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What were some of the other options brought up before settling on the 3/5's Compromise at the Constitution Convention? | I'm afraid I can only touch on the Great Compromise a bit, but the 3/5 is in my wheelhouse.
Your student's suggestion was the actual position of the less-enslaving states: enslaved people count zero for representation because they are in essentially no other ways treated like human beings. Counting them for purposes of allocating power, particularly power over white men, would have been illogical, absurd, and morally abhorrent to the white North. The argument was that if enslaved people ought to be counted, then so should livestock. It falls out this way because if representation is contingent on freeing enslaved people, then those people are no longer enslaved and don't count as such...at least as a matter of law. The oft-precarious status of free people of color did not much enter into it.
The large enslavers, of course, wanted it just the other way: they ought to be able to buy power by buying people. If that meant power flowed directly from enslaving, that was just how things ought to be...though most of them are shy about admitting this at the time. That one's worth and fitness for public office and public life derived almost entirely from one's property value -though also critically from being white and a man- was reasonably uncontroversial. They argued that women and children, and also poor white men, did not have the vote yet they were still to be used for representation. So why not enslaved people?
So far as the larger dichotomy goes between enslaving people and political power, the white South perceives the two as largely identical. They understand, at least in a nebulous way, that the less-enslaving states to their north have become increasingly hostile to enslaving people. Some of them have already enacted emancipation plans that will, over the course of decades, end slavery within their bounds. That wave of emancipationist feeling might even infect the Upper South (Maryland, Virginia, and company around the Chesapeake at this time) and that would place enslaving in a dangerous position. These fears are always very much overblown, but they're a significant engine of southern politics all through the antebellum. You can get ahead by arguing your opponent is soft on slavery and conjuring an external threat on slavery is the way you build a national coalition in the South among polities that otherwise often disagree.
Thus enslaving people needs extra protection, which the white South seeks ardently. This includes protection from democracy, though at the time such a concept isn't seen as inherently problematic since the founders are quite openly authoritarian oligarchs. The extra safety comes in many forms, some of which evolve over time, but the biggest are apportionment in the Senate -which was not *only* because of slavery, but people in the room at the time noted that the issue of small vs. large states rapidly dissolved in favor of division between enslaving and free-r states, with the enslaving very enthusiastic for the Senate as we know it- and the 3/5 ratio. With the sections at rough population parity, or even tilted a bit in the more enslaving states' favor since no one had a national census to work with when the decision was made, those extra representatives mean that the white, enslaving South has a veto on close House votes. The exact value of that is hard to assess -you'd actually have to reapportion the House every time around to know for sure and the method for doing that changed a few times- but it's very much the case that in the great sectional controversies to come that small margin is a factor.
The third proslavery provision of the Constitution is the one that enslavers were most keen to boast: the fugitive slave clause. In South Carolina's ratifying convention they made it very explicit: until and unless they had the Constitution, enslavers had no right to go into another state to recover a person who dared steal themselves. In essence, they compelled the North to recognize the status of Southern slavery even within Northern jurisdictions. Massachusetts or Pennsylvania might abolish slavery, but only so far as people enslaved in Massachusetts originally were concerned. Should an enslaved person from Virginia escape to either place, the Constitution granted their enslaver a new power to go and seize them back. Quite what that was going to mean was left unclear in Philadelphia, but when it came to legislation on the matter in 1793 -after a controversial rendition case- the white South were not at all ambiguous. They asked for essentially what became law in 1850: a complete legal obligation for men in free states to render aid in the recapture and rendition of enslaved people, practically on the enslaver's say-so. They had to settle for rather less during the Washington years, but still a far more substantive right than the literally nothing they'd had beforehand. | [
"The task of the convention became the creation of a position that both supported the Compromise of 1850 as the final solution to the sectional disputes over slavery while maintaining a strong position for protecting traditional Southern rights. They did this by approving what came to be known as the Georgia Platfo... |
why germany has maintained economic stability while greece has faltered | I think the answer that terminal_velocity gave has a lot of truth to it; namely Germany has a diverse exporting infrastructure, as well as a controlled import system.
But the most important thing to remember is that Germany has taxes, okay? Greece in the meanwhile has had huge problems with tax-evasion and under-taxing. ["With the economy losing as much as $58 billion a year in undeclared income, the administration has made tax collection a priority. But so did previous governments, which failed miserably at the task." ](_URL_0_)
**In short, Greece has very little exporting diversity, and horrendous tax policies, while Germany has a fairly rigid tax system and a wide variety of things they sell, that helps them pay for things they need to bring in** | [
"The version of adjustment offered by Germany and its allies is that austerity will lead to an internal devaluation, i.e. deflation, which would enable Greece gradually to regain competitiveness. This view too has been contested. A February 2013 research note by the Economics Research team at Goldman Sachs claims t... |
Is it possible to kill a house fly with a static charge that you have accumulated? | Well you can accumulate a voltage of between [1000 and 10000 volts](_URL_0_) with static electricity and most electric fly swatters have a voltage of 1500 volts or less, so I would assume it is safe to say that a fly could be killed with a static charge. | [
"If perturbed or threatened, an adult bee moth will fall to the ground and pretend to be dead by lying on their backs in the exact form that they landed. This is beneficial when infiltrating a host wasp or bumblebee nest as the host will be less likely to attack when it believes that the moth is dead.\n",
"BULLET... |
Nearly half of the people who died from the Spanish Flu of 1918 were 20-to-40 year olds, a normally resistant population. Do we know why? What steps were taken to curb the outbreak (which killed more people than the Great War)? What sort of advances had we made by 1998 to prevent a recurrence? | There have been some studies that have shown that people who were exposed to the Russian flu pandemic of 1889-90 were the most likely to die if they contracted the Spanish flu.
Examinations of the virus structure of the Russian flu and Spanish flu have shown that they had vast differences in the structure of their respective viruses. When individuals who had previously contracted the Russian flu contracted the Spanish flu, their immune response was simultaneously delayed and wrong. The individuals' immune systems started producing antibodies based on the Russian flu, but since the virus structure was so different, these antibodies had little to no effect on the Spanish flue. By the time the immune systems realized that the antibodies it was producing was not effective, it was too late.
Source: [Age-specific mortality during the 1918 influenza pandemic: unravelling the mystery of high young adult mortality.](_URL_0_) | [
"A new strain of the virus emerged in 1918, and the subsequent pandemic of Spanish flu was one of the worst natural disasters in history. The death toll was enormous; throughout the world around 50 million people died from the infection. There were 550,000 reported deaths caused by the disease in the US, ten times ... |
why do our eyes/brains struggle to figure out how many numbers/letters are in something when one repeats it self vs when all are different (12333332 vs 60292813) | This is because it is easier for the human brain to count different numbers since you can know at which number you are looking at (The criterion is that the next number is visibly different than the previous).
When you have to deal with a repeatitive number, you "have" doubts whether you skipped or count twice a number , so you instictively start take more time to make sure you read the number correct. | [
"People have a limited ability to retain information, which worsens when the amount of information increases. For this reason, people alter information to make it more memorable, such as separating a ten-digit phone number into three smaller groups or dividing the alphabet into sets of three to five letters. George... |
Why did China not discover Australia/ the Pacific Islands? | hi! there's always room for more info on this topic, but FYI, there have been several posts asking about non-European discovery/settlement of Australia. Catch up on previous responses here:
China
[Why did the British/Europeans discover Australia and not the Chinese?](_URL_5_)
[Why did the Chinese or Japanese apparently never try to colonize Australia or New Zealand? They're right there.](_URL_2_)
[What were some reasons that China turned inwards and neglected maritime exploration after Admiral Zheng He and his missions.](_URL_8_)
[Why were Zheng He's voyages considered wasteful?](_URL_10_)
[How reliable are the accounts for the Chinese explorer, Zheng He.](_URL_12_)
SE Asia
[Are there any evidences for pre-European contact of the Australias?](_URL_0_)
[To what extent did Asian know about the Island of Australia? Are there documents showing the pass of this knowledge to Europeans?](_URL_1_)
[Why did no Asian cultures ever find Australia?](_URL_3_)
[I just read about the Bugis people, the Vikings of Southeast Asia because they discovered Australia and New Guinea long before the European Age of Discovery. What other maritime cultures had a golden era of exploration in the Middle Ages?](_URL_7_)
South Pacific
[Why are the aboriginal peoples of Australia and New Zealand so different? Was there much interaction between the two prior to the arrival of Europeans?](_URL_9_)
[Why did the Maori not conquer aboriginal Australia?](_URL_11_)
[Why didn't the Polynesians colonize Australia?](_URL_4_)
[Why did Polynesians stop expanding? Also, why did they never settle Australia?](_URL_6_) | [
"Although Chinese authorities did not assert claims to the islands while they were under US administration, formal claims were announced in 1971 when the US was preparing to end its administration. A 1968 academic survey undertaken by United Nations Economic Council for Asia and the Far East found possible oil rese... |
Why were D-Day landing craft designed the way they were? Opening the large ramp from the front seems almost suicidal to me. | The D-Day craft to which you are referring (the LCVP) was based heavily on the a boat designed by Andrew Higgins in the prewar years, ostensibly for "oil workers" but probably a smugglin' swamp boat during Prohibition. The Marine Corps was not happy with the contemporary Navy options for landing troops on beaches, and so Higgins' design was shoved into production. It underwent a few different versions, the last of which (the LCVP) had modifications based on the earlier Japanese [Daihatsu-class landing vehicle](_URL_0_). The ramp opens front so that troops and vehicles can (ideally) exit onto the shallow part of the beach while the propeller stays in deeper water, enabling the craft to back up and return to the big ships afterwards to pick up another load. If the ramp were to open to the rear, you've got troops and jeeps exiting into 8 feet of water. Yes, when one of these opened into the face of a German MG-42, it was bad, but for every one of those, there were 20 more landing (relatively) safely and unloading cargo and men efficiently. | [
"Because of the need to run up onto a suitable beach, World War II landing craft were flat-bottomed, and many designs had a flat front, often with a lowerable ramp, rather than a normal bow. This made them difficult to control and very uncomfortable in rough seas. The control point (too rudimentary to call a bridge... |
how nearsightedness and farsightedness work | With nearsightedness, the eyeball is too long for the lens, so that the image often focuses *in front* of the retina. With farsightedness, the eyeball is too short for the lens, so that the image (if we pretend the retina is transparent) would focus behind the retina.
The result is that people who are nearsighted can still see things close up, while people who are farsighted can see things far away but not close up.
Farsightedness, which is uncommon, is often confused with presbyopia, which happens with age and is believed to be caused by the lens in the eye getting less elastic, and thus having less focal range. The symptoms are pretty similar, the inability to focus on near things. | [
"Foresight is a framework or lens which could be used in risk analysis and management in a medium- to long-term time range. A typical formal foresight project would identify key drivers and uncertainties relevant to the scope of analysis. \n",
"A particular place on this list should be reserved for the practition... |
why are savings account yields in australia 4%/year, and in the u.s. they are .025%/year? | Because the Australian Federal Reserve bank has a cash target rate of 2.5% - banks charge more than that for lending (I pay 4.9% on my mortgage) and also more than that for certain high interest online bank accounts (the 4% your sister is getting). _URL_0_. Australia has typically had higher interest rates but at the moment we are one of the strongest economies in the world, and if our interest rates were cut much more inflation would be triggered.
This is distinct from the US interest rate that is 0.25% right now (_URL_1_).
I have Canadian family who talk about sending money here to make better interest. However, the interest earned in an Australian bank account is pre-tax and is counted as income for the purposes of income tax - so if you sent $1,000,000 to your sister (for example) she would have to declare the $40,000 as income subject to tax. So the effective rate is a bit lower. You would also be exposed to the risk that the Australian dollar will sink lower once the US interest rates start to rise again.
I wish I could borrow from the US or Canada on a 30 year fixed rate mortgage, put in a nice futures contract for the foreign exchange risk because I'm pretty sure that would still end up well, well ahead.
TL:DR; Australian economy good, US bad, better economies have higher interest rates all other things being equal. | [
"India's gross domestic savings in 2006–07 as a percentage of GDP stood at a high 32.8%. More than half of personal savings are invested in physical assets such as land, houses, cattle, and gold. The government-owned public-sector banks hold over 75% of total assets of the banking industry, with the private and for... |
Limits of the Internet. What is the current limit of possible addresses? | The most commonly used version of the Internet Protocol (IP), IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses (often represented as 4 numbers between 0 and 255 separated by dots, such as 192.168.1.1). Of these, a maximum of about 4 billion addresses are possible. But due to the way these addresses are assigned, the actual number is much lower. Large parts of the address space are intended for internal networks only and in the early days of the internet, companies were allocated far more addresses than they really needed, which may leave many IPv4 addresses unused.
There are clearly not enough IPv4 addresses to give a unique address to every internet-capable device. One very common workaround is to use Network Address Translation, which is a technique that allows a number of devices that are on the same network to use a single internet-facing IP address. When you connect to a website on your laptop, that website will probably register the same IP address as when you connect to it on your desktop, tablet or phone that are part of the same home-network.
Clever bookkeeping by the router ensures that all traffic coming from the internet into your network is delivered to the correct device, even though multiple devices share the same public IP address.
A more permanent solution is a successor to IPv4, IPv6. In IPv6, the address space is 128 bits, which means there are about 3 * 10^38 possible addresses. This means that every device can be assigned thousands or millions of unique addresses and we'd still not get anywhere close to reaching the limit.
IPv6 is being deployed across the globe, but its rollout is rather slow and we're still having to rely on IPv4 and the workarounds such as NAT. | [
"BULLET::::- \"Computing:\" 2 = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 (≈3.40282367), the theoretical maximum number of Internet addresses that can be allocated under the IPv6 addressing system, one more than the largest value that can be represented by a single-precision IEEE floating-point value, the... |
why does it often say when trying to download something "download should start soon, if it does not press this button" instead of triggering the function of the always working button. | They're trying to load balance server requests so that no one server gets nailed with all of the download bandwidth. They give you the link so that if the fancy load balancer doesn't work you can still get the file from the main server.
Also ads. | [
"Drive-by downloads may happen when visiting a website, opening an e-mail attachment or clicking a link, or clicking on a deceptive pop-up window: by clicking on the window in the mistaken belief that, for example, an error report from the computer's operating system itself is being acknowledged or a seemingly inno... |
What has the sleep schedule of the US President looked like historically? | During his presidency Coolidge supposedly would sleep around 11 hours a day. When writer Dorothy Parker was told in 1933 that Coolidge had died she replied, "How can they tell?" Source: The American Age: US Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750, Walter LaFeber | [
"The President's Bedroom is a second floor bedroom in the White House. The bedroom makes up the White House master suite along with the adjacent sitting room and the smaller dressing room, all located in the southwest corner. Prior to the Ford Administration it was common for the President and First Lady to have se... |
What causes pianos to go out of tune, and why do they go out of tune faster if unplayed or in high humidity? | I can answer some of these. A piano goes out of tune when the various components change shape and deform over time. For example, the strings are under quite a lot of tension and will eventually begin to stretch or slip ever so slightly. It doesn't take much of this at all for a good musician to hear the changes. Humidity largely effects the wood of the piano, especially the sound board. Extra humidity can cause the wood to swell which slightly changes the shape of the piano and causes tuning changes. I can't find, nor can I think of why not playing a piano would account for more tuning changes. If I find something I will update you. | [
"Pianos go out of tune primarily because of changes in humidity. Tuning can be made more secure by installing special equipment to regulate humidity, inside or underneath the piano. There is no evidence that being out-of-tune permanently harms the piano itself. However, a long-term low-humidity/high humidity enviro... |
Has there ever been an attempt to create a SI unit of time? | The second is based on something physical - it's defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom".
It may seem somewhat arbitrary, because it isn't based on anything fundamental to the universe, but it's no more so than, for example, the kilogram - which is the mass of a cylinder of platinum and iridium held in a vault in Paris. The meter is actually defined in terms of the second, and doesn't have it's own reference point. | [
"In the International System of Units (SI), the unit of time is the second (symbol: formula_1). It is a SI base unit, and it has been defined since 1967 as \"the duration of periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom\". This ... |
how did manual telephone switchboards work? | In your local switchboard, everyone in the locality who had a house phone had a connection on the switchboard. If you lifted the receiver at your end, at home, a light would illuminate on your connection at the switchboard.
On the desk in front of the operator, there were two rows of jack connectors sticking out of the desk, plug up [like this](_URL_0_). Each pair one above the other were connected together. That's all they were, like giant aux cables.
As well as that, for each of those pairs, there was a switch which could be in one of three positions. The middle position just treated the cable like an aux cable, as above, one position let the operator speak to that connection, and the third position made that connection ring.
The switchboard operator would then plug one of the rear plugs into your lit up socket on the board in front of them to connect them to you, and flip the switch to let them talk to you. They'd ask you where you'd like to be connected to.
If it was a local number, you'd give them the local number (which would probably be something like "185", and then the operator would ask you to wait while they connected you. The operator would then take the other plug sticking out the desk, plug it into the number you'd requested, and then flip the switch to the Ring position. At your end, you'd hear the ring signal, at their end the phone would ring. The operator would wait for the light to illuminate on the connection you're trying to ring, which would tell them they'd picked the phone up, and then the operator would flip the switch back to normal mode, (or if they felt like eavesdropping they could leave the switch in talk and sit there silently listening to the phone call) and you could then talk.
The operator would know when you'd hung up, because the lights on both connections would go out, at which point she would pull both plugs out and they would reel back into the desk ready for use again.
If you were calling long distance, there would be some other connections that could be used, called 'trunk lines' which would connect to another switchboard perhaps in another city. Then the operator would connect to one of those, and talk to that operator, to establish an eventual connection between you and whoever you wanted to talk to long distance via these trunk connections. Because this would take time, they would probably tell you to hang up while they established the connection and then ring you back when the call was ready.
As you can probably begin to imagine, if you were in a busy city, it was quite a fraught job.
Also, if you ever wondered, the classic old movie trope of rattling the hook switch and shouting "Operator operator!" down the phone was actually a thing. Of course, tapping your hook switch would cause your light at the exchange to flash, perhaps increasing the likelihood of the operator connecting to you faster.
| [
"Automatic telephone switching, which eliminated the need for telephone operators to manually connect local calls on a switchboard, was introduced in 1892; however it did not become widespread for several decades.\n",
"A telephone switchboard is a telecommunications system used in the public switched telephone ne... |
The movie zeitgeist | You may be interested in [this section of the FAQ](_URL_1_).
