question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
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How can we be sure that planets light years away will still be there when we get there? | You cant. But the odds are pretty good for a planet to last a billion years or sk. We can tell what stage the star is at in its lifecycle. But yeah...especially if it's taking you thousands of years to get there the planet may have been destroyed or chucked out of its orbit (especially in a binary star system) | [
"Astrophysicist Sten Odenwald stated that the basic problem is that through intensive studies of thousands of detected exoplanets, most of the closest destinations within 50 light years do not yield Earth-like planets in the star's habitable zones. Given the multitrillion-dollar expense of some of the proposed tech... |
what/ who are gypsies? | The Romani (also spelled Romany; /ˈroʊməni/, /ˈrɒ-/), or Roma, are a traditionally itinerant ethnic group living mostly in Europe and the Americas, who originate from the northwestern regions of the Indian subcontinent.[28][29] The Romani are widely known among English-speaking people by the exonym "Gypsies" (or "Gipsies"). However, according to many Romani people and academics who study them, the word has been tainted by its use as a racial slur and a pejorative connoting illegality and irregularity.[30][31][32][33][34][35][36] Other exonyms are Ashkali and Sinti.
Romani are dispersed, with their concentrated populations in Europe — especially Central, Eastern and Southern Europe including Turkey, Spain and Southern France. They originated in Northern India and arrived in Mid-West Asia, then Europe, around 1,000 years ago,[37] either separating from the Dom people or, at least, having a similar history;[38] the ancestors of both the Romani and the Dom left North India sometime between the sixth and eleventh century.[37]
Since the nineteenth century, some Romani have also migrated to the Americas. There are an estimated one million Roma in the United States;[4] and 800,000 in Brazil, most of whose ancestors emigrated in the nineteenth century from eastern Europe. Brazil also includes some Romani descended from people deported by the government of Portugal during the Inquisition in the colonial era.[39] In migrations since the late nineteenth century, Romani have also moved to other countries in South America and to Canada.[40]
More info at : _URL_0_ | [
"One theory suggests that the name ultimately derives from a form \"ḍōmba-\" 'man of low caste living by singing and music', attested in Classical Sanskrit. Many also believe that Gypsies are descendants of Dalit because of the word zingaro (ατσίγγανος) (\"untouchable\") that was used to designate gypsies in Greece... |
death by hanging | It depends if they do it properly. Hanging is supposed to snap your neck, severing your spinal cord,and killing you fairly quickly.
Often (especially when done by amateurs), if it isn't done right (drop isn't big enough, knot isn't done right, whatever), and the neck isn't snapped, they'll suffocate slowly. | [
"Hanging, as it was practised in 1817, was particularly cruel and inefficient. The story predates the adoption of the \"long drop,\" calculated to end the condemned person's life quickly by breaking the neck. During this time, all deaths by hanging are caused by slow choking. In the novel, James Botting, the execut... |
What is the driving force of the solar cycle? Does it significantly affect total solar output? | The Sun is a giant rotating ball of plasma. Plasma is very electrically conductive so the currents in the Sun naturally give rise to strong magnetic fields. This "solar dynamo" is a complex phenomenon because the Sun's poles and equator rotate at different speeds, causing the magnetic field to evolve in an unusual fashion.
Typically, for our Sun the Solar magnetic field will evolve over a 22 year cycle (give or take), alternating between periods of relative quiescence while being established at one pole then evolving into a chaotic jumble with a peak of sunspot activity then flipping poles and reprising the same track again. Often this is just called an 11 year cycle since mostly we don't care about whether the Solar magnetic field is "upside down" or not.
During the periods where the magnetic fields are chaotic on the Sun this causes the formation of sunspots, Solar flares, etc. and changes the overall output of the Sun since sunspots are a slightly different temperature than the rest of the Sun. Additionally, it's known that the Sun can enter a period of time when it stops alternating the magnetic field and stops producing sunspots (a so called "maunder minimum" period).
These changes affect the total energy output of the Sun to a small degree (within about 1% or less), but they also change the Solar wind environment, which impacts cosmic ray flux at Earth and cloud formation, which has a complex impact on Earth's climate. There is a lot of suspicion that the maunder minimum was the cause for a general global cooling at around that time but overall the evidence is sketchy and such conclusions are more speculation than fact. | [
"The solar cycle also modulates the flux of short-wavelength solar radiation, from ultraviolet to X-ray and influences the frequency of solar flares, coronal mass ejections and other solar eruptive phenomena.\n",
"The solar cycle is an approximately 11-year period of varying solar activity including solar maximum... |
how do some websites keep you from navagating back? | Usually, this is done by sending people to a page, which immediately redirects to another page. So, if you click back on the second page, it just sends you back to the first page which immediately redirects you again.
Usually, if you click back fast enough, you can get past it and eventually make it back to where you were. | [
"The first layer of defense is a captcha page where the user is prompted to verify he is a real person and not a bot or tool. Solving the captcha will create a cookie that permits access to the search engine again for a while. After about one day the captcha page is removed again.\n",
"Delete messages: A user can... |
I've heard a lot that pre-modern soldiers generally did not aim to kill, or would purposefully miss their target so-as to not kill. Was this also a problem when melee weapons and archery was the dominant means of warfare? | You may be interested in a [previous answer](_URL_0_) I wrote to a similar question. | [
"As happens, the Army's men often had the weapons to fight the \"last\" war by the time of the following conflict. Most of the 19th century weapons were technologically obsolete at their introduction or within five years, and despite the apparently exhaustive testing many inadequate weapons were issued.\n",
"Trad... |
Why was Gustav III of Sweden so determined to aid Louis XVI during the French Revolution? | Multiple reasons. First Gustav III was a king who believed in the idea of 'Enlightened Absolutism'. He'd instituted absolute monarchy (one of two quite short periods of that in Swedish history) in a coup d'etat, inspired strongly by Louis's absolutism, and Gustav in his coup strongly curtailed the power of the Swedish parliament. Gustav wanted to be hip to his age ('enlightened') but firmly believed in his - and other kings' - divine right to rule. (and indeed a huge stickler for rules and traditional formality in general, to the extent that other rulers like his cousin Catherine the Great found him annoying to deal with) His 'enlightened' ideas were - for instance - things like abolishing torture, but not popular rule.
Second, Gustav (as many others in Europe at that time) was a huge Francophile and admirer of France and the French monarchy, Versailles and all that. His court used French a lot more the Swedish language. (and the late 18th century is the one period in Swedish language history when loanwords from French dominated)
Third, per the above he didn't have so much to gain from aiding Louis as he stood to lose by _not_ doing so. Louis's downfall started earlier but Gustav III still ended up with the dubious honor of being murdered first.
| [
"When Gustav made war on Russia and did poorly he was assassinated by a conspiracy of nobles angry that he tried to restrict their privileges for the benefit of the peasants. Under King Charles XIII, Sweden joined various coalitions against Napoleon, but was badly defeated and lost much of its territory, especially... |
Is the term "Cultural Marxism" actually historically related to a fascist reaction against Critical Theory? | Yes, that would be the idea that the term "Cultural Marxism" comes from the 1920s German concept of Cultural Bolshevism (Kulturbolschewismus - _URL_6_) - which along with "Jewish Bolshevism" (originating in pre-war Poland as "Żydokomuna" _URL_2_) was claimed to be the secretive and hidden attempt of Bolshevists to bring down Europe's "beloved" Nazi culture via the slow introduction of an insidious "degenerate culture" (a term you may have heard of already).
This is of great irony as the currently much accused Herbert Marcuse of The Frankfurt School was actually employed for a short time near the end of the war by the OSS (Office of Strategic Services - _URL_3_). Where some say he was involved in attempting to Americanize Bolshevist culture (_URL_5_). But I'd take that last part with a grain of salt.
However according to Richard R. Weiner the English rendering of the term dates back to Trent Schroyer's 1973 The Critique of Domination - in which Schroyer is arguing that Critical Theory and Cultural Marxism must adopt MORE of Marx's historical materialism if it is to have an impact on society (although I doubt given Schroyer's tone that he came up with the term).
Schroyer was as radical if not more radical than Fredric Jameson who straight up wanted Cultural Studies to be renamed "Cultural Marxism" (creating further confusion around the term).
Of course, then cold-war era politicos like William S. Lind (_URL_1_) emerged during the 1990s Culture Wars (_URL_4_) and once again made the claim that these Cultural Theorists and Sociologists were actually trying to destroy his particular version of American Western Christianity by introducing a degenerate cultures. In 2002 he reportedly spoke on this topic at a holocaust denial conference - _URL_0_.
So the term has changed hands so often that it's fairly null in void today (with most understanding that criticism of all persuasions should remain part of a free society)... and it goes without saying that The Frankfurt School's (now 50 year old) model of hegemonic culture hasn't been nearly as influential as movements like The Chicago School of Sociology (fond of using statistical and demographic proofs) and The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (who promoted the idea that all readings of culture come from specific cultural contexts), both of which have had more impact on Today's academic and intellectual landscape. | [
"In \"Fascism: Fascism and Culture\" (2003), Matthew Feldman traced the etymology of the term \"Cultural Marxism\" as derived from the anti-Semitic term \"Kulturbolshewismus\" (Cultural Bolshevism), which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party used in charging that Jewish cultural influence was the source of German social... |
High heels were primarily worn by men for the first 700 years after they were invented, changing to being primarily worn by women in the 17th century. What triggered this change? Was there a time when both genders commonly wore them? | I've actually got a past answer that deals with this question: [How did heels became a purely feminine thing, after it was first used on shoes in the 16th century by noble or rich men?](_URL_0_) (For more on the Great Masculine Renunciation I mention in it, try [here](_URL_1_).) It's on the short side, though, so there is certainly room for someone else to write a fresh response. | [
"The girdles and buckled belts that were popular in the fifth and sixth century, with tools and personal items suspended from the belt, have gone out of fashion by the tenth century. Women wear simple ankle shoes and slippers in the tenth and eleventh century. Archaeological evidence suggests that a variety of shoe... |
What was the draw weight of a historical Yumi (Japanese bow)? | You would do far better to search on military forums, as there are no historical records of an actual number to it. There is no direct data that is reliable enough to draw a conclusion, unlike Chinese, Turkish and Middle Eastern, and European bows that still survive or were measured with quantitative draw weights. Not to mention that there are so many variables such as arrowtip, armour, range, penetration of various materials, the ability to wound v. kill, and so on.
| [
"Among Filipino swords, the most distinguishing characteristic of the Kampilan is its huge size. At about 36 to 40 inches (90 to 100 cm) long, it is much larger than other Filipino swords, and is thought to be the longest, though smaller versions (sometimes called the \"kampilan bolo\") exist. A notable exception w... |
How much land does it take to support one human being? | > The minimum amount of agricultural land necessary for sustainable food security, with a diversified diet similar to those of North America and Western Europe (hence including meat), is 0.5 of a hectare per person. This does not allow for any land degradation such as soil erosion, and it assumes adequate water supplies. Very few populous countries have more than an average of 0.25 of a hectare. It is realistic to suppose that the absolute minimum of arable land to support one person is a mere 0.07 of a hectare–and this assumes a largely vegetarian diet, no land degradation or water shortages, virtually no post-harvest waste, and farmers who know precisely when and how to plant, fertilize, irrigate, etc. [FAO, 1993]
From the FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Note: .07 hectare = .17 acres | [
"For example, there were 12 billion hectares of biologically productive land and water on this planet in 2008. Dividing by the number of people alive in that year, 6.7 billion, gives a biocapacity of 1.8 global hectares per person . This assumes that no land is set aside for other species that consume the same biol... |
Louis XIV and absolute monarchy | The standard Europe 101 argument (and I just gave a lecture on it last week) is:
- by building a state bureaucracy of non-noble, paid staff (instead of offices that would be handed to aristocrats)
- by having loyal administrators, *Intendants*, travel to distant areas and keep an eye on things;
- and by building Versailles... a huge symbol of status and power... and then inviting the most powerful nobles in the realm to come live there. (and distribute "favors," such as the opportunity to dress him in the morning, which translated into access.)
But a cooler, much more sophisticated argument--too complex for my 101 class, unfortunately-- is in William Beik's book on Absolutism, which basically shows how it's just as much a *bottom up* process... namely, all the aforementioned things (bureaucratic state-building, Versailles) were going on, of course,
... but the key factor became when the great nobles (Anjou, Berry, etc) started to perceive this growing "state" of Louis XIV's monarchy as an *opportunity*--as an avenue to advance their own interests.
So, imagine the Duc de Berry in competition with the Duc d'Anjou; instead of a futile (and often deadlocked) direct struggle of rallying their own supporters, resources, etc., the could now turn to the growing state--and use it to press their own claims to their own advantage.
Short version: once the great nobles saw that they could *use* Louis XIV for their own interests, they increasingly made Louis the de-facto "center" of power... and thereafter could be increasingly coopted *by* him...
| [
"Louis XIV, known as the \"Sun King\", reigned over France from 1643 until 1715 although his strongest period of personal rule did not begin until 1661 after the death of his Italian chief minister Cardinal Mazarin. Louis believed in the divine right of kings, which asserts that a monarch is above everyone except G... |
Can stars spit out elements we've yet to discover? | Currently, for transuranium elements the heavier atomic weight is, the less is half-life. So, by simple extrapolation, heavier nuclei shouldn't really exist. Now, it has been theorized that there is an ["island of stability"](_URL_0_), where extremely heavy nuclei suddenly become stable. We are currently unable to test this hypothesis with our accelerators, so it's highly controversial. Also, it's worth noting that unless the half-life of an element is millions of years, it's challenging to find it in nature, since it has already mostly decayed. | [
"The presence of heavy elements in a star's light-spectrum is another potential biosignature; such elements would (in theory) be found if the star was being used as an incinerator/repository for nuclear waste products.\n",
"BULLET::::- 1957 – William Alfred Fowler, Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, and Fred H... |
how does photos taken on iphone geotag without service? | It simply uses the phone's built in GPS (which only requires a view of the sky) and puts the phone's current location into the metadata of the picture. | [
"Many smartphones automatically geotag their photos by default. Photographers who prefer not to reveal their location can turn this feature off. Additionally smartphones can use their GPS to geotag photos taken with an external camera.\n",
"Contributors gather imagery with their smartphones using an Android or iO... |
why is a flat tax regressive? | Let's look at two people:
* A makes $50,000 and spends $25,000.
* B makes $100,000 and spends $40,000.
If you have a flat consumption tax of 50%, A pays $12,500 and B pays $20,000. The effective tax rate (the amount paid in tax relative to income) for A is 25% and B is 20%. Since A pays more as percentage of his income despite making less, it is a regressive tax.
