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Can all of chemistry be explained/modeled by physics? | Yes, that's true. All theoretical chemistry is based off physics, and has been since around the 1920's. Virtually all the models and descriptions and 'rules' you learn in chemistry have rigorous physical justifications, even if chemists themselves don't necessarily know about them.
The first description of chemical bonding in terms of quantum mechanics (the first description that can be considered reasonably correct, physically) was Heitler and London's 1927 paper _"Wechselwirkung neutraler Atome und homöopolare Bindung nach der Quantenmechanik"_, which is quite early considering that the Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics had only been 'invented' in the previous year. By the late 1930's, Pauling, Slater, Mulliken and Hund had finished up the broad strokes of Valence-Bond theory and Molecular-Orbital theory, the two main qualitative models of chemical bonding that chemists use.
By 1929, Paul Dirac wrote that "The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known", which has pretty much been generally-agreed-upon since.
But since the equations of quantum mechanics are quite difficult to solve (even with a computer), it's been slow progress to actually calculate _quantitatively_ accurate results from quantum mechanics. We're limited in the size of the things we can calculate, and the accuracy.
But essentially all chemical modeling is based on physics.
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"Chemistry focuses on how substances interact with each other and with energy (for example heat and light). The study of change of matter (chemical reactions) and synthesis lies at the heart of chemistry, and gives rise to concepts such as organic functional groups and rate laws for chemical reactions. Chemistry al... |
In Ancient Rome, did Gladiators pick on Scholars and call them a Roman equivalent of 'nerds'? | No, for most of the empire the nerds held the political power.
Success in Roman politics depended upon education and connections. You had to know the right people, and you met them while attending elite schools that trained you in the rhetorical skills, philosophical knowledge, and deportment necessary to move in elite circles in the Greco-Roman world. This education - *paideia*, in Greek - started with memorization of Homer (or Vergil) and, if completed, was basically a graduate degree in literature and/or philosophy. It required significant expense and years of training to complete. But without it, it was hard to be taken seriously by the ruling elites.
By the third century, the army was playing a central role in selecting the emperor (in many cases, by deposing the sitting emperor), and it was possible for an uneducated military general to make his way to the top. But these new men struggled to win acceptance from the established senatorial aristocracy, and usually didn't live long before being assassinated and replaced. Education gave you connections and taught you how to get along with the rich and powerful; without it, it was difficult to maintain a powerful position in the heartland of the empire.
Over time, this created something of a cultural divide between educated urban elites and the military families which rose to prominence on the empire's frontiers. Philip von Rummel has argued that many of the fifth-century texts complaining about 'barbarians' are actually talking about these Roman military men who gained power in the army on the frontiers, and whose lack of education earned them harsh criticism from the old, wealthy elites in Rome and other urban centers of power.
It was only with the division of the western empire into smaller kingdoms ruled by these military generals (in the fifth century) that the 'nerds' finally lost power to the less educated military strongmen.
If you want to read more, I'd recommend P. Brown, *Power and Persuasion* - a short and well-written book on the importance of education in Roman politics and power. | [
"\"Scultimidonus\" (\"asshole-bestower\") was rare and \"florid\" slang that appears in a fragment from the early Roman satirist Lucilius. It is glossed as \"Those who bestow for free their \"scultima\", that is, their anal orifice, which is called the \"scultima\" as if from the inner parts of whores\" (\"scortoru... |
Do dogs know our faces or do they use our scent to differentiate between us? | Disclaimer: My research is at the undergraduate level, and has to do with materials science and crystallography, and I had like, two biology and two biochem classes, so this is very, very, very much not my field at all.
[Discrimination of human and dog faces and inversion responses in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris).](_URL_0_)
[Reading Faces: Differential Lateral Gaze Bias in Processing Canine and Human Facial Expressions in Dogs and 4-Year-Old Children](_URL_1_)
[Dogs’ attention towards humans depends on their relationship, not only on social familiarity](_URL_2_)
You should be able to take a look at the abstracts from those links without institutional affiliation/log in, but in sum; dogs not only recognize human's faces, but they use this information to learn about the emotions and situation responses of humans, and the importance they give to that depends on their relationship to the human in question.
They know who were are (or can learn that), what our deal is, and know whether they should care or not and how much.
Again: not an animal behavioral scientist or biologist with lots of comparative/mammalian evolutionary training, *but*; this doesn't sound unreasonable or unexpected to me.
Dogs are variously thought to have originated as a clearly domesticated species somewhere between 15 to 30 thousand years in our past.
For comparison, the genes for blue eyed individuals probably came about in the Neolithic revolution - - - *six* to *ten* thousand years ago.
[There's a reasonably large body of evidence](_URL_3_) elucidating how our genomes evolved together as well.
So, that they would as domesticated social animals evolving along side humans be capable of being part of our society insofar as they can recognize faces and look where we're pointing and know when we're feeling sad or very angry or happy, etc. seems about right!
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"Primarily, dogs use their sense of smell, to find and follow a track. Dogs have a highly sensitive olfactory system superior to humans, and are able to discriminate between different humans' scents. Moreover, dogs are also able to use visual cues to follow a track.\n",
"Dogs have an olfactory sense 40 times more... |
the difference between a url, urn, and uri | The simplest explanation starts by categorizing: The first thing you should know is that an URL or a URN are **both** URIs.
An [**URI** (Uniform Resource Identifier)](_URL_3_), is a way to identify some type of resource on the Internet, they are handled by browsers and other network capable applications.
So the two types are the [**URL** (Uniform Resource Locator)](_URL_2_) which is the one you come across everywhere on the Internet.
It's divided into:
scheme://domain:port/path?query_string#fragment_id
You can see these parts explanation on the wikipedia link above. But you should recognize the format already...
And the [**URN** (Uniform Resource Name)](_URL_0_) which is a way to link to a particular item in a category. The examples seen on wikipedia you might recognize are the [ISBN](_URL_4_) (books) and [ISAN](_URL_1_) (audiovisuals).
I actually haven't seen these being used, which is a damn shame because they intended to be location independent. But what we usually see are the same ISBNs or ISANs identifier keys used as parts of the query string in URLs to some online retailer...
Hope that's clear enough kid :) | [
"Ura contains extensive use of morphemes in terms of pluralizing nouns and pronouns, producing prefixes which derive nouns from verbs, setting locations for nouns, portraying positive or negative connotations, and compounding nouns with other nouns, adjective, or verbs. For example, attaching the suffix ‘’-ye’’ to ... |
What DID "Game of Thrones" get right? | Game of Thrones is a work of fiction and should be treated as such. If you have a question about the historical accuracy of *historical fiction* (e.g. 'How accurate is the Sharpe series of books?' 'How accurate is Stanley Kubrick's portrayal of 18th century Ireland in 'Barry Lyndon'?') you are more than welcome to ask. :) | [
"\"Game of Thrones\" is an American fantasy drama television series created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. The series is based on George R. R. Martin's series of fantasy novels, \"A Song of Ice and Fire\". The series takes place on the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos, and chronicles the power struggle... |
credit default swaps | So ShittyBank offers loans to people buying homes (mortgages.) The bank writes you a mortgage, buys your home for you and lets you live there as long as you make monthly payments to pay off the loan. ShittyBank does this hundreds of thousands of times all over the country.
Now ShittyBank turns around and says "hey, we've got all these mortgages providing a stream of income. Anyone wanna buy a piece of them? If you buy a piece of them, you'll get a portion of all the payments made on them for the next 30-45 years." The bank is selling "collateralized debt obligations" or CDOs--huge bundles of active mortgages, organized into tiers according to the creditworthiness of the person paying off the mortgage. You buy a CDO, and you get a piece of the payments for every mortgage contained in that CDO.
The problem is, ShittyBank now has to pay anyone who purchased its CDOs, even if the people holding the original mortgages fail to pay. The bank doesn't want to be left holding the bag if a bunch of people decide to stop paying their mortgages.
So the bank decides to get some insurance. It goes to an insurance company--let's say, AIG. AIG says "pay us a little fee, and if your mortgage borrowers default on their loans, we'll step in and keep paying out to those who bought CDOs with those loans in them." This is a *credit default swap.*
Make sense? | [
"Credit defaults swaps (CDS) are insurance contracts, typically used to protect bondholders from the risk of default, called credit risk. As the financial health of banks and other institutions deteriorated due to losses related to mortgages, the likelihood that those providing the insurance would have to pay their... |
Were there major tensions between the different Jewish groups that came to Israel? | Yes, from what I gather after talking to my Hebrew teacher and my Grandfather there was a lot of tension (and there still is) between European Jews how see Israel as a European State in the Mid-east and the Jews from the Levant, North Africa and Persia who see Israel as a modern Middle Eastern state. It comes out in little petty ways like the European Jew would use Arabic curse words because it was a "dirty" language and because Hebrew has Curse words (for the record it does) and for the longest time the Israeli currency was named after the old Italian currency. In addition there were groups in Israel who were not happy about the Ethiopian Jews moving to Israel and some groups did not see them as real Jews. | [
"During the first decades of Israel as a state, strong cultural conflict was going on between Mizrahi, Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews (mainly east European Ashkenazim). The roots of this conflict, which still exists to a much smaller extent in present-day Israeli society, stems from the many cultural differences betw... |
what factors contribute to cultures advancing at different rates? | Cultures advance for two reasons, because they have to and because they can.
Cultures have to advance when they are facing a threat. Common threats include another nation attacking you, a new disease, or localized climate change.
Cultures can advance when they can spend time doing thing other than just surviving. This is usually caused by access to food that allows for less farmers to feed more people.
Some cultures advance faster than others because they have the right combination of outside threats, and the ability to not be destroyed by those outside threats.
If you are interested in digging a little deeper, check out [CGP Gray's Americapox](_URL_0_). If you want to go even deeper than that, check out [Jared Diamond's *Guns, Germs, and Steel](_URL_1_) | [
"Cultural context can also shift and evolve. For instance, a study has argued that both Japan and Finland (high-context cultures) are becoming lower-context with the increased influence of Western European and United States culture.\n",
"Yu Xintian noted two contrary trends in culture due to economic globalizatio... |
How come the Iberia in the caucuses and the Iberian peninsula share the same name in spite of being thousands of miles apart at opposite ends of the Roman empire? | Follow up question: I often see other names refer to different areas, such as Albania (modern Albania, and Caucasian Albania) and Galicia (Easter Europe and Iberian), Is there a reason to name those areas with similar names? | [
"After the conquest of the peninsula (25–20 BCE), Augustus divided it into the southwestern Hispania Baetica and the western Hispania Lusitania, the latter including the territories of the Celtic tribes known as the Astures (in Asturia) and the Gallaeci (in Gallaecia). In 27 BCE, the Emperor Augustus made a smaller... |
why do scientists think hubble constant (a characteristic of the universe expansion rate) is actually a constant? | When you look farther away you also look back in time, so when you detect light that has been travelling for 10 billion years from a distant quasar you're also detecting the results of whatever happened to it during that time.
The amount of redshift (energy loss due to the expansion of space while it was in flight) we see in these ancient photons suggests that the rate of local expansion was the same at all times and at all places while the light was traveling.
If the expansion *wasn't* constant over time or location, you would see light unexpectedly under/over shifted compared to its age and point of origin. | [
"The Hubble parameter is not thought to be constant through time. There are dynamical forces acting on the particles in the universe which affect the expansion rate. It was earlier expected that the Hubble parameter would be decreasing as time went on due to the influence of gravitational interactions in the univer... |
how was nyc able to build and afford their entire subway system over the past 100+ years, but the 2nd ave line keeps running into budget issues and delays? | I would say the construction costs have soared. Wages are high for construction workers compared to the past. An immigrant was willing to work for low wages. Now there are unions, OSHA, overtime rules, etc. | [
"Since the late 20th century, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has started several projects to maintain and improve the New York City Subway. Some of these projects, such as subway line automation, proposed platform screen doors, the FASTRACK maintenance program, and infrastructural improvements proposed i... |
Fiction makes such a big deal of British, US and Soviet spies. In the end, how important were they really in ending (or surviving) the Cold War? | No replies yet so I'll try to offer something.
There is a lot of uncertainty when exploring what-if scenarios. You can't be sure what may have happened without the efforts of the spies involved. The best example I can give of spies potentially contributing to the peaceful resolution of the Cold War might be the Soviet spies in the Manhattan Project. This may seem counter intuitive, but I'll try to make the case.
Combined, Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, and David Greenglass provided Soviet intelligence with a wealth of valuable information from the Manhattan Project, which likely sped up the Soviet development of nuclear weapons significantly (although by how long is hard to say).
The foundations of the cold war were in place even before WWII had ended, but it was the period from 1946-1949 that really cemented the standoff and lead American policy makers to give up on cooperative engagement. Also during this time the US had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Despite this, the US did not yet have a large enough nuclear arsenal to be confident that it would be decisive in a war with the Soviet Union. It would not be long though before the US had amassed a huge arsenal. However, when the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb in 1949, the US nuclear monopoly ended, as did any real risk of the US using its nuclear weapons to push the Soviets back.
Although the two great powers came very close to the brink of Armageddon a few times, mutually assured destruction effectively made nukes useless in practice, and the stability of mutually assured destruction lasted throughout the remainder of the Cold War. The success of the Soviet spy efforts around the Manhattan Project brought that stability about faster, and there is no telling what could have happened in an alternative history where the US nuclear monopoly lasted another year or two.
