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What sort of evidence is there of the interactions early modern humans had with other species of archaic humans that were alive at the same time? | There are a few anthropologists in this sub who might take a run at this post, but fyi, the question would do better in /r/AskAnthropology. In fact, there have been many posts in that sub asking related questions | [
"Modern humans appeared in the island during the Upper Paleolithic, a phalanx dated to 18000 BC had been found in the \"Corbeddu cave\", near Oliena. Mesolithic human remains had been discovered at \"Su Coloru cave\" of Laerru but also in the south (Sirri, Arbus).\n",
"There is evidence of human activity in the a... |
the finances of power grids | My explanation is for the US -- I believe the UK system is similar.
The entire system is kind of a masterpiece of capitalism, run by interacting private corporations and nonprofit organizations, with no central government control. The players are:
* Generators, companies who make electricity
* Transmission line owners
* Distributors, who own neighborhood power lines and sell electricity to customers.
In addition, there's the
* Independent System Operator (ISO), a nonprofit organization that makes the rules and manages how the players interact. An ISO controls the power network for a large region of the country (say, New England or the Pacific Northwest).
Here's how it works. Every day, the ISO holds an auction for tomorrow's power usage, hour by hour. A coal plant offers to produce 500 megawatt-hours of power at 10 am for $55 per megawatt-hour. A local gas plant offers to make 20 MWh at 9 pm for $45... and so on. Once all the bids are in, the lowest bids are accepted, up to the amount of power that matches the predicted demand for each hour tomorrow. (It's like a Dutch auction on eBay.) The winning power plants have the right to put their energy onto the grid and make money, the losers must go dark.
The ISO holds the auction for power delivered to a single spot location in its network, but distributors will demand power, and generators will be creating power, at various places. This means the price of electricity varies from place to place. Transmission line owners can take advantage of this by buying power at places where it's cheap and selling where it's expensive. That's how they make a profit, and pay for the upkeep of the transmission lines.
One last factor: this all assumes that the ISO can predict the demand for electricity tomorrow. What if it's wrong? Maybe the weather's unusually hot, or everyone turns on their TV to watch a news event. To deal with this, there's also a real-time auction, in which power plants bid for the right to produce power minute-by-minute. If there's an unexpected demand, the price can spike drastically, and some power plants are designed specifically to take advantage of these price spikes to fill in any unmet demand.
You want to see something cool, check this out: real-time data from New England's ISO, showing current power prices across the region, current and forecast power demand and supply, and the current mix of power plants feeding the grid.
_URL_2_
For more info on ISOs and how they work:
_URL_0_
_URL_1_ | [
"In simple terms, the public electric grid that a power company operates was originally designed to take power from a single source: the operating company's generators and power plants, and feed it into the grid, where the customers consume the power. Now, some customers are operating power generating devices (sola... |
Does dyslexia only effect your reading skills, or does it effects other aspects of your life as well? | I have only minor problems so I’m probably not the best person to answer this.
Firstly, dyslexia is not well understood or defined. So there is a broad spectrum of cognitive disabilities that make it difficult to read, write and understand written text, but it is caused by a multitude of different symptoms.
In my case the letters jump around on the page, so I find reading very tiring and stressful and my spelling is terrible (I will have to check this three times before I post it).
As for other symptoms, my balance was very bad as a child, and I was always running into things. I also wonder if it affects my hearing, I seem to have much more difficulty understanding people in loud crowded environments.
But the worst aspect of it is the negative psychological problems it causes. You know there is something different about you but you don’t know what it is, so you don’t trust yourself, or other people’s opinions of you. And not being able to trust yourself is very damaging and limiting.
| [
"National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke defines reading disability or dyslexia as follows: \"Dyslexia is a brain-based type of learning disability that specifically impairs a person's ability to read. These individuals typically read at levels significantly lower than expected despite having normal... |
Does it make a difference if I turn my clothes inside out before I wish them? | Side note - Stop using auto-correct if you're not going to at least proof read what it's typing for you | [
"Changing is done simply by stepping into the new longyi and pulling it up, at the same time loosening and dropping the old one, or the new one can be pulled over from the head down. However, even when in private, women change without removing all their clothes. Instead, they will wear one htaimin while changing in... |
Follow up on my previous question "Does light orbit black holes?": Is it possible that light from a star is warped around a source of gravity such that it appears as two points of light in the sky? | When a bright object is behind a heavy object (like a black hole) relative to our line of site, it's called an Einstein Ring and [it looks awesome](_URL_0_).
It's also possible for the same object to appear [multiple times](_URL_1_) depending on the geometry. | [
"During 1783 geologist John Michell wrote a letter to Henry Cavendish outlining the expected properties of dark stars, published by The Royal Society in their 1784 volume. Michell calculated that when the escape velocity at the surface of a star was equal to or greater than lightspeed, the generated light would be ... |
Are/were there any ancient tombs that resemble ones depicted in the Indiana Jones series? | It seems this question is asked fairly regularly in some form or another. A search of r/AskHistorians gives [quite a selection.](_URL_0_) | [
"Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb is an action-adventure video game developed by The Collective and published by LucasArts in 2003 for the Xbox, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2 and OS X. It features cover art by Drew Struzan. The game is an adventure of fictional archeologist Indiana Jones. The story takes pla... |
cyprus banking crisis | - _URL_9_
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My post from the first link:
Cyprus has a large banking industry that functions largely as a tax haven for foreigners (read: "legitimate businessmen" in Russia). Cypriot banks had enormous deposits, and invested those deposits. The financial crash caused many of those investments to fail, and the banks lost so much money that they are no longer able to pay back depositors. The nation of Cyprus doesn't want to lose all of the foreign banking business, but it simply doesn't have the money to fully guarantee everyone's deposits. And, since it doesn't control its own currency or monetary policy, it can't simply inflate away the brunt of the losses.
Their plan is to take out large bailout loans from the rest of the Eurozone, guarantee most of those deposits, and "tax" the remainder. This proved massively unpopular with ordinary Cypriots, who would lose part of their savings so that the government could bail out foreign ~~mobsters~~ investors. It seems that the new plan is to fully guarantee "smaller" deposits and tax larger deposits more heavily, which will probably spell an end to the Cypriot tax evasion industry.
If Cyprus had its own currency, and owed its debts in that currency, then it could simply "print money" using conventional monetary policy and avoid the worst of these problems, at the cost of inflation. But more powerful Eurozone nations don't want inflation, so Cyprus is out of luck on that front. | [
"Cyprus banks first came under severe financial pressure as bad debt ratios rose. Former Laiki CEO Efthimios Bouloutas admitted that his bank was probably insolvent as early as 2008, even before Cyprus entered the Eurozone. The banks were then exposed to a haircut of upwards of 50% in 2011 during the Greek governme... |
How many revisions of the bible did it take to get to the current, most widely accepted English version? | The answer: not many, and not much.
Various sects have their own bible preferences, of course, but the the best translation from an academic point of view is currently the NRSV. This edition was created from the Greek and/or Hebrew text, and we have copies of (almost?) all of these at least from the 3rd century. While any manuscript tradition will show some variation due to scribal error, interpolation, etc, modern scholarly techniques for creating a critical edition, that is, an edition which shows the most probable original text with major variations, are highly advanced. Thus, the Greek and Hebrew from which the NRSV is translated is considered to be highly accurate.
While the NRSV was translated to English by competent scholars, translation will always be an act of interpretation. For example, the NRSV translators decided to represent the Greek word *ecclesía* as "Church", a meaning it would not have had for the actual authors of the New Testament, for whom it meant "community."
Most of these translator judgments are, however, relatively minor and only of interest with respect to intricate points of theology, and not of any practical consequence for most believers.
So, while I like Bill an awful lot, his point doesn't really stand up. | [
"Near the time when the copyright to the English Revised Version was due to expire (1935), the Oxford University Press and the Cambridge University Press, who were the current English Revised Version copyright holders, began investigations to determine whether a modern revision of the English Revised Version text w... |
How many ants are there in the world? I've heard for every human on Earth there comes more then a million ants | Holldobler and Willson (The Ants, 1990) estimate 10 000 trillion individuals. So that's probably closer to 1.4 million per person.
But ants are a large and diverse group with about 14 000 species. They also have a communal ecology wherein most individuals don't reproduce and cannot survive without the rest of the colony, so maybe the colony is the better unit of comparison rather than the individual. | [
"It has been estimated by E.O. Wilson that the total number of individual ants alive in the world at any one time is between one and ten quadrillion (short scale) (i.e., between 10 and 10). According to this estimate, the total biomass of all the ants in the world is approximately equal to the total biomass of the ... |
If the goal was to win WWII, why on earth would the American military segregate white and black soldiers? | By the start of WWII, the U.S. Army had been segregated since the Civil War, nearly 75 yeard ago. The Army had fought and won the Civil War, the Plains Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine Insurrection, and WWI as a segregated force. From the Army's point of view, segregationist policies hadn't been an obstacle to victory in 1865, 1876, 1898, or 1918, so why change in 1941? Granted, that attitude would start to change by 1945.
Now, the Army saw black manpower as highly useful in wartime, but often utilized black soldiers in non-combat roles. During World War I, the vast majority of the 367,410 blacks drafted were used as manual laborers or sent to service units. In WWII, much the same thing happened. Of the 922,965 black soldiers in WWII, most spent the war working in segregated rear-area service units. The all-black 2nd Cavalry Division was sent to North Africa and Italy, only to be broken up and used to provide troops for labor units or replacements for an all-black infantry division. The 555th Parachute Infantry Regiment wasn't ever sent to fight the Japanese, instead they spent the war as smokejumpers fighting forest fires in the Pacific Northwest. The U.S. Army had a huge need for laborers and support personnel to move supplies, build airfields, and do other vital work in rear areas. Although there was unquestionably a racial tint to the Army's choice, there was a certain half-sense to it - many black soldiers were undereducated and it would have been difficult to train them for other roles.
Some Army officers believed there were racial differences between whites and blacks that justified, nay, demanded, segregation. This attitude, perhaps unsurprisingly, was prevalent amongst southern-born officers. Now, the U.S. Army deliberately assigned white officers from Southern states to command segregated black units. The theory was that Southern officers would have more experience dealing with blacks and would know how to handle them.
This lead to some ... issues.
Take Virginian Ned Almond, for example. As a Brigadier General, Almond was made the assistant divisional commander of the all-black 93rd Infantry Division.* His divisional commander, Mississippi native Major General Charles P. Hall, was assigned to the unit for similar reasons. Later, Almond was promoted and given command of the 92nd Infantry Division, the "Buffalo Soldiers Division" before it was sent into combat in Italy.
Although Almond had excellent paper qualifications, he was a terrible choice for the job. Almond was virulently racist (during the Korean War he called Chinese soldiers "laundrymen") and loathed his assignment. He went so far as to say:
> "No white man wants to be accused of leaving the battle line. The Negro doesn't care .... people think being from the South we don't like Negroes. Not at all, but we understand his capabilities. And we don't want to sit at the table with them."
Many of Almond's white officers felt the same way. Being assigned to an all-black division was seen as a career-killer. Turnover rates were high, as some white officers schemed ways to get out of black units. Training and readiness suffered, especially since many black soldiers from Jim Crow areas could barely read or write. When the 92nd went into combat in Italy, it's combat debut went badly. Badly-lead and badly-trained soldiers failed to take objectives and took heavy casualties. Many black soldiers deserted or broke down. In fact, desertion became a chronic problem for the unit. Despite the fact he was partly to blame, Almond blamed his black soldiers and cursed his hard luck at getting the assignment.
Interestingly enough, the combat failures of segregated units like the 92nd Infantry Division in WWII and the 24th Infantry Regiment in the Korean War spurred integration efforts in the late 1940s and 1950. Limited experience with integration in WWII had suggested mixed-race units did better in combat than segregated ones.
During WWII, there had been some experiments with partial integration. Between June and January 1945, the Army had lost 430,000 troops in Europe. In January 1945, the Army desperately needed more troops. Lieutenant General John C.H. Lee suggested the Army send more black troops into combat. Lee was the Service of Supply (SOS) commander in the ETO, so he'd had extensive, often positive experiences working with all-black service units.
The Army accepted Lee's suggestion. To help fill the manpower demands, the Army sought out volunteers from all-black units. Initially, the Army only took 2,000 men (the maximum number that could be simultaneously trained at the Ground Forces Reinforcement Center (GFRC) in northern France). The spots were quickly filled with volunteers, many of them long-serving NCOs willing to be reduced in rank for a chance to fight in the rank. The Army now had enough manpower for 53 all-black rifle platoons. By March 1945, 37 platoons were ready. Some were formed into all-black company-sized units and attached to the 12th and 14th Armored divisions. Others were attached to all-white infantry companies to form a 5th rifle platoon (usually, rifle companies had three rifle platoons and a heavy weapons platoon).
White officers were generally assigned to lead these new all-black platoons while they were in training at the GFRC. Some resented the job. Others, like combat veteran First Lieutenant Richard Ralston were more sanguine. He recalled:
> "There was a learning process on both sides ... They were pretty ginger about me because I was white, but once they were convinced that I was talking serious stuff and wasn’t racially prejudiced, they got down in the dirt and did what they had to do. They knew then I was talking survival."
"We kept training in earnest ... I exaggerated considerably about how many of them were going to die to try and scare them out of the unit. I only wanted the best and bravest. But nobody quit. They were pretty darned good."
Ralston's 5th Platoon was assigned to K Company, 394th Regiment, 99th Infantry Division. They were thrown into combat in March 1945. In the fighting around the Remagen bridgehead, the platoon took its first losses. It spent the rest of the war in the advance into the Rhineland. Another black platoon in the 393rd Infantry Regiment, 99th Infantry Division did so well it was regarded as one of the best platoons in the regiment
Other all-black platoons did similarly well. Brigadier General Edwin F. Parker, the 78th Infantry Division's commander, asked for more black platoons after the fighting around Remagen.
The 104th Infantry Division reported:
> "Morale: Excellent. Manner of performance: Superior. Men are very eager to close with the enemy and to destroy him. Strict attention to duty, aggressiveness, common sense and judgment under fire has won the admiration of all the men in the country."
The 1st Infantry Division observed:
> "White platoons like to fight beside them because they laid a large volume of fire on the enemy positions."
Post-war interviews revealed more. In mid-1945, the Army interviewed 250 officers and 1,700 enlisted men who had fought with or near the black soldiers. The results were promising. 84 percent of the officers said the black soldiers did "very well" in combat. The other 12 percent said the black riflemen had done "fairly well." A mere 5 percent of officers thought black troops were inferior infantrymen to white soldiers. Race relations had also been better than expected. 73 percent of officers and 60 percent of NCOs thought black soldiers and white soldiers got along well with each other.
It is important to consider that the black soldiers in many of the 5th Platoons weren't representative of the average black soldier or the average Army infantryman in 1945. They were relatively older, longer-serving, and all were volunteers. That doesn't in any way diminish their combat performance or their service. It's just important context to consider when we evaluate their performance.
One company commander reported:
> "They were the best platoon in the regiment. I wish I could get a presidential citation for them. They are very aggressive as fighters — really good in woods and at close-quarters work."
