question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
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Do historians generally believe that terracotta army found near Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum were made using imported 'Hellenistic' expertise? | There was a great answer on this question about a year ago by u/kungming2 in response to someone who watched the same documentary:
_URL_0_ | [
"In 2017 Li Jian was curator of the \"Terracotta Army: Legacy of the First Emperor of China\", the Qin Dynasty terracotta soldiers exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The VMFA's director, Alex Neryges, stated that the Terracotta Army was the biggest archaeological discovery of all time calling the Qin S... |
how's does liquid soup turn into foam when i pump it from it container? what's exactly is happening? | When you push the pump (which contains one chamber for soap and one for air) it creates negative pressure that brings the liquid and air together, creating foam. | [
"One of the ways foam is created is through dispersion, where a large amount of gas is mixed with a liquid. A more specific method of dispersion involves injecting a gas through a hole in a solid into a liquid. If this process is completed very slowly, then one bubble can be emitted from the orifice at a time as sh... |
why do i sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with the sole thought of remembering i forgot to set my alarm? | I'd love to know the answer to this too. Sometimes I can't even get to sleep until I *know* I set the alarm. | [
"Today, many humans wake up with an alarm clock; however, people can also reliably wake themselves up at a specific time with no need for an alarm. Many sleep quite differently on workdays versus days off, a pattern which can lead to chronic circadian desynchronization. Many people regularly look at television and ... |
what is the point of those things that appear in your eyes after sleeping? | They're called eye poop in Sweden | [
"When the individual is awake, blinking of the eyelid causes rheum to be washed away with tears via the nasolacrimal duct. The absence of this action during sleep, however, results in a small amount of dry rheum accumulating in corners of the eye, most notably in children.\n",
"Acute Haemmorrhagic Conjunctivitis ... |
why do companies spend excessive amounts of money on logos that look barely different? | Peter Drucker, a very famous business professor, was often quoted as saying: "There are only two things in a business that make money - innovation and marketing. Everything else is a cost."
A company's logo is its face to the world. Anything that people think of when they glimpse a company's logo is probably going to strongly impact that consumers perceptions of the company.
One of my firm's clients recently heard in a focus group that a new logo they were testing out made someone think of the Nazi Swastika. This one guy's random impression was enough for our client to want to get us to speak to hundreds more people to ensure that this was just one random guy thinking that and not evocative of a larger trend. It's pretty clear how the client would have lost a lot of money if their logo made people think of nazis and they didn't catch it before making the change. That type of thing is a pretty compelling case to spend money researching a logo. A bit of money spent on research can avoid huge costs in the future if the logo/marketing idea doesn't work out. | [
"Because these company and program logos represent the company and product itself, much attention is given to their design, done frequently by commercial artists. To regulate the use of these brand icons, they are trademark registered and are considered part of the company intellectual property.\n",
"Consumers de... |
britons of reddit, can someone explain the "first past the post system"? | The country is divided into "constituencies".
Each constituency elects a single representative, or MP. (Edit, as pointed out below): they do this by voting on the candidates, and the candidate with the most votes wins. The winner doesn't need a majority of votes, they just need more votes than anyone else.
Most MPs represent a party (although independent candidates are allowed to stand, and occasionally win). The party with more than 50% of MPs gets to form the government.
If no party has more than 50% of MPs, the party with the most MPs gets to try to form a government by going into coalition with other parties, so that the parties in the coalition have more than 50% of the MPs between them. | [
"First past the post was used in New Zealand prior to MMP, and the three other systems were recommended by the Royal Commission on the Electoral System for further scrutiny in 1986 and were voted on in 1992.\n",
"The first-past-the-post system used in UK general elections means that the number of seats won is not... |
Did any military powers use light (most likely the reflection of it) in military tactics in an attempt to blind or burn the opposition? | Sorry, we don't allow ["example seeking" questions](_URL_0_). It's not that your question was bad; it's that these kinds of questions tend to produce threads that are collections of disjointed, partial, inadequate responses. If you have a question about a specific historical event, period, or person, feel free to rewrite your question and submit it again. If you don't want to rewrite it, you might try submitting it to /r/history, /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact.
For further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_1_). | [
"Battlefield illumination is technology that improves visibility for military forces operating in difficult light conditions. The risks and dangers to armies fighting in poor light have been known since Ancient Chinese times. Prior to the advent of the electrical age, fire was used to improve visibility on the batt... |
quantum computers (you can explain it like i'm a dumbass 26yr old too if that suits you more.) | _URL_0_
This video explains it fairly well. | [
"Quantum computers are the ultimate quantum network, combining 'quantum bits' or 'qubit' which are devices that can store and process quantum data (as opposed to binary data) with links that can transfer quantum information between qubits. In doing this, quantum computers are predicted to calculate certain algorith... |
eli: the current debate in the uk about the eu. | [This](_URL_0_) excellent post by /u/loudribs over at /r/unitedkingdom gives a good overview of the pros and cons. | [
"The United Kingdom renegotiation of European Union membership was a package of changes to the United Kingdom's terms of European Union (EU) membership and changes to EU rules which was first proposed by Prime Minister David Cameron in January 2013, with negotiations beginning in the summer of 2015 following the ou... |
Is there a chance to be struck by lightening in a room with window and door closed ? | Yes, but probably not in the way you think. A lightning bolt will most likely not shoot through a window, leave the wall unmolested, shoot through the air in your room and then head right towards you. Lighting is electricity and takes the path of least electrical resistance. Your walls have metal plumbing pipes and metal household electrical wires running through them that are the path of least resistance. Therefore, a lightning bolt will mostly likely touch down from air onto your roof or the outside of a wall, and then run along the wiring and plumbing towards the ground. For this reason, being inside a building is safer than being out in an open field. But, lightning bolts carry a lot of electrical current, so not all of the current is contained exactly in the pipes and wiring that it is traveling down. A lot of the current spills out, and dissipates in all directions. So if you are touching your metal sink knob right when a bolt hits your house and runs down the plumbing in the wall just behind your sink, some of current can travel through you and give you a shock. You may not be "struck by lightning" in the sense of lightning first touching down from air directly on you if you are in a building, but you can still be "struck by lightning" in the sense that some of the electrical current from the bolt travels through you as it makes its way down through the structure of the house.
In short, to stay safe from lightning when indoors, avoid touching plumbing or the water coming out of plumbing (sinks, showers, toilets) and avoid touching plugged-in electrical equipment (appliances, corded phones, charging devices). | [
"Upon entering the darkened room, the gaze falls on a black “picture”, which, surrounded by a vibrating light, appears to float in front of the wall. The image is made up of 16 monitors arranged as a compact rectangular block at a distance of 30 centimetres from the wall – the screens facing the wall. A crackling s... |
why do people enjoy the smell of their own farts?? | It's just you. | [
"The effect his scent has had now confirms to Grenouille how much he hates people, especially as he realizes that they worship him now and that even this degree of control does not give him satisfaction. He decides to return to Paris, intending to die there, and after a long journey ends up at the fish market where... |
why was earth more subject to cosmic debris impacts billions of years ago compared to today? | Because there were a lot more cosmic debris back than, in fact Earth is a collection of cosmic debris. Over the course of billions of years Earth along with the rest of the planets in the Solar System have cleaned out the space debris adjacent to their orbits. That being said there are still billions of space rocks left in the Solar System, but since space is so big they rarely hit us. | [
"Large areas of Earth's surface are subject to extreme weather such as tropical cyclones, hurricanes, or typhoons that dominate life in those areas. From 1980 to 2000, these events caused an average of 11,800 human deaths per year. Many places are subject to earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, to... |
is it really true that cockroaches find humans repulsive? | Cockroaches don't have the neurons required to feel revulsion, or much of anything, really. They're little machines with a bunch of hardwired responses and little to no ability to actually make decisions. That said, one of their responses is to remove foreign smells from their bodies. The oils on your finger qualify, so they try to remove them. | [
"Cockroaches are social insects; a large number of species are either gregarious or inclined to aggregate, and a slightly smaller number exhibit parental care. It used to be thought that cockroaches aggregated because they were reacting to environmental cues, but it is now believed that pheromones are involved in t... |
Historians, how do you feel, in general, the accuracy and completeness of wikipedia entries compares to High School history textbooks? | It depends on the article, especially on how popular the topic is. I'd say, in general, that wikipedia articles are more complete than a typical textbook. This is due to space more than anything. A textbook can't spend 1200 words on Julius Caesar's [early career](_URL_0_) before becoming consul. But the rest of his career is pretty comparable to what you might find in a textbook.
Thankfully you do not have to rest on my anecdotal data. Check out this [study by Roy Rosenzweig on Wikipedia](_URL_1_). This is widely read by teachers and professors and informs many opinions on the website. He concludes that Wikipedia is just as accurate as a comparable encyclopedia, a tad less accurate than a topical encyclopedia, but more exhaustive than either. The issue is that the articles often focus on material that many academics would consider "beside the point" for a person looking for an overview on a topic and its importance to historians.
Edit: the study is about Wikipedia, not at Wikipedia. | [
"The book reflects Loewen's belief that history should not be taught as straightforward facts and dates to memorize, but rather as analysis of the context and root causes of events. Loewen recommends that teachers use two or more textbooks, so that students may realize the contradictions and ask questions, such as,... |
how come some animals, like kangaroos, bulls and some apes, can get so jacked buy eating almost no proteins? | They don't eat "no" proteins, but their diet consists of food with only a small amount of protein in it (grasses, etc do still have a small amount of protein)
So they eat a LOT of it. And have digestive systems (and muscles) that have evolved to extract the maximum benefit out of what they do eat. | [
"Kangaroos have single-chambered stomachs quite unlike those of cattle and sheep, which have four compartments. They sometimes regurgitate the vegetation they have eaten, chew it as cud, and then swallow it again for final digestion. However, this is a different, more strenuous, activity than it is in ruminants, an... |
What would be considered the greatest political "blunders" of U.S.'s 1st President, George Washington? | Over reliance on Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton and Washington's relationship is well known and predates his time as President but it was his over reliance on Hamilton during and after his Presidency that greatly increased political tensions, contributed to the rise of the Republican party and contributed to Adams loss in 1800.
Initially Washington had leaned very heavily on James Madison, who was the most effective politician in the house, but Washington eventually turned to his cabinet largely out of constitutional reasons. His cabinet was initially a good mix of geography and political persuasion. The political arguing between Jefferson and Hamilton is known well, but initially Washington was far less biased than one would think, for instance he very nearly vetoed BOTUS I. As political tensions mounted Washington increasingly relied on Hamilton at the expense of the moderates and what would be Jeffersonians within his cabinet. For instance the negotiations between Jay and the British were run through Hamilton( the secretary of the treasury) and not state. Edmund Randolph (the secretary of state) was left almost entirely in the dark and consequently so was the ambasaddor to France, James Monroe. Jay and Hamilton's working around of the Pro-French Virginians put both Monroe and Randolph into the near impossible position of attempting to explain the Jay Treaty to their still nominal allies in France which contributed to the more famous hostilities of Adams presidency.
After Jefferson's departure there was no remaining Republican leaning members of Washington's cabinet, only Randolph and mostly high federalists. In 1795 a letter written by Edmund Randolph to France had been seized by the British who turned it over to Alexander Hamilton, who informed Washington that it contained treasonous material to the United States. Washington, never actually read the letter nor did he have someone else read it relying solely on the opinion and word of Hamilton. He confronted Randolph in a cabinet meeting forcing him to resign. Within the 18th century society of honor, Washington's actions were highly offensive made evident by Randolph taking the unusual steps of publicly attacking Washington in his [A Vindication of Mr. Randolph's Resignation](_URL_0_) at about the same time Monroe was also removed from France. These removals meant that there was now no Republicans holding high office within the United States, and only one moderate Federalist(Lee). Jefferson and Madison in particular saw the removal of Randolph as the last straw, and any lingering sentiments towards reconciling with the Federalists was highly unlikely. Jefferson in a pained letter even wrote to Washington, telling him of how dangerous he felt Hamilton was to Washington.
Adams too many problems during his presidency to get into at any length but one of the ones not of his creation was because of Washington. Adams had expanded the armed forces of the United States (either to oppose France or as some Federalists hopped to stop domestic violence ie: Republican). At this highly partisan time Adams thought that only Washington could be offered command of the army to ensure that the army held the support of all Americans. Perhaps showing the severity of the time, Washington actually accepted but refused to have anyone other than Hamilton as his second in command. Adams huffed and puffed but was left with little choice but to accept Hamilton. Hamilton was not the man to bring the nation together, especially at the head of an army one of his best friends Gouvernor Morris wrote of Hamilton
"Our poor friend Hamilton bestrode his hobby to the great annoyance of his friends, and not without injury to himself.. He well knew that his favorite form (of government) was inadmissible, unless as the result of civil war; and I suspect that his belief in that which he called an 'approaching crisis' arose from a conviction that the king of government most suitable in his opinion, to this extensive country, could established no other way".
