First of all, the number of victims of the Holocaust is estimated as accurately as possible going through mounts and mounts of evidence, most of it produced by the Nazis themselves. How that works, I explain [here](_URL_0_) and here is a table for the number of victims:
Country| Est. Pre-War Jewish pop. | Est. Jewish population killed | Percent killed
--------|--------|---------|---------
Poland | 3,300,000 | 3,000,000 | 91
Baltic countries | 253,000 | 228,000 | 90
Germany Camp; Austria | 240,000 | 210,000 | 88
Bohemia Camp; Moravia | 90,000 | 80,000 | 89
Slovakia | 90,000 | 75,000 | 83
Greece | 70,000 | 54,000 | 77
Netherlands | 140,000 | 105,000 | 75
Hungary | 650,000 | 450,000 | 70
Belorussian SSR | 375,000 | 245,000 | 65
Ukrainian SSR | 1,500,000 | 900,000 | 60
Belgium | 65,000 | 40,000 | 60
Yugoslavia | 43,000 | 26,000 | 60
Romania | 600,000 | 300,000 | 50
Norway | 1,800 | 900 | 50
France | 350,000 | 90,000 | 26
Bulgaria | 64,000 | 14,000 | 22
Italy | 40,000 | 8,000 | 20
Luxembourg | 5,000 | 1,000 | 20
Russian SFSR | 975,000 | 107,000 | 11
Denmark | 8,000 | 120 | 2
Finland | 2,000 | 22 | 1
Total | 8,861,800 | 5,933,922 | 67
Now, when reviewing the above table, the answer to the question why these newspapers mention six million Jews especially in the timeframe of 1905-1920 should almost become apparent: Six million was the approximate number of Jews living under Tsarist Russian rule in the so-called pale of settlement and Congress Poland.
What here is represented through interwar Poland, the Ukrainian SSR, the Belorussian SSR, the Baltic countries, Finland and the Russian SFSR is taken together roughly the number of Jews living in Tsarist Russia before 1917 and in the areas affected by the Russian Civil War until its end in 1921.Taken the numbers from this table, that adds up to 6,405,000, although in the case of Poland, some need to be subtracted since not all the areas that constituted interwar Poland were part of Tsarist Russia. According to sources like Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern and Nora Levin, the number of Jews in Tsarist Russia were somewhere around 5,7-5,9 million people. So when these newspapers refer to 6 million Jews in peril, they refer to all Jews in Tsarist Russia and later the areas affected by the Russian Civil War.
Now, why they were in peril changes somewhat in this time frame. Between 1903 and 1906 Tsarist Russia saw a wave of bloody anti-Jewish pogroms sweep the land. It was the second wave of such pogroms after those in 1881-1884. The 1903 and 1906 pogroms were heavily related to the political struggle in Tsarist Russia at the time and the growing tide of nationalism of all varieties. Anti-Semitism ran high since it had become somewhat customary to associate Jews either with liberal ideologies or with foreign influence in Russia. Unsurprisingly, the forgery *The Protocols of the Elders of Zion* were produced in Russia right around that time, these pogroms erupted where people blamed Jews for political reform or lack thereof. Pogroms in Kishinev, Odeassa and about 660 other cities cost over 2000 Jews their lives and the international press saw pretty much the whole of Russian Jewry -- approx. 6 million -- in danger.
A similar situation arose in the Russian Civil War. While Jews found themselves on both sides of the Civil War, the found themselves often on the receiving end of violence perpetrated by the White and other anti-Bolshevik faction during that time. The trope of the "Jewish Bolshevik" originated in the Tsarist empire and figures such as Leo Trotsky were used as "evidence" for its truth. White and other anti-Bolshevik factions often turned against the Jews they perceived as the fifth column for the Bolsheviks. Most of the pogroms during the Civil War took part in Ukraine and several authors estimate that more than 100.000 Jews fell victim to them (127.000 according to the NYT article you linked).
Similarly, after Revolution and during the Civil War, a famine affected a lot of areas in newly created Soviet Union and the areas adjacent to it. Droughts, problems with early Soviet Policy (War Communism and NEP) combined with the Civil War lead to this so-called Povolzhye famine, which killed somewhere around 6 million people in the years 1920-1921. It was so severe that an international relief effort was organized among others by the United States in form of the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover. This received a lot of press coverage and once again, international media outlets also reported on the situation of the Jewish population, which had been hit hard by this famine.
So, the TL;DR of this whole thing is that 6 million Jews, about half the world's Jewish population lived in Tsarist Russia in the early 20th century and especially in areas which were hit hard with pogroms and later the Russian Civil War and the famine that followed it (Poland and the so-called pale of settlement, the area where the Tsar had allowed Jews to settle). This is the origin of the six million number in these newspaper reports.
Later when the Nazis marched into Poland the USSR, these Jews were of course hit particularly hard by Nazi genocidal policy. The Nazis didn't get them all, in part because Stalin evacuated/deported a lot of them in the beginning of the war to Kazakhstan and other Central Asian SSRs but in combination with the Jews killed from Western Europe, the number of murdered amounts to approximately the same number of Jews living under Tsarist rule in the early 20th century.
Sources:
* Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe. 2014.
* Nora Levin: The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917: Paradox of Survival. 1988.
* Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920. 1999.
* Oleg Budnitskii: Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. 2012.
* Moshe Lewin: The Soviet Century. | [
"In 1919, Russian Jews were caught in the middle of a civil war, and became the victims of warring Red and White Russian, Ukrainian and Polish forces, among others, resulting in the loss of an estimated 100,000 Jewish lives. White Russian troops led by Denikin staged pogroms against Jews in practically every town h... |
How important was honour in Tokugawa Japan? Could it have possibly weakened rule e.g Ako incident and seppuku after the death on ones lord? | There isn't a simple answer to this question. Tokugawa Japan was not a monolithic society. There were diverse people living in Japan in this long period, separated by wealth, location, social status, gender, occupation and so on. Honor was certainly an ideal of the small but powerful samurai status group. But it was not necessarily the guiding imperative of other parts of the population. It was often parodied in plays, questioned in fiction, mocked in poetry, and celebrated in moralistic writings. | [
"Hideyoshi had on his deathbed appointed a group of the most powerful lords in Japan—Tokugawa, Maeda, Ukita, Uesugi, Mōri—to govern as the Council of Five Elders until his infant son, Hideyori, came of age. An uneasy peace lasted until the death of Maeda Toshiie in 1599. Thereafter, Ishida Mitsunari accused Ieyasu ... |
Is human labor and delivery more dangerous than other primates'? Why? | Yes, mainly because of a narrow pelvis, combined with large heads. (Children have huge heads in proportion to bodysize and weight, as they are born with about 33% of adult brain volume)
Human pelvi are so narrow because of bipedality, which, as other comments already explained, seems to have been a bigger advantage than having easy childbirths.
[Interesting article about this topic](_URL_0_) | [
"Infanticide in non-human primates occurs as a result of exploitation when the individuals enacting the infanticide directly benefit from consumption or use of their victim. The individual can become a resource: food (cannibalism), protective buffer against aggression, or a prop to obtain maternal experience.\n",
... |
Did Isaac Newton know how big the Earth is? How? | Almost certainly. The circumference of the Earth had been known for nearly 2000 years before Newton was born. In about 250BC, the head librarian of the library at Alexandria (Egypt), [Eratosthenes of Cyrene](_URL_1_), came across an interesting account in one of the library's manuscripts.
It observed that in the distant southern city of Syene, at noon on the summer solstice vertical columns would cast no shadow, and the sun would shine all the way down a deep water well. That means the sun was directly overhead at that time, but no other. Eratosthenes had never observed such an occurrence in Alexandria, but set about to test it.
On the summer solstice, he placed a stick in the ground plumbed vertically, and watched to see if it would eventually cast no shadow. But it always cast a shadow, first getting shorter, then longer as the day wore on. The shortest shadow would have been cast at noon, when the sun was highest in the sky.
Eratosthenes was a mathematician and also knew the sun was very far away. He made the assumption that the sun's rays that struck the earth were largely parallel. If not, sharp shadows would not be cast. He knew that at noon in Syene, the difference in the angle between a vertical column and the sun was 0 degrees. Measuring the shortest shadow in Alexandria, he calculated the difference in the angle between the vertical shaft and the sun was 7.2 degrees (actually described as 1/50 of a circle).
If the Earth were flat, the column (or well) in Syene and the stick in Alexandria would have cast no shadows at noon. But if the surface of the Earth was curved, the sun could be directly overhead at one spot (Syene), but not another (Alexandria). Given the difference in angles (1/50th of a circle), and the distance between Alexandria and Syene, the actual circumference of the Earth could be calculated using simple trigonometry.
Apocryphally, Eratosthenes paid someone to measure the distance between Alexandria and Syene by walking there and back with a camel. However, the empire's cartographers tended to make annual measurements and that is most likely the metric Eratosthenes used. The distance between the two cities is about 800 km\*. That gives the estimated circumference as 50 x 800 km = 40,000 km. The actual circumference of the Earth is about 40,800 km.
So why is the sun overhead one day a year in Syene, but never in Alexandria? Because of the 23.5 degree tilt of the Earth (the angle between the axis of rotation and the plane of revolution around the sun), the sun is only ever directly overhead between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn (23.5 degrees above and below the equator) and only directly overhead on the summer solstice at each of the Tropics. Outside that region, the sun can never be directly overhead, and Alexandria is outside that region, whereas Syene is located very near the Tropic of Cancer.
\* At the time, Eratosthenes used a measure of distance that had not yet been fully standardized, stadia, and Alexandria is not directly north of Syene, so the original computed circumference may be off by as much as 17 percent.
[Video of Carl Sagan on Cosmos](_URL_0_) describing this using a much better voice than mine. | [
"Isaac Newton explained this in his \"Principia Mathematica\" (1687) in which he outlined his theory and calculations on the shape of the Earth. Newton theorized correctly that the Earth was not precisely a sphere but had an oblate ellipsoidal shape, slightly flattened at the poles due to the centrifugal force of i... |
What is an example of two very similar chemical formulas behaving very differently? | There are many examples of this. The chemical formula itself is often not a good indication of its properties, rather, a compound's structure is often important. Take for example the formula C4H8O2. Two ways that we can arrange those atoms is as [ethyl acetate](_URL_1_) or [butyric acid](_URL_0_). Those two compounds have the *same* formula, but entirely different properties: one being an ester and one a carboxylic acid. | [
"In chemistry, the empirical formula of a chemical compound is the simplest positive integer ratio of atoms present in a compound. A simple example of this concept is that the empirical formula of sulphur monoxide, or SO, would simply be SO, as is the empirical formula of disulphur dioxide, SO. This means that sulp... |
My friends are watching a documentary, and the host mentioned that "it is estimated that there are more stars than grains of sand on all the world's beaches." Does this have any basis, and is it really true? | They can estimate it, the numbers will be rough but even using rough numbers this isn't that difficult to determine since the difference is vast.
[I'm sure this isn't the only estimate but this is one done by the University of Hawaii](_URL_1_)
They come up with 7.5 x 10^18 or 7.5 billion billion grains of sand.
[Calculation for the number of stars](_URL_0_)
They come up with 9 × 10^21 stars (9 billion trillion stars).
But if you really want to blow your mind, this is only for the observable universe and the best minds around agree the universe is infinite.
| [
"\"Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand\" is about the distant future but the ideas that Delany writes about are reflections of the contemporary world. Delany himself has said, \"Science fiction is not ‘about the future.’ Science fiction \"is in dialogue with the present\"…[the science fiction writer] indulge[s] ... |
why do some governments see the need to have a tax on taxi fees? | > Why do some governments see the need to have a tax on taxi fees?
To make money.
> And why can't they tax Uber similarly?
They could pass a law to do so if they want to.
| [
"In the taxi regulation report by U.S. FTC it was concluded that there are not grounds for limiting the number of taxi companies and cars. These limitations cause a disproportionate burden on low income people. It is better to increase the pay for unprofitable areas than to force the taxis to serve these areas.\n",... |
What is it psychologically that makes $9.99 so much better of a price than $10.00? | [Wikipedia has a whole article devoted to this idea, called *psychological pricing*](_URL_0_). In short, people seem to overestimate the difference between 99¢ and $1, which is why retailers price things in odd units. | [
"There are certain price points where people are willing to buy a product. If the price of a product is $100 and the company prices it at $99, then it is called psychological pricing. In most consumer's minds, $99 is psychologically 'less' than $100. A minor distinction in pricing can make a big difference in sales... |
how did the economy work during the middle-ages? | The early middle ages can be viewed as effectively the worst economic depression western civilization has ever faced. Coupled with - and contributing to - that downturn was a sudden and overwhelming lack of law and order because the political and economic system that had previously maintained it - the Roman Empire - lay in ruins.
For these reasons, Europe started over economically. Europe developed a system over a series of centuries where virtually all power and wealth had to be created locally. It was an agrarian society, and its basic unit was a man's labor. Specialization became inefficient; if a town could not produce enough food to feed itself, there was no point producing goods that required specialized labor, like wine or clothing, for export. A local lord could control as much land, and therefore as much wealth, as he could effectively protect. Over time, this system built itself into a pyramid where the wealth created locally in farms was handed upward to increasingly powerful lords promising to defend more and more territory until you came to a King who claimed to protect them all. In turn, all of the lower sections of the pyramid would swear to help the lord above them - up to the King - in his causes and wars. You can see how in this system, wealth and power were intimately linked, and furthermore, that wealth was more easily expressed in land than in any concept of money. A modern CEO can define his wealth and power in his company and its well-measured incomes and expenses. But a Medieval lord was defined by the country he ruled: obviously, the Duke of Provence was better off than the Duke of Northumberland because Provence would be larger, better positioned for trade and much easier to farm. Therefore, an up-and-coming member of the vast interwoven noble class of Europe would rather become Duke of Provence through whatever means were at his disposal.
Obviously, there was trade during the middle ages. However it was difficult, expensive and exceptionally dangerous. On the other hand, a fortunate merchant stood to gain vast amounts of money by transporting products from where they were produced to wherever people would pay more for them. Ultimately, this is what slowly broke down the feudal system. A new and growing merchant class began to compete with the noble class for local power, and ultimately won it. This also led to improved roads and other trade routes and incentivized greater specialization of labor, allowing some towns to specialize in products that were not necessarily food. | [
"During the Middle Ages, commerce developed in Europe through the trading of luxury goods at trade fairs. Some wealth became converted into movable wealth or capital. Banking systems developed where money on account was transferred across national boundaries. Hand-to-hand markets became a feature of town life, and ... |
how the licence plate system is working in the usa ? | As far as I know, each state handles their own plates. So they are free to create as many custom plate styles as they see fit. Most of the custom plates are local government trying to get more money from you, as you have to pay more for these. | [
"Often, registration plates are called \"licence plates\" (drivers are licensed, vehicles are registered), but the term \"licence plate\" is common in informal usage. On most licence plates, there is a small sticker, which indicates the month and year of plate renewal, that the driver sticks to the licence plates. ... |
Is there any doubt that the Colossus of Rhodes existed? | Strabo states with a degree of certainty that the ruins of the Colossus were visible when he wrote the *Geography* (English version [here](_URL_2_)) at around the turn of the 1st century AD, and Pliny the Elder's [Natural History](_URL_0_) goes into considerable detail about the construction of those ruins. We also have a fragmentary epigram dated prior to that appears to be [a dedication of the Colossus](_URL_1_), or at least of a giant statue of some kind at Rhodes.
