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Why is hot metal softer? | This is somewhat tricky to answer because metals have many different structures and atomic arrangements, depending on the material. In an ideal metal, the atoms are held together by a metallic bond in a perfect, repeating crystallized structure. In an actual metal, these crystallized structures still exist, but they are not uniform throughout. Instead they are localized into little "grains" in the material, usually micrometers in size (but varying depending on the metal, etc). So in a realistic metal you have a bunch of small pockets of atoms, bonded in a perfect crystal-lattice pattern, all separated by what are called "grain boundaries". These grain boundaries hold neighboring grains together via the metallic bond, but this bond is much weaker than the metallic bond keeping the atoms together inside a grain. Here's a [picture](_URL_0_) of grains in a metal to give you an idea.
These grain boundaries are brittle compared to the rest of the metal because they are not as strongly bonded. The metal *wants* to be completely uniform as opposed to being made up of millions of these grains, but the atoms are too low energy to rearrange themselves. It's like a ball stuck in a mudpit at the top of a mountain - the ball wants to roll down the hill, but it doesn't have enough energy to get out of the mudpit to do so. When you heat up a metal, you give enough energy to the atoms to allow them to rearrange themselves and become more uniform. This removes the grain boundaries, which were the limiting factor in the materials malleability. The end result is increased malleability. In addition, many metals (it might be most metals, but I'm not certain) will retain this improved malleability even when they are cooled back down (as long as it's a relatively slow and gradual cooling process).
Now, again, there are a lot of types of metals and atomic structures so there are always exceptions. But the above explanation holds for most metals. | [
"Other than to increase its malleability, another reason for heating the metal is for heat treatment purposes. The metal can be hardened, tempered, normalized, annealed, case hardened and subject to other process that changes the crystalline structure of the steel to give it specific characteristics required for di... |
Are there any entirely fictional people commonly taught in history classes in North America? | Do you mean as a way of illustrating an "average" person? It's a common thing to 'create' people in order to help children understand more complex ideas from a relatable viewpoint. For instance life in a 13th century English manor-village is more easily understandable if you create a villager who's life the children can follow.
Or do you mean creating someone who had an effect on history as a whole but never really existed, like a fake king or something? | [
"This is the list of fictional Native Americans from notable works of fiction (literatures, films, television shows, video games, etc.). It is organized by the examples of the fictional characters that are based on the indigenous people of the United States.\n",
"My America is a series of fictional diaries of chi... |
what are and how effective are sabermetrics, and can they be applied to other sports? | Sabermetrics in baseball is a statistical analysis of performance. The idea is to shift away from aggregate measures like "hits per at bat" which have tactical dependencies that consider who's on which base and the overall state of the game. Instead, statisticians look at measures like OPS+ (runs per out relative to the league average). This measure can be statistically shown to be a better performance predictor than batting average.
To apply the concept to other sports you'd need three things: data, more data, and a game model. Baseball is a slow game, in terms of time between plays to write down data about what just happened. As a result, baseball statisticians have lots of data for many past years with batter-by-batter detail and recent data with pitch-by-pitch detail. This would be harder to do in a faster game like basketball or a game with more things going on at the same time (which makes the game model harder to interpret) like soccer or football. | [
"Sabermetrics was created in an attempt for baseball fans to learn about the sport through objective evidence. This is performed by evaluating players in every aspect of the game, specifically batting, pitching, and fielding. These evaluation measures are usually phrased in terms of either runs or team wins as olde... |
How was marriage viewed in the 1800s - early 1900s as opposed to now? | For much of Korean history, marriage for most was quite like a business arrangement between families. Women as well as men worked in the fields or in craft industries - men and woman with strength and skills were valued. Family leaders looked to marry their sons and daughters to people who could contribute to the well-being of the clan or village.
As far as parties are concerned, the wealthy would have all-day affairs, with the groom escorted by his friends to the house of the bride and the usual feasts and songs. Both bride and groom would wear silk (often brocaded, if they could afford it) and the bride would get an elaborate tied-up hairstyle. For most people among the local nobility this might be the most expensive outfit they ever owned.
When time to consummate the marriage, close relatives would hide near the room to make sure the deed was done. It's said that the old ladies of the village were permitted to poke holes in the waxpaper doors of the bridal suite to 'check up' on the young ones.
For most people though, things were much simpler. The bride would move to her new husband's home and help his mother with farmwork and chores. The family might build an addition to the home before the ceremony if possible. | [
"By the mid-18th century, the values of the American Enlightenment became established and weakened the view that husbands were natural \"rulers\" over their wives. There was a new sense of shared marriage. Legally, husbands took control of wives' property when marrying. Divorce was almost impossible until the late ... |
what are the financial advantages for video game developers to make their game for one system only? | Generally, they get a bucketload of money from some platform's parent company to release exclusively on that platform for some period of time, then they use that time to develop the versions for the other platforms. | [
"A common exit strategy for a successful video-game developer is to sell the company to a publisher, becoming an in-house developer. In-house development teams tend to have more freedom in the design and content of a game compared to third-party developers. One reason is that since the developers are employees of t... |
what's the deal with those tar pits in the usa? | [The La Brea tar pits](_URL_0_) are natural, and pre-date current estimates of human colonization of North America.
Tar pits happen when oil leaks to the surface. Gases and lighter hydrocarbons evaporate, leaving the heavier oily and tar-like fractions. Being thick and sticky, over the millennia they've trapped careless animals. Excavations have yielded all sorts of interesting fossils.
| [
"A tar pit, or more accurately an asphalt pit or asphalt lake, is the result of a type of petroleum seep where subterranean bitumen leaks to the surface, creating a large area of natural asphalt. This happens because, after the material reaches the surface, its lighter components vaporize, leaving only the thick as... |
"Under God" was added to the US Pledge of Allegiance in 1954; what was the background behind this change? Was there any controversy accompanying it at the time? | The change to the pledge was part of a broader movement over the past decade in the United States to distinguish Americans from "godless Communists" during the Cold War. There was a rise of civil religion—church attendance and profession of belief in general Christian principles tied closely to one's American identity. Which denomination one might attend was far less important than just believing at all; it wasn't, in other words, a competition over theology, rites, or practices.
Billy Graham rose to fame beginning in 1949, a symbol of this notion of civil religion. He frequently denounced Communism and intertwined American democracy with Christianity. Prior to this time, the phrase, "under God" was used sparingly by American politicians and presidents. But it was Truman who began to use it more frequently, and like Graham, it was often used to denounce Communism.
The Pledge of Allegiance wasn't the only thing that was changed. It was during this time that the phrase "In God We Trust" was added to paper money. The phrase was also added to the speaker's dais in the House of Representatives, and above the entrance to the US Senate chamber. The National Prayer Breakfast became a larger part of American politics. These movements were often spearheaded by fraternal organizations. It was the Knights of Columbus that pushed to have the pledge amended with the phrase, "under God." Another organization, the Fraternal Order of Eagles, worked with American director Cecil B. DeMille to place monuments of the Ten Commandments across the country. DeMille's film, "The Ten Commandments," was coming out in 1955 and so he readily partnered with the Eagles to have the monuments—monuments that in the last thirty years have been the subject of several court challenges—placed on public land, both because he believed in their mission and because he saw it as an opportunity to promote his film.
In other words, the changes to the pledge were just one part of a sharp focus in the late 1940s and 1950s on publicly demonstrating, both as a nation and as individual citizens, one's commitment to God, religion, and America. Historian Kevin Kruse has also written about the role of businesses and the capitalist angle in the shift (Kruse, "One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America) that is excellent.
There was minor push back on these changes, but nothing that made a dent or gave pause to the shift. Some Jewish organizations wrote letters of protest. There were, of course, actual Communists in the United States as well as atheists who also spoke out, but that was the extent of the protests: speaking out. No large, well-organized or well-funded campaign emerged to offer legal challenges. | [
"Critics of the American Pledge of Allegiance have argued that the use of the phrase \"under God\" violates the separation of church and state. While the pledge was created by Francis Bellamy in 1891, in 1954, the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization, campaigned with other groups to have the words \"under G... |
why are brass, copper, and bronze used in pluming? | They're very corrosion resistant, considering the constant exposure to water. They're also very malleable (meaning they're easily shaped into tube and pipe) and not toxic, plus it is easy enough to be bent by hand rather than having to fabricate exact curves and lengths. In addition, the three metals are also resistant to the growth of bacteria and other microbes.
Brass, copper, and bronze are all mostly copper. Admiralty brass, the type of brass you'd normally see in plumbing, is only 30% zinc. Bronze is typically no more than 12% tin. Keeping the metal mostly the same also helps limit corrosion. Typically you'll see copper tubing and brass fittings, because pure copper doesn't hold its shape very well under the higher stress at a fitting. | [
"During the Roman period a new process of metalworking started, cementation, used in the production of brass. This process involves the combination of a metal and a gas to produce an alloy (Zwicker et al. 1985: p107). Brass is made by mixing solid copper metal with zinc oxide or carbonate which comes in the form of... |
what happens to a file when it is uninstalled from a computer? | We tend to say the file is deleted.
The computer has a disk that acts like a like a filing cabinet. The computer keeps a list or table that tells it where the files is stored on the disk - similar to which draw on hanger in the filing cabinet.
So the table might say - file1 is stored at address 100 and is 40 pages long, and file 2 is stored at address 140 and is 50 pages long, file 3 is stored at address 190 and so on.
If you ask the computer to delete file 2 then it will just delete the name of the file from the table. After deleting the file the table might be - file1 is stored at address 100 and is 40 pages long and file 3 is stored at address 190.
So the file is still on the disk but the computer cannot find it from the table anymore. Next time a file is to be saved it might put it in the space the file 2 is using. If say file 4 is also 50 pages long then the computer might use the space file 2 uses and the table might be - file1 is stored at address 100 and is 40 pages long, and file 4 is stored at address 140 and is 50 pages long, file 3 is stored at address 190. File 2 has then been overwritten.
Unlike real files the file on a computer is a row of switches that can be set to 0 or 1. When a new file needs to use the row of switches they are just switched to the new values.
Hope my analogy helps and doesn't confuse - the main point is that in most systems the file is not deleted, the index is deleted, and the space reused.
There are also other ways for the computer to manage the disk. | [
"When a file is said to be corrupted, it is because its contents have been saved to the computer in such a way that they can't be properly read, either by a human or by software. Depending on the extension of the damage, the original file can sometimes be recovered, or at least partially understood. A file may be c... |
what are moments, skewness and kurtosis in statistics? ;-; | Did you find this [article](_URL_0_) ? | [
"In statistics, L-moments are a sequence of statistics used to summarize the shape of a probability distribution. They are linear combinations of order statistics (L-statistics) analogous to conventional moments, and can be used to calculate quantities analogous to standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis, termed ... |
What was the decision making process behind choosing Normandy as a target for invasion as opposed to Calais, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, etc? | Choosing a landing site required finding a compromise on a number of factors. The chosen site had to be within aircraft range of the UK, so the beachhead could receive fighter cover and air support. The closer it was to the UK, the better, as less shipping would be needed, and it would be less exposed to attack by U-boats, E-boats, mines or aircraft. It needed to be close to Germany, so that the Allied armies wouldn't have to spend a lot of time fighting across France to get there. There needed to be ports in the vicinity of the landing site, so that the troops could receive the supplies they needed. The landing beaches had to be suitable - shingle would jam tank tracks, while mud would tire men out and immobilise tanks by causing them to sink in, and a long shallow beach would cause the landing craft to beach too far offshore. The landings also needed to be in a place where the Germans were not well dug-in, and had comparatively few troops in the vicinity. If it was too close to Germany, the landing ships would be more easily attacked by the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine.
The Pas de Calais was the obvious area for a landing. It had good ports, at Calais, Dunkirk and Boulogne. It was very close to the UK, close enough that heavy guns from Dover could fire upon it. It was the closest bit of the French coast to Germany. It had good beaches, as shown by the Allied evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940. However, all of these qualities were equally obvious to the Germans. The Atlantic Wall was at its thickest in the area around Calais. It had the heaviest coastal batteries on the French coast, the most bunkers, the thickest minefields. The largest concentration of German troops in France lay behind the beaches of the Pas de Calais. All this made a landing there too risky.
Landings further down the French coast, between Dieppe and Le Havre, might have been possible. However, as the 1942 raid on Dieppe showed, the beaches in this region were not good for landings. Many of the beaches were shingle, making them unsuitable for landings with tanks. The coastline was lined with cliffs, making getting off the beaches very difficult. There were also worries that the 1942 raid had alerted the Germans to the possibility of a landing in this area, causing them to strengthen their defences.
Going much further west, to Brittany, was considered. Brittany had good beaches, and excellent ports, at Brest and Lorient. Taking these would also help reduce the threat posed by German U-boats to the Atlantic convoy routes, as these ports were key U-boat bases. It was relatively undefended. However, it was considered to be too far from the UK. Air support could not be effectively guaranteed, and the shipping requirements for the desired force would be be too large for the Allies to supply. Brittany was also too far from Germany - the Allies would have had to fight all the way across France to reach it, greatly stretching their supply lines.
Landing in Belgium or Holland was also a possibility. The same caveats applied to landings in the west of Belgium as applied to the Pas de Calais. However, landing in eastern Belgium or southern Holland would have advantages. The area had major ports in Rotterdam, and especially Antwerp. It was close enough to the UK, especially for shipping, and less well defended than the areas around Calais. It was also close to Germany. However, good beaches were hard to find, thanks to the estuaries of the Meuse, Rhine and Scheldt filling the area with mud and silt. Landing here might require a number of sequential landings on different islands in the estuaries, further complicating operations. Landing in northern Holland, Germany or Denmark was not ideal, as to do so would be fighting too far from the Allied bases in the UK, and too close to German air and naval bases.
As such, landing in Normandy was the best possible option. Ports were available, at Caen and Cherbourg. There were good landing beaches across the area. It was within fighter range of the UK, and close enough that ships wouldn't take too long in transit. It was better defended than say, Brittany, but not as well defended as the Calais region. | [
"Having succeeded in opening up an offensive front in southern Europe, gaining valuable experience in amphibious assaults and inland fighting, Allied planners returned to the plans to invade Northern France. Now scheduled for 5 June 1944, the beaches of Normandy were selected as landing sites, with a zone of operat... |
How would I go about testing and documenting a theory/hypothosis without being a scientist? | One option is to contact a research centre at a local university/hospital/etc that performs research in the particular field, and attempt to get them on board. Unless it is blindingly obvious that your study would be beneficial, you will want to be extremely well prepared to have any chance of convincing them. Visit libraries/universities and do a thorough literature review so you have the necessary background knowledge to discuss the study at the level that will be expected from the researchers.
