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If space is ever so expanding, do we seen new/farther everyday we take photos of the outer edges of space? Do we add on to “observable universe” everyday too? | Kind of.
So, the universe as a whole does not have a boundary. The expansion of the universe is not the expansion of the *edge* of the universe, but rather everything getting further away from everything else - it's not expanding at the edges, it's expanding *everywhere*. In fact, the evidence is somewhat pointing towards the universe being *infinite* in size.
However, the *observable* universe *is* expanding. The edge of the observable universe represents the distance that light could have travelled since the beginning of the universe. The universe is about 13 billion years old, so the light from the edge of the observable universe is the light that has travelled about 13 billion light years (although the universe has continued to expand since the light was emitted and the images we see from this light are from objects that are now much more than 13 billion light years away).
This means that the images we see of the very edge of the observable universe are images of the very very young universe. This is the universe before there was any structure - it was a dense, uniform, opaque fluid of energy and particles. Because the universe was opaque, we can't actually see the light from the very beginning of the universe. Instead, we see the light that was emitted just as the universe got cool enough and sparse enough to become transparent. This light forms a background behind everything else in the universe. It has been redshifted over billions of years into microwave frequencies, which is why we call it the Cosmic Microwave Background, or the CMB.
So, as the observable universe expands, what happens is that the CMB radiation that we see is from slightly further away. What's happening is that the CMB radiation was emitted *everywhere*, but because it takes time for light to reach us, every second we're seeing CMB radiation that was emitted from gas about a light-second more distant than what we received the previous second.
This means we are technically seeing new parts of the observable universe, but it's not like we're seeing new galaxies turn up - we're just seeing slightly more distant "slices" of the CMB. The CMB is far too uniform over time for us to really see any change over decades though. | [
"Trivia questions and urban legends often claim certain constructed objects or effects are so large they are visible from outer space. For example, a giant beaver dam in Canada was described as \"so large it is visible from outer space.\" \"Field and Stream\", a Canadian Magazine, wrote, \"How big? Big enough to be... |
Any good non-Roman sources on the Roman military? Talking about tactics, formations, appearance, etc. | Polybius is a Greek writing to Greeks trying to explain how Rome came to dominate the Mediterranean. His 6th book is an analysis of Rome's political and military practices systematically including the structure of the legion, recruitment, provisioning, layout of the camp etc.
The rest of it is a military history starting with the 1st Punic War down to 146, the year in which Rome destroyed Carthage and Corinth.
Polybius lived for years in Rome as a hostage in the house of Paulus and apparently traveled widely in Italy and was friends with Scipio Aemelianus, so he probably has a fairly good idea what he's talking about.
[LacusCurtius](_URL_0_) has the Loeb translation up. | [
"The focus below is primarily on Roman tactics – the \"how\" of their approach to battle, and how it stacked up against a variety of opponents over time. It does not attempt detailed coverage of things like army structure or equipment. Various battles are summarized to illustrate Roman methods with links to detaile... |
why do cuts get white when you take a shower? | It's a bodily fluid that mostly contains white blood cells and vitamins. It's to help speed the process of tissue/skin repair. | [
"Another common problem is color bleeding. For example, washing a red shirt with white underwear can result in pink underwear. Often only similar colors are washed together to avoid this problem, which is lessened by cold water and repeated washings. Sometimes this blending of colors is seen as a selling point, as ... |
why are firefighters called to the scene of an emergency even if there is no fire involved? | You could almost call firefighters the engineers of the emergency services. They carry ladders, lifting gear, cutting tools, winches etc... | [
"Firefighters work closely with other emergency response agencies such as the police and emergency medical service. A firefighter's role may overlap with both. Fire investigators or fire marshals investigate the cause of a fire. If the fire was caused by arson or negligence, their work will overlap with law enforce... |
How much of an impact did the ending of slavery have for the emancipation of women and women's rights in general? (USA) | Well, the idea of giving black *men* the vote gained traction pretty quickly; this was actually used to try and suppress the Women's Rights groups by telling them that they should be quiet and wait as this was "the Negro's hour." Elizabeth Cady Stanton took a somewhat dim view of this idea on the grounds that black *women* were going to be denied their rights, and expressed her views on the matter in [a letter to the National Anti-Slavery Standard](_URL_0_) (scroll down; it's the third document in the PDF.) | [
"Even as women played crucial roles in abolitionism, the movement simultaneously helped stimulate women's-rights efforts. A full 10 years before the Seneca Falls Convention, the Grimkés were travelling and lecturing about their experiences with slavery. As Gerda Lerner says, the Grimkés understood their actions' gr... |
how does a strong currency affect a country's economy? | a strong currency makes your exports comparably more expensive. and vice versa.
Consider this. The canadian dollar is currently in the shitter. but canadians have not all had their annual salary adjusted. So their product cost in canadian dollars is the same. But to americans, due to the favorable exchange, you can buy a canadian product for less US dollars.
| [
"BULLET::::7. Economic strength of a country: In general, high economic growth rates are not conducive to the local currency's performance in the foreign exchange market in the short term, but in the long run, they strongly support the strong momentum of the local currency.\n",
"A strong currency helps domestic i... |
What did the ancient people that built Stonehenge do when it was cloudy on the Solstices? | Since this involves a time before written records, this may not be the best subreddit for the question. At the same time, since it is involves a time before written records, it is largely impossible to answer your question. I can say that with my experience involving winter in Britain and Ireland, the average day was indeed cloudy, but the sun more often than not appeared on the horizon as it rose, shined for a few minutes, and then rose into the bank of clouds. Stonehenge only "works" at the solstices at the moments of sunrise and sunset; not later when the sun is behind the clouds. | [
"The prehistoric monument of Stonehenge has long been studied for its possible connections with ancient astronomy. The site is aligned in the direction of the sunrise of the summer solstice and the sunset of the winter solstice. Archaeoastronomers have made a range of further claims about the site's connection to a... |
if pets require protective collars to allow wounds to heal properly how do wild animals repair wounds? | They die a lot of the time from those types of wounds. The cones are generally used so the animal won't pick out the sutures. Any animal in the wild would probably die from a wound that needed sutures anyway. | [
"In order to prevent the animal from irritating a wound or removing stitches while self grooming, Elizabethan collars are used to either prevent the animal from licking/biting its wound or using its limbs to scratch their head or ears. The collar can also be used to restrain animals with self destructing habits, ei... |
Why did the crafters of the various U.S. State Constitutions (except Nebraska) choose to create bicameral legislatures? Was this simply a matter of mirroring the federal Congress, or was there a prevailing political theory that suggested bicameralism was better than unicameralism? | Political Science major, worked in my college's Political Science Department performing spatial analyses of electoral data for professors studying electoral malapportionment.
Originally state legislatures were designed similarly to the federal legislature, with lower house districts based on population while upper house district based on territory. For example, the 1901 Alabama State Constitution divided the Alabama state legislature as such:
> The legislature consisted of 106 representatives and 35 senators for the State's 67 counties and senatorial districts; each county was entitled to at least one representative; each senate district could have only one member; and no county could be divided between two senate districts.
This setup eventually led to some pretty egregious cases of malapportionment as rural areas depopulated and legislators proved unwilling to update electoral boundaries. In Alabama the most populous district was 41 times larger than the smallest district. These levels of malapportionment were by no means unique to Alabama, in an October 14, 1964 report to his constituents, Congressman Morris K. Udall of Arizona wrote of other outrageous cases of electoral malapportionment in other state legislatures:
> \*\* In Connecticut one House district has 191 people; another, 81,000.
>
> \*\* In New Hampshire one township with 3 (three!) people has a state assemblyman; this is the same representation given another district with 3,244. The vote of a resident of the first town is 108,000 percent more powerful at the Capitol.
>
> \*\* In Utah the smallest district has 164 people, the largest 32,280 (28 times the population of the other). But each has one vote in the House.
>
> \*\* In Vermont the smallest district has 36 people, the largest 35,000 a ratio of almost 1,000 to 1.
>
> \*\* In California the 14,000 people of one small county have one State senator to speak for them; so do the 6 million people of Los Angeles County. It takes 430 Los Angelenos to muster the same influence on a State senator that one person wields in the smaller district.
>
> \*\* In Idaho the smallest Senate district has 951 people; the largest, 93,400.
>
> \*\* Nevada's 17 State senators represent as many as 127,000 or as few as 568 people -- a ratio of 224 to 1.
>
> \*\* In Arizona, Mohave County's 7,700 people have two State senators; so do the 663,000 people of Maricopa. The ratio is 86 to 1
These state legislative districts were eventually overturned by the Supreme Court in *Reynolds v. Sims, 1964*. Following the principal of "one man one vote" previously established under *Baker v. Carr, 1962*, the Court found that "legislators represent people, not trees or acres," and deemed that state legislative districts should be constructed to be roughly equal in population.
[_URL_0_](_URL_0_) (Reynolds v. Sims, 1964)
[_URL_1_](_URL_1_) (Rep. Morris K. Udall's report to his constituents)
[_URL_3_](_URL_3_) (1901 Alabama State Constitution, Article IX concerns representation of the state legislature)
[_URL_2_](_URL_2_) (A nice little summary of Reynolds v. Sims, 1964)
Edit: Deleted the second instance of ‘egregious’ | [
"Government powerlessness led to the Convention of 1787 which proposed a revised constitution with a two–chamber or \"bicameral\" congress. Smaller states argued for equal representation for each state. The two-chamber structure had functioned well in state governments. A compromise plan, the Connecticut Compromise... |
If time is nonexistent for a photon, how can it be emitted from something and never be absorbed? | Time isn't quite non-existent for a photon. A photon simply has no perspective in the first place; there's no way of putting a coordinate system on the Universe to describe things as a photon would see it. In Science-Speak, there's no such thing as a photon's frame of reference, because there's no such thing as a frame in which a photon can be at rest. Photons are only able to exist in other observers' reference frames and in those frames, photons travel at a definitive speed, the speed of light. | [
"The process of emission and absorption of photons seemed to demand that the conservation of energy will hold at best on average. If a wave containing exactly one photon passes over some atoms, and one of them absorbs it, that atom needs to tell the others that they can't absorb the photon anymore. But if the atoms... |
Why have infirmaries at Auschwitz? | I'm a licensed tour guide at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial. Not Auschwitz, but the general policy for the infirmaries was the same throughout the concentration camp system.
The purpose of the concentration camp infirmaries was multi-faceted, and they were used both as sites of convalescence and healing, as well as murder and torture.
The SS doctors who ran the infirmaries were often poorly trained or not very well qualified (a notable exception being Mengele, who was a respected figure in his field at the time), and in any case had little to no interest in treating ill or weak prisoners. The day-to-day seeing of patients was actually done by prisoner-doctors. In many concentration camps (certainly in Sachsenhausen), for a number of years it was strictly forbidden for any prisoner who had actually been a doctor to work in the infirmary as a prisoner-doctor. This meant that the "prisoner-doctors" often had absolutely no clue what they were doing. In Sachsenhausen and throughout the concentration camp system that policy would change in 1942, when the war was turning against Germany and the slave labour was suddenly not as disposable as it had once been. From 1942, prisoners who had been doctors before their lives in the camp (often much more competent and qualified than the SS doctors) were allowed to work in the infirmary. They had to tread a fine line between helping prisoners to survive and not being seen by the SS to be too soft on other prisoners, keeping them in the infirmary when they could be out doing slave labour. Even after 1942, the level of medical care was nowhere near adequate and the shelves were rarely stocked with enough essential medicines. Furthermore, in the second half of the war the camps became increasingly overcrowded, compounding the problems of unhygienic conditions, malnutrition and debilitating slave labour which caused the disease and illness within the camp to ratchet upwards. At this point, even if the SS had wanted to give proper medical care to all the prisoners (which they did not), it would have been very difficult to do so. The best care generally went to well-connected prisoners within the camp hierarchy, i.e. the Kapos who ran the camp. As Primo Levi mentioned, many prisoners did not necessarily want to go into the infirmary to get adequate medical care, but to get out of doing a day's slave labour - which could be life-saving.
The infirmaries also had a propaganda purpose for the Nazis, who would occasionally allow visitors into the camps, either from Axis nations or even from neutral or enemy countries. They would often carry out staged tours for visitors in which they would be led to select areas of the camp. The infirmary could be used to try to prove that, actually, these camps were "normal" places of detention where inmates could receive medical care.
The SS doctors were perhaps more likely to kill patients than they were to help them. As the camps became increasingly overcrowded, they became full with Muselmänner (the concentration camp slang for prisoners so ill and weak that they were no longer really human anymore but walking skeletons. The translation is "Muslims," apparently in reference to the fact that hunched-over, crawling prisoners resembled Muslims at prayer). Heinrich Himmler's solution was Action 14f13, a program to murder prisoners that were, in Himmler's words, "excess ballast." In other words no longer able to work because of the debilitating conditions within the camps. This operation began in 1941, originally carried out by the same doctors who had been murdering mentally ill and disabled Germans during Action T4. Later the Camp SS doctors carried on this procedure of their own initiative, murdering primarily through lethal injection.
The infirmaries were places of quarantine when deadly diseases broke out, e.g. typhus, tuberculosis, and other diseases which could affect not just the prisoners, but the SS guards as well. Often prisoners were shut away in a certain wing of the infirmary (although sometimes they were locked in a few specific barracks within the camp) and left there to die.
The infirmary would also be used by the SS to carry out gruesome medical experiments on human beings. They were additionally used to castrate homosexual prisoners.
To answer the question of "why didn't the Nazis send all the sick people at Auschwitz to the gas chamber?" The fact is that often they did. The SS would sometimes go to the infirmary and select every prisoner that was no longer capable of work and send them to their deaths. But policy fluctuated with the changing circumstances of war and the various (often contradictory) policy goals of leading figures in the SS, e.g. Himmler, Oswald Pohl, Theodor Eicke. Sometimes they were more worried about preserving their labour force, or at least keeping them alive to get just a bit more labour out of them. Sometimes they were even thinking about perhaps retaining some prisoners so they could hold them as hostages to make some sort of deal with the Allies. The fate of the prisoners inside the infirmary often depended on events that were taking place far outside of the infirmary's walls.
The best book about the concentration camp system, and one which spends a good deal of time talking about the infirmaries, is Nicholaus Wachsmann's "KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps." It just came out this year and I really can't recommend it highly enough. A more Sachsenhausen-specific source (not what you're asking for but where I've gotten some of my information for this post) is "Medical Care and Crime: The Infirmary at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp" by Günter Morsch and Astrid Ley. | [
"\"Survivor syndrome\", also known as \"concentration camp syndrome\" (or \"KZ syndrome\" on account of the German term \"\"), are terms which have been used to describe the reactions and behaviors of people who have survived massive and adverse events, such as the Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking, and the HIV/AIDS e... |
Is the Revolt of 1857 a War of Independence or just a major insurrection? | The problem with the violence of 1857 is that it had so many meanings, so many in fact that categorising it as one thing or another is almost impossible. Indeed, Chris Bayly, one of the most prominent historians of the mutiny has stated "it was not one, it was many," which in some respects might seem to be an admission of defeat but does help to do justice to the sheer variety of the characterisations of the rebellion. It was constitutional, racial, religious, the first modern war of information and a way of economic dislocation all at the same time.
The first thing I will say is that one thing it certainly was not was a war of independence. The argument that the rebellion represents the first flowering of Indian nationalism and leads directly to the independence of India in 1947 is a long one. Probably the most influential statement of this would be from V.D. Savarkar in his history of the rebellion "the First Indian War of Independence". He argued as early as 1909 that the mutineers of 1857 might be regarded as noble patriots, fighting in a good cause, pro rege and pro patria, for the king and the motherland, for swaraj and swadesh," while drawing on the writings of European nationalists like Mazzini. He chose to see the mutiny as a moment when Indians regardless of race and caste recognised their Indian-ness chose to make common cause to drive the British from India. While that is all well and more recent historians have, in my view wisely, decided to look at the above statement as an ideological statement of the Indian independence movement in 1909 rather than a statement of historical reality.
