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What did the public think of Castrati? How was life for them past their singing age? Did the public accept/approve the castration for music practice? | Oooh one in my subject area!! Best mark this in my diary, this only happens twice a year or so. :) Can I ask what made you think of the castrati?
It’s a little hard to say what “people” thought of them, because the castrati kinda got around! Castrati went to work in England, France, Spain, most German courts, and even Russia! So in many places where they travelled they were not just castrati, but also representatives of Italy, Catholics, and the entire noble beast that is Italian music. So sometimes attitudes about the castrati overlapped pretty heavily with attitudes about these other things. I’ll talk about their home country Italy, although I can answer for the other European cultures if you’re curious.
For the basic concept of what gender they were, most of Europe was still on a humoral (the four humors, think of medical bleeding!) understanding of medicine, and part of that was the one-sex model, which had men and women on sort of a sliding scale between masculine and feminine. Children were one sort of blank gender, and during puberty a boy got a burst of “vital heat” that made him into a man, women did not. On this model castrati are best understood as sort of permanent boys. They wouldn’t have been thought of in any way close to our various understandings of trans* people, intersex people, etc. today. This permanent boyishness also made them something like an idealized sexual object, both for men and women. You can see this echoed in opera to some extent - castrati always played the lovers, until the takeover of the tenor.
They were a socially marginalized people, because they were denied the basic human right of marriage. However, inside of Italy there was a fair amount of celibate (meaning unmarried, not necessarily sexually inactive) people in society, such as nuns, monks, priests, etc, so while they were denied marriage by the Catholic church, they weren’t too unusual there, lots of people in society had roles that denied marriage. Outside of Italy, especially in places where there wasn’t as much social celibacy, you’ll sometimes see castrati who got married, usually in Germany, as the Lutherans didn’t have any big problem with them getting married. There was a guy named Filippo Finazzi who pretty much “went native” in Germany, converted to Lutheranism, and married the widow of a blacksmith in 1765.
In general terms though, the castrati were generally considered a normal subset of professional musician and accepted as such, but also they were objects of pity or scorn, often they were subjected to rather crude “farmyard” jokes (ask me how I know all the words for castrated animals! capon, barrow, ox, etc.), sometimes treated as a threat to the masculinity of those around them, sometimes considered as a threat to the virtue of women as they were offering risk-free sex, often they were considered overpaid whiny children, and sometimes they were well-respected wealthy professionals. Some castrati were nice, some were douchy, and most just wanted to make a living.
Life after their singing age was actually pretty good for them. Castrati had pretty long-lasting voices in general, and they usually didn’t retire until at earliest their 50s, usually they could sing into their 60s. If you know modern opera voices this isn’t too unusual, most opera singers don’t hit their vocal peak until their late 30s or early 40s, and they can usually go on working into their 50s-60s if they wish. After this point your successful castrato might have enough money just to retire entirely, but some also would teach singing or stay active in music this way. One other interesting example of their post musical life would be the small corps of castrati who worked at the French royal chapel in the 1700s. The French didn’t have a place for castrati really, they weren’t acceptable in opera, and no one else had them on staff, there was only this small bunch of them in all of France. These men sort of lived in a commune, they had a shared house and left all their money to each other when they died.
There’s a good argument that Italian society’s acceptance of castration was high in the 1600s and dropped off after maybe 1700. In the 1600s you can find pretty hum-drum matter-of-fact records of castration, for example a contract between parent and teacher specifying the teacher has permission to castrate the boy if he thinks it appropriate and will pay for the procedure, petitions from boys (or someone writing for the boy) requesting a local lord sponsor him and pay for his castration, records in court accounting books of paying for castrations, etc. After 1700 you don’t find so many of these records, and most men after this period also have a little tale or excuse for their castration, a “childhood accident” of some vague sort. (There are exceptions, Caffarelli told no tales about his castration, and in his grandmother’s will there’s the very plain language that she bequeaths to him “a wallet with greatly fitting music, for which Cajetanus is said to have a great inclination, and a desire to be castrated and become a eunuch” and also the income from a vineyard to pursue music. He was castrated some time after this document, maybe 1722. Caffarelli was an odd duck though.) By the 1800s castration had completely soured in public opinion, and very few castrati were made after the turn of the century, the last known musical castration around 1865.
Let me know if you have any other questions! :) | [
"Historically, a strategy for avoiding the shift altogether was castration. \"Castrati\" are first documented in Italian church records from the 1550s. Mozart's \"Exultate Jubilate\", Allegri's \"Miserere\" and parts of Handel's \"Messiah\" were written for this voice, whose distinctive timbre was widely exploited ... |
why does our teeth not erode away when we are brushing our teeth (and using them in other ways) every single day? | If the tooth enamel is only gently weakened it can regenerate. Toothpaste is specifically made to help your teeth do this regeneration. If you significantly damage your tooth enamel it is gone forever and your tooth underneath will likely begin to rot. | [
"Brushing teeth properly helps prevent cavities, and periodontal, or gum disease, which causes at least one-third of adult tooth loss. If teeth are not brushed correctly and frequently, it could lead to the calcification of saliva minerals, forming tartar. Tartar hardens (then referred to as 'calculus') if not remo... |
what's the significance of the queen's guard's hats? bonus explanation: what purpose do they serve in a modern attack with glowing uniforms and massive heads? | The queen's guard aren't commandos that get sent on covert Missions.
They're meant to stand out, and be a very visible show. They aren't just ceremonial, though. They're full trained soldiers in their own right on full guard duty.
But to do their job there is no need to hide or blend in. They want to be a very visible deterrent. | [
"BULLET::::- Various as the Knights, several near-identical knights who serve as background characters and comedy relief. Their features are obscured by their helmets, while the Queen's personal guard wear sunglasses and headsets in parody of the Secret Service. It is not uncommon for them to appear in their underg... |
Origins of Japanese and Korean, and why they sound similar? | Korean and Japanese are both *language isolates*, that is, languages not provably related to any other language. Okay, recently a dialect of Japanese has been moved to related language, but so far there are no ties between Korean and Japanese. A proposed Altaic superfamily would still leave them less connected than Gaelic and Sanskrit.
So your mind is messing with you.
What you may be hearing is a little sprachbund effect, where disparate languages approach each other because a lot of people use both. This usually shows up in vocabulary borrowing, so it shows how slight the sprachbund is in that you heard nothing reasonable.
You see, Korea was part of the Japanese Empire from the later 1890s, ending the Joseon Dynasty's rule, until the end of WWII. So they had half a century of Japanese influence, but of a hostile memory, so they may have purged any borrowings. | [
"In 2017 Martine Robbeets proposed that Japanese (and possibly Korean) originated as a hybrid language. She proposed that the ancestral home of the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages was somewhere in northwestern Manchuria. A group of those proto-Altaic (\"Transeurasian\") speakers would have migrated south i... |
Can you actually hear bullets whizzing past your head? | Yes you can. I've heard it.
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"A bullet bow shockwave will be heard by any witness as long as the bullet speed is faster than the speed of sound, whether the bullet was fired from a weapon giving off an openly audible muzzle blast, or a mechanically-suppress-fired muzzle (Suppressed weapon) blast. If a bullet is fired from a suppressed weapon, ... |
How did Native American tribes’ tactics to resist European encroachment evolve? With expulsion being a common fate for those lucky enough to survive, did streams of survivors travel to Western tribes, warning them of U.S. strength and brutality? If so, how did this change Native responses? | I think this question assumes a homogeneity among native tribes. Often tribes were fighting amongst themselves. Europeans often played a role as another tribe to be reckoned with, either as an ally or as an enemy, as a trading partner and/or arms supplier. The long term narrative is of the constant invasion and rape of the tribes and land doesn’t accurately reflect the day-to-day interactions.
You only need to read about something like [King Philip’s War](_URL_0_) and all its background and aftermath to see the complexity. Tribes would engage with and ally with settlers for their own advantage, and vice versa, trying to get a leg up on historical enemies.
The biggest advantage Europeans had was they had an endless supply of reinforcements. Sometimes the natives were horrified and upset by the extreme lengths the Europeans would go to, like completely destroying whole villages including non-belligerents, women, children, animals, crops, and houses would all be destroyed. But they often got terrible retribution for that, to the point of failure and near extinction of early colonies.
Europeans also had many technological advantages. They also brought a sense of superiority in the white race and inferiority of natives, and a mandate to convert and uplift the heathen. Don’t underestimate the power of even a misguided and erroneous philosophy in the hands of zealots.
Disease also played a role, especially smallpox. There are stories of intentional infection, but that doesn’t reflect the day to day reality. Europeans had centuries of innate immunity in their genetic code, and natives were never going to be able to obtain that. The losses and decimation were brutal in some cases.
All this took more than two centuries to happen, the image of a big war with massive migration that many people picture when viewing the whole of “New World” history just doesn’t apply. Remember, for decades, places like the middle of what is now the middle of Massachusetts was completely native territory which if any white person ventured would not live. It’s why banishment from a colony was such a huge deal as a punishment. It was basically a death sentence, either by exposure, dehydration, starvation, or disease. If you were lucky, you got a quick death at the hands of an animal or native tribe, though frequently people would be tortured to death or enslaved for entering native territory.
Caveat: I am not a professional historian, but this particular topic has always been of great interest to me (ie, How did what started out as a small group of people come to dominate an entire continent that was already occupied, sometimes by advanced peoples) | [
"Interference or resistance from local inhabitants was a concern going back to the first explorations by France and Spain. This was especially of concern to Anglo-American settlers in the 19th century as they pushed the frontier ever westward. While Native Americans of coastal regions and East Texas were relatively... |
how do snakes grow? | The number of vertebrae is genetically determined, as with us, and does not increase during the snake's lifetime. Their bones grow, just as with ours, and judging from the skeleton on-hand at work, although the relative space seems to remain more or less constant, indeed, in absolute terms the spacing increases. | [
"These snakes range in size from the diminutive hump-nosed viper, \"Hypnale hypnale\", that grows to an average total length (including tail) of only , to the bushmaster, \"Lachesis muta\", a species known to reach a maximum total length of in length.\n",
"Growth is rapid; snakes may reach in total length at 1 ye... |
how do tv game shows tax people who get cash on the spot? | Any cash prize (including lotteries) is generally considered income in the eyes of the IRS (or similar entity for other countries).
The person/entity giving the money will report the transfer of money to the IRS (and in some cases, offer to withhold the expected taxes) , and it becomes the responsibility of the recipient to submit a payment of the expected owed taxes in a timely manner and to report the earnings when the time comes to file taxes for the year. | [
"Games that are not paid for will show a pop-up every time you play it—asking whether you’d like to try the free trial or either purchase, enter an unlock code (purchased or given through promotions), or rent the game. More on this below.\n",
"BULLET::::- Game Show: A television show depicting a real contest, typ... |
why did civil war soldiers not use revolvers exclusively? | First of all, I'm not sure why you think accuracy doesn't matter. Direct, close range, charges were not common and when they did occur the two lines would be separated by hundreds of yards to start. The Napoleonic line tactics fell out of favor pretty early in the war and the small unit tactics that developed were not that different from modern warfare (in fact, the number of shots per causality was much lower than it is now). Late in the war, many battles turned into long sieges in which snipers accounted for a large percentage of the casualties.
Secondly, a revolver is a relatively low power weapon. A revolver fires a small ball with about 250 ft-lbs of energy. By comparison a rifle firing a minie ball might have over 1000 ft-lbs of energy and offer superior ballistics (so it kept it's energy for a longer distance). Beyond 50 yards a revolver was fairly ineffective.
Lastly, they developed much better solutions than percussion cap revolvers in either handgun or rifle form. Most notably the Spencer rifle and similar lever actions guns were developed which were cartridge fed and so much faster to reload than a cap and ball revolver. These might have completely replaced the muzzle loading rifle in the North if not for limited manufacturing capacity.
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"For a Civil War soldier, owning a revolver as a Backup-Gun was important, so Smith & Wesson's cartridge revolvers, the \"Army Model 2\" and the Model 1 1/2 in caliber .32 rimfire came into popular demand with the outbreak of the American Civil War. Soldiers and officers on both sides of the conflict made private p... |
Since kittens are born in litters from one pregnancy, does that make them twins/triplets/quadruplets? | They would be fraternal, not identical quadruplets/septuplets/whathaveyou. Unlike humans, female cats don't release eggs until after they have mated, sometimes after multiple times. With the sperm of several tom cats floating around in there, it is easy to have litters with very different looking kittens- definitely not identical cat twins. I think the closest human phenomenon is fraternal twins/triplets but in that case there is only 1 father. | [
"A litter is the live birth of multiple offspring at one time in animals from the same mother and usually from one set of parents, particularly from three to eight offspring. The word is most often used for the offspring of mammals, but can be used for any animal that gives birth to multiple young. In comparison, a... |
how commonly known would the story of the Iliad, have been in the second century BC classical world? | A cup with a depiction of a scene of the Illiad was found in a grave of the first century AD in Denmark. I guess they knew what the scene meant. | [
"Oral tales have been formed into classic literature centuries later so that the historicity of the events is left to uncertainty. The Greek Heroic Age as described in the Iliad is dated to historic events in 1460 to 1103 BC according to the chronology of Saint Jerome.\n",
"The main ancient source for the story i... |
Was it common to actually eat the bizarre dishes seen in the cookbooks of the 1970s and earlier? | Yes, they were certainly a thing. Taste is capricious. /u/searocksandtrees has collected [answers about jello oddities before](_URL_1_), feat. /u/gothwalk, et al.