Hamilton's appointment panicked Republicans even more so, many who now openly thought that the army's purpose was to crush the Republican movement. Jefferson sent out letters to Republican leaders imploring them to avoid giving the Federalists any reason whatsoever for using the army against them. In doing so Jefferson allowed the public to arrive at their own conclusion regarding the army, which contributed to his victory in 1800. Adams had planned to appoint moderates in Pennsylvania and New York to high offices within the army (the two states he needed to win to secure his election) but Hamilton ensured that only high federalists and no Republicans were appointed to command, again reinforcing the Jeffersonian fear. It was at this point that Adams realized he had lost complete control of the Federalist party and he attempted to reassert his authority through sacking his cabinet(minus Lee) and negotiations with France, causing a civil war within the party.
Had Washington continued to rely on moderate Republicans like Madison and appointed a bi-partisan cabinet much of the political infighting that resulted in the two party system could have been lessened or delayed.
outside of that I'm not sure what else you can really hold Washington accountable for major political mistakes. Ellis in *American Creation* holds the entirety of the founding generation responsible for failing to find a solution for the natives and slavery. However Ellis notes in the book (for the Creek confederacy for instance) the Federal government held few tools on hand to deal with many of the issues affecting the Creek. | [
"George Washington, best known for being the first official president of the United States and a great military leader, appears in \"The Maddest Idea\", and is the one who assigns Major Edward Fitzgerald to the job of flushing out the traitor. \"(See George Washington)\"\n",
"His Excellency: George Washington is ... |
how can video games produce sounds from specific areas in the game? | Science.meme
But seriously, it’s all in just using the right balance between left and right to mimic what he hear and how we perceive direction in real life. We experience the sounds we hear all the time in stereo (i.e. out of each of our 2 ears), so it’s *relatively* straightforward to create this same effect by splitting the sounds just right between 2 (or more, but a minimum of 2) speakers.
You can confirm by playing one of these games with headphones on backwards. It’s pretty trippy, to be honest. | [
"Many games use advanced techniques such as 3D positional sound, making audio programming a non-trivial matter. With these games, one or two programmers may dedicate all their time to building and refining the game's sound engine, and sound programmers may be trained or have a formal background in digital signal pr... |
what does the wow! alien signal mean? the image is just a bunch of numbers and letters so what is the significance of those specific letters? | [Here is a better visualization of the WOW signal](_URL_0_)
Basically those numbers and letters are a printout of raw data because you can fit more datapoints on a printed sheet of paper this way. The numbers go up and then into the alphabet to represent the strength of a signal.
As you saw on the printout, the norm was nothing and maybe 1's 2's and 3's. Suddenly you get a 7, and then start seeing letters! Not just one, but a sustained 70 second signal. That was something of note. | [
"Donnelly discovers that the symbol for time is present throughout the message, and that the writing occupies exactly one-twelfth of the space in which it is projected. Banks suggests that the full message is split among the twelve craft, and the aliens want all the nations to share what they learn.\n",
"The Wow!... |
how does the chinese economy work/differs from the rest of the world. | Its basically American capitalism with loose or non-existent civil rights laws (child labor, unequal wages and hours ) and the government can own and compete in business. Imagine if the US government decided to start building super cheap economy cars, built with unpaid slave labor provided by the prison system and super ultra subsidized by itself, and than sold those cars with huge tax incentives to the customer within America in direct competition with American manufacturers. Substitute analogous industry with any alternative you like. | [
"The socialist market economy of the People's Republic of China is the world's second largest economy by nominal GDP and the world's largest economy by purchasing power parity. Until 2015, China was the world's fastest-growing major economy, with growth rates averaging 6% over 30 years. Due to historical and politi... |
why do non-hearing people sound "that way" when they speak? | They can see how lips move, but they can't see how throat, tongue, windpipe, etc move. Observing mouth movement is not enough to recreate all the sounds, you need to be able to hear it in order to accurately replicate what others are saying. Not to mention you can't get the tone or pacing correctly either by just looking at mouth movement. In addition some of them can't hear their own voice either, which makes it even harder to know if they pronounce something correctly or not. | [
"BULLET::::- psychological noise are the preconception bias and assumptions such as thinking someone who speaks like a valley girl is dumb, or someone from a foreign country can’t speak English well so you speak loudly and slowly to them.\n",
"While native speakers correctly pronounce the sequence differently in ... |
why do road workers cut strips out of the interstate and refill them? | Potholes are partially caused by the stuff under the road settling and no longer supporting it. They need to cut out the road and repair the road bed or else the problem will just come back.
A freeway isn't just a strip of concrete, they have to dig out the ground and provide a stable foundation when building it. Just putting blacktop on a pothole is like putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound. | [
"These roads are made from recycled plastics, and the first step in constructing them is to collect and manage the plastic material. The plastics involved in building these roads consists mainly of common post-consumer products such as product packaging. Some of the most common plastics used in packaging are polyet... |
Does anyone know a good read on snipers in WWII? | Karabiner 98k by Karem and Steves is a great resource for K98k snipers, particularly Volume IIa. There are currently 3 volumes, Volume 1 covers pre-war (banner model, standard modell, etc) to 1938 rifles at Mauser-Oberndorf, JP Sauer, Mauser-Borsigwalde, Ermawerke, Berlin Lubecker, and BSW. Volume 2 covers wartime production, and Volume 3 covers the Kriegsmodell. 2A specifically has a lot of info regarding sniper rifle development at Mauser-Oberndorf, specifically the ZF-39 (low and high turret), the ZF-41, and the Jung Prismatic Optics prototypes. The 3 book set is an excellent resource for the history and engineering of the German K98k. The only downside to the books is that they are pretty pricey, at $345 for the 4 book set (Volume 2 is so large that they had to split it into 2 volumes).
Link: _URL_1_
The only other "WW2 German Sniper" book I know about is Backbone of the Wehrmacht Vol 2.
Link: _URL_0_
I personally do not own volume 2 (I own volume 1), but it seems to be a decent source on the rifles. | [
"Common sniper rifles used during the Second World War include: the Soviet M1891/30 Mosin–Nagant and, to a lesser extent, the SVT-40; the German Mauser Karabiner 98k and Gewehr 43; the British Lee–Enfield No. 4 and Pattern 1914 Enfield; the Japanese Arisaka 97; the American M1903A4 Springfield and M1C Garand. The I... |
Iroquois vs. Haudenosaunee | The exact etymology of "Iroquois" is debatable, and there are plenty of Iroquoian people who use it and related terms for various purposes. If you're talking about an individual person, it's best to go with their specific nation. Joseph Brant is Mohawk (or *Kanien'kehá:ka* if you're feeling particularly ambitious). Haudenosaunee is the accepted English variation for the name of the confederacy itself, based on the Mohawk name (*Rotinonshonni*). As such, it's reserved of usage for the political entity or its citizens as a whole. Joseph Brant was a defender of *the* Haudenosaunee, but he was not *a* Haudenosaunee.
Iroquois is used more generically, to refer to people culturally but often outside the context of the Haudenosaunee as a political entity. After the revolution, Joseph Brant led many Iroquois refugees to Ontario and helped found the Six Nations of Grand River (now home to the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team) as one of the successors to the Haudenosaunee. In the derivative form "Iroquian" is extends to cover culturally and linguistically related peoples including the Wendat (Huron), the Chonnonton (Neutral), and the Cherokee. | [
"The Iroquois Confederacy or Haudenosaunee is believed to have been founded by the Peacemaker in 1142 or 1451 AD, bringing together five distinct nations in the southern Great Lakes area into \"The Great League of Peace\". Each nation within this Iroquoian confederacy had a distinct language, territory, and functio... |
How did the various Viking colonizers of parts of Britain react to different forms of Paganism in the areas they commanded? | They didn't react to them, because as far as we can tell, there were no surviving population groups practising pre-Christian religions in the British Isles when the Vikings first began making incursions in 793. Ireland and Scotland had fully Christianised over the course of the fifth to seventh centuries and developed pervasive Christian identities of their own right -- especially so in Ireland, where sharing religion and language across the many hundreds of small states across the island facilitated a degree of common ethnic consciousness that made Norse settlers initially quite unwelcome. When the Vikings began appearing at the end of the eighth century, there were no pagans left in the British Isles, or at least any remaining communities were small enough to escape documentation and to leave no trace in the archaeolgical record.
If you're interested in how Scandinavian pagans interacted with other polytheistic communities, it might be smart to direct your inquiries into their early voyages into Eastern Europe, especially the Kievan Rus. I haven't studied that part of the world to the extent I've studied Ireland (and to a lesser extent, Scotland), so I can't speak with any authority there, nor can I recommend you any texts.
Sources: Stefan Brink and Neil Price (eds.), *The Viking World*, various articles
J. H. Barrett (ed.), *Contact, Continuity and Collapse: The Norse Colonisation of the North Atlantic*, various aritcles
Clare Downham, *Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland: The Dynasty of Ivarr* | [
"The Viking invasions of the eighth and ninth centuries reintroduced paganism to North-East England, leading in turn to another wave of conversion. Indigenous Scandinavian beliefs were very similar to other Germanic groups, with a pantheon of gods including Odin, Thor and Ullr, combined with a belief in a final, ap... |
what does a magnetic polar reversal mean for everyday life? | The poles don't actually switch like flipping around. One or both weaken, then wander. During the weak time, the Earth is bathed in radiation that a strong field prevents. Time to go underground. | [
"Gregg Braden (born June 28, 1954) is an American author of Consciousness literature, who wrote about the 2012 phenomenon and became noted for his claim that the magnetic polarity of the earth was about to reverse. Braden argued that the change in the earth's magnetic field might have effects on human DNA. He has a... |
if i find an undiscovered island in international waters, is it mine? | Essentially, on the scale of nations, there's not really legal rules exactly. Its more like, if you can convince everyone that it is yours, then it's yours.
For my money, I would instead make a deal with the US or your large power of choice. "Let me own this whole island, and I'll be part of your country." The odds of the international community recognizing the US's claim on an undiscovered island is way better than them recognizing yours. | [
"The only immediate mining potential is on and immediately offshore of the islands themselves (phosphates, sand, gravel, and coral) which would conflict with their protected status per the study. Iron deposits on a few seamounts are also mentioned as an \"intermediate\" possibility but no energy resources are ident... |
how do music editing programs change the pitch without changing the speed? | Sound can be converted between "time domain" and "frequency domain" using Fourier transform (sort of a spectrum analyzer). So you can convert the sound to frequencies, do modifications there (for example shift frequencies) and convert back to time domain, and you get pitch shift without speed change. In practice doing this is very time consuming, so it's done in small blocks and quality will not be perfect. | [
"The software generally goes through a two-step process to accomplish this. First, the audio file is played back at a lower sample rate than that of the original file. This has the same effect as playing a tape or vinyl record at slower speed - the pitch is lowered meaning the music can sound like it is in a differ... |
Is the total mass of oxygen atoms greater in the ocean or in the air? | Oxygen is about 23.20% of the atmosphere by mass, and the atmosphere has a total mass of about 5 x 10^(18) kg. So the atmosphere contains about 1.16 x 10^(18) kg of oxygen.
Oxygen is about 88.89% (16/18) of water by mass, and the oceans have an approximate mass of 1.35 x 10^(21) kg. So the oceans contain about 1.2 x 10^(21) kg.
In other words, the oceans contain roughly 1000 times more oxygen than the atmosphere does, by mass. | [
"Oxygen is one of the most abundant elements on Earth and represents a large portion of each main reservoir. By far the largest reservoir of Earth's oxygen is within the silicate and oxide minerals of the crust and mantle (99.5% by weight). The Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere together weigh less than ... |
All this talk about humans on Mars someday. How will that be possible with such extreme cold temperatures on Mars? | Well, the temperature isn't even the biggest problem. Radiation and (lack of) pressure are at least as problematic. All of these limit the extent of extravehicular surface activities feasible to humans. We do need heated, insulated pressure suits on Mars, but they can be quite a bit more lightweight and less clumsy than the spacesuits used on the Moon and in orbit. | [
"In complete contast the mean temparature on Mars is very cold at -63 deg C [-82 deg F] This is despite having over 95% atmospheric CO2, almost the same as Venus, but at a much lower pressure than both earth an Venus. Mars is further from the Sun than earth but still receives about 44% of the suns heat [approx 500w... |
why do apples make me hungrier? | The problem with apples is that they are purely carbs and nothing else, and carbs will always leave you with that "empty" feeling. Granted, they have a lot of health benefits, are highly nutritious, and I definitely eat them all the time. However, foods that contain fats and proteins are the ones that make us feel full. What you need to do, and what I do, is eat the apple with a couple of almonds or a piece of low calorie string cheese. That way you are getting a good mix of carbs, fats, and proteins as part of a healthy snack that will leave you feeling full for quite some time. Hope this helps! | [
"It is fairly large, oblong and has red skin and crisp flesh. Like many late-season apples, it improves with a few weeks of cool storage, which brings it to its full, rich flavor. Hedrick praised this apple as attractive and keeping well in cold storage, but added that it was imperfect in that the trees lack vigor ... |
Why is there a dotted image on the side of public bus windows? | It's called frit. Has a number of purposes- it's ceramic based paint that helps the adhesive bond to the window in the mount. It also minimizes UV reducing its ability to break down the sealant.
