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how the hell can 700+ people die in a stampede? | I was once trapped in a bad situation, a crushing crowd. It was New Years Eve, in Paris. My wife and I were with friends. When it started getting bad, we all held hands, but that wasn’t enough; our friends were slowly ripped away from us and we wouldn’t see them till the next day. My wife and I stayed together by hugging face to face and wrapping our arms around each other.
Nobody died that night. There were injuries, though.
All this happened without there being any reason for panic or urgency. There was no fire, no gate suddenly slammed shut, no bridge swaying dangerously. There was no hill pushing people down. If everybody had just stood still we would have been fine.
Here’s what happened: Everybody wanted to move towards the exits, which were inadequate. The whole crowd moved in that direction but people got squeezed. There were times when my wife and I, our bodies were literally pressed between other people, and we couldn’t do anything but ride it like we were caught in an underwater current. There are times you can’t move your legs, and you could just lift them off the ground and be carried along. Some people started stumbling. When you fall in a situation like that, you may die. When somebody next to you falls in a situation like that, you may not have a choice but to go over them. But you try, right? Somebody next to you falls, you back up to give them a little space. That’s what you do. It’s human nature.
But now you have this point in the crowd where a ring of people have decided to back away from somebody who is vulnerable, somebody who tripped, or a little kid. There were lots of kids that night. And that protective gesture sends ripples and waves throughout the crowd beyond, because it’s so dense. Like ripples and waves in a pond, they can interfere with each other, sometimes adding together to make a more powerful wave. I doubt they ever really cancel each other out, though, because if you were pushed from behind and a split second later pushed from the front, you wouldn’t remain still, you’d stumble, right? And the waves just keep going, magnifying, as a wave makes people stumble, which makes more waves. A wave would hit a wall, and the people who were already pressed against it would be crushed, and then the wave would rebound in a different direction. You can see the waves in the crowd. Or, if you’re not tall (I’m not) you can hear it, hear the screams of people, and try not to freak out when the screams are coming your way.
So even when there was no reason for anybody to panic -- it was just show’s over, time to leave -- there were pockets of sheer terror. The general pressure from the back moving forward to the exits wasn’t the threat -- it was ripples and waves in that dense crowd, running counter and crosswise to the main current. | [
"\"If you look at the analysis, I’ve not seen any instances of the cause of mass fatalities being a stampede,\" says Keith Still, professor of crowd science at Manchester Metropolitan University. \"People don't die because they panic. They panic because they are dying.\"\n",
"A human stampede occurred on 30 Septe... |
Was Teddy Roosevelt’s reputation as a badass exaggerated? | Well, let's just take your list and see if it happened.
> Went blind in one eye from a boxing match while he was president.
[Teddy Roosevelt's little-known secret](_URL_2_)
> Of the White House incident in which he was blinded, Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography:
>
> "I had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling, for in one bout a young captain of artillery cross-countered me on the eye, and the blow smashed the little blood vessels. Fortunately it was my left eye, but the sight has been dim ever since, and if it had been the right eye I should have been entirely unable to shoot.
>
> "Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing. I then took up jiujitsu for a few years."
So that one is true
> Killed a mountain lion with a knife so it wouldn’t kill any of his hunting dogs.
[Teddy Roosevelt's Tiffany Bowie Knife ](_URL_0_)
> Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children:
> Keystone Ranch, Colo., Jan. 14th, 1901 -
> "Soon we saw the lion in a treetop, with two of the dogs so high up among the branches that he was striking at them. He was more afraid of us than of the dogs, and as soon as he saw us he took a great flying leap and was off, the pack close behind. In a few hundred yards they had him up another tree. This time, after a couple of hundred yards, the dogs caught him, and a great fight followed. They could have killed him by themselves, but he bit or clawed four of them, and for fear he might kill one I ran in and stabbed him behind the shoulder, thrusting the knife right into his heart. I have always wished to kill a cougar as I did this one, with dogs and the knife.”
Two are correct, lets see about three
Pursued boat thieves down a frozen river on a boat he made from scratch with his hunting buddies, eventually overpowering and arresting the thieves.
[Roosevelt Pursues Boat Thieves](_URL_3_)
> “But we never carried out our intentions, for next morning one of my men, who was out before breakfast, came back to the house with the startling news that our boat was gone – stolen ... "Accordingly we at once set to work in our turn to build a flat-bottomed scow wherein to follow them ... For three days, the three men navigated the icy, winding river among the colorful clay buttes hoping to take the thieves captive without a fight. ... [Roosevelt] kept guard over the three prisoners, who were huddled into a sullen group some twenty yards off, just the right distance for the buckshot in the double-barrel
Three for three, going for four
> Delivered an hour-long speech just after being shot.
[When Teddy Roosevelt Was Shot in 1912, a Speech May Have Saved His Life](_URL_4_)
> The horrified audience in the Milwaukee Auditorium on October 14, 1912, gasped as the former president unbuttoned his vest to reveal his bloodstained shirt. “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” the wounded candidate assured them. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a bullet-riddled, 50-page speech. Holding up his prepared remarks, which had two big holes blown through each page, Roosevelt continued. “Fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”
> Only two days before, the editor-in-chief of The Outlook characterized Roosevelt as “an electric battery of inexhaustible energy,” and for the next 90 minutes the 53-year-old former president proved it.
Four! What about five?
> Led the Rough Riders’ famous uphill charge.
[The Rough Riders Storm San Juan Hill, 1898](_URL_1_)
> "Colonel Roosevelt, on horseback, broke from the woods behind the line of the Ninth, and finding its men lying in his way, shouted: 'If you don't wish to go forward, let my men pass, please.' The junior officers of the Ninth, with their Negroes, instantly sprang into line with the Rough Riders, and charged at the blue block-house on the right. I speak of Roosevelt first because, with General Hawkins, who led Kent's division, notably the Sixth and Sixteenth Regulars, he was, without doubt, the most conspicuous figure in the charge.
Five, lets see if we can make it a perfect six.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find anything I considered good enough for this one. However, it is very widely considered a fact that he had the Roosevelt crest as a Chest tattoo and perhaps the least of the accomplishments listed.
Was Teddy Roosevelt as badass as the stories say? Based on this list, I think it is very likely that he was. | [
"Roosevelt normally enjoyed very close relationships with the press, which he used to keep in daily contact with his middle-class base. While out of office, he made a living as a writer and magazine editor. He loved talking with intellectuals, authors, and writers. He drew the line, however, at expose-oriented scan... |
why do teeth feel a bit loose when not brushing for a couple days? | I don't know how old you are, or what dental treatment you have had in the past but here goes:
- As you get older, your gums recede leaving your teeth with less structure around them
- If you smoke or drink alcohol or have an unhealthy diet, this will also cause gum recession
- If you haven't been to the dentist in quite a long time, and you get a clean it will feel like they're loose as anything
- Vitamin C deficiency, genetic disease will also cause a loose feeling
- you need to be brushing your teeth twice a day
- go and see a dentist please
- eating raw, fresh vegetables can assist with your gums coming back as they stimulate blood flow into the gum area and increase your mouth health | [
"Brushing teeth properly helps prevent cavities, and periodontal, or gum disease, which causes at least one-third of adult tooth loss. If teeth are not brushed correctly and frequently, it could lead to the calcification of saliva minerals, forming tartar. Tartar hardens (then referred to as 'calculus') if not remo... |
why are those red lines on composition notebooks not lined up? | The sheets are cut in twos, stacked, folded in half, bound to the cover, and cut to size and uniformity. When the pages are folded, the sheets shift causing the red margin to be in slightly different places on each page | [
"The lines are not straight, but askew. The difference of the thickness of ink color shown on drawn letter paper is large, and spots often occur. Even some characters, such as 'day' (日) or 'one' (一), are written reversely, while other letters are not printed out completely. The same typed letters are not shown on t... |
how come my cat can tear up chipmunks and birds and eat them, but if i were to do the same thing, i would probably get very sick? | Your kitty cat and you have different tummys. Your kitty gets to eat chipmunks and birds and cat food with its tummy, and you get to eat chocolate and ice cream and human food with your tummy. | [
"The cat manages to survive, but he's still out to get Tweety. When he arrives at the bottom of the tree, he becomes a nest. Tweety attempts to get into it, but a hen, laying her eggs, causes him to get off. When she's finished, she flies off. The cat also arrives and his mouth is full of nothing but eggs. He attem... |
why aren't heatsinks entirely made of copper (mostly for cpu's or gpu's)? | > To my knowledge pricing cannot be the reason as aluminum and copper are both relatively cheap raw materials.
Copper costs more than three times as much as aluminum. | [
"Copper’s antimicrobial properties can enhance the performance of HVAC systems and associated indoor air quality. After extensive testing, copper became a registered material in the U.S. for protecting heating and air conditioning equipment surfaces against bacteria, mold, and mildew. Furthermore, testing funded by... |
why is "swatting" so easy? i feel like it shouldn't be that simple. | There was a [pretty good AMA](_URL_0_) earlier this week after the Keemstar/SWAT incident which would answer some of your follow-up questions.
A few key points:
Some popular YouTubers will notify their police department of their online presence and give a heads up that they might be a potential target for a SWAT call.
The punishment for calling a false SWAT claim is difficult to enforce for a number of reasons. A caller could claim they heard noise like gunshots coming from a property, and it would be hard to prove they sincerely did not or they mistook it for something else. The caller is frequently from another country or calling through a proxy line. However, if a false caller is caught and admits to his crime, he could face a severe fine and a month jail. It depends on the jurisdiction.
If a SWAT response is determined to be from a false call, the city (taxpayers) replace all damaged property.
If you are the victim of a SWATing, the best course of action is to lay face down on the floor (feet towards the door), and stretch out your arms. Do not get up. Wait for the SWAT team to get to you, and explain it was a "false call."
Protocol for aggressive dogs is to pepper spray them. Not shoot them.
Mustaches are not standard issue. You have to earn it. | [
"Swatting is a criminal harassment tactic of deceiving an emergency service (via such means as hoaxing an emergency services dispatcher) into sending a police and emergency service response team to another person's address. This is triggered by false reporting of a serious law enforcement emergency, such as a bomb ... |
why is exercise not enjoyable if it is beneficial? | It is enjoyable once you start doing it.
The reason it's found hard to start is because as a rule of thumb, it is evolutionarily beneficial to save energy rather than "wasting" it in superfluous exercise. The problem is that in our society, you can almost get around moving altogether; but that hasn't been going on for too long, so evolution has not "programmed" it into us yet. | [
"Benefits of exercise include stress reduction, reduced risk of heart disease, lowers blood pressure, helps control weight and aids insulin in improving management of diabetes. Exercise that is not too strenuous is recommended. Such activities may include walking, swimming, gardening, cycling or golfing.\n",
"Stu... |
Is there a chance abiogenesis occurs all the time, but there's just next to no likelihood of it being observed? | The [Miller and Urey experiment](_URL_0_) sought to recreate conditions they think existed on the earth long before life existed here. They succeeded in creating amino acids from inorganic precursors.
They did not create life but showed an important fist step was possible.
On earth now the conditions are not necessarily ripe for producing new life via abiogenesis. Even if such life was spontaneously produced the biological niches on the planet are pretty well filled. Such life would have to out-compete existing life which has a head start on being adept at living in its niche.
In short, if it happens, it'd probably never be witnessed.
| [
"It has also been noted that arguments against some form of life arising \"by chance\" are really objections to nontheistic abiogenesis, not to evolution. Indeed, arguments against \"evolution\" are based on the misconception that abiogenesis is a component of, or necessary precursor to, evolution. Similar objectio... |
what things affect fuel prices? | Avalability of oil, political sanctions and teriffs (tax), disputes between the countries providing the oil, and cost of refining to fuel as well as transport. | [
"Increases in the price of fuel do not lead to decreases in demand because it is inelastic. Rather, a greater portion of income is spent on fuel, and less is available to purchase other goods. This leads to an overall decrease in consumer spending.\n",
"Rising oil prices cause rising food prices in three ways. Fi... |
how do aimbots work? | The bot responds to the "pull trigger" key by twitching the weapon's aimpoint onto the nearest target first. The user kits a key and the game sees a mouse move and key sequence that produces a better score. You have to be pretty close and "target-ness" needs to be well defined, so it's hardly a perfect thing. However, it's clearly cheating. | [
"Aimbotting relies on each player's client computer receiving information about all other players, whether they are visible from the player's position or not. Targeting is a matter of determining the location of any opponent relative to the player's location and pointing the player's weapon at the target. This targ... |
why do computer mice move off the screen on the bottom and right side of the screen? also is there any purpose to this? | > Because the pointer is normally at the top left tip, which is the part that is restricted to the screen boundaries. The rest of the cursor is just a graphic that helps in visually locating this tip. This graphic is not restricted, and in fact can't be - if the cursor graphic was trapped you would not be able to click on the very right or bottom edges of the screen.