Research centres are approached often by non-academics with ideas, so you need to be thoroughly prepared, well-versed in the topic, and convincing to separate your proposal from the "chaff". Be polite if they reject your proposal. Most research fields are small communities and you don't want to develop a reputation that may hinder your chances of collaboration in the future.
Understand that even a feasible study with little possibility of generating revenue via grants, etc or much recognition in the field is likely to be rejected. Resources are limited, and ultimately the centres have to channel their available resources into studies that keep the doors open. | [
"The hypothetico-deductive model or method is a proposed description of scientific method. According to it, scientific inquiry proceeds by formulating a hypothesis in a form that can be falsifiable, using a test on observable data where the outcome is not yet known. A test outcome that could have and does run contr... |
Is there a material so dense that smells can't get through? | That's not a hard requirement. Depending on the size of the molecule just a thin sheet of plastic wrap could stop smells. The steel of a gas bottle certainly stops the diffusion of gas. | [
"Some storing materials can be harmful to ceramic objects. Wool felt attracts and harbors insects including moths and silverfish which can be potentially very harmful to other collection material types. Polyurethane foam deteriorates over time which leaves a by-product that are sticky and acidic.\n",
"In 2012, di... |
Did the confederacy during the civil war ever make any music? Like a confederate "Hail to the chief"? | [This older answer of mine](_URL_0_) focuses on one of the most popular songs of the Confederacy. | [
"The song plays a prominent role in Michael Shaara's American Civil War historical novel \"The Killer Angels\" and its film adaptation \"Gettysburg\". Confederate Brigadier General Lewis A. Armistead recalls a dinner at the marital home of his best friend—the now-Union Major General Winfield Scott Hancock—at the U.... |
Why do people use "old timey voice" when mimicking historical people from the past 150 years? | Public speakers, leaders, and entertainers in the 19th century were almost always trained in elocution. It was an important part of education - search for elocution in this 1857 [McGuffey's Reader](_URL_0_) for an example, and in passing to marvel at what was expected of 19th century schoolchildren.
Speakers were expected to understand their voice and to speak in a clear, well-modulated voice with varying pitch and cadence. Not everyone got a good education in those days, but anyone who held elected office or made their living as an entertainer in those days had to be an accomplished speaker, physically and mentally capable of talking at length and being heard.
For many Americans, however, their greatest exposure to public speaking came at sporting events, where announcers shouted through megaphones to be heard over the crowd. The excitement and physical tension in their voices translated to a higher pitch, megaphones reproduce higher voices more easily, and higher voices could be heard more easily over the crowd.
In the late 19th century, the gramophone was introduced. Like the megaphone, it had a hard time reproducing bass sounds, so any sounds from the gramophone came out high and tinny. Early radios also had a problem reproducing bass. Early talkie film technology raised the voice an octave, rendering a generation of silent film stars instantly ridiculous.
So there are a number of factors. Artifacts from the era of early recording technologies don't faithfully record the human voice. As time went on, a number of Americans adopted the tinny quality of recorded voices. For millions of people, listening to records and sports announcers were their elocution lessons. A high, nasal voice became a signifier in its own right, a humorous acknowledgement that the speaker was playing to a crowd. It was cutting-edge stuff in the age of ragtime, snappy and a little dangerous, but it was winking parody by the time of Bugs Bunny's introduction a decade or two later. | [
"\"Voices of Old People\" is a sound collage, and was recorded on tape by Garfunkel at the United Home for Aged Hebrews and the California Home for the Aged at Reseda. The collection of audio recordings of the elderly find them musing on treasured photographs, illness and living conditions. In \"Old Friends\", the ... |
stud finders / stud sensors | They are mini metal detectors. They don't have a long range and are usually fairly accurate unless the stud is buried deep or there's some other piece of metal that distracts it. | [
"Electronic stud finders rely on sensors that detect changes in the dielectric constant of the wall. The dielectric constant changes when the sensor is over a stud. The lower reading indicates the presence of a stud in the wall. Internal capacitor stud finders can also come with other features that locate metal and... |
How do they polarize glass? | There are many different ways, one is simply placing a PVA (poly vinyl acetate) foil on the glass. This material approximately has the consistency and thickness of plastic wrap. The manufacturing process begins by heating and stretching PVA to five times its natural length, making it even thinner. This lengthens PVA's long chain molecules, causing them to align. The stretched PVA is then dipped in iodine solution. The iodine is absorbed into the molecular chains forming long grids of parallel, darkened lines that are not visible to the human eye. The film is then dyed to the color of the desired finished film. The darker the film, the more polarization it provides. In the last step, the film will be applied on the glass. | [
"Circular polarizers can also be used to selectively absorb or pass right-handed or left-handed circularly polarized light. It is this feature which is utilized by the 3D glasses in stereoscopic cinemas such as RealD Cinema. A given polarizer which creates one of the two polarizations of light will pass that same p... |
Are taste buds (human and animal) programmed from birth to 'like' or 'dislike' certain flavours? | Can't answer your question entirely, but the sense of smell comes from chemical receptors, which are genetically programmed. However, it's a receptor, and it doesn't indicate that you like or hate something, necessarily. For instance, Durian fruit: Most people who've grown up without tasting it find it to be one of the most foul tastes and smells around... while people who grow up with it tend to be more receptive to it.
What you're seeing is the Nature vs. Nurture conflict: we're born with certain traits, but how we use those traits to interact with our environment isn't fixed from birth.
For the record, the type and number of receptors for taste/smell that we have is refined by the environment that our ancestors came from: Cats are VERY sensitive to nitrates and other meaty smells, for instance. Whales and other marine mammals still have the "air based" receptors that their more cow-like ancestors had - but most of them have been deactivated. Not surprisingly, you wouldn't use a whale to sniff out drugs, the same way you might with a dog - for many reasons, including the uselessness of the air-based smell receptors in a generally watery environment.
Cheers! | [
"Kent Berridge, a researcher in affective neuroscience, found that sweet (\"liked\" ) and bitter (\"disliked\" ) tastes produced distinct orofacial expressions, and these expressions were similarly displayed by human newborns, orangutans, and rats. This was evidence that pleasure (specifically, \"liking\") has obje... |
wittgenstein | I agree with the above post - you'd have to narrow down what you want to know about Wittgenstein. However, you're in luck! As there exists a comic book which explains various bits of Wittgenstein in a very simplified manner which I've copied below. Hooray!
_URL_0_
It's mainly about Russell, but there's loads of stuff on Wittgenstein, I remember a very interesting section on his picture theory. I think it's mainly earlier Tractatus stuff when he arrived at Cambridge, rather than anything on the later Wittgenstein. Hope that helps.
EDIT: typo | [
"The New Wittgenstein (2000) is a book containing a family of interpretations of the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In particular, those associated with this interpretation, such as Cora Diamond, Alice Crary, and James F. Conant, understand Wittgenstein to have avoided putting forth a \"positive\" metaphy... |
how is it possible that our brain is able to calculate trajectory (e.g. throwing an object at something) so easily (especially if i'm so bad at math)? | what you are doing is what most physicists do when looking into new equations or formulas - "first approximation"
you aren't predicting the trajectory with a high degree of accuracy so the actual path it takes is always "close enough" for you to think you are getting it right
being good at maths is more about getting it exact, and when not exact, knowing the amount of error, exactly
and your brain has seen solid spherical objects interacting with gravity and air all it's life, the model is fairly simple and uniform - try watching footballs roll around the ground and see how good your guess is to its path :) | [
"For simple dynamical systems, knowing the trajectory is often sufficient, but most dynamical systems are too complicated to be understood in terms of individual trajectories. The difficulties arise because:\n",
"The premise of the method is that the human brain thinks in a number of distinct ways which can be de... |
What is required for a car to hydroplane? | You can hydroplane on very little water, all you need is enough to coat the surface of the road.
What keeps you from hydroplaning is the tread on your tire. At speed the treads act like a high speed pump, channeling water into the tread pattern where it is expelled by the spinning of the tire. As the contact pattern compresses against the water, the water migrates to the channels allowing the contact pattern of the tread to come into contact with the ground. Tires that have no tread such as racing slicks can start hydroplaning as soon as the ground gets wet. This is because as the contact patch compresses against the water, the water has no place to go and consequently the tread loses contact with the ground which is in essence floating on the water.
Now the larger and deeper the puddle, the volume of water overwhelms the tread pattern and water begins to come between the contact patch and the ground. Although the tread pattern is channeling water away, there is too much water and the tire begins to float.
However, the exact point at which this happens is a factor of many different things so your best bet is to avoid large puddles, replace worn tires and if you do start hydroplaning do not hit the brakes. At low speeds you may not notice any loss in contact with the ground since you're going slow enough that the car tires "sink" through the water bringing the tire into contact with the ground. At higher speeds you require more friction between the tire and the ground to maintain control of the car and even a small loss in friction can send you out of control. | [
"A hydroplane (or \"hydro\", or \"thunderboat\") is a very specific type of motorboat used exclusively for racing. One of the unique characteristics about hydroplanes is that they only use the water they're on for propulsion and steering (not for flotation) - when going at full speed they are primarily held aloft b... |
Silk Road Reading | Also, *Foreign Devils on the Silk Road* is a really fascinating and engaging look at history of excavation of the Silk Road. | [
"In 2012, Hansen wrote the book, \"The Silk Road: A New History\", which weighs archeologically excavated documents and artifacts to argue that the Silk Road trade was small-scale and usually involved local goods. The book received positive reviews from critics with Library Journal writing that it is “an impressive... |
why do we get that strange feeling in our head when something sharp and long is pointing right between our eyes? | Doesn't work for me. Maybe it's because I don't use my left eye? Maybe it's related to the Ajna chakra point (third eye) and I mediate almost daily? Can you explain the sensation. | [
"When following the letters on the spine of a book with our eyes, our gaze moves in a vertical direction. One famous interpretative model holds that this movement stimulates the defecation urge.[ウェブページ：“本屋で便意を催す理由”][ウェブページ：“本屋に行くとお腹が痛くなる理由”] According to those who have experienced the phenomenon, it is to do with t... |
In protracted conflicts and wars, especially where soldiers were conscripted, does the 'quality' of soldier decrease as the war goes on? | It would rather depend on the nature of the state and its army at the time.
In Britain, there is no indication of a deterioration in the quality of the army as the Napoleonic wars went on, and I have read at least one suggestion that the turnover in officers was beneficial to the purchase system (The Reason Why by C. Woodham Smith) and also that at Waterloo, after a break of several years, there was dearth of experienced, battle-hardended redcoats.
The Luftwaffe in WWII is a good example of a force that is initially superior but steadily deteriorates with mounting pressure over several years. On the other hand, RAF bomber command steadily increases in efficacy with better equipment and better training as the war progresses.
The British army in WWI is a mix of both. It starts off being the best army in the world size for size (arguably), then deteriorates rapidly in 1915 as the old regulars and territorials are killed off. It reaches its nadir in 1916 with large drafts of gallant but semi-trained recruits and then slowly builds up to being the supreme fighting power by summer of 1918. | [
"In 2016 the Army was struggling to recruit conscript servicemen, due to significant evasion of conscription, to replace demobilising soldiers including volunteers. This followed negative publicity about nutrition and equipment deficiencies in the conflict zone. By mid-April 2016, 127,363 soldiers and volunteers ha... |
color wheel versus visible light spectrum | With visible light, red doesn't come after/before violet and violet doesn't come after/before red. On the color wheel it does because it makes finding relationships between colors easier than a straight line. Green being the opposite of red has everything to do with color theory in art and nothing to do with the wavelength of light. In chemistry or astronomy, any science that relies on visible light, you wouldn't note that something is a complementary color. Just like in art you don't really care that a color has a wavelength of 400nm and a certain frequency. And the violet in the visual spectrum is really more of a deep blue than what we typically think of as violet or purple. But the contrast with the cyan band makes it appear more purple. Really it's red and blue at opposite ends.
Red and green are subjectively complementary. Just like blue and orange or purple and yellow. The color wheel is a circle, so there are no ends. Everything blends together. You can pretty much do what you want in terms of matching colors on a wheel. Traditionally it's a line from one side to the other to get complementary colors. A triangle for tertiary colors. A square for tetradic colors. You can keep going with a pentagon, hexagon, etc. It has nothing really to do with the physical nature of light. It's just about making color schemes that look good together.
RGB light mixed makes white. RGB paint makes black. But you can make a color wheel that includes shades (darks) or tints (lights). So it doesn't really prevent you from including white just because it's a subtractive color model. | [
"A color wheel or other switch for changing a projected hue (e.g., for an optical display) is a device that uses different optics filters within a light beam. Common usage includes continuously-rotating wheels for seasonal home displays (e.g., at Christmas) and controllable color wheels for a particular instrument ... |
How fast are the particles in the LHC moving relative to each other? | The last c in your equation should also be squared and then you get
2vc/(1-v^2 )=0.99999999999999999999999999999988*c
Anyhoo, From the view of the LHC the relative velocity of the particles is just 2*v*c The velocity addition comes into play when assessing the velocities from the refernce system of the particles themselves.
So the particle "sees" the other particle approaching at 0.99999999999999999999999999999988*c whereas the experimenter sees a head on collision with a relative velocity of almost 2c | [
"Imagine two fast-moving particles approaching each other from opposite sides of a particle accelerator of the collider type. The closing speed would be the rate at which the distance between the two particles is decreasing. From the point of view of an observer standing at rest relative to the accelerator, this ra... |
class warfare | Class warfare is the idea that one class of people, usually the rich or well-to-do, either take action to prevent the poor from "rising above their station", or support policies which help suppress the poor, or are otherwise implicitly assisting in the suppression of those of a lower class, or are least complicit in it.
The converse, of course, would be action by the poor against the rich (vandalism, threats, property destruction, etc.) Very few people would, I think, claim to be "for" class warfare; but plenty of people deny it exists. | [
"Class conflict, frequently referred to as \"class warfare\" or \"class struggle\", is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests and desires between people of different classes.\n",
"The forms of class conflict include direct violence, such as wars for resources an... |
what is self-healing plastic and how does it work? | I'm not an expert but I believe that self-healing plastic is a typical long-chain polymer material that contains pockets of liquid plastic. When the material is broken, these pockets of liquid plastic get broken open and the liquid fills the gap created. The liquid then solidifies to heal the plastic. | [
"Self-healing materials are materials in which repair, or “heal”, themselves upon damage from an external force through the use of living polymers. For example, if a crack forms in the material, it proceeds to repair the crack and restore itself to its original, undamaged form. It achieves this by incorporating mon... |
Religious relic? | I agree with Bodrk43: it looks like a benchmark or surveyor's mark of some sort. If it's a US Geological Survey benchmark, then destroying it is a crime. If it was set by some other agency or a private party, I don't know what the law says but I would be hesitant about destroying it.
