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Why did Britain/USA not just colonialize Saudi Arabia? | You've pretty much answered your own question. Invading and controlling countries was not the preferred method ot at least was losing favour. That doesnt mean that some control was entirely off the books (vis a vis Persia and the Brits), but that it wasnt the ideal way of gettings one way. It was clear that a pro-western government could be dealt with via treaties, bribes and business arrangements rather than unpleasant invasions and occupation. The fact that Saudi Arabia has remained western aligned and at least partly benign for 80 years odd is evidence it was a reasonable plan. British expansionism had largely stopped at this time and was indeed receeding.
Additionally the US had never, as OlfactoriusRex suggest, ventured too far into interfering directly in these regions, partly as a matter of policy but also as a matter of practicality. US power projection capabilities at that range were fairly poor until post WW2. Some military bods would know more on that than I. The UK of course was the most expert nation at that sort of thing around this time.
The question is thus not so much why didnt they, but why would they? | [
"The background of the Protectorate of South Arabia is part of an effort of the British Empire to protect the East India Route, the sea route between the Mediterranean Sea and India, in and through the southern coasts of Arabia. Already before the opening of the Suez Canal, industrial Britain with its rapidly expan... |
Have there been Nobel prizes awarded for theories that were later disproven? If so, how does the foundation respond? | Yep, there has been the prize of [Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger](_URL_0_) in 1926.
> The 1926 prize went to Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger, "for his discovery of the Spiroptera carcinoma", a microbial parasite which Fibiger claimed was the cause of cancer. This "finding" was discredited by other scientists shortly thereafter.
| [
"The Nobel Foundation was founded as a private organisation on 29 June 1900 specifically to manage the finances and administration of the Nobel Prizes. It is based on Nobel's last will and testament. At the time Nobel's will led to much specticism and criticism and thus it was not until 26 April 1897 that his will ... |
Which part of China did Han people originate in? | The earliest that "ethnic Chinese" can be placed with certainty is the 13th century BC, when the Shang were writing divination records in what was clearly an ancestral form of the Chinese language. Shang materials have been found over a large part of north China but concentrated around Yinxu in Henan, identified as their last royal capital. We can confidently identify the late Shang as "ethnic Chinese" because their language shows continuity with later forms of Chinese; their material culture shows continuity with Zhou and later cultures; and Zhou and later texts explicitly refer to them as Huaxia.
Earlier cultures in north China, like the Erligang (15th century BC) and Erlitou (19th-15th centuries BC) are ancestral to the Yinxu culture in the material sense, but they lacked writing and therefore we can't be certain whether they spoke Chinese, another language, or a mix of languages (in the better-documented Zhou period, for example, we know that South China and the northern steppe were each home to numerous distinct language families- the same could have been true of early North China). So while many Chinese archaeologists and historians identify these material cultures with the Xia and early Shang and therefore as ethnic Chinese, this is not widely accepted outside of China due to the lack of written evidence produced by the cultures themselves.
In short, we can be very confident that there was a Huaxia ethnicity at least by the 13th century BC, and at least around the middle reaches of the Yellow River, but because of the nature and availability of evidence the further back you go in time, or the further you get from Yinxu, the less certain things become.
- *The Formation of Chinese Civilization: An Archaeological Perspective* by K. C. Chang, Xu Pingfang et al | [
"During the 4th–12th centuries, Han Chinese people from North China's Yellow River delta migrated and settled in the South of China. This gave rise to peoples including the Cantonese themselves, Hakkas and Hoklos, whose ancestors migrated from Henan and Shandong, to areas of southeastern coastal China such as Chaoz... |
Why does orbital velocity decrease with distance from the planet/sun, but velocity around a turntable increases with an increased radius. | It is because the two are not the same.
Your example of a coin on a turntable has constant angular velocity, regardless of distance from the center. In other words, no matter how far away it is, it makes one revolution in the same period of time. This is _forcibly_ imposed on the coin by the friction of the turntable.
If you look at the equation for [centripetal force](_URL_0_), you'll find that for constant angular velocity, centripetal force increases as a function of distance from the center. At some large distance, friction will not be able to apply enough centripetal force - and your coin will slip and be flung off.
In the case of gravity, you can find this is not the case. The inward force [does not increase as a function of distance](_URL_1_) - in fact, it _decreases_ as a square of distance - so it can never maintain the same angular velocity as you change the distance. | [
"However, as a planet grows more massive and its interaction with the disk becomes nonlinear, it may induce eccentric motion of the surrounding disk's gas, which in turn may excite the planet's orbital eccentricity. Low eccentricities are correlated with high multiplicity (number of planets in the system) based on ... |
When in the past did year abbreviations switch over (ex, '90s to 1890s vs 1990s)? | I'm not sure what question you're asking.
The 1890s will always be the "Gay Nineties", as per your link (or [The Mauve Decade](_URL_0_)), just as the 1920s will always be the "Roaring Twenties", and the 1960s will always be the "Swinging Sixties".
However, if you refer to the "nineties/'90s" *now*, most people will assume you mean the 1990s - which don't yet have a "tag" like the 1890s.
What are you trying to learn?
| [
"The first era name to be assigned was , celebrating the political and organizational changes which were to flow from the great of 645. Although the regular practice of proclaiming successive era names was interrupted in the late seventh century, it was permanently re-adopted in 701 during the reign of Emperor Monm... |
since space itself is stretching, does that mean that black holes could form more easily in the distant future? | It actually makes it harder for black holes to form because over time matter becomes more sparsely distributed. However, most black hole dynamics are on stellar and maybe galactic scales, which at this time aren't affected by the expansion of space. | [
"In the Star Trek universe, wormhole theory states that if a section in the fabric of spacetime joins together with another section of spacetime, a direct connection can be made between the two, allowing speedy travel between the two (normally unrelated) spacetime coordinates. Black holes are one such way of stretc... |
how do criminals get away when being interviewed in documentaries on national geographic and such? | The police cannot assume what is on "TV" is true. Neither should you. It could easily be staged or scripted. In order to become evidence, a man or woman would have to testify in court that everything on the video is true. That would make the film makers job very difficult in the future, so you can imagine they aren't running to court to testify. | [
"True crime documentaries have been a growing medium in the last several decades. One of the most influential documentaries in this process was \"The Thin Blue Line\", directed by Errol Morris. This documentary, among others, feature reenactments, although other documentary filmmakers choose not to use them since t... |
how do communication waves travel in space, for example between the rover or apollo and nasa. don't waves need matter to travel? | Not Electro-Magnetic waves. Those can also travel as particles. Back in the day we did, in fact, thought that there must be a medium in space to allow light waves to travel through, called **aether**, but all attempts to detect it failed, because it doesn't exist.
Electromagnetic signals can act as both particles and as waves in different conditions. Numerous tests show that it has properties of both. It's very confusing, but we just have to accept it. | [
"Mechanical and electromagnetic waves may often seem to travel through space; but, while they can carry energy, momentum, and information through matter or empty space, they may do that without transferring any mass. In mathematics and electronics waves are studied as signals. On the other hand, some waves do not a... |
why is usb the standard and not thunderbolt? | USB has been around for over 15 years. Thunderbolt's been around for only a couple. Will Thunderbolt become the standard? Maybe. It's hard to see something replacing USB, though. Maybe it will become the standard for displays (although HDMI is quickly becoming a standard on the PC side for that), or maybe storage devices (although USB 3 is pretty darn good, and eSATA already exists).
But mainly because USB has *just now* **almost** fully replaced everything else--definitely parallel and serial ports, and almost replaced PS/2 connectors entirely--that you probably won't see much movement away from USB in a while, just faster speeds of it. Already, you can't really find any new computer out there with USB 1.1 ports anymore (nor a 10 or 100 Mbps network adapter); they're all either USB 2.0, or mostly USB 2.0 with a few USB 3.0 ports as well (and 1 Gbps network adapters). It won't be long before most systems feature mostly USB 3.0, I'd imagine.
As for why Thunderbolt is faster, it's because it's newer, basically. They likely also use more expensive parts, meaning Thunderbolt costs more than USB does, but these parts can run faster. | [
"Thunderbolt is the brand name of a hardware interface developed by Intel (in collaboration with Apple) that allows the connection of external peripherals to a computer. Thunderbolt 1 and 2 use the same connector as Mini DisplayPort (MDP), whereas Thunderbolt 3 re-uses the USB-C connector from USB. It was initially... |
car engine terms | > What does a (x)liter V(x)engine means?(The x are the numbers, for example 3 liter V8 engine)
The first is the capacity in liters of the cylinders of the engine. More liters = more air/fuel mixture and more power.
The V8 is the layout and number cylinders. The V indicates an engine with half of it's cylinders on either side of the cam shaft in a V shape. Some (usually smaller) engines have all their pistons in a single line instead, these are referred to with an I instead of a V.
> What does horsepower means?
How much work the engine can do. More horsepower means it can do more work in a shorter amount of time. In vehicles this equates to moving the car faster.
> It's the same as break horse power?
Brake horsepower is a measurement of the horsepower ~~after~~ before power is lost to the drive train. Same unit of measurement, specific point of measurement.
> And what does CC means?
Another way of measuring fluid capacity. 1000cc = 1 liter. | [
"Engine: The word engine derives from \"ingenuity\" and originally referred to contrivances that may or may not be physical devices. See Merriam-Webster's definition of engine. A steam engine uses heat to boil water contained in a pressure vessel; the expanding steam drives a piston or a turbine. This principle can... |
Can aquatic mammals get Decompression Sickness (the Bends)? | Human free-divers can do the same.
The problem is different gas pressures in your breathing mix - for a SCUBA diver or someone working in a pressurized caisson, they inhale air at higher-than-atmospheric pressure, which causes the concentration of dissolved nitrogen in their blood to increase. When they move back to normal pressure, the nitrogen in their blood will come back out of solution and form gas bubbles, causing the bends. Problems can be avoided by depressurizing slowly, so the amount of dissolved nitrogen can slowly return to normal without excessive bubble formation.
For a free-diver or a whale, they inhale air at atmospheric pressure, so they never get extra nitrogen forced into solution in their bloodstream. Thus they can ascend as fast as they want with no problems. | [
"Diving animals such as rats, minks and burrowing animals, are sensitive to low-oxygen atmospheres and (unlike humans) will avoid them, making purely hypoxic techniques possibly inhumane for them. For this reason, the use of inert gas (hypoxic) atmospheres (without CO) for euthanasia, is also species-specific.\n",
... |
in a time when drunk driving is so universally frowned up on and everyone is cracking down on duis, why is it that in some cities a business cannot be issued a liquor license if they don't have enough parking? | It's often that they need a certain amount of spots in order to host any event, or they lack the required number of specialized spots (handicapped, expectant mothers, etc.) Or they lack the ability to have overnight parking for people who wish to drive there, drink, and then come back the next day and pick up their car. | [
"A study of about 39,000 alcohol-related traffic accidents in Kentucky found that residents of dry counties are more likely to be involved in such crashes, possibly because they have to drive farther from their homes to consume alcohol, thus increasing impaired driving exposure. The study concludes that county-leve... |
what is syndication exclusivity? | Syndication is when a show starts airing on other networks. Sometimes they make contracts promising to exclusively air on only specific networks. | [
"Syndication exclusivity (also known as syndex) is a federal law implemented by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States that is designed to protect a local television station's rights to syndicated television programs by granting exclusive broadcast rights to the station for that program in... |
What are the chances that the Human race could evolve into two different species that couldn't reproduce with each other? | Some small population that had enough people to maintain itself would have to become isolated long enough from the rest of humanity that they would change enough to not be able to reproduce with us.
The chances are incredibly slim in our modern world, almost impossible. Given that even "isolated" tribes on islands in the pacific did not become new species it likely will never happen. Maybe if we visit other planets and some get stuck somewhere or we have a post-apocalyptic scenario here on earth. | [
"Population-dependent and reversible sex determination, found in animals such as the blue wrasse fish, have less potential for failure. In the blue wrasse, only one male is found in a given territory: larvae within the territory develop into females, and adult males will not enter the same territory. If a male dies... |
What is a good (modern) book on the Battle of Passchendaele? | These may be of some help:
- Your first stop should be John Terraine's *The Road to Passchendaele: the Flanders Offensive of 1917* (1977); while not "modern" in the strictest sense, Terraine is very much reliable on these matters and is one of the fathers of the "learning curve" school to begin with. He doesn't put up with any Lions/Donkeys nonsense.
- Peter Barton and Jeremy Banning's *Passchendaele* (2007), put out by the IWM, is a remarkable piece of work. It's not so aggressively within the "learning curve" school as other works might be, but both Barton and Banning are serious-minded scholars and the quality of their work is enormous.
- Osprey's guide to the campaign (*Passchendaele and the Battles of Ypres 1914-18*, 1997) would be worth checking out just for being an Osprey, but Martin Marix Evans, its author, has supported something like the "learning curve" school elsewhere in terms of the Somme. I don't know if he takes the same line on Passchendaele, but it might be worth checking out. He has another book on this subject (*Passchendaele: The Hollow Victory*, 2005), but I cannot speak to its quality or contents either. The title does not inspire delight, for our purposes, but it could be worth a look.
Incidentally, it would probably be best to avoid Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson's *Passchendaele: The Untold Story* (2003); as much as I've enjoyed their work in other capacities (they penned a legendary take-down of Paul Fussell, for example), this particular book is pretty much everything you are NOT after. | [
"The book has seven chapters, the first two cover the days prior to the battle, four chapters deal with the day and night of each of the two days of the battle, and the last one with the immediate aftermath of the \"hecatomb\". Historical notes are attached.\n",
"Coningsby is the author of a diary of the action o... |
How similar is present-day Judaism to the Judaism of the 1st and 2nd centuries? | This is not really a simple question to answer. There's no way to really define how similar things are over time. Additionally, the 1st-2nd centuries were a time of incredible amounts of change in the Jewish community, and neither ancient or modern Judaism are homogeneous.