And, I've heard they think it makes a car more appealing- so you don't go from black window gasket to window- it's a slow transition. | [
"At the centre of the map is a rectangular area with a yellow background which shows the local street layout and bus stops labelled with letters (A to Z, and if necessary AA to ZZ) of all the bus-stops in the local area. Beyond this is a schematic bus map for an area about radius with a pale yellow background, whic... |
how does private individual buy stocks offline/online? and how does the process work? | "private individuals" don't really buy stocks, you need to go through a broker. You place an order with one of a thousand or more investment houses/companies that you have made an account with, the company then goes through the process of buying you that stock through their electronic systems. It takes only milliseconds for a transaction to occur. | [
"There are other ways of buying stock besides through a broker. One way is directly from the company itself. If at least one share is owned, most companies will allow the purchase of shares directly from the company through their investor relations departments. However, the initial share of stock in the company wil... |
According to a History Channel documentry, during the Vietnam war, US ground troops would face 240 days of combat a year, versus 11 days of combat a year during WW2. Is this claim true? | I just recently [made a post](_URL_0_) concerning the psychological effects of long-term frontline service in the U.S. Army during WWII.
> Being assigned to the Infantry branch (as roughly half of all men entering the Army were in mid-1944) was an assignment fraught with danger;
Deployed overseas|Total battle casualties|*Deaths among battle casualties*|*KIA*|*DOW*|*Died while MIA*|*Died while POW*|WIA|MIA|POW
:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--|:--
757,712|661,059|*142,962*|*117,641*|*19,613*|*1,795*|*3,913*|471,376|15,830|56,212
> There was no such thing as a "tour of duty" for U.S. soldiers during WWII; those on the front lines saw service until they were killed, wounded, taken prisoner, disabled, or otherwise too mentally broken to continue. It was estimated that a soldier began to lose his effectiveness after about 90 combat days (American troops were often on the front lines for as long as two months without a visit to a rear area rest center; the British had a policy of allowing four days of rest for every twelve days of combat) and was completely ineffective after 200-240 combat days. After 180 combat days, less than three percent of the original men in a unit remained, the rest lost to various causes. Neuropsychiatric casualties accounted for 15 to 25 percent of all non-battle losses (the Army hospitalized about 900,000 men for neuropsychiatric reasons during the war, a number Eisenhower demanded not be released to the press) and it was estimated that for every ten days of combat, three to ten percent of men in a unit became neuropsychiatric casualties. The "rate of replacement" for men varied wildly; many were killed nearly immediately, while others made it through the entire war without suffering any bodily harm whatsoever.
> Men who showed particular aptitude for certain tasks were often sent back to the United States on temporary duty to attend specialist schools; they then returned to their units. Week-long passes were often offered to rear areas such as London or Paris. Combat veterans who had been made unsuitable for frontline service through wounds or other causes were often assigned to apply their expertise in training new soldiers at replacement training centers stateside.
> In early 1945, to improve the morale of replacements (by now called "reinforcements"), General Joseph Stilwell proposed that they be pre-designated for assignment to certain units while still in the United States, and shipped in groups. Four men would form a squad, four squads a platoon, and four platoons a company. Companies and platoons would be broken up as needed, but the basic unit of four men would always remain intact. The plan was begrudgingly adopted by theater authorities in Europe in March 1945, and it is not possible to tell how effective it was since it only operated for a short time. The Surgeon General of the United States proposed that soldiers be given a six-month non-combat furlough after 200 to 240 days and have the option of serving it in the United States.
> Before the invasion of Japan, it was proposed that infantry divisions be augmented with a fourth regiment (many being the "orphan" regiments detached from divisions when they moved from a "square" to "triangular" structure in 1940) so that one could be shifted completely out of the combat zone, as well as a policy that soldiers only serve 120 combat days before a substantial rest. As Japan surrendered, this was never implemented. A proposal was also made to rotate divisions completely out of the front line to rear areas, something done in the German *Heer*.
> The replacement system in the *Heer* operated differently than in the U.S. Army, and it can be argued that there was an effect on morale. Divisions in the German Army were raised in certain geographic areas (not dissimilar to U.S. National Guard units) known as *wehrkreise* and men were assigned to divisional replacement units and took their training together, shipping to the front in groups, where they received more training before being assigned to their unit. The U.S. replacement system was rather impersonal. Men from all over the country (remember that the United States is massive; Germany is only about the size of Montana) were shipped to replacement training centers to receive instruction, and then shipped overseas to wherever they were needed, be it Europe or the Pacific. A port of embarkation (many replacements were assigned to augment divisions less than a month before they shipped out; the only significant small-unit training these men received would be combat) gave way to a trans-Atlantic or -Pacific voyage, intermediate and then field army replacement depots, replacement battalions, and then final units, each step of the way another obstacle to unit cohesion. Men often arrived scared and isolated, having little, if any, training upkeep offered along the way.
> **Sources:**
> * Atkinson, Rick. *The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945*. New York: Picador, 2013.
> * Ruppenthal, Roland G. *United States Army in World War II, European Theater of Operations, Logistical Support of the Armies Volume II: September 1944-May 1945*. Washington: United States Army Center of Military History, 1959.
> * United States. United States Army Adjutant General's Corps. *Army Battle Casualties
and Nonbattle Deaths in World War II Final Report, 7 December 1941-31 December 1946*. Washington: Statistical and Accounting Branch, Office of the Adjutant General, 1953.
> * United States, United States Army Medical Department. *Neuropsychiatry in World War II Volume I, Zone of Interior*. Washington: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army, 1973.
> * United States, War Department, *Army Ground Forces Historical Study No. 7: The Provision of Enlisted Replacements*. Washington: Army Ground Forces Historical Section, 1946.
This is a very interesting claim that is supposed to have originated in a speech given by Army general Barry McCaffrey to Vietnam War veterans at the Vietnam War Veterans' Memorial in 1993. Was raw data collected from a sample of a large enough number of men to form a representative conclusion, or an assertion made based on interviews with just a few veterans? The method of data collection is thus unknown, and calls the results into question. The possible decision to include rear-echelon service troops in the World War II situation and not the Vietnam War one (as that average appears *very* high in comparison) makes the average significantly smaller; frontline infantrymen in the ETO were routinely in the line for as long as 30 days (and sometimes up to 60 or 90 days) at a time without relief, and never truly left as divisions were not moved completely to the rear ("in reserve" often meant only a mile or two from the front) except in extraordinary circumstances. In the Pacific it might have been a little different, as the number of pitched battles (i.e. Kwajalein or Saipan) were relatively spaced out and divisions were often moved back to Hawaii or Australia for several months of rest and refit. What criteria were used to obtain a definition of what "combat" was, and were they applied relatively equally in both scenarios?
| [
"The ground war began in late February 1991 and lasted approximately 100 hours. TAC close air support A-10 aircraft supported ground forces as they had trained for in the United States and Europe for well over a decade. Military planners and Washington officials were correct when they proclaimed that the war in the... |
Did the Byzantines ever consider building a 'Great Wall' of their own to repel the Arabs and Turks? | The situation for the Byzantines was very different.
In the cases of the Romans versus the Picts/Germans/other peoples, or the Chinese versus the various nomadic peoples to their north, you have a big, strong, rich, centralised empire that has to deal with endemic raiding from less organised but mobile and elusive enemies. These states have resources to throw at the problem (though not infinite ones) and have border control as their main priority.
The Byzantines, on the other hand, were a regional power sitting right next to, depending on the timeframe, far greater world-class empires.
Sure, the Arabs would raid Byzantine territory year after year in the 7th and 8th century. But it was a different kind of raid: the Byzantine problem wasn't finding the raiders and delaying them until overwhelming force could be brought to bear against them. They didn't have overwhelming force. The Caliphate was much bigger and stronger. The Byzantine priority was survival and minimising the damage they suffered.
They were never in a position to expend the massive resources it would take to create giant walls. At times their enemies were weaker and divided, but that usually prompted the Byzantines to try and re-take their lost territory rather than construct big static defences.
That said, in the Balkans they did construct the [Long Walls of Thrace](_URL_0_) in the 5th century, a 56 kilometer stretch of wall west of Constantinople, protecting its peninsula from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara. These defences don't seem to have been very effective. | [
"The Byzantine Empire was left much poorer, smaller, and ultimately less able to defend itself against the Turkish conquests that followed; the actions of the Crusaders thus directly accelerated the collapse of Christendom in the east, and in the long run facilitated the expansion of Islam into Europe.\n",
"Event... |
why does america mostly use traffic lights at intersections when europe uses a lot of traffic circles? what are the benefits to either? | A roundabout (or traffic circle) can usually handle a greater volume of traffic. It's relatively rare, at least outside of the rush hour, for traffic to come to a complete standstill, which is the case with traffic lights. However, roundabouts do force traffic to slow down: at traffic lights, drivers may be tempted to speed through a green light, but at a roundabout you have to slow down. So you have this twin benefit of traffic that slows down (which is safer) but flows more smoothly (which is quicker). Also, while at a standard intersection you have to watch for traffic coming from several different directions, at a roundabout you only need to worry about traffic coming from one direction (from the left in countries that drive on the right, and vice versa).
But there are downsides. First of all, if you have an intersection where lots of pedestrians are likely to be milling around, traffic lights can be programmed to allow pedestrians to cross safely. This isn't possible with roundabouts, where foot bridges or foot tunnels become necessary unless you want to put in crossings on every road just before the roundabout, completely negating most of the advantages. Also, roundabouts can actually become choked at times, and while traffic lights can be programmed to take account of this, roundabouts can't be regulated in this way. Roundabouts also need more space, especially where large trucks and other vehicles have to use them. | [
"In other countries like Australia, New Zealand, Lebanon and the United Kingdom, traffic lights are mounted at the stop line before the intersection and also after the intersection. Some busy intersections have an overhead traffic light for heavy vehicles and vehicles further away.\n",
"In North America, there is... |
Are (biological) children of gay people more likely to be gay? | > Is this an inheritable trait?
is a different question than
> Are (biological) children of gay people more likely to be gay?
The evidence is overwhelming that there are genetic factors at play in homosexuality, if your identical twin is gay, there's something like a 52% chance that you will be gay[1], compared with something like 2-5% of people in the general population. Sexuality is an incredibly complex trait - in other words, it probably involves many different genes and interaction with the environment - but it is almost certainly heritable in some degree.
However, this does not mean that the biological children of gay people are more (or at least significantly more) likely to be gay. To take a simple example, there's some evidence that there's a gene or genes on the X-chromosome that may make women with the gene more fertile, but also make men with the gene more likely to be gay. If this was the sole determinant (it's not, but pretend it is), then a gay man would be no more likely to have a gay son than a straight man, since fathers only contribute their Y chromosome. In this case, it would increase the chances that a gay man's male grandchildren (by his daughters only) might be more likely to be gay.
The genetics of inheritance for complex traits get super complicated super fast, and if a trait is determined by 10 different genes in different combinations in addition to environmental factors, and where the population is extenisvely outbred (in other words, you don't have cousins marrying etc) it's possible that there would be little if any change in the measured probability.
All of this is a long way of saying that I've never seen a study that suggested that the offspring of gay people are more likely to be gay. It's possible that there just aren't enough known examples, and once more research is done, it will show that gay parents *are* more likely to have gay children, though it might be like a 7% chance instead of a 5% chance.
[1] _URL_0_ | [
"A 2001 review suggested that the children with lesbian or gay parents appear less traditionally gender-typed and are more likely to be open to homoerotic relationships, partly due to genetic (80% of the children being raised by same-sex couples in the US are not adopted and most are the result of heterosexual marr... |
Can it be that life is originating constantly since it first originated 3.5 billion years ago? | There is no real way of knowing, but until we find another form of life that does not use DNA/RNA, we have no reason to believe that abiogenesis (the process of life originating) is still occurring.
I would also add that it is very very very unlikely that any life from recent abiogenesis would ever be found, if it ever did occur the resulting organisms would be incredibly simple and would likely die out in competition for resources. | [
"The chemistry of life may have begun shortly after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, during a habitable epoch when the Universe was only 10–17 million years old. According to the panspermia hypothesis, microscopic life—distributed by meteoroids, asteroids and other small Solar System bodies—may exist throughou... |
why hasn't usa adopted nordic countries education and health care system? | *Sigh*. Some of us have, it just doesn't go anywhere for a variety of reasons.
The "core" reason is that when the European democracies rebuilt after WWII, they developed universal healthcare systems to ensure everyone had care. This was largely an expansion of the systems Germany used to strikebreak or otherwise help industrial workers even before WWI, and it spread relatively easily in the wake of WWII - it was also seen as a comfortable political compromise with socialism, which had arrived rather dramatically on the political scene with the influence of an emboldened and expanded USSR. Giving people free healthcare and high taxes but keeping most of a capitalist economy while rebuilding from a grueling war was where people would up.
In the US, things were a little different. We have a very long history of wealthy people and their corporations having a lot of say in how things are run through several mechanisms. During WWII, it was really hard to get anyone to work for a company - most young men were at war, and there were only so many women who could or wanted to work in the factories or other businesses. This caused some problems, and part of that solution was the government stating outright that nobody could be paid more than a certain amount - but healthcare insurance policies were not considered "pay" by this rule. So companies started competing about health insurance instead of just wages.
This eventually led to a system where the government, insurance companies, and the medical industry all have roughly-equal say in how things are run - and the medical industry and insurers both have a lot of say in how the government is run, since they're fairly wealthy and we still defer to the wealthy in a lot of things.