Of course, while the Soviet Union's shiny new nukes kept both powers at arm's length, by restraining the US nuclear threat, it also opened the door for conventional warfare. It wasn't long after that North Korea, with the blessing of Stalin, invaded the South. | [
"Much spy fiction was adapted as spy films in the 1960s, ranging from the fantastical James Bond series to the realistic \"The Spy Who Came in from the Cold\" (1965), and the hybrid \"The Quiller Memorandum\" (1966). While Hamilton's Matt Helm novels were adult and well written, their cinematic interpretations were... |
how do marketers get so much data on me? | They check the listings in the county tax assessors office, which lists dates of sales, as well as amounts and names. It's also more than possible that the realtor sold your data. | [
"BULLET::::5. Market data and miscellany — From market research, who would in most cases act as a source for this information. His sources of data, however, assume the resources of a very large organization. In most organizations they would be obtained from a much smaller set of people (and not a few of them would ... |
how do mom porcupines and hedgehogs give birth without the babies' spines causing any harm to the mother's insides? | A porcupine's quills are hair, not stiff rods. When they give birth, the quills are soft and wet. That is also why the quills can be replaced constantly. | [
"Gestation lasts thirty to forty days, and the mother gives birth in a well-lined nest cavity, such as an abandoned rodent burrow. The young are covered in a thin membrane to protect the mother from their already present spines, though it takes them some time to gain control over the muscles that move them. At birt... |
How excentric is the solar system's orbit around the gravitational center of the milky way? | The words you are looking for are apogalacticon and perigalaticon.
The eccentricity of the sun's orbit about Sagittarius A\\\*, (the center of the Milky Way galaxy) is 1.07, which leads to a difference of about 15% between apo- and peri- galacticon. This leads to the two points being about 27,0000 and 31,0000 light years away from the center point. | [
"However, there are a number of complications. The simple derivation above assumed that both the Sun and the object in question are traveling on circular orbits about the Galactic center. This is not true for the Sun (the Sun's velocity relative to the local standard of rest is approximately 13.4 km/s), and not nec... |
the oil business | Let's say you have a lemonade stand. You charge a thousand dollars per lemonade, and since it's really hot, you make a million dollars a day.
Well, obviously, that can't last. Someone else will open up a lemonade stand and try to take your business away by only charging $750. Pretty soon there are so many lemonade stands that lemonade is selling for $1 and nobody makes crazy money anymore.
But that's because anyone can make lemonade.
If lemonade were only found in certain spots in the ground, and you owned a lemonade well and nobody else did, you could keep selling lemonade at $1000 per cup and nobody could undercut you because they wouldn't have access to the well.
That's how oil works; once you've found it, it's no work at all to pump and sell it (as BP showed us in the gulf, the stuff pumps itself). And you can sell it for a high price because, while other people might be happy to sell oil much cheaper, they can't because they don't own the wells. | [
"OIL is engaged in the business of exploration, development and production of crude oil and natural gas, transportation of crude oil and production of liquid petroleum gas. The company's history spans the discovery of crude oil in the far east of India at Digboi, Assam in 1889 to its present status as a fully integ... |
why is it that bands/singers can have wildly successful careers sometimes spanning decades, dozens of albums, and countless recorded tracks, yet only have those 3 or 4 songs that really get any airplay/recognition? | Short answer, program managers are lazy. It's easy to stick with the 'classics'. It's safe.
Also if a band is around long enough they may not fit the style of the station with their new/old stuff. Classic rock stations are going to play the hell out of 60/70 era Rolling Stones, but wont touch anything they have released in the last 2 decades as it diesnt fit their format. | [
"BULLET::::- There are several well-known bands that have endured for decades – bands that are promoted and perceived to be continuations of the original. These types of bands are analogous to franchises, except, instead of multiple bands touring under the same name, only one band performs, but with a turnover of m... |
how does bracing yourself for an impact actually make the impact worse? | Because your muscles tense up and become rigid and have no "give" at that point. If you don't know it's coming, you will be loose and more flexible which would help with NOT further jarring the flexed muscle. | [
"To assume a brace or crash position is an instruction that can be given to prepare for a crash, such as on an aircraft; the instruction to 'brace for impact!' or 'brace! brace!' is often given if the aircraft must make an emergency landing on land or water. There are many different ways to adopt the brace position... |
Is there a speed a cell phone can go to not receive wifi or cell signal anymore? | The frequency bands for both Wi-Fi and LTE are both reasonably narrow, so you will hit a point where the waves for the node you are trying to connect to are red or blue shifted to the point where your device will not be able to communicate on them
A long time before you get to that point, you will not be in range of the access point long enough for your device to negotiate a network connection | [
"Dial-up connections usually have latency as high as 150 ms or even more; this is longer than for many forms of broadband, such as cable or DSL, but typically less than satellite connections. Longer latency can make video conferencing and online gaming difficult, if not impossible. An increasing amount of Internet ... |
Is there any point during Operation Barbarossa that Axis victory over the USSR was obtainable? | Not really, no. The only way the Germans could have scored a victory was to have Russia negotiate for peace after taking Moscow, which the Soviet regime had little intention of doing as it was a fight for the very survival of the Russian nation and Stalin did not want to appear so weak abroad. There was still a massive heavily populated country after Moscow, and the Germans would have had to move further and further East and taken cities like Omsk, Yekaterinburg, Ulfa, Kazan, Novosibirsk, and so on. Given that their supply lines were already at the breaking point before they reached Moscow, this was not an achievable objective, especially with American involvement in the war right around the corner. The entire thing was a fools errand. | [
"On 22 June 1941, contravening the Hitler–Stalin Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, over 3 million Axis troops attacked the Soviet Union. This offensive (codenamed Operation Barbarossa) was intended to destroy the Soviet Union and seize its natural resources for subsequent aggression against the Western powers. The invas... |
Do animals actually understand each other's calls like humans understand speech? | Like humans? Yes, maybe. We think dolphins actually have a complex language with syntax. There is evidence that they even each have individual names that they get from their mother's name. But we haven't made much headway in learning their language if it's there.
Other animals certainly recognize conspecific calls. Song birds find mates using their songs, so wouldn't be very successful at reproducing if they didn't recognize each other. Other animals have other forms of complex communication. Vervet monkeys have predator calls that identify the type of predator they see. There is a call for 'eagle' that will tell all of the other monkeys to look up and maybe duck, a call for 'leopard' will let the group know that they should run into a tree, and the call for 'snake' tells everyone to look down. Other monkeys have similarly different calls for different predators. Most animal mothers will also recognize their own offspring calls and distinguish them from the other young in the group.
Whales will recognize each other's calls from far off. Because whale songs travel in water they can be heard up to 3,000 kms. from the source. One whale, called the 52 Hz whale, has for decades been singing in a vocal range that's too high-pitched and is undetectable by other whales, so this lonesome whale cannot elicit a response from other whales.
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"If these animals have a language it is restricted to a very few sounds of a general emotional signification. Articulate speech they have none and communication with one another is accomplished by vocal sounds to no greater extent than it is by dogs, with a growl, a whine, or a bark. They are, however, capable to a... |
Is there any credence to the marketing claim that a better
bed provides a "better night's sleep"? | I think you partly answered your own question with the "springs" comment. Better just means that you are able to experience enough deep sleep at night. Things that are uncomfortable, painful, noisy, etc rouse you from this deep sleep. Since there are distinct stages of sleep, you spend more time getting back into deep sleep and less actually experiencing it. | [
"Numerous studies have also shown that media consumption has a significant association with poor sleep quality. Television and computer game exposure affect children's sleep and deteriorate verbal cognitive performance.\n",
"Relyon are a bed and mattress company claiming to have 'the best beds in the world'. Orig... |
how does the u.s. government owe money to itself? | The Federal Government "borrows" money from the people by issuing Federal Bonds and printing more cash, which devalues whatever money you have in your pocket.
Hypothetical situation. 2017 budget rolls around, we have a $1 trillion deficit. The Fed issues $1 trillion in bonds and prints that much in cash. If there's $100 trillion dollars in circulation, printing that $1T just devalued your dollar by 1%.
This is a result of the official abolishment of the gold standard in 1971
| [
"The national debt fell into three categories after the American Revolution. The first was the $12 million owed to foreigners, mostly money borrowed from France. There was general agreement to pay the foreign debts at full value. The national government owed $40 million and state governments owed $25 million to Ame... |
the sufi sect of islam. | I won't be able to go into much detail on account of illiteracy, but just for starters:
Sufiism is not as much a 'sect' of Islam as a way of thinking. It is kind of an 'approach' to how to treat the philosophies of your sect (be it sunni or shia or whatever). That said, it is very distinct and 'almost' a sect because it differs in some basic aspects and is very prominent in those differences.
The main point of Sunniism is the idea that nearness to Allah is not restricted to the traditional activity-reward cycle of other sects. Sunniism attaches a very philosophical and non-physical domension, wherein sufis can be closer to Allah and can be 'at one' with Allah's universe and his creations by relishing the spiritual world and shunning the physical world.
The primary realization of a sufi is of the Oneness of Allah, which causes him to understand the falseness or temporary-ness of everything else, including himself. Thus, as a result, there is no one and nothing, except the Divine.
They are not like monks, as in they don't live in secluded groups, but instead it is a lonely journey for whcih they might or might not be physically aloof, but mentally should be.
I'm not aware of any Nomadic rituals or religious requirements of sufis. There was a mass exodus of such people from Turkey, Egypt and Iran in the first half of the 20th century due to these countries banning Sufiism outright (Turkey formally, Iran & Egypt informally). The sufis then, naturally, gravitated towards the Arabian peninsula and Middle East, but were ostracized by the strict 2+2=4 ideas of Wahabism and further moved on. They largely reside now in Africa and the Indian subcontinent.
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"Sufism is Islam's mystical-ascetic dimension and is represented by schools or orders known as \"Tasawwufī-Ṭarīqah.\" It is seen as that aspect of Islamic teaching that deals with the purification of inner self. By focusing on the more spiritual aspects of religion, Sufis strive to obtain direct experience of God b... |
Is the common cold or flu transmissible through contact with the infected person's blood? | Think this came up in one of my lectures the other week; I believe it would be *possible* but unlikely since the virus only replicates in certain cells (in the case of influenza in the cells of the upper respiratory tract, particularly the nose), and is therefore only present in large quantities at those locations. It is possible that virus particle(s) could end up in the circulatory system, but the chances of enough of them coming into contact with another person's blood, and then that blood reaching their nose without the viruses being mopped up somewhere along the line is pretty low. | [
"Direct human-to-human transmission initially was believed to be caused only by occupational exposure, such as in a laboratory setting, or conjunctive exposure to infected blood. The US outbreak identified additional transmission methods through blood transfusion, organ transplant, intrauterine exposure, and breast... |
how/why does our brain mishear lyrics? | Because rappers need to demonstrate better diction!
Dammnit, i love hip hop but if i hear another rapper garble nonsense into my headphones im gonna lose it. | [
"Neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of \"Musicophilia: Tales of music and the Brain\", studied neurological oddities in people, trying to understand how the brain works. He concluded that people with some type of frontal lobe damage often “produced not only severe difficulties with expressive language (aphasia) but a... |
what is *first run syndication*, how does it work, and how is it different from standard *broadcast syndication* | A first-run syndication show is one that is sold to individual local TV stations instead of to a national network. The show won't be available in all regions and will play at different times in different cities.
A TV station has certain hours of the day when they decide locally what programs to air, and certain hours in which they have to carry the programs of the national network. In the US an NBC affiliate will have to air the Today Show in the morning, a couple of midday soap operas, NBC Nightly News, and then NBC's primetime shows in the evening. (I'm sure I'm overlooking some programs, but you get the idea.) In between those slots, the local station decides for themselves what goes out, and it'll be different from one city to the next.
Shows like Judge Judy and Ellen aren't acquired through the national network. The local TV station buys the rights to those shows directly from the producers of the show. I don't think people are making fiction syndicated shows like they used to now that there are a bazillion cable networks and five national broadcast networks to distribute TV shows, but some of the iconic TV shows of the 80's and 90's were first-run syndicated shows, like Baywatch and Star Trek: The Next Generation. No national network carried them. They were spread around the country by hundreds of individual contracts with local stations instead of one big contract with a national network.
When I was a kid in the early 80's, my city had five TV stations, but there were only three national networks: NBC, ABC, and CBS. (Oh, and PBS.) Two stations weren't affiliated with a network, and they aired exclusively syndicated programming. Some of it was new, some of it was reruns from a generation ago.
That brings us to rerun syndication, where a network will sell rights to previous seasons of a show to local stations that may or may not be affiliated with the original network that aired them. I think this may be what you mean by broadcast syndication, and it's why as an adult I was able to watch old episodes of Friends in the early afternoon on our Fox station even though it was an NBC show. | [
"In first-run syndication, a program is broadcast for the first time as a syndicated show and is made specifically to sell directly into syndication (not any one particular network), or at least first so offered in a given country (programs originally created and broadcast outside the US, first presented on a netwo... |
how those little baby doll toy bottles work where you hold it upside down and the liquid seems to appear like he drank it, but when you hold it right side up, it refills...? | The bottle is actually two containers (one inside the other). There is a thin gap between the two which is filled with liquid.