_URL_0_ | [
"Nearly all mice now have an integrated input primarily intended for scrolling on top, usually a single-axis digital wheel or rocker switch which can also be depressed to act as a third button. Though less common, many mice instead have two-axis inputs such as a tiltable wheel, trackball, or touchpad.\n",
"A mous... |
at a molecular level, why do super hot and super cold objects induce pain when we touch them? | On a basic level... The hotter something is, the faster its molecules move.
When you touch a super hot object, it actually damages the cells in the skin because the molecules are excited, and at a certain point, actually begins to overheat the water in the cells. That's what causes burns... As well as actually "cooking" the skin and its cells.
On the opposite, extreme cold kills the feeling that nerve endings give us. The body is designed to operate in a certain temp range. The cold feeling you get, is water molecules in your body beginning to "freeze". That's what frostbite is... When ice actually begins to form under skin. So when something gets colder.... Its molecules begin to slow down. Electrical signals from nerves, as well as cellular respiration begin to slow... Causing damage to the tissue. | [
"When a person touches a hot object and withdraws their hand from it without actively thinking about it, the heat stimulates temperature and pain receptors in the skin, triggering a sensory impulse that travels to the central nervous system. The sensory neuron then synapses with interneurons that connect to motor n... |
What religion did jews and inhabitants of what is today israel and palestine practice before judaism ? | There is substantial evidence that the ancestors of those who would call themselves Israelites followed religious practices common in Canaan, and that they themselves were a subgroup of the what would broadly be considered Canaanites. Canaan itself would have been a sort of area between the great bronze-age empires of the day, encompassing modern Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria.
Canaanite religion centered around two main figures El and Asherah. El is also referred to with other epithets such as Ba'al (who may be identified as the same as El, or as a separate storm god, or as a title given to lesser gods and kings), and was often conflated with, if not considered the same as, Yahweh. There is often inconsistency in naming and even whether a word refers to a god's personal name, attributes, or is used as a title. It can be rather confusing to us but I believe the ancients were generally comfortable with this sort of ambiguity.
El's consort was Asherah, who seems to have been a fertility/mother goddess often worshiped or honored in the form of a live tree or wooden pole. She and El were considered to have been the parents of the numerous lesser gods of the Canaanites.
In the Bible itself, complaints against worship of Asherah and Asherah poles by early Israelites are numerous, as are commands to cut down and burn these poles.
I think its fair to say that identifying Yahweh as a deity distinct from Ba'al or El, and certainly as the only one worth worshipping ("you shall have no other gods before/besides me") were an innovation and were key to the early self-identity of the Israelites. Asherah must have been considered quite a threat to his primacy given the strident admonishments against her worship.
It's interesting to note that even in the name Israel one finds the appellation "El", the term meaning anything from "El is just" to "El strives" or "Triumphant with El" and in Exodus God reveals he had been known as "El Shaddai" but now shall be referred to as Yahweh, or Lord. El and Yahweh may be translated Lord and/or God and El Shaddai as God Almighty - though these names may have been understood differently by different people in their own times.
You can find more information here:
_URL_0_
| [
"Judaism was practiced widely throughout the European continent within the Roman Empire from the 2nd century. Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews were accused of ritual murder, faced pogroms and legal discrimination.\n",
"BULLET::::- Judaism — the national religion of the Israelites/Hebrews of the Fertile Crescent, ... |
Where did the Imperial Chinese court get its eunuch? | Ming is the "golden age" of Chinese eunuchs, that's the period with the most of them running around, so you have made a solid choice! One of the [few good English texts on Chinese eunuchs](_URL_0_) is just about this period.
Eunuchs of this period would have been majority voluntary or semi-voluntary, both adult men who elected to be castrated to join the palace service, and some would be castrated under the auspices of their parents as children for service.
As to why... I know it's insane to think about now. But (assuming you're male, and that you've had sufficient education to type this post, and sufficient privileges in life to find and use a computer) it's just hard for you to imagine this as a very do-able sacrifice for a better life. You have to think outside of your situation a bit. If you were a poor farmer with many sons, castrating 1 or 2 and sending then to the city to find service in a royal family or (with luck!) inside the palace is a reasonable gamble, considering. And if you're an adult, I mean, wouldn't you be tempted if you could be [super rich and powerful?](_URL_2_) It is a more accessible option to a poor and uneducated man than the Imperial examination, which required extensive education. Consider very high ranking eunuchs would outstrip in rank just about everyone, your "career" options are virtually unlimited once you get in the palace, and even if you were just sweeping corridors you would be given food, clothes, money, medicine, and if you were promising, education. If you were an adult man with a wife and children (which did happen) you could send money home. If you were an adult child of poor farmers you could also send money home. Castration is a reasonable choice, which you have few others.
Other than the book I linked above, which is certainly decent but the author doesn't like eunuchs much so I'm not fond if it, there a [very interesting article about Jesuit missionaries observing Chinese eunuchs in the Late Ming period.](_URL_1_) | [
"At the end of the Ming dynasty, there were about 70,000 eunuchs (宦官 \"huànguān\", or 太監 \"tàijiàn\") employed by the emperor, with some serving inside the imperial palace. There were 100,000 eunuchs at the height of their numbers during the Ming. In popular culture texts such as Zhang Yingyu's \"The Book of Swindl... |
Why do I randomly and suddenly run out of breath mid-sentence? It feels similar to a hiccup. | Are you forgetting to breathe when you talk? That's not snark, that's an actual question. When you talk, make sure to pause and take a breath. That's also a good time to think about what you're saying. | [
"A hiccup (also spelled hiccough) is an involuntary contraction (myoclonic jerk) of the diaphragm that may repeat several times per minute. The hiccup is an involuntary action involving a reflex arc. Once triggered, the reflex causes a strong contraction of the diaphragm followed about a quarter of a second later b... |
Is there a link between handwriting and writing abilities? | Relevant Studies that investigate correlations between handwriting and personality variables:
_URL_1_
_URL_2_
Maybe the most relevant to your question:
_URL_0_ | [
"Research in writing development has been limited in psychology. In the research that has been conducted, focus has generally centred on the development of written and spoken language and their connection. Spoken and written skills could be considered linked. Researchers believe that children's spoken language infl... |
Did the stereotypical drill sergeant exist before WWII or so? | Sorry, we don't allow ["trivia seeking" questions](_URL_0_). These tend to produce threads which are collections of disjointed, partial responses, and not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for. If you have a specific question about an historical event, period, or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. For further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_1_).
I would very much suggest to narrow this question down to just the US and post it since it's very interesting. | [
"Top Sergeant is a 1942 American military drama film. United States Army Sergeant Rusty Manson (Don Terry) is on maneuvers with slackers Frenchy Devereaux (Leo Carrillo) and Andy Jarrett (Andy Devine) when robbers attack them and kill Manson's brother \n",
"Combat Sergeant is an American television program that o... |
exactly how are underwater bodies of water formed (e.g.: underwater waterfall, river, lake, etc.) and why do they occur? | The short answer is: Different densities of water and temperature. Salt water meeting fresh water is a great example of this. Check this out ---- > _URL_0_ | [
"The water in a river is usually in a channel, made up of a stream bed between banks. In larger rivers there is also a wider floodplain shaped by waters over-topping the channel. Flood plains may be very wide in relation to the size of the river channel. Rivers are a part of the hydrological cycle. Water within a r... |
What kind of defense against invasion did Great Britain have during WW2? | I can't speak to static defenses, but the main deterrent to a cross-Channel invasion were the RAF and the Royal Navy. The Germans had little chance of a cross-channel invasion after they were unable to win the Battle of Britain. Making an amphibious landing without air superiority would have been difficult, particularly because it would mean that the potent British Navy would be able to take part in the defense. Even if the RAF and Navy could be somehow neutralized, the Germans had insufficient landing craft to make the attempt (river barges were considered for transports, but they would have been hideously vulnerable in the Channel). There were also army units waiting for any potential invasion.
But my favorite defense was the tiny [Romney Hythe & Dymchurch light railway coastal armored defense train](_URL_0_). The efficacy of a 15 inch gauge armored train is *highly* questionable. To me, though, it epitomizes the idea of 'British pluck.' The idea being that, hey, we have a tiny railway here. Get me a train and some cars, slap some armor on it, we'll grab some guns, and we'll punch Jerry in the mouth if he has the temerity to cross the Channel. Would a tiny train with a couple machine guns and antitank rifles really have done much? I don't know. But I know that it shows the determination of the British military to resist any such invasion.
Christian Wolmar says only a few words about this train in his book *Engines of War*, but the book is a treat if you're into military history and trains.
Perhaps another of our experts can chime in regarding ground defenses--static and mobile. | [
"British anti-invasion preparations of the Second World War entailed a large-scale division of military and civilian mobilisation in response to the threat of invasion by German armed forces in 1940 and 1941. The British army needed to recover from the defeat of the British Expeditionary Force in France, and 1.5 mi... |
in cryptography, how is it that i am able to encrypt something with a public key but then not able to decrypt it? | You should watch [THIS VIDEO](_URL_0_).
They liken it to colors - just because you have the ending color doesn't mean you know what the exact original colors were.
| [
"Encryption in modern times is achieved by using algorithms that have a key to encrypt and decrypt information. These keys convert the messages and data into \"digital gibberish\" through encryption and then return them to the original form through decryption. In general, the longer the key is, the more difficult i... |
How do they know that HPV in men can cause certain types of cancer and genital warts if it is impossible to test men for HPV? | Just because there aren't widely used clinical tests for HPV in men does not mean that we don't have ways of detecting HPV in males. [PCR](_URL_0_), which amplifies DNA, can be used to detect HPV in a variety of locations such as [on the penis](_URL_1_), [in the rectum, and in the mouth](_URL_2_). PCR can also be performed directly on tumors such as is shown in [this paper about penile cancer](_URL_3_). Alternatively, there are histological (under the microscope) methods of identifying cells with HPV infection. | [
"HPV is the sexually transmitted virus that is known to be the cause of genital warts. There are currently more than 100 different strains of HPV, half of which can cause genital infections. It is worth noting here that although it is not usually the HPV strains that cause genital warts that are associated with the... |
If even light cannot escape the event horizon of a black hole because of the mass of the singularity, how did the universe expand from an infinitely dense singularity in the first place? | This question has [already been asked](_URL_0_)
tl;dr — it's not the density that results in black holes, but curvature, and uniformly distributed matter doesn't generate the necessary curvature. | [
"With classical-model black holes, objects passing through the event horizon on their way to the singularity are thought to enter a realm of curved spacetime where the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. It is a realm that is devoid of all structure. Further, at the singularity—the heart of a classic black ... |
Is it theoretically possible to freeze or preserve a human embryo and then have the child in the future? | IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) often uses this exact mechanism. (Any professional biologists feel free to chime in and correct me if I slip up somewhere.)
Short and sweet background on IVF:
Potential mothers are given hormones (primarily FSH) for ~3 weeks before the procedure. Around 24 hours before the extraction of the eggs (mature follicles), doses of HCG are administered. During the procedure, a tool (needle) is inserted through the vaginal wall and the ovaries are scanned for mature follicles (which are extracted). These are then mixed with sperm and incubated. Those that are fertilized are kept, and those that are not are discarded.
Of these fertilized eggs, usually two or three will be chosen for implantation into the uterus, often after being screened for diseases. Those that are not implanted are contained in liquid nitrogen almost indefinitely; there are cases of twins being [born years apart.](_URL_1_)
In other words, yes. Hopefully I answered your question.
Here's another resource just for further reading. It's funny you asked this question, because I just finished a unit on human reproduction with a side lesson on IVF. [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) | [
"or donating them for use in embryonic stem cell research. Although embryos can, theoretically, survive indefinitely in frozen storage, as a practical reality someone must eventually decide on a permanent disposition for them.\n",
"The Rand Consulting Group has estimated there to be 400,000 frozen embryos in the ... |
why do starved people (holocaust victims, famine victims and other unlucky people) die if they eat too much food after being rescued or find food? | After a long period of starvation, the body has learned to not secrete digestive juices. Stomach muscles shrink as they have no work. All the glands are on holiday and don't know when duty again calls. (Without food in the stomach the stomach acid will severely damage the thick stomach lining). Pancreas and liver also go on conservation mode. Then the necessary nutrients are drawn from within the body, mainly from fatty tissues.