It's not necessarily smart, but it's where we wound up. | [
"According to Finnish sociologist Erik Allardt, the hallmark of the Nordic welfare system was its comprehensiveness. Unlike the welfare systems of the United States or most West European countries, those of the Nordic countries cover the entire population, and they are not limited to those groups unable to care for... |
how do grizzly bears (or any other animal) know that we are not a threat to them? | > How do they know that we are weaker than them?
We are smaller, no claws in sight.
> They don't get taught by their parents to hunt human, so why they are not afraid to attack us?
See answer #1
> How do they know that we don't have some poison or something.
animals have very limited reasoning abilities. We don't display nature's poison colors so we are not poisonous.
> Is it our body language that shows that we're scared?
Yes
> What if we acted super confident and crazy, would they run from us then?
Maybe depends on the bear. Imagine they are like dumb drunk people. Some are rational, some are not. Some are angry, some are cowards, etc. | [
"Grizzly bears normally avoid contact with people. In spite of their obvious physical advantage they rarely actively hunt humans. Most grizzly bear attacks result from a bear that has been surprised at very close range, especially if it has a supply of food to protect, or female grizzlies protecting their offspring... |
peer reviewed journals | > Can anyone submit?
Technically yes, although your qualifications to publish will be subject to scrutiny.
> How much evidence do you need to support your hypothesis?
Depends on the field and the type of paper. Some publications don't really posit much of a hypothesis at all, but rather report on experimental findings, offer suggestions as to why a given set of behavior is seen, and use it as a means to test *other* people's hypotheses.
> Is speculation allowed?
Again, depends on the field. This is where your own qualifications come in handy, as well as the qualifications of those you cite. You need enough evidence to back your claims, but what constitutes "enough" is subject to what field you're publishing in. Use other papers in the same field as a litmus test.
> What is the whole process?
You write a paper and submit it to a given journal, who then send it out to reviewers (often, you can choose who you'd like to review your paper, which typically will be people you cite in your work). The reviewers give their input, and pass it on to the editor, who decides between the following;
Accept.
Request minor revisions.
Request major revisions.
Reject.
Of the four, the 2nd and 4th are the most common, and are up to the editor's discretion (typically, a "major revision" request won't happen unless the subject matter is particularly good, or the name(s) attached to the paper are particularly noteworthy). Assuming revisions are necessary, you revise the paper as per the reviewers'/editors' critiques, and then send it back in for another round. This can technically go on forever, but typically after the first round of revisions your paper is either accepted or rejected. Once it's accepted, you fill out the remaining paperwork, and the paper is published in the next edition of the journal. If rejected, you try again somewhere else.
Rejections aren't necessarily because the paper is bad, but often because the paper doesn't fit the journal's subject area. Because many of the journals are affiliated with other journals, they sometimes make a recommendation, or will outright hand your manuscript to the editor of another journal on your behalf.
> Is it better to submit or self publish?
Self-published material is generally seen as worthless in the sciences, unless you have already have a name for yourself.
> Whats the benefit to submitting?
You get citations and readership, ultimately to get your name out there. If you have more journal papers, it's easier to convince Universities and funding institutions that you're worth investing in.
> What copyright rights do you lose?
Depends on the journal. Many reputable journals hold the copyright themselves, but leave intellectual property rights to you. Less reputable journals with less stringent peer review may ask you for a fee to publish, and you sign away all intellectual property rights based on your work.
> Is a peer review journal the only place to submit if you have a hypothesis, or are their other platforms?
Peer-reviewed journals are the only place that's worth anything if you want to be taken seriously.
> And anything else worth knowing?
Be careful with anything that starts with "International Journal of ..." These are typically scam journals (particularly in engineering fields), and are based out of India. There are exceptions of course (Int. Journal of Hydrogen Energy is one that I deal with occasionally), but generally IJXX journals are shifty. Open-source journals also can be highly suspect, as they are often patent trolls who get you to sign your IP away in return for "expedited publishing" (i.e. no peer review).
> Can you recommend good journals to submit to for certain fields?
Literally depends on the field. The rule-of-thumb is to check the journal's Impact Factor, which is just a number representing the likelihood that your work will be read and cited if you publish in that journal. The higher the impact factor, the better, but what constitutes a "high" impact factor depends on the precise field. For example, in medicine, the *really* good impact factors are up in the 30-60 range, while for my field (engine research), I start breathing heavy when a journal with an impact factor of 4 or more starts talking to me.
Edit: On names and author order; there are two schools of thought on this.
The first way, which seems to be more common in the US, is that the first author is the person responsible for writing the work (typically a graduate student), the middle names are people who helped out with the work (typically, the 2nd or 3rd name is the PhD student who runs the lab, and who was supervising when the experiments were taking place), and the last names are the professors who actually funded the work. Thus, it's best to either be the first author (as the person who was responsible for the work), or the last author (as the most important PI who has the biggest name in the field, or who contributed the most money to the research).
The second school, which seems particularly common in India, is that the author order should go in importance of the authors, so PI first, second PI second, and so on, down to the graduate students who likely did the bulk of the work, but don't have a name for themselves.
Of the two, I prefer the American version of it, although it has led to me getting shitloads of resumes and job requests from graduate students and postdocs (typically from India, as they are used to the *other* system) wanting to work in "my" lab, thinking I'm some hot-shit professor, when in reality I'm just a PhD student ruffling through my friends' couches looking for quarters for the laundry machine. It's a fun world. | [
"Some of the scientific journals for which he peer reviews are Nature, \"Science\", \"Physical Review\" journals (A,B,E, Letters), and includes journals produced by the American Chemical Society, the Optical Society of America, IEEE, IOP Science and others.\n",
"In 2006, the journal introduced open peer review, a... |
Any recommendations for a good espionage book? | I'm a fan of the atomic spies myself. Some favorites that focus on individuals (which often makes for better stories than big, all-encompassing books on Soviet espionage, like _The Haunted Wood_):
* _Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy_. This focuses primarily on the spying of Ted Hall, a Harvard undergraduate who worked at Los Alamos. The guy is barely out of high school and he decides to spy on the atomic bomb for the USSR. Why'd he do it? How'd he do it? And why did he never go to jail, even though the FBI figured out he was a spy? The book gives interesting answers to these questions.
* _The Catcher was a Spy_. Moe Berg was a Princeton-educated catcher for the Boston Red Sox. He was also a spy for the US during WWII. One of his jobs was to decide whether or not he should assassinate the famous German physicist Wernher Heisenberg who was thought to be working on an atomic bomb for the Nazis.
* _The Invisible Harry Gold_. Gold was not a spy himself per se, but he was part of the Rosenberg/Greenglass/Fuchs network that got a lot of information out of Los Alamos, working as a courier. What makes him a great study is that he is not some kind of trained agent or even an ideological die-hard, but just a psychologically kind of messed up guy who falls in with "the wrong crowd" and aims to please. A much more nuanced story than you usually get with spy accounts, a great psychological portrait.
| [
"\"Time\" magazine, while including \"The Spy Who Came in from the Cold\" in its top 100 novels list, stated that the novel was \"a sad, sympathetic portrait of a man who has lived by lies and subterfuge for so long, he's forgotten how to tell the truth.\" The book also headed the \"Publishers Weekly\"s list of 15 ... |
why does certain parts of audio dissappear when the headphonejack isn't all the way in? | The headphone plug actually has multiple connectors on it--those are the colored ridges on the plug itself. Usually, there are three main connectors, but I suppose others can exist.
When the plug isn't all the way in, some of those connectors don't line up, and others might line up with another input. This causes the audio to be messed up.
The audio is typically split into several channels; each channel contains some audio information. If the song is encoded such that the voices are on one channel and the bass is on another, moving the headphone plug out a little bit might cause the lyrics to cut out but not the bass, or the bass to cut out but not the lyrics, etc. | [
"The Gamate's mono internal speaker is of poor quality, giving off sound that is quite distorted, particularly at low volumes. However, if a user plugs into the headphone jack, the sound is revealed to be programmed in stereo, and of a relatively high quality.\n",
"Active noise-cancelling headphones use a microph... |
Have the Amish always been significantly different than other rural Midwestern farmers? At what point did technological and societal changes really set the Amish apart? | From the time they first settled in the US, the Amish have been different. They spoke German and eschewed the clothing that was popular. They had specific rules about dress and behavior, like no buttons, which set them apart even before modern technology. They also have their own religion that is a branch of Protestantism.
As a result, they'd be going to their own church and hanging out in their own social circles. | [
"The first Amish began migrating to the United States in the 18th century, largely to avoid religious persecution and compulsory military service. The Northkill Creek watershed, in eastern Province of Pennsylvania, was opened for settlement in 1736 and that year Melchior Detweiler and Hans Seiber settled near North... |
why does tiresize change based on car size? | Larger wheels allow the axle to be higher off the ground, letting you drive over larger irregularities without smashing into things. This is important in something like a pickup truck which might be driving onto an ungraded work site. A civic or a smart car would prefer to have smaller wheels because they aren't designed to leave a road, and it is more difficult to turn a larger tire because of the leverage involved. | [
"Note that tire size (or dimensions of the road wheels) does not affect the gear ratio of a vehicle, and thus using a different size tire on the same vehicle does not affect the torque on the road wheels or the crawl ratio. However, for a given engine speed and a gear ratio, the output force on the road wheels decr... |
why does our own body clog our nose, which is essential for breathing, on allergic reactions or when we've got a cold? | The allergic reaction comes from the inflammatory response trying to stop the spread of the allergen. The cells that release these chemicals don't know where in the body they are located. Just that something foreign is there and the body doesn't like it. | [
"One of the more common health risks that people encounter is a result of air pollutants and air quality. Allergic Asthma is a chronic disease that affects individual's inflammatory system when they are exposed to allergens resulting in shortness of breath, wheezing, and coughing. Environmental factors such as, air... |
if you're swimming in a pool and lightning strikes the water, it'll most likely harm you. at what range when swimming in a larger body of water, like a lake or even an ocean would lightning have an effect on a person swimming in it at the time? | Lighting striking in an open water has a lethal range of about 6 - 10 meters with most of the energy being dispersed along the surface. If you're outside that range, you might still suffer burns. There's also a notable pressure wave (the underwater equivalent of thunder) that would be potentially dangerous at further distances. | [
"Besides boats and dockside power hookups, several other potential causes exist. Lightning strikes over or near water have caused electric shock drownings. Faulty hydroelectric generators or damaged underwater power lines can cause leakage currents, potentially creating a hazard. In general, anything electrically a... |
in terms of evolution, why are peacocks' tails so big? | a large tail would be a trait of a healthy bird, which in turn drives the success of the species. | [
"The tail of a peacock makes the peacock more vulnerable to predators, and may therefore be a handicap. However, the message that the tail carries to the potential mate peahen may be 'I have survived in spite of this huge tail; hence I am fitter and more attractive than others'.\n",
"In 1993, along with two other... |
at any given night in a city, we see a fairly small amount of stars but far away from city lights we see thousands of stars. what determines what stars we see in a city? | The brightest stars are still visible. Cities produce a lot of light, dubbed "light pollution" that drowns out the light from dimmer stars. | [
"Heavy, bright stars (both giants and blue dwarfs) are the most common stars listed in general star catalogs, even though on average they are rare in space. Small dim stars (red dwarfs) seem to be the most common stars in space, at least locally, but can only be seen with large telescopes, and then only when they a... |
How does the photon of specific phase that causes stimulated emission in a laser device arise? | The first photon doesn't have to have a specific phase. Whatever it has determines the phase of the laser. In terms of direction and polarization: If it is not aligned with the laser cavity (or has the wrong polarization, if that is relevant), this chain of photons dies down quickly and another "first photon" will start the laser. Note that actual lasers do not emit *perfect* laser light. You can still get all sorts of weird effects in between. | [
"The critical detail of stimulated emission is that the induced photon has the same frequency and phase as the incident photon. In other words, the two photons are coherent. It is this property that allows optical amplification, and the production of a laser system. During the operation of a laser, all three light-... |
Who is the Japanese military leader in this picture? | > My own investigation of Jappanese military leaders who killed themselves in circumstances where the Americans might quickly find their body makes me think it could be either Isamu Cho or Mitsuru Ushijima. The picture of Cho kind of looks like the picture I have.
Right idea, but wrong guy, mainly because this is a suicide attempt, not a successful one! Hideki Tojo was seen as one of the principal war criminals of Japan by the Allies, and when American MPs went to arrest him in early September, he attempted to shoot himself in the heart, but missed and only wounded himself. He was arrested, and successfully treated by American medical personnel so that he could stand trial for war crimes, be found guilty, and finally be executed by hanging a few years later.
Now of course it is possible Im wrong, but based on what I can see of the face, [with that trademark mustache](_URL_1_), as well as the apparent location of the wound based on the bloodied garments, I feel confident in my deduction here.
Edit: reverse Google search failed, but "Tojo suicide photos" turned up a few that [look very similar](_URL_0_), although that specific one does not seem to be online (which would make it pretty interesting for a collector!) | [
"There are Japanese caricatures and depictions of the Imperial Japanese Army. There is also a reference to Hirohito. The Japanese soldiers speak in stereotypical dialect and advocate firing the first shot at a man's back.\n",
"It shows the common Japanese soldier as an individual and as a family man, and even ene... |
Was suicide among "commoners" normal during time periods like the renaissance? Or is it something that became more prevalent recently? | It is *also* impossible to calculate a suicide rate for early modern western Europe. The difficulties with identifying modern victims of suicide come into play--people who try to cover up their own actions, families who don't report it. For the early modern era, the usual problem with surviving sources compounds these problems exponentially.