/u/PeculiarLeah interprets it as [part of the recovery from rationing in World War II](_URL_0_), specifically mentioning bananas and ham with hollandaise. | [
"The most frequently ordered meal, even as late as the 1980s, was prawn cocktail, steak and Black Forest gateau. This is sometimes called the \"Great British Meal\". As Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham note in their 1997 book \"The Prawn Cocktail Years\", \"cooked as it should be, this much derided and often rid... |
how is it that i'm left handed but do some activities like a right handed person would? | As I understand it, left/right-handedness isn't a 100% binary thing. You can be left-handed for *most* activities, but still be right-handed on a few/some others depending on how you were taught, how you grew up, etc. | [
"Also, it is not uncommon that people preferring to use the right hand prefer to use the left leg, e.g. when using a shovel, kicking a ball, or operating control pedals. In many cases, this may be because they are disposed for left-handedness but have been trained for right-handedness. In the sport of cricket, some... |
if some humans have neanderthal dna while others don't, does that mean some humans are at least somewhat of a different species than others. | The definition of species is indeed somewhat loose but most agree on the basic that successfully interbreeding and having fertile offspring means that you are part of the the same species.
This is why many people now think that Neanderthals should be considered a different subspecies of humans not a different species altogether.
It is similar to wolves and dogs which can interbreed and are the same species but still obviously different enough to tell them apart.
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"The following is a list of physical traits that distinguish Neanderthals from modern humans. However, not all of them distinguish specific Neanderthal populations from various geographic areas, evolutionary periods, or other extinct humans. Also, many of these traits are present in modern humans to varying extent ... |
How do dogs make ATP? | Gluconeogenesis is the production of glucose from protein-rich sources. This is quite commonly used for production of energy across all living beings (plant and animal alike). In humans this is frequently seen in ketogenic diets or diets treating diabetes (and, to an extent, also the Atkins diet that was popular in the early 2000s).
Glycogen can be produced in this manner from fatty acids and amino acids with pyruvate (as well as lactate). It is also associated with the Cori cycle as a part of the larger Krebs cycle.
While carbohydrates are more easily converted to glucose/glycogen, gluconeogenesis fills the pathway to ATP production in the absence of sugar stores. | [
"ATP is a molecule found only in and around living cells, and as such it gives a direct measure of biological concentration and health. ATP is quantified by measuring the light produced through its reaction with the naturally-occurring firefly enzyme Luciferase using a Luminometer. The amount of light produced is d... |
on gawker websites i need to spam the back button to actually go back, why? | What happens when you click on one of their links is you get taken to a proxy page. This proxy page basically acts like a handler for requests. It then passes you on to the relevant page. When you press back on any webpage the browser you use automatically re-enters any data it did the first time around. An example of this is like when you enter data on an internet form. Lets say I'm entering a username and password. I then get somewhere. I then decide to go somewhere else. When I press back to go to the page where I went *after* I entered the data my browser automatically re-enters that same username and password I entered. The same thing is happening on sites like gawker. Personally I feel that it is often a very poor way of handling things and results in forcing people, as you have noticed, to either open a new tab or window, or to mash the back button. | [
"Backscatter occurs because worms and spam messages often forge their sender addresses. Instead of simply rejecting a spam message, a misconfigured mail server sends a bounce message to such a forged address. This normally happens when a mail server is configured to relay a message to an after-queue processing step... |
often people say when you get a splinter your body will learn to push it out at some point. how does it happen? | Your body doesn't learn to push it out, it's just that tissue regrows in such a way that the splinter is eventually moved towards the outside of the body, which eventually results in the splinter emerging from the skin. | [
"Generally, a splinter causes an initial feeling of pain as the sharp object makes its initial penetration through the body. Through this penetration, the object cuts through the cutaneous layer of the skin, and settles in the subcutaneous layer of the skin, and can even penetrate further down, breaking the sub-cut... |
how do prince rupert's drops work? | Because the glass is rapidly cooled it sets up a state of high residual stress, compressive stress on the surface and tensile stress in the center. This effectively toughens the glass of the head similar to how Gorilla glass is toughened on cell phone screens. The residual compressive stress in the glass resists crack propagation and shattering.
Since the tail is very thin it isn't subject to the differential cooling effect and doesn't set up residual stresses. So it's just ordinary glass. A hammer blow here will shatter it and the crack propagation through the inner tensile stressed material of the head will release the enormous potential energy in the head making it disintegrate. | [
"Prince Rupert's drops are produced by dropping molten glass drops into cold water. The water rapidly cools and solidifies the glass from the outside inward. This thermal quenching may be described using a simplified model of a rapidly cooled sphere. Prince Rupert's drops have remained a scientific curiosity for ne... |
why/how did smoking become less painful on my throat and lungs over time? | You destroyed the nerves that were on the surface, and the cilia that are in your lungs that cause coughing when a foreign substance is introduced. Cilia are fine hairs in your lungs that move out mucous. Smoking burns them away.
If you stop smoking/weed for a length of time, you will regain your lung response to the smoke you are breathing into them. | [
"Smoking has been linked to a variety of disorders of the stomach. Tobacco is known to stimulate acid production and impairs production of the protective mucus. This leads to development of ulcers in the majority of smokers.\n",
"Smoking also increases the chance of heart disease, stroke, atherosclerosis, and per... |
how is a glass of wine everyday good for you? :) | It is not. There is proof to suggest that the antioxidants in wine are good for you.
But with that said, current consensus is that *any* alcohol is bad for you, and for virtually all drinks, the downsides outweigh any upsides. Drinking is always bad and should be avoided for optimal health. | [
"Wine is a popular and important drink that accompanies and enhances a wide range of cuisines, from the simple and traditional stews to the most sophisticated and complex haute cuisines. Wine is often served with dinner. Sweet dessert wines may be served with the dessert course. In fine restaurants in Western count... |
What are some recent major depopulation events? | European discovery of the Americas. Close to 90% of Native Americans died to diseases. | [
"Depopulation began in the early 1900s, accelerated in the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, and has generally continued through the most recent national census in 2010. The population decline has been broadly attributed to numerous factors, especially changes in agricultural practices, rapid improvements in urban tran... |
how does motorcycle rpm and gearing work. | The RPM of a motorcycle engine as well as how the gearing works, functions on the same principles as any other engine. The whole system is setup slightly different as space is an issue. But the basics are all the same. To answer if your engine is doing the same work at 5k RPM on 2nd gear vs 5th simply, is no, it's not doing the same work. If you ever owned a Bicycle with gears it's the same principle.
At the low gears, it's super easy to pedal because the rotation is very small. However, you don't output very much energy on the lower gears. At high gears it's the opposite, it's difficult to pedal, but you output much more energy than you're putting in.
Breaking the inertia of a bicycle/motorcycle/car can be a very difficult task, that's why we start at low gears and work up to high gears. | [
"The clutch in a manual-shift motorcycle transmission is typically an arrangement of plates stacked in alternating fashion, one geared on the inside to the engine and the next geared on the outside to the transmission input shaft. Whether wet (rotating in engine oil) or dry, the plates are squeezed together by a sp... |
what would happen if coke stopped advertising for a year? | I'm assuming you mean advertising as in media (TV, radio, billboards, etc). You should note that Coke advertises EVERYWHERE and you may not even realize it. The soda machine with a giant coke bottle on the front? Glasses with a coke logo at TGIF? That's all advertising too. Even if they stopped all "ads", stopped endorsing NASCAR and sporting events, etc, there would still be Coke logo's in your face all over the place.
Lets look at 2 scenarios:
1. Coke stops advertising but Pepsi does not: Pepsi's market share increases, as people get bombarded with Pepsi marketing and try it out. However, there's only so far they can go because restaurants with existing Coke equipment aren't going to switch because of TV ads. Coke's revenue decreases more than Pepsi's increases because without advertising, some people will just drink less soda.
2. Both companies agree to stop advertising: People drink less soda in general. Would it offset the amount that they each spend? Who knows, my guess is not because if it did, then the companies would already have stopped advertising.
Advertising at that level is not about "making people know about Coke" it's about having Coke be the first thing you think of when you think "I want a drink"
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"The tobacco industry appealed against this decision, but it was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case. \"Various governmental and voluntary health organizations made extremely creative spots and provided them to stations.\" In response, tobacco c... |
why does online shopping shipping cost so much more than personally sending packages? | a few examples.
-amazon (not books)- free under certain conditions, reasonable when not-free. probably has a deal with ups/usps for volume discount.
-amazon - books - media mail at usps costs $2.65. there is not really a cheaper way to send a book. if you pay less than $4 for a book + shipping the seller is taking a loss.
-ebay - ebay charges fees based on final bid price not shipping, so some people mark up the shipping to hide costs
-random other website - for low volume stuff, that $8 includes troubling larry to get up, prepare your package, and drive it to the post office. or the cost of the box +tape + etc.
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"One advantage of shopping online is being able to quickly seek out deals for items or services provided by many different vendors (though some local search engines do exist to help consumers locate products for sale in nearby stores). Search engines, online price comparison services and discovery shopping engines ... |
how can our brains, while sleeping, create images of people/things we've never met or seen before and how can dreams create deja vu/seemingly predict future occurrences? | Dreams don't actually create déjà vu. That phenomenon is actually created by a slight delay between sensory reception and neural recognition. Basically you witness something via sight, sound, etc, but for whatever reason your brain takes a few extra nanoseconds to process the information, so you feel as though you've experienced it before, and often feel like you can "predict" what will happen next, but only as it is actually happening.
As far as creating entirely new content in dreams - that isn't possible even while awake. All of human creativity is limited to our experiences. Our minds are just able to reassemble these experiences into new combinations. (There are a few exceptions to this, such dealing with things such as scale or color, but those are debatable). | [
"This theory suggests that dreaming is an \"unlearning process\" in which our brains bring up material to be thrown out like a computer attempting to clean itself of things we do not need to remember. That is, the subconscious organizes things, solves these problems, and then communicates them to the individual via... |
what are turkeys being pardoned from if they have not done anything? | They are "being pardoned from the sentence of death for being a turkey at thanksgiving". It is just a silly tradition. | [
"A number of U.S. states have similar turkey-pardoning events, including Minnesota. The pardoning ceremonies have also been extended to other holidays; for instance, Erie County, New York's county executive facetiously pardons a butter lamb during Holy Week.\n",
"In \"The West Wing\" episode \"Shibboleth,\" when ... |
How did the Norway GDP increase by ~$22k in a 4 year span? | edit-- not an economist so maybe someone else will prove/disprove the following
GDP per capita increased by USD 22k in 4 years. The important thing to note here is that it is in USD, so let's just run a quick conversion from USD to NOK for 2009 and 2013:
77k USD - > 77/0.14 - > 550 NOK in 2009 at the rate of approx 1 NOK to 0.14 USD
99k USD - > 99/0.17 - > 582 NOK in 2013 at the rate of approx 1 NOK to 0.17 USD
I've used imprecise numbers but from this, it is absolutely clear that the increase is due to exchange rates. | [
"Norway's mainland GDP, which excludes the oil and gas sectors and the shipping industry, shrank 1.0% in the three months to March after a 0.8% decline in the final quarter of 2008, with recession counted as two consecutive quarterly figures showing a contraction. Mainland GDP is considered a better indicator of th... |
Why were so many large college football stadiums built in the US in the 1920's? | The Colleseum in Los Angeles was built for the 1932 Olympics. Cleveland built their Munincipal Stadium in an attempt to augment their bid for the 1932 Olympics. Not only did they not get the Olyimpics, they could not convince the Cleveland Indians to play there until the 1950s. They did have an NFL team, the Rams, that played there from 1937 to 1945. The Rams won the 1945 championship on a fluke play. Sammy Baugh threw a pass from his own end-zone that richocheted off the goal post and scoring a safety for the Rams. The Rams moved to Los Angeles for the 1946 seaon and played in the LA Colessium until the early 1980s, when they moved to Anaheim. Al Davis moved the Raiders to Los Angles and played at the collessium for less than ten years before they moved back to Oakland, the same year the Rams moved to Saint Louis. Al Davis left because an earthquake damaged the collessium and would have been to expensive to repair.
During the 1920s, the National Football leaugue was still in an embryonic stage of development. Without television, it was not yet a popular sport. College football was popular though. Especially in the Ivy League and Big Ten states. Schools like Michigan could build a stadium with 100,000 seats and sell enough tickets to fill them all. The revenue generated by a successful football program gave the presidents of other schools an edifice complex. They want to build a stadium tha was comparable in size and get their own piece of the pie. During the 1920s college football replaced boxing and horse racing in popularity, and only baseball remained more popular. There were sound business reasons that colleges built such large stadiums.