This allows a very small amount of liquid to appear to fill the entire bottle. When you tip it, the liquid flows through the gap and down into a resevoir in the top, making it appear empty. | [
"BULLET::::- Baby All Gone: a doll who is fed \"bananas\" on a magnetic spoon and makes them \"disappear\", although the food and drinks do not move through to minimise mess caused by doll food moving through. They seem to go into the doll's mouth when they are mechanically retracted back into the spoon. Also, she ... |
why is it considered immoral to outsource labor to workers in countries willing to work for very little money? | Usually it's the working conditions that people are protesting. Factories in developing countries with little regulation and workers' rights can be downright abysmal to work in. They're not called "sweatshops" for nothing.
In addition to poor working conditions is also worker safety. A man might lose an arm operating a press or similar machinery because the safety regulations aren't written into law or enforced. So a man without the factory might not have gotten that pay, but they might still have both arms and have been able to farm or some other small-time employment, whereas the man in the factory might have earned a year or two's worth of wages before becoming a cripple.
It's a value judgement, nothing more. | [
"Indirect economic oppression is exemplified when individuals work abroad to support their families. Outsourced employees, working abroad generally little to no bargaining power not only with their employers, but with immigration authorities as well. They could be forced to accept low wages and work in poor living ... |
how does standard bar soap clean your hands if it does not have any antibacterial additives? especially when the soap uses animal fat as a base component. | The reason regular non-antibacterial soap still works at _removing_ - not killing - bacteria and virus carrying stuff, is because thats what soap does: soap molecules have a water loving (philic) end and a carbon chain (oils etc.) end. When you wash your hands with soap, oil and other gunk is on your hands. The soap molecules surround the gunk molecules in little bubbles with their water loving ends sticking out and thus all of these little water loving pockets of gunk, oil, grease, bacteria etc. are easily washed away. With enough scrubbing and water, you can do the same, but soap just makes it easier.
Your body naturally has a rather robust barrier (your skin, mucous membranes) and it will do most of the work at containing things like the corona virus, hanging out in blobs of saliva, or mucous or whatever that might have come from another person. But when you rub that stuff on your hand in your eyes or put it in your mouth, well, you essentially just opened the door in that barrier to the bad stuff.
Yes, if you ARE infected, you stand a really good chance of surviving with nothing more than really strong "regular flu" symptoms; the ones who will die from coronavirus are those who would be susceptible to any flu like thing (elderly, those with already compromised immune systems), its just that this one is so much more contagious than regular flu....
So if you take one thing away here its WASH YOUR HANDS A LOT and don't go licking things. | [
"Ordinary soap is a salt of a fatty acid. Soaps are mainly used as surfactants for washing, bathing, and cleaning. Soaps for cleansing are made by treating vegetable or animal oils and fats with a strongly alkaline solution. Fats and oils are composed of triglycerides; three molecules of fatty acids are attached to... |
why is the vatican and the pope in italy? wouldn't it be more logical for the head of the church to be in the country jesus was active in? | Christianity wasnt popular in Israel, never rising above the status of a sect or cult - it was only its adoption by the roman emporer constantine which raised it's status and propelled it to becoming a world religion | [
"In later years, particularly after the establishment of the Vatican City had reassured the papacy of its place within Italy, non-Catholic politicians would complain that the Holy See made too many recommendations to the Italian voters.\n",
"Due to the size of the Vatican City State, embassies accredited to the H... |
A solid argument against the earth being billions of years old? | I'll disprove all of the geology ones here:
> 12: Scarcity of plant fossils in many formations containing abundant animal / herbivore fossils. :
It is incredibly hard to preserve plant fossils, and it only happens under the most favorable circumstances, which don't happen very often. If you wonder where all of the plant material goes: See oil.
> 13: Thick, tightly bent strata without sign of melting or fracturing.
You don't have to break or melt rocks in order to have them bend in very tight fractures, you just need to warm them up to a certain temperature, and bend them over a long time. You can play with this at home with brittle plastic. Try to bend it with no heat: it breaks, try to heat it slowly and bend it fast, it breaks, but if you bend it slowly and heat it slowly, you can get it to bend in a very tight fold.
> 14: Polystrate fossils—tree trunks in coal
Yes, they are right that you can get these types of things from rapid burial. But they just nit pick on the areas that have it. If there was a world-wide flood, this would be the norm, and it's certainly not.
16-19: No. These have been disproven many many many times over.
You know what, I read through the rest of them, and they are mostly proven false by common sense and all it's doing is frustrating me. If there is one you have a question about specifically, let me know and I will explain it out for you.
*edit: I just read, in detail, all of the geologic ones, and there are some flat out lies sprinkled in there as well, so be careful. Also, they are picking just the examples that fit their 'theory' and leave out the 95% of the rest of the world. It's a common tactic. | [
"In May 2014, Robertson responded to a caller regarding the age of the earth: \"You have to be deaf, dumb and blind to think that this Earth that we live in only has 6,000 years of existence, it just doesn't, I'm sorry ... To deny the clear record that's there before us makes us looks silly ... There's no way that ... |
So I was told today by a professor (not a science professor) that the Theory of Gravity is not actually proven and that we don't actually know how it works. Is this true? | See [Tests of General Relativity](_URL_0_) for an overview. Rlee89 is right -- we can only *disprove* theories. See *[The Logic of Scientific Discovery](_URL_1_)* by Karl Popper.
Summary: Newton's theory of gravitation put a man on the moon, and that ain't bad. As you know, Einstein's general theory superseded Newton's. The three classical tests were 1) the correct explanation of the precession of Mercury's orbit by Einstein, 2) observation that the sun deflects starlight, made by Arthur Eddington during an eclipse in 1919 , 3) observation of gravitational redshift by Pound and Rebka in 1959.
In addition, the Hubble telescope has taken pictures of gravitational lensing effects. The Hafele-Keating experiment tested general and special relativity by putting atomic clocks in circumnavigating aircraft. GPS satellites must account for general relativistic effects in their timing systems. The orbits of binary pulsars cannot be accounted for with Newtonian gravitation, but can be explained with GR. Gravity Probe B detected frame-dragging and the geodesic effect. GR also explains the observed expansion and acceleration of the Universe, although cosmological tests aren't as conclusive as solar-system tests. Currently, scientists are trying to directly measure gravitational waves with large interferometers.
I believe the modern interpretation of gravity is that it is not really a force. This is what happens instead: Mass-energy causes spacetime in its vicinity to curve. Free-falling objects move in straight-lines (geodesics) in the curved spacetime. Because of our limited perspective, we interpret this as an acceleration caused by a "force".
I think most would agree that GR will eventually be superseded by a Theory of Everything, which will reduce to GR in the appropriate limit. For now, though, GR has stood up to experiment quite well, especially considering that there was absolutely no experimental basis for it when Einstein and Grossman were working on it. Einstein was driven by his sense of aesthetics. Pretty fucking incredible. | [
"These mechanical explanations for gravity never gained widespread acceptance, although such ideas continued to be studied occasionally by physicists until the beginning of the twentieth century, by which time it was generally considered to be conclusively discredited. However, some researchers outside the scientif... |
Do Brita filters need to be replaced as often as suggested? Or is Brita just capitalizing on replacement filters? | The activated carbon does get saturated at some point, but don't buy a whole new filter: _URL_0_ | [
"An inexpensive, homemade alternative to professional ND filters can be made from a piece of welder's glass. Depending on the rating of the welder's glass, this can have the effect of a 10-stop filter.\n",
"Ross Fitzgerald of \"The Australian\" believes that the filter was not introduced in 2010 to defuse it as a... |
why do raised areas of the body (collarbone/cheekbone etc) get more severely affected by sunburn than the surrounding area? | Because natural shadows occurs when these raised areas “intercept” sun rays thereby blocking the lower lying areas from absorbing light. Inversely there is nothing shadowing your most protruding body bits hence why they are likelier to burn. But rest assured if you lay perfectly still at a perpendicular angle to the suns rays you will burn quite evenly. | [
"Suntan and sunburn are familiar effects of over-exposure of the skin to UV, along with higher risk of skin cancer. Living things on dry land would be severely damaged by ultraviolet radiation from the Sun if most of it were not filtered out by the Earth's atmosphere. More energetic, shorter-wavelength \"extreme\" ... |
Why did bread never become a big part of the Chinese diet? | It did! It's just more traditionally confined to the North.
There's not just one Chinese cuisine. Rice cultivation wasn't actually a part of the early Chinese diet at all. There's no word in Sinotibetan languages for rice that isn't a loan. In Tibetoburman they borrowed the vocabulary from Tai languages much later (e.g. \**na*^1 for wet rice field), and in Chinese the common word for rice 米 is actually originally meaning "millet", not "rice", and was only later shifted in meaning to "rice". This was made easier by the fact that millets had largely been replaced in major parts of the Sinotibetan language family by wheats due to their heartiness in cold climates.^2,3
Have a look at [this map](_URL_0_) showing where wheat is grown most. The areas of East Asia that are dark green are places where you're going to find breads. The Shandong Peninsula, all of Jiangsu province north of the Yangtze and a good chunk of Hebei. There's a folk etymology for 饅頭^4 * màntóu*, a popular steamed bread, that it's actually *Man[chu] tóu*, with *tóu* meaning "head", because it entered Chinese cuisine through non-Chinese Northern groups. Actually more people will tell you it was invented by Zhūgě Liàng.
This and other similar breads such as *bāozi* 包子, the stuffed version of *màntóu*, are popular throughout the region including Korea.
There's also *ròu jiā mó* 肉夾饃, which is another incredibly popular food in China and pretty much the best thing ever. These are roud breads which are not steamed but instead grilled on a hot plate, and then stuffed with spicy meat and cilantro. They're a notable food from Shǎnxī (Shaanxi) and have become quite popular throughout the Northwest as well as being readily available throughout the country.
There's also [spicy and non-spicy onion pancakes](_URL_1_) which are again cooked on a hot plate and regularly consumed as a snack. There are other similar pancake-like treats as well but some, such as the Shandong wrap (山東雜糧餅) are getting further away from what we might call bread.
Finally in Taiwan there's a sort of steamed bread sandwich called *koah pau* 刈包. They're awesome but almost certainly a more recent thing in Taiwanese cuisine.
All of these are made with wheat flour, but grilling in a large oven wasn't always a possibility, and steaming/frying was always more common in Chinese cuisine anyway, so the breads that we have in the region tend to be more reliant on these ways of cooking.
In the end, the relative scarcity of wheat in the south and the ease of growing multiple rice varieties has lead to rice being seen as a more typical Chinese food, but in reality it was imported from cuisines of other, non-Chinese, groups.
- - -
1. Matisoff, James A (2003) *Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction. Univ of California Press.*
2. Guedesa, Jade A d’Alpoim; Lub, Hongliang; Heinc, Anke M; Schmidt, Amanda H (2015) *Early Evidence for the Use of Wheat and Barley As Staple Crops on the Margins of the Tibetan Plateau.*
3. Sagart, Laurent (2011) How Many Independent Rice Vocabularies in Asia. Rice, vol. 4, pp. 121–133.
4. Note that food vocabulary varies considerably throughout Mandarin dialect areas. Mantou isn't always called mantou, and the word mantou doesn't always mean what I'm talking about here.
(edited to expand a little bit more) | [
"At first there was only a small market for bread, both because the initial products were poor, and the indigenous would not eat bread at first. However, as quality improved and the Spanish and mestizo population grew, so did the market for bread. Although the consumption of wheat never surpassed that of corn, brea... |
What is the importance of irrational numbers? | even the square roots of certain numbers (like 2) are irrational. pi and e are in a sense even more.. let's say you need to put in more work to describe them.
the roots are zeros of polynomials with rational coefficients. pi and e aren't.
when you start out with rational numbers (ie fractions of integers ) and consider sequences of fractions, and then consider the limits of those sequences, you get more than just the rational number / fractions. you also get irrational numbers. they **cannot be represented as fractions** but they can be represented as limits of a sequence of fractions. (ie you can approximate them to arbitrary precision by fractions. the fractions are dense in the real numbers, therefore you will always find a fraction at least as close as you wish to a given irrational number)
the part in bold is probably the most important thing about them, ie why you even bother giving them a name | [
"Because the algebraic numbers form a subfield of the real numbers, many irrational real numbers can be constructed by combining transcendental and algebraic numbers. For example, 3 + 2, + and \"e\" are irrational (and even transcendental).\n",
" is an irrational number, meaning that it cannot be written as the... |
how do forex brokers work? | Brokers in general provide access to markets, and clearing and settlement facilities. So when you buy some euros, they handle all the details of actually getting those euros into your account (including routing your order to the proper market and getting it executed).
I am not sure what you mean by "their" money. They charge a fee per trade for these services, and you can get leverage from them by borrowing money from the brokerage. They get this money from other people's accounts. Similar to a bank giving out mortgages, they take money from accounts, and lend it out at an interest rate. | [
"However some countries do regulate forex brokers through governmental and independent supervisory bodies, for example the National Futures Association and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the US, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in Australia and the Financial Conduct Authority in the... |
Was Shay's Rebellion Really a Result of a Weak Central Government? | A Shays' Rebellion question! My favorite!
The primary weakness of the existing governmental structure that the rebellion exposed was the inability for the Massachusetts Governor to quickly raise the troops necessary to fight off the rebels.
You mention that the rebels were fairly easily dispersed once a formidable fighting force was created to opposed them. However, what you're missing is how long it took and the difficulty in creating that force.