But it's also harder because of much darker cultural beliefs about suicide. It was a matter of deep social shame for the survivors and the memory of the victim. It was a legal crime that punished survivors through state seizure of the victim's property. And in Christianity, it was a sin that sent one's soul straight to hell.
This was true on all sides of the Reformation. In Catholicism, suicide offered no time for repentance between act and death. According to Protestant beliefs, suicide was an act of the reprobate.
So with so much societal push against suicide, combined with the usual narratives of the early modern era as the "rise of social discipline," who would get to the point of actively trying to kill themselves? Through the difficulties in the sources, one thing has stood out in multiple studies.
Suicide was often, though obviously not always, a sin and a crime of social and economic outcasts. People who perceived they had nowhere to turn or would have nowhere to turn in the future; people who faced a really awful future.
Legal records are where most of our data on suicide in early modern Europe comes from--actual court cases, records of deaths in a city, investigations of violent death and accidents in general. But studies of England and northern Germany show some of the problems with using these records straightforwardly.
First, it's generally considered fact that people sought desperately to cover up the suicidal death of a family member for three reasons: their own social shame, refusal of Christian burial rites, and seizure of property. In England, laws mandating almoners and coroners investigate *all* suspicious deaths were codified around 1500, which you would think would eliminate some of the chances of a cover-up.
But as R. A. Houston showed for 16th century England, cases taken to the courts often ended up more as a mediation in how to divide a deceased person's assets than outright forfeiture. And they might not end up in court until *decades* after a death. At the same time, there's plenty of evidence of families indeed trying to cover up someone's suicide. And people who committed suicide themselves might also have taken care. So we're definitely still dealing with very selective reporting and recording.
In northern Germany and Scandinavia, so-called "suicidal murder" became a major problem in the 16th-18th centuries. This involved a person who despaired to the point of suicide actually murdering someone else, a victim and in a manner that made capital punishment inevitable (usually a child not related to them). Arne Jansson traced this horror to a local folk belief that a violent death of any kind--including execution--sent one to heaven. This would presumably constitute a small number of cases of suicide overall. But it's a useful, if tragic, reminder that suicide doesn't always look like "suicide."
And of course, a major difficulty is that sources don't always agree--and that they disagree in really significant ways. Through 1646, Laura Cruz observed 38 suicides recorded in court records for Leiden; Jeffrey Watts observed 41 in Geneva through 1650. This seems quite ordinary until you realize that Leiden was about twice the size of Geneva.
However, Cruz and Watts found agreement in their sources on a crucial point: suicide was overwhelmingly an act of the socially marginalized. Cruz observes a strong link between economic difficulties and suicide. Even as Leiden prospered dramatically, not everyone came along. Those excluded from guild membership as temporary workers (the adjunct professors of early modern trades, if you will) or those still trying to earn their way in as apprentices (the grad students) constituted 20% of the people "convicted" of committing suicide in court records.
Feeling a full sense of belonging and community in a church was also insulation from actually committing suicide, although there is no information on attempts. Cruz found only 2 cases out of 38 who were full members of a Calvinist or Anabaptist church (about 40% of the population overall).
For Geneva, on the other hand, Watt identified surprisingly specific groups as those most likely to commit suicide: suspected witches, prisoners, and people previously considered violently insane. 9 out of the 41 pre-1650 victims of suicide had been accused or suspected of witchcraft.
Studying England, Houston cautions that the predominance of social outcasts in statistics about people who committed suicide, likely reflects source bias to some extent. MacDonald and Murphy in *Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England* highlight the presence of nobles and wealthier burghers among the registers of suicide victims. But they still point out that based on assets uncovered for forfeiture, more than half of victims of suicide would qualify as poor or destitute.
Sharon Strocchia, meanwhile, studied suicides and suicide attempts among nuns in early modern Italy--what more tight-knit community than a convent? It's impossible to reconstruct the complex social, medical, and personal reasons that any one person committed suicide. But looking at the circumstances of these nuns, she detected two patterns at work in many (not all) cases. First, some of the nuns were noted as suffering horrible verbal and even physical abuse. (And this does not seem to have been an exaggeration--one nun, who reported the suicide of her sister to local authorities, also sought permission to transfer to another convent because of the terrible environment.) Second, many nuns who attempted suicide, or had sisters desperately concerned that they would, were among those forced into monastic life by relatives. In both those cases, there was sharp displacement from these women's desired community, whether that was within the convent or outside.
And Houston offers a poignant reminder that "social outcast" could come in many forms. From 17th century Shropshire (the year isn't clear), a man named John Gossage committed suicide by taking arsenic. He had spent time in jail for counterfeiting money and was accounted an alcoholic by survivors. When his body was found, the only person the town could find to deal with his burial was his landlord.
And the nameless woman who threw herself into the Nor Loch in Edinburgh in 1665? She was buried right next to where she drowned herself--she had no family or friends to claim, move, or take care of her body. We only know her from a brief reference in the city treasurers' records of the need to supply a coffin. | [
"Attitudes towards suicide slowly began to shift during the Renaissance; Thomas More the English humanist, wrote in \"Utopia\" (1516) that a person afflicted with disease can “free himself from this bitter life…since by death he will put an end not to enjoyment but to torture...it will be a pious and holy action”. ... |
why do woman traditionally throw underhand while men throw overhand? | What do you mean by "traditionally"? Do you mean as in softball vs. baseball? They're different games with different rules, and overhand pitching is illegal in softball. Women who do play baseball do throw overhand pitches. | [
"Dunking is much less common in women's basketball than in men's play. Dunking is slightly more common during practice sessions, but many coaches advise against it in competitive play because of the risks of injury or failing to score.\n",
"\"Faltas\" (errors or faults) were made when the ball came to a halt on t... |
Will Microscopes ever be powerful enough that we can view individual molecules? | [Already exists](_URL_0_). That is from an atomic force microscope; optical microscopes are limited by the wavelength of light and laws of optics. | [
"Optical microscopes can focus on objects the size of a wavelength or larger, giving restrictions still to advancement in discoveries with objects smaller than the wavelengths of visible light. Later in the 1920s, the electron microscope was developed, making it possible to view objects that are smaller than optica... |
i need help understanding the difference between torque and rotational inertia | Linear | Rotating
---|---
Force | Torque
Inertia | Rotational Inertia
Torque is the force you apply in a circular fashion. The moment arm is how far away from the axis that the force is applied. If I have a wrench and I'm turning a nut with it, I'm applying torque (circular force) to that nut by pushing on the end of the wrench. The distance between the center of the nut and where my hand is is the moment arm. The further from the nut my hand is (longer the wrench) the more torque is applied as long as I'm pushing with the same amount of strength.
Rotational inertia is just how much inertia a spinning object has. I spin a basketball on my finger by applying torque to it. Once it's spinning, it keeps spinning because it has rotational inertia, even if I apply no additional torque.
[I made you a crappy picture](_URL_0_) | [
"Torque is the rotation equivalent of force in the same way that angle is the rotational equivalent for position, angular velocity for velocity, and angular momentum for momentum. As a consequence of Newton's First Law of Motion, there exists rotational inertia that ensures that all bodies maintain their angular mo... |
electricity supply | Houses have 3 power lines. Imagine a top, bottom and middle line. Top and bottom are 240V with respect to each other. The middle line is there to give you 120V between it and the top or bottom line. | [
"Electric power is usually produced by electric generators, but can also be supplied by sources such as electric batteries. It is usually supplied to businesses and homes (as domestic mains electricity) by the electric power industry through an electric power grid. Electric energy is usually sold by the kilowatt ho... |
why do muscles stiffen and lose flexibility? and why does stretching sometimes feel good and sometimes hurt? | Lots and lots of reasons. But ELI5. Muscles get stiff because they get used to being short and all the fibres get tighter and closer together. It can also be because of literal knots in the muscle. Imagine you cut a piece of string in half, to make it whole you have to tie a knot in it. The string is shorter but it’s whole. These are knots and there can be thousands. Thanks to healing and massage those cuts can be healed to normal.
Pain when stretching is normally due to excessive tearing. It’s your body screaming at you to stop. It feels good because of other reasons that I’m not clear on. | [
"Flexibility is improved by stretching. Stretching should only be started when muscles are warm and the body temperature is raised. To be effective while stretching, force applied to the body must be held just beyond a feeling of pain and needs to be held for at least ten seconds. Increasing the range of motion cre... |
what is a proxy war? what sets it apart from a traditional war/conflict? | You have a brother called Joe, and a sister called Suzy, now you don't want to fight Joe because your parent will get mad at you, so you give Suzy some candy to pick a fight with Joe. Your parents don't get upset with you, because you're not involved. | [
"A proxy war is an armed conflict between two states or non-state actors which act on the instigation or on behalf of other parties that are not directly involved in the hostilities. In order for a conflict to be considered a proxy war, there must be a direct, long-term relationship between external actors and the ... |
why does vision degrade when you are tired? | Your eyes become fatigued, as they are working muscles. So after a long day of using your eyes, they need that rest. Usually by the time you’re tired your eyes have been strained enough to feel that fatigue. It can also sometimes make you think that you are tired when your eyes just need resting too, especially if you use bright light objects such as a computer phone or television for an extensive amount of time. | [
"Numerous clinical studies have shown that dark adaptation function is dramatically impaired from the earliest stages of AMD, retinitis pigmentosa (RP), and other retinal diseases, with increasing impairment as the diseases progress. AMD is a chronic, progressive disease that causes a part of your retina, called th... |
Was there any condemnation in the 1500s towards Luther's piece on the Jewish community? | I wasn't active here for a while and am looking through the backlog of Judaism related questions, and think this is a great one.
Luther's views on Jews in that essay were by no means universal and perhaps more vitriolic than the average, but they did reflect his era's view on Jews in general, were not considered particularly unusual, and were very influential.
His attitude in general toward Judaism was very much shaped by the prevailing Christian beliefs in Judaism as the antithesis to Christianity, in supersessionism (the idea that with the New Testament, Christians had become the "real Jews"), and in Jews as a malevolent force. It's unlikely that Luther himself ever met more than a few Jews in his life, despite living among them; however, he would have had plenty of material, theological and otherwise, on which to rely in his formulations here. For centuries, Jews had been used as examples of veniality, heresy, blindness to reason and truth, falsehood, and arrogance. Martin Luther simply continued in this tradition in many ways, in that he used his perception of Judaism and Jews as a foil for how he saw Christianity to be, as in the much older comparison of the frail, blindfolded Synagoga with the youthful, forward-seeing Ecclesia. However, it is undoubted that these feelings about Judaism went beyond a rhetorical device and were instead an actual sentiment felt about actual Jews.
Some draw a sharp distinction between early Luther and late Luther in terms of his antisemitism, saying that he was actually somewhat friendly to Jews in his early life and only in his later years grew virulently antisemitic. However, while there is certainly a difference in the level of the rhetoric regarding Jews, the actual feelings were essentially the same. As I mention in [this answer](_URL_0_), no matter how benevolent Christian theologians and academics ever were toward Jews, it was nearly always from a position of superiority and disdain and often with an eye on conversion. In fact, a main feature of Luther's early writing about Jews is his opinion that if Christians treat Jews badly then they won't want to convert. However, it seems that later in his life he became less tolerant, and soon raged against Jewish practice of Judaism as a heresy against Christianity but no longer believed that conversion was possible.
It was at this point that his statements about Jews became far more violent than merely advocating for conversion. He made recommendations like "... first to set fire to their synagogues or schools ... to raze and destroy their houses ... to take all their prayer books and Talmudic writings ... that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb ... that safe conduct on the highways be abolished completely ... that that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping..." In these recommendations he was NOT necessarily supported by other Christian scholars of his era; however, this was because of the violent nature of his statements rather than a fundamental disagreement between him and them about the role of Jews, their inferiority, and their heresy. These scholars would have preferred something of a benign disdain, enlightened curiosity, and subtle (or not so subtle!) attempts at conversion. Luther was seen as vulgar in his recommendations by other theologians, not necessarily as wrong in his opinions about Jews from a theological perspective.
& #x200B;
Bell, "Martin Luther and the Jews: Context and Content"
Rudnick, "Early Modern Hate Speech- Martin Luther's Anti-Semitism Responses and Reactions" | [
"Luther argued that the Jews were no longer the chosen people but \"the devil's people\". An English translation of \"Vom Schem Hamphoras\" was first published in 1992 as part of \"The Jew In Christian Theology\" by Gerhard Falk. Historians have noted Luther's writings contributed to antisemitism within the German ... |
the median of something vs. the average. | Median is just a different way to calculate an average. The three main ways to 'average' a group of numbers are: Mean, median, and mode.
Let's say you have the following 11 speeds caught on a radar and you need to determine the average
(56,58,62,65,65,68,69,70, 71,74, 75)
Mean = 66.6 (add all #s and divide by the sample size). This is the most common use when someone talks about an average.