The foundation texts that define modern Jewish practice were not written yet in the 1st-2nd centuries. The first text that goes into the canon of Rabbinic literature, the Mishnah, was compiled in the mid-2nd century.
The Mishnah does not seem to be a legal code exactly, but it is a compendium of opinions of things in Jewish law of sorts. Its content serves to illustrate some of the similarities and differences. For the similarities, the holiday schedule, basic form of the liturgy, practices like blessings on food, some elements of theology, etc are present in the 1st century. Though it's important to note that this is the similarities specific to the 2nd century forerunner of modern Judaism--these similarities would not be present for groups that did not evolve into modern Judaism. And of course some modern Jewish groups have altered these things, though they still exist in some form today.
But the content also shows how different the Jewish world was. Agricultural laws were an important part of the laws it contained, but not many modern Jews work in agriculture. States of ritual purity/impurity were a huge part of what the Jewish experience was in the Second Temple era and immediately after, but it is not today in the same way. The Temple and the laws and rituals surrounding it were important parts of Judaism then, but are only theoretical now, and only their study is part of the Jewish experience (and even this is limited compared to practical things) Jewish courts enforcing tort law is a major point of discussion, and while Jews do still sometimes have their financial disputes settled by Jewish law, this is not nearly such a significant part of what the Jewish communal authorities are doing.
Really, modern Judaism itself is similar to its ancient ancestor in important ways. But what the Jewish religious experience looks like is really drastically different, because life in general is. And that's only comparing to the predecessor of modern Judaism, we have much less textual material left over from other groups. And nothing in history is truly static, so Jewish law has developed over the past two thousand years. Depending on your perspective, that could be "very similar" or "very dissimilar". | [
"The history of the Jews and Judaism can be divided into five periods: (1) ancient Israel before Judaism, from the beginnings to 586 BCE; (2) the beginning of Judaism in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE; (3) the formation of rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE; (4) the age of rabbinic ... |
why does the math they teach in school keep changing and getting harder? | One could argue that 3+5=8 hasn't changed in, forever.
The pressure is to teach **more math** in the same amount of time. That means that more intensive techniques need to be used, and students must **work harder**. It's not the math that's different, it's how much math you need that's changed since your parents were in school. | [
"Traditional mathematics focuses on teaching algorithms that will lead to the correct answer. Because of this focus on application of algorithms, the traditional math student must always use the specific method that is being taught. This kind of algorithmic dependence is de-emphasized in reform mathematics. Reforme... |
why no one appears to be talking about lockheed martin's recent claims to have a breakthrough in nuclear fusion technology. | Because they haven't made a breakthrough yet. They have a design that isn't even complete, let alone a working prototype.
| [
"When Lockheed Martin announced a \"major breakthrough\" in fusion power in October 2014, Lincoln described the process of nuclear fusion for the Australian Science Media Centre. He expressed some reservations about the alleged break-through, noting that achieving an energy output greater than the required energy i... |
what's the point of big research stations in antarctica? | I have a professor that goes to Antarctica yearly to study climate change, by examining Ice cores and sedimentary deposits. A lot of things can only be observed in Antarctica about paleoclimate (how the climate was in the past) because Antarctica is pretty untouched by man. | [
"A number of governments have set up permanent research stations in Antarctica and these bases are widely distributed. Unlike the drifting ice stations set up in the Arctic, the research stations of the Antarctic are constructed either on rock or on ice that is (for practical purposes) fixed in place.\n",
"The lo... |
why does anybody get any kind of insurance? aren't they statistically formulated to rip you off (after calculating probabilities of accidents etc).. | Insurance is designed to protect you from catastrophic loss. You *shouldn't* buy insurance for a TV or Playstation because losing them won't ruin your life. You *should* by insurance for your health, car or house because losing one of those could put you in a financial hole you can't recover from. Most people aren't willing to take the risk. In theory if you were a billionaire buying something like homeowners insurance would be a waste of money because if you did lose your house you have the resources to eat the cost. | [
"In the United States, economists and consumer advocates generally consider insurance to be worthwhile for low-probability, catastrophic losses, but not for high-probability, small losses. Because of this, consumers are advised to select high deductibles and to not insure losses which would not cause a disruption i... |
Biography recommendation(s) on the space/arms race during the cold war. | Von Braun is kind of overdone — you're not going to find anything too new or interesting. If it were me, I would seek out other, often-overlooked, plenty interesting figures. Theodore von Karman comes to mind. Qian Xuesen is also an interesting case (though not European...). There were Germans who were taken to the USSR as well — their cases make for interesting contrasts with the ones who were taken to the USA. If you are willing to avoid rockets, and look to atoms instead, the case of Nikolaus Riehl is quite interesting and there is a translated autobiography available. Gernot Zippe is another interesting figure, and one that gets you into many other countries (he is the one who "exported" the gas centrifuge to many European countries in the later Cold War). | [
"During the Cold War, the magazine committed itself to presenting a balanced view of the physical and human geography of nations beyond the Iron Curtain. The magazine printed articles on Berlin, de-occupied Austria, the Soviet Union, and Communist China that deliberately downplayed politics to focus on culture. In ... |
what is the purpose of the extra gears in my automatic car? when (if ever?) should i use them? | If you're driving down a steep slope, shifting into first or second will hold you back so you don't have to ride your brakes all the way down. I recently drove over Sonora Pass, and there was a large section I had to take in first, and some of it I even had to take in second. | [
"The name Self-Changing Gears is sometimes confusing: the gearboxes are not fully automatic, \"selection\" of gear ratio remains a manual choice, but the gear-changing and any clutch control needed is automated. The gearboxes were used in conjunction with a fluid coupling so no clutch pedal was needed.\n",
"BULLE... |
What differences would we see in the world (technologically and otherwise) if it was proven that p = np? | I actually just started a research project about this and I've interviewed several people about this. An example of what could be solved include extremely accurate weather prediction. However, not every consequence would be beneficial; computer security relies on the fact that some problems are too complex to efficiently solve. Security might need to be revamped or completely redeveloped if P is proven to equal NP. | [
"The question of whether P equals NP is one of the most important open questions in theoretical computer science because of the wide implications of a solution. If the answer is yes, many important problems can be shown to have more efficient solutions. These include various types of integer programming problems in... |
why did the dea strike a deal with the sinaloa cartel? | I live in Juárez México, you might have heard of if because at one point in the drug war it was considered the most dangerous city in the world. So I know a bit about this, there are a lot of factors but to summarize, the United States needs the drug trade, it means money , a lot of money, and México is the fastest route.
The problem came when to many cartels started showing up, now you can´t control the intake of drugs, everybody was "importing" drugs without any kind of control (yes the US knows exactly how many drugs they need to let into the border) And you no longer had one head of the cartels with whom you could organize the drug trade.
This was a problem for México also, before there was an unspoken rule, you don´t mess with the people I don´t mess with your drug business, this stopped when all the cartels started fighting. Before if there was a problem, like a rogue dealer or high crime rate in a city, you had a head boss (e.g. El Chapo) who you could go to and he could make decisions.
So to answer your question, things got so out of hand that in the best interest of the Mexican and the U.S. government, they needed to implement the one cartel system that they had before. They picked a leader, El Chapo, sprung him from jail and then began helping him regain control. This has happened, Juárez and most of México y getting back to how things were, you know there is a drug trade, but you don´t see it. Hey, as long as drugs are illegal and there is money to be made, people will sell them, lets hope this changes, meanwhile, things are quiet at least.
TL:DR The U.S. and México needed to implement one head in charge of the cartels, too many cartels where getting out of control, so they decided on one and worked on getting him back in charge. | [
"When Mexican President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006, he announced a crackdown on cartels by the Mexican military to stem the increasing violence. After four years, the additional efforts had not slowed the flow of drugs or the killings tied to the drug war. Of the 53,000 arrests made as of 2010, on... |
When did Europeans start to refer to themselves as Europeans? | People identifying themselves as European? That's still rather a strange thing to do for anyone. Only a few people who are seriously supportive of the EU would do that. Most others would either identify mostly by their national identity or even by a regional identity, like Scottish, Catalan or Occitan.
And if one would connect to a larger entity, most people would see little reason to then limit themselves to 'European'. People might call themselves "world citizen" to emphasize their international outlook, or "Western" to emphasize their economic and political privilege. This is partially a remnant from the Cold War, in which Western Europeans tended to see themselves as part of the NATO block more than as part of the EU, for better or for worse. It's possible that in the former Warsaw pact states the self-identification as European is easier nowadays, I don't know.
So is there resistance to self-identifying as European? Yes, almost everywhere in Europe this resistance exists. People are anxious to retain some significance in their national or regional identities, as small as the importance of their governments might be to their daily lives. Although most Europeans are reasonably accepting of their European neighbours, and in practice quite supportive of European cooperation, a large part of the European population is very resistant to Europe as an idea. Self-identifying as European would need to overcome that resistance.
And frankly while I personally am quite in favor of further European integration, I would rarely if ever self-identify as European. It just rarely seems relevant. | [
"Yolŋu had known about Europeans before the arrival of British in Australia through their contact with Macassan traders, which probably began around the sixteenth century. Their word for European, \"Balanda\", is derived from \"Hollander\" (Dutch person).\n",
"Historically, learned Europeans were often identified... |
It's often stated that the U.S. has been at war for most of it's history. How does this compare to other states, past and present? | So the question we really need to tackle is: What do you mean by "been at war"? The United States has not *legally* been at war since 1945, which means weve had nearly 70 years of uninterrupted peace since the end of World War Two. Infact, in its history the United States has only issued 5 declarations of war, so (again) *legally*, weve only been to war 5 times. But that doesnt count that thing in Vietnam, the thing in Korea, or either thing in Iraq. But what are *those*? Youd likely suggest that they were *undeclared* wars, but they were still wars. Id agree with that, but it raises a stickier question. We could all accept that conflicts like Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq are *wars*, but what else? Is the 1989 invasion of Panama a war? What about the intervention in Afghanistan? What about Operation Gothic Serpent, which spawned the Battle of Mogadishu and the famous Black Hawk Down incident? How small a conflict can I find that still constitutes a war? What about during Hurricane Katrina, [when there were reports of sniper fire against National Gaurd Units](_URL_0_)? And how do we classify the Civil War? Surely its a war, but the United States never recognized the CSA. Then theres the KKK and its guerilla war against federal troops, whats that? And what of the Cold War, and our (continued) impending deaths in a great nuclear holocaust?
So, there is a *lot* going on in this question, including producing a workable definition of what a war is, exactly. To then compare that information with *another country*, youd have to create a robust definition which fits both nations peculiar histories, no small feat! And a country like Rome is doubly difficult, with so much of its history shrouded in the past. We really have very few sources which detail the history of Rome, and even fewer ever discuss the micro-wars which were fighting over. So in that case, itd be next to impossible to create a definition of war that would work between the two nations, *and* that would include every "relevant" American conflict, *and* that would produce useful results. Its like comparing apples to onions, you could call both "food", and both "round", but they have very little else in common.
And then we have to figure out what is an *American* war? What about the Pequot war of 1634, fought between Massachusetts Indians and colonists of Massachusetts Bay.
Thats maybe not the answer you were looking for, was it? Well, heres as close to an answer Ill probably give: The United States has been at war for virtually all meaningful periods of time throughout its history. Between the decades long Indian Wars, a conflict which lasted most of the 18th and 19th centuries, the American interventions in Latin America, the European Civil War, the Cold War, and the Post-Cold War, you can always find some kind of conflict, large or small. Some American soldier, somewhere, has always been in a combat zone. | [
"The history of armed conflicts involving the United States of America spans a period of more than four centuries. A period ranging from the early era of European colonization and the formation of the new national polity that is to become the United States, to its evolvement through technological and political uphe... |
what is redox chemistry and what is it used for? | Redox is a reaction that involves reduction and oxidation of molecules. Examples are electron transfers that happen in living organisms during respiration. | [
"Redox therapy is an experimental therapy that aims to effect an outcome by modifying the levels of pro-oxidant and antioxidant agents in cells. The term \"redox\" is a contraction of \"reduction-oxidation\". For cancer patients, the therapy is predicated on the idea that the redox state of cells may have an effect... |
why the bullshit of naming sequels with original titles? | Don't know the thinking in the game world, but I read the movie industry avoids numbering sequels because the audience thinks they have to have seen all the films in the series to get the new one, lowering the number of people who go to the sequel. Probably something similar applies for video games. | [
"Not all remakes use the same title as the previously released version; the 1966 film \"Walk, Don't Run\", for example, is a remake of the World War II comedy \"The More the Merrier\". This is particularly true for films that are remade from films produced in another language, such as: \"Point of No Return\" (from ... |
how do pearls form? | Here's a hint- It's the same material as their shell.
The sand is an irritant to the soft gooey creature, it can't reach to dislodge a grain of sand that is stuck, so it covers it in a layer of the same stuff the shell is made of. They get the minerals from their diet. Layer after layer it gets incrementally larger, just like the shell. | [
"Natural pearls are formed by nature, more or less by chance. On the other hand, cultured pearls are human creations formed by inserting a tissue graft from a donor mollusk, upon which a pearl sac forms, and the inner side precipitates calcium carbonate, in the form of nacre or \"mother-of-pearl\". \n",
"Pearls a... |
Why was property ownership a requirement for voting in early US history? | Hey, this can be traced to the English traditions and views on voting rights. Though, it has to be said, we have to make a distinction between three phases: pre-Revolutionary structures, the 13 states under the Articles of Confederation and Post-US Constitution in 1789.