The digestive system takes some time to relearn its role and judge the quantity of stomach acid to be secreted, when starvation conditions disappear. The stomach muscles have lost their tone and need to relearn. Think, how you would feed a baby and do somewhat similarly. Start off on water only. After a few hours some quantity of fresh fruit juices. Administration of solid foods in small quantity starts the next day. About 3-4 days should be sufficient to revert to old routine. A medic should preferably be consulted while breaking extended starvation. | [
"When food is not sufficient, the elderly are the least likely to survive. In the extreme case of famine, the Inuit fully understood that, if there was to be any hope of obtaining more food, a hunter was necessarily the one to feed on whatever food was left. However, a common response to desperate conditions and th... |
Book Recommendation on Class Analysis of Nazi Germany | Part of the problem with your google search might be that "class" is often a highly nebulous term and despite its importance to social historians, it is often highly difficult to nail down.
Most of the works using a socioeconomic lens to examine the Third Reich deal primarily with the issue of the Nazi seizure of power and trying to examine what electoral group bears responsibility for voting for the Nazis. older historiography emphasized that Nazism was a largely middle-class movement, but recent scholarship has qualified this assessment. Both Conan Fischer's *The Rise of the Nazis* and *The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919-1933* by Thomas Childers assert that while the lower middle-class was one of the stablest of the Nazi's constituency, they managed to branch out into other groups. Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann's *Nazism in Central Germany: The Brownshirts in 'red' Saxony* largely examines the small but significant inroads the NSDAP made among Saxony's proletariat, which many prior scholars had assumed were immune to the appeal of the NSDAP. *Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929-1933* by Pamela E. Swett is an excellent readable urban study of how violence ensconced itself into Berlin's working class culture and neighborhoods.
For the period 1933-39, a good survey is Richard Evans's *The Third Reich in Power*, which covers more than just class but is a good grounding for understanding this period. lthough it's both old and a biography, Ronald Smelser's *Robert Ley: Hitler's Labor Front Leader* is a good window into both the promise and the shortcomings of the German Labor Front, which the Third Reich intended to be the worker's voice in the new order it was creating. Historians are also increasingly turning less to class as a category or statement of identity and instead examining how class was experienced by people, particularly with their consumption of material goods. Two of the books that typifies this new approach to class is *Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich* by Shelley Baranowski and *Nazi 'Chic'?: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich* by Irene Gunther. Both historians examine how the Third Reich tried to have its cake and eat it too; it pursued a consumer strategy that promised the good life for all Germans, but then had to both make the dream possible and define it in such a way that it would distinguish itself from both American-style mass consumption and older middle-class patterns of consumerism.
Obviously, this is just scratching the surface of a vast historiography upon the Third Reich and I don't doubt that others on here can weigh in with suggestions.
| [
"In 1932, Geiger wrote an analysis of the classes in Germany. The analysis was based on an empirical study of social stratification. In his analysis of the data, he classified the population into five groups, more complex than capitalists and proletariat as used by Marx, to determine the objective economic criteria... |
why do people hate sarah palin? | Because she is incredibly dense. A mixture of her over-friendly non-Canadian Canadian joyfulness pings a bad ring with many people especially with a mix of how she talks about thinks like she knows about things but is sadly mistaken when put to the test.
Also the very idea this woman could have been an American Vice President is a sad reminder of how Democracy can sometimes screw us over.
Also, everyone secretly wants to have sex with her. | [
"The Miranda character receives negative comments to her videos from viewers who are fooled by the character and believe that they are watching a serious video by a bad entertainer. Ballinger told \"Backstage\": \"It's sort of like an Andy Kaufman thing. You wouldn't believe the hate mail. ... You would never say t... |
Why doesn't air (Nitrogen, Oxygen, CO2) separate into different layers? | [Turbulence keeps gasses mixed in the lower parts of the atmosphere:](_URL_1_)
> The homosphere and heterosphere are defined by whether the atmospheric gases are well mixed. In the homosphere the chemical composition of the atmosphere does not depend on molecular weight because the gases are mixed by turbulence.[11] The homosphere includes the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere. Above the [turbopause](_URL_0_) at about 100 km (62 mi; 330,000 ft) (essentially corresponding to the mesopause), the composition varies with altitude. This is because the distance that particles can move without colliding with one another is large compared with the size of motions that cause mixing. This allows the gases to stratify by molecular weight, with the heavier ones such as oxygen and nitrogen present only near the bottom of the heterosphere. The upper part of the heterosphere is composed almost completely of hydrogen, the lightest element. | [
"When air is liquefied the oxygen and nitrogen are condensed simultaneously. However, owing to its greater volatility the latter boils off the more quickly of the two, so that the remaining liquid becomes gradually richer and richer in oxygen.\n",
"An air separation process is used to separate nitrogen from air f... |
how does the picking of world cup teams happen? | The countries do send in their best possible premier team, just every country is different. I am assuming you are referring to the comments related to Christiano Ronaldo's club team Real Madrid as opposed to his national team Portugal.
Real Madrid is one of the wealthiest teams in the world and simply buys the top talent available. Essentially that team is comprised of the best players of variety of nations to make a super team.
Portugal can only use Portuguese citizens (FIFA rules for national teams). While Ronaldo is an amazing player, there aren't any other players that are eligible to play on the national team that are as good as him. | [
"The first event of the FIFA World Cup starts with a kind of lottery but instead of selecting classified numbers, in this contest a country is selected; most had been made in January of the tournament year until 1982 and since the 1986 World Cup it is held in early December of the year before the start of the tourn... |
how does the stomach work in space? do astronauts feel constant need to throw up since the contents are bouncing around inside? | A stomach is also more a wet bag than a box or bottle. There's no big open space to fill. The contents can slosh around when you fill it up.
You have a sphincter (round muscle like your butthole) that holds things in at each end. There's a lower esophagal sphincter at the top of the stomach that keeps the digesting food down, and a pyloric sphincter at the bottom that lets it into the intestines when it's digested enough to move on.
When that esophagal sphincter gets weak, the result is reflux. It would be very unpleasant to be in space and have that aggravated. | [
"Breakfast began at 7 am. Astronauts usually stood to eat, as sitting in microgravity also strained their stomach muscles. They reported that their food—although greatly improved from Apollo—was bland and repetitive, and weightlessness caused utensils, food containers, and bits of food to float away; also, gas in t... |
why does my internet go so much faster when downloading from steam or a torrent? | Your download speeds depend both on your connection to the server and the server's capacity. If you're connecting to a server on the other side of the world, you'll probably get a crappy download speed, even if both you and the server have a super fast connection to your ISP. Because of this, large networks like Steam have data centres all over the world that replicate the same content. This is called a Content Delivery Network or CDN. This means that you'll always connect to a Steam server that's close to you and that you'll have a good connection.
Regarding BitTorrent, you are always downloading from multiple other users simultaneously. So even if your connection is slow to one peer, you can make parallel connections to other peers. Together a lot of slower speeds can add up to quite a lot. Also you might get someone who is on the same network as you. The speed would be super fast in that case, since there is only minimal routing involved. | [
"speeding up the download time, especially for users with faster download than upload speeds. Thus, the more popular a file is, the faster a user will be able to download it, since many people will be downloading it at the same time, and these people will also be uploading the data to other users.\n",
"BULLET::::... |
what does the cdc in america do? | As some examples:
CDC tracks the spread of diseases, looking for the source, transmission vector, and that sort of thing.
CDC also maintains the ‘strategic national stockpile’ of medicine, which is basically something from an action move. They can get tons of medical products to basically anywhere in the US in 12 hours (and I mean tons in the literal sense).
> These so-called push packages are warehoused in a dozen, classified, non-descript facilities under 24-hour, contractor armed guard protection. Geographically situated to allow rapid delivery anywhere in the Continental U.S., material will deploy by unmarked trucks and/or airplanes within 12 hours of the receipt of the request by CDC. The U.S. Marshal provides armed security from these federal sites to local destinations.
_URL_0_
How cool is that?
| [
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the leading national public health institute of the United States. The CDC is a United States federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.\n",
"The CDC works with other organizations around the w... |
How is 90377 Sedna's orbit really an orbit? How is this stable? | It is counted as a stable orbit because it is gravitationally bound to the sun. It will repeat its motion around the sun indefinitely. Why would it not be stable? The only unstable orbit would be due to a) gravitational interactions which deposit large amounts of momentum into the body and cause it to eject from the system (for example due to a large solar system body like Jupiter) or b) orbits so wide that they are torn from the sun by the influence of other bodies (namely stars). | [
"The orbital inclination of HD 3167 d is inclined at least 1.3° away from the orbital planes of the other two exoplanets. Its orbit is expected to remain stable for periods longer than 100 million years only if this inclination is less than 40°. It has an orbital period of , placing it in between the other two orbi... |
what happens in america if someone rings 911 for an ambulance and that person is dying, but they do not have health insurance? | The ambulance comes. They get cared for, taken to the emergency room, get treated.
Then they start getting really large bills that they cannot pay and end up declaring bankruptcy. | [
"In general, first responders are sent to immediately life-threatening situations such as cardiac arrest. Some ambulance services restrict the type of calls which responders can attend, either through blanket prohibition or by more detailed call screening by the emergency dispatch centre. This is because responders... |
How far from the surface of the Earth would a nuclear explosion have to be before it didn't create a mushroom cloud? | > I assume that mushroom clouds are a result of the explosion moving away from the surface of the earth.
Kind of. They happen when less dense gases form (in this case due to an explosion), and rise rapidly forming a vortex. That's the column. The head of the mushroom comes from the gases reaching an altitude/temperature where they are no longer less dense than the surroundings, and therefore are pushed out rather than up by the still-rising column beneath.
The mushroom cloud is visible because of debris and water vapour. In the absence of either you clearly wouldn't get one: so for example there would be no mushroom cloud if you detonated a nuclear weapon in interplanetary space.
There probably isn't an exact height at which you cease to get a mushroom cloud, you'd find the shape just became less and less distinct as you gained in altitude, before disappearing entirely as you left the atmosphere.
> Also, just for interests sake, do other kinds of bombs "mushroom".
Sure, depending on conditions. Probably the most well known to do this are fuel-air bombs like the so-called Daisy Cutter. | [
"Aboveground nuclear explosions produce a characteristic mushroom cloud, which moves downwind as it reaches its stabilization height. Dispersion of the radioactive elements causes vertical and lateral cloud movement, spreading radioactive materials over adjacent regions. While the large particles settle nearby the ... |
i just watched a cop roll through the same stop sign that i got pulled over for rolling through last week. if i were ballsy enough for a citizens arrest, how would that work? if some rando ever tried to arrest me, i’d laugh and ask what their authority was, and then likely walk away. | As far as I know citizen arrests can only be done if you witness someone committing an indictable offense or a felony. And you can only interfere if you are there when it is happening you can't go get them after | [
"The police officers who were still on scene, then pulled McGee over. McGee then became combative with the officers, asking \"What are you going to do about it, arrest me?\" McGee's statement says he was then pulled from the car, handcuffed, struck with a closed fist on the side of his head and then had his head sl... |
difference between phenomenology and symbolic interactionism | Phenomenology considers the “subjective conscienciousness”, where and individual’s consciousness creates meaning based on experiences. It concerns understanding of the underlying meaning of “things”, stripping away assumptions based on how we perceive the world, influenced by cultural norms.
Symbolic interactionism, on the other hand, looks more at how people’s actions are aligned to perceptions of how others might act but is also concerned with the meanings that individuals ascribe to things. Symbolic interaction sees this process as something which is constantly in a state of flux. | [
"The phenomenological lineage can be traced through philosophers Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. This perspective stands in contrast to the positivist reductionist orientation of the scientific psychology. Rather than understanding mind, emotion and consciousness in terms of its constituent par... |
the first lady's role in politics | Officially, no purpose. The first lady is just the president's wife (and sometimes not even that, Emily Donelson was Andrew Jackson's Niece and served as First Lady because Jackson's wife died).
Unofficially, the first Lady plays a huge role in both the president's public image and are now almost expected to use the position to push for some charitable or public service good (such as Michele Obama's push for healthier food in schools). | [
"The position of the first lady is not an elected one and carries only ceremonial duties. Nonetheless, first ladies have held a highly visible position in American society. The role of the first lady has evolved over the centuries. She is, first and foremost, the hostess of the White House. She organizes and attend... |
sleep apnea? | Apnea is "not breathing" sleep apnea is when you have something wrong with you that will make you stop breathing while you sleep.
It happens if your throat is partly paralyzed, swollen for some reason or just a huge fat neck.
It makes it so you never sleep right and are always sleeping and also makes your brain slowly die if it's bad. If it gets very bad it makes your brain quickly die and you just die. | [
"Sleep apnea may be diagnosed by the evaluation of symptoms, risk factors and observation, (e.g., excessive daytime sleepiness and fatigue) but the gold standard for diagnosis is a formal sleep study (polysomnography, or sometimes a reduced-channels home-based test). A study can establish reliable indices of the di... |
Why didn't sports teams in the US develop like soccer clubs in England? | In part we can look to the prevalence of collegiate sports programs across the nation as an alternate form.