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"In North America, multipurpose stadiums were built primarily during the 1960s and 1970s as shared home stadiums for Major League Baseball and National Football League or Canadian Football League teams. Some stadiums were renovated to allow multipurpose configurations during the 1980s. This type of stadium is assoc... |
why is computer image recognition so hard? | I know we aren't supposed to post just links, but I don't think there's a better explanation than [this WaitButWhy article](_URL_0_). Scroll down to "The Road From ANI to AGI" paragraph.
Edit: For those about to tl;dr - over millions of years of evolution our brains became really good at recognizing objects, because that's what is useful (even necessary) for survival. Computers are very primitive in comparison to our brains, and they can't (yet) teach themselves without any human assistance, so we have to manually "wire" them for image recognition. | [
"The classical problem in computer vision, image processing, and machine vision is that of determining whether or not the image data contains some specific object, feature, or activity. Different varieties of the recognition problem are described in the literature:\n",
"Computer algorithms for recognizing objects... |
If protons & neutrons are each composed of 3 quarks, is the atomic nucleus just a jumble of quarks, or is each set of 3 quarks a distinct particle? | These pictures of 3 quarks making up a nucleon is a crude simplification. A proton is a very complex bound state that consists of the 3 valence quarks as well as a fluctuating part of gluons and quark anti-quark pairs.
Even though the nucleons are a seemingly a mess, they can be more or less be seen as distinct particles that bound together make up atomic nuclei. The predicitions from this assumption lead to pretty good results (shell model of the atomic nucleus). | [
"Inside protons and neutrons, there are fundamental particles called quarks. The two most common types of quarks are \"up quarks\", which have a charge of +/, and \"down quarks\", with a −/ charge. Quarks arrange themselves in sets of three such that they make protons and neutrons. In a proton, whose charge is +1, ... |
Do eggs change weight as they develop? | Yes, the [egg loses weight during incubation](_URL_0_). | [
"An average of 146 eggs are laid per batch. Each egg weighs around 1.63 mg and ranges from 1.13-1.89 mg. The specific time in which the eggs are laid does not seem to determine larval fitness. Similarly, the range of egg weight seems insignificant as there is no known information on whether or not quality/health of... |
intelligence quotient / iq, what exactly is it and what are its criticisms? why is it potentially wrong? | IQ is a measure of how 'intelligent' you are compared to the average person your age where you live.
Having an IQ of 100 by definition means that you are exactly average for your age and area.
A 20 year old and 12 year old writing the same test and marking the exact same answers would get different results. The 12 year old having answered everything the same as the 20 year old would get a higher IQ because older people are expected to get more answers right than children.
Similarly the test is reclibrated based on region, but this is not a big difference in practice. The result however is that the average IQ in the US is exactly the same as the average IQ in for example Pakistan: 100 because that is how the whole thing is defined.
Some criticisms are based on the age thing. Some children develop faster than other which might lead to having fantastically high IQs as children which later when they reach adulthood go down to only normal 'very smart'.
Other somewhat controversial criticisms are for example about the fact that IQ test are supposedly culturally biased in some way or another.
Even more controversial theories attack the concept of intelligence itself and demand that it be more inclusive. Some people believe that certain other skills and abilities such be seen as forms of intelligence, that for example someone who is not good with numbers or words or spatial reasoning or abstract ideas but is a really good dancer should be considered to be 'intelligent' in that area. While there might be some kernel of a rational and worthwhile argument at the core of this theory it has been pretty much co-opted by people who use it unintelligently like parents who refuse to admit that their child has below average intelligence and insists that he is merely differently intelligent as evident by the fact that he is good at sports. | [
"A large body of research indicates that intelligence measures such as intelligence quotient (IQ) varies between individuals and between certain groups, and that they correlate with socially important outcomes such as educational achievement, employment, crime, poverty and socioeconomic status.\n",
"An intelligen... |
when someone talks about rendering a video, or an animation, what does that mean? and how would not rendering it affect it? | Let's compare video editing to building a car.
So you're editing your video, but really it's a collection of parts. Multiple footage clips, effects like color correction, etc. The computer is able to tell you that "yes, these parts put together make a car" but rendering is where the parts actually get put together and consolidated into one piece. It's a little more complicated than that I think, but ELI5.
If you try to play your video/move your car without rendering, the smoothness really depends on if your computer is strong enough to pick up x amount of parts at the same time. Rendering is like putting some of the car together so it can drive a little smoother. | [
"Rendering or image synthesis is the automatic process of generating a photorealistic or non-photorealistic image from a 2D or 3D model (or models in what collectively could be called a \"scene\" file) by means of computer programs. Also, the results of displaying such a model can be called a render. A scene file c... |
why do so many americans blame obama for practically everything? | Because most American citizens have very little idea of how their government actually works, and how limited the president's power is, domestically and economically. The president is the most well-known governmental figure, and it's a lot simpler to blame him than to go watch C-SPAN or check voting records and see that it's actually your representatives and senators who are screwing you, in many cases, *specifically* because they know you'll blame Obama for it and they want his approval rating to go down. | [
"Obama commented on the role of government that \"Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time — but it does require us to act in our time.\" And he added while the American people never gave up their skepticism of a strong federal government, they also neve... |
Why is Neptune warmer than Uranus? | There isn't a great deal between the two, but because of the huge distance that both are from the Sun neither gets much warmth from the Sun. Instead some heat is generated by internal motion within the planet, partially assisted by the Sun striking the pole as Neptune is "tipped over" | [
"Neptune's more varied weather when compared to Uranus is due in part to its higher internal heating. Although Neptune lies over 50% farther from the Sun than Uranus, and receives only 40% its amount of sunlight, the two planets' surface temperatures are roughly equal. The upper regions of Neptune's troposphere rea... |
why can't another wifi device interfere with another one | > Hey, I'm the router, send me your information" as Man in the Middle Attack
They can do exactly this. It is known as an [ARP poisoning attack](_URL_0_) and it is a type of man-in-the-middle. An attacker sends spoofed ARP packets to other machines on the network, causing them to route all packets through the attacker's computer. The attacker will then forward the packets onto the actual gateway, so the connection functions normally but the attacker can intercept and modify the traffic (unless it's seperately encrypted, of course). | [
"One of the challenges of a wireless system is the possibility of interference. Radio frequency wireless systems may get interference from other wireless devices. Some wireless intercom designs reduce this interference by using \"digital spread spectrum\".\n",
"Compared to wired systems, wireless networks are fre... |
if we could take a snapshot of every atom in the universe, could we effectively predict the future? | Quantum Mechanics at least suggest, if not prove, that there may be an element of inherent randomness that cannot be eliminated. If that is the case, then it is certainly at least plausible that there is some degree of unpredictability that also cannot be eliminated in macroscopic events. | [
"While the future can never be predicted with absolute certainty, present understanding in various scientific fields allows for the prediction of some far-future events, if only in the broadest outline. These fields include astrophysics, which has revealed how planets and stars form, interact, and die; particle phy... |
why are males naturally attractive without make-up? | Because we are conditioned to believe that girls need make up to be attractive, not to mention that women have used make up for a long time creating a "norm" | [
"Regardless, by using cosmetic surgery, females can change various aspects of their body to make themselves more attractive by displaying a more desirable waist-hip ratio. This can lead to competition with other females who may be considered less attractive in comparison. When women change their appearances, such a... |
Were Asian Americans Segregated and considered "Coloured" in the 1950's to 60's? | Yes they were. Asians were subject to segregational practices in many cities. I wrote a bit about this topic previously [here](_URL_0_), but am always happy to add on to it or have more of a discussion on the topic. Filipinos, for example, were prominent targets of attacks by white people. This was often rooted in white men feeling threatened by Filipino masculinity; it manifested in arresting or even attacking or shooting Filipinos who were seen with white women during periods where anti-miscegenation laws were in place, as well as the invention of stereotypes about Asian men that are still widely believed today. In general, Filipinos were seen as less civilized than whites. | [
"The 1950s and 1960s was an era when racial discrimination against Afro-Americans was widely practiced in the state of Michigan and most of the Midwestern states. Public accommodations that could be used by black tourists and travelers were so scarce in the northern United States that New York City resident Victor ... |
in traffic, why do cyclists by default have to use the road instead of the sidewalk? aren't motor vehicles and cyclists a bigger danger to each other than cyclists and pedestrians would be? | Bicycles and cars are supposed to follow the same rules, and both drivers and riders are responsible for maintaining situational awareness. This is intended to create a predictable flow.
As others have mentioned, while there are notions about how best to walk on a sidewalk, there aren't really any rules or regulations. A bike coming up behind a car can make a fairly accurate assumption about what the car is going to do next based on signals used by the car and/or the lane the car is in. Sidewalks are pure chaos. | [
"Cyclists may travel either in the street or on the sidewalk. On the sidewalk they must behave so as not to cause danger to pedestrians (which is an arbitrary judgment that seems to translate into traveling at walking pace). Moreover, in some of the cities within the greater Los Angeles region, it is illegal to cyc... |
why is the taste/smell of licorice so polarizing? | This is the same with most bitter foods like coffee and beer. People have an inherent disgust for things bitter and you have to learn that something bitter is good. After you have related the bitter taste of licorice with the sweet taste, or the bitter taste of beer with alcohol you start ignoring the bitter taste in these foods. | [
"Miraculin itself does not taste sweet. When taste buds are exposed to miraculin, the protein binds to the sweetness receptors. This causes normally-sour-tasting acidic foods, such as citrus, to be perceived as sweet. The effect lasts up to about an hour.\n",
"It has the unusual property that it either tastes ver... |
how does all dna of a fully grown human fit in a baby? | It's better than that -- all the DNA fits in almost every one of the trillion cells in a human body! How? Because DNA Is written extremely small, using just a tiny molecule (an amino acid) to represent each "letter" of the information. And DNA takes the shape of a long string of such "letters" which is all folded up. | [
"Mosaic trisomy 16, a rare chromosomal disorder, is compatible with life, therefore a baby can be born alive. This happens when only some of the cells in the body contain the extra copy of chromosome 16. Some of the consequences include slow growth before birth.\n",
"During conception, the father's sperm cell and... |
If you were to ingest or inject yourself with ATP, would it provide you with energy? Would consuming more act like a sugar rush or an energy drink? | ATP is fairly large, and it's purine functionality would make it difficult to enter the cell without transport. Outside of the cell it acts as a signalling molecule, which plays a role in regulating heart rate, blood coagulation, and inflammatory/immune response. The metabolic byproducts of ATP degradation are also signalling molecules, and would have their own psysiological effects.
So, in short, not much would make it into your cells as usable energy, and it would likely feel more like getting poisoned than a sugar rush, depending on how much you injected.
See: [This review](_URL_0_) and [this paper](_URL_1_) | [
"Breaking one of ATP's phosphorus bonds generates approximately 30.5 kilojoules per Mole of ATP (7.3 kcal). ADP can be converted, or powered back to ATP through the process of releasing the chemical energy available in food; in humans, this is constantly performed via aerobic respiration in the mitochondria. Plants... |
Can we reproduce every wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum? | Even if I only have an LED, which emits light at one singular frequency, we can still get any wavelength we want by moving that LED and let the Doppler effect take care of the rest. | [
"There is a minimum possible wavelength, given by twice the equilibrium separation \"a\" between atoms. Any wavelength shorter than this can be mapped onto a wavelength longer than 2\"a\", due to the periodicity of the lattice. This can be thought as one consequence of Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem, the lattice ... |
Is topical Vitaminc C effective for boosting collagen or is the beauty/skincare industry somewhat falsely claiming this? | Vitamin C can diffuse through the cellular membranes but it's very slow and it has to be from high concentration to low.
Here's some literature about topical Vitamin C :)
_URL_2_
_URL_1_
_URL_0_ | [
"Vitamin C – specifically, in the form of \"ascorbate\" – performs numerous physiological functions in the human body by serving as an enzyme substrate and/or cofactor and an electron donor. These functions include the synthesis of collagen, carnitine, and neurotransmitters; the synthesis and catabolism of tyrosine... |
Why on earth did Krushchev try to put offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba in the first place? | There's a lot to it, but the gambit was that a) the US had put missiles in the USSR's back yard (the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, to say nothing of the [over a dozen](_URL_0_) nuclear deployments that the US ringed the USSR and China with in the late 1950s), and this was both payback and a stimulus to remove them; b) this was also tied up with Khrushchev's feelings on the Berlin crisis, and he thought it would give him leverage there; c) Castro wanted the missiles so that the US would (once again) not try to invade his island, as they had tried to with the Bay of Pigs.
The idea that the US would freak out about this was not obvious. The US leaders themselves acknowledged, privately, that the missiles in Cuba did not in any meaningful way change the balance of military power. The US itself had been engaging in "absurdly reckless" behavior of the same order for several years. The US chose to escalate it to a full crisis; it was not obviously one, and the Kennedy administration could have had many different responses to it than the one they had (which brought them to the brink of war and was only really released because Khrushchev allowed them a way out of it). The Soviets were extremely surprised by the intensity of the US response.