& #x200B;
Pre-Revolutionary structures varied greatly between colony to colony, since each operated under its own Charter, rules and traditions. Think of them as 13 independent countries that just happen to be next to each other and share a language. Under the Articles of Confederation, this degree of political independence is also maintained, the only exceptions being military and foreign policy matters. (not that it worked anyway… ) So each one had a different electoral policy. Examples from 1763 show the variety of these requirements. Delaware expected voters to own fifty acres of land or property worth £40. Rhode Island set the limit at land valued at £40 or worth an annual rent of £2. Connecticut required land worth an annual rent of £2 or livestock worth £40.
& #x200B;
I assume that your question is about the Post-Constitution voting policies of 1789 so really early Federalist era. The property requirements remained in the electoral system as a holdover from the English voting traditions and views on voting rights of the 18th century. Many Founding Fathers viewed that individuals who did not posses wealth were inherently unworthy of voting because their poverty made them vulnerable to political manipulation. Only vested members who were financially responsible were immune to such populism. Likewise, they believed that women, children, African Americans and Native Americans were incapable on handling such responsibility in politics.
English jurist William Blackstone wrote in the 1700s that “The true reason of requiring any qualification, with regard to property, in voters, is to exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation that they are esteemed to have no will of their own. If these persons had votes, they would be tempted to dispose of them under some undue influence or other. This would give a great, an artful, or a wealthy man, a larger share in elections than is consistent with general liberty.”
Likewise, John Adams affirms in 1776 that “Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end to it. New claims will arise; women will demand the vote; lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level.”
& #x200B;
We have to keep in mind, our Founding Father did not intend for a direct democracy, but a Representative Republic, which is a very different proposition.
& #x200B;
EDITED thanks to the input of [dhmontgomery](_URL_2_)
**Sources:**
[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)
[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)
Keyssar, Alexander. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2009). Basic Books, Revised Edition.
Murrin, John M.; Johnson, Paul E.; McPherson, James M.; Fahs, Alice; Gerstle, Gary (2012). Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People (6th ed.). Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
& #x200B; | [
"The Constitution did not originally define who was eligible to vote, allowing each state to decide this status. In the early history of the U.S., most states allowed only white male adult property owners to vote (about 6% of the population). By 1856 property ownership requirements were eliminated in all states, gi... |
Why do I sink faster in water than others? | Buoyancy in water is all about water displacement.
Generally the fatter you are the easier it is to float. If you are more muscular with very little fat then you will sink. This is why it takes a toll on you. You have to work to stay afloat where others can do little to no work for the same effect.
| [
"A human is unlikely to sink entirely into quicksand due to the higher density of the fluid (assuming the quicksand is on dry ground and not under water, but even if underwater, sinking is still improbable). Quicksand has a density of about 2 grams per milliliter, whereas the density of the human body is only about... |
why are gay pride and black pride encouraged while straight pride and white pride are considered as racist ? | I've always found 'pride' to be a shit word for this sort of thing. 'Not-shame' would be more accurate, but there's no good word for that.
Basically in the past and to a degree in the present homosexuals and black people in the United States, amongst other groups, have been subjected to prejudice against them for their romatic attractions and/or heritage. The 'gay pride' or other such events are meant to simply say "We're not going to be ashamed of who we are because people did, and some people still do, have problems with us for reasons totally unrelated to who we really are. We're not going to give in to racism or anything."
In the USA at least your average straight white person doesn't belong to any group that's been subject to such in the past so it makes no sense to refuse to be ashamed like society has and to a degree still does expect you to be for being white and straight because... well because nobody has been picking on that demographic.
Now maybe white pride would be fine if it was just a bunch of Scots and Germans enjoying their traditional foods and all, but there's also the fact 'white pride' as a term has largely been used by white supremacist organizations so it's sort of tainted by association as well. | [
"The Black Gay Pride movement is a movement within the United States for African American members of the LGBT community. Started in the 1990s, Black Gay Pride movements began as a way to provide black LGBT people an alternative to the largely white mainstream LGBT movement. The movement serves as a way for black LG... |
Are there any good books or sources to read up on the mid to late pueblo people of the mesa verde region? | Unfortunately, there aren't too many good and accessible sources on Mesa Verde meant for more general consumption (as opposed to very technical archaeological material).
If you are interested in Ancestral Puebloan archaeology generally (and not just Mesa Verde), then there are three good overviews of Pueblo archaeology, any of which would be a good primer to Pueblo archaeology (including Mesa Verde).
These three are the [Cordell and McBrinn](_URL_0_) book, the [Plog](_URL_1_) book, and the [Kantner](_URL_5_) book. Any of the three is acceptable and covers more or less the same information.
For Mesa Verde specifically, unfortunately (though understandably), most of the archaeological work (including accessible books) has centered on researching the very sudden and very thorough depopulation of the Mesa Verde region around A.D. 1270, wherein nearly the entire population of the area moved southwards into the northern Rio Grande. Explaining this sudden and complete depopulation is a major topic of research in Southwestern archaeology. For this, I would recommend two books. The first, [Leaving Mesa Verde](_URL_6_), takes a very ecological and environmental approach to the problem, positing that environmental changes in the 13th century was both a stress on corn-farming agriculturalists like those that lived in Mesa Verde, but also compounded other social problems. The second book, [Winds from the North](_URL_3_), takes a very different approach to the problem by looking at linguistic, genetic, and ethnohistoric evidence from modern Pueblos in New Mexico to discuss their connection with the Mesa Verde region.
I wouldn't say either is "complete" in the sense that both take a very specific approach to answering the issue. If you wanted to read either, I would say "Winds from the North" is the most accessible to a non-archaeological audience since it doesn't get as lost in the weeds of environmental reconstruction like "Leaving Mesa Verde", but neither was written for a popular audience (like the three overview books I linked to above). Both are also quite expensive, so check your local libraries! Might want to skim online previews before committing to one or the other.
You should also take a look at the [Crow Canyon Archaeological Center website](_URL_2_). They aren't focused exclusively on Mesa Verde (they do a lot of work on Chaco-related sites in northern New Mexico/southern Colorado), but they are focused on public outreach and making archaeological research accessible to the public.
Finally, I've written a little bit about Mesa Verde before on /r/AskHistorians, in [this](_URL_4_) and [this](_URL_7_) answer.
Hope that helps, and happy to field any other questions. | [
"Cordell's research focused on the pre-Columbian history of the Southwestern United States. She was particularly interested in the anthropology of the Pueblo Indians, their social organization, their migration and demography and their culture (especially ceramics). In the field of archaeobotany Cordell dealt with t... |
How did ancient archaeological sites like the Palace of Knossos and Troy (but not limited to) get buried? | Most ancient cities quite honestly get torn or burned down due to accidents, conquests, or natural disasters and are subsequently built over.
Tenochtitlan was the Aztec capital. The Aztecs had built and modelled their city over the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan. After the Spanish Conquest and the fall of the Aztec Empire, the capital of New Spain was built over the foundations of the razed city. After the Mexican Revolution, the site now stands as Mexico City.
You listed Troy, which was rebuilt so many times due to war or fire that historians have labelled the various iterations with numbers (Troy VI, Troy VII, etc). Heinrich Schliemann infamously destroyed several layers while searching for Homeric Troy.
_URL_0_
_URL_1_
| [
"The site of the Greek colony and its necropolis have been periodically excavated since the 19th century; even though the site has suffered from erosion (and the tombs also from looting), the digs produced rich findings (archaic ceramics, inscriptions, etc.).\n",
"Among the first archaeological sites discovered i... |
why do leaves turn yellow and wither during fall? | During winter, there is not enough light or water for photosynthesis. The trees will rest, and live off the food they stored during the summer. They begin to shut down their food-making factories. The green chlorophyll disappears from the leaves. They then slowly begin to become waste products of the tree and turn from green to yellow/brown. | [
"Leaves in temperate, boreal, and seasonally dry zones may be seasonally deciduous (falling off or dying for the inclement season). This mechanism to shed leaves is called abscission. When the leaf is shed, it leaves a leaf scar on the twig. In cold autumns, they sometimes change color, and turn yellow, bright-oran... |
why are americans saying special words for school years, like "sophomore"? | Cambridge!
In or before 1688, Cambridge University used a ranking system for students to help professors keep track of student progress: Fresh Man, Sophmore, Junior Sophister, Senior Sophister. These terms relate to the Greek "Sophos" meaning knowledge and were meant to reflect the amount of knowledge the student possesses.
Every major English-speaking University copied this in some form or another. It is why we now consider 4 years necessary to obtain a bachelors degree. The actual names of each rank varied from campus to campus. Importantly the names used at Harvard University were "Freshman, Sophomore, Junior Soph, Senior Soph." Sometime before 1800 "soph" was dropped from the upperclassmen titles.
In the 19th century the US greatly expanded its high school and university offerings. With many founders educated at Harvard, their system was exported across the US.
So the question should be, why did the British Empire stop using these terms? The answer is Empire. The older Universities in Scotland and Ireland adopted the 4 year system but, because they were not founded by Cambridge alumni, they adopted their own ranking terms. At St. Andrews University, for example, the ranks were bejaune, semi-bejaune, tertiand, and magistrate. As the U.K. sought to standardize education throughout its territory, it sought to not impose one campus culture on another, instead going with very clinical 1st-4th year.
The U.K. Terminology translates easily and is unambiguous even in the US, so it should be used in most cases.
TL;DR - Frontier principals had ~~dilutions~~ delusions of grandeur.
| [
"Among high-school and college students in the United States, the words \"freshman\" (or the gender-neutral terms \"frosh\" or \"first year\", sometimes \"freshie\"), \"sophomore\", \"junior\" and \"senior\" refer to the first, second, third, and fourth years respectively. For first-year students, \"frosh\" and \"f... |
when drawing straws, are you more likely to get the short straw if you pick first, or after several people have already picked? | It does not matter. Say there is 5 straws. The first one to pick have a 20% chance of picking the shortest one. Now there is 4 straws so the next person have a 25% chance of picking the shortest one. However that is assuming the first person did not already pick the short straw. And there is an 80% chance that he did not. And 80% of 25% is 20% which is exactly the same chance as the first one had. This is true for everyone involved. The last person have an 80% chance that someone already picked the shortest straw so even if he have a 100% chance of picking the shortest straw if that remains that is only a 20% chance.
You can think of the situation differently. What if instead of straws there was sealed envelopes. The order in which you pick your envelope does not matter as everyone is left with an envelope that might be the special one. The fact that you open the envelope just after you have picked it or after everyone have picked does not change its contents. | [
"Straw is a soft, dry stalks containing small grains such as barley, oats, rice, rye, and wheat. Straw is easy to handle and available in most agricultural areas. When deciding to use straw, is imperative to make sure that the straw is not palatable. To do this, the seed must be checked to ensure it is not availabl... |
Is it possible to ever encounter plastic in nature that wasn't made by humans? | Not in the strictest sense, as most definitions I have seen for plastic specifically use the words synthetic or man-made. As such a non-manmade plastic is impossible.
However plastics are really just polymers, long chain molecules that are usually organic (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, maybe a few heavier elements). There are tons of those in nature, you are probably touching a couple right now. Cellulose and starch are good examples, glucose polymers that are in almost every plant. Spider silk, DNA, and proteins are all polymers too. They usually don't look like what we think about when we say plastic but they have the appropriate properties and structures. | [
"A 2004 study by Richard Thompson from the University of Plymouth, UK, found a great amount of microdebris on the beaches and waters in Europe, the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Antarctica. Thompson and his associates found that plastic pellets from both domestic and industrial sources were being broken down int... |
If you are on the moon, does Earth appear to go through phases? | Yes.
In fact, it will be the exact opposite of whatever phase the Moon is in as seen from Earth. So if it's a New Moon as seen from Earth, it will be a Full Earth as seen from the Moon; if the Moon is in a waxing crescent phase, Earth will be in a waning gibbous phase. | [
"The lunar phase or phase of the Moon is the shape of the directly sunlit portion of the Moon as viewed from Earth. The lunar phases gradually and cyclically change over the period of a synodic month (about 29.53 days), as the orbital positions of the Moon around Earth and of Earth around the Sun shift.\n",
"In w... |
Why were the soldiers after WW1 seemingly so much more traumatized than the soldiers after WW2? | I'd say it's a difference of depiction more than anything else. The fact that more armies and more soldiers fought in WWII than in WWI, the new weapons available, the extent of the destruction caused by the war, and the extent of the atrocities committed in WWII, the trauma of the second world war was probably of a much greater scale than WWI; including civilians, the Second World War far out does the first in terms of the trauma.
Of course trauma is hard to quantify exactly, but it must be said that despite the reputation for horror attached to WWI, nothing in my mind at least can compare to the Second World War in terms of sheer human suffering. | [
"Soldiers (and other frontline personnel) returning home from World War I suffered greatly from the horrors of war that they had witnessed. Many returning veterans suffered from what was then known as shell shock; now known as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).\n",
"Veterans of World War I had little affectio... |
What mathematical structure represents a spin-3/2 field? | You might be interested in the [Rarita-Schwinger equation](_URL_0_). The field is represented by a spinor. | [
"Spin is a 2-to-1 cover, while in even dimension, is a 2-to-1 cover, and in odd dimension is a 1-to-1 cover; i.e., isomorphic to . These groups, , , and are Lie group forms of the compact special orthogonal Lie algebra, formula_39 – Spin is the simply connected form, while PSO is the centerless form, and SO is in g... |
double exposure | Originally, a double exposure is an accident where a camera does not advance the film to the next frame, and you take a second picture ontop of the first. This often results in a mess, but sometimes it makes an interesting effect.