This then begs the question, where did the impression of the mutiny as a nationalist struggle come from in the beginning. The answer is actually quite simple -- it came from the British themselves. The summation of the British judge at the trial of Badhur Shah (the last Mughal and leader of the rebellion) sums this up. That British rule had created the conditions for European style national consciousness -- "Brahman and Mussulman met here as it were on neutral ground; they have had, in the army, one common brotherhood of profession, the same dress, the same rewards, the same objects to be arrived at by the same means”. This argument was then picked up by people like Sayyid Ahmad Khan (an Islamic Indian philosopher) amongst others.
It would therefore seem that we have reached an impasse. If the rebellion was not India's first nationalist uprising, then what was it? That is a question that any historian could write a very long book on, but I will put forward one interpretation made by Faisal Devji about what the rebellion meant to the troops that participated in it. He argues that the revolt of the sepoys was a legitimist revolt which can be attributed to the feeling that the British had broken their moral obligations as Indian rulers.One way that this can be viewed is through a concept called the “empire of Distinctions.” Whereby the just ruler was meant to preserve and contain the distinctions within a deeply heterogeneous but just society. The soldiers believed that the British were trying to impose cultural and religious homogeneity on them. One thing that particularly drew their ire was the aggressive Christian preaching – something that Charles Grant (a missionary) characterised as “the introduction of light,”to darkened Asiatic despotism. This, was received especially poorly by the soldiers, with one officer commenting that his troops believed that they would “be compelled to eat the same food… that they would likewise be compelled to embrace one faith.” Such a status which the soldiers viewed as being little different from slavery and at least partly explains the position of Bahadur Shah at the head of the revolt, as an exemplar of a religiously tolerant and therefore legitimate constitutional ruler. Therefore, the decision to revolt was based on the idea that they would suffer for each other even though they had no intention of sharing religious or cultural practices. An example of this can be seen in the probably apocryphal story about the greased gun cartridges, which, it could be argued, only exists so as to establish an equivalence and commonality between the Hindus and Muslims.
The final bit that I will discuss here is economic dislocation. British rule from men like James Mill (the father of J.S. Mill was predicated on improvement) and a large part of this assumed that if British conditions were introduced then the Indians would begin to behave more like the British -- i.e. rationally. One of the main ways they did this was through the introduction of British style single title to land. This often had interesting consequences for the Zamindar class in general. For instance when proprietary title was introduced in Bengal it paved the way for many Zamindar Rajputs to be unable to charge rents as they had before. The problem with this is that they did not have enough land themselves to live on comfortably, and if they began to farm they would sink in caste status. As such the rajput class of north India became increasingly dependent on remittances from their sons in the army, but even then this source of income was threatened by the introduction of Sikhs into the army after the annexation of Punjab in 1842. While this community was relatively small in number they are disproportionately important because they were the local magnates in their communities. They provided the organisational know how to make the rebellion self sustaining while at the same time providing a link to their sons who were involved in the Dehli mutiny.
Now these are just two isolated but linked case studies, but there are many more out there, and an illustration of how the violence of 1857 defies categorisation. | [
"The Murree Rebellion of 1857, sometimes termed a war of Independence, was part of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. It was a rebel skirmish between the tribes surrounding the Hill Station of Murree (in modern-day Pakistan) and the colonial government of British India. Resentment toward colonial rule had been mounting ... |
Coin from 1919; can somebody identify? | That's a British 3 pence coin featuring king George V. It appears to be of fine condition and could probably fetch anything from a pound up to 3-4 pounds at the most. An uncirculated version of the same coin would have been worth around 10 pounds. | [
"Coins were first issued in 1952 in denominations of 1, 3, 5, 10, 25, and 50 bani, with aluminum bronze for 1, 3, and 5 bani, and cupronickel for 10, 25, and 50 bani. These coins featured the state arms and name \"Republica Populara Româna\".\n",
"Coins were issued in 1934 in denominations of 1-, 2, 3-, 5-, 10-, ... |
A question about how colonization affected the languages of Africa. | This is in reference to the "how the languages are faring" question only, and is currentish info; if it's violating the 20-year rule too badly, my apologies (I trust it will meet a speedy end in that case!):
There are many, *many* languages in Africa; some of them are thriving (e.g., Yoruba, Kinyarwanda), others not. For *basic* information about current language situation, you might find the [Ethnologue section for Africa](_URL_1_) useful -- while the specific population figures for many of the languages will be off a bit (because of sampling error, the agenda of the organization (missionaries), and some out-of-date-ness in some cases etc.), it'll give you a general idea. If you move the cursor over regions of the map, it'll give you pop-up boxes with relative "vitality" counts for languages, and you can drill down to individual countries, etc. The [World Atlas of Languages](_URL_0_) may be useful as well, although it's focused more on specific linguistic characteristics.
| [
"Throughout the long multilingual history of the African continent, African languages have been subject to phenomena like language contact, language expansion, language shift and language death. A case in point is the Bantu expansion, in which Bantu-speaking peoples expanded over most of Sub-Equatorial Africa, disp... |
how do people find out who a reddit user is in real life? | Probably not unless you mention doing something very illegal that warrants notifying authorities who can seize ip logs & shit. | [
"When various users answer a question they are awarded a certain number of points, the person who asked the question can then select the best answer and will be awarded points. This user can then ask questions on the website using the points that he/she was awarded. The users with most points are ranked daily with ... |
Do Coronal Mass Ejections have a significant impact on the life of a star? | I assume you mean in terms of mass lost, and the answer is a resounding "NO". The mass lost in a typical CME from our Sun is [of the order of 10^15 grams](_URL_0_), while the mass of our Sun is of the order 10^33 grams. So every CME from our Sun releases approx 0.000000000000000001% of the Sun's mass.
In human terms, if you weigh 100Kg (220lbs) then it would be like losing 1^-13 grams in mass... which, if my math is correct, is about 0.00000000015% the mass of the average human hair. | [
"The ultra-fast coronal mass ejection of August 1972 is suspected of triggering magnetic fuses on naval mines during the Vietnam War, and would have been a life-threatening event to Apollo astronauts if it had occurred during a mission to the Moon.\n",
"The first detection of a Coronal mass ejection (CME) as such... |
What did the diet of North American 19th century lumberjacks consist of? | from Roy B. Clarkson's description of a logging camp in West Virginia circa 1909:
> A typical evening meal consisted of boiled or roast beef or pork or steak, turnips, hanovers, tomatoes, potatoes, beans, hash, "light" bread or corn bread, and two different kinds of pie ( quartered) and cake and cookies. The men were encouraged to eat all they wanted, and at the end o a hard day's work their appetites were prodigious...
>
> A typical breakfast consisted of hot biscuits, steak ( well done or rare) fried eggs, fried potatoes, oatmeal, cake, donuts, prunes or other fruit, and coffee. It was not uncommon for a man to eat half a dozen eggs along with generous helps of other "vittles"...
>
> One of the ways the men had of relieving the boredom of their existence was to invent nicknames for each other and for the objects around them. Thus, biscuits were "cat-heads", donuts were "fried holes" or "doorknobs", meat was "sow-belly" or "long-hog", light bread was "punk", milk was "cow" or "white line", sugar was "sand train", prunes were "Rocky Mt. Huckleberries", coffee was "java or "Arbuckles", apple butter was "Pennsylvania Salve", cooks were called "boilers", women cooks were rare but were called "she-boilers" or "Open bottom cooks".
>
> *Tumult on the Mountains* (1964) p.63-65
Clarkson said nothing about lunch, but you suspect that there was enough consumed in two meals to equal three, and that if a man stuffed something into his pocket at breakfast for a noon break nothing would be said.. He also noted that a good cook made about $3.00 a day, and the loggers $1.75 to $2.00: but the cook worked seven days a week.
& #x200B; | [
"The original Oʼodham diet consisted of regionally available wild game, insects, and plants. Through foraging, Oʼodham ate a variety of regional plants, such as: ironwood seed, honey mesquite, hog potato, and organ-pipe cactus fruit. While the Southwestern United States did not have an ideal climate for cultivating... |
If I was in the center between two planets with the exact same gravity, would I be ripped apart? Or would I experience weightlessness? | Whether or not gravity can rip you apart depends on the tidal forces or differences in gravitational attraction across a body's length. So the answer is "it depends." If you [make a graph](_URL_0_) of -1/(r+1)^2 - 1/(r-1)^2 you'd see the potential does have a maximum in between the two point sources which means you'd be safe if you were small enough.
For a single attractive source, the tidal force (for a target body of length L) is approximately L/r^3 and it would be interesting to see what modification to this you'd need for a body balanced in the center. Of course the center is unstable so a push or shove in any direction will make you fall one way or the other, then you can use the L/r^3 equation to figure it out ignoring the source you didn't fall into. | [
"The pull of gravity in LEO is only slightly less than on the Earth's surface. This is because the distance to LEO from the Earth's surface is far less than the Earth's radius. However, an object in orbit is, by definition, in free fall, since there is no force holding it up. As a result objects in orbit, including... |
why are some corn fields allowed to go brown before they are harvested? | Don't worry, you're not seeing waste, its perfectly normal. You're seeing the corn plant, not the corn ear. The plant dries down and turns brown before the grain moisture gets low enough to harvest and store. If you harvest corn while its wet and store it, it will rot. What you're seeing is perfectly normal. Most corn for cattle actually gets harvested early, while there's still some green on the plant. | [
"Field corn primarily grown for livestock feed and ethanol production is allowed to mature fully before being shelled off the cob before being stored in silos, pits, bins or grain \"flats\". Field corn can also be harvested as high-moisture corn, shelled off the cob and piled and packed like silage for fermentation... |
why would we ever care about the distinction of a newtonian fluid and a non-newtonian fluid? (i put this with an engineering flair because i want to know if there’s any practical use, not theoretical) | Imagine you're trying to fill a mold with a material. You'd likely want to do that as fast as you can. Well, what happens if the material doesn't behave like a Newtonian fluid? It becomes much more difficult to predict how the mold will fill without extensive experimentation.
You can also get neat things like _URL_1_ which lets us do _URL_0_ | [
"Newtonian fluids are the simplest mathematical models of fluids that account for viscosity. While no real fluid fits the definition perfectly, many common liquids and gases, such as water and air, can be assumed to be Newtonian for practical calculations under ordinary conditions. However, non-Newtonian fluids are... |
Would supersonic air flowing across a wing fixed to the floor in a lab produce a constant sonic boom? | A sonic boom is the perceptual phenomenon caused by the passage of a shock wave over the human ear. Every object that is going faster than the speed of sound in a medium has an associated shock wave attached to or very near the object. This shock wave is always there once the object reaches a speed faster than Mach 1. In a stationary wind tunnel, with an object exposed to supersonic flow, the shock wave would be stationary relative to the object and therefore relative to the observer. If the observer were inside the tunnel, they would not hear a sonic boom unless they deliberately walked through the shock. | [
"The aerodynamics of supersonic flight is called compressible flow because of the compression (physics) associated with the shock waves or \"sonic boom\" created by any object travelling faster than sound.\n",
"The later shock waves are somewhat faster than the first one, travel faster and add to the main shockwa... |
What is the connection between Majorana Mass and a Majorana Particle? | If you give a Majorana mass to a "normal" four-component spinor, so making it satisfy the Majorana *equation*, you obtain *two* particles. They are antiparticles of eachother and must be electrically neutral.
Only when you supplement the Majorana *condition*, that is that the spinor is its own charge conjugate, you get one single Majorana particle, neutral and its own antiparticle. | [
"However, the right-handed sterile neutrinos introduced to explain neutrino oscillation could have Majorana masses. If they do, then at low energy (after electroweak symmetry breaking), by the seesaw mechanism, the neutrino fields would naturally behave as six Majorana fields, with three of them expected to have ve... |
Floating Feature: Close Up Shop and Celebrate History Coming to an End as 'The Story of Humankind' Concludes With Volume XIII from 1947 to 2000 CE! | **The 1980s neo-liberal reforms as an attempt to eliminate the military-industrial complex: part 1**
Now that should be a provocative title!
Over the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, there were pro-market reforms across much of the world. These reforms were and are highly controversial. My purpose in this post is to give a high-level description of the reforms and of the economic theory and practical experiences that motivated them, followed by what I think are the strongest criticisms of them.
A bit of background, I’m a New Zealander, and thus this description will be somewhat biased towards New Zealand as an example. My interests are in economic history and the history of economic thought. Combined, this means that I don’t know much about the politics behind the reforms in most countries, including the USA, so I will probably struggle to answer follow-up questions that focus on the politics.
*What we can agree on*
They say that when writing a persuasive essay on a provocative topic, you should start with outlining areas of agreement. (I will be a bit lazy and use terms like 'no one' 'everyone' and 'all' in a loose sense, I’m sure you can find someone on reddit who disagrees on something!)
We all agree that markets fail from time to time. We all agree that governments fail from time to time. No one has blind faith in markets, no one has blind faith in governments. And, while we're at it, we all agree that non-government, non-profit institutions have their uses. Different people do tend to be more inclined to view particular institutions as useful in more situations than other people do, but even Communists agree that people should be able to hold personal possessions as their own property, and only the most thorough-going libertarian would deny a role for government in services like military defence, or, to pick a NZ example, biosecurity (keeping out foreign pests). The relevant question is, for a given economic problem, which type of institution is best at solving it, or, for a more pessimistic view, least-bad. I presume a thorough pessimist would declare that it doesn't matter, whatever the problem, the worst possible institution will be picked for it.
We all agree that people do not always behave rationally, and people always have limited information to base their decisions on, and that this is true both of people acting in markets and people acting in government.
We also, I think, mainly agree, that within the things that fall in the scope of government, different types of structures might be useful for different problems. Most democracies insulate judges of criminal and civil matters from direct democratic pressures (the USA is unusual in that many states elect at least some judges). Public healthcare systems like the UK’s NHS mainly leave medical treatment to be decided by the relevant doctors and their patients. Etc.
Everyone agrees? Onto the history. | [
"The longest of the stories is also called \"Half a Life\" and tells the story of a Russian woman kidnapped by an alien spacecraft in the years following the second world war. In a distant, but unspecified future, human cosmonauts discover the alien ship floating in space, a derelict. Entering the ship, they soon r... |
Can theories be proven or is it that they have just failed to be disproved? | You are correct.
The general answer for the scientific method is that nothing can be proven, only disproven.
However, once a hypothesis has passed enough experimental tests that the only other competing hypothesizes are clearly wrong, then the hypothesis becomes a "theory" meaning it has a great deal of acceptance in the scientific community. | [
"To the Sceptics, none of the contending theories, proposed by limited intellect, can be known to be true, since they are mutually contradictory. Also, any new theory is bound to contradict existing theories, and hence cannot be true. Hence nothing can be known to be true. Thus the Sceptics conclude that the contra... |
Are there any examples of animals practicing medicine in the wild? | There are parrots in the amazon that eat fruit that is toxic to them. Every evening they fly to a riverbank with an exposed clay cliff and eat some of the clay. The minerals in the clay neutralise the poison. I wish I could remember more details, like the species of parrot and the specific type of fruit. | [
"Some animal parts used as medicinals can be considered rather strange such as cows' gallstones, hornet's nests, leeches, and scorpion. Other examples of animal parts include horn of the antelope or buffalo, deer antlers, testicles and penis bone of the dog, and snake bile. Some TCM textbooks still recommend prepar... |
Can someone lend a neutral analysis of Mao, the Cultural Revolution, and the Great Leap Forward? | Well I will be honest I don't have anything more than an undergraduate's understanding of China, having taken a few classes on the subject, but I have a few things to say here.
First the problem with the article you linked is that it is overwhelmingly arguing from a position of "well the evidence that this happened might not be true." The problem with that tactic is that it is sort of a rabbit hole, you can basically argue almost anything from that position but it doesn't prove the reverse happened.
Additionally, even if the numbers of people who died in the famine are disputed (they typically range from 30-50 million in most things I've seen), there does seem to be a general agreement that such a famine occurred.