Median = 68 (the middle number when #s are sorted by size. 68 in this example is the 6th sample counting up from the smallest and 6th sample counting down from the largest sample)
Mode = 65 (mode is the most frequently sampled speed as there were 2 samples at that speed whereas there is only 1 sample for all the other speeds)
The type of average used depends a lot on what the user wants to convey. Mode is often used to communicate image the most "popular" or most likely outcome. Median is used to identify the middle, where it may be helpful to know that half of the numbers are smaller and half the numbers are larger... You can even say that is the number where there is a 50% chance that any new sample will be larger and 50% chance that it will be smaller. | [
"The median is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample (a population or a probability distribution). For a data set, it may be thought of as the \"middle\" value. For example, in the data set {1, 3, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9}, the median is 6, the fourth largest, and also the fourth smallest, ... |
if both nuclear fission and fusion generate energy, why don't we have infinite energy? | You don't use the same elements in fusion and fission. The whole reason the respective processes can generate energy is because the nuclear reaction results in a nucleus that is _more stable_ than the starting nuclei.
You use a heavy element - such as uranium - for fission, while you use a light element - such as hydrogen - for fusion. You cannot reverse those and still get energy out of the reaction. | [
"Nuclear fusion produces energy by combining the very lightest elements into more tightly bound elements (such as hydrogen into helium), and nuclear fission produces energy by splitting the heaviest elements (such as uranium and plutonium) into more tightly bound elements (such as barium and krypton). Both processe... |
How did medieval leaders get their armies to fight against the pope? | In some cases there were Antipopes - that is, a rival claiming to be the true pope. Of course, each declared the other to be the Antipope! This was the case during Roger II of Sicily's disagreements with the papacy. In Roger's case the hostilities were usually initiated by the pope rather than the king, which might have helped. Regardless, one of the greatest disputes Roger had with the papacy revolved around the new Pope Innocent II's refusal to acknowledge him as king of Sicily, and the equally new Pope Anacletus II's promise to support him if Roger returned the favour. At this point, Roger was one of the most powerful rulers in Italy and his backing would be invaluable to Anacletus. Roger, for his part, wanted simply to have his newly assembled kingdom recognised as such, and the anti-Norman Innocent II had no intention of doing so (Houben, *Roger II: a Ruler between East and West*). In this type of case, both sides have an equal claim to righteous conviction.
As might be expected, a papal schism is not the norm when disputes between secular rulers and the papacy arise, but I think these unusual cases serve as illustrations of a more broadly applicable principle - that clergy, including even popes, can be considered illegitimate. The claim of a pope to divine correctness isn't necessarily swallowed without question. Any pope could be painted as a fraudulent pope. Remember also that God's will is in action. If a ruler goes against the pope and wins, then it was God's will all along and the pope was being ungodly.
Indeed, Helene Wieruszowski argues (in a 1963 article that makes some very valid points despite its age) that the widespread support of Sicily's social elites, magnates and so forth could be taken as evidence that God was speaking through the actions of these powerful citizens - who, naturally, had themselves risen to prominence on the back of God's good will (Wieruszowski, 'Roger II of Sicily, *Rex-Tyrannus*, in Twelfth-Century Political Thought', *Speculum* 38:1). Near-universal acclaim by the divinely appointed influential elites is a ringing endorsement of the king's legitimacy and a condemnation of the pope's ungodly error.
To further muddy the waters, the pope was also ruler of a material realm in his own right, and could muster armies and negotiate treaties like any other ruler. The 1156 Treaty of Benevento between Pope Adrian IV and William I of Sicily is an interesting example. Although the concessions that it requires from Pope Adrian are ecclesiastical - that is, it demands papal recognition of the Hauteville kingdom of Sicily in perpetuity - in most respects it is like any other treaty between two rulers. (ed. Enzensberger, *Guillelmi I Regis Diplomata* and, for an English translation, ed. Loud, *The History of the Tyrants of Sicily by 'Hugo Falcandus' 1154-69*). Clearly the popes were treated as susceptible to mundane negotiation like anyone else.
My point here is there's evidence that popes weren't thought to be unassailable and so defying them wasn't necessarily as unthinkable as we might imagine.
Of course, the best we can do here is to speculate based on limited evidence. There's very little record of what an 'average' citizen, soldier or otherwise, thought about anything during the middle ages. They didn't govern and they weren't literate, so couldn't write their own letters or diaries. The lesser nobility who followed the kings most likely did so out of self interest, which brings me to my final point.
I want to throw in a thought that one of my undergraduate professors always reminded us of: people are always people. In the present day, many of us would be more likely to follow our immediate ruler over a lofty figure from hundreds or thousands of miles away, someone who is more an abstract idea than a tangible, real person. If we stand to gain (or simply to avoid hardship) by following our king or government to war against a faceless abstract concept who we have never seen and who doesn't even know we exist, many of us will go with the tangible, the things that are real to us. People are always people; follow your king against your pope because he's here and his best interests probably overlap with your own. | [
"While the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy were in conflict, it often fell to secular leaders to campaign. What is sometimes known as the Barons' Crusade was first led by Count Theobald I of Navarre and when he returned to his lands, by the king of England's brother, the newly arrived, Richard of Cornwall. Sultan ... |
if the edge of the universe to us is 45 billion light years away, could it have already stopped expanding? | When we talk about the "edge" of the universe, we are referring to the extent of the observable universe. Space is expanding, and there is no centre to the expansion. Every point is moving away from every other point, equally in all directions. The further away you look, the more space exists between you and the point you are observing, so the faster that point appears to be moving away from you. If you look far enough, space is expanding away from you at the speed of light. This is the limit of observability, because no information about events beyond that distance will ever reach you. That occurs at a finite distance, so the observable universe is finite in extent, but we can't ever know what lies beyond. The true universe could be infinite or not. At present, all indications are that the expansion will continue, so more and more objects will continue to expand out past the observability limit and become invisible to us, until eventually our own galaxy will be the only thing in the night sky. | [
"The proper distance—the distance as would be measured at a specific time, including the present—between Earth and the edge of the observable universe is 46 billion light-years (14 billion parsecs), making the diameter of the observable universe about 93 billion light-years (28 billion parsecs). The distance the li... |
why do we tend to get small violent tendencies when we get angry or have a heated argument with someone else? [biology] | The "Fight or Flight" response to the confrontation. Anticipating a fight, a cascade of things happen to your physiology..adrenaline production, flushing, heat, respiration increasing, muscles tensing..the whole brain is prepped to go to battle. This also suppresses normal functions, like situational awareness giving way to tunnel vision, reduced perception of pain and fatigue, and most noteworthy: rapidly reduced impulse control. Impulse control in a potentially fatal situation can be deadly, and we have evolved a way of shutting it down in the face of danger: Don't *think* about the tiger in the bushes, just run. Baser impulses become difficult if not impossible to suppress, as seen when someone "rages". Those violent tendencies rush to the surface and find expression.
We don't even have to full on rage for this. It varies from person to person but when there is moderate stimulation of a fight-or-flight response we can observe expressions of anxiety and/or aggression. It's why people yell during sports matches. | [
"Confrontation may occur between individuals, or between larger groups. Because groups are composed of multiple individuals, with each member having their own specific triggers for a violent response to a perceived provocation, risk factors which \"may not be sufficient individually to explain collective violence, ... |
I'm watching English period pieces like The Tudors and Elizabeth. Did monarchs have titles like Lord Burleigh to give out? What did that entail? | If you're just talking about titles rather than estates and incomes, yes. The sovereign is the [fount of honour](_URL_0_), i.e. has the exclusive right to confer titles of nobility and orders of chivalry. | [
"There was no consistent title for the king of England before 1066, and monarchs chose to style themselves as they pleased. Imperial titles were used inconsistently, beginning with Athelstan in 930 and ended with the Norman conquest of England. Empress Matilda (1102–1167) is the only English monarch commonly referr... |
Why do atoms "want" to get full outer electron shells when bonding? | Good question! Understanding this behaviour requires that you first understand that a reaction can be considered as a number of individual processes. When you combine chlorine and sodium to make table salt, the sodium atom loses an electron, the chlorine atom gains one and the resultant ions bond due to their charge (this description is accurate to a first approximation).
Removing electrons from atoms takes energy. Adding electrons to neutral atoms releases energy, but adding electrons to already-negative ions typically takes energy. Forming the resultant bond between the atoms releases energy. So, let's add this all up.
Sodium has a single electron in its outer shell. The energy cost of removing this, combined with the energy gain of creating Cl^- and then the salt NaCl yields a large negative number for the overall energy change because the bond that's formed is quite strong. That is, the overall process is favoured and the reaction happens. You may ask: if the bond is quite strong, why not form two of them (i.e. NaCl*_2_*) and get twice the energy out from bonding?
Removing a second electron from sodium is much tougher. It's at a lower energy level, much closer to the nucleus and more tightly bound. It turns out that the energy gain from a second bond doesn't make up for the extra energy required to remove a second electron. Similarly, for magnesium, which does form two bonds, this is because magnesium has two electrons in its outer shell which are comparatively easy to remove.
So, it's not so much that an element wants to form a particular number of bonds. Elements will form as many bonds as they can (because bond formation releases energy) until the energetics become unfavourable. Sometimes, if you have particularly reactive compounds, you can exceed the traditional "correct" number of bonds because the reactive compound releases sufficient energy in the reaction.
Bond angles are caused by the electrons in bonds repelling each other. If you have methane, a tetrahedral molecule, you end up with the bonds at an angle of about 109 degrees because that maximises the distance between bonds. However, lone pairs that aren't involved in bonding exert higher repulsion than bond pairs. So, in water, oxygen has two lone pairs which squeeze the bond pairs closer together to an angle of about 104 degrees. Read up on "VSEPR" for more about this. | [
"Chemical bonds between atoms in a molecule form because they make the situation more stable for the involved atoms, which generally means the sum energy level for the involved atoms in the molecule is lower than if the atoms were not so bonded. As separate atoms approach each other to covalently bond, their orbita... |
What is the best referencing/organizing software you use to write history and why? | Not history specific, but OneNote works REALLY well for writing initial drafts. You can organize your work far beyond anything else I've used, and can include text clippings, photos, videos, and links out to the side. It eschews the "page" construct and is more like a whiteboard.
Once you get down to doing a final draft, you'd be better to switch to something designed to nicely handle notations, footnotes, and all that. | [
"The more-concise author-date style (sometimes referred to as the \"reference list style\") is more common in the physical, natural, and social sciences. This style involves sources being \"briefly cited in the text, usually in parentheses, by author’s last name and year of publication\" with the parenthetical cita... |
what is the purpose of checking in for a flight, if you can check in online? | The online checkin process is mainly to get the customer to complete as much of the administration and data entry as possible before hand - rather than have staff do it whilst a queue waits. | [
"Online check-in is the process in which passengers confirm their presence on a flight via the Internet and typically print their own boarding passes. Depending on the carrier and the specific flight, passengers may also enter details such as meal options and baggage quantities and select their preferred seating.\n... |
Why do the edges of certain materials dry faster than the middles? | The edges are more likely than not touching more air than concrete found in the center of a section of sidewalk. Whereas the center only has exposure to air above it (along with a very small amount found in small cracks, etc), the edges are exposed to air on two fronts, the top and the side that goes into the ground. More air allows for more heat to transfer to the edges of the sidewalk, causing more water to evaporate. As the center is only exposed to air on the top, the water found in this section takes longer to acquire enough energy to evaporate, thus remaining wet for longer. | [
"Because reeds change with climate, reeds that are too soft can be kept in the hopes that they eventually thicken, but there is nothing else that can be done. If a reed is too stiff, however, there are solutions. The most simple solution is to turn a piece of paper over so there is no ink and gently rotate the reed... |
Why can I hear a transmitted radio signal on several frequencies? | Its called harmonics, the idea comes from that all waveforms comes from the sum of a series of increasing sinusodial waves. Meaing a 11MHz transducer is transducing a sum of 11Mhz, 22Mhz, 44Mhz, 88Mhz etc frequencies, but in decreasing amplitudes. But your reciever is sensitive enough to pick those harmonics up.
I need to stress that this is not a problem with your transducer, but a fundamental property of maths and physics. | [
"The radio waves from many transmitters pass through the air simultaneously without interfering with each other because each transmitter's radio waves oscillate at a different rate, in other words each transmitter has a different frequency, measured in kilohertz (kHz), megahertz (MHz) or gigahertz (GHz). The receiv... |
why is it easier to shoot at people under you in games? | Insert "i have the high ground" meme.
Its not only in games, highround has the vision advantage. | [
"Many shooters will allow players to zoom down the sights of a gun or use a scope, usually exchanging movement speed, field of vision, and the speed of their traverse for greater accuracy. This can make a player considerably more vulnerable to circle-strafing, as objects will pass through their field of vision more... |
why doesn't the us place a price ceiling on medical equipment ? | The issue is that developing new medicines or medical devices is somewhat of a gamble. It costs a lot of money and the project you're working on might turn out to be ineffective or not be approved by the FDA or whatever. The prospect of being able to make a lot of money encourages companies to go out there and spend a lot of money developing new medicines.