As to its construction, I offer nothing beyond noting that there has been academic discussion that have reverse-engineered its construction (see [here](_URL_3_) if you have access). I do not know if Pliny (or Philo, who also attests to seeing its ruins) is accurate in regards to the estimate of its height - much of the time I mentally replace specific measurements in Classical texts with vague ones - but it could be plausible nonetheless. | [
"The Colossus of Rhodes ( ) was a statue of the Greek sun-god Helios, erected in the city of Rhodes, on the Greek island of the same name, by Chares of Lindos in 280 BC. One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it was constructed to celebrate Rhodes' victory over the ruler of Cyprus, Antigonus I Monophthalmus... |
why does a deep scrape on elbows/knees/shins stay white for a period of time before bleeding? | This is because initially after an injury, blood vessels contract in order to minimise blood loss. They increase again in diameter later to facilitate healing and the movement of specialised cells and materials towards the site of injury. You can see this contraction and subsequent dilation of blood vessels anywhere; try scratching your arm with your nail (don't cut yourself!) and you'll see that your skin will become pale initially, then redden. | [
"Bleeding or flushing is shiny, black surface film of asphalt on the road surface caused by upward movement of asphalt in the pavement surface. Common causes of bleeding are too much asphalt in asphalt concrete, hot weather, low space air void content and quality of asphalt.\n",
"Whereas a bruise typically appear... |
what "latter" means in a sentence. i've heard it for a few years now and don't understand how to use it. | If I ask whether you have an apple or an orange and you reply that you have the latter, you mean that you have an orange. If you reply that you have the former, you have an apple. | [
"The phrase 'the three Rs' is used because each word in the phrase has a strong \"R\" phoneme (sound) at the beginning. The term is ironic, since someone with rudimentary language education would know that two of the original words do not actually begin with the letter \"R\". The third \"R\" was more probably Recko... |
why do we still use roman numerals? | It looks cool. | [
"The use of Roman numerals continued long after the decline of the Roman Empire. From the 14th century on, Roman numerals began to be replaced in most contexts by the more convenient Arabic numerals; however, this process was gradual, and the use of Roman numerals persists in some minor applications to this day.\n"... |
how will the rising antimicrobial resistance affect us in the future? | Worst case scenario? We're back to the middle ages, when a cut could kill you if it got infected.
What's actually likely to happen, though, is that certain bacteria will become highly resistant to antibiotics, and if we can't develop new antibiotics to combat them then those particular diseases will become more deadly and require much more in the way of treatment. It wouldn't be totally back to the days before antibiotics, but it would make life more difficult. Eventually, people would catch on and start to become more careful about sources of these diseases, and doctors would stop prescribing so many antibiotics, but that's likely to occur only after there's an indisputable problem. | [
"The increasing interconnectedness of the world and the fact that new classes of antibiotics have not been developed and approved for more than 25 years highlight the extent to which antimicrobial resistance is a global health challenge. A global action plan to tackle the growing problem of resistance to antibiotic... |
Did the Ottomans refer to Istanbul as Konstantiniyye? | The official name change was after the Ottomans. It took place in the 20th Century.
There is a nice discussion anchored by /u/spoonfeedme at [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)
& #x200B;
& #x200B; | [
"The name \"İstanbul\" (, colloquially ) is commonly held to derive from the Medieval Greek phrase (pronounced ), which means \"to the city\" and is how Constantinople was referred to by the local Greeks. This reflected its status as the only major city in the vicinity. The importance of Constantinople in the Ottom... |
If I can increase the air pressure in an opened 2 liter bottle of soda would that prevent it from going flat? | Here's a thought: If you put a carefully calibrated piece of dry ice (solid CO2) into the soda bottle before you closed it, you could raise the pressure in the bottle enough to re-fizz your soda.
Of course, if you put too much, the bottle will explode. | [
"The difference between the reduced pressure at the top of the tube and the higher atmospheric pressure inside the bottle pushes the liquid from the reservoir up the tube and into the moving stream of air where it is broken up into small droplets (not atoms as the name suggests) and carried away with the stream of ... |
if websites like google take a double shot using the captcha (first makes sure you are not a bot, second using you as a worker to do a job for them by reading let's say a house number that is not legible for a machine), how do they know what is that so-called number? | One of the things in the captcha is known to the system already. This is the one they are using to make sure you're not a bot.
The other one is not currently known. It takes your answer, looks at it and a bunch of other people's answers for the same image, and takes the most common answer. Then this becomes a known picture that can be used for validating.
This strategy relies on the average person giving the right answer to both the pictures. It works pretty well, unless there is an organized effort to screw with it, like 4chan did that one time. | [
"There are a few approaches to defeating CAPTCHAs: using cheap human labor to recognize them, exploiting bugs in the implementation that allow the attacker to completely bypass the CAPTCHA, and finally using machine learning to build an automated solver. According to former Google \"click fraud czar\" Shuman Ghosem... |
What happens when one plant's pollen gets into another plants reproductive area? If the species are similar enough, will it produce offspring? | Yes, in some cases hybrids can form by pollen fertilizing eggs of a different species. The likelihood of this happening is generally dependent on how different the two species are.
Researchers who study speciation (the process of how new species form) identify traits that are responsible for determining whether individuals from two different species (heterospecific) mate or not. They categorize these traits as "[isolating mechanisms](_URL_0_)" that generally fall into two broad categories, based on whether they have an affect before or after fertilization:
* pre-zygotic isolating barriers (e.g. geography, using different pollinators, having a different mating call)
* post-zygotic isolating barriers (e.g. hybrids are sterile or dead)
Sometimes, a third category (post-copulation, pre-zygotic) is used to describe factors that happen between (in animals) insemination and fertilization. This is a good analogy for pollen tube growth, as pollination has happened but a zygote has not yet formed.
This paper by Williams et al. ([PDF](_URL_1_)) shows an experiment done in birch, where pollen from two species was mixed in different proportions. Heterospecific pollen was associated with slower pollen tube growth rate and lower siring probability. When only heterospecific pollen was added, some hybrid seeds were formed. However, when heterospecific and conspecific pollen were mixed, the conspecific pollen "won" over 99% of the time.
Pollen tube competition may therefore be an effective isolating mechanism between two incipient species, assuming conspecifics are also present. | [
"It was found that the amount of fertilizing pollen can influence secondary sex ratio in dioecious plants. Increase in pollen amount leads to decrease in number of male plants in the progeny. This relationship was confirmed on four plant species from three families – \"Rumex acetosa\" (\"Polygonaceae\"), \"Melandri... |
I have seen footage from World War I and there were two soldiers carrying big, round thing, what could it be? | It's a roll of Concertina Wire. Effective barrier against infantry and vehicles.
Basically it's barbed wire rolled in a circle to make it hard to ignore and easier to set up. 3 of them in a pyramid shape are the standard configuration.
Source: I've set up plenty of this
Additional Source: _URL_0_ | [
"John \"Barney\" Hines (1878–1958) was a British-born Australian soldier of World War I, known for his prowess at taking items from German soldiers. Hines was the subject of a famous photo taken by Frank Hurley that depicted him surrounded by German military equipment and money he had looted during the Battle of Po... |
Can anyone identify these microorganisms? | Number 1 is **likely** a [Rotifer](_URL_0_) from Phylum Rotifera. They are common in fresh water environments. Some are free floating while others anchor themselves to something (plants, soil, rocks etc...). They feed by having the cilia on their corona (these large flaps that protrude from their mouths, a bit like lips) sweep food into their mouths. They can blow through the water like a street cleaner, sweeping debris and food into their mouths for consumption.
Not sure on the second one, likely a larval form of an insect, not very good with those. | [
"Over 100 species have been included in the genus \"Mycoplasma\". Microbes of the class Mollicutes, to which Mycoplasma belongs, are parasites or commensals of humans, animals, and plants. The genus \"Mycoplasma\" uses vertebrate and arthropod hosts.\n",
"Carini was Professor of Microbiology at the Faculty of Med... |
how can food be "smoked" or have a "smoky taste"? | I smoke and use a "green egg" type grill on almost a daily basis.
The "smoke" flavor is absorbed by the outermost part of the meat being cooked, when you cut into it, chicken being the easiest to tell with, a pink ring is created in the meat. this is the "smoke ring" where the flavor from whatever wood you have chosen resides.
Everything you cook with, leaves a flavor is the general gist of it. fruit tree wood tends to be a bit sweeter, some smoke chips are made from things like whiskey barrels, that you can get a "whisky" flavor imparted. but again, whatever you cook with, gas, charcoal briquettes with lighter fluid ( which is horrible tasting ) leaves some sort of flavor behind. Some good, some bad. Smoking normally occurs at lower temps, this allows the meat to absorb more of the "smoke" flavor. different woods, have different flavors. Mostly, its personal taste. I hate hickory, but love cherry, or apple wood.
Smoking meat mostly in earlier days was used to help preserve meat, there are compounds produced in the smoke, that kill, and restrict the growth of bacteria and germs. | [
"This is a list of smoked foods. Smoking is the process of flavoring, cooking, or preserving food by exposing it to smoke from burning or smoldering material, most often wood. Foods have been smoked by humans throughout history. Meats and fish are the most common smoked foods, though cheeses, vegetables, and ingred... |
why can't i relax my jaw to be able to freely move it with my hands? | Well, you actually *can* move the jaw by external force. If you've ever been hit in the chin, or bumped your chin against something, and it made your teeth collide with each other, that's what happened.
The reason it doesn't happen much is that the muscles that move your jaw (the masseter is the one that closes it, and I'm blanking on the name of the one that opens it) are very strong, particularly for their size. Also, because opening and closing your mouth are such instinctive movements, the muscles almost act of their own accord, without you thinking about it. This is good because without the muscles working all the time, your jaw would just hang open constantly.
TLDR: Jaw muscles are very strong, and are basically "always on". While you can move your jaw with external force, it's surprisingly difficult. | [
"As with most dislocated joints, a dislocated jaw can usually be successfully positioned into its normal position by a trained medical professional. Attempts to readjust the jaw without the assistance of a medical professional could result in worsening of the injury. The health care provider may be able to set it b... |
Arsenic in food. What's the real story? | The CDC's Chemical Profile page for [Arsenic](_URL_0_) is a really good place to start.
In the US the only exposure levels that have been set are for occupational exposure, by OSHA, and the EPA has set a standard for arsenic in drinking water (0.01 ppm).
In general, you probably won't ingest enough arsenic from food to give you cancer, but a chronic low level exposure to arsenic will cause other health effects (nausea, vomiting, skin discolouration, ...)
It also depends on the type of arsenic and type of exposure. Inorganic arsenic is more readily absorbed through the skin, and has been found to be more harmful than organic arsenic compounds. Organic arsenic is found in pesticides, so that's more likely the type you would ingest. | [
"Lowe and McLaughlin state that the chemical analyses conducted at the time do not support the theory that the incident was accidental. Cheong's clan record reports that \"one day, through carelessness, a worker dropped some 'odd things' into the flour\". Yet the arsenic was found only in the bread itself, and in m... |
How efficient/inefficient are computers really? | > As I'm just an undergrad student in mechanical engineering, I realize that I might be looking at this the wrong way.
No way, you're asking a great question. This is an absolute gem of a question and you've posed it very clearly and thoughtfully. I'm really happy I noticed it because it's directly related to my work.
Let's forget about the monitor and other peripherals. Also forget about the efficiency of the computer's power supply, because that's not essential to the question. We're asking about whether or not the information processing part of a computer really needs to consume power.
The short answer is that processing information does not require consumption of energy. You can see why through the example of a mechanical computer. As shown in a few [various](_URL_2_) [examples](_URL_3_), you can construct logic gates mechanically. Any energy consumed by these simple push/pull rod and gear mechanisms is lost as friction, a.k.a. heat. After using the mechanical gate there's nothing left over as potential energy. Note that this means that, at least in principle, we can get the energy consumption of the gate as close to zero as we want by using low friction materials. That alone proves definitively that it is possible in principle to build a Turing machine which consumes no energy. You may need to operate it really slowly to avoid electromagnetic loss channels and whatever else, but given an efficiency target we can always beat it in principle because the information processing part itself does not consume energy.
Now look at your computer box. It's not lifting weights up onto a shelf. It doesn't store chemical energy or have some capacitor that it charges up to indefinite amounts of charge. When you turn it off it's in the same state as before you turned it on (except for the hard drive, but you could use a computer without one). Therefore, whatever energy you dumped into it while you used it must have gone into either heat or computation. However, we just proved that computation itself doesn't take up any energy, so it must all be heat. Since *all* of the energy consumed by your computer is going into heat, it is *exactly* as efficient a heater as an electric radiator. I mean, it *is* an electric radiator.
> If 100W of electricity in a computer generates exactly the same amount of heat as a 100W radiator does, wouldn't that mean that a computer, in theory, could do the same amount of "work" (moving electrons around), regardless of how much energy it gets?
Yes, but only if pushing electrons around didn't consume energy. As you know, the power consumed by pushing electrons around is `P = IV` where `I` is the current and `V` is the voltage on any particular element. That power loss happens because as the electrons move, they scatter off of the ions comprising the solids. This causes vibrations (also known as [phonons](_URL_1_)) which eventually wind up as heat or sound. So you see, when your computer pushes electrons around that is exactly the process that's generating the heat because the materials in the computer have nonzero resistance.
> It's just that to me, it does seem like a computer in reality is extremely inefficient, with all of the (mostly) unwanted heat it generates. Is this the case?
Well, that's certainly a matter of opinion since "extremely inefficient" has to be compared against something. Let's compare to a human. You require roughly 2000 Cal per day. That comes out to a power of 100 Watts. If you want to compute a the cosine of a million floating point numbers to twelve digits of precision that would take a human considerably longer than his/her life time. One a computer it's trivial. On that comparison the computer wins the efficiency match handily.
> Also, as I was discussing this with a classmate earlier today, we also hit upon the "issue" of actually relating energy to information.
Good for you two. This is a really interesting topic.
> HDD's we kind of think we understand how one would relate energy to the information alone
May I ask how?
> but SSD's and ram chips seems a bit more messy. Unless it's only the matter of moving and removing the electrons?
The different types of memory aren't really all that different from a physical point of view (although DRAM is different in a sense because it's life time is really short). If you could explain your thoughts I can respond.
Really great question!
P.S. If you're interested in reading a little bit about the physics of computation and in particular about *quantum* computation, you can check out the first chapter of [my PhD thesis](_URL_0_) :D. | [
"Modern computers are significantly faster than the early computers, and have a much larger amount of memory available (Gigabytes instead of Kilobytes). Nevertheless, Donald Knuth emphasised that efficiency is still an important consideration:\n",
"Power efficiency is another important measurement in modern compu... |
17 and need to know how taxes work? | Ask them what you have to do to have the most amount withheld (probably have to use `0`).