It works this way because as people make more money, they spend less of it as a percentage of their income. The more income you have, the less you have to spend to stay alive and the more you can save. | [
"Where deductions are allowed, a 'flat tax' is a progressive tax with the special characteristic that, above the maximum deduction, the marginal rate on all further income is constant. Such a tax is said to be marginally flat above that point. The difference between a true flat tax and a marginally flat tax can be ... |
Regarding the media treatment of President Kennedy's affairs in the 60's. Is this really accurate? | A lot of it was that the press really, really liked Kennedy. You don't smear people you like. No president since has been anywhere near as popular with the press, not even Obama, though he has come closest. | [
"President John F. Kennedy, whose government was the main sponsor of Diệm's regime, learned of Đức's death when handed the morning newspapers while he was talking to his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, on the phone. Kennedy reportedly interrupted their conversation about segregation in Alabama by excla... |
To what extent was the spread of Islam bloodless? | You're absolutely right that the expansion of territory under the control of Muslims happened very quickly and through military conquest! However, scholars differentiate between *Arabization* and *Islamicization* (or Islamization) of conquered territories. It generally happens that conquest preceded the gradual acculturation of Arab culture which preceded the bulk of local conversions to Islam.
Here are three earlier answers of mine that address the complexity of Arabization, Islamicization, the status of "peoples of the Book", and the possibilities of forced conversion:
* [What does it mean that the Middle East was 'Arabized' over the course of history?](_URL_0_)
* [How much of a financial burden was the jizya on non-Muslims?] (_URL_1_)
* [Can we blame the West for radical Islam/its ideology? Has Islam always been violent?] (_URL_2_)
Hopefully this will get you started! | [
"Besides the spread of Islam through Arabia by prophets it spread through trade routes like the Silk Road and through conflicts of war. Through the Silk road traders and members of the early Muslim faith were able to go to countries such as China and create mosques around 627 C. E. As men from the Middle East came ... |
can you get in trouble for streaming movies online for free? | Any authority is much, much more likely to go after the host of the stream rather than an individual user who watches it. Legal? No, it's not. Going to get you into trouble? Unlikely. | [
"The film can also be rented via DVD on Netflix as of March 17, 2010. When asked by a media provider on behalf of Netflix in April 2010 if she would also offer the film via the company's on-demand streaming service in exchange for a limited amount of money, Paley requested that the film be streamed either DRM-free ... |
How does a radio not pick up old signals? | Old radio signals from space? Radio telescopes *do* pick up radio waves from long ago because it takes so long for the wave to travel through space.
Old radio signals from Earth? They are absorbed and destroyed soon after they are created. For instance, a radio broadcast tower sends out waves. These waves travel through the air without being effected much. But soon after they reach the ground, people, antennas, and such, they are quickly absorbed. A little bit of the radio waves may be reflected around the local terrain for a fraction of a second, but with each reflection, the intensity of the wave greatly drops. It is possible to tell the difference between the primary wave and a significantly-delayed reflection of the primary wave from a microsecond ago because the primary wave is much stronger. The reflected signals act essentially as noise, degrading the primary signal. With the right set-up, the reflected signals can interfere quite a bit with the primary signal. But there are no radio broadcasts from 50 years ago still bouncing around along Earth's surface, if that's what you had in mind. | [
"Unlike modern AM radio stations that transmit a continuous radio frequency, whose amplitude (power) is modulated by an audio signal, the first radio transmitters transmitted information by wireless telegraphy (radiotelegraphy), the transmitter was turned on and off (on-off keying) to produce different length pulse... |
what does „star collapses under its own gravity” really mean when star dies? | The gravity of the star constantly pulls all of the mass toward the center. While the mass of the star is a plasma, a lot of that mass and energy pushes particles apart and forces the star to expand. The star expanding and the gravity pulling eventually reach a relative equilibrium that keeps the shape and size of the star. When the reactions stop, the star stops expanding and gravity overtakes the force of expansion as it weakens. This crushes the star.
It isn't a perfect overview; but, hopefully helpful. | [
"The gravitational collapse of a star is a natural process that can produce a black hole. It is inevitable at the end of the life of a star, when all stellar energy sources are exhausted. If the mass of the collapsing part of the star is below the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff (TOV) limit for neutron-degenerate matter... |
How much radiation would you be exposed to holding weapons-grade plutonium in your hand? | It depends on how much of it you’re holding, and whether or not criticality is reached. The “common” isotopes of plutonium are radioactive to alpha decay, but Pu always comes cladded in other metals, which the alpha particles can’t penetrate. Some fraction of the time, it will undergo spontaneous fission instead, which will also result in the emission of neutrons and gamma rays. These will in general penetrate through the cladding and give you a dose.
As long as there is no criticality reached, the dose rate won’t be *too* high. People can handle amounts on the order of a few kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium (I personally have done so) without receiving a dangerous dose.
You don’t just hold bare Pu in your bare hands though, the Pu is cladded with some other metal (like zirconium), and you generally wear gloves when handling it. The gloves are not very heavy-duty, as they’re not used to shield radiation. Instead they’re used to mitigate the spread of radioactive contamination. When you’re done handling the material, your hands will generally be tested for contamination, and once you’ve been given the all-clear, you remove the gloves and dispose of them.
So it’s really not as dangerous as you think. The real danger is in criticality accidents, but as long as you’re handling less than the critical mass with your given amount of moderation, then criticality can’t be reached, by definition. A fun fact about it though is that for kilogram amounts of Pu, the cladding actually feels warm to the touch due to the radiation (most of which doesn’t penetrate the cladding). | [
"BULLET::::- While demonstrating his technique to visiting scientists at Los Alamos, Canadian physicist Louis Slotin manually assembled a critical mass of plutonium. A momentary slip of a screwdriver caused a prompt critical reaction. Slotin died on May 30 from massive radiation poisoning, with an estimated dose of... |
Breathing fumes of dry ice, bad for you? | A little bit of it, not that bad. But I once made the mistake of accidentally inhaling some really concentrated fumes, while bent over double trying to get some of the last chunks of the stuff out of a usually closed container. **River** of blood out my nose in under a second. Do not try at home. | [
"Dry ice sublimates at , at Earth atmospheric pressures. This extreme cold makes the solid dangerous to handle without protection due to burns caused by freezing (frostbite). While generally not very toxic, the outgassing from it can cause hypercapnia (abnormally elevated carbon dioxide levels in the blood) due to ... |
is the sugar in chocolate the same as the sugar in fruit? | No, they are different sugars.
The (added) sugar in chocolate is typically sucrose, the sugar in fruit is fructose.
However In practice, they both become glucose in the body, so a comparable amount of sucrose is 'the same' as that amount of fructose.
Remember, you're not just eating a teaspoon of sugar in either case. Eating fruit also means eating fiber, which tends to mitigate blood glucose spikes in a way that chocolate (or soda) won't. | [
"BULLET::::- Fructose, or fruit sugar, occurs naturally in fruits, some root vegetables, cane sugar and honey and is the sweetest of the sugars. It is one of the components of sucrose or table sugar. It is used as a high-fructose syrup, which is manufactured from hydrolyzed corn starch that has been processed to yi... |
how is it that the leaders in the house can hold back a vote (regarding the us budget)? | For one, spending bills have to originate in the House. Also, the House Rules Committee recently amended the rules to only allow the majority leader, Eric Cantor, to put bills before the House. This rule is temporary, but it is the reason why moderate Republicans have not allied with Democrats to pass a clean continuing resolution.
If you are wondering how/why this is legal or allowed, the Constitution allows the House to set its own rules with a simple majority vote, and the House has operated this way (majority party screwing minority party) for a long, long time. It's not democratic, but it is both legal and with precedent.
Anyone with better knowledge of parliamentary procedure please feel free to correct the above. | [
"Both majority and minority blocs in Congress have used the lack of quorum in defeating bills that they don't want to be passed without putting it to a vote. After an election during the lame-duck session, quorums are notoriously difficult to muster, more so in the House of Representatives as winning incumbents may... |
is saudi arabia's rejection of its security council seat anything other than symbolic? | I am not sure what would qualify this to you as a big deal. It is in protest of the veto members blocking Saudi's attempts to sanction Bashar Al-Asad. The security council seats are highly coveted as it signifies prestige and international influence for a country.
That region of the world will still have representation on the security council as the council is divided into regions (asia-pacific 3, africa 3, east-europe 2, latin america 2, europe/other 5, permanent members included in the count). The members are elected to two year terms. The Saudis declined their election to this council, so someone else from the region will be elected. ALthough one must question why Saudi Arabia campaigned for the seat in the first place, only to turn it down.
If you are questioning the power of a rotating seat on the security council is, then thats a different question. The Security Council members discuss and vote on matters of international peace and security (e.g. peacekeeping missions, sanctions, etc.). The 5 permanent members have power of veto. Saudi Arabia turned down the opportunity to participate and vote on such matters.
Here is a good article from the NYPost:
_URL_0_ | [
"Following the vote, Saudi Arabia, despite winning, declined to take the seat citing the UNSC's \"double standards\" in being allegedly ineffective in regards to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, nuclear disarmament in the Middle East and putting an end to the Syrian civil war. This was the first time a state had r... |
how is maintaining a high credit card balance bad for your credit score, even though you constantly pay off 10x the monthly payment at a time? | Credit score is all about saying how responsible you are with credit. If you have a $10,000 credit limit, but you routinely carry a $9,000 balance, that tells other creditors that you run it pretty close to the edge and that you borrow a lot of money and take time to pay it back. They don't care *how much* you pay each month, that doesn't even show up on a credit report. They care that you pay on time, and that you pay off your debts.
EDIT: Think about it this way. Would you rather lend money to a friend who is constantly borrowing that money right back from you and always owes you a ton of money, or would you rather lend money to a friend who will pay it all back within a short time and usually doesn't owe you very much? | [
"Because a significant portion of the FICO score is determined by the ratio of credit used to credit available on credit card accounts, one way to increase the score is to increase the credit limits on one's credit card accounts.\n",
"Getting a higher credit limit can help a credit score. The higher the credit li... |
during the late 80s to mid 90s, every home computer came with their own operating system. now almost all home computers comes with just windows, why? | The short answer: because Microsoft, lead by Bill Gates, engaged in illegal anti-competitive actions to drive competitors out of business and establish a near-monopoly. They engaged in [wide-spread predatory business practices](_URL_0_) designed to drive out direct and indirect competitors in the OS market.
To give just a few examples:
- Microsoft used their domination of the office suite market (Word and Excel) to sabotage their competitor DR DOS, by having their software detect when it was running under DR DOS and [falsely report that it wasn't compatible](_URL_4_).
- Microsoft used their growing monopoly power in the PC market to "negotiate" deals with PC manufacturers ("agree to our terms, or we'll stop supporting your PC") for what became effectively compulsory royalties. Royalties were tied to the number of PCs sold, not the number of Windows OS supplied. Consequently, if you bought a PC from a major brand they paid for Windows regardless of whether or not they actually supplied Windows. Of course they passed that cost on to you, the consumer, and **you still paid for Windows** even if it wasn't supplied. This ["Microsoft tax"](_URL_2_) made it impossible for alternative OSes such as BeOS to compete even though they were much better and faster.
- Microsoft partnered with IBM to develop OS/2 for servers, while secretly using the knowledge they gained to develop Windows NT as a direct competitor. Then, before OS/2 could be established in the server market, they dropped out of the partnership released NT, and used their domination of the PC market to likewise dominate the server market.^1
(Funnily enough, the early versions of OS/2 written by Microsoft were full of technical flaws which similar early versions of NT did not suffer from. It was only when IBM more or less re-wrote OS/2 themselves was it a decent server-class OS, but of course it was too late by then.)
In the 1990s, the US Department of Justice [took action against Microsoft](_URL_3_) and found that they had [acted illegally](_URL_1_), but by the time Microsoft was found guilty, the US government under President Bush Jr lost its stomach for doing anything about it and merely gave them a slap on the wrist and made them promise to not do it again. But for a time, there was real talk about splitting Microsoft into two separate companies to break the monopoly.
The longer answer would have to acknowledge the effect of non-predatory economic factors such as network effects (if all your friends used Windows, there are advantages for you to use Windows as well), piracy (software piracy helped MS DOS spread in the first place, and especially helped Excel and Word succeed against more established incumbents such as Lotus and WordPerfect), high costs of entry etc. The Dept of Justice findings of facts does a good job at explaining those as well.
Nevertheless, the major reason that Microsoft dominates the OS market is that they illegally lied, cheated, sabotaged competitors and stifled innovation. We're still paying the price for that now, even though Microsoft appears to (mostly) no longer be acting in such ways, thanks to legal actions by both the US and EU threatening to break the company apart, plus the disruptive effects of the Internet.
^1 Microsoft never dominated the server market to the same degree they did the desktop. Unix and Unix-based OSes, especially Linux, continue to hold a large share of the market. But among the *DOS compatible* server market, Windows dominated. | [
"A home computer was the description of the second generation of desktop computers, entering the market in 1977 and becoming common during the 1980s. A decade later they were generally replaced by IBM PC compatible \"PCs\", although in actuality home computers are also members of the class known as personal compute... |
how do construction workers put together a crane | I assume you mean a tower crane. That is done piece by piece as with another mobile crane as helpt initially. You put it together with the horizontal beam relative close to the ground and then the crane can raise itself up and add another vertical segment.
Look at [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) The self raising part start at 4 minutes.
You can see a real video at [_URL_1_](_URL_1_) | [
"Cast Load: Crane has the ability to produce cast loaded explosives utilizing various production lines with mixing, melting, and holding kettles. We have the capability to produce bombs, mines, shock test charges, demolition charges, shape charges, burster tubes, underwater sound signals, cluster bombs and projecti... |
why is it so easy for a person to believe in a complex conspiracy such as the illuminati? | It's easy for people to believe conspiracy theories because they are basically shortcuts to explain the world. Understanding the Federal Reserve is complicated, understanding how power is allocated and what motivates people in power is complicated. Accepting cancer rates are rising due to known carcinogens, but we rarely know exactly which ones isn't satisfying. Understanding cancer rates are rising because people are living longer isn't satisfying.
Basically conspiracy theory fulfills two basic needs, feeling smarter than other people and replacing uninteresting work i.e. studying a dry subject with interesting work e.g. studying aliens.
If you don't like the explanation for something you can explain it however you want and be outraged at whoever you want. That's appealing to people. Chem trails cause it and Ronald Reagan started chem trails. It's arbitrary what "it" even is. The person gets to feel smart, explain a mystery and blame whoever they want without putting in any actual work into understanding the problem. | [
"Many conspiracy theories propose that world events are being controlled and manipulated by a secret society calling itself the Illuminati. Conspiracy theorists have claimed that many notable people were or are members of the Illuminati. Presidents of the United States are a common target for such claims.\n",
"On... |
what causes a drug addict's veins to deteriorate when i've been donating plasma for months with no deterioration? | [Here's my arm after 2 years of shooting H 3-4 times a day](_URL_0_). Only been about every second day for the last 2 months though cause I'm on Suboxone. So it's not always too bad.
It's not because drug users 'don't know what they're doing' as mentioned here. 99% of the time I get it right on the first try, and I've hit someone who nurses have a hard time with. And safely injecting is a big concern for drug addicts. | [
"Alcoholic cirrhosis caused by alcohol abuse is treated by abstaining from alcohol. Treatment for hepatitis-related cirrhosis involves medications used to treat the different types of hepatitis, such as interferon for viral hepatitis and corticosteroids for autoimmune hepatitis. Cirrhosis caused by Wilson's disease... |
what happens to the Carbon-14 that decays inside of us? | It pretty much does what you think it might. It changes into nitrogen which changes its chemical properties. Since Carbon typically makes 4 bonds while Nitrogen prefers 3 if the bonds aren't destroyed by the nuclear reaction itself (Since these reactions can often give off a fairly large amount of energy) they'll likely react immediately to form a more stable structure since you'll have a nitrogen cation with 4 bonds. You'll also have an extra electron floating around if it doesn't exit your body which can also cause a few problems of its own.