I'm a member of the Geocaching hobby, and some of us also engage in the even geekier sub-hobby of searching for old benchmarks like this. If you could post the GPS coordinates or even the approximate location of this marker, I could look it up on some government databases and other listings of benchmarks to see if there's a record that would tell us what exactly it is. | [
"In religion, a relic usually consists of the physical remains of a saint or the personal effects of the saint or venerated person preserved for purposes of veneration as a tangible memorial. Relics are an important aspect of some forms of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Shamanism, and many other religions... |
Have there been female rulers with harems? | Follow up question: the Ottoman and various chinese dynasties had harems where concubines competed for political influence, and occasionally one concubine rose to the top of the entire governemnt, fir example Wu Zetian. What happened to the institution of the harem during the these periods? Were all the other concubines exiled/executed or just the ones who posed a threat to the supreme concubine? | [
"The administration of the royal harem constituted an independent branch of the court, staffed mainly by eunuchs. These were initially black eunuchs, but white eunuchs from Georgia also began to be employed from the time of Abbas I. The mothers of rival princes together with eunuchs engaged in palace intrigues in a... |
what really happens when people die of "old age" or "natural causes" ? | what happens is the family and doctors agree it is not worth determining what the actual cause of death was.
actual cause is often heart failure, but frankly could be almost anything that isn't blatantly obvious from an external inspection.
edit: stroke is another common cause. may actually be even more common that heart attack for "old age" deaths, as it can hit suddenly with less obvious symptoms. | [
"A death by natural causes results from an illness or an internal malfunction of the body not directly caused by external forces. For example, a person dying from complications from influenza (an infection), a heart attack (an internal body malfunction), or sudden heart failure would most likely be listed as having... |
Western texts talk at length about Eastern goods received from the Silk Road such as spices and silk. What Western goods went east through the Silk Road of Antiquity that were in high demand for Eastern traders? | With respect to the Roman period, we have a few clues. *The History of the Later Han Dynasty* *(Hou Hanshu*), compiled in the fifth century, contains a brief passage on trade goods from Da Qin (The Roman Empire):
"This country produces plenty of gold, silver, and precious jewels, luminous jade, bright moon pearls, fighting cocks, rhinoceroses, coral, yellow amber, opaque glass, whitish chalcedony, red cinnabar, green gemstones, drawn gold-threaded and multi-coloured embroideries, woven gold-threaded net, delicate polychrome silks painted with gold, and asbestos cloth." (12)
An excellent commentary on this list can by accessed by clicking on the [notes linked to this text](_URL_0_).
Most of the products listed by the Hou Hanshu were (unsurprisingly) produced in the Roman east, and traded primarily by the merchants of Alexandria and Antioch. Some of them, like the rhinoceros horn and amber mentioned in the list, were not products of the Empire itself, but were handled by Roman merchants. Others were Roman products: that asbestos, for example, probably came from the mountains of Cyprus.
Another passage in the *Hou Hanshu* remarks:
"In the reign of Emperor Huan, king An-tun of Da Qin (Rome) sent an embassy....this offered ivory, rhinoceros horn, and tortoise shell....but their tribute contained no jewels" (88)
This was not a real embassy - as far as we know, in fact, the Romans never sent a formal delegation to China. It was almost certainly a party of Roman merchants operating between Alexandria and India, who had either been shipwrecked on, or attempted to trade along, the southern Chinese coast. The ivory and tortoise shell they brought were probably from India, though the rhinoceros horn may have been imported from sub-Saharan Africa via Alexandria.
In general, however, the Chinese do not seem to have been especially interested in most Roman products; Pliny the Elder remarks in his (admittedly very ill-informed) description of "the Seres" (Chinese), "they shun all intercourse with the rest of mankind, and await the approach of those who wish to traffic with them" (6.20). | [
"The Silk Road was the great overland trade route of the Ancient World, carrying goods including silks from China to the Mediterranean. By the 6th century C.E., tensions between Byzantium and the Sasanian Empire disrupted trade along the traditional route. Central Asian merchants developed a new route to Byzantium,... |
how things such as albums and photos are leaked onto the internet. | It's a good real world example of how a secret is something you tell NOONE. Once you tell anyone, it has a very good chance of not being a secret for long.
An imaginary scenario would be something like the chapter of a book sent to a lot of people during the process of publishing. If one of those just tells 2 close personal friends one of whom happens to tell their family who has a teenager that has a boyfriend that brags on a private forum read by 50 teenagers, one of which uploads it to 4chan.... and suddenly it's there for the whole world to see.
| [
"\"A person who either downloads images on to disc or who prints them off is making them. The Act is not only concerned with the original creation of images, but also their proliferation. Photographs or pseudo-photographs found on the Internet may have originated from outside the United Kingdom; to download or prin... |
pluto's orbit | Pluto isn't actually an oddball. Most dwarf planets have highly eliptical, angled orbits. [see this side-view image of the solar system with several dwarf planets and kuiper belt objects highlighted](_URL_0_) | [
"Pluto's four small moons orbit Pluto at two to four times the distance of Charon, ranging from Styx at 42,700 kilometres to Hydra at 64,800 kilometres from the barycenter of the system. They have nearly circular prograde orbits in the same orbital plane as Charon.\n",
"Observations indicate a circular, equatoria... |
why such widespread poverty still exists in the 21st century. | It has become institutionally acceptable for American Corporations to lay off literally millions of people and then ship those jobs overseas while paying maybe $3 a day.
The reason other countries accept these jobs goes back to the complicatd post ww2 cold war era of **de**colonization and subsequent **neo**colonization of these lands. This is the reason why Africa, one of the most naturally rich lands on the planet, faces famine and war; not by their own means, but by the corrupting influence of both the corporate west and communist east.
you should check out[This interview](_URL_1_) or [this one](_URL_0_) to gain a further understanding of modern empire and how that equates to our current paradigms of **dual economies**; the dichotomy of abject poverty and decadent opulence coexisting, side-by-side, in the same country.
Edit: added John Perkins Interviews | [
"Poverty has been historically accepted in some parts of the world as inevitable as non-industrialized economies produced very little, while populations grew almost as fast, making wealth scarce. Geoffrey Parker wrote that Poverty reduction occurs largely as a result of overall economic growth. Food shortages were ... |
When two photons interfere, what happens to their energy? | Every destructive minimum has a corresponding constructive maximum. | [
"Photons traveling in this loop will also interfere with each other. The well defined cavity length (1–10 μm) will ensure that the interference is constructive and will allow certain modes to oscillate. The competition for gain permits one mode to oscillate once the lasing threshold has been reached.\n",
"Several... |
what philosophical assumptions does science make? what are the 'beliefs' inherent in scientific inquiry? | One of the bigger things is that we can never be sure of our observations 100%. If I flip a coin 4 times and it lands on heads all of those times, I would be wrong to say that it's always going to land on heads. I may have just been very lucky! If you think about this, there's no reason this doesn't apply to 10 consecutive heads, 100 consecutive heads, or 1,000,000,000 consecutive heads.
This applies to everything. Maybe the sun isn't going to come up tomorrow even though we the sun has come up every single day for the past 7,000 years of recorded history(?). We could have just been very, very, very lucky.
We usually assume that observation "A" is true if we can calculate that the statistical probability "A" being due to luck or chance is less than 5%. That is true for the biological sciences .. for physics it's more like 0.0000000034% or something.
Anyway, yeah. Some food for thought. | [
"Perhaps the most basic assumption of science is that factual statements about the world must ultimately be based on observations of the world. This notion of empiricism requires that hypotheses and theories be tested against observations of the natural world rather than on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelat... |
Would the Third Reich have supported the creation of Israel? | I think this is a fair question to ask, given that much of the groundwork of the Jewish state was well in motion by the time of Nazi Germany (Third Reich is a propaganda term they themselves coined).
Your recollection is correct. From the beginning of the mass murder of Jewish people in what became the Holocaust, it was readily apparent that simply shooting every Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe was not a feasible plan. So by the end of 1941, tentative schemes were in motion that would become official policy as of the Wannsee Conference in 1942 (which explicitly outlined the Final Solution - viz. expelling Jews to Eastern European labour and death camps).
Prior to that conference, however, a variety of methods for removing Jews from Europe were explored, including potentially sending them to Madagascar. However, keep in mind this would not have been simply a Jewish state - the SS intended to monitor and control the island, making it more a "super-ghetto" than an autonomous Jewish state proper. Their plan was contingent on victory over Britain, which of course did not happen, and when British forces seized Madagascar from Vichy control, that ended that scheme.
It would be incredibly unlikely that the Nazis would move the Jews to Palestine, given their struggle for North Africa, and thus their attempts to befriend Arab leaders, including Hitler pledging support for Grand Mufti Amn al-Husseini's plan of an Arab state in Palestine. They would in effect be alienating people they regarded as necessary allies, to placate a group they literally saw as on the level of rats.
But if the Nazis for some reason did see it worthwhile to move the Jews to Israel, I suspect the SS would run the province like a super-ghetto, much in the way they envisioned potentially turning Madagascar. | [
"The Biblical concept of Eretz Israel, and its re-establishment as a state in the modern era, was a basic tenet of the original Zionist program. This program however, saw little success until the British commitment to \"the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people\" in the Balfour Declara... |
warts. | You can have the virus (HPV) on your body without necessarily having any visible effects of the virus. Not only that, but there are many different types of HPV that only affect certain parts of the body, so it's possible that your finger wart may have come from a different surface of your skin, where it was relatively harmless. Either that or you made contact with someone else who had the virus on the skin surface. The virus needs to penetrate the skin through a cut in the skin, and you may have unkowingly had a very tiny cut on your finger. Viruses are much smaller than a single cell, so they don't need a large opening. [Here](_URL_0_) is a link to the Wikipedia article. | [
"WarFriends is a 2017 third-person shooter video game developed by About Fun. It is played by third-person perspective with elements of real-time strategy. It was originally released on 7 October 2016 as early access. The full version was released on 17 January 2017.\n",
"\"The War Game\" depicts the prelude to, ... |
how can a single strand dna hold almost a zettabyte of digital storage? | i hate to sound flippant but the answer is that our current technology has storage density limitations that prevent us from doing the same thing our DNA does. Data does not inherently take *any* space really. at least, not any more space than the synapses firing creating the idea.
Chemical storage is something we're still learning to understand but our technology tree has been rooted in magnetic storage for a long time so getting to refined chemical storage like what our DNA uses will take some time. | [
"As an alternative to the storage in direct DNA sequence, the data can also be stored in DNA nanostructures. On December 26, 2018, researchers from Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge published a paper in Nano Letters (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b04715) to show the possibility of e... |
why do we still have single cell/simple organisms? | Bacteria is the most successful thing on this planet with about 5*10^30 individuals. Some scientists estimate the total weight of bacteria exceeds that of both plants and animals. So a better question to ask would be why we are even here?
You have to keep in mind that evolution is not a straight line. It is a branching series of organisms that try something and either fail or succeed. Those that succeed make more organisms that repeat the process. So far, that incredibly branching process has formed a vast number of organisms alive today, each one of which has found a way to survive and reproduce in its own unique way. Simply because one animal has found another way to be successful doesn't mean that every organism adopts that same method in the same way that you don't munch on maggots just because other people have found it to be an effective source of energy. | [
"Multicellular organisms may have first evolved through the formation of colonies of identical cells. These cells can form group organisms through cell adhesion. The individual members of a colony are capable of surviving on their own, whereas the members of a true multi-cellular organism have developed specializat... |
Why are most psychedelic plants native to Latin American countries? | There are many psychedelic plants native to temperate and even artic countries. I think the reason so many come from the tropics (where most Latin American countries lie) is because the tropics have the highest level of biodiversity of any ecosystem. Probably as a result of moderate year round temperatures and maximum solar radiation. So lots of opportunities for a lot of different species of psychoactive plants to evolve. | [
"The Native Americans of Mexico are known to have long used the seeds of species of \"Ipomoea\" for preparing psychedelic infusions; several scientific studies indicate they contain several ergoline alkaloids with effects somewhat similar to, but weaker than, those of LSD It is possible that some of these studies m... |
Does one have greater sense if the sensory organ (nose, mouth, eyes) in particular is larger than normal? | No. Perception is based on the amount of receptors. While you could potentially link the size of the sensory organ to the number of receptors, I haven't seen that it makes a difference.
Example: A dog nose is thousands of times more powerful than a humans, yet not much larger. This is because they have far more receptors that are also far more specialized.
Other examples include eagles eyesight, wildlife's hearing (deer).
There are other factors such as the structure of the sensory organ, but larger doesn't mean better. | [
"Scientists who study perception and sensation have long understood the human senses as adaptations to their surrounding worlds. Depth perception consists of processing over half a dozen visual cues, each of which is based on a regularity of the physical world. Vision evolved to respond to the narrow range of elect... |
How do black holes combine? | Scientists have never observed black holes merging, but it is possible. Almost every galaxy contains a black hole at it's center, so scientists have said it is most likely to happen when two galaxies collide and their supermassive black holes at the center collide.
A black hole forms when a large star, one much larger than our sun (20x the mass), dies. Throughout a star's life there is a constant battle between the force of gravity which is forcing the pressure inwards and nuclear fusion in the core which forces the pressure outwards. (Nuclear fusion is the process by which stars burn light elements into heavier elements to generate energy, e.g. hydrogen to helium). However, once a star's fuel supply runs out, usually at the iron stage, the core starts to collapse in on itself as nuclear fusion slows down and gravity takes over. The outer parts of the star are violently cast in a supernova, while the core collapses under its own weight. The core collapses at a point with virtually zero volume and it is said to have infinite density, a singularity. When this happens, it would require a velocity greater than the speed of light to escape the object's gravity.
Basically, when two black holes collide...you get a larger black hole. Honestly, scientists do not know much about this because it has never been observed. If they come together relatively slowly, then they merge together and create a big black hole which has a mass equal to the sum of the two masses unless it releases energy. Sometimes black holes can be spinning so rapidly that what can happen is that they are both spinning and they can bang together and one can be bounced out into space, like spinning tops. It really depends on what is actually happening. Again, this has never been observed so we do not know for sure. | [
"A binary black hole (BBH) is a system consisting of two black holes in close orbit around each other. Like black holes themselves, binary black holes are often divided into stellar binary black holes, formed either as remnants of high-mass binary star systems or by dynamic processes and mutual capture, and binary ... |
How were battles fought during the Flowery Wars involving the Aztecs, in terms of tactics, weaponry, etc.? | According to Ross Hassig, flower wars were pretty much the same as other conflicts. The exception being is that armies would not make use of projectiles. Part of this reason is that projectiles can easily kill a person, but projectiles are also impersonal in that you cannot easily make claim to a captive. Instead they made more use of shock weapons (Hassig 1988:128-132).
Shock weapons included thrusting spears ( *tepoztopilli*), swords (*macuahuitl*), and clubs. The spears were about 1.87m long and could be used to thrust as well as slash and could parry at a distance. The spearhead was a triangular, ovoid, or diamond shaped head with stone blades embedded in the edge forming a nearly continuous cutting edge.