With Zeitgeist specifically, the answer generally is that no, there's no truth to it. [This](_URL_0_) lists some of them. A few illustrative examples:
1. Horus wasn't born of a virgin, as the movie states, but by Isis impregnating herself with Osiris' penis
* Horus didn't die, and wasn't resurrected
* Horus didn't have 12 disciples
* The film connects Jesus being the 'son' with 'sun' gods, but those two words don't even sound similar in the relevant languages | [
"\"Zeitgeist: The Movie\" is a 2007 film by Peter Joseph presenting a number of conspiracy theories. The film assembles archival footage, animations and narration. Released online on June 18, 2007, it soon received tens of millions of views on Google Video, YouTube, and Vimeo. According to Peter Joseph, the origina... |
Did the original Boy Scouts (British) have a tendency to wander into the army as they got older? What kind of effect did the early Scouts have on patriotism in Britain? | The early Boy Scout movement emerged hand in hand with patriotism in Britain at the beginning of the 20th century. The Boy Scouts creator, Robert Baden-Powell, noted the general despair amongst soldiers during the Boer war in South Africa because of the significant number of casualties in the army. Upon his return to London, Baden-Powell was convinced that reforms in the education of youth were needed. He envisioned a stronger British empire, and one that could rely on physically and mentally strong men. He later wrote in his memoirs that:
*“we had to remedy some of the shortcomings in [soldiers’] character and to fill in the omissions left in their education by developing in them the various attributes needed for making them reliable men. We had to inculcate a good many qualities not enunciated in text-books, such as individual pluck, intelligence, initiative, and spirit of adventure.”*
By 1917, there were 194,331 Boy Scouts in Great Britain and this number increased to 443,455 over the next twenty years.
**Physical strength** became an early and important feature of the new Boy Scout association. The invasion scare of 1906 and the growing perceived military threat from Germany resulted in an evident shift from social issues to problems and concerns for Britain’s patriotism and citizenship. Physical fitness and good health became national goals. One guidebook maintained that *“to the boy Scout the importance of physical training is very great, for besides being very necessary for his well being, it is also the foundation of the object of that grand Brotherhood to which he belongs."*
A strong rhetoric of **imperialism and British strength** over other peoples‘ can be found in Boy Scout guides. In Scouting for Boys, Baden-Powell proclaims that “power at sea has enable us of late years to put a stop to the awful slave trade which used to go on the coast of Africa; it has enabled us to discover new lands for our Empire, and to bring civilization to savages in farthest corners of the world.” History was also rewritten to strengthen this idea. While talking about the Crusades, Baden-Powell asserts that “*scouts cannot do better than follow the example of your forefathers, the Knights, who made the tiny British nation into one of the best and greatest that the world has ever seen.*" Most historiography on the crusades argues the contrary: economic reasons (knights acquiring land and riches) amongst others fostered the crusades.
Scouting evolved into a youth movement that offered a romantic program of outdoor adventures and activities to **remedy the division between classes** and the often disrupted and poor lifestyles caused by industrialization and urbanization. Many British sociologists in the early twentieth century, such as Brian Wilson and William Morrison, saw the increase in violence at the time as the result of the erosion of traditional authority and community control and by the development of adverse living conditions. The Boy Scout Movement acted as a movement in which these divisions could be severed, much like the armed forces in WWI and WWII. Point 4 of the Scout Law states that “A Scout is a Friend to All, and A Brother to Every Other Scout, no Matter to what Social Class the Other Belongs”. By breaking down social barriers, Boy Scouts facilitated the growth of ideas of fairness and parity amongst the British youth. Early on, the movement also established any kind of spiritual commitment (Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, etc.) as one of the cornerstones of the movement. A sense of reinforced uniform White racial identity was therefore maintained - one that crossed class and religious lines.
When I researched this topic, I wasn't able to find numbers of Boy scouts who became soldiers - I don't know if any survey by the British Armed Forces was done on that subject. *One can only assume that there is a strong correlation*. In any event, the primary and secondary sources I looked at significantly convey the following: the early Boy Scout movement acted as a strong engine to reinforce the ideas of British strength, unity and patriotism.
Sources (Primary):
Adams, Morley. *What a Scout Should Know* (London: Henry Frowde, 1915)
Lord Baden-Powell of Gillwell. *Lessons From the Varsity of Life* (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1933)
_____. *Scouting for Boys* (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1937)
_____. *The Wolf Cub’s Handbook.* Eight Edition. (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1931)
Sources (secondary):
Jacobson, Sven. *British and American Scouting and Guiding Terminology* (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 1985)
Jeal, Tim. *Baden-Powell* (London: Pimlico, 1991)
MacDonald, Robert H. *Reproducing the Middle-class Boy: From Purity to Patriotism in the Boys’ Magazines*, 1892-1914. Journal of Contemporary History. Volume 24, No. 3 (July 1989), pp. 519-539
Parsons, Timothy H. *Race, Resistance, and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial America* (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004)
Proctor, Tammy M.*(Uni)Forming Youth: Girl Guides and Boy Scouts in Britain, 1908-1939*. History Workshop Journal. No. 45 (Spring 1988), pp. 103-134
Pryke, Sam. *The Popularity of Nationalism in the Early British Boy Scout Movement*. Social History. Volume 23, No. 3 (October 1998), pp. 309-324
Reynolds, E. E. *The Scout Movement* (London: Oxford University Press, 1950)
Mary Aickin Rothschild. *To Scout or to Guide? The Girl Scout-Boy Scout Controversy, 1912-1941*. A Journal of Women Studies. Volume 6, No. 3 (Autumn 1981), pp. 115-121
Warren, Allen. *Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the Scout Movement and Citizen Training in Britain, 1900-1920.* The English Historical Review. Volume 101, No. 399 (April 1986), pp. 376-398
Wilkinson, Paul. *English Youth Movements, 1908-1930.* Journal of Contemporary History. Volume 4, No. 2 (April 1969), p.3-23
Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Ina. *Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain.* Journal of Contemporary History. Volume 41, No. 4 (October 2006), pp. 595-610 | [
"The British Army also made use of Boer auxiliaries who had been persuaded to change sides and enlist as \"National Scouts\". Serving under the command of General Andries Cronjé, the National Scouts were despised as \"joiners\" but came to number a fifth of the fighting Afrikaners by the end of the War.\n",
"Shor... |
Regarding the Large Hadron Collider, what else in terms of the standard model are we still looking out for? Has finding the Higgs made any significant impact? | There are still some things in the Standard Model that are incomplete or aren't fully understood, such as the strong CP problem or the origin of neutrino mass, but the Higgs was the "last major piece," and the remaining issues are relatively minor in comparison. In other words, with the discovery of the Higgs, all of the broad strokes of the Standard Model have been confirmed to be correct. It is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on how amazing it is that we have literally *correctly predicted* the existence of a *fundamental particle* before it had been observed. In fact, before the Higgs, we knew we were surely on the right track, having already predicted the W+, W-, and Z particles (and their masses) before their discovery. So the Standard Model is clearly a very good model of reality. And now, having confirmed that the Standard Model is broadly correct, the main thing left to do is to simply measure the parameters of the Standard Model to better and better accuracy. We may find that at a certain point some of the predicted parameters deviate slightly from the measured parameters, and this would indicate that the Standard Model is only an approximate model. This is assumed anyways by most people, and indeed another thing that will continued to be searched for are various *extensions* to the Standard Model, such as supersymmetry, that may only be relevant at higher energies than we can currently probe. Thus there is still a desire among physicists to build ever larger particle accelerators like the LHC. There may be more particles/forces out there at higher energies, and we may never know about their existence without being able to produce those energies in the lab. | [
"The Large Hadron Collider at CERN was designed to test the existence of the Higgs boson, an important but elusive piece of knowledge that had been sought by particle physicists for over 40 years. A very powerful particle accelerator was needed, because Higgs bosons might not be seen in lower energy experiments, an... |
Was the father of philosophy Thales of Miletus Greek or Phoenician? | The short answer is: we're not sure, but it's likely Thales came from a Phoenician family that migrated to Miletus. As far as I know, Herodotus is the earliest source we have that talks about Thales. And even this source is written about a hundred years after Thales had already died. So we have very little to base a clear answer to this question.
Now for the more interesting long answer. First it must be mentioned that the Milesians in the time of Thales did not call or consider themselves first and foremost as 'Greek', they would call themselves Milesians first, and Ionians second. At the same time, the people we now call Phoenicians, also never called themselves that. Second, it's important to understand that ethnic categories such as Greek, Phoenician, Carian were in reality not as clear-cut as they seem. The area around Miletus was inhabited since the neolithic, thousands of years before there were Greeks or Phoenicians. Already during the Bronze Age and later Archaic Age, Miletus was a powerful regional city with a rich history. The people who lived there were probably a changing mixture of people we would now call Lydians, Myceneans, Minoans, Carians, Phoenicians, Greeks, ...
So how can we determine if someone was Greek or Phoenician (keeping in mind that these are categories of a later date and not used by the historical people we're talking about)?
First off, language. Miletus was part of the Ionian League. This was a defensive/religious alliance between twelve independent city-states on the western coast of what is now Turkey. They (or at least the elites of these cities) spoke the Ionian dialect of Greek. But even between the cities of the Ionian League there were many differences in dialect. Ionian Greek was also spoken in Athens, and many Ionians had the notion that they were the descendants of Athenians that migrated across the Aegean Sea. But this idea is not to be taken too literal and mostly a result of Athenian expansion in the centuries after Thales. The Athenians tried to expand their power and a semi-legendary common origin was a successful way of making alliances.
That brings us to population and migrations. The Ionian migration into the region probably occurred around the 11th century BCE. These people presumably came mostly from Attica and Boeotia. The way in which they mingled and lived together with the existing populations is uncertain and most likely happened in different ways each time according to the circumstances. In other instances of Greek migrations we see that they could marry into the local families, they could live together on relatively equal footing, they could go to war and chase off or enslave the people, and everything in between. In whatever way it happened, in these twelve cities, the Greek culture became the dominant culture during the following centuries.
Miletus, like the other city-states of the Ionian League, had a political organisation based on different tribes. It seems there were six tribes. Four of them would have their origin in Greece and two would be local. How large these groups were, or what differences in social standing they had is unfortunately not clearly known. Nevertheless, this shows us that, even though Milesians would later consider themselves Greek (or at least Ionian), their origins are very murky and any idea about ethnic heterogeneity was mostly an ideal not at all reflected in reality.
About a century before the birth of Thales, Greek pottery entered a phase called the Orientalizing Period. During this time many cultural influences from the eastern mediterranean entered the Greek speaking communities. It is very likely that a major driving force of these cultural developments were traders and craftsmen who originated in the Phoenician city-states such as Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and had contacts with Greek cities and towns. At first, Phoenician traders would visit and conduct business in these towns (and Miletus was a very important crossroads of the mediterranean trade). Later, these traders would settle down and create small industries and trade hubs. There's no question these traders and craftsmen were at first looked at as foreigners, but they could amass considerable wealth and were probably at times able to secure citizenship and an important place in their new homes.
So where does that leave us with Thales? If we look at the language, Thales was Greek. For most Greeks, language was the first and most important thing that distinguishes Greeks from barbarians. Since Thales lived in a city dominated and inhabited mostly by people who spoke Ionian Greek, he would have spoken this language as well.
That Thales was of Phoenician origin, as Herodotus and others mention, is also possible. Lots of Phoenicians spread out across the mediterranean in the centuries before Thales. As traders and craftsmen, some of them were able to become quite rich and secure citizenship and prominent places in the societies they migrated to. That Thales is a descendent of Phoenician migrants is therefore perfectly imaginable.
In conclusion: was Thales Greek of Phoenician? The answer is most likely: both, with countless caveats about the complexity of ancient ethnicity and identity.
Main sources:
Roebuck, C. 'Tribal Organization in Ionia' (1961).
Greaves, A. M. 'The Land of Ionia' (2010).
And of course the Histories of Herodotus. | [
"Thales of Miletus (; , \"Thalēs\", or ; 624/623 – c. 548/545 BC) was a pre-Socratic philosopher, mathematician and astronomer from Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. He was one of the Seven Sages of Greece; many, most notably Aristotle, regarded him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition, and he is otherwise h... |
What am I missing in Einstein theory of relativity? | If that is the example in the biography used to explain how simultaneity of events is relative, then it is not only a terrible example, but it just entirely misses the point of relativity.
In the example, the two observers are not moving with respect to each other. So they are in the same inertial frame. This means that the same event gets the *same* temporal coordinate from both of them. In other words, they should both say that the two lightning strikes hit at the same time. The author of the example is confusing two very different concepts: coordinates of events and human perception of events. It is certainly true that the individual standing closer to one of the strikes literally sees with his eyes the arrival of one flash before the other. But that is not what is meant by relative simultaneity.
This confusion is actually more common than I would hope, simply because we typically use words like "observe" and "see" to talk about spacetime coordinates, and not to imply anything about actual human perception. Human vision is not based on spacetime coordinates, but rather the simultaneous arrival of photons at our eyes.
The relativity of simultaneity only occurs when we talk about observers in *different inertial frames*. That is, the two individuals should be moving at constant velocity with respect to each other. Before relativity was discovered, simultaneity was still absolute for all inertial observers. Every observer assigned the same temporal coordinate to same event, regardless of whether they were in motion with respect to each other. In relativity, that simply does not happen. Observers moving with respect to each other will assign different temporal coordinates to the same event, and this is very non-intuitive given our typical (human) perception of the world.
Your example of the three men shooting guns is correct. All three men are not moving with respect to each other. So they should all give the same time for the two shootings. | [
"Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity starting with the assumption of the intentionality of correspondence between inertial and passive gravitational mass, and that no experiment will ever detect a difference between them, in essence the equivalence principle.\n",
"Special relativity was ori... |
What were the reasons the U.S. attempted to pull off a coup of the Iranian government in the 50s and eventually imposed the Shah? | This is a complex topic but I'll give it my best stab!
> I thought the Iranian public had a very positive view of the U.S. at the time and this started off a chain of events that led the very hostile relationship we currently have
Firstly, you're correct that the Iranian public had a relatively positive view of the US but I'd be careful of suggesting that the coup "started off a chain of events that led the very hostile relationship we currently have". This can present an overly inevitable view of history; people are quick to link the coup to the Islamic Revolution but do bear in mind that they're more than 25 years apart and plenty could have gone differently in that time.
But to get to your main question, the UK and US both have several important motivations which different historians give different weight. I will separate them roughly into economy, strategy, ideology.
**Economy**
It is hard to overstate the value of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company for Britain here; it is Britain's single largest overseas asset at a time where the country is trying to rebuild itself from World War 2. It is a vital source of dollars in a very literal sense given Britain's balance of payments woes at this time.
Beyond this, they were not the only player that stood to gain economically from the coup. The US had been frustrated by Britain's restrictive control on Iranian oil which denied US oil companies market access; following the coup this arrangement was clearly unsustainable and US companies were able to enter the market much to their benefit.
**Strategy**
As the British Empire was increasingly called into question, British strategists increasingly turned towards Africa and the Middle East as a solution to secure Britain's global position. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company is not only a key resource: it's a key aspect of British strategic influence in the region (along with the Suez canal). For an easy example, just consider the importance of a secure oil supply through the major wars that had just passed.
Britain's strategic position is also a concern for the US. The US and the UK have just come out of WW2 where they fought as allies. They didn't always see perfectly eye to eye, but nonetheless they had an important strategic relationship. This especially true as the Cold War Era commences and the US is increasingly concerned with the spread of communism.
**Ideology**
The Iranian Oil Crisis is fascinating for the way which it highlights the balance between different ideological paradigms: imperialism, nationalism, and "cold-war"ism.
You've asked why the UK pursued the coup even though Iran was acting within its rights as an independent nation. This reflects a modern conception of nationalism -- and one which Iranian nationalists were quick to uphold -- but which wasn't necessarily that convincing to the British imperialist mindset. At least not when vital resources were on the line.
For the US, the ideological confrontation with the USSR -- and the possible spread of communism -- was a growing concern. Mosaddeq had wide popular support and something of a socialist platform. He also unfortunately also played to US fears of Iran falling to communism in an attempt to gain aid from the US; some later American sources further suggest that the British deliberately played on this fear to push the US into action. It's difficult to know exactly how much weight to give the fear of communism since naturally its a nicer justification for the Americans involved than oil-money. One thing that I would highlight here is the distinction between the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Under Truman the US takes a generally reconciliatory approach with significant efforts towards a negotiated settlement. Eisenhower's administration (which is generally further into the paranoia of the Cold War) takes office and the coup follows shortly after.
Regarding why the UK asked the US for help, on top of the close economic and strategic relationship above there is also an important practical factor: the UK's ability to orchestrate a coup is hampered after Mosaddeq expelled Britain's diplomatic mission in 1952 and working with the CIA helps them to overcome this obstacle.
**Closing thoughts**
Firstly, I have separated various factors out, but please don't read them in isolation. For example, Iran's strategic importance should *also* be read in terms of the post-war geopolitcal orientation towards Cold-War competition between the US and USSR, and the American desire to open the Iranian oil market has an ideological undercurrent as well as an economic rationale.
Lastly, I do want to re-iterate that this is a really fascinating question which remains debated in the historical community. Over-emphasising the "fear of communism" interpretation risks giving too much weight to post-hoc explanations given by Americans and arguably verges on apologia. (This is also complicated by the fact that detailed American sources were more readily available than others). At the same time, over-emphasising the "it's all about money and power" interpretation risks boiling complex ideological and personal factors down to simplistic realpolitik. An interesting questions to ask yourself as you delve into the topic is "why does the US behave differently around the Suez crisis only three years later?".