How do taxes work? I'd say they don't. But to answer your question, an amount gets withheld from your salary each pay check and gets sent to the government every quarter. Then, at the end of the year you file your returns which tells whether you have paid too much already or not paid enough. In your situation, you have probably paid too much (which I'd say is a good thing) and you wait for a check in the mail (you can also have it directly deposited to your bank account). | [
"Congress has enacted numerous laws dealing with taxes since adoption of the Constitution. Those laws are now codified as Title 19, Customs Duties, Title 26, Internal Revenue Code, and various other provisions. These laws specifically authorize the United States Secretary of the Treasury to delegate various powers ... |
In films like "The Pianist" and "Schindler's List," German guards seem able to kill prisoners at any time without restriction. Did concentration camps and ghettos have rules stating when and how soldiers could kill inmates? | The problem with camps was a lack of oversight once the initial responsibilities had been established. Meaning the answer to this question depends largely on who the camp commandant was and how tight a ship they wanted to run.
Let's start, not with concentration camps, but with Soviet POW camps. Soviet POWs were kept in horrible conditions, and German guards often tormented them. A common practice was siccing guard dogs at prisoners and betting on which dog would do the most damage. Guards also liked to use Soviet POWs for "target practice." So needless to say random killings of prisoners was a common practice, at least among certain aspects of the army.
Now moving to camps, as said above it depended on the camp commandant. Majdanek stands out in this regard. It's two successive commandants, Karl Koch and Hermann Florstedt, stole from the camp massively and instituted a regime of terror in the camp. It became notorious for its corruption and brutality at every level. So in this case random murders of inmates was a common feature of life in the camp. The guards were also Romanian and Croatian, they developed a reputation for savage cruelty and brutality, as well as being difficult to control. Eventually both Koch and Florstedt were arrested for wastefulness. Koch was particularly famous for an event, where in he selected a group of Jews marched them in front of a gate and had them executed; later claiming they tried to "escape."
So there wasn't a time when you could just kill whenever you wanted, but if a guard did just randomly execute an inmate, depending on the camp the punishment would range from nothing, to a slap on the wrist. Radicals on the bottom worked to satisfy the whims of those at the top. Take low ranking SS lackey Gustave Sorge. He enjoyed beating defenceless prisoners to death in Buchenwald. He later would testify: "We believed that we were helping state and leadership when we abused prisoners and drove them to their deaths."
This violence wasn't just during the later periods either. In early 1933, when groups of Jews were temporarily sent to Dachau, hundreds died from abuse/murder by the guards despite the Nazis not yet wanting to kill Jews. Another example is the case of four Jews in Dachau, Erwin Kahn, Rudolf Benario, Ernst Goldmann, and Arthur Kahn. They were made an example of by the newly inaugurated SS leadership. However, the SS commandant had worked his men into a frenzy, and one day a group of SS guards took it upon themselves to lead the 4 Jews out to the woods and execute them. A wave of killings by power hungry SS guards followed after that.
Here is what a Czech prisoner, named Karel Kašák, wrote in his observations while spending time in one of the camps:
> May 9 [1941]. Again a Jew shot in Freiland II. He started to run. The sentry told us that although he has instructions to shoot without warning, he shouted twice. The [prisoner] stopped and just exclaimed: “I want to go there” and fell after two shots … Again they have put a group of lifeless and unconscious Jews on the cart. Human flesh, the bodies of these sons of God, stacked like logs, arms and legs swaying limply—a horrendous picture that we witness daily …
> May 14. In the afternoon they again shot a Jew in Freiland II …
> May 15. Again a Jew shot. They threw his cap behind the sentry and the Kapo forced him with a truncheon to fetch it. Complete exhaustion has made [the Jewish prisoners] unrecognizable, like in a trance, with a far-away gaze …
> May 16. At nine in the morning two more Jews shot in Freiland II. They threw the exhausted men into the water and held them under water until they had almost lost consciousness, and definitely lost their minds, and Kapo Sammetinger hit them with the spade until he had forced them to cross the sentry line, whereupon they were immediately shot.
Now Ghettos were worse for this type of behaviour. The liquidation of the Ghettos was an orgy of violence. In one roundup in the Warsaw Ghetto during 1942, 10,000 people were shot. Mostly because the soldiers later claimed they were "resisting" or they were trying to send a message to get the other Jews moving faster. A similar story is told in other ghettos. In Luniniec ghetto around 2000 were shot during the liquidation. During the liquidation of Yanov another 2000 were shot. Liquidations were never pretty, and by their nature very chaotic.
A source I would recommend if you want some reading. Check out *KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps*
by Nikolaus Wachsmann. | [
"A concentration camp commander could as early as in 1933 inflict the \"death penalty\" for disobedience, i. e. order to murder a disobedient, without any legal ground whatsoever besides the will of Heinrich Himmler, but also without meeting opposition. Himmler himself offered an honorable way out for members of th... |
what is the benefit of having all these subreddits going private? | _URL_0_
In short, Victoria, the AMA lady, was apparently fired today with no notice and no support for the mods and subs who depend on her, and subreddits are shutting down left, right, and center either because she was critical to their operations or as a show of solidarity for all the people who are being screwed over. | [
"In May 2019, former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao told Mother Jones that the subreddit should be banned for not following the sites rules. However, she also acknowledged that \"it's hard to take down a subreddit which is driving a lot of traffic.\"\n",
"The subreddit r/DarkNetMarkets, a darknet market discussion forum, f... |
how can matter outside of the observable universe travel faster than light? | It can't. Nothing with mass can ever travel at or faster than the speed of light in a vacuum (c). It sounds like you may be confusing the observable universe with the Hubble volume. Beyond the Hubble volume, objects are receding from us at faster than c because of the expansion of the universe. The objects themselves are not moving faster than light, but rather space is expanding faster than light. | [
"Light that travels through transparent matter does so at a lower speed than \"c\", the speed of light in a vacuum. For example, photons engage in so many collisions on the way from the core of the sun that radiant energy can take about a million years to reach the surface; however, once in open space, a photon tak... |
What is the best way to become an astrogeologist? | 1. Get a bachelor's degree in astronomy or geology.
1A. Get research experience with a professor.
2. Get a PhD in whichever you didn't do your undergrad in. | [
"While an undergraduate, Carlson carried out what is widely regarded to be the most comprehensive test of astrologer's abilities to extract information about their clients from the apparent positions of celestial objects as seen from the places and times of their clients' births.\n",
"The primary goal of astronom... |
If I had a rod that was two lightsyears long and suspended in space, and I pushed one end, how long would it take the other end to react? | You are right. The deformation of the material would propagate through at the speed of sound in the material, and so that would determine how long it would take till the other end moved. | [
"It follows that if a rod is accelerated by some external force applied anywhere along its length, the elements of matter in various different places in the rod cannot all feel the same magnitude of acceleration if the rod is not to extend without bound and ultimately break. In other words, an accelerated rod which... |
Home experiment demonstrating particle nature of light? | [here](_URL_0_)'s a good example of how you can demonstrate the photoelectric effect at home. | [
"It is also possible that the illumination experiments can be explained by a longitudinal learning effect. Parsons has declined to analyse the illumination experiments, on the grounds that they have not been properly published and so he cannot get at details, whereas he had extensive personal communication with Roe... |
what the hell is going on in india right now? | Indian here.
For the past decade or so, rape has been a constant fixture of the criminal landscape. Urban centres like Delhi, Mumbai and so on are just as affected as the rural areas. Our society has almost always dismissed these as the fault of the victim - blaming them for dressing provocatively, being out late at night, being in the company of young horny men and so on. A generally cunty cop-out, but one that society at large accepted for the many years that rapes went on unchecked. Surely it must be the fault of a lascivious young woman and not the WholesomeIndianMale™.
In keeping with the general attitudes of civil society, cops act pretty shitty toward rape victims too. The reason rape is the #1 most under-reported crime in this country is because cops are *assholes*. They mock victims when compaints are being filed, insinuate that they are loose, *easy* women and frequently fail to follow up properly on rape cases (check out this [particularly egregious situation](_URL_0_) - this is the norm for police conduct, not the exception).
However, a few days ago, a girl got gang-raped, and had her insides all but scooped out with iron rods in New Delhi, our capital city. Unusually, she was accompanied by a male friend, at a fairly conservative hour, and was on a "sort of" public transport bus when it happened. This renders all previous cop-outs invalid - how could it be her fault?
Confronted with the harsh reality that they were barely separated from animals, delhiites went properly apeshit.
The powers-that-be have all been trying to pass the buck, but people are no longer interested in being taken for a ride and are not withdrawing just because so-and-so issued some wishy-washy statement of sympathy. For a nation of generally passive, cowardly fucks, this is unusual.
My personal take? I've lived here for years, I know how this crap works. The ruling classes will apologize, sympathize and generally grovel for as long as it takes for the outrage to die down. Then things will go back to normal and this city of ca. 15 million will go back to life as usual.
Someone needs to die for anything concrete to happen. Now, I know this is a rather dire statement, so bear with me. If the Mob™ grabs the police commissioner or the governor, or chief minister of Delhi and lynches the bastard, the rest of the ruling classes will suddenly sit up in bed and think "Bloody hell, I could be next." Suddenly, their lives provide the incentive to give the citizenry the justice they want and the safety they deserve. Suddenly the VIPs stop sucking up the city's police force for their personal security and give the city its due, because for the first time in their miserable existence, they are being held physically accountable.
But of course, this will never happen. I said it earlier - we are a nation of cowards. There is no will to carry this forward into an "Arab Spring" for the subcontinent. This will die down, like the hundreds of corruption, misgovernance and crime scnadals in the past. Indians deserve India and vice-versa.
EDIT1: To the folks asking for a proper ELI5 or TLDR, I'm awfully sorry, I have no idea how to shorten or simplify this.
EDIT2: My highest-rated comment on Reddit! At least it happened here and not in a pun thread.
EDIT3: To those accusing me of inciting violence - I am not calling for bloodshed, nor do I condone it.
I am merely making an observation - peaceful protests have accomplished very little on a national scale in our nation's 60-odd year history. This indicates, to *me*, that if there is a clear and present *physical* danger to members of the legislature or security forces from the public, they will be more likely to act than if there were no consequences for their inaction, as has been the case so far.
The same thing could be accomplished by, say, performance-based reviews. You perform, you keep your job, you don't, you get fired. However, the legislature is *never* going to pass a law establishing such a procedure, which brings us back to square one: zero accountability. | [
"India's parliament is mostly destroyed in an apparent terrorist attack while in session waiting for an address by the Prime Minister. The casualties are significant and the suspicion immediately turns to Pakistan-based terrorists. Unknown individuals initiate a massacre of Hindu citizens triggering a Hindu back la... |
Was the Catholic Church founded by St Peter or Constantine? | Well, neither is probably the best answer.
The claim of the Roman Catholic Church is founded on basically two things: a documentary tradition that claims Peter was the leader of the church in Rome and passed on his authority to its bishop as a passing on of apostolic *authority* as well as *primacy*. However that documentary tradition is itself a development of the idea of Roman primacy that takes place over several hundreds of years. One cannot trace this idea, or at least the fullness of the claims of the RCC, back to surviving 2nd century documents, let alone 1st century ones.
It is complicated by the claim that there was always an unwritten tradition that accompanied the New Testament documents, an unwritten apostolic tradition that was authoritatively transmitted by the church, and that the RCC itself is the authoritative arbiter of such pronouncements.
You are right that the first Gospel text probably didn't appear until at least the 60s AD. Paul's earliest letters probably were written in the early 50s.
However Constantine is not really a good contender either. By the time Constantine emerges on the scene, there already exists a large, connected network of churches that recognise each other and have a concept of unity. Indeed, Constantine does not establish that at all, rather they appeal to him to deal with the problem of the Donatists, a separatist group dominant in North Africa. In that issue you already see a church that considers itself both unified and universal attempting to deal with a group of believers that the mainstream considers outside the church.
Furthermore, a very great deal of Constantine's dealings with the church take place in the Eastern half of the church, which down the track will comprise the portion that begins to be identified as Eastern Orthodox in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic Church dominant in the West.
Who founded the Roman Catholic Church is not actually that helpful an historical question to ask. As a *tradition*, the RCC can legitimately claim a historical continuity that goes back to the earliest period. But so can several other branches of Christianity. Furthermore, what exactly 'historical continuity' guarantees is not so certain. There was historical continuity between the Roman Empire in 1453 and the Roman Republic in 100 BC, but they were vastly different things. The RCC has a long and involved history in itself, and it's difficult even to decide when we should start talking about the RCC as something distinct from other 'Church' entities. Personally I wouldn't distinguish the Western church as "Roman Catholic" before the 5th century. | [
"According to Catholic tradition, the history of the Catholic Church begins with Jesus Christ and his teachings (c. 4 BC – c. AD 30) and the Catholic Church is a continuation of the early Christian community established by the Disciples of Jesus. The Church considers its bishops to be the successors to Jesus's apos... |
why do people say “he died for our sins”? | if you don't sin he died for no reason, so sin whenever you are able to, make his death worth a thousend sins | [
"In the Jerusalem \"ekklēsia\", from which Paul received this creed, the phrase \"died for our sins\" probably was an apologetic rationale for the death of Jesus as being part of God's plan and purpose, as evidenced in the scriptures. For Paul, it gained a deeper significance, providing \"a basis for the salvation ... |
how were mitochondria allowed to survive in foreign cells without being treated as invaders and digested? | Cells have pretty basic immune systems even now, with a lot of issues with bacteria crawling in and out of them and a lot of human disease involving types of bacteria that can enter cells and the body immune system having to deal with it because the cell immune system can't. Go back a hundred million years and the immune system was even more basic. | [
"The ability to ingest other cells enabled ancestral eukaryotes to build a much more complex cell. Once the capacity for consuming other cells was in place, early eukaryotes began to acquire internal membrane-bound organelles that included organelles that were once free-living prokaryotes. Based on phylogenetic and... |
how does entropy prove why time only goes forwards? | Think about burning a piece of toast. Can you unburn the toast? No. Why not? Because we didn’t change the toast into a new thing called burnt toast, we just burned up part of the toast. The way our universe works, so far as we can tell, this only goes one way. Once you burnt the toast you can’t make it back the way it was. Even if you had a way or rebuilding it, it wouldn’t be the exact same toast. Even if you found a way to rebuild it with the exact same stuff and it was the same toast (impossible as far as we know) then you would have needed to spend lots and lots of energy to do that, which means we still lost something, right? Not quite.
We didn’t lose anything, really we didn’t even lose anything when we burn the toast. We just converted what was toast into other things. The universe didn’t lose anything, it still has the same amount of stuff it had before. We see it as loss because the heat and burnt crumbs aren’t as useful to us. The universe doesn’t care for toast, it’s not picky at all, it just wants to keep all its stuff. So it’s not that stuff disappears, it just gets turned into less complicated stuff by breaking it down into its most basic parts, including just plain old forms of energy like heat and light.