The sword came in two varieties, one-handed or two-handed. They were usually made of oak and were about 7.6cm to 10.2 cm wide and over a meter long. The sword had two grooves carved on either edge that allowed for stone blades to be placed sometimes being glued in. The macauhuitl can be used for a downward slash as well as a backhand cut. Parrying was probably done with the flat of the blade to avoid damage to the stone blades.
There were several types of clubs that were used by the Aztec. There were simple wooden clubs, clubs with stone blades (*huitzauhqui*), clubs with a spherical ball at the end (*cuauhololli*), and clubs with protruding knobs of wood much like a morning star (*macuahuitzoctli*) (Hassig 1988:81-85).
As for general tactics, fighters were grouped into combat units and were rigidly led into or out of conflicts. During battle they would form a solid front against the enemy, but only deep enough into order to maintain that front rather than having large blocks of fighters. This focused the battle into a face to face fight. When the opposing sides met, battle units would skirmish with one another on an individual combat basis while trying to maintain a cohesive front. If a unit's front broke, a rout was likely. The Aztecs tended to either surround their enemies from all sides or attack from the flank while engaged in a frontal assault (Hassig 1988:100-101).
Hassig, Ross
1988 Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control. University of Oklahoma Press | [
"There appear to be a variety of reasons that the Aztecs engaged in flower wars. Historians have thought that flower wars were fought for purposes including combat training and capturing humans for religious sacrifice. Historians note evidence of the sacrifice motive: one of Cortez's captains, Andres de Tapia, once... |
why netflix's "recently added" column has all the newest releases, while it's "new releases" contains mostly movies that have been on netflix for months-years. | It's based off of your recommended shows/movies so if you have a specific taste, the newest movie in that category might be a year old. | [
"As of June 2019, Vudu's selection contains over 24,000 titles in their catalog and over 8,000 television shows, making them one of the largest streaming providers of its kind. Titles range from major motion pictures, independent films, documentaries, children's programming, anime, musicals, recorded musical perfor... |
Why is beer foam white, and not the same colour as the beer? | the light is scattered through the thin film of the bubbles, causing it to look like a homogeneous white. | [
"Many beers are transparent, but some beers, such as hefeweizen, may be cloudy due to the presence of yeast making them translucent. A third variety is the opaque or near-opaque colour that exists with stouts, porters, schwarzbiers (black beer) and other deeply coloured styles. Thickness and retention of the head a... |
with the epa allowing asbestos again, what exactly is it, what are those commercials saying, should i be scared, and if so what can i do to prevent harm? | Although this doesn't get to your question - the EPA isn't allowing asbestos again.
In 2016 Congress passed a revised version of the Toxic Substances Control Act which requires the EPA to periodically review certain substances to see if they should be banned or if existing restrictions on their use should be lessened.
The current news concerns the fact that in June asbestos was listed as one of 10 such chemicals that are undergoing review. As part of that review, the EPA is soliciting "public comment" on whether asbestos should be totally banned or granted a "Significant New Use" designation - in line with the review required by the 2016 amendment to the Toxic Substances Act.
This is not a "rolling back" of restrictions on asbestos. Even if it is granted Significant New Use designation - and its very unlikely that will happen - that still requires a company to jump through an extraordinary amount of regulatory hurdles before being able to sell asbestos. And even then, companies would be required to go back through the approval process again for each different asbestos containing product they wish to sell.
As to the public comment - what they are stating is that for the purposes of the public comment, they are not concerned with the long term environmental effects of asbestos and so you should not submit a comment on that issue. Rather, they are focusing on the health effects that asbestos has to those directly exposed to it, ie, those involved in asbestos manufacturing, installation, and removal, as well as those that might be acutely exposed, such as the occupants of an asbestos containing house that collapses in a fire.
And again, the EPA is not doing this for fun or even because they want to. They are required under the 2016 revision of the Toxic Substances Control Act to perform this exact review. That revision was passed by Congress and signed by President Obama. | [
"Asbestos regulation critics include the asbestos industry and JunkScience.com owner Steven Milloy. Critics argue that the outright banning of dangerous products by government regulation is inferior to keeping the products while innovating ways to prevent the lethal effects. They argue that the product benefits are... |
In Ontario, Canada. Why are there two towns/cities named "London" and "Paris"? Did the names have any influence from the much larger, famous European counterparts? | I have a great book called ["Ontario Place Names" by David E. Scott](_URL_0_). He has tracked the history and meaning of the name for pretty much every hamlet/village/town/city in Ontario. Some are quite brief and he cannot determine the meaning of the name, but he usually goes into more detail for the larger towns and cities and those with a more detailed history. Gingerbreadman42 is right about the names, but I can give a bit more detail from the book.
For London, he says that Col. John Graves Simcoe (who later became the governor of Upper Canada) chose London to be the capital of Upper Canada in 1793, and named it after London England. However, his choice for capital city was overruled by governor-in-chief Lord Dorchester, and York (Toronto) became capital.
Paris was named by William Holmes, the first settler, who built a mill to grind gypsum, otherwise known as plaster of Paris. Gypsum was (is?) used as a fertilizer and got the plaster of Paris name because its usefulness as a fertilizer was first discovered near Paris, France.
And those are just the two biggest places in Ontario named after foreign capitals. Washington, Dublin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Moscow, Warsaw, Athens, Manilla, Delhi, and Cairo are all places in Ontario. And so are Zurich, Adelaide, Ceylon, and Gibralter.
And based on my casual reading of this book, I figure that a solid quarter to a third of all place names in Ontario are named after either a place in Great Britain & Ireland, or a 18th or 19th century English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish person. Think York (formerly Toronto but also York Region, North York, East York, etc.), Stratford, Southampton, Malton, Manchester, Lansdowne, Kilbride, Embro, Dorchester, Cumberland, and Chatham, to name a few.
Oh, and Punkeydoodle's Corners. Punkeydoodle's Corners is also the name of a hamlet in Ontario. It's near Stratford and Tavistock. There's not much there. Apparently they have to replace the sign often because it get stolen all the time. | [
"Like another ten cities in the world, this London was named after the British capital of London by John Graves Simcoe, who also named the local river the Thames, in 1793. That was understandable since John Graves Simcoe and many of the original settlers were from Britain. Simcoe had intended London to be the capit... |
Can zygotes fully develop to term in vitro/without a mother? | Impossible at this time.
Typically right now IVF embryo transfers occur at about day 5 or 6 after conception when the embryo is about 60-100 cells in the blastocyst form.
On their own they start dying more rapidly if left to grow after that. Ultimately for them to survive with current technology, they need a uterus. | [
"The zygote contains a full complement of genetic material, with all the biological characteristics of a single and unrepeatable human being, and develops into the embryo. Briefly, embryonic development have four stages: the morula stage, the blastula stage, the gastrula stage, and the neurula stage. Prior to impla... |
when driving does a change in air pressure determine how much fuel you use (mpg) etc.. | Yes...but not very much. Also, fuel gauges aren't all that accurate.
Probably the most noticeable effect on MPG, for the same trip at the same speed, is wind. Headwind or crosswind will decrease it, tailwind will increase it. Many other things affect MPG: Cargo/passenger in your car (more weight). Air pressure in the tires. Outside temperature. Air conditioner on/off. | [
"To decide how much fuel needs to be injected into each intake runner the ECU calculates the air mass that had been drawn into the cylinder. The calculation makes use of the cylinder volume (the B204 engine has a displacement of 0.5 litres per cylinder). That cylinder volume holds equal amount of air which has a de... |
what does it mean when someone "itemizes" their taxes? also is this somehow related to deductions. actually, eli5 deductions as well. | When figuring out your taxes, there are certain things that the government has decided you don't have to pay taxes (or can pay less taxes) on. Because you're deducting them from the amount you have to pay, they're called deductions. They are for things like raising children or business expenses if you're self-employed - Generally, things that the government has decided will benefit the nation in the long run (well-raised kids, successful businesses).
When you pay your taxes, you can choose to take a "standard deduction" which is a predefined amount set by the government. Doing this is basically saying "Yeah, I have some deductions to take off, but either I don't feel like listing them all or even if I did it's not going to be more than the Standard."
Or you can choose to *itemize* your deductions. This means listing every item/purchase/travel expense/whatever that you can possibly write off of your taxes. People do this if it means they'll save more money than if they just took a standard deduction, but it's generally a big hassle. Also, if you get audited by the IRS (I.e., they think you lied about your taxes), you need to have receipts for everything you listed available to prove you actually spent the money the way you said you did. | [
"Under United States tax law, the standard deduction is a dollar amount that non-itemizers may subtract from their income before income tax (but not other kinds of tax, such as payroll tax) is applied. Taxpayers may choose either itemized deductions or the standard deduction, but usually choose whichever results in... |
Were there any Confederate generals who were anti-slavery? On the other side of that coin were there any Union generals who were pro-slavery? | I do not believe there were any Confederate Generals who were anti-slavery. In 1861 it was actually quite dangerous for any American citizen to express anti-slavery views while in the South. You will see quotes from men such as Lee which indicate slavery is an evil but Lee is also recorded as voicing the predominant opinion that it was an evil which God inflicts on black people and God will decide to end in his own time.
The Union side was much more complex of a story. The Democratic Party and the large number of voting public had a long history of agreeing with Southern slave owners. Most enlisted for the Union. Not to end slavery. But very many of those voted Republican in the 1864 election which was clearly anti-slavery.
Roughly two hundred thousand Southerners joined the Union army. Mostly coming from the border states but coming from all of them except SC. as a sweeping statement, they were more motivated in loyalty to their country than to slavery and their state. Many northerners joined the war, many were force conscripted and they joined with no interest to fight and die with the goal of ending slavery.
There were Republicans and Abolitionists who were the first to join the Union army with the singular goal of ending slavery. The Commander in chief, Lincoln, navigated the slow and steady path of enlisting border states and Union men into the cause. It took time and a lot of blood before the objective of the war changed. The Emancipation proclamation changed it from the preservation of the union to the extinction of slavery and thus permanently end the agitation. Public opinion of Northerns changed greatly with time to the point they ended up arming black men and paying them equally in the army. So, not only did a lot of men vary but they varied in time as well.
I will call out the top Union General of them all as pro-slavery. General McClellan. But I won't critique him. I will let Frederick Douglas do that.
Frederick Douglas wrote "McClellan, in command of the army, had been trying, apparently, to put down the rebellion without hurting the rebels, certainly without hurting slavery, and the government had seemed to cooperate with him in both respects. "
"I, however, faithfully believed, and loudly proclaimed my belief, that the rebellion would be suppressed, the Union preserved, the slaves emancipated and that the colored soldiers would in the end have justice done them. This confidence was immeasurably strengthened when I saw Gen. George B. McClellan relieved from the command of the army of the Potomac and Gen. U. S. Grant"
"With this condition of national affairs came the summer of 1864, and with it the revived Democratic party with the story in its mouth that the war was a failure, and with it Gen. George B. McClellan, the greatest failure of the war, as its candidate for the presidency. It is needless to say that the success of such a party, on such a platform, with such a candidate, at such a time, would have been a fatal calamity. All that had been done toward suppressing the rebellion and abolishing slavery would have proved of no avail, and the final settlement between the two sections of the Republic touching slavery and the right of secession would have been left to tear and rend the country again at no distant future." | [
"Prominent Confederates such as R. M. T. Hunter and Georgian Democrat Howell Cobb opposed arming slaves, saying that it was \"suicidal\" and would run contrary to the Confederacy's ideology. Opposing such a move, Cobb stated that African Americans were untrustworthy and innately lacked the qualities to make good so... |
AITA for asking some maroon friends to help me steal from the Spanish only to accidentally spark a four-year-long scorched earth campaign against my allies? | ESH. Well, everyone but the slaves. The Spanish sound just *terrible*, you're in this for your own selfish reasons, and you caused a *scorched earth war*? What the hell! | [
"The Spanish freed their slaves, who became Jamaican Maroons in the mountainous interior, and they fought on the side of the Spanish against the English invaders. There were two separate bands of Maroons, led by Juan de Bolas and Juan de Serras respectively, and they effectively repelled any attempts by the English... |
Why are there so many things named "Columbia" in the United States. Does it have any relation to Columbia the country? | Only insofar as they have the same source: the name of Christopher Columbus.
"America" is kind of an odd name, taken from cartographer Amerigo Vespucci. But it caught on, the way things that are kind of counterintuitive will sometimes.
This left a kind of unsatisfied urge to name it for Columbus, it seems. In 1776, a certain country was very nearly the United States of Columbia, did put their capitol in a District of Columbia, and it remained a tradition to poetically personify the country in the female figure of Columbia (songs like "Columbia the Gem of the Ocean" are about the USA).
On the other hand, there's a lot of use of Columbia (meaning the Americas) in Canada, starting with British Columbia.
Colombia (notice spelling), as Gran Colombia, and very different borders, seceded from the Spanish Empire in 1819, but split up by 1830 into New Granada, Ecuador & Venezuela. It was 1863 before New Grenada became the United States of Colombia.
| [
"Columbia is a poetic name for the Americas and the feminine personification of the United States of America, made famous by African-American poet Phillis Wheatley during the American Revolutionary War in 1776. It has inspired the names of many persons, places, objects, institutions, and companies in the Western He... |
helpful maps | Could always try /r/mapporn there is loads of useful images there.
| [
"General-purpose maps provide many types of information on one map. Most atlas maps, wall maps, and road maps fall into this category. The following are some features that might be shown on general-purpose maps: bodies of water, roads, railway lines, parks, elevations, towns and cities, political boundaries, latitu... |
Does chemotherapy affect the health of a male's future offspring, conceived years after treatment? | Be careful answering this post, as it borders on asking for medical advice. Linking to relevant papers is probably okay, but telling OP whether or not he should have kids wouldn't be... Obviously it's up to the mods to define the line of what's acceptable. | [
"Female infertility by chemotherapy appears to be secondary to premature ovarian failure by loss of primordial follicles. This loss is not necessarily a direct effect of the chemotherapeutic agents, but could be due to an increased rate of growth initiation to replace damaged developing follicles. Antral follicle c... |
If there really was another planet orbiting the sun opposite the earth as some people claim, how would we know? | Yes, it would affect the orbits of other planets. Also, other planets would affect its orbit, so it would be hard put to stay exactly on the opposite side.