As a result whatever had the carbon-14 in it would most likely not be the same compound it started as. However, since Carbon-14 is both in low abundance and has a fairly long half life (over 5,000 years if memory serves me right) the rate at which this occurs in your body is so rare that you will most likely replace the carbon through natural processes before it can actually do anything in your body. You might have a handful of these events occur in your entire lifetime. Over the course of a 100 years only about 1-2% of the C-14 that was present when you were born will have decayed and your body's Carbon is over 99.9% C-12 and C-13.
And even in the event that it does decay, it's fairly likely the damage will be so small that your body will either remove the damaged area or may just end up ignoring it altogether.
C-14 will never do enough damage fast enough, but on the other hand fast decaying isotopes in large enough quantities could do damage. The most common threat is Iodine-131 which has a half-life of about 8 days. Since your thyroid uses Iodine for its processes (and not much iodine is needed I might add) you can absorb enough to start killing thyroid cells. Between the radiation given off and the change of the chemical make up, it absolutely messes with your thyroid. Needless to say this is a very bad thing | [
"Nitrogen-14 is the source of naturally-occurring, radioactive, carbon-14. Some kinds of cosmic radiation cause a nuclear reaction with nitrogen-14 in the upper atmosphere of the Earth, creating carbon-14, which decays back to nitrogen-14 with a half-life of 5,730 ± 40 years.\n",
"By emitting an electron and an e... |
why can't we simply restart the brain? | Brain-dead doesn't mean the software in your brain has crashed and requires a reboot. Brain death means the hardware of your brain has been chemically destroyed. It's not usable anymore. | [
"BULLET::::- Dying ReLU problem: ReLU neurons can sometimes be pushed into states in which they become inactive for essentially all inputs. In this state, no gradients flow backward through the neuron, and so the neuron becomes stuck in a perpetually inactive state and \"dies\". This is a form of the vanishing grad... |
In 1095, the First Crusade is called to aid Byzantium, a Christian power, against their Muslim enemy. In 1204, the Fourth Crusade conquers the capital of Byzantium. How on earth did this happen? | While it is true that the relationship between the Catholic and Orthodox churches did decline this isn't them main reason for the 4th Crusade conquering Constantinople. The 4th Crusade wasn't called against the Byzantine Empire, infact the pope excommunicated the participants of the 4th Crusade because they weren't fighting against the target the pope had intended.
The 4th Crusades' original target was Egypt, the Crusaders planned to capture Egypt, and then move on to the holy land, in order to prevent a counterattack from Egypt against the Holy Land when the Crusaders left, as happened after the 1st and 2nd Crusades.
The Crusaders decided to travel by boat because they were heading to Egypt, and because previous expeditions by the German and French contingents that travelled by land through Anatolia during the 2nd and 3rd Crusades had suffered high casualties.
Therefore the Crusaders commissioned Venice to build a fleet for them, promising to pay them 85,000 marks when the crusade began, however when the Crusaders showed up they only had 35,000 marks, and since Venice had made a huge investment in building the fleet they weren't willing to reduce their price by that much.
Instead Enrico Dandolo, who was the Doge of Venice said that they would transport the crusaders, if the crusaders would help the Venetians recapture the city of Zadar(also known as Zara), which had rebelled against Venetian rule in 1181. Doge Enrico also prevented food from being transported to the island the Crusaders were stationed on until the crusaders agreed to the deal. Therefore the crusades' leaders agreed, despite the fact that Zadar was a Catholic city, and under the protection of Emeric I, King of Hungary and Croatia.
In October 1202 the Crusade left Venice and they besieged and captured Zara in November 1202, in response to this King Emeric asked Pope Innocent III to excommunicate the Crusaders, which he did, although most members of the Crusade didn't hear about this fact.Since the siege had ended on November 24, by which time the weather wasn't suitable for sailing, the Crusade had to spend winter in Zara.
Meanwhile Boniface I Marquess of Montferrat who was one of the leaders of the Crusade had left to visit his cousin Philip the Duke of Swabia, and King of Germany. Philip was married to Irene. Irene had a brother, Alexios IV (who wasn't emperor at this point I'm just including his regnal number to avoid confusion) who was living at their court. The father of Alexios IV was overthrown imprisoned and blinded in a coup carried out by his older brother Alexios III, in 1195. Ever since this Philip had supported Alexios IV claim on the Byzantine throne and they plotted to place Alexios IV on the Byzantine throne. When Boniface went to Swabia he met with Alexios IV, and they presumably reached an agreement, although we don't know exactly what happened at their meeting due to a lack of primary sources.
In January 1203 Boniface arrived at Zara alongside envoys from Alexios IV, Alexios IV offered to give the crusaders 200,000 marks, as well as pay off all of their debts to the Venetians, give 10,000 men to the crusade and permanently maintain 500 knights in the holy land, have the Byzantine navy transport the crusaders, and mend the great schism of 1054 by placing the Byzantine Church(Eastern Orthodox) under the authority of the Pope. This offer was strongly supported by Boniface, Doge Enrico, and Louis I Count of Blois. The other leaders of the crusade eventually agreed to the offer as well. This prompted a few of the crusaders to leave the Crusade, however the vast majority of the crusaders remained with the crusade.
When the weather improved and the crusade gathered supplies, in April 1203 the crusade left Zara alongside the Venetians, at this point a majority of the Crusading force was Venetian. With there being 14,000 Venetians and 10,000 "regular" non-venetian crusaders. The Venetians relationship with the Byzantines was much worse than that of other Catholic countries. Since Venice made a large amount of its wealth by trade, and the Byzantines were rivals to the Venetians, and through their competition and their favourable treatment to Byzantine merchants were harming Venetian profits. Also in 1182 after Alexios II was overthrown by Andronikos I, the supporters of Andronikos I performed a massacre of Catholics who lived in Constantinople, which resulted in over 10,000 Catholics dying (there is a wide number of estimates for the death toll ranging from 10,000-80,000). Before 1182 there were a large number of Venetians living in Constantinople, and many soldiers in the Venetian navy had lost relatives in the massacre, causing the Venetians to hate the Byzantines a lot more than average Catholics hated them.
In June 1203 the crusade arrived in Constantinople . The Crusaders had hoped having Alexios IV with them would convince the garrison to defect, but that didn't happen. During the siege in July Alexios III, after a failed sally attempt fled the city prompting the people of Constantinople to release Isaac II from his imprisonment and proclaim him as Emperor, the Crusaders then demanded that Alexios IV should be proclaimed as Emperor as well, at which point they stopped besieging the city.
At this point the Crusaders didn't control Constantinople, instead it was in the hands of their ally Alexios IV. In August 1203 another smaller massacre of Catholics happened in Constantinople, due to the Crusader army being away fighting against Alexios III in Thrace. Meanwhile Alexios IV was trying to fulfil the promises he had made to the Crusaders. Placing the Eastern Orthodox Church under the Pope was very slow, however even this little effort annoyed a great many Byzantines. The main promise Alexios IV tried to fulfil was the financial one, however even after melting down statues to make money he could only raise 100,000 of the 300,000 marks he needed to make the payment.
His attempts to fulfil his promise to the Crusaders made Alexios IV very unpopular with the people of Constantinople, who overthrew and killed him and his father on February 1204, and named Alexios V as Emperor instead. The crusaders still demanded that the promise of Alexios IV should be fulfilled, however when they realised that Alexios V wasn't going to abide by the deal the Crusaders besieged Constantinople, sacking it in April 1204.
In summary political upheaval in the Byzantine Empire resulting in the massacre of Catholics soured the relationship between the Byzantines and Catholics, leading to the Venetians hijacking an indebted Crusading force and taking it to capture Constantinople. The pope had called the 4th Crusade against Egypt, not the Byzantines.
| [
"In 1099, the Christian Crusaders, with the support of the Roman Catholic Church, launched the First Crusade campaign with the aims of regaining control of Jerusalem from the Fatimid Caliphate, and helping the Byzantine Empire fight the Seljuk Turks. During the campaign, the Crusaders launched an assault on the cit... |
what is that yellow foil around space probes and what is its function? | The gold and silver colored sheets you see are often a single layer of aluminized polyimide with the silver aluminum side facing in. The yellowish-gold color of the polyimide on the outside gives the satellite the appearance of being wrapped in gold.
Multi-layer insulation is used on satellites primarily for thermal control and protects the delicate on-board instruments from the extreme temperatures of space. Depending on its orbit, a satellite can experience temperatures from below -200°F to well above 300°F, sometimes at the same time! Not to mention the high temperatures the onboard instruments can produce. | [
"Foil is commonly used in household applications. It is also useful in survival situations, because the reflective surface reduces the degree of hypothermia caused by thermal radiation (see space blanket).\n",
"An aluminum electrolytic capacitor with a non-solid electrolyte always consists of two aluminum foils s... |
If I filled up a water bottle underwater in the deep part of the ocean, and brought it back up again, would the bottle explode? | **Short answer:** Probably not, but it depends on the quality of your plastic bottle.
**Long answer:** Gasses and liquids behave a little differently when under pressure. The temperature or pressure of ideal gasses, for example, will have a dramatic response when compressed.
Water is different- in fact, it's often taken to be an *incompressible fluid* meaning that it's density doesn't really change as the pressure on it increases. This means that you have to squeeze really really hard on water to change it's volume a small amount. If you filled your water bottle at the very bottom of the ocean and brought it up, the change in pressure will only have a minute effect on the volume of the fluid. Provided your bottle is some sort of crazy cool pressure vessel that can handle deep sea pressures without getting crushed, then it's certainly capable of handling the water once it's back at the surface. | [
"The bottle, more precisely a metal or plastic cylinder, is lowered on a cable into the ocean, and when it has reached the required depth, a brass weight called a \"messenger\" is dropped down the cable. When the weight reaches the bottle, the impact tips the bottle upside down and trips a spring-loaded valve at th... |
Can you tell the age of someone by their DNA? | To some extent, yes. In the S-phase of the cell cycle, when the cell is preparing to undergo mitosis, the chromosomes containing our DNA are duplicated by the DNA-polymerase enzyme.
The telomeres are strands of nucleotide bases at the end of the chromosomes where no genes are located. These are used to provide the location for RNA primers, allowing DNA polymerase to synthesise the lagging strand of the DNA.
As the first part of this video _URL_1_ shows, there is a small nucleotide sequence lacking at each replication, but since the telomeres are not involved in the translation of DNA to protein, they are expendable. However they will continue to get shorter at each replication and are widely believed to be responsible for part of the ageing process in eukaryotes.
By combining the knowledge of DNA replication rates in various tissues and the telomere length, an estimate of age can be provided.
Sources:
_URL_0_
_URL_2_
Campbell Biology, Pearson Education | [
"The determination of an individual's age by anthropologists depends on whether or not the individual was an adult or a child. The determination of the age of children, under the age of 21, is usually performed by examining the teeth. When teeth are not available, children can be aged based on which growth plates a... |
In video games and popular media, the Sengoku Period of Japan are often characterized as a period of conflict between Japanese clans which were small but were of equal economic or military strength with each other. Was this accurate? | Well...it really depends on the specific clan, battle, and war. When we are talking about local strongman vs local strongman, it's probably not too far off to assume each side only had a few hundred, or at most a couple of thousand. However, things could be quite large and lopsided. For instance, the overall engagement at Nagashino was, according to the Chronicles of Lord Nobunaga, 38,500 for the Oda and Tokugawa and 15,000 for the Takeda, with the decisive engagement at Shitaragahara 32,000 vs 12,000. And this is the *lower* end of pre-modern sources. And engagements after Yamazaki got stupidly large because of the wide range of resources and clans mobilized.
On the other hand... it's my experience that media often *exaggerate* the strength disparity to make for a better story, so I'm not sure which media you're referring to. | [
"\"Sengoku BASARA\" takes place during the Sengoku period, or Warring States period, of feudal Japan during which Japan was split into many minor states battling over power and land. The game features two historical warlords as the main protagonists: Date Masamune and Sanada Yukimura.\n",
"The Sengoku Period is m... |
if humans have a night and day circadian clock, why have i (and others) been a night owl since birth? | I'm right there with you. Our knowledge of sleep is still very limited (as well as pretty much anything that has to do with our brain), but there are a large range of classified sleep disorders. Insomnia, night terrors, narcolepsy, things you've probably heard before. [Here's a good Wikipedia article on Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder](_URL_2_), which I'm guessing will sound pretty familiar to you.
DSPD (and its opposite [Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome](_URL_1_)) is an *uncontrollable* shift in your sleep cycle. People with DSPD commonly go to sleep well past midnight. They find it difficult to keep a "normal" schedule, especially with standardized work hours being 9-5. If left on their own they will resort to a regular (albeit shifted) sleep schedule. This is more common in adolescents (possibly as high as 7%), and less common in adults (around .15%). If the DSPD does not disappear after adolescence/early adulthood it will be a lifelong condition.
There are some treatments, including medication and non-medication. Light therapy, sleep phase chronotherapy, meltanonin, modafinil, are more common. A significant thing to note, with DSPD you may find that people will label you as lazy. While this may be true, it is entirely separate from the condition itself. DSPD is a shift in how a person is able to fall asleep and wake up, not their ability to get out of bed--though it is far easier to get out of bed when your body wakes up naturally after a full night's rest.
You may find that you have difficulty feeling tired after a late night on Reddit. If you're looking at a screen late at night, the blue light (which is the majority of the light coming out of the screen usually) disrupts your sleep cycle by suppressing melatonin, [proportional to the light intensity and length of exposure](_URL_0_). I would recommend installing a program like [f.lux](_URL_3_) to lower the amount of blue light coming out of your screen late at night. | [
"The opposite of a night owl is an early bird – a lark as opposed to an owl – which is someone who tends to begin sleeping at a time that is considered early and also wakes early. Researchers traditionally use the terms \"morningness\" and \"eveningness\" for the two chronotypes or diurnality and nocturnality in an... |
How common were certain Roman names, and are there any reliable statistics on this? | The traditional Roman male *tria nomina* were made up of three elements. The *tria nomina* was a symbol of Roman citizenship and quite often thought as the 'classic' form of Roman nomenclature, but in reality, it was actually used for a relatively short amount of time in Roman history and all sorts of other formulas and variations were popular at different times, but maybe there's no need to go into that just now. Benet Salway's 1994 [article](_URL_1_) offers a classic review of changes in Roman onomastic practise if someone's interested.