This may not seem like a big deal, but stretch it out of millions and billions and trillions of years and it starts adding up. Eventually everything get’s less complicated, which means eventually everything becomes the same thing. To put this in human terms, everything dies. When we see this happening we call it time passing.
Time and Entropy are twisted together, one has to be that way because other is. Break one and you break the other. | [
"Chapter 6, \"Chance and the Arrow\", asks, \"Does time have an arrow?\" The reader discovers that the laws of physics apply moving both forward in time and backward in time. Such a law is called time-reversal symmetry. One of the major subjects of this chapter is entropy. Various analogies are given to illustrate ... |
My professor told me that one of the worst mistakes a historian can make is to engage in a teleological reading of history. What is that, and why is it so bad? | Going back to the philosophical debates of the ancient Greeks two of the most prominent competing overarching theories of the nature of the Universe in general were teleology vs. mechanism. Teleological beliefs are those that say that things exist or happen for a reason. For example, the idea that the reason clouds exist is to provide rain to water crops so that humans can grow food for themselves. It elevates "purpose" and indeed the concept of sentience or conscious thought to the level of fundamental force in the Universe. Competing against that is the theory that the underlying structure of the Universe is fundamentally mechanistic, based on simple rules and brainless processes without underlying final purpose. Things such as conscious thought and human life aren't planned for integral aspects to the Universe, rather they are emergent accidental phenomena. The process of science has over time settled on a decidedly mechanistic view of the Universe.
In other words, your professor is warning you against the idea that things happen in history purposefully to enable other things in the future that result. For example, it has been very common to elevate the early democracies in Greece by seeing them as intentional ancestors of modern westernized democracies. To see Charlemagne as the creator of France. Or view WWI through the lens of WWII. Especially since so much of history comes down to the actions of individuals acting on their own motivations it's very easy to cast new motivations on them based on what was happening elsewhere or what would happen later. A lot of history comes down to things happening by accident combined with very complex motivations by numerous individuals some of whom are acting together or at cross purposes. Even when you have a lot of detailed information on a historical event it takes a lot of work to understand exactly why some outcome was achieved vs. some other outcome, and it's very easy to ignore all of that and think of history as inevitable or happening within some constraint of a larger purpose or larger system. | [
"In modern science, explanations that rely on teleology are often, but not always, avoided, either because they are unnecessary or because whether they are true or false is thought to be beyond the ability of human perception and understanding to judge. But using teleology as an explanatory style, in particular wit... |
why are relays (electronics) used? | A relay allows a much smaller current to switch a very large current, or a DC signal to switch an AC signal, or for a single signal to switch multiple signals. They're very versatile.
To be turned on via relay contacts just means that power is supplied from the electrical contacts of the relay. A signal goes into the relay, telling it to supply power to output contacts, which then would supply power to the load (in this case, a PLC). | [
"Relays are used where it is necessary to control a circuit by an independent low-power signal, or where several circuits must be controlled by one signal. Relays were first used in long-distance telegraph circuits as signal repeaters: they refresh the signal coming in from one circuit by transmitting it on another... |
why do my joints hurt during menstruation? | Estrogen affects joints by keeping inflammation down and estrogen levels decline during menstruation. | [
"The menisci act as shock absorbers and separate the two ends of bone in the knee joint. There are two menisci in the knee, the medial (inner) and the lateral (outer). When there is torn cartilage, it means that the meniscus has been injured. Meniscus tears occur during sports often when the knee is twisted. Menisc... |
Are the busts of Roman leaders like Caesar taken from death masks or are they impressions crafted from contemporary descriptions? | Follow up query; Octavianus, Trajan and even Constantine I had a bust, however Basil II did not. At what point did they stop producing busts for each emperor and move towards using mosaics like that of Zoe and Constantine IX or Ioannes II Komnonos at the Hagia Sofia? | [
"Historians and archaeologists not affiliated with the French administration, among them Paul Zanker, the renowned archaeologist and expert on Caesar and Augustus, were quick to question whether the bust is a portrait of Caesar. Many noted the lack of resemblances to Caesar's likenesses issued on coins during the l... |
Is it possible that our solar system is inside of the event horizon of a black hole? | This write up seems to refute the idea - [relevant post by robot roll call](_URL_0_) | [
"An observer crossing the event horizon of a non-rotating and uncharged (or Schwarzschild) black hole cannot avoid the central singularity, which lies in the future world line of everything within the horizon. Thus one cannot avoid spaghettification by the tidal forces of the central singularity.\n",
"In the simp... |
If you pour equal amounts of hot and cold water in a container, would the resulting mixture be the exact median of the two temperatures? | In good approximation yes, as the total energy is conserved and the temperature is a direct measure of energy per volume. The mixture will have the average energy per volume of the two initial portions and therefore the same temperature.
However the factor of proportionality between temperature and energy itself is also slightly temperature dependent (as shown [here](_URL_0_)), so that this will be only true in first approximation.
Calculating the final temperature taking this into account will be slightly more complicated and requires you to invert the polynomial relation between heat and temperature.
As you can see heat capacity greatly increases when you come close to freezing/boiling temperatures. This is because at these temperatures energy that you transfer into the system will not only affect the average movement/vibrations of a the water-molecules, but will also be used to change the state of aggregation. Ice at zero degrees has a very different energy content than water at zero degrees. | [
"Mixtures with 3–5 °C span of temperatures and ranges from about 17–23°C to about 37–40 °C can be composed from varying proportions of cholesteryl oleyl carbonate, cholesteryl nonanoate, and cholesteryl benzoate. For example, the mass ratio of 65:25:10 yields range of 17–23 °C, and 30:60:10 yields range of 37–40 °C... |
how do we know that my blue is your blue? | We aren't. This holds true for all "fundamentals" in human perception - sound, taste, etc. | [
"BULLET::::- Dictionary (also voiced by Brianna Gentilella) - A book containing many words and their definitions that Blue looks in almost every day to find out what the Word of the Day is. She has a face and has the ability to speak, similar to all other residents of Blue's Room.\n",
"Blue is a primary color. It... |
how does overheating affect a laptop's performance? | Excessive heat can damage the silicon logic or the metal wires or capacitor's electrolytes or melt insulation. It can set fire to dust inside the machine. | [
"Due to the relatively small size that the hardware has to fit in, cooling the heat intensive components is a major problem affecting the performance of such laptops, usually causing degraded value for money performance wise. Attempts at using the same performance hardware as desktops usually end in a decreased clo... |
how do audio editors manage to dub movies without losing the rest of the sounds(i.e. ambient noises, background music, gunshot noises) | There are multiple soundtracks going on at the same time and each soundtrack can be adjusted individually. So they record the background noises, they record the voices and they record other things as well.
When they replace the voices, they just switch out the voice track but keep others the same or adjust them. | [
"The process usually takes place on a dub stage. After sound editors edit and prepare all the necessary tracks – dialogue, automated dialogue replacement (ADR), effects, Foley, music – the dubbing mixers proceed to balance all of the elements and record the finished soundtrack. Dubbing is sometimes confused with AD... |
What was the Cuban side of the Missile Crisis? | Leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even throughout the crisis and for a time after it was concluded, the CIA was carrying out acts of sabotage and terrorism in Cuba. This was called the [Cuban Project](_URL_0_) (alternatively, Operation Mongoose). While the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs was approved under the Eisenhower administration, the Cuban Project was authorized by Kennedy.
In [this article](_URL_2_), Noam Chomsky talks about the crisis, I wouldn't say from a Cuban side, but rather from a side that challenges the prevailing orthodox view of Kennedy bringing back the world from the brink of annihilation and being a saviour.
Keeping in mind that the United States had once before attempted an invasion of Cuba in 1961, Kennedy seriously contemplated a military invasion of Cuba to eliminate the missile threat.
> From the ExComm records, Stern concludes that on 26 October President Kennedy was "leaning towards military action to eliminate the missiles" in Cuba, to be followed by invasion, according to Pentagon plans.
But Khrushchev sent two messages to Kennedy, the first of which offered that "The missiles would be removed if the US promised not to invade Cuba."
Subsequently:
> Kennedy also made an informal pledge not to invade Cuba, but with conditions: not just withdrawal of the missiles, but also termination, or at least "a great lessening", of any Russian military presence. (Unlike Turkey, on Russia's borders, where nothing of the kind could be contemplated.) When Cuba is no longer an "armed camp", then "we probably wouldn't invade," in the president's words. He added also that if it hoped to be free from the threat of US invasion, Cuba must end its "political subversion" (Stern's phrase) in Latin America.
So Cuba had to quit political subversion in Latin America (stop spreading communism) but the US had to abide by no such restraint. Still, the continued existence of Castro was still seen as a threat that was needed to to be taken care of:
> In the case of Cuba, the State Department policy planning council explained:
> "The primary danger we face in Castro is … in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries … The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half."
And the Cuban Project continued:
> The crisis, however, was not over. On 8 November, the Pentagon announced that all known Soviet missile bases had been dismantled. And on the same day, Stern reports, "a sabotage team carried out an attack on a Cuban factory," though Kennedy's terror campaign, Operation Mongoose, had been formally curtailed at the peak of the crisis. The 8 November terror attack lends support to Bundy's observation that the threat to peace was Cuba, not Turkey – where the Russians were not continuing a lethal assault. Not, however, what Bundy had in mind, or could have understood.
> More details are added by the highly respected scholar Raymond Garthoff, who also had a great deal of experience within the government, in his careful 1987 account of the missile crisis. On 8 November, he writes, "a Cuban covert action sabotage team dispatched from the United States successfully blew up a Cuban industrial facility," killing 400 workers, according to a Cuban government letter to the UN Secretary General. Garthoff comments that "the Soviets could only see [the attack] as an effort to backpedal on what was, for them, the key question remaining: American assurances not to attack Cuba"
So, while the intensity of attacks lessened during the crisis, they were quickly resumed:
> Kennedy officially renewed the terrorist operations after the crisis ebbed. Ten days before his assassination, he approved a CIA plan for "destruction operations" by US proxy forces "against a large oil refinery and storage facilities, a large electric plant, sugar refineries, railroad bridges, harbor facilities, and underwater demolition of docks and ships". A plot to assassinate Castro was apparently initiated on the day of the Kennedy assassination. The terrorist campaign was called off in 1965, but "one of Nixon's first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify covert operations against Cuba," Garthoff reports.
The American government was still dead-set on overthrowing the Castro regime. Although it had promised not to invade, it kept up attacks from inside Cuba by exiles and CIA operatives.
So that gives a general idea of what Cuba was going through at the time. It was besieged, subjected to sabotage and was threatened with invasion twice. There is an interesting documentary on Robert McNamara called The Fog of War, and in it he gives an account about the time he met Castro after the crisis. [This is the specific part.](_URL_1_) The impression you get is that Castro urged Khruschev to fire the missiles at the United States in some state of madness. What he actually meant was that he urged Khrushchev to fire the missiles *if Cuba was invaded again*. Given the circumstances, it was understandable. Cuba was, and saw itself, as under existential threat.
| [
"The Cuban Missile Crisis was a tense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States over the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. On October 22, 1962, Admiral Horacio Rivero, Jr. was the commander of the American fleet sent by President John F. Kennedy to set up a quarantine (blockade) of t... |
How did Western Europian Socialist Parties view the USSR? | With regards to Italy, the matter is very complicated.
The Italian Communist party had a love-hate relationship with the USSR.
The Italian Socialist Party was a generally capitalist-oriented, pro-European, "Third Way" party, although when he was Prime Minister, Socialist leader Bettino Craxi enjoyed a cordial working relationship with Ronald Regan.
And lastly, the Italian Social Democrats never got enough votes for anyone to ask them for their opinion, but they entered in a number of coalitions with the pro-American Christian Democracy party.
**Il Partito Comunista Italiano** (Electoral Range: fluctuating between 22% and 30%)
The Italian Communist Party (PCI) was the spiritual successor to the Communist militias which had taken up arms against the Fascist Regime between 1944 and 1945. Although these militias were composed of existing anti-fascist activists as well as returning soldiers/deserters, they received small albeit perceptible amounts of aid from the Soviet Union. The "Sovietization" of these militias, and by extension the "sovietization" of opposition to the dying regime, definitely was tangible. Although he's not a historian, in Hemingway recalls the mood of the moment in *Across the River and Into the Trees* by recounting that the owner of Harry's Bar in Venice has bought an equal number of cases of Whiskey and Vodka, being unsure of who would liberate Venice first.
In its early days, the most members of the Italian Communist Party leadership were definitely pro-USSR, and the General Secretary Togliatti had a direct line to Moscow. However, by the 1950s it became increasingly difficult for the PCI to justify increasingly evident oppression in the Eastern Block, culminating in the Hungarian Revolution of 1958. Togliatti began advertising "The Italian Way Towards Socialism" in the 1958 election, signaling that the pro-USSR faction within the party was definitely in the minority. By the 1968 Prague Spring, the PCI was actively condemning the Soviet Union. By 1976, the General Secretary of the PCI, Enrico Berlinguer, declared in a high-profile interview in the *Corriere della Sera* newspaper that his “Eurocommunism” was unconditioned by the regimes behind the Iron Curtain, and that at any rate he felt safer living under the umbrella of NATO than he would be in a Warsaw Pact country. A vaguely pro-American declaration, although Berlinguer wasn't by any means supportive of US policies in Europe and the world.
In spite of Berlinguer's official line, there remained a backbone of pro-USSR administrators in the Italian Communist Party such that when Berlinguer suffered a fatal stroke at a rally in 1984, the Communist Party leadership sought refuge in pro-Soviet nostalgia, only to lose any ability to form coherent policy after Michail Gorbachev’s reforms within the Soviet Union gained steam.
**Il Partito Socialista Italiano** (electoral range: between 7% and 15%)
The Socialists were in great part perceived as "Diet Leftists," seeing as the Italian Communist Party itself was founded as a direct reaction to the 1921 PSI congress when Socialist Party leaders denounced the use of arms. In fact, the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) was only ever the "Younger Brother" of the Italian Communist Party until the 1960's, when youth activism revealed the ruling Christian Democrats (DC) were very unpopular with younger voters, pushing together center-left coalitions. Prior to then, there had been a "Unity of Action" between the Communist Party and the Socialist party, and this had extended to foreign policy: the Socialists opposed Italian entry into NATO in 1949, but also began to denounce the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
However, unlike the Communists, in the Socialist party the pro-Soviet faction was only small (albeit vocal) and rapidly evaporated. By the time the Socialist-led governing coalition of the 1980s came to power, the Socialist Party was committed to a strong pro-European line. Relations with the USSR were non-existent, while relations with the US were pragmatic: most prominently, Craxi affirmed Italian sovereignty during the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship “Achille Lauro” off the coast of Egypt by members of the Palestinian Liberation Front. Already peeving Italy’s NATO allies by negotiating with the terrorists, after the hijackers’ getaway plane was coerced by American fighter jets to land on a NATO base in Sicily, Italian *Carabinieri* (the national Gendarmerie) impeded a detachment of American Special Forces operatives to apprehend the four hijackers, so that they could be tried in Italy. In spite of not realizing that one of the negotiation aids sent by the Palestinian Authority had been intimately involved with the hijacking, Craxi’s firm stance during the crisis strengthened his public image.
**Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano** (electoral range: between 2.5% and 6%)
The Italian Social Democrats had originally been founded as a splinter group of the Socialist Party in 1947. The Socialists had proven to be too centrist for some important members of the party. However, their focus on social welfare policy quickly led them to be perceived as a single-issue centrist party, seeing as the ruling Christian Democrats were also not opposed to generous welfare policies. Their impact on Italian foreign policy was negligible, although they did act as important scale-tippers in numerous governing coalitions.
Sources on European Political History you might be interested in:
*The Italian Revolution: The End of Politics, Italian Style?* (1995)
and
*European Integration: A Concise History.* (2012)
Both by M. Gilbert
| [
"In the Western Bloc, many of the self-styled communist parties reacted by changing their policies to a more moderate and less radical course. In countries such as Italy and Germany, post-communism is marked by the increased influence of their existing social democrats. The anti-Soviet communist parties in the West... |
how can we so distinctly remember things that never actually happened? | It is possible to vividly imagine something and then simply re-categorize that mental image as a memory rather than something you imagined. The act of remembering it works just the same. You can see what it looks like, hear the sounds or voices, and so forth. You just have attached a wrong category to it. | [
"There is barely any recalled memory in cases of fear and trauma exposure, brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, pain, or anxiety. Recall memory is very limited, since the only memory people have that suffer from these problems is the flash backs of what happened when the event took place. People can only r... |
how to simplify square roots, such as √99 into 3√11? i just can't understand this concept. | okay! so basically you divide while it's still inside the square root. so √99 = √(9•11)=(√9)•(√11). √9=3. so √99=3•√11=3√11. | [
"Indeed, an early method for calculating square roots can be found in some Sutras, the method involves the recursive formula: formula_11 for large values of x, which bases itself on the non-recursive identity formula_12 for values of \"r\" extremely small relative to \"a\".\n",
"In order to determine the right si... |
Can you break your own teeth by closing your jaw? | If your teeth are damaged from tooth decay you most certainly can.
The teeth are made of calcium and if they aren't taken care of they can slowly get eaten away by bacteria on the teeth. This will weaken the surrounding layer of the tooth and eventually make them brittle and prone to damage.
Even if your teeth aren't damaged from tooth decay they can still get damage from grinding your teeth. People tend to do this in their sleep or if they are nervous. What happens is a person will unconsciously or consciously bite down and move their jaw from side to side. This causes the teeth to slowly grind down through one another like rubbing two stones together. | [
"The mouth is unique, in that the teeth are well secured to the bone ends but come through epithelium (mucosa). A leg or wrist, for instance, has no such structure to help with a closed reduction. In addition, when the fracture happens to be in a tooth bearing area of the jaws, aligning the teeth well usually resul... |
. how do soda fountain machines work? | Lots of tubes, and a mixer on each nozzle.
Basically there are 3 parts that go into your fountain soda.
Water - first tube from water supply to each nozzle.
Co2 - large canister in back (think like size of a large helium tank) - 2nd tube to each nozzle.
Syrup - generally come in boxes. Heavy plastic bag inside box with about 3 gal of syrup - 3rd tube to each nozzle.
Nozzles contain a mixer mechanism - basically can control hoe much of each of the 3 to dispense. (ie 1 part syrup to 1 part CO2 to 4 parts water.)
The carbonated water and syrup spray into the funnel part of the nozzle and into your cup. If the funnel part were removed, the carbonated water and syrup would be seen coming out as 2 separate streams.
If you ever see a Coke nozzle dispensing only carbonated water - the syrup box is empty and needs to be changed out (takes about a minute)
If your soda is totally flat, time to switch Co2 canisters.
If your soda is too bubbly and not enough flavor - time to recalibrate the dispenser quantities. | [
"A soda fountain is a device that dispenses carbonated soft drinks, called fountain drinks. They can be found in restaurants, concession stands and other locations such as convenience stores. The device combines flavored syrup or syrup concentrate and carbon dioxide with chilled and purified water to make soft drin... |
Why does plasma create light, when it is just a superheated gas? | Everything emits [black-body radiation](_URL_6_), across a continuous spectrum of temperature which determines the distribution of emitted photons, "hot" things just emit significantly in our visual range.
Separate from that, when atoms or molecules transition from a higher to a lower energy state, [they emit specific frequencies](_URL_4_), forming "bands" rather than a smooth spectrum, which is how [spectroscopy](_URL_5_) can determine the composition of an object.
Generally a plasma, as with a candle flame, is hot enough to emit light both ways. There are "cold" or ["non-thermal" plasmas](_URL_1_) in which the electron gas is thousands of kelvin, but the atoms are at room temperature, and so not visible from black-body radiation, and can be invisible. It can also be too hot to be visible. In [this image](_URL_0_) from [_URL_2_](https://www._URL_2_/mag/2/18):
> the brightest areas of the photo are in fact the coolest. At 150 million °C (the temperature in the centre), the plasma doesn't emit in the spectrum of visible light.
| [
"Plasma techniques are especially useful because they can deposit ultra thin (a few nm), adherent, conformal coatings. Glow discharge plasma is created by filling a vacuum with a low-pressure gas (ex. argon, ammonia, or oxygen). The gas is then excited using microwaves or current which ionizes it. The ionized gas i... |
what was so major about that debate yesterday? | I got majorly drunk playing the Debate Drinking Game...
It's not really that major. It's just a tool the Republican Party uses to gauge which candidates are least likely to be eaten alive in the public eye. | [
"As the day before the debate, November 13, was the day of the November 2015 Paris attacks, CBS announced that the debate would focus on foreign policy and terrorism. In addition, a moment of silence was held at the beginning of the debate in memory of the victims.\n",
"The debate started in 1999 with an exchange... |
Why do people experience cravings years after they have quit the substance to which they were addicted? | You should think about addiction as a *learned* behavioural response. Cravings are usually triggered by two events, first is when exposed to drug related stimuli (e.g. seeing a crackpipe, bong, watching people take drugs, walking past the pub, thinking about drug use) and the second is when exposed to stressors.
In the first example, the person has previously *learned* to associate drug related cues to reward related internal processes. This is a natural learning process most likely mediated primarily by [classical conditioning](_URL_0_) and is the same kind of learning as when you associate a particular perfume smell to that old girl/boyfriend you used to date. So when exposed to drug related cues, you get that automatic association with reward pathways. And humans at their most basic are driven to obtain reward - hence cravings.
In the stress induced cravings, the person has previously *learned* that the use of drugs can reduce the negative feelings of stress and negative mood states. This learning process is mediated by [negative reinforcement](_URL_1_) learning. So in this sense, craving can be induced by a desire to reduce the negative feelings.
Based on this, it is important to note how difficult it is to unlearn something. So going back to the example of the perfume, the thoughts you have of the old girl/boyfriend are almost automatic. The learning is very strong. Same way as if you have a particular strategy (maybe it is having chocolate, or seeing a movie, or playing with your kids) for calming yourself down when you are angry, or increasing you mood when feeling down. Imagine taking that tried and tested strategy for reducing the negative mood. This is what cravings are all about. They are automatic responses to a strongly learned behavioural response. | [
"A variety of addictive drugs produce an increase in reward-related dopamine activity. Stimulants such as nicotine, cocaine and methamphetamine promote increased levels of dopamine which appear to be the primary factor in causing addiction. For other addictive drugs such as the opioid heroin, the increased levels o... |
why is it that when my feet are cold and i put them under my covers, they start sweating but they're still freezing? | The control center in your brain for body temperature (the hypothalamus) is part of a different network than the sensory system for perception of heat (primary somatosensory cortex).
The control center for body temperature is more concerned about the temperature in your brain and other vital organs; so if your core is too warm, you will sweat all over. The will happen no matter how cold your feet are. Cold feet is less of a problem than a brain that is too hot. | [
"Wearing closed-toe shoes (\"e.g.\", ballet flats or pumps) without socks leads to accumulation of sweat, dead skin cells, dirt, and oils, further contributing to bacterial growth. Momentarily slipping off shoes whenever feet start to feel \"hot\" or sweaty can help prevent odor.\n",
"The main cause is foot sweat... |
why do some recent films from the 2000s need to go through a remaster process into higher resolutions like 4k? aren't the original source files already at their native resolution, especially if they were filmed digitally? | No, there was still a lot of film used in the 2000s. Even so, digitization for HD (1080) is very different from digitization for 4K (2160) because different bitrate limits are needed for the different formats. There might have been a 4K "digital" version for theaters with digital projectors in the 2000s, but that's not the right bitrate for an Ultra HD Bluray. | [
"In the spring of 2013, during its 86th year of existence, efforts began to convert to digital picture and sound (with the exception of productions that are only available in the movie reel format) and screened a free showing of \"Samsara\" to celebrate the transition. The switch to digital—in anticipation of an in... |
why does an extra oxygen atom make such a big difference between h2o (water) and h2o2 (rocket fuel)? | The bond between the two oxygen atoms in H2O2 is not very strong and, as a result, the molecule as a whole is rather unstable. H2O2 readily breaks down into normal H2O and O2, producing heat in the process. | [
"It just so happens that hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) are both diatomic molecules, thus we have H and O. To form water, one of the O atoms breaks off from the O molecule and react with the H compound to form HO. But, there is one oxygen atom left. It reacts with another H molecule. Since it took two of each atom to ... |
The Fukang meteorite is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old, how is it that people manage to estimate its age? | The age of meteorites is measured the same way we measure the absolute age of materials on Earth, via [radiometric dating](_URL_0_). I'm going to venture a guess that your confusion might stem from a common misconception, namely that radiometric dating always equal carbon, or ^14 C, dating which is only useful over a few tens of thousand of years (and thus is not useful for measuring the age of meteorites or most geologic materials on Earth for that matter). In detail there are a whole host of useful radioactive isotopes that decay to stable products and that have half lives long enough to make them suitable for dating materials several billion years old. Specifically for meteorites, the most common radiometric systems are U-Pb, Sm-Nd, and Rb-Sr with half lives of 0.7 (for ^235 U - ^207 Pb), 4.5 (for ^238 U - ^208 Pb), 106, and 50 billion years, respectively (I've seen Ar-Ar dating used as well, which has a half life of 1.3 billion years, but usually in the context of dating an impact as opposed to the age of the meteorite itself). The useful range for any given isotope (i.e. the age of material you can date with it) is roughly between 1/10 to 10 times the half life, so all of these systems are useful for meteorites that formed at the same time as the rest of the solar system. Which radiometric system is used (and the details of how it is applied) will depend on they type of meteorite as these different radiometric systems only work with specific minerals as you need minerals which incorporate the radioactive parent into it's structure during crystallization and which retain the daughter isotope during decay. | [
"Less than ten thousand years old, and with a diameter of or more. The EID lists fewer than ten such craters, and the largest in the last 100,000 years (100 ka) is the Rio Cuarto crater in Argentina. However, there is some uncertainty regarding its origins and age, with some sources giving it as < 10 ka while the E... |
why is it illegal to copy the appearance/design of others' inventions, but not illegal to copy the taste of other brands' foods? | Appearance or design seems much more quantifiable than taste, which is far more subjective and varies from person to person. | [
"Some artists, such as Girl Talk and Nine Inch Nails, use copyleft licenses such as the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that don't allow commercial use. In this way they can choose to sell their creations without having to compete with others selling copies of the same works. However, ... |
Why is it so difficult to clean up oil spills that happen in large bodies of water? | Actually, compared to other liquids, lipids can be removed quite easily as they are less dense than water and therefore float. When you pour oil into a tub of water, you can simply lay a tissue on the surface and it is going to absorb the oil quite neatly. I think for oil spills on the oceanic level the problems are that the sheer amount of oil is too enormous to be cleared easily. Also, animals will come into contact with it nevertheless (especially when the spill reaches the coast) and will cause the terrible problems that are associated with this. | [
"Cleanup and recovery from an oil spill is difficult and depends upon many factors, including the type of oil spilled, the temperature of the water (affecting evaporation and biodegradation), and the types of shorelines and beaches involved. Physical cleanups of oil spills are also very expensive. However, microorg... |
Does the age in which you procreate affect what is inherited by the child? For example, will a child that is conceived by 20 year old parents have traits very different than if the parents were in their 50's? | I know Autism is linked to the age of the Father.
_URL_0_ | [
"The effects of the fathers age on offspring are not yet well understood and are studied far less extensively than the effects of the mother's age. Fathers contribute proportionally more DNA mutations to their offspring via their germ cells than the mother, with the paternal age governing how many mutations are pas... |
Does the 5 second rule actually work - how do germs attach themselves to things? | [Residence Time and Contact Time: Testing the 5 second rule](_URL_0_)
Conclusion, contamination can be detected almost immediately on contact. This was only done with *S. typhimurium* which has pili for attachment onto M cells in the body, these probably play a role in surface attachment as well.
This bacteria is motile by way of multiple flagella and many species of bacteria are motile. To move they need to be in an aqueous environment but in a dry environment many bacteria can survive from days to weeks waiting to find a more suitable environment. | [
"The five-second rule was also featured in an episode of the Discovery Channel series \"MythBusters\". There was no significant difference in the number of bacteria collected. The aspects that affect the contamination process is the moisture, surface geometry and the location. Ted Allen put the rule to the test in ... |
Did Vikings have music and/or art (paintings, sculptures, etc)? | Art is so much and hard to define. I would argue that the Vikings were very artistic. Look at their wood carvings on boats especially. There are some very fine details you can see this very day on the well preserved **Oseberg Ship** for example.
The Vikings worked with material they had plenty off. Therefor is there no marble statues you find south in Europe for example. What they did, beside carving tree, was decorating stones and stone walls. Not only did they carve illustrations on stones (Hunnestad Monument in Sweden), they wrote heathen poems and songs on them. An example is **Røksteinen** (Rök Runestone) in Sweden. This stone is actually the first piece of Sweden litterateur and tells stories from Norse mythology.
You ask for music. And there was music. They made songs at feasts, after battles, before battles and when heroic people passed away or were killed in battle. Our problem is that they did not write lyrics (as we know of) and neither did they know about notes. What we do know is what instruments that were used because we have found them preserved in burial grounds and such. Mostly instruments you blow in to make sound, flutes like pan flutes and *blokkfløyte*, lur/lure/lurr, (a long blowing horn), wooden lyre (Greek string instruments) and horns of different sorts.
**Sources:**
_URL_2_ a very good source for information about the Vikings available in English, Norwegian and some articles are in Danish.