Which is to say: when you look at it from an exclusively American perspective, yes, it looks crazy. But if you look at it from the Soviet perspective, the US reacted in a very dangerous and irrational way to what was, at worst, a tit-for-tat operation. | [
"Additionally, placing nuclear missiles on Cuba was a way for the USSR to show their support for Cuba and support the Cuban people who viewed the United States as a threatening force, as the latter had become their ally after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. According to Khrushchev, the Soviet Union's motives were \"a... |
What is the smallest possible Goldilocks zone for any star? | Probably a red/brown dwarf where the goldilocks zone will be close to the star itself, adjusting the mass and temperature of the star so that it's right outside of the Roche limit for a rocky planet. | [
"BULLET::::- In astrobiology, the Goldilocks zone refers to the habitable zone around a star: As Stephen Hawking put it, “like Goldilocks, the development of intelligent life requires that planetary temperatures be ‘just right’”. The Rare Earth Hypothesis uses the Goldilocks principle in the argument that a planet ... |
why can't dental crowns be whitened/have something placed over them to make them whiter? | Crowns are made of non-porous material that is very, very hard. They don't discolor or stain, so it's uncommon for them to need to be whitened. Crowns are matched to your natural teeth colour, so if you plan on bleaching your teeth, you should bleach them prior to the crowns being colour-matched, or let the dentist know about your plans so they can take that into account (none of which helps you now).
You cannot mold something over crowns because that will alter the shape and function of your teeth, which could create a lot of problems, from misaligned bite to sores to crowns breaking or coming off. But mostly things just don't stick to crown material very well. You also probably don't want thick, fake-looking teeth.
You should ask your dentist what colour he selected for the crowns and ask him to double-check that the lab made the crown with the correct colour. If the lab messed up, they should be willing to remake the crowns and your dentist should be willing to put in the correct ones for you.
If everything was ordered correctly, you could look into "clip on" veneers if they're very bothersome. Which is basically temporary veneer, kind of like invisilign but opaque.
Also, be aware that natural teeth aren't super white -- I believe the average natural tooth colour is A3, which is substantially yellowed. Blindingly white teeth are all achieved artificially. | [
"Preventive and restorative dental care is very important as well as considerations for esthetic issues since the crown are yellow from exposure of dentin due to enamel loss. The main objectives of treatment is pain relief, preserving patient's remaining dentition, and to treat and preserve the patient's occlusal v... |
What's myth and what's truth about the legend of Rasputin? | * /u/kieslowskifan has a fantastic post on the [creation of the Rasputin mythology](_URL_0_) out of contemporary Russian court gossip and post-Revolution anti-Romanov polemic. It addresses the "power" aspects of the legend
* /u/carlton_the_doorman addresses the rumors specifically connected to [Rasputin's assassination](_URL_2_) using Edvard Razinsky's *The Rasputin File*, a fascinating book based on the massive reports from early Soviet/Revolution interrogations of czarist political figures. One thing to note here is that he acquired some of his sources privately through an auction house, leaving a fragment of a question about reliability--[here's a review](_URL_1_) from a Russian history professor addressing that issue which is nevertheless overall positive. | [
"BULLET::::- In the 2003 novel \"The Romanov Prophecy\" by Steve Berry, Rasputin is depicted as a mysterious and prophetic figure who predicts his own demise, as well as that of the Russian Empire, but then a return of the Romanovs to power. The first two of those prophecies are based on an actual letter that the h... |
how do some websites offer free returns on unwanted goods? | Some of it is about price. Whether that comes from charging the customer more, or getting the goods cheaper. Some websites (such as Amazon) have stipulations about free returns depending on who you purchased from or what good it is, unless you pay for Prime, so it isn't actually free. And of course, there are always stipulations about the condition of the item when returned. For example, a fragrance has to be in the original cellophane. So they may eat the cost of return shipping but they get a sellable good back.
Finally, it's about a commitment to quality and a willingness to stand by their products, even if it costs them a bit. A site selling legitimate goods (as opposed to counterfeits, tampered or with undisclosed flaws or damage) seems, on average, more likely to offer free returns as they have confidence that the buyer will be satisfied with their genuine article and its condition upon arrival. | [
"Travel bargain websites collect and publish bargain rates by advising consumers where to find them online (sometimes but not always through a direct link). Rather than providing detailed search tools, these sites generally focus on offering advertised specials, such as last-minute sales from travel suppliers eager... |
What is the oldest translated book? | An actual historian can give you a more detailed answer, but you should check out the Wikipedia page on [ancient literature](_URL_1_). The short answer would be the Sumerian texts discovered in Abu Salabikh and the Akkadian legend of Etana. While there are earlier examples of writing that has been translated, these are the first things that can really be called "texts". If you're interested in reading some really old texts check out the [Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature](_URL_0_). | [
"The translators appear to have otherwise made no first-hand study of ancient manuscript sources, even those that – like the Codex Bezae – would have been readily available to them. In addition to all previous English versions (including, and contrary to their instructions, the \"Rheimish New Testament\" which in t... |
posting for a friend, "so color is just a specific reflection of light, correct? would that mean that a planet under another star (ex. krypton and it's red sun) would have completely different colors?" | No, not completely. The colour of an object is depending on what light it reflect but our eyes can only see colours within certain wavelengths. That doesn't change on another planet. Certainly a different colour from a light source changes the colour you see from an object but that can be shown on Earth no need to go to another planet. A dark room for photo development for instance is lit normally by red light. That makes the objects seem red because the only wavelengths of visible light is red so only that is getting reflected. If the sun only gave off light in a narrow wavelength then it would change our perception of things. | [
"Astronomers originally supposed that the entire trans-Neptunian population would show a similar red surface colour, as they were thought to have originated in the same region and subjected to the same physical processes. Specifically, SDOs were expected to have large amounts of surface methane, chemically altered ... |
why is an accounting firm responsible for the academy award envelopes? | Tabulating vote data, ensuring its accuracy, and security from disclosure are all things that fall under the realm of accounting/auditing. | [
"Oscar (Oscar Nunez) informs Michael (Steve Carell) that the office must spend a $4300 surplus or lose it in next year's budget. When Michael opens up the floor for suggestions, factions break out and officemates square off against one another in order to get what they want. Oscar suggests that they replace the cop... |
Just how successful or influential was the global protest movement in shaping the course of the Vietnam War? | Have you read Todd Gitlin's [The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left](_URL_0_) (1980)? Gitlin is now an academic, but during 1963-4, he used to be the head of the SDS, the main student activist organization in the US, and was involved heavily with the anti-war movement. He wrote in detail about how the media skewed the protest movement in order to contain and control its impact. Rather than the protest movement itself, Gitlin actually credits the mass media and its distortion of the Tet Offensive with turning the national tide against the war, with implications for policy makers in Washington. He argues that the anti-war movement was heavily instrumentalized by the media in order to justify their headlines. In any case, it's worth a read, and it also points to a number of follow-up sources on the political impact of Tet, although they're a bit dated by now. | [
"High-profile opposition to the Vietnam war turned to street protests in an effort to turn U.S. political opinion against the war. The protests gained momentum from the Civil Rights Movement that had organized to oppose segregation laws, which had laid a foundation of theory and infrastructure on which the anti-war... |
When in high school I remember somebody telling me the fire us made of a different sate of matter (different being not solid, liquid or gas) called plasma. Is there any truth to this statement and if so what exactly is plasma? | > Is there any truth to this statement and if so what exactly is plasma?
Absolutely it is true!
The standard response is that plasmas are the fourth state of matter, just like you can heat a solid into a liquid and a liquid into a gas you can heat a gas into a plasma. The transition happens because individual atoms receive enough energy to ionize, ie one (or more) of their bound electrons are stripped off. You are left with a gas made up of positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons.
In a flame this happens because it is high temperature. Hot electrons collide with atoms and cause them to become ionized.
The definition actually extends broader since things like an electron+positron gas is a plasma or a collection charged dust particles with electrons is a plasma. The exact transition from gas- > plasma is also slightly blurry since we would consider things like the photosphere of the Sun (at ~6000K) to be a plasma despite it only being something like 1 part in 10^4-5 ionized. This is also the case in your flame where the gas will only be weakly ionized. However, [if you put a flame in an electric field you can easily tell it is a plasma!](_URL_0_)
Other examples of plasmas in your life are: plasma tvs and (there is a tiny plasma inside every pixel!) flourescent tube lights. Also almost everything these days has been made with plasmas at some point. All electronic chips are manufactured using plasma etching and deposition along with coatings on any number of objects...mirrors, phone screens, plastics, chrome on cars...etc.
This is how we really hone in on what makes a plasma. Plasma behaviour shares some broad similarities with a gas but due to the electric charge of the composite species it ends up very different. The reason why is simply because gasses interact mostly by short range forces during binary collisions, whereas plasmas interact via long range electromagnetic forces.
These electromagnetic forces give rise to a set of collective behaviours that are unique to plasmas, the range of these behaviours is vast. The most useful (in my opinion) definition of a plasma is that it is a gas where there are a sufficiently large fraction of charged particles to enter a regime where the collective electromagnetic response is more important than the binary collisions of a gas. This is a characteristic of all the examples of plasmas I gave before.
I could probably write several more pages on what a plasma is (and I did when I wrote my PhD thesis) but I'll stop here before every single person has stopped reading.
edit:clarity | [
"Plasma is any gas whose atoms or molecules have been ionized, and is a separate phase of matter. This is most commonly achieved by heating the gas to extremely high temperatures, although other methods exist. Plasma becomes increasingly viscous at higher temperatures, to the point where other matter has trouble pa... |
Why does damped oscillation depend on velocity? | Friction forces are not typically considered damping. You are confusing energy dissipation (which can come from anything, including friction) with damping. Damping is a type of energy dissipation, as is friction. But damping is a specific type of energy dissipation, specifucally given to energy dissipation proportional to velocity.
Damping also fits in to our differential equation models extremely nicely since it is dependent on velocity, another state that we can calculate with our existing differential equations. Friction does not fit differential equations very well; as energy dissipation due to friction is nonlinear in nature (either on or off, no middle ground). As such, friction is always modeled as an external force instead of a damping force. | [
"In real oscillators, friction, or damping, slows the motion of the system. Due to frictional force, the velocity decreases in proportion to the acting frictional force. While in a simple undriven harmonic oscillator the only force acting on the mass is the restoring force, in a damped harmonic oscillator there is ... |
Why are low-pitch sounds generally relaxing while high-pitch sounds are annoying? | Because the higher the frequency the more waves are hitting your ears (and all the stuff in them) per second and the lower the frequency the less that is.
Say I punch you in the arm at a rate of 4 times per minute, it's not as bad as being punched 400 times per minute. Just pretend the movement of your arm from my punches are like the vibrations of your ear drum! | [
"BULLET::::5. Blowing more softly lowers the pitch; blowing harder raises it. Breath force can change the pitch by three semitones. This is why ocarinas generally have no tuning mechanism or dynamic range, and why it is hard to learn to play one in tune.\n",
"The difference in pitch of the sounds arises because t... |
why is a viral disease, cat leukemia, named as a cancer type? | This virus causes the cats to get this type of cancer.
Just like some strains of HPV result in cervical/penile (and throat) cancer in humans, some viruses will integrate into the genome of some of your cells and cause them to turn cancerous. | [
"A lymphoma is a type of cancer arising from lymphoid cells. In AIDS, the incidences of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, primary cerebral lymphoma and Hodgkin's disease are all increased. There are three different varieties of AIDS-related lymphoma: Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, B-cell immunoblastic lymphoma, and Burkitt's... |
Is it true that Germans didn't actually use the term Blitzkrieg themselves? | It’s true the term “Blitzkrieg” does not come up often in German plans, old memoirs, or communiques. It’s closest word or phrase that the Germans/Prussians may have used more often was Bewegungkrieg or maneuver warfare. The term Blitzkrieg however pops up more post-war to describe the tactics of their Wehrmacht during the WW2. But to be honest the Prussians and later Germans have been practicing these kind of tactics for years and the end result was this form of warfare during WW2.
The reason Blitzkrieg is so prevalent when talking about the Germans is because it’s a buzzword that most people recognize and can understand automatically. | [
"Despite being common in German and English-language journalism during World War II, the word was never used by the Wehrmacht as an official military term, except for propaganda. According to David Reynolds, \"Hitler himself called the term Blitzkrieg 'A completely idiotic word' (ein ganz blödsinniges Wort)\". Some... |
how would we know how much *successful* voting fraud is happening, if by definition successful attempts at fraud go undetected? | This is a bit like Russel's Teapot--it's very difficult if not impossible to prove that there *isn't* a teapot floating around somewhere between Mars and Earth. It's more useful to focus on the fact there is no evidence to suggest that there *is*.
There are many ways we could detect large-scale in-person voter fraud if it existed. When someone votes, the fact that they voted is recorded. (Unlike in some countries, their ballot is a secret; it's that they showed up to vote that is recorded.) If fraudsters frequently impersonated registered voters, then two things would happen: when that genuine voter comes to the polling place, it will be discovered that someone has already voted in their name. And looking back at the voting records, which are public, we would find that the records reflect more frequent voting than the registered voter claims.