Governor Bowdoin attempted to raise the state's militia after the rebels had begun shutting down courthouses across the state in August/September of 1786, but because the militia was made up of the same kinds of people rebelling, the local units refused to act. I did a fair amount of work on a transcript of a trial in Worcester that took place after the rebellion. There were many leaders of the local militias who were tried for aiding the rebels or participating in the rebellion themselves.
It is also important to conceive of the rebels as less akin to a dumb "mob" and rather think of the event as the rise of an entire oppressed socio-economic class. The latest work on the rebellion tells the story of a deeply shattered economic structure for the Western Massachusetts farmers that was inflamed by a strong power base in Boston. We have a merchant class in charge, and they were simply unwilling to govern for their whole state. This is the framework we should be using the understand the local militias and their reluctance to take up arms against their neighbors.
After his own militia failed to act, Governor Bowdoin asked his neighboring states to help by using their militias, but he received no such help. So, lacking a federal army to ask for assistance (remember, we're still in the Articles of Confederation here), Bowdoin has to use the Bostonian merchant's deep pockets to cull together a last-minute force of mercenaries. This group is by General Benjamin Lincoln and eventually marches out in late January 1787. The rebellion is dispersed in early February.
Rebels are shutting down courts in August, and it's only until the following year that the state government is able to pull together a force to fight them.
The reason this reverberated across the nation was a result of this inability for Massachusetts to quickly put an end to the problem themselves (although they eventually did). The concern was that this kind of action could happen in any of the states, and the powerlessness of the states in the face of such an uprising was a troubling thought. The rebels got very close to raiding the federal arsenal in Springfield and had a control over much of the state's courthouses, effectively preventing the state government from functioning in the western 2/3 of the state.
Federalists saw a strong, centralized national government as a way to prevent these kinds of flare ups in the future.
If you're interested in the macro-level economics of the time period and a even-keeled take on the rebellion, then David Szatmary's ["Shays' Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection"](_URL_0_) is the seminal work on the real underlying issues of the day. If you are looking for more narratives and individually-based description, then Leo Richards's ["Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle"](_URL_1_) is for you.
This topic is definitely one of my specialities, so I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have or clarify anything I've written above. | [
"In 1787, Shays' rebels marched on the United States' Springfield Armory in an unsuccessful attempt to seize its weaponry and overthrow the government. The federal government found itself unable to finance troops to put down the rebellion, and it was consequently put down by the Massachusetts State militia and a pr... |
how do car horns project so well? | So usually cars have two horns in the front of the car, a high pitch and a low pitch. So a standard electric car horn does have a diaphragm just like a speaker. Inside there’s basically a plunger connected to the center of the diaphragm and on the other side of the plunger is an electromagnet. When you hit the horn button. The electromagnet forces the plunger to bounce off of it so fast the diaphragm produces a frequency, a loud one. The combination of the high and low frequency together makes the sound travel farther and through more surfaces. | [
"A horn loudspeaker is a speaker system using a horn to match the driver cone to the air. The horn structure itself does not amplify, but rather improves the coupling between the speaker driver and the air. Properly designed horns have the effect of making the speaker cone transfer more of the electrical energy in ... |
How did Fascists deal with healthcare? | Both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were concerned with healthcare and promoting health in general, for a couple reasons. Firstly, for reasons of natalism. Militarist-expansionist states need a growing population to make up for deaths in war and settle conquered territory, so both the Nazis and the Fascists were keen to promote population growth.
> In 1925 the Italin Fascist regime created the Opera Nazionale Maternita ed Infanzia (ONMI), one of the many fascist organizations that survived into the post-war era. The ONMI combined social welfare with the realization of the regime's demographic aims. It sought to block abortion, to provide medical care and, if possible, involve the fathers of illegitimate children.
> ... the fascists understood that the high infant death rate was a major and preventable depressant on population growth. The rate of infant mortality did decline, this being in part attributable to the policies of the regime but also the long-term rise in the standard of living and health care that had been initiated before fascism.
-Alexander J. DeGrande, [*Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The Fascist Style of Rule*](_URL_0_), p. 79
Apart from natalism, the fascist powers also had an ideological interest in health, especially Nazi Germany. This was part of a larger fascist idealization of youth, athleticism, and action. In "Germany Speaks", a collection of essays attempting to improve Germany's image and explain fascist thought to the foreign public, the head of the National Socialist Welfare Organization says of health:
> We have faith in the ancient saying that a sound mind and a healthy body are mutually inter-dependent. Our work, therefore, not only teaches our nation the importance of health, both morally and physically, but also enables every individual to obtain a proper idea of his responsibilities towards the nation and towards his family.
> By developing all our intrinsic abilities we make up for our country's lack of valuable raw materials and for our inferior degree of economic and political power as compared with other countries. The more we contribute towards the establishment of fundamentally healthy conditions at home, the stronger and healthier will be the influence exercised by all our national manifestations, be it in the realms of economy or science, in our domestic and our foreign policy.
This hints at the way some Nazis considered health to be an almost metaphysical concept which could pervade every aspect of life. This was manifested in a variety of government policies and campaigns, from promoting physical education and athletics to anti-smoking campaigns and maternal/infant care campaigns.
Of course, this glorification of health had its dark side in the demonization of disease and disability, which contributed greatly to the eugenics and euthanasia intiatives carried out in the name of public health. And we must not forget the racial dichotomies in Nazi thought which associated the Aryan with health and the Jew with disease, a common theme in antisemitic propaganda.
EDIT: Removed some unnecessary verbiage from the second quote | [
"It is still debated whether Italian Fascism was originally anti-Semitic. Mussolini originally distinguished his position Hitler's fanatical racism while affirming he himself was a Zionist. More broadly, he even proposed building a mosque in Rome as a sign that Italy was the Protector of Islam, a move blocked by a ... |
What types of plants played the role grasses before grass evolved? | The short answer is [pretty weird](_URL_0_) with a lot of [seriously alien-looking wtf plants](_URL_1_).
Most plants you see today are vascular plants; they have xylem and phloem (picture little pipes running from roots to leaves) to carry water up to the leaves and sugar down to the roots respectively. They also contain lignin, the polymer that gives wood most of its hardness.
Ancestral green algae did not need all that because they lived in the oceans, where sunlight and water are abundant and you don't need to be particularly strong. Bryophytes (mosses and liverworts) are basically land-based algae that evolved ~450 million years ago. Like today, you never find them far from water and most of Earth's surface simply didn't have plants on it.
Then came the early vascular plants equipped with the necessary plumbing to conquer dry land. The horsetails in the first image once grew like grass and are still with us today, as are the ferns and a couple of others. [Lycopods](_URL_2_) developed, and eventually flourished into forests of giant 30-meter vaguely phallic [trees](_URL_3_) in the Carboniferous. If you were transported to this time you would wonder why all the plantlife was designed by Dr. Seuss, although late in the Carboniferous you start to get vaguely familiar-looking conifers (pine trees).
One disappointing feature of this world would be the total lack of flowers. All of these primitive vascular plants reproduced by spores like modern ferns do. If you want flowers or true grass you need to go forward a couple hundred million years to at least the Cretaceous.
| [
"Grasses probably originated in the understory of tropical rainforests in the Late Cretaceous, but have since come to occupy a wide range of different habitats. Notably, they are the dominant species in grasslands, open habitats that cover around one fifth of the earth's terrestrial surface. The C photosynthetic pa... |
how the gunslingers in western films shoot so perfectly from the hip? | Because it's fiction.
In real life, no one actually fought like that. Gun slinger fights in the wild west were messy, and usually involved many combatants, not 2 doing a stand off. It was no different than modern gang shoot outs, except their guns were far less accurate, and shooters would typically ambush opponents from rooftops and stuff. | [
"Quick draw and hip shooting was a rare skill in the West, and only a handful of historically known gunslingers were known to be fast, such as Luke Short, John Wesley Hardin, and Wild Bill Hickok. Shooting a pistol with one hand is normally associated with gunslingers, and is also a standard for them of the era to ... |
what exactly makes the popping sounds when popping/cracking your muscles? | Could be wrong here, but I've heard that gas bubbles form throughout your body. When you pop a joint, the bubble that formed in there collapses and is re-absorbed into the blood? | [
"In the thoracic spine the facet joints function to restrain the amount of flexion and anterior translation of the corresponding vertebral segment and function to facilitate rotation. Cavitation of the synovial fluid within the facet joints is responsible for the popping sound (crepitus) associated with manual spin... |
does the earth travel the exact same orbit every year or does it change slightly? | The orbit definitely changes, but by how much? With Newton's law of universal gravitation (F=GmM/d^2 ), the force of gravity is dependent on the square of the distance between two objects. The force between two objects can literally never be 0, but it will get really small. That means every object in the universe pulls on the earth in some way, but it won't significantly affect the orbit unless it is either really really big, or really really close (usually both). The only things big enough to do that are other planets and stars. There aren't really any stars close enough, but we can look at planets.
Looking at the second biggest relatively nearby body, Jupiter, we can see roughly how much it affects the earth. The minimum distance between earth and jupiter, according to NASA, is 588.5 \*10^6 km, or 5.885 \* 10^11 m.
The mass of Jupiter is 1.89813\*10^27 kg, and earth 5.97219\*10^24 kg. Thus making the force of gravity between the two be 2.186\*10^18 newtons. That's a lot of force, but how much does it affect the earth?
F=ma, so 2.186\10^18 / 5.97219\*10^24 = acceleration by the force of gravity, = 3.66\*10^-7 m/s^2
That's really small. Actually, its one one-hundred-millionths of the acceleration of gravity on earth.
So the answer is definitely no, the orbit is not the same from year to year. It varies, but by how much? Not a lot, at least because of gravity. There is probably something I overlooked in all of this that is much more significant. | [
"The Earth is rotating or spinning around its axis. This is evidenced by day and night, at the equator the earth has an eastward velocity of . The Earth is also orbiting around the Sun in an orbital revolution. A complete orbit around the sun takes one year, or about 365 days; it averages a speed of about .\n",
"... |
how many days of fasting does it take for your metabolism to slow down? | This isn't as simple as how many days. A person's metabolism is based on multiple factors, such as age, gender, genetics, etc. As far as fasting if you mean eating smaller meals then it won't have much of an effect. If you mean more a person that doesn't eat for a day and is barely eating then they are dealing with bigger issues with their body than their metabolism.
If you are curious here are a few fasting myths debunked. Seems like your question might be answered with the first myth._URL_0_ | [
"After 2 or 3 days of fasting, the liver begins to synthesize ketone bodies from precursors obtained from fatty acid breakdown. The brain uses these ketone bodies as fuel, thus cutting its requirement for glucose. After fasting for 3 days, the brain gets 30% of its energy from ketone bodies. After 4 days, this goes... |
why does rubbing a coin on a metal surface make a vending machine accept it? | There are finite ways how a vending machine checks the coin, and none of them can be affected by rubbing it beforehand.
So why does it work then? It doesn't. It seems to work because confirmation bias.
See: _URL_0_ | [
"Normal circulation coins eventually collect microscopic particles of dirt, dust, oil and grease from people's fingers. When a coin acceptor is used for a long time, thousands of coins rolling along a track will leave enough dirt, dust, oil and grease to be visible. As a consequence of this, the coin acceptor must ... |
just watched "the big short" someone please explain exactly how the main characters made money. | To address your questions;
Bonds (groups of mortgages, with bad mortgages mixed in) were bought and sold. They had variable rates and terms that made it very easy to obtain a mortgage regardless if someone was qualified or not.
Their "bets" did not really effect the economy. They had caught onto a snowball sequence of events that would happen regardless of if they bet on it or not and choose to use it as an opportunity to profit. | [
"Eventually, all the new millionaires go to Scrooge's farm to buy food and perhaps get a job. Due to Scrooge and the nephews being the only producers of food, the prices having drastically increased — an egg now costs one million dollars, as does a ham, a cabbage costs two million, and a peck of corn costs four mil... |
how does electrical grounding work for ships? why is it so complicated? | It's not about electrical safety directly. If you use a metal hull as ground, especially in salt water, electrolysis can cause corrosion. | [
"Ship grounding is a type of marine accident that involves the impact of a ship on the seabed, resulting in damage of the submerged part of her hull and in particularly the bottom structure, potentially leading to water ingress and compromise of the ship's structural integrity and stability. Grounding induces extre... |
why after months of making no noise does my fan catch something in it to start making a rattling noise. | Spinning and vibrations can loosen screws. Loose screws cause pieces to knock against eachother. It should be an easy fix unless something is actually broken. | [
"Fans installed in a PC case can produce noise levels of up to 70 dB. Since fan noise increases with the fifth power of the fan rotation speed, reducing rotations per minute (RPM) by a small amount potentially means a large reduction in fan noise. This must be done cautiously, as excessive reduction in speed may ca... |
how nyc is able to implement "stop and frisk". | Bloomberg prefers asking forgiveness rather than permission. The city will be sued at some point, but by that time Bloomberg hopes to have something to show for this very questionable policy. He did it with the park smoking ban, too. Make bold laws, let someone else work to get rid of it.
That being said, I've seen it happen multiple times. Enrages me. | [
"Notify NYC is the City of New York’s official source for information about emergency events and important City services. It is a free service launched by the NYC Emergency Management and New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT)] in 2007, allowing users to receive alerts thr... |
What are some causes of the tank in WWI? | Designs for tanks actually predate WW1. There were various designs floating around before the war. An Australian (Mole?) had submitted a design for a tank (obviously not called a tank) before WW1 to the British War Department. They told him there was no use for it. Some of these designers were paid royalties after WW1.