Main sources:
Gasiorowski and Byrne (Ed.), *Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran*
Katouzian, *Musaddiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran*
Louis, *The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951*
Bill and Louis (Ed.), *Musaddiq, Iranian Nationalism, and Oil*
Galpern, *Money, Oil, and Empire in the Middle East: Sterling And Postwar Imperialism, 1944–1971*
For more accessible reading, I recommend Gaziorowski, ['Coup d'etat of 1953'](_URL_0_) in the *Encyclopaedia Iranica* which is an incredible peer-reviewed online resource for Iranian history. | [
"In 1953, the government of prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq was overthrown in a coup organized by the governments of the U.S. and the UK. Many Iranians argue that the coup and the subsequent U.S. support for the shah proved largely responsible for the shah's arbitrary rule, which led to the \"deeply anti-American ... |
If someone was hemorrhaging uncontrollably, could you keep them alive by transfusing blood in at the same rate they were losing it? | People can certainly have more than their entire blood volume replaced and survive. Normal blood volume is around 70ml/kg, so about 5L on average. One unit of blood (packed red cells) is around 250ml, so once someone has received more than 20 units of blood they are close to having replaced their circulating volume. Transfusions of this amount are certainly not uncommon, and I have seen people who have received 50 or even 100 units of blood survive.
There are significant problems with giving this amount of blood though. You mentioned whole blood in your comment, and that would certainly be ideal. Most blood banks don't store whole blood though; donated blood is separated into its components parts, such as red cells and plasma. Blood is normally given as packed red cells which doesn't have the plasma component. This is important as its the plasma which contains the proteins you need to allow blood to clot.
So, as you transfuse large amounts of packed red cells into a bleeding patient the coagulation factor are lost (this is called dilutional coaguloapthy) and the patient won't stop bleeding. Its therefore important to transfuse plasma and concentrated clotting factors as well.
Other problems from massive transfusions are hypothermia, as these products have been stored in freezers, so are cold, and metabolic problems from the additives in the blood packs, Citrate, for example is used to prevent the blood from clotting in the pack, but in large amounts can lower calcium levels and cause alkalosis.
Large volumes of blood can also cause fluid overload and can specifically damage the lungs, a condition called TRALI (Transfusion Related Acute Lung Injury)
Current research into this topic is looking at how much plasma you should give per unit of blood (it looks like we haven't been giving enough in the past) and whether the age of the blood matters; it seems like the longer the blood has been stored for, the less beneficial it is. | [
"The main consequence of hemolysis is hemolytic anemia, condition that involves the destruction of erythrocytes and their later removal from the bloodstream, earlier than expected in a normal situation. As the bone marrow cannot make erythrocytes fast enough to meet the body’s needs, oxygen does not arrive to body ... |
Do all plants metabolize (convert CO2 to O2) at the same rate or do some plants generate O2 more efficiently than others? | There's variation among plants generally, but specifically an alternative carbon fixation pathway called Crassulacean Acid Metabolism (CAM) used in plants that are found in arid climates that is less efficient, but with the benefit that it allows the plant to shutdown respiration during the day when heat and dry air pose a threat of substantial water loss. | [
"The glyoxylate cycle can also provide plants with another aspect of metabolic diversity. This cycle allows plants to take in acetate both as a carbon source and as a source of energy. Acetate is converted to Acetyl CoA (similar to the TCA cycle). This Acetyl CoA can proceed through the glyoxylate cycle, and some s... |
scientifically speaking, is there a hypothetical cure for every disease? | the short answer is that we don't know.
We've cured a lot of diseases and accomplished amazing things with science. at times it seems that everything is possible. But unless we cure ever disease, we won't really know.
My guess would be yes. But we can really only guess. | [
"Dr. Brian Bolwell, chief of hematology at the Cleveland Clinic noted that Dr. Mathé had proved an important principle: \"You can cure an incurable leukemia patient.\", and had developed both a technique and an important term, \"adoptive immunotherapy,\" to describe how a person’s own immune system can be used to c... |
what does the 'end task' command do differently than normally exiting out of a program? | There are three main ways to stop a program.
You can quit from inside the program. The program does whatever it's programmed to do when you click quit, saving data and closing files and such normally.
You can use End Task (on windows), this is the operating system sending a signal to the program that tells the program "Time to quit, finish what you're doing and then exit.". The program (hopefully) responds to the signal, finishes up what it's doing, saves data and such, then quits.
You can use End Process (also Windows). Windows just ends the program, and frees up any memory associated with it. There's no communication with the program.
In terms of the other guy's restaurant metaphor: Quitting is finishing your meal then paying up and leaving, end task is being told to pack your shit and leave, and end process is being thrown out. | [
"The \"end\" case is a very simple case that works to simply delay the program to allow the user enough time to check that they have received their change and picked up their item. After 5000 milliseconds (5 seconds) the wait timer is used, up and the program continues back to the start page to wait for another use... |
how someone can have a big belly but is relatively skinny/normal? | Fat deposits vary from person to person and from source to source. A few of the hormones racing through your body affect the location of fat (cortisol directs it to the abdomen, for example) as well as your sex. (Women tend to have a 'donut' or bigger legs, men tend to have bigger bellies.) I don't know enough on the subject to give you a specific answer, sadly. On the bright side; as long as it's hanging in front or on the side of you, the dangers are relatively low. Fat between the organs or 'hard fat' is where you need to be scared. | [
"BULLET::::- Belly Kid (voiced by Zachary Gordon) – A kid who has a big belly. He was first ashamed of it, but Uncle Grandpa taught him the best features of having a big belly. He appeared in \"Belly Bros\".\n",
"Mr. Skinny is the 35th book in the \"Mr. Men\" series by Roger Hargreaves. Mr. Skinny lives in Fatlan... |
why does windows 10 take over 2 gb of ram to sit there doing nothing, while windows 95 needed less than 0.004 gb? | 1. It's not sitting there doing nothing. There's tons of stuff running in the background- updaters, anti-virus, Cortana, and more.
2. It doesn't actually need a full 2GB. But RAM that's not being used is just wasted, so it will load extra things into memory to speed up the computer if you have more RAM than you need. | [
"Windows 95 may fail to boot on computers with more than approximately 480 MB of memory. In such a case, reducing the file cache size or the size of video memory can help. The theoretical maximum according to Microsoft is 2 GB.\n",
"All 32-bit editions of Windows Vista, excluding the Starter edition, support up t... |
does the united states government heavily regulate media outlets? | No. The concept of [prior restraint](_URL_0_) is almost completely foreign to the US legal system.
Now, the government can always *ask* an outlet not to run a story, or at least to delay it, and sometimes the network or newspaper will oblige. But it's almost impossible to legally prevent a US newspaper or television network from releasing any information at all. | [
"Although the government censors the electronic media through the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), which is responsible for monitoring and regulating broadcast media, there's no established proof towards Government's control of the media. Radio stations remain susceptible to attacks by political groups. For ... |
what is a name server, what is a network domain, and how are the two related? | So a name server is like a telephone book, it takes the name of a website and converts that information into a usable IP address which is an internet protocol series of numbers like 8.8.8.8 which is used in this case to connect to _URL_0_ | [
"An example of a name server is the server component of the Domain Name System (DNS), one of the two principal namespaces of the Internet. The most important function of DNS servers is the translation (resolution) of human-memorable domain names and hostnames into the corresponding numeric Internet Protocol (IP) ad... |
how can long water fasting periods be healthy? | That is insanely unhealthy. I had a friend one time do a 40 day fast, did it more for some personal factors, not weight loss. He discussed it with his doctor and took the proper precautions and he did it.
Fasting should **never** be a method of weight loss. His obesity will simply complicate things... Terrible idea. | [
"There is no scientific evidence that prolonged fasting provides any significant health benefits. Negative health complications from long term fasting include arthritis, abdominal cramp and orthostatic hypotension.\n",
"Understanding the potential adverse effects of intermittent fasting is limited by an inadequat... |
How dependent is oceanic life on phytoplankton? Not just fish, but mammals and all life forms that live off or in the ocean? | [Extremeophiles](_URL_0_) would be okay. | [
"Phytoplankton serve as the base of the aquatic food web, providing an essential ecological function for all aquatic life. Under future conditions of anthropogenic warming and ocean acidification, changes in phytoplankton mortality may be significant. One of the many food chains in the ocean – remarkable due to the... |
why us telecos still use cdma technology, when majority of the world uses gsm for the communication? | The main reasons are a matter of timing, corporate greed and legacy.
Back when the US networks where starting to form, the switch from analogue to digital cellular technology was also happening and CDMA had some interesting advantages over GSM.
One of the most appealing features at the time (And still continues to be) was that it is easier to lock a CDMA user into the network that provides the phone than it is with GSM technology whose spec demands that they be interoperable between networks. CDMA makes it harder for a user to leave a network for another one and take the phone with them (In some cases it's impossible).
There where other benefits to CDMA as well such as greater capacity on the network, a questionable theory that call quality was better and so forth but GSM caught up very quickly and eventually leapfrogged CDMA in the quality and feature departments.
Now of course, some of those network operators have folded into the big players you see today and frankly switching from CDMA to GSM is a BIG commitment those network operators don't really wish to undertake.
CDMA as a technology outside of the USA and small parts of Russia is dead with the advent of 4G. GSM has been taken up by most of the world, mostly driven by Europe's mass uptake of it. Though 3G briefly was based on a variance of CDMA, 4G uses a technology called LTE which is a further refinement of GSM technology. | [
"CDMA or \"code division multiple access\" is a digital radio system that transmits streams of bits (PN codes). CDMA permits several radios to share the same frequencies. Unlike TDMA \"time division multiple access\", a competing system used in 2G GSM, all radios can be active all the time, because network capacity... |
Jesus Christ and John the Baptist - Bibical Scholars wanted | The association of Jesus with John is more or less universally accepted. There are a number of clues.
First is the baptism. John offered baptism for the remission of sin, a fact that caused the last three evangelists apparent embarrassment. Matthew and Luke have John denigrate himself at the event. John goes a step farther and eliminated the baptism entirely. Why make it up if it causes problems?
Against this view we should bear in mind that the earliest known recension, that of Mark, shows no such shame.
The second is that all four evangelists are careful to have John either implicitly (such as his emissaries from prison) or explicitly acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah. This seems to indicate that such an endorsement was important to the early Christian movement.
Additionally, the idea of baptism for remission of sin is unattested in judaism prior to John. Both the capacity of immersion to serve in this way and the idea that such an act could be performed by a third party are novelties, shared by the Baptist and the Christian movement. | [
"Consequently, his work has a refreshing lack of negative presuppositions. As with his teacher C. H. Dodd, he was adamant that the gospels were reliable witnesses not only to the theology of the early church but to the theology of Jesus himself. His claim in particular that Jesus's friction with the Pharisees refle... |
what is the difference between relative humidity and dew point? | They are related in that they are both measures of the amount of water in the air.
Relative humidity compares how much water vapor is in the air to how much water vapor the air could possibly hold at the current temperature. It is a measure of how saturated the air is compared to how saturated it could be.
Dew point is the temperature at which the current amount of water vapor in the air would be the maximum amount. Since as the air temperature cools, it can hold less water vapor, there is a temperature where the air can no longer hold the water vapor it currently has. That's the dew point. | [
"A high relative humidity implies that the dew point is closer to the current air temperature. A relative humidity of 100% indicates the dew point is equal to the current temperature and that the air is maximally saturated with water. When the moisture content remains constant and temperature increases, relative hu... |
How did the Roman aristocracy treat/view plebeians? Were they treated differently at different points in the republic? | Much of the historical narrative that we have for the early Republic is dominated by the so-called struggle of the orders. This was sort of a civil rights campaign by the plebeians for equal rights. At this stage the patricians were a handful of established aristocratic families, and the plebeians were everyone else. At first, the patricians monopolised all the major political and religious offices, but the plebeians gradually won the right to hold these positions. One of the most important victories for the plebeian cause came in 367 BC, when a law was passed guaranteeing at least one plebeian consul; subsequently more and more offices were opened up to plebeians. (It should be noted that the literary sources we have for this period are much later, and are therefore open to question. But we don't have anything better to go on, so most historians tend to assume that the surviving narratives are based on a factual core even if many of the details are invented or distorted.)
By the late Republic, the patrician-plebeian distinction was largely redundant. There were still patrician families, but these were not synonymous with the office-holding nobility, as they had once been. Being a patrician could even be seen as a disadvantage: one patrician, the populist politician Publius Claudius Pulcher (wow, alliteration), had to be adopted into a plebeian family in order to stand for the office of tribune (he became Publius *Clodius* Pulcher in 59 BC as a result). In late Republican parlance, "plebs" became a more general term to refer to the common people, meaning anyone who didn't belong to the senatorial or equestrian classes, except in technical cases like that of Clodius. | [
"Roman society is largely viewed as hierarchical, with slaves (\"servi\") at the bottom, freedmen (\"liberti\") above them, and free-born citizens (\"cives\") at the top. Free citizens were themselves also divided by class. The broadest, and earliest, division was between the patricians, who could trace their ances... |
why are governments post-actively banning the filming of slaughter house cruelty instead of pro-actively following animal abuse laws? | I don't know where the government is specifically making it illegal to film that - it already is based on normal privacy and employment law. If you trespass onto a private property to film, that's illegal. And if you gain employment there to film secretly, you've committed fraud - and you've probably violated a clause in the employment contract you signed.
A USDA Inspector has to be present at all times a slaughterhouse is operating. However, the agency is massively underfunded given the size of the industry, and they have a shortage of inspectors. If the abuse happens where the inspector doesn't see it, and it doesn't affect the meat after slaughter, it's not going to be noticed. And those videos, horrific as they may be, are illegally obtained by private individuals with no way of verifying their authenticity, so they wouldn't be admissible in any type of legal action.
Also, if a violation was observed, I believe it would be handled as a regulatory issue, unless it became a repeat or widespread violation, or seriously affected the safety of the meat. The company would be issued with a finding and be given a time period to show that they had corrected. (I'm more familiar with FDA procedure than USDA, but I assume it would be similar.) So, if there are cases where violations were found and corrected, you'd be unlikely to hear about them. | [
"Animal cruelty such as soring, which is illegal, sometimes occurs on farms and ranches, as does lawful but cruel treatment such as livestock branding. Since Ag-gag laws prohibit video or photographic documentation of farm activities, these practices have been documented by secret photography taken by whistleblower... |
Can anyone recommend any books or articles on ancient cultures and sharks? | This article might not quite fit the bill -- it's not specifically situated in an ancient period -- but it does do a good job of exploring the place of sharks in Hawaiian religion and culture.
Goldberg-Hiller, Jonathan, and Noenoe K. Silva. “Sharks and Pigs: Animating Hawaiian Sovereignty against the Anthropological Machine.” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 2 (Spring 2011).
| [
"Among the most ancient and primitive sharks is \"Cladoselache\", from about 370 million years ago, which has been found within Paleozoic strata in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. At that point in Earth's history these rocks made up the soft bottom sediments of a large, shallow ocean, which stretched across much of ... |
how do recycling plants process liquids? | Yay! Something I can finally answer!
I work as a chemist at a waste disposal facility. At our plant we sort liquids into various catergories depending on what we think is in the containers.
These containers are then shipped off to a machine which essentially crushes all the liquid out of the containers making cubes of plastic or metal.
The liquid itself is gathered in large 1000L drums and shipped off to another facility to be chemically treated to be safe for release into the environment.
If this can't be achieved the liquid gets incinerated in small batches.
Hope this helped! | [
"Recycling plants such as those at Kaybob, West Whitecourt and Crossfield produced liquids-rich gas from \"retrograde condensation\" reservoirs. They stripped condensate and natural gas liquids and sulfer (which they alternately stored in blocks or sold, depending on demand and price), then re-injected the dry gas ... |
why do we feel the weird banging in our body when listening to loud live music | Sound is pressure waves moving through the air that vibrate your eardrums.
Your ribcage doesn't have much that is solid behind it to stop it vibrating to large, low frquency pressure waves. | [
"When exposed to a multitude of sounds from several different sources, sensory overload may occur. This overstimulation can result in general fatigue and loss of sensation in the ear. The associated mechanisms are explained in further detail down below. Sensory overload usually occurs with environmental stimuli and... |
Kingdom of Sardinia's place in Italian Unification in the nineteenth century | Well, there is no clean cut explanation.
Historically the Duchy of Savoia (mainly centered in Piedmont, capital Turin), was the more expansionist Italian state from the late seventeenth century onward.
The dukes played an active role in all the European wars of the period, shifting their alliance between France and Austria, expanding their territory eastward toward Milan and acquiring Sicily and the title o King (Sicily was later exchanged with Sardinia).
So it was already their long time goal to acquire the duchy of Milan.
There were also other factors: it was the more independent minded Italian state, and also the more open to external influences; it certainly had the more advanced and powerful military at the time (not counting the Austrian garrisons). Milan was maybe a more advanced city, but as it was under Austrian rule (along with Lombardy and Veneto), it could not be a fulcrum for independence (there was a revolt in 1848 where the city expelled the Austrian garrison, but it was short lived, and anyway it immediately asked for military support from Piedmont).
Regarding the other states the duchy of Parma, Modena and Tuscany were closely aligned with Austria; the Pope was not interested in territorial expansion, and this also limited any ambitions from the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily (who could not well invade the territory of the Pope).
At the time a complete takeover of Italy by Piedmont was not a given. There were many other hypothesis, like a federation of independent states, with the expulsion of the Austrians, the duke of Piedmont as the Military commander and the Pope as the president of the federation.
After the war of 1859 actually there was no impetus for further expansion from the duke of Savoia, Vittorio Emanuele II; he had gained the duchy of Milan from the Austrians and modern Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany by plebiscite, and he was pretty satisfied. There were proposals for a federation of three states, north Italy under the Savoia in the north, the Pope in the center and the Bourbon in the south.
But then Garibaldi mounted its expedition and conquered the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily with an army of volunteers. At this point Piedmont intervened, as it had no wish for the potential establishment of a republic in the south, and the kingdom of Italy was formed.
So there was more than a factor in play:
- the dynastic impetus of the Savoia to expand, playing the French and the Austrians one against the other
- a strong desire of a large part of the elites of the various Italian states to expel the Austrians and to form some sort of united entity in Italy, with the awareness that only the Savoia had in practice the inclination and the capability to push for this same objective
- the relative fragility of the governments of the other states once the protection of the status quo by the Austrians was removed | [
"In December 1859, the Grand Duchy was joined to the Duchies of Modena and Parma to form the United Provinces of Central Italy, which were annexed by the Kingdom of Sardinia a few months later. On 22 March 1860, after a referendum that voted overwhelmingly (95%) in favour of a union with Sardinia; Tuscany was forma... |
Do we know of any chants that galley sailors would sing while they rowed? | It's unlikely that they sung - that would not be conducive to rowing, which is physically tiring. It has been theorised that they may have hummed, which is less tiring, but there is no substantial proof of this. [A reconstructed trireme was tested using various means of synchronisation - humming was reportedly effective.](_URL_2_)
[You may find this source useful, though I do not know how you might best access a full version of it](_URL_1_); 'The Athenian Trireme: The History and Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Warship,
By J. S. Morrison, J. F. Coates, N. B. Rankov'.