Another officer had only one complaint:
> "The only trouble is getting them to stop; they just keep pushing."
After the war, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) dissolved the black platoons and most of the men were forced to return to their original units. However, the experiment had been instructive to the Army. It had certainly given civil rights leaders lobbying for integration in the Army.
In July 1948, Truman signed Executive Order 9981, which read:
> It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.
This integrated the U.S. Armed forces, although it would take years before the effort was complete. The need for troops, any troops, to provide casualty replacements in the Korean War really shoved forward integration.
*The 93rd was nicknamed the "Blue Helmet Division" and had a blue French Adrian helmet on its shoulder patch. Partly for racial reasons, it hadn't fought under direct control of the U.S. Army, but had been attached to the French army. The blue helmet was a token of this history.
Sources:
"The 93rd Infantry Division: The Only African-American Division in the Pacific Theater" by Stephen D. Lutz
"Bring on the Buffalo" by Michael Lynch
*The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Ital y, 1943-1944* by Rick Atkinson
"African American Platoons in World War II" by David P. Colley | [
"During the war, the C.S.A. military suffers massive losses and tries to solve its manpower shortages by recruiting a black regiment, promising the slaves freedom after the war. This regiment receives the most dangerous missions and suffers high casualties, and despite earning the respect of white officers, when th... |
what makes "the cloud" different from just a regular server? why is there a new term for something that was already done before? | The "cloud" is mostly just a buzzword to refer to a concept that is a little more abstract than just "server".
Instead of your data being stored on one particular server (e.g. that you own or rent), your data is being passed off to a third-party company (i.e. "the cloud") that handles the data for you and stores it as they see fit. The data may be stored on some random server that third-party owns, or it may even be stored / replicated across different servers in different locations, etc.
As the end user of the cloud service, none of this matters to you. You don't concern yourself with what server(s) the data is being stored on or how the data is being stored, you just know that if you pass data to the service then they will store it for you and then you can later retrieve that data (from anywhere you have internet access).
So, before companies started moving to "the cloud", they would (for example) often host their own email servers in-house and often the only way for employees to access their work emails would be to connect to the corporate network (either physically at the office or remotely via a VPN connection) and then use a desktop email client like Outlook to read their emails.
Now companies move stuff like email "to the cloud" where they get major service providers like Google and Microsoft to provide cloud-hosted solutions where all the corporate email etc. is managed by those third-parties and employees can login to their corporate email from anywhere via "the cloud" (using just their web browser).
Now the company no longer has to worry about things like server operating costs, server maintenance / security, etc. now they just pay a provider like Google/Microsoft for a corporate cloud-solution and they handle everything instead. | [
"In many ways cloud servers work in the same way as physical servers but the functions they perform can be very different. Typically, the cloud server is an on-premises device that is connected to the Internet and gives users the functions available on the online cloud but with the added benefit and security of the... |
explain contemporary indian politics like i'm 5 | I'm commenting because I'm 5 and also want to know (when someone answers). | [
"Studies in Indian Politics is a Peer reviewed journal. It provides a forum to explain different aspects of Indian politics. It covers a wide variety of sub-fields in politics, such as political ideas and thought in India, political institutions and processes, Indian democracy and politics in a comparative perspect... |
Could a dinosaur regrow a severed tail like some lizards? | Neither birds nor crocodiles can regenerate lost body parts, and being the closest living relatives to dinosaurs (in birds case they are direct descendants) it's likely that dinosaurs couldn't regenerate body parts either. | [
"Like most lizards, these anoles possess autotomic tails. If the lizard is captured or pursued, the end portion of the tail may break off and continue to move for several minutes, hopefully distracting its attacker and giving the lizard enough time to escape. Given time, the dislocated portion of the tail may be re... |
how do scientist figure out when man-made things will decompose, like how do they know styrofoam takes 1000 years? | Actually, we don't. Plastic bags have only been around for about 50 years, so there's no firsthand evidence of their decomposition rate. To make long-term estimates of this sort, scientists often use respirometry tests. The experimenters place a solid waste sample—like a newspaper, banana peel, or plastic bag—in a vessel containing microbe-rich compost, then aerate the mixture. Over the course of several days, microorganisms assimilate the sample bit by bit and produce carbon dioxide; the resultant CO2 level serves as an indicator of degradation.
Respirometry tests work perfectly for newspapers and banana peels. (Newspapers take two to five months to biodegrade in a compost heap; banana peels take several days.) But when scientists test generic plastic bags, nothing happens—there's no CO2 production and no decomposition. Why? The most common type of plastic shopping bag—the kind you get at supermarkets—is made of polyethylene, a man-made polymer that microorganisms don't recognize as food.
So, where does the 500-year statistic come from? Although standard polyethylene bags don't biodegrade, they do photodegrade. When exposed to ultraviolet radiation from sunlight, polyethylene's polymer chains become brittle and start to crack. This suggests that plastic bags will eventually fragment into microscopic granules. As of yet, however, scientists aren't sure how many centuries it takes for the sun to work its magic. That's why certain news sources cite a 500-year estimate while others prefer a more conservative 1,000-year lifespan. According to some plastics experts, all these figures are just another way of saying "a really, really long time."
Sometimes, even banana peels don't decompose once they reach the landfill. For sanitary reasons, modern landfills are lined on the bottom with clay and plastic to keep waste from escaping into the soil and are covered daily with a layer of earth to reduce odor. The landfill, then, acts like a trash tomb—the garbage within receives little air, water, or sunlight. This means that even readily degradable waste objects, including paper and food scraps, are more likely to mummify than decompose. | [
"BULLET::::- Nullentropy – Technology akin to the science fiction concept of stasis, in which the natural processes of time, such as decomposition, are ceased. In this way, perishable matter such as food and even human cells may be stored for millennia and remain undamaged.\n",
"Decomposers are organisms that bre... |
Would it be possible to make a bio-luminescent tattoo? | I couldn't find anything that had already been done the way you're looking for (UV tattoos have already been mentioned and I think you're looking for something that glows under any amount of light). So, I went about trying to figure out how this could be accomplished. The idea of bio-luminescent organisms was interesting but it brings up the question of a "food" source for the organisms. If you aren't having to constantly feed them by putting some sort of media on the tattoo, then one would presume they would have to take it from your skin in some way, and I imagine it would probably cause some long term damage to the skin. Then you run into problems of keeping the culture exactly in the shape of the tattoo and I'm sure countless other issues that I can't think of.
The solution that seemed easiest (or at least the most effective and practical) would be a light emitting and heat sensitive nanoparticle. [This article](_URL_0_) (which you can't access the full version without subscribing to the service, but the abstract and highlights are available to anyone) seems to be looking at a way to construct chains of nanoparticles that will absorb heat and emit light. I'm not suggesting using this particle, in particular, because I also can't access the full findings, but with the ever increasing number of nanoparticles being able to be synthesized and all of the different properties coming from them, I would imagine there are others with similar properties already being produced or at least in the making.
These particles could then be put into the "ink" and injected into the surface of the skin to produce the desired result. I will point out, though, that not a lot is known about most of the nanoparticles being developed today in relation to their toxicology. Nanoparticles tend to be very reactive with such a high surface area to volume ratio and this leads to many having unexpected dangers that have to be dealt with.
The conclusion I've reached, then, is that these tattoos are very possible but also most likely several to many years in the future, provided someone with the know-how and the resources decides to endeavor into tattoos.
P.S. Please correct me if I've misrepresented anything and I'll make adjustments as necessary, it's 4 am my time. | [
"A light-emitting diode tattoo is a type of body modification similar to a tattoo, but specifically involves implantation of technologically based materials versus traditional ink injection into the layers of the skin. LED tattoos are accomplished by a combination of silicon-silk technology and a miniature lighting... |
How fast do newly formed stars move away from the nebula where they were born? | Stars form from molecular gas clouds, which tend to be large. As more stars form in the cloud, the radiation pressure disperses the gas leaving what we see as an [open cluster](_URL_0_).
While the stars form close together, gravitational perturbations make the stars disperse and the open cluster basically falls apart. For most clusters, the time frame for this to happen is on the order of millions of years, which is fairly short in the big scheme of things.
As the open cluster loses more members, they tend to still move roughly together and appear to have similar motions in space, just they're not in a nice little cluster anymore. At that point we can see them as a ["moving group"](_URL_1_), of which the most prominent is the Ursa Majoris group. The wiki article on kinematics is *okay* to start with, though I'll edit in a better one a little later. | [
"After a star passes through the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) phase, the short planetary nebula phase of stellar evolution begins as gases blow away from the central star at speeds of a few kilometers per second. The central star is the remnant of its AGB progenitor, an electron-degenerate carbon-oxygen core that ... |
why won't a pair of aaa batteries neutralize their charges when you touch one positive end to the other's negative end? | Batteries contain chemicals that will react when given a path for electrons to flow from the positive end to the negative end. Touching the positive end of one battery to the negative end of the next doesn't complete a circuit and allow electrons to flow, therefore nothing happens. | [
"The negative electrode uses the nitroxide - hydroxylamine anion redox pair to create an electrochemical potential, i.e. when the battery discharges the nitroxide radical is reduced to the hydroxylamine anion and when the battery charges the hydroxylamine anion is oxidized back to the nitroxide. This half-reaction ... |
How many WWII draftees were working in the CCC before they were drafted? | The Civilian Conservation Corps was far and away the largest of the make-work projects during the New Deal. It was operated by the US Army, since they were the only government organization in 1933 that had the ability to handle such a large number of men. The CCC workers were civilians, so the army could not boss them around, using army regulations. The army NCOs and lieutenants had to develop real leadership skills, to get the CCC workers to do their jobs. That was far more valuable for the military's overall readiness than any physical fitness benifits. CCC jobs were also temporary, and the turnover each year was enormous. There must have been at least a million CCC alumni in the World War II US Army. During the nine years the CCC was in operation, 2.5 million different men were on its payroll, although never more than 375,000 in any one year. | [
"Drafted into the U.S. Army, he was ordered in 1944 to the Graphics Division of the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. where he made war posters, including \"Save Waste Fats\" and \"Someone Talked\", the latter winning an award from the Museum of Modern Art. Shipped to London, he documented, in pen an... |
why can news stations not delay the broadcast by a few seconds incase something goes wrong? | They can and do. However, the process still has some dependency on human attention and reaction time. [Here](_URL_0_) is a relevant article. | [
"In radio and television, broadcast delay is an intentional delay when broadcasting live material. Such a delay may be short (often seven seconds) to prevent mistakes or unacceptable content from being broadcast. Longer delays lasting several hours can also be introduced so that the material is aired at a later sch... |
What effect might hallucinogens have on a comatose patient? Could it bring them out of the coma? | Hmm, interesting idea. I have heard of Zolpidem (Ambien) being used recently for comatose patients [link](_URL_0_), which is kind of ironic since it's a sleep aid (and also a hallucinogen at clinical doses) | [
"This type of hallucination is usually experienced during the recovery from a comatose state. The migraine coma can last for up to two days, and a state of depression is sometimes comorbid. The hallucinations occur during states of full consciousness, and insight into the hallucinatory nature of the images is prese... |
when is it the proper time to use the characters ; , : - in writing? examples would be helpful too! | Colon (:) is used when making a list or explanation. For example: hey, look at that, I'm making an explanation already.
Comma (,) is simply used to separate things within a sentence. For example: in this example, i am using both a colon and a comma, and the comma is separating ideas.
Semi-colon (;) is basically used to join a sentence and a clause related to it, and is used in place of words like "and," "or" and "but." For example: I am going to use a semi-colon in this example; they are easy enough to use.
Also, do not use semi-colons WITH conjunctions like "and" "or" or "but."
For example: It is poor form to use a conjunction with semicolons; and this is an example of that.
Hyphens (-) are used in joining words without turning them into larger words (which can have different meanings). For example: if an NFL player retires from football, he can resign; if his team extends his contract, he can re-sign. | [
"The art of writing Chinese characters is called Chinese calligraphy. It is usually done with ink brushes. In ancient China, Chinese calligraphy is one of the Four Arts of the Chinese Scholars. There is a minimalist set of rules of Chinese calligraphy. Every character from the Chinese scripts is built into a unifor... |
If hitler was arrested what crimes would he be charged for? | *Borrowing from a previous answer I have written, with some minor addendum*
So obviously, we can't *know* what would happen, but as has been noted by several mods, we can say what was discussed in the event that Hitler was captured. In the tome "*What If?*", Roger Spiller's chapter, "The Führer in the Dock", focuses on this very scenario, and while he goes on to contemplate various scenarios as they may have played out, he spends much of the chapter establishing how he arrives at those conclusions, and looking at how plans progressed up until Hitler's hypothetical capture in the Spring of '45.
To start with, there was considerable disagreement on just what would be done, although punishment for war crimes was essentially assumed by all - see the St. James Declaration of early 1942, which stated "*international solidarity is necessary to avoid the repression of these acts of violence simply by acts of vengeance on the part of the general public and in order to satisfy the sense of justice of the civilized world*". The Moscow Declaration of late 1943 would further solidify that sentiment, but while it directed 'minor' war criminals would be tried in "*the countries in which their abominable deeds were done in order that they may be judged and punished according to the laws of those liberated countries and of the Free Governments which will be erected therein*" it continued to leave open the situation with the 'big guys', explicitly noting that "*major criminals whose offences have no particular geographical location*" would be "*punished by a joint declaration of the Governments of the Allies*"... but no agreement on what that punishment would be had yet been hammered out! It didn't even spell out whether or not they would be granted trials.
Winston Churchill, contemplated several possible scenarios through the years. Early in the war, he considered exile for the high-leadership of the Party, similar to the treatment of Napoleon, placing them on a remote island (although he specifically stated he would not desecrate St. Helena by doing so). He also proposed a rather gruesome end for Mussolini at that time, proposing that he be strangled in the same manner the Romans (who Il Duce sought to emulate) had killed the Gallic leader Vercingetorix. As the war progressed though, he became more amenable to summary execution. In a meeting of the War Cabinet in 1942, he stated:
> If Hitler falls into our hands we shall certainly put him to death. [He is] not a sovereign who could be said to be in [the] hands of ministers, like [the] Kaiser.
Others also seemed to support a similar approach. FDR seems to have liked the very harsh proposal made by Henry Morgenthau for mass executions of Nazi "archvillains", possibly numbering in the thousands (And apparently joked [?] once or twice about mass castration of Germans to boot). Cordell Hull proposed a similar idea, executing Hitler within hours of his capture, noting:
> I would take Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo and their accomplices and bring them before a drumhead court martial, and at sunrise the following morning there would occur an historic incident.
In the US, calmer heads prevailed though, and in discussions on the matter in October, 1944, Henry Stimson would have none of it. He was insistent that an international tribunal of the Nazi leadership was the only method of dealing with Hitler and his ilk while remaining true to the moral justifications that the Allies gave for the war, noting "*the punishment of these men in a dignified manner will have all the greater effect upon posterity", which did in the end win Roosevelt over.