Basically I would say that unless some smoking gun evidence appears that suggests this massive famine didn't occur, it would be reasonable to assume it did.
Oh and Mao is still on the hook for the nightmare that was the Cultural Revolution.
| [
"The official view aimed to separate Mao's actions during the Cultural Revolution from his \"heroic\" revolutionary activities during the Chinese Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War. It also separated Mao's personal mistakes from the correctness of the theory that he created, going as far as to rationalize t... |
Is there any peculiarity about the places a supercontinent splits (e.g. the Atlantic coastlines of Africa and South America) or is it just about the subterranean magma flow? | There are a couple of things that (potentially) contribute to where the rift system that breaks up a supercontinent will localize, but all of them will generally lead to the rift system initiating broadly in the center of the supercontinent and roughly coincident with where the supercontinent was joined together in the first place.
In detail, the presence of the supercontinent contributes to (1) an accumulation of heat beneath the supercontinent from insulation of the mantle by the thick continental crust, which will be greatest roughly near the center of the continental mass and (2) the development of a [geoid](_URL_1_) high within the supercontinent (and a corresponding geoid low in the surrounding ocean basin). In a very general sense, warmer earth materials mean weaker earth materials, so the first property would tend to make areas in the center of the supercontinent weaker. The geoid high represents an instability that likely drives (or at least contributes to) the breakup of the supercontinent. Once there is a force driving supercontinent breakup, the resulting rifts will localize where the continental crust is the weakest (i.e. if you start deforming any heterogeneous material, the weakest portion will start deforming first). As mentioned earlier, the center of the supercontinent may be warmer and weaker due to the insulation effect, but anything that contributes to a reduction in strength in a particular area may help to initiate a rift in that region. One of the primary sources of weakness are preexisting structures, meaning that the [sutures](_URL_0_) marking the locations where the constituent continental portions of plates were joined during supercontinent assembly likely are important 'guides' for the localization of rifts during breakup. Pangea is a good example, at least in the North America - Europe portion, as the rifting largely followed the location of the mountain ranges (e.g. the Appalachians, etc) that were formed during the assembly of Pangea. For those interested in more details, there are a variety of review papers about the supercontitent cycle which discuss the breakup and assembly processes (and the variety of ideas related to them) in great detail, e.g. these papers [1](_URL_2_), [2](_URL_3_), or [3](_URL_4_). | [
"In plate tectonics theory during the breakup of a continent, three divergent boundaries form, radiating out from a central point (the triple junction). One of these divergent plate boundaries fails (see aulacogen) and the other two continue spreading to form an ocean. The opening of the south Atlantic Ocean starte... |
studying vs fun | Feel good now many times or feel good once later in the future? Your brain prefers the former.
It comes down to gratification frequency in your brain. The frequency of dopamine release you get from video games is shorter in video games since you can get instantly rewarded for your tasks, feeding into a cycle. Think about it each time you pick up treasure or beat a hard boss. Whereas studying has a long-term dopamine award that you won't see without seeing your exam grade. That's why people often suggest creating your own dopamine awards when you've finished a study period (e.g., I can continue watching my TV show if I finish writing this report or finish studying).
The same analogy can be applied to diets too. Eating a bag of chips is highly addictive for the average person, but following a healthy diet is better for your body. Unfortunately, your brain prefers the former earlier. The mentality of preference over instant gratification probably stems from primitive times when instant gratification was necessary to ensure immediate survival in a time before modern civilization and technology. | [
"\"Fun School Specials\" is a set of educational games, created in 1993 by Europress Software, consisting of four different games. Upon demand, Europress designed each game specifically with a certain major topic to add depth to spelling, maths, creativity and science, respectively and comply fully with the Nationa... |
Would it be possible to make a device to see radio/TV/cell phone signals, the same way an infrared camera can "see" heat? | This is used a lot in astronomy [pic](_URL_0_) | [
"There are two infrared-based approaches. In one, an array of sensors detects a finger touching or almost touching the display, thereby interrupting infrared light beams projected over the screen. In the other, bottom-mounted infrared cameras record heat from screen touches.\n",
"The use of an infrared sensor to ... |
why is it difficult for the investigators to find the flight recorder from the downed malaysia flight 17 , when there is supposed to be a beacon pin-pointing its location ? | Finding the proverbial black box is simple if it's left where it is. The moment someone picks it up, removes the pinger, and sticks it on a truck -- it becomes hard to find. Rebels (or Russians, I don't know that there's a practical way to distinguish) have been all over the site removing "stuff".
The working hypothesis, based on the fact that rebels or Russians aiding rebels, have shot down several aircraft in the past couple of weeks is that whoever shot the missile downing the plane probably thought that it was a Ukrainian transport plane (probably rebels, since I think it's unlikely a professional Russian soldier would make such a stupid mistake). Ukraine intelligence even offered up something they claim to be an intercepted communiqué between rebels and Russian forces indicating as much. | [
"The aircraft's flight recorders were sent to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau for analysis. Initial statements by the authorities suggested that the pilots mistook a road for the airport's runway in low visibility.\n",
"However in case the flight recorders shall become available to the western countries th... |
Foggy London vs polluted Beijing | fyi, you'll find some previous discussions on this in the FAQ
* [Air pollution](_URL_0_) | [
"Due to Beijing's high-level of air pollution, there are various readings by different sources on the subject. Daily pollution readings at 27 monitoring stations around the city are reported on the website of the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau (BJEPB). The American Embassy of Beijing also reports hourly fi... |
Did the Barbarians of the Classical Roman Era field any navies and if so was there ever any engagements between them and the Roman Empire? | The Veneti, a Gallic tribe from Brittany in modern France, posed quite a naval threat to Caesar during the Gallic Wars. They had several coastal citadels that couldn't be sieged out, as the strong Venetian (no, not *that* Venetian) navy protected the supply ships from across the channel in Britain. A fascinating aspect of these coastal cities was the fact that at high tide, they were islands, and at low tide, peninsulas, creating a problem for Caesar.
At this point, the Romans had absolutely no naval power in the English Channel. To combat this, Caesar constructed a navy. However, the stormy seas of the English Channel and the oak ships of the Veneti were difficult to overcome for the Romans. The Romans did eventually, in the Battle of Morbihan, defeat the Venetians by cutting their halyards, causing their mainsails to fall, in turn leaving the ships as sitting ducks for the Romans' excellent boarding capabilities. | [
"The barbarians comprised war bands or tribes of 10,000 to 20,000 people,[5] but in the course of 100 years they numbered not more than 750,000 in total, compared to an average 39.9 million population of the Roman Empire at that time. Although invasion was common throughout the time of the Roman Empire,[6] the peri... |
if everyone says girls mature more quickly than boys, why do boys seem to have a higher sex drive than girls while teenagers? | because sex drive and maturity have nothing to with each other? | [
"Studies have shown that most high school girls are more interested in a relationship compared to high school boys, who are mostly interested in sex. Young women tend to be honest about their sexual encounters and experiences, while young men tend to lie more often about theirs. Another study shows that once a pers... |
If a person gains weight gradually, will their leg muscles (quadriceps, hamstrings, calves etc) grow proportionally to support the added weight? | They would have to, otherwise you wouldn't be able to walk. On the other hand, it depends on what kind of weight you are gaining. Obviously gaining muscle mass will cause your muscles to grow. On the other hand, gaining a lot of weight in the form of fat has other consequences. The fat gets deposited all over the place, including within the muscle, and certainly within the walls of your blood vessels, limiting blood flow.
Your muscles may get stronger to carry the weight, but the restricted blood flow limits the ability of the muscle to perform for long periods of time, because it doesn't get enough oxygen for oxidative phosphorylation. While overweight people may have an increased amount of glycogen providing the muscle with a larger "fuel tank" if you will, the muscle still will quickly be forced to switch to anaerobic metabolism. This is less efficient, and causes lactic acid to build up (which gives you cramps). Your heart beats faster to deliver more blood to the tissue, but it isn't getting there effectively because of the fat clogging up the blood vessels. You start to hyperventilate (technically speaking this is a misnomer, it would likely be hyperpnea in this case) to compensate for the increased oxygen demand and the increased acid load created by lactic acid. **You will tire out more quickly**
The consequence of this is that you walk less, and of course, without using the muscle, it gets weaker again, and you may end up with a weaker muscle as well as body fat that you cannot carry. **Your muscle ends up weaker in the long run, if you gain enough weight**.
See: [*Muscle strength is inversely related to prevalence and incidence of obesity in adult men*](_URL_0_)
In [this paper](_URL_1_), the results conclude that obese women are stronger than their lean counterparts, but only in terms of absolute strength. When you control for body weight, every muscle is weaker on a pound for pound basis in the obese women, with the exception of trunk flexors, which were stronger. Presumably, this might be because many obese women carry the weight in the abdomen and chest.
Edit: tl;dr: Yes, gaining weight makes your legs stronger. But there is a diminishing return on this, and the growth is not linearly proportional. This does more harm than good.
| [
"Individuals with this disorder typically experience progressive muscle weakness of the leg and pelvis muscles, which is associated with a loss of muscle mass (wasting). Muscle weakness also occurs in the arms, neck, and other areas, but not as noticeably severe as in the lower half of the body. Calf muscles initia... |
why do people's voices sound higher pitched in older recordings? were the vocal tastes for higher pitched voice in the past or was it due to the recording equipment used? | Bass frequencies require more energy to record and reproduce than do higher ranges of audio. Old recording equipment didn't have the types of improvements we've made since then. The diaphragm in a modern microphone is much more sensitive to input and can record a sound with much less intensity than older equipment. The primary factor is production. Most music made these days is mixed for use on smaller speakers, like headphones, laptops, smartphones, etc. And is adjusted to try and be "louder" then the other guys. They butcher old recordings, strip out the dynamic range, and level-match everything for a "digitally remastered" sound that ruins classic albums, also. | [
"Some evidence exists of vocal fry becoming more common in the speech of young female speakers of American English in the early 21st century, but its frequency's extent and significance are disputed. Researcher Ikuko Patricia Yuasa suggests that the tendency is a product of young women trying to infuse their speech... |
Do mental illnesses run in families? Will they be the same mental illness or can they vary between each offspring? | There is a genetic role in some forms of mental illness like schizophrenia for example. There's also a lot of environmental factors that cause or worsen mental illness, like physical/emotional abuse/neglect, malnutrition, traumatic life events, etc. There are usually many factors at play and no case is exactly the same. | [
"A similar study on the mental health of single mothers attempted to answer the question, \"Are there differences in the prevalence of psychiatric disorders, between married, never-married, and separated/divorced mothers?\" Statistically, never married, and separated/divorced mothers had the highest regularities of... |
How did Polar Bears survive the Medieval Warm Period? | It [wasn't that warm](_URL_0_) compared to today. | [
"In the Ice Age (which included warm spells), mammals such as the woolly mammoth, wild horse, giant deer, brown bear, spotted hyena, Arctic lemming, Norway lemming, Arctic fox, European beaver, wolf, Eurasian lynx, and reindeer flourished or migrated depending on the degree of coldness. The Irish brown bear was a g... |
Who were Turkish Sultans descended from? | As strange as it may seem, your story is essentially correct. Ottoman Sultans didn't marry, and instead had lowborn concubines. I'm not sure how many of the Sultan's mothers were European, but some were, yes. And indeed since only the direct male line is the family of the Sultans, the vast majority of later Sultans' ancestors would have been commoners.
As to whether the Sultans were white... I think this sort of shows your nationality, if I'm guessing right that you're American. In the Old World Turks would generally be considered white. And to those who don't agree with that, they wouldn't really think Bulgarians or Romanians are white either! As the old proverb says after all, the "wogs start at Calais". | [
"This is a list of the biological mothers of Ottoman sultans. There were thirty-six sultans of the Ottoman Empire in twenty-one generations. (During early days the title \"Bey\" was used instead of \"Sultan\") Throughout 623-years history the sultans were the members of the same house, namely the House of Ottoman (... |
The origins of the Abrahamic religions. | Can I ask a clarification question before my answer gets deleted? Are we allowed to use religious texts such as the old testament or Koran as sources while we acknowledge the disputed historicity? In particular, the book of Joshua? | [
"Abrahamic religions are those religions deriving from a common ancient tradition and traced by their adherents to Abraham (circa 1900 BCE), a patriarch whose life is narrated in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, where he is described as a prophet (Genesis 20:7), and in the Quran, where he also appears as a prophet. ... |
Is the Multiverse a "God of the Gaps"-type explanation for something we don't understand? | I think that this links directly to the question of the place of falsifiability in science more broadly, which is something that physicists are currently fighting over. [Some have argued](_URL_1_) that the multiverse theory, among others, fails a basic test of scientific rigor in being falsifiable. [Others](_URL_0_) have argued that falsifiability is unrelated to whether something is real or not, and that an idea shouldn't be rejected out of hand just because it's unfalsifiable. So some professional scientists would answer your question with a resounding "Yes!" while others would say "Of course not!" (My personal view is that the theories and their consequences should be explored, but held in suspicion until falsified or not, so both camps have a valid point. The ability to live with the tension of uncertainty is a virtue.) | [
"The multiverse is a series of parallel universes in many of the science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories written by Michael Moorcock. (Many other fictional settings also have the concept of a multiverse.) Central to these works is the concept of an Eternal Champion who has potentially multiple identiti... |
why can't i, a nearsighted person, use a vr headset without my glasses? shouldn't everything still be clear since it's just a screen close to my eyes? | Glasses refocus light to correctly hit misshapen eyes. Each person, sometimes each eye, will have different corrections that need to be made. If a "normal" sighted person wears someones prescription glasses everything will look distorted.
The lenses in a VR set also refocus light, but are designed to simulate distance rather than correct for eye shape. Wearing your glasses or contacts with the vr headset will add the corrections needed for your eyes. | [
"VR headsets may regularly cause eye fatigue, as does all screened technology, because people tend to blink less when watching screens, causing their eyes to become more dried out. There have been some concerns about VR headsets contributing to myopia, but although VR headsets sit close to the eyes, they may not ne... |
why, when watching a live tv program, is there a delay on a screen in the shot when it shows the same program as being broadcast | Because there is a time delay in capturing video and displaying it.
The live view is capturing a display of itself. At one frame in time, that light information from the camcorder gets converted to electrical signals, decoded, then sent to be displayed elsewhere. This will take several frames of time before it pops up on screen for the live view to see. This time difference is the delay you see.
You can get the same effect by pointing a webcam to look at a screen with its own video feed, you'll get a repeating image of what you see but they will pop up one at a time due to the delay. | [
"In radio and television, broadcast delay is an intentional delay when broadcasting live material. Such a delay may be short (often seven seconds) to prevent mistakes or unacceptable content from being broadcast. Longer delays lasting several hours can also be introduced so that the material is aired at a later sch... |
why do people's ears tend to get hot when they drink alcohol? | Alcohol causes your blood vessels to expand which increases circulation. This is more noticeable where there is very little skin and muscle to hide the changes. Like your ears. | [
"Alcohol may worsen asthmatic symptoms in up to a third of people. This may be even more common in some ethnic groups such as the Japanese and those with aspirin-induced asthma. Other studies have found improvement in asthmatic symptoms from alcohol.\n",
"Alcohol abuse can cause a susceptibility to infection afte... |
Why are older geological layers at the bottom and newer ones at the top? | An important concept is that of [isostatic subsidence](_URL_0_). Let's imagine a really simple scenario. Imagine a lake whose level is around sea-level. It is receiving sediment from rivers draining mountains and other surrounding upland areas. Let's say that we deposit 1 cm of sediment in that lake. That 1 cm of sediment has a mass associated with it which now adds to the total mass of the column of crust beneath it. This addition of mass causes a little more of the aesthenosphere (a part of the mantle beneath the lithosphere which is weaker, behaves plastically and is able to "flow" on a geologic timescale) to be displaced beneath this column so the column sinks a tiny bit, thus creating more space, referred to as "accommodation space" within this lake. Continue this process for a long time and you will progressively end up with a column of sediments that increases in age downward, but the surface of the earth (where sediment is being deposited in your simple lake) is about the same absolute elevation referenced to some external datum (like sea level).