New York City for instance at one time all had Columbia, Fordham, NYU, St. John's, and just up the river, West Point, fielding teams with Yale, Princeton, and Rutgers just outside the City, attracting young men to play, and everyone else to watch.
To get a sense of just how many schools still today are playing NCAA Football this map shows their location. [And there are a lot across all 3 divisions](_URL_1_)
So we can say that college sports drew much of the early interest, development, and focus of competitive sports, that other nations saw in club sports. Gridiron football was born and nurtured on the campuses of the Ivy League after all.
Though there are a plethora of more independent professional, and semi professional teams across the North East and Mid West. Many of who either couldnt sustain themselves, closed during the Depression, or were left out in the various mergers and consolidations that ensured the early NFL could make a profit.
Its wiki but take a look at the list of defunct NFL teams and their geographic concentration: _URL_0_ | [
"Unlike major team sports in North America, where franchises are awarded to nominated cities, most European teams have grown from small clubs formed by groups of individuals before growing rapidly. Churches, universities and work places have often been the most fertile birthplace of many of Europe's major sports cl... |
Ten years ago, my boyfriend found this buried at the beach. Does anyone know anything about it? | I think it is a small [shot put](_URL_0_), not a cannonball. Sorry, I know that's not as exciting! However, it's a reasonable size for a shot, and while I can't think of a reason why a cannonball would be labeled by weight, a shot should be.
Edit: drat, beaten to the punch while I looked up a link! | [
"The next morning, on Tuesday, 12 January, Peter Smith was taking three young nephews for a walk through the Wanda Beach sand-hills. Some distance north of the surf club, he discovered what appeared to be a store mannequin buried face-down in the sand. He brushed away sand from the head and realised that it was a b... |
why can't pilots see when a laser hits them? | Lasers spread out the farther they travel. That "tiny dot of light" isn't so tiny after it travels 1000 feet through the air. If it hits the plexiglas cockpit window, it diffuses out even more. The result looks [something like this](_URL_0_).
You're right that it only flashes for a split second, but that's all it takes. When people say that it blinds pilots, it doesn't mean that the laser is burning out their retina and causing permanent blindness. They're talking about *flash blindness*, the temporary dazzling effect you get when a bright light flashes in your eye. Like when someone uses a camera flash in a dark room, and you have to blink away the aftereffect for a few seconds? Imagine trying to land a plane during that. | [
"Under certain conditions, laser light or other bright lights (spotlights, searchlights) directed at aircraft can be a hazard. The most likely scenario is when a bright visible laser light causes distraction or temporary flash blindness to a pilot, during a critical phase of flight such as landing or takeoff. It is... |
My town claims to be the originating place of three nursery rhymes; Twinkle Twinkle, Old King Cole and Humpty Dumpty. Do we know the history of other children's rhymes? | Many nursery rhymes have legendary or unclear history. However, the nursery rhymes you mentioned all originate in England or Britain. The lyrics to Twinkle Twinkle were indeed, as far as we know, written by Jane Taylor. The Wikipedia article shows she was born in London, which is near Colchester. Old King Cole's origins are very obscure and nobody knows who he really was. However, Geoffrey of Monmouth does associate him with Colcester by writing that he may have been King of Britons after the reign of the Romans ~300A.D. -Wikipedia, again. Humpty Dumpty could have been a riddle because the rhyme does not say that he was an egg. Many do believe that 'Humpty Dumpty' was a canon used at St. Mary-at-the-wall by the defending royalists in the Siege of Colchester -1648.
I hope this all helped. | [
"Colchester is reputed to be the home of three of the best known English nursery rhymes: 'Old King Cole', 'Humpty Dumpty' and 'Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star', although the legitimacy of all three claims is disputed.\n",
"Rhymes for the Nursery is a collection of English poems by sisters Jane and Ann Taylor, publis... |
why was there no guerilla resistance to the us occupation of japan? | Japan was under a brutal Imperial rule where civilians were told to kill themselves rather than surrender, with mass horrors committed on Japanese soil. When Japan surrendered, its people were already heavily demoralized after the dropping of the Nuclear weapons and the social conditions that were enforced during the war.
They didn't see the US are conquering oppressors but occupying freedom bringers. | [
"The Japanese army implemented a scorch earth policy. Filipino and American guerrilla forces fought back during this occupation and American planes bombed both the university and San Agustin church on October 10, 1944. The Japanese were never able to successfully move outside the city for any length of time due to ... |
Confederacy fetishists often point to Lincoln not being on the ballot in 1860 as the "principal" cause of the Civil War, but *why* wasn't he on the ballot in southern states? Did they just refuse to put him on there, or was there some complications w/r/t the newly formed party and the dem split? | It's absurd to say that Lincoln not being on the ballot in 1860 is the principal cause of the Civil War. The only way that even makes minimal sense as a southern grievance is if southern state governments and a large portion of the white populace in the slave states wanted Lincoln on the ballot. They didn't and *that was the whole point.* The simple threat of an antislavery president was enough to trigger an existential crisis for the section. One actually winning pushed the most enslaving states over the edge because they believed he was coming for their human property, whether directly or indirectly. That's the cause of the Civil War and everything else that gets tossed up either as secondary causes or as a distraction, to the degree they have any historical basis at all, flows from it.
But you asked about the why and that requires going into how elections worked at the time. Today, we go into the booth and there's a ballot paper printed by the state with all the candidates on it that qualify under whatever eligibility requirements the state has. You go into a little booth or otherwise secure your privacy, mark your ballot however your precinct does that, hand it in and go home.
This is not how the middle nineteenth century runs elections at all. Ballots are produced by partisan printers. They will have the full ticket filled in correctly: just the names of the people the printer endorses for each spot. If you want to change that, you've got to scratch out their name and write in the one you prefer. Then you have to actually cast the ballot, which is done in public. Printers usually run off ballots on different colors of paper and/or different sizes too, so everybody around can see who you vote for.
Voting for an "abolitionist" (which Lincoln is not, but white Southerners rarely care for fine distinctions in these things) is a good way to get yourself mobbed in much of the South. Election violence isn't exactly common (though it is more so the further west one goes) but it's regular enough that everyone knows the score. Furthermore, freelance violence against people not deemed sufficiently proslavery is a regular part of southern political life. Simply debating the merits of slavery can risk violence, let alone voting for an antislavery ticket. Even in Kentucky, which is more permissive than most of the South, antislavery speakers can literally get stabbed for the deed.
But that assumes you can get your hands on a GOP ballot, if you even want to. (Most of the white South has been all-in on slavery for decades by the time 1860 rolls around.) Most printers are local, so they're part of and subject to the same community pressures as ordinary voters. Given the expense of a steam press and the ease with which a mob can wreck one, as well as their requirement for the goodwill of the community for their business to continue, they're probably more vulnerable than usual.
It's true that Lincoln isn't on ballots in the South for all those reasons...except that he is in a few slave states. (He loses them.) The thing is that his not being an option for voters is what the South intends from the start. They're not upset that they couldn't vote for him, but rather angry that their proscriptions didn't settle the election in their favor. That suggests to the white South that their regime is unstable to a new degree, particularly as the GOP is keen to expand its reach in the Border South.
There are small Republican parties operating in Maryland and Missouri already. What happens if Lincoln uses the spoils system, as every president did, to seed the rest of the section with antislavery men? They would be the nucleus of new state GOPs that might build the infrastructure that makes slavery debates unavoidable. The two-party system was only tolerable in the slave states so long as both parties competed over who was the most proslavery, which the GOP will not do. Breaking the appearance of white uniformity can underscore its genuine absence (though the GOP was always too optimistic about having hordes of antislavery whites who just needed a vehicle) and will, in the minds of enslavers, embolden the people they enslave. That will, again their estimation, inevitably bring bloody slave revolts which can easily snowball into a genocidal race war. White southerners expect to win that one, because they're white supremacists, but they know it'll be bloody and probably cost them a lot of lives on top of the tremendous profits at stake.
**Sources**
*Liberty & Slavery* by William Cooper
*Road to Disunion* (2 vols) by William Freehling
*The Fiery Trial* by Eric Foner | [
"BULLET::::- The South Was a Closed Society: For the 1860 Presidential Election, in 10 of the 11 states that became the Confederate States, Lincoln was not on the ballot, denying him at least the 100,000 votes of those who later went north to join the Union Army, possibly more. Jaffa points out that in the Cooper U... |
how does flea medication for pets work? | The shoulder blade spot-on treatments are absorbed through the skin, go into the blood, and are then ingested by the adult fleas when they bite the animal. The best flea treatments generally have two active ingredients. There is the "adulticide" (e.g., permethrin) which kills the biting adults, and also an insect growth regular (e.g. pyriproxyfen) that suppresses eggs/larvae/pupae. I believe some preparations are meant to be applied to the whole fur, and have a local killing effect.
I have no authority on this matter | [
"Removing fleas from the pets is not a difficult task considering the advent of products which are designed not only to kill fleas, but also to offer protection from further infestations. Flea-control products are available in once-a-month topicals, dog collars, sprays, dips, powders, shampoos, and injectable and o... |
how did the gunmen in the slew of mass murders over recent years acquire their guns and would any laws have stopped them? | Today you can buy guns legally, at a gun store, or illegally, from a criminal in a bad part of town late at night. Changing the laws only impacts the first transaction.
Pot was completely, totally, illegal in all states 20 years ago; and yet we have people running for president that admit they were able to buy it under those strict laws. That's because banning the sale of something only shifts the balance between the two possible types of purchases.
Completely honest, civic minded, law abiding, sane people won't buy a gun from a criminal because they don't want to break the law. None of the people who committed mass murder fit that definition. That's because killing people is also illegal, has been ever since "Thou shalt not kill", it's one law everybody seems to agree on. But some folks just won't obey it. | [
"As a result of the mass shootings Hungerford massacre in Hungerford, England and Dunblane school massacre in Stirling, Scotland, the United Kingdom enacted tough gun laws and a buyback program to remove specific classes of firearms (The Firearms Amendment Act 1988 limiting rifles and shotguns, and the 1997 Firearm... |
During WWII, how did China (and not Japan) end up getting into the Allies? | From circa 1925, Japanese political/social culture shifted significantly — away from the democratic experiments of the Taishō era and towards the nationalist, militarist, expansionist and ultimately totalitarian state structure that characterised the Shōwa period.
So, for example: the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 massively reduced personal freedoms and squashed political dissent, and under a series of prime ministers Japanese foreign policy evolves in direct opposition to the Western powers (widely seen as having manipulated, strong-armed and Japan since the end of *[Sakoku](_URL_3_)*.)
By the late 1930s, they had developed the concept of the [Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere](_URL_1_); the idea of a Japanese empire in east Asia as a national right. The idea was that Asia shouldn't be part of a European sphere of influence; they took "Asia for the Asiatics!" as their slogan — and believed that, naturally, Japan should and would be the dominant influence in the region.
The Japanese regime from the late 1920s until 1945 is commonly described as 'fascist', but that's not strictly true. Japanese politics in the post-Meiji era is a case study in syncretism; it simply doesn't fit the conventional Western left/right paradigm. Japanese imperialism is a similar case: it doesn't fit the colonial model of the Western powers, but was undoubtedly influenced by it — it's been described as '[mimetic imperialism](_URL_6_)'.
But fascist or not, Japan identified ideologically more closely with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy because those regimes also saw themselves as natural opponents of and successors to the traditional, liberal-democratic global powers (Britain, France and the United States.) You see that goal explicitly stated in [the text of the Tripartite Pact](_URL_2_) (the 1940 military alliance between Japan, Germany and Italy):
> The governments of Germany, Italy and Japan, considering it as a condition precedent of any lasting peace that all nations of the world be given each its own proper place, have decided to stand by and co-operate with one another in regard to their efforts in greater East Asia and regions of Europe respectively **wherein it is their prime purpose to establish and maintain a new order of things** calculated to promote the mutual prosperity and welfare of the peoples concerned.
>
> [...]
>
> Accordingly, the governments of Germany, Italy and Japan have agreed as follows:
>
> ARTICLE ONE
>
> Japan recognizes and respects the leadership of Germany and Italy in establishment of a new order in Europe.
>
> ARTICLE TWO
>
> Germany and Italy recognize and respect the leadership of Japan in the establishment of a new order in greater East Asia.