Both events are relatively easy to test. Any loser in an election has an incentive to investigate this, and it would be a scoop for any news organization, and both have the means to do so. Yet we do not find them occurring often, in fact rarely ever. | [
"Electoral fraud in the country was usually done by manipulating the ballots. However, a new technique has arisen which just involves the manipulating the \"election return\" or \"ER\", which is a summary of the votes in precincts. Evidence exist showing that the 32,000 sets of overprinted ERs of the Commission of ... |
why do i get automated phone calls that promptly hang up? | I believe they're called 'robocalls' and they're done to see if your number is a live line, in which case your number is sold to spammers | [
"Mobile phone services are prepaid. A person finding himself with inadequate prepaid time to make a call will ring up the intended recipient of the call and hang up immediately. The receiver of the call, hearing the phone ring once and seeing the number, understands himself to have been \"beeped\". Alternatively, i... |
why is the lesbian/gay/transgender community referred to with so many different acronyms, many of which are long and confusing? | Individuals don't decide these terms. We in the community are just as confused as everyone else sometimes. "Oh, so that's what we're calling ourselves now.... okay"
Any marginalized community has smaller groups in it that are further marginalized by that community and society at large. They get double hate. I know some gay people that have said horrible things about transgender people and bisexuals. There comes a point where the group says, "We shouldn't hate on ourselves". Subgroups start getting more recognized. This leads to new terminology and respect for the subgroup and redefinition/fragmentation of the group name at large. Initially, it causes confusion for everyone. Utimately, it leads to positive visibility, inclusion, and understanding. This what most people want. | [
"An addendum to the terminology of homosexuality is the seemingly ever-changing acronym, with its roots in the 1980s when female homosexuals began to identify themselves as lesbians instead of gay. This led to references of \"gay and lesbian\" every time homosexuals were discussed in the media. Non-heterosexuals su... |
why do people lose their senses of hearing and sight, but not their sense of touch, taste, or smell? | People can also lose their sense of taste and smell...you are just a lot less likely to notice them.
People also can lose there sense of touch over part of their bodies, but there are not a lot of neurological disorders to totally remove touch...at least not without also killing you. | [
"This interplay of various ways of conceiving the world could be compared to the experience of synesthesia, where stimulus of one sense causes a perception by another, seemingly unrelated sense, as in musicians who can taste the intervals between notes they hear (Beeli \"et al\"., 2005), or artists who can smell co... |
If shoot a gun in a car at 10 m/s, and the car is travelling at 5 m/s relative to an outside observer, is the bullet really moving at exactly 15 m/s? Do velocities really transfer fully? | For the numbers you mention, the answer is for all intents and purposes yes. But according to special relativity velocities u and v add according to the formula w = (u+v)/(1+uv/c^2) where c is the speed of light. For small u and v this works out to very close to just w = u+v. | [
"From Eq. 1 we can write for the velocity of the gun/shooter: V = mv/M. This shows that despite the high velocity of the bullet, the small bullet-mass to shooter-mass ratio results in a low recoil velocity (V) although the force and momentum are equal.\n",
"BULLET::::- formula_11 = parameter calculated from a wei... |
why didn't other european powers shut down hitler as soon as he violated the versailles treaty? | That would require mobilization of troops and resources that many European powers just didn't have. World War I decimated many European countries in manpower, resources and financially and the Great Depression didn't help any.
Not to mention that many politicians wanted to avoid war because it would have been detrimental to their political career. | [
"Alongside this, Hertzog saw France as the main threat to peace in Europe, viewing the Treaty of Versailles as an unjust and vindictive peace treaty, and argued the French were the principal trouble-makers in Europe by seeking to uphold the Versailles treaty. Hertzog argued that if Adolf Hitler had a belligerent fo... |
Why did the Germans seemingly abandon their colonial holdings in Asia during WWI? | They were un defendable these colonies were right on the doorstep of Australia and New Zealand two British colonies with millions of people compared to the German colonies couple of thousands. If they had tried they would have failed. Any attempt to reinforce would have resulted in the ships sinking by the Royal Navy.if they had attempted to reinforce before the war then they would be blockaded and surrender. The action the Germans took was the only option. | [
"Germany lost control of its colonial empire when the First World War began in 1914 and many of its colonies were seized by the Allies during the first weeks of the war. However some colonial military units held out for a while longer: German South West Africa surrendered in 1915, Kamerun in 1916 and German East Af... |
how is netflix able to provide seemingly perfect subtitles to basically every show/movie on their platform and what allows them to do this so well? | The people that make the show or movie write down the subtitles, from the script. They package that as a subtitle file inside the video file, and Netflix opens that up to show it to you if you enable subtitles. | [
"Netflix provides both subtitles and dubbed audio with its foreign language shows, including Brazil’s dystopian “3%” and the German thriller \"Dark\". Viewer testing indicates that its audience is more likely to finish watching a series if they select to view it with dubbed audio rather than translated subtitles. N... |
how does venture capitalism work? | On one end, there are the big money funds. Some groups that have tons of money. Enough that they've already put a lot into traditional stocks and bonds and money market stuff. Now they want to take some more and put it in a different area: new companies that aren't on the stock market yet.
On the other end, there are the entrepreneurs. These guys want to start a new company or maybe they have already started it and it's humming along. Either way, starting and growing a young business is hard. It's hard to make stuff without hiring people and it's hard to pay your hires if you haven't already made and sold the stuff. If you just had a bunch of money to start with, it would be a lot easier to get the ball rolling and make something great.
In order to bridge the gap between the funds and the entrepreneurs, the big money funds hire money managers. Those are the VCs. The VCs travel around looking for new companies that would be able grow in value by a large amount if they had a cash injection to kick it off. (There are also VCs who use their own money rather than simply representing a fund. That type of VC is traditionally called an "angel investor".)
If the VCs find a company they really like, they sit down with the company founders and hammer out a deal. There are lots of options and variations and details in VC deals, but usually it goes something like this:
> Lets argue for a long time about how much the company is currently worth. It's really hard to pin that down because your aren't making any money right now, but there's a lot of potential. OK, we all agree it's currently worth about $10 million? How about we put an additional $10 million in cash into the company? Then it will be worth $20 million and we'll both agree that moving forward 50% of the value of the company belongs to you and 50% belongs to us. Sounds fair? Hopefully, together we'll be able to use that extra $10 million to grow this company to $200 million in about 5 years or so. That would be awesome.
That would be the most straight-forward VC deal ever. Real deals have lots of details covering all of the possible events that could happen to the company. But, the general theme is that if the company takes off, gets bought by Google, has a big stock market IPO, or whatever, the fund that the VCs represent gets their share of the earnings.
| [
"Venture capital is also a way in which the private and public sectors can construct an institution that systematically creates business networks for the new firms and industries, so that they can progress and develop. This institution helps identify promising new firms and provide them with finance, technical expe... |
What was the general public perception of Dunkirk immediately after the rescue throughout the nations involved in WWII? | I can give a broad summary from the point of view of the British as, like so many other British War myths, it is more complicated than it has subsequently been reduced to and therefore infinitely more interesting as a result (in my admittedly nerdy opinion).
So I will assume the common narrative is widely known, the surprise and certain defeat, the plucky English resolve, Churchill and rousing speeches and the little boats. Now much of this lies in well founded fact, though shaves off a lot of the complexities which then simply reduces the nature of British society and politics during the war.
First things first the reaction was not simply joyous. It was a clear defeat and setback which signalled a grave turn in the war. And while the absence of more death and capture was certainly good for morale at home it did not distract from this fact far beyond the last boat reaching blighty. Indeed the press, bouncing off this disaster, had a field day attacking the ex-PM Chamberlain and his ilk for their inadequate preparations. Linking implicitly, and at times explicitly the disaster - perhaps a little unfairly - at the door of Chamberlain. A great example of this feeling was the pamphlet *Guilty men* which opened a rabid attack on interwar government with the beaches of Dunkirk, casting the honest soldiers there victim of the ineptitude and complacency of the uninspired grandees of the previous decade. The anonymous writers (a Tory, Liberal and Labour supporter and future leader) emphasised the futile bravery of the front in marked contrast to the antagonists. To quote its evocative first chapter's final line:
*It is a story of an army doomed before they took the field.*
Despite publishers avoiding it, *Guilty men" sold 200,000 copies.
Now this was perhaps a little unfair, while there was plenty of blame and there were problems which led to this disaster, to lay this in the laps of solely the old political order was a little much. Without wanting to get into the monkey knife-fight that is appeasement historiography on the internet, Chamberlain perhaps did not deserve the image portrayed in this book. However, it certainly did not do Churchill any harm to have his rivals in the party (Chamberlain and Halifax, the preferred contender for the PM's office against Churchill) so publicly savaged. His wartime coalition shedded meaningful need for these individuals and as a result became easier to manage. It also saved the reputation of many men still involved in the war effort yet perhaps also partially responsible. Anything else one wishes to add is speculation so far as I understand, whether this was a happy coincidence for Mr Churchill or something more orchestrated lacks firm evidence one way or the other.
Aside from this the cultivated and co-opted press loudly triumphed the official narrative of heroism on the day. From the Daily Mirror proclaiming the heroic retreat as *"bloody marvellous"* to War Illustrated outlining the *"Immortal story of Dunkirk"*. However this struggled at times when squared with the experiences of retreating men. Gardiner emphasises the combination of the chaos of war with the wounded pride of retreating men creating a toxic atmosphere of recrimination. For example in one village pub a patron recounted an NCO whose:
*"loud-mouthed criticism of junior officers of his Ack-Ack unit seizing the only available transport and making for the French coast, leaving their NCOs and men to fend for themselves"*
or the sister of a soldier, Harry Woolf, who recounted:
*"he saw his cousin dead on the beach & another man on the street. He was talking to a chap who was showing a silk handkerchief bought for his joy lady. That moment a bomb killed him. Harry took the handkerchief. Harry has had eno' of this war and is certain of our defeat - got no arms & no aeroplanes - how can we do anything"*
The civilian population, though clearly depending on a multitude of disparate and ever shrinking factors, was mixed in its reaction. Women assisted in aid stations, some cheered paraded troops (one commentator noted that the lining of the streets and accolades were more frequent then than during the soldier's embarking to France). Church membership rocketed up, with Calder pointing out that:
*"even Guildhall was not big enough to accomodate more than half the congregation that flooded to the united service"*
with 2000 listing outside on loudspeakers.
Elsewhere Donald Johnson, a medical officer, recounted:
*"From the moment you woke up, you thought, ‘Oh, my God’ as you realised [Britain’s] position afresh …It was only after two or three beers at lunch that the situation did not seem quite as bad; but by three thirty in the afternoon it was desperate again—and it was quite time to go back to the mess for another drink. In the evening, the outlook depended entirely on the amount of alcohol you consumed. I use the plural ‘you’ because everyone was in the same boat.”*
People carrying gas masks increased from basically 0% to 30%, black marketeers trade slightly declined and strikes fell in the month following. There was a 25% increase in production as workers worked longer, without holidays and weekends one must distinguish between patriotic fervour and invasion-panic.
An interesting example is how one pigeonholes the famous "fight them on the beaches" speech made to the Commons, and delivered in extracts by a BBC announcer to the wider public. While it has been proclaimed as a masterful oratory, public reaction was mixed. Addison in his wonderful work based on Mass Observation, one of my favourite-ist things going in this period points out the following extracts:
*"he grave tone of Churchill’s speech made some impression and may have contributed in some measure to the rather pessimistic atmosphere of today. […] The contents of the speech were on the whole expected but some apprehension has been caused throughout the country on account of the PM’s reference to ‘fighting alone’. This has led to some slight increase in doubt about the intentions of our ally [France]."*
However it is worth noting the the general consensus from the different areas of the British Isle was that the speech was well received if not fervour-rousing. Though, as a *further* caveat, even its immediate effect was perhaps not brilliant, as Winston's wife said afterwards about the House of Commons and the original speech:
*"a great section of the Tory Party were not behind Winston & had received his great speech […] even in sullen silence."*
This may point to the esteem the 'double-rat' and wilderness-dweller Churchill held amongst his backbenches, shocked & pessimistic immediate reaction to the news or the quality of the speech (or any of the above in combination).
Interestingly, the rumour summaries for each day (may I say you should really get [his book](_URL_0_)) emphasise a rich and at time bizarre array of rumours emanating from the disaster which demonstrates a society perhaps not entirely unified. A common a pressing one was the well-trodden discontent of the army with the RAF, the latter being perceived too weak/suspiciously absent during the evacuation. The report nervously notes that this should be checked though an official statement as its effects would be:
*"most unfortunate in military and civilian circles"*
Additionally paranoia of infiltrators and aliens underlined the daily rumour mill. From arrests of German parachutists in the Midlands (usually neither German nor parachutists) to Belgians children being denied access to play groups in London (probably not because they are Belgian), suspicions ruled supreme. This is just a taster -there were many other examples of rumours showing a society confused, angry and scared, all suggesting a society ill-at ease.