Edit: See also [The Trireme](_URL_0_), by Prof Boris Rankov (Royal Holloway), also a rower. | [
"As a rule, the chantey in its entirety possesses neither rhyme nor reason; nevertheless, it is admirably fitted for sailors' work. Each of these sea-songs has a few stock verses or phrases to begin with, but after these are sung, the soloist must improvise, and it is principally his skill in this direction that ma... |
Why do certain musical scales sound happy, scary , eerie, etc? | i am not a scientist, but a reasonably educated musician.
the associations with scales is largely cultural. minor scales are not sad in all cultures. however, minor scales, because of how the notes compare to the harmonic series, tend to resolve downward to structural pitches rather than upward, which accounts for a lot of the difference.
there are also modes of the major scale. a mode is the same pitch relationship starting on a different pitch. natural minor is the 6th mode of the major scale, meaning you start on the 6th degree and play all the notes in the octave. lydian (major, aka ionian with a raised 4) is the brightest mode, and you can hear how bright and "up" it is in for example the simpsons theme song or in the 3rd movement of [beethoven's op 132, (starting at 19:24)](_URL_0_)
(EDIT: and for the record, that string quartet is one of the finest chamber works ever, in my opinion. the third movement is the high point of the work, but it's worth listening to the whole thing. there was such a stir about it, that schubert requested to hear it his deathbed, and his response was "after this, what is left for us to compose?" AND beethoven was stone deaf for years before he wrote it. impressive guy.)
i'm afraid the ability to scientifically determine what's going on once and for all is rather limited at this time, because in addition to physics/acoustics, we have to deal with psychoacoustics (how our brains process sounds, deleting and adding content from different combinations of pitches and harmonics), cultural training, and personal associations.
EDIT: thanks to z3ugma for the youtube link that takes you to the right spot in the video. | [
"What does music using a Bohlen–Pierce scale sound like, aesthetically? Dave Benson suggests it helps to use only sounds with only odd harmonics, including clarinets or synthesized tones, but argues that because \"some of the intervals sound a bit like intervals in [the more familiar] twelve-tone scale, but badly o... |
Is depression more frequent amongst people in developed countries? | A [2011 study](_URL_1_) reported:
> On average, the estimated lifetime prevalence [of depression] was **higher in high-income (14.6%) than low- to middle-income (11.1%) countries** (t = 5.7, P < 0.001). Indeed, the four lowest lifetime prevalence estimates ( < 10%) were in low- to middle-income countries (India, Mexico, China, South Africa). Conversely, with the exception of Brazil, the highest rates ( > 18%) were in four high-income countries (France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the USA).
...and generally that:
> Consistent with previous cross-national reports, the WMH MDE [World Mental Health major depressive episodes] prevalence estimates varied considerably between countries, with the highest prevalence estimates found in some of the wealthiest countries in the world.
The researchers provided several possible explanations for these results (including the suggestion that ["depression is to some extent an illness of affluence"](_URL_0_)), but also **acknowledged several limitations and that their findings might be due to recall error**. They concluded **more work needed to be done**.
Edit: more bold for clarity.
Edit 2: **Social context is indeed a known issue**, in addition to many other factors. Please refer to Epilepep's remarks, which have unfortunately become buried.
Also, **please (at least) read the methods** of the paper before commenting about potential errors in data collection. This study may not be completely culturally sensitive, but efforts were made to conduct the face-to-face interviews as objectively as possible. For instance, the "interview translation, back-translation and harmonization protocol required culturally competent bilingual clinicians in the participating countries to review, modify and approve the key phrases used to describe symptoms of all disorders assessed in the survey".
The researchers explicitly noted that "no attempt was made to go beyond the DSM-IV criteria", but stated that "as noted in the introduction, previous research has shown that the latent structure of the symptoms of major depression is consistent across countries, providing a principled basis for focusing on this criterion set in our analysis".
**Again, the authors of this paper made a very cautious conclusion**:
> MDE is a significant public-health concern across all regions of the world and is strongly linked to social conditions. Future research is needed to investigate the combination of demographic risk factors that are most strongly associated with MDE in the specific countries included in the WMH. | [
"Depression is a major cause of morbidity worldwide, as the epidemiology has shown. Lifetime prevalence estimates vary widely, from 3% in Japan to 17% in the US. Epidemiological data shows higher rates of depression in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and America than in other countries. Among the 10 count... |
what is more dangerous for the human body. high ac or dc and why? | The biggest advantage to AC is that it fluctuates the level, which gives you more of a chance of disconnecting from it. DC will lock your muscles and keep you from letting go. | [
"The minimum current a human can feel depends on the current type (AC or DC) as well as frequency for AC. A person can feel at least 1 mA (rms) of AC at 60 Hz, while at least 5 mA for DC. At around 10 mA, AC current passing through the arm of a human can cause powerful muscle contractions; the victim is unable to v... |
How do changes in Earth's global temperature caused by Milankovitch cyclicity compare to other climate change sources (anthropogenic and other)? | [This page at skeptialscience](_URL_0_) discusses Milankovitch Cycles and cites the variation of solar forcing due to orbital eccentricity as ~0.45 W/m^2. Current estimates of anthropogenic alterations to the radiative balance ([see IPCC](_URL_1_)) are about 1.6 W/m^2. So variations in forcing due to Milankovitch Cycles were less than 1/3 as strong as the current anthropogenic perturbation. | [
"According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), \"warming of the climate system is unequivocal\", and the global-mean temperature has increased by over the last century. This report also states that \"most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very... |
Washing clothing that was not color fast. | To cover the basics first, dyes before modern dyes were color fast and dry cleaning did exist. One of the most popular dyes still today is indigo. Interestingly it doesn't dissolve in water nor adhere to fabric, so how does this work? You need an alkaline solution such as lye, ammonia, or urine in order to dissolve the indigo. Once set into the fabric, water won't wash it out. Other dyes that are water soluble will still be color fast because of the process of using a mordant. The New Pocket Cyclopaedia of 1813 lists common mordants as "sulphate of alumine, oxide of tin, oxide of iron in combination with acids, oxide of arsenic, tan, & c." It goes on to say that the most permanent dyes are cochineal and gum-lac (scarlets), indigo and woad (blue), dyers weed (yellow), and madder (coarse reds, purples, blacks). Mordant can be added before, during, or after the dying process depending on the chemistry needed. It does change the final dye color. Iron oxide mordants are notorious for their deterioration of textiles, and are the reason so many black garments survive in terrible shape if at all. Basically mordants help the dye to bond to the textile and keep it much more permanent. Silks and wools do incredibly well with this, linen less so and it's harder to get a dark color set into it for that reason.
When it comes to cleaning you are very correct about not having to wash exterior pieces often (if at all). Undergarments were white for this reason, being able to be bleached and boiled to make them clean. Outer garments can sometimes be washed and submerged in water, but more often are spot cleaned based on the exterior dirt/stain. Dry cleaning by definition is simply cleaning with something other than water. For example, if you got a grease stain on silk (due to the carriage or dinner), it gets sprinkled with fullers earth, covered in paper, and a light amount of heat applied. This will draw out the stain (in modern day use baby powder to much the same effect). To remove any remaining rings you can wash the area with soap and water, washing it out with gin, and then washing it out with water. If the entire garment must be wetted to keep from getting water rings you'll wrap it up in a towel immediately to dry. Cook books often have recipes in back for laundering. And if you don't want to deal with it professional laundering can be had as well. | [
"Washing clothes was not easy. Washing powder was eventually replaced by ashes or by using infusions of plants such as soapwort, which lathers like soap. Ivy was used for black garments, worn by the numerous women in mourning.\n",
"Clothes washer technology developed as a way to reduce the manual labor spent, pro... |
Suppose we had working fusion reactors with the output and specifications we're working towards? What implications would it realistically have for other energy sources and humanity in general in terms of the other problems we have? | Hi! I'm a fusion researcher (tokamaks, specifically). These are some interesting questions. Let's see:
> I mean based on what size we predict them to be, amount of output per generator etc.
Some of the other replies have already talked about ITER for a sense of scale. An actual power-plant tokamak (a concept called DEMO) would be somewhat larger than ITER based on an ITER-like design - ITER is more the proof of concept of scaling our existing fusion experiments up to power-plant sizes, rather than a power-plant prototype itself.
The trick is, tokamaks generally get substantially more efficient the bigger you make them, the tradeoff being that the capital cost to build the power plant becomes unfeasibly high. You could actually build a fusion power plant right now, using only reactor tech and plasma physics we've understood since the 1980's. The problem is, to compensate for the crappy plasma behavior you'd have to make the tokamak huge (major radius of around 20 meters, compared to 6 meters on ITER). Since the major cost-of-electricity from a tokamak would just be the cost of building it amortized over its lifetime (since operating costs would be very low), this puts the cost per kWh out of an economically competitive range. The idea, then, is to build the tokamak as small as possible while still having efficient output. Based on a number of advances in reactor tech (particularly superconducting-magnet design) and plasma physics, it could very well be possible to build a power plant *smaller* by a significant margin than ITER.
All that said, you're generally looking at a power plant facility (tokamak, fuel handling, and all the ancillary structures) with a footprint of comparable size to an existing fission power plant, putting out in the neighborhood of a GW electric. There's actually some concern that building a tokamak large enough to be efficient would actually produce *too much* power for a single point-of-generation on our existing grid; in such a case, some of the power would be diverted to other energy-intensive uses, like hydrogen fuel cell charging or pumped-water storage.
> What it cast all form of existing electricity generation into obsolescence?
Not entirely. So every form of power generation has strengths and weaknesses, even fusion. Trying to pick one and saying "this is how we will power America" very quickly becomes a round-pegs-in-square-holes type of problem. What fusion can do is this: large-scale (GW+), always-on baseload power without environmental pollution or risk of radiation, and with *extremely* plentiful fuel. This means it can entirely replace coal-fired power plants, for example, and many existing fission plants (though I'd forsee small modular fission reactors as another viable option for certain situations). There will also pretty much always be regions where wind, solar, or hydroelectric are more economical - remember, I said the limiting factor on fusion power is the capital investment needed to build the plant. Generation from wind or solar is geographically dependent, though - so a fusion plant can get (comparatively) compact power generation easily for high-draw areas, like near population centers.
> How big would they need to be, including surrounding safety equipment? Would they be mobile?
I think I've addressed this rolled into my responses above. To reiterate - a footprint for the entire power plant comparable to existing fission plants. However, thanks to the inherent safety of fusion plants (more on this later) the area around the compound would be far more usable, rather than the "no-man's land" typically found in the immediate vicinity of fission plants.
Due to their size, it's unlikely that fusion plants would be mobile in the near future. However, the high power output at a single point of generation does lend itself to mobile energy forms like hydrogen cells.
> Would they require as many safety precautions as existing fission plants or would the reaction simply be extinguished in the event of an equipment failure?
This is one of the biggest wins for a fusion plant - they are *extremely* safe. Even in the event of a catastrophic loss of confinement, the nature of the reaction is simply to burn itself out, rather than run away. Part of this is due to the nature of the fuel - fusion fuel would be gas continuously pumped into the reactor, rather than solid fuel rods stored in the reactor vessel. A fission plant contains a year's worth of fuel at once - this is a huge source of free energy in the case of a meltdown. In a fusion plant, the fueling cuts off as soon as you lose confinement. It's rather like the difference between turning off the ignition in your car, versus lighting the gas tank on fire.
Even if you continued fueling, losing the confining magnetic fields and heating would cause the plasma to rapidly expand and cool, contacting the reactor walls. Though the plasma is very hot (~150 million degrees C), there is very little of it - ITER, for example, would contain less than a gram of fuel at a time. Any contact with the wall would rapidly cool the plasma, re-neutralizing it and burning the plasma out. This would cause serious (read: expensive) damage to the wall, but presents basically no safety risk. ITER's own safety plans (per their licensing with France's nuclear regulatory commission) mandate that even in pretty much the worst case, you don't need to evacuate outside the facility perimeter.
As for waste: fusion reactions produce *very* little radioactive waste, and what there is is relatively easy to handle. For one thing, half of the fuel (deuterium) is nonradioactive, and the other half (tritium) is short-lived, so there would be very little stored on-site (it would actually be manufactured in the reactor shielding itself!). The high-energy neutrons produced by fusion reactions would activate structural materials in the reactor, creating some radioactive waste. However, we can engineer these materials to be somewhat resistant to damage, and they largely retain their solid, chemically-inert form (compared to fission waste, which is a toxic, radioactive slurry in addition to being radioactive), so it's relatively easy to handle. All in all, the waste handling from a fusion plant would be more like that for a hospital radiology department, rather than like a fission plant.
> Would it open many possibilities for projects whose energy demands would have made them perviously unfeasible due to their energy demands? E.g. CO2 sequestration, huge aircraft (similar to [1] The Valiant in Doctor Who) etc..
Yes, at least in stationary activities (desalination, water cracking for hydrogen and oxygen, hydrogen fuel cell charging). A large plane would be unlikely, given the weight of a full-power tokamak.
As for WarPhalange's concern about fuel - that would be less of an issue. Fusion fuel (DT, specifically) has around 10 times greater energy density per mass than fission fuel.
*edit:* check out this [AMA](_URL_0_) several researchers from my lab did a few months back - I like to point to it, since we had a pretty broad discussion. May give you more ideas for questions! | [
"Fusion reactors generally use hydrogen isotopes such as deuterium and tritium, which react more easily than hydrogen. The designs aim to heat their fuel to tens of millions of degrees using a wide variety of methods. The major challenge in realising fusion power is to engineer a system that can confine the plasma ... |
How have norms against attacking civilian populations developed and been applied by Western countries post WW2? | > The more specific question is: what instances after 1945 are there of Western militaries attacking civilian targets with the explicit or implicit aim of coercing the civilian population?
Well, for one, the Korean War which began in 1950 saw the US use B-29 bombers to bomb Pyongyang and other cities in North Korea. However, as I'll explain later, the deliberate targeting civilians already begun to fell away as a strategy.
> The broader one is: how have we got from there to here? When did Western militaries accept and start teaching that this was unacceptable? What resistance has there been to the changes?
Studies after WW2 were conducted about the effectiveness of strategic bombing. It found that the deliberate targeting on civilian centers wasn't all that effective in terms of breaking the civilian morale. Not only did strategic bombing of German cities day and night not end the war any sooner (the Soviets taking Berlin and the Allies closing in from the west prompted their surrender), but the Allies suffered their own forms of bombing (England during the Blitz) and instead found their citizens more resolute in defending their own homes.
Where strategic bombing did become more useful was when it was targeted at infrastructure and other assets that their military would use. Bridges, rail centers, transportation hubs, etc. You see this in Korea where B-29s started dropping radio bombs to target bridges/railways, and in Vietnam even our major bombing campaigns with strategic bombers like the B-52 (e.g. Operation Linebacker II) were targeted at ports, railways, supply depots, etc.
And finally, beyond the fact that military studies finding deliberate targeting of civilian centers being less effective, there was the fact that warfare had changed.
Today it takes a single B-52 with a crew of 5 to drop the same amount of bombs that 16 B-17s with 160 total crew members took from London to Berlin. And oh yeah, that B-52 took off from Louisiana.
Because of this, we employ far fewer bombers - which also makes each bomber significantly more valuable. Losing a B-52 much less a B-2 today would be extremely costly - instead, we employ our bombers completely differently. We found, during Vietnam, that bombers like the B-52 could be very vulnerable to surface to air missile systems.
Hence, in the post-Vietnam era, the USAF focused on fast bombers that either flew extremely high (like the XB-70) or low (like the B-1) and then on stealth aircraft (the F-117 and then of course the B-2). The B-52 has become more tailored to carrying long range cruise missiles as a stand-off missile platform (though it can carpet bomb as it used to as well).
So to answer your question: the studies done after WW2 and the lessons learned in Korea and Vietnam have changed military doctrine regarding aerial bombardment. Not only that, but changes in air defense and in bombing technology have more or less ended the days where bombers fly in massive formations to indiscriminately carpet bomb large areas.
> How was the discord between this norm and the doctrines of nuclear war managed?
Nuclear war has been treated as a separate entity from strategic bombing really ever since the Soviet Union developed their own nuclear weapons and the capability to deliver them.
The idea of mutually assured destruction has more or less relegated nuclear weapons into two categories: tactical and strategic, with strategic being more aligned with the idea of wiping out an entire civilization.
Both sides drew up numerous use cases for nuclear weapons. Some believed that tactical exchanges against enemy armored formations would be acceptable - indeed, it was suggested that if the enemy used nuclear weapons strictly on military targets only, we'd respond in kind.
The whole idea that "if one nuke goes off, we wipe them completely out" is a misconception a lot of people have about nuclear weapons. All that stuff is way above public discourse for obvious reasons, but using nuclear weapons to wipe out an entire country's populace is not a frequent reason for the use of nuclear weapons. | [
"Technologically advanced countries can generally select their targets in such a way as to minimize collateral damage and civilian casualties. This can fall by the wayside, however, during unrestricted warfare.\n",
"The exception towards the otherwise ferocious application of military justice was the widespread t... |
how do enzymes actually lower activation energy? | The reactants don't immediately form products, they'll form a transition state first, and the energy needed to form it corresponds to the activation energy.
A catalyst (including enzymes) will make a transition state available which is lower in energy than the one which is used without the catalyst. Therefore the activation energy corresponds to the new lower-energy transition state. | [
"Like all catalysts, enzymes increase the reaction rate by lowering its activation energy. Some enzymes can make their conversion of substrate to product occur many millions of times faster. An extreme example is orotidine 5'-phosphate decarboxylase, which allows a reaction that would otherwise take millions of yea... |
why do some people believe ai (artificial intelligence) will take over the world | In theory, it might be possible for an AI to improve itself, becoming smarter faster than humans can keep up with it. It could become capable of doing anything with any computer system in the world (that isn't physically isolated), such as taking control of power grids, banks, dams, satellites, military hardware, etc These things are all vulnerable to human hackers but are defended by human means; an AI could overcome any possible defense.