However, as said, it took the stalemate of WW1 trench warfare for people to start looking around for something that would break it.
Other things were tried first. Not official things, but things done by soldiers. Some took wheelbarrows and stuck, not sure how, steel plates on them and then would try and advance with it. Didn't work out so much. Some took steel plates and tried it with other already existing vehicles. None of these turned out to be very practical. | [
"During World War I, the stalemate of trench warfare during on the Western Front spurred the development of the tank. It was envisioned as an armoured machine that could advance under fire from enemy rifles and machine guns, and respond with its own heavy guns. It utilized caterpillar tracks to cross ground broken ... |
statutory rape? | The idea behind statutory rape laws is that young people are much easier to manipulate, are frequently placed in situations where adults have considerable power over them, and haven't developed enough judgement to make potentially large decisions.
Those factors combine to make any potential actual consent very hard to determine, so there's a cut off that says, nothing is sufficient to show consent in cases where the younger person was under a certain age.
Note that we also don't generally let those under age participate in commercial contracts for the similar reasons. | [
"In some common law jurisdictions, statutory rape is sexual activity in which one person is below the age required to legally consent to the behavior. Although it usually refers to adults engaging in sex with minors under the age of consent, it is a generic term, and very few jurisdictions use the actual term \"sta... |
Seriously: What came first, the egg or the chicken? | In terms of timeline, the dinosaurs were laying eggs before birds had even become a separate biological class, so the very first animal that could even possibly have been designated as a type of fowl would have come *long* after the first egg. | [
"If the question refers to \"chicken\" eggs specifically, the answer is still the egg, but the explanation is more complicated. The process by which the chicken arose through the interbreeding and domestication of multiple species of wild jungle fowl is poorly understood, and the point at which this evolving organi... |
why is push-back from power utilities against solar power such a big deal? | Interestingly, current power prices have a low fixed rate plus the variable rate based on usage. If you generate more power than you use, it credits back.
That fixed rate is *supposed* to account for grid maintenance and such, but the pricing used by most American utility systems doesn't charge enough in the fixed rate to cover those costs, and the balance is made up through usage.
Customers which use very little grid power thanks to on-site generation are therefore gaining the benefits of grid connection (more or less steady power at all times) without, necessarily, paying into the maintenance of said grid.
It's similar in some respects to the ways that electrical adoption in other fields is causing the breakdown of existing price structures. There's talk of switching the gas tax to a per-mile road tax, for example; the gas tax is a primary funding source for road maintenance, but high-efficiency vehicles pay a fraction of it and all-electric vehicles are effectively driving on roads that they're not helping to pay into.
It just means that the cost structure and pricing models associated need to adjust, and haven't done so yet. | [
"Along with other state utilities, FPL has been criticized for using its influence with state politicians and political organizations to reject laws which would make it easier for home and business owners to adopt rooftop solar. According to the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, several of the top utility... |
why in the usa do black people typically vote for the democratic party when the gop is the party of emancipation and used to have the so-called "black" vote? when did it change? | The New Deal (1930s) started the change in voting patterns, and Truman's desegregation of the military (1948) also shifted the partisan identification of blacks in the US towards Democrats, but the overwhelming margins today stem from the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and 1965, which were two landmark race-related bills spearheaded by Democrats. | [
"On September 16, 1964, Senator Strom Thurmond announced to a statewide television audience that he had switched parties from the Democrats to the Republicans, saying the Democratic \"party of our fathers is dead.\" He said it had \"forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups, power-hungry union lead... |
why do we like listening to sad music and watching scary movies when sadness and fear are negative emotions? | It's not the feelings of being sad and scared that are so enjoyable, its the psychological notion that you are in control of those experiences and that you are actually safe and sound. There is also the release of adrenaline with the fear response. | [
"People shown extracts from films known to induce fear often overestimated the elapsed time of a subsequently presented visual stimulus, whereas people shown emotionally neutral clips (weather forecasts and stock market updates) or those known to evoke feelings of sadness showed no difference. It is argued that fea... |
facebook bought whatsapp for $22 billion a while back. they just updated their app and claim that nobody, not even themselves can read the messages and calls now. whatsapp has close to zero revenue. what's in it for facebook? | One of the things that particularly american audiences don't understand is that for chat services like Whatsapp, chat is just one of many things that the service could offer.
Download WeChat or Line or Cacao. These are chat services that operate in China, South Korea and Japan.
These places act as MARKETPLACES! People can buy and sell services and goods, pay people over these services, upload photos to a "Profile" similar to instagram, find random people in your area or around the world to talk to (think Tinder) etc..
The chat feature is a basis for all these add on services. This is why Facebook bought Whatsapp. To get these type of services to users before one of these Asian companies make moves into areas where Whatsapp is bigger than facebook (Africa, South America, other parts of Asia) etc.
Its about the potential of the service, while keeping competitors away. If you can't beat them, join them basically | [
"On May 18, 2017, it was reported that the European Commission would fine Facebook €110 million for \"misleading\" it during the 2014 takeover of WhatsApp. The Commission alleged that in 2014, when Facebook acquired the messaging app, it \"falsely claimed it was technically impossible to automatically combine user ... |
why does toothpaste with the colours of red white and blue never mix up | The gel compartments are near the nozzle of the toothpaste tube. Most of the tube has white toothpaste. As the toothpaste is squeezed through the nozzle, it passes the gel compartments and gains the characteristic stripes. They are not mixed until the very end of the tube.
Edit: [Here is a youtube video showing it](_URL_0_)
Edit Edit: Well, I just cut open a tube of crest and the toothpaste was striped all the way through in a single compartment, different than the video above. And if you mix it all together, you get amorphous blended mush. | [
"Whitening toothpastes are different to regular toothpastes in that they contain higher amounts of abrasives and detergents to be more effective at removing tougher stains. Some whitening toothpastes contain low concentrations of carbamide peroxide or hydrogen peroxide which help lighten tooth colour however they d... |
if i'm driving at a constant speed of 60mph and get rear-ended by a vehicle which is moving at a constant 80mph, would the force of impact be the same as if i were sitting at 0mph and got rear ended by someone driving 20mph? | yes, the impact would have the same amount of force.
The big difference would be the whole spinning out of control at 60 mph would be much more dangerous than at 0 mph. | [
"BULLET::::1. Figure 1 (center panel). To an observer at rest on an inertial reference frame (like the ground), the car will seem to accelerate. In order for the passenger to stay inside the car, a force must be exerted on the passenger. This force is exerted by the seat, which has started to move forward with the ... |
In Medievel Europe, Were Jewish People More Literate than Average? | It is pretty much impossible to know for sure, because, like you said, they didn't have comprehensive population surveys, and we have no records about most people's lives. In particular, we have almost no records of people who couldn't write, because they didn't write anything. So even if we have loads of records of people who *did* write, it's very hard to tell how many *other* people there were who we don't know about it. It's a sampling bias problem that's very hard to deal with.
But we do have some indications from both Jews and Christians that it was at least popularly perceived that Jews were much more likely to be literate. For example, one twelfth-century Christian writer said:
"When Christians send their sons to school, they do not send them for the love of God but for lucrative reasons [...] But a Jew, even if he is poor, even if he has 10 sons, will send them all to school, not in order to obtain any benefit, as Christians do, but for the study of the law of God, and not only the sons but also his daughters."
It's hard to tell how literally to take this text. Did he really know that many poor Jews with educated daughters? Maybe. Did he know that Jews care about education and then try to use that to motivate his Christian readers to care more about education? Also maybe.
We also have a number of Jewish legal texts saying that everybody ought to learn to read so they can read the Torah and rabbinic texts, and that all Jewish communities should appoint someone to teach the young children how to read. But we don't know how much anyone listened to those legal texts. We have a large number of financial documents written by Jews in Hebrew, many of them in non-professional handwriting, which suggest that at least merchants and their clients could read and write and didn't need to hire scribes for everything like many Christians did. But it is very hard to tell how far down that really went in socio-economic classes, and it is very likely that very poor Jews were less likely to be able to read. | [
"From the beginning of the 20th century, the literacy rate among the Jewish minority was significantly higher than the Muslim masses. In 1945 about 80 percent of the Jewish population were literate, whereas most Muslims could not read and write. In 1968 only 30 percent of Muslims were literate, whereas this figure ... |
What were the difference in the military physical qualifications during WW2 between the various powers? | As a follow up, were there differences in mental or educational qualifications as well?
I know from [this excellent answer](_URL_0_) by /u/the_howling_cow that the US military often rejected recruits for not meeting literacy qualifications. But I assume that the Soviets, Japanese and even Germans had lower literacy rates among their general population. Did they have looser standards about literacy, and if so, did that affect their performance or what type of tactics they could employ? | [
"World War II brought renewed interest in ability testing (to accurately place recruits in new technologically advanced military jobs), the introduction of the assessment center, and concern with morale and fatigue in war industry workers.\n",
"Some soldiers had received training through the compulsory training s... |
How does being born blind or deaf influence the way you think? | DeafBlind people learn tactile sign language. So they think in that language.
If you're interested in something more deeper, there have been studies that show hearing people are able to memorize 7 short bits of information (like a phone number) in only one direction, while Deaf people are able to memorize 5 more complex things (such as a family of five children, their ages and genders) forward and backward. This is due to the ability to use space to "place" things (such as on the fingers of the hand) in ASL. | [
"When a person has become blind, in order to “see” the world, their other senses become heightened. An important sense for the blind is their sense of touch, which becomes more frequently used to help them perceive the world. People that are blind have displayed that their visual cortices become more responsive to ... |
Did WW1 really have a reason? | You can point to some widespread elements that contributed to the war. Social Darwinism, nationalism, militarism may have, to debatable degrees, made the leadership and population of Europe more accepting of the idea of a general conflict. There was likely also an lack of appreciation for the risk of a drawn out exhaustive conflict by some leaders and the general public. While there is some evidence (from quotes from Moltke and other military figures) for instance that the possibility for a long war wasn't totally disregarded, the more popular opinion was that a long war was impossible because no nation could afford it economically. This idea was put forward, perhaps most famously, in *The Great Illusion* by Norman Angell, and in the end I think that we'd have to agree he was largely right if only the actors in the drama had had the foresight to see.
At a lower level, though, each major player had their OWN specific reasons for accepting the war... things they wanted to get out of it.
Austria-Hungary wanted to punish Serbia for a track record of supporting separatist agitation and terrorism. Austria also strongly (and correctly) suspected, and had some but not enough proof, that elements of the Serb government were actively involved with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Austria also saw an opportunity to strengthen their influence in the Balkan region which might have enabled them (in their own excessively optimistic minds) to build an extended economic zone.
Serbian leaders knew that if they allowed a proper investigation, the Austrians would be able to justify overthrowing the Serb government and installing a puppet (because they knew they were busted). The only hope the Serb government had of retaining it's position was to fight it out and hope the Russians decided to help them and could beat the Austrians.
Russia (who had no treaty with Serbia, so don't "web of alliances" this situation) had a desperate need to defend their last remaining proxy in the Balkans and to restore their credibility in the region. After having been seen as letting down the Serbs in 1908 by not contesting the formal annexation of Bosnia by Austria, seen (by previously preferred proxy Bulgaria) as betraying Bulgaria in 1912/1913 in favor of the Serbs during the Balkan Wars, and seen by the Serbs as not supporting them in 1913 when they tried to annex Albania, there was certainly a track record of diplomatic "failure" and "weakness" growing. The Russians also had long term goals to acquire Constantinople and the Turkish Straits, which were so important to their economy, and a general war could offer at least a restoration of their Balkan influence and possibly the possession of the straits (if the Ottomans joined the Central Powers and if Russia won, of course).
Germany had this encirclement syndrome thing going on. They saw France building up for war with the new 3 year law, in theory leading to a 50% increase in peacetime army size and over time a similar increase in reserve manpower. They saw similar build ups in the Russian force, as well as vast improvements in Russia mobilization speeds that could nearly rival the Germans ability to deploy to the Polish front. Germany also knew that France had been unwilling to fight over Balkan issues in the past (1908, 1913) and that Russia had always backed down in the past. In the opinion of German leadership, if Russia didn't back down this time too then that meant France wanted a war. Germany probably overestimated the future military strength of France (there was a pretty good chance that the 3 year conscription law, which was very contentious when it was passed, wouldn't have lasted long) and definitely overestimated Russian military ability in 1914, but hindsight offers us these advantages.
France worried that they would be at risk of losing the Russian alliance after not supporting Russia in 1908 and 1913 during those Balkan crises. France did not have to support Russia in 1914, yet they chose to do so for their own reasons. The record of diplomatic communication and activities of the French ambassador Paleologue show that French officials went so far as to encourage Russia to escalate the situation rather than attempt to calm the crisis. There were also many in France that longed to avenge the defeat of 1871 and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, but sometimes that influence gets overplayed. That sort of thinking did exist, however, in the public and in government.
& #x200B;
So all the major players had reasons that, in June/July 1914, they thought were of strategic importance either politically, militarily, or both. They all had opportunities the step away from the war, but each decided the potential gains were worth the risks that war entailed. | [
"Another cause of World War I was growing militarism which led to an arms race between the powers. As a result of the arms race, all European powers were ready for war and had time tables that would send millions of reserves into combat in a matter of days.\n",
"BULLET::::- Rising nationalism and increasing natio... |
why do 2 minute offenses in the nfl seem to be more efficient than the normal offense? | the 2-minute offense, also known as the "hurry up", seeks to play as many downs as possible in the quickest time. A defense usually puts new guys in during the game (i.e. bigger dudes on 3rd and short to stop the run). The hurry-up prevents this, by not giving the defense enough time to swap personnel before the next play is starting.