There is also some amount of recycling that is happening as some areas are uplifted due to processes like mountain building. So you may have millions of years of deposition in an area and eventually this area may be involved in the formation of a mountain range and then a decent portion of those rocks will be uplifted, eroded and then deposited in a basin. | [
"That new rock layers are above older rock layers is stated in the principle of superposition. There are usually some gaps in the sequence called unconformities. These represent periods where no new sediments were laid down, or when earlier sedimentary layers were raised above sea level and eroded away.\n",
"When... |
What was the journey to Auschwitz like? | What they were referring to as "goods wagons" were likely the trucks which were in this case used to take people from factories to centers from which they were deported to Auschwitz in cattle cars. The Nazis usually deported Jews to extermination camps such as Auschwitz Birkenau in cattle cars with very horrible conditions. Auschwitz was a large camp complex with concentration camp, labor camp, and extermination camp sections. Most of the German Jews deported in February of 1943 were murdered in the gas chambers in the Birkenau section of Auschwitz. About 4000 people escaped the Aktion, and about 1500 of these people survived in hiding. However there were no escapees once people were put on the trains. Some of the deportees from the Fabrikaktion survived because in Auschwitz they were selected for forced labor, a very small number of people, mostly able bodied young men and young women without children were chosen for forced labor and so were not immediately gassed as most of the deportees were. Most of these forced laborers were eventually killed, but some did survive.
Most of the other Jews in Berlin had already been deported and murdered, most of the people deported in the Fabrikaktion were the spouses of non-Jews or were children of interfaith couples, or else were skilled workers or forced laborers in war production. Up until then these people had avoided deportation, however at the end of 1942 the Nazis decided to deport and murder these last Jews in Berlin by the end of March of 1943. This particular Aktion is well known historically because it was the day of the Rosenstrasse protests of women married to Jewish men occurred. This was particularly significant because it was the only mass demonstration against the deportation of Jews in Germany.
The deportations were ordered by the RSHA, and were organized by various groups, mainly the SS but also others, including local police. The deportations themselves were extraordinarily brutal. Usually between 75 to 100 people were stuffed in a cattle car, without windows, with no food, with no room to move or even sit down. Some cars had a bucket of water and an empty bucket for a toilet, but many did not even have these. The trip from Berlin to Auschwitz usually took a a day or two, sometimes longer. Many people died during the journey. These trains were heavily guarded, often with a guard with a machine gun on top of each car. Very few people escaped and almost all who did were murdered. Thousands of railway workers, and the Deutsche Reichsban were also complicit. The trains then arrived at Auschwitz and the prisoners underwent selection, a few able bodied prisoners were chosen to live and the rest were murdered and their bodies burned within a few hours.
"The Factory Action and the Events at the Rosenstrasse in Berlin: Facts and Fictions about 27 February 1943: Sixty Years Later" by Wolf Gruner and Ursula Marcum
[_URL_1_](_URL_1_)
"An Underground Life" by Gad Beck, Beck's description of the Aktion is particularly heart wrenching because he remembers losing his first love, Manfred during the Aktion (though not the one on feb. 27).
[_URL_0_](_URL_0_) | [
"The trip was organized to both commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II as well as to be witness to the suffering in contemporary war zones. The group walked from Auschwitz to Vienna, then travelled through Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia. They crossed the front lines of the Bosnian war in Mostar and... |
Was American Artillery more effective and decisive than German Artillery in WW2? If so, why? | [This response by /u/vonadler is exactly what you are looking for.](_URL_0_)
| [
"Although also frequently out-ranged by their German counterparts, American artillery built up a reputation for effectiveness and the infantry increasingly relied on the artillery to get them forward. The War Department General Staff ignored the Army Ground Force's recommendations for a powerful heavy artillery arm... |
Why does it seem like early American civilizations' (Maya, Olmec, Aztec) art/architecture is much less developed or much less impressive than that of early Europe and Asia? | This is a common misconception, in truth mesoamerican and south american cultures were very advanced, just in ways that were different than what is typically thought of as "advanced". Early American civilizations had very complex construction and architecture techniques as well as metallurgy and textiles.
When people say that "they weren't that advanced" people are usually referring to the fact that the Incas didn't use wheels. Long story short; They did. But American cultures didn't use extensively for a couple of reasons, namely they didn't have any draft animals. Cattle and horses simply didn't exist in the american continents at the time. [Llamas](_URL_0_) aren't very strong, and the [American Bison](_URL_4_) was never tamed. This, in combination with the many steep, rocky, mountainous regions of the american continents meant that the wooden cart wheels of the time simply weren't useful to them on a large scale.
Another reason they tend to be thought of as less advanced is that the american cultures tended to favor natural defenses instead of the artificial method of castle building. See [Machu Picchu](_URL_1_) and the [Cliffdwellers](_URL_5_). Those, and many construction sites like them had very advanced construction and carving techniques employed throughout them.
There was also [Tenochtitlan](_URL_2_) the capital city of the Aztecs that was built in the middle of a lake using a combination of natural and artificial islands, complete with huge drawbridges that could be raised in case of an attack. This wasn't just one fortress either, the entire city was built like this. And in some places there was even running water thanks to two large aqueducts flowing into the city.
And then we come to [Teotihuacan](_URL_3_) a *massive* city that existed centuries before the aztecs built Tenochtitlan. It is thought to have housed at least 125,000 people during its height making it the 6th largest city in the world at the time. These were the people the Aztecs worshipped as gods!
There are a couple of other reasons why they aren't thought of as "advanced" including their highly fragmentized cultures, their lack of large scale warfare (there are exceptions, but most ancient american conflicts were relatively small and over pretty quickly compared to the grand battles of european military history), and the difficulty of obtaining certain materials made certain tasks more difficult for the people of the american continents.
TL;DR The many American cultures were advanced, in some cases just as much or moreso than their european counterparts. But due to differing circumstances and environments, they never developed, or never needed to develop those technologies in the first place.
| [
"They were a forerunner of later cultures such as Teotihuacan, north of Mexico City, the Zapotecs in Oaxaca and the Mayas in southern Mexico, Belize and Guatemala. While empires rose and fell, the basic cultural underpinnings of the Mesoamerica stayed the same until the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. These i... |
Neutron Star Density question. (Chemistry/Astrophysics) | The mass density of a neutron star is comparable to the mass density of the nucleus of an atom.
In ordinary matter, the density is much less, because the mass of an atom is almost all in the nucleus, but the nucleus takes up only a tiny fraction of the volume of an atom, so the density of ordinary matter is vastly less than the density of the nucleus.
In a neutron star, you basically have density comparable to what you'd get if you piled a bunch of nuclei as close to each other as you could. | [
"Neutron stars have overall densities of to ( to times the density of the Sun), which is comparable to the approximate density of an atomic nucleus of . The neutron star's density varies from about in the crust—increasing with depth—to about or (denser than an atomic nucleus) deeper inside. A neutron star is so den... |
why are addresses depicted the way they are, and not postcode/zipcode first? surely this would be easier? | Pretty much you answered it yourself.
It's done that way because it's traditional.
People haven't felt a need for change because there were no problems with the old way.
The cost to promote the change, and the cost of potential delays or disruptions from confusion or inconsistency, would outweigh the negligible benefits. | [
"Postal designations for place names become \"de facto\" locations for their addresses, and as a result, it is difficult to convince residents and businesses that they are located in another city or town different from the \"preferred\" place name associated with their ZIP Codes. Because of issues of confusion and ... |
In late medieval England, how were MPs chosen for the House of Commons? | Ah the pre reform house of commons.
As always the answer is it depends which ones.
Essentially you had 2 main forms of MPs. The knights of the shires that represented counties and those that represented urban centres. Then you had varies other MPs such as those that represented the Cinque Ports (University constituencies though cam rather later.
Now we've got that out of the way it depends on the date. 1430 is a critical year as is when the 40 shilling freeholders act was passed. After that date you needed to have a freehold worth 40 shillings a year in rent in order to vote in county elections (prior to that point is possible that all freeholders had the vote in theory). One big catch was that you had to vote in the county court. This meant if you didn't live near it voting wouldn't be very practical. An exception was Hampshire where you could vote in Newport on the Isle of Wight as well as Winchester. Voting was public so you might want to stick to candidates that the great and good of Winchester were happy with. So in practice such MPs were selected by who met the voting requirements, were able to get to the county town and were prepared to openly support them.
For MPs that represented towns the system was largely left up to the authorities of the town in question and a range of approaches were taken from giving the vote to most householders through just those that paid certain taxes to just the members of the borough corporation.
Of course this assumes that any MP was chosen at all. Southampton for example repeatedly failed to provide an MP (at the time it was expected to produce two). This makes more sense when you realise that Southampton was frequently a poor town and parliaments could be held in some fairly random places. | [
"The House of Commons of the Kingdom of England evolved from an undivided parliament to serve as the voice of the tax-paying subjects of the counties and of the boroughs. Knights of the shire, elected from each county, were usually landowners, while the borough members were often from the merchant classes. These me... |
how can monsanto get away with virtually suing any farmer? how can the non-gmo farmer protect him/herself? | You have to go out of your way to get sued. Here's what happens...
It's suspected that you have GMO crops on your land, this is usually reported by other farmers or by seed elevators that buy crops from farmers.
The owners of the technology (Monsanto, usually (thanks to their patent portfolio)...but can be Dupont/Dow/BASF/Bayer/etc depending on the crop or technology) will approach the farmer/farm and ask for voluntary documentation on their seed source and/or a sample of their seed/crops.
Things can go a couple ways from here...either they comply or they resist. If they resist, things can go into legal wrangling (especially since pretty much everyone who denies to comply in order to investigate the issue is in the wrong). If they comply (or once compliance is legally won) then they send the samples off to labs to test for priority genes. Sometimes it gets to the point where it's a case of "well, go ahead and harvest and then we'll take samples" when farmers are adamant they're doing nothing wrong...they will be busted or cleared once sampled after harvest without any impact to the value of the farmer's crop or harvest if in the clear.
Here's the thing about GMO accidentally ending up on your land...Monsanto/etc. have programs in place which will pay for the contaminated crop, it's clean-up, and the labor/chemicals used to remove it from your land...even in border lands like ditches and runoff-protection areas that aren't in production fields.
Here's the other thing...there is no way on this planet someone accidentally has 70-80-90%+ GMO contaminated seed in their fields. This only happens when buying illegal seed or (more commonly) cultivating, selecting, and saving GMO seed when you notice it's shown up on your property. If I happen to be driving a truck holding 10,000 copies of MS Windows and a copy falls off the back of my truck you don't have the right to install that on 1000 computers at your business or go around installing copies on other people's computers because you found it on the ground.
Monsanto has never lost a case they've sued a farmer over...and it's only been a few dozen farmers in the past 18-ish years...and well over 1/2 of them happened in the early years of GMO adoption before a lot of people knew exactly what was up with the legal limits of using this technology.
If you're farming 100s-1000s of acres, you know exactly what you're getting into when you choose to cross the line into stealing intellectual property. The only farmers that have gone up against this system were either testing the system for it's limits and/or were simply trying to steal intellectual property. It's a very deliberate act in either case.
Beyond all this, it's a case of farmers who WANT to crop GMO crops without actually paying the higher seed price for GMO seed. They are no different than GMO seed purchasing farmers, use no more or less chemicals, nor are they somehow saintly or innocent for wanting to do this...they just want to cut out the "paying for it" part that helps brings this intellectual property to market.
| [
"Those who opposed the provision referred to it as the \"Monsanto Protection Act\", on the premise that it \"effectively bars federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of controversial genetically modified (aka GMO) or genetically engineered (GE) seeds, no matter what health issues may arise conce... |
How does cortisone work? | I think you mean cortisol, rather than cortisone. The two are interconverted in the cell by an enzyme system (11- beta HSD 1 and 2) and cortisone is actually much less active than cortisol.
Cortisol circulates in the blood bound to corticosteroid binding globulin, a carrier molecule. About 96% of cortisol is bound, but it is only the 4% free fraction that is biologically active. Free cortisol passes from the blood into the intracellular space, and then passes freely through the cell membrane.
Once inside the cell, cortisol binds to the glucocorticoid receptor, a molecule found in all nucleated cells. The binding of cortisol causes the receptor to shed heat shock proteins, then the cortisol and receptor complex migrate into the cell nucleus. It is here in the nucleus that cortisol has its effects. The complex binds to glucocorticoid response elements in the DNA and by so doing effects the regulation of genes - by either suppressing or stimulating them. Its is thought that cortisol can effect the regulation of over 2000 genes, so its actions are widespread- -not just the immune system, but on metabolic control, cardiovascular response and wound healing.
The immune system effects are very complicated. Some cortisol is necessary for a normal response to infection; animals without adrenal glands who don't secrete cortisol die when exposed to bacteria. However, cortisol also has anti inflammatory actions. A lot of its actions are mediated by control of cytokine release - TNF alpha, and especially NF kappa b.
If you don't have enough cortisol you won't survive a serious illness. having too much will suppress your immune system. Give extra steroid to critically ill patients is a deeply controversial practice at the moment. | [
"Cortisol is a stress hormone secreted by the adrenal gland, which makes up part of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. It is typically released at periods of high stress designed to help the individual cope with stressful situations. Cortisol secretion results in increased heart rate and blood pressure ... |
Are the stars in the big dipper closer to Earth than other stars in the night sky and is that how they came to be a constellation? | [This image](_URL_0_) shows the Big Dipper head on, and from the side. Distances to astronomical objects are essentially impossible to judge from a human perspective on Earth. Stars that are much brighter, but further away, can far outshine nearby dim stars. A star's location on the sky or in a constellation usually has little to do with it's distance to stars that are visually nearby, except in the case of clusters or binaries.
*Edit*: To answer the constellation question, yes; constellations are essentially just groupings of bright stars in a region on the sky that helps make observing and recording the movements of celestial objects easy. This was originally done for calendar keeping and astrology, but they're still useful features for astronomy and the general public today. | [
"If the Sun were to be observed from the Alpha Centauri system, the nearest star system to ours, it would appear to be a 0.46 magnitude star in the constellation Cassiopeia, and would create a \"/W\" shape instead of the \"W\" as seen from Earth. Due to the proximity of the Alpha Centauri system, the constellations... |
Navigation in bombers during world war 2. Were the navigators able to compute the route on their own or their work was mostly handled by electronical devices? | Mostly map work and instruments - at least early on - which is why the Blackouts actually worked as a measure to reduce the accuracy of Bomber attack. There are examples of long-range guidance by electronics; however, the Luftwaffe used radio transmitters and modified Lorentz blind-landing sets (short range radio receivers designed to guide pilots in to land in poor visibility) to produce the 'knickerbine' bomber guidance system.
The system essentially consisted of a radio that would pick up either dots or dashes if you strayed too far left or right of your flight path and a final beam that told aircrews they were over their targets. The system relied upon the fact Germany controlled France and Norway, so they could properly cross all the beams of radio signal required. The system was not incredibly successful because local interference (such as falsifying the signal for 'you are too far right' at the rightmost edge of the lane) could cause it to mislead the pilots it was supposed to lead, and it was rather expensive (directed high-power radio transmitters aren't cheap). | [
"The first distance-based navigation system was the German Y-Gerät blind-bombing system. This used a Lorenz beam for horizontal positioning, and a transponder for ranging. A ground-based system periodically sent out pulses which the airborne transponder returned. By measuring the total round-trip time on a radar's ... |
what happens to our world (including its inhabitants) if the worst case scenario happens with global warming. i'm not even sure how to define worst case scenario. melting of polar ice caps? temperature going up globally 10 degrees (f)? | The ice caps are going to melt. It is a question of when. The models use are always failing for predicting how much sea ice is melting.
There are unknown factors. We estimate based on what we know and what we guess. The unknowns can kill us.