Now clearly self-interest and patriotism are interlinked and are certainly not mutually exclusive, but it would be wrong to characterise the work ethic which followed as simply a "we are all in this together", long lasting and significant shift in the relationship workers had with the wartime economy. While people were more acutely aware of their national predicament and therefore willing to sacrifice this may well have been as much for narrow self-interest than a stoic submission to the needs of Britannia.
As the immediate fear of invasion fell back so too did these positive and negative effects. Indeed this boost in production fell back a few weeks later as workers tired and the propaganda around immediate invasion rang increasingly hollow. Gas mask-uptake fell back down to 10% by August and the black market returned to booming normal. Even the rumour mill died down, which is often an excellent barometer of public feeling. Therefore it is difficult to view Dunkirk as a profound rallying of the public will. As (a) it caused as much division and ill feeling as it did unity and (b) its effects were temporary.
However there is an interesting argument that Dunkirk, though much of the effects on soldiers and civilians was indeed negative, acted as a positive 'bookend' to the war. Essentially it acted as a shift in narrative between the war of the 'old guard', complacent, elitist and slow to the war of the people. A more dynamic war effort and one where society had a greater stake. Now indeed it helped that the old guard were functionally out of office and replaced with an evolving coalition of all major parties, so this potentially toxic narrative did not disrupt politics too greatly immediately. However I have seen Addison argue that this is in part a reason for the result in 1945, so intimately connected was the mainstream Conservative party to this clique in the minds of many. I perhaps would not go that far, but it certainly added to the milieu of the time.
| [
"In the Second World War, ten of the fleet of sixteen ships were commandeered for active duty, four of which were lost. The Dunkirk evacuation was perhaps the company's finest hour, with \"Mona's Isle (IV)\" being the first to leave Dover and the first to complete the round trip during the evacuation. Eight company... |
How do you calculate the focal length of a multi-lens setup? | In my opinion, the cleanest formalism for linear optics is using [transfer matrices](_URL_0_). There is a fixed matrix for each type of optical element, and to find the optics of a series of optical elements, you just multiply the corresponding matrices in the right order. Then you get one final matrix that describes the transport of a ray with any initial condition. Certain elements of the final matrix can be associated with the total focal length, the magnification, etc.
If you have a doublet consisting of a thin focusing and a thin defocusing lens with a drift in between them, you can see what the matrix looks like on slide 15 [here](_URL_1_) (ignore that the slideshow is about charged particle optics for particle accelerators, it works the same way as light optics).
For two lenses, this is not really that difficult. You could just memorize that effective focal length equation like people do in Physics 101.
But this formalism gives you the power to chain together arbitrarily many cells like this. And even add other optical elements, rather than just thin lenses and drifts. There are some other nice features, like being able to analyze the stability of the system. If the focusing isn't strong enough, or if it's *too* strong, the trajectories of individual rays may not be transported through the entire optical system. Analyzing the stability of the entire system is as simple as taking the trace of the final matrix. | [
"Many lens manufacturers produce or produced prime lenses at or near the following focal lengths: 20mm, 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, 40mm, 50mm, 85mm, 105mm, 135mm, 200mm, 300mm, 400mm, and 600mm. For these lengths many manufacturers produce two or more lenses with the same focal length but with different maximum apertures to... |
how do they measure the visual acuity of animals? | One of the oldest way to test it is the following:
1. set up 2 doors: one with food and one without. Put a label on top of each door with black square (door no food) and black square with a single white stripe (door with food).
2. During the first few times, open both door and let the animal go. After a few times they'll learn that door with white stripe has food.
3. Close both doors in such a way that the animal can still open it easily, but cannot see through it. Then let the animal go. Since they remember that the one with the stripe has food, they'll pick the door they see the stripe.
4. Reduce the width of the white stripe. Then let the animal go find the food (repeat this a few times for reliability). Repeat this process until the animal is unable to reliably locate the door with a white stripe.
Source: remember watching a video of eagle vision test (couldn't find it now). The stripe was so small that humans cannot see it with naked eye. The stripe was made using computer-assisted tool. | [
"For a human eye with excellent acuity, the maximum theoretical resolution is 50 CPD (1.2 arcminute per line pair, or a 0.35 mm line pair, at 1 m). A rat can resolve only about 1 to 2 CPD. A horse has higher acuity through most of the visual field of its eyes than a human has, but does not match the high acuity of ... |
how can north korea have work camps and not get in trouble for it? | Because they're a country. They're not a person and can be arrested by the police. The only way to force another country to do something is either from the threat or application of military or economic action.
North Korea has a military 9 million strong and doesn't have an economy to ruin. | [
"In October 2014, North Korea admitted for the first time that it had labor camps. Choe Myong Nam, a North Korean foreign ministry, said \"Both in law and practice, we do have reform through labor detention camps – no, detention centers – where people are improved through their mentality and look on their wrongdoin... |
Does mental/emotional trauma halt maturation of the mind? | Clinical psychologist here. The effects aren't nearly that predictable or lawful. Various effects are possible, its not a straightforward case of arrested development. Some victims of abuse are amazingly [resilient](_URL_0_). | [
"Its theoretical basis emphasizes early trauma in shaping an individual's consciousness. It claims that trauma that takes place before, during and soon after birth has strong influences on how someone interprets and copes with their future life. These early preverbal traumata, as well as later difficult childhood e... |
who pays for the plane ticket back to your home country if you’re denied entry to a country? | The passenger legally has to pay, but the airline is required to take them back no matter what. If the airline will actually get their money is another question. | [
"An onward ticket can be required, based on the countries' entry requirements (which may or may not include the onward ticket). Many countries insist a flight ticket be held out from their country, which must be presented upon arrival at immigration. They set this requirement, so that if travellers run out of money... |
I heard in a PBS documentary that Napoleon's policies set the framework for what would become modern France. How specifically did he help build this framework? And to what extent did Napoleon pick up on the shortcomings of the French Revolution to spur the country into its 'modernity'? | By "set the framework for modern France," the documentary was probably referring to the [Civil Code](_URL_0_) of 1804. That link provides the Code in its entirety, so you can peruse at your leisure.
The Civil Code standardized legal jurisdictions across all of France regarding subjects such as inheritance, civil rights, marriage, finance, etc. To understand what a monumental achievement this is, it's important to realize what law was like under the Old Regime. Each region in France was governed by a set of overlapping juridical bodies that often vied for power: local nobles argued with the king's functionaries (notably the royal tax collectors, the _intendants_), the _parlements_ (regional judicial bodies) argued with the crown over matters of authority, guilds argued with municipal authorities over labor rights, and so forth. There was no such thing as a single, universal law that applied to all of France, and such a concept would have been anachronistic under a system regulated by privilege based on social class and geographic location.
The Civil Code changed this by standardizing legal codes and partitioning France into the _départements_ (administrative units, sort of like American or British counties) it still uses today. [Here](_URL_5_) is a convenient visual of that administrative structure. Most importantly, the Code greatly facilitated a process of state centralization begun under the Old Regime that the French still debate to this day.
Bonaparte, however, didn't create a standardized law _ex nihilo_. Rather, he modified developments that were already under way during the French Revolution. The idea of a universal law was a concept articulated by [The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen](_URL_1_). Also, the system of _départements_ was originally proposed by the National Constituent Assembly in 1790. Divorce [became easier](_URL_4_) during the Revolution and [feudal privileges were abolished](_URL_2_) on August 4, 1789.
In other words, the ideas and structures that Bonaparte implemented were outgrowths of the French Revolution. Martin Lyons [makes an explicit point](_URL_3_) to view Bonaparte and his accomplishments as children of the Revolution, rather than understanding the coup on 18 _brumaire_ as a radical break or an end-point. | [
"Outside France the Revolution had a major impact. Its ideas became widespread. Roberts argues that Napoleon was responsible for key ideas of the modern world, so that, \"meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on-were protected, ... |
why african americans are not given the prefix of their country of origin while european's are? | Because Black Americans who are descendants of slaves usually don't know their family's country of origin. Slave owners and traders were not interested in the ethnic origins of their slaves and kept only the most rudimentary records. Many Black Americans find it impossible to trace their families back more than a few generations. | [
"Many African Americans have expressed a preference for the term \"African American\" because it was formed in the same way as the terms for the many other ethnic groups currently living in the nation. Some argued further that, because of the historical circumstances surrounding the capture, enslavement and systema... |
What Really Happened Between Edison and Tesla? | Tesla claims, in his autobiographical [*My Inventions*](_URL_1_), the following regarding his time at the Machine Works in NY:
> For nearly a year my regular hours were from 10.30 A.M. until 5 o'clock the next morning without a day's exception. Edison said to me: "I have had many hard-working assistants but you take the cake." During this period I designed twenty-four different types of standard machines with short cores and of uniform pattern which replaced the old ones. The Manager had promised me fifty thousand dollars on the completion of this task but it turned out to be a practical joke. This gave me a painful shock and I resigned my position.
We don't know for sure that "The Manager" was Edison, and the use of that title suggests it was someone else. Tesla resigned in 1885, when Edison's involvement in company operations was very limited (the death of Mary in 1884 had deeply affected him), and day to day management was the province of [Samuel Insull](_URL_2_). Insull apparently disliked Tesla; he referred to the prospect of dealing with him over his patent for certain lamps to be "most objectionable" in 1887. Of course, it was also a good way for Tesla to tell that part of the story without running the risk of a lawsuit. We don't know the details beyond that, because here's what Edison had to say about this period with Tesla in his own papers:
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Not in the Edison Electric Company papers, not in Edison's personal papers, nowhere--no reports from others at the Works, no angry notes from Tesla, nothing. I've been in those papers for this very period, and all we have is evidence of him being on the payroll before this time. If we had the records of the European company in better order there might be something there (he worked in Europe before coming to New York). But the truthfulness of this claim will never be established, and it has been taken as gospel and magnified by every author since O'Neill's hagiography in the 1940s. Some of the embellishments appear to have no actual source.
But it gets better and more suggestive than that, even. Edison and Tesla corresponded in the 1890s over X-rays and may have worked together; we don't have Tesla's letters to Edison, but Edison wrote to Tesla on 18 March 1896: "My dear Tesla, Many thanks for your letter. I hope you are progressing and will give us something that will beat Roentgen." (LB062322) That's hardly the language or activity of mortal enemies. I've never seen the original letter Tesla sent, or what he was offering--was it collaboration, purchase, contract? Edison even seems somewhat protective of Tesla in this time; in response to a critical essay to be published in the *Electrical Review* in May of 1896, Edison said he didn't care what the article stated for his own sake, but that Tesla "was of a nervous temperament and it will greatly grieve him and interfere with his work. While Tesla gives vent to his sanguine expectations when he should not do so, it must not be forgotten by [the article author] Mr Moore that Tesla is an experimenter of the highest type and may produce in time all that he says he can." (LB062498) Again, if the bad blood was between those two, why this expression of confidence in Tesla's work and ambitions? There's more to this story, and it may be hiding among Tesla's papers in Belgrade in any of a dozen languages. *Good luck, researchers!*
My personal suspicion was that any clash probably involved Insull, and that were any idle offer made, Tesla did not really believe it--he was idealistic, but not *that* naive. It's worth pointing out that Insull was alive in 1919 (until 1938 really) and controlled an empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and he didn't get there by being nice--so Tesla would be suicidal to cast aspersions on someone of Insull's power and reach. Of course after Edison died, Tesla tossed a few barbs at his crude methods of experimentation, which was totally in keeping with his opinion in 1919. But if either had another grudge, the War of the Currents had probably been the real poisoner of the well. In that case, Tesla had cause to be angry at Morgan and Westinghouse in the aftermath more than Edison.
(For sources, the numbers and letters after the quotes above refer to the digital edition of the [Edison Papers](_URL_0_)--plug in the doc number and up it will come. Not everything has been digitized--some things are still on microfilm--but the hardcopies at West Orange don't seem to include any Tesla surprises.)
[edit: too many semicolons; added TLDR]
**TL,DR: Tesla says there was a joke offer of money he took seriously and quit over; Edison says nothing about Tesla at that time, nothing at all. Evidence suggests that the two were at least cordial until the late 1890s, contrary to popular belief.** | [
"The investors showed little interest in Tesla's ideas for new types of alternating current motors and electrical transmission equipment. After the utility was up and running in 1886, they decided that the manufacturing side of the business was too competitive and opted to simply run an electric utility. They forme... |
why do dogs drink out of the toilet, even though you give them fresh water? | As far as the dog's concerned, a source of water is a source of water. All he'll care about is that there's always water there, it's clean (by the dog's standards) and at a convenient head height for drinking. Dogs are also creatures of habit and will keep going back to the same places for food and water just because that's what they're used to doing.