Interestingly, Stalin was also in favor of trials, although it is safe to say that a trial, as envisioned by him, was little more than a rubber-stamp show trial that was already typical of him. While earlier in the war, Stalin had expressed a desire for blood, toasting to "*the quickest possible justice for all German war criminals*" at the Tehran Conference in '43 for instance, although his accompanying suggestion that this would mean 50,000 executions might have been a joke. Certainly it shocked all present, but either way, he seems to have mellowed a year later. While Churchill might still have had bloodspilling on his mind, and certainly wanted execution to be meted out as punishment in the end, it was Stalin who turned him, during their Moscow meeting in 1944, where Stalin insisted that "*There must be no executions without trial otherwise the world would say that we were afraid to try them.*"
It perhaps went even further than that. When the first reports of Hitler's suicide were coming in, and Stalin heard of it, he was reportedly put out by the fact, and it seems to have been quite clear that he considered taking Hitler alive to be part of his victory, a trophy, and putting him on trial a means of displaying his achievement.
To be sure, that isn't to say, of course, than anyone necessarily *wanted* to deal with a trial of Hitler. A month before Hitler's demise, Anthony Eden remarked that were a Tommy to have the opportunity to capture Adolf, "I am quite satisfied to leave the decision to the British soldier concerned". And while Stimson might have won the debate in the US Cabinet, the concerns that he had fought against, namely that giving Hitler *any* sort of platform to defend himself was dangerous, never entirely went away. It is doubtful you can find very many leaders at the time who were put out by the fact Hitler escaped trial, as his death put the nail in the coffin of a debate that not everyone saw eye to eye on.
If you are interested in what such a trial might have looked like, well, I recommend you look for the book, but simply put, we can only guess. What we can say though is that while there were variances within the Allies about what to do, and some voices in the leadership would have liked nothing more than to dispose of Hitler and the Nazi leadership with "no fuss", by the last days of the war, the agreed to policy would be to put Hitler on trial for his life if captured. The charges would certainly have been the same four counts that the other principal defendents at Nuremberg had to face, as laid in the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal:
> Article 6. The Tribunal established by the Agreement referred to in Article 1 hereof for the trial and punishment of the major war criminals of the European Axis countries shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes.
> The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility:
> (a) CRIMES AGAINST PEACE: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;
> (b) WAR CRIMES: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;
> (c) CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.
> Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.
These were charges which were successfully prosecuted against key figures of the Nazi hierarchy who survived, most importantly perhaps, given their proximity to Hitler, Goering (guilty on all counts), Hess (guilty on A, not guilty on B/C), as well as Martin Bormann (guilty on B and C, not guilty on A) who we know know to have been dead by then, but at the time, this being unconfirmed, was tried in absentia. There is no reason to believe Hitler would not have been found guilty on all charges, and hanged in due course, but any specifics are, again, speculative.
-----
*London Charter of the International Military Tribunal*. Aug 8, 1945.
Spiller, Roger. "The Führer in the Dock." In *The Collected What If?: Eminent Historians Imagining What Might Have Been*, edited by Robert Cowley, 744-65. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2001.
Thompson, Jonathan. "Churchill Wanted a Captured Hitler to Die 'like a Gangster' in the Electric Chair." December 31, 2005. Accessed October 10, 2016. _URL_0_.
Tusa, John & Tusa, Ann. "The Nuremberg Trial", New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010.
| [
"Arrested by the authorities and tried for treason, Hitler manages to use the trial to his advantage, winning over the audience and the Judge with his courtroom theatrics. Consequently, he is awarded a lenient sentence in Landsberg Prison, during which he writes his memoirs (later published as \"Mein Kampf\"). In 1... |
Why was there such a backlash against disco? | I was trying to get into the music biz around then, as a rocker. Although I didn't hate disco, I could under stand why mt friends didn't get into it. It's over-produced and most of the "artists" were just singers put up to sing someone else's music. And the lyrics were almost universally uninspiring, and mostly sounded like a narration of a night at a club. Pretty silly to anybody who takes music seriously.
The backlash caught on when disco had overwhelmed all other pop music. And like all pop phenomenons, it became over-exposed. I admit I got pretty sick of it, too, towards the end.
The music producers hastened the end by abruptly abandoning all disco in an over-reaction to the haters and made it seem as if the haters could take credit for ending disco suddenly with one punch.
For quite a while, dance music artists could only survive by clearly distinguishing themselves as apart from disco. | [
"Factors that have been cited as leading to the decline of disco in the United States include economic and political changes at the end of the 1970s, as well as burnout from the hedonistic lifestyles led by participants. In the years since Disco Demolition Night, some social critics have described the backlash as i... |
why do people think that blacking out their eyes in pictures protects their identity? | Eyes presumably show the most emotion / personality etc of any body part, so we're most likely to remember those, if we see them again.
Also, who blacks out their own eyes..? It's usually done by others to protect the identity of someone. | [
"In addition, he noticed that when black people were depicted it was usually in a negative light. Research has shown that Black images in the media adversely affect how members of the Black community view themselves. These harmful images are not only seen by the Black community, but by everyone who has access to a ... |
What's happening to the human body when it faints for 3 or 4 seconds, then regains consciousness for 3 or 4 seconds, then faints back again and so on? An example is on amusement park rides. | The short answer: Your brain loses oxygen for whatever reason, you pass out, you drop to the floor so gravity works less, the vessels relax etc, and more blood flows to the brain, which thus regains consciousness.
The long explaination (this is gonna be pretty complicated)
There are a lot of reasons for syncope (Fainting), but the major categories are
Neurally mediated reflex (60 % of cases)
Orthostatic hypotension (15 %)
Cardiac arrythmias (10 %)
Structural cardiopulmonary reasons (5%)
The numbers are from Denmark.
There are also pseudo-syncopes, which are not a *real* syncope. For example, an old patient may not be certain if they actually passed out or not. For it to be a true syncope, it must be sudden and you must almost immediately regain consciousness.
So the most common is neurally mediated and the most serious are the cardiac ones.
But orthostatic is probably the one most people are familiar with, remember it's all (mostly) about losing blood in the brain.
Orthostatic is when a person gets up from a chair, vision goes black and they pass out. What normally is when you get up, the sympathic nervous system will make the arteries in the legs smaller, so it presses the blood upwards / prevents it from going into the leg. But in people with hypotension or a weak sympathicus response (fx elderly), the response isn't sufficient, so the blood they have pool in the legs and thus the brain gets no blood, passes out to make you completely relaxed, then you regain blood supply to brain -- > conscious again.
The vasovagal reflex, which is (i'd imagine) the most common of the neural syncopes, is the one you're talking about in the amusement park ride. Can happen for a lot of reasons, doesn't have to be something scary, it can just be taking a dump basically. Or urinating.
Here's a figure of the vasovagal syncope _URL_2_ from Boron & Boulpaep, Medical Physiology, 2nd ed, update 1.
_URL_0_ and this is a figure of the nerves involved (if it's for example during defecation). Same book.
So what happens is basically - You have a stressful experience, for example a scare or a crazy ride (or an amazing poop). The nucleus tractus solitarii (NTS on figure 2) is activated, which increases parasympathetic tone and decreases sympathetic tone.
This causes multiple things (Figure 2):
Decreased sympathetic tone to the heart meaning **less** ionotrophy and heart rate (So the heart relaxes/works less)
Less sympathetic tone to the vessels, causing them to relax more, ie **dilate**
This combination makes sure that you cannot maintain a high enough blood pressure because your heart doesnt pump hard enough and the blood that it does pump is pooling in the legs.
And thus you faint, until your brain gets blood back.
The exact mechanism as to why this happens in most cases is unknown.
But as mentioned, it comes down to rapid drop in blood pressure in the brain.
As for the numbers, I got them from a lecture I had about 4 months back. Not sure what the lecturers source is, but here's a source on some slightly similar numbers _URL_1_ | [
"Onset of symptoms may be after just a few minutes, but usually occurs after at least 20 minutes of free hanging. Typical symptoms are pallor, sweating, shortness of breath, blurred vision, dizziness, nausea, hypotension and numbness of the legs. Eventually it leads to fainting, which may result in death due to oxy... |
why does the freight elevator in a building require a union employee to operate? (nyc) | > Is it a safety thing?
No, it is a union thing. There was a time before unions when companies could offer whatever jobs they wanted, and workers were free to take them or leave them. A big problem was that companies would offer dangerous jobs with low pay, and yet workers would still take them and get angry about the conditions.
So, a bunch of them got together and decided that they would try to bargain with the companies as a group. If the companies wouldn't agree to their demands then they would all stop working, and then the company would be in trouble! This tactic tended to work, so the unions go what they wanted: Better working conditions and higher pay. ... And then rules preventing any new workers from being hired who didn't join the unions, so the unions would maintain their monopoly on bargaining with the company. Also, preventing any non-union person from doing their jobs so the companies remained crippled by union strikes. Also, some unions became involved with organized crime and would intimidate their opponents through physical attacks and backroom dealings.
After a while the rules and limitations of companies which contained unions were so terrible that new companies would pay their employees more than those with unions, just so the limitations of the unions wouldn't get in the way of operating the business. Such as the stupid rule that only a union employee can operate a freight elevator, and that employee cannot be told to work late, meaning if you need to take a late delivery you are out of luck. Any normally functioning business could easily respond to such a request, but the union rules crippled it. | [
"An elevator mechanic is someone who constructs, modernizes, repairs, or services conveyances. Typically elevator mechanics only work on elevators, escalators, dumbwaiters, wheelchair lifts, moving walkways, and other equipment providing vertical transportation. In many countries, particularly in North America, the... |
gravitational pull in relation to the ocean's tide... | [I wrote this a few days back](_URL_0_), let me know if anything needs clarifying. | [
"Gravitational Tides are caused by changes in the relative location of the Earth, sun, and moon, whose orbits are perturbed slightly by Jupiter. Newton's law of universal gravitation states that the gravitational force between a mass at a reference point on the surface of the Earth and another object such as the Mo... |
What is the net metabolic benefit of the caffeine in a cup of coffee? | EDIT: Caffeine Only
"Measurements of energy expenditure (EE) in a room respirometer indicate that repeated caffeine administration (100 mg) at 2-h intervals over a 12-h day period increased the EE of both subject groups by 8-11% (p less than 0.01) during that period but had no influence on the subsequent 12- h night EE. The net effect was a significant increase (p less than 0.02) in daily EE of 150 kcal in the lean volunteers and 79 kcal in the postobese subjects."
100 mg every 2 hours is a lot of caffeine. For an example, to burn 150 kcal you would need 7.5 Red Bulls at 80 mg/250 ml. At 110 kcal per can, you drank 825 kcal. So, if you want to burn calories, you need a low calorie source of caffeine.
Source: _URL_1_
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I just found a group that studied a specific suplement. It contained 10 mg of caffeine and 5 mg of ephedrine. The crossover trial measured oxygen consumption for 45 minutes after taking two herbal dietary supplement capsules.
The Results were as follows: The herbal dietary supplement increased peak oxygen consumption 0.178 ± 0.03 (SEM) kcal/min (8.01 ± 1.35 kcal/min expressed over 45 minutes) above baseline (p < 0.0001), and 2.0 ± 0.56 kcal/min over 45 minutes compared to placebo (p < 0.006).
SOURCE: _URL_0_
I will try to find a "Caffeine Only" experiment. | [
"The world's primary source of caffeine is the coffee \"bean\" (the seed of the coffee plant), from which coffee is brewed. Caffeine content in coffee varies widely depending on the type of coffee bean and the method of preparation used; even beans within a given bush can show variations in concentration. In genera... |
Suppose you visited Ireland in 1415, what would the farmland that would later be used for potatoes, have been used for at that time before they were brought back from the Americas? | You'll expect a sizable arable farming component, based on wheat, barley, some oats, probably still rye in areas with monastic influence. Rye was big in the Early Christian Period and associated with monasteries. Some peas and perhaps other crops as well. However, Ireland's farming economy has always been (since the start in the Early Neolithic c. 3800 BC) predominantly based on pastoral activity. You will expect a lot of grazing (cattle, sheep) throughout the country. | [
"The obelisk, erected in 1810 by Sir Thomas Chapman some 200m to 300m from the house, marks the position where Sir Walter Raleigh planted some of the first potatoes that he imported to Ireland. Antoine Parmentier who promoted the cultivation of potatoes for human consumption and the Spanish conquistadores who first... |
why does playing music on devices at full volume decreases the lifespan of the speakers? | Why do fat people have knee problems? Because there's more force acting on the same object over time.
The same goes for speakers. When you play music louder, the suspension of the speaker cone is being driven with more force. Over time that wears it down faster than if it was played quietly. | [
"Digital audio players such as the iPod, demonstrate the need for a common alignment level. While tracks taken from recent CDs sound loud enough, many older recordings (such as Pink Floyd albums which notably allowed lots of headroom for stunning dynamic range and rarely reach peak digital level) are far too quiet,... |
During conditions of severe smog, etc, is the air quality indoors actually appreciably better? | It depends on the building and the nature of the air quality crisis. Buildings have a turnover time of air, and you can lengthen that time by closing doors, windows, and vents. The air might get stuffy inside, but the smog won't mix much. If there is a few-hour smog event, that could reduce the interior smog level.
Some buildings have HEPA or electrostatic filters on their interior air supply; these filters remove particulates from the air and can increase air quality if the main problem is small particles.
Some buildings contain smokers. That degrades interior air quality.
| [
"Weatherization can have a negative impact on indoor air quality, especially among occupants with respiratory illnesses. This occurs because of a decrease in air exchange in the home, and resulting increase in moisture. This leads to higher concentrations of pollutants in the air.\n",
"Considering that North Amer... |
does sunlight coming through a windowpane onto skin provide any benefits at all? | It would depend on the type of glass — with just straight window glass with no coatings, yeah, there’d be some vitamin D benefit. With highly tinted or UV-coated glass, probably significantly less benefit, if any.
There are mood benefits to being able to see the sun, even through a window, so there’s that, at least..., | [
"While determining how much UV light should be filtered by art glazing, it may also be important to consider the amount of UV light present inside a room or a building. Note that regular window glazing filters away a significant portion of the UV light, which originates from the sun.\n",
"Objects struck by sunlig... |
Is the Hubble sphere expanding or shrinking? | The Hubble sphere is not the same as the observable universe. The Hubble sphere is the radius beyond which light *emitted now* will never reach us, whereas the observable universe is the radius from which light that *reaches us now* was emitted from.