An AI may be smarter than humans but lack morals, or have it's own alien morality system, for example it might see humans as the greatest threat to itself/the planet/the universe and so it may decide it should eliminate humans.
An AI controlling a toaster oven is not dangerous, but an AI that could both improve itself beyond it's design and take control of other systems would be incredibly dangerous.
It's just as likely that such an AI would seek to help humanity instead but that's less interesting as a literary conflict. | [
"Anders Sandberg has also elaborated on this scenario, addressing various common counter-arguments. AI researcher Hugo de Garis suggests that artificial intelligences may simply eliminate the human race for access to scarce resources, and humans would be powerless to stop them. Alternatively, AIs developed under ev... |
how is normalizing relations with cuba going to affect the us economy? | It will have some positive effect, but I think you're right that it's not going to be hugely impacting one way or the other.
Lifting the embargo will take quite some time because our laws will have to change. There's no clear agreement that lifting the embargo is a good thing, and our lawmakers seem to be having a hard time doing anything at all lately. | [
"Economic hardships occurred in countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela as oil and commodity prices declined and according to analysts because of their unsustainable policies. In regard to the economic situation, President of Inter-American Dialogue Michael Shifter stated: \"The United States–Cuban Thaw o... |
Is there a correlation between race and intelligence? | It turns out that there is an arguably large cultural bias on many of these intelligence tests, combined with confounding factors like low socioeconomic status (poverty) and minority status in the US. For this one specific test, there may not be doubt that there are differences (on average) between ethnicity groups - the incorrect part of the argument is that the 'racial' group is the *reason* for the higher/lower score.
tl;dr there's no difference in actual intelligence just based upon race - many other factors get in the way and make it look like there are differences. | [
"The connection between race and intelligence has been a subject of debate in both popular science and academic research since the inception of IQ testing in the early 20th century. There remains some debate as to whether and to what extent differences in intelligence test scores reflect environmental factors as op... |
why does baking soda help get rid if mouth ulcers? | Baking soda is a base and often ulcers are irritated by the acidity of our saliva. So if you the baking soda with the saliva create a neutral environment for the sore to heal. | [
"Classical dietary and oral hygiene techniques of reducing sugar content and eating frequency, and removing plaque by effective brushing, are still very important practices for treatment as well as prevention. Also, biochemical techniques can be used to treat the bacterial infection directly. Agents such as chlorhe... |
What was Lenin's real nature in comparison to Trotsky or Stalin? | I would absolutely agree with the first part of his thesis: that Lenin was a brutal dictator and that the myth of Lenin being a good Bolshevik and Stalin being a bad Bolshevik is unsupported by evidence. Lenin clearly wanted to provoke a civil war in Russia, as documents uncovered since the opening of the Russian archives in 1991 have shown. This is because he knew that the Social Revolutionary and Menshevik forces in Russia would not support his violent overthrow of Alexander Kerensky's provisional government. Through both the Russian Civil War 1917-1921 and its accompanying Red Terror, Lenin clearly demonstrated the brutality and ruthlessness that characterized Stalin's regime. Lenin established his secret police, the Cheka, in December 1917, and formed the gulag prison camp system in the same month. Both of which were used to enact horrible terror and brutality on the Russian people. By 1923, over 500,000 people languished in gulag labor camps. In January 1918, Lenin had his Third Soviet Congress pass what was called the Loot the Looters Decree, whose intent was to annihilate Russia's middle and upper classes. Lenin also implemented his War Communism in 1918, an attempt to solve Russia's food crisis, but an attempt that ended in disaster and resulted in a horrible famine. Through all of this, it is clear that in many ways, Lenin displayed the same blindness to human suffering that Stalin did. From the Civil War and the Red Terror alone, I think one can reasonably claim that Lenin was indeed a ruthless and brutal dictator, just like Stalin.
Yet, I don't necessarily think that Lenin wanted Stalin to succeed him. I think one can claim that Stalin was in many ways a continuation of Lenin, as both used terror to achieve their goals. But Lenin was pragmatic, as his New Economic Policy of 1921 demonstrates. He was not completely blind to human suffering, as Stalin was. Not only that, but the postscript to Lenin's Testament of early 1923 shows that Lenin feared Stalin's place in the party because of Stalin's complete disregard for human suffering, such as the kind that Stalin displayed in the Georgian Affair of 1922. Not only that, but I think the relationship that Lenin and Trotsky had, especially through Trotsky's role as War Commissar in the Civil War, demonstrates that the two had a closer relationship that Stalin and Lenin.
Thus, to answer your first question, I think that to a major extent is the sympathetic image of Lenin incorrect. Lenin was clearly a brutal and ruthless dictator, who although pragmatic, was not afraid to use terror and civil war to accomplish his goals. And to answer your second point, I don't think that Lenin necessarily wanted Stalin to succeed him. Rather, he preferred Trotsky. Stalin's rule however does demonstrate that he in many ways continued what Lenin started. But I think that the poor relationship between Stalin and Lenin at the end of Lenin's life demonstrates that while Stalin did continue with the precedence that Lenin set, Lenin did not necessarily want this to occur.
Even though Lenin did shift away from War Communism to NEP in the 1921, it's impossible to overlook the fact that Lenin was brutal and repressive and that the civil war and terror he used were very effective in guaranteeing his rule. Yet, I think this shift demonstrates Lenin's pragmatism, something that Stalin did not display. As such, I don't think that Lenin's late actions support the thesis that he wanted Stalin to succeed him.
Sources:
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution by Orlando Figes | [
"Lenin favoured Stalin until, too late, their fallout in 1923 really opened Lenin's eyes to the danger of a future with Stalin in power. Trotsky failed to form alliances and was socially inept and never fully accepted in the Bolshevik party leadership, which he had joined late. However, Stalin, contrary to his oppo... |
Tuesday Trivia | Never Done: Women’s Work in History | Is today’s theme just an excuse for me to post a long winded ramble about my hobbies? Of course not.
But it’s time to talk about knitting and its fantastically understudied history. Knitting gets very little attention from “real” historians, its history and folklore was only passed orally for a long time, and today it is primarily discussed in pattern books, blogs, and forums. I know of a whopping TWO academic-ish history books about knitting. It’s a history you don’t think about unless you start doing it I think.
I knit my share of junky modern stuff with fun-fur eyelash yarn and such, but I try to do some historic and vintage things because they make me feel a connection with women of the past that I really can’t get elsewhere, even from cooking historic recipes which I also like to do. (I suspect my foremothers would laugh at me feeling historical by making anything in my modern kitchen on my clean electric stove.) Knitting is kinda extra-historical because its largely unchanged from its murky invention, sure there are innovations, like the knitting machine, or those sweet rubber caps for the tips of needles so your stitches don’t slide off the ends, and the fun of superbulky yarns knit on needles [the size of Olive Garden breadsticks,](_URL_1_ ) but in the end hand-knitting is still just you making some fabric with 2 or more pointy sticks and some string. Just like people (especially women-people) did generations and generations before you.
I’ll steal a quote from Franklin Habit who really sums up the appeal:
> Whenever I work through an antique pattern, my thoughts inevitably turn to another knitter, long gone and utterly forgotten, who may have pursued the same course of knits and purls [...] Sometimes she’s an expectant mother puzzling over the Baby’s Hood, or a grandmother with a quiet afternoon turning out yet another Pence Jug. She may be called Ada or Isabel. She may live on the American frontier or in a London row house. She may be knitting under a tree, or beside a coal fire. She often, when confounded by the same vagueness in the pattern that confounds me, indulges in unladylike and possibly anachronistic vulgarities. (“Oh, @#$!% this @#%@^ nightcap,” said Aunt Ada.) ([source](_URL_0_), I’ve been meaning to make the Mrs. Roosevelt Mittens for like 5 years now.)
Another reason I am drawn to knitting is because [it was a skilled cottage industry for a lot of centuries, especially for Scottish women,](_URL_2_) who would be the bulk of my ancestors. Scotland in particular was known for socks and lacework. Knitting was a source of money people who otherwise couldn’t do any useful labor - it doesn’t require a lot of investment in materials (you just need needles and yarn), nor does it require physical strength, it could be done by people otherwise unemployable like the elderly or infirm, or just farming-people in winter. Another reason knitting is so lovely is because it’s a social or asocial activity as you see fit. You can knit in a group, you can knit with a friend, you can knit on the couch with your husband, or you can knit all by yourself. Many of the women who had to knit for money or to keep their family clothed [did that shit on the go](_URL_5_) between other work.
My favorite type of knitting is lace knitting, my goal is to someday make a Shetland lace [“wedding ring” shawl](_URL_6_), which is the pinnacle of a lace knitter’s art. But for the meantime I stick to simpler lacework. Like most knitters, I have a habit of buying yarn that I think looks really cool in the skein, getting it home, forgetting about it, and years later discovering some butt ugly yarn in my closet and then desperately trying to think of something to use it up on. [Here is my yarn of the moment](_URL_3_), a bulky weight dark purple mohair with a sparkle running through it, which I know must have seemed awesome at the time but now strikes me as compelling evidence that I have truly awful taste and should not be allowed to dress myself. It’s also itchy, and I had 8 goddamned skeins of this to somehow make into something acceptable. I decided on a lace wrap (as wraps/shawls don’t get too close to your body so the itchy wouldn’t be too bad). Mohair yarns’ fuzzy halo kinda “muffles” the visual impact of lace patterns, so I wanted a bolder, simpler lace that would still be visible through the eye-stunning fug of a sparkly mohair. I settled on [Old Shale Stitch,](_URL_7_) which is an old Shetland lace pattern. It’s actually really “Shell Stitch” because it looks like seashells but the early knitting pattern collectors didn’t speak Highland brogue so it got put down in the books as Shale. It’s the traditional edging on [hap shawls](_URL_8_) which are big wool shawls that would be everyday wear, so I thought I’d make my wrap something of an homage to those. It’s also an “unbalanced” lace (that doesn’t stay square as you knit up), so I thought the way it pulled itself into ripples was also kinda neat.
So, my husband was unexpectedly in the hospital for a few days 2 weeks ago, and when I rushed home after he was admitted I had a few minutes to gather some overnight stuff and then just anything to distract me, and I grabbed: a gay romance novel, a Tupperware container full of soynuts (I don’t remember what the thinking was on this one), and my knitting. And boy did that damn knitting just about save my life. I did not have 2 brains cells to rub together long enough to do any sort of reading so the book got left in my bag the entire time, but I think I knitted about 5 skeins in 48 hours. “I’m sorry about all the mohair!” I said to the cleaning staff as I shredded like a dog blowing coat, compulsively knitting in the guest chair. But that repetitive, productive movement of knitting gave me a comforting connection to countless women before me who had no doubt sat at many besides waiting to see what would become of their loved ones. Husbands have always gotten sick. Illness has always been fearful. And women have always worked through it. (And after all this I forgot to take a picture of the final product last night, I'll see if I can update with a photo when I get home.)
Anyway he’s fine. After Christmas is done I think I’m going to make good on my threats and finally make him a historic [Scottish-pattern gansey](_URL_4_) and force him to wear it.
Anyway, if you’d like to read about the history of knitting, here are the two books:
* *A History of Hand Knitting* by Richard Rutt, from 1987 and EXTREMELY British
* *Knitting by the Fireside and on the Hillside: A History of the Shetland Hand Knitting Industry c.1600-1950* by Linda G. Fryer, from 1994 and not so terribly British | [
"Makers: Women Who Make America is a 2013 documentary film about the struggle for women's equality in the United States during the last five decades of the 20th century. The film was narrated by Meryl Streep and distributed by the Public Broadcasting Service as a three-part, three-hour television documentary in Feb... |
why do commercial airplanes board passengers using the seemingly inefficient "zone" system, rather than filling the seats chronologically? | There was research done into the fastest way to board a plane. The result? Completely random boarding.
Imagine passengers get in line to board the plane in perfect order from rear to front. The first person in line reaches the back of the plane and proceeds to load his bags in the bins. The passenger behind him must wait for him to finish because he is in the same row, same with the one behind him and so on. There are six people in the rear row but only one of them has reached the back of the plane. The entire line is now backed up. In this case *only one passenger* is actively in the process of boarding *the whole time*.
Now imagine you line the passengers up randomly. Yes, you will get times where one person is blocking the line up at front, but now you will also get times where multiple people are boarding at a time because you have some mixes of people in the back and people in the front getting seated simultaneously. Make sense?
Each zone has people from all over the plane to ensure a random mix of boarding throughout the plane as much as possible.
I suppose if you could be perfectly ordered the best way to do it would be to line everyone with a left window seat rear to front, followed by everyone with a right window seat rear to front, followed by middle seats ect. Realistically the logistics of lining people up like this would just be impossible, especially because now you have to separate families and groups. Random is the easiest way to ensure somewhat efficient boarding.
One idea I have to slightly speed the process is to board all lone travelers with window seats first. Maybe that's just me being selfish :) though.
tr; dr: Airlines researched the fastest way to board. Random (though it may seem counter intuitive at first) is the best answer. | [
"Since airlines often fly multi-leg flights, and since no-show rates vary by segment, competition for the seat has to take in the spatial dynamics of the product. Someone trying to fly A-B is competing with people trying to fly A-C through city B on the same aircraft. This is one reason airlines use yield managemen... |
If the Earth is shaped like a pear does that mean atmospheric pressure at sea-level differs depending on latitude? | Where have you heard that the earth is shaped like a pear? | [
"The pressure of the atmosphere is maximum at sea level and decreases with altitude. This is because the atmosphere is very nearly in hydrostatic equilibrium so that the pressure is equal to the weight of air above a given point. The change in pressure with altitude can be equated to the density with the hydrostati... |
Henry VIII jousting in The Tudors | Jousting armour typically had excellent neck and forearm protection. As you note, it would be very dangerous to not have it.
One example of one of Henry's jousting armours:
_URL_4_
I believe this is the armour he wore for jousting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold tournament.
Jousting armours could be field armours (i.e., armours intended for battle) with extra pieces of armour to provide more protection. On example of such additional protection is this *grandguard*:
_URL_2_
which was made for this armour:
_URL_5_
(among the 89 photos of this armour on that page, you will see some with this reinforcing piece, and other additional pieces, in place). The grandguard provides additional protection for the left shoulder and neck. The armour it is made for already has excellent neck protection. With this, it has even more excellent neck protection. The real-life Henry VIII would not have put up with the armour in the TV series!
Jousting helmets could also be made specially for jousting. For example,
_URL_1_
and
_URL_0_
(this type is often called a "frog-mouth helm").
Henry VIII took his combat sports very seriously, and could afford the best in available armour, and his armours show this. Two further examples of this are this armour:
_URL_6_
and his "spacesuit" armour:
_URL_3_
which is remarkable for its thorough coverage of the insides of joints (which are often unprotected, or protected by mail "voiders" in field armours).
Even with that superb protection, jousting was still dangerous. Henry VIII suffered a serious accident in a joust in 1536 when his horse fell on him, resulting in a leg injury and possibly a brain injury. The possible connection between the accident and his later tyranny has been discussed in various documentaries and web articles, but as discussed earlier, here, by u/rbaltimore in r/AskHistorians/comments/4i4e1w/was_henry_viiis_jousting_accident_in_1536_really/ and also elsewhere (e.g., Suzannah Lipscomb, *1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII*, Lion, 2009, who points out that Henry was on the way to tyranny already), it doesn't seem likely. An earlier accident, in 1524, where he was hit in his helmet while his visor was up, has also been blamed (see Lipscomb). | [
"King Henry took part in the jousting, sporting Diane's black-and-white colours. He defeated the dukes of Guise and Nemours, but the young Gabriel, comte de Montgomery, knocked him half out of the saddle. Henry insisted on riding against Montgomery again, and this time, Montgomery's lance shattered in the king's fa... |
where do nicknames for enemy soldiers come from? | > In the US the bad guys are "Charlie"
No they aren't. That specifically refers to Vietnamese forces in the Vietnam war. The Vietcong (VC) is "Victor Charlie" in radio speak. That's where the charlie comes from.
> in the UK they are "Jerry"
Again, it refers to just Germans. Not just any aggressor. Jerry is just an abbreviation of German. | [
"Giving nicknames to soldiers has long been a feature of military life. Private David McCook of Company B was referred to as the \"Skillet Wagon\" by men of other companies, because they were always borrowing his tin pans, buckets or cans for cooking. Private Matthews was called \"Marker\", while others sported suc... |
what exactly fills up when computer memory is full? | Imagine your device as a blank notebook. Now start writing all the 'data' or 'songs' down in the notebook. When it's full, so is your device. To put it as simply as possible. As far as the physical size of the device is concerned I'll go back to the notebook. As we get better at making notebooks we can make them with smaller and smaller lines allowing you to fit more information on each page. The more data per page the more info you can put in a smaller notebook. | [
"Although core memory is obsolete, computer memory is still sometimes called \"core\" even though it's made of semiconductors, particularly by people who had worked with machines having real core memory. And the files that result from saving the entire contents of memory to disk for debugging purposes when a major ... |
why do we use radioactive metals in nuclear power plants? | We don't choose uranium and plutonium because they are radioactive. We choose uranium and plutonium because they happen to split easily when they absorb a neutron.....AND produce more neutrons when they split to continue the reaction on their own.
You can split just about any element, but most atoms will require you to put a lot of energy/effort into splitting them. | [
"Natural radioactive elements are present in very low concentrations in Earth's crust, and are brought to the surface through human activities such as oil and gas exploration or mining, and through natural processes like leakage of radon gas to the atmosphere or through dissolution in ground water. Another example ... |
If we ever get to do brain transplants, what would happen? Would the person with the new brain have the new brain old memories, or would all memories be forgotten? | **IF** it were ever possible, and that is a big if, you, and every conscious aspect of you, would be transported with your brain. Your mind is the product of the pink squish stuff between your ears. Move the squishy stuff around, and the mind follows.
Now, there would be some things that would probably not be transported (at least to some degree), like certain physical skills that involved precisely timed interactions between muscles and the nervous system. But conscious memories? They're in your brain. | [
"He proposes that every memory, skill, and passion is encoded somehow in the connectome. And when the brain is not wired properly it can result in mental disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's. Understanding the human connectome may not only help cure such diseases with treatments but... |
I can't think of the name of painting, nor the artist, that I can write a perfect paper about. | I think /r/tipofmytongue might be a better place for this. | [
"\"I see the painter as an instrument, a function, a conduit of the essential unity. My work is metaphor, never simile. I make no distinction between subject and object, inner and outer, maker and viewer. I am continually surprised by what arises on the canvas or the paper. I am not a 'creator'. How can one create ... |
What reasons made Justinian’s conquest of Italy take so long? | The conquest of Italy started off well in 536 with the quick taking over of Sicily and then Naples after some resistance. Once Belisarius reached Rome however things slowed down. He entered the city unopposed but there were significant challenges in holding they city. Food first of all there was the issue of feeding the poplulation and secondly the wall circuit of Rome was enormous and the city itself had no gates. There was a one year siege of the city (537-538) which was successfully repelled.