There is an [equilibrium point, L3](_URL_0_) on the opposite side, but it's not stable. Instead of being like a valley, it's like the top of a hill. So if something is at the L3 point, the slightest disturbance will move it away. | [
"A planet orbiting the Sun so that it was always on the other side of the Sun from Earth could (in theory) have such an orbit because it was the same distance from the Sun and had the same mass as Earth. Thus, what would make it undetectable to astronomers (or any other human beings) on Earth would also make it hab... |
[Meta] New r/askhistorians official policies. | If I could suggest one addition: downvotes are for bad responces, not for responces you disagree with/that challenge your view of things but are otherwise excellent. | [
"An acceptable use policy (AUP), acceptable usage policy or fair use policy, is a set of rules applied by the owner, creator or administrator of a network, website, or service, that restrict the ways in which the network, website or system may be used and sets guidelines as to how it should be used. AUP documents a... |
why do next gen video games all require downloading new content immediately after purchase? why can't they sell complete games out of the box anymore? | Printing discs, boxing and shipping take a while to do, and because games have to be shipped to retails days before the release in order to ensure that they have them available for purchase that day, this packaging process has to start early.
Yet the development of a game doesn't stop the moment they start packaging. Usually, developers work very hard closer to release getting any bugs fixed, or omitted features put into a patch. | [
"Users who pre-order upcoming games through Access are able download special limited versions of the games, released five days prior to the retail launch. EA described these early-release versions as not being more traditional demos, but instead full-featured but time-limited versions, with the exact extent of cont... |
why small businesses are considered "good" | Keeping money flowing is what creates a good economy and the most direct way of doing that is by making sure the money you are giving out doesn't get stockpiled in some giant vault or sent out the country.
If you spend $100 at a local butcher that money is probably going to get spent elsewhere in the area. Your butcher will go buy bread from the baker, who'll go buy milk from the farmer who pays his employees who buy meat at the butcher and so on. The money doesn't leave and the constant exchange is what keeps everything ticking.
If you are that baker or butcher you are more likely to spend that $100 if you feel that the economy is flowing freely enough for someone else to come in and hand over their $100 to you.
Like the current economic downturn. It's not really because suddenly a bunch of money has vanished. It's just that people and business' aren't sure if the money they pay out is going to get replaced any time soon, so there is a tendency to hold on to it. Which makes the problem worse. Which is why in times like this the Government steps in and injects a massive amount of money into the system to try and get it moving again, in the hopes that once it's all flowing freely we can take that money back without harming the system too much.
(The flaw is we expect that flow of money to get faster and faster every year, but that is unsustainable. Eventually we reach a point where we think we are *too* free with our money and we slow down but we do it quicker than the system can react, it gets shocked and it crashes. The .com bubble was like that. Slowly over time more and more money was being pumped in. It got easier and easier to get investors and eventually business started relying on this easy money and were completely unprepared when that cash dried up.)
If however you spend that $100 at Wal-Mart it goes into the till and gets siphoned off to their big single bank account somewhere else. They pay their employees who are local obviously, but they likely put a lot of that money back into Wal-Mart.
Another problem is Wal-Mart are far more capable and far more likely of out-sourcing to other countries. Not just hoarding money inside the same country but shipping it out and greasing the gears of some other economy, from which it might never come back.
As Deadcellplus mentioned though the downside is cost. Wal-Mart can buy a million times the amount of mince your local butcher can at once and that means they get it cheaper per pound and they pass that saving on to you.
-----
'Course it's all a bit of a phenomena because we don't have any real sense of control over it at a local level. You might be hyper-local in your spending but if your butcher takes your money and pays his VISA bill with it instead of using it locally.. all your hard work is pretty much done for. It can only really be measured at scale and it's not universal, Even in depressed economies you get pockets of 'boom', little bits that somehow thrive in the conditions. | [
"“Small businesses tend to have just one or two key products that they sell to government as their discriminator. And a lot of initial profits go into keeping talent at the company, rather than investing in the next big development. For all of industry, this requirement will force some business decisions to be made... |
Couple questions about planetary orbit. | Tidal Locking.
_URL_0_
The moon is tidally locked with the Earth, it is slowly getting farther and farther away and is in fact slowing down our days. It does spin on its own axis once per month. But since it revolves around us at the same rate, we are only seeing one side. | [
"The only parameters of the planet's orbit that are currently available are its orbital period, which is about , and its inclination, which is approximately 90°. From Earth, the planet appears to make a transit across the disk of its host star. It has an eccentricity of 0, meaning its orbit is circular.\n",
"Unde... |
how do they declare certain aquatic organisms as extinct, when we haven't explored a huge majority of the oceans? | The same way we do on land, really. It is basically the reasoning of 'if we haven't seen any trace of species X in a good number of years, most likely they are extinct.' Sometimes those assumptions are correct. sometimes they are very false. (Like with coelacanths)
Though note that unexplored parts of the ocean don't necessarily have to mean you can't know if an animal species is extinct. Many species have very specific habitats they don't deviate from. If you have a species that can only exist in shallow water or tide-pools, for example, then the fact that the deep sea has not yet been explored is not really an issue. That is not where those animals could live in the first place. Additionally, you don't always need to have explored a region. A lot of this is based on traces of their survivals, but that doesn't necessarily mean seeing the fish in the flesh. Finding remnants of them in the stomachs of other fish, finding them in fishing nets, finding them washed up on beaches. all of that can count towards being able to tell a species exists still or not. And if there is a huge change in that (for example, we used to find X species frequently in the stomach of dolphins, but they haven't been spotted there in 30 years) that can be a good indicator said species is gone.
Again, not ever 100% and some species have clung onto life in places unknown to us at first, but still a reasonable guess. | [
"A species is declared extinct after exhaustive surveys of all potential habitats eliminate all reasonable doubt that the last individual of a species, whether in the wild or in captivity, has died. Recently extinct species are defined by the IUCN as going extinct after 1500 C. E.\n",
"This page features lists of... |
How does it happen that an entire volume of data can become corrupt when the writing of only a small portion of it is interrupted? | In your case it seems was damaged the File Allocation Table (FAT). This file system can be read and written by a wide range of devices, but it is very fragile because of how data is arranged logically. In most cases you can fix the problem with a specialized application, like chkdsk under Windows.
If you are using it only on computers, you can format it with NTFS file system. This file system is more robust. | [
"In general, when data corruption occurs a file containing that data will produce unexpected results when accessed by the system or the related application. Results could range from a minor loss of data to a system crash. For example, if a document file is corrupted, when a person tries to open that file with a doc... |
how would half the gravity on earth, and in another scenario double the gravity on earth affect us in everyday life? also, could we survive without any gravity at all? | Not exactly an expert, but I'm an undergraduate Physics major:
Assuming that Earth has ALWAYS had the gravitational attraction of Mars or Jupiter, it would affect us very little. Our bodies would have evolved along with all other life on Earth to match whatever the gravitation of Earth is. However, if Earth's gravitation were to suddenly "change" to that of Mars or Jupiter, things get a bit more complicated.
Let's talk about the "general physics" of it first. Most people on Earth have a general concept of physics that applies to everyday life. We know things like how high we can jump, how close we can get to another car before we start braking, etc. As soon as you change the Earth's gravitation, those basic previous expectations about how things move in our everyday lives has to be thrown out the window. As a result, depending on how extreme the change is, there would be a lot of crashes, a lot of bumps, and a lot of bruises as we adjusted to the new "rules."
Physiologically, there would be serious consequences to an extreme change in gravity. We run into this problem a lot with astronauts returning from long stays in zero gravity. Our bodies simply aren't built to be under gravitation that is not Earth's. People returning from space experience a lengthening of the spine, weakening of joints, and a huge loss in calcium. Basically, when placed in a zero-g environment, our body will try to adapt accordingly. If we don't use our bones and are floating around, our bodies will basically begin to get rid our bones. Now for us to be on the surface of Earth at all, there has to be at least a little gravity so we don't float away. Therefore, if gravity on Earth was reduced but not eliminated, people would get taller and we would have less calcium. Now the opposite would happen if gravitational attraction increased. People would be shorter, breathing would be harder, we would rely on our skeletons more so we would require more calcium, etc. Long term, humanity would adjust, but short term, there would be a lot of problems for a lot of people, especially the weak and elderly.
Now I'm not sure exactly what would happen on the astronomical scale, but there would be even more serious consequences which would effect our daily lives. Gravitational attraction is a force between two objects. On the very basic level, gravitation depends on the masses of the two objects involved. (Mass is basically just a measure of how much stuff there is) More mass between the two = more gravity. Less mass between the two = less gravity. The situations that you have described deal with a change in mass of the Earth. If the Earth were suddenly half of it's mass, the Moon would begin to orbit further away, that is, as long as it wasn't "slingshotted" away (more likely). Also, we would begin to orbit the Sun further away, as long as we weren't "slingshot" out of the solar system (also more likely). Living further away from the Sun would cause widespread panic as our light from the Sun would diminish quite a bit. Plants and animals would die, famines if everyone wasn't frozen already, etc. etc. you get the picture. REALLY BAD STUFF. If the Earth doubled it's mass, the Earth and the moon would also most likely be "slingshotted" out of the solar system. But, if we managed to stay in orbit, our proximity to the sun would most likely burn most life on Earth.
**TL;DR**:
Overall - Our basic concepts about how things move in everyday life would change...Lots of crashes, bumps and bruises.
1. No Gravity - We would all float away from the surface of the Earth.
2. Half Gravity - We would all get taller, breathe easier, and have weaker skeletons because we wouldn't need them as much. The Earth would likely be "slingshotted" out of the solar system, or we would all freeze to death.
3. Double Gravity - We would all get shorter, breathe harder, and have stronger skeletons. The Earth would likely be "slingshotted" out of the solar system, or we would all burn alive.
| [
"BULLET::::- Some microbes can survive gravity more than 400,000 times that felt on Earth, a new study says. By contrast, most humans can tolerate three to five times Earth's surface gravity before losing consciousness. (\"National Geographic\")\n",
"The difference in gravity would negatively affect human health ... |
Why is there virtually no outside sources for the Kingdom of Israel during the time of David & Solomon? | Part of the answer is that most people stopped being interested in the area. The Egyptians gave up campaigns in the Levant around 1175 until Shoshenq around the early 900s (who is mentioned in 1 Kings 14 although some dispute this), and New Kingdom pharaohs didn't name their adversaries (certainly Shoshenq didn't). The Assyrians never ventured that far either until 853 so are unlikely to make mention before that time, and they like the Egyptians very rarely named those they encountered (no Assyrian source names anyone in Philistia, Transjordan, Israel (north or south) or Phoenicia between 1200-1050).
Of the remaining sources of perhaps lesser powers, most of them are concerned with their own local affairs - the neo-Hittite kingdoms make no mention of Canaan or Phoenicia. No Aramean inscriptions exist from before the 9th century save Tell Dan and Melqart, and no administrative texts either. Phoenician texts tend to mention only their own kings, and they tend to start only around 1000 BC.
There are a couple of possible mentions of David, Tell Dan (841), Mesha (840), and Kitchen makes a case for the possibility that Shoshenq mentions "Dwt" at Karnak which he suggests might be David, but even if it is, it's still only in the 900s.
Why nothing is found is Israel should be paralleled to "what have we found in Israel regardless?" and the answer is "not very much". Jerusalem has been heavily rebuilt and destroyed numerous times over the centuries and only a tiny part *can* be excavated, and even those areas are fraught with disputes (cf the Temple Mount). Samaria has produced no official inscriptions and that is from a much later period. The parts of texts we have found have been serendipitous in that they were smashed and used in building rubble.
We can also ask "what is found elsewhere in the Levant?". Aram-Damascus existed for 200 years but left nothing behind. Damascus has revealed no Iron age inscriptions (and I think parallels Jerusalem in that respect). Moab has only left 1 stele (Mesha's) and one other fragment. 3 small pieces exist from the kings of Ammon, none commemorating the Edomite kings. So nobody else has left very much behind. | [
"Although the Book of Samuel and initial parts of the Books of Kings, portray Saul, David and Solomon ruling in succession over a powerful and cosmopolitan united kingdom of Israel and Judah, Finkelstein and Silberman regard modern archaeological evidence as showing that this may not be true. Archaeology instead sh... |
if networks cancel a show mid-season and have filmed the rest of the season, why aren't the rest of the episodes released online? | Well sometimes they are, so there is no rule/law against it.
However the show makers often do not have the license / copyright to their own shows. So it´s not up to them to release the episodes however they want.
The network on the other hand who does have the rights, doesn´t really have an interest in releasing the episodes for free. They might have other plans for monetizing them or they just don´t want to release them at all for many reasons (out of spite, to not support a competitor, etc.) | [
"Eight episodes of the program were ordered, however only five have been broadcast in America. In May 2015, A&E announced it was removing the program from its schedule following controversy surrounding the series, and the network isn't planning to air the remaining three episodes, effectively cancelling the series.... |
Was homosexuality seen as normal in the middle east prior to 1885? | ...kind of.
Not "homosexuality" as we think of it today, though. That is to say, an outright sexual relationship between two adult men would not have been regarded as acceptable behavior. However, under certain limited circumstances same-gender love and (depending on whom one asked) even same-gender sexual relations could be viewed as normal. Here I'm going to limit my discussion to male "homosexuality" in the Ottoman Empire prior to the nineteenth century.
& nbsp;
*Terminology and Law*
"Homosexuality" as a category of sexual orientation was not a concept that existed in the Muslim world prior to its importation from the West. Sexually, a man was defined primarily by the acts he performed rather than the gender of the person with whom he performed those acts. Specifically, one adopted either an active or a passive role in sexual intercourse. Men were expected to actively penetrate; women were expected to passively be penetrated, and this basic dichotomy extended to the terminology used to describe male-male intercourse. One wasn't a "homosexual" engaging in a relationship with another "homosexual." Rather, one either took on the active role, thus becoming a *lūṭī* (sodomizer) or took on the passive role, becoming a *mukhannath* (Turkish: *muhannes*, catamite). There was no single term to refer to someone who took on both active and passive roles, although in Islamic Law the term *lūṭī* was sometimes used to refer to any man who engaged in anal intercourse. This emphasis on the act as such rather than an abstract "homosexuality" meant that non-anal intercourse between men was not condemned to the same degree. That's not to say that the Islamic jurists were fine with men kissing, caressing, or engaging in intercrural intercourse with one another, but these acts did not make one a *lūṭī* and therefore constituted only minor sins (*ṣaghā'ir*). Likewise, there was no legal distinction between engaging in anal sex with a man and engaging in anal sex with a woman. It was the act that mattered.
The act of anal sex, however, was universally condemned by Islamic jurists. As we will see, some groups have at some times tolerated anal sex between males under particular circumstances, but the Islamic jurists who determined what was and was not lawful were unanimous in condemning it. They nevertheless differed somewhat in how serious of a sin they considered it to be. Of the four main legal schools of Sunni Islam, three regarded anal sex as falling into the category of *zinā*, or illicit sexual intercourse. Punishment differed based on marital status: a married man would be liable for the death penalty by stoning, while an unmarried man would be punished with a hundred lashes. It is worth mentioning in this context that these strict punishments, called *ḥadd* ("limit") punishments, required either voluntary confession or the testimony of four reliable witnesses who actually saw the act being committed, while the judge was expected to make every possible excuse for the sake of the defendant, in accordance with the saying of the Prophet Muhammad: "Ward off *ḥadd* punishments as much as you can." We have no statistics, of course, but it seems as though *ḥadd* punishments occurred only infrequently because of the difficulty of actually convicting someone, and the jurists regarded this rarity of conviction as a good thing.