The Hubble sphere does expand in an accelerating universe, but the Universe is expanding faster, and thus things within our Hubble sphere now can pass out of it in the future. | [
"However, the Hubble parameter is not constant in various cosmological models so that the Hubble limit does not, in general, coincide with a cosmological event horizon. For example, in a decelerating Friedmann universe the Hubble sphere expands with time, and its boundary overtakes light emitted by more distant gal... |
Gilgamesh in Cuneiform | What you are asking for is the two-volume [*The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic* by A. R. George](_URL_0_). This masterful work includes the editions of all of the known tablets of the Gilgamesh epic (except for [the most recenly discovered tablet](_URL_1_)), an English translation, and images of the cuneiform tablets. These aren't side-by-side like the Loeb Classical texts, but it's the best you will be able to find. The set is expensive, so you will likely need to find an academic library in order to use it. It also may not be suitable for non-specialists. The work was published mainly with Assyriologists in mind, so if you cannot read Akkadian, looking at the editions and the tablets won't be of much help. | [
"The \"Epic of Gilgamesh\" was discovered by Austen Henry Layard, Hormuzd Rassam, and W. K. Loftus in 1853. The central character of Gilgamesh was initially reintroduced to the world as \"\"Izdubar\"\", before the cuneiform logographs in his name could be pronounced accurately. The first modern translation was publ... |
Does fiber simply speed up our digestive system, or do our bodies want to expel fiber quickly? | Fiber acts as a bulking agent, and as mentioned by HonorAmongSteves, it carries water, creating a rather substantial mass that moves through one's digestive tract. Peristaltic movements by the colon and eventually defecation are stimulated by stretch receptors present in the wall of the colon. Due to the increased bulk in the colon, stretch receptors are activated, passage is expedited, leading to a faster mouth to anus transit. | [
"Whole grains, beans and other legumes, fruits (especially plums, prunes, and figs), and vegetables are good sources of dietary fiber. Fiber is important to digestive health and is thought to reduce the risk of colon cancer. For mechanical reasons, fiber can help in alleviating both constipation and diarrhea. Fiber... |
If you could make a race car's tires, and the road it drives on, out of any materials know to man, what combo would perform the best? | Well it depends what you mean by "perform the best".
Let's start off at the most basic level. Wheels work because of friction. An ideal wheel is one that does not slip at the point of contact. Imagine a car on ice - it wouldn't be going anywhere. The higher the [coefficient of friction](_URL_1_) the better. This allows the wheel to convert as much energy as possible to forward motion.
Another big factor is [rolling resistance](_URL_0_). A common misconception is that this resistance is due to friction; really, it is due to the deformation of the tire. Because of this factor, you would want a wheel that is as perfectly rigid as possible. The less the wheel deforms, the less energy is lost due to rolling resistance.
Well, these two factors alone would mean you want a really hard material for your tire in contact with another material that provides as much friction as possible. [Metal on metal does that job well.](_URL_2_) This is one of the reasons why trains are so efficient at transporting cargo - they are "the best" at efficiently converting energy into forward motion and then maintaining that forward motion.
The way you put it, a race car with train-like wheels on a train track would be the best race car you could get based on the mechanics of wheels only. Unfortunately, cost and resources do apply to the real world. We couldn't just turn all the roads into rails - that would introduce a mind boggling number of engineering challenges. Not only that, but you loose out a number of other benefits to traditional rubber tire trucks/cars such as maneuverability and not necessarily needing a paved road to travel on. As far as the real world is concerned, asphalt and rubber is incredibly efficient and economical for the purposes it is used for. | [
"BULLET::::- \"Race-car tires\"—Race car tires come in three main categories, \"DOT\" (street-legal), \"slick\", and \"rain\". Race car tires are designed to maximize cornering and acceleration friction at the expense of longevity. Racing slicks have no tread to maximize contact with the pavement and rain tires hav... |
When did local lords lose their political authority in England? | I asked a related question (about when making knights became a royal monopoly rather than something any lord could do) about a month ago, and despite a very courteous effort by a mod, it wasn't really his field and I didn't get a satisfactory answer.
However it prompted me to do a bit of research and the answer is 1504.
Henry VII passed a law restricting non-royal retainers. This effectively restricted and regulated the swearing of fealty to anyone but the king. Thus the nobility (peerage rank) were unable to rely on the social and military support of their local gentry.
Few lords personally owned all the land in the territory they controlled. However they were able to effectively control the middle-sized landowners in their locality through personal ties, diplomacy and the offering of political protection. Think of the Roman patron/client system rather than the lord of the manor/serf relationship, personal and economic ties rather than legal ones.
Through this system prominent nobles would have been able to call on the services of every landowning family in their area, and field a much larger army than through arming their own tenants and peasants alone.
Henry VII, having successfully exploited this system to win the crown, didn't want anyone else to do the same. Hence the 1504 act of parliament. NB: gentry is a purely English term, the equivalent on the continent would be the lower nobility (nobility in England being tied to the peerage and thus restricted to those with actual titles).
Your question wasn't phrased too well though, I almost answered 1998 since that was when Tony Blair kicked all but 90 of the hereditary peers out of the House of Lords.
edit: added an interesting but a bit pop-historyish link _URL_0_ | [
"The House of Lords developed from the \"Great Council\" (\"Magnum Concilium\") that advised the King during medieval times. This royal council came to be composed of ecclesiastics, noblemen, and representatives of the counties of England and Wales (afterwards, representatives of the boroughs as well). The first En... |
color correction glasses | [This question has just been asked and answered](_URL_0_?). | [
"Plastic glasses, developed in recent years, provide both the diopter \"fix\" noted above, and a change in the cyan filter. The formula provides intentional \"leakage\" of a minimal (2%) percentage of red light with the conventional range of the filter. This assigns two-eyed \"redness cues\" to objects and details,... |
How accurate is the TV series "Rome" in depicting the daily life of both plebians and patricians? | Alrighty, first off - I'm going to preface this with a couple of disclaimers. Or a few. Whatever :P
* **I LIKED *Rome*. What I say below doesn't change that.**
* **The show is more accurate than most movies that are "based on history.**
* **Obviously, there are spoilers. I've only seen most of the first season, and I'm basing this off of what I've seen.** If you want to continue watching the show in blissful ignorance of the stuff that makes me go "Well that's not quite right...", then please, don't read any more!
---
Okay, now that the prelims are done with, I'm going to address the idea that the producers did their homework regarding the Roman army. Honestly, it's better than *most* (They're not wearing *lorica segmentata*, for one thing), but again, it's not quite right. I love how they showed the discipline of the Roman army, however, again, it was not quite right. For example, Pullo, when he breaks formation and strikes a superior officer, would have been executed on the spot. No questions. The Roman army had *extraordinarily* strict discipline and specific, harsh laws regarding their behaviour. Pullo should not have survived the first episode. Speaking of the first episode, the show depicted a battle - however, I'm not sure WHAT battle it was, even though they claim it was Alesia (By Vercingetorix being captured afterwards). The Battle of Alesia was a totally different beast - it was a desperate siege, with the besiegers themselves being besieged, and an incredible display of Julius Caesar's brilliance as a commander, as well as an indisputable example of Roman engineering at its finest. I didn't get that from the show :/
Then, one little nitpick that would have been a HUGE deal. Caesar (and others) rode through the Roman camp. Again - seems like a funny thing to nitpick, no? The thing is, *no* one, not even kings and commanders, were allowed to ride through the camp - it was considered extreme bad luck, and at least one Roman loss that I've read about was blamed partly on a couple of individuals riding through the Roman camp. Caesar, a man who publicly based his reputation on his fantastically good luck, would never *ever* have committed such a *faux pas*.
Oh right. Speaking of Caesar and *faux pas*-es. Another thing he would never have done is shown that much favour to the Thirteenth Legion over all of his others - his favoured legion was the *Tenth*, and he spent the vast majority of his time with that legion, as opposed to the others. The *Tenth* went with Caesar almost everywhere he went (The only exception being the one legion he took with him when he went to Rome, crossing the Rubicon - which WAS the *Thirteenth*). When Caesar fought the Alexandrian Civil War, the *Thirteenth* wasn't originally with him, as shown (poorly) in the show - that was the *Sixth* and the *Twenty-Eighth*. But they did get the armour right, and it's absolutely possible that they rotated their ranks like they showed in the show, even if we have no proof of it! :)
---
Now, on to non-army things. As /u/Tiako noted so well [here](_URL_0_), with broad strokes, the show is pretty solid. Showing street life is fantastic, showing the colours of the city, rather than the blase, stolid marble that we're used to is utterly gorgeous. But then there are the little things - and I'll just give you a couple of examples of those.
First of all, Caesar's...uh....sleeping around was rather well known. He'd slept with half of the married women in the Senate, it seems, and Servilia was Cato's (Who was FAR too old in the show, and would NOT have worn a black toga in the Senate) half-sister. Also, she had a daughter - who Caesar also slept with. Cato's wife? Yeah, Caesar slept with her too, I believe (He divorced her for sleeping around). Caesar's legionaries sang songs about how much Roman tax money was spent on Gallic women. My point to all of this is that *Caesar's wife would not have been surprised at his propensity to bang everything with boobs and two legs.* She certainly wasn't about to divorce him over it.
The one big one that ground my gears a bit - they got housing completely wrong. The vast majority of Romans would have lived in houses called *insulae*, which were essentially big tenement complexes. Rooms were small, shoddily built, and they were generally five stories tall or so. Contrast that with Lucius' lodgings - the room is relatively comfy, larger than you would get from one of these *insulae*, and, most of all, it had something that those tenements would NOT have had - a kitchen. Funny how we just take that bit for granted, eh?
And then, of course, the excessive incest and random sex between Servilia and Octavia, Octavia and Octavian, Atia being batshit loony, etc etc are completely ridiculous. If you have specific questions about what you're looking for, please, feel free to ask them :) The issue with this question is that it's extremely broad - but in general, this all sums up to **NOT ALL THAT ACCURATE.** Compared to other Hollybood butcheries? It's amazing. Compared to reality? Not all that true.
If you'd like an amazing overview of life in the Late Republic, feel free to check out Adrian Goldsworthy's *Caesar: Life of a Colossus*. If you'd like some other book recommendations, just let me know and I'll provide :) | [
"BULLET::::- \"Rome\": A historical drama set in Ancient Rome that primarily chronicles the lives and deeds of the rich, powerful and historically significant, but also focuses on the lives, fortunes, families and acquaintances of two common men, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo. They both manage to witness and often... |
when i have to "stop and think" to solve a problem, what is going no in my body as i stare at nothing? is this different from "stopping to think" to remember a fact? | You are simply shutting down the other activities that your brain is usually forced to multi-task, in order to divert more of your brains attention to the task at hand. You have markedly diminished critical thinking skills when you are multi-tasking, so if you can just quiet down for a second and stop intaking other sensory information, you can do a much better job of solving problems and thinking.
Notably, you also function in the opposite way when you encounter a thought or situation that you find unpleasant. You will start moving, touching, and making noises to force your brain to multi-task and oversaturate so you can't focus on the unpleasant situation as easily. | [
"For example, when a student has forgotten an answer to a question in an exam, he will likely think something such as \"I have forgotten the answer\". The more they try to think of it, the more the answer becomes blurred and obscured. However, if this negative thought is replaced with a more positive one (\"No need... |
Ancient Greek helmets on heads | Hi, not discouraging direct answers here, but you may be interested in some earlier threads:
* /u/Iphikrates in [Is it true that those helmets of the kind Pericles is shown wearing in the now famous bust never "closed"? If yes, why? Is it supposed to represent an owl or was it an intimation thing?](_URL_2_)
* Iphikrates and /u/XenophonTheAthenian in [Why do many Ancient Greek sculptures of Gods and soldiers depict their helmets atop their heads, rather than over their faces?](_URL_0_)
* /u/Deirdre_Rose in [Why is the Corinthian helmet being worn over the forehead so common in Greek art?](_URL_1_) | [
"The Iberians did wear bronze helmets, sometimes of Greek and Corinthian shape (due to Greek influence and trade in the southern and eastern parts of the peninsula), with either a low or high crest, but they seem to have been rare. They were probably worn only by the nobles and the tribal leaders. The crests are sa... |
governing during american civil war | Its super complicated. Some representatives of these states stayed as like a goverment in exile, some positions were left vacant, representaives who took direct part in seccesion were expelled.
This gives a general overview of the beginning of the war.
_URL_0_
There was definitly more pro union and north bills passed. West Virginia was also allow ro break off of virginia and was admitted. The southern states would had never allowed this to happen. | [
"The American Civil War (1861-1865) was fought over the issue of tariffs as well as slavery. At the time of independence, the agrarian interests of the South were opposed to any protection, while the manufacturing interests of the North wanted to maintain it. \n",
"In April 1861, the American Civil War began when... |
how is it in tennis that players ranked in the hundreds and thousands are matched against players in the top 20? | Traditionally, large single elimination tournaments are seeded, meaning that the 'more qualified' participants are given an easier set of opponents.
Obviously this sucks for the poorly seeded participants, but it also serves to encourage viewers to watch the tournament to the end. If you wanted to watch really high-class tennis, and you knew the #1 and #2 would be matched up in round one, guaranteeing the elimination of one of them, a lot of viewers would stop caring after their hero lost.
So, for example, in a 64 entry bracket, in round one you have (1 vs 64), (2 vs 63), (3 vs 62), etc. This guarantees that #1 and #2 will only meet in the final. | [
"Most large tournaments seed players, but players may also be matched by their skill level. According to how well a person does in sanctioned play, a player is given a rating that is adjusted periodically to maintain competitive matches. For example, the United States Tennis Association administers the National Ten... |
Why was Shakespeare not knighted? | Most knights were either of low noble background, or knighted after making their fortunes. Most also had done governmental or military service to the crown; the modern practice of recognizing the arts with a knighthood simply didn't exist.
Francis Drake, for instance, was already a successful privateer in the service of the crown before he became a knight. Walter Raleigh had first been introduced at court as a child, but wasn't knighted until after he helped suppress Irish uprisings against England. As an arbitrary example of a non-military knight made by Elizabeth I, Nicholas Mosley started off his career as a weaver of wool cloth, but was knighted only after serving as Lord Mayor of the City of London.
Shakespeare was never in government, never a military officer, and poor. Knighting him wouldn't have made any sense to the monarchs of his day. | [
"William Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and playwright as yet unsurpassed. Shakespeare was not a man of letters by profession, and probably had only some grammar school education. He was neither a lawyer, nor an aristocrat as the \"university wits\" that had monopolised the English stage when he st... |
Why is the earth so wet? | A partial answer to your first set of questions.
> Why is water so common in the universe in general?
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe (per mass). Since the second most abundant element (helium) is chemically inert, it shouldn't be that surprising that the two most abundant chemically reactive elements should form a common molecule.
> I get why hydrogen is super common, but why is oxygen so common?
Because the most common fusion reaction in the [Alpha process](_URL_1_) produces oxygen.
> And are there other compounds of similar complexity that are significantly more common?