In the late 1930s, Japan saw opportunities for expansion in east Asia: they invaded China in 1937 (the [Second Sino-Japanese War](_URL_7_)) — that, incidentally, is in large part why China eventually became one of the Allied powers. Their invasions of Western territories in Asia — Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, French Indochina, and so on — had dual motives: to secure strategic resources (oil and rubber, in particular) and to break Western colonial power in the Far East.
Japan came into conflict with the US ultimately as a result of [a US-led oil embargo](_URL_4_) that cut off almost 90% of Japan's oil imports, leaving them with just three years of petroleum reserves. The attack on Pearl Harbor was in large part an effort to knock out America's strategic influence in the Pacific.
A couple of good overview from the historiography on Shōwa-era Japanese foreign policy and imperialism:
* W. G. Beasley, *[Japanese Imperialism, 1894-1945](_URL_5_)* (1987)
* R. Myers & M. Pettie, eds., *[The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945](_URL_0_)* (1984)
There's plenty more that's worth reading — the historiography on Japan is huge. But those two are a good starting point. | [
"In September 1940, Japan decided to cut China's only land line to the outside world by seizing French Indochina, which was controlled at the time by Vichy France. Japanese forces broke their agreement with the Vichy administration and fighting broke out, ending in a Japanese victory. On 27 September Japan signed a... |
circuit boards | You probably mean Printed Circuit Boards (PCB's)? They form a firm structure to hold electric components an replace loose wires by having one or more layers of copper that are removed except from small connecting 'paths' that are actually needed to connect the electric components. | [
"A distribution board (also known as panelboard, breaker panel, or electric panel) is a component of an electricity supply system that divides an electrical power feed into subsidiary circuits, while providing a protective fuse or circuit breaker for each circuit in a common enclosure. Normally, a main switch, and ... |
why can't we help fight global warming by painting things like cars, roofs, roads, etc. white? wouldn't it reflect sunlight just like the arctic snow does? | It [might not](_URL_0_) be as helpful as we'd like to think.
> Painting roofs white has been—like changing lightbulbs—one of the well-cited easy ways out of climate change. By reflecting more light and heat back to the atmosphere, a white roof should act like a natural anti-warming device, while also reducing your energy costs by keeping your house cool in the summer. Turns out, painting your roof white would be simply a massive waste of white paint.
> As it is, Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford and his colleague, research student John Ten Hoeve, found in a new paper in the Journal of Climate that while white surfaces cooled houses, they also reduced cloudiness, allowing more sunlight to reach the ground. That conclusion complements a recent study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research that found that the positive effect of white roofs in the summer would be offset by a negative effect in the winter.
> "There does not seem to be a benefit from investing in white roofs," says Jacobson. "The most important thing is to reduce emissions of the pollutants that contribute to global warming."
> Solar panels are a better idea than white paint, he says. "The better thing to do is to put a solar panel on the roof because that not only cools the house by absorbing the sunlight to make electricity. It also offsets fossil fuel generation at power plants." | [
"A 2011 study by researchers at Stanford University suggested that although reflective roofs decrease temperatures in buildings and mitigate the \"urban heat island effect\", they may actually increase global temperature. The study noted that it did not account for the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that res... |
supply side economics. is it the same as trickle-down? if not, how's it different? | trickle down is tax rich people less so they will spend more money on businesses, and thus that money will grow the economy. That works if people like investing more then they like just keeping money.
Supply side is invest in/tax less factories and companies that produce things. The idea being that it will encourage companies to spend more money. To me this makes more sense because they are beholden to their stockholders so growth is their #1 priority.
But ya its giving money to companies to produce things (supply side) vs giving money to rich people to improve companies/businesses. | [
"Traditional supply-side economics suggests that when business is less hampered by government controls or high taxation, it produces more economic benefits for the middle class in the form of jobs and cheaper goods. \"Trickle-down economics\" is a pejorative term for a policy of cutting taxes on wealthy in an attem... |
What happens physically when crossing the Termination Shock? | It's more correct to say that the termination shock is the point where the solar wind velocity slows down to subsonic speeds due to interactions with the interplanetary medium. The interplanetary medium, while extremely sparse, has a constant pressure, whereas the pressure of the solar wind decreases according to inverse-square law. Now, the speed of sound in a medium is dependent on its pressure and density. The speed of sound in the ISM is around 100km/h, whereas the initial solar wind velocity is ~400km/h. However, its pressure decreases, and will continue to decrease until the point where the solar wind cannot maintain a supersonic flow relative to the speed of sound in an ISM, and a shockwave forms.
Yes, there is localized heating and differences in particle flows, but... there's also a shockwave and corresponding fluid flow and heating effects when a supersonic jet airliner exceeds the speed of sound in air. The mechanism is extremely similar, with the exception that the ISM (and the solar wind at the termination shock) is *extremely* sparse. Were you there it would be impossible for you to notice - we need sensitive magnetometers and particle counters to see details in the edge of the heliosphere.
For reference, Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock on December 16th, 2004. Here are some plots from the CRS (Cosmic Ray Subsystem) particle detector, showing changes and increases in detected particle counts at the transition point:
_URL_3_
And some more details showing a linear increase in particle count after crossing the termination shock:
_URL_2_
And more detailed plots of CRS fluxes for the low-energy particle telescope:
_URL_0_
And the same for the low-energy and ion detectors on the LECP (Low Energy Charged Particles) instrument:
_URL_1_
As can be seen, this is a fairly subtle effect. It's even more subtle for the magnetometer data (which I couldn't get plots of... curse you cohoweb! :P) where the solar magnetic field is so weak that we're almost at the detection limits of the Voyager magnetometers. (In theory (and in practise, it turns out! though unlike theory, the galactic magnetic field is not flowing in the opposite direction to the solar one, but rather in the same direction), at the termination shock the solar magnetic field should form "bubbles" and the interstellar magnetic field's interactions with it should be detectable). | [
"A break junction is an electronic device which consists of two metal wires separated by a very thin gap, on the order of the inter-atomic spacing (less than a nanometer). This can be done by physically pulling the wires apart or through chemical etching or electromigration. As the wire breaks, the separation betwe... |
why do abuse victims frequently become abusers themselves? | > Why do abuse victims frequently become abusers themselves?
They don't BUT many abusers were abused. It is an important distinction. Most abuse victims do not become abusers but many of those who are abusers were abused. | [
"Many abusers are able to control their victims in a manipulative manner, utilizing methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the abuser, rather than to force them to do something they do not wish to do. Simon argues that because aggression in abusive relationships can be carried out subtly and covertl... |
How rapidly would a flamethrower deplete the oxygen in an enclosed space? | 3000 cubic feet of air would contain about 1520 moles of oxygen. Wikipedia says that modern flamethrowers use propane.
Propane combusts as follows:
C3H8 + 5 O2 - > 3 CO2 + 4 H2O
So 1520 moles of oxygen could combust 304 moles of propane. 304 moles of propane has a mass of 13.4 kg.
Unfortunately, i'm unable to find out how much fuel a flamethower consumes, so anything beyond this point is speculation.
However, let's assume that the flamethrower uses 500 grams of propane per minute, you'd deplete all the oxygen in the room in about 27 minutes. However you'd die once the carbon dioxide levels reach 10%. Not to mention how hot it'd get from using a flame thrower in such a small space.
tl;dr you'd die long before you'd deplete all the oxygen.
| [
"The fuel supply to the fire was so rich that some of the combustibles were unable to find oxygen inside the tunnel with which to burn; they were instead ejected from vent shafts 8 and 9 as fuel-rich gases that burst into flame when they encountered oxygen in the air outside. At the height of the fire, pillars of f... |
ignoring religious reasons, what benefit does removing birth control and making abortions illegal serve to the usa? i'm struggling in understanding the politics behind it besides catering to "public opinion." (fyi liberal bay area native just trying to understand) | Having a "moral" people can be useful in foreign relations with other countries.
I thought for a solid minute. All I could come up with. | [
"Shirley Chisholm spoke to the debate from a political perspective in 1970. Chisholm described the decriminalization of abortions as a necessary step toward the safety of women. \"Experience shows that pregnant women who feel that they have compelling reasons for not having a baby, or another baby, will break the l... |
are you able to split a different type of atom in an atomic bomb to have the explosion but without radiation? | Only a small number of specific types of atoms (isotopes) can be used in an atomic (fission) bomb. This is because they need to have several properties:
* they need to be easily split by the kinds of neutrons that are released with fission (splitting) happens
* they need to release neutrons when they fission (split)
* they need to be producible in large quantities
The first two are important because these work by chain reactions — the splitting of one atom releases neutrons that split two more atoms that release neutrons that split more atoms and so on.
Only three types of atoms hit all three of those points: U-235 (enriched uranium), Pu-239 (plutonium), and U-233 (another type of uranium that can be made in a reactor). There are a few other obscure elements that can do the first two but are hard to produce.
The radioactivity produces is a by-product of the splitting itself. Splitting is a violent act for an atom. It releases a lot of energy and some of that energy comes in the form of immediate gamma rays and neutrons. The two "chunks" of the atom that are left over after splitting are always misshapen and radioactive as well, and these are what are responsible for the contaminating radiation you get from nuclear explosions.
> If you were to use a different atom, the explosion would be a lot smaller. Right?
No. The explosion size mostly has to do with how many of those atoms are split, not what type of atom they are. | [
"Atomic bombs are based on the theory of nuclear fission, that when a large atom splits, it releases a massive amount of energy. Thermonuclear weapons, (colloquially known as \"hydrogen bombs\") use the energy from an initial fission explosion to create an even more powerful fusion explosion.\n",
"BULLET::::- Inv... |
what is the point of places like puerto rico, usvi, etc , being "us territories"? | They are covered by US federal law, and people born there are considered US citizens (some exceptions in the case of Somoa). Basically, the individuals have most of the same rights as any other citizen in the US, but they have limited power in congress. If they chose to do so, the territories can go through a process to apply for statehood. | [
"Puerto Rico is an organized unincorporated U.S. territory which has been given internal self-governing powers which are referred to as \"Commonwealth\" status. (The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, located in the western Pacific Ocean, has a similar delegation of self-government powers by the United S... |
How did knights mount horses in medieval times? | Artistic evidence says that they could mount a horse, armoured, unassisted, foot in stirrup and hands on saddle (basically similarly to mounting a saddled horse unarmoured). Textual evidence suggests that at least some could leap onto horseback - this appears to mean mounting without using the stirrup, presumably with hand on saddle/horse for assistance, like mounting bareback.
This nice lecture, "How to Mount a Horse in Armor and Other Chivalric Problems", courtesy of the Met Museum,
* _URL_1_
discusses just this question. The main discussion on mounting horses is from about 23:00 to 34:00, and presents multiple pieces of artwork showing armoured knights mounting horses as described above, and finishes (33:30-34:00) with a film clip showing an armoured curator mounting a horse in this fashion.
Modern jousters will often use a mounting block, and old-time knights could have used a stool or a helping hand to make it easier to mount (as discussed in the lecture above).
Well-fitted armour gives sufficient freedom of movement to mount a horse, and to do plenty more. One essential task that requires a certain amount of freedom of movement is fighting, whether with a pollaxe, sword, lance, or wrestling. Equestrian armour need to allow the wearer to ride, and to mount, dismount, etc. Sacrifices in protection are made to achieve this - equestrian armours often leave much of the inside and back of the legs and buttocks exposed, which is a vulnerability if fighting dismounted. Freedom of movement of arms and shoulders means that arm protection has gaps, armpits have gaps (at least in terms of coverage by plate - mail can be used to protect where the plate doesn't).
A couple of video clips showing the kind of motion that is possible in plate armour:
* _URL_0_ (see attempt to jump onto a "horse" at 0:40)
* _URL_2_
Modern re-enactors are often more encumbered by their armour than knights would have been. Often, they wear off-the-shelf armour that isn't fitted to them (and worse, sometimes poorly designed). Their armour often has heavier arms and legs than historical armours (because historical arms and legs often used thin plates that would be badly dented in re-enactment fighting). Re-enactors are often very part-time, and unfit. It's often a safe assumption that if re-enactors can do something in their modern armour, a Medieval knight would have been able to do the same, more easily. | [
"In the Early Medieval period any well-equipped horseman could be described as a knight, or \"miles\" in Latin. The first knights appeared during the reign of Charlemagne in the 8th century. As the Carolingian Age progressed, the Franks were generally on the attack, and larger numbers of warriors took to their hors... |
how jihadism/muslim extremism convinces so many individuals to abandon their lives for its cause? | Similar to how kids today join gangs. From a rational expectations perspective, no one should even consider a gang - you're very likely to either end up in jail or dead. People join because they don't have many other options, it looks cool, everyone else around them is doing it, and you get to be a man with a gun and fight.