There are certain things that could be done to make this system work better, either by identifying situations where the market is failing and then trying to fix them with new rules, or by subsidizing poor people's drug bills more, or by having the government take a more active role in research and development of new medical technology. A blanket law that said something like "no pill shall cost more than $10" would not be a good idea though. | [
"In 2018, an analysis concluded that prices and administrative costs were largely the cause of the high costs, including prices for labor, pharmaceuticals, and diagnostics. The combination of high prices and high volume can cause particular expense; in the U.S., high-margin high-volume procedures include angioplast... |
What is happening at the molecular level when water is being squeezed or wrung out of something? | Water goes into fabric and is held in small spaces where its cohesive and adhesive properties hold it to the fibers in the cloth. Tighten up the fibers (by wringing) and you restrict the space the water can be in squeezing it out of all its little spaces in the cloth. | [
"In a liquid solution, any given liquid molecule experience strong cohesive forces from neighboring molecules. While these forces are balanced in the bulk, molecules at the surface of the solution are surrounded on one side by water molecules and on the other side by gas molecules. The resulting imbalance of cohesi... |
why do people hide their license plate when selling their vehicle but not always their vin? | The VIN number only shows who manufactured the car and what model it is. The licence plate tells you what state the car is in and, if someone is thorough, it can reveal the location. You don't want randoms knowing where you live. | [
"This is the recommended procedure for selling a car. Alternatively the seller may hand out their car with valid licence plates and papers still in their name to the new owner thus giving them the responsibility to register the car in their name shortly. In a scenario without a proper sales contract the seller may ... |
How often does a comet crash into the Sun? | Only one time per comet. | [
"In 1998, two comets were observed plunging toward the Sun in close succession. The first of these was on June 1 and the second the next day. A video of this, followed by a dramatic ejection of solar gas (unrelated to the impacts), can be found at the NASA website. Both of these comets evaporated before coming into... |
what is with the sometime hours and hours or delay in having sore/dead/tired legs after over doing and pushing yourself with leg exercise/walking/running? | I believe it's somewhat to do with DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness), in which your body begins to repair tiny microtears in the muscle fibres of your legs after long periods of exertion.
Doing this makes your legs stronger and able to endure more physical activity. It's like how people build muscle in the gym.
The delay must be due to inflammation occurring in your leg tissue hours later as the body begins to repair them. Not inflammation in the sense that your legs are gonna swell up and become red and very hot, but bits of inflammation in the muscle fibres which add up to aching. There'd probably be lactic acid present as well which contributes to the aches, like how a stitch aches.
Explained this out of my own idea of it, so if I'm a bit off what actually happens, I apologise. | [
"Intermittent claudication (Latin: \"claudicatio intermittens\"), is a symptom that describes muscle pain on mild exertion (ache, cramp, numbness or sense of fatigue), classically in the calf muscle, which occurs during exercise, such as walking, and is relieved by a short period of rest. It is classically associat... |
why is a revealing outfit that doesn't quite bare all often so much more attractive than a completely nude body? | For the same reason that things like burlesque and stripper shows are popular. It's about anticipation and tantalisation. While the body is covered up, your imagination is running wild. Even the most flawless body is still just a body. Your imagination is always more powerful.
EDIT: general useless spelling. | [
"Barechestedness is the state of a man wearing no clothes above the waist, exposing the upper torso. Bare male chests are generally considered acceptable at beaches, swimming pools and sunbathing areas. However, some stores and restaurants have a \"no shirt, no service\" rule to prevent barechested men from coming ... |
why does food dye in milk react in such a way when soap is added? | The soap breaks the surface tension of the milk. The food coloring rests on top because it has a lower density than milk. When you drop soap in the middle, the surface tension drops. But it takes time for that effect to reach the edge of the container. So the edge of milk still has all it's surface tension while the middle doesn't. This makes the food coloring move toward the edges. | [
"Methyl cellulose is very occasionally added to hair shampoos, tooth pastes and liquid soaps, to generate their characteristic thick consistency. This is also done for foods, for example ice cream or croquette. Methyl cellulose is also an important emulsifier, preventing the separation of two mixed liquids because ... |
how are government subsidies for food producers different from an indirect food tax? | Do you read The Week (the magazine)? They just had a good feature on US food subsidies.
Anyways, there is a very simple difference between an indirect tax and a subsidy.
A tax generates revenue for the government. A subsidy is *paid for by the government*, meaning they lose money on it.
In terms of effects, (changes to price and quantity), they are generally the same.
For your other questions:
- I don't know about you, but I heard a lot of debate when the new US Farm Bill was being proposed. The main problem is that it is *so* complex that many common people do not understand most of it. However, there have been a lot of controversies in recent years surrounding it, so I think we can expect reform in the next decade or two.
- They can't, really. The large producers expend a lot of resources on how to get the best deal from the government, from lobbying to expansion/contraction of business. The government does not know the *exact* cost structures or production capabilities of the firms, so have to approximate, which leads to inefficiencies.
- ...
Hope this helped!
| [
"Like indirect taxes, they can alter relative prices and budget constraints and thereby affect decisions concerning production, consumption and allocation of resources. Subsidies in areas such as education, health and environment at times merit justification on grounds that their benefits are spread well beyond the... |
i know it's not quite scientific, but what are elementary particles(e.g. leptons, bosons) "made of"? | Thank you all for your answers! I suppose the question was easier to answer than I thought, though as I would hope, I'm still left wanting more answers to the universes mysteries. I imagine my talk with a physics professor would go something like:
Me: "Where did that come from?"
Professor: *Explanation given*
Me: "But where did THAT come from?"
Professor: *Explanation given*
Me: "But where did THAT come from?"
Professor: "We don't quite know"
Me: ...... "Amazing". | [
"In particle physics, an elementary particle or fundamental particle is a with no sub structure, thus not composed of other particles. Particles currently thought to be elementary include the fundamental fermions (quarks, leptons, antiquarks, and antileptons), which generally are \"matter particles\" and \"antimatt... |
How does the electrolyte function in a dry cell battery? | I can't tell you about the specifics of dry batteries but I can try to address your two main questions.
1) The plates have positive or negative charges like a capacitor. However, unlike a capacitor, there are reactions at the electrodes that facilitate the replenishment of the charges and so a constant (-ish) voltage is maintained (a capacitor's voltage depletes overtime). Sometimes the electrodes themselves are involved in these reactions. But I think the your confusion follows from the fact that the electrons don't flow through the electrolyte. Charged ions carry the charge in the electrolyte. At least this is the case for liquid electrolytes. I can only assume that this is also the case with dry, solid-state batteries and I think it's the defects within the material that facilitate movement of charge.
2) Imagine two half cells with two different concentrations of copper metal ions and each with a copper electrode. If you put an ionic bridge between the two beakers and connect a circuit to them, electrons will flow from the beaker with the lower Cu concentration to the beaker with the higher Cu concentration. The electrons will flow until the concentrations become equal and the cells are at equilibrium. This is why batteries 'run out' of energy; for the cell reaction to preceded any further and for one the concentrations to increase, energy must be supplied. Put another way, we've reach the bottom of a energy well and trying to go up either side of this well requires energy. However, instead of a difference in concentration, batteries typically utilise a difference in reactivity of two metals (you get a lot more energy compared with just a difference in concentration). This follows the same basic idea; the reaction or cell wants to move towards equilibrium.
But what happens to the electrons if there's a component in the circuit? They don't get used up. It's the energy they 'carry' that is used up, not the electrons. The current or flow of electrons is constant throughout the circuit. | [
"An A battery is any battery used to provide power to the filament of a vacuum tube. It is sometimes colloquially referred to as a \"wet battery\". (A dry cell could be used for the purpose, but the ampere-hour capacity of dry cells was too low at the time to be of practical use in this service). The term comes fro... |
what makes a good haircut? | Go to a licensed barbershop. Not a salon or discount place. Ask for a gentlemen’s cut. Haircut should run you $30-40.
Ask for a scissor cut. Long on top, taper fade on the sides.
This is pretty much the traditional ww2 style haircut everyone has. If you want to have a more extreme fade, you can ask them to use clippers down to a 1.
I personally vary my fade length down to a 0, up to scissor length of a half inch depending on the season.
Buy some “American crew” pomade off amazon for $10. Style your hair with that and a **wide toothed** comb. You can easily find one off amazon for < 5. | [
"The cuticle is responsible for much of the mechanical strength of the hair fiber. A healthy cuticle is more than just a protective layer, as the cuticle also controls the water content of the fiber. Much of the shine that makes healthy hair so attractive is due to the cuticle. In the hair industry, the only way to... |
In the nervous system, how exaclty does a stimulus cause the initial depolarization of the membrane that will then open the Sodium voltage-dependent channels once the treshold value is reached? | At the synapse, the presynaptic terminal releases neurotransmitter that causes receptors on the postsynaptic cell to respond. Typically this can be ligand gated ion channels, G\-protein coupled receptors, or receptor tyrosine kinases. If the input is stimulatory, that is it triggers an action potential, the ligand gated channels allow sodium and/or calcium to enter the cell causing depolarization. If enough of those channels open to allow for above threshold level depolarization the voltage gated channels open. There are pretty complete explanations [here](_URL_0_).
I tried to keep this explanation broad enough to be true of most types of action potential, but there are many specific types of nerves and synapses so if I didn't answer your question or if I missed your point let me know. | [
"However, once a stimulus activates the voltage-gated sodium channels to open, positive sodium ions flood into the cell and the voltage increases. This process can also be initiated by ligand or neurotransmitter binding to a ligand-gated channel. More sodium is outside the cell relative to the inside, and the posit... |
where the phrase 'second nature' comes from | It's a corruption of the Latin phrase *secundum naturam*, which means 'according to one's nature'. Basically, whatever you're referring to meshes well with your natural abilities or tendencies, as opposed to something that was *contra naturam* (against one's nature), or *super naturam* (above nature, or Godlike). | [
"Nature has two inter-related meanings in philosophy. On the one hand, it means the set of all things which are natural, or subject to the normal working of the laws of nature. On the other hand, it means the essential properties and causes of individual things.\n",
"The word \"nature\" derives from Latin \"nātūr... |
Wool as a materials for uniforms: why? And why into WW2? | Alright, since no good answer has come up yet, I'll field this one.
There are a lot of misconceptions about wool, and they mostly stem from the horrible synthetic blends that parade around as "wool" in cheap suits, cheap coats, cheap socks, and cheap blankets. If your only personal experience with wool is with something like that, of course it seems like a horrifying material to wear, especially in a military uniform.
But wool was used for hundreds of years, if not thousands, because it was one of the most widely available, inexpensive, and versatile fabrics available to humanity until the last 40 years or so. Depending on the weave and thickness, wool could make quite comfortable blankets, coats, or cloaks, and was even used for athletic clothing and swimwear. Wool wicks moisture away from the body, making it an ideal fabric for cold weather wear, since the material will keep sweat from staying on the body and will prevent outer moisture from penetrating. Outdoor wear, even today, is highly dependent on wool as an inner layer, especially in socks, because other fabrics (like cotton) will swell with moisture and, once wet, will get extremely cold and make the outer layer essentially useless in preventing cold-weather fatigue and injuries.
Wool also stretches, and is extremely pliable and durable. Medieval hose, which were often meant to be skin-tight, were generally made of wool and were expected to last a year or more of continuous use. Heavier upper-body clothing, like doublets and coats and overcoats, et al, were often made from a heavier weave and were similarly durable and long-lasting.
So for military uniforms, wool is beneficial in cold climates because its moisture-wicking properties, and is also not as uncomfortable as you might imagine in hot climates. Wool breathes, it's part of the same microscopic geometry that makes it wick moisture, and so in even direct sunlight it does a good job of blocking sunlight while allowing fresh air to penetrate. An undershirt of cotton with an overshirt or blouse of wool was a standard of the US army, even in the west, where temperatures could fluctuate wildly.
So there's no reason that wool was holding anything back or was somehow sub-standard. Cotton blends became less expensive and as uniforms changed it was simply a better option for hard-use field uniforms, but wool remained the main component of dress uniforms for a very long time.
It's honeslty hard to find sources that argue all of this of any quality, partly because wool's ubiquity is itself a weird paradox; when it was the only choice no one wrote about it because it was obvious. Nowadays the assumption is that wool is terrible and scratchy and bad, thanks to synthetic blends. And now, of course, there *are* better options for many things. Performance fabrics and the like. Much of my familiarity with it is wearing wool uniforms at a working historic site, and just realizing that I was fairly comfortable even when the temperatures reached the 90s F, and when I changed back into modern t-shirt and shorts it made very little difference to my personal comfort.
tl;dr, though: wool is extremely versatile, and until the mid 20th century or so was abundant and inexpensive, and made an ideal choice for all sorts of uses. | [
"During World War II, U.S. soldiers wore uniforms made of wool. Worried that domestic producers could not supply enough for future wars, Congress enacted loan and price support programs for wool and mohair in the National Wool Act of 1954 as part of the 1954 Farm Bill. Despite these subsidies, wool and mohair produ... |
what's wrong with dumping radioactive waste in the bottom of the ocean? | Kaiju
Gojira
Have you no cinema history?
/s | [
"Ocean floor disposal of radioactive waste has been suggested by the finding that deep waters in the North Atlantic Ocean do not present an exchange with shallow waters for about 140 years based on oxygen content data recorded over a period of 25 years. They include burial beneath a stable abyssal plain, burial in ... |
Were Henrietta Lack's cells special? | This is a great question! By today's standards, there is nothing inherently special about HeLa cells. Not only do we have countless "immortal" cell lines from other people, we have very well established protocols for immortalizing cell lines ourselves.