H*_2_* and CO are more common. See this answer by u/Stargrazer82301 for details:
_URL_0_ | [
"Weather is one of the fundamental processes that shape the Earth. The process of weathering breaks down the rocks and soils into smaller fragments and then into their constituent substances. During rains precipitation, the water droplets absorb and dissolve carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. This causes the ... |
why a person can feel groggy and fatigued after getting very little rest, but feel energized after work with no sleep in between (no caffeine/drugs involved) | Being tired isn't just caused by being awake for a certain amount of time, it's also caused by your natural biorhythms. It's a balance of the two. Most people are programmed to get tired at night, because we evolved to sleep when it's dark out. In your case, my guess would be that, for some reason, your body's 'clock' has been thrown off so your body sends 'wake up' and 'sleep' signals at the wrong times. Maybe try melatonin to help reprogram it? Not sure how well that works... | [
"Fatigue can be a symptom of a medical problem, but more commonly it is a normal physiological reaction to exertion, lack of sleep, boredom, changes to sleep-wake schedules (including jet lag), or stress.\n",
"Fatigue is generally considered a more long-term condition than sleepiness (somnolence). Although sleepi... |
Why are there so many variations of some names? For example: Edward, Edwin, Edmund, etc. | In this case, this is due to the nature of ancient Germanic personal names. They were “dithematic,” *i.e.* composed of two meaningful elements (though there were “hypocoristic” names, of which only one element was commonly used; over the course of time, these monothematic names became normal names of their own right—cf. Hugh/Chuco, Charles/Karl or Otto). This onomastic structure became very common in Europe as a result of the Germanic take-over of the majority of the former Roman West. These elements were transmitted within family groups and recomposed to form new names ([here is an example](_URL_0_) [1] of the transmission of a few elements in a 7th-century Frankish family). The choice of these elements was precisely made to emphasise one's position within a family group. Over the course of time (in royal families at first, and then in the aristocracy), recomposition stopped and was replaced by transmission of names (something historians link with the transformation of family structure: belonging to a (paternal) line became more important). But these names were still inherited from the previous system; therefore, the plurality of Ed- names reflects the relative frequence of the theme “Ead” in Anglo-Saxon royal onomastics. Similarly, several continental names were formed with the component Adal- (A(da)lbert, Ad(al)olf), whose Old English equivalent was Æthel- (Æthelberht, Æthelbald—though its influence was not, in this case, paralleled in modern personal names).
[1] from Régine le Jan's *Famille et pouvoir dans le monde Franc*. | [
"Ellsworth is a surname, originating in England prior to or around the 11th Century A.D. in the Cambridgeshire area. The name comes from as \"Ellesworth\" or possibly Elsworth, from the place-name (and family seat) which in turn was derived from the Old English name \"Eli\" and \"worth\", an Old English word for fa... |
Why did Greek cuirasses and Roman-style plate armor disappear from Western Europe? | By "Roman plate" I assume you mean lorica segmentata, which is what you tend to see a lot of in popular culture. We're not exactly sure which Roman troops used it, or even how the Romans themselves called it, but it was used from 1st - 3rd century AD. Lorica hamata (mail armour) is what most Roman troops wore throughout Roman history. As for why, it's because it is more costly to build and maintain than mail armour. After the crisis of the 3rd century there wasn't enough economic power to sustain it. | [
"As Western European metalwork became increasingly sophisticated, the traditional image of the cataphract's awe-inspiring might and presence quickly evaporated. From the 15th century and onwards, chain mail, lamellar armor, and scale armor seemed to fall out of favour with Eastern noble cavalrymen as elaborate and ... |
how to government officials get away with proposing/enforcing laws with the argument "because of my religious belief." | The 1st Amendment prohibits the US government from establishing a State religion that people must be a part of and it prohibits the government from hindering people from practicing their religion.
For those who are religious that religion is the foundation that their ethical and moral codes are built. When our elected representatives vote on and draft potential laws they use their ethical and moral codes when doing so. That means that their personal religion will influence how they vote and for the government to attempt to prevent that would be violating the 1st amendment rights of that representative.
They cannot make a law "because _____ religious text or doctrine says murder is wrong" but they can make a law "because my religion tells me that murder is wrong I think it is a big enough threat to society to make a secular law also forbidding it". | [
"The law protects the right of individuals to choose and change their religion and to interpret their religious beliefs for themselves. Members of all religious groups worshiped freely. There is no state or otherwise dominant religion, and the Government practiced no form of religious favoritism or discrimination e... |
Can you experience time faster than it actually passes? | What you're talking about does not require relativity or time dilation at all. It's merely the [Doppler effect](_URL_0_). If you walked toward a metronome playing at 100 bpm, you would hear the beats slightly faster than 100 bpm.
The effect is of order v/*c*, where v is your velocity relative to the stationary metronome, and *c* is the speed of sound. *i.e.*, the effect is small if you're not going near the speed of sound. Smaller still if you're using vision (light) to count the beats of the metronome. (The speed of light is much greater than the speed of sound.) | [
"The person affected by Alice in Wonderland syndrome may also lose a sense of time, a problem similar to the lack of spatial perspective. Time seems to pass very slowly, akin to an LSD experience. The lack of time and space perspective also leads to a distorted sense of velocity. For example, one could be inching a... |
Why is Rhode Island a state? | The United States isn’t a country divided into states; it’s a country formed when states joined together. So your question is a bit like asking why Luxembourg wasn’t simply slotted in with Germany or Belgium. Who would do the lumping together?
Roger Williams and others who had been banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious reasons in the 1630s took up residence on coastal land controlled by local Indian tribes, and got an English royal charter for a new colony. More than a century later, the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations was one of the colonies who broke away from Great Britain and then joined together to form a new nation.
You can read the royal charters on p. 106 of *Boundaries of the United States and the Several States,* a US Geological Survey book [available as a PDF here.](_URL_0_)
| [
"Rhode Island (), officially the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, is a state in the New England region of the United States. It is the smallest state in area, the seventh least populous, and the second most densely populated. Rhode Island is bordered by Connecticut to the west, Massachusetts to the... |
Basques in North American prior to Columbus? | I am almost done reading his book "The Basque History of the World" in which he discuses it in a bit more detail.
Flavored_crayons is right in that there is little evidence but after having read Kurlanksy I have come away with the impression that they did: in the book (which I encourage you to read if you enjoyed "Cod") he explains how the Basque were the first major whalers in Europe - this was due to the fact that only did there used to be many whales off the Bay of Biscay but because of the unique trade tariffs in the Basque land that allowed them to import to the rest of Europe without having to pay Spain taxes for the importations.
Back to North America though; the Basque's had contact with the Vikings and were known to make trips across the sea to the Faeroe Islands as early as 875 - this was a 1,500 mile journey and this tied in with the fact that they provided so much whale material to Europe (which would have needed extensive fishing locations) leads to deductive arguments about how they were there before or around the same time as the Vikings.
Kurlanksy also notes that "numerous reports claim that Cabot and other early explorers arrived in North America [and] encountered native tribesman who spoke Basque."pp 58 - 59
All of this is without concrete evidence and more sources should be looked into but you should definitely read this book!
I am continually surprised at the influence on the world that this small, and very old (the most ancient language still spoken in Europe today) people have had on the world.
Source: *The Basque History of the World* by Mark Kurlansky (43 - 64)
The Gernika chapter is depressing as hell but I really enjoyed reading the book while I was in Bilbao the past week.
Edit: weird that I came across this post as I was using the book to keep my hot laptop off me. | [
"There has been a Basque presence in the Americas from the age of Columbus. Basques under the crown of Castile were among the explorers, priests and Conquistadors of the Spanish Empire. Placenames like Durango, Colorado, Trepassey, Biscayne Cove and Biscayne Bay remember their foundations. Basques began to come to ... |
why mustangs don't need anyone to maintain their hooves, but domesticated horses do? | Their hooves get worn down because they're almost constantly moving. Even when ridden all the time, domestic horses don't travel enough to significantly wear down their hooves because they're still stalled/pastured. In fact, a lot of farriers have taken to studying the shape of mustang hooves in order to find different ways to trim domestic horse hooves in a way that makes them stronger. There's demand for this because shoeing can be very damaging to the feet, though it'll always be necessary for a significant portion of domestic horses who are tender footed or subject to tough terrain/roads. | [
"The debate as to what degree mustangs and cattle compete for forage is multifaceted. Horses are adapted by evolution to inhabit an ecological niche characterized by poor quality vegetation. Advocates assert that most current mustang herds live in arid areas which cattle cannot fully utilize due to the lack of wate... |
Is there a case in nature in which a species A can breed with species B, which can breed with a species C, but A and C can't breed with each other? | Yes, what you describe exists, they are called [Ring species](_URL_0_). All populations involved in such a ring may be considered the same species since gene flow can still occur between the most distant populations, through the intermediaries. However if the populations in the middle were to be wiped out, the two distant populations could no longer interbreed, so would be considered a different species. These cases do highlight how fluid and somewhat arbitrary any species concept is. | [
"Some hybrids between similar species have been achieved by housing males of one species and females of the other together to limit the choice of mate. To create a \"natural\" macropod hybrid, young animals of one species have been transferred to the pouch of another so as to imprint into them the other species. In... |
c3, c4, and cam pathways. what is the difference between them, and in what type of plant are they used? | C3 converts CO2 into a 3-carbon acid. Most plants use this mechanism, but it works best in wetter areas with moderate temperatures. As temperatures go up, growth is stunted because it becomes less efficient. C4 converts carbon into a 4-carbon acid, and this works in warmer weather with less water. Tropical plants tend to be this.
CAM is something else entirely, where the plant takes in carbon dioxide at night and stores it for the daytime use. Then it seals off when the sun comes up to avoid losing water and photosynthesizes using the stored carbon during the day. Orchids, bromeliads, cacti, cactus form spurges, succulents, and other things without much water will use CAM. | [
"A C3 plant uses C3 carbon fixation, one of the three metabolic photosynthesis pathways which also include C4 and CAM (described below). These plants are called \"C3\" due to the three-carbon compound (3-Phosphoglyceric acid, or 3-PGA) produced by the CO fixation mechanism in these plants. This C3 mechanism is the ... |
It is the year 900 in the kingdom of Wessex. What’s for dinner? | Who's eating? The average peasant, a petty noble, or the King himself? | [
"Western Europe: Since the year 1066 English royalty ate lavishly. During the Victorian era, formal meals consisted of twelve or thirteen courses; informal meals of five or six courses. A single breakfast might have consisted of soup, roast turkey or pork with potatoes or rice, two vegetable side dishes, citrus ice... |
Was the Southern Defensive War really that crucial to the South's early wins? | I disagree entirely. While the Confederacy won an early initial victory at Manassas/Bull Run, the overall picture for the South for much of late 1861 and 1862 (the period in which the South stood on the strategic defensive) was incredibly gloomy. Let's run through the list of disasters briefly. November 7 1861: the US Navy seizes Port Royal, South Carolina, thus driving a wedge between Charleston and Savannah. January 19, 1862: the Confederate army in eastern Kentucky is routed at Mill Springs, opening the way for a Union invasion of Tennessee. February 6: Fort Henry falls to US Grant, opening the Tennessee River to the Union. February 16: Fort Donelson is surrendered, opening the Cumberland to Union troops and gunboats. April 6: the combined western Confederate army fails to break Grant's army at Shiloh, and with the arrival of Don Carlos Buell's forces, are forced to withdraw, making the fall of Corinth inevitable. Finally, McClellan, despite his flaws, comes within a few miles of Richmond before being driven away by an inferior, but very aggressively commanded Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.
It is true that a period of Confederate superiority followed *in the east*. But even for the year or so that the Army of Northern Virginia was dominant, the Confederacy continued to collapse steadily in the west. | [
"Scholars have debated what the effects of the war were on political and economic power in the South. The prevailing view is that the southern planter elite retained its powerful position in the South. However, a 2017 study challenges this, noting that while some Southern elites retained their economic status, the ... |
food tax, why in a restaurant but not a store? | Likely because buying food at a store is basically a necessity of life, especially if you can't afford to eat out every meal.
Eating at a restaurant is basically a privilege, not a necessity, so it makes more sense to tax that, than to tax basic food.
Up here in Canada, our national tax (GST) applies at all stores, but not on basic food items like milk & bread etc. | [
"In grocery stores, unprepared food items are not taxed but vitamins and all other items are. Ready-to-eat hot foods, whether sold by supermarkets or other vendors, are taxed. Restaurant bills are taxed. As an exception, hot beverages and bakery items are tax-exempt if and only if they are for take-out and are not ... |
Why do atoms "want" to form covalent bonds? | When someone tells you atoms or molecules "want" to do something it is almost always code for "would be in a lower energy state" if they did that. Saying that two atoms want to form a covalent bond just means that the state in which the two atoms are bonded is lower in energy than the one in which they are not. | [
"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... |
Ignoring the difficulty of capturing a comet or adjusting its orbit: If we could arrange for a comet to strike Mars, what would the effect be? Could we terraform Mars by hitting it with a cubic mile of water? | The smart thing to do would be not to smash a comet into Mars directly, but to aerobrake one in Mars' atmosphere. The temperature of atmospheric entry would be enough to not only break up & melt the comet, but also split the water molecules into their constituent oxygen & hydrogen.
If you planned the comet's entry into the atmosphere *just so*, you'd be able to control how much of the O & H got liberated, or re-combined back into water after the fact. So you'd get to choose the proportions of oxygen, hydrogen & water you introduced.
Oxygen is obviously very handy! The hydrogen would be so much lighter than the rest of the atmospheric gases that it would rise to the atmosphere's upper layers, and get preferentially stripped away, protecting the more valuable oxygen & water vapour.
However, it would a good hundred comets to so much as double the mass of Mars' atmosphere. So you're better off grabbing a Kuiper Belt Object.
Even then, the real issue with terraforming Mars is a lack of nitrogen. You ideally want some sort of inert gas to make up the bulk of the atmosphere. Too much oxygen, and everything is flammable. too much carbon dioxide and people can't survive. Nitrogen is also vital to plant (and therefore animal) life on earth, in the form of the nitrogen cycle. | [
"In 2013 it was thought possible that Comet Siding Spring would create a meteor shower on Mars or be a threat to the spacecraft in Mars orbit. Studies in 2014 showed the threat to orbiting spacecraft to be minimal. The greatest threat would be about 100 minutes after closest approach. Mars passed about from the com... |
why do men get a weird feeling in their penis when they see an injury or cut | Ummm no we don't? You should go see a doctor. | [
"While less often depicted in media, a strike to the groin can cause pain for female victims too. The skin of the vulva and the clitoris are highly sensitive, making laceration injuries especially painful. In extreme cases, nerve damage can occur to the clitoris.\n",
"The body's physical arousal response (vaginal... |
How did the Seven Years War begin? | In 1740, a new king came to power in Prussia, Frederick the Great. His predecessor built a large, well-organized army, and Frederick immediately used it to defeat Austria in the War of the Austrian Succession from 1740-1748. By doing so, Prussia became a great power in Europe, attracting the suspicions of other nations such as France and Russia. In 1756, Austria's queen, Maria Theresa, used diplomacy to unite France and Russia against Prussia. England naturally joined in against France, her biggest rival. The immediate cause of the war was a French assault of a British base in Minorica. Prussia quickly took to the offensive, and the war continued from there.
In North America, the war began in 1754 as a result of land disputes between New France and the Thirteen Colonies over the fertile Ohio Country. France had long standing claims over the area, but pioneers in the British colonies kept moving west, settling in any land they could get their hands on. | [
"The Seven Years' War was a global conflict fought between 1756 and 1763. It involved every European great power of the time and spanned five continents, affecting Europe, the Americas, West Africa, South Asia, and the Philippines. The conflict split Europe into two coalitions: one was led by the Kingdom of Great B... |
let's say, everything in the universe (not the atoms!!) get's 10 times bigger. would it effect anything? | If you were 10 times bigger you would weigh 1,000 times more, so you and most everything else would be crushed under its own weight. | [
"Such a number may be incomprehensibly huge. If the Big Bang is reckoned to have occurred 13.8 billion years ago, there have been \"only\" about 4.35 x 10 seconds since the birth of the universe. It is estimated that the Earth is made up of roughly 5.5 x 10 atoms; the number of atoms in the Milky Way Galaxy is appr... |
[Chemistry] Are there reactions that aren't endothermic or exothermic? | The H-O bond that is broken turns H2O into a OH-.