As things warm up, we know they will, there will be more carbon dioxide released from soils, more released from the tundra, and there is a tremendous amount of methane clathrates on the ocean floor waiting for conditions to change a little for the methane to go back into solution and into the atmosphere. The ocean pH is changing. We know this. The ocean is warming. "When the ocean changes enough that methane will go into the atmosphere.
We are conducting a tremendous experiment on the whole world. The US has just elected a president who is appointing a climate change denier to the EPA.
We really do not know what the worse case is. But we know that changes must be made which should happen as soon as possible with as many incentives from government as possible. The worst case scenario for doing this is that we will have a cleaner environment and pay a little more for it. There are many health care benefits from living in a clean environment. Do you have asthma? Know someone who does? That is one of the costs of a dirty environment. | [
"António Guterres the Secretary-General of the United Nations told “We’re running out of time. To waste this opportunity would compromise our last best chance to stop runaway climate change. It would not only be immoral, it would be suicidal.” The IPCC special report is a stark acknowledgment of what the consequenc... |
Is there a "filter" that can shift infrared light into the visible spectrum? | Not all night vision goggles work that way. The more traditional approach is to use the photoelectric effect - incoming IR photons hit a screen, which emits electrons. These are then accelerated through an electric field and strike another screen, which causes the emission of even more electrons, and these then strike a phosphor screen which emits visible photons. | [
"For observing the sun, a much narrower band filter can be made from three parts: an \"energy rejection filter\" which is usually a piece of red glass that absorbs most of the unwanted wavelengths, a Fabry–Pérot etalon which transmits several wavelengths including one centred on the H-alpha emission line, and a \"b... |
the mess of weird text you get when you turn a .png/.jpg file into a .txt | In the end, all files are just 1s and 0s.
A jpg is only a jpg because the program opening it knows how to interpret those 1s and 0s as an image.
But notepad doesn't know how to interpret it as an image. It just assumes anything you open in it is meant to be text. So it interprets the data as if it was text.
But since the data wasn't meant to be text it looks weird. There are some characters that have special purposes and aren't really meant to be displayed. So they are represented by weird symbols. Chances are some of the numbers in that jpg file will happen to match up with the values of these special characters so you get these symbols which you wouldn't normally see in data that is actually meant to be text. | [
"The next graphic shows the contents of such a minimal PNG file, representing just one red pixel. The PNG signature bytes and the individual chunks are marked with colors. On the left side, the byte values are shown in hex format, on the right side as their equivalent characters from ISO-8859-1 with unrecognized an... |
how do companies get paid from credit cards? | Short answer: They receive money in chunks throughout the month usually on a daily basis but it is on a 2 day delay.
The company has a bank that they process credit cards through, this is called the acquirer bank. The card the customer uses is also backed by a bank, this is called the issuer bank. When the merchant charges the customers card it goes to the acquiring bank which puts the transaction on to a network (MasterCard, VISA, etc) the transaction reaches the issuer bank where they make the decision to honor or decline the card. They send their decision back to the acquirer bank and the bank sends it back to the merchant. The transaction goes to ACH (automated clearing house) which is when the actual money moves from the issuer bank to the acquiring bank. ACH usually takes 2 days to process. | [
"Within the United States, credit card transactions are controlled by four main financial institutions: Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover, making it an oligopoly. Credit cards work as a two-sided market, with the institutions providing benefits to consumers (by allowing them to access lines of credit... |
Why did Staten Island remain mostly residential, and not develop more like Manhattan did? | Totally got this one. Native Staten Islander here, who has done research. I'm on my phone, so I cannot provide links at the moment though.
First, one has to realize that Staten Island is the least populous borough--I think the current population is only about 500-600k. Staten Island historically has also been sparsely populated in relationship to the rest of the city. This is very much a result of the geography of the island. While not a problem now, Staten Island had difficult terrain to live: rocky hills (made of Serpentine rock) and wetland/marshland further south. This made it very difficult for many people to have farms, and the surroubdi by waterways (Arthur Kill and Kill van Kull) would have been too narrow and shallow for large scale exporting.
Staten Island, therefore, remained as a sparsely populated farmland for a long time. Similarly, it's distance from Brooklyn and Manhattan made it difficult for regular travel and inter-county trade. There were ferries (such as Cornelius Vanderbilt's, which started him on to his fortune and later evolved into the Staten Island Ferry), but they were not as many as would have been needed for large scale trade.
That being said, Staten Island was always integrated with New York rather than New Jersey. Fort Wadsworth was paired with Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn to protect the harbor. Staten Island served as a quarantine for sick immigrants. It's proximity to the harbor allowed it to profit from New Yorks trade as well.
When New York became a city, Staten Island was the last to join in 1898. Many Staten Islanders were not happy (and many are still not to this day).
The first easy access to the borough came in 1963, when the Verrazano Narrows bridge was completed. That started Staten Islands population growth. New Yorkers saw the free land and the proximity to the city (now with bridge access) and began to move there for residential purposes, while working in the rest of the city. | [
"Although Staten Island as a whole remained largely residential and less densely populated and developed than the surrounding region, the inhabitants of the region favored consolidation with the greater metropolis. In 1898, Staten Island was consolidated with New York City, and this move accelerated development of ... |
After reverse transcriptase creates a provirus, how does a retrovirus differ from a single-stranded DNA virus in its activity? | There are two major reasons, to my knowledge, that retrovirus replication using a provirus intermediate is different than an single stranded DNA virus.
One, proviruses directly integrate into the chromosomal genome, while DNA viruses (usually) integrate extrachromosomally ([there have been some reports that Herpes virus can integrate into the chromosome](_URL_1_). Whether or not there are any benefits to being integrated directly into the genome as opposed to not integrating directly but still sitting in the nucleus (and subsequently "hidden" from cytoplasmic DNA sensing immunity proteins) I do not know.
Two, creating a provirus is an error intensive process. Unlike the cell's normal method of replicating DNA, Reverse Transcriptase (RT) is notoriously sloppy. Regular DNA polymerases have an error rate of [about 1 in 1,000,000 to 100,000,000](_URL_0_) but RT has an error rate of about [1 in 1700](_URL_2_). Such high rates of mutation would be deleterious to most organisms, however, not all mutations would necessarily be negative (you could very possibly have silent mutations, or you could have gain of function mutations). Deleterious mutants would be quickly selected against because of their inability to replicate and subsequently infect other cells, while productive viruses can continue to replicate very quickly. Massive amounts of mutations can be a good thing for the virus, especially in the case of antiviral treatment. This is why HAART, the standard in HIV treatment, exists as a cocktail; when the first antiviral was released for HIV people that took the drug quickly found that the virus mutated to evolve resistance against it. But by giving a cocktail of multiple drugs you make it less likely that the virus will generate resistant mutations against all of the drugs at once. | [
"The retrovirus begins the journey into a host cell by attaching a surface glycoprotein to the cell's plasma membrane receptor. Once inside the cell, the retrovirus goes through reverse transcription in the cytoplasm and generates a double-stranded DNA copy of the RNA genome. Reverse transcription also produces ide... |
Why does our skin get numb when we're cold? | Blood flow to exterior arteries is restricted to keep the internal organs warm. | [
"When exposed to cold temperatures, the blood supply to the fingers or toes, and in some cases the nose or earlobes, is markedly reduced; the skin turns pale or white (called pallor) and becomes cold and numb.\n",
"The most common, everyday cause is temporary restriction of nerve impulses to an area of nerves, co... |
Was there any presidential republics like the United States before the United States existed? | There were prior examples of mixed regimes. Aristotle advocated for them and the Roman Republic may be an example with its consuls, senators and assemblies. However, no prior regime deeply resembled the US.
The US arguably drew more on ideas than examples in its creation. The separation of powers, of which the US president is a product, was an Enlightenment idea perhaps inspired by Aristotle and Cicero but articulated more recently (and perhaps with greater influence on the US) by Locke. The framers also drew the constitution against things that they feared, the tyranny of monarchy and the tyranny of the majority. And they also had to reconcile their government with the conditions that already prevailed in their newly independent land: sovereign states. This meant that many executive powers would be reserved not for the president but the states. Lastly, much of the nature of the US presidency has evolved over time with gradual developments in the constitutional interpretation of presidential powers.
Overall, then, the US presidential system was rather new to human experience and a product of its era and location. It has served as a model for others but did not really have close models itself. | [
"In the example of the United States, the original 13 British colonies became independent states after the American Revolution, each having a republican form of government. These independent states initially formed a loose confederation called the United States and then later formed the current United States by rat... |
why do cats love to push things off tables? | I did a report for an animal behavior class in undergrad on animal play. It overwhelmingly focused on younger animals and why it is such a common trend across species to mess around with each other and fuck around with objects. As far as playing with each other, it seems to be a natural inclination to enjoy it but the evolutionary purpose seems to be that it reinforces social norms, learning how hard you can bite someone without it being aggressive, seeing how you can figure your social standing in the pack by whether or not you groom the others, as well as running and chasing to build hunting skills and refine motor movement/muscle memory/whatever you want to call it.
Playing with objects seems to be important for that latter part as well. It helps them develop and refine motor functions that can be applied later on in life for actually not ass hole tasks. So, that's why kittens would do that kind of thing, it feels enjoyable for them, and it feels enjoyable because a billion years ago, the saber tooth tigers that liked swatting hamsters off of rocks wound up with better developed neuromuscular systems which allowed more successful not-dying. Traits got passed on.
I can only assume adults do it because that youthful drive to refine motor skills doesn't just disappear.
Edit: Obligatory "holy crap, thank you for the gold" edit...holy crap, thank you for the gold! | [
"Jackson teaches that cats are territorial, needing spaces within homes to call their own and that they send signals when they no longer desire petting, a condition he refers to as \"overstimulation.\" Cats do not like being cornered and lash out when overstimulated. Certain cats (whom he calls \"tree-dwelling cats... |
I know that in the middle ages many towns were rather small (often the largest still only consisting of tens of thousands of people). How vital to the national economy were towns? What sort of professions were people practising there and were there any that weren't as common in more rural locations? | "How important were towns" is kind of a tough question to answer, because the existence/increase of towns is both a sign and a cause of overall exonomic restructuring over the later Middle Ages. Towns were essential to the economic system they were a part of/helped create. You can say something like by 1300, about 65% of England's economic production was shipped overseas, which meant it came through market towns, but obviously this was heavily agricultural/pastoral commodity. And of the 35% or so internal trade, that would be intimately bound up in a market/rural/urban web.
As Christopher Dyer neatly sums it up, by the late Middle Ages, tow key developments had happened. First, lords were thinking about economic productivity and how to get *more* out of their land. (But at the same time, we are in the days of the moral economy as well--fixing bread prices to make sure everyone can afford at least A Loaf of bread each day, even if it was a smaller load when grain prices rose). Second, the transition from crop to cash rents, which would be accelerated by the Great Famine in1315-1322, was already underway.
Thus, lords expected income in cash from their peasants, paid it in tax, and sold their share of crops on their land for cash. Day laborers in the countryside were paid in cash and needed somewhere to buy the necessary goods to stay alive. Conversion of crops to cash meant longer distance trade, which meant traders--and the people to support them. Who, in turn, produced more refined goods and services for each other, and maybe for rural dwellers who might spend more time gearing up for production of what brought them cash (either their own crops or as mill workers, harvest laborers, miners).Talking about towns is inseparable from talking about long-distance economies overall. (Since "national" can be a questionable term still at this time. Centralized/royal authority isn't even always an aspiration of rulers, much less a fact.)
But there are a couple of things we can look at to get a bit deeper. First, towns enabled specialization of profession--the ability to make a living from a very narrowly focused line of work which, overall, meant a greater variety of goods being produced in abundance. Secondly, towns were vital to economic *growth*.
Towns were signs and causes of specialization in profession. And medieval people could be very, very specific about what constituted a "profession." In Rouen, for example, the guilds for women (yes, women!) who made clothes out of new fabric versus those who made clothes out of secondhand fabric were not only separate but often at war in the courts for encroaching on each other's territory. Nuremberg had a dedicated craft (Nuremberg's formal guild system was abolished around 1348) of *gingerbread baking.*
The Nuremberg *Hausbücher* are a great example of how specialized professions could be. You can navigate around the site--I've sorted it by "profession" for you--and click through to see illustrations of the different jobs or people who did them in late medieval/early modern Germany.
_URL_0_
Probably the most important urban profession was not unique to towns, but it illustrates well the central role that towns played in economic development. In northwest Europe, it was increasingly popular for teenage men but *especially* women to move to cities and work as servants for a period of time, saving up money for marriage or to start a singlewoman's household. (The medieval demographic imbalance between women and men was heightened by the fact that a higher proportion of women moved to cities and stayed; a higher proportion of men stayed in or went back to the countryside.)
What Hajnal originally identified as the "European marriage pattern," of women and men both marrying later in northwest Europe connected to which countries' economies grew relatively stronger in the early modern era, isn't quite a *marriage* pattern. Women in Eastern Europe show a wide variety of ages at first marriage; even in Italy many women married later than we are often given to assume. Instead, it seems to be a *women's wages* pattern. Places with towns where women worked--acquiring cash income, spending cash income--generally speaking saw more economic growth from the late Middle Ages on.
I'm still struggling to say "how important were towns" because without them, the late medieval economy would have had to look completely different. This would have been true at the local level, the regional level, the "national" level, and the international level. But within the system that existed, specialized professions and their products would seem to be a good illustration of the economic contributions of cities to local life rather than just long-distance trade. | [
"A few towns in the Low Countries dated back to Roman times, but most had been founded from the 9th century onward. The oldest were in the Scheldt and Meuse areas, with many towns in what's now the Netherlands being much younger and only dating from the 13th century. From early on, the Low Countries began to develo... |
when i uninstall a program using an unistallation .exe included in the program's folder, how is that .exe capable of uninstalling itself? | It is not possible for a Windows executable to delete itself. This is due to the way that executable files are loaded by Windows. Instead of reading the entire file into RAM (as some commenters have suggested), Windows *maps* the file into memory - it is more accurate to say it maps portions of the file to different places in memory. The file is then *paged* into memory as needed. (This process is handled by the operating system and is transparent to application developers and users).
Most Windows applications' installation and uninstallation is handled by [Windows Installer](_URL_0_), a component of the operating system. To uninstall a product, an executable simply has to request that Windows Installer remove the product from the system and then terminate. The Windows Installer service handles all the of the file and registry operations. | [
"The term \"decompiler\" is most commonly applied to a program which translates executable programs (the output from a compiler) into source code in a (relatively) high level language which, when compiled, will produce an executable whose behavior is the same as the original executable program. By comparison, a dis... |
how do items like peelers, graters, scissors etc. stay sharp but knives constantly need to be sharpened? | It's not that they stay sharp, but for their purpose they don't need to be as sharp. They are also subject to lesser forces and materials than a knife, which might be used to cut a carrot one minute and a tomato the next. The knife's edge will also get rolled over and dulled by the cutting board/surface and how it is used. The degree to which this happens is determined by the metal used in the knife which can have different properties based on it's purpose (It's sharpness, hardness, and rust resistant properties are variable whereas the other devices are just regular old stainless steel so it won't rust). Lastly, scissors can be sharpened but most don't bother. | [
"Different knives are sharpened differently according to grind (edge geometry) and application. For example, surgical scalpels are extremely sharp but fragile, and are generally disposed of, rather than sharpened, after use. Straight razors used for shaving must cut with minimal pressure, and thus must be very shar... |
How did someone such as Ibn Battuta (practically and logistically) travel, and keep travelling? | While I cannot speak for Ibn Battuta's case (I think he is a really interesting figure though), you need to break away from the 20-21st century capitalist mentality that every service is paid for using cash currency. My guess (and I will defer to scholars of the Islamic world) is that given his high status he would have likely benefited from the hospitality of other high status individuals. He very well might not have needed to pay for lodging or food he might have been welcomed into someone's home. He could have become a dependent of that household (which is different than a servant).
edit: punctuation | [
"Scholars do not believe that Ibn Battuta visited all the places he described and argue that in order to provide a comprehensive description of places in the Muslim world, he relied on hearsay evidence and made use of accounts by earlier travellers. For example, it is considered very unlikely that Ibn Battuta made ... |
If time is infinite... | > If time is infinite, would it be fair to say that every configuration of the universe happens at least once,
That conclusion does not necessarily follow from that premise.