Using digital cameras, the term 'double exposure' is somewhat misleading. New cameras actually have a mode that creates double exposures. You take one shot that is very high contrast, and then a second that has a flat texture. The camera mixes them together, and you can end up with a desirable effect. This has been a common photoshop trick for years now, but only recently have digital cameras included the double exposure mode. | [
"In photography and cinematography, a multiple exposure is the superimposition of two or more exposures to create a single image, and double exposure has a corresponding meaning in respect of two images. The exposure values may or may not be identical to each other.\n",
"Double Exposures (A.K.A. Alibi Breaker) is... |
how do animals that come back from extinction overcome inbreeding problems | They don't. At least not in the short-term. In the short-term they're absolutely will be inbreeding related problems associated with that bottleneck.
In the long-term if the species does survive, it does so because the problematic genes that have been over-represented in the population are slowly culled out by natural selection.
Since that means that the population is going to be less healthy in the short-term, that poses a big problem that can make it even harder to recover from a very low population than it would be otherwise. | [
"Inbreeding and genetic diversity loss often occur with endangered species populations because they have small and/or declining populations. Loss of genetic diversity lowers the ability of a population to deal with change in their environment and can make individuals within the community homogeneous. If this occurs... |
why is unrefined sugar more expensive than white
sugar? by the same token, why do whole grain
products like whole grain bread and brown rice
tend to be more expensive than their white, refined
counterparts? surely, refining should add extra
cost? | In a third world country unrefined food is cheaper than refined food. But in the western world they realized they can charge more by calling it "healthy". | [
"Brown and white granulated sugar are 97% to nearly 100% carbohydrates, respectively, with less than 2% water, and no dietary fiber, protein or fat (table). Brown sugar contains a moderate amount of iron (15% of the Reference Daily Intake in a 100 gram amount, see table), but a typical serving of 4 grams (one teasp... |
what is that bubbling creaking sound that my eyeballs make when i'm tired and i rub them? | Wen you rub your eyes from left to right and vice versa, especially over the joint of the two lids, you are causing air to get into and under your eye lids. This forms bubbles and makes squishy noises.
This seems to happen more if you are short sighted, because that means that your eyeball is not exactly spherical and makes it easier for bubbles to get trapped in.
Happens to me too. I am short sighted as well. If i press the edges of the eye lids they seem to flow to the centre. | [
"Periorbital puffiness, also known as puffy eyes, or swelling around the eyes, is the appearance of swelling in the tissues around the eyes, called the orbits. It is almost exclusively caused by fluid buildup around the eyes, or periorbital edema. Minor puffiness usually detectable below the eyes only is often call... |
How does the quantum tunneling effect limit development of micro processors and how do we overcome that? | When transistors get to a certain size, they can’t always hold electrons back, which can cause false signals and errors in computations. As far as I know, we can’t directly overcome tunneling, we can only work around it. | [
"Fundamental quantum mechanical concepts are central to this phenomenon, which makes quantum tunnelling one of the novel implications of quantum mechanics. Quantum tunneling is projected to create physical limits to the size of the transistors used in microprocessors, due to electrons being able to \"tunnel\" past ... |
Do the rate of calorie intake and weight gain have any relationship? | eating an extra 4k in a day would drastically alter hormones via increasing insulin and a variety of other hormones (thyroid hormone for example). these drastic hormone deviations shouldn't be seen if you only eat a couple hundred extra kcal per day.
i'm not quite sure, but I believe the drastic changes in hormone levels would promote lipogenesis to a greater extent. i haven't seen any studies on this. | [
"Weight gain has a latency period. The effect that eating has on weight gain can vary greatly depending on the following factors: energy (calorie) density of foods, exercise regimen, amount of water intake, amount of salt contained in the food, time of day eaten, age of individual, individual's country of origin, i... |
When listening to music with earbuds/headphones, how are the producers/artists able to make the music only play on one side? | This is called stereophonic sound, or simply stereo. It works by storing the music in 2 separate channels, one intended to be played by the speaker (or earbud) on the left side and one for the right side.
On the recording side, this effect is created by using specific microphone setups, for example two microphones placed some distance apart. Or as an added effect in post production. In this case, the voice moving from side to the other will be an effect that was added after recording where the voice is initially only present in one channel, but is gradually added to the second channel at the same time as it is being muted in the first. This has the effect of the voice moving from one speaker to the other.
The stereo concept can be extended to more channels and speakers. Surround-sound can contain many channels, each associated with a specific spatial orientation (front-left, back-left, center, front-right, back-right for a standard 5 channel setup) as well as a channel with the low frequencies specifically meant to be player on a subwoofer. | [
"Conventional music recording is produced for stereo playback which makes use of only Left and Right playback for speakers and headphones. The implementation of Dummy Head allows the recording artist to make use of three dimensional sound reproduction. This is because through playback via headphones the listener pe... |
Wikipedia says that when Constantinople fell and the Hagia Sophia was converted to a mosque, the mosiacs depicting Jesus were either covered or destroyed. Since Muslims believe in Jesus, why were these mosaics covered or destroyed? | Well the thing is, that during the first centuries of Hagia Sophia's history as a Mosque the mosaics were infact uncovered and were still prominently on display. When Cornelius Loos made his engravings of Constantinople around 1710, he documented the mosaics [pretty clearly](_URL_0_) (this example is particularily striking as it shows the Virgin Mary, still prominent over the Islamic Mihrab). Some of his engravings even show mosaics that have now been [completely lost](_URL_1_).
Shortly after Loos made these engravings, the mosaics of the mosque were covered up and [replaced with white plaster](_URL_2_). We don't know for sure when this happened as there is no official proclaimation, but the interior of the Hagia Sophia was renovated in 1717, so it is quite possible that this is when the mosaics were covered up, just 17 years after Loos made his drawings.
So what took the Ottomans so long, and why did they make the decision to cover these mosaics up by almost 400 years after they took the city? There were several renovations to the Hagia Sophia after the conquest, so why did they not cover them up?
The preservation of the mosaics seem to have been an intentional choice. For example, the windows, altar, bell tower and Patriarchate of the Hagia Sophia were all destroyed or replaced. The Ottoman Sultans could have easily also destroyed the mosaics or covered them up, but they didn't for whatever reason. Here are a few theories I have heard for why the mosaics may have been preserved and later covered up:
It may be that these mosaics were preserved to serve as trophies of the conquest. The Hagia Sophia was itself preserved partially for this reason. The presence of the mosaics next to the Islamic calligraphy and Mihrab would remind the visitor of what used to be, and clearly signal the appropriation and reconversion of this former church.
Another theory might be that the Ottomans, despite being Muslim, wanted to emphasize some degree of continuity, or respect with the past. That these mosaics were to be admired for their beauty rather than for their religious significance, and give the Ottoman Sultans legitimacy as protectors and successors of the Roman imperial past. Mehmed II did proclaim himself Caesar of Rome after all, and specifically decided to have the Hagia Sophia converted from Imperial Church to Imperial Mosque to bolster this claim.
But if any of these were the case, why were these mosaics later covered up? Well for one, the Ottoman Empire in 1717 was in a very different place compared to earlier centuries. Ottoman Sultans no longer really took their claims as Caesar of Rome seriously (After Suleiman the title seems to have faded into obscurity). The Ottomans were also slowly being encroached by the Habsburg and Russian Empire to its north and west. The Empire would manage to survive this encroachment, but the sudden losses to Christian states may have provoked a defensive attitude among some Ottomans, which may have made these Christian mosaics in the Imperial Mosque somewhat uncomfortable. Several other former churches in Constantinople, like the Zeyrek Mosque and the Little Hagia Sophia also had their mosaics covered in plaster during the 18th Century aswell. Which implies that it may have been a larger ideological change that caused this.
It is also important to point out that by the 18th Century these mosaics were in very poor condition and were probably falling apart. Some of the broken tesserae from the mosaics were even stolen by local salesmen, who would sell them as "gemstones". So the mosaics may simply have been covered up because they were falling apart, which accidentally saved many of them and allowed them to be uncovered much later.
It is tempting to want to look for theological reasons for why the mosaics were covered up. But it becomes difficult to reconcile such arguments with the nearly 400-year long preservation of the mosaics in the mosque.
I hope this answered your question in a satisfactory manner. If you want me to elaborate more, just ask. | [
"The 9th- and 10th-century mosaics of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople are truly classical Byzantine artworks. The north and south tympana beneath the dome was decorated with figures of prophets, saints and patriarchs. Above the principal door from the narthex we can see an \"Emperor kneeling before Christ\" (lat... |
Why do certain materials in my dishwasher retain water so much longer than others? | Heat capacity.
Ceramic/Metallic objects can store a lot more heat during the long wash/rinse cycles than plastic objects can. During the drying cycle, that helps evaporate any water that remains on them, while the plastic objects cool off before the water evaporates. | [
"Absorption or desorption of water (or other solvents) can change the size of many common materials; many organic materials change size much more due to this effect than due to thermal expansion. Common plastics exposed to water can, in the long term, expand by many percent.\n",
"The heat inside the dishwasher dr... |
why shouldn't you clean your earwax? | Cleaning earwax is fine, cleaning too much is when their is an issue. As earwax protects your ears from excess sound, so too little earwax can result in damaged eardrums.
I normally just wrap a tissue round my little finger and clean my ear, this means that only some wax is cleaned as the finger is too big to go fully into the ear. | [
"Ear cleaning in general may also be ineffective when used by one with little experience or guidance. When done incorrectly, significant amounts of ear wax may be pushed deeper into the ear canal rather than removed. The lining of the ear is delicate and can be easily damaged. The ear is also self-cleaning and earw... |
why is there little to no border security between european nations. | There's an agreement between many European countries called the Schengen Agreement. This means they have all agreed to abolish border controls between their countries, and cooperate on maintaining border controls with countries outside of the Schengen Area. So for the purposes of border controls, it's as if they were a single country, including when it comes to issuing visas.
This is not strictly part of the EU, but it's closely related. Not all EU countries are in Schengen and there's some non-EU countries in it. For example UK, Ireland and Cyprus are currently in the EU, but not in Schengen. While Norway, Switzerland and Iceland are in Schengen but not the EU.
It is closely tied to the EU because in general EU members are expected to join Schengen eventually. Although some members have an opt out (including the UK, but it's leaving the EU anyway so it's moot). | [
"European Union laws prohibit systematic customs checks at any border between two members of its Customs Union. So, there is permanent customs facility at the borders with these countries. However, France has borders with non members of this Union : Switzerland, Andorra, Brazil and Surinam. At these borders are loc... |
How did ancient/medieval wars lasting for dozens, hundred+ years work? | The Peloponnesian War lasted over two dozen years (431–404 BC). Think of it as being something akin to the Cold War (the modern one between USA and Russia) where it is mostly political maneuvering and proxy wars. However unlike the Cold War, direct and intense fighting between the two biggest warring states (Sparta and Athens) did also break out with multiple cities being captured or destroyed. But there would also be times of relative peace after armistices or peace treaties were signed. However, the peace treaties were not enough to stop the conflict from continuing, if they were ever intended to. For instance, the Peace of Nicias, at the time called the "Fifty-Year Peace" was intended to last 50 years. It lasted about 5 years. The Athenians' main goal of the treaty was to have Amphipolis returned to their control, but that was negotiated out of the treaty. So it was pretty much determined that the fighting would definitely resume and the Fifty-Year peace was just an indefinite armistice.
You might ask, five years is a long time, shouldn't that be called a different war, then? Yes and no. The two phases of the war between the Peace of Nicias are called the Archidamian War and the Ionian War. However because it is essentially the same conflict with mostly the same parties involved, fighting for the same reasons, it is all considered one war even though there were long periods of relative peace. When it comes to two major expansionist powers that are close to each other, it is often just a matter of perspective as to when one war has ended and another has begun. Some historians would say that WW1 and WW2 were really just one long war and it is possible that future historians will give them just one name which everyone will commonly refer to them by. This is called periodization: picking a start and end point for a given series of events in order to facilitate study and discussion. You can't really study The Ionian War without also studying the Archidamian War. Thus we have the Peloponessian War.
So you have something like The Hundred Years' War, which you probably had in mind when you asked this question, which could also be considered three separate wars: The Edwardian Era War (1337-1360), the Caroline War (1369–1389), and the Lancastrian War (1415–1453). So The Hundred Years' War is "war that lasted 116 years" but during that time there was 35 years of truce. | [
"The Hundred Years' War was a time of rapid military evolution. Weapons, tactics, army structure and the social meaning of war all changed, partly in response to the war's costs, partly through advancement in technology and partly through lessons that warfare taught. The feudal system was slowly disintegrating thro... |
Did the Communist party have any chance of success in the post WW1 world? | In hindsight, they probably did not have much of a chance of success. Electoral Communism had its high-water mark on the Continent as minor coalition partners to much-farther-right, distinctly-anti-Soviet labor and social democratic parties in proportional representation nations. (It never had more than one or two MPs in first-past-the-post Britain.) Revolutionary Communism was DOA almost everywhere it wasn't imposed by Soviet occupiers. The closest Communism got to power in the West was Republican Spain, and that through a lot of clever backstabbing in the chaos of the Civil War, with the end result not of victory but of enabling Franco to mop up rather more easily than he might have against a unified center-left coalition.
The rather more interesting question is, with the evidence then available, were those fears reasonable. I think that here you would say, "somewhat so, at least."
Data points supporting this:
The Soviet revolution was truly shocking, a new thing on the face of the Earth. If the French Revolution and the Terror had been a passing fit, this was the chronic disease. It was not unreasonable to believe the Soviets would export revolution or that a sufficiently motivated Communist movement, supported by the Soviets, might powerfully try to execute something similar given a sufficient background of disorder. (Indeed, the Spanish Civil War proved those fears entirely right, even if the effort still fell short).