However, at the time Henrietta Lacks' cells were isolated, this was definitely not the case. These were the first human cells which were found to be able to divide indefinitely. Prior to this, cells would last only a few divisions before either dying or changing dramatically. The use of HeLa cells allowed for: 1.) More convenient cell culturing; and 2.) More importantly, it allowed the scientific field to "normalize" their *in vitro* research in a profound way.
All that said, HeLa cells were special because they were the *first* of their kind isolated, not because they were inherently special. In theory, cells of equivalent value could have been isolated from any cancer patient. | [
"Henrietta Lacks was an African American woman whose cells were removed without consent while receiving cancer treatment. Her cells became the source of the foundational HeLa cell line in the scientific world today. Lacks and her family were neither informed nor asked for consent to the use of her cells for this re... |
why does the skin on our hands & feet have so many lines (i.e. fingerprints)? | They increase the grip and durability of that surface, the rest of your skin is pretty slick.
The process that your body uses to create that type of skin also blocks hair growth and disables melanin production though, so it's only done on the palms and bottoms of your feet. | [
"In the palms, fingers, soles, and toes, the influence of the papillae projecting into the epidermis forms contours in the skin's surface. These epidermal ridges occur in patterns (\"see:\" fingerprint) that are genetically and epigenetically determined and are therefore unique to the individual, making it possible... |
If neutrinos turn out to be faster than light, are they useful in any way? Communication? | The recent measurement has no practical implications for communication. Neutrinos make inefficient signals because they are almost indetectable. One application I've seen proposed is for messaging submarines, because radio can't penetrate and sound is slow. | [
"Neutrino speeds \"consistent\" with the speed of light are expected given the limited accuracy of experiments to date. Neutrinos have small but nonzero mass, and so special relativity predicts that they must propagate at speeds slower than light. Nonetheless, known neutrino production processes impart energies far... |
During the time of the moon landing did people get upset about the governments space race and the mission to the moon? | Absolutely. In fact, at no point prior to the first Moon landing did the program receive a majority of support by the public at large. Indeed, there were several notable very vocal public opponents of the program because they felt it drew funds away from or was a distraction from now important work (such as poverty reduction and anti-segregation).
And in some regards they had a solid case to make. In the 1960s the per capita gdp of the US was considerably lower than today. There was a level of common poverty that existed then that today exists mostly in the developing world. Remember that in the 1960s the whole country didn't even have indoor plumbing, electricity, or phones. And, of course, this was also the peak of the struggle against Jim Crow. Many people, correctly, saw the moon race as a geopolitical struggle and lamented the waste of resources for what was effectively war making on another front. Even more so while the Vietnam War was raging.
It was only after the fact that the Apollo program became more closely associated with peace, science, and the inchoate environmental movement. And, of course, for the spending to become a sunk cost that couldn't be undone or diverted elsewhere.
Sources & further reading:
* [Historical Studies in the Societal Impact of Spaceflight pgs. 12-17 particularly (25-30 in the pdf)](_URL_3_)
* [Public opinion polls and perceptions of US human spaceflight](_URL_0_)
* [Moondoggle: The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program](_URL_2_)
* Gil-Scott Heron (of "the revolution will not be televised" fame): [Whitey on the Moon](_URL_1_)
* [The Apollo Disappointment Industry](_URL_4_) | [
"BULLET::::- Marcus Allen – British publisher of \"Nexus\", who said photographs of the lander would not prove that the United States put men on the Moon, and \"Getting to the Moon really isn't much of a problem – the Russians did that in 1959. The big problem is getting people there.\" He suggests that NASA sent r... |
Who discovered energy = force x distance, and how? | The work done by a force was simply *defined* to be the line integral of the force field along the particle's path. There's nothing to discover. But this turns out to be *useful* because of the work-energy theorem and conservation of energy, which can be proven using Newton's laws and experimentally verified. | [
"However, over large variations in distance, the approximation that \"g\" is constant is no longer valid, and we have to use calculus and the general mathematical definition of work to determine gravitational potential energy. For the computation of the potential energy, we can integrate the gravitational force, wh... |
Dinosaurs and the Square/Cube Law: How'd it all work? | The square/cube law applies to objects (or animals) that scale isometrically. In other words, the object exactly retains its shape and relative dimensions, it just scales in size. Think of a scale-model matchbox car relative to a real car.
You can imagine an isometrically scaled chicken as being a chicken that is longer, taller, and wider by a factor *n*, with *n^2* times the surface area, and *n^3* times the mass of a regular chicken.
In reality, species do not tend to scale isometrically, due to the problems it would create. For example, a chicken that is 10 times as tall as a regular chicken would weigh 10^3 = 1000 times as much, but the cross-sectional area of its leg bones would only be 10^2 = 100 times greater. This means the static pressure the bones would have to bear would be 1000/100 = 10 times greater than for a regular chicken.
For this reason, many aspects of physiology are found to scale [allometrically](_URL_0_). For example, larger animals tend to have much stockier legs, dinosaurs being no exception to this.
This also applies to metabolism. Larger animals tend to burn less energy per unit mass per unit time. Specifically, metabolic rate scales as approximately mass^{3/4}, so metabolic rate per unit mass scales as approximately mass^{3/4} /mass = mass^{-1/4}. This relationship is known as [Kleiber's Law](_URL_1_). While we cannot study metabolic rates of extinct species, the ubiquity of this law in living species suggests that dinosaurs too would have followed it.
In addition, a lot of early estimates of dinosaur masses are now thought to have been [too high](_URL_2_). | [
"The Cube can be found in many publications related to design and some technology museums. In addition, the computer has been featured in other forms of media. The G4 Cube was used as a prop on shows such as \"Absolutely Fabulous\", \"The Drew Carey Show\", \"Curb Your Enthusiasm\", \"Dark Angel\" , \"The Gilmore G... |
Why when looking at a clear container holding water from a side the surface of the water looks like a mirror? Is it the container or the water? | You mean the underside of the water? It's because of [total internal reflection](_URL_0_). That's the water. | [
"\"And the same object appears straight when looked at out of the water, and crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes convex, owing to the illusion about colours to which the sight is liable. Thus every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the human mind on which the art o... |
Is there a point between the earth and the moon where their gravitational forces cancel out? | Yes, and it has a name. That's the Earth-moon L1 point.
You can float there but you are in unstable equilibrium; if you are nudged even slightly to one side then you will drift towards either the moon or Earth never to return.
The SOHO satellite is at the Earth/Sun L1 to monitor the sun and [continually take pictures of it](_URL_0_) without ever having an object get in the way of the sun. It starts drifting away every once in a while but moves itself back.
There are not one but five different points around any two objects where gravity and centrifugal force will cancel and you can just hang there with little or no effort. There are [lots of things](_URL_1_) at Lagrange points. L4 and L5 are stable; Jupiter has a whole collection of asteroids that have become caught in those points.
| [
"BULLET::::2. It is sometimes suggested that the gravity field of the Earth might preferentially allow eruptions to occur on the near side, but not on the far side. However, in a reference frame rotating with the Moon, the centrifugal acceleration the Moon is experiencing is exactly equal and opposite to the gravit... |
How is the suffix of an element determined? | Well "gen" is ~~latin~~ greek for maker, or generator, the word "Hydrogen" literally means "Water Maker", whereas Oxygen (somewhat misnamed) means "Sharp (Acid) Maker"
Not too sure what "Ium" means, but ^ is where the gen comes from!
Hope that helps :) | [
"Once an element has been named, a one-, or two-letter symbol must be ascribed to it so it can be easily referred to in such contexts as the periodic table. The first letter is always capitalised. While the symbol is often a contraction of the element's name, it may sometimes not match the element's name when the s... |
the contradiction of why you have to wait x amount of hours to report someone missing when they also say the first 24-48 hours are most important? | The 24 hour thing is a myth, an invention for police procedural dramas. In real Police stations they will ask why you suspect that a person has gone missing and will respond accordingly.
For example, a woman who comes to the Police station stating that her teenage daughter never came home from school and she was supposed to be home two hours ago, the Police might say that she's just running late.
However if, in the same scenario, the woman explains that she's worried because she's seen suspicious behavior in the area then the Police may open an investigation immediately. | [
"A common misconception is that a person must be absent for at least 24 hours before being legally classed as missing, but this is rarely the case. Law enforcement agencies often stress that the case should be reported as early as possible.\n",
"BULLET::::- The probability that a user may be delayed longer than t... |
Can planets in the habitable zone have moons that also supports life? | I think that the magnetic shielding would be a big issue. Even larger planets like Mars have their atmosphere stripped away by the solar winds, and Mars is much larger than our moon. | [
"Gliese 876 c lies at the inner edge of the system's habitable zone. While the prospects for life on gas giants are unknown, it might be possible for a large moon of the planet to provide a habitable environment. Unfortunately tidal interactions between a hypothetical moon, the planet, and the star could destroy mo... |
Would it be possible to make a mirror that reflects the image back the right way around? | Yes. This is called a [non-reversing mirror](_URL_0_). There were some articles about a new kind of such mirror invented a few years ago. The guy who did it also made a side view mirror with "no blind spot". | [
"A non-reversing mirror (sometimes referred to as a flip mirror) is a mirror that presents its subject as it would be seen from the mirror. A non-reversing mirror can be made by connecting two regular mirrors at their edges at a 90 degree angle. If the join is positioned so that it is vertical, an observer looking ... |
how will the porn ban in the uk affect ordinary internet browsing? | Same way the torrent site "ban" affected torrents in the UK - > it won't. | [
"In 2013, an 'Official' Court order was called in to bar users from browsing pornographic material. While the rule applies on censoring pornographic sites, it has been found that Internet filters have blocked other websites, \n",
"Internet censorship in the United Kingdom is conducted under a variety of laws, jud... |
When and how did Boston, Massachusetts first become so heavily associated with Ireland and Irish culture? | > Does Boston simply have an extremely high proportion of Irish Americans?
Yes, historically Boston was a site of major Irish immigration, beginning as early as the beginning of the 1800s but massively increasing from 1840-1870 as the influence of the Great Famine was felt in Ireland.
In the earliest decades of the nineteenth century, the general contours of Irish immigration was to first stop off in the ports of Atlantic Canada (Halifax, Montreal, Quebec) because the shipping rates to those ports were cheapest^1. After a few years, they would then move south to American cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. In this period from 1800-1820, the majority of immigrants from Ireland tended to be Irish Protestants, owing to the fact that Protestants tended to have greater resources to manage the trip across the atlantic.
In the period from 1820-1840, the demographics and contours changed, with greater numbers of impoverished Catholics leaving Ireland and heading directly for Boston or New York. This immigration of Catholics did prompt hostility from a Protestant Yankee native population, and this period saw some notable anti-Catholic riots. The most notable event in Boston was the [burning of the Ursuline convent](_URL_3_) in 1834. Another famous confrontation was the [broad street riot](_URL_0_) in 1837.
As the Great Famine ravaged Ireland from 1845 to 1849, massive numbers of Irish people left the island, far greater in scale than previous migrations. 200,000 Irish immigrated to America in the decade of the 1830s. In the 1840s, 780,000 Irish came to America, mostly after 1846. At the outset of the Famine, Boston had a population of approximately 115,000 residents. In 1847, the first year of major migration due to the famine, 37,000 Irish arrived in Boston^2.
Like the earlier immigration from 1820-1840, this influx of Irish Catholics into a Protestant Yankee majority led to anti-immigrant hostility in the 1850s. In that decade, Know-Nothing politicians filled the State Senate, State House of Representatives, served as Governor and as Mayor of Boston^3.
As others have said in this thread, migration tended to flow towards established communities of Irish-Americans, where a migrant might have family or friends already living there. Thus, in the post-Famine period, Boston continued to see heavy migration of Irish people into the 1870s, and lower levels of migration into the 20th century.
> and why Boston, as opposed to any other major American city?
As I said above, other cities like New York, Philadelphia, Savanna and New Orleans all saw migrations of Irish into their cities in the 1840s and 1850s. The immigrant vote was quite important to the functioning of New York's Tammany Hall political machine in the later decades of the 1800s. Additionally, New York City saw severe Draft Riots in 1863, and newly naturalized Irish-Americans played a large part in these riots. They were partly motivated by resentment of exemption provisions, when working-class immigrants could never afford to pay the $300 required. Partially too, the Irish and German immigrant workers were driven by fears that abolition of slavery would result in labor competition from free Blacks.
In any case, New York City did not become as closely tied to Irish identity as Boston did for a variety of reasons. In the late 1840s and 1850s, New York saw German immigration at the same time and in similar numbers to Irish immigrants. Also, New York has hosted subsequent waves of Italian, Jewish, Balkan, Chinese, and other ethnicities, which made the city a patchwork and prevented New York from being associated with any one community. Boston, in contrast, did witness large Italian immigration into the North End, but not a similar scale and variety of immigration as New York did.
Of course, cities like Philadelphia and Chicago continue to have notable Irish-American communities, and noteworthy St Patrick's day parades.
----
1) [Enclyopedia of American Immigration](_URL_1_) pp 154.
2)_URL_4_
3)[Hidden History of the Boston Irish](_URL_2_) pp 21 | [
"Irish immigrants to the U.S. in the 19th century faced a combination of anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and specifically anti-Irish bigotry which were closely intertwined. This was especially true in Puritan-founded Boston, with its strongly Anglo-Saxon population. Generations of Bostonians celebrated Pope's Night ... |
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