Additionally, the fast pace of the offense usually prevents any unique defensive play-calls, because there isn't enough time to relay the proper call to everyone on the field. So, the defenses usually use a standard man or zone defense, with no tricks or disguise.
Those two things: preventing the defense from swapping personnel to fit each situation, and causing basic defensive formations... that's what gives the offense an easier time as they continue to execute plays. Added on... the 2-minute drill is almost always done to make a comeback from the team that is losing the game. The defense doesn't want to give up any big plays, so they play "back", not putting as much pressure on the short and medium passing game. | [
"During the 2011 season, the three teams with the best offenses (New England, Green Bay and New Orleans) also had the worst defenses, which explains why none of those teams were happy to run out the clock, instead always pressuring for points. The current salary cap rules mean that it is nearly impossible for a tea... |
how do these websites that buy gift cards from consumers work? | They re-sell your gift card. If you browse around the site you'll usually also find gift cards for sale, those are the cards they bought. They make money by selling them for a few bucks more than they bought them, they aren't using the cards or anything like that. | [
"GiftCards.com offers gift cards from around 500,000 different large and small businesses throughout the United States. Major gift card providers include Best Buy, Sephora, Yankee Candle, Amazon.com, Pottery Barn, Starbucks, The Cheesecake Factory, Gap, Macy's, and Bloomingdale's among many others. The company also... |
Did the Confederate troops that accidentally shot Stonewall Jackson suffer any repercussions for their actions? | The commander of the 18th NC, Major then Col John Barry retained hi s command till the end of the war and was both wounded and served as acting Brigadier General in the Overland Campaign. He died soon after the war and supposedly continuously expressed remorse.
The Brigade commander General James Lane was actually one of the young stars of Lee's Army. The youngest flag officer he on multiple occasions served as acting division commander and received multiple wounds.
After the war he was recruited as the first Commandant of the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, today known as Virginia Tech, and he also served a time as a professor at Auburn after being forced to leave VAMC.
EDIT: Because I trusted a school to know the history of its own founders Lane was not the youngest in the entirety of the Army of Northern Virginia, but one of a handful to have been promoted before age 30, and was simply the youngest one left with Lee by the end, Ramseur having been killed and Hoke having joined Joe Johnston in the Carolinas. | [
"General Stonewall Jackson was shot and mortally wounded by friendly fire in Spotsylvania County during the Battle of Chancellorsville. A group of Confederate soldiers from North Carolina were in the woods and heard General Jackson's party returning from reconnoitering the Union lines. They mistook them for a Feder... |
gearing/leverage (finance) | Gearing and leverage refer to the level of debt a company or financial venture has taken on. To see why it's called leverage, let's look at a simple example.
Let's say I have a business venture that can always earn a 10% return on capital investment. That means, every time you give me $100 to buy machinery (or whatever) I can use it to make $10 a year.
If I do happen to have $100 that's great. I make $10 profit a year.
But if I can borrow money more cheaply than that 10%, I can make extra profit by borrowing money. If I borrow another $100 at 5% to add to my $100, I can make $20 a year before interest. After I pay the $5 interest I can make $15.
Let's add another zero onto it. How about I borrow $1000. Add it to my $100 and now I can make $110 a year, take away my $50 interest payment and now I make $60.
All I'm doing is increasing the amount of debt I take on and yet I become more profitable. It's called leverage because with the same amount of initial money, I can earn more profit (just like a lever allows you to do more work with the same initial application of force).
Now, the problem with leverage is that I cannot be sure about my profits. The future is inherently unknowable and there's a chance I might not make enough money. With my initial no debt $100 situation, all I stand to lose is my $100. But as I borrow more, the consequences of making the wrong prediction about my profits get worse and worse and I might end up owning far more than I could ever repay.
In finance specifically, this often refers to the leverage of a financial entity. A firm (like a pension fund) that exists just to buy shares in companies and other financial instruments. It could simply take money from its investors and use it to buy shares and other assets. But it could make more profit by mixing the money from its investors with some borrowed money ie, it can leverage itself. Once again, this is a game of comparing risk with rewards. If the investments pay off, the profit is all that much higher for having used debt to fund it. But if they investments go bad, you end up losing your capital AND paying off more debt. | [
"In finance, leverage (sometimes referred to as gearing in the United Kingdom and Australia) is any technique involving the use of debt (borrowed funds) rather than fresh equity in the purchase of an asset, with the expectation that the after-tax profit to equity holders from the transaction will exceed the borrowi... |
if the fec restricts individual contributions to a federal election to $2500, how can celebrities and the super wealthy hold $40,000 a plate fundraisers? | $2500 is the limit for individual candidates, you can also give $30k to the national parties, and $5000 to PACs. So that $40k will get split up in some legal way, but in general the candidates will have direct or indirect access to those funds. | [
"Simmons, a longtime Republican donor, gave the maximum $2,300 contributions to Senator John McCain, as well as to fellow Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani. He was listed as a \"bundler\" for the McCain campaign on McCain's website, which meant that he had raised between $50,000 and $100,000 for t... |
How long is the delay between the stimulus and response for any sensory organ in the body? | You are aware of a delay when someone touches you? Most people are not normally aware of anything coming between ourselves and what we see/hear/touch (we aren't aware of the various pathways the signal travels in our body or our brain interpreting the signals). Also perceptual experience is seemingly instantaneous in that we ordinarily assume that we perceive events as they happen, with absolutely no time-lag or delay. ([source](_URL_0_)).
Although we don't experience a delay, we know it exists due to the physiology of our nervous system. The delay is more difficult to measure than might be expected. You can read more about how we measure it & a lot more about the nature of perception [here](_URL_0_), but **it's estimated that stimuli can produce basic sensations in as little as 50–80 msec.** | [
"The kappa effect or perceptual time dilation is a temporal perceptual illusion that can arise when observers judge the elapsed time between sensory stimuli applied sequentially at different locations. In perceiving a sequence of consecutive stimuli, subjects tend to overestimate the elapsed time between two succes... |
What qualities did furs from North America have that made them so desirable to Europeans? Were commonly worn clothes prior to the Fur Trade really much worse, or was it primarily an aesthetic/fashion/status thing? | One of the biggest qualities North American furs had was a simple one: they were there to use in the first place. One of the largest sources of supply for European furs before 1492 was in northern Russia, flowing into Western Europe primarily via Novgorodian and later Russian traders through the Baltic. This region had been massively depleted by the 1500’s due to intense cultivation over a prolonged period, with the beaver in particular practically vanishing from Europe.
This factor was paired with an environmental phenomenon known as the Little Ice Age, which was a period of generally lower temperatures across the globe from around the 15th to the 19th centuries. I’m sure an environmental historian could speak more on this but the decline in temperature was certainly significant and had a broad historical impact: one the one hand, you could enjoy a winter fair on the frozen Thames, but if you were a Chinese peasant, famines caused by the temperature drop would (arguably) lead to the overthrow of your ruling dynasty by Jurchen tribes. Colder temperatures would undoubtedly cause an increase in desire for furs due to its excellent protective properties. In essence It was a classic low supply/high demand scenario that led to a boom in the transatlantic fur trade being as profitable as it was, with a relatively untapped source of supply sitting abundantly in North America. | [
"The European discovery of North America, with its vast forests and wildlife, particularly the beaver, led to the continent becoming a major supplier in the 17th century of fur pelts for the fur felt hat and fur trimming and garment trades of Europe. Fur was relied on to make warm clothing, a critical consideration... |
Is it possible to have a non-gaseous planet with permanent storms like Jupiter? And what would the conditions have to be for that to happen? | It would have to be covered in some sort of fluid atmosphere in order for the storms to have a media to propogate in. For example a liquid covered planet with oceans over the entire surface several kilometres deep at a minimum would be covered in constant ongoing chaotic weather systems which could be described as 'storms' depending on their severity.
Assuming a broader interpretation of the question, (non-gas giants) another example might a Venus type planet. Storms on Venus propogate through its dense gaseous atmosphere but it is a 'rocky' earth like planet as opposed to a gas giant like Jupiter. | [
"Storms such as this are common within the turbulent atmospheres of giant planets. Jupiter also has white ovals and brown ovals, which are lesser unnamed storms. White ovals tend to consist of relatively cool clouds within the upper atmosphere. Brown ovals are warmer and located within the \"normal cloud layer\". S... |
why do so many asian demonyms end with "ese"? (chinese, vietnamese, japanese, burmese) | From [this source](_URL_0_):
> The -an, -ian, and -ese suffixes all stem from the Latin adjectival naming system:
> -ian or -an, from Latin, –ianus, meaning "native of", "relating to", or "belonging to"
> -ese, from the Latin, -ensis, meaning "originating in"
They all save similar meanings, and the assignments seem to be arbitrary, maybe based on what sounds "better."
For example, a citizen of Vienna is both Viennese and Austrian. | [
"In East Asia, tone is typically lexical. This is characteristic of heavily tonal languages such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Hmong. That is, tone is used to distinguish words which would otherwise be homonyms, rather than in the grammar, but some Yue Chinese dialects have minimal grammatical use of tone.\n",
... |
why are saudi arabia and iran are having a war in yemen? | Yemen has only been a single country for 25 years and fought a civil war in the 1980's. The central government is weak, the economy weak, an active al-Qaeda branch causes problems, and the various tribes follow different religions. The current unrest is a new civil war supported in part by outside parties.
Saudi Arabia is interested in a stable neighbor and Saudi-allied government. Iran is interested in an unstable neighbor for Saudi Arabia and a new Iranian ally. The most dangerous branch of al-Qaeda is located in Yemen and is the primary reason for US involvement.
Proxy wars are preferable to real wars as they are less expensive, involve few of your own people dying, and harder to be blamed for. Proxy wars are strongly preferable to the weaker party who holds little hope of victory in conventional war. Iran has no chance of defeating Saudi Arabia in direct fighting. The Saudi military is superior and supported by the US, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Pakistan.
Saudi is leading the current intervention and is supported by nine other countries including Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, Pakistan, Kuwait, UAE, Jordan, Bahrain, and Qatar. The US is providing intelligence support but I don't believe any money. Iran is supporting an insurgent group. | [
"The Saudi conflict of Shia and Sunni extends beyond the borders of the kingdom because of international Saudi \"Petro-Islam\" influence. Saudi Arabia backed Iraq in the 1980–1988 war with Iran and sponsored militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan who—though primarily targeting the Soviet Union, which had invaded Afg... |
the "planet x" conspiracy | This might be a bit long winded as there's a bit of background to get through.
Ok, before we really could see well to Pluto and beyond, we knew that funny things were influencing Neptune and Pluto's orbits. A lot of explanations were put forth, and one of them was that there was a relatively large, 10th planet, beyond Pluto, which was coined often as 'Planet X'. It actually predated Pluto's discovery, and people thought for a bit that Pluto was the one causing the disruption, but then figured that it couldn't be moving them that hard because it's just too small.
This was before we had really learned a lot about the Kupier Belt and didn't know a lot about any trans-Neptunian objects, redefined planet and coined the term dwarf planet as a spheroid object that's planet shape but not enough mass that hadn't cleared its own debris field properly, which is why up until recently people thought Planet X was a theoretical 10th planet, and not 9th. The 'X' was originally meant to just mean 'unknown' but kind of came over time to mean '10' to people.
I mean at that point their explanation wasn't completely crazy; that's how people first learned about Neptune because Neptune itself was messing with Uranus's orbit.
Then they figured out later, that a large part of the discrepancy was just that Neptune is just straight up more massive than previously thought. Come around to modern time and now they're finding out a lot of bodies in the Kupier belt are way off and there's possibly another theoretical actual 9th planet maybe.. and there we go again.
But that's not the conspiracy, just the background.
After a while, in 1995 this lady named Nancy Lieder, who runs his webpage called ZetaTalk starts to stay that she's been contacted from aliens from Zeta Riticuli through implants in her brain that was chosen to warn people about a giant object that would rip through the solar system in 2003 though obviously when that didn't happen the date magically just gets postponed, that would cause basically the world to end. It would pass by and cause the earth's magnetic poles to reverse somehow and every thing would just go to crap somehow.
So pretty much any time any object larger than a muffin is discovered or even passes by like, the galactic neighborhood, she and the people who believe her jump on the wagon of "No really this time guys it's coming". She also has extremely detailed descriptions and measurements of objects that don't exist and were later proven to not exist.
And conveniently they all had all kinds of things to protect yourself from magnetic rays like.. white cloth. And tried to convince people to kill their pets out of mercy before the world ended.
Then when nothing happened she was like "Oh, I totally lied about the date, because if I said the TRUE date, then the government would trap people in cities leading to their death", never mind that even the worst government on earth's goals are pretty much never 'kill all our our tax payers'.
Then all of this got moved and swept up in the "December 2012 end of the world!" nonsense.
She tried to claim legitimacy by trying to link her work with another guy (Zecharia Sitchin) that claims aliens from a place called Nibiru came and helped kick start civilization, rebranding the run away death planet as Nibiru. In Zecharia's works, Nibiru would pass by closer to the solar system and it's people would fly to Earth, change things, then fly back until the next pass. His version of Nibiru never endangered the Earth. For the record, Zecharia pretty much denied her claims as having any relevance to his works up until his death in 2010.