Norwegian:
_URL_2_s/life/music/n-music-iceland.html (Viking music with focus on Icelandic music)
Danish:
_URL_1_
_URL_0_
| [
"Viking art, also known commonly as Norse art, is a term widely accepted for the art of Scandinavian Norsemen and Viking settlements further afield—particularly in the British Isles and Iceland—during the Viking Age of the 8th-11th centuries CE. Viking art has many design elements in common with Celtic, Germanic, t... |
why are most cars sold in muted colors as opposed to bright ones? | Bright colors (except red) typically do not sell very well as compared to greyscale or muted colors. Not that many people want bright colors like green/cyan/yellow, and cars used for commercial purposes are almost exclusively greyscale.
New Car dealerships, especially smaller lots, do not want to stock something they believe won't sell at a profit. Manufactures will still make many color varieties by request for those who want them, so there is not much incentive to stock them at dealerships. | [
"The most popular car colours today are greyscale colours, with over 70% of cars produced globally being white, black, grey or silver. Red, blue and brown/beige cars range between 6% and 9% each, while all other colours amount to less than 5%.\n",
"Almost all the states prohibit the colors green, red and blue bec... |
What exactly is an analog computer and how do they work? | The linked example is actually a digital not an analog computer. The idea in that comic isn't that complicated. A digital computer keeps track of 1s and 0s as electric current and based on those does operations to them. Well, there's no reason you can't do something similar with stones, say having a stone by itself represent a 0 and having a pair of stones represent a 1. Now, you can then follow through and do everything single operation to move the stones just like a computer would. If one is patient and follows through the detailed instructions (in your comic the person is a very bored immortal), you could run any calculation a computer could run. | [
"An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computer that uses the continuously changeable aspects of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities to model the problem being solved. In contrast, digital computers represent varying quantities symbolically, as their numerical v... |
can someone explain to me what is right, far right, left, far left, middle right, middle left and such in politics? | There is no easy answer to this as it depends on both where someone is and their personal perception, as well as the perception of others, to an enormous degree.
First, the terms "right" and "left" come from France around the time of the French Revolution. In 1789, France convened something called the National Assembly. There were two major groups, people who supported the monarchy, and people who wanted a popular revolution. The supporters of the king sat on the right hand side of the debate hall, and those who supported revolution sat on the left. Presto, right-wing and left-wing.
To build on that further, the terms "progressive" and "conservative" can be applied to this makeup. A conservative wants to *conserve* things as they are. A progressive wants to *progress* onto something else. And that is where a lot of the confusion arises. Conserve what exactly? Progress from what towards what else exactly? Well that's going to be different in each nation or region. Hard line communists in the USSR in the late 80s would actually be conservatives, as they wanted to conserve the communist rule of the Soviet Union, and the progressives would be the ones who wanted to get rid of the communist party and progress to something else. Those same communists with the exact same ideology would have been the progressives in 1917,and the Tsarists would be conservatives. Conservatives in the mid to late 1700s in English North America were anti-Revolution loyalists, and the progressives would be those who wanted an American revolution (this is also where the term 'liberal' as in 'one who wants liberty' comes from).
But as times, governments, social and political attitudes and populations change and shift over the decades or even centuries, who wants to conserve what and who wants to progress past that also change and shift too. The people who wanted to progress past a monarchy in the North American colonies and wanted a constitutional republic became conservatives once they achieved that constitutional republic. They just gained it, they don't want to give it up for something else. They've progressed as far as they want and got what they wanted, now they want to conserve it.
Then you throw in perceptions, both of yourself and how you see others. For simplicity's sake, lets say that someone who agrees with 100% of the Republican Party platform is full right-wing, and someone who believes in 100% of the Democrat Party platform is full left-wing. To someone on the full right, someone who is only 75% in favor of the Democrat Party is still probably far-left, but to a centrist, they probably only seem left-leaning compared to someone who is 100% in favor of the Democrat Party. How "far" someone is in one direction depends on where you're viewing them from. Same with how they see themselves.
Then you add in the fact that in many nations other than the United States, these terms are completely shifted towards one end of the spectrum or the other, or they're switched entirely, or some people have completely different explanations that aren't country specific for what "left wing" and "right wing" mean to them, such as the further left one is the more authoritarian and statist they are, and the further right someone is, the more individualist and libertarian(small L) they are. And others will see it completely opposite. Far Right in Germany does not mean the same thing as it does in England, or in the United States or in Japan (if they even use those terms).
The terms are naturally confusing from the start since the original meanings that actually made sense, where one sits in the French National Assembly and how much they want the monarchy or revolution, are totally lost at this point, and the rest of us are just trying to apply them to other people, or self apply them, in ways that will never be fully accurate.
TLDR; /u/N7_Astartes's post is a good summary. | [
"Far-right politics are politics further on the right of the left-right spectrum than the standard political right, particularly in terms of extreme nationalism, nativist ideologies, and authoritarian tendencies.\n",
"The left–right political spectrum is a system of classifying political positions, ideologies and... |
do canadians have the same rights and freedoms as americans? | The US and Canada have different legal systems. While many rights and freedoms overlap between both countries you should never apply any legal advice regarding the US into the Canadian system. | [
"Similarly, Justice Hall argues that the \"Canadian Bill of Rights\" can only be fulfilled if it has the effect repudiating \"discrimination in every law of Canada by reason of race, national origin, colour, religion or sex in respect of the human rights and fundamental freedoms set out in s. 1 in whatever way that... |
Books on Finland During the Cold War | You could look at *Urho Kekkonen: A Statesman for Peace* edited by Keijo Korhonen, written in 1975.
The book focuses on the long-term president of Finland, Urho Kekkonen, and his policies with respect to foreign relations with the Soviet Union and with Western Europe. It includes contributions from Finnish, American and other international scholars. Since it was written in 1975, it is written in the context of an ongoing Cold War. So, it lacks information that has become available since the opening of the Soviet archives in the last 25 years. Also, it can't discuss the last 10 years of the Kekkonen presidency (until 1986), which were still to come when the book was published.
With all those caveats, I think the book is highly relevant to the question of Finlandization. | [
"Hautamäki's book brings forth details and information about the last Finnish wars, which were not discussed in the Finnish main media - nor elsewhere - during the Cold War period, due to the sensitive and friendly Finnish-Soviet relations, in particular.\n",
"Ohto Manninen has focused foremost on second world wa... |
what is that warm, fuzzy feeling in your stomach when you fall in love with someone? | That fuzzy feeling is actually a baby that starts to grow, if u love each other then it continues to grow until it comes out but if things don't work out then it shrinks back to inexistence | [
"Scientific study on the topic of lovesickness has found that those in love experience a kind of high similar to that caused by illicit drugs such as cocaine. In the brain, certain neurotransmitters — phenethylamine, dopamine, norepinephrine and oxytocin — elicit the feeling of high from \"love\" or \"falling in lo... |
Are there precious resources (ie gold, copper, titanium) on the moon? Would it be possible to mine them? | The moon actually has a fairly high abundance of titanium compared to most bodies in the solar system--so far as we're aware--and in general you should expect to be able to find all metals on the moon in rates comparable to Earth. It's nonmetals like carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus--all necessary to life--that are hard to come by (oxygen is present in water ice and in silicate and other oxide minerals). | [
"Prospecting operations will be aimed at locating concentrations of extractable lunar gems and minerals. High grade titanium, rare-earth metals and helium-3 (a potential fusion reactor fuel) are all known to exist on the Moon. Low cost flight of concentrated ores to the Earth is feasible using Solar Powered, electr... |
Why were there no medieval Eropean cities with a population as a high as first century Rome? | Because a city so large needed a massive amount of land and the centralization of power to control what happens on that land to feed it. The *annona* was, among other things, the tax with which the Roman empire fed the city of Rome. There was a Prefect of the Annona whose sole job was to oversee the supply of grain to the city (and later, another Prefect of the Annona was established for Constantinople).
Because of the way it was conquered by Julius Caesar, and passed down to Augustus, the Province of Egypt had the odd position of being the personal possession of the Emperor, as opposed to a province in the way we would recognize it. Egypt, thanks to the Nile and its flooding, was one of, if not *the* greatest breadbaskets of the Roman Empire, and large portions of the grain grown in Egypt were shipped to Rome, where the Prefect of the Annona was in charge of getting it made into bread and handed out to the people of Rome. Any person who was a Roman Citizen in the city of Rome was allotted a certain amount of bread, though often if a citizen didn't need it, they would sell their allotment of bread to poor non-citizens. This is part of what Juvenal was mocking when he coined the term "bread and circuses" from this passage: " for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses".
EDIT: I'm rereading the paper I wrote on this in undergrad, and realized something I said above wasn't quite right- in the 1st Century AD, when OP was asking about, it was given out as grain, and only the rich could afford to bake it into bread. The poor ate it as oatmeal. In the 3rd century, Septimius Severus and Aurelian added olive oil and wine to the *frumentatio*, and Aurelian started giving the grain out prebaked into bread, which required the construction of massive bakeries in Ostia, Rome's port. It was important enough that to ensure things went smoothly, various emperors offered tax breaks and citizenship to the people involved in the process, the ships captains who transported it and the millers and bakers in Ostia.
**Sources:**
Garnsey, Peter. *Cities, Peasants and Food in Classical Antiquity*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Garnsey, Peter. *Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Sirks, Boudewijn. *Food for Rome*. Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1991.
Bowman, Alan and Andrew Wilson. “Quantifying the Roman Economy: Integration, Growth, Decline?” in *Quantifying the Roman Economy*, edited by Alan Bowman and Andrew Wilson, 3-84. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. | [
"At its peak, after the Antonine Plague of the 160s CE, it had a population of about 60–70 million and a population density of about 16 people per square kilometer. In contrast to the European societies of the classical and medieval periods, Rome had unusually high urbanization rates. During the 2nd century CE, the... |
why does your leg jerk when you hit the ligament below the knee? | I'm not a native speaker but I'm pretty sure I know what your question is.
& #x200B;
The answer is kinda simple: It's supposed to tense the leg when falling/jumping on the ground to catch the bodies weight. The "shock" that goes through your body from landing would trigger this mechanism and tense (?) the leg to catch your fall.
& #x200B;
If this wasn't the case, not only would you fall over more often, even when it's just a 1 or 2 meter drop, but you would also hurt your knee and ankles a lot more (yes theres a similiar reflex for your ankles)
& #x200B;
If you want more information on how this works biologically, I suggest you look it up on your own, it's been a while since my last biology lesson. | [
"Because the medial collateral ligament resists widening of the inside of the knee joint, the ligament is usually injured when the outside of the knee joint is struck. This force causes the outside of the knee to buckle, and the inside to widen. When the MCL is stretched too far, it is susceptible to tearing and in... |
how cameras work. how do they capture an image and print it? | Imagine if you were holding a piece of paper with a bunch of glue. Now imagine if someone put glitter in front of a fan, the paper would catch the glitter and you'd have a picture.
Now imagine if your sister stood in between the fan with a metal door she could open. You tell her to open it for 1 second only, and you'll catch what you want to see on your glue paper. In this example, your sister is kind of like a camera and the glue paper is your camera's really sensitive image sensor.
____
Bonus:
Imagine if your glitter fan was making a rainbow of colors. You tell your sister to open it for 10 seconds instead of 1 second, and you get more glitter and your picture is brighter, fine.
But if your dog runs through the blue half of the rainbow during those 10 seconds, he'll mess up and blur the glitter. Now the blue part of your rainbow picture is blurry.
In real life, someone probably had to take the picture for a "long time" e.g. 1/2 of a second instead of 1/100 of a second, and something moved fast enough during this time, enough to blur. The people in the front stood still for the whole 1/2 second and are fine. | [
"Photographers control the camera and lens to \"expose\" the light recording material to the required amount of light to form a \"latent image\" (on plate or film) or RAW file (in digital cameras) which, after appropriate processing, is converted to a usable image. Digital cameras use an electronic image sensor bas... |
why don't gas pumps themselves accept cash? | Because if they did accept cash, they would need to be stocked with cash to dispense change and also have added security features to protect that cash and any cash you add to it. They would also need to hire someone to come and restock and collect the cash. No, they can not just get the clerk at the station to do it because you don't want them skimming off the top. | [
"In states such as Oregon and New Jersey, where pumping your own gas is outlawed, automated cash handling has played an important role as a crime deterrent and economical sound system. Gas attendants now do not have to worry about being burglarized. With automated cash systems in place at these gas stations, everyt... |
Were the founding fathers radicals? | The most radical of the generally-recognized “founding fathers” was Thomas Paine—his views on politics and religion, and his bitterness at what he felt was betrayal by other revolutionaries, eventually made him an outcast in American society.
Paine also took an active part in the French Revolution—but by French standards he was only moderately radical, and his opposition to the more-extreme Montagnards almost cost him his life. So using Paine as a yardstick, the American revolutionaries weren’t terribly radical even for the time. | [
"The \"Founding Fathers\" were strong advocates of republican values, especially Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.\n",
"These writers, and others such as the Abbé Sieyès, one of the main authors of t... |
how do gas stations make money, or account for the volatility when oil prices are falling? do they "buy" the gas when the fuel trucks refill the station or are their profits calculated at a spot price each day based on how much gas they sell? | Just for clarity—gas stations make minimal profits of actually selling gas. That’s not the business they are in. Yup, sounds odd, but gas stations aren’t really in the gas business
Gas stations make almost all of their profit in their convenience store—not gas! Cigarettes are particularly major for their profits.
The gas just gets customers to go into their convenience store is all. They make their money because their margins in the store are big and they sell lots of cigarettes and alcohol. | [
"Individual gas stations in the United States have little if any control over gasoline prices. The wholesale price of gasoline is determined according to area by oil companies which supply the gasoline, and their prices are largely determined by the world markets for oil. Individual gas stations are unlikely to sel... |
what’s the difference between a stratocaster and a les paul. | A big **difference between** the **Stratocaster** and the **Les Paul** is their scale length—the length of the strings measured from the nut to the bridge. ... The **Stratocaster's** longer scale results **in a** brighter, more chiming sound whereas the LP's shorter scale is to an extent responsible for its rounder, warmer sound.
First answer on Google.
Further explanation from me would be Stratocaster single coil pickups and less wood lending to a brighter and crisper tone, Les Paul having much more wood, heavier construction and humbuckers lending themselves to a thicker, fuller tone with less buzz and crackling. The amount of wood used in the construction changes the dynamics of the instrument, less so with a bolt on neck than a neck through or set neck but it does have an effect on tone the less. | [
"The Fender Stratocaster is a model of electric guitar designed from 1952 into 1954 by Leo Fender, Bill Carson, George Fullerton, and completed by Freddie Tavares. The Fender Musical Instruments Corporation has continuously manufactured the Stratocaster from 1954 to the present. It is a double-cutaway guitar, with ... |
why is it that rap disputes are/were far more common, and typically more violent than other genres of music? | Rap and Hip-Hop grew out of gang culture: dance and rap battles were a way for gangs to solve minor disputes without resorting to violence.