Belisarius eventually conquered most of Italy by 540 including Ravenna the capital.
So the initial conquest was only 4 years long but holding the gains would prove difficult and wars would last two decades. See this wikipedia article on the Gothic wars for more in depth information:(_URL_0_)
Compared to the conquest of Africa where the Vandals had only two fortified cities (Hippo and Carthage), the Goths left the walls of the Italian cities intact and thus had more strongholds to retreat to and retaliate from.
The Goths also had allies such as Franks and Persians who would distract the empire and force resources elsewhere.
Lastly there is the problem of Justinian not trusting his generals' loyalties and splitting up armies in between them. The generals did not always cooperate either and at one point many just holed up in their own cities with their treasure and individually knocked out. [There is a fun little reference to this in computer science known as the byzantine general problem ](_URL_1_)
Luckily we have great sources primary on this era thanks to Procopius's *Wars* and *Secret History* and his being present with the armies. | [
"After taking areas occupied by the Vandals in North Africa, Justinian decide to retake Italy as an ambitious attempt to recover the lost provinces in the West. The re-conquests marked an end to over 150 years of accommodationist policies with tribal invaders. His first target was Sicily (known as the Gothic War (5... |
How is it that different dogs breeds have specific personality types? | Selective breeding by humans. If you want a good hunter then you breed the best hunters together, if you want a guard dog then you breed the animals that are more territorial. If you want a lap dog then you need to select the dogs that are less stressed by being around new and different humans. humans select the breeding animals for both desired form and temperament. | [
"Dog types are broad categories of dogs based on form, function or style of work, lineage, or appearance. In contrast, modern \"dog breeds\" are particular breed standards, sharing a common set of heritable characteristics, determined by the kennel club that recognizes the breed.\n",
"Dog types are broad categori... |
How can animals sense danger and humans can't? | Animals have adapted to react to a variety of sensory inputs that are associated with weather changes or imminent disasters.
Dogs can sense the pressure and humidity changes in the air with an impending rainstorm. You'd always hear old people say "I can feel a storm coming, I feel it in my bones." They're feeling pressure changes **literally** in their bones (due to old age).
As for earthquakes, numerous studies have been done by the USGS (United Stated Geological Survey), but nothing substantial enough to make legitimate claims have been found.
Dogs can sense many things humans can't. They can detect certain medical issues before they happen, such as sensing hypoglycemia (diabetic condition) by feeling tremors and hyperglycemia (the opposite of the first) by smelling a ketone smell. Some dogs can sense seizures before they happen and alert their owners before they happen. Some dogs can even sense a myocardial infarction (heart attack) before they happen. | [
"In many areas, adventurers may encounter large predatory animals such as bears or cougars. These animals rarely seek out humans as food, but they will attack under some conditions. Some hazardous encounters occur when animals raid human property for food. Additionally, if travelers come upon an unsuspecting animal... |
why are you supposed to always add acid to water and never water to acid? | If water splashes up at you, it's not a big deal. If acid splashes up at you, it can be. | [
"Because the hydration reaction of sulfuric acid is highly exothermic, dilution should always be performed by adding the acid to the water rather than the water to the acid. Because the reaction is in an equilibrium that favors the rapid protonation of water, addition of acid to the water ensures that the \"acid\" ... |
I know that the Civil War armies were said to make a miserable show to Europeans, but how did the Continental Army perform by European standards? | Great question!
The answer to this will depend firstly on when in the way you're asking about, and secondly on what scale you grade an army's capabilities on.
At the start of the war, the Continental Army was, by almost every standard, terrible. The army that amassed outside Boston and later fought around New York City had poor officers, little discipline, uncertain supplies, and a patchwork of enlistment contracts that made its size unpredictable at best and doomed to extinction at worst. While the army won at Bunker Hill, that was more a testament to Gage making the wrong decision (a frontal assault), then lacking the manpower to launch a flank attack. Around New York, the Continentals were repeatedly outfought bad outmaneuvered by the British and Hessian armies, even in the wooded and broken terrain that was supposed to favor American troops. In one of the war's most catastrophic defeats, poor command and control of the army led to a force of 3,000 Americans staying in Fort Washington well after the position should have been abandoned. A Hessian assault force captured this garrison, and and an even more valuable cache of supplies, in one afternoon with minimal casualties.
Even in the early years of the war, the Continental Army showed signs of promise. Knox's transport of 200 cannon from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston during the winter of 75-76 was a master stroke that effectively created the army's artillery branch in one go. Patriot troops captured Montreal and nearly seized Quebec in a daring and difficult winter campaign. Individual units fought well during the New York campaign, and American troops consistently demonstrated the ability to rapidly build large fieldworks. Washington's winter campaign in 76-77 saw a hardened core of veteran survivors of the Battles of New York surprise and out-maneuver well-commanded British forces in Southern New Jersey, doing permanent harm to the British war effort by making them look unable to hold territory the conquered or to defend the loyalists who publicly opposed the rebellion. Continentals stalled and swarmed a British attack towards Albany in the Battles of Saratoga, while Americans managed to make fighting retreat d at the Brandywine and Germantown I that fall of 77.
Between 1778 and the end of the war in 1783, the Continental army got more technically proficient as it professionalized. The Continentals fought the best units of the British Army to a draw on the open field at Monmouth, made successful night attacks at Stoney Point and Yorktown's Redoubt #10, and demonstrated incredible resiliency in the "fight, get beat, get up and fight again" chase across the Carolinians. At Yorktown, the Americans laid an exceptionally smooth formal, conventional siege, arguably the defining trait of military craft in the 18th century.
Why, then, do I still have reservations about calling the Continental Army good? First and foremost, their performance was inconsistent. Gates bungled the Battle of Camden in catastrophic fashion. While Morgan and Greene did led Cornwallis on an epic chased across the Carolinians, they could not stop him from invading Virginia, freeing thousands of slaves, and nearly capturing Thomas Jefferson as he fled off his plantation.
Most importantly, the Continental Army grew increasingly mutinous in the latter half of the war. Between 1780 and 1783, the Pennsylvania Line mutinied twice abs the New Jersey line once in situations that stretched for days and resulted in some loss of life. Connecticut troops rioted in their camps at Morristown and West Point. The officers of the army gave some support to a plan by one of Gates' aides to march on Congress if they weren't guaranteed pensions.
In short, if I were drafting an army for a fantasy league of 18th century empires, I would not take the Continental Army. Their greatest victories involved either surviving defeat or substantial French assistance. They frequently seethed with discontent, as mutiny never seemed far away for both Continental soldiers and their officers.
**Sources**
Martin and Lender, *A Respectable Army*
Fischer, *Washington's Crossing*
Niemeyer, *America Goes to War* | [
"Increasing military efficiency, morale, and discipline improved the army's well-being with better supply of food and arms. The Continental Army had been hindered in battle because units administered training from a variety of field manuals, making coordinated battle movements awkward and difficult. They struggled ... |
what is a cocaine analogue? | It means it acts on the e.g. brain receptors or whatever it is you're interested in, in the same way as cocaine does without all the other effects. Usually such analogues either take cocaine as a starting point for their synthesis or have a synthetic component very similar to part of the cocaine molecule. | [
"In the United States, cocaine is a Schedule II drug under the Controlled Substances Act, indicating that it has a high abuse potential but also carries a medicinal purpose. Under the Controlled Substances Act, crack and cocaine are considered the same drug.\n",
"This is a list of cocaine analogues. A cocaine ana... |
What are the actual bytes made up of in a computer? | That depends entirely on the type of medium. On a mechanical harddrive, those bits are magnetic. In RAM or within the CPU, they're represented by electrical currents or charges. Data could be written to paper as visual or physical data if someone chose to. The list goes on. Ultimately, "bits" are just an abstraction of whatever medium that's been chosen to represent the binary data.
Mechanical harddrives store the data magnetically. The data is 'converted' from an electrical to magnetic charge when being written (and vice versa when being read). SSDs use completely solid-state chips to store the data. The type of chips and arrangement allow for the device to store data when powered down. These are pretty big simplifications, but that's the general idea of the differences. | [
"The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures.\n",
"A \"byte\" is a bit str... |
Is the ethical debate over killing and farming animals only a recent thing? Or did it span back further? | Although there are some of the probably older traditions around the world (like ancient Indian jainism, which advocated a path of non-violence towards all living beings, animals and humans alike) I'll limit my answer to ancient Greek philosophy – field of my academical interest.
We'll start with Pythagoras (Samos, c. 570 – c. 495 BC), presocratic philosopher who, same as Socrates, didn't write down his thoughts, but had a faithful bunch of students and followers to whom we own his historical record. Dicaearchus (Aristotle's pupil) wrote how Pythagoras': „most universally celebrated opinions, however, were that the soul is immortal; then that it migrates into other sorts of living creature \[...\]“
Now in this, his doctrine of the transmigration of souls (*metempsychosis*), lies bio-ethical stance on killing animals. For one more example of the metempsychosis doctrine we can observe quote from Empedocles (c. 490 – c. 430 BC): „For already have I once been a boy, and a girl, and a bush, and a fish that jumps from the sea as it swims.“
The important part of this doctrine is that it *proclaims personal survival of bodily death.* By Xenophanes' writing considering this context, Pythagoras even recognized the dog as one of his late friends. Now, if I held this opinion, we can see how easy it would be for me to defend non killing and farming animals – how can I eat a chicken, if there's possibility that that chicken was my mother?
Both Empedocles and Pythagoras were vegeterians. By Empedocles' surviving fragments, which are concerned with „not killing living creatures“, we learn that we are enjoined to abstain from „harsh-sounding bloodshed“, to avoid sacrifice and moreover, we must not eat meat, beans or bay leaves. As explained, the sheep you slaughter and eat was once a man, and once, perhaps, your son or your father. That said, to avoid patricide and filicide you must avoid all bloodshed.
Pythagorean school was an interesting mix of philosophy and mysticism, with an unique set of rules, such as not taking roads which public uses (out of fear of being defiled by the inpure, as Aristotle explains), dietary restrictions, vows of silence for new initiates, etc., and I encourage you to read further on this funky crew.
For now and to conclude, let's jump few centuries forward to confront Empedocles and Pythagoras with Aristotle. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) assigned to men and animals the faculty of sentience (capacity to suffer), but which gives men a title to moral consideration. That means animals don't have rationality or moral qualities which could match ones that we find in humans. He argued how plants are created for the sake of animals, and animals for the sake of men. What he did is establish some sort of hierarchy, taxonomical categorization - *scala naturae* (or Great Chain of Being) and at the top of that chain are masters who are gifted with rationality – men.
As we can see, Aristotle's position that humans and animals create two opposite moral circles, one rational and one non-rational is directly clashed with Pythagoras' and Empedocles' stance. To further this ancient debate, Aristotle's pupils, Theophrastus (c. 371 – c. 287 BC) argued also for vegeterianism, as he tried to explain how animals can feel same as men do and thus killing them is morally wrong. These are the beginnings of the ethical debate of killing animals in Western philosophy, and further thinkers followed in next centuries – Seneca, Plutarch, Plotinus and Porphyry, to name ancient Roman ones, for example.
& #x200B;
**Sources:**
& #x200B;
Jonathan Barnes, *The Presocratic Philosophers*, Routledge, 1979.
Terence Irwin, *The Development of Ethics: A Historical and Critical Study*, Oxford, 2007.
*Historia Animālium*, Aristotle
Robert Audi, *The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy*, Cambridge, 1999. | [
"Another concern about the welfare of farm animals is the method of slaughter, especially ritual slaughter. While the killing of animals need not necessarily involve suffering, the general public considers that killing an animal reduces its welfare. This leads to further concerns about premature slaughtering such a... |
what led to the end of people's beliefs in mythology as a religion? | That never happened. The vast majority of religion today are based on a mythology. Abrahamic mythology is still very prevalent today as organized religions. The Garden of Eden isn't any different than Pandora's Box or Thor crossing the Bifröst. The religions around some mythology's simply died out as other religions converted people. | [
"Mor's comprehensive analysis of world mythologies traces the origin of ancient spiritual beliefs, ceremonies, and rituals as related to Women. She argues that the goddess-centered beliefs that dated from humanity's Paleolithic age were violently destroyed and replaced by war-like patriarchal cultures and religions... |
Why does gravitational potential start at zero and become infinitely negative? | Potential energy is relative, not absolute.
One way of saying it is that you define where your zero point is and that becomes your reference.
Another way of saying it is that the you are really looking for a potential energy **difference** (Delta-U). | [
"where \"G\" is the gravitational constant, and F is the gravitational force. The potential has units of energy per unit mass, e.g., J/kg in the MKS system. By convention, it is always negative where it is defined, and as \"x\" tends to infinity, it approaches zero.\n",
"As with all potential energies, only diffe... |
if nothing can exceed the speed of light, how can we measure something as being 10,000 light years away without it taking 20,000 years to measure? | If we were measuring the distance with something like a laser range finder, that would be true.
Obviously nobody measure the distance to such far away object be pointing a beam at them and waiting until it gets bounced back.
This method is actually used with close by objects like the moon where astronauts left some mirrors just for that.
In astronomy however many interesting object are far to far away for this to work. So other methods are used.
One for relative close by object is measuring the stellar parallax.
You know how you can hold a thumb up and close your left and right eye alternatively and have the thumb move left and right against the background.
If you stay awake in math class and learn trigonometry you can use the distance the thumb appears to move to calculate the distance of objects in the background.
The same works in astronomy but the left and right eye is our earth travelling half a year around the sum and instead of the thumb being a fixed distance we have the really far away stars as 'fixed' and calculate the distance of more nearby stars by comparison and how much they move back and fourth against the background.
That is why the unit parsec (for parallax arc second) is sometimes used instead of the similarly sized light-years for such distances.
| [
"\"If one considers the vast size of the diameter KL, which according to me is some 24 thousand diameters of the Earth, one will acknowledge the extreme velocity of Light. For, supposing that KL is no more than 22 thousand of these diameters, it appears that being traversed in 22 minutes this makes the speed a thou... |
what happens to food when exposed to air that justifies having a "consume within x days of opening" date? | Air has bacteria in it. Smoothies are great environments for bacteria to live in. Once it's opened, the number of bacteria will rapidly become high enough to threaten your health (and the taste of the smoothie).
| [
"Once opened for consumption, the product is immediately exposed to atmospheric oxygen and floating dust particles containing bacteria and mold spores, and all protections from the preservation process are immediately lost. At room temperature, mold and bacteria growth resumes almost immediately, and warmer tempera... |
kernels (computing) | The kernel is the heart of an operating system. The most basic kernel does very few things. It manages and restricts access to memory, it manages processes and threads, it manages communication between processes, and controls access to the disks.
1) Memory access. In order to run more than one program at a time, you need to have space in memory set aside for each program to use. Each program needs to be restricted to using it's own space in memory, and *only* it's own space. If you don't do this, badly behaving programs will damage data from other programs. Commonly, each program won't even know the memory used for other processes exists.
2) Process management. In order to run more than one program at once, you need some code to keep track of all the programs, and to schedule time for each of them to use the processor.
In most desktop and server operating systems, this is done in some semblance of fairness, allowing each program to request time on the processor, and rotating through each program in turn to give roughly equal access to each, though a process can give up some of it's time voluntarily.
There are other ways to do this, like real-time computing, which allows programs to request hard deadlines, a time that they *must* be finished processing by. This is often used in some kind of control system, where the computer must take input, and process it quickly enough to respond to whatever is happening in the real world.
There's also the fact that most modern computers have more than one processor available. This can allow programs to split themselves into multiple pieces that are more or less independent, in order to run in parallel to each other. Making sure that programs actually gain performance out of this takes some adjustments to how you schedule processes.
3) Communication between processes. Often, programs will be divided into smaller units that perform some task, and then hand a result off to another part of the same program. Or you want to be able to take advantage of multiple processors available, and run some of your code on each. Or your code uses some standard library or device driver in order to perform a standard task, or to talk to some piece of hardware.
To split your code into multiple processes, you need a way to communicate. In kernel land, this mostly takes the form of semaphores, pipes, message queues and shared memory.
Semaphores let two or more programs control how they execute in relation to each other. It's essentially a flag that each program can raise and lower to let the other process know they've reached some specific point in their code. They're commonly used to let parallel processes share some common resource without stomping all over the other processes using it. If the flag is up, one program is using it, and any other programs using the same resource shouldn't touch it until the flag goes down.
Pipes are common in the Unix based world. They take the output from one program, and feed it into another. Usually, they're very temporary, only existing long enough to transition from one program to another.
Message queues are used for longer term communication. One program can put data into a queue, and when another related program gets it's turn on the processor, it can read from the queue. Messages stack up in sequence, so the reading program reads them in the same order they were sent.
Shared memory is actually just a careful breaking of a concern from 1). Normally, each program should be kept separate in memory, so they don't stomp all over each other. But, if they want to communicate large pieces of data, the kernel can set aside another piece of memory that they both have access to. Each program can read and write to this spot in memory when it's their turn.
4) Disk access. Programs need to have access to disk, and while it's less critical than memory and processor time that it's shared equally, you also don't want programs stomping all over each other's data.
The more important point is actually that disk access is slow. In computing time scales, it's glacially slow. It's so slow that it would be a really stupid idea for the processor to be idle while waiting for a response to come back when it could run through a few more turns for other programs in the time it would have just been sitting there.
The kernel controls this. When a program requests disk input or output, it will send the request off to the disk, then put the program in a waiting state. When the response comes back, it triggers an interrupt, a special circuit in the processor that stops everything and loads up the kernel to process the response. The kernel then loads whatever program was waiting for the response, and lets it finish what it was doing as if the processor *was* sitting idle instead of letting other programs cut in line.
---
You'll notice that all of these functions for the kernel have something in common. They're all about letting you run more than one program at a time. Before we'd written any operating system's and kernel's, running one program at a time is just how using a computer worked. You'd manually load a program into memory, manually start it processing, and the computer would do only that one thing until it had finished and gave you some output.