A lot of scientists looked at her work and said "It's crazy" and all the crazy people looked at that and said "NASA is clearly just covering up the truth". And the world continued to not be killed by a random planet to this writing. | [
"Conspiracy X is a role-playing game (RPG) originally released by New Millennium Entertainment in 1996, and since revised and released by several publishers including Steve Jackson Games and Eden Studios, Inc. In all versions, the setting posits that aliens are insiduously taking over the world, reminiscent of \"Th... |
Why do vaccines cause fever and flu-like symptoms in some people? | Would it make things clearer if I pointed out that fevers are (in many cases) *not* caused by the flu? Your own body is what causes the fever when you have the flu; it's an immune response.
When the vaccine is introduced, an immune response is triggered, and it's the immune response *itself* that makes you feel shitty.
(As I understand it anyway. As you can see I'm purple, so it's not in my area of expertise) | [
"Vaccines can cause the immune system to react as if the body were actually being infected, and general infection symptoms (many cold and flu symptoms are just general infection symptoms) can appear, though these symptoms are usually not as severe or long-lasting as influenza. The most dangerous adverse effect is a... |
the difference between existentialism, nihilism and absurdism | Nihilism - nothing has inherent meaning, and it never will.
Existentialism - nothing has inherent meaning, but maybe you can make your own meaning.
Absurdism - nothing has inherent meaning. Haha, that's pretty weird right? Go do something that makes you happy. | [
"Nihilism is the philosophy that believes that there is no purpose in the universe, and that \"every\" choice is arbitrary. According to nihilism, the universe contains no value and is essentially meaningless. Because the universe and all of its constituents contain no higher goal for us to make subgoals from, all ... |
how do car key-fobs work and why do we not see machines that can mass-spoof unlock signals like computer passwords? | The fob sends a very large number very slowly. It takes about 25ms to send the number, so that's only 40 per second, max. Most cars require 50ms of no signal to restart their receivers. That's about 13 guesses per second. It takes a long darn time to send a trillion numbers at 13 guesses per second. | [
"Remote keyless entry fobs emit a radio frequency with a designated, distinct digital identity code. Inasmuch as \"programming\" fobs is a proprietary technical process, it is typically performed by the automobile manufacturer. In general, the procedure is to put the car computer in 'programming mode'. This usually... |
how did all(or most) countries in the world decided to bring in same laws/rules to living, eg; lights on street red+amber+green or sirens on police being red and blue and many others? | Unofficial conventions to begin with, international agreements and the UN later.
This [Wikipedia article](_URL_0_) is a good start, but there is a myriad of different local, regional and national agreements and standards bodies that regulate these things.
I can't speak to emergency vehicles in general worldwide, but fire trucks are regulated in North America by NFPA standards, which are referenced by local, regional and national laws. | [
"The law used to allow only the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía, Guardia Civil, Policía Local and autonomous law-enforcement agencies to use blue lights, so in contrast with convention in Europe, civil defense, ambulances (Ambulancia) and fire engines (Bomberos) had to use yellow/amber lights (the only other color autho... |
If fusion power was as widespread as fission today, what would the worst case "meltdown" scenario be and how bad would it be compared to fission meltdowns? | Since fusion reactions take place only under very specific conditions (very high temperature and pressure), any disruption in the operation of the reactor would cause the necessary conditions for fusion to disappear, which would halt the reaction.
Unlike nuclear fission, which in many cases can be self-sustaining and needs active intervention to be slowed down (in the form of control rods, for example), a fusion plasma takes a lot of work to be kept in the right state. Except of course when it is so large that its own gravity does the trick, like in stars. But that won't be the case for earthbound fusion.
So if there is a catastrophic incident in a hypothetical fusion reactor, the reactor and surrounding building could be destroyed and the high energy particles could irradiate some of the debris. But that's about the extent of the damage. Unlike the unmitigated meltdown of a fission reactor, the damage would be very localized. | [
"A nuclear meltdown may be part of a chain of disasters. For example, in the Chernobyl accident, by the time the core melted, there had already been a large steam explosion and graphite fire, and a major release of radioactive contamination. Prior to a meltdown, operators may reduce pressure in the reactor by relea... |
what would happen if hackers stole all the digital money from all the countries and corporations? | Digital money doesn't actually exist, it is just a system that you gave the bank money, now they owe you that money and you can ask for it when you wish. You cannot steal what does exist. | [
"The hackers then used this information to take over the victims’ bank accounts and make unauthorized transfers of thousands of dollars at a time, often routing the funds to other accounts controlled by a network of money mules, paid a commission. Many of the U.S. money mules were recruited from overseas. They crea... |
how does a car shutting down automatically at a stop light/sign help with gas consumption? | The amount of fuel spent idling at an intersection, keeping the engine rotating are a slow speed with a light load, far exceeds the amount needed to restart the engine.
Modern car engines start up very quickly. | [
"BULLET::::- Idle stop - when stopped at traffic light, the engine shuts off automatically, then restarts immediately when the driver takes their foot off the brake, contributing to both greater fuel efficiency and lower emissions.\n",
"When the vehicle is stopped the ICE is switched off without idling, while the... |
Did the Andean countries ever get into conflict with the mayans or the aztecs? | No, they have absolutely no known direct contact. | [
"The last battle between the Aztecs and the Zapotecs occurred between 1497 and 1502, under the Aztec ruler Ahuizotl. At the time of Spanish conquest of Mexico, when news arrived that the Aztecs were defeated by the Spaniards, King Cosijoeza ordered his people not to confront the Spaniards so they would avoid the sa... |
Which of the basic forces of nature is the strongest? | Yes, your teacher is correct.
The reason why gravity seems to be the strongest over large length scales is that the strong and weak forces have very short ranges (~ 10^(-15) and 10^(-18) meters, respectively), and electrostatic forces tend to cancel each other out when you have material that is macroscopically neutrally charged.
So for material which extends over a large region of space, and has no net charge, gravity tends to dominate. That's why gravity is a very important force for astronomy/astrophysics/cosmology, but it's totally irrelevant for things like atomic/nuclear physics. | [
"All of the known forces of the universe are classified into four fundamental interactions. The strong and the weak forces are nuclear forces that act only at very short distances, and are responsible for the interactions between subatomic particles, including nucleons and compound nuclei. The electromagnetic force... |
what exactly does it mean to "hedge" against something? | In essence, a "hedge" is an investment designed to offset substantial losses (or gains) made by an individual or organization. | [
"The word \"hedge\", meaning a line of bushes around the perimeter of a field, has long been used as a metaphor for placing limits on risk. Early hedge funds sought to hedge specific investments against general market fluctuations by shorting the market, hence the name. Nowadays, however, many different investment ... |
Are there organisms with more than two functional sexes? | Yes, but it doesn't work the way you think. Slime molds have quite a few sexes ([13](_URL_0_) or [over 500](_URL_1_), depending on how you count), but any two can breed, as long as they're different sexes.
So yes, there are multiple sexes, but it only takes two to tango.
| [
"Joan Roughgarden argues that some non-human animal species also have more than two genders, in that there might be multiple templates for behavior available to individual organisms with a given biological sex.\n",
"The sex of a particular organism may be determined by a number of factors. These may be genetic or... |
Transgenic engineering: when a gene from an original organism is completely foreign to the new host organism, how do we know where to insert it in the host genotype? | Foreign genes inserted into a host genome need to have some type of regulatory DNA (called a "promoter") in order to be transcribed and translated ("made into protein"). There are two ways to do this, generally: 1) include a promoter region just before the foreign gene such that the inserted DNA is actually promoter+gene, not just the gene by itself; or 2) insert the foreign gene into the genome immediately after a naturally-occurring promoter in the host genome (this technique is used to make transgenic mice with the inserted gene being regulated just like whatever endogenous gene it replaced).
However, in E. coli, the situation is much easier. Bacteria are able to host smaller loops of DNA separate from the original chromosome. These little loops are called plasmids, and they act like little chromosomes independent from the single bacterial chromosome. Placing the correct regulatory sequence inside the plasmid DNA sequence causes many dozens or hundreds of copies of that plasmid to be present in a single bacterium, in contrast to the single bacterial chromosome.
Also on the plasmid is the foreign promoter+gene, so the end result is that, "they copy it into e. coli's genome hundreds of times, the bacteria will make hundreds of times more slime."
At least this is how standard prokaryotic transgenics work; I have not read the details on how this specific study developed their hagfish-slime-bacteria. I also do not know the specifics of how the slime proteins are secreted--it may be the case that no secretion is needed (they could just harvest the bacteria and chemically extract the protein of interest.) | [
"Once the gene is constructed it must be stably integrated into the target organisms genome or exist as extrachromosomal DNA. There are a number of techniques available for inserting the gene into the host genome and they vary depending on the type of organism targeted. In multicellular eukaryotes, if the transgene... |
Why does language become more difficult to read as it gets tilted sideways and then upside-down? Can't our brains compensate? | They can, that's why it just gets more difficult but not completely impossible.
Most people learn to read(and practice reading) on things that aren't tilted or upside down. As you learn to read, your brain physically reconfigures itself to handle the task of translating squiggles on a page into language more efficiently, which is why literate adults can do it unconciously.
This efficiency has a price though:our automatic reading systems aren't very good at dealing with new situations. So when we encounter text that is unusual for some reason, we have to turn on more resource-intensive processes to read the text. | [
"When resecting the left hemisphere, evidence indicates that some advanced language functions (\"e.g.,\" higher order grammar) cannot be entirely assumed by the right side. The extent of advanced language loss is often dependent on the patient's age at the time of surgery. One study following the cognitive developm... |
the difference between being asleep, being unconscious and being put asleep with anestesia. | sleep is the body doing repair work on the brain - it's very easy to wake up a sleeping person
unconsciousness is an emergency shutoff, usually due to trauma - low blood pressure and brain swelling are the usual candidates. - It's (near) impossible to wake up an unconscious person (and usually it's pretty dangerous to do so)
A coma is when, for whatever reason, you don't wake up from being unconscious. This is usually because whatever caused you to go unconscious doesn't go away (this is where brain damage happens, and can turn people in vegetables), and less often because the thing that's supposed to wake you up just... doesn't. - It's impossible to wake up someone in a coma (that's what separates a coma from unconsciousness), and a lot of the treatments for non-traumatic comas are basically just the same drugs you use to wake up unconscious people turned up to 11
anesthesia is for you brain like what happens when you unplug a desktop computer. The drugs just turn off your brain, and it will stay off until the drugs are scrubbed from your system. | [
"Catathrenia typically, sometimes even exclusively, occurs during REM sleep, although it may also occur to a lesser degree during NREM sleep. Catathrenia begins with a deep inspiration. The person with catathrenia holds her or his breath against a closed glottis, similar to the Valsalva maneuver. Expiration can be ... |
How Nazis Evaluated The French Revolution? | I haven't read much of it so far but "Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture" by David B Dennis seems to be the place to go for queries of this kind. It shows how the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter reappropriated figures of Western culture such as Socrates, Da Vince, Beethoven etc and placed them in the Aryan culture.
Edit: Just had a look, one of the chapters is titled: "Intolerance Toward Enlightenment".
There are a few sections addressing the French Revolution:
Pg 142
> The Volkischer Beobachter analysed the French Revolution as primarily a racial conflict between Latin underclasses and the "Germanic" French nobility.
> The Volkischer Beobachter's reception of Beethoven centered on the composer's reactions to the Revolution in an effort to refute assertions that he experienced a case of "revolutionary fever."
Pg 162-163
> According to a 1927 article on "racism in the French Revolution," ancestral differences played a much greater role in social and political revolutions than indicated in historical writings that "didn't pay attention to racial questions." For instance, the English Civil War that led to the "dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell" was strongly marked by "racial differences between the Anglo-Saxon majority and the French-Norman aristocracy that had conquered it in 1066." In similar ways, the war of the Third Estate against the nobility in the French Revolution correlated with the "conflict between the Gallo-Roman majority of the French Volk and the originally mainly German class of nobles - among them, Montesqieu." Right away in the first battles of the Third Estate for equality of rights, "racial thinking was used as a weapon, especially in the writings of the Abbe Sieyes, who had such a powerful influence on the path of the French Revolution." For the paper, it was no coincedence that Sieyes was a French southerner, coming from Frejus - an area where "Germanness was of significance during the early Middle Ages, the overwhelmed by the superior numbers of Gallo-Romans." An excellent speaker, he was a "typical Gallo-Roman Frenchman." And as cuch, he use "racial concepts" in his political advocacy. For instance, to explain why the "nobility of the nation was foreign" in What is the Third Estate? Sieyes "first discussed its laziness, then its political and civil priviedges." Then he argued that the "French Volk had lived in slavery - that is, enslaved by the aristocrats."
> Sieyes:
*...some will say, "but conquest has upset all relationships and hereditary nobility now descends through the line of the conquerors."...The Third Estate will become noble again by becoming a conqueror in its own turn.*
> While Sieyes usually proceeded "completely ahistorically and puerly rationalistically," the Volkischer Beobachter interjected, here he tried to "strengthen his argument for class war with reference to the racial foreignness of the nobility." Moreover, he also sought to draw a portion of the nobility over to the side of the Third Estate, stipulating that since the conquering of Gaul by the Germans "a strong mixture between them and the Gallo-Romans had taken place." So, although the numerically superior Third Estate had to be considered the "Fathers of the Nation," some nobles could be rehabilitated into the ranks of the Third Estate. Therefore, the paper argues, Sieyes' representation of the French aristocracy as a "racially foreign class of conquerors" led to "root out and dissipation of the nobility from France." The "battle against everything Germanic that had commenced in the Renaissance continued in the form of hatred toward everything German."