We can take Cicero's, that is, Marcus Tullius Cicero's name as an example. There is the *praenomen*, which was the first name that originally was used as the main diacritic within family (Marcus). Then, there's the *nomen gentilicium* or sometimes called just *nomen* (Tullius), which was basically the family name that showed which *gens* you belonged to. The Romans had laws for protecting these *nomina*, and using an Italian *gentilicium* even when you were not a citizen was a punishable offense. The *gentilicium* always passed from father to sons and daughters, and the *praenomen* almost always, so that the sons of the family often had the same first name. The last element, the *cognomen* (Cicero), then was originally used as an added personal touch that could differentiate males in the same family or family line. In reality, these were often hereditary as well, which can make it very difficult to differentiate between generations. *Cognomina* could for example differentiate between the sons in the family and mark the order of birth; Primus, Secundus, Tertius etc. were very popular. They could also have something to do with the characteristics or achievements of the individual - Plutarch says that Cicero (which means 'chickpea') had gotten his name from an ancestor who had a small nose that looked like a chickpea.
So, to go back to your questions, are you only interested about the *praenomina*, i.e. the first names? If yes, the Romans had a *very* [limited repertoire](_URL_0_) of *praenomina*, some three dozen. *Praenomina* practically always passed from father to sons, and freedmen usually took their old master's *praenomen*. So, "what should I call my son?" was very rarely a puzzle for Romans. The Wikipedia article says that about a half of those in the list were in popular use, but I could limit the names that were really popular to an even smaller number; the most common one's you'll see are Gaius, Gnaeus, Lucius, Marcus, Publius, Quintus, Sextus, Tiberius, Titus - perhaps Statius and Servius can make that list as well. *Praenomina* other than these are pretty rare. I'm pretty sure I've seen statistics for different Roman regions about how popular each *praenomen* was, but, sorry, I can't remember on my feet where I could find one just now :P There will be regional variations, and I don't think anyone has done a survey for the *whole* Roman world, since we have tens of thousands of inscriptions and therefore personal names from the Roman era!
If you're interested how common some *gentilicia* and *cognomina* are, that's a more difficult question because there are huge amounts of them. Study of Roman personal names, known as onomastics, is a big academic field of its own. People who work on this field, among other things, make lists of *gentilicia* and *cognomina* and track how popular certain names are in certain regions and eras. These can be used to make some guesses about where any individual came from the Roman world. | [
"The early sources for Roman names show numerous variants and misspellings of the Latin names. Moreover, one of the principal authorities, Ptolemy, wrote in Greek so names that he records need to be transliterated back into Latin to reveal the original form.\n",
"An amount of names from Roman times has also survi... |
Should the Atlantropa project (the partial drying of the Mediterranean sea) be realised, wouldn't the newly freed land be too salty for agriculture ? | It's not easy but the Dutch have been doing it for a long time now.
Youtube clip, 19 minutes:
_URL_0_
Long read about the Dutch desalination and reclamation of land:
_URL_1_ | [
"In 1985 a new development proposal was formulated that would see additional land taken from the Mediterranean, and integrate as an urban park, a beach of three kilometers, as well as residential, commercial and tertiary zones. The first works for its revitalization began in 2006 and consisted of work of depollutio... |
why streaming porn on my tablet loads 10 times faster than any other video streaming domains. | There are a LOT of people using SFW video streaming domains like Netflix and YouTube. Compared to the relatively small amount of data not-video content takes up, it's an absolutely massive amount of traffic. Porn sites get a lot of traffic too, but I'd be willing to wager that at least within the US (because copyrighted material isn't as available in other countries), sites like Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu have a much higher demand. When you factor in the fact that most content watched on porn sites is lower resolution/bitrate, it's a lot easier to stream a 480p 5-minute video than a 1080p 55-minute episode of Orange is the New Black. | [
"The amount of data used by video streaming services depends on the quality of the video. Thus, Android Central breaks down how much data is used (on a smartphone) with regards to different video resolutions. According to their findings, per hour video between 240p and 320p resolution uses roughly 0.3GB. Standard v... |
Russian roulette - what is the origin? Has it actually been played? Are there testimonials from survivors? | One of the first mentions of Russian Roulette in literature was in a 1840 novel by Russian poet Lermontov "Hero of Our Time" (Full ebook available on [Gutenberg Project](_URL_1_), scene is in the last chapter of the book).
Since Lermontow was a Russian officer who served in Caucasus and at least some facts\stories in the novel (which is a work of fiction) were autobiographical, the Russian Roulette story might have some real background behind it.
EDIT: I did some additional research and found some obscure references in a biography of Russian general Mihail Skobelev (russian only, Google Books link [here](_URL_0_), unsure if it was ever translated), who lived 1843—1882 and was famous due to his service in one of many Russian-Turkish wars in 1870-s. The books mentions that Skobelev was aware of the risky game his officers played, unofficially approved it as a display of valor and bravery, but was forced to punish it severely due to special order from Emperor Alexander II by demoting involved officers to common soldiers (officers were mostly nobility, soldiers were mostly peasants, so this demotion would be quite shameful). Book fails to reference any sources though, and I also was unable to find any traces of such law or order.
But if those facts are true, it all fits quite well. Early 1800s during Lermontov time the Roulette appeared among officers on Caucasus (note that Lermontov describes the game, but never actually calls it Russian Roulette), late in 1870s it is well known, has its official name "the Roulette" and is popular enough to requite special actions from Emperor and generals to stop its spread among officers. | [
"Russian Roulette is the third studio album by American hip hop producer and recording artist The Alchemist, the album was released on July 17, 2012. The project is constructed from samples of Soviet music (hence the title), making it a concept album. Featured artists on the project consists of acts such as Evidenc... |
What is the best book to explain the evidence and the argument for climate change? | There is a wealth of resources that deal with climate change.
For a brief summary, I think the [booklet published by the Australian Academy of Science](_URL_0_) does a fair job. There are probably many similar booklets out there.
If you want more details, the website [Skeptical Science](_URL_1_) is one extraordinary resource. Not only do they have concise explanations (with different technical levels) to many climate change phenomena and myths, they are also constantly addressing claims from the contrarian community.
The [IPCC 4th Assessment Report by Working Group I](_URL_2_) is actually a somewhat lengthy but good resource. If you don't want to read all of it, try the Technical Summary or FAQ chapters. | [
"The book presents an in-depth analysis and refutation of climate change denial, going over several arguments point-by-point and disproving them with peer-reviewed evidence from the scientific consensus for climate change. The authors assert that those denying climate change engage in tactics including cherry picki... |
do birds pee? | Water is a pretty heavy material, so if birds were to have a bladder it would significantly affect weight distribution. So instead of converting amino acids to urea which needs to dissolve in water to be removed, a lot of water. The convert it to uric acid which forms a paste when a small amount of water is added to it. Lizards do the same since they live in dry, water sparse regions | [
"This is a vocal bird in the breeding season, with constant calling as the crazed tumbling display flight is performed by the male. The typical contact call is a loud, shrill \"pee-wit\" from which they get their other name of peewit. Displaying males usually make a wheezy \"pee-wit, wit wit, eeze wit\" during thei... |
Any book recommendations on the history of contemporary music? | First off, because you mention the 60's as your starting point for learning about the history of music, I am going to assume your focus lies in the British reinvention of rock and roll and the countless genres spawned by this event. This happens to be an area with which I am familiar. However, our culture glorifies the 60s and "classic" rock. This doesn't mean that all of a sudden there was a huge burst in creativity untapped by mankind previously which resulted in rock and roll music. On the contrary, rock is a development in an ongoing series of musical developments (by no means linear).
My quasi historical approach to music would be to appreciate it as a series of movements. These movements originate because of artistic desire, which seeks originality. Nobody wants to sound stale. Important musical groups in history synthesize various musical influences into a "fresh" sound: for instance, Nirvana "created" grunge music.
There is an inherent problem in this model in that it gives far too much credit to individual artists. Usually, these artists operate within a musical scene. For Nirvana, they came from Seattle in the late 80s, which was frustrated with the glam-metal that reigned supreme at that time. These artists didn't care about apperance (shaggy hair, thrift store flannels and jeans, et cetera) and wrote music, well, I can't really define grunge (this isn't my area of expertise as far as music history goes). Anyway, this music became popular with Nirvana's breakthrough album "Nevermind." Therefore, by reading biographies of Nirvana, you will gain information on the particular variables that lead to the creation of grunge music. This gives you an insight into the overall progression of musical development.
But what do I know? [ Here](_URL_0_) (scroll down a tad) is the famous chalkboard from the movie "School of Rock" in which Jack Black instructs his students about the history of rock music since the 50s. That chart is pretty helpful in showing the major movements as well as the most important innovative artists.
As for choosing particular biographies based on my approach... Good luck with that. I would suggest doing a search on amazon and then checking out the reviews.
Hopefully, one of our peers can provide a more effective method to understanding this music. If I ever happen across a worthwhile book on the subject, I'll shoot you a pm =D | [
"Hebert's interests in global music historiography developed as he explored such topics as how European music was adopted in Japan, and how the American genres of jazz and rock music ironically struggled to gain acceptance in American schools. In 2014 he produced a book with Jonathan McCollum (Washington College) e... |
After WWII, what did the International Red Cross conclude, in it's investigations into the holocaust? | From an [older answer concerning this specific claim about the ICRC](_URL_2_). And for good measure one on the actual death toll [here](_URL_3_)
With regards to the documents by the International Committee of the Red Cross:
This myth of a Red Cross document originates with famous Holocaust Denier Richard Harwood in his propaganda book *Did Six Million really die*, which has not only been disproven several times – among the most famous incidents at the trial of Ernst Zündel – but also by the International Committee of the Red Cross itself.
Harwood is in typical fashion for deniers twisting evidence and words in this case. He cites a document by the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross compiled in response to a query regarding the number of deaths in concentration camps they had so far recorded based on surviving documents from the various camp administrations. Given the practice, as the Nazis themselves described it, that the majority of Jewish prisoners send to camps like Auschwitz or the Reinhard Camps were not even registered in those camps but rather killed immediately upon arrival and that a lot of the documentation of the Nazis was destroyed by the same Nazis before the end of the war – see also my answer concerning the [Auschwitz Death books here](_URL_1_) – this document was never intended or claimed as numbering all the victims of the Nazi killing spree. Yet Harwood and other deniers ignore this and base their dubious and politically and morally abhorrent claims on the falsification of this document among other things.
The ICRC published [a refutation of said claims](_URL_0_) in a 1979 bulletin where they write:
> A machination initiated years ago has gone so far that the ICRC is now entangled in its mesh. Its object is to whitewash the National Socialist system in wartime Germany of the accusation of genocide. (...) Consequently the ICRC considers it must make clear the fact that is has never published – or even compiled – statistics of this kind [meaning statistics of all victims of the Holocaust] which are being falsely attributed to it.
As to the ITS document numbering 271.000, they write:
> The same propaganda scheme has recently been making use of other figures, namely the number of deaths recorded by the International Tracing Service on the basis of documents found when the camps were closed. Obviously this number bears no relation – though the authors of the propaganda pretend otherwise – to the total deaths in concentration camps; firstly because a considerable number of documentary material was destroyed before the departure of the Nazi administration, and secondly because many deaths were never recorded, such as those which occurred in the extermination camps where records were generally not kept.
They end with this very true statement:
> There is, incidentally, something revolting about this arithmetical controversy as if such a tragedy could be reduced to mere figures.
Sources and further reading:
* Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? by Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman (2002).
* Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory by Deborah Lipstadt (1994).
* History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving. by Deborah Lipstadt (2005).
* Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial by Richard J. Evans (2002). | [
"The International Committee of the Red Cross did relatively little to save Jews during the Holocaust and discounted reports of the organized Nazi genocide, such as of the murder of Polish Jewish prisoners that took place at Lublin. At the time, the Red Cross justified its inaction by suggesting that aiding Jewish ... |
Are there the equivalent of speech impediments in sign language? | I've worked with a lot of impaired students, and some of the students who sign have physical disabilities with their hands/arms, or cognitive disabilities that affect their motor skills. So yes, trying to understand their signing is a lot like trying to understand someone with a severe speech impediment | [
"For people who have hearing difficulties, sign language is sometimes employed to communicate. Sign language makes use of a combination of hand gestures, facial expressions, and body postures. Similar to speech, it has its own grammar and linguistic structure and may vary from each deaf community around the world.\... |
why do we have to move our eyes when remembering something? | I'm not a neurologist or psychiatrist, but I can tell you how it kind of works for me. When I move my eyes to remember, it's more like I'm looking away from what I was focused on rather than visually focusing on something new. It's kind of like daydreaming when can be staring off into space without really seeing what you're looking at. Looking away just helps me look inward to figure something out (working out a problem, going through memories, etc). | [
"Primarily, experimenters recorded eye movements while participants studied a series of photos. Individuals were then involved in a recognition task in which their eye movements were recorded for the second time. From the previous tasks, it was discovered that eye fixations, maintaining a visual gaze on a single lo... |
How strong is the electric current in Earth's core that produces Earth's magnetic field? | [Here](_URL_0_) is a discussion on this topic, the first comment used the formula for a current loop and came up with a value of around 10^8 amps. The comments note that this uses the field strength at the surface when it should be at the core, so more like 10^11 amps.
I’m not really sure how valid of an estimation this is, as I understand it dynamo theory says the liquid iron motion itself is what causes the field, not the current through the liquid. So we’d be looking for equations that relate the motion of liquid to field strength as opposed to equations for current. Would think that also kinda throws out the concept of current flow. Could be way off on that though. | [
"The main part of Earth's magnetic field is generated in the core, the site of a dynamo process that converts the kinetic energy of thermally and compositionally driven convection into electrical and magnetic field energy. The field extends outwards from the core, through the mantle, and up to Earth's surface, wher... |
A foolish question on my part, but it's bothering me (Relating to stellar evolution). | All other things being equal, more mass would mean longer lifetime, but all other things are not equal. The luminosity of a star increases much faster than its mass; it typically goes something like (mass)^3.5 (the exponent varies somewhat depending on the mass of the star), and so the increased rate of fusion wins out over the presence of more mass to go through.
Why is this? The rate at which the star undergoes fusion is fixed by the star hitting an equilibrium between the gravitational forces pulling matter inward and the pressure pushing outwards resulting from the fusion at the core. A more massive star will require a greater outward pressure to achieve balance, and so it will compress to achieve a greater rate of fusion at the center than a lower mass start would have. | [
"Stellar evolution is not studied by observing the life of a single star, as most stellar changes occur too slowly to be detected, even over many centuries. Instead, astrophysicists come to understand how stars evolve by observing numerous stars at various points in their lifetime, and by simulating stellar structu... |
what is it about video games that turns some lazy people into completionists? | I'm not sure who you mean by "lazy people" in the title, but let's assume you mean someone like me. I'm at work and I'm on reddit, despite having made multiple appointments on my calendar that simply say (no exaggeration), "get to work."
Yet I'm an achievement whore of OCD caliber.
The reason is simple: Video games offer short, measurable, attainable goals, and they offer them repeatedly, and in some cases reward you for them with in-game benefits.
This was true even before achievement systems. A 70-hour RPG starts with basic characters at low levels, levels which are surpassed in minutes, not hours. So that's easy. Along with the numeric counter measuring your progress, when the character learns a new fire or ice spell, it's easy *and* you're rewarded.