World War One had created death and dismemberment, industrialization, economic mobilization and privation, and social tumult quite unlike anything Britain, France and Germany had experienced. It was not at all unreasonable to expect worker militancy and political mobilization. And, indeed, that happened. Unionization exploded, political parties favoring or favored by unions grew dramatically, etc. Electoral and revolutionary Communism were not able to catch the benefit, but the property-owning establishment couldn't have known that more centrist parties and labor organizations would be the beneficiaries. (In the UK, Labour surpassed the Liberals first in 1922, and were in government, albeit short-lived, in 1923.) That the post-war environment would be generally fruitful for unions and their political parties was re-demonstrated in 1945 by Clement Attlee's Labour victories coming despite Churchill's personal popularity. | [
"The Communist Party and its allies played an important role in the United States labor movement, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, but never succeeded, with rare exceptions, either in bringing the labor movement around to its agenda of fighting for socialism and full workers' control over industry, or in conver... |
Would deep-sea pressure have any effect on explosions? | Yes:
_URL_0_
During such an explosion, the hot gas bubble quickly collapses because:
The water pressure is enormous deeper than 2,000 feet.
The expansion reduces gas pressure, which decreases temperature.
Rayleigh–Taylor instability at the gas/water boundary causes "fingers" of water to extend into the bubble, increasing the boundary surface area.
Water is incompressible.
Vast amounts of energy are absorbed by phase change (water becomes steam at the boundary).
Expansion quickly becomes unsustainable because the amount of water pushed outward increases with the cube of the blast-bubble radius. | [
"The blast caused by a sudden release of the gas pressure inside a diving cylinder makes them very dangerous if mismanaged. The greatest risk of explosion exists while filling, but cylinders have also been known to burst when overheated. The cause of failure can range from reduced wall thickness or deep pitting due... |
why soldiers are such a big deal in the us, while for europe for example it isn't such a big deal. | I don't know the answer and am braced for the downvotes but Americans seen to get very overenthused about a lot of things.
Halloween, Christmas, thanksgiving, soldiers. The world series of sports that only America plays etc. | [
"BULLET::::- The United States Army – Exhausted from all the heavy fighting across the world; it struggles to keep American superpower dominance in the world. The US Army has the power to balance out all types of combat and situations out in the field. The US Army has a brute force of veterans, as they can skill up... |
Did the Rome begin what we now understand to be civilisation? | So, "civilization" is a pretty terrible term. It seems to be ranking different people in a way where "civilized" is good and developed and "uncivilized" is bad and primitive. In addition, by selecting some traits as necessary traits for a "civilization" we exclude people who might suit the term in other ways. For instance when I was an undergraduate the definition of "civilization" included writing, which excludes a lot of people we might want to let it. The Inca didn't have a writing system in the sense of making marks to transmit language, but they had a system of knots that transmitted information. By the time I was in graduate school I saw "writing" replaced by "complex record keeping" which is a little better. But you can see how drawing up a checklist of what qualifies as "civilization" is problematic.
With that said, when I was a teaching assistant for Early World History classes we used this list:
* monumental (or civic) architecture,
* complex record keeping
* complex social structure
* division of labor
* agriculture
Monumental or civic architecture indicates some kind of communal awareness. Complex record keeping means things are organized and the organization is preserved. Complex social structure means we can see that some people had more importance than others, and there are multiple ranks - whether in government, religion, military, whatever. Division of labor and agriculture go together in that agriculture allows people to do things other than grow food, like build the monuments, keep the records, be the priests etc.
We also made the distinction between pristine civilizations and secondary civilizations. Pristine civilizations are communities that can check all the boxes without known contact with another civilization. The textbook we used (*Worlds Together Worlds Apart*) I think gave five pristine civilizations:
* Sumerian
* Chinese (I can't remember the precise name for this civilization)
* Harappan
* Olmec
* Chico
Some people like to list Egypt in there too. For your question, there are two important points. All of these developed more or less independently (so it's not the case that civilization began in China and spread west), and these developed a **long time before Rome!**
Sumerians show up around 4000 BCE. The Harappan cities around 3000 or so. The Chinese civilization I can't remember the name of sometime around 2000. The Olmec around 1600. The Chico, 3000.
Rome, by contrast, wasn't founded in tradition until 753 BCE. Archaeology shows us settlement a little before 1000 BCE. By the time the Romans showed up, the Sumerians were long gone, the Minoans had failed, the Mycenaeans collapsed, the Hittites were forgotten, and that's just civilizations geographically near Rome.
Rome itself developed its civilization from contact with the Greeks, from whom they got their alphabet among other things, as well as other cultures. The Greeks were heavily influenced by contact with Anatolian cultures that developed out of the Bronze Age Collapse, and so on. Rome is very much a late comer to the civilization game. Rome existed in a Mediterranean surrounded by people with different levels of civilization. Phoenicians (including Carthage), Greeks, Persians certainly rate the term "civilization." I would include the Celts, the Celtiberians and Iberians as well, and numerous other European populations.
Again, "civilization" is a terrible idea to apply to people, especially when we can't have a good understanding of a given group. For instance, if we stress the "complex records" thing, we are claiming to know complex records when we see them, and we might not, and it might be a bad thing to measure in the first place. But I think I've described the sort of taxonomy that shows up in books that do that sort of thing and given some direction for your specific question about Rome.
| [
"Ancient Roman civilisation has contributed to modern language, religion, society, technology, law, politics, government, warfare, art, literature, architecture and engineering. Rome professionalised and expanded its military and created a system of government called \"res publica\", the inspiration for modern repu... |
how i can circumvent internet censorship with proxy's and vpns. | [Tor](_URL_0_) is pretty good. They have a firefox plugin that gives you a button to enable or disable it. When you request a webpage through Tor, your request gets encrypted and sent to one of the Tor nodes out in the internet. That node sends it encrypted to another one, who then sends it encrypted to another one, etc. Eventually it reaches what's called an "exit node" which will actually go out to the internet and retrieve the web page you want, and then they send it back in the reverse order until it gets to your computer. The "exit node" can be just about anywhere in the world.
This way, your ISP and even people running the internet for your country can't figure out where you're going.
However, Tor is *slow* because it has to travel to so many nodes. Initially it's really slow, but once you start using it for 20 minutes or so it goes up to a little faster than 56k speeds. During the startup stages it has to find good nodes. You also shouldn't have your BitTorrent client running through Tor. | [
"Some networks have an HTTP proxy which can be used to speed up web access when multiple users visit the same websites, and to get past blocking software while the owner is using the network of some institution that might block certain sites. Public proxies are often slow and unreliable and so it is worth the troub... |
During nuclear fission in uranium, what kind of radioactive rays are emitted? Alpha, Beta or Gamma? | All of them can result from a fission reaction.
After each fission reaction has occurred, the products may generally be in excited states, which can gamma decay to the ground state. Fission products tend to be neutron-rich, so they will usually beta decay one or more times to reach stability. Alpha emission from fission products is more rare than beta, but it's possible as well.
And alpha and beta decays don't necessarily go directly to the ground state in the daughter, so alpha and beta decays will often come with gamma rays as well.
The prompt radiation during a chain of fission reactions will consist of neutrons, gamma rays, fission products, and some light charged particles, while the delayed radiation will consist of alpha, beta, gamma, neutrons, protons, etc.
You can find an energy breakdown for a typical fission reaction [here](_URL_0_). These are averages, because neutron-induced fission of uranium-235 has many possible final states, each one generally having multiple paths by which to ultimately reach stability. So the amount of energy carried away by each kind of radiation varies event-by-event. | [
"The total prompt gamma ray energy in a fission explosion is 3.5% of the yield, but in a 10 [[Nuclear weapon yield|kiloton]] detonation the triggering explosive around the bomb core absorbs about 85% of the prompt gamma rays, so the output is only about 0.5% of the yield. In the [[Nuclear fusion|thermonuclear]] Sta... |
How do you determine the boiling point of water under certain vacuum pressures? | You use [Antoine's equation](_URL_0_) which is an empirical forumala that gives you the vapour pressure as a function of temperature. Each chemical has different A, B and C constants. You're going to have to convert your vacuum units into absolute pressure to use it however. To save you time, here's a graph of the result for water:
_URL_1_ | [
"The boiling point of a liquid varies depending upon the surrounding environmental pressure. A liquid in a partial vacuum has a lower boiling point than when that liquid is at atmospheric pressure. A liquid at high pressure has a higher boiling point than when that liquid is at atmospheric pressure. For example, wa... |
if we can produce phone screens that are 6" in diameter with a full hd resolution, whats stopping us from making 16k tvs? | Nothing is stopping us. Theres just no market value. Even 4k is limited by content creators actually making their products 4k in resolution, most of the market for media consumption is for 2k displays.
| [
"An important consideration, however, is that this is based on the physical screen size in millimeters and is not proportional to the screen size. As such, an 18 mm tube with a resolution of around 64 lp/mm has a higher overall resolution than an 8 mm tube with 72 lp/mm resolution. Resolution is usually measured at... |
what "chained cpi" is, and how it affects the social security cuts. | Standard CPI has a couple of problems in that it overestimates inflation for consumers as it doesn't account for substitution in consumer behavior.
In the simplest example imagine someone is buying Lays brand chips that cost $2 a bag. Suppose that the price rises to $2.20 a bag, instead of accepting the higher price point some consumers will seek out a cheaper an alternative (store brand at $1.20 a bag) and so measuring inflation based on the change in price of these goods produces an inaccurate result as some consumers have achieved a cost saving as a result of the price increase.
Currently SSA use the standard CPI in their cost of living adjustments and due to the substitution bias this means that every year the program gets very slightly more generous. Chained CPI is an alternative measure that is corrected for the substitution problem so the benefits offered by SSA remain much more static then they would otherwise.
Another idea that is also being floated is setting benefits based on region instead of nationally. SSA use two indexes to calculate benefits; CPI for All Urban Consumers and CPI for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers. The names describe why these introduce a problem; not everyone is an urban consumer (and when they are the index biases for larger urban centers) and the spending behaviors of clerical workers is hardly indicative of the population as a whole. | [
"Application of chained CPI has been suggested as a means of reducing the US federal budget deficit by reducing the rate of growth of government benefits. The Moment of Truth Project estimates that moving to the Chained CPI would reduce the deficit by about $390 billion in the first decade alone, with roughly one t... |
can insects see cells and their organelles? aren't there insects or other very, small microorganisms (think face mites or mites in general) that can see things as small as mitochondria? any organism with eyes that can detect things- what's the smallest thing they can visually perceive? | People are talking about what the smallest visible thing actually is and while I find that very interesting, I wonder if they might be overlooking something (but I could be wrong).
An eye has to be fairly complex in order to perceive small, intricate things, and as far as I'm aware, the smaller a creature is, the less distinct and precise its vision by virtue of necessity. I think the better question is: is it possible for eye cells to be arranged so efficiently that they can perceive themselves? | [
"Many small organisms such as rotifers, copepods and flatworms use such organs, but these are too small to produce usable images. Some larger organisms, such as scallops, also use reflector eyes. The scallop \"Pecten\" has up to 100 millimetre-scale reflector eyes fringing the edge of its shell. It detects moving o... |
Solar thermal farms are 19th century technology, why isn't the US full of them? | This chart from the Energy Information Administration shows the levelized cost of energy from various renewable and non-renewable sources:
_URL_0_
Essentially, solar thermal is among the costliest sources of generation, even when compared with other renewable alternatives. Still, it has had some success in California's renewable energy marketplace.
To your point on the death valley solar farm, the nearby Mojave desert is one of the most active solar development regions in the world. Since death valley is a national park, it's pretty doubtful that there will be any development there. | [
"Solar thermal power plants can generally be built in a few years because solar plants are built almost entirely with modular, readily available materials. In contrast, many types of conventional power projects, especially coal and nuclear plants, require long lead times.\n",
"In the early 1970s, before the Arab ... |
Did people living in the Roman Empire call it the "Roman Empire"? | It was more common to refer to people ethnically rather than in terms of a kingdom, although "Romans" often referred to themselves as *Romani*. So you had Etruscans, Etrurians, and so on which made up the body. All people could collectively be referred to as *The Populus*, however that's not really the name for the empire.
EDIT: I believe that, distinctly, populus refers to a man who is of fighting age, not just 'anyone'.
Older (BCE) coins can be found stamped with SPQR, *"senatus populus que Romanus"*, i.e. 'the Senate and People of Rome' but this is obviously from very early on in the empire.
Shortest, cleanest answer is: There wasn't a proper name for the empire, but there was a proper identity shared by citizens used to identify themselves. | [
"Though Marcellinus does not refer to the Empire as a whole after 395, only to its separate parts, he clearly identifies the term \"Roman\" as applying to the Empire as a whole. When using terms such as \"us\", \"our generals\", and \"our emperor\", Marcellinus distinguished both divisions of the Empire from outsid... |
Any sources for reading about CIA, NSA, or just secret intellegence over all? Good non fiction. | Look for James Bamford's books:
The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America
I've read and enjoyed the first two, didn't read the third, yet. Remember the first rule about fight club. | [
"Espionage and secret operations have long been a source of fiction, and the real and perceived U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is a source of many books, films and video games. Some fiction may be historically based, or will refer to less action-oriented aspects, such as intelligence analysis or counterinte... |
How did the introduction of the pocket watch effect surveying? | Finding longitude and latitude were very big problems for a ship out on the ocean. It was impossible to precisely measure the distance from one day to the next with no hard and fast landmarks, and the actions of currents and imprecise speed gauges made it hard to correlate knots with actual travel. Use of navigational tools like sextants and chronometers were key. However, for surveying on land, that was not the case. From a precisely measured base line, triangles could be laid off to map any piece of ground. The typical tools of chain, plumb bob, and transit would suffice. Sightings of the sun would not be needed, or precise time measurement. They would of course be needed to place continents and islands in the correct distance from each other. | [
"The use of pocket watches in a professional environment came to an ultimate end in approximately 1943. The Royal Navy of the British military distributed to their sailors Waltham pocket watches, which were 9 jewel movements, with black dials, and numbers coated with radium for visibility in the dark, in anticipati... |
What social opportunities would be available to a free black family living in the antebellum deep south? | This is what my master's thesis was on, so buckle in, I love to talk about it. It was specifically about a wealthy Tuscaloosa, Alabama man named Solomon Perteet. He was by no means the most successful person of color in the antebellum South, but he's the one I know best. That said, let me give you a short bio of his life, before I move into what the literature as a whole says about your question.