The H-O bond that is formed (in autoionization) turns H2O into H3O+.
The bond-breaking and bond-forming reactions are nonequivalent, as the products side (hydronium and hydroxide) and reactants side (water) are nonequivalent.
deltaG is defined as 0 at chemical equilibrium. Not sure if that answers your question. | [
"A reaction is said to be exergonic if the final state is lower on the energy scale than the initial state; in the case of endergonic reactions the situation is the reverse. A reaction is said to be exothermic if the reaction releases heat to the surroundings; in the case of endothermic reactions, the reaction abso... |
Where are we on fusion power? How clean would it be? How long can we see fusion power in grid? | We cannot sustain fusion without enormous energy usage. We cannot produce any energy from fusion yet.
It will probably be a long time before it's used for commercial power production. | [
"This is a key concept in the hybrid concept, known as \"fission multiplication\". For every fusion event, several fission events may occur, each of which gives off much more energy than the original fusion, about 11 times. This greatly increases the total power output of the reactor. This has been suggested as a w... |
Why did Republicans become so conservative so suddenly in the 1920s? | /u/Samuel_Gompers has your number. He previously answered:
* [Can someone address a brief history of Democrats vs Republicans, specifically the change in Dems from the early 1900s being against civil rights to a more progressive party in the 50/60s leading much social change in the U.S.](_URL_0_)
* [Why was there such a huge shift in the core viewpoints of the Republican Party in the past 100 years?](_URL_1_)
I hope you find those answers helpful, but an answer related to conditions in the decade specified would be welcome. | [
"In the United States, the Republican Party has been the party of conservatism since the 1890s, although there was a strong Eastern liberal wing. Since 1964, the conservatives largely took control. Meanwhile, the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, based in the South and strongly opposed to Civil Rights, gre... |
why does ctrl+alt+del'ing into task manager sometimes unfreeze frozen applications in windows? | Most likely it doesn't. Unless freeze is somehow fixed by changing window focus, pressing ctrl+alt+del doesn't affect the program in anyway.
Probably application just wasn't completely frozen or suck in forever loop. Windows shows application being frozen if it doesn't handle events in certain time. Some applications do potentially long taking tasks in main thread that handles the events. Eg. if you open a huge image, the application might appear frozen until it finishes the loading.
Usually these kind of temporal freezes are caused by slow IO. Well made applications use separate thread for these tasks so the main thread handling events isn't blocked and application doesn't appear frozen. But not all IO tasks are moved to separate thread just because they are so small that they don't normally cause any meaningful pause and threading is hard and can cause other problems.
Sometimes even small IO tasks take unexpectedly long: small file on network drive + physical drive on power saving mode + network problems and suddently loading a single 1kB file takes multiple seconds.
Freeze can also be caused by bugs in program that in some conditions cause logic to go loop that doesn't end or takes seconds to complete.
TL;DR: Application wasn't in unrecoverable state and something just took longer than it should have and Windows just though the program was frozen. Application starting to work after pressing ctrl+alt+del was just a coincidence | [
"Because the window controls are being rendered by the application process, if the application freezes the controls will often become unresponsive too. This can make it more confusing when trying to close unresponsive applications as the display server has to detect this. \n",
"BULLET::::- A (complete) feature fr... |
What factors determine how fast a CPU runs? | Well there are a bunch of things. We have billions of transistors to utilize to make our CPUs work. Utilizing them in different ways is going to cause variations in how the CPU performs.
Here are a few other things that matter. It's not just hardware that improves performance, it's how well the software can utilize the hardware.
* The code running on the machine itself, and specifically how it was compiled
* How well the OS is tuned to work with the architecture itself
* Whether or not each core can issue instructions from multiple threads
* Whether the CPU is designed to maximize single thread performance or good performance of several threads
* Cache statistics, such as size, associativity, number of caches, depth of the cache hierarchy, bandwidth to main memory, number of entries in the store buffer, etc
* TLBs also matter immensely and depend on the results from the previous bullet point
* Number of ALUs and various other functional units that can have instructions issued to them.
* Reorder buffer size, and physical register file size
* The interconnection network between cores, but this is again how well the program uses the CPU effectively.
* The accuracy of the CPUs branch predictor, and it's misprediction penalty.
As you can see, there are a lot of things that can affect CPU performance. This is just a random list off of the top of my head, and I'll probably come back and add more later.
All of this however is well beyond what the average user ever sees. The relationships between these subsystems in a CPU are complex, and that's why even experts rely on results from benchmarks to see how things operate. | [
"The \"performance\" or \"speed\" of a processor depends on, among many other factors, the clock rate (generally given in multiples of hertz) and the instructions per clock (IPC), which together are the factors for the instructions per second (IPS) that the CPU can perform.\n",
"The clock rate of a CPU is most us... |
At what point is a system considered random as opposed to just too complex to predict? Is there any difference? | in science, we use 'random' to describe effects that aren't determined by the parameters of the models used to describe whatever phenomenon we're looking at. often you have an idea that you *could* parameterize those effects, but it's not worth the trouble because they're very small and average to zero. for example, there's 'random noise' in the retina produced by the isomerization-by-heat of photopigments (that ideally are being isomerized by visible light). in theory you could predict most of those isomerizations by precisely characterizing the dynamic distribution of heat in the retina, but they're marginal enough that they can generally be ignored (or just characterized by a summary statistic rather than by a mechanism). so at that level, we would characterize the retinal response as a random system only because we can't (or don't care to) fully specify the system, although theoretically we *could*.
on the other hand, at the very lowest physical levels, you have probabilistic randomness, which cannot be parameterized. so, the light falling on the retina has an average intensity, but the incidence of photons *per photon* is probabilistic (following a Poisson distribution). this makes incidence of a photon a random event, and beyond knowing all the optical parameters and the parameters of the summary distribution, you can't predict exactly when or whether a photon will pass by a certain photoreceptor. this kind of thing is why quantum randomness is in sometimes characterized as 'truly random' - the system can never be *fully* specified. | [
"Irregularity and local representativeness affect judgments of randomness. Things that do not appear to have any logical sequence are regarded as representative of randomness and thus more likely to occur. For example, THTHTH as a series of coin tosses would not be considered representative of randomly generated co... |
What happens when you superimpose two coherent, out-of-phase beams of light? | This is basically a [Michelson interferometer](_URL_0_). The semi-transparent mirror is semi-transparent in both directions. Destructive interference on the path to the right will mean that no energy goes that way: instead, there will be a beam with constructive interference going *downward* from M on your diagram.
E
|
|
E----M . . . . . no beam
||
||
||
beam | [
"If a coherent, narrow bandwidth laser is applied to a two-level system, the wave function will undergo Rabi flopping (Rabi oscillation) between the ground and excited states. At some point in time the system will undergo spontaneous decay and its wave function will collapse to the ground-state wave function. From ... |
If someone were to die today because of an accident involving an unexploded WW2 bomb, would they be added to the list of WW2 casualties? | So I considered taking a stab at this question last evening, and while there are a few comments which do strike in the direction of an answer, I think that a META answer is also in order here.
First, and perhaps most important, there is no "list of WW2 casualties", at least in the sense of an official, agreed upon one. In fact, only a few countries can even provide more than generalized estimates of the number of their citizens killed in the conflict. [Here is a table from John Ellis' "Statistical Survey" book on the War](_URL_0_), and you'll notice everything is in nice, round numbers. So my point here is that if the recent bomb in Frankfurt went off and killed someone, Ellis isn't going to be going back to edit the next edition of his book from 2,050,000 civilian casualties to 2,050,001 civilian casualties in Germany. And of course, the estimates themselves vary, so you won't always see agreement on some statistics across various works, depending on what method a given historian uses, and/or what primary sources they give more weight to.
Secondly though, is the fact that there isn't going to be an Official *Universal* Definition of who gets to be a casualty and who doesn't. These statistics are originating from a wide variety of persons, groups, and governmental organizations, and while there will be a general consensus on the main points (i.e. someone killed in action is definitely a casualty), *there is no world law* preventing Dr. John Smith from writing a book in which he includes deaths from exploded ordnance decades later as part of the total casualty numbers. That doesn't mean that other works need to agree with him though. I have not, nor am I capable of, doing a survey of every work on World War II which touches on tabulating casualty numbers so while I suspect Dr. Smith is in the minority, I couldn't say quite how much he is, although it is likely safe to say he is in a small one, as no works come to mind which make a point of arguing for it.
So finally, the closest thing we're going to see to an *answer* is less about how historians will judge the deaths in terms of "how many died in World War II" and instead how the death is treated in practical terms. If someone is killed or injured by unexploded ordnance, how does their insurance policy classify the death or injury, for instance, assuming it includes any sort of provision that touches on armed conflict. In all honesty I can't say, but that is a question for a lawyer, or perhaps an underwriter, not an historian. Likewise, presuming the government has any sort of compensations which were tied to war deaths or injuries, it would be a matter of what their written policy is on that matter, which will vary country-to-country. There may be other practical considerations that I'm missing, but again, that isn't a question for an historian, as it has little bearing on casualties *as an aspect of historical study*. It is a question for someone who is versed in the German *Sozialgesetzbuch* or another appropriate law/program/group/etc in which practical effects are relevant, so again, a lawyer or a government official (and likewise for France, Belgium, Poland, etc. and so on). They might be able to give some semblance of an answer, but for an historian, there is no "official rules" on this, so it is a matter of opinion and argumentation. | [
"On 23 August 1945, shortly after the Second World War had ended, the war claimed three more victims locally. Three youths, Helmut Keul, Ernst Josef Probst and Werner Ullrich, went to the Dreis munitions depot to undertake the disarming of the weapons there, left over from the war. Their efforts resulted in a treme... |
the passage of time | I think you think antimatter is something other than it is.
Antimatter is exactly the same as regular matter, but with opposite charge. If our entire universe was switched from matter to antimatter, everything would be *exactly* the same when observed. | [
"Time travel is the concept of moving backwards or forwards to different points in time, in a manner analogous to moving through space, and different from the normal \"flow\" of time to an earthbound observer. In this view, all points in time (including future times) \"persist\" in some way. Time travel has been a ... |
do good quality tires improve gas mileage? | proper tire inflation will have more of an impact than tire "quality"....
but you shouldnt buy quality tires for the MPG.....you should buy quality tires because that is the only thing responsible for stopping your 2 ton death trap.....
| [
"Fuel efficiency is further improved by six percent by utilizing: a new front air dam and rear spoiler, along with revised underbody panels, reducing the drag coefficient from 0.30 to 0.28; replacing traditional power steering with electrical power result as reduction in parasitic losses and special lower rolling r... |
how come when i have to pee, i can sometimes postpone it for a pretty long time, and sometimes my bladder can't even hold it in for a couple of minutes. | It will vary with how much food and drink you've had. Think of your bladder like a balloon. It will expand as it fills up with urine. If your bladder is full, it will take up a certain amount of space in your abdominal cavity. Suppose you eat and drink a large amount. As things digest and pass down to your intestines, your bladder has also been expanding and taking up space. It may take a couple hours before your bladder needs to be relieved. But after you pee, the balloon is empty. Now all the other stuff in your gut takes up that space and puts pressure on your bladder, preventing it from fully expanding. You'll feel a similar pressure to pee, but much less urine will come out.
The mystery of "breaking the seal" when drinking is compounded by the fact that alcohol is a diuretic. Your kidneys are working overtime but your bladder's capacity gets constricted after the first piss. | [
"If an incontinence is due to overflow incontinence, in which the bladder never empties completely, or if the bladder cannot empty because of poor muscle tone, past surgery, or spinal cord injury, a catheter may be used to empty the bladder. A catheter is a tube that can be inserted through the urethra into the bla... |
if being attractive is an important aspect of sexual attraction, why hasn't natural selection turned us all into super models? | Ugly people will still mate with ugly people. | [
"Successful couples of differing physical attractiveness may be together due to other matching variables that compensate for the difference in attractiveness. For instance, some men with wealth and status desire younger, more attractive women. Some women are more likely to overlook physical attractiveness for men w... |
Is it possible to 'write' in Cuneiform? | Keep in mind that cuneiform, as a script, is not identified with any single language or language family, but was rather adapted via Sumerian origins to write a collection of Mesopotamian languages, some of which belong to extinct families and none of which are related to Sumerian itself. Which is to say, familiarity with Sumerian offers precisely nothing whatsoever toward the comprehension of any other language written using cuneiform script. In the same way that our ability to decipher Linear B as a script, via Greek, offers nothing to our comprehension of syllabic Linear A (whose language appears to be non-Indo-European, but is otherwise a mystery).
This being the case, the answer to this question is *entirely* dependent on which language is being spoken of. Akkadian is very well understood, as it offers an extremely large and well-studied corpus, and belongs to an otherwise well-understood language family (Semitic). Elamite is poorly understood by comparison, as it is, like Sumerian, a language isolate, but lacks Sumerian's central importance to the study of human language history.
So can we write *new* documents in these languages, *analogous to the documents which have survived in them, from the ancient period?* Yes! But therein lies the caveat. Eblaite accounting ledgers may give scholars a good understanding of Eblaite names for various commodities, and means of enumerating values. But they do not instruct one in how to say "How is your mother doing these days?" A 1000 word historical record may tell us a great deal about how events can be described in the past tense third person indicative, but provide us not a single second person inflection or phrase in the imperative mood. The genre of a text frequently dictates what it can teach us and what it cannot, leaving inflectional paradigms a messy, incomplete patchwork. And ancient corpora are seldom diverse in their genre content. | [
"Cuneiform script is one of the earliest systems of writing distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, made by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. Emerging in Sumer c. 3500 BC, cuneiform writing began as a system of pictograms. Around 3000 BC, the pictorial representations became simplified and more a... |
how come headphones/earphones can sometimes break in such a way that when you listen to audio, the background noise is audible but all the voices are completely mute? | If you look on most headphone plugs, there are rings. Some have 2, if they have a microphone there will be 3 or more. Inside the headphone jack, there are corresponding metal nipples, one transmits sound from the left and right, etc. When one of those rings or nipples gets damaged you get unpredictable sound.
Life pro tip, don't wrap your headphones around your device while they are still plugged in, that's a one way ticket to device failure. | [
"To cancel the lower-frequency portions of the noise, noise-cancelling headphones use active noise control. They incorporate a microphone that measures ambient sound, generate a waveform that is the exact negative of the ambient sound, and mix it with any audio signal the listener desires.\n",
"Active noise-cance... |
Did the Roman Empire have its own Urban Legends, and if so what were they? | The term "urban legend" was created to describe modern, traditional stories to be believed. Legends have always fallen into several groups, but the genre hangs together as stories that are generally intended to be believed. Not all of the stories are traditional (even if they employ traditional beliefs).