> similar to how if the set of natural numbers is infinite, every number is in this set?
Of course the set of natural numbers contains every number in that set, but that has nothing to do with the set being infinite. I don't even know what it would mean to say that some set *didn't* contain every element of itself.
On the other hand, it is clearly possible to construct infinite sets of numbers that don't contain every number. Or even every number of some particular type. For example, the set of all even numbers is just as infinite as the set of all integers, but doesn't contain the number 3.
Moreover, and this is important, the fact that an event has nonzero probability per unit time does *not* guarantee that it will happen even if you have an infinite amount of time. While the probability will approach 1 as the time approaches infinity, a probability of 1 does not actually guarantee success. | [
"In \"Did the World Have a Beginning?\" he argues that the temporal world cannot always have existed. An actual infinity is impossible, he reasons, because infinity is a potential value that cannot be reached. A line, for example, may be extended infinitely—that is, without a limit—but at no point will the actual m... |
Why doesn't gravity work on small scales? | Gravity is a very, very, very, very weak force.
To get appreciable gravitational effects, therefore, you need to have very large objects, like a planet.
There is a gravitational force between you and that building you walk by, but it is absolutely tiny.
| [
"As the sizes got smaller, one would have to redesign some tools, because the relative strength of various forces would change. Although gravity would become unimportant, surface tension would become more important, Van der Waals attraction would become important, etc. Feynman mentioned these scaling issues during ... |
Why is carbonated water effervescent while other gas-liquid solutions (e.g. vinegar, hydrochloric acid, etc.) are not? | Two things:
1. While carbondioxide can disolve in water it can also react following CO2 + H2O -- > H(+) + HCO3(-). This means the gas can be stored as ions and react back into gas when the relation between the amounts of CO2 and HCO3(-) changed.
2. Carbonated drinks are made under pressure. At say 10 bar a lot more CO2 can dissolve in one liter water than at 1 bar.
So when you open a bottle the gas will come out of the liquid because of the lower pressure and reasons 2, and it will keep going for a while because of reason one.
In other gas-liquid solutions only a soluble amount of gas is dissolved making it a stable solution with no needs to bubble. | [
"By itself, carbonated water appears to have little impact on health. While carbonated water is somewhat acidic, this acidity can be partially neutralized by saliva. A study found that sparkling mineral water is slightly more erosive to teeth than non-carbonated water but is about 100 times less erosive to teeth th... |
why shouldn’t you eat anything before going into a swimming pool? | People used to think that it would cause cramps, which could result in you drowning in the pool. This is an old wives tale - it doesn't cause cramps no matter how soon you swim after eating.
However, it does have the benefit of keeping food out of and away from pools, thus keeping the pools cleaner, so no one is really interested in dispelling the inaccuracy. | [
"Nonetheless, licking does play a role for humans. Even though humans cannot effectively drink water by licking, the human tongue is quite sufficient for licking more viscous fluids. Some foods are sold in a form intended to be consumed mainly by licking, e.g. ice cream cones and lollipops.\n",
"BULLET::::- Don't... |
why does a computer need to "warm up"? | Because (especially in the case of Windows), the operating system loads and runs just enough components to allow you to log in, and show the desktop, while literally hundreds of drivers and services continue to be loaded and run "in the background" .
Older versions of Windows would not allow use until everything was loaded and running, which meant that, for several minutes, the system was completely unusable. The newer method is a compromise.
You may find that installing an SSD disk drive greatly speeds up the time to usability. | [
"Reducing the heat output of the computer helps reduce noise, since fans do not have to spin as fast to cool the computer. Reduced heat and resulting lower cooling demands may increase computer reliability.\n",
"Because high temperatures can significantly reduce life span or cause permanent damage to components, ... |
How do anti-diarrheals work? Is a bowel movement is coming from the colon/rectum how does something like Imodium of pepto bismal work so quickly when digestion of food takes hours? | Gastroenterologist here: Short answer - there are multiple mechanisms:
1) **Mu Receptor agonists** These bad boys are drugs like immodium (loperamide) and lomotil (diphynoxylate and atropine). They work by binding to Mu receptors on the smooth muslcles of the colon. By binding to these receptors the muscles of the colon wall (which normally contract like a worm) are slowed down. This is also the mechanism by which morphine, dilaudid, percocet, heroin, etc cause severe constipation - and people who undergo withdrawl from these drugs often have severe diarrhea.
2) **Fiber Supplements** Most commonly Psyllium (Metamucil), Methylcellulose (synthetic fiber) and Guar Gum. These supplements are not absorbed by the colon (the cellulose is nonabsorbable). Like a sponge they absorb the water/liquid in the colon/SB. They also bulk the stool and can be used in constipation (dual use). The colonic bacteria are able to breakdown some of the fiber (via fermentation) and as a result produce hydrogen and methane which can cause gas/bloating.
3)**Bile Acid Binding Resins** You may know these drugs as cholysteramine. They actually work when there is diarrhea due to Bile Acid Malabsorption (BAM). Bile acid is usually absorbed in the ileum (terminal small bowel). Patients that have had a surgical resection of the small bowel, a choleycstectomy, or disease of the small bowel (like Crohns) can result in failure of bile from being absorbed in the small bowel. Excess bile then enters the colon - which is actually an irritant to the colon wall - and cause diarrhea from the irritation (inflammatory diarrhea)
4) **Somatostain analogues** Now we are getting into some specialized drugs - Octreotide (most common somatostatin analogue in Canada). Works be inhibiting secretion of fluids from the cells of the small bowel (these cells are responsible mainly for absorption of liquid, but they can also secrete liquid - like in cholera). The mechanism of Somatostatin analogues are complex and involve activating signalling proteins that downregulate the production of channels (like chloride and sodium channels) that are ultimately responsible for secreting water INTO the colon/small bowel.
5) **Targeted treatment** most gastroenterologist will actually work to figure out the cause of the diarrhea and will prescribe medications that will treat the disease. These drugs are often very different from the drugs I describe above. Example Diseases **Inflammatory Bowel Disease** (5-amisosalycilic acid, azathiprine, 6-mp, infliximab), **Cholera** (oral rehydration solution), **Microscopic Colitis** (discontinue offending drug, 5-asa), **Infectious Colitis** (Antibiotics), **Irritible Bowel Syndrome** (antidpressants), etc**.
Hope that helps | [
"As bowel stimulants, enemas are employed for the same purposes as orally administered laxatives: To relieve constipation; To treat fecal impaction; To empty the colon prior to a medical procedure such as a colonoscopy. A large volume of enema can be given to cleanse as much of the colon as possible of feces. Howev... |
how do we know how much charge is left in a battery? | _URL_0_
This question has been asked before. | [
"Charge and discharge rates are often given as \"C\" or \"C-rate\", which is a measure of the rate at which a battery is charged or discharged relative to its capacity. The C-rate is defined as the charge or discharge current divided by the battery's capacity to store an electrical charge. While rarely stated expli... |
why's it so important to recycle batteries? | We don't want the metals found in batteries in our drinking water. If they go into the trash, the go to the landfill. Water leaching from landfill ends up in someone's glass eventually.
| [
"Battery recycling is a recycling activity that aims to reduce the number of batteries being disposed as municipal solid waste. Batteries contain a number of heavy metals and toxic chemicals and disposing of them by the same process as regular trash has raised concerns over soil contamination and water pollution.\n... |
What are the origins of Goebbels' Nazi identification? | This requires a few different answers in order to get to Nazism. For the TL;DF crowd - just check out the links if you're curious and here's your sum-up: Spengler's German Socialism stands *very* apart from Marxism and Stalinism & even Nazism (due to racism in nazism); Eugenics became an obsession for the Third Reich; Versailles left the German people in a vindictive mood *AND* the German Unification was the basis for Klein- vs Gross- Deutschland and a part of the NSDAP identity (National Socialist *German* Workers Party) which led to expansionism coinciding with territorial reacquisition and revenge.
**I**. German Socialism can be dated back to German historian [Oswald Spengler](_URL_3_) who wrote *[Preußentum und Sozialismus](_URL_4_)*, a book dedicated to the betterment of the German people using Prussian values in connection to socialism: self-sacrifice, discipline and concern for the greater good (the values) are the core tenets a national community must embrace to better the nation (socialism). The Marxist-Leninist revolution in Tsarist Russia the year before scared Spengler, because he felt Marxism was wrong: "Marxism is the capitalism of the working class" and not true socialism.^1 Again, socialism for Spengler was a self-sacrificing act, not a selfish act; Therefore, he argued that all Marxism did was reverse the capitalist scales, serving no purpose other than to rob the businessmen in the same way businessmen robbed the working class, which would only train the proletariat to exploit the wealthy, resulting in stagnation and laziness. His approach towards nationalist socialism also stood as a conservative basis for the value of the individual, something the Bolshevik uprising greatly differed in (there's more, but the answer would get too disparate. I'd check out the wiki pages on Fascism and Communism to springboard your question)
His belief in the betterment of mankind and therefore the nation was a proactive approach that many intellectuals and individuals were attached to in the '20s and *early* '30s. I say *early* because while Spengler was a German Socialist, he was critical of national socialism, he was unimpressed with Hitler, and he believed anti-semitism & racial supremacy based on dodgy studies in Eugenics were wrong. As a result, he was effectively gagged and shunned by the German media after Hitler came to power and then died of a heart attack in '36.
**II**. I wrapped up with Eugenics, because that's where a lot of the elements that make Nazism stand apart from Fascism come from. Eugenics stems from [Francis Galton](_URL_2_): He's the 19th century guy who coined the phrase "Nature vs nurture" in the modern sense, which is the hereditary nature vs the personal experiences (nurture) and how they impact the individual. Eugenics is the principle that desirable traits are heretical (read: natural), which is largely inspired by contemporary Darwinism. What's important to take away from Eugenics is the concept that racially, some races are inferior to others; This principle was co-opted by nationalists to argue that their race of people was superior to those not of their nation-state. When developing the fascist ideology of the NSDAP, eugenics was very popular because it was used to explain why Germans were superior to non-Germans like gypsies, Jews, blacks, Russians/Bolsheviks. William Shirer's [Rise and Fall of the Third Reich](_URL_0_) has a very good^2 section on the beginnings of the Nazi movement and the initial laws passed, which coincides with the racist agenda of Nazism.
**III**. When discussing Nazi Germany, it's also important to note that Nazism used anti-semitism to scapegoat the Jews in order to press their agenda; Eugenics was a part of this, Jewish businessmen and bankers that survived the economic downturn following Versailles was another; Communist Jews from Russia was also a big issue - Hitler *hated* communists as much as he hated Jews... imagine both in one, which was a thing in Russia because the Bolsheviks gave the Jews rights that the Tsar did not (Pogroms were kind of an issue). One of the primary tenets of the Nazi party greatly sought the redemption of Germany following the very humiliating Treaty of Versailles; Article 231 stated that Germany was responsible for the war ("war guilt clause") and as a result, Article 232 forced the Germans to pay war reparations to the Entente.
*Revanche* was one of the leading battle cries of the Germans going into the '30s as the Weimar Republic floundered. Since Alsace-Lorraine, the Polish Corridor (Danzig) and other parts of the *Kaiserreich* were taken apart at Versailles, the NSDAP under Hitler sought its reclaim. The Annexation of Austria is important for the Nazi identity because it follows the eugenics and nationalist paths towards their blood brothers; But here's the largest context: During the Unification Period, there was a question regarding which power in greater Germania - Prussia or Austria (This was "The German Question)? A great, but long, read on the entire context and timeline of Unification is James Sheehan's [German History: 1780–1866](_URL_1_). The core concept of the time is this: Prussia was Protestant, Austria was Catholic. Otto von Bismarck argued for *Kleindeutschland,* a smaller Germany under Prussian guidance as a predominantly Protestant state; This was partially because Austria, as a Catholic nation, was under the influence of the Papacy in Rome. In 1866, Prussia and Austria went to war and Prussia won; Ergo, *Kleindeutschland.* The reason the papacy was an issue dates back to Martin Luther. Technically this is relevant, but I'm passing over this because I'd have to write a book to cover it all.
So, Nazi Germany looked back at Bismarck and said "you know what, we're going to include our brothers this time, because they are ethnically German. The emphasis in Hitler's time wasn't on religion, but race. So, between seeking to reclaim lost lands, Hitler sought to creation of a greater German empire that would last a thousand years.
In conclusion, the Nazi identity is more than just anti-semitism. It largely draws from nationalism as well as recent German histories from the Unification to the failures of the Weimar Republic in the advent of Bolshevism.
1. [Here's](_URL_4_) Spengler's book in English for those who missed the above link.
2. I say "good" because while it's relevant for context and history, the book's section on early nazism is limited to the first portions of the book. The rest covers wartime Germany itself. Any additions that would add to a more timely context would be great! I can't find my books on the subject. | [
"\"Schicklgruber\" is the surname Adolf Hitler's father, Alois Hitler carried for the first 40 years of his life, until he took the name Hitler (Hiedler) from his stepfather. While Adolf Hitler himself never carried the surname, the British made use of it for propaganda purposes since even to Germans, the name is l... |
Woodrow Wilson had a PHD. Was he addressed as Dr. President? | No—"Mr. President" is not just the name of the job preceded by the traditional male English honorific. It's the actual title of the sitting president, the way something like "your majesty" might be used for a monarch. *Edit:* /u/The_Alaskan's [comment reply](_URL_4_) notes that "Madam President" would be used by a female president, and that a formal decision to that effect was made in advance of the 2016 U.S. general election.
So did this hold true for Dr. Wilson? Yes! From my own study of America during that time period, I recalled seeing Wilson addressed as Mr. President in print, but I wanted to confirm that by finding a verifiable example with a source. The best I've got for now is a reference to a sign carried in the NAACP's 1917 "Silent Protest Parade" that read "Mr. President, why not make America safe for democracy?" [Source: Alan Dawley, *Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution.*](_URL_5_) *Edit again:* /u/Lo-Jupiter pointed to additional, earlier examples of Wilson being addressed as Mr. President in [this comment reply!](_URL_2_)
But why is Mr. President the title, and not something else? Initially, after the formation of the young U.S. government, there was a bit of a debate over how to address the president. Some in the early U.S., including the first president and vice president, favored a more exalted title. VP John Adams suggested "his highness," and George Washington preferred "his mightiness." Adams believed the executive ~~was~~ appeared too weak in comparison to the other branches of the new government, and sought to ~~consolidate presidentail power~~ boost the appearance of the president's power by way of a grandiose form of address.
However, there was vehement opposition to this style of address among many other leaders, who felt it was a bit too reminiscent of the monarchy they had all just worked so hard to escape (Thomas Jefferson said an exalted presidential title was "the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of," and Benjamin Franklin called Adams' stance "absolutely mad"), and ultimately Washington and Adams yielded and accepted the title "Mr. President." *Edit a third time:* /u/yodatsracist points to a source in [this comment reply](_URL_3_) suggesting that Washington himself never actually went by Mr. President. My sources (listed below) suggest that the title was adopted through common usage because the House of Representatives opposed anything more elevated than that, but don't say whether or not Washington himself ever used it.
*****
I'm not an expert on the American Revolution or its aftermath, and I'd be happy if a real expert could flesh out or correct any aspects of that hurried section of this explanation! Here are the sources I used for my quick study on it:
- [James H. Hutson, *John Adams' Title Campaign*](_URL_0_)
- [Albert Hart, *Formation of the Union, 1750-1829*](_URL_1_)
Edits for clarity, and to add additional info! | [
"BULLET::::- Woodrow Wilson (1210 Eutaw Pl.), President of Princeton University, Governor of New Jersey, and President of the United States. Wilson lived in Bolton Hill during his doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins.\n",
"Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924) was an American statesman, lawyer... |
what does it mean if a currency is ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ | A strong currency is a currency that has an increased value compared to other currencies. But this has little to do with the numerical value of the currencies, despite what other commenters above said.