Solomon was born in 1789 to a wealthy white woman in Georgia. His father was most likely a slave, based on the sparse population data that survived the War of 1812. He was raised by his mother, and was apprenticed to a wealthy plaster worker at the age of eleven. He moved to Tuscaloosa in the mid 1820s, and received a lucrative contract to do the plaster work in the new Tuscaloosa capitol building.
He was already a slave owner by the time he arrived in Alabama, and married one of his slaves, Lucinda, soon after his arrival. He petitioned and paid for manumission for Lucinda and their eldest child, Andrew Jackson. (Interestingly, Solomon also paid for the manumission of Lucinda's son from another relationship, but he was only to be freed when he turned 21.)
Solomon branched out into real estate, partnered with a white man to open a tannery, kept a medium-sized farm, owned a store, and got into money lending. He did most of his business with white clients, and successfully took debtors to court when they were unable to pay him back. I even found multiple instances of Lucinda appearing in court on his behalf, with an equally impressive success rate! As to the scale of his holdings, he owned at least forty city lots (10 city blocks), several rural plots of land, and large reserves of specie. According to English geologist (and Darwin's mentor!) Charles Lyell, Perteet loaned 17,000 dollars to a debtor who was unable to repay the money, and Solomon emerged relatively unscathed by the loss. Lyell traveled to the South in the 1840s and wrote about his trip, including meeting Solomon in Tuscaloosa.
Socially, his family was well-integrated into elite white society. The Perteet family lived in the most fashionable neighborhood in town. They had their own pew at the Episcopal church, and held weddings, baptisms, and funerals in the white sanctuary, while also retaining access to the black chapel. Solomon, Lucinda, two of his children, and two of his grandchildren, are buried in Greenwood Cemetery, right in the middle of his rich white neighbors. After his grandchildren were orphaned in 1869, they were informally adopted by a former CSA officer, lived in a mansion, and were sent to college.
That said, racism was still fundamental to the legal and social order of the South. In my work, I found two boundaries that Solomon was unable to cross, even with his substantial wealth. The first is a concrete one. He was unable to have his son admitted to the University of Alabama in the early/mid 1840s. I have no evidence of social pressure in either direction, but there were laws expressly prohibiting higher education for people of color at the time.
The second barrier was an intangible one. Solomon was unable to escape from the the conflation of blackness with poverty and servitude in public discourse and consciousness. Even though Solomon bought his wife and daughters $300 silk dresses, silk gloves, and velvet cloaks, ads for "negro clothes" ran in the paper. Lucinda's glowing obituary ran in the same 1869 Tuscaloosa Monitor that bore the headline, "Lo, the lazy negro."
This is probably a bit of a jumble; I've been working on it off and on today. However, this is my take on the boundaries of race and class in the Old South, based on my own research. Once I post this, I'll post a follow-up comment giving you a rundown of the literature. | [
"There were economic and ethnic differences between free blacks of the Upper South and Deep South, with the latter fewer in number, but wealthier and typically of mixed race. Half of the black slaveholders lived in cities rather than the countryside, with most living in New Orleans and Charleston. Especially New Or... |
how come even after just wearing my glasses for an hour without touching them, they’ll still get smudged? | Your eyelashes may hit the lenses, leaving behind oils. And airborne dust may also get caught in said oils, further adding to the smudges noticed. | [
"The glasses appear to be more susceptible to damage than the screwdriver; in \"The Girl Who Died\", a Viking warrior takes the glasses off the Doctor's face and easily breaks them in half. Nevertheless, the glasses continue to appear via replacement or repair until the end of the season. They return the following ... |
how do dogs know to be gentle with babies? | Weve been breeding dogs for 40 thousand years to do things we want. The ones who didnt, didnt get to reproduce. Part of this was selecting for good hunting dogs, tracking dogs, guard dogs, but not murdering your children is also a trait that would be selected for. | [
"They make fairly good watch dogs. When necessary, this dog will bark to alert its family that someone is nearby. This breed is typically good with other pets, especially when socialized at an early age. This dog gets along well with children, but it may be a good idea to socialize this breed at an early age as wel... |
Does listening to neuroacoustic music have any measurable effect in putting people to sleep? | The man is a quack and he has no scientific studies (besides his own) backing him up. There's no identifiable process behind the supposed 'theory', and everything I've read is nonsense.
So in short, no. Nothing beyond placebo. | [
"In another study, specifically looking to help people with insomnia, similar results were seen. The participants that listened to music experienced better sleep quality than those who did not listen to music.\n",
"The use of auditory stimulation has been shown to increase PGO waves during waking and sleeping cyc... |
when you listen to music on high volume in a loud place, does it damage your hearing the same way as it would in a quieter place? | If you turn your music up, it will be more likely to damage your hearing. Doesn't matter how loud it is relative to your background noise. That's not considering if the background noise is loud enough to damage your hearing as well | [
"According to the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks, the risk of hearing damage from digital audio players depends on both sound level and listening time. The listening habits of most users are unlikely to cause hearing loss, but some people are putting their hearing at risk, becaus... |
what makes good sushi "good"? | the freshness of the fish and how the chef cuts it, i.e. not leaving the skin on it, thick or thin slices etc. Also with nigiri sushi (fish on rice with wasabi between) the right amount of wasabi. Some bad sushi ive had had insanely big slices, like hard to eat big, the salmon still had a little silver on the side, and there was about a baseballs worth of wasabi.
| [
"Sushi has seen rapidly rising popularity recently in the Western world. A form of fast food created in Japan (where bentō is the Japanese variety of fast food), sushi is normally cold sticky rice flavored with a sweet rice vinegar and served with some topping (often fish), or, as in the most popular kind in the We... |
how did "*" become an understood symbol for correcting a spelling mistake made while typing? | "*" is usually used in text to [reference a footnote](_URL_0_). I assume it has derived from this as the corrections are usually placed under the text. | [
"Incorrect use of the \"ß\" letter is a common type of spelling error even among native German writers. The spelling reform of 1996 changed the rules concerning \"ß\" and \"ss\" (no forced replacement of \"ss\" to \"ß\" at word’s end). This required a change of habits and is often disregarded: some people even inco... |
How were cartoons (political or otherwise) printed in newspapers during the age of movable type? | What /u/CptBuck said. Also, cartoons don't really appear in newspapers until the 19th century, first in the form of lithographs; *Punch* in Britain and *La Caricature* and *Le Charivari* in France in the 1830s. Before that they exist as stand alone sheets. What we would recognize as political cartoons, employing caricature, don't really appear until around the 1770s in Britain, printed as etchings, usually hand-colored. | [
"Until the 1980s, most large newspapers were printed with turn-of-the-century \"letterpress\" technology using easily smudged oil-based ink, off-white, low-quality \"newsprint\" paper, and coarse engraving screens. While letterpresses produced legible text, the photoengraving dots that formed pictures often bled or... |
what is the leading theory / theories regarding creation of our solar system / universe / etc within the scientific community? |
Thanks to a guy called u/BadAstronomer, AKA Phil Plait, for most of this information. I knew only the most rudimentary of things before, and used to even be scared of the concept of such a huge universe before I saw his videos.
Scientists still have very little idea as to why the Big Bang happened.
We do know that many black holes are in the centres of most galaxies, certainly the largest like the Milky Way and Andromeda. They, plus the mass of stars and gas near the centre provides something for the whole thing to orbit around.
As for the solar system, that used to be a rather large cloud of gas and dust sitting around about 5 billion years ago. A supernovae happened nearby, which because of the insane pressure in large star cores, generates many of the heavier elements, and that supernovae also disrupted the balance in that cloud, and in the centre, it began to coalesce into a star. This took some time.
It got hotter and hotter and denser and denser until it had enough pressure and to initiate hydrogen fusion in the core. That is the definition of a star.
Stars have something called a steller (when we talk about our own Sun, we usually call it a solar) wind that blew away the remaining gas and dust nearby to the outer parts of the solar system.
The other planets began to coalesce in similar ways, but got nothing even remotely close to enough to be even a brown dwarf, let alone a star. Jupiter's birth is a bit disputed, we don't know whether it ever had a core, and if so how it formed.
The gas and dust was blown too far away for the four rocky planets to collect any kind of impressive atmospheres like even the Ice Giants of Neptune and Uranus have, but they did still have some.
The Asteroid belt was constantly disrupted by Jupiter's massive gravity, and was probably in part swallowed up by it, leaving Mars relatively small, and unable to form any sort of planet that has no other objects of similar size within it's orbit, part of the definition of a planet.
It actually seems like Jupiter moved inwards towards the Sun (a process that actually happens to many gas giants like Jupiter in exoplanet solar systems), but was stopped by Saturn's gravity from going too far. It was just trying to eat up as much as it could.
Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune began to move further out from the Sun, towards their current positions, and that seemed to disrupt the Kuiper Belt and the comets around it. And that also began to send a lot of asteroids and comets into different orbits. I'll get to that later.
Earth got it's start pretty early, but a few tens of millions of years after it's birth, a massive protoplanet named Thea slammed at it in a low angle collision, blowing apart Thea and taking a good part of the Earth with it, and the crust of the earth liquified into lava, that coalesced into the Moon, but that Moon was pretty near the Earth, so the Earth cooked the moon, making the far side of the moon's crust thicker. Remember the asteroids moving around from last paragraph? That slammed into the Moon (and Earth), which couldn't penetrate, only crater, the far side, but broke through the near side's thinner surface, bubbling up Lunar lava, which made the Maria we see today. Tidal forces moved the Moon away from the Earth and also tidally locked the Moon's faces.
The Earth cooled down and also got a lot of water from comets, and it looks like some organic molecules too, and maybe although disputed, basic forms of life.
Mercury was formed just as a basic coalescence of rocks, but it's orbital period isn't tidally locked to the Sun the same way. It's a 2:3 resonance, not like the Moon. And it's been that way since.
Venus once was much cooler, its clouds much less of a problem, and had oceans of liquid water and maybe life. But the Sun began to heat up, due to the hydrogen fusing into helium which increased the pressure, and pressurizing gas leads to gas heating up. The Sun eventually boiled away the oceans, and water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas, and the rocks even began to have greenhouse gases boiled out of them too. Plate tectonics, what may have once been, stopped. We have a few ideas as to why Venus rotates retrograde and so slowly, but the giant impact hypothesis, IE a big object turned the thing over, is popular. The Solar wind also blew away lighter elements in the Venusian atmosphere, leading to only the heavier ones like sulfur dioxide. Any core of iron providing a magnetosphere that may have provided a shield went away when the rotation slowed, exposing the planet to even more rays.
Mars once had oceans of liquid water too, and maybe life as well. But for some reason, it's magnetosphere stopped, not sure why, and the sun blasted away with the solar wind anything keeping the planet tempurature regulated. The water evapourated over the eons, and is lifeless today.
The Saturnian moons likely are stopping the rings from forming into a moon themselves, they've locked them into positions where they can't move.
Uranus likely got whacked, hard. And that would be why it spins sideways. It's much colder, and so methane is much more common in its atmosphere.
Neptune's moon Triton looks like it might have been a dwarf planet captured from the Kuiper belt, which probably explains why it orbits retrograde.
The Kuiper belt is probably too close to Neptune to form a proper planet, and the objects that are there have to be far away from Neptune to not get thrown out of orbit.
The Sun's Ort Cloud is much more populated than the math would suggest. The Sun's been orbiting for a pretty long time though, and has passed by other stars. Maybe that's where the extra comets are from.
Good enough answer? | [
"Ideas concerning the origin and fate of the world date from the earliest known writings; however, for almost all of that time, there was no attempt to link such theories to the existence of a \"Solar System\", simply because it was not generally thought that the Solar System, in the sense we now understand it, exi... |
what are those random sharp pains i get often on my skin almost like a big bite that catches my attention but immediately goes away? | It could be a misfire of the nerves. It could be a hair stuck and being pulled on by something. Or it could be an insect, there are many microscopic insects that live in the pores and hair follicles of your skin. | [
"Pain is very subjective and it is difficult to ascertain how much the initial piercing will hurt to a given person. Some people experience pain comparable to that of an average cartilage piercing to the helix or tragus, and others have described it as one of the most painful piercings they've ever received, either... |
Is it possible to access more of your subconscious? | The subconscious is a psuedoscientific term used by New Age types... *not* by modern psychologists.
Contemporary science doesn't really view the unconscious mind (which is the more scientific term) as some sort of powerful resource to be tapped into. | [
"Erickson maintained that it was not possible consciously to instruct the unconscious mind, and that authoritarian suggestions were likely to be met with resistance. The unconscious mind responds to openings, opportunities, metaphors, symbols, and contradictions. Effective hypnotic suggestion, then, should be \"art... |
how did the fluoridization of water improve dental health in america; historically and scientifically? | They found that people who lived in areas with naturally high fluoride levels in their water supplies had far fewer cavities than those that lived in areas with lower levels of fluoride. So they started testing the compounds and determined that fluoride helps to strengthen enamel. It was a simple addition to the water supply that greatly increased the over-all dental health of the nation, but in particular helped with making sure soldiers were more fit when drafted and so that is why the government did it.