The fourth legal school of Sunni Islam, the Hanafi school, was the official school supported by the Ottoman Empire, and was predominant in modern-day Turkey, the Balkans, and Syria. This was the only school that did not regard anal sex as an act of *zinā*, simply because *zinā* was technically defined as the unlawful insertion of a penis into a vagina. Therefore, Hanafi jurists regarded anal sex as less of a sin than the other law schools. It could not be punished by the death penalty except potentially in the case of repeat offenders; its actual punishment was up to the discretion of the judge, but it could not be any greater than 39 lashes, one less than the lowest of all the *ḥadd* punishments. Most often punishment entailed some combination of lashes and a monetary fine. On the other hand, since it didn't entail a *ḥadd* punishment, conviction was also easier, requiring only two witnesses rather than four.
& nbsp;
*Sex, Love, and Beauty*
One of the most striking cultural differences one finds prior to the nineteenth century has to do with the conceptual separation of romantic love and sex, and particularly how this related to the love of boys. Adolescent boys, particularly those who lacked beards (a quintessential element of manhood), were regarded as not yet belonging to the same socio-cultural category as men. Boys were widely regarded as aesthetically beautiful in a sexually neutral sense. One could look upon and appreciate a boy's handsome features without that necessarily implying sexual attraction. One finds this attitude expressed in the works of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111), one of history's most influential Islamic theologians:
(Quoted in Khaled El-Rouayheb, *Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800* (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 54)
> Do not think that the love of beautiful forms is only conceivable with an eye toward satisfying carnal desire, for satisfying carnal desire is a distinct pleasure that *may* be associated with the love of beautiful forms, but the perception of beauty in itself is also pleasurable and so may be loved for its own sake. How can this be denied, when greenery and flowing water are loved, not with an eye toward drinking the water or eating the greenery or to obtain anything else besides the looking itself?
Common opinion held that observing the beauty of boys was neither sinful nor deviant. Likewise, there was nothing inherently sinful or deviant about forming close relationships with them, or ultimately with falling in love with them. The two males in such a relationship would take on the roles of lover and beloved, corresponding to the older, active, pursuing man and younger, passive, pursued boy - the latter in a sense being conceptually feminized by this relationship. The chaste love of boys for their beauty was not condemned by any aside from the most puritanical of Islamic jurists, and even then not because it was objectionable in and of itself, but because of its potential to inspire unchaste feelings. Indeed, one's ability to properly recognize and praise beauty was part of what made one a cultivated and civilized person; this attitude is what led to the creation of an enormous body of "homosexual" love-poetry in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Yet most of the authors of these poems would not have viewed themselves as homosexuals even had the concept existed - many of them would have looked upon the idea of actual sex with boys as abhorrent. There was no contradiction between being married and sexually active with a woman while also appreciating the beauty of boys.
Of course, this sharp distinction between romantic love and sexual desire did not hold for everyone. Those jurists who held that it was sinful to gaze upon boys did so because they recognized that the line was so frequently crossed. Because romantic love in this context was widely regarded as normal, so too was a certain degree of physical affection. But there was a line somewhere, in which love and affection ceased to be chaste and started to be sinful. Naturally, there existed a range of opinions on this issue. Kissing appears to have been fairly common, but we do not know to what degree various forms of sexual activity were or were not tolerated and by whom. A fair bet seems to be that sexual activity was more tolerated among groups who derived their religious authority from places other than scholarly Sunni Islam, such as certain Sufi organizations, whose members were endlessly lampooned by their religious opponents for being *lūṭī*s. Indeed, for some Sufis, gazing at beauty was considered one way of increasing one's closeness to God (insofar as all beauty was a reflection of the beauty of the divine), thus giving religious sanction to pederastic relationships. | [
"The attitudes toward homosexuality in the Ottoman empire underwent a dramatic change during the 19th century. Before that time, Ottoman societal norms accepted homoerotic relations as normal, despite condemnation of homosexuality by religious scholars. The Ottoman Sultanic law (\"qanun\") tended to equalize the tr... |
why was synth used so much in 80s music? | Synthesizers became popular very quickly due to their marketed ability to 'create the sounds of any instrument imaginable'. Up to a certain extent this is true. A synthesizer is one big piece of math hooked up to the most accessible musical interface at the time: a keyboard.
A synth is programmable by tweaking faders, knobs, etc in order to modulate/create sounds as you please. You can mimmick a lot of instruments using synths, plus you can create sounds that are otherwise hardly accessible.
In the 80s, synths gained massive popularity because of some clever innovations in the interface. The synth controls were simplified and easy to understand for any music enthousiast. Companies marketed their synths big time, and included digitally stored presets so the synths came with a bunch of (now very well known) sounds out of the box. You could also save your own sounds to the internal memory so you wouldn't have to write down all the settings.
MIDI helped as well. Most synths came with a MIDI port, enabling the users to hook the synth up to their other equipment.
All this made synths very capable of doing a lot of different tasks in an easy way. But more importantly: Synths were cheap and easy compared to buying and maintaining/storing a bunch of 'real' instruments. And for example playing a guitar and a trumpet both takes a lot of practise each time to learn these different instruments; where a synth just has the keyboard.
Add to that the very popular synth sounds of the 80s, which turned out to be the sound of a decennium. Lots of reasons for musicians to hop on the synth-wagon, up to this day. | [
"The definition of MIDI and the development of digital audio made the creation of purely electronic sounds much easier. This led to the growth of synthpop, by which, particularly through their adoption by the New Romantic movement, synthesizers came to dominate the pop and rock music of the early 80s. The early sou... |
How do colony species like ants and bees evolve to their present states? | This is no small question. This is THE question as regards ant colonies. Until only a few years ago the predominant theory claimed that a quirk of the chromosome structure led to increased "inclusive fitness". The quirk, [haplodiploidy](_URL_5_).
In haplodiploidy a fertilized egg goes female and unfertilized eggs go male. Many of the ants, bees and wasps (and some others) that are haplodiploid also exhibit "eusociality". Eusociality being the most extreme case of individual cooperation in which many individuals forgo reproduction and expend their energy increasing the offspring of other individuals.
The haplodiploidy theory claimed higher levels of "inclusive fitness". Inclusive fitness is when your genetic fitness is shared with others. For example, a sibling has half your DNA. It makes sense under natural selection that you should gain some small reproductive success by helping a sibling or close relative succeed in reproduction. This is not a controversial theory, it is the basis of ["kin selection"](_URL_4_). Haplodiploidy was thought to give siblings higher levels of relatedness and haplodiploid sisters were thought to share 3/4 of their genes with each other, and this, by the theory, increased their "interest" in helping their siblings and parents reproduce.
In the most recent survey of relevant species, E.O. Wilson, a main proponent of the haplodiploidy theory and the world's pre-eminent ant scholar, found that there was no longer enough data to suggest haplodiploidy as the root cause of eusocialty. (Can't find the exact quotes...roughly 2006). Too many non-eusocial haplodiploid species found and even more difficult to explain, the existence of eusociality in regular old diploid insects - namely termites (also some aphids and thrips).
That said we fall back to the few options that were already waiting in the wings. Here is a brief discussion from the book on ants "The Ants" by E.O Wilson and Bert Holldobler, 1990. From google books subheading ["Beginnings of social Behavior"](_URL_1_).
I am a inclined to lean with the mechanism he refers to as "manipulation". I liked the idea even before the collapse of the haplodiploid theory. Ants are easily "programmed". There are really hundreds maybe thousands of examples of ants getting manipulated, re-programmed, by other organisms. To name a few, there is a worm that "hacks" ants, at least one fungus that does, many insects that fake ants out into feeding them and then of course the most dramatic examples are cross-species and cross colony "slave making".
The slave making, also called "Dulosis", is so common that there exists many examples of species that have split into two nearly identical species except that the one species habitually parasitizes the other by co-opting its workers as "slaves". Further there is the extreme case of dulosis in which rather small and feeble ants literally ride on the backs of the much larger individuals of the "host" colony, and control their every move. In this extreme case the parasite ant colony controls the host colony completely and denies the host any reproductive success. These tiny ants make zombies of another entire colony completely through manipulation of the host colony's chemical communication.
To read more on the various forms of ant parasitization see "The Ants" subheading ["Symbioses among ant species"](_URL_0_) (There exist so many interactions among ant species that you can read them all as a spectrum of "symbioses" from co-operation and tolerance to competition, war, and parasitization.)
Further you could read about [the origins of monogyny and polygyny](_URL_2_)(These are the two major types of queens in ant colonies...)
Also the Australian species [Nothomyrmecia macrops](_URL_3_) This "primitive" ant's reproduction and behavior is thought to be indicative of an earlier stage in the history of the ants. | [
"In eusocial insects, new colonies are usually formed by a solitary queen; however this is not always the case. Dependent colony formation, when new colonies are formed by more than one individual, has evolved recurrently multiple times in ants, bees, and wasps.\n",
"Usually new colonies are formed by older indiv... |
why is the us police force becoming more militarized and more powerful? or is this a misconception? | I'm a cop. Its hard to argue that police isn't becoming more miltarized but I think its vastly over rated. Two agencies in my county have a bearcat (like a tank with no big gun) but it it rarely used and all the agencies borrow it when needed. Aside from a taser, I have received no new weapons since I started 15 years ago.
Edit: Some good comments, I'll just edit this post instead of responding to each one.
I don't have access to anymore equipment than I did 15 years ago. Well I suppose we have .40 caliber pistols now instead of 9mm but besides that and the taser, everything else is the same.
Generally the bearcat is used for barricaded and armed subjects. I work in the SF bay area of California which is extremely liberal and has very tight gun control. I pulled an AK-47 and an illegally modified shotgun off a suspect two weeks ago. Criminals are now heavily armed and the police need to be able to match them in firepower. The bearcat would have been eventually been used if that suspect had barricaded himself in a house. We can use it to provide our SWAT teams with mobile cover to either take the house or launch non-lethal ordinance at the house (gas, stun grenades, etc).
I have read about SWAT teams being used unnecessarily. My contention is that sometimes the news outlets don't have all the facts. Don't forget that a **judge** must authorize no knock warrants. However, there are probably a good number of search warrants being served by SWAT teams than is truly necessary. I just don't have enough facts to talk about specific cases. I will note that any search or arrest warrant involving the sale or manufacture of illegal narcotics is pretty much an automatic SWAT call out. Major dealers and producers can make $25,000 a week and they usually have guns.
SWAT teams and the rise of police firearms training is to counter the evolution of the way the criminal element does business. 40 years ago, officers didn't have shotguns or vests because they weren't really necessary. Today, pulling a handgun off a felon is not rare. Being attacked is not rare. Like I said earlier, I pulled an AK-47 off a suspect recently. A shotgun and pistol cannot counter an AK-47. If I have to respond to an active shooter situation, I want the weapon that can deliver the most rounds, with the most accuracy, with the least reload time and that is my M-4. I have an M-4 in my patrol car. I actually remove it for calls maybe once a year. I have never had to fire it outside of the training range. But if that active shooter crisis happens at your children's high school, you'll be glad that I'm trained and armed to deal with the threat. They waited for the SWAT team at Columbine. That shit can never happen again.
Edit2: I'll also just note that I have been a soldier and a cop my entire adult life except for 4 years of college and a few years tooling around the white collar corporate ladder. I have never been issued a fully automatic M16 or M4 at any point.
Edit 3: Some people have argued that we don't need patrol rifles (M4). As I've said earlier, I pull it out maybe once a year. I have pointed it at one person in 15 years and have never pulled the trigger outside of the range. If it is taken away from me it will have pretty much zero effect on my day to day activity. However, if someone starts shooting at the high school I will not be going in. I'll secure the perimeter and wait for people who have the proper weapons and training to arrive. This can take anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours.
Edit4: I'm going to bed. Thanks for the great discussion everyone. A few last thoughts. There is only three things I really need to do my job: my gun, my vest, and my radio. If you take away the rest you just reduce my options and flexibility. Sure some cops think they're navy seals when they go through rifle training but the rest of us know that the weapons we carry are a responsibility to protect and serve and not a booster for our egos. I don't think its a good reason to hamstring all of us.
I'll say in closing that we're human just like you. Most of us are married (some formerly) with kids. If crime ended tomorrow and we got paychecks for helping old ladies cross the street then we would be happy.
Got up to pee. Holy shit GOLD!!! Thanks!!!!! | [
"The war model of policing has been offered as a reason for why police brutality occurs. Through this model, police brutality is more likely to occur because police see crime as a war and have people who are their enemies. Police who have been exposed to war have more than a 50% higher rate of excessive force compl... |
why does the us model of the samsung galaxy s8 have a different processor than the global model? | Qualcomm owns many many patents in the US basically forcing any company to use Qualcomm's modem to connect to wireless signals. Companies are free to use any SoC (System on a Chip) they want, the Galaxy S6 used the global SoC version but used a Qualcomm modem. The big issue is Qualcomm prices things in such a way that the 'deal' a company gets from using Qualcomm's modem and SoC makes it economically stupid to use your own SoC and Qualcomm's modem.