Adding on to SpareLiver's explanation of motivation, if you attach a "greater cause" to the reason's I've listed above, plus a healthy dose of brainwashing, you can convince quite a few people to resort to terrorism. | [
"In a lecture given in University of the Gambia, Zakir strongly condemned the atrocities around the world in the name of Jihad, where innocent people lost their lives, saying \"Jihad is misunderstood by both Muslims and non-Muslims, Jihad means to strive and struggle to make society better, the best form of Jihad i... |
Females in the military prior to the 20th century? | Woman have always fought wars of course but normally informally. Female pirates, women fighting in drag, women fighting because their town was attacked and it was fight or die, etc. You do see occassional records of female fighters within the formal military (there's records of female samurai and ninjas, viking burials indicate female vikings, there's female military leaders in a bunch of cultures) but they tend to be exceptions among majority male military forces.
If you're looking for all female front line military units, there is only one pre 20th century example generally accepted as having happened. And that's the Dahomey Amazons in western Africa during most of the 19th century.
'Amazons of Black Sparta' by Stanley B. Alpern is a very good book about them, if you're interested.
The gender relations of dahomey are fascinating generally and worth looking into. Check out 'The Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa' and some of the articles by Lorella Rouster for more on the general role of woman in west african kingdoms during the 19th century. It was mostly hugely regressive with sex slavery, human sacrifice, ritual servitude and submission of women to their husbands.
But Dahomey itself essentially created a new culture, government type and economy after the old fon style, of individual towns ran by their own headman under the loose moral rather than real leadership of a capital town, had collapsed due to the slave trade so it did a lot of things that nobody else did. (Again how successful they were at state building is well worth reading further into. I.A. Akinjogbin 'dahomey and it's neighbours' is the most positive view of the dahomion reforms I've seen with Karl Polanyi's 'Dahomey and the slave trade' being the most negative. Though both of those were written in the 1960s so might be well out of date.)
One of the things they did is bring woman into roles that they hadn't held previously. So because their king was an absolute ruler who ruled by power rather than moral leadership and because the state took direct control of the country in a way that hadn't previously happened in benin (including laws on what crops you could grow and when you could let farm animals run wild etc.) they needed a bureaucracy. And because the dahomey religion believed in duality, the way the bureaucracy worked was each male bureaucrat was assigned a 'mother', a female bureaucrat who would check his work and make sure he wasn't lying to the king about how much tax he was collecting for instance. Which set a precedent of the King relying increasingly on woman to keep the men in check as he could rely on their loyalty as they were outside of the traditional power structure. King Ghezo went a step further and relied mainly on foreign, non fon, women who he had taken by his slavers from nigerian and togoloese families so they'd be twice the outsider (he even gave one of these woman as a gift to queen Victoria where she became a british lady). Anyway women were part of the dahomian bureaucracy from the beginning which led to female palace guards and female elephant hunters. And because dahomey fought a lot of wars, they eventually needed more manpower then they could recruit and the inevitable result was female front line units. Which by the time of the late 19th century they had a decent amount of and again nobody else prior to that did.
How they managed to arm such a large amount of their woman and also maintain the ritual servitude and submission of women to their husbands is questionable but lots of other societies armed serfs and peasants. Richard Burton, a welsh diplomat who visited dahomey in the 1860s, argued it was because the amazons (the female soldiers) didn't consider themselves women but men, that they'd been given the male gender by their king and so were entitled to male privileges. That's debatable but we do know that they had their own female servants/slaves and sang a war song that went 'we are men, we are not women'. They were also banned from having any sexual relations with men let alone marrying them so whether or not they were actually viewed as men, they were certainly taken out of the usual role for women and treat as a separate case.
A.B. Ellis, who visited dahomey in 1895, claimed the dahomians themselves viewed women as superior to men so that was why there was no push back against the amazons (to some extent, you can trace this back to the religion and the belief in duality. The god mawu-Lisa was sometimes depicted as two siblings, a male lisa and a female mawu, but also sometimes as a dual spirited single entity with male and female parts, you can see how that might lead to a different view of women than a purely male creator god) but he also wrote about the hundreds of woman kept in servitude as wives to the king or the priests so if they did think that, they didn't live up to their ideals. The average non amazon woman doesn't seem to have been well treated at all, beyond anything else we have eye witness reports by the crew of the HMS Bonetta of the bloody execution of female slaves by men at the annual customs.
In terms of their effectiveness, the military of the dahomey kingdom were more effective than most of their African neighbours with the amazons participating in victories against the mahi, aja, oyo and badagry but suffered brutal defeats against European and American armies. Missionaries from the Southern Baptist Convention wiped out hundreds of the amazons at Abeokuta in 1851 for instance (according to the eye witness report of Thomas Jefferson Bowen). And the French made short work of them in 1890 and 1892. But you could say that for any African army of that time period. | [
"The first American women enlisted into the regular armed forces were 13,000 women admitted into active duty in the Navy and Marines during World War I, and a much smaller number admitted into the Coast Guard. These \"Yeomanettes\" and \"women Marines\" primarily served in clerical positions. They received the same... |
why does the quadratic formula work? | [This website explains the derivation of the quadratic formula really well](_URL_0_). Basically in ax^2 + bx + c = 0, you're just solving for x, and the quadratic formula is a shortcut so you don't have to do it by hand every time. | [
"In elementary algebra, the quadratic formula is the solution of the quadratic equation. There are other ways to solve the quadratic equation instead of using the quadratic formula, such as factoring, completing the square, graphing and others. Using the quadratic formula is often the most convenient way.\n",
"Th... |
if our bodies run on atp and we can "replenish" that atp from eating alone, why do we need to sleep to feel refreshed? | sleep isn't for collecting energy, it's for cleaning up chemical buildup in your brain (which is why you can't think right) and your muscles (which is why you feel fatigued) | [
"The oxidative system (aerobic) is the primary source of ATP supplied to the body at rest and during low intensity activities and uses primarily carbohydrates and fats as substrates. Protein is not normally metabolized significantly, except during long term starvation and long bouts of exercise (greater than 90 min... |
In the 17-1800s, how were dances developed and circulated to the higher classes of European societies? | Dances were important social occasions, and people studied to dance well, if they wanted to make an impression. There were dancing masters ( you can see a caricature of one, up on his toes with his typical kit fiddle in [one](_URL_0_) of Hogarth's series The Rake's Progress). There were also plenty of dance manuals- there's a good [collection](_URL_1_) of them at the Library of Congress, available online. The link is to one by Louis-Julien Clarchies, who led a very popular dance orchestra in France circa 1800, perhaps notable for also being black, born in Curacao.
You can find dancing masters and manuals going back into the 16th century, and manuals can be good sources for tunes. Thoinot Arbeau's [Orchesographie]( _URL_2_) was the source for Peter Warlock's Capriole Suite ( and supplied the melody for the carol Ding Dong Merrily On High, found there as Bransle de l'Official) , and many of the dances and tunes in the Playford Dance books (printed 1650 into the 1700's) are still in use. | [
"To understand why Quirey says \"The advent of the in polite society was quite simply the greatest change in dance form and dancing manners that has happened in our history\" we need to realize that all European social dances before the waltz were communal sequence dances – communal, because all the dancers on the ... |
if we are never really touching anything due to atomic repulsion, how do we get cuts, scrapes and impalements? | It's that same atomic repulsion that causes friction, which causes human flesh to be scraped, cut, etc. The object that causes the injury is pushing your flesh out of its way. | [
"The Elise Kimble version of Persuader has an atomic axe that can cut objects on a molecular level, allowing her to cleanly shear flesh, bone, steel, wood and any other object except for Ravager's energy swords.\n",
"Other nuclear warfare doctrines explicitly exclude decapitation strikes on the basis that it is b... |
why is it called an autopsy for humans, but a necropsy for animals? | "auto" means "self" and "optos" means "to see," so the sense here is that when we dissect another human, we are inspecting ourselves. Since animals aren't humans, when we dissect them, we are only inspecting "necros," or "death." | [
"Post-mortem examination, or necropsy, is far more common in veterinary medicine than in human medicine. For many species that exhibit few external symptoms (sheep), or that are not suited to detailed clinical examination (poultry, cage birds, zoo animals), it is a common method used by veterinary physicians to com... |
why some countries spice a lot their food and others don't? | Typically countries use a lot of spice when spices grow well in their climate, or when their climate is very warm and thus foods are prone to go bad.
Countries with neither of these attributes tend to have mild food, other than immigrant groups who came from spicy-food countries. | [
"The trade among different countries also largely affects a region's cuisine. Dating back to the ancient spice trade, seasonings such as cinnamon, cassia, cardamom, ginger, and turmeric were important items of commerce in the earliest evolution of trade. Cinnamon and cassia found their way to the Middle East at lea... |
Importance of combat experience during world war two. | Obviously more experienced troops will perform better than green troops, but it depends what you really mean as green. True a lot of Allied troops that landed in Normandy were relatively green, but the Allies had been preparing for Overlord for a long time and the troops had large amounts of training. This is massively different to a soldier who has just had a rifle shoved into their hands and told to fight.
I'm not going to say that combat experience made no difference to battle outcomes, but i will say that it is often overstated. In reality soldiers in the war gathered experience relatively quickly, but soon reached a level of diminishing returns after that. For example, a unit with 6 months combat experience performed much better than one with no experience at all, but would not perform much worse than one with say 2 years of experience. Therefore soldiers were able to reach a level of parity with the opposition relatively quickly. So while having experienced troops is a bonus, i would argue that it's less of a factor that manpower, weaponry, technology, tactics and strategy etc.
The main advantage of experienced troops is a certain coolness under fire which makes them less likely to panic. This works better when the veteran soldiers are mixed into formations made of relatively green troops because having people who know what theyre doing improves the morale and fighting ability of less experienced soldiers dramatically. Germany divisions towards the end of the war were often a mix of veteran soldiers and new conscripts. While a veteran unit fighting together is formidible, the logic went that mixing veterans in with new recruits made a much larger force fight more effectively and was therefore worth it
| [
"COMBAT was a project commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the First World War. It was an offshoot of parent project Coming World Remember Me (CWRM), a collaboration between Vanmechelen and Jan Moeyaert.\n",
"Distinctions between World War II combatives and modern combatives include: 1) The... |
Age of Discovery - are there any interesting, but relatively unknown discoveries? | Try this guy.
_URL_0_
| [
"The Age of Discovery, also known as the Age of Exploration, was a period in history starting in the early 15th century and continuing into the early 17th century during which Europeans engaged in intensive exploration of the world, establishing direct contacts with Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania and mappin... |
I Have Two Chinese Antiques with a Common Theme - Need help with identification and context | The old fellow is a *xian*, or immortal sage. Cranes are a symbol of longevity and immortality.
There are couple specific possibilities.
In the carpet, I'm guessing there are two more figures not pictured, and that he's [Zhongli Quan](_URL_3_) or maybe [Zhang Guo](_URL_7_) (is that possibly a phoenix behind him?). Those are the two beardiest of the Eight Immortals, a really common folk art motif.
Zhongli Quan is usually showing off his belly, while Zhang Guo is usually older than the rest of the group.
The statue - and I'm less comfortable here - looks like Shou (or Sau), one of the trio of [Fu Lu Shou](_URL_0_). He's called the "god of longevity," and identified with [the South Pole Star, Canopus](_URL_2_). He's often pictured flying [around with a crane](_URL_1_).
Shou in general looks a little like Zhongli Quan to me... and the statue *could* be Zhongli if (as it seems) his robe is open and those are supposed to be his ribs showing. If there's a fan somewhere, that might also clinch it.
The stick might also lean him closer to another of the Eight Immortals, [Iron-crutch Li](_URL_5_), especially if there's a bottle somewhere on his belt or underfoot. His face doesn't look grouchy enough for that for me, but it's hard without seeing the other seven figures in the same style.
But really, he looks an awful lot like Shou, and Shou is more commonly seen without cohorts than any of the Eight Immortals.
So probably Shou on two, Zhongli Quan on one.
There's an outside chance either of them could be some other immortal or sage ... there are [Seven Taoist Masters](_URL_4_), *Quanzhen qizi*, who are sometimes pictured together (or [written about](_URL_6_)) like the Eight Immortals, and cranes are, as I said, a general symbol of longevity or immortality.
The fact that the dude in the statue has one leg raised is not a coincidence... he's being crane-like, whoever he is, in a way that seems like the internal arts cultivated by the fellow who taught the Seven Masters.
| [
"Traditionally, Chinese antiques are marked by a red seal, known as a 'chop', placed there by an owner. Experts can identify previous owners of an antique by reading the chops. The pre-revolution Chinese government tried to assist collectors of Chinese antiques by requiring their Department of Antiquities to provid... |
the difference between uhd 4k, super uhd 4k, dolby vision, hdr. | UHD is a standard resolution of 3840x2160 pixels. This is the next step up from FHD (Full HD) which has a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels and HD which has a resolution of 1280x720 pixels.