Also, it should be pointed out that modern kernels do more than just these four things. They typically come with all kinds of additional tools to make writing programs easier. A modern kernel is a one-stop shop for every programming shortcut you might need.
But, if you wanted to write something that would be called a kernel, at a minimum, you'd want it to do these four things. | [
"The kernel is a computer program that is the core of a computer's operating system, with complete control over everything in the system. On most systems, it is one of the first programs loaded on start-up (after the bootloader). It handles the rest of start-up as well as input/output requests from software, transl... |
When did people start calling themselves "Italians" and "Germans"? | [This question came up about a year ago](_URL_0_), although it's a good question that can certainly merit more discussion.
For Italy, the short answer is, "When Napoleon crowned himself King of Italy." Prior to then the concept of an Italian language and culture was solely the purview of a small intellectual elite, who would have nonetheless identified more with their local identity more so than a common one spanning the whole peninsula. | [
"The English term \"Germans\" is only attested from the mid-16th century, based on the classical Latin term \"Germani\" used by Julius Caesar and later Tacitus. It gradually replaced \"Dutch\" and \"Almains\", the latter becoming mostly obsolete by the early 18th century.\n",
"While in most Romance languages the ... |
In the second world war, was there ever an incident of a ship being captured by one side, then pressed into service for use against its former operator? | The IJN used several ships captured from the British, Dutch and Americans as convoy escorts. These weren't captured in the traditional sense - they were never boarded. Instead, they were scuttled in port by their former owners when capture of the port seemed likely. The Japanese would later salvage them, and press them into service against their former owners.
The RN lost two ships in this way. HMS Thracian was on station at Hong Kong in December 1941. She remained at Hong Kong to provide fire support to the garrison, while the remainder of her squadron left for Singapore. She was scuttled after being heavily damaged by Japanese aircraft. She would be refloated in July 1942, and operated as patrol boat PB-101. She was recaptured in Yokosuka in 1945, and scrapped in 1946. The river gunboat HMS Moth would also be captured at Hong Kong, and operated on inland waterways in Japanese-occupied China.
The USN lost six ships in this way. USS Stewart, a Clemson class destroyer, fled the Philippines, and operated with ABDA forces in Indonesia. Heavily damaged after the Battle of the Bandung Strait, she was put into a floating drydock in Surabaya. She was not repaired before Java fell, and the drydock was scuttled with her inside. She was raised in 1943, and put back into service as PB-102. She would also be recaptured at the end of the war, and sunk as a target in 1946. The minesweeper USS Finch, fleet tug USS Genesse and Philippine customs vessel Arayat would be captured in Manila in various states of repair. They would enter Japanese service as PB-103, PB-107 and PB-105 respectively. Two gunboats, the USS Wake and USS Luzon were also captured, and put into service as the gunboats Tatara and Karatsu. Tatara fulfilled a similar role to the ex-HMS Moth, while Karatsu operated in the Philippines. PB-107 was destroyed by American carrier aircraft in Manila Bay at the start of November 1944, while PB-105 would be sunk by PT boats at the end of the month while escorting a convoy near Leyte. USS Finch would be sunk by aircraft from TF-38 while escorting a convoy off Vietnam in January 1945. Four Dutch ships were also captured, including one destroyer and three patrol boats. Another ship, the minesweeper Regulus, would be captured while under construction.
While purpose built warships were repurposed, in some cases merchant ships could be reused. The first escort carrier was built by the RN on the hull of a merchant ship captured from the Germans. The banana carrier Hannover was captured in the Caribbean in 1939. She was operated by the Merchant Navy until January 1941, when she was selected to become an escort carrier. She was the first to enter service, being commissioned in June 1941. She was renamed HMS Audacity in service. Audacity would operate with the RN for 6 months, escorting convoys to Gibraltar. Her fighters claimed 7 German aircraft before she was sunk escorting convoy HG76 by U-751.
Sources:
Tabulated Records of Movement for the Japanese Navy, available at [_URL_1_](_URL_0_) - look under the sections for escorts and gunboats.
The Fleet Air Arm Handbook 1939-1945, David Wragg, 2003, Sutton Publishing. | [
"BULLET::::- While searching for survivors during the aftermath of Battle off Texel, the was seized, even though war conventions stipulated for navies never to do so. The Royal Navy justified the seizure as coded radio messages were monitored coming from the ship, the ship's wireless was destroyed, and the crew was... |
If one were to throw a magnet at a metal object, would it accelerate before it hits the metal? If so, where does the change in kinetic energy come from? | > would it accelerate before it hits the metal?
Yes, it would. The extra kinetic energy comes the potential energy that was stored in the system due to two magnets between positioned at a distance from each other. | [
"During spot welding, the large electric current induces a large magnetic field, and the electric current and magnetic field interact with each other to produce a large magnetic force field too, which drives the melted metal to move very fast at a velocity up to 0.5 m/s. As such, the heat energy distribution in spo... |
according to data we have discovered 14% of all organisms on earth. where does this number come from, if the other 86% of haven't been discovered yet (and therefore we don't know if they exist)? | Statistics like this are created based on looking at what is identified within a group.
Perhaps an easier example.
Let's say people are inspecting defects in a product. Someone in charge intentionally adds 10 defects. Then they watch and see what comes through the line, what is discovered by the process. If people only find 3 of the defects, then they can estimate they're catching 30% of the defects overall, letting 70% of the defects go through. On the other hand, if all 10 defects are discovered, then they know they're catching all or nearly all of the defects. The percentage of things they know about should roughly match the percentage of things they don't know about.
It applies to other statistics as well, like crime stats. They can look at crimes they know happened but weren't reported through official channels, and look at crimes they know about and were reported. Looking at the difference shows about how many crimes go unreported. It is not exact, but if people are careful about how they create the stats they can be fairly accurate.
For counting species there are several ways it can be done. One way is like above, to have one group track the number of species in an area and another group figure out how many are new. Another method is a linear regression, figuring out an approximately how many species there should be based on estimates and comparing it to how many have actually been identified.
Also, most of the species that aren't discovered are small things. We're down to small numbers of new birds and mammals, often they are sub-species that get reclassified as a new species, or they're highly specialized species living in a remote and small geographic area.
It is mostly bugs, fungi, and other small organism that are being discovered in large numbers. These are things that are hard to spot and identify, many only identified because of genetic testing on tiny or microscopic organisms.
| [
"Although the number of Earth's catalogued species of lifeforms is between 1.2 million and 2 million, the total number of species in the planet is uncertain. Estimates range from 8 million to 100 million, with a more narrow range between 10 and 14 million, but it may be as high as 1 trillion (with only one-thousand... |
How do I calculate laser divergence? | The units of the result are [radians](_URL_0_).
This is a unit that is actually dimensionless. That is, an angle of one radian is an angle that forms a circular arc with a length equal to its radius. Meaning, radians measure the ratio between two lengths, thus it is not actually a unit at all.
Radians are used in most scientific and engineering contexts in college coursework and onward because they actually simplify many of the calculations we do, compared to using degrees to describe angles. | [
"The beam divergence of a laser beam is a measure for how fast the beam expands far from the beam waist. It is usually defined as the derivative of the beam radius with respect to the axial position in the far field, i.e., in a distance from the beam waist which is much larger than the Rayleigh length. This definit... |
how do showers pump water to the highest floor? | I would say that it mostly depends on your location. A lot of places such as New York City have water towers placed on top of the buildings that feed via gravity.
A lot of small towns where you see large water towers up high above the town essentially do the same thing.
Then there will of course be situations where gravity cannot be used and that's pressurized system will be put in place. | [
"Rainwater is harvested and channelled down the centre of the building, flowing through its bowl-shaped roof into a reflecting pond at the lowest level of the building. The rainwater is then recycled for use in the building's restrooms.\n",
"The basement also had a \"hydrozone water bottling unit\" that would fil... |
Do Large Lakes Serves as Natural Storm Breaks? | Yes, you're correct. **Lake modified air** can have an impact on these types of storms. Mostly in a way directly [opposite to this](_URL_2_) in the winter. In the spring/summer the lake is relatively cool compared to the land and induces subsidence (sinking air) that can inhibit thunderstorms which need [heat and rising air](_URL_0_) to survive. The larger the lake (e.g. Great Lakes) the more of an impact it will have for longer into the spring/summer.
Another impact can be topography that sometimes surround lakes. From [this diagram](_URL_1_) you can see that the moist air is forced up over the terrain and the water precipitates out, leaving little moisture on the lee side of the mountains or hills. | [
"Sudden storms can whip up dangerous, steep waves on the surface of the lake. Their average height is , and their average length is . A prevailing north-easterly or south-westerly wind can push the water from the eastern basin of the lake (to the east of the Tihany Peninsula) into the western basin or on the contra... |
During the Carboniferous, O2 levels were 163% modern levels while CO2 was 800ppm. With so many plants, why were CO2 levels so high relative to modern levels? | Are you sure you mean the Carboniferous here? That period actually saw a huge drop in global CO2 level, indicated by "C" [in this graph](_URL_0_) around 300-350 million years ago.
Those pCO2 levels had been steadily falling since the Cambrian period, but likely saw an extra large drop during the drop as the climate transitioned from greenhouse to icehouse and massive glaciations occured...and as temperatures fall, ocean CO2 solubility increases. | [
"The Carboniferous spans from 359 million to 299 million years ago. During this period, average global temperatures were exceedingly high: the early Carboniferous averaged at about 20 degrees Celsius (but cooled to 10 degrees during the Middle Carboniferous). Tropical swamps dominated the Earth, and the large amoun... |
What are the neurological differences, if any, between reading a physical book and reading online? | I'm not entirely sure about the standards of this journal, but it does have citations. I'll try to sum up the author's major points that are at least supported by studies:
1) Reading online requires much more "cognitive space" for a number of different reasons. The use of hyperlinks embedded within texts leads to more decision-making to be made, which of course requires more use of the brain. Just like when reading a paper newspaper, when one is confronted with many different choices in terms of what to read, one needs to make more cognitive decisions in selecting the most appealing thing to read. Also, websites that require scrolling to read the full text leads to greater brain activation that websites that do not require scrolling.
2) The framework of the text (paratext) has an influence on the reader's response to the text. In a normal book, we have the acknowledgements page, title page, etc. that all shape our view that "we are reading a book". Similarly, a study showed that subjects were more likely to perceive humor in a text when reading on a lighter, clearer device.
3) Online multitasking while reading on a screen most likely leads to a reduction in comprehension of and "deeper" thinking about the text. However, a link between reading comprehension and reading on paper vs screen is still not definitive, because studies have found conflicting results.
This is clearly still an emerging field of study, as e-readers and e-books have only become popular in recent years. I'll be curious to see what the results are from more careful scientific studies.
_URL_0_
Barry W Cull, "Reading Revolutions: Online digital text and implications for reading in academe" | [
"BULLET::::- Shankweiler, D. P., Mencl, W. E., Braze, D., Tabor, W., Pugh, K. R., & Fulbright, R. K. (2008). Reading differences and brain: Cortical integration of speech and print in sentence processing varies with reader skill. \"Developmental Neuropsychology\", 33, 745-776.\n",
"Various approaches to reading p... |
Does Mars have enough mass to support a habitable atmosphere? | Titan, a moon of Saturn, has about 1/5 the mass of Mars but holds an atmosphere with 1.5 times Earth's atmospheric pressure. So theoretically yes.
One big difference is that Titan is much colder than Mars and nowhere near habitable, but it turns out even with Mars's higher temp, it should be able to hold onto a significant atmosphere over billions of years. So why hasn't it?
Here I quote from [Principles of Planetary Climate](_URL_0_) Chapter 8
> It takes rather little impactor mass in the late stage veneer to deplete the atmosphere of an Earthlike planet – only a tenth of a percent of Earth’s mass, which is not an unreasonable amount to be left over after the assembly of an Earth-sized planet. An important result is that if Mars were to start out with a 2 bar CO2 atmosphere (as suggested by some climate calculations based on evidence for warm, wet early conditions), its atmosphere would not be much more subject to erosion than Earth’s. The mass of available impactors required to erode such a Martian atmosphere would be fully 70% of the corresponding mass for Earth. The main reason the estimates are so similar is that a 2 bar atmosphere on Mars has much more mass per unit area than Earth’s atmosphere, requiring a higher critical mass of impactor as compared with Earth. A more tenuous Martian atmosphere is much more erodable than Earth’s, as illustrated by the 100 mb Mars case in the table. Similarly, if Venus had an Earthlike atmosphere, its atmosphere would be essentially as erodable as Earth’s, whereas the actual dense Venus atmosphere requires about seven times as much available impactor mass to erode. The hypothetical Super-Earth case is only a bit less subject to erosion than Earth, in this case because a 1 bar atmosphere on a large planet has less mass per unit area than Earth’s atmosphere. The importance of the atmospheric mass effect shows also in the hypothetical planetary Titan case, which, owing to its very massive atmosphere, requires nearly as much available impactor mass to erode as does the 2 bar Early Mars case. The real Titan, in contrast, is very difficult to erode, requiring an available impactor mass of nearly a tenth of Earth’s mass, owing to the competition with Saturn for impacts.
> The essential puzzle posed by the results of Table 8.7 is that it looks quite plausible that Earth’s atmosphere would be subject to loss by impact erosion in the Sweep stage, and that a dense Early Mars atmosphere would not be appreciably less erodable than Earth. How, then, to account for the present tenuous Martian atmosphere, while Earth has a substantial atmosphere remaining? One potential scenario is that Earth’s atmosphere was indeed lost by impact erosion, but was regenerated by outgassing from the interior. Consistent with this picture, we note that while Mars requires nearly as much available impactor mass as Earth, this impactor mass is delivered over a much longer time, owing to the smaller cross- section of Mars. Combined with the relatively early shutdown of tectonic activity and hence outgassing on Mars (owing to its small size) it could be that the essential difference between the planets resides not so much in ability to hold an atmosphere as in ability to regenerate an atmosphere. A severe difficulty with this picture, however, is the abundance of N2 in Earth’s atmosphere. A CO2 or water vapor atmosphere could be easily regenerated, but it is not easy to hide enough N2 in the mantle to allow this component to be regenerated. And recall that Venus has even more N2 in its atmosphere than Earth, suggesting that even if Venus went through an early stage with far less CO2 in its atmosphere, it did not suffer total atmosphere loss by impacts during that stage. Could it be that there is an ability to sequester a bar or two of N2 in a planet’s mantle? Could it be that Earth started out with much more N2 in its atmosphere and that what we have today is the small bit left over after substantial impact erosion? Or could it be that the mass of impactors was not in fact sufficient to deplete Earth’s atmosphere and that the tenuous Martian atmosphere has some other explanation? Perhaps it never generated a dense atmosphere, because it never received enough oxygen-bearing material to turn carbon into carbonate and CO2. Perhaps Mars lost its atmosphere in a chance giant impact which got rid of Martian N2, whereas Earth’s Moon-forming impact was not big enough to get rid of all the N2. If a giant impact removed most of the primordial N2 on Mars, then perhaps the rest could have been lost by non-thermal escape and solar wind erosion. But if Mars lost its atmosphere too early then it becomes hard to account for the large, extensive water-carved channels on Mars, some of which suggest persistence of active surface hydrology up to 3.5 billion years ago, with episodic recurrence of less extensive river networks extending billions of years later. More precise dating of these hydrological features, which will come ultimately with sample return missions from Mars, will go far to help resolve these puzzles. Still, the Mystery of the Missing Martian Atmosphere is likely to remain one of the Big Questions for a long while to come.
> How do giant impacts fit into the picture? Giant impacts do not come in a continuous stream, but lunar to Mars-sized bodies are common enough in the late stages of planetary formation that it is likely that one or more giant impact occurs before the planet attains its final size. The very existence of the Moon provides evidence that Earth experienced a giant impact, while the anomalous retrograde rotation of Venus has been taken as evidence that a giant impact occurred there as well. The Martian crust exhibits a striking dichotomy between rugged thick-crusted and heavily cratered southern hemisphere highlands and smoother, thinner northern hemisphere lowlands; this has sometimes been taken as having resulted from a giant impact, though one smaller in relative scale than Earth’s Moon-forming impact. A single giant impact can blow off an entire atmosphere, but this is not inevitable; depending on the energy of the impactor, there can be a substantial proportion of the original atmosphere left. The issues in reconciling the histories of Earth and Mars are essentially the same as for impact erosion at the Sweep stage: how do we account for the story of N2 on Earth (or Venus, for that matter)? And how are we to account for the hydrology of Early Mars if a giant impact blew off the primordial Martian atmosphere but the planet was unable to regenerate a new CO2 atmosphere by outgassing? | [
"According to scientists, Mars exists on the outer edge of the habitable zone, a region of the Solar System where liquid water on the surface may be supported if concentrated greenhouse gases could increase the atmospheric pressure. The lack of both a magnetic field and geologic activity on Mars may be a result of ... |
the american game-show 'jeopardy' | Standard quiz/trivia show. The players' scores are in "jeopardy" throughout because wrong answers subtract from their total. Another gimmick is that the clues are provided in the form of a statement and the participants have to respond in the form of a question.
3 rounds: Jeopardy, Double Jeopardy, and Final Jeopardy
Jeopardy has 6 categories of 5 questions each (ranging from $200 to $1000).
Example:
Player - I'll take Websites for $400, Alex.
Alex Trebek - It's a place where user-submitted links are voted up or down by the rest of the users.
Player - *rings in* What is reddit?
Failing to phrase your response as a question counts as incorrect, but you have a few seconds to correct your mistake if you forgot.
Double Jeopardy is the same, but the values are doubled (ranging from $400 to $2000 per question/answer).
The first two rounds have Daily Doubles as well (one in the first round, two in the second). When selecting a clue, the player gets a special clue just for them (the other players can't ring in), and they get to wager how much they want to earn/lose on the result. So making something a "true Daily Double" means betting your entire score.
Final Jeopardy is like a Daily Double for all players. The category is given, players get to decide how much they want to bet on a single question, then they hear the clue and have 30 seconds to write down their response.