For example, if I tell someone, "you wouldn't believe what I saw last night. It was really weird and I think it was... [fill in the blank with an entity that is regarded as possible by modern standards - including, an angel, a ghost, an extraterrestrial]." That story may not be repeated so it ends with that. It is what the great folklore theoretician Carl Wilhelm von Sydow (1878-1952) called a "memorate" - a personal account that may employ traditional beliefs but does not rise to the level of becoming a traditional story by being repeated. Probably all cultures tells these short forms of stories, so we can imagine the Romans did as well.
Other legends consist of traditional stories and beliefs. In pre-industrial cultures, we generally refer to these as migratory legends. The first to catalogue these stories was the great Norwegian folklorist Reidar Th. Christiansen (1886-1971). These tended to die out with modernization. When folklorists recognized that modern society had legendary-like stories being told over distance and time, they arrived at the term "urban legend" in recognition that these stories were modern and they thrived in an urban setting. There is a flaw in the distinction implied by this name since migratory legends could also thrive in a pre-modern urban setting. In fact, the term "urban legend" is unfortunate because it implies that "our" folklore is different from that of pre-industrial people.
The only significant difference between an urban legend and the migratory legend is that the former tends to be debunked quickly, so its life is often shortened. Also, some of these legends are dependent on technology, and so when technology changes or becomes general accepted and understood, the urban legend fades. Thus, when I ask my folklore classes if anyone has heard the story of the poodle in the microwave or of the foreign tourist misunderstanding how cruise control works while driving on an LA freeway, students younger than 40 tend to have never heard the stories, while those older remember them very well. These were very popular in their time, but they quickly become obsolete and so they faded away.
Which gets us to the Roman Empire and the question of migratory legends. These would be what people in the empire would have told to be believed - the counterpart of today's urban legend. Since we have a great many sources from the period, we can recognize many stories that were captured in Roman literature that were repeated until the nineteenth century, and we can glimpse stories that may not have survived but were likely traditional for at least a while even if they did not survive.
For example, the first-century "Satyricon" includes two legends, one involving the supernatural abduction of an infant and the other a man transforming himself into a werewolf. Motifs associated with both stories are recognizable in European folklore collections from the nineteenth century. Other stories appear in primary sources involving Roman-era mythology, and these too (they were stories told generally to be believed) are often echoed in pre-industrial migratory legends.
So the answer to your question is that people in the Empire did indeed tell stories to be believed that echoed what we know today as urban legends. The traditional European migratory legend typically lasted longer than an urban legend, but it behaved in much the same way. These were entertaining stories that were thrilling to hear and imagine to be true. Skeptics in any century may ruined the fun but the genre continues to thrive. | [
"The myth of the city's origin was significant in ancient Roman mythology because Pallantium became one of the cities that was merged later into ancient Rome, thereby tying Rome's origins to the ancient Greek heroes. Other cities in the area were founded by various Italic tribes. \n",
"Traditional stories handed ... |
Can an object become a black hole by moving fast enough? | No. The easiest way to see why the answer is no is to remember the laws of physics have to work the same in every inertial frame of reference (per special relativity). If the object won't act as a black whole in its stationary frame of reference, the same must be true for any other frame of reference where its speed can be arbitrarily high. | [
"As a black hole rotates, it twists spacetime in the direction of the rotation at a speed that decreases with distance from the event horizon. This process is known as the Lense–Thirring effect or frame-dragging. Because of this dragging effect, an object within the ergosphere cannot appear stationary with respect ... |
How do languages develop unnecessary complications? Why don't they evolve out of the language? | Having agreement features - such as verbs agreeing with their arguments, genders on nouns (and their respective adjectives, determiners, etc) are all redundancy features. Think of them like a safety net. Language is not some perfect system, nor is the world we live in perfect for communication (due to things like background noise, misunderstandings, etc). Having redundancies in language allows for information to be better retained and transmitted. Think of it like this, if you take the two statements "He is here" and "they are here" but my dog barks during the first word you end up with [BARK] is here vs. [BARK] are here - you retain some information about who is here one person or several.
The same goes for things like case marking, some languages overtly mark nouns for their role in the sentence such that you don't confuse "The dog bit the man" with "the man bit the dog" even if the word order gets changed (for whatever reason.
There are two old r/linguistics threads which go into why languages have gender - found [here](_URL_1_) and [here](_URL_0_) - which is in the same line of thinking. Languages aren't designed to be logical and perfect. But these seemingly "pointless" features do make sense. | [
"However, while arguing that language itself is adaptive and \"did not 'just happen'\" (p. 172), Hurford suggests that the critical period is not an adaptation, but rather a constraint on language that emerged due to a lack of selection pressures that reinforce acquiring more than one language. In other words, Hurf... |
What side of the road did traffic drive on in allied occupied France in WWII? | Practice varied dependent upon the formation. 21st army group's (Anglo-Canadian and polish forces) area of operations had left hand drive, the American sector was right hand. This was due to an inability to agree on which side was the correct side, and was responsible for a significant amount of rage and confusion at all levels during the war. | [
"To eliminate traffic accidents, everyone had to drive and cycle on the right. Furthermore, to avoid confusion over road names, the Germans introduced a colour and number code. Roads going northwest to southeast were yellow; those going northeast to southwest were red. Also, each route was given a number. Many road... |
how much of my hunger is based on my regular eating schedule and how much on my body actually needing food? | Quite a lot is psychological. I feel hungry if I don't eat at lunchtime when I'm at work, when I usually eat a proper meal. I don't at the same time at weekends when I usually skip food until the evening. So feelings of hunger must be tied in to outside clues as to whether the body expects food. | [
"In daily diary studies, individuals have been found to eat from 30 to 40-50 percent more while in the presence of others versus eating alone. In fact, some research has indicated that the rate of intake is best described as a linear function of the number of people present, such that meals eaten with one, four, or... |
If the human population were reduced to one man and one woman, which types of incest would give the race the best chance to survive? | This question was asked in a slightly different form in the past two weeks. The question comes down to population genetics and probabilities - how many people are necessary to keep a small population from becoming inbred.
IIRC, the answer given there was ~16 people, where after a generation that large selective choices for mating could reduce or eliminate most problems associated with inbred genetics. | [
"While it is theoretically possible that natural selection may, under certain genetic circumstances, select for individuals that instinctively avoid mating with (close) relatives, biological evolution cannot select for punishing others for incest, since even genetically weakened, inbred individuals are better watch... |
autoimmunity | Your immune systems attacks your own cells because they think they are foreign. | [
"Autoimmunity is a process in which the body fails to recognize itself and therefore attacks its own cells and tissue. Specific antibodies have been found in LS. Furthermore, there seems to be a higher prevalence of other autoimmune diseases such as diabetes mellitus type 1, vitiligo and thyroid disease.\n",
"Aut... |
The Western Way of War: How true is the assertion that the Greeks preferred pitched phalanx battle and despised cavalry, missile troops, and most of all, archers? | In respect to cavalry and missile troops, it isn't true.
Cavalry had been used to cover the flanks of armies on the battlefield but due to terrain, cavalry wasn't heavily used until Philip II. As for missile troops, slingers and peltasts are commonly used after the Persian Wars to skirmish and soften up the enemy but there is a distaste for archers. Archers don't have a strong tradition in the Greek or Roman armies. | [
"One of these strategies was shown in the battle between Greek city states and Persia. The Battle of Thermopylae in which the Greek forces were outnumbered stood as a good military strategy. The Greek allied forces ultimately lost the battle, but the training, use of armor, and location allowed them to defeat many ... |
What was Nazi Germany's attitude to the former German Royal Family? | Hitler and the Nazis took a very dim view of the German monarchy and were quite hostile to monarchist sentiment and supporters. That being said, he did allow the younger generation of nobles to serve as officers, seeing that they were more open to national socialism than their predecessors and seeing that they were invaluable as officers. Many of Kaiser Wilhelm's sons had children serving in the army, and many royals died in service to the Wehrmacht. But most royals were kicked out of the army as the war went on and Hitler grew increasingly paranoid about a possible monarchist coup. He held Bismarck in quite high esteem, and he saw the Monarch, specifically Kaiser Wilhelm as being the main stumbling block to Germany's success. This quote from Hitler during a meeting in 1941 is quite illuminating:
> The injustice committed by the Kaiser at Bismarck's expense
finally recoiled upon him. How could the Kaiser demand
loyalty from his subjects when he had treated the founder of
the Reich with such ingratitude? The shameful thing is that
the German people allowed such an injustice to be committed.
The generation of 1900 was lost—economically, politically and
culturally.
He also spoke critically of the Kaiser's ability to command troops (with no sense of irony):
> Apart from the great victories, like the battle of Tannenberg
and the battle of the Masurian Marshes, the Imperial High
Command proved itself inadequate.
The Kaiser put in an appearance on one single occasion,
because he believed that all would go well. During the great
offensive of 1918, it was trumpeted around that the Kaiser was
commanding it in person. The truth was, the Kaiser had no
notion of command.
Hitler, at a dinner party in May of 1942, again went on a long rant about the Kaiser:
> The behaviour of Wilhelm II in society was unworthy of a
monarch. Not only did he consistently ridicule the members of
his immediate entourage, but also fired a constant stream of
ironic remarks at his guests for the amusement of the remainder.
His bad taste and familiarity with other monarchs—backslapping
and the like—robbed Germany of much sympathy.
A monarch must learn that self-restraint and dignity must be
observed in everyday life.
The example of Wilhelm II shows how one bad monarch can
destroy a dynasty. In the same way, those who wish to play
their parts in history must understand that one single bad
generation can cause the ruin of a whole people.
Now Hitler didn't hate monarchy as rule of thumb, indeed there were many German Kaisers and monarchs he respected, but he held dim a view of the Kaiser Wilhelm's monarchy.
Himmler had a different view of the nobility, while Hitler saw them as needlessly decadent and incompetent. Himmler saw their years of selective breeding as being a good thing, assuming it would produce great racial qualities. As a result many young nobles joined the SS. By 1938 a fifth of the top SS officers were nobility. Many like Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski (who played a key role in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising) found a home in the upper ranks of the SS.
So moving on from the military, things were not good for monarchists on the home front. In 1934 the Brownshirts and the Gestapo began cracking down on displays in favour of the monarchy. For example private celebrations of the Kaiser's birthday were banned, and celebrations were ruthlessly broken up. Hitler lavished bribes upon old monarchist officers like August Von Mackensen in order to drive them away from Monarchist sentiments. This particular case caused a bit of a ruckus because Von Mackensen wrote to the Kaiser asking if it was okay to accept a gift from Hitler. This show of respect managed to anger both Hitler and the former Kaiser. Finally, with the death of Hindenburg and Hitler's ascension to absolute power, many Monarchist organizations were banned and any hope of a restoration was gone completely.
Among the monarchists opinion was divided over the Nazis. During the Wiemar years a clear generational gap had emerged. During the Wiemar years many aristocrats had been deprived of their estates and had grown impoverished and had been politically marginalized by the Republic. They longed for the return of the good ole days of the German Empire. To the monarchists the Nazis plans of conquering and colonizing the eastern territories appealed to them and reminded them of their German ancestors who had done the same in Pomerania and Prussia. But to the older monarchists were also familiar with extremist groups. They viewed the Nazis with distrust and saw their fanaticism as being a fatal flaw. The Nazis racial speeches and violent tactics did little to win over the old monarchists.
However, the generational gap had created a group of young, radicalized nobles. These nobles, many of whom belonged to the former royal family held much the same views as Hitler with regards to race and foreign policy. Much like Hitler, these young nobles despised the older generation for surrendering in 1918. This group of young nobles supported the Nazis. And the Nazis made great use of these supporters during election time, using them to win votes from conservatives who otherwise would have been put off by the Nazis fanaticism. Prince August Wilhelm of
Prussia and Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm were both early supporters of Hitler.
So how did the Kaiser himself react to Nazism? Well he held much the same view that the older generation did. He initially supported the Nazis assuming that they would restore the monarchy, but once the Nazis made it clear that wasn't going to happen, he turned against them. He viewed things such as the night of the long knives, where the Nazis purged many monarchist supporters among others, as "gangster tactics" that had no place in Germany.
Kaiser Wilhelm in his later years kinda waned between being a supporter of Nazi racial doctrine, and being against it. He would often complain of a Jewish plot against Germany, with Jews manipulating Britain against Germany. But he also opposed the violence of things like the Night of Broken Glass, where Nazi supporters and angry German citizens attacked Jewish shops and synagogues. He said "What would people have said if I did such a thing?"
There was an incident before WWI, where Kaiser Wilhelm's son was given a book, written by a nationalist author named Konstantin von Gebsattel, called "If I were Kaiser" which argued for harsh measures against the Jews and the Social Democrats; as well as authoritarian rule by the Kaiser. The author forwarded his ideas to Kaiser Wilhelm's son, a known nationalist. The Kaiser shot down his son's and Gebsattel's ideas as "Childish" and "potentially destabilizing." Furthermore Gebsattel was regarded as a "Weird Enthusiast." None the less the Kaiser did read the book "Foundations of the Nineteenth Century" by Houston Stewart Chamberlain and looked fondly on its anti-Semitic stereotypes. But the Kaiser never dreamed of actually acting on those ideas, and didn't dream of seriosu restrictions on the Jewish population.
When the Nazis took over the Netherlands, Kaiser Wilhelm was given a permanent SS guard and people were forbidden from visiting him to pay respects. Even Hermann Goering, the number 2 man in Nazi Germany, couldn't visit the Kaiser. Which speaks to Hitler's irrational fear of Monarchist sentiment.
Edit:
For the quotes I drew directly from Hitler's Table Talk and Mein Kampf. For the Nazis smashing of the Monarchist movement I recommend Richard J. Evans' treatment of the Nazi political movement in his book "The Third Reich in Power." | [
"His death and the ensuing sympathy of the German public revealed that despite years of Nazi ideologic indoctrination large parts of the German society still were affectionately bound to the former German royal houses. Shortly after Wilhelm's death, a decree known as the \"Prinzenerlaß\", or Prince's Decree, was is... |
when someone has their identity stolen, why is their responsibility to fix it and not those of the banks/organizations who allowed the thief to do so? | As a general rule, the bank/organization didn't let the thief steal your identity, you did. The bank didn't give them your info, they got it from something you did. Order online from a sketchy site? That's on you. Pay at a sketchy restaurant? That's on you. Use a tampered ATM? Also you. Bottom line is that unless someone hacks the bank's database to steal your info, they got it from *you,* so it's *your* responsibility to get it fixed. Typically banks will help you out by freezing your accounts when they see suspicious activity, but that's just them doing you a favor. | [
"The majority of identity theft victims do not realize that they are a victim until it has negatively impacted their lives. Many people do not find out that their identities have been stolen until they are contacted by financial institutions or discover suspicious activities on their bank accounts. According to an ... |
why do fingernails turn translucently clear and become more flexible when wet? | Nails are made of the same stuff as your hair, and rhino horns: a protein called keratin. Keratin can come in lots of sizes and shapes. In your nails, it is like stacks of thin scales one on top of the other (you've probably seen nails that are damaged can flake and peel). The whiteness of your nail tips isn't from the colour of the keratin itself. It's white for the same reason clouds are white even though they're made of transparent water: it reflects light. The reflections happen at the edges of the keratin scales, where there are air gaps. When your nail gets wet, water fills these tiny air gaps and this reduces the amount of light that can get reflected: it can travel straight through and make the nail look transparent. | [
"The protein keratin stiffens epidermal tissue to form fingernails. Nails grow from a thin area called the nail matrix at an average of 1 mm per week. The lunula is the crescent-shape area at the base of the nail, lighter in color as it mixes with the matrix cells. Also, the stratum corneum is the top part of the e... |
What specific part of cigarettes are cancerous? | There are a lot of carcinogens in cigarettes, with ~60 out of the 2000 - 4000 chemicals being known human carcinogens. The most common known carcinogens in cigarettes are:
- Tar
- Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (e.g. naphthalene, benzopyrene)
- Nicotine (this hasn't be confirmed, however there have been associated links between tumor promotion and nicotine)
- Formaldehyde
- Nitrosamines
Of course there's a fair few others such as Polonium-210, a radioactive element (low amounts, but still enough to be carcinogenic with frequent usage).