This is why MMOs use non-linear progression. You become accustomed to rewards and progress when they're easy. When they're harder, all those dopamine hits from easier goals start paying off, and you feel like even very complex achievements are worth the trouble. Also, they are rarer, so whatever bragging rights you feel are amplified, and in-game rewards become more prestigious or valuable too.
Compare this to life at work. There is no directly visible reward for anything I accomplish today, easy or difficult. Nothing pops on screen that says, "You did it!" Also, since my job is completely different from everyone else's, comparing difficult accomplishments is a wash.
(Oh sure, I'm paid a salary for the labor, but that becomes very intangible after awhile. If you don't do the work, it vanishes, and you depend on it for living, so it feels more like a negative incentive than a positive one, even if in fact it's the most positive incentive there is.)
Furthermore, for longer term goals, there is no path or route that's obvious to me. There is no list of checkboxes that will lead to a raise or promotion, it's all very amorphous and vague. (Some jobs it aren't; mine is.)
In addition, Achievement Systems are more than just things for players to 'accomplish.' They also serve as guides to the game. An achievement to complete a number of quests per zone clues you into how many quests there are. Even if you never complete the achievement, you know whether you were almost done, stopped halfway, or barely scratched the surface, which you wouldn't otherwise know.
An achievement list of all the dungeons and modes tells you right away how many are there, and how much progress you've made. An achievement to conquer all of Calradia is a clue that doing so is possible and others have done it, even if it seems insurmountable by the gameplay.
| [
"This genre involves games that orient the player with a trivial task, such as clicking a cookie; and as the game progresses, the player is gradually rewarded certain upgrades for completing said task. In all, these games require very little involvement from the player, and in most cases they play themselves; hence... |
how can some parts of the universe be so far that light hasn't reached them, since nothing can travel faster than light? | Because space can expand faster than the speed of light, matter cannot however. | [
"Some parts of the universe are too far away for the light emitted since the Big Bang to have had enough time to reach Earth or its scientific space-based instruments, and so lie outside the observable universe. In the future, light from distant galaxies will have had more time to travel, so additional regions will... |
The United States Second Amendment starts with "A well-regulated militia...". What was intended by the phrase "well-regulated" if the right extends to gun owners who are not part of an organised group? | Looks like I am a little late to the party, however, I just answered a very similar question a few days ago, so [I will copy and paste it here:](_URL_3_)
Specific question I answered: "Why would Thomas Jefferson write in, and founding fathers put their signatures on, the 2nd amendment after Shays rebellion?"
This is an incredible question and I'm very glad you asked. Before I answer it, I'd like to briefly describe what Shay's Rebellion actually was:
**Context:**
Shays' Rebellion was an armed uprising led by former Massachusetts Militiamen and Veterans of the American Revolution which took place between 1786 - 1787. Daniel Shays led several thousand "rebels" to fight against the economic injustices that were facing farmers and agrarian peasants all across America. These farmers were experiencing extreme poverty following the end of the Revolutionary War. All across Massachusetts (and the rest of America) farmers saw their lands foreclosed on in unfair property seizers, and they wanted to fight back, which they did here. They were also trying to fight taxes which were beginning to be levied against them. They fought this in many ways, but among them was closing and obscuring roads so that government agents couldn't reach rural parts of the state. Shays' Rebellion would ultimately be put down, but it startled the gentry who feared further uprisings throughout the United States.
I also like to point out that the naming of this event is really interesting. The people who did this, called themselves Regulators ( [modeling off of the North Carolina Regulators](_URL_2_) who also fought against economic injustices before the start of the American Revolution.). The idea of Civilian Regulation was a popular idea that sought to end government corruption and stamp out the overwhelming power of the gentry. They believed that if the government wasn't regulating itself on behalf of "We the People", then "the People" had the right to regulate, or take back the government -- to take it back and do what they believed was right. They didn't see themselves as a rebellion, but rather the gentry labeled them as such in order to de-legitimize their cause. The gentry didn't want to call these men "militiamen" or "regulators" for this reason (which they clearly were), but instead, branded them as "rebels" who needed to be stopped.
Veterans like Benjamin Lincoln would raise militias on their own and mounted their own assaults against the "rebels." They call themselves the "the Massachusetts Militia" even though it was the former militias who they were fighting! So as they begin to debate this on the national stage, especially in 1787 at the Constitutional convention, the gentry singled out Daniel Shay (even though there were actually many other leaders), and they said he was crazy and people were only following a demagogue. They hailed The Massachusetts Militia as the victors and saviors and asserted that militias are what will save America in the future against such madness.
**Answer:**
Although the Constitution was drawn up in 1787 and ratified in 1788, the Bill of Rights was not ratified until December of 1791 when the Bill of Rights was finally agreed upon. Whether or not to include the Bill of Rights (and what to include inside it) was a matter of extreme contestation between the Founders and everything within it was deeply fought over.
When we look at the Second Amendment specifically, we should look at a few things before hand. First, by the 1790s, other small rebellions had popped up all over the country. Terry Bouton's article "A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania" (The Journal of American History, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Dec., 2000), pp. 855-887) masterfully explains the fighting and rebellion that took place in the rural countrysides of Pennsylvania that mirrored what had happened in Massachusetts with Shays' Rebellion. Simply put, the gentry were terrified that they were losing control of rural America, and as a result they would not be able to seize foreclosed land and collect taxes, which they deeply wanted. Empowering militias to be trained and carry firearms allowed the gentry to call up these men in times of need and suppress these rebellions that were taking place.
Now there was already precedent in existence for protecting militias and their rights to bear arms in many states. Multiple other bills of rights from other states had already protected a militia's right to bear arms (such as [Section 13](_URL_1_) of Virginia's Declaration of Rights) and many of these states were fighting to have the federal government protect this as well.
Now, look at the very wording of the [Second Amendment](_URL_0_).
> A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
"A well regulated Militia" is the key phrase. They are referring to the militias led by people like Benjamin Lincoln and his Massachusetts Militia not Shays and his "rebellion". The initial goal was to protect a state's right to call up arms against rebels, not to arm the masses. The Founders feared that in some states (like Rhode Island) that were already being drastically controlled by the poor (rather than the gentry), that local governments would start being able to choose who could keep and bear arms, and that by creating the Second Amendment, the gentry would always have the ability to call up and arm militias in times of need.
**Clarification:** I also need to stress that this question mentioned Jefferson by name, however he was not a signer of the Constitution, but did certify the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1792.
Tl;Dr: The second ammendement wasn't passed *in spite of* Shays' Rebellion, rather it was passed *because* of Shays' Rebellion.
**EDIT: 1**
Wow, what a response from everyone! I started posting responses to people below, but alas it is Father's day and I am heading out with my family to do some fun stuff for the day. I will do my best to answer questions I wasn't able to answer when I return tonight and will also answer any news ones that I can. I would like to say thank you to /u/DBHT14 , /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov , and /u/FatherAzerun who have helped me answer many of these follow ups (and given some pretty fantastic answers themselves)
**EDIT: 2**
Thank you to everyone for your patience. Sorry for the delay. Father's day and then NBA Finals and then Game of Thrones -- busy day!
Here are some great secondary sources that many of you have requested from me. I will post some more by tomorrow evening. Please let me know if you have any follow up questions.
Shalhope, Robert."The Ideological Origins of the Second Amendment" *The Journal of American History*, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Dec., 1982), pp. 599-614.
Bouton, Terry. "A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania" *The Journal of American History,* Vol. 87, No. 3 (Dec., 2000), pp. 855-887
I always recommend starting with this one. It's an excellently written article that is extremely well-respected in the field. It helps set up a much broader perspective for what was going on in the rural countryside with agrarian peasants who were rebelling during this time period.
Parker, Rachel. "Shays' Rebellion: An Episode in American State-Making" *Sociological Perspectives*, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 95-113
Konig. David. "The Second Amendment: A Missing Transatlantic Context for the Historical Meaning of 'The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms'". *Law and History Review,* Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 119-159
**Edit 3**
Once again, thank you to everyone for your patience. I am still getting PM requests for books, so I am adding two plus a few more articles. If would you like the articles emailed to you, please PM and I will send them to you. **Please be aware** that I am posting books that are on **both** sides of the gun control debate because **both** sides pretty much universally agree that regardless of what the founders' original intent was, a major (if not the major reason) for including the Second Amendment for the Bill of Rights were the incidents of rebellions, insurgencies, and regulators.
If anyone has more questions on this, I am perfectly willing to discuss them. Just ask the question in /r/AskHistorians and feel free to tag me.
Cress, Lawerence. *Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812* The University of North Carolina Press; First Edition edition. 1982
Malcolm, Joyce. "To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right* Harvard University Press. 1996
Cress, Lawerence, *An Armed Community: The Origins and Meaning of the Right to Bear Arms" *The Journal of American History*, Vol. 71, No. 1 (Jun., 1984), pp. 22-42
Higginbotham, Don. "The Federalized Militia Debate: A Neglected Aspect of Second Amendment Scholarship" *The William and Mary Quarterly,* Vol. 55, No. 1 (Jan., 1998), pp. 39-58
Shalhope, Robert. "The Second Amendment and the Right to Bear Arms: An Exchange" *The Journal of American History*, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Dec., 1984), pp. 587-593
| [
"In a 1994 article co-authored with University of Oklahoma law professor Robert B. Smith, Deming and Smith concluded \"the Second Amendment safeguards an individual right; the militia consists of people who have a right to keep and bear arms.\" In 1997, Deming argued that gun ownership was \"net benefit to our soci... |
how do biologists and doctors know what chemical to use in order to make something happen in the body? | The collective body of herbalists, doctors, chemists, and witch doctors from the past two to three thousand years have been documenting findings and studying effects of substances on the human body.
Lets work out an easy example. In our tribe of neanderthals, everyone knows if you eat the red berries from the bush by the river you're going to do nothing but shit for the next three days. We also know that if you eat leaves of the tree on that hill over there you won't shit for a week.
The town doctor recognizes this, and whenever someone has food poisoning due to bad water, they'll advise them to eat the tree leaves to stop the pooping. Can't poop and now your belly hurts? Red berries bro. That'll clean you right out.
As time goes on, he teaches his son where to find the best herbs & spices for various ailments, which allows his son as the new town doctor to look for even more, since he didn't have to spend his entire career finding the same medicines as his father. Eventually they start writing it down, and now all of the five nearest towns know how to treat more and more diseases.
Eventually, scientists become a thing, they start looking into the berries to see what about them makes you poop, and if there are other plants that have the same property. Eventually someone discovers how to extract just the pooping oils from the berry and bottles it so now a doctor can carry the equivalent of 100 berries in their pocket.
Since they know one berry = 1 drop = 1 poop, they start administering that to stopped up patients. But eventually someone REALLY needs poop, and the drop didn't work, so they administer more drops. The guy poops! Hooray! He poops more! Yay! He poops blood! That's probably bad. He passes out! That's definitely bad. He dies covered in shit-blood! Whoops. Too many berries. Note for next time: 1 Poop-berry can cure a potentially lethal ailment. 10 poop-berries is potentially lethal. Administer no more than 9 Poop berries to adult males.
Fast forward thousands of iterations and documentation, and we now know that the chemical [Sennosides](_URL_0_) is what caused the poop reaction in the body, and that 15mg is a good 'standard dosage'. After even more research we discover a way to use Science and Chemistry to manufacture Sennosides directly, skipping the berry harvest altogether.
Take this logic for literally every medicine we have, and you have the basis for every medicine we use today. Our scientists inventing drugs are standing on the shoulders of everyone that came before them. Some treatments have been discovered hundreds of years ago, but manufacturing and sourcing technologies needed breakthroughs to make what worked on paper possible. | [
"Researchers often want to measure, say, medical compounds in the bodies of animals. It's hard to measure them directly, so it can be chemically joined to a radionuclide - by measuring the radioactivity, you can get a good idea of how the original medical compound is being processed.\n",
"Direct biochemical metho... |
Is it possible or even part of the theory of evolution that a population produces multiple beneficial mutations at once? | This happens, people tend to follow one mutation down generations only for simplicity of demonstration but of course each and every gene develop in parallel. Millions of genes all develop at the same time.
Mathematically, however, the most common mutations are minor, insignificant mutations that do not affect reproductive capacity. Thus any strong beneficial mutations will be diluted within a population. Also, there can also be detrimental mutations that may be passed on. Thus the timescales are still very long. | [
"The probability that amount of mutation will go to 0 with the next generation is increased by using non-uniform mutation operator. It keeps the population from stagnating in the early stages of the evolution. It tunes solution in later stages of evolution. This mutation operator can only be used for integer and fl... |
what is the difference between gaming fps, where it's normally around 60, and slow-motion fps in videos, where it says 1000 fps. | The 1000 FPS in the video is referring to the number of frames per second the camera captures, not the number of FPS the video is playing back.
When you're playing LoL and getting 60 FPS, the game is rendering 60 FPS, and displaying it at 60 FPS.
The 1000 FPS camera is capturing 1000 frames in a second, and then the video is displaying it at, say, 60 FPS.
If you have 1000 frames of footage, but are only showing 60 in second, an action that would normally take one second, is taking 1000/60 seconds--about 16.7 seconds of footage. This is why it appears to be in slow motion. | [
"Because both film speeds have been used in 25-fps regions, viewers can face confusion about the true speed of video and audio, and the pitch of voices, sound effects, and musical performances, in television films from those regions. For example, they may wonder whether the Jeremy Brett series of Sherlock Holmes te... |
Has David Irving contributed anything positive to Holocaust academia? Or have his contributions worked to purposefully obfuscate real Holocaust research? Additionally, are there any other examples of well-known "researchers" to watch out for? | Personally i have a lack of knowledge on the work by David Irving. What i can talk about is other Holocaust research and academia. Due to battery life, this will have to be a tad limited, sorry for this.
You ask for "well-known" researchers, then i will give you three.
* Raul Hilberg
* Christopher R. Browning
* Daniel J. Goldhagen
Starting with Hilberg, the so called "Grandfather of Holocaust studies" creating what can be deemed to be the basis of all modern holocaust research. His magnum opus "The Destruction of the European Jews" is 1273 pages.
Very noteworhy is Christopher R. Browning, famous in the field of Holocaust research, especially for his book "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland." What makes Browning so interesting is his work with the 101 police battalion, showing the people behind the killing. He conclude with the same fact that Hilberg does in his book, that in fact that it was 'ordinary Germans' that were the perpetrators of the Holocaust, not just SS-troops or the Einsatzgruppen. "*They did not kill because they were coerced by the threat of dire punishment for refusing*"^1. Browning argues that the 'ordinary Germans' became killers based on basic obedience to authority and peer preassure, not based on bloodlust or primal hatred.