*edit* Daily Doubles are hidden, so there's no way to know which clue is going to be one. They tend to be in the lower half (i.e. higher-scoring clues) of the board. | [
"Jeopardy! is an American media franchise that began with a television quiz show created by Merv Griffin, in which contestants are presented with clues in the form of answers, and must phrase their responses in the form of a question. Over the years, the show has expanded its brand beyond television and been licens... |
what is the premise of the 'shadow' that carl jung wrote about? | The idea is that we look at ourselves in a good light, and this casts a shadow that hides from us our true selves.
He believed that we had to face that shadow in our journey to self realization. Facing that shadow means recognizing that all the worst parts of humanity are in you too. If you were born in Nazi Germany to a German family, there is a good chance you would have been a Nazi. You wouldn't have had some moral epiphany and rallied against your people, you would likely have taken part in the Holocaust.
For a better look at that idea. What it takes for a normal person, you or me, to turn into that kind of a monster, read Ordinary Men. | [
"Carl Jung stated the shadow to be the unknown dark side of the personality. According to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to psychological projection, in which a perceived personal inferiority is recognized as a perceived moral deficiency in someone else. Jung writes that if these pr... |
how can the suns rays make you feel mentally/psychologically better? | Mostly your brain (pineal gland) produces two kinds of "drugs" (hormones): one for the day (serotonin) and one for the night (melatonin). This is part of your inner clock. Serotonin keeps you awake and melatonin makes you sleepy. Light, specially sunlight, stops the production of melatonin. So if you would stay in dark places without (sun)light over a long period of time, the levels of melatonin would be very high and you would be, more or less, feeling sleepy all the time. When the balance of serotonin and melatonin in your body is messed up, your inner clock is also messed up. This leads to e.g. sleep disorders, depressions and some other stuff that isn't very healthy either.
| [
"If the Sun is strong and favourably placed the soul will feel strong, one may make efforts for self-realisation, live splendidly, travel far and wide, engage in strife or hostility that yields good dividend, rise in position and status, gains through trading, and benefits from father or father will benefit. If the... |
how can people take old videos and upscale them to 4k? | That video was recorded in 1985 on film from my understanding.
Film itself has a resolution way beyond 4K depending on the grain size. As long as the film is preserved, it can be re-scanned using a higher resolution scanner.
We will probably get an 8K cut in a few years. | [
"On December 25, 2013, YouTube added a \"2160p 4K\" option to its videoplayer. Previously, a visitor had to select the \"original\" setting in the video quality menu to watch a video in 4K resolution. With the new setting, YouTube users can much more easily identify and play 4K videos.\n",
"Videos can be viewed b... |
why does water and air feel different at the same temp? full question below. | Transmission of energy. Water holds and absorbs tremendously more energy than air, that's why it takes so much more airflow volume to create the same cooling effect as water. | [
"If formula_7, formula_8 is positive though generally much smaller than formula_4. Because water is much more dense than air, the displacement of water by air from a surface gravity wave feels nearly the full force of gravity (formula_10). The displacement of the thermocline of a lake, which separates warmer surfac... |
The Great Arab Revolt | I'll try to answer your question, sorry if it doesn't satisfy you.
First, despite its name (and what was believed to be by Arab and Turkish nationalist historiography), there was no general "Arab Revolt" against the Ottoman Empire. Firstly, Husayn, the leader of the revolt, was not an Arab nationalist, and he did not adopt the ideology of Arabism. He was an ambitious dynast who used his Islamic status as a *sharif* and the *amir* of Mecca in an attempt to acquire a hereditary kingdom or principality for his family. He even stated that his objective was to free the caliph from the "atheistic" clutches of the CUP regime rather than overthrowing him. Second, Although clandestine support for the revolt existed in some parts of Syria, Husayn’s call failed to generate any organized or widespread response in the Arabic-speaking provinces. Many Arab public figures even accused Husayn of being a traitor and condemned his actions as dividing the Ottoman-Islamic Empire at a time when unity was crucial. Rather than a popular uprising against the Ottoman Empire, the Arab Revolt was a more narrowly based enterprise relying on tribal levies from Arabia and dominated by the Hashemite family. Huge subversion among Arabs in the Ottoman army as had been expected by the British Arab Bureau never materialized, even after Sharif Hussein’s revolt in 1916. No Arab units of the Ottoman army came over to Hussein, and from British intelligence memorandum, many Arab soldiers continued to demonstrate loyalty not only to Islam but also to the Ottoman government. Except for a few thousand tribesmen, most Arabs remained loyal to the empire during the traumatic events of the times
In my knowledge, the Arab mobilization during the First World War was less researched, and the fragmentary evidence we have doesn't help. However, using a general calculation, the Ottoman armed forces would have comprised by 47% Turks and Anatolian Muslims, 37% Arabs, 8% Ottoman Greeks, 7% Armenians and 1% Jews. The motivation for the Arabs to join the Ottoman army varied.
Some enthusiastically joined, motivated with nationalist fervour or *jihad* propaganda. In Damascus, the population was opposed to Great Britain, Russia and France while the Muslim population of Palestine held anti-British feelings as well. With the onset of the war, propaganda and rumours filled the town that the army intended to invade Egypt and free it from the British rule. The propaganda succeeded in winning the wholehearted support of the Arab Muslims and soldiers, a few weeks before the expedition the enthusiasm and excitement of the people reached a ‘fever pitch’ in Jaffa. Parades and celebrations of all kinds in anticipation of the triumphal March into Egypt were taking place and the enmity against the Entente states was at the centre of the propaganda. Even Arabs that made bitter remarks against Germany for not helping the Ottomans during the war against Italy soon underwent a change and they came to realize that the Ottomans had taken up arms against Russia and that Russia was considered first and foremost the arch-enemy. Reports on German victories also had a powerful effect on them. Similar propaganda was directed at the soldiers who would invade Egypt since many of the Arab soldiers were not acquainted with the disciplined character of military life. To increase their enthusiasm, Cemal Pasha, the theater commander used both jihad propaganda and the argument that the Egyptians were ready to revolt against British rule. He had many Arab scholars preach to the Arab soldiers before and during the first attack against Egypt. These military employees strolled through the camps and delivered vehement speeches. Their orations were so influential among the common Arab soldiers that some had fits of hysteria due to the excited preaching.
On the other hand, some were also forcefully mobilized with no other choice. These forced conscripts had almost no option but to join the army. The alternative was often death by starvation. Moreover, the conscripts, isolated in their camp life, developed a critical distance from the normative ethics of their original communities when they moved to the margins of major cities like Alexandria and Cairo. Families also mourned the loss of their sons, who were the backbone of the family. They dodged conscription with hiding in villages, prepared hiding places in the houses, fields, caves, with Bedouin families or in other out-of-the way places. When apprehended, suspected draft evaders were usually convicted by military court and often sentenced to flogging. Many also mutilated themselves to avoid draft, but since the ultimate consequence of capture was often military service, applying effective deterrent measures was nearly impossible. Many also avoided draft by moving to Mecca and Medina, as the the cities were exempted from mobilization. Evidently, the number of young pilgrims to Mecca spiked during recruitment. For the less pious, two popular options for circumventing military service remained substitution (sending a personal replacement) and payment of forty to fifty liras, which get increasingly higher as the war progressed. For the non-Muslims, changing nationalities, fleeing abroad, or paying the individual exemption fee was the common course to avoid draft
**Sources:**
*A History of the Modern Middle East 6th Edition* by William Cleveland and Martin Burton
*The Ottoman Mobilization of Manpower in the First World War* by Mehmet Beşikçi
*A Land of Aching Hearts* by Leila Tarawi Faraz | [
"The Arab Revolt (, ; ) or Great Arab Revolt (, ) was a military uprising of Arab forces against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I. On the basis of the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence, an agreement between the British government and Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, the revolt was offic... |
A poor family living in the woods circa 1500; how did they find husbands and wives for their children? | The average woods-living family would not have been quite as isolated as the family in that movie. Remember that they were explicitly ostracized and thus unable to associate with society. But the average family would have had plenty of opportunities to meet new people.
While you did specify time and place, the answer is going to be much the same for any traditional, rural, Christian community. For the record, my specialty is in Italian society of the same period.
First, obviously, is church. Every Sunday, at least, they would have made the trip to the nearest one. There they would have gotten to know the other children who lived nearby and probably had their first flirtations.
Then there are dozens of holidays and festivals, both Christian and secular (i.e. Harvest, May Day), that would have brought families from the countryside down to the village centers. As opposed to church, these visits would have given young people the chance to run around and socialize with their peers with minimal adult supervision.
Finally, depending on your father's profession, you might accompany him to town on market days or business trips. This way you would meet his associates, friends, or business partners and possibly their children. If you don't manage to find someone on your own, there is a good chance your future spouse will be selected from this pool.
As for marriage, if you are a teenage girl around the age of the film's protagonist you generally have two options: you meet a boy and get your father's approval, or your parents set you up with someone and you approve or disapprove. Despite the common conception that the father's word was law, many parents would have been willing to consider their daughters' opinions. This is especially true in the lower classes, where the stakes of marriage were not as high. That is, while the daughter of a duke or rich merchant may have been basically sold off to forge family alliances, a farmer or fur trapper would have wanted little more than a son in law who was well-raised, polite, and had a promising job, or a daughter-in-law who was attractive, healthy, and well-mannered (i.e. obedient--hate to say it, but that's how people thought back then). Research has found that in the Early Modern Era, love marriages were much more common among the poor than the rich. | [
"Families of the woodsmen produced their own food through gardening and hunting, as well as their own clothing. In some cases, their sewing of intricate laces became well known outside the forest, resulting in additional family income. Because of their isolation from society in general, woodsmen and their families ... |
What is the largest molecule, and how is a single molecule defined (as opposed to an amount of a certain compound)? | My guess (depending on your definition) would be some sort of plastic, seeing as how they basically form long chains from repeating units (*monomers* forming *polymers*). For plastics, this size can either be defined as the number of individual units (monomers) incorporated into the chain, or by the weight of the entire chain.
To answer the second part of your question, the size of a single molecule is typically defined by the weight of that single molecule. The amount of a certain compound may also be defined through weight (X grams of table salt, or sodium chloride), but the most common unit would probably be x amount of [moles](_URL_0_).
FUN FACT: The largest protein (which is also a molecule, sometimes called biomolecule) is titin, which has the chemical formula: C^169723 H^270464 N^45688 O^52243 S^912 | [
"Usage of the term to describe large molecules varies among the disciplines. For example, while biology refers to macromolecules as the four large molecules comprising living things, in chemistry, the term may refer to aggregates of two or more molecules held together by intermolecular forces rather than covalent b... |
why does some movie theaters get to show a movie a day or two before it's actual release date? | They're called advanced screenings, and they have several purposes.
They're leveraged for publicity and marketing for many shows. A private screening for film critics means getting reviews out early. Including a few VIPs and well-connected people can build hype. A few people describing how they saw the show early and they loved it can help pump the excitement before the big launch.
They serve another useful purpose. They allow theaters to test that the movie is all present, that it is the correct movie, and that all the equipment is functioning normally before the big initial showing. Occasionally there are mistakes made, such as theaters being sent mislabeled reels or reels being incompatible with the viewing equipment. An advanced showing gives an opportunity to verify those things.
In some locations an advanced screening is required by law, since "blind sales" are prohibited. Somebody representing the theater must view it at least once to verify that they're receiving the thing they expected.
They can serve all the purposes above; the screening provides a teaser and advertising for the community, and it is a test of the equipment on a small scale, and it meets the terms of the law.
For some shows --- especially the shows of lower quality --- sometimes the advance showing is done privately, with no critics or private audiences except for the theater owner and only to satisfy the law and ensure the equipment works. | [
"This list charts films the 50 biggest worldwide openings. Since films do not open on Fridays in many markets, the 'opening' is taken to be the gross between the first day of release and the first Sunday following the movie's release. Figures prior to the year 2002 are not available. Country-by-country variations i... |
how are damages caused by disasters calculated and reported? how accurate should i expect them to be? | I have done damage calculations for FEMA for flooding in two scenarios:
While a flooding event is going on, we take live data from water gauges, run them through models, estimate the size of flood waters, then calculate the number of structures (data quality varies) that intersect with the estimated flood extent, and take the estimated flood level. We run this many times as the flooding event unfolds. We figure out how many homes are impacted by 1-2, 2.01 - 5, 5.01 - 8, and 8+ feet of water. Unfortunately, I don't get to see what happens after we ship the data but I am told that the data really helps to better direct resources. Later the points (often tens of thousands) are checked for accuracy by comparing the damage estimation to aerial photography.
After a flood event, (this is massively simplified) FEMA may supplement local communities work forces by sending building inspectors into the field. They spend about 15 minutes at each structure collecting the high water mark (the most important piece of data) and a few dozen characteristics of the building. It goes into software thay spits out a damage estimation. This goes to the local community who then uses it for permitting for reconstruction and whatever else. The structure owner has the opportunity to contest the determination (whether they think should have a higher or lower rating, it depends) with the local community.
The accuracy really depends in the data quality which is far from perfect but keeps getting better every year. | [
"Disasters take a variety of forms to include earthquakes, tsunamis or regular structure fires. That a disaster or emergency is not large scale in terms of population or acreage impacted or duration does not make it any less of a disaster for the people or area impacted and much can be learned about preparedness fr... |
how does social science work? | Social science is very much a soft science. It is a science, in that the Scientific Method is applied to try and find facts. However, there is an inherent, recognized difficulty in accurately measuring and testing in these fields.
Philosophy itself, while under the umbrella of social science, is not necessarily a science. In fact, science itself is a form of Philosophy. Science is a set of rules and ideas that are used to evaluate the world around you. How do we then evaluate philosophy? Through the use of logic. Logic is probably the one Philosophy that is agreed on. Without it, all analysis becomes impossible.
The "proof" of a Philosophy is that it is logically consistent and has supporting evidence for its validity. As was mentioned earlier though, there are inherent problems in accurately gathering and analyzing evidence. The human brain is INSANELY complex. We understand some of the chemical reactions, but know one really knows how the brain does what it does or thinks what it thinks. Even without that, you need to filter out cultural and societal biases and deal with the reality of humans being dishonest about their thoughts and actions.
Going back to Social Science as a whole, some of it is well researched, and some of it is pure drivel. The best thing to do is go back to the original studies and experiments done. You will be surprised to see that many of "truths" about humanity are supported by poorly done studies with comically small sample sizes. | [
"Social science – study of the social world constructed between humans. The social sciences usually limit themselves to an anthropomorphically centric view of these interactions with minimal emphasis on the inadvertent impact of social human behavior on the external environment (physical, biological, ecological, et... |
How far has the crown gone through the royal family tree to find the closest living relative? | Depends how you look at the War of the Roses. In terms of the most distantly related successor, Henry VII was the third cousin once removed of Richard III. However, this took place in the Wars of the Roses when there were often several competing claims, and Henry claimed that Richard was never the rightful king in the first place (though Henry was still only the second cousin of the man he claimed was his rightful predecessor - Henry VI).
Scotland had a similar case in the late 13th/early 14th centuries where the main royal line collapsed and the Bruce and Balliol families (both of whom were only distantly related to the previous king) both claimed the throne and fought each other for it.
In the times of more clearly defined rules, Anne and George I were second cousins.
If you're looking for a case of a really large "distance" between monarchs, then look at France rather than Britain. Britain has a male-preference primogeniture succession law, which means that while men come first, women do count in the line of succession. France historically had what's called Salic Law, meaning only male ancestry counts. This means they've often had to go a longer way to pass on the crown. The biggest example of this was Henry IV, who was a *ninth* cousin once removed from his predecessor Henry III; their closest common male-line ancestor had died over 300 years before. | [
"The following is a simplified family tree of the English and British monarchs. For a more detailed chart see: English monarchs family tree (from Alfred the Great till Queen Elizabeth I); and the British monarchs' family tree for the period from Elizabeth's successor, James I, until the present day. For kings befor... |
Did the 'Cult of the Feathered Serpent' play a significant role in the end of Mayan civilization? | No, not really.
The "Feathered Serpent Cult" is a name that archaeologists and iconographers have given to a pan-Mesoamerican explosion of imagery associated with Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan dating to the Epiclassic period (around the time of the Classic Maya collapse). It appears to be a larger religious movement associated with sacrifice, the ballgame, and the nobility. It's most prominent in Central Mexican sites like Tula and among the cultures of the Gulf Coast such as the Totonac city of El Tajin. Some time during the Early Postclassic a group of people from the Gulf Coast (Putun and Itza peoples, specifically) migrated into the Northern Yucatan and created a kind of hybridized culture with the Maya who were living there. At this time cities like Chichen Itza begin to show an increased focus on Kukulkan and ballgames in imagery.
Although it's tempting to see the Feathered Serpent Cult as a kind of Mesoamerican *opus dei*, that's not really accurate. I'm not even sure the word "cult" is a fairly accurate descriptor. Feathered Serpent Tradition might be better. Here's Susan Toby Evans (2008:386) discussing this cultural shift:
> Turning to the central Yucatan Peninsula, the motivations for the intrusion of Central Mexican stylistic motifs are more difficult to recover. Large-scale migration seems unlikely. Religious proselytization, in the form of an emphasis upon Central Mexican belief systems, may have been an important factor, but seems secondary to both military conquest and securing trade routes.
This had virtually nothing to do with the collapse of Classic Maya centers, except that it happened at about the same point in time. The Maya "collapse" was fairly localized. The densely populated southern lowlands had a major demographic collapse, but the Northen Yucatan (where the Feathered Serpent "Cult" took hold) was largely not affected other than in the loss of trading partners.
* Evans, Susan Toby. 2008 *Ancient Mexico and Central America: Archaeology and Culture History* 2nd edition. Thames and Hudson. | [
"During the epi-classic period, a dramatic spread of feathered serpent iconography is evidenced throughout Mesoamerica, and during this period begins to figure prominently at sites such as Chichén Itzá, El Tajín, and throughout the Maya area. Colonial documentary sources from the Maya area frequently speak of the a... |
why, despite the various laws against it, is vigilantism wrong? | Per the Constitution, accused criminals have a lot of rights. They need to be investigated by the police, tried by the DA, represented by a lawyer, found guilty by a jury, and sentenced by a judge. There's a lot of people involved in that, who should be making sure everyone else is doing their job correctly, and affording the accused their civil rights.
With vigilantism, you're removing the whole criminal justice process, and basically deciding guilt and punishment based on one person's whim. | [
"Antifragility is a property of systems that increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. It is a concept developed by Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, \"Antifragile\", and in technical papers. As Taleb explains in his book... |
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