UHD has exactly four times the pixels per field as FHD and maintains the same 16:9 aspect ratio.
UHD 4K is a marketing term used to distinguish the display from other "4K" display formats that use different field sizes and aspect ratios.
HDR is a term used in video processing that has different meanings based on context but all relate to contrast. **High Dynamic Range Rendering** has been used in video games for more than a decade to more accurately reproduce reflections of bright lights without artificially brightening the whole scene.
**High Dynamic Range Video** is a two part display requirement. First, the display must exceed specific peak brightness, darkness, and peak contrast ratio values. Second, the display must be capable of processing 10 bit per sample colour values.
HDRR and HDRV are entirely distinct technologies. HDRR does not require an HDRV display and a standard display will look much better when HDRR is enabled. On the other hand, HDRV is useless if the source material is restricted to a standard dynamic range.
Plasma Display Panels long ago met the darkness and contrast requirements but fell behind in peak brightness. LCDs met the brightness requirement but had terrible darkness and contrast. Only in recent years have LCDs been able to match the colour reproduction of PDPs that are considered obsolete. Moreover, 10 bit sampling was foreign to consumer devices until very recently. Historically, it's use has been restricted to professional devices.
Dolby Vision is a mastering format designed to facilitate accurate encoding and reproduction of colour and brightness by the display. Dolby Vision compatible displays have greater knowledge of how the master was *intended* to look and can use that information to reproduce it as accurately as possible. | [
"This resolution, sometimes referred to as 4K UHD or 4K2K, has a 16:9 aspect ratio and 8,294,400 pixels. It is double the size of Full HD (19201080) in both dimensions for a total of four times as many pixels, and triple the size of HD (1280720) in both dimensions for a total of nine times as many pixels. 38402160 ... |
Chess is a game that has existed in its current form for hundreds of years, and in different variations for over a thousand. How did people in your area of history view the game? Has it always been associated with smart people, for example? | We know that chess was played in 11th c. Scandinavia and the British Isles and the most evocative evidence of its popularity are the beautifully carved [Lewis Chessmen](_URL_0_) which were made of Walrus ivory and Whale's teeth. They are currently held at the [British Museum](_URL_1_) and the Museum of Scotland. The materials and intricacy of carving suggest they were high status items and the figures depicted show that the game had been adapted to reflect local culture. The Knights and Bishops that we know feature, along side Beserkers and characters from Norse saga. However the set remains enigmatic, we don't know who made them or who owned them. | [
"The origin of three of the world’s most loved and played games all over the world can be traced back to India. Modern chess developed out of this ancient Indian game - chaturaṅga – meaning four parts. Trace the history of Chess back to the Gupta Period in the 6th Century AD. From the Indian game Pachisi, Ludo has ... |
why do so many huge companies continue to use very old computers and software when it seems the benefits a system-wide update would outweigh the associated costs? | > when it seems the benefits a system-wide update would outweigh the associated costs?
Apparently, the management doesn't think so.
Or, they may not be tech-competent. Lots of people aren't, especially people old enough to be managers/business owners. | [
"This is the case for the computer market over the past decade or so. Every year, computer based companies market machines that are more and more powerful, and cheaper to make thanks to technological advancements. Computer based companies attempt to promote their newer models every year because of this, as it allow... |
are different over-the-counter pain medications better for different kinds of pain? | Ibuprofen, Naproxen, and aspirin are all non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). All are used to reduce fever and inflammation, as well as help with pain.
Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is not an NSAID, which means it does not reduce inflammation. It still reduces fevers and helps with pain, but since it does not have anti-inflammatory properties, it usually cannot help with pain as much as NSAIDs do.
I've read that combining ibuprofen with acetaminophen can work even better to help with pain, but I'm not sure on the specifics of that. | [
"Pain medication, such as aspirin and ibuprofen, are effective for the treatment of tension headache. Tricyclic antidepressants appear to be useful for prevention. Evidence is poor for SSRIs, propranolol and muscle relaxants.\n",
"Over-the-counter drugs, like acetaminophen, aspirin, or NSAIDs(ibuprofen, Naproxen,... |
What historical basis is there for pirates being popularly depicted with eyepatches? | You should read the biographical accounts of Admiral Don Blas de Lazo. Whilst the article I will cite is not academic, I found it very entertaining. _URL_0_
Admiral Don Blas de Lazo lost his eye, leg and hand in the service of the Spanish Navy. He had a peg leg, an eye-patch and a hook hand, pretty much all the stereotypical appurtenances associated with a grizzled mariner, albeit excluding the talking parrot on the shoulder. | [
"One of the stereotypical features of a pirate as portrayed in popular culture, the eye patch, may have been partially derived from the Arab corsair Rahmah ibn Jabir al-Jalahimah, who wore a patch after losing an eye in battle in the 18th century.\n",
"One of the stereotypical features of a pirate in popular cult... |
why shouldn't i wash my cast iron pan? | Cast-iron seasoning is technically, just oil that has slightly soaked into the metal. This soaking-in is also why the pan is heated to season it as heat expands the molecules of iron allowing room for oil to soak in.
As for cleaning and taste:
You can wash cast-iron with soap and water every time, but then you must immediately re-season it by coating with oil and heating, else it rusts fast. This mostly clears the flavors from previously cooked dishes.
Alternatively, you can clean cast-iron (without soap) using hot or boiling water, then put a small amount of oil on. Recommend to do this while pan is still hot from cooking, if possible. This method leaves behind many of the previous flavors and is no less sanitary than re-using deep fryer oil.
| [
"Because other cookware cleaning techniques like scouring or washing in a dishwasher can remove or damage the seasoning on a bare cast-iron pan, these pans should not be cleaned like most other cookware. Some chefs advocate never cleaning cast-iron pans at all; simply wiping them out after use, or washing them with... |
why are some showers very steamy, but then the next day in the same shower there will be no steam at all, even at the same temperature? | Barometric pressure, as the pressure rises and falls with different weather patterns, the steam in your shower will stay around longer or shorter. | [
"Water left stagnant in the pipes of showers can be contaminated with pathogens that become airborne when the shower is turned on. If a shower has not been used for some time, it should be left to run at a hot temperature for a few minutes before use.\n",
"The effects of dousing are usually more intense and longe... |
why does a larger screen look better than a smaller screen even if, by adjusting viewing distance, the field of vision occupied is exactly the same? | Maybe it's because you have to force your eye's lens to focus close things (your phone). And for far images, you don't. | [
"The principal disadvantage of side-by-side viewers is that large image displays are not practical and resolution is limited by the lesser of the display medium or human eye. This is because as the dimensions of an image are increased, either the viewing apparatus or viewer themselves must move proportionately furt... |
if you were to draw the universe as a circle on a piece of paper, what would be outside the circle? | Nothing: it's like taking a 5" radius circular piece of paper and saying 'this represents the universe' and then asking what's written 6" from the centre: nothing!
On the other hand, depending on the 'shape' (or more correctly the geometry) of the universe, this might become more meaningful: if the paper is rolled into a tube you can 'go off the top' and end up at the bottom. You'd need to ask someone with a better knowledge of tensor calculus than I have though... | [
"The subject of these drawings, a small and always visible table is prosaic, it is always at hand. The lines on these drawings are never the contour of the closing of an area: they always move, thus liberating mysterious energies.\n",
"No one has ever seen a perfect circle, nor a perfectly straight line, yet ever... |
To scale, how big would the earth be if the observable universe was the size of the milky way? | The diameter of the Milky Way is 100000-120000 light years (_URL_1_). The diameter of the observable universe is about 28 billion parsecs (_URL_0_). So we're scaling down by a factor of about 10^(6), and the scaled diameter of the Earth is around 15 meters. | [
"Research released in 2016 revised the number of galaxies in the observable universe from a previous estimate of 200 billion () to a suggested 2 trillion () or more, containing more stars than all the grains of sand on planet Earth. Most of the galaxies are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter (approximately 3000 t... |
What happens when the myelin sheath gets damaged? | Similar in principle to what happens when a wire starts loosing its insulation.
The electrical signal carried in a myelinated axon jumps between the small gaps in the myelin sheath. This dramatically speeds up the rate of conduction. When the sheath gets damaged, the signal has to travel along the length of the axon the slow way, where the signal can diffuse and degrade and can simply not be strong enough to perpetuate. | [
"CNS demyelination autoimmune disease causes the myelin sheath to deteriorate since the sense of recognition of self is lost.The loss of the myelin insulation either disrupts or prevents neural conduction along the nerve cell’s axon.\n",
"The myelin sheath is a multi-layered membrane, unique to the nervous system... |
Could it be possible that degenerate matter ("neutronium") exists outside of neutron stars ? | It's the force provided by gravity that turns the matter into "neutronium", so anything that gets ejected from a collision would no longer be under an immense gravitational force. With the loss of this force, the matter would likely return to a more normal state. | [
"Another argument against the hypothesis is that if it were true, all neutron stars should be made of strange matter, and otherwise none should be. Even if there were only a few strange stars initially, violent events such as collisions would soon create many strangelets flying around the universe. Because a single... |
What are the differences between Adult Stem Cells and Embryonic Stem Cells in research? | To put it simply, one (adult) is already more differentiated, meaning it has already undergone some changes that make it more like the normal adult cells in your body and less like the pluri potent stem cells that can turn into anything (if they get the right signals to do so)
edit: see ren5311's comment below | [
"Adult stem cells have provided many different therapies for illnesses such as Parkinson's disease, leukemia, multiple sclerosis, lupus, sickle-cell anemia, and heart damage (to date, embryonic stem cells have also been used in treatment), Moreover, there have been many advances in adult stem cell research, includi... |
Was the Puckle gun used during the American Revolution? | As cool as that would be, there's no record of the Puckle gun being used by either side. From the [Long 18th Century Blog Series](_URL_0_):
> "Although John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu (1690-1749) purchased several pro-type models of the gun in 1722, the British army and Royal Navy never placed a major production order. Consequently, no historical record of the Puckle Gun fired in combat exists."
James Puckle actually demonstrated the weapon to the English Board of Ordinance several times: in 1717, while the design was still being developed, several times between 1719 and 1721, and, famously, at a public trial in 1722. The gun impressed the audience by firing 63 shots in seven minutes in a heavy rain. However, it seems to have been treated as a hyper-specialized novelty by both its audience and its inventor. Puckle advertised its speed and rapid-fire ability, and added in the same breath that it could shoot square bullets at the Turks (while round bullets would be reserved for Christians) (Willbanks 2004).
Sources:
Michael Burgan, *Weapons, Gear, and Uniforms of the American Revolution.* Capstone Press, 2012.
George D. Moller, *American Military Shoulder Arms, Vol. 1: Colonial and Revolutionary War Arms.* University of New Mexico Press, 2011.
George C. Neumann, *Battle Weapons of the American Revolution.* Andrew Mowbray Inc, 2011.
James H. Willbanks. *Machine Guns: An Illustrated History of Their Impact.* ABC-CLIO, Weapons & Warfare Series, 2004. | [
"The Gatling gun is one of the best-known early rapid-fire spring loaded, hand cranked weapons, and a forerunner of the modern machine gun and rotary cannon. Invented by Richard Gatling, it saw occasional use by the Union forces during the American Civil War in the 1860s, which was the first time it was employed in... |
During the Middle Ages, why was the suffix “-eth” used, and what purpose did it serve? | r/AskHistorians probably isn't the best sub for this question, but the answer is conjugation. Before answering your question in more detail, I would point out that what you heard on the radio was not representative of language during the Middle Ages (moreover the Middle Ages covered a very long period and language was not consistent throughout). What you heard would be more consistent with the 15th or 16th century. One of the most common places people encounter this kind of language would the King James Bible. The explanation below is for that era of language, and although the gist of it applies to the Middle Ages--i.e.
"conjugation,"--the details would be different.
"-eth," and "-est," (and its variations) are suffixes to conjugate verbs. "-eth" and "-th" for irregular verbs are used for third person: "She *shareth* her wealth." "He *hath* one goat." "-est" (also sometimes "-st" or "-t" for irregular verbs) is used for second person: "Thou *sharest* thy wealth." "Thou *art* a true friend." Conjugation gets more complicated when you introduce tense and plural verbs. If what you heard on the radio put the suffix on anything other than a verb, it was just wrong, and would explain why it sounded like nails on a chalkboard. This has become popular lately as a form humor, kinda like "DoggoLingo." | [
"BULLET::::- Romance palatal approximant (GE-, GI-, I-) consistently became medieval , as in medieval Catalan and Portuguese. This becomes modern \"ch\" , as a result of the devoicing of sibilants (see below). In Spanish, the medieval result was either (modern ), or nothing, depending on the context. E.g. IUVENEM ... |
what is the actual amount of money spent on welfare/food stamps in the united states? how does it compare to subsidies and military funding? | _URL_0_
This is more of a search for the answer than simplify a complex subject.