There are also other chemicals present in cigarette smoke that while might not be directly carcinogenic, could indirectly increases ones chances of cancer due to the cellular damage caused by said chemicals. | [
"This cancer usually is seen peripherally in the lungs, as opposed to small cell lung cancer and squamous cell lung cancer, which both tend to be more centrally located, although it may also occur as central lesions. For unknown reasons, it often arises in relation to peripheral lung scars. The current theory is th... |
why is the letter "w" sometimes pronounced like the letter "v" and vice versa, the letter "v" is pronounced like the letter "w" in some non-english languages? | Not all languages have the same grammatical constructs as English. Latin didn't have all the letters of modern day english, it was missing the J and W, and had the I and V in their place. | [
"\"W\" was created in the 11th century from \"VV\". It represented in Germanic languages, not Latin, which still uses \"V\" for the purpose. \"J\" was distinguished from the original \"I\" only during the late Middle Ages, as was the letter \"U\" from \"V\". Although some Latin dictionaries use \"J\", it is rarely ... |
If the speed of light changes when it travels through different mediums, does this mean light accelerates when it enter and leaves a medium? | The short answer is no, the process of refraction is actually tricky to explain properly, but I will do my best! If we consider the classical picture of light, we have an electromagnetic (EM) wave which consists of oscillating electric and magnetic fields. As this wave enters a medium (such as glass) the oscillating electric and magnetic fields interact with the atoms that make up the material and cause the electrons within these atoms to oscillate as well. As these electrons oscillate they in turn produce EM waves themselves.
So now in our system we have our original EM wave from our light source, as well as many more EM waves created via oscillating electrons. All of these individual waves will interfere with each other and produce some total wave which is a superposition of all the contributions from the many EM waves in our system. In general, the result of this superposition is a wave which has a velocity less than the speed of light. However, it is important to note that this is not because any of the individual EM waves are moving slower than the speed of light, but because of relative phase shifts between the waves which leads to a superposition that gives a wave with a speed less than that of light.
To answer your question specifically, as light moves from one material to another the contributions to this superposition will change which will change the speed of the resultant superimposed wave, however the individual EM waves of light are not themselves accelerating. | [
"When light propagates in a medium, its speed is reduced, in the rest frame of the medium, to , where is the index of refraction of the medium . The speed of light in a medium uniformly moving with speed in the positive -direction as measured in the lab frame is given directly by the velocity addition formulas. For... |
How did debtors’ prison work? | The assumption by the creditors, in having a debtor put into a prison, was that the debtor's friends and family would step forward and pay the debts, that the debtor would somehow find the money somewhere...and that, unless the debtor wasn't put in jail, they would never step forward and do that. It is a pretty bizarre notion to our modern minds, but you have to remember that , for most people England in the 18th - early 19th. c., the world was structured into family units. Farms, businesses, great houses and estates of the nobility were generally all owned by families. If, as a young adult, you learned a trade or simply learned to serve, as an apprentice or a servant, you would move from your family household into another family household. So, the idea that a family would come to the rescue of a debtor in prison was not as far fetched as it seems now.
It was also easy to get into debt. There was a generally a scarcity of currency, and lots of people would also have a seasonal income, so most merchants ( if not all) would carry purchases on their books- if they approved of you , you'd stop in, buy something, and have it added to your account. Then periodically you'd pay your account ( and there might be some trading, here- like, bringing the merchant a few geese, instead of a few shillings). It was therefore comparatively easy for people to fall into the trap of living beyond their means. Of course, it was readily seen that some fault therefore lay with the merchant, and the merchant might also be more than a little aggressive ( he , too, would likely have debts to pay). With a lawyer he could swear out an affadavit that the debt was owed, that could b presented to the judge, and if the debt was over a certain amount ( 2 pounds, in England) the debtor could be arrested- he would not be asked for records of his own , before he was detained. He might be able to get someone to bail him immediately- accept paying for his debt. But otherwise, he was on the hook. As Samuel Johnson wrote ( in his *Idler* essays)
> The confinement ... of any man in the sloth and darkness of a prison, is a loss to the nation, and no gain to the creditor. For, of the multitudes who are pining in those cells of misery, a very small part is suspected of any fraudulent act by which they retain what belongs to others. The rest are imprisoned by the wantonness of pride, the malignity of revenge, or the acrimony of disappointed expectation
Johnson was imprisoned for debt a couple of times, his friend Oliver Goldsmith as well. It was a common theme in Hogarth's paintings and etchings. [Here](_URL_1_) in the Rake's Progress you can see the Rake finally getting arrested for debt, with an officer of the court standing off and letting the rough-looking bailiffs handle the apprehension. Later, you can [see him in the prison](_URL_0_), with both jailer and a serving boy from a tavern wanting to be paid. Nothing was free in debtor's prison: a criminal had his basic needs met, but not the debtor. Though, interestingly, in England after 1759 the creditor had to put up a very small amount of money for the debtor- basically, so they would not just starve.
How could you work off your debt? If you were lucky, you might write a play or something that could be sold ( notice that's what the Rake seems to be doing) . Or you might simply beg. Or your wife: just as married men were responsible for the debts of their wives, wives had no immunity from the debts of their husbands. While not being locked up, they could stand outside and appeal to passersby. The debtors ( in England) could not be made to work, however. Of course, if the debtor was well-connected, had wealthy friends, they could pay for much better lodgings for him, more decent food. If the debt was huge, that could be preferable to paying it. But the well-connected would often simply abscond to someplace like France, where the creditors couldn't reach them. The poor had little chance of that.
Jerry White: *Mansions of Misery* | [
"A debtors' prison is a prison for people who are unable to pay debt. Through the mid 19th century, debtors' prisons (usually similar in form to locked workhouses) were a common way to deal with unpaid debt in places like Western Europe. Destitute persons who were unable to pay a court-ordered judgment would be inc... |
is it even possible to make a perfect circle? | The inability to make a perfect circle is one of the things Plato points out to support his philosophy of "the forms." We can *imagine* a perfect circle, but it does not exist in the material world. Similarly, though Plato never speaks about this specific example, if you were to kill all the mosquitoes in the world, the *idea* of mosquitoes would still exist. So, Plato says there is a "world of the forms" where such ideas reside and that all material existence is a cheap knock-off of the version of that thing in the world of the forms.
I know that wasn't what you asked, but it was somewhat related, so I went ahead and posted it. | [
"No one has ever seen a perfect circle, nor a perfectly straight line, yet everyone knows what a circle and a straight line are. Plato utilizes the tool-maker's blueprint as evidence that Forms are real:... when a man has discovered the instrument which is naturally adapted to each work, he must express this natura... |
How important was the Carolingian Renaissance? | Perhaps the most important aspect of the Carolingian "Renaissance" is the issue of uniformity. All the individual accomplishments that wedgeomatic, bowies4, and others have touched on were all attempts at creating a single unified way of doing things. After Charlemagne had come to dominate such a disparate area, it became quite clear that each city, province, abbey, etc. had its own way of saying the liturgy, writing, using coinage, etc. Charlemagne gathered together the brightest minds he could and had them work through these.
Handwriting, for example, was radically different in the different centers, so a single common minuscule form was developed which is still largely what we use today. Jerome's Vulgate bible had taken on many idiosyncratic readings and so these were standardized into a common bible. The Latin language itself was standardized and remodeled in terms of spelling and grammar along the lines of ancient grammars, helping to distinguish it from the Latin spoken by the common person (which was approaching what we would call French, Spanish...). Monastic centers had numerous rules and practices they followed and so they picked one rule, the Benedictine Rule, somewhat augmented and adapted, to be used throughout the empire. Churches too had grown up over the centuries with their own ways of saying the mass and performing the sacraments and these were standardized. Coinage was too, I think. It could be argued that the notion of Europe as a single entity is something of the product of these attempts at unification, though I wouldn't want to press these claims too far.
So the answer is yes, the Carolingian Renaissance was very important, although Renaissance might not be the best term for it. | [
"The Carolingian Renaissance was a period of intellectual and cultural revival during the late 8th century and 9th century, mostly during the reigns of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. There was an increase of literature, the arts, architecture, jurisprudence, liturgical and scriptural studies. The period also saw ... |
; why does the usa have so many federal crime agencies? | The two major US political parties are BOTH a mix of authoritarian and borderline paranoid anti-authoritarian. Sometimes the same person can have both sentiments in their head at the same time.
This means that a Republican sees a problem ("dope pushers corrupting our children!") and want a federal response (War on Drugs! Establish the DEA!). But they think "National Police issuing a national ID card? First step toward forcing us into socialist reeducation camps!"
Same thing for the Democrats. "We need to protect against evil industrialists who secretly pollute! The EPA should have a Criminal Enforcement division." But also "Whoa! Centralized tracking of criminal activity? Fascism!!!1!!!"
So there's a tendency to solve each problem ad hoc -- small agencies with limited purview. If it's narrow in scope then it feels more controllable, even if it is horribly inefficient and confusing to the public.
This pattern also reflects the historically (90+ years ago) small scale of the US government. Agencies started off with mundane missions, and grew into big police agencies as the mission changed. The ATF started off as purely an agency to tax manufacturers, not really aimed at controlling who bought and used their products. The US Marshall Service ran federal court security and policed the territories before they became states (now they hunt fugitives, run Witness Protection, transport federal prisoners). The FBI started off literally as Investigators for the federal prosecutors, to coordinate with state and local police forces (now they also handle terrorism, counterintelligence, bank robbery, kidnapping). | [
"Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police departments and sheriff's offices, with state police providing broader services. The New York Police Department (NYPD) is the largest in the country. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. ... |
tom bombadil in lotr | Tolkien on Tom Bombadil: "Even in a mythological Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally)."
And additionally, Tolkien explained that Tom's existence demonstrates that there are entities in the world for whom the war is largely irrelevant or unimportant.
Tom isn't an anomaly, some randomly or mistakenly placed character. He is an enigma; a mystery with a subtle or abstract purpose. What "race" he happens to be is anyone's guess. But it isn't important.
**Like you're five?** Tom is intentionally a symbol for mystery and untouchable power. He exists to show that not everything matters to the story in the same way. Sometimes we can't always understand every detail. | [
"He, along with Iggy, is skilled at making bombs and has a lot of knowledge about them, as Max states, \"You could lock the Gasman in a padded cell with some dental floss and a bowl of Jell-O, and he'd find a way to make something explode.\" For example, when he and Iggy had to escape from their original house in t... |
What was the first life form that ever came into existence? | a self replicating chain of complex chemistry might be the first bit of "life".. life history from that deep in time is a bit hazy and we only have educated guesses.
After that we expect self replicating cells and later more complex multi-cellular sorts of life.
Quoting star trek and more importantly Q on abiogenesis theories might be misguided.
| [
"The earliest life on Earth existed more than 3.5 billion years ago, during the Eoarchean Era when sufficient crust had solidified following the molten Hadean Eon. The earliest physical evidence so far found consists of microfossils in the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt of Northern Quebec, in \"banded iron formation\... |
why is car insurance complusary and not optional like other insurances? | Because by driving a vehicle you're potentially putting other people at risk. If I don't have homeowner's insurance and my house burns down, that sucks for me and my family, but nobody else is really harmed if I can't afford to buy a new house.
But if I drive my car into a sidewalk full of pedestrians and hurt a bunch of them, they could face all sorts of medical costs, and I would likely be held responsible. If I have no insurance or assets, then I couldn't pay to cover those costs, and those pedestrians would potentially be stuck having to pay them through no fault of their own.
Edit: It's worth noting that I bought my house via a mortgage from a bank. So if my house burned down, the bank would have its investment at risk. That being the case, the terms of the mortgage require me to have homeowners insurance on my house.
| [
"Vehicle insurance (also known as car insurance, motor insurance, or auto insurance) is insurance for cars, trucks, motorcycles, and other road vehicles. Its primary use is to provide financial protection against physical damage or bodily injury resulting from traffic collisions and against liability that could als... |
Was Joseph Smith a convicted con-man? | Disorderly conduct is a really broad charge in NY, even today, where it's defined as
> A person is guilty of disorderly conduct when, with intent to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof:
> 1. He engages in fighting or in violent, tumultuous or threatening behavior; or
2. He makes unreasonable noise; or
3. In a public place, he uses abusive or obscene language, or makes an obscene gesture; or
4. Without lawful authority, he disturbs any lawful assembly or meeting of persons; or
5. He obstructs vehicular or pedestrian traffic; or
6. He congregates with other persons in a public place and refuses to comply with a lawful order of the police to disperse; or
7. He creates a hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no legitimate purpose.
It's a bit hard to gather case law from the 1820s, but in that period of time, anything that causes excessive noise (see Conrad v. Williams, 6 Hill 444 (1844)) or causing public strife (see Duffy v. People, 6 Hill 75 (1843), Cowden v. Wright, 24 Wend. 429 (1840)) have been considered as disorderly conduct. With such broad common law examples, it would not be amiss that a lot of people's conduct fell within the prima facie definition. So the mere fact that he has been convicted a disorderly conduct charge doesn't say a whole lot about him. I can't comment as to how it ties into the greater scheme of things during his rise. | [
"Joseph Smith III was an ardent opponent of the practice of plural marriage throughout his life. For most of his career, Smith denied that his father had been involved in the practice and insisted that it had originated with Brigham Young. Smith served many missions to the western United States where he met with an... |
how do viruses like hiv transmit through fluids like blood, breast milk, semen, and vaginal secretions? | I'm not sure what you are asking. The viruses are within those secretions, moving there as they do through any sort of tissue. By their presence they are transmitted to whatever encounters those substances. | [
"Hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and hepatitis D are transmitted when blood or mucous membranes are exposed to infected blood and body fluids, such as semen and vaginal secretions. Viral particles have also been found in saliva and breastmilk. However, kissing, sharing utensils, and breastfeeding do not lead to transmiss... |
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