1 dollar is usually worth 100-120 yen. If the dollar becomes worth 80 yen, then it means the yen has become stronger relative to the dollar, and the dollar weaker relative to the yen.
It's completely meaningless to say that if 1 dollar = 1000 of X currency then X currency is weak, and if 1 dollar = 0.1 Y currency then Y currency is strong, because prices in the countries of those currencies will be adjusted accordingly.
Another example is the Brazilian Real, which is currently US$ 1 = R$ 3.70. The country is in recession so the dollar is strong compared to the real. But in 2008 US$ 1 = R$1.60. At that time, the US was in recession and the brazilian economy was still strong. The dollar was weak compared to the Real, even though one dollar was worth more than 1 real.
Edit: another example is that governments with hyperinflation usually need to remove zeroes from their currency every few years. Imagine if the zimbabwe government changed its 100 trillion dollar (40 USD cents) and removed 14 zeroes. Now 1 zimbabwe dollar is worth 40 US cents. But why stop at 14 zeroes? They could remove 15 zeroes, so now 1 zimbabwe dollar is worth 4 US dollars. This would not make the zimbabwe dollar a stronger currency than the US dollar. It's just a numerical trick. To decide if a currency is strong or weak you can't just look at the numbers they are being traded for, but also their value history, and evaluate their purchasing power. | [
"The weak force is due to the exchange of the heavy W and Z bosons. Its most familiar effect is beta decay (of neutrons in atomic nuclei) and the associated radioactivity. The word \"weak\" derives from the fact that the field strength is some 10 times less than that of the strong force. Still, it is stronger than ... |
How do thermophiles survive temperatures that would quickly cook animal tissue? | I found a website that has several different adaptations thermophiles have:
_URL_0_
Basically it boils down to having extra-tough proteins that can withstand the higher temperatures without denaturing. The flipside is though, that some of these tougher proteins are only viable at higher temperatures.
If the temperature drops too far the protein essentially freezes and the organism is ... going to have a bad day. | [
"There are two explanations for thermophiles being able to survive at such high temperatures whereas mesophiles can not. The most evident explanation is that thermophiles are believed to have cell components that are relatively more stable than the cell components of mesophiles which is why thermophiles are able to... |
If the speed of light is constant, how does it "bounce" off of a mirror. Does'nt that imply that the light slowed to a velocity of zero and reversed its momentum? | Well...I'd like to clear up a subtle point in your post's title. You say "if the speed of light is constant" - remember that c is the speed of light *in vacuum*. The speed of light in a material is less than c, and has to do with the material properties that the light is traveling through (it's NOT due to photon absorption and re-emission, like many say).
Mirrors are complicated little things believe it or not. Your average metal mirror behaves the way it does because the the electric field of the incoming light moves the (unbound) electrons in the metal back and forth. The energy from the incoming light is absorbed and makes the electrons wiggle. These wiggling electrons then produce a secondary light wave, which we see as a reflection. This behavior is organized in such a way that we see clear reflections with very little scatter.
[Source](_URL_0_) | [
"The formula for radar Doppler shift is the same as that for reflection of light by a moving mirror. There is no need to invoke Einstein's theory of special relativity, because all observations are made in the same frame of reference. The result derived with \"c\" as the speed of light and \"v\" as the target veloc... |
slightly new to reddit, why do people post their edits at the bottom of their posts | If you edit a post after a number of minutes it puts an asterisk in the header of the post.
Additionally, people generally do it as a form of courtesy, either to not force someone to re-read the entire post and figure out what the altered content is, or to maintain the flow of conversation. That is to say, if you post, and someone replies to your post, and you alter the original post, you can make the reply appear nonsensical. Posting that you have edited the post will clue other people in on why this mismatch may exist, and thus is courteous to both them (by aiding their reading comprehension) and the respondents (by making them look less crazy). | [
"An editor's current position is represented with an editor-specific color/cursor, so if another editor happens to be viewing the same slide, they can see edits as they occur. A sidebar chat functionality allows collaborators to discuss edits. The revision history allows users to see the additions made to a documen... |
what is it about orange juice that dulls the taste of alcohol so well? | Ethanol causes a burning sensation because it activates the same [receptors](_URL_0_) as capsaicin. Acids also activate this class of receptors and so drinks like OJ and coke which are acidic will also activate them. | [
"Orange soft drinks (especially those without orange juice) often contain very high levels of sodium benzoate, and this often imparts a slight metallic taste to the beverage. Other additives commonly found in orange soft drinks include rosin and sodium hexametaphosphate.\n",
"Common orange juice is made from the ... |
the difference between discrimination & prejudice? | Prejudice is a feeling or an opinion, while discrimination is an actual act. Prejudice of course often leads to discrimination.
For example, if I believe people of a certain ethnicity are likelier to be shop lifters then I am prejudiced against them, but that doesn't mean I discriminate against them. It's discrimination when I act upon it, for example if I were to check every person of that ethnicity before they leave my store to make sure they haven't stolen anything. | [
"Discrimination is the selection for unfavorable treatment of an individual or individuals on the basis of: gender, race, color or ethnic or national origin, religion, disability, sexual orientation, social class, age, or as a result of any conditions or requirements that do not accord with the principles of fairne... |
how are vector illustrations not based on pixels if our screen is made up of pixels? | > So even if we're using a software like Adobe Illustrator, isn't a vector line made up of a bunch of small pixels in actuality?
The vector itself is just a bit of math saying "A line exists between point A and point B". The resulting line is *displayed* using pixels, but the underlying mathematical representation means that you can display the same vector on a higher-resolution screen, and it would fully take advantage of the higher resolution by being drawn with more pixels.
If the image itself were stored as pixels, then showing it on a higher resolution monitor would just make the image smaller, and not more detailed. | [
"Vector formats are not always appropriate in graphics work and also have numerous disadvantages. For example, devices such as cameras and scanners produce essentially continuous-tone raster graphics that are impractical to convert into vectors, and so for this type of work, an image editor will operate on the pixe... |
Have any of the works of Greek & Roman Antiquity been recovered in contemporaneous form, and turned out to differ from their Renaissance-era translations? | Not "first editions" (haha), but ancient copies, certainly. The most common avenue for finding ancient copies is via papyri preserved in Egyptian rubbish dumps, or turned into papyrus-mâché and used in sarcophaguses, though papyri have certainly turned up elsewhere too (e.g. in Herculaneum, as you mention).
They're nearly always very fragmentary. Often the surviving fragment preserves no more than a few letters. But yes, they're important sources of textual variants. They're not always *better* than the mediaeval manuscript tradition: transmission errors happened in antiquity too. But earlier witnesses always add more information, so even if there are errors, they're always *informative*.
The number of papyri that have been found varies depending on how popular the text was. For things like the New Testament and Homer, we have thousands of papyrus fragments. For example, we have fragments of at least 136 separate papyri of Euripides, 36 of Sophocles, and 32 of Aeschylus. For early epic, we have 1569 papyri of the *Iliad*, at least 252 of the *Odyssey*, 58 of the *Catalogue of Women*, 40 of the *Theogony*, and 32 of the *Works and Days*.
A very few are relatively intact. There's one 5th/6th cent. CE papyrus that preserves substantial chunks from every book of the *Iliad*, and one 3rd/4th cent. CE papyrus that preserves most of 11 books of the *Odyssey*. A very few texts are known only from papyri: the main ones I know of are Aristotle's *Constitution of the Athenians*, the majority of what survives of the *Catalogue of Women*, and the Derveni papyrus.
As to how they shed light on surviving texts, [I wrote an old post here](_URL_0_) which gives one example of how a papyrus reading affected our understanding of the correct reading of a text. Papyri are and will always continue to be an important avenue for finding new corrections to ancient texts, which is why there are a few journals specifically devoted to papyrology. In a modern critical edition of a text, papyrus readings will normally be annotated in the apparatus (the list of textual variants at the bottom of the page) with the letter *p*, though the exact typography varies from edition to edition (e.g. sometimes an edition will use a lower-case italic *p*; some older editions use a capital *P* in blackletter script). | [
"recovery of lost Greek classics (and, to a lesser extent, Arab advancements on them) following the Crusader conquest of the Byzantine heartlands, revitalized medieval philosophy in the Renaissance of the 12th century, just as the refugee Byzantine scholars who migrated to Italy during and following the Turkish con... |
why does wine give such wicked hangovers? | You've got a mild allergy to the grape in that type of wine.
Switch types and/or color, and drink more water.
Or switch to beer or hard liquor or heroin. | [
"Whether fusel alcohol contributes to hangover symptoms is a matter of scientific debate. A Japanese study in 2003 concluded: \"the fusel oil in whisky had no effect on the ethanol-induced emetic response\" in the Asian house shrew. Additionally, consumption of fusel oils with ethanol suppressed subjects' subsequen... |
Why are triangles, squares, and hexagons the only shapes that can tesselate? | Regular polygons are equilateral and equiangular. The only way a regular polygon can tesselate the plane is if some multiple of the interior angle equals 360 degrees. This is the only possible way you can actually fit a multiple of the polygons around each vertex.
The interior angle of an *N*-gon is (1- 2/N)π radians. Some multiple of this angle must be exactly equal to 2π. So the only regular *N*-gons that can tesselate the plate are those *N*-gons for which there is some integer *M* such that
> M = 2N/(N - 2)
The function f(N) = 2N/(N - 2) decreases to 2 as N varies from 3 to infinity, and f(3) = 6. So we need only find those values of *N* that correspond to M = 3, 4, 5, 6. The corresponding values of *N* are N = 6, 4, 10/3, 3. Since 10/3 is not an integer, the only possible regular *N*-gons that can tesselate the plane are the 3-gon (triangle), 4-gon (square), and 6-gon (hexagon).
> I understand that the angles don't allow other shapes to do this, but I would like to understand it from a more conceptual and visual perspective.
Well, all of the relevant concepts are in the proof above. As for a visual, I'm not sure you can get any more insight than just looking at an image of tesselations for the regular polygons ([like this](_URL_1_)) and an attempted tesselation with some other regular polygon ([like this failed regular pentagon tesselation](_URL_0_)). Recall that above we found that f(5) = 10/3 = 3.33. So around each vertex you can fit at most 3 regular pentagons, but there will always be some room left over.
It all comes down to the fact that 360-degrees is not a multiple of the interior angle of any regular polygon other than the triangle, square, and hexagon.
| [
"Triangles are sturdy; while a rectangle can collapse into a parallelogram from pressure to one of its points, triangles have a natural strength which supports structures against lateral pressures. A triangle will not change shape unless its sides are bent or extended or broken or if its joints break; in essence, e... |
Question from my boy: Are some mammalian tails vestigial, and why haven't they disappeared? | Human tails are vestigial because there's no selective pressure against them. In order for natural selection to act to discard a body part (e.g. a tail or appendix), there has to be some evolutionary *reason* to do so. If having a vestigial tail significantly decreased an individual's ability to mate or survive, there would be selection against that trait. Since there is not selection for or against the tail bone or the appendix, they simply remain as mostly useless appendages in our bodies.
As for why they disappeared in humans, at some point there arose selection against a tail. Human ancestors moved out of the trees and thus no longer needed a tail for gripping tree branches, so the selective pressure *for* the tail disappeared and some kind of selective pressure *against* the tail arose. So it became very short. But there was never any reason to completely get rid of it. And in fact, the vestigial does actually serve to protect some of the pelvic organs, so it does have slight selective pressure in its favor.
Hope this helps! | [
"The coccyx, or tailbone, is the remnant of a lost tail. All mammals have a tail at some point in their development; in humans, it is present for a period of 4 weeks, during stages 14 to 22 of human embryogenesis. This tail is most prominent in human embryos 31–35 days old. The tailbone, located at the end of the s... |
why does inhaling steam seem to clear up clogged sinuses? | Think of your mucous as a kind of hydrophilic (strongly attracted to water) slime. If you're sick, suffering from allergies, exposed to irritants, etc... then it can be valuable to move that mucous along faster than it would normally. By inhaling water vapor, you increase the water content of the mucous, and it becomes looser, less sticky and more subject to being cleared.
Another reality of the situation is that often what we perceive to be clogged sinuses due to mucous are actually just inflamed. Steam and warmth can be soothing, especially since dryness or the presence of an irritant is often a cause of that initial inflammation. | [
"Many people believe that steam inhalation reduces cold symptoms. There is no evidence suggesting that steam inhalation is effective for treating the common cold. There have been reports of children being badly burned by accidentally spilling the water used for steam inhalation.\n",
"Breathing low-temperature ste... |
maslows hierarchy of needs. | Basically it talks about what a person can focus time and energy on as one tries to be as complete and satisfied a human as possible.
The idea is that for example it is hard for someone to worry too much about whether they have an artistic outlet if they are worried about how they are going to find food for the night. Or if their spouse is going to beat them tomorrow. Or if they are about to get evicted.
Once you have basic needs (food and shelter) then you can worry about your saftey. Once you are safe and fed, yiu can worry about being loved. Once you feel safe, fed, loved, you can worry about building a meaningful social network. Once you have all that met, you can worry about whether your job is providing a means of self actualization.
It isn't a rigid or linear framework. A kid who isn't safe at home can have even greater need for social network and creative outlet, especially the more we learn about trauma's actual physical impact on the brain and development. Feeling greater esteme can give a woman the courage to risk basic need loss in order to flee a financially secure but unsafe relationship.
But it provides a general outline of prioritization, and a way of understanding why a person may respond or not respond to a situation compared to someone else who has a different circumstance and life experience.
Basic safety social emotional actualization
| [
"Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper \"A Theory of Human Motivation\" in \"Psychological Review\". Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. His theories parallel many other theories of human developm... |
Why did China recieve Veto-power at the creation of the SC of the UN? | They were 'granted' this at the Conference of Cairo in 1943 by FDR and Churchill. The Americans needed the Chinese to continue the fight against the Japanese on the mainland, since most of the Japanese armed forces were occupied fighting the Chinese United Front (Both the Kwomingtang and the Communists). At Cairo FDR also was already preparing his 'New Order' by trying to get all allied powers to sign off on the United Nations Idea, and by giving China the seat they also participated in the United Nations.
It's also important to note that FDR and Churchill negotiated with Chiang Kai Shek, and as such the veto power in the Security Council went to the Kwomingtang, even after they were forced in exile to Taiwan. Only after the thaw in the '70s did the Pernament seat at the Security council and veto-right go to the Peoples Republic of China, instead of the Republic of China (Taiwan).
Source:
KERREMANS, B. and LAENEN R., International Politics since 1945, Leuven, 1999.
Edit: Spelling Errors | [
"In 1971, the Republic of China was expelled from the United Nations, and the Chinese seat was transferred to the People's Republic of China. China first used the veto on 25 August 1972 to block Bangladesh's admission to the United Nations. From 1971 to 2011, China used its veto sparingly, preferring to abstain rat... |
How close could i get to building a modern day jet engine with the materials and techniques used at the time of the Wright brothers' first flight? | It depends on which modern day jet engine you're talking about.
A real actual [turbofan](_URL_4_) or [turbojet](_URL_2_) like on a jet airliner, no way. The tolerances for heat and stress just weren't available in 1903. [Turbine Blades are often the limiting part of the engine](_URL_1_) and are generally made form exotic materials and are processed in ways to make them more durable. Early Engine designs suffered from [issues in the combustion section of the engine](_URL_1_#Materials) which didn't get properly worked out until the 1940's
Now a [pulsejet](_URL_0_), that should have been obtainable but not really all that usefull for air travel.
*edit: Missed, a comma. | [
"BULLET::::- The aircraft engine that will power the Wright brothers' first airplane later in 1903 is run for the first time in Dayton, Ohio, United States. It is the first successful attempt to build a heavier-than-air aircraft engine.\n",
"The Wright brothers flights in 1903 are recognized by the \"Fédération A... |
Can someone explain heteroscedasticity in simple terms? | I'll try to do it in somewhat visual terms for you rather than in terms of the error statistic or matrix math -- let's look at the sample plot for the topic on Wikipedia (_URL_1_). In the sample, you can clearly see a couple of things.