And you are right that drinking it is less effective than if you can make your teeth sit in fluoride solutions for a while. This is why toothpaste, and mouthwashes also tend to have fluoride. | [
"Water fluoridation is the controlled addition of fluoride to a public water supply to reduce tooth decay. Although many dental-health organizations support such fluoridation, the practice is opposed by conspiracy theorists. Allegations may include claims that it has been a way to dispose of industrial waste, or th... |
How did tall ships and the like leave port before the advent of modern engines? | Most of the time tall ships aren't docked, they're moored in a more accessible area and then when they push off, it's mostly a question of letting the wind and the tides do the work.
However, if that's not good enough, there is also a particular anchor called a kedging anchor which is taken out by longboat in the direction the ship wishes to go and dropped as far as they can get it away from the ship, and then the ship is warped, or pulled, over to it by hand. Rinse lather repeat until the ship is where you want her. It's a similar process if the ship does actually have to be docked - a rope is wound around something solid onshore on one end and the ship's capstan (a large drum that can be turned by hand) on the other, and the ship is warped in and out.
I had to actually do this as a trainee sailor. If you would like to learn more about it without having to pull a ship by hand, however, you can do so [here](_URL_0_). | [
"The steamship was preceded by smaller vessels designed for insular transportation, called steamboats. Once the technology of steam was mastered at this level, steam engines were mounted on larger, and eventually, ocean-going vessels. Becoming reliable, and propelled by screw rather than paddlewheels, the technolog... |
How much of the earths surface can we see from the moon? | From the side of the moon that is facing us, one would see about half of the earth at any single point in time, or all of the earth over a period of time.
From the side of the moon that is not facing us, one would see none of the earth ever.
Asking "How much of the earths surface can we see from the moon?" is essentially the same as asking "From where on the earth can you see the moon?" | [
"BULLET::::- The full moon covers only about 0.2 deg of the sky when viewed from the surface of the Earth. The Moon is only a half degree across (i.e. a circular diameter of roughly 0.5 deg), so the moon's disk covers a circular area of: × (), or 0.2 square degrees.\n",
"The Sun is seen from Earth at an average ... |
why do people hate tsa soo much? | The TSA is the organization that deals with security at places like airports. The typical person's interaction with a TSA member consists of the individual having to prove that he or she is not a threat. This involves waiting in long lines and going through a metal detector. In other circumstances, people may be patted down or have seemingly harmless items taken away, like nail clippers or bottled beverages. Since many people have experiences with being bothered or inconvenienced by the TSA and few have witnessed the direct prevention of a terrorist attack or drug smuggling, they view it as a bad organization that annoys passengers instead of protecting them.
Please note that [most](_URL_0_) Americans are fine with the TSA. They're just less vocal. | [
"The entertainment industry has been accused of depicting those with TS as being social misfits whose only tic is coprolalia, which has furthered stigmatization and the general public's misunderstanding of persons with TS. The symptoms of Tourette syndrome are fodder for radio and television talk shows. Some talk s... |
Do we lose any weight through exhalation? | You're exactly right! We actually lose *most* of our weight through exhalation. (Sweating is the other major mechanism, but since that's mostly water it doesn't create a net loss.) This is why weight loss is so hard; all the fat molecules that your body stores have to be oxidized and exhaled. | [
"The main reason for exhalation is to rid the body of carbon dioxide, which is the waste product of gas exchange in humans. Air is brought in the body through inhalation. During this process air is taken in through the lungs. Diffusion in the alveoli allows for the exchange of O into the pulmonary capillaries and t... |
Why are cheetahs so fast? | Cheetahs have a ton of physical adaptations for speed. Just mentioning a few here –
- extra flexible spine for long strides and quick turns
- shoulderblade doesn't attach to clavicle for added flexibility
- lighter bones
- they only run on the tips of their toes, using their claws more for traction than other big cats
- tail partially flattened for use in balancing turns
- large heart and lungs for pumping oxygen to muscles
They are not stronger than lions, and at a significant size and weight disadvantage – an unfortunate trade-off for the cheetah's light frame and speed. A lion can easily kill a cheetah if they have to go head-to-head, so cheetahs will often lose their hard-earned catches to scavenging lions and other predators. | [
"African cheetahs may achieve successful hunts only running up to a speed of while hunting due to their exceptional ability to accelerate; but are capable of accelerating up to on short distances of . It is therefore the fastest land animal. Because of its prowess at hunting, the cheetah was tamed as early as the 1... |
What was the first event in recorded history? | There's a discussion of dated events at _URL_0_. I was taught at school that Egypt's unification around the 32nd century BCE was the first specifically recorded "event", though the precise date is unknown. I'm not sure if we've found earlier ones in the interim - shameful, I admit! | [
"The earliest recorded event in its history is the building by Ethelfleda of a fortification at Runcorn to protect the northern frontier of her kingdom of Mercia against the Vikings in 915. The fort was built on Castle Rock overlooking the River Mersey at Runcorn Gap.\n",
"Three Plinian eruptions are known to hav... |
How effective was armor in medieval battles? | Alright there's a lot to unpack here. But the short answer is: armor is amazing, that's why the wealthiest people and elite fighters wore it. What sane person would choose to wear 30-60 lbs of steel on their body if it didn’t do anything but slow you down?
First things first, light, medium, and heavy armor isn't really how people thought of armor during the medieval periods. It's, I believe, in invention of D & D, though I could be wrong on that one. In any case, it's usually easier to conceptualize armor as being either soft armors or hard armors.
Soft armor were like gambesons or aketons, basically thick layers of cloth and/or leather on top of each other (interesting tidbit, among the historical recreators and scholars there’s a debate going on about how prevalent leather actually was in armor. While I’m personally on the rare side of the debate, depending on time period of course, it was used in armor. Didn’t look like biker jackets and fetish gear though, unlike what many games and shows would have you believe).
During the medieval period these gambesons were often the first real line of defense people had, it was cheaper to make, much easier to mass produce, so you’d see some of the common soldiers wearing it. And it could definitely save their life. Layers of padded cloth could turn a killing blow into a scratch, or even stop an arrow if you’re lucky. There’s an account of the 3rd Crusade that compared the infantry after being harassed by the Saladin’s forces as looking like pincushions as they moved with arrows sticking out of their armor. Though it’s ambiguous if they’re referring to the low infantry that could only afford the gambeson or the more wealthy who likely had cloth armor worn overtop their mail.
There have been a lot of tests in the last few decades to determine the effectiveness of various weaponry on armor. Unfortunately, a lot of these tests were done by people to “prove” how one weapon was better than another, or how one weapon could beat all armor without much in the way of unbiased scientific research. You’ll see someone use a longbow and punch through some thin piece of cooking metal and claim that therefore a longbow could punch just as easily through armor. That is not the case.
One has to remember that weapon technology and armor technology went hand in hand. As armor got better, weapons changed to match them, which then changed armor to deal with the weapons and so on. But as a general rule, the best armor of the day made you impervious from anything but the most direct blows toward the weak points in the armor.
While armor technology went through a lot of development over the period of time that we consider the medieval ages. I’m going to limit myself to full body mail that we see during the crusades, and then the full plate armor that isn’t really invented until the very end of the medieval period, but is what most people think of when talking about knights.
Mail, is largely immune to any weapon that cuts: swords, one-handed axes and the like. And with extra padding from the gambeson the mail has a pretty good cushion against a lot of bludgeoning weapons and piercing weapons like maces and daggers. Though these weapons could still wound or even kill. Despite the padding a solid hit with a mace or hammer on the head, could potentially bring the entire force of the blow down into the opponent’s neck. It would need to be a pretty direct hit, though. While a dagger or other such weapon could stick in between the rings of mail, or get pushed into a weak point where the mail isn’t as strong. Possibly going up under the neck armor to pierce into the throat. Or into the eye holes of the helmet to stab.
Arrows were a bit more of a problem than most melee weapons. One of the quick and dirty ways to see how effective armor was is to see what kind of weapons they had and when art depicts them as using some weapons. One of the easiest examples to illustrate this point is the huskarl of Norse and English fame. Now, huskarls were the wealthiest and theoretically the best warriors in their respective armies. In art they are depicted as being covered almost completely in mail armor and holding onto large shields when advancing toward the enemy, where they are in danger of being fired upon by their enemy. However, when actually engaged in melee combat, they would sling their shields on their back and fight with large two-handed axes as an anti-armor and anti-cavalry weapon.
Now I want you to picture standing in the middle of a violent battle. Weapons are flying everywhere, swords, axes, spears, everything is whirling around much too quickly and chaotically for anyone to truly make out and keep their focus on. Someone attacking just out of eyesight could kill you before you could even know what’s going on. In such a situation any means of protection against this combat would be what you kept with you at all times. So to see them disregard their shield, one of their best forms of defense, and rely entirely on their armor to protect them. That speaks volumes about what they were worried about.
Eventually armor, and weaponry got better, and we get to the High and Late Medieval period where plate harnesses were fully or at least almost fully developed.
You have heard of the battle of Agincourt. Where English and Welsh longbowmen beat back the advancing armored French knights. A lot of people have taken this to mean that the longbow could pierce through the armor like it was nothing. That isn’t really the case.
There are plenty of tests some of dubious quality to show that, some use the wrong arrow, some use the wrong bow, some the wrong armor. None are perfect, but this is the best one I’ve seen: _URL_0_
So if longbows didn’t pierce through armor, how did the English win? Well, while one hitting a breastplate wouldn’t do much, an entire army of arrows can theoretically get into the weakpoints in the armor. There are accounts of the French knights lowering their heads as they charged because the volume of arrows shot at them would otherwise stick into their visors or breathing and eye holes. It’s also worth noting, that many of the French knights did make it to the English line, where they were stopped by the English knights fighting on foot, who hadn’t just charged over rough terrain into a constant rain of arrows.
In the terms of melee fighting, we see special anti-armor weapons being constructed like the pollaxe, one of my favorite weapons. It was designed specifically to be used while in full armor against opponents in full armor. And even then we have accounts of duels with the weapon continuing for long stretches of time where the armor of both contestants became battered beyond recognition but the men underneath were still fighting strong. The other powerful anti-armor weapon was the couched lance, being charged on horseback where the full weight of the horse and rider is placed on a single point to punch through the armor as best it can. This was so deadly that tournaments with these lances pioneered a thicker type of armor to protect the tournament knight. These armors could be twice as heavy as the usual field armor, and often didn’t allow much of the movement that would have been necessary to survive a battlefield, with pieces that restricted the arm and neck to move at all, all for the safety of the tournament knight.
But by this point the time of the near impenetrable armor was coming to an end. Now guns had lived concurrently with armor for hundreds of years, but as the power of guns grew, more and thicker armor needed to be developed to stop it. This was when the concept of bullet-proof came about. In order to prove an armor was immune to these weapons, the armor-smith would show off the armor take a pistol and shoot it point blank in the chest. The small dent the bullets made was the proof that the bullet couldn’t penetrate it. Here’s an example: _URL_1_
But we start to see armor getting thicker and heavier during this period to continue its dominance to the point that only the wealthy could afford it at all. And medieval style armor slowly disappeared, though armor itself isn’t gone. Even our current soldiers and police forces wear armor to defend against shrapnel and small arms fire.
But in brief. No. A movie or tv hero placed into an actual medieval battlefield would have their sword bounce off their opponent’s armor, and then they’d die. Likely from an attack they never even saw coming. Because they didn’t wear any real protection, and if they couldn’t afford it, weren’t standing in a protective line with their friends holding up their shield to protect them.
| [
"Medieval armor often offered protection for all of the limbs, including metal boots for the lower legs, gauntlets for the hands and wrists, and greaves for the legs. Today, protection of limbs from bombs is provided by a bombsuit. Most modern soldiers sacrifice limb protection for mobility, since armor thick enoug... |
factory method design pattern | Have you ever had to instantiate an object, and then do *something* to configure or manage it?
Let's say your application has a SoundManager object, and you need it to know about every Sound object that you create. This means that you're liable to write code like this:
mySound = new Sound( data );
mySoundManager.AddSound( mySound );
If you think about it, you're *always* going to add new Sounds to the SoundManager, right? So why not encapsulate that into a factory method? Like so:
mySound = mySoundManager.CreateSound( data );
This example is pretty simple, but I hope you get the idea.
In addition to reducing code duplication, this has one other important advantage: the code which initializes your sounds is now located *in* the SoundManager object; you could modify it there, centrally, or someone else could write a subclass -- StereoSoundManager -- which creates StereoSound objects instead of the plain ones. This second advantage can be very handy when dealing with large libraries or frameworks, since you can work within the infrastructure established by the library while still providing your own object classes and constructors. | [
"The making of industrial patterns begins with an existing block pattern that most closely resembles the designer's vision. Patterns are cut of oak tag (manila folder) paper, punched with a hole and stored by hanging with a special hook. The pattern is first checked for accuracy, then it is cut out of sample fabric... |
How did Buddhist communities in East/SE Asia perceive the decline of Buddhism in India? | We actually have some decent contemporaneous accounts of Chinese pilgrims visiting India during Buddhism's stable phase and then further accounts during the terminal phase.
Faxian describes his experiences in India in his text *Foguoji (A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms)*. He departed China in 399 as part of a pilgrimage mission. He observes that there were apparently thriving monastic communities at Kusinagar (where the Buddha attained *parinibbana*) and other Buddhist sites. He observes that at this time Kapilavastu (Buddha's home city) and Lumbini (his birthplace) are desolate and dangerous places. If you visit Kapilavastu today I would say it is pretty similar to when Faxian visited. All that is left are some crumbling walls. We also see evidence in his records of Buddhist sites that were in a state of degradation - he describes how a holy site built over a place in Rajgir where Buddha preached Dharma was basically destroyed.