This meant that many early Rap and Hip-Hop stars came out of gang culture; and when their rap battles grew heated and serious; they did what they had before: turned to violence. Meanwhile, most other music genres didn't (and don't) have the same association with social groups that solve their problems with violence, and so conflicts between them are solved in different ways. | [
"A controversial issue hotly debated in rap/hip-hop culture throughout its history is the use of violence and aggression as a feature of the hardcore styles of its music. But its social significance can't be removed from the factors it came from that births this debate. The prevalence of misogyny, sexism, and sexua... |
How do astronomers turn observations of a celestial object (eg. Halley's comet) into solid information about its position, size, orbit, etc, and be able to predict it's behaviour in the future? | Wow this a huge question so i'll try to keep my answer short and simple:
The position of bodies on the solar system are determined using either radar (for big bodies) or the parallax method for smaller ones:
_URL_0_
The orbit is extremely notorious to calculate, you need to fit the position points of the comet in a model and try to simulate the orbit that fit best, with enough points only one will.
_URL_1_
The size is also difficult to obtain, you can use radar or a large number of observations from different locations on earth to try to constraint the size. An easy case is binary bodies, where their speed of rotation will inform you on their mass, so if you know it density you can get an approximation about its size.
| [
"In order to determine the unknown orbit of a body, some observations of its motion with time are required. In early modern astronomy, the only available observational data for celestial objects were the right ascension and declination, obtained by observing the body as it moved in its observation arc, relative to ... |
What causes the two big population spikes in China's population pyramid? | I believe the first "spike" was due to (a) the great leap forward in the early 1960s which killed a lot of people, and (b) decreased birth rates starting around 1970 due to a two-child policy and then one-child policy. Basically, starting in the mid 1960s, birth rates dropped. Consider also decreases in mortality, especially [infant mortality](_URL_0_), in the 1960s and 1970s, which tends to shift the spike later.
The second is an "echo" of the first spike. There were more young adults entering breeding age around 1990 compared to 1980 or 2000, due to the earlier spike.
| [
"We can see how population pyramids change shape according to the country’s specific stage by using the demographic transition model (DTM). By looking at Taiwan’s population pyramid, the country is in stage 4 of the DTM and its shape contracts but it will soon enter stage 5. In stage 5 of the DTM, death rate gradua... |
why aren't red pandas and other cute/exotic animals bred as pets? | Not every cute animal would make a good pet, relatively few species out there can thrive while domesticated like cats, dogs, etc.
Many will never be tame, or may need a lot of space to be happy, or cannot be house trained, etc. You can try to breed pet-like qualities, but it won't necessarily be successful. Besides, if you are trying to save a endangered species, is breeding out all their wild qualities really saving them? Certainly we aren't okay with wolves dying out just because we have domesticated dogs. | [
"Due to CITES, this zoo harvest has decreased substantially in recent years, but poaching continues, and red pandas are often sold to private collectors at exorbitant prices. In some parts of Nepal and India, red pandas are kept as pets.\n",
"Red pandas are excellent climbers, and forage largely in trees. They ea... |
Kilogram or Newton? | Because if you make the distinction between mass and weight while on the Earth, you're being a dick. | [
"It has long been an objective in metrology to define the kilogram in terms of a fundamental constant, in the same way that the metre is now defined in terms of the speed of light. The 21st General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM, 1999) placed these efforts on an official footing, and recommended \"that na... |
how do drag racers get grip at the beginning of a race by spinning tires? | They burn out to heat up their tires and soften the rubber to make it more sticky. When they race they carefully control the throttle and clutch so that they are right at the edge of breaking their tires loose into a burnout but not quite. If they accidentally do burn out during a race they will lose unless their competitor makes a worse mistake | [
"Drag racing is a point-to-point race that forces a player to use a manual transmission. Steering in this mode is simplified to simply allow for lane changes, while the game handles the steering along the lanes, and the player focuses more on maintaining an optimum speed for the car. The Nitrous Oxide meter is enla... |
how come being outside in 90 degree weather is uncomfortable, but 90 degree water is amazing...65 degree weather is very comfortable, but 65 degree water is awful? | The thing is, your body doesn't really measure temperature - it measures a little something known as heat flux.
Heat flux is pretty much the rate at which heat enters or leaves your body. For us, the most comfortable state is when we have a little bit of heat leaving our body.
In all of these cases, heat is moving from the body to the surrounding environment, since your body is always warmer, but the important part here is the rate. Different materials touching have different willingness to transfer heat to each other, as it turns out, water transfers heat easier than air does. The farther the temperatures between the two materials is, the faster the heat transfer will occur as well.
So, 90 degree air is uncomfortable because your body wants to move more heat from your body to the surrounding environment, but water, which conducts heat better, will transfer the heat from your body to it much faster, making it a comfortable feeling.
The opposite is true. 65 degree air pulls quite a bit of heat from you, but still it is within normal comfortable range. Water on the other hand will pull much more heat from you, making it cold. | [
"In addition to long distances and elevation, the temperature can play a major factor. At the start in Badwater, temperatures can routinely be as high as degrees, but the temperature quickly drops at higher altitudes. Below freezing temperatures can be encountered near the Portal at night, making temperature swings... |
Would matter-antimatter annihilation be any different than nuclear explosion? | The annihilation reaction is much "cleaner" as all the reactants form photons with the same energy. There would be a large flash of almost monochromatic gamma radiation. A nuclear reaction leaves free neutrons and radioactive nuclei flying around. The dust, clouds, etc would depend on the environment that the bomb was detonated in. | [
"The paramount advantage of such a theoretical weapon is that antimatter and matter collisions result in the entire sum of their mass energy equivalent being released as energy, which is at least an order of magnitude greater than the energy release of the most efficient fusion weapons (100% vs 7-10%). Annihilation... |
Why is the French Revolution (1789) is considered much more important than English Revolution (1649)? | There are a number of contributing factors to this disparity. First and foremost is the wider global impact of the English Revolution, or rather the lack thereof. The French Revolution is particularly unique among revolutions(other than the Russian Revolution, but I won't get into that) in that the ideas of it spread throughout all of europe, and thus the world. When looking at a single point to mark the beginning of the modern world, the revolutionary period (marked as 1789-1815) is one of the most important transitionary periods(at least in terms of the society, modern tech seems to have made another change on that scale...). Looking at areas where you wouldn't expect much rest-of-world impact, such as Latin America, we can see the direct impact of the French revolution (more on that later). Secondly it's about the final state of these periods. When everything settled out, Parliament being the dominant power within England had been settled, but it had been the de facto case for decades before that - hence why the parliament was able to challenge the king successfully in the first place. In France on the other hand, it was something of a shock that something like this could have taken place, one of the best analogies I've ever heard for grasping this is "Imagine if the modern United States were overthrown by Maoists [communists]", France under the bourbon's had been one of the most autocratic governments in Europe, and the legacy of the Sun King made France the most important nation in European politics, so when France of all places was overthrown by an enormous burgher revolt it was quite shocking to everyone. Although there was a king again at the end of the period, it didn't last and France ended up settling out as a Republic so it's not accurate to say that it ultimately failed to change (though if you don't count the whole period it's understandable that you'd believe that). The final major factor involved is the nature of the revolution. In England it was largely a question of religion and of who has authority, it was never a question of what form society should take. In France on the other hand, as things spiraled out of control and more heads started being taken during the terror, the whole structure of the society began to be under question - the peak of this being all that silliness around changing the calendar to 'Thermidorian'. This meant that the French revolution had a much broader range of thought, and the notions of freedom would later go on to infect everywhere that napoleons troops went as he conquered most of Europe(the Napoleonic ideas ended up being the largest influence on Sardinia-Piedmont when it started marching to unite Italy, and for that alone it would be important).
1) Global Impact:
The list of places impacted by the French Revolution is too long to reasonably mention if it's explained (which I intend to do). The list ranges from the USA - the Louisiana Purchase would never have happened without it. To Latin America(something of a pet focus of mine) where the independence of the entire region, from Mexico to Argentina happened directly as a result of the Revolution. The important thing to understand about the independence revolutions of the various latin american states is that they were fundamentally run by local Creole elites, quite different from other independence movements. The revolutions all had the same casus belli, the restoration of the 'Desired One' which was the heir to the King of Spain that had been deposed by Napoleon. Here we see the link. Napoleon deposing the king of spain and putting his step-brother Joseph on the throne directly led to the independence of Latin America. This is just one of the many Global reasons why the French Revolution is much more important than the English one.
The next two are closely linked so I'll actually discuss them as one.
2) Long-term results:
3) Intellectual Nature:
In the long run, France settled out as a republic, as I said before, whereas we see that England still has a monarchy, power reduced though it might be. The Ideas of the French Revolution and the societal changes, particularly to the idea of war, are unmatched in any other revolution of history(Except maybe the Russian Revolution, but this is something that is under much discussion these days in the post-Soviet world). The change in armies from a small professional group to an entire society at arms is crucial to understand the gap between pre-modern warfare and early modern warfare. In addition to this, the soldiers of Napoleon's armies mingled with people all across europe as he marched around taking stuff, which spread the ideas of the revolution which were FAR from unified. Everything from Liberal Democracy to Communism that we see in the modern world has some roots in the French Revolution, and it was spread all over the place as a result of it, so the long term impact is undeniable. It's quite possible, though this part is debatable, that Unified Germany was strongly impacted by the experience of the Napoleonic Wars, which are linked intrinsically with the revolution by most historians - the process of divide and conquer that allowed Napoleon to steamroll the Rhine made it a much easier to argue that Germany should become one state with one policy to defend against 'the vile french'.
In conclusion, the English revolution ended merely having codified the de facto laws that existed before, whereas the French revolution was a fundamental change to the way France worked. In addition to this, the scope was much larger, with the French revolution impacting places all across the globe in both the short and long terms. Finally, the nature of the Revolution was much more intellectual and helped give birth to many modern ideologies and setting the roots in place to the others.
This was just a basic overview of the reasons, but I hope it answered your question satisfactorily.
Some of my Sources: (I was mostly drawing from memory and don't have specific page numbers for my facts without tracking down each book again)
Small unprofessional note: WHY ARE ALL FRENCH REVOLUTION BOOKS SO BORINGLY NAMED????
Connolly, S. (2003). The French Revolution. Chicago, Ill.: Heinemann Library
A good timeline orientation with some pleasant asides. Rather standard as I recall, but fairly good for further reading nonetheless
Kates, G. (1998). The French Revolution : recent debates and new controversies. London: Routledge.
I think there's a newer version of this but I can't vouch for anything about it. I'd also tend to read this one last as it's at times a bit preachy but gives an important unusual perspective to some of the discussions that few other books give.
Lefebvre, G. (2001). The French Revolution: from its origins to 1793. London: Routledge.
I'd recommend this alongside others since it's originally a French Source, though it introduces a few associated biases, it still offers some good perspective.
Melton, J. Van Horn. (2001). The rise of the public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This book was one of the first books I had to read for a class in undergrad, the chapter on the rise of the public in France is CRITICAL to my own understanding of the societal changes associated with France during this period.
There's one other book that's on the tip of my tongue as it were and I'll add it here once I've found it...
EDIT: Here it is: (if i recall correctly, which it's possible that I don't) this book provides some nice details on how the Latin American revolutions were different, including the impact of the French Revolution on it, which has a special place in my heart.
Graham, R. Independence in Latin America : CONTRASTS AND COMPARISONS. THIRD edition. | [
"The causes of the French Revolution are complex and are still debated among historians. Following the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary War, the French government was deeply in debt. It attempted to restore its financial status through unpopular taxation schemes, which were heavily regressive. Leadin... |
Why aren't small invasive species collapsing ecosystems? | They do.
For some reason invasion of tiny unmentionnables is just not that sexy a topic in journalism and it usually slides under the radar.
Yet there are huge problems with (for instance) [the introduction of earthworms to northeast N America](_URL_1_), or [the uncontrolled expansion of the Mountain Pine Beetle](_URL_0_) to name a few. | [
"Invasive species are a worldwide epidemic threatening ecosystems and costing billions of dollars to control. The reason these invasive species thrive in these locations is due to no predators to hunt them. With no predators, they are able to grow in population quickly but they are taking up too many of the resourc... |
Which civilization in the ancient (latest being Early Middle Ages) world held the highest literacy rate? Were there any authors who weren't scholars in that civilization? | > a stone tablet that had a joke
> gossip-type documents
You might be interested in [graffiti from Pompeii](_URL_0_). Warning, a lot of this is explicit and NSFW!
* *Theophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog*
* *Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity*
* *Restituta, take off your tunic, please, and show us your hairy privates*
* *Lovers are like bees in that they live a honeyed life*
* *I screwed the barmaid*
* *If anyone does not believe in Venus, they should gaze at my girlfriend*
* *Secundus likes to screw boys.*
* *I screwed a lot of girls here.*
* *To the one defecating here. Beware of the curse. If you look down on this curse, may you have an angry Jupiter for an enemy.*
* *Gaius Valerius Venustus, soldier of the 1st praetorian cohort, in the century of Rufus, screwer of women*
* *We have wet the bed, host. I confess we have done wrong. If you want to know why, there was no chamber pot*
| [
"Literacy emerged with the development of numeracy and computational devices as early as 8000 BCE. Script developed independently at least five times in human history Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus civilization, lowland Mesoamerica, and China.\n",
"But the availability of a technology of literacy to a society is n... |
what is the difference between the different types of antidepressants? (ssri, snri, tca, etc.) | Finally something psychology based that I can answer!
Okay, I don't know how much you know, so I'm going to explain everything that I need to. Here goes:
The biological theory of psychology states that mental illness is caused by imbalances in chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters. In most cases of depression, there is a deficiency of serotonin and/or norepinephrine. Serotonin is a monoamine neurotransmitter that regulates happiness and good moods. Norepinephrine (also called noradrenaline) is a neurotransmitter that regulates the body's levels of alertness, awakeness, vigilance, anxiety, and the fight or flight response.
There are four basic types of antidepressants. First generation antidepressants, tricyclic antidepressants, second generation antidepressants, and third generation antidepressants.
* **First Generation**, also known as MAOIs inhibit a family of enzymes called monoamine oxidase in the brain/body which causes serotonin levels to decrease. This family of enzymes also serves to break down tyramine in the liver. If tyramine levels are too high, they can lead to elevated blood pressure, so people who take them need a restricted diet. They also react with a lot of different medications. Examples include Nardil and Parnate.
* **Tricyclics (TCAs)** have a three ring portion of their molecular structure (hence the name). They slow down serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake. They're essentially early SNRIs, but they have a bunch of cardiovascular side effects and a really high potential for accidental overdose that make them undesirable for many patients. Examples include Elavil, Pamelor, and Tofranil.
* **Second generation antidepressants** are the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (or SSRIs). These slow the reuptake of serotonin from its receptor at the synapse. These don't have as many side effects as the ones that came before them, but the side effects that they can have are fairly undesirable, including decreased sex drive, agitation, nausea, and increased risk of seizures. They also take at least 4 weeks to take effect. Some examples are Prozac, Celexa, Lexapro, Paxil, and Zoloft.