Firstly, there is apparently a clear line of best fit for the data that runs from the lower left to the upper right: it's obvious what your final regression model's linear equation will look like if you graph it as a line. It'll go right through the middle of those dots and will be very good about having equal numbers of dots above and below.
Secondly, in any given region around the regression line, the average distance between the line and the dots above is comparable in scale to the distance between the line and the dots below.
Think about the implications of this visually first. Your regression line is still an *unbiased* estimate of the data no matter where you are on the line. A real data point is as likely to be above the line as below, and if you go looking for a real data point above the line, on average you will not have to stray any farther than if you go looking for one below the line.
Thirdly, however, the dots toward the lower left side will crowd together close to your line. Toward the upper right, the average distance between the line and a data point, regardless of whether it is above or below the line, grows much larger.
The assumption of homoscedasticity is that this does *not* happen. Data points are not supposed to "fan out" as you move down the line, regardless of whether they keep the line in the center. Your error (or residual) term, ε , is supposed to be an equally useful guide to how good your line is, regardless of where you are on the line.
This is important for Type I errors because statistical inference has two parts, not just one: in a simple OLS case, it is a combination of *both* (a) how sloped your line is when you fit it to your data *and* (b) an estimate of how likely it is that the line is only sloped by chance, and that if you got a whole new data set on the same topic, the line would be flat or slope in the other direction.
And the key to the second part is getting a good and consistent measure of how far the data points are spaced from the line. If they hew closely to the line, then you can have higher confidence that the trend is "real"; if they are scattered much further from the line, then your confidence will diminish. Intuitively, you can see in that picture that the line seems to be a very good description of the data toward the lower left, and it is not such a good description of the data toward the upper right.
Now you have to consider what you are doing when you run a hypothesis test and say that you have 95+ percent confidence that there is a real, positive trend to this data (in other words, you are rejecting the null hypothesis, concluding that if you got all new data about this topic over and over again, you would keep seeing positive slopes in your regression lines). How do you determine the confidence interval? Well, you hypothesize that the "real" trend is zero, and that if you did the experiment over and over, recording the slope of the line you got, the data for all the slopes would cluster around zero: specifically, they would form a normal distribution around zero. If the slope you got in the experiment you really did is far away enough from zero (about two standard deviations), then it is really unlikely that you would have gotten it in a world where the reality is zero, so you conclude that the effect is real.
The key piece of the puzzle is that in every experiment, you have to redefine what a standard deviation actually means in numerical terms. With heteroscedastic data, you have compromised your ability to state how responsible the slope of your line is for keeping the points close to it (and remember also at the outset that you are using the squares of distances rather than the absolute value of distances when you are doing OLS regression). You are coming up with an estimate of how big the error term is going to tend to be every time you re-run the experiment, and in a Type I error case, you are understating it. This means that, while your estimate is still unbiased, it looks like it is straying very far from a world in which the "truth" is zero. In reality, though, the truth could be zero *and still* allow you to run a bunch of sloped lines that look like they're doing a good job at estimation.
Look back at the sample plot to see this visually. Take a ruler or a piece of string and overlay it on the line of best fit. Now rotate it around back and forth, with the center of rotation being in the middle of the dense cluster of dots toward the lower left. You now can see how, even when you move the slope quite far off of what you think its "true" trend should be, the "bad" lines you are making are *still* able to capture a lot of brownie points, as it were, for being very close to the dots down there on the lower left. And because, further on the right, you are still in the thick of the "fan", you aren't being punished all that much for "missing" the middle of that section.
Now consider what happens if you try that with homoscedastic data, like with the Wikipedia sample plot for linear regression in general (_URL_0_). Now, if you pick a point on the lower left (or anywhere on the line, really) and rotate the line around it (to give it an ''incorrect'' slope), you can still stay close to the dots near your axis of rotation. But your error term immediately starts to punish you severely elsewhere on the line, because when you look at the upper right, you are moving away from all of the data points and moving toward almost none of them. When you were in the fan, the punishment was not nearly so severe.
Therefore, from a visual perspective, heteroscedastic data can cause you to make a Type I error because it may be capable of accommodating a relatively wide range of regression line slopes that each reports a relatively small average error. This can lead you to set tight definition for how ''bad'' a line slope has to be in order to be an outlier, since a line that has even a modest amount of error will look like a bad line. This is because the heteroscedastic data is making it artificially easy to be a ''good'' line. Since the null hypothesis is that zero slope is correct, then, if the null is true, you must have been *terribly, badly unlucky* to end up with a set of points that generates even your modestly-sloped line. You may have decided to say that ''if my line looks like one of the bottom-5-percent most unlucky lines in the world, I'm going to conclude that it's not me that's unlucky, it's that 'zero is the truth' is wrong." And then you'll pull that trigger, when the truth is that zero is the best answer but that this data is going to throw up more unlucky-looking line slopes than you expected. | [
"The existence of heteroscedasticity is a major concern in the application of regression analysis, including the analysis of variance, as it can invalidate statistical tests of significance that assume that the modelling errors are uncorrelated and uniform—hence that their variances do not vary with the effects bei... |
What number would our number system have to be based on for PI to be equal to 3.2? | If b is the base, then you'd need pi=3+2/b. Solve for b to get b=2/(pi-3). This is closest to 14, and in base 14 pi is 3.1D ish, where D is 13, so it's the base 14 equivalent of 3.19 | [
"The spectator's 3-digit number can be written as 100 × A + 10 × B + 1 × C, and its reversal as 100 × C + 10 × B + 1 × A, where 1 ≤ A ≤ 9, 0 ≤ B ≤ 9 and 1 ≤ C ≤ 9. (For convenience, we assume A C; if A C, we first swap A and C.) Their difference is 99 × (A − C). Note that if A − C is 0 or 1, the difference is 0 o... |
How did the Jewish working rise to prominence so quickly in the USA after WWII? | History minor focusing on Jewish History (Post diaspora, pre WWII) here.
This is on the periphery of my studies, but here it is:
First some nomenclature: There were, at the time of WWII (and still are) several different types of "Jews." The Jews of Poland and Lithuania were most likely Hasidic. If you have no experience with Hasidic jews, think of them as similar (not really, but for the purposes of analogy...) to charismatic christian churches.
The other big group were the so-called Ashkenazi Jews, or "German Jews." Keep in mind at this time, the concept of "nationality" was an evolving one, and most people, pre WWI thought of themselves less-so as members of a particular nation, than as citizens of a country, so them being "German" had less to do with Germany and more to do with the language they spoke, and having a generalized western culture similar to that of christians of Western Europe; this lies in contrast to the distinctly eastern european culture that was prominent in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and the other Eastern European/Ural/Baltic states. When I say "German Jew," think Western European.
With that out of the way, lets get some historical context. Laws limiting Jews to particular professions and trades were quite common, and had been around for centuries. So too had the practice of the State, at the behest of nobles or merchants, seizing resources from the Jews, burning their homes, and running them out of the city, only to realize in a few years that the reason they had so much stuff is that they were good at what they did and their services were in demand. So, eventually they would be ushered back in, even sometimes being offered incentives (protection, tax breaks, etc) for returning.
The end result of this is that Jews couldn't really become farmers, since farmers can't take their land and crops with them when they flee town. So what jobs were left? How does a Jewish man feed his family in 1900's Europe?
Mercantile and Professional jobs. You either become a trader/retailer, or a doctor/lawyer/etc. Reading was not a common skill even a few decades ago. In the 1900's it was not at all common for the general public to be well read. Ashkenazi Jews, on the other hand, studied their religious texts obsessively. They would be able to read and write in two languages by 10, with formal training beginning around 5 years of age. As a result, their cultural practices lent themselves to scholarly pursuits.
*****SIDE NOTE*** I want to be clear here. This is not a racist "jews make good lawyers Hyuck!" argument. They started their children reading in Hebrew at a young age, and taught them the local language as well. This familiarity at a young age with reading and writing primes a young child's brain for such pursuits, and it will (and does) when anyone, not just the Jews does it. ***END SIDE NOTE*****
So as a scholar or a merchant with a portable trade, what do you do when anti-semitism begins to rise? You do the same thing the Jews had done for centuries, and you leave your current home for a nearby land where public sentiment lies more in your favor. Many Jews left Europe for the United States. (though nowhere near the numbers we saw in four decades) Keep in mind this is even pre-wwI.
The next thing you have to understand about European Jewry is that there was always a sense of community toward other Jews (not counting the Hasidim; their relationship with the Ashkenazi is more... complicated.) to the point that supporting a traveling scholar was considered a *mitzvah* or religiously obligated good deed. The Jewish community would take up alms for those among them that could not, for whatever reason, support themselves.
So lets take a quick inventory of what our context has created:
We have a community of people with a long history of relocating, engaged in trades that are lucrative wherever you go, who believe strongly in the importance of charity.
Now, getting to your actual question:
After WWII, when the horrors of the holocaust had been revealed, the surviving Europeans Jews made a choice. Many (more than you might think) stayed in Europe. Some left for Israel after it was founded a few years later, and some headed to the United States. Those Jews not directly affected by the holocaust engaged *heavily* in charities benefitting its victims. Additionally, Many were business owners who could easily give a job to a jewish immigrant just off the boat from Europe.
Sources:
Dubnow's History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Link:_URL_2_
Bartal's "The Jews of Eastern Europe: 1772-1881" Link: _URL_1_
Stow's "Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe" Link: _URL_0_
| [
"As the Jewish working class died out in the years after the Second World War, its institutions and political movements did too. The Arbeter Ring in England, for example, came to an end in the 1950s and Jewish trade unionism in the US ceased to be a major force at that time. There are, however, still some remnants ... |
In this video of the tsunami in Japan there is a white cloud moving out of the water and disappearing. What is it? | You can see it happen at around the [10 min 32 sec mark](_URL_0_) too (just a little bit to the left of the spot in your video, under the tree).
Maybe it's a punctured tank of gas, like propane. It's venting gas all the time, it just looks like that when it's above water.
| [
"The image depicts an enormous wave threatening three boats off the coast of the town of Kanagawa (the present-day city of Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture) while Mount Fuji rises in the background. While sometimes assumed to be a tsunami, the wave is more likely to be a large rogue wave. As in many of the prints in t... |
why is it illegal to download movies/music/games/etc, but people can sell used copies? either way the company isn't getting a cut after the first time. | First off, the difference is that a digital copy is endlessly duplicable, while a physical item changes hands -- if you sell a CD, you no longer have access to that CD. But you could copy a music or video file and still have that media while also selling it.
Secondly, there are laws that define "first-sale doctrine" -- that specifically state one can sell, rent, loan, destroy, give away, etc. something once they purchase it. The company that produces it loses rights to dictate how product is used once bought. But this applies to physical items, not electronic media. So you can rent a DVD if you buy it for your video store, or your can donate that old Abercrombie logo sweatshirt to the homeless and there's nothing that the producer can do to stop that... but the law doesn't say you can duplicate an MP3. | [
"A 2009 court case, \"United States v. Dove,\" ruled that the content industry equation of lost sales with illegal downloads is not valid, with the judge noting \"Those who download movies and music for free would not necessarily purchase those movies and music at the full purchase price... although it is true that... |
Do we know when certain food and drink pairings first became popular? Eggs and bacon? Wine and cheese? Etc | This question has been removed because it's [an "in your era" or "throughout history" question](_URL_0_), which are not appropriate for this subreddit. If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. | [
"Although the bacon and egg combination is not unique to any country, its use in modern cooking is notable in New Zealand and Canada. Recipes for it have been found as early as \"The Experienced English Housekeeper\" in 1769.\n",
"The Ancient Romans were the first to understand the binding properties of eggs. Dur... |
why do pain killers help some types of pain, but not others? | Different kinds of pain killers (analgesics) react in the body in different ways so you need to identify what's causing the pain to effectively treat it. Basically it's a combination of the type of pain (Cancer/Inflammatory/Neuropathic/Nociceptive) and the severity of said pain. | [
"Such action extends the duration of enkephalin effect where the natural pain killers are released physiologically in response to specific potentially painful stimuli, in contrast with administration of narcotics, which floods the entire body and causes many undesirable adverse reactions, including addiction liabil... |
Why was Yugoslavia formed after WW1, rather than re-establishing the Kingdom of Serbia? | My first comment here. Hope my answer will suffice!
Yes, there was strong local desire for such a state before the First World War. Yugoslavism became a distinguished segment of the wider Pan-Slavic movement around the 17th century. It was popularised by the Illyrian movement in the 19th century and afterwards, throughout the territories populated by South Slavs, the idea of Yugoslavism was growing strong, helped by the general dissatisfaction with the Austro-Hungarian government.
In Croatia, the Serbs and Croats who lived under Austro-Hungarian thrall were often grouped together as they considered one another to be cast in the same mold. In the early 20th century, these stances were most explicitly espoused by the disciples of Svetozar Pribićević, the leader of the Serb Independent Party (Serbo-Croatian: *Srpska samostalna stranka*) who advocated for the creation of a Yugoslav state, thus welcoming collaboration with Croatian politicians, which resulted in the SIP merging into the Croat-Serb Coalition. The joint interests and friendship between the two parties culminated in 1905 when two documents were signed - the Rijeka Resolution and the Zadar Resolution, which both proclaimed solidarity and equality between the Croats and the Serbs. On the other hand, the Croatian Party of Rights, led by the likes of Ante Starčević and Josip Frank, opposed the idea of Yugoslavism with zeal.
In the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina, following the Bosnian Crisis, the locals were very much dissatisfied with Béni Kállay's administration, and the Bosnian intelligentsia rallied behind pan-Serbian and anti-Austrian publications like *The Bosnian Vila* and *Zora* (Dawn), which helped preserve Serbian national identity. Such a sentiment was supported by many eminent authors, politicians and poets of the time, with the poet and politician Osman Đikić, a Serb Muslim, being an example. This was the ideological basis of the Young Bosnia organisation, frequented by many young intellectuals of the time, an organisation now famous primarily for assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
In the independent Kingdom of Serbia, the Yugoslav nationalists were influenced by the *Risorgimento* (Italian unification) and considered Serbia to be responsible of emulating the Kingdom of Piedmont by uniting all South Slavs into one state henceforth known as Yugoslavia. Slovene nationalists like Anton Korošec espoused pro-unification ideas, believing the unification to be a means of freeing Slovenia from Austro-Hungarian control. How deeply ingrained the idea of Yugoslavism was within the nationalist sentience of the time is best exemplified by this Gavrilo Princip quote: *'I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free from Austria.'*
So, that said, the idea was rooted within the collective conscious of a majority of South Slavs of the era, but after the Great War, Yugoslavia wasn't immediately formed. The Corfu Declaration made the Serbian pro-unification intentions rather clear, and once the war ended the Kingdom of Serbia merged with the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, and once the pro-Serbian Whites have outnumbered the pro-independence Greens in the Podgorica Assembly, so did Serbia merge with the Kingdom of Montenegro thus creating the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, separated into nine *banovinas*. The newly-formed state was no stranger to separatist and nationalist turmoil, which is why King Aleksandar I changed the name of the country to Yugoslavia in 1929, and started working on eradicating the national identities of Yugoslav peoples from existence for the sake of creating a unified state, not separated by neither religion nor ethnicity. This process was later continued by the communists but has evidently failed to take hold, as shortly after Tito's death, Yugoslavia again found itself divided by separatism and nationalism promoted by all the parties involved in the conflict.
Sources:
V. Ćorović - *Istorija Srba*
J. R. Lampe - *Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country*
Z. Pavlović & J. Bosnić - *Mozaik prošlosti*
Lj. Antić - *Prvi svjetski rat i Hrvati* | [
"The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was drawn into World War II following the Yugoslav coup d'état of 27 March 1941 and the German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia that followed on 6 April 1941. Yugoslavia was quickly defeated and dismembered by the Axis powers, and before the Yugoslavs had even surrendered, the Germans orch... |
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