If a dog's drinking out of the toilet, encourage him to drink from his own bowl by making sure that his bowl is always kept full of fresh water, that it contains enough water for him, that the bowl is always accessible and that it is always in the same place (preferably close to where he eats and/or sleeps). Also, reinforce good behaviour by giving him treats for drinking from his own bowl. | [
"According to Alexei Vereshchagin, a graduate student of Poyarkov's who has studied them, the dogs generally go out of their way to avoid conflict with humans, and rarely defecate in busy areas or onto pavements.\n",
"Dogs can be bathed by being sprayed with a hand-held shower head, or doused with water from a bu... |
How large was the U.S involvement in the Boxer rebellion? | The Boxer Rebellion, which took place at the start of the 20th century, was a 3-way power struggle between Chinese peasants, the Boxers (a xenophobic, anti-Christian, anti-modernization, mystic religious group), the Qing Empire and (mostly) Western foreign powers.
The United States desired to set up commercial operations in China (Open Door policy) before the rebellion to compete with other European powers, especially British dominance, but had no interest in involving itself in military matters. However, after realizing how serious the rebellion was becoming, the McKinley Administration through Secretary of State John Hay, approved military action combined with European powers (the Eight Nation Alliance included Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy, Russia, France, Japan & USA), despite its diplomatic tradition of avoiding entangling alliances, and the policies of the Monroe Doctrine, to avoid getting involved in the politics of European colonial powers.
The defeat of the Qing Empire in Tianjin and siege of Beijing by the Boxer rebels in July 1900 caused major world powers to intervene more directly, and the Eight Nation Alliance arrived in Beijing (Peking) to lift the siege.
US Troops were sent from the naval base in the Philippines and included the 9th Infantry, 14th Infantry, 6th Cavalry, 5th Artillery regiments and a Marine battalion under the command of Lt. Gen Adna Romanza Chaffee and was known as the "US Army China Relief Expedition". This was the first time US forces fought on Chinese soil, and also set a historical precedent where the president could intervene in a sovereign nation's affairs without the express authorization from Congress.
Japan sent the largest contingent of troops: 20,840 and 18 warships, but they also suffered a disproportionate number of casualties: more than half of allied casualties in Tianjin, and almost two-thirds of the losses in Beijing. The reason is that (according to a British military observer), the Japanese were aggressive, used densely-packed formations and were over-willing to attack.
The British was also engaged in the Boer conflict at the same time, so they had limited troops available, and had to rely on the 'China Squadron' and troops from India. They were the third largest contingent after the Japanese.
The Russians had the second largest force, of 12,400.
Austria-Hungary sent a single cruiser and sent some sailors to defend positions in Tianjin.
The Germans initially had a garrison of about 2,000 men around Qingdao (Tsingtao), and sent a larger force of around 15,000 later in the struggle, but they arrived too late to take part in any major action.
The French sent three battalions and a brigade of marines.
The Italians had around 2,000 troops, initially made up of sailors from warships and later included troops dispatched from Italy.
After the rebellion was culled, the signing of the Boxer Protocol of 1901 which was signed between the Eight Nation Alliance and the Qing Empire then allowed Britain and the USA (and to a lesser extent the other 6 nations) to have a great deal of influence in Beijing and to be in control of how the country could be partitioned.
Before the rebellion, there was a lot of discussion in the media about the rebellion, and The Washington Post, for example, had a field day publishing reports about it, mostly factually incorrect, as they had no reporters on the ground; there was a major disconnect between the information in China and the US public and it could be argued that the public opinion in the US was shaped by American and Chinese interest groups to support the rebellion and draw US forces into the war.
After the rebellion, there was a great deal of debate about the US involvement. It was revealed that a number of atrocities were committed by foreign troops, and precious artifacts and treasures were heavily looted from places like the Forbidden City. Mark Twain gave his famous "I am a Boxer" speech that mocked and criticized Christian missionaries and the US government involvement in China. Furthermore, the reparations payments on China were extremely high and they were forced into virtual disarmament. | [
"The Boxer Rebellion was a proto-nationalist movement in China between 1898 and 1901, so called because it was led by fighters who called themselves the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists. The United States was part of an Eight-Nation Alliance that brought 20,000 armed troops to China, defeated the Imper... |
what is happening in our heads that allow thousands of people to sing, shout, clap or speak in almost perfect unison? | I haven't been able to find anything completely definitive, but the phenomenon you're talking about is called [entrainment](_URL_0_) (specifically, beat induction), and is similar to how fireflies synchronize their flashes.
There's a neural deficiency known as [beat deafness](_URL_1_) that prevents people from being able to detect the beat in music. This appears to be caused (in at least some cases) by issues with the left auditory cortex, which is involved in beat detection (as opposed to the right audio cortex, which detects harmonies).
So the short answer is "our brains are hard-wired to be able to find beats in music (including that produced by people around us in a crowd), and to coordinate our actions with that beat." | [
"By a sole speaker, it is a form of interjection. In a group, it takes the form of call and response: the cheer is initiated by one person exclaiming \"Three cheers for...[someone or something]\" (or, more archaically, \"Three times three\"), then calling out \"hip hip\" (archaically, \"hip hip hip\") three times, ... |
Are alligators and crocodiles actually living dinosaurs? Or did their ancestors just exist at the same time as dinosaurs? | Crocodylians, which include alligators and crocodiles, are not dinosaurs. They are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, however (because birds *are* theropod dinosaurs).
Dinosauria is a group that was originally defined by anatomist [Richard Owen](_URL_2_) based on a few described taxa, including [*Iguanodon*](_URL_3_) and [*Megalosaurus*](_URL_0_). There are a few more technical ways to define the group, but no matter what it falls out being comprised of two smaller groups: [Ornithischia](_URL_8_) and [Saurischia](_URL_5_), although these groups were not recognized at the time. Ornithischia includes dinosaurs like *Triceratops*, *Iguanodon*, and ankylosaurs. Saurischia includes sauropods and theropods.
Crocodylians, dinosaurs, and a couple other groups (including pterosaurs) are [archosaurs](_URL_17_) (side note: people often refer to pterosaurs as dinosaurs, but they're actually not).
To get more at the heart of your question: Crocodylians are widely perceived as these unchanging, prehistoric animals. They're really not. Crown-group crocodylians (that is, the group consisting of the common ancestor of all living species and all of the descendents of that ancestor) first show up in the Late Cretaceous, around 84 million years ago. This actually isn't a terribly long time ago, and it overlaps with the non-avian dinosaurs for about 20 million years. For reference, the [oldest known placental mammal](_URL_9_) is 160 million years old.
It is true that crocodylians do have relatives that extended back much further, because archosaurs started to diversify in the Triassic some 250 million years ago, but the crocs you see today are highly derived, not long-forgotten vestiges of the Mesozoic. It's true that some have had a fairly stable body plan, but it's also a body plan that has cropped up multiple times in vertebrate evolution, including in [temnospondyl amphibians](_URL_18_) some 270 million years ago. In a lot of these cases it has evolved independently.
The major radiation of archosaurs that includes modern crocodylians is known as Pseudosuchia, and it [first shows up about 250 million years ago](_URL_14_). These early [relatives of crocs](_URL_16_) looked more like [this](_URL_15_) (in that cladogram Crurotarsi = Pseudosuchia). Nothing like a modern croc.
Even as we move up the tree towards Crocodylia, early crocodyliforms looked like [this](_URL_12_). These were fairly gracile, terrestrial animals. Again, a similar croc body plan pops up in a few lineages, like in the [phytosaurs](_URL_13_), which are likely a basal pseudosuchian but not closely related to crocodylians.
[Mesoeucrocodylians](_URL_10_), a grade of crocodyliforms that isn't a valid taxon but useful for referring to groups outside the crown group, often look more like the body plan associated with typical crocodylians, but they also show significantly more morphological diversity than that. Pholidosaurs (like [*Sarcosuchus*](_URL_7_)) and dyrosaurs have a similar body plan. Metriorhynchids like [*Metriorhynchus*](_URL_4_) were marine and had flippers. Notosuchians like [*Simosuchus*](_URL_1_) are very different. *Simosuchus* probably wasn't even carnivorous. It was also pretty adorable.
The oldest members of crown-group Crocodylia are more morphologically similar to extant crocodylians. However, you still have morphological variation within Crocodylia, such as the [pristichampsids](_URL_6_), which were terrestrial. Terrestriality shows up again even in the family Crocodylidae (with the Mekosuchinae, including *Quinkana*).
The oldest members definitely attributable the genus *Crocodylus* [date to the Late Miocene](_URL_11_) (paywalled, sorry), and the genus probably diverged in the last 10 million years or so. That's pretty recent in the grand scheme of things, and some 55 million years after the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct.
| [
"As the Mesozoic progressed, the Protosuchia gave rise to more typically crocodile-like forms. While dinosaurs were the dominant animals on land, the crocodiles flourished in rivers, swamps, and the oceans, with far greater diversity than they have today. With the end Cretaceous extinction, the dinosaurs became ext... |
if i drive 5 miles going 40 mph vs. the same 5 miles going 80 mph, will one require more gas than the other? | The short answer is that at those speeds yes, air resistance increases and going 80 will take more fuel. If you stick your hand out of the car window when doing both of those speeds you will notice that the air pushes harder on your hand at 80mph. The car engine needs to output more power to hold the speed because the resistance is higher, and thus needs more fuel to do so.
Now going slower using less fuel is not always true. With a modern car the highest fuel efficiency is somewhere around 35-40mph. If for example you did that 5 miles at 5 mph the car would actually use more fuel than at 40 miles per hour. This is because there is some base amount of energy the engine needs to just keep itself running and that becomes a much higher percentage of the total energy used to travel the set distance. | [
"On test by \"Autocar\" average fuel consumption for the total distance of 1404 miles proved to be 14.7 miles per gallon or 19.2 L/100 km. The maximum speed of the car was a (mean) of 113.5 mph, 182.6 km/h and the best run 114 or 183.2 km/h.\n",
"BULLET::::- Gas mileage is below average (11-13L/100 km or 18.1–21.... |
what was happening in north america during the bible? | Natives. Literally.
If we look at the bible as a semi-historical text, it goes back a few thousand years.
People started migrating over the Land Bridge into North America from Asia before that. Meaning that while David fought Goliath, Geronima was chasing the buffalo. While Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, Sacagawea was helping prepare food. While Jesus was sitting at the last supper, Squanto was deciding whether or not to travel to the winter camp.
The Natives have little written history, and even that which does exist, in drawings and oral history has been destroyed. We can't tell what exactly was happening, but we have a decent idea that the Native Americans were just living their lives. Like the Picts were living their lives, the Japanese were living their's, and the Australians, and Indians, etc.
Edited for political correctness, because apparently English versions of Native Names are racist. | [
"It seems a link between the colonial Bible Belt (the North, especially New England with its Puritan heritage) and the later Southern Bible Belt may be seen in the impact which some Northern figures had on the religious development of the South (perhaps not incomparable to the origins of Mormonism in the North, in ... |
Humans at one point used to see slavery as a positive good. At what time did this change to where now modern humans are disgusted by its practice? | I can only speak of the American slave trade, and not anything that happened before 1492, but as far as the Transatlantic slave trade goes, slavery was never seen universally as a positive good.
Bartolomé de las Casas was a contemporary of Christopher Columbus's and participated in early expeditions to America. He criticized the practice of slavery vehemently, and wrote a book called [*A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies*](_URL_3_) that was published in 1542. The light he shed on what was happening in the Americas led to the banning of slavery by Spain, at least for the time being.
Jumping forward and north to British North America, in the first decades of colonization of the future U.S., there wasn't yet full slavery. There was indentured servitude, which still guaranteed some rights to those servants (not splitting up families, you could take your master to court, things like that). In the 1640s and 50s, outright slavery began to be instituted and it was more or less immediately criticized.
Quaker leader George Fox wrote in support of the slaves' struggle [as early as 1657](_URL_1_).
In 1673, Puritan leader Richard Baxter published [*A Christian directory, or, A summ of practical theologie and cases of conscience*](_URL_0_) which speaks against the evils of slavery.
In 1684, Thomas Tryon published ["The Negro's Complaint of Their Hard Servitude, and the Cruelties Practised upon Them"](_URL_4_), another anti-slavery text.
In 1688, the people of Germantown, Pennsylvania, signed a document now called the ["1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery"](_URL_2_) admonishing the practice of slavery and calling for its end.
From that same year, there is also ["Oroonoko or The Royal Slave"](_URL_5_), a work of fiction published in London that often ridicules the practice.
It took many decades for slavery to become normalized in the American South, and it never became normalized in the North. New York was the only state north of Maryland where it ever took off, but never to the same extent as in the slave states. Future slavery was banned in New York pretty much the moment that the American Revolution ended. But by then, it had become a widely accepted practice in Maryland, Virginia, and all points south, which led to it being protected in those states when the U.S. Constitution was written. | [
"In the 19th century, proponents of slavery often defended the institution as a \"necessary evil\". White people of that time feared that emancipation of black slaves would have more harmful social and economic consequences than the continuation of slavery. The French writer and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, in \... |
Do videos and photos help children remember their early childhoods? | Yes and no? Depends on how you would define memory I guess.
When we recall something we rewrite said memory in the way we recalled it at that moment. Stuff we miss-remember becomes part of the memory and stuff we leave out will be forgotten. This has all kinds of implications like the setting in which we remember something influencing the content of the memory, memories that have been recalled many times tend to have more (falsely) added details etc. This is the basic function behind the false memory phenomenon.