Last, as you mention people that have "prevented" Holocaust research, you have the obvious name of Daniel J. Goldhagen with his, New York Times Bestseller "Hitlers Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans of the Holocaust". This book is an indirect response to Brownings book on the Police Battalion, where Browning argues the fact that even if the perpetrators were Ordinary Germans, they did not kill the Jews out of their own will, Goldhagen argue that due to the German Phenomenon, mentioned a few lines down, the perpetrators were willing executioners. His book takes the stance that the Holocaust could only happen in Germany based on a German Phenomenon called "Eliminationist Anti-Semitism". Goldhagen argues that this was the sole motivation for the Holocaust and comes often with outlandish and overconfident statements. "*With regards to the motivational cause of the Holocaust, for the vast majority of perpetrators, a monocausal explanation does suffice.*"^2 and “*their[German people] approval[of the holocaust] derived in the main from their own conception of Jews is all but certain, for no other source of motivation can plausibly account for their actions.*”^3
After Goldhagen became a massive commercial success, increasingly many scholars started writing reviews and essays explaining how Goldhagen was wrong. Hilberg goes as far as to outright dismiss the work of Goldhagen. Notable reviews and Essays regarding the book: Yehuda Bauer "On Perpetrators of the Holocaust and the Public Discourse", Hilberg "The Goldhagen Phenomenon" and Browning "Daniel Goldhagen's Willing Executioners".
Goldhagen is an important example of someone using the same sources as others (Browning) yet reaching comepletely different conclusions, although his work was dismissed by most scholars, it is an important lesson to learn from, do not only pick information that help your case.
1. Christopher R. Browning “Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland”, 1998, p.191
2. Daniel J. Goldhagen "Hitler's Willing Executioners", 1996, p.416
3. Goldhagen, 1996, p.416
Sources:
Bauer, Y. and Finkelstein, N. G. (1998), The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 89, No. 1/2 pp. 123-126
Bauer, Y. (1997) On Perpetrators of the Holocaust and the Public Discourse. The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 87, No. 3/4, pp. 343-350
Hilberg, R. (1997) The Goldhagen Phenomenon. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp 721-728
Browning, C. (1996). Daniel Goldhagen's Willing Executioners. History and Memory, 8(1), pp.88-108
Goldhagen, D. (1996). Hitler's willing executioners. 1st ed. New York: Knopf
EDIT: Goldhagens' book is a very interesting read where he bring up case studies like the death marches, I would definitely suggest reading up on the "duel" between Goldhagen and Browning | [
"Over the years, Irving's stance on the Holocaust changed significantly. From 1988, he started to espouse Holocaust denial openly: he had previously not denied the Holocaust outright and for this reason, many Holocaust deniers were ambivalent about him. They admired Irving for the pro-Nazi slant in his work and the... |
Does the "will to live" among the very ill create biochemical changes in the body that helps keep them alive? | There are a number of articles and research papers indicating that a positive mental attitude towards an illness such as cancer can have a profound effect on the rate of recovery. The reasons for this are not particularly well known. It's potentially an extension or application of the placebo effect in that a person can effectively will themselves back to better health.
It's true not only of physical ailments but also of mental disorders such as chronic depression. Oddly in placebo testing, even being made aware of the fact that a placebo is being administered doesn't change the effect of such a treatment as much as would be expected. In fact in most testing the participants with the placebo have a significantly higher rate of improvement than those receiving nothing at all.
Went a little off topic there but in a nutshell, the will to live does have a profound effect on recovery rates but as yet there is not a great deal know as to why this happens as far as I have read. Bearing in mind that I'm just graduating from a psychology bachelors I may be wrong/not as well read as some so I may have missed some more recent or appropriate literature that might give a little more insight but I hope I've helped a little.
Edit: I posted some related articles lower down for some further reading so I thought I'd add them here.
Ok, so here's a little article about placebos acting even when they are known to be placebos. _URL_0_ - Well worth a read.
_URL_4_ - Much more in depth journal article on placebo (specific to sudden loss of hearing) in which there seems a much smaller gap than you would imagine between placebo and medical treatment. (this is full of stats and jargon but if you can bear with it, it's very interesting).
_URL_1_ - An article describing how the placebo effect can alter brain function.
_URL_5_ - another article describing how the placebo effect works in certain cases. This one is well worth a read. It shows that in some cases placebos are not the magic bullet they are sometimes painted as in journal articles.
Would do more but I have to get back to revision. I get the feeling I'll be back to have a look at this topic soon enough though.
Edit: I've seen a few posts citing that I didn't back up the information regarding cancer sufferers specifically so I found a couple of articles that would hopefully shed some light on this. I can't cite the peer reviewed journals as the library account at my University doesn't allow direct links so I did my best to find some informed yet admittedly not peer reviewed articles on the subject.
Ok, so specifically to cancer sufferers, _URL_6_ - This article shows that people without the stresses of a distressed relationship show a much quicker state of recovery than those who do not.
_URL_2_ - This is more a Q & A for those suffering from breast cancer but shows that good mental health can increase the level your body heals or responds to the negative sides of the treatment itself.
_URL_3_ - A further article explaining the links between good psychological health and cancer survival rates explaining the positives of good mental health on the stresses of being diagnosed with cancer.
Sorry I didn't cite these earlier. Didn't have much time on my hands but I hope this goes some way to explaining and backing the claims I made regarding cancer in the original post. | [
"Many studies have been conducted on the theory of the will to live. Among these studies are subject to the difference in gender and the elderly and also in the terminally ill. One study focused on a simple question that asked about rating one’s will to live and presented the findings that elderly participants repo... |
If you traveled back in time wouldn't you being there mean that more mass has entered the universe than was originally there? | So you're asking "if you violate the laws of physics, wouldn't that mean you've violated the laws of physics?"
Yes. | [
"Namely, that from the perspective of the point of origin of the Big Bang, according to Einstein's equations of the 'stretching factor', time dilates by a factor of roughly 1,000,000,000,000, meaning one trillion days on earth would appear to pass as one day from that point, due to the stretching of space. When app... |
- why don't we clean up satellite debris? | High cost, low benefit. | [
"\"Space debris\" usually refers to the remains of spacecraft that have either fallen to Earth or are still orbiting Earth. Space debris may also consist of natural components such as chunks of rock and ice. The problem of space debris has grown as various space programs have left legacies of launches, explosions, ... |
why does food that should be warm seem to taste worse when cold? also why does it seem cold when left out for too long, when it should only be room temperature? | When it's warm, it has more flavor. Some liquids evaporate and give off that aroma, some liquids better coat your tongue.
Food left out *is* cold, compared to the temperature it's served at and the temperature of your body. Food is usually heated above 100 degrees F. You body is in the 90s. Room temperature is usually 15-25 degrees lower than your body. Go lick something with the same heat transfer rate as oil and it will seem just as cold. If you had two pieces of food and put one in the fridge and left the other out, it'd be pretty obvious the refrigerated one is much colder when you tasted it.
Edit: fixed "it" to "out" | [
"Temperature can be an essential element of the taste experience. Food and drink that—in a given culture—is traditionally served hot is often considered distasteful if cold, and vice versa. For example, alcoholic beverages, with a few exceptions, are usually thought best when served at room temperature or chilled t... |
Info on English Lancegays seems to be impossible to find on, are there any sources that I can be pointed towards as to how these were used? Any treatise or manuals as to how they'd be used in combat? | > [...] there is no identified archaeological evidence: nothing that can show us exactly how long or heavy a lancegay was, what the diameter of the shaft was, what shape of head it had, or whether it had heads at both ends, as is sometimes claimed. There is also no detailed description of a lancegay in any known written source; and there is no instance in any of the visual media that can indubitably be identified as a representation of the weapon. As is so often the case with weapons terms in the Middle Ages, writers of literature and other documentary sources assume that one knows what technical words denote, making it unnecessary for them to supply explanations or descriptions. As a result, everything we believe we know about the lancegay has to be *deduced* from what is said about it.
-David Scott-Macnab, [Sir John Fastolf and the Diverse Affinities of the Medieval Lancegay](_URL_0_)
There are no surviving fectbuch or manual involving a section on the lancegay, although there are surviving treatises (or sections thereof) on spears and lances, such as [Fiori de'i Liberi](_URL_1_), and the techniques involved would presumably have been similar. | [
"A number of manuscripts covering longsword combat and techniques dating from the 13th–16th centuries exist in German, Italian, and English, providing extensive information on longsword combatives as used throughout this period. Many of these are now readily available online.\n",
"\"Conquests of the Longbow\" is ... |
why blood turns brown after it dries? | When the liquid from the blood is seeped into the bandaid, the only thing left outside are the dead red blood cells. That is what you are seeing.
Also: the brown colour of poo is caused by the dead red blood cells filtered out by your liver. The contents of your guts before this is added is grey. | [
"Freshly dried bloodstains are a glossy reddish-brown in color. Under the influence of sunlight, the weather or removal attempts, the color eventually disappears and the stain turns gray. The surface on which it is found may also influence the stain's color.\n",
"The color of red blood cells is due to the heme gr... |
What would Gettysburg battlefield have looked like in the 1950s? (story behind question inside) | The Gettysburg National Military Park was established and gained it's initial protection status in 1863, about a hundred years before you father visited. The park received federal protection in 1893, was designated a National Park in 1895, and added to the National Register of Historic Preservation in 1966. Keeping in mind that the park had been established and protected in some fashion or another for at least 90 years before you father visited, it's extremely unlikely that he found a canon ball just resting on the surface somewhere and absconded with it.
There were a variety of different field guns deployed by both sides during the battle, and the size and composition of the ammunition used is likewise diverse. Shot and bolts used in the battle would have been composed of solid iron or bronze, and would have weathered pretty poorly in the open.
I suppose it's possible he could have lifted a ball from a stacked display, but I'd count it as unlikely that a school aged boy could effectively remove and conceal a canon ball successively. They can be quite heavy.
On the off chance that your father did remove a canon ball from the field, or from a display, it would have been a punishable violation of the National Historic Preservation Act after 1966, the Historic Sites Act after 1935 and the Antiquities Act after 1906. More than likely it would have been a violation of any number of local laws as well. | [
"A copy of the Gettysburg Cyclorama was displayed in an 1894 tent at The Angle, and during reunions in 1887, 1913 (50th battle anniversary), and 1938 (75th); battle veterans shook hands over the rock wall at The Angle. The nearby field along the Emmitsburg Road was also the site of Gettysburg Battlefield camps afte... |
how does someone bet that a country's credit rating will fall and make money? | It's like betting on any futures.
The better the credit rating, the better the value is of a piece of paper that says someone owes you money. If you expect the credit rating to go up, you would buy more, if you expect it to go down, you would sell what you have.
The complicated part happens when someone figured out they could sell more than they have. If they are really sure the value of a bond will drop, they can essentially make a deal to owe someone that bond in return for money, then when it does drop, they can buy it at the low value to pay to give to the other party, and come away with a profit. Of course, if the value goes up instead of down, they're in trouble. | [
"Defenders of credit rating agencies complain of the market's lack of appreciation. Argues Robert Clow, \"When a company or sovereign nation pays its debt on time, the market barely takes momentary notice ... but let a country or corporation unexpectedly miss a payment or threaten default, and bondholders, lawyers ... |
why is no mouth cpr what everyone is told to do now? | The breaths aren't worth doing. Keeping the heart pumping (doing the compressions) is far more important. This is because while people will lose consciousness from carbon dioxide build up in a couple of minutes, the average person actually has enough oxygen in their blood to stay alive for for a while (nearly 20 minutes) if the heart is pumping. There's really a caveat that after about ten minutes you need to start doing rescue breaths if they're not breathing. But the idea is that in most "man on the street" rescue efforts professionals show up and take over before the person would actually die of lack of oxygen. So for an amateur trying to operate in a high stress situation they probably aren't super practiced in, keep it as simple as possible to have the best effect. Add to that rescue breathes don't have much oxygen in them anyways, since your lungs filtered it out when you inhaled. | [
"Tube weaning is contraindicated in children who do not have a safe swallowing response. It is not recommended if there is a high possibility of an upcoming surgery or intervention that will require further usage of a feeding tube.\n",
"Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, a form of artificial ventilation, is the act of... |
why don't newly pressed vinyl records use the whole side? | I can tell you that some recording lathes (the machine that cuts the master disc that the record stampers are made from) are adjustable...to make the tracks closer together. This is done to increase the amount of music on the side. However, some lathes are better than others, and some engineers (who run the lathes) tend to be conservative. The more bass-heavy (low notes) the music is, the more room it takes up (really!)
I would like to say that in your case, they wanted to cut the best possible record, and so gave themselves lots of room when cutting the master. | [
"The composition of vinyl used to press records (a blend of polyvinyl chloride and polyvinyl acetate) has varied considerably over the years. Virgin vinyl is preferred, but during the 1970s energy crisis, it became commonplace to use recycled vinyl. Sound quality suffered, with increased ticks, pops, and other surf... |
Does the US meet traditional definitions of an empire? | It depends on what qualities defines an Empire, really. This is quite a hard question to answer for sure.
The element that is most iffy is the central idea that an Empire not only has the original culture subjugate others, but then attempts to create a state that actively manages all of those cultures at once. In the case of the USA, it never began as a single-culture enterprise at the time in which it was integrating other cultures, it seems to me. Almost like the Imperial part was done in reverse order. | [
"The term \"American Empire\" refers to the United States' cultural ideologies and foreign policy strategies. The term is most commonly used to describe the U.S.'s status since the 20th century, but it can also be applied to the United States' world standing before the rise of nationalism in the 20th century. The U... |
Why was there such a regression in technology from the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Middle Ages? | Hiya, not discouraging any new answers coming in, but I think you might find the [part of our FAQ about the so called "Dark Ages"](_URL_0_) helpful and interesting. Scroll down a tiny bit when you open the link:) | [
"During the growth of the ancient civilizations, ancient technology was the result from advances in engineering in ancient times. These advances in the history of technology stimulated societies to adopt new ways of living and governance.\n",
"In summary, Rome contributed numerous advances in technology to the An... |
what is it about apples that makes us have so much variety compared to other fruits? | In many cases there are in fact many different kinds of a fruits or vegetable. We just either dont sell them or they got breeded out for what was considered better looking or tasting. For example there are multiple types of bananas, oranges, ( berries in general actually), etc. Theres also variety in vegetables with various kinds of greens, peas, corn, carrots, etc.
Carrots are a prime example of breeding out different types. The orange one you see today was created mostly by cross breeding, not naturally
As for fruits that only have one type thats mostly because they only grow in a very select few places under fairly strict weather requirements leaving little room for mutations. | [
"Apples are fruits commonly studied by researchers due to their high phenolic content, which make them highly susceptible to enzymatic browning. In accordance with other findings regarding apples and browning activity, a correlation has been found between high phenolic amount and enzymatic activity of apples. This ... |
In medieval times, was it common for average citizens to go about their daily lives with weapons? | The answer to this somewhat depends on your meaning of 'armed'. For example, early medieval English fashion called for the carrying of a *Seax*, a long, single-bladed knife that was worn horizontally hanging from a belt on the waist, roughly the size of large kitchen knife. The Saxons derive their demonym from this, but it was carried by Angles as well. Early medieval English culture is essentially one of ostentatious display; from horse tackle, to brooches, to jewellery, wealth and status are displayed in personal ornamentation and the Anglo-Saxons are famed for their metalwork featuring ornate patterns and inlaid gems. For those who could no afford gold and gems, burnished brass and glass could be used, much like costume jewellery today. Part and parcel of this culture of display, therefore, would have been the regular wearing of a *seax*, both as an indicator of wealth, but also as a practical tool for everyday life.