* **Third generation antidepressants** consist of Serotonin-Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitors (SNRIs) and Norepinephrine Reuptake Inhibitors (NRIs/NERIs). These do the same as SSRIs, but with either just Norepinephrine or both Serotonin and Norepinephrine. These also have similar side effects to SSRIs. Some examples include Cymbalta, Effexor, and Pristiq.
Edit: I fixed my mistake | [
"SNRIs, along with SSRIs and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (NRIs), are second-generation antidepressants. Over the past two decades, second-generation antidepressants have gradually replaced first-generation antidepressants, such as tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) and monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), as ... |
My grandfather was a German soldier in WWII and I found this map in his old Atlas. | The retreat from Warsaw that's plotted on the map corresponds in time and places to the so called "wandering cauldron of Kielce" of parts of the 342 Infantry Division - more specifically the XXIVth Panzerkorps. "Cauldron battle" is the German term for an encirclement battle - the troops were encircled by the Soviet troops and fought themselves free along Petrikau, Shiraz, Kalisch and Lissa on to Glogau in Germany. These places are all marked on the map in a dashed line, most likely to mark a retreat (opposed to the straight line marking the march to the front to Warschau/Warsaw).
While I haven't been able to pinpoint any more specific units your grandfather may have fought in, I hope this might serve as a first pointer to someone more versed in these matters than me. It's late here and I need to go to bed, but I'll have another look at it tomorrow and try to find out about these battles around Warsaw to further narrow down which unit your grandfather may have belonged to.
Edit: Had another quick glance at the map - the unit your grandpa was in seems to have ended the war near the town of Budweis/Budějovice. (From the location on the map, even though it is not mapped itself. But if you'd draw a triangle between Budweis, Prague and Pilsen, and put it on the map from your grandfather, you'd get approximately the same area that he plotted). The XXIVth Panzerkorps ended the war in this area and was dissolved there, so it seems very likely that your grandfather volunteered/got drafted, trained in Germany and sent to Warsaw where he joined the XXIVth Panzerkorps, fought in the retreating battles of the Eastern front and then saw the end of the war in the Czech Republic. | [
"Ih his memoir of World War I, A S Bullock recalls the night of 24 October 1918 when he was among the reserves helping the Gloucestershire Regiment in a final push against the Germans at Vendegies-sur-Écaillon. He notes that although 'maps were scarce', he managed not only to obtain one but to retain it after the w... |
[Mathematics] Is there a faster way to multiply (large) numbers? | There's two operations in here: multiplication and addition. Addition is considered cheap in that the trivial algorithm runs in linear time, which is optimal. So I won't consider the number of additions needed in what follows (there'll be some linear term).
Your algorithm is the standard long multiplication algorithm, and runs in O(n^(2)) time (n is the number of digits in each number). The exponent (2) can be improved by swapping to a recursive algorithm like follows: if your two numbers are am+b and cm+d (ie. write the numbers as 'two-digit' numbers in base m), then you compute:
1. A = ac
2. C = bd
3. D = (a+b)(c+d)
4. Your result is Am^2 + (D - C - A)m + C
For appropriate choices of m (ie. m ~ 2^(n/2)), this divides an n-digit by n-digit multiplication into 3 (n/2)-digit by (n/2)-digit multiplications, giving a recurrence relation F(n) = 3F(n/2) + O(n), which has bound F(n) = O(n^(log_2{3})). Better recursive algorithms improve this exponent further, but note that for small numbers, the recursive overhead makes all such algorithms slower than the algorithm you gave -- implementations will generally cut off at some number of digits and just do the multiplication your way (this is a standard practice in implementing recursive algorithms).
More complex algorithms exist as well to bring it down to the approximately linearithmic range. However, again due to overhead and the simplicity of the "more obvious" (but asymptotically slower) algorithms, these algorithms are not actual improvements until the numbers are enormous.
Work from this year (see [here](_URL_0_)) improves this to O(n log n) which is conjectured to be optimal for multiplication (the only provable lower bound is the trivial one of Omega(n)).
Edit: Corrected an error pointed out by /u/mfb- | [
"However, if a fast multiplication algorithm is used, one may modify the Euclidean algorithm for improving the complexity, but the computation of a greatest common divisor becomes slower than the multiplication. More precisely, if the multiplication of two integers of bits takes a time of , then the fastest known a... |
why do our toes taper down in size? | The big toe is a left over from our days as apes. Their feet were shaped more like our modern hands and the big toe functioned like a thumb, allowing us to grip onto branchs to avoid falling. [Human vs Chimp foot](_URL_0_)
Although good in trees, this wasn’t useful when our ancestors switched to standing and walking on two feet. Thus our feet changed shape to reflect their new role, and our toes reduced to what they are today. | [
"In mammals, the growth rate of nails is related to the length of the terminal phalanges (outermost finger bones). Thus, in humans, the nail of the index finger grows faster than that of the little finger; and fingernails grow up to four times faster than toenails.\n",
"The most common digit to become ingrown is ... |
since animals do not brush their teeth how do they prevent cavities? how do they get fluoride for their teeth enamel? | -They don't prevent cavities. (more later)
-Fluoride exists in nature, and most water sources to some degree or another, but isn't _necessary_ for enamel formation it's just helpful to improve its toughness. So the fluoride question is sort of "where do bears buy styling conditioner for their fur?" Human's use of fluoride is a luxury, not a necessity. It improves our health and so extends our lives, but it's not a necessity.
Back to the cavities...
Some animals like rats and beavers just have teeth and tusks that just keep growing. As the exposed part wears away the base of the tooth just gets longer and more tooth comes out.
Some animals like sharks shed old teeth and replace them with new teeth.
Some animals like birds and turtles don't have teeth, but have beaks, which, like finger nails and claws, just keep growing and have to be worn down like the rat teeth.
Many animals simply don't live long enough for tooth decay to be a problem.
Many more, like the big cats, lose their teeth to age and damage and decay and then starve.
Humans development of technology, particularly the invention of fire and so cooking, has had a remarkable effect on our dental circumstances. Freed from the all-day chore of chewing hard and raw stuff and so our teeth and jaws got smaller and our food choices expanded immensely.
We then invented agriculture and selective breeding of crops and medicine and whatnot.
We now put a remarkable number of things in our mouths, many of which are full of sugars and starches and acids that would have sickened or killed our ancestors. This not only causes us to host particularly aggressive bacteria, but those bacteria get the chance to build protective coverings of plaque that let them stay in place and do extra harm.
Lemonade is, for example, one of the most tooth-damaging things you can put in your mouth.
But we also get to constantly replenish the supply of tooth harming stuff because we can snack all day, constantly adding just a little more acid and a little more bacteria food.
That's not to say the past was "better". The ancient Egyptians showed us that they rarely had tooth decay. This sounds great, but it's only half the story.
For every cavity they were spared, they wore away a similar amount of tooth because the sand and grit in their foods mechanically polished away their teeth. The sand also basically gave them all a kind of lung disease that we now reserve for coal miners as inhaling silica dust all day sucks.
So in terms of the various dental issues, we kind of just traded ailments around. More cavities, but fewer abscesses and fewer food-borne illnesses, and more interesting an varied food choices and so improved nutrition overall.
TL;DR? The reason you "never look a gift horse in the mouth" is because if you look in an old horse's mouth it's a disgusting mess of cavities and receding gums (so for eons it's been considered rude to look for the flaws in a gift so obviously). Animal mouths can get disgusting just like people's, the reasons simply vary by species and location. | [
"Toothpaste (dentifrice) with fluoride is an important tool to readily use when tooth brushing. The fluoride in the dentifrice is an important protective factor against caries, and an important supplement needed to remineralize already affected enamel. However, in terms of preventing gum disease, the use of toothpa... |
if real estate in downtown toronto, (specifically toronto, not the gta in general), is so overvalued, why does the population continue to grow at a relatively consistent pace? | "Overvalued" isn't really a functional concept. In practice, it's just used when something is more expensive than someone wants it to be.
The real estate in any given place is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. If the prices are high, it means people are paying a lot of money for it, so that's what it's worth. If the population is growing and the prices are high, it probably means that the area is desirable enough that wealthy people from other places are moving in. | [
"In March 2017, the cost of owning a home in the greater Toronto area had grown 33% in just one year's time, with 19% of that growth occurring in just the two most recent months. Even the less desirable, semi-detached homes have surpassed $1 million in value. Suburbs have seen large price increases as well. Homes t... |
why is buying from small businesses better? | It's not, necessarily. There are both advantages and disadvantages to buying from a small or large business.
Small businesses make up the bulk of businesses, pretty much everywhere. Money that you spend at a small business is much more likely to stay in the community. I.e., if you buy product X from a small, local retailer, then the profit from that sale goes into the small business owner's pocket; if you buy it from Walmart, then the profit goes into the corporation's pocket. The small business owner is more likely to spend their profit locally, in their own community (or on their own business) than would Walmart, which might spend that profit to open a new store a thousand miles away. So buying from small businesses tends to boost the local economy more.
However, small businesses usually have higher costs. They don't have the economy of scale to buy in bulk like a Walmart or Target or Barnes & Noble or Kroger does, so they're paying higher wholesale prices for their goods and that gets passed along as higher retail prices to you, the consumer. That means your dollar typically doesn't go as far when you're buying from a small business as it would when you're buying from a big retail chain. If you show at big retail chains, you can get more goods for the same amount of money, which is (potentially) good for you and potentially good for the _overall_ economy, because your dollars are being "invested" (i.e. spent) more widely in more supply chains.
The reality is that the economy relies on a mix of small and large businesses. | [
"BULLET::::10. Buy what you want, not what someone wants you to buy: A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term. A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based not on a national sales plan but on their own interests a... |
How many Decibels can kill a human? | This was covered back in 2001 by [The Straight Dope](_URL_0_).
tl;dr - "German physicist Jürgen Altmann, who has written about the physiological effects of high-intensity sound, tells me the threshold for suffocation or embolism following lung rupture is 2.6 to 11 times atmospheric pressure, depending on pulse duration."
Or around 200 decibels to cause lung rupture and presumably embolism due to air blast. The typical [stun grenade](_URL_1_) stays under these levels, at around 160 to 180 decibels.
And no, I don't know what you would need to shatter, melt, or otherwise cause some immediate and theatrical 'instakill' of the human body. I'll leave that to Hollywood.
Let me know if you need additional information. | [
"The official number of recorded deaths is given as 5,573, representing nearly 3% of the area's inhabitants, with a further 1,583 injured. Other estimates of the death toll are in the range 4,000 to 6,000.\n",
"An official with the ministry also confirmed the figure yesterday [Nov. 10, 2006], but later said that ... |
what does this german sign mean? | > **NATO military bridge classification signs**. Posted near bridges and viaducts and indicates the safe load-carrying capacity of the bridge for military vehicles.
[source](_URL_0_)
[See also](_URL_1_)
To ELY5:
It means that tanks and trucks that are heavier than that number can't cross the bridge or else the bridge might fall down. | [
"Although the sign might initially appear to be in German and uses an approximation of German grammar, it is composed largely of words that are either near-homonyms of English words or (in the cases of the longer words) actual English words that are rendered in a faux-German spelling. As such, the sign is generally... |
What determines whether the country uses its indigenous language as the main language or a foreign language as the main language? | The Finns always remained in Finland, even when they were under Russian occupation. Similarly when the Swedes owned the land the language never "died out" as such, as it was still spoken by the majority of people - Swedish became Finland's second language however, as the nobility spoke it.
On the other hand, the Americas saw huge swathes of native people dying due to disease and/or conquest, and colonialism took root. The modern nations are mostly based on the colonies that founded them, and so the languages spoken by the colonists have become the main ones, in almost all countries except Paraguay (where Guaraní is still the most spoken language).
The main difference is the fact that Finland was never a colonial nation, that is, it was always in Europe and therefore was never exposed to the difficulties nations that were not European (e.g. Native American peoples) had. Africa is an interesting thing to think about here - although it was colonised to a similar extent to the new world, the native languages remained. People did not die from diseases in the same way that they did across the Atlantic, as traders would already have brought the diseases millennia ago. | [
"BULLET::::- Internationalization: the adoption of a non-indigenous language as a means of wider communication, as an official language or in a particular domain, such as the use of English in India, Singapore, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and South Africa.\n",
"Many regions, notably Canada, Australia, Indi... |
How bloody was the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands? | Considering the revolt of the Netherlands lasted 80 years, this varied greatly by period. Regents such as Mary of Hungary was able to increase the wealth of the region through trade, although she was over-ridden by Charles V who captured and executed leaders of the Ghent revolt to discourage further objections to higher taxation.
Margaret of Parma was a weak regent, which saw the rise of further objections to taxation and the rise of Calvinism. She also saw a power struggle between herself, the clerics, the magnates, the council of state, and Protestants. Her alarming letters, warning of hundreds of thousands of rebels, led to Philip II sending the Duke of Alba at the head of tens of thousands of Spanish troops.
Of course, the reign of the Duke of Alba itself started with the Council of Blood that saw strong repression of rebels, both Catholic and Protestant. Most importantly, those executed include Count of Egmont and Philip de Montmorency, both heroes of Philip II's army. Instead of pacifying the region, this fortified the belief of local nobility that their king was out for blood and revenge. Further, the presence of such a large body of troops led to increased tax and burden to local towns. The Duke of Alba was mostly victorious in battle, but the locals increasingly turned against him.
His replacement, Don Luis de Zuniga y Requesens preferred compromise. He recommended amnesty to all except the most ardent heretics. He led armies to victory in battle. However, when money failed to come from Spain, he was forced to negotiate and worse some of his troops mutinied and sacked towns.
King Philip II's illegitimate brother Don Juan of Austria, fresh off his great victory at Lepanto, was sent to the low countries to be regent, however he died and was replaced by Alessandro Farnese, son of Margaret of Parma. Farnese was able to rally the catholic rulers, mostly in the south, behind him. With local support he was able to win back cities that had been lost: Tournei, Maastricht, Breda, Bruges, Ghent, opened their gates to him rather than risk a protracted and bloody siege. He laid siege to Antwerp and won that city.
Were the Spanish the only ones who tortured and murdered dissenters? Not even close. As an example, Calvinists tortured and murdered Catholics in Brielle. Watergeuzens captured civilians and sold them to Mediterranean slavery.
This is a very big topic that is best answered if you specialize your question to certain periods, groups, or regions.
Lastly, you have to keep in mind that the first half of the conflict saw Spanish troops largely winning field engagements, as they had much higher quality troops. Their main challenge was money and local politics. This results in sackings and mutinies. This is not to say that the other side is innocent, but this impacts portrayal especially in English language historiography.
Edit: if you can read only one paper on this, I highly recommend: G. Parker, "Why Did the Dutch Revolt Last Eighty Years?," Trans. Royal Historical Society, vol. 26, December 1976. It covers the outbreak and development really well, and in good context. | [
"This shocking event stiffened many in the Netherlands, even many Catholics, against the Spanish Habsburg monarchy; and further tarnished Philip's declining reputation. The States General, influenced by the sack, signed the Pacification of Ghent only four days later, unifying the rebellious provinces with the loyal... |
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