Hopefully you find that of some use! | [
"The French Revolution and its political legacy had a major influence upon the development of fascism. Fascists view the French Revolution as a largely negative event that resulted in the entrenchment of liberal ideas such as liberal democracy, anticlericalism and rationalism. Opponents of the French Revolution ini... |
space coordinates? | There are several astronomical coordinate systems: Horizontal (AltAzimuth), Equatorial, Ecliptic, and Galactic are four commonly used, and each has it's own purpose. The choice of which coordinate system you use depends on what you're looking at, what kind of instrument you're using, and who you're talking to when you try to describe an object's position.
If you're standing in your backyard, using your eyeball as an observing instrument, and you want to tell somebody standing next to you what you're looking at, the Horizontal (AltAzimuth) system works well: look 12 degrees (clockwise) in Azimuth from due North, then go up 27 degrees in Altitude from the Horizon. Pretty simple, but it doesn't mean much to somebody who is not at your location. Consider how a person in Australia might describe where something is in the night sky, compared with a person in Norway.
The Equatorial Coordinate System is typically used by scientists to describe the positions of most celestial objects in reference texts, astronomical databases, and in Google Sky. One of the benefits of this coordinate system is that it doesn't matter where on Earth you are, the reference points are out in the night sky instead of the local horizon.
As a very coarse description, you should know that Right Ascension (R.A) in the sky corresponds to Longitude here on Earth. The difference is that R.A. is measured in hours, minutes, and seconds, based on the idea that the Earth rotates one complete revolution every 24 hours. A circle is 360 degrees, so one hour of R.A. represents exactly 15 degrees of arc (360/24=15). Just like Longitude on Earth is measured from an arbitrary meridian line passing through Greenwich, England, R.A on the sky is measured (clockwise) from a point called the vernal equinox. I'm not going to try to explain what the vernal equinox is here. All R.A. numbers are positive, from 0hr 0min 0sec through 24hrs 0min 0 sec. You can't have a negative R.A.
Declination (Dec) in the sky is a little easier to understand, it corresponds to Latitude here on Earth. The Celestial Equator (the line on the night sky that you'd see if you could extend the Earth's Equator out into space) is the zero point, and declination is measured positively up to the North Celestial Pole at +90 degrees, and negatively down to the South Celestial Pole at -90 degrees.
The Ecliptic Coordinate System can be used to locate objects in the Solar System, and likewise, the Galactic Coordinate System can be used to describe objects in our galaxy. There are reasons why it may be more convenient to use one of these rather than the Equatorial Coordinate System, but remember that any given object in the night sky can be described by more than one coordinate system.
TL:DR; We measure everything from were it is as compared to earth. | [
"In mathematics, a coordinate space is a space in which an ordered list of coordinates, each from a set (not necessarily the same set), collectively determine an element (or point) of the space – in short, a space with a coordinate system.\n",
"Coordinates systems are often used to specify the position of a point... |
Is there any single cell in my body that would have any effect if it suddenly ceased to be? | There is a theory in neuroscience that distinct faces activate single subsets of neurons, or even a single neuron. This is referred to as the grandmother neuron, Halle berry neuron, or Marilyn Monroe neuron hypothesis. As few as one neuron lights up when shown a picture of a famous celebrity. Presumably, removal of that neuron removes the memory of that celebrity's face. Not terribly consequential in the grand scheme of things, but pretty cool.
_URL_1_ - this is the Nature paper on the topic
_URL_0_ - review of topic for those that can't access or don't want to read the scientific paper
| [
"Cell viability can be assessed based on the integrity of plasma membrane: the living cells have intact plasma membranes whereas membranes of dead cells are broken. When a cell is exposed to a low voltage field, the electric current cannot go through the intact membrane, which is an electric insulator, if it is via... |
Were Oktoberfest celebrations held in the German Democratic Republic? | The short answer is no, but that would be a bit untruthful since I think what you mean is something else (if not, I apologize):
Oktoberfest is not a pan-German phenomenon, it isn't even a pan-Bavarian (whose culture seems to be often associated with Germany in General abroad) one. Oktoberfest is a Munich tradition, it originated in Munich as a celebration of the marriage between King (then crown-prince) Ludwig I. of Bavaria and princess Therese of Sachsen-Hildburghausen (a minor Ernestine duchy). The Theresienwiese, where Oktoberfest takes place, is named after her.
So you'd be hard pressed to find Oktoberfest celebrations held anywhere outside Munich in the FRG as well, especially in the North. There are copycat 'Oktoberfest' celebrations throughout Germany nowadays, but those piggyback on the popularity of the Munich event.
Now, with that in mind, there are a lot of Volksfeste (literally 'people's festivals', usually a combination of beer or wine festivals, depending on local customs, and carnival) throughout Germany (more than 10.000 a year), and they have a long history going back to the Middle Ages. I'm not a mediaevist, so I'm not going to embarass myself talking about that stuff, but I'll point out that there is a current initiative to have the German Volksfeste accepted into the UNESCO world cultural heritage for the importance they hold in German culture, which tells you a lot about how important they are for many Germans and the communities where they are held. [Here](_URL_0_) is an English language article on the topic. There are many famous other 'Fests', like the Cannstadter Wasen in Stuttgart, the Hamburger Dom and so on. You'll find them even in small cities and villages, accordingly smaller in scale.
This means, of course, that they were also important for people in the GDR. The leaders of party and state also recognized the role they could play in pacifying and appeasing the population, by providing pleasures and distractions (often by also providing music or products that were not commonly available), while also recognizing the danger that masses of people under alcohol could pose should the mood turn against the system. Thus members of the security organs were usually present, even if attempts to ideologically take over these festivals to instrumentalize them for propaganda were not really successful on a grand scale.
I don't know if there are any English language sources on this topic, but 'Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR 1971-1989' by Stefan Wolle is a good source for everyday culture in the GDR.
This page has some pictures of Volksfeste/Jahrmärkte in the GDR and some of the attractions you might find there:
_URL_2_
Here's also a map (from 2010) showing the locations of copycat Oktoberfests throughout Germany:
_URL_1_
There you'll also see that, apart from the one in Berlin(West) 1949, this trend as a mass-phenomenon is a pretty new one, taking off really only after the fall of the GDR and in time-periods of which we do not speak here. | [
"Celebrations were held annually on 18 January. At centralised and local events, patriotic speeches were held and songs such as \"Heil dir im Siegerkranz\", the unofficial anthem of the empire were sung. Celebrations also took place publicly during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) and with the participation of high ... |
How did Spanish theologians try to legitimise Spanish overseas expansion in the 16th century, and the treatment of the native people that they 'acquired?' | People in this thread are kind of dancing around it, but the Carlos I of Spain appealed to the pope for religious justification of conquests in the New World. The previous wars Spain had fought against the Muslims were justified by the Catholic faith because the Muslims were "heretics" who had heard the "Word of God" and rejected it. There was a considerable moral ambiguity as to whether violence could be brought against people who had never before heard of Christianity.
Pope Paul III responded by issuing a papal bull called *Intra Arcana* which ruled that yes, violence could be used against pagans if the goal was to convert them to Christianity. This, combined with the earlier [Treaty of Tordesillas](_URL_0_) effectively gave the Spanish and Portuguese free reign to conquer any native people they encountered with the full backing of the church, so long as the "official" goal was to convert them to Christianity.
Originally they used this as an excuse to enslave the native peoples, (see whitesock's post on the Valladolid debate). But the pope eventually ruled in 1531 (Sublimus Dei) that the American Indians were indeed human and could not be enslaved. The Spanish found ways to get around it by *virtually* enslaving them through the encomienda and later hacienda systems. | [
"The task of incorporating eastern Honduras into the Spanish Empire fell to the evangelising efforts of Spanish missionary orders. The earliest Franciscan missionaries, at the beginning of the 17th century, attempted to convert the natives in their own settlements. It soon became obvious that this was impractical, ... |
what exactly does oil have to do with the wars in afghanistan and iraq? | oil doesnt have really anything to do with either conflict. iraq does have the worlds 4 largest reserves, but the us doesnt even have access to them. they let the iraqi's bid them out and now china's gas company, BP, Total Sa, and Sidanco are the owners of the oil extraction. theres no oil in afghanistan. | [
"Oil, as a natural resource and a commodity, can be identified as a contributor to war. In the Gulf and Iraq Wars, oil and its flow to other countries were factors considered by Iraq and the other countries involved in the conflict. Although political changes, economic sanctions, and war created instability in Iraq... |
why don't device manufacturers provide higher rate chargers with the device? | I'm a radio control hobbiest. I have learned quite a bit about batteries and one thing I have learned is that the faster you charge these batteries the less time the charge will last. So in a cellphone situation where a big selling point is battery run time and life they are gonna want you to charge it as slow as possible To get the longest run time out of the battery.
Cellphone batteries are not designed to charge faster then the output. These are known as 1 C batteries. If the batter in your phone is only 1800mah it can only be charged at 1.8a anything more and it will over heat, cause damage to the battery including puffing and blowing up.
So cellphone makers are not gonna make a new charger for every different size battery in every different phone they have on the market. They are gonna make a general charger that will charge all or most of their devices.
On the other side I could be mistaken but I recall reading usb 2.0 is limited in how fast it can charge things. | [
"Newer approaches reduce transfer losses through the use of ultra thin coils, higher frequencies, and optimized drive electronics. This results in more efficient and compact chargers and receivers, facilitating their integration into mobile devices or batteries with minimal changes required. These technologies prov... |
Why are energy levels of electrons quantized? | > I've read on Yahoo answers that these quantized energy levels are harmonic solutions to Schrödinger's equation and that just like there are some harmonic frequencies that a bell rings at, there are certain harmonic solutions to the equation. In which case my question would be that is this due to the fact that there's a LaPlacian in the equation that needs spherical harmonics to be solved?
The first part is correct. Although it's nothing specifically to do with the Laplacian or the spherical harmonics. You have a PDE and some boundary conditions. The boundary conditions enforce the condition that only certain solutions to the PDE are allowed.
It's the boundary conditions which lead to quantization. For example in an infinite square well, it's the boundary conditions which enforce the fact that bound energy eigenstates have discrete wavenumbers, because the wavefunction must go to zero at the boundaries. | [
"Quantized energy levels result from the relation between a particle's energy and its wavelength. For a confined particle such as an electron in an atom, the wave function has the form of standing waves. Only stationary states with energies corresponding to integral numbers of wavelengths can exist; for other state... |
custom feeds. how are they, how do they work, how do you edit them? | A multireddit, now renamed to “custom feed”, is a group of two or more subreddits. Think of it as a folder in your bookmarks. Instead of seeing everything in your home feed, you will see just the ones in that folder. This is the main way I use Reddit. I have all of my subs grouped into topics look at one topic at a time. | [
"Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a website. To provide a web feed, the site owner may use specialized software (such as a content management system) that publishes a list (or \"feed\") of recent articles or content in a standardized, machine-readable format. The feed can then be ... |
if our field of vision is limited, why can we not see or imagine "nothing" on the outer edges of our vision, or "black" like the top/bottom edges of movies | Your brain already "erases" information you see but you don't need, as well as "fills in the blanks" for information that's missing or assumed.
you have a blindspot in each eye but if you look at a wall, you don't see two black circles, your visual center just automatically paints in the blindspots, because you don't need to see two blank spots. Your brain also ignores stuff like your nose, you don't need to pay attention to your nose poking into your field if view
Seeing the end of your vision, or seeing a big black region around your visio would serve no purpose and have no advantage, and there's no point for the visual system to evolve such a feature.
| [
"Another criticism comes from investigation into the human visual system. Although both eyes each have a blind spot, conscious visual experience does not subjectively seem to have any holes in it. Some scientists and philosophers had argued, based on subjective reports, that perhaps the brain somehow \"fills in\" t... |
why does yellow highlighter not show up when you copy it? and why can't you copy red pages? | It's just a matter of contrast. Most copy machines only print black and white; they can't even produce gray except with [dithering](_URL_0_). So every color on the page has to be converted to either black or white. Yellow is very close to white, so it disappears. Red is sort of a half-dark color, so in some areas it turns to black and in some areas it turns to white, and you get huge blotches all over your copy, obscuring the text.
If you have a more modern scanner/copier with a grayscale option (it can produce 256 different shades of gray), then the problem isn't quite as bad. Yellow will still probably be invisible, because it's still very close to white. But your red might actually show up as a nice gray, and leave the document readable.
And, of course, if you have a full color copier, everything will come through perfectly. I scan color stuff all the time at work.
You can play with this effect a bit if you have a photo editing program like Photoshop, GIMP, or _URL_1_. Pull in an image with a lot of red or bright yellow, and experiment with the desaturate/grayscale and the black and white options, and see what different colors turn into. | [
"Many highlighters come in bright, often fluorescent and vibrant colors. Being fluorescent, highlighter ink glows under black light. The most common color for highlighters is yellow, but they are also found in orange, red, pink, purple, blue, and green varieties. Some yellow highlighters may look greenish in colour... |
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