Edit* Qualcomm is not competition friendly. There is a big reason why r/fuckqualcomm is a thing. | [
"Galaxy S4 models use one of two processors, depending on the region and network compatibility. The S4 version for North America, most of Europe, parts of Asia, and other countries contains Qualcomm's Snapdragon 600 system-on-chip, containing a quad-core 1.9 GHz Krait 300 CPU and an Adreno 320 GPU. The chip also co... |
how exactly does the us "cut someone off from the dollar market" with sanctions? | The US tells banks that they cannot do business with "someone" if they want to do business with US regulated banks or the electronic funds transfer network. This doesn't exactly prevent them from spending dollars, but they have to do it with bundles of currency. As many a drug cartel discovered, Dollars are not compact or light at scale. To work at scale you really need your money to be numbers in a bank computer, and the US can cut off access to that. | [
"The Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, \"CAATSA\" (, ), is a United States federal law that imposed sanctions on Iran, North Korea, and Russia. The bill was passed on July 27, 2017, 98–2 in the Senate, after having passed the House 419–3. On August 2, 2017, President Donald Trump signed it int... |
animals with rabies live normally but infected people die in a week? | Animals with rabies typically *don't* live normally. It is generally a disease with rapid deterioration and usually fatal. | [
"BULLET::::- Rabies, a fatal neurologic disease in animals and people, is caused by a virus. Animals and people are most commonly infected through bites from rabid animals. Infected cats may have a variety of signs, but most often have sudden behavioral changes and progressive paralysis.\n",
"Rabies is rare in ca... |
Romance of the Three Kingdoms is one of the most famous works to come out of China, however it is not historically accurate. What is a historical description of Cao Cao, Liu Bei, et al.? | Add on-- which (if any) of the central generals that are not real. I.e. Did Lu Bu exist? Guan Yu? Zhang Fei? Sima Yi? | [
"\"Romance of the Three Kingdoms\" is acclaimed as one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature; it has a total of 800,000 words and nearly a thousand dramatic characters (mostly historical) in 120 chapters. The novel is among the most beloved works of literature in East Asia, and its literary influ... |
how does the acid in lead acid batteries not consume the lead? | It does- in fact, that's how it works. It turns it into lead sulfate, and when all the lead has been so turned, the battery is dead. Charging a battery gradually turns the lead sulfate and water back into lead oxide and sulfuric acid. | [
"Conventional lead–acid batteries consist of a number of plates of lead and lead dioxide suspended in a cell filled with weak sulfuric acid. Lead oxide reacts with the sulfur and oxygen in the acid to give up an electron, leaving the plate positively charged and producing lead sulfate. Lead reacts with the acid by ... |
Do historians in the US/Europe study the south american independence wars and consequences? | Speaking as an American historian, yes, they do study it, but Latin American history is a reasonably small sub-discipline in the US (at least compared to US and European history). It could be that there are not many specialists in late colonial early national South America who are redditors. The other issue is that Latin American history is not covered extensively in US primary and secondary school curriculum meaning few people have enough exposure to even ask a question.
If you want to know some good scholars of that era I would suggest Lyman Johnson, Peter Blanchard, and George Reid Andrews. | [
"BULLET::::- \"Based in the American Studies Department at the University of Sussex, the Cunliffe Centre offers a concentration of scholars of the history of the South unparalleled anywhere outside the United States. The principal purpose of the Cunliffe Centre is to build upon this strength by enhancing research n... |
how come people say "drinking the kool-aid"when referring to cults? | The Jonestown Mass "Suicide" where over 900 members of the Peoples Temple (a cult) drank cyanide laced kool-aid. I take the term to represent how people involved in cults are willing to do anything and believe everything the leaders tell them.
Jim Jones told the members to drink to kool-aid and nearly 1000 people drank the kool-aid.
_URL_0_ | [
"This phrase, \"drinking the Kool-Aid\" has a particular significance, meaning to accept an argument or philosophy completely or blindly. The term originated from the Jonestown Massacre, in which 913 People's Temple cultists committed mass suicide by drinking potassium cyanide laced Flavor Aid, a product similar to... |
To what extent is the body able to heal deep lacerations and non-lethal bullet wounds? | If the damage is too severe, then fibrosis is the mechanism of repair. And example is a muscle tear, usually called a strain. This is where muscle cells are torn apart, or there may be damage from a cut. In this case the body has to fill in the open space of missing tissue with scar tissue, this is called fibrosis. After it has been repaired, another healing mechanism called remodeling begins and this is what makes the scar tissue more pliable and functional.
The more scar tissue required to repair the damage the less functionality is regained. The scar tissue causes a reduction in strength and elasticity.
| [
"Most penetration wounds require immediate treatment and are not as easy to repair. For example, a deep knife wound to the brachial plexus could damage and/or sever the nerve. According to where the cut was made, it could inhibit action potentials needed to innervate that nerve's specific muscle or muscles.\n",
"... |
atlas shrugged | Reply stolen from Hapax_Legoman in [this post](_URL_0_).
The basic plot of the book is actually in the title. Atlas (yeah, like the book full of maps) is a figure from Greek mythology. He's what's called a Titan, a race of very old, very powerful god-like figures. They gave birth to another generation of god-figures called the Olympians. The Olympians fought a war against the Titans, and won. Atlas, for his part in the war, was sentenced to stand at the edge of the world and hold the sky on his shoulders. That was his punishment for being on the losing side.
Except in art, over the past few thousand years, Atlas has often been depicted as holding the Earth on his shoulders. This isn't really what the original myths said, but it's become so widely recognized that it's how Atlas is generally thought of today.
Well, the title of the book is "Atlas Shrugged." Which, if you imagine a god holding the world on his shoulders, should be a pretty evocative image.
As far as the details go, the book is set in a world that's running down. Industries are being nationalized, people are apathetic and unambitious. But a couple people aren't happy about that. There's Dagny Taggart, who runs a railroad, and Hank Reardon, who runs a steel foundry. They both feel really strongly that people should work hard and do important things. Dagny wants to expand her railroad to move freight around the country, and Hank has just invented a new metal alloy that's going to make really good rails for trains to run on. But each of them encounters resistance along the way from people who resent their ambition and their drive, and they have a hard time of it.
Eventually, prominent industrialists and business leaders start to disappear. Like literally disappear: it's like they've been kidnapped or something. Their companies are gutted, their business commitments abandoned … it reaches the point of being a real national crisis. Imagine if the heads of companies like Wal Mart and UPS and Home Depot and a bunch more just shut down their companies all on the same day, and left millions of people out of work. It'd be a catastrophe a lot like the one depicted in the book.
Dagny and Hank end up stumbling across an abandon invention. I forget the details, but it's something really important, like a perpetual-motion machine or something. Just left laying in the corner of some abandoned factory. They start to wonder what the hell's been going on, and whether this has anything to do with the disappearing business and industry leaders. So they go on a hunt. This part of the book is basically a mystery story, as Dagny and Hank try to track down the person who invented the perpetual-motion machine, and see if they can get to the bottom of the disappearances.
Dagny follows the trail of clues, but ends up crashing her small plane in a valley way up high in the mountains. There, to her surprise, she finds all the "kidnapped" business leaders, and more. Scientists, artists, engineers, all kinds of brilliant, ambitious people. They've all created this new town there, organized by a guy named John Galt. Galt explains to Dagny that he got fed up with the way the world is going, so he decided to try to do something about it. He went, quietly, to all these smart people and persuaded them to quit. Just quit. Just walk out on their jobs, their companies, their families, everything, and come start this new town with him.
See, Galt figured that most of the good things that go in the world are the result of the hard work of a pretty small number of people. It's what they sometimes call the "80/20 rule." Eighty percent of the work gets done by twenty percent of the people, that kind of thing. Well, Galt didn't think that was a very good idea, so he decided to change it. His plan was to get all of those "twenty percent" people to join him in withdrawing from society. Once all those people quit, the world would just grind to a halt, because everybody who was making important things happen would've stopped. After everything collapsed, Galt and his friends would come out and start building from scratch, with the intention of creating a more just world where everybody contributes and nobody slacks off.
So that's what he did. He convinced all these smart people to "go on strike." Only it gets ugly. The government, panicked at the economic disaster, starts trying to nationalize industries. They seize companies, force inventors to give over their ideas, basically try all these completely wrongheaded ideas, never understanding the real cause of the problem. Eventually they track Galt down and arrest him. They torture him to try to get him to call off the strike, but he doesn't give in, until his friends manage to rescue him and take him back to the valley.
And then everything just goes downhill. The big turning point in the book is the moment, right at the end of the story, where the electricity supply finally quits, because there was nobody to keep the generators running. And all at once, the lights of New York City go out.
Sometime later, having weathered the collapse in their valley, Galt and his friends decide it's time to go back out into the world and start rebuilding.
People love to complain about the book and make fun of it for political reasons. I always wonder whether the people who do have ever actually read it. Cause while it's got flaws, overall it's a really cool story. | [
"\"Atlas Shrugged\", published in 1957, was considered Rand's \"magnum opus\". Rand described the theme of the novel as \"the role of the mind in man's existence—and, as a corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest\". It advocates the core tenets of Rand's philoso... |
If I was standing on Phobos or Deimos, could I throw a ball fast enough to make it goes into orbit around the moon itself? | Phobos and Deimos have escape velocities of about 40 km/h and 20 km/h, respectively. The speed required for a circular orbit at surface level is (escape velocity)/sqrt(2), so 28 km/h and 14 km/h. That's well below the typical speed of a pitched baseball.
However, both Phobos and Deimos are so small and so close to Mars that tidal effects would tend to make any such orbit unstable. For both bodies, but especially for Phobos, the [Hill sphere](_URL_0_) isn't much bigger than the moon itself. | [
"The player picks his/her ball up from the ground from between his/her feet and throws it where he/she stands. Contrary to normal pétanque, it is allowed to jump during the throw, provided that the player lands on the same spot where he/she started from. The ball must travel in the air at least 10 cm.\n",
"The ba... |
why is it cold during summer further up north if over there the sunlight lasts longer? | The reason it's cold in the north, even in summer, is about the angle that the sunlight hits the earth. Far north the sun is in the sky for a long time but it never gets very *high* in the sky. In the far north the sun barely gets up over the horizon for much of the day. The sunlight is shining on the earth there sideways instead of straight down, so it's the same amount of energy spread out very thinly over a large area, and it doesn't heat that part of the world up very much.
___
` < ----- Rays here are spread over a wide area
\
Earth | < ----- Rays here are striking head-on (Sun is over here)
/
___-
Edit: Also physical distance to the sun doesn't make any real difference. The sun is so immensely far away that even moving closer to it by the diameter of the earth would have basically no effect. | [
"In September and October the days get rapidly shorter, and in northern areas the sun disappears from the sky entirely. As the amount of solar radiation available to the surface rapidly decreases, the temperatures follow suit. The sea ice begins to refreeze, and eventually gets a fresh snow cover, causing it to ref... |
Why was the Black Sea historically a freshwater body? | The base level and salinity history of the Paratethyan basins (i.e. the Dacian Basin, Black Sea, Caspian Sea, and Aral Sea) is complicated to say the least. One flaw in the logic regarding these basins is the assumption that they are completely endorheic, in reality they have a complicated history of both one and two way connections between each other and the global oceans. In a very general sense, they tend to have high stands during glacial periods, meaning that they tend to 1) have a positive hydrologic budget during these periods (more surface inflow than outflow/evaporation), 2) connect to each other during these periods and can exchange water/organisms, and 3) sometimes flow out into the lower global ocean. These complicated interactions coupled with occasionally unique hydrologic conditions lead to a variety of non-unique mechanisms for changes in salinity in the Black Sea (and other Paratethyan basins).
In detail, the fact that the Black Sea was fresh to brackish prior to the most recent influx of Mediterranean water is well documented beyond this recent shipwreck, [e.g. Yanchilina et al 2017](_URL_2_). While they do not directly address the question of why it was fresh to brackish prior to the marine transgression, the presence of 'Caspian affinity fauna', i.e. organisms that are associated with the Caspian sea, provides one clue, namely that at various points, the Caspian has had an extremely positive hydrologic budget and flooded into the Black Sea and provided both endemic organisms and fresh water.
Another important process that may contribute to freshwater conditions in the Black Sea can be observed in the modern. As described in [Ivanova et al, 2015 (see section 2)](_URL_1_) areas of the Black Sea have low salinity surface water (e.g. the Caucasian coast) where high precipitation rates and inflow from large catchments results in a locally positive water balance. At the scale of the whole Black Sea, this is outweighed by the inflow of saline water from the Med, but at times when they are disconnected, this would not be the case.
An additional example of mechanism of changes in salinity can be found in the slightly older geologic past. As it turns out, depending on the details of connection with the Mediterranean (i.e. exact depth of connection and hydrologic conditions in both water bodies, etc) as described by [van Baak et al, 2015](_URL_0_), inflow of Mediterranean waters around 5.8 million years ago actually led to a decrease in salinity because the Mediterannean was sufficiently stratified itself to prevent inflow of saline waters into the Black Sea. This coupled with a positive hydrologic budget at this time in the Black Sea led to a decrease in salinity within the Black Sea as a whole.
As for which (or any of these mechanisms) led to the particular fresh water period that provided the current anoxic bottom water in the Black Sea, I'm not sure, but the larger point is that the Black Sea and associated basins have an incredibly complex range of processes that have led to alternations between fresh and saline conditions throughout their existence. | [
"Originally a land-locked fresh water lake, the Black Sea was flooded with salt water from the Mediterranean Sea during the Holocene. The influx of salt water essentially smothered the fresh water below it because a lack of internal motion and mixing meant that no fresh oxygen reached the deep waters, creating a me... |
Can smells evolve over time? For example, do we know that a pineapple or our body odor has always smelled the same way? | Both your examples almost certainly have changed over time. Body odour for sure - different countries have different body odours due to diet and what comes out in sweat so that will definitely have changed as human diets changed.
The smell of pineapple is linked to the chemicals in it. As they've evolved and the chemicals or balance of chemicals has changed, the smell would also have changed. | [
"The idea that sounds and scents may be linked in the brain was suggested in 1862 by G. W. Septimus Piesse, who said, \"Scents, like sounds, appear to influence the olfactory nerve in certain definite degrees.\" Piesse also suggested that there may be an octave of odour.\n",
"\"The Art of Perfumery\" is also nota... |
From the beginnings of the Republic until the fall of the Western Roman Empire, did Roman architecture change significantly and, if so, how? | Roman architecture is a HUGE topic - they tended to borrow bits and pieces from here and there (Etruscan arches, Greek columns...), and adapted their architecture depending on where in the Empire it was.
There's actually a really good online course here: _URL_0_ which may be worth a look if you are very interested in Roman architecture, and it may help answer your question.
I hope this doesn't break top tier reply rules! | [
"BULLET::::- Western Roman Empire – In 285, Emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305) divided the Roman Empire's administration into western and eastern halves. In 293, Rome lost its capital status, and Milan became the capital.\n",
"The decline of the Roman Empire is one of the events traditionally marking the end of Clas... |
would an oil heating system use more oil keeping a house a constant temperature all day or turning it off and bringing it back up to temperature? | A lot depends on your home. The size, type of heating system, amount of insulation, how tight the house is all play a factor. With that being said, I can't ELI5 but I have a lot of experience in home building/home performance. It's what I do. I typically recommend setting your away at work tstat temp no more than 5 degrees lower than where you have it when you're home. | [
"In a cool, dry place, oils have greater stability, but may thicken, although they will soon return to liquid form if they are left at room temperature. To minimize the degrading effects of heat and light, oils should be removed from cold storage just long enough for use.\n",
"Bruzio oil has to be preserved in dr... |
When did supermarkets first appear? | Various elements of the modern supermarket arose in different places, mostly in the 1920s.
The first self-service grocery store is thought to have been a Memphis Piggly Wiggly opened in 1916. The concept was patented and franchised to other operators. Customers entered through a turnstile and made their way through the store to a checkout at the exit.