While the *seax* was technically a weapon, it was predominantly a hunting or utility weapon; in warfare the main weapon of the Anglo-Saxons would have been the spear or javellin, and these are unlikely to have been carried socially. Swords are a slightly different beast again; although they are weapons of war, the time and skill necessary to make a sword means that they are largely constrained to the nobility, and as such once again become an object indicative of wealth and status. As such, we might not expect to see a *thegn* or *ealdorman* "casually" wearing a sword, but we might if he was performing a civil action - presiding over a trial, say - as a signifier of his status. | [
"Through the medieval period, soldiers were responsible for supplying themselves, either through foraging, looting, or purchases. Even so, military commanders often provided their troops with food and supplies, but this would be provided in lieu of the soldiers' wages, or soldiers would be expected to pay for it fr... |
how / when did scotus judges become so partisan to predict a decision on the basis of party appointment rather than on the merits of each case? | They're really not as partisan as people make it seem. However, they are human. The constitution and laws have a lot of ambiguity to them. People are going to interpret certain things differently-
> If Supreme Court Judges are as partisan as everyone else they shouldn't be given lifetime appointments.
The founders thought the opposite. The idea is that if you have a lifetime appointment, you don't need to make partisan votes in order to get re-elected. You can tell your party to fuck off, if you disagree. If you have the ability to be replaced, you don't have that freedom.
And what's to stop Congress from just replacing a conservative judge with a new conservative judge? Not much. That's basically how Congress gets elected now, and they are far more partisan.
> When non-SCOTUS judges are elected, how possibly can they remain impartial?
The short answer is they aren't. Ideally, they do the best they can, and you try to make sure you vet them heavily before allowing them onto the court. There's no magic way to find someone who isn't political. The job is inherently political.
The check/balance on this is that if it gets bad enough, judges can be impeached. Also, both parties in congress has a lot of power in screening(or making new laws), so that tends to moderate judges quite a bit (and worst case scenario, if congress screws up, voters can vote them out). If voters don't vote them out, the founders figured that means it doesn't bother them that much.
But just to emphasize, for the most part, even though they tend to vote on "party lines" (and keep in mind, the big cases in the news tend to be ones where there is a split- there are many that are unanimous), generally speaking, they do have a coherent ideology , even if you don't agree with it.
edit:
In addition, precedent matters a lot. If Scotus decides "x is legal", it's incredibly hard to over turn that-they almost never reverse themselves. They're very very away that if you say "x is legal" and it benefits one party today, it might be the other way in the future, and they've put themselves in a box. That is a huge check on their power.
To give a recent example, a big part of the recent ruling by Judge Robart putting a stay on the immigration ban- relied on the decision to prevent Obama's immigration changes a few years ago. It really can come back to bite you in the ass, and the Judges are not so partisan as to not be blatantly inconsistent (for the most part) | [
"The political litmus test is often used when appointing judges. However, this test to determine the political attitude of a nominee is not without error. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren was appointed under the impression that he was conservative but his tenure was marked by liberal dissents. Today, the lit... |
why do dogs care about babies? | Domestic dogs view themselves as part of a human pack, the family. Since babies are part of the pack too, and the pack's alpha members (us) like them they must be worth keeping (dog logic). | [
"They make fairly good watch dogs. When necessary, this dog will bark to alert its family that someone is nearby. This breed is typically good with other pets, especially when socialized at an early age. This dog gets along well with children, but it may be a good idea to socialize this breed at an early age as wel... |
Is dairy really that crucial to our diet? | As others have said, many, many perfectly healthy people live entirely without dairy (myself included).
> why dairy?
Government food recommendations are based as much on economics as health, if not more so. Cheap high-yield staples are not the basis of the recommended diet for health reasons. Health issues are considered, of course, but certainly not exclusively.
> Throughout my entire life, it's been pounded into my head to drink my milk.
Most of the popular conception about milk being necessary for calcium and so on comes from advertising. Most of that advertising is paid for by the dairy industry, and exists for the same reason that all other advertising does: profit.
edit: Sorry, not very AskSciencey. With nutrients, how absorbable they are is important, calcium merely being in a food doesn't mean it is useful to your body. Many vegetables are a good absorbable source of calcium[1], mostly leafy greens.
[1] _URL_0_ | [
"A 2009 scientific conference reported that despite the contribution of dairy products to the saturated fatty acid intake of the diet, there was no clear evidence that dairy food consumption is consistently associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.\n",
"Dairy products are produced from the milk of ... |
why does norway have some of the world's highest gas prices despite being the 15th largest oil producer (1.9m bbl/day) | It's mainly because they tax it ALOT. This is to make an negative incentive to drive as much because of the negative effects of traffic, the impact it has on local environment (bad air) and the global environment. This is also a huge way for the government to earn a lot of taxes which go to building infrastructure or other goods.
It should also be noted that norwegians have an high average income, thus making their purchasing power stronger than most of the world, which would make the prices seem high when you compare it to countries with less income per capita. | [
"In 2011, Norway was the eighth largest crude oil exporter in the world (at 78Mt), and the 9th largest exporter of refined oil (at 86Mt). It was also the world's third largest natural gas exporter (at 99bcm), having significant gas reserves in the North Sea. Norway also possesses some of the world's largest potenti... |
Is anyone creating Atoms? Or is this even possible? | Most of the elements on the periodic table above uranium are synthetically created. | [
"Other exotic atoms have been created by replacing one of the protons, neutrons or electrons with other particles that have the same charge. For example, an electron can be replaced by a more massive muon, forming a muonic atom. These types of atoms can be used to test the fundamental predictions of physics.\n",
... |
Is there any rational explanation for these noises? | Are they heard in any rural areas? It sounds like traffic noise echoing off of buildings.
(It would be easy enough to drop in a sound to a film to further conspiracy theories, btw.) | [
"According to the NOAA description, it \"rises rapidly in frequency over about one minute and was of sufficient amplitude to be heard on multiple sensors, at a range of over .\" The NOAA's Dr. Christopher Fox did not believe its origin was man-made, such as a submarine or bomb, nor familiar geological events such a... |
Bio: X-inactivation and x-linked disorders? | We evolved to handle two sets of every gene...except when it comes to the sex chromosomes. Having too much of certain proteins wreaks havoc during development (e.g. trisomy 21, having an extra chromosome 21 causes Down Syndrome), with most trisomies being fatal.
X-inactivation serves the purpose of making sure you only have one X chromosome doing its thing, because doubling the dose with these particular genes can cause a lot of problems.
In fact, [Klinefelter's Syndrome](_URL_0_) is what can develop in someone with XXY. Even though their extra X chromosome does get inactivated, it's apparently not completely inactivated and causes some issues from the doubling doses of particular gene expression. | [
"The X-linked form of MTM is the most commonly diagnosed type. Almost all cases of X-linked MTM occurs in males. Females can be \"carriers\" for an X-linked genetic abnormality, but usually they will not be clinically affected themselves. Two exceptions for a female with a X-linked recessive abnormality to have cli... |
if we can have physician assisted suicides, why are there sometimes major malfunctions when administering the 'death penalty'? | Physician assistant suicide is often phenobarbital, something people would OD on back in the day. One single drug, gently knocks you out and kills you without any dramatic stuff. It basically amps up the brain receptor that says "chill out neuron" so your whole brain chills out, till it knocks you out, and your respiratory drive chills out too and you die.
Death penalty, that doesn't use such a method. There's a cocktail of 3 drugs, one to knock you out, then one that relaxes your muscles, then one to stop your heart. Since your heart is a muscle, the anti-heart drug also messes with your muscles so they can very dramatically spasm if the anti-muscle drug didn't work right. This is also complicated by many pharma companies refusing to provide the drug for moral reasons. Or the electric chair, which also doesn't always work. Or hanging, which can be ugly.
Death penalty uses more complicated and less reliable methods, physician assisted uses simpler and more reliable methods. | [
"Regardless of an alternative protocol, some death-penalty opponents have claimed that execution can be less painful by the administration of a single lethal dose of barbiturate. Supporters of the death penalty, however, state that the single-drug theory is a flawed concept. Terminally ill patients in Oregon who ha... |
what's the purpose of the num lock key on a full sized keyboard? | The first IBM PC keyboard had 83 keys. The numeric keypad doubled as the cursor control keys, and you used Num Lock to toggle between the two.
A few years later, IBM introduced what is now the familiar 101 key layout, with dedicated cursor control keys. Even though the Num Lock key was no longer strictly necessary, they left it in for backwards compatibility (some programs use it for other purposes) and because some people preferred the cursor control keys in the numeric keypad layout.
Even through that was almost 30 years ago, the layout has become so standard no one has seen a need to change it. | [
"The Num Lock key exists because earlier 84-key IBM PC keyboards did not have cursor control or arrows separate from the numeric keypad. Most earlier computer keyboards had separate number keys and cursor control keys; however, to reduce cost, IBM chose to combine the two in their early PC keyboards. Num Lock would... |
how is it so hard for many people to even try to read or pronounce foreign names? | Part of how most people read is not by looking at each individual letter but rather looking at the word as a whole, more like a singular shape rather than a string of letters. If you've been reading "by shape" and have to switch to reading each individual letter it's pretty jarring. Also different languages will pronounce the same letters differently and so combinations that make sense in Spanish won't make sense in English. | [
"The following is a list of common non-native pronunciations that English speakers make when trying to speak foreign languages. Many of these are due to transfer of phonological rules from English to the new language as well as differences in grammar and syntax that they encounter.\n",
"Users have the ability to ... |
if water is not compressible, why does a pressure exists if pipe has limited volume of water ? | Water is compressible; everything is. Water pressure is typically generated by having the storage tank at some height above the pipes. The static pressure in the pipes is proportional to the height. | [
"On the other hand, liquids have little compressibility. Water, for example, will compress by only 46.4 parts per million for every unit increase in atmospheric pressure (bar). At around 4000 bar (400 megapascals or 58,000 psi) of pressure at room temperature water experiences only an 11% decrease in volume. Incomp... |
Were there any examples of Fascist states before 1930's Europe? | Fascism at the best of times is a vague description. As a Marxist, I see fascism as being a reaction to a crisis of state brought on by a crisis of capitalism, as such, to argue that fascist states existed before capitalism wouldn't make sense. The goal of a fascist state then is to try and maintain capital as a mode of production, even if this is an unconscious and only historical role. Have there been dictatorial states and rulers before fascism? Yes, but I think to describe them as being fascist would be taking fascism out of the specifics of the 20th century. A nice pamphlet you can read would be Gilles Dauve's [When Insurrections Die](_URL_0_). | [
"The first totalitarian state in the West was established in Italy. Unlike the Soviet Union however, this would be a Fascist rather than a Communist state. Fascism is a less organized ideology than Communism, but generally it is characterized by a total rejection of humanism and liberal democracy, as well as very i... |
where did the misconception that radioactive waste glows green come from? | An early use of radioactive material was luminescent applications. You've seen glow in the dark watches as an example. These commonly involved a phosphor that glowed green via interaction with the radioactive substance.
This also led to [radium girls](_URL_0_) as an early terrifying example of what can go bad with radiation.
So you have a combination of 'green glow' and 'horrible radiation damage.' | [
"Near the facility, a dense cloud of radioactive dust killed off a large area of Scotch pine trees; the rusty orange color of the dead trees led to the nickname \"The Red Forest\" (\"Рудий ліс\"). The Red Forest was among the world's most radioactive places; to reduce the hazard, the Red Forest was bulldozed and th... |
Clarification of the disputed status of the Nagorno-Karabakh region | International norms. Since roughly WWII, it's been very rare for international organizations like the UN or NATO to recognize territorial changes adjudicated through conquest. Look at North Cyprus, or Western Sahara--they've been under the control of Turkey and Morocco, respectively, for decades but few countries formally acknowledge it. When you see a UN health statistic map, for example, you'll see that Western Sahara has "no data" even though Moroccan data includes data from Western Sahara and it is made to appear like the data from Cyprus covers the whole island. [Look at this map for example](_URL_0_) (you can't really see Cyprus, but trust me, it's undivided in that map).
Second, the norms of how states change borders have become fairly firm. Other than colonial possession, you see states can split up (as in the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, most famously, but also East Timor from Indonesia, Singapore from Malaysia, Eritrea from Ethiopia, and South Sudan from Sudan), and you see them combine (as in Vietnam, Tanzania, Germany, Yemen, Sikkim going in India), but I can not think of a single case since 1946 where a significant part of one state broke off and was allowed to join another, other than a few random post-colonial cities like Ifni or Pondicherry or Hong Kong. There have been many attempts that have failed, like Iraq's attempts to annex parts of Iran and all of Kuwait, but I honestly cannot think of an example that has succeeded. You see small border adjustments here and there, but they're mainly technocratic things that affect few people--nothing like before WWII when you'd see Alsace go to France, and then the Sudetenland go to Germany, and then Germany and the USSR split Poland, etc. Kosovo is 90% ethnic Albanian, but when it broke off from Serbia, it was explicitly not allowed to join Albania. Furthermore, when 10% of Kosovo that is ethnic Serb lives next to Serbia, but they're not allowed to split off from Kosovo and join Serbia. The international community is also generally very reluctant to recognize split-off claims at all without the state they're splitting off from approving, which is why we have a laundry list of things like Transnistria, Abkhazia, Puntland, Somaliland, Tamil Eelam, North Cyprus, Palestine, Daesh, and even Kosovo itself (Serbia officially only recognizes Kosovo as having a "special status" within Serbia--Kosovo was a weird precedent for NATO to set, but they haven't really followed up on it). | [
"Nagorno-Karabakh is a disputed territory, internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, but most of the region is governed by the Republic of Artsakh (formerly named Nagorno-Karabakh Republic), a \"de facto\" independent state with Armenian ethnic majority established on the basis of the Nagorno-Karabakh Auton... |
Were their any non-medieval jousts, for example in Japan or Ancient Rome? | OP, I was waiting for 3rd or 4th level comments to mention this, but since there aren't any responses...
I actually saw a jousting tournament at a marina in southern France (Nice?) but rather than two knights on horseback, it was two teams of two in small boats: one standing on the prow with a sheild & jousting pole, the other rowing. Per Wiki, I find that *[joute nautique](_URL_1_)* has not only existed in Southern France for centuries, but traces back to ancient [Egypt](_URL_0_), Greece and Rome. I'll leave further searching for you. | [
"Evidence of jousting is subsequently found in Ancient Greece. The Greeks introduced the practice into Sicily where the Latins, great lovers of all kinds of spectacle, immediately adopted it. Indeed, there are countless signs of jousting in the Roman Empire, especially during naumachia (literally \"naval combat\").... |
Has anyone come across any papers on attempts to elucidate how telomerase becomes upregulated in cancerous cells? | Try this one:
Wnt/β-catenin signaling regulates telomerase in stem cells and cancer cells.
Hoffmeyer K, Raggioli A, Rudloff S, Anton R, Hierholzer A, Del Valle I, Hein K, Vogt R, Kemler R.