Military is about twice welfare, but subsidizes other countries in a way. "Welfare" draws from other programs in loosely related ways as well. | [
"As of 2012, the United States government spent about $50 billion annually on 10 programs, mostly administrated by the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, which in total deliver food assistance to one in five Americans.\n",
"BULLET::::- President Johnson presented a record 135 billion dollar U.S. governmen... |
What happens if a plutonium reactor heats up in a molten pool of salt? | I would think they flush it out while its just very salty water. I doubt they let it evaporate until solid before putting new water in. | [
"Molten salt reactor designs carry out fluoride volatility reprocessing continuously or at frequent intervals. The goal is to return actinides to the molten fuel mixture for eventual fission, while removing fission products that are neutron poisons, or that can be more securely stored outside the reactor core while... |
why did muslim countries stop secularizing and embraced islamic fundamentalism | Here's an extremely simplified bullet point explanation:
* Most Middle Eastern nations are relatively new nation states (i.e., less than 100 years old) with very artificial borders that are a holdover from the colonial era. As such, most Middle Eastern nations are insanely divided along ethnic/sectarian/tribal lines, and they don't have very strong national identities.
* During the 20th century, many Western governments effectively propped up or supported authoritarian, secular governments in the region.
* These authoritarian regimes did a terrific job of keeping sectarian/tribal conflicts to a minimum, at the terrible expense of human rights to free expression and assembly.
* Most Middle Eastern nations are insanely resource rich with oil. This means a shortcut to wealth for those nations' elites, often at the expense of properly developing their nations' infrastructure, education and economies.
* There has been rapid economic development in the region over the past 50 years, and with that has been Western influence and culture. That bred resentment toward the Western-friendly regimes.
* While we often think poverty is what leads to religious extremism, that's not necessarily the case here. The real culprit is lack of opportunity for people who are decently educated and who come from lower-middle to middle class families. Due to the corrupt and nepotistic nature of the authoritarian regimes in the nation, good jobs are only available to those with connections.
* One of the most critical points: Due to the lack of freedom of expression in many of these nations, Islam became a vehicle for political expression. You couldn't go into the street and protest, but you could generally voice your opposition to the regime in the context of Islam inside of a mosque.
* Mosques became breeding grounds for political activity because they were the only safe space for dissidents to congregate.
* As in any ideological battle, the loudest and most extreme voices either drown everyone else out or outright kill any moderate voices off.
* So, many Muslims were faced with a choice: either siding with their weak national identity or their strong religious identity.
* That's more or less why Islamic fundamentalism exists.
Obviously that is a very simplified explanation and there are other factors I didn't go into. | [
"Because Muslims believe that their faith was revealed in its complete form to Muhammad, it has been difficult to adapt Islam to the social, economic, and political changes that began with the expansion of colonial rule in the late 19th century. Some modifications have occurred, however. One response was to stress ... |
the difference between ad valorem tax and capital gains tax | You've got some of your vocabulary mixed up, and it's like you're asking *what's the difference between asphalt and I-95.*
Capital-gains tax is basically a tax on your profit from buying something for a low price and selling it for a higher one. In a little bit more detail, it's a tax on the difference between your sale price and your cost to acquire and improve (but not maintain) the asset.
Ad-valorem is an adjective to describe taxes that are assessed on the (estimated) value of a property. The Latin just means according-to-value. Many cities and counties have a property tax where homeowners must pay a certain percentage (1%-2% is pretty typical, but there are high-tax cities out there) of the assessed value of their house & land. | [
"Capital gains tax (CGT), in the context of the Australian taxation system, is a tax applied to the capital gain made on the disposal of any asset, with a number of specific exemptions, the most significant one being the family home. Rollover provisions apply to some disposals, one of the most significant of which ... |
how are apple pay, samsung pay, google wallet different? | Samsung pay can use magnetic secure transmission, to basically send the information to the magnetic reader on almost all card readers wheras apple pay and google wallet use nfc to process payments
The added capability of samsung allow it to truthfully make claims that it is accepted in more places | [
"While Android Pay is only available to Android users, Google Wallet is available on iOS and via Gmail as well. For those using Android, the two products together (Android Pay and Google Wallet) offer a comprehensive payments management system, a “tool for staying in charge of the bank account.” Users can link thei... |
the confusion between r and l when japanese and english are exchanged. | The Japanese language has no *L* sound. It doesn't have a true *R* sound either. The sound that comes closest to both is actually the same sound - it's a sort of blend between the English L and the English R. It's always transliterated as an R sound because the sound is a lot closer to our R than it is to our L. | [
"Due to the difficulties that Japanese have in distinguishing \"l\" and \"r\", this expansion of Japanese phonology has not extended to inventing different kana for /l/ vs. /r/. Therefore, words with /l/ or /r/ may be spelled identically if borrowed into Japanese. One important exception is due to the fact that Jap... |
why does a running hose slither around like a snake when you let go of it? | Because of Newton's third law. Water is pushed out the hose, so conversely, the hose is also pushed away from the water. This means that, as long as the water in the hose is under pressure, there will be a 'recoil' force acting on the tip of the hose, making it move around. | [
"When water is supplied to the hose, it flows through the nozzle body to the opening, where it would normally flow straight forward in a stream. Just after leaving the opening it encounters the plug, which deflects the water sideways through an angle. After travelling a short distance the water encounters the outsi... |
Why do the poles of the moon have more craters than the equator? | Possibly because of sheer probability. One hemisphere of the moon is always blocked by the entire mass known as the Earth, and the other is sometimes blocked by the rest of the solar system, while the poles aren't blocked by anything. | [
"The far side has more visible craters. This was thought to be a result of the effects of lunar lava flows, which cover and obscure craters, rather than a shielding effect from the Earth. NASA calculates that the Earth obscures only about 4 square degrees out of 41,000 square degrees of the sky as seen from the Moo... |
how have sports contracts gotten so inflated over time? | Sports are big money: the NFL made more than $13 billion last year, MLB $10 billion. Teams have to compete for top talent and better representation for players such as the NFL's Players Union mean that more of the total revenue of the league goes to players instead of owners. | [
"This competition for the best amateur athletes resulted in skyrocketing signing bonuses. In 1947, Major League baseball implemented the bonus rule. The rule prevented the wealthiest teams from signing all of the best players and from stashing those players in their farm systems. Additionally, the bonus market was ... |
how does warrant canary work if they can compel you to lie? | A warrant canary works because you cannot be compelled to lie.
I can be under a gov't warrant cooperate in some way, and I can be barred from revealing the existence of that warrant. If someone asked me directly, I can either lie, or refuse to answer without violating the warrant.
The warrant canary is basically a trick that makes the refusal to answer a positive answer. If I create a policy where I always truthfully say no when there is no warrant, not saying no becomes a yes. I don't violate the terms of the warrant, but at the same time I am able to confirm it exists. | [
"A warrant canary is a method by which a communications service provider aims to inform its users that the provider has been served with a secret government subpoena despite legal prohibitions on revealing the existence of the subpoena. The warrant canary typically informs users that there has been a secret subpoen... |
Were there any truly secular Muslim empires in history other than modern Turkey? | Most Middle Eastern countries have been secular since the end of colonialism, such as Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. In the more homogenous countries (basically all of them except Lebanon, Syria and Iraq), the primary political struggle was between secular military dictators and Islamists. That's changed in the past decade or so as the relatively new university-educated class has demanded liberal democracies, and the old order has been pretty well destroyed by the "Arab Spring" that the liberals championed. Nonetheless, secularists (autocrats that often preached some sort of "Arab socialism") have been in power for most of the second half of the 20th century. | [
"Subsequent empires dominated by Muslims, such as those of the Abbasids, Fatimids, Almoravids, Seljukids, Ajuran, Adal and Warsangali in Somalia, Mughals in the Indian subcontinent (India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan e.t.c), Safavids in Persia and Ottomans in Anatolia, were among the influential and distinguished power... |
lake baikal in russia - how did the baikal seals come to reach that lake? | It's actually somewhat of a mystery. There are 2 main theories. The first is that some ancestral seals from the Paratethys Sea, (a large, shallow inland sea covering much of Eurasia millions of years ago) could have gotten there by moving north, although this would have required the seals hopping through multiple rivers and lakes across a long distance. The other theory is that they could have moved south from the Arctic through the Yensei and/or Angara Rivers, which connect the present day Kara Sea to the present day Lake Baikal. | [
"The Baikal seal lives only in the waters of Lake Baikal. It is something of a mystery how Baikal seals came to live there in the first place. They may have swum up rivers and streams or possibly Lake Baikal was linked to the ocean at some point through a large body of water, such as the West Siberian Glacial Lake ... |
How did Thomas Jefferson reconcile "all men are created equal" and the unalienable rights of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" with the fact that he owned hundreds of slaves? | I can't comment too much on Jefferson's wider moral and political philosophy because I'm someone who studies slavery in comparative contexts rather than the history of the United States itself, but I wrote an answer to a follow-up in [this thread](_URL_0_) a few months ago that a lot of people seemed to find really helpful in getting their head around how Jefferson could reconcile his slave ownership with his political philosophy emphasising freedom and self-determination. It's a very long answer that runs to the character limit so I can't reproduce it in quote form below, I'm afraid. One key takeaway I would say to be aware of is that Jefferson is by no means unusual of slave owners in his life time, it's just that his particular historical significance as an individual and lasting impact of his political ideas in American political culture that makes him seem somehow uniquely problematic and hypocritical as a figure. | [
"BULLET::::- Thomas Jefferson: \"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.\" (Declaration of Independence)\n",
"In 1773–85, Philip Mazzei, a physi... |
is it legal to pirate a game i own legitimately? | If I remember correctly, you're not buying the game per se, but a license to play that game on whichever system you buy it for, which makes playing same game technically illegal on an emulator. Hopefully someone else can verify/expand on this. | [
"There are a number of Pirates in the game, who immediately attempt to destroy any non-Pirate ship they spot, with the exception of the player once they have achieved a high combat rating. The Pirates do not plunder their targets due to limitations in the game; the player, however, is allowed to board ships, and ma... |
Is speed in space measured in relation to something else? If so wouldnt two beams of light going in opposite directions be going at 2c if measured relative to each other? | Congratulations! You have actually stumbled upon the same train of thought that led Einstein to develop his [Theory of Special Relativity](_URL_3_).
Essentially, Special Relativity states that no matter what speed you are traveling, the laws of physics will be thee same. Since the speed of light is set by the laws of electromagnetism (specifically, [Maxwell's Equations](_URL_0_)) you will always measure the speed of light to be the same.
The theory also states that there is no "absolute reference frame". So yes, you are correct that in space (and everywhere, really) the velocity of one object must be measured in relation to another object.
While you can't travel at the speed of light, you can travel arbitrarily close to it. But let's say you were traveling away from Earth at 99% the speed of light. The fact is: *you would still measure a beam of light sent from earth as traveling at the speed of light*. And if you shot a bullet out in front of you at 99% the speed of light compared to your spaceship, an observer on earth would still see that bullet traveling at less than the speed of light!
Now, this may seem strange and full of contradictions, but there actually are no contradictions (though there is *a lot* more strangeness: [length contraction](_URL_4_), [time dilation](_URL_2_), [relativity of simultaneity](_URL_1_) all come into play). I suggest you read the article I linked in the first paragraph if you're still curious. But if you have any specific questions I'd be glad to take a crack at them! | [
"A series of one-way measurements were undertaken, all of them confirming the isotropy of the speed of light. However, only the two-way speed of light (from A to B back to A) can unambiguously be measured, since the one-way speed depends on the definition of simultaneity and therefore on the method of synchronizati... |
Does the big earthquake in Alaska today mean there is less of a chance for "the big one" to happen that they keep talking about in the Pacific NW? | Releasing strain on one section of a fault can increase strain on another section. See the Anatolian fault earthquake dates as an example. Spoilers: Istanbul is in a tough place.
That said, the PNW is a complex area with a variety of slip types ranging from constant slow slip which isn't a significant danger, to the more classic type of slip in which stain builds up over time until the rocks rupture. | [
"Southern Alaska lies at the eastern end of the Aleutian Trench, where the Pacific Plate is subducting beneath the North American Plate. Near Anchorage, the plates are converging at a rate of 57 mm per year. The region has experienced severe earthquakes in the past, including several megathrust earthquakes. The 196... |
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