Drive-in markets that patrons reached by auto began to be built in Southern California about 1923. These were akin to farmers markets (a strong regional tradition) in hosting a variety of independently owned stands, but sellers of packaged goods also set up shops. The low prices and convenience began to set the pattern of weekly shopping excursions by auto—to a single place.
In the 1920s, Ralphs began to build branch stores in new outlying areas of Los Angeles, and within a few years the branches were every bit the equal of the downtown store. At first, the new Ralphs were organized like other groceries or department stores, with goods called for and presented at departmental counters. But Ralphs displayed produce in ways that made customer inspection easy, and within a few years introduced self-service in other departments, assumed ownership of all the departments in the store, and eventually created a modern "front end" of multiple checkstands in one row, allowing one payment at one time for all of a customer's purchases.
Two Houston food markets, J. Weingarten and Henke & Pillot, began to evolve into similar prototypes about the same time, introducing large parking lots that the stores faced regardless of how that oriented the store's front in regard to traditional retail streets or streetcar lines. Both these markets and Ralphs began to think of their stores as freestanding objects in the landscape, rather than storefronts on an established shopping street.
These innovations spread rapidly in the early years of the Depression, with King Kullen's in the New York area focusing on major brands at rock-bottom prices, with large stores (some repurposed from industrial spaces) where products were displayed in stacks that, to customers of the time, seemed warehouse-like. Soon it was clear that this new way of food marketing was not a short-lived fad related to the Depression, and established chains like A & P or Safeway began to follow the new model. In 1937, Piggly Wiggly introduced a larger wheeled shopping basket in an Oklahoma City store, and that came to be the iconic representation for the supermarket concept.
I've drawn extensively from Richard Longstreth's 1999 book *The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914-1941.* | [
"In the 20th century, supermarkets were born. Supermarkets brought with them a self service approach to shopping using shopping carts, and were able to offer quality food at lower cost through economies of scale and reduced staffing costs. In the latter part of the 20th century, this has been further revolutionized... |
Was there a strong national identity for Israel before it was formed in 1947? | First of all Israel officially came into existence in 1948 when David Ben Gurion declared the birth of the country.
Now to actually address your question. It is hard to get a perfect answer when it comes to this as the idea of an Israeli national identity is closely tied to the idea of a Jewish identity. The belief that Jews should have a Jewish country, not necessarily in Israel, is called Zionism which began to gain traction in the late 1800s. As Jews faced increasingly more difficulties as a result of their religion in Eastern Europe a call arose for the creation of an independent state for the Jewish people. Famous Zionists including Theodor Herzl, Ahad Haam, and A.D. Gordon began popularizing different branches of Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, drumming up support among Jews across the world and about the same time the first groups of Jews came to Israel to settle.
Early Zionists most likely did not see themselves as Israelis simply because they weren't, they saw the creation of the State of Israel as a manifestation of a Jewish goal, even though they did not have the support of even close to the entirety of the Jewish community. Zionists thought of themselves simply as Jews. However certain Zionists, like Ahad Haam, believed that the idea of an Israeli national identity grew from a Jewish national identity. You actually ask two different questions in this post, 1. Was there a strong national identity for Israel before it was formed in 1948? Yes however that national identity was a Jewish national identity not an Israeli, it was the idea that Jews should have a country. 2. Was there an Israeli national identity before Israel was formed in 1948? No, prior to the creation of the state of Israel the Zionists saw themselves primarily as Jews not as Israelis. The whole concept of an Israeli national identity has grown out of the existence of the country over time.
Today there exists a divide between Israelis and Jews in the rest of the world, however the original Zionists were much like American Jews today. They were natives of a country that was not Jewish, and their movement to Palestine changed that but they clung to the idea that no matter where they came from they were Jewish. The modern world is a very different place and if you have any more questions or want clarification on something more specific feel free to ask. | [
"The Land of Israel, which is considered by Jews to be the Promised Land, was the place where Jewish identity was formed, although this identity was formed gradually reaching much of its current form in the Exilic and post-Exilic period. By the Hellenistic period (after 332 BCE) the Jews had become a self-conscious... |
How does the human body remain stable as we walk? | Walking is surprisingly an extremely complicated process when you look at all the system involved. Let me give you a brief walkthrough of the process.
So first you have your inputs: places where you body gets information before actually walking. The major ones are the vestibular and visual systems. The vestibular system in your inner ear sends information about your head's (and therefore partly your body's) velocity, acceleration, and position. Your visual system, as you can imagine, sends information about what is around you. Beyond that there are also propioceptive inputs from your body which both consciously and unconsciously tell you body where it is in space.
Your cerebellum is the major coordinator of movements. It has feed forward and feed backward mechanisms of control. Before you start a movement, your cerebellum takes in a lot of input from your body and surroundings and predicts what a proper movement would be for the situation, even when it comes to just walking.
It then sends this information to your brain and spinal cord directly and indirectly. The brain tells the basal ganglia to start the initiation process for movement. The basal ganglia tell the brain it's ready. Now the brain does the most complex integration, where it mixes a shit ton of inputs such as all senses, emotion, goals, etc.
Only now do we get information sent to the muscles to start walking. This isn't the end of it however. Our cortex isn't properly equipped to handle all the tiny unforeseen issues like a slight deviation in your arm, or a bump on the ground, or some awkward foot placement. Now comes the feedback mechanism involving spinal reflexes, some brainstem tracts, and the cerebellum. The cerebellum will make corrections to movements as we are doing it. Our spinal reflexes are nerve tracts that go from muscle to the spine and then straight back to the muscle (they don't send information up to the brain necessarily). These really help in postural control. Finally, same goes for the various tracts that are also involved such as the rubrospinal (helps control upper limb flexors and neck), medial and lateral vestibulospinal (helps with neck posture), reticulospinal (aids in trunk posture, and tectospinal. The last 3 collectively help with control of extensor muscles. There are others of course, but these are the main ones.
As you can see, it is an extremely complicated thing to walk. That's why it takes babies so long to learn. But once you learn it, your brain stores the information sort of like a program. Then the brain just runs the program when you want to walk and the feedback mechanisms are still alert to make sure you don't mess up. Hopefully I gave you a greater appreciation of how our complicated our brain are and truly how fast they work. | [
"In case of leg muscles, where circulation is substantially dependent on their cyclical contraction when the body is upright, a small but useful degree of initial up-regulation of the citric acid cycle may be achieved just by standing still for a few minutes. It is most useful when a long period of rest, or sitting... |
i thought jordan had a constitutional monarchy, yet it appears that democratic movements have flaired up in the region. eli5 | Good question. If you don't receive an adequate answer here in ELI5, you might try /r/middleeastnews or even /r/islam | [
"As a developing constitutional monarchy, Jordan has survived the trials and tribulations of Middle Eastern politics. The Jordanian public has experienced limited democracy since gaining independence in 1946 however the population has not suffered as others have under dictatorships imposed by some Arab regimes. The... |
Will you help me identify a snake? Pictures in comments. | It's neither a boa nor a viper based on the head shape (too narrow/not triangle-shaped). That leaves the elapids and colubrids. I can't do much research on my phone, but the Lyre Snake (Trimorphodon) looks like the one. I'm guessing it's about 40cm? Not quite an adult. They are venomous, but rear-fanged and thus unlikely to envenomate a person unless you put your fingers in their mouths. | [
"The Plains garter snake (\"Thamnophis radix\") is a species of garter snake native to most of the central United States as far north as Canada and as far south as Texas. It has a distinctive orange or yellow stripe from its head to tail, and the rest of its body is mainly a gray-green color. The snake is commonly ... |
why do i drive down the road and sometimes people flash their headlights once or twice before we pass? | Either your driving like a loonatic or more likely its just a slight bump in the road. Dimmed headlight point down and if the car moves up slightly theyre pointing straight ahead, so it looks like they're flashing you but they're not :P | [
"BULLET::::- A common experience while travelling on state highways is being 'flashed' by oncoming vehicles. This is when an oncoming vehicle flicks its high beam headlights quickly but noticeably (day or night), and serves to warn drivers they are approaching a hazard: a speed camera or Police vehicle/Radar/Random... |
how does slag glass form? | Slag is a byproduct of metal refining. It's essentially impurities in the metal that are removed and is often kinda glassy. Originally slag glass had slag mixed into the glass to give it the appearance. However, later multiple colors of molten glass were mixed together to get a similar effect. | [
"glass is melted and formed by typical glassworking techniques into the desired shape. This is heat-treated, which causes the material to separate into two intermingled \"phases\" with distinct chemical compositions. One phase is rich in alkali and boric oxide and can be easily dissolved in acid. The other phase is... |
how do you build synthetic molecules? | The best way I can explain it is to think of going on a road trip. To get from A to B, there are several routes you could take. You want to stop at a particular tourist attraction on the way, so that eliminates some of the possibilities. Another route is notorious for constant traffic jams, so that's out. Eventually, you come to one route that gets you where you want to go pretty efficiently, and that's the route you take.
Synthetic chemistry, particularly synthetic organic chemistry (yes, that's a real thing) works the same way. You start with a pretty simple molecule, then perform reactions to add specific new parts to the molecule until you get the desired product. Like the road trip, there are usually many ways to accomplish the goal, although there's usually far more options for the chemist. In fact, there are so many different groups and different ways to add them that I doubt any one chemist knows them all; that's why sometimes, companies will bring in a guy from outside to see if they can work out a more efficient process. | [
"Modern synthetic chemistry has reached the point where it is possible to prepare small molecules to almost any structure. These methods are used today to manufacture a wide variety of useful chemicals such as pharmaceuticals or commercial polymers. This ability raises the question of extending this kind of control... |
landfill. surely it's a really really bad idea to fill holes with a partly rotting, gassy, mix of crap? won't we run out of places to put it? | Generally speaking no. Landfills are actually quite small even for large cities.
I mean yes, eventually if we did nothing to recycle or reclaim things I guess we'll fill the planet with trash ... but at our current rates no.
In parts of the world (re: asia) where you see garbage line the streets it's more a question of a) people litter all the time and b) nobody picks it up ever.
In Western countries we greatly organize our garbage for pickup and then compact and store it. So we use less land area than them even if we actually throw out more mass per capita than other countries. | [
"There are no established landfill facilities or recycling programs established, except for the use of glass bottles. Because of the lacking structured garbage system, garbage can be found anywhere and everywhere in the town. These areas include the beaches, the water, and the streets.\n",
"Landfills can be regar... |
linear alegbra: what the difference between linear independence and linear dependence is. | Let's say I give you a set of vectors. If any one of those vectors can be constructed as a combination of any of the others, then the set is said to be "linearly dependent". If the set isn't linearly dependent, we call it "linearly independent".
One way to check for linear independence is to write down a matrix where the columns are the vectors you've been given. If the determinant of that matrix is zero, then the vectors are dependent. If the determinant is not zero, then the vectors are independent. | [
"Here (\"v\") denotes a family of vectors. The \"i\"-th vector \"v\" only makes sense with respect to this family, as sets are unordered and there is no \"i\"-th vector of a set. Furthermore, linear independence is only defined as the property of a collection; it therefore is important if those vectors are linearly... |
what is mega doing? why do i have to wait forever twice? | A lot of complicated encryption.
Remember Megaupload? It was a site for hosting files on for download, based in New Zealand, much like Mega, but it was quicker. Unfortunately for them, US law deemed it illegal because it had lots of copyright-infringing files on it, and had the New Zealand police go shut them down.
The founder, despite having legal action pending over Megaupload, went and made Mega, its followup website. In order to avoid the law being able to easily "see" what's on the site (I believe their official mission statement about it is to "maintain user privacy"), it's all encrypted.
All the encryption is what takes time when it's downloading. It's the tradeoff to having a website the police would find it *very* difficult to legally take down.
If you want an ELI5 of what encryption is, imagine your file is a finished jigsaw puzzle. Encryption is the act of jumbling up the puzzle and making sure only certain people have a copy of what it's supposed to look like when it's put back together. While it's stored on Mega's servers, it's only there in jumbled up form. The delay is from that jigsaw being put back together when you download it. | [
"Mega is known for its security feature where all files are end-to-end encrypted locally before they are uploaded. This prevents anyone (including employees of Mega Limited) from accessing the files without knowledge of the pass key used for encryption. The service was previously noted for a large 50 GB storage all... |
why do the skeletons of people that died hundreds of years ago have perfect white teeth but mine will yellow within days without brushing? | You are alive. You are constantly exposing your teeth to food and other habits that can stain them, and you are providing a nice, warm, wet environment perfect for bacteria growth which can lead to plaque and cavities.
Skeletons are, well, dead. They are not constantly eating. Their mouth is not a nice warm wet environment. Bacteria cannot really survive long in that environment. | [
"\"All are very careful of their teeth, which from a very early age they file and render even, with stones and iron. They dye them a black color, which is lasting, and which preserves their teeth until they are very old, although it is ugly to look at.\"\n",
"Maiko who are in their last stage of training sometime... |
Penrose diagrams for evaporating black holes? | In Penrose diagrams, the horizontal coordinate is normally **radial**, so it goes from zero to infinity. The vertical axis is time, and each point corresponds to a spatial two-sphere at that given radius and time. For a given time, the left-most boundary is r = 0, the center of the spacetime (which you'll notice does some funky stuff for your evaporating example, related to the fact that the black hole singularity is a space-like surface). In Minkowski diagrams one usually take the horizontal axis to be a spatial Cartesian coordinate so the origin is at the center, but since black holes have spherical symmetry this isn't as convenient.
Note also that unlike Minkowski diagrams, spacetime infinities are represented by finite distances on Penrose diagrams (that is the mapping takes them to finite points on the diagram). [Here is the Penrose diagram for Minkowski space using a radial spatial coordinate (Fig. 1)](_URL_0_) if you'd like to compare the differences directly. | [
"Penrose diagrams are frequently used to illustrate the causal structure of spacetimes containing black holes. Singularities are denoted by a spacelike boundary, unlike the timelike boundary found on conventional space-time diagrams. This is due to the interchanging of timelike and spacelike coordinates within the ... |
why doesn't america join russia fighting isis in syria on the ground? | * Russia is not fighting on the ground, they are providing arms and support and are starting to fly air sorties.
* The US does not want to support the Assad regime, which is what Russian action is really all about, not fighting ISIS in particular. Western governments maintain that Assad must step down and refuse to work with him.
* Russia is attempting to pose as a "good partner" in Syria and in the Iran deal to take the diplomatic/economic pressure off of them over Ukraine. Aiding Russia in supporting Assad and legitimizing their strategy should only come with real concessions from Russia on Ukraine, such as turning over control of the Ukrainian border back to the government in Kiev. | [
"BULLET::::- The US-led coalition that is launching its own air strikes against ISIS demanded that Russia stop attacking targets other than ISIS. \"We call on the Russian Federation to immediately cease its attacks on the Syrian opposition and civilians and to focus its efforts on fighting ISIL,\" said the US-led c... |
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