Stem cells use Wnt signaling through receptors (Lgr5 for instance) which modulates ß-catenin activity. Without Wnt ß-catenin is degraded by the SCF-ßTrCP E3 ligase complex, but the moment Wnt binds to Lgr5 this degradation is inhibited, ß-catenin moves to the nucleus and triggers accumulation of TCF BCL9 and ß-catenin complexes in the nucleus.
This then leads to a whole variety of signaling events that are associated with stem cell phenotype and behaviour, including upregulated telomerase activity.
[EDIT]Cancer cells, especially as the disease progresses, display a lot of so-called stemness; a phenotype that closely resembles stem cells. Wnt-signaling plays an important part in many, many cancers, either directly by aberrant upregulation of Lgr5 or by disruption of the downstream regulation mechanisms. | [
"If increased telomerase activity is associated with malignancy, then possible cancer treatments could involve inhibiting its catalytic component, hTERT, to reduce the enzyme’s activity and cause cell death. Since normal somatic cells do not express TERT, telomerase inhibition in cancer cells can cause senescence a... |
why do certain franchising companies limit intentionally limit their geographic distribution? (i.e. why is there no steak n shake or in n out in the northeast?) | Part of bring a.franchise is maintaining uniformity of goods. You can't have an In N Out unless you get their meat, bread, etc. The parent company doesn't want to deal with shipping food across the country or setting up regional distribution. | [
"Regional distributors appeared, offering pressing and distribution deals to the small labels that would reach all of the shops in a region. Shops preferred to deal with only a handful of distributors and so the small distributors agreed to also distribute each other's stock, segregating the market by the geography... |
What were the economic causes of the Hundred Years War. And are there any parallels today? | Man I really wish I could give you a clear and direct answer but it has been a while since I spent any time on the 100 Years' War.
I'll try to sketch out some of the basic economic aspects of the war but a real late Medieval or Early Modern person can probably go further and do better.
First off, 1415 is not the beginning of the 100 Years War but rather the beginning of its last phase, marking the resumption of hostilities after a peace which had lasted since 1389. 1415 is the year that Henry V invades Northern France and things get rolling again.
Some economic aspects:
* The Wool Trade. England's economy was heavily dependent upon the wool trade which was intimately connected with Flanders (Belgium, the Netherlands and Northern France). Control or easy access to this area was essential to both the merchants in England and the Crown which taxed those merchants.
* Chevauchée. Much of the 100 Years War was in reality a series of ongoing raids by the English, rather than attempts to conquer and hold land. These raids allowed for the taking of booty, the sacking of town and were generally about making a profit and earning praise. The fact that these had ceased when peace fell was extremely unpopular among the aristocratic classes (both high and lower) who had a lot to gain from these military ventures. Moreover even the 'yeoman' class, the typical class of everyday soldiers, could stand to make a living off these events.
* Ransom. While war could certainly be bloody the 100 Years' War is more known for the number of nobles (including a French king) who were captured than who were killed. Capturing a noble was a great way to make bank. I recall reading a court case where a French night found himself captured three times in one day and the various claimants of his ransom were disputing in court. Warfare could be a great way to bring in money to the English economy in this way as well.
* Banking. While warfare could generate income for nobles it was, in fact, incredibly expensive for the Crown overall. Edward III pawned the crown jewels to Italian bankers, for instance, in order to raise cash to campaign in Northern France. Credit certainly became scarce and there was always a fear that the crown would default on its loans or worse that race-riots would target Italian bankers (as happened under Richard II).
So those are some of the economic elements. I would imagine that the issue of credit and banking is what the lecture was talking about but again a real expert would probably be able to answer you.
Some other places to look would be:
Jonathan Sumption's *The Hundred Years' War* is huge (3 BIG volumes so far) but it also narrative and a good read. The caveat, it is not complete yet, which means it doesn't actually get up to 1415!
C. T. Allmand's book *The Hundred Years War* (noticing a trend?) is much smaller and easier to read but not nearly as exhaustive.
For a great primary source check out Jean Froissart. It is in translation in penguin, cheap.
Good luck! | [
"The Hundred Years' War had begun in 1337 as an inheritance dispute over the French throne, interspersed with occasional periods of relative peace. Nearly all the fighting had taken place in France, and the English army's use of \"chevauchée\" tactics (destructive \"scorched earth\" raids) had devastated the econom... |
the problem with hipsters | Hipsters invented hipster hate as a way to make themselves appear more underground and oppressed. It is my belief that the majority of hipster hate posts are originated by hipsters.... | [
"Greif's efforts puts the term \"hipster\" into a socioeconomic framework rooted in the petit bourgeois tendencies of a youth generation unsure of their future social status. The cultural trend is indicative of a social structure with heightened economic anxiety and lessened class mobility.\n",
"Mark Greif, a fou... |
when we call or write our representatives in congress, what incentive do they have to listen to us instead of just doing what they wanted to do in the first place? | Because you voted them in and will choose whether or not they get re-elected in the next election. If your representative doesn't represent you very well, you're much less likely to vote for them next time. | [
"Even if Congress is composed of representatives elected by the people, it does not follow, except in a highly qualified sense, that in every exercise of its power of inquiry, the people are exercising their right to information. The members of respondent Committees should not invoke as justification in their exerc... |
What exactly is asthma? Like what is it, how does it form, and how severe can it get | Asthma is, essentially, a chronic inflammatory disease. After, being exposed to an allergen, your body sensitizes itself to that pathogen, so that in the future it garners a large immune response. In the early phase, you have cells that release a substance called histamine, this causes bronchoconstriction (basically your airways getting smaller) and make it difficult for you to breathe all of your air out. So you get hyper inflated lungs and people tend to hyperventilate. After this there is usually a later phase called an inflammatory phase that involves swelling of the airways. So you get airways that are smaller, and are more prone to collapse.
Asthma ranges from mildly severe to being extremely severe. Luckily we have pretty good medications that help prevent attacks, and quickly treat them when they do occur. | [
"Asthma is a common long-term inflammatory disease of the airways of the lungs. It is characterized by variable and recurring symptoms, reversible airflow obstruction, and easily triggered bronchospasms. Symptoms include episodes of wheezing, coughing, chest tightness, and shortness of breath. These may occur a few... |
I just read that major works by Cicero, Aristotle, etc. are missing. How often do these things get found? Any hope of excavating a library? ... | Absolutely there is - hope of excavating a library, that is - and new works continue to be discovered, not on a timetable, but regularly. The Greeks and Romans generally used papyrus scrolls to record works of literature, and, in most places where the Greeks and Romans lived, papyrus and linen don't preserve well - but there are some major exceptions. One is in Egypt, where the dry desert preserves practically everything; tens of thousands of documents and literary works have been dug out of [a rubbish heap at Oxyrhynchus](_URL_7_) - and there's no reason to think that Oxyrhynchus is in any way unique - and Egyptians tended to reuse scrolls, including literary works, to wrap mummies, which preserves the text quite well indeed. The most important recent discoveries I know of came from mummy cartonnage: a [fourth poem by Sappho](_URL_5_), published in 2005, and a large fraction of a [book of poetry by Posidippus](_URL_6_), published in 2001.
(Edit: I just saw an article in /r/archaeology discussing [a new discovery of 4500-year-old papyrus texts in Egypt](_URL_2_), including a *diary* from one of the builders of the Great Pyramid. This may not be as exciting as finding Euripides' lost *Telephus* would be, but it's still really neat - and suggests what other sorts of things are still out there beneath the sands.)
Another exception is Pompeii and Herculaneum, where [we did excavate a library!](_URL_3_) The papyrus scrolls - burnt and charred - survived under the volcanic ash; it was once thought impossible to unroll and read scrolls like that, but science finds a way. Since many wealthy Romans had private libraries, further excavations in those cities - if Italy can find the funding, [which is doubtful](_URL_1_) - are very likely to dig up more collections of this sort.
A third way new texts can be discovered is by using modern technology to read *erased* texts from existing parchments that were cleaned off and reused for other purposes. An example of this is the [Archimedes Palimpsest](_URL_0_), a medieval prayer book which reused pages from (lost, and now rediscovered) treatises from Archimedes, speeches from Athenian orators, etc.
So yeah, tl;dr: new texts are appearing all the time, and the development of new *technologies* for reading burned and erased texts means that we're entering into a new age of textual discovery. [Science!](_URL_4_) | [
"The Library of Alexandria was the most important collection of ancient knowledge ever assembled. The building stood for six hundred years and contained more than half a million manuscripts. Then suddenly it vanished. No trace of this literary treasure has ever been unearthed.\n",
"BULLET::::- The Library of Aris... |
What happens if an electron met the nucleus of an atom? | _URL_0_
It has nothing to do with temperature. Electrons are already in the lowest energy state they can occupy relative to the nucleus. | [
"In the quantum mechanical model of the electron, there is a non-zero probability of finding the electron within the nucleus. During the internal conversion process, the wavefunction of an inner shell electron (usually an \"s\" electron) is said to penetrate the volume of the atomic nucleus. When this happens, the ... |
What was the medical process like when an organ displayed symptoms (e,g gall or kidney stones, liver disease, stomach ulcers) back in the Medieval times? | One of our most interesting sources for medieval medicine is *Bald's Leechbook*, an Anglo-Saxon medical textbook of sorts, likely dating from the late ninth century and potentially a result of Alfred the Great's literary and educational reforms. The book itself is the only surviving copy, and was written by a scribe called Cild on Bald's behalf.
The text itself is split into two sections, dealing with external and internal maladies and afflictions respectively. As one might expect from an early medieval source, much of the 'medicine' therein is of a 'folk' nature and involves ritual almost as often as it does actual remedy, coming dangerously close in some places to the kind of 'witchcraft' proscibed by contemporary penitentials like the *Scrifboc*. Some afflictions, for example, may be caused by Elves and cured by carving runes into a ceremonial dagger hilt. However, we must as always be wary of presentism and accusing the Anglo-Saxons of a 'primitive' or even dangerous superstition or lack of medical awareness. The *Leechbook* appears to be the result of a genuine attempt to compile the best and most effective medical treatments from a variety of Anglo-Saxon, British, Roman and Greek sources, and we must assume that the cures it provides appeared to be in some way effective at the time, even if only through the power of placebo. Indeed, the text gained some passing fame in 2015 when researchers at Nottingham found that one of its cures for dealing with an eye infection was surprisingly effecacious against antibiotic-resistant MRSA.
Many different afflictions of organs are discussed, particularly of the *maw* and *wamb* (stomach and intestines) and the liver, which is discussed in surprising detail. Many remedies appear designed to flush out an organ, or to reduce swellings. Crushed poppy seeds in wine or in a poultice are regularly prescribed as a painkiller. Wormwood is a particularly popular panacea, one which is somewhat born out by modern medicine, as is vinegar. Refined honey mixed with vinegar is prescribed for an 'evil humour' of the upper belly, which may indicate ulcers. For symptoms of 'maw' pain which may be gallstones, great importance is made of diet: fatty meats are to be avoided, bread and water and fruit should be eaten instead. Vinegar and oil should also be ingested.
In cases of liver disease, the *Leechbook* recommends forgoing medical treatment until diet is properly examined, and especially until fat is given up. Then a medicine of dill, wormwood, marchseed, pepper and costmary should be taken. Vinegar and wine and other 'cure-alls' should be avoided.
An online archive of the *Leechbook* can be found [here](_URL_0_). | [
"human organs affected, rather than the disease itself, was a revolutionary development at that time. It contains insights that in some cases did not enter the medical knowledge of Europe until the twentieth century.\n",
"In Medieval Hungary, the Inquisition recorded the trials of pagans. A document from the 12th... |
if you want to heat an oven or stove to 175 degrees, does turning it way up to 400 degrees make it get to 175 faster? | For an electric oven, no. The temperature control is a thermostat, not an accelerator. If the oven is below the set point, the element is on; otherwise it's off. It will take the same amount of time regardless of the setting.
For a stove, it depends. A gas stove uses valves to control how much gas comes out, so turning it up will heat the pan faster. A regular electric stove turns the element on more if you turn the knob higher, so it will also heat faster. An infrared or ceramic cooktop works with a thermostat, as described above, so turning it up will not speed it up. | [
"When there is a high temperature differential (e.g., when an air-source heat pump is used to heat a house with an outside temperature of, say, 0 °C (32 °F)), it takes more work to move the same amount of heat to indoors than on a milder day. Ultimately, due to Carnot efficiency limits, the heat pump's performance ... |
How are scientists sure that the theory of a singularity at the centre of a black hole, is correct? | > how are scientists so sure that black holes have a singularity where all our understanding of physics breaks down rather than saying that the theory may have inaccuracies?
When they say "all our understanding of physics breaks down" is the same in this context as "the theory may have inaccuracies." "The laws of physics break down" or some similar variant is a pretty common hyperbole in this and other scenarios, but what is really meant is that the laws of physics we use break down. Inside a black hole, it's likely that a theory of quantum gravity will dominate, and we don't have a working (and experimentally verified) theory of quantum gravity.
*Classically* the existence of singularities is inescapable. The Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems guarantee that a singularity will form under reasonably physical conditions that come with the formation of a black hole in general relativity. However, nature is not fully classical. I'd wager most physicists working near the field suspect that this singularity will disappear completely in a full theory of quantum gravity. Physicists don't like singularities hanging around in their theories. | [
"In simple terms, he believes that the singularity in Einstein's field equation at the Big Bang is only an apparent singularity, similar to the well-known apparent singularity at the event horizon of a black hole. The latter singularity can be removed by a change of coordinate system, and Penrose proposes a differe... |
eli 5 if there is so much junk and satellites orbiting earth, how come we never see any of it in the background of pictures taken from space? | Because there *isn't* that much.
Yes there is a lot of it, but the amount of space is *huge*. You're talking about a density like one Volkswagen Beetle in the state of Texas. | [
"This is a list of satellite map images with missing or unclear data. Some locations on free, publicly viewable satellite map services have such issues due to having been intentionally digitally obscured or blurred for various reasons. For example, Westchester County, New York asked Google to blur potential terrori... |
What's past the cosmological horizon? | By definition, no; the observable universe encompasses all that we can have any information about. But there's no particular reason to imagine it would be much different from the local area--it's just impossible to confirm. | [
"The cosmological horizon (also called the particle horizon or the light horizon) is the maximum distance from which particles can have traveled to the observer in the age of the Universe. This horizon represents the boundary between the observable and the unobservable regions of the Universe. The existence, proper... |
why couldn't data be transmitted back to us beyond the event horizon of a black hole, i understand gravity prevents light from escaping, but how, and would it be a similar scenario for data? | Well, first off, the data would be travelling as some frequency of light, like radio. So, consider them one and the same.
The way it prevents light from escaping is that gravity actually bends space. Light travels along space, and when [space gets curved](_URL_0_), the light has a longer journey and that journey takes a little longer.
In the case of a black hole, space gets bent so much that the light can't get out -- [kind of like a deep, deep hole](_URL_1_). | [
"Ever since Stephen Hawking suggested information is lost in an evaporating black hole once it passes through the event horizon and is inevitably destroyed at the singularity, and that this can turn pure quantum states into mixed states, some physicists have wondered if a complete theory of quantum gravity might be... |
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