Faxian describes his visit to the temple site in Bodh Gaya where the Buddha attained enlightenment. He notes that the temple is well looked after by Buddhist families and that monks who live in the area observe the precepts carefully. (Eventually this site is reclaimed by the Hindus - when it is basically discovered again by Buddhist missionaries in the 19th ce it is heavily overgrown and the Buddha image has been replaced with Hindu iconography. Anagarika Dharmapala - a Sinhalese Buddhist missionary - describes his experiences of this rediscovery in his biographical writings).
Next we have Xuanzang who visits India in the 630s. He recorded his observations in the text *The Great tang Records of the Western Regions*. We learn from him that, at this stage, the situation was quite perilous and we get this very clearly from his writings. He reports that when he visited Jetavena it was basically in ruin. This was previously a major Buddhist site. Kapilavastu is predictably empty. Interestingly his visit to Kusinagar reveals an empty city with few inhabitants - just a few hundred years prior Faxian reports that there was a thriving monastic community. Again, at the city of Vaisali - previously having a community of monks - he finds "very few monks." When he does find monastic communities he describes the conditions in negative terms - very often the monks are deprived and without lay support. The temples are usually dilapidated.
Xuanzang does complain about the fact that many of the monastic communities are Hiniyana and notes especially that they eat "the three kinds of pure meat" which he regards as evidence of not elevating themselves to a higher interpretation of scripture (i.e. the type of Buddhism he is familiar with in China). It is a subtle way of suggesting that they are pious but misguided.
In general, we get a sense from Xuanzang that Buddhism in India is in a pitiable state at this time. So in answer to your question, yes, there are historical accounts of Buddhism where we get a direct description of the condition of Buddhism in India and the impressions of the Buddhist pilgrims.
It is very interesting to note just how rapidly (comparatively speaking) things had degraded between Faxian's initial visit and Xuanzang's visit a few hundred years later. By the 9th ce Buddhism is all but completely destroyed in India. In fact many of the Indian Buddhist texts that we currently have only exist because they were kept in Tibet and translated to Tibetan during the initial dissemination of Buddhism in Tibet. Likewise, we also have surviving manuscripts kept in Chinese recensions. But major Indian Buddhist institutions of learning such as Nalanda were basically annihilated and the texts there lost.
There are many reasons for the decline of Buddhism in India. Hindu revivalism is one cause - Buddhism just ultimately became obviated by this more popular religion. Another important factor was a lack of state sponsorship - Buddhism originally thrived under state patronage and there was a long tradition of Indian rulers supporting many different religions, including Buddhism. But it seems that at some point this support ended. We also have to consider the fragmentation of the Buddhist tradition in India. After the Buddha's death the *sangha* broke up into many competing factions. This rivalry was probably not very healthy for Buddhism's longevity in its home nation as resources were stretched thin. Probably the least important aspect is the foreign invasion factor - while Muslim incursions into India was an issue for Buddhism (and all the native religions), Buddhism was virtually already destroyed. | [
"The decline of Buddhism has been attributed to various factors, especially the regionalisation of India after the end of the Gupta Empire (320–650 CE), which led to the loss of patronage and donations as Indian dynasties turned to the services of Hindu Brahmins. Another factor was invasions of north India by vario... |
I was microwaving some water, and it exploded all over the inside of the microwave with a loud "pop". What happened? | Superheating happened.
Water normally boils at 100^o C or 212^o F, but that is only if there is a nucleation site for the first bubbles to form. A nucleation site can be a defect in the vessel (your mug in this case) or contaminates in the water. If you had relatively clean water, and a nice smooth mug, it's possible to heat up your water well above the boiling point. Some substances superheat easier than others.
Once a *tiny* bubble forms, the surface tension of the water might be enough to hold that bubble in place and not let it grow too much. The temperature has to increase a bit above the regular boiling point for the bubble to keep expanding. When the bubbles grows a little bit, the surface tension decreases and then the bubble grows *rapidly* which causes that loud pop you heard.
[Here is the wiki article](_URL_0_). | [
"In a July 2012 post (which has since been removed), Hari quoted the ideas of Masaru Emoto that microwave ovens cause water molecules to form crystals that resemble crystals exposed to negative thoughts or beliefs, such as when the words \"Hitler\" and \"Satan\" were exposed to the water. Steven Novella calls Emoto... |
how does the united states federal government prevent a president from assuming total control and creating a dictatorship - like the actual people, laws or processes, etc that stop a rouge president from becoming a thing? | Mostly the fact that people would not recognize his authority.
If the president ordered airstrikes or army occupation of a US city without cause, the military leadership would inform the president that is an illegal order and ignore it and likely inform congress of the president's attempt to murder US citizens so that congress could impreach him.
Legally, the President does not have the authority to make law, so he can't unilaterally change laws. Again, if he tries to enforce invalid law, congress can impeach him.
Worst comes to worst, the States or People can rebel against the president's authority using police, national guard, and privately owned weapons. | [
"In dictatorships, the title of president is frequently taken by self-appointed or military-backed leaders. Such is the case in many states: Idi Amin in Uganda, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Ferdinand Marcos in Philippines and Saddam Hussein in Iraq are some examples. Other presidents in authoritarian states have wiel... |
how and why does mega work differently than others file hosting services? | Mega does this because the file itself is encrypted. Files are encrypted before uploading and then decrypted on your system.
What is really happening is:
The encrypted file is downloaded, this takes the time.
The file is decrypted, very fast.
The decrypted file is saved, as you noticed rather quickly.
They do this to meet some legal requirements in a rather twisted way that makes it harder on copyright holders, rather than the easier the law was intended to be. A major part of this is that the encryption makes it so Mega can not identify the content without first modifying it, but they are not required to modify to identify.
Mega slides through a loophole in the law. | [
"Open hosting servers allows people to upload files to a central server, which incurs bandwidth and hard disk space costs due to files generated with each download. Anonymous and open hosting servers make it difficult to hold hosts accountable. Taking legal action against the technologies behind unauthorized \"file... |
Assuming there IS silicon based life there in the universe, what would they use as "water" or as their organic solvent? | If water is available, there's not much reason to believe they wouldn't use it - carbon and silicon have near enough identical chemistry with water.
Otherwise, your options are quite limited. If it's too hot for water, you're really too hot for most simple liquids - you also don't really expect silicon at high temperatures, as its bonds are weaker than those of carbon, so it would run the risk of breaking apart. If it's too cold for water, you could possibly use some of the simple hydrocarbons (methane, ethane) if they were around in suitable quantities. | [
"In addition to carbon compounds, all currently known terrestrial life also requires water as a solvent. This has led to discussions about whether water is the only liquid capable of filling that role. The idea that an extraterrestrial life-form might be based on a solvent other than water has been taken seriously ... |
Did modesty in clothing (particularly covering the genitalia) originate from one culture or did cultures develop this fashion concurrently? | Perhaps this is a question more suited for r/askanthropology? I'd suggest cross posting this there. | [
"Early in the culture, the loincloth was used by both sexes. The women of Crete wore the garment more as an underskirt than the men, by lengthening it. They are often illustrated in statuettes with a large dagger fixed at the belt. The provision of items intended to secure personal safety was undoubtedly one of the... |
why are we not working on sending a probe towards our nearest habitable planet (gliese 581g)? | Because by the time it could get there we'd already have sent probes there using faster engines, if there's any reason to do it at all.
Current technologies would take on the order of a hundred thousand years. We can probably cut that significantly just by waiting a few decades. At that time scale, it would even make sense to wait a few centuries. Or millennia, if that's how long it happens to take to get a more economical and advanced probe.
And incidentally, there's absolutely no reason to believe it is actually habitable... | [
"Freitas finds numerous reasons why interstellar probes may be a preferred method of communication among extraterrestrial civilizations wishing to make contact with Earth. A civilization aiming to learn more about the distribution of life within the galaxy might, he speculates, send probes to a large number of star... |
Why is derivative notation d2y/dx2? | Often, dy/dx is written d/dx(y), where "d/dx" is an operator. It's an abuse of notation but well understood.
If you apply an operator twice it's common to write it as "squared" - another abuse of notation. e.g A(A(t)) = A^2 (t).
If you square d/dx you get d^2 /(dx) ^2.
Apply that to y and drop parentheses and you get d^2 y/dx^2 .
So it's a combination of notational abuses, but it's kind of stuck because it's cute. | [
"Partial derivatives may be combined in interesting ways to create more complicated expressions of the derivative. In vector calculus, the del operator (formula_28) is used to define the concepts of gradient, divergence, and curl in terms of partial derivatives. A matrix of partial derivatives, the Jacobian matrix,... |
why will youtube show people dying but freak out over nudity even non sexual nudity? | For the exact same reason a film can have dozens of deaths depicted yet remain PG but throw a couple breasts and swear words in and it's an instant R rating. American prudishness, pure and simple. All nudity is considered inherently sexual (not long ago there was a question on here freaking out about the idea of children at nude beaches) and sex is considered inherently bad. | [
"Experts say that sexting poses a serious problem, partly because teens do not understand that the images are permanent and can be spread quickly. \"It does not click that what they're doing is destructive, let alone illegal.\" \"Once they are out there, it spreads like a virus,\" police say.\n",
"In January 2019... |
What is the volume of an inch of rain? | So, first of all, a full measure of rainfall would be "X inches in the last Y hours". (Typically, the Y is standard, particularly on local news, and many times is just 24 or however many hours since the rainfall started. But a careful weather report will make sure to indicate the value of Y.) The reason you don't need to know the area over which the rain has fallen is because it doesn't matter.
The measurement is given assuming that the rain falls straight down and remains where it lands, with no runoff into streams or lakes and no absorption into the ground. So if I say that 1 inch of rain has fallen in the last 8 hours, that means under these idealized conditions, enough rain has fallen in the last 8 hours to cover the affected area (where the rain is actually falling) evenly with 1 inch of rain. So if you leave out a container with a flat bottom and constant cross-sectional area, it should have accumulated about 1 inch of rain in the last 8 hours. The area does not matter.
If that is confusing, just consider how we are defining each of the variables. The height *h* of the water in the container is
> h = V/A
where V = volume of water and A = cross-sectional area of container. The volume of water, however, is proportional to the rate of rainfall times the area A. So the area just completely cancels from the calculation. The height h is proportional to the rate of rainfall, measured in something like raindrops per square inch. (The constant of proportionality would describe the effective volume of one raindrop in inches-cubed, which we can assume is the same for all raindrops.)
More accurate measurements can be made with a so-called [rain gauge](_URL_0_), but the principle is the same. | [
"The largest recorded raindrop was 8.8 mm in diameter, located at the base of a cumulus congestus cloud in the vicinity of Kwajalein Atoll in July 1999. A raindrop of identical size was detected over northern Brazil in September 1995.\n",
"Rain is measured in units of length per unit time, typically in millimeter... |
why does a rocking motion facilitate sleep? | I imagine that it has something to do with the development of an unborn child in the mother's womb. In what way is it comfortable to sleep? - in darkness, in warmth and with rocking motions, three attributes of the inside of the uterus. You spent the first nine months of your life sleeping inside of there. It's only logical that your subconscious pines for its relative safety and comfort. | [
"Many adults find rocking chairs soothing because of the gentle motion. Gentle rocking motion has been shown to provide faster onset of sleep than remaining stationary, mimicking the process of a parent rocking a child to sleep.\n",
"Indian people believe that the rocking motion soothes and relaxes the child and ... |
why is it that playing an online game uses less data in comparison to watching a video or browsing the internet? | Here's an analogy. You're driving down the road, talking to your mom on the phone, telling her everything you see. Your mom isn't familiar with the area, so you have to say a lot - what restaurants you're passing, what the streets are called, what the signs say, where the potholes are, etc. You have to say a lot. In other words, you have to transmit a lot of data.
Now imagine instead, you're talking to your friend who knows the area. In fact, he knows the area as well as you do. So, instead of describing everything, you can just say, "I'm crossing Main Street." He's familiar with the area, so he can imagine everything else - you don't need to describe it. In other words, you don't need to transmit as much data.
That's how games work. Your console and mine both already have the world stored in memory, so our consoles don't have to transmit everything - all they have to do is transmit our location, and the other console can extrapolate the rest.
EDIT: Did this get linked from somewhere? It got little attention when I posted it last week, but since then it's exploded. | [
"Online games are video games played over a computer network. The evolution of these games parallels the evolution of computers and computer networking, with new technologies improving the essential functionality needed for playing video games on a remote server. Many video games have an online component, allowing ... |
Is it possible to cure HIV or AIDS with a full body blood transfusion? | HIV infected cells migrate to (reside in) the lymph nodes as well as in circulation. Performing a full body transfusion, which would be difficult on its own, would not remove the infected cells which are traveling in the lymph or residing in lymph nodes.
What you may want to look into is the recent case involving a patient who underwent irradiation and a bone marrow transplant that had HIV. The last I read about him (the article was published in Blood in 2010, don't have the article saved, but googling should come up with the right thing) he had no detectable levels of HIV. They didn't call it a cure (the media is/did) because there is the high chance that he has some population of HIV+ cells in his lymphatics or some other area which was not eliminated during the radiation therapy.
As to the initial part of your question. HIV primarily infects CD4 T cells, macrophages, dendritic cells, and in some instances NK cells. Some of these cells require a co-infection with another virus in order to be infected by HIV (NK cells do not express CD4, but when infected by herpes are forced to express it and can be infected by HIV). Any cells which express CD4 and CCR5/CXCR4 are up for infection by HIV. NK cells have recently been identified as important for the maintenance of the HIV infection as they serve as a viral reservoir. | [
"Preventing the spread of these diseases by blood transfusion is addressed in several ways. In many cases, the blood is tested for the pathogen, sometimes with several different methodologies. Donors of blood are also screened for signs and symptoms of disease and for activities that might put them at risk for infe... |
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