So if you were to remind a child of an event, either through photographs or story telling or whatever, you aren't necessarily reinforcing their memory, you are reinforcing your representation of it. | [
"The types of childhood memories that an adult recalls may be linked to personality. Research into memory in both children and adults reminiscing about childhood memories is not well-established, but considerable attention has been devoted to assessing the validity of strategies that can be used to recall early mem... |
/r/darknetplan | So websites have names. The place that has all these names is called ICANN. When you type in a website name, ICANN tells you the address for you to go to so you can get to that website. A lot of other fancy stuff happens that makes the information get from one place to another.
This is good most of the time. Remember a name, get to a website. The big problem is that because all of this information runs through ICANN, among other systems, it's easy to see who was looking for what. That means people can watch what you're doing on the internet. This is important.
Now, say you don't want people to know what you're doing, whether you're talking bad about your government, peddling illegal wares, or just exercising your right to privacy. You need a new way to transfer info without the internet. A darknet will do that. It is an untraceable way to communicate with other over a network.
/r/darknetplan is a just a way for people to organize the best procedure and method of creating this theoretical "darknet".
An alternative option is an easier but less secure method, generally known as an "undernet". It's not completely untraceable like the darknet, but still has more anonymity than the normal internet. TOR is an example of this. | [
"Darkforest is a computer go program developed by Facebook, based on deep learning techniques using a convolutional neural network. Its updated version Darkfores2 combines the techniques of its predecessor with Monte Carlo tree search. The MCTS effectively takes tree search methods commonly seen in computer chess p... |
what causes baseball pitchers speed to be capped at approximately 105 mph? | I recall reading a popular mechanics article about this. One interesting aspect was that the amount of torque needed to throw the ball in excess of 105 mph corresponded roughly to the point where a certain ligament in the elbow would tear.
For reference:
_URL_0_ | [
"How has pitch velocity gone up so much? Mostly by the development of better training and clearer communication within the baseball community that velocity is so valued. People like Tom House, Eric Cressey, Kyle Boddy, and Ron Wolforth have all pushed the edge and dedicated careers to research on what makes the ult... |
Does the availability of Narcan (naloxone) encourage opioid use? | This [National Academy of Sciences review paper](_URL_0_) cites several studies showing that Narcan is associated with lower overall heroin use, fewer opioid-related ER visits, and fewer deaths due to opioid OD. I assume your thought process is that people are more likely to take a more risky dose if they know their buddy is there with Narcan.
Here’s an example of the thought process of some drug users that results in the opposite: opioid users are generally not happy when you hit them with Narcan. First, you’ve completely ruined what I have to imagine was great high, even if it was life-threatening. Second, not only did you ruin it, but they are now actively in withdrawal, and no one is happy to be in opioid withdrawal.
There is one way that Narcan does encourage opioid use, but not how you expect. Buprenorphine is a drug used for opioid addicts among others. It’s a very high affinity partial agonist of opioid receptors; where rubber meets road, this means it stimulates the opioid receptors enough to keep withdrawals manageable (in theory), but will out-compete any other opioids the person takes, making them useless. Buprenorphine is also given compounded with naloxone to further prevent abuse of other opioids. Because these drugs technically still stimulate opioid receptors, they do have some street value (apparently higher than methadone according to the same article). In that sense they do encourage opioid use, but they encourage use of themselves while discouraging use of other opioids. | [
"Naloxone is a drug used to counter an overdose from the effect of opioids; for example, a heroin or morphine overdose. Naloxone displaces the opioid molecules from the brain's receptors and reverses the respiratory depression caused by an overdose within two to eight minutes. The World Health Organization (WHO) in... |
how are horses taught to respond to the controls of the rider? | Repetition and reward. It's a long process to train a horse, and there are different methods (Western vs English mainly) but it all boils down to repetition and reward. Just like teaching a dog to sit, or a toddler to use the potty.
Thanks Pavlov | [
"The simulators are controlled two different ways. The instructor mode is by pressing buttons on the side of the simulators to start, speed up, slow down or stop the horse whilst the rider mode is aid sensitive in the form of squeezing his/her leg on a side sensor panel to start the ride and squeezing again to spee... |
Did Salmon Evolve From Freshwater Fish Or Saltwater Fish? | [This book](_URL_0_) says that there has been "considerable debate" as to whether they evolved from freshwater or saltwater fish and the most recent theories suggest that they evolved from fish that were already able to survive in fresh and salt water.
Originally though, all fish evolved in the sea and it must have been a strong advantage to be able to survive in fresh (or brackish) water and lay eggs there, away from predators. | [
"Today, many sea fish, such as fresh herring, tuna, mackerel, salmon and sardines, are well established throughout the country. Prior to the industrial revolution and the ensuing pollution of the rivers, salmon were common in the rivers Rhine, Elbe, and Oder and only slowly started to return along with a growing co... |
What was warfare like in pre-colonial Indonesia? | Warning: Wall of text incoming. But then this was /r/AskHistorians, so you expected this.
For practical reasons this answer relies substantially on European sources and wars against Europeans, but I did intentionally avoid talking about more modern weaponry like muskets or cannons.
---
This question is really hard to answer, simply because Indonesia was and is such a diverse region. For example, the distance between [Aceh](_URL_4_) and [Pidie](_URL_2_) is, what, 100 km/70 miles? But a local romance notes the drastic difference in tactics between the two (Charney, *Southeast Asian Warfare*, p. 75-76):
> Fighting in Pidië is quite different from fighting in Acheh, bear that in mind!
> Fighting in Acheh is attended by a lot of stratagems; they hide behind fortifications.
> Outside and inside these they dig trenches, and it is very difficult to surmount the palisades and mantraps.
> These fortifications are half a coconut palm high, whitewashed and plastered.
> What are you to do if you do not take with you chisels and saws?
> You will not gain your object, and the people will be slain without the enemy making an appearance.
> You had better go to war here in Pidië, my son...
So the answer is that "a battle between two warring kingdoms" would be drastically different depending on where you are.
With this in mind, let's look at warfare in one specific area of Indonesia, the peninsula of [South Sulawesi.](_URL_1_)
# Mobilization
War has just been declared. What now? If you're a king in South Sulawesi, the answer is simple: send out the *bila-bila*.
The *bila-bila* are knotted palm leaves sent out to all your allies and vassals. The number of knots tells you how many days there are left until war is to begin. If the leaf is knotted eighty times, for example, eighty days later every lord great and little *must* show up with their armies.
But who are these armies made up of? There was a core of heavily trained nobles (think knights in Europe) who rode on horseback and fought with swords. Once Europeans showed up, they started wearing chainmail and using guns. But these elite troops were a small minority. In a 1676 war between the kingdoms of Gowa and Boné, the king of Gowa himself and two of his leading nobles approached a Boné fortress with 500 troops - but even among these troops deemed worthy of accompanying the king, only a fifth wore chainmail.
The vast majority of the army was instead composed of peasants and slaves. Peasants were conscripted as part of their corvee duties (corvee is like a tax, but instead of paying money to the government, you pay in labor). Slaves were conscripted because, well, they're slaves.
So South Sulawesi armies were basically peasant levees. That explains the huge army sizes reported in many sources. 17th-century South Sulawesi probably had a population between 1 and 2 million, but one Frenchman claims that one kingdom could raise 160,000 troops. While this is almost certainly not true, armies in the lower tens of thousands are well-attested. South Sulawesi's kings had chosen quantity over quality.
But we shouldn't underestimate these troops, even if they weren't professional ones. They were trained three times an year and specialized in different weaponry; one European observer noted that the only weapons common to the entire army were a helmet, a shield, and a piece of armor for the chest. And in a society where war was glorified, even common troops took pride in being a soldier. And so:
> Being full of these notions, they never beg quarter nor give it, and ten Makassars [an ethnicity of South Sulawesi], with their drawn daggers, will attack ten thousand men; and no wonder, for men who have such principles engrafted in their very nature are void of all fear, and are very dangerous people to deal with.
# Weaponry
Before the coming of guns, South Sulawesi troops were armed with "cudgels, lances made of sharp-pointed bamboo or wood of the areca palm, various kinds of spears with a fine copper or iron tip, swords, [daggers], blowguns, and shields made of woven twigs." Fairly simple weaponry, you might say.
But being 'simple' does not make weapons any less dangerous. The [blowgun](_URL_3_) was the most terrifying. South Sulawesi troops never used the bow and arrow. Sure, arrows might be more powerful on their own. But the merest scratch from a dart could be mortal, for they were coated with the sap of the [Antiaris tree](_URL_5_), a deadly poison which stops the heart almost the moment it enters the bloodstream. Local sources report the potency of the blowgun in warfare. In the early sixteenth century, the armies of the kingdom of Gowa were said to have been routed by a single enemy blowgun:
> Thus died one by one the people of Gowa. Sombaya [the king of Gowa] was routed. Those people of Gowa who still lived ran tumbling like chicks abandoned by their mother. Hundreds of people from Gowa died in the battle. If they had stayed, clearly all would have died too, because I Buqle [the name of the blowgun] did not shoot in error. All were cut down.
Even if the victim survived, the poison would linger on - as in the case of the unfortunate Dutchman who was hit in the chest by a dart, then, *three years later*, "felt a burning in the same spot, followed by a raging fever that killed him."
Besides the blowgun, poison was applied on stabbing spears and swords. One clever innovation for close-range combat was turning the blowgun into a bayonet. As the Dutch reported:
> We also had to heed the Blow-pipes themselves, because those warriors in the front ranks of the enemy had fastened them with iron blades, like spears, and smeared these with poison.
There were ways to save yourself from poison, of course. The oxhide armor most troops wore would have protected them from many darts, while an apparently excellent antidote was human feces. But well-made poison darts kill instantly, and a way to save victims of sufficient *Antiaris* poison from immediate death has never been found, not even today.
# Tactics
So war has begun. What now? Stockades of rammed earth and thorny trees - big enough for a few hundred troops and sometimes as many as 3,000 people - would be built in strategic locations. But these were temporary, mainly intended to deter ambushes and night attacks. It was assumed that stockades would fall before a well-equipped enemy, so one side was always left open so that the defenders could flee when their position was about to fall.
Actual fortifications did exist. In the 1670s the Dutch encountered a formidable complex of three stout forts, protected by a six-feet-deep moat and pits full of sharpened bamboo spikes. After the mid-16th century brick forts began to be made and proved a major obstacle even for European firearms.
But overall, sieges were uncommon. Most battles were fought in the open, often between two stockades. The fight would begin with the armies in a fixed position; in at least one kingdom, there was a central battle corps and flanks to the left and right, and each division was manned by troops from a specific area of the kingdom. One war poem says:
> As soon as the soldiers heard the command
> they took up their positions.
> Every man was at his post
> almost anticipating his general's orders.
But we actually have little information about the tactics in these battles. It does seem likely that battles were commonly determined by a mass charge launched toward the enemy. As one European said:
> So soon as they see the Enemy, they try to terrifie him with redoubl'd Cries and hideous Yells. All the Drums beat at a Time, and so soon as the King's Standard has given the Signal, they hasten to engage, and fall on with all their Fury upon the First they meet. [...] And then it is, that they butcher one another in such a Horrid manner, that they have an Abhorrency of it themselves, when the Battel is over, and that they have once recovered their Reason.
These charges often involved soldiers 'running amok,' or in a state of terrifying frenzy. Troops running amok could supposedly brush aside lethal injuries. One European described such an incident:
> I plunged my lance into his stomach; nevertheless, the Makassar, as if he had no sense of feeling, advanced upon the weapon which I held fast in his body, and made incredible efforts to come at me in order to run me through; and he would infallibly have done it, if the hilt of the blade had not hindered him. I found that my best way was to retreat a little, still keeping the lance in his stomach, without venturing to repeat my thrust, till at length I was relieved by others of the lancemen who laid him dead upon the spot.
Charges also involved cavalry, although Europeans believed that South Sulawesi troops "were much better Infantry than Cavalry." Nonetheless, South Sulawesi was a major center of cavalry and "indigenous cavalry presented a very real challenge" to the Dutch as late as the 19th century. (If you're wondering how cavalry can exist in the tropics, [Sulawesi has its own breed of ponies.](_URL_0_))
Once the battle was lost, the defeated army sought to make an honorable retreat. In one campaign the army of Gowa was forced to abandon their stockades, but as they retreated they fired a salvo of muskets to let the enemy know that they had retreated in an organized manner.
One final tactic was perhaps the simplest: foraging. Armies would raid enemy territories for provisions and plunder, burning down villages and chopping down fruit trees on the way. This was a potentially devastating tactic because it sapped enemy morale and deprived the enemy army of basic supplies. Rape and pillage could win wars just as much as battles and sieges. | [
"Guerrilla tactics were employed in the war in the Pacific as well. When Japanese forces invaded the island of Timor on 20 February 1942, they were resisted by a small, under-equipped force of Allied military personnel— known as Sparrow Force—predominantly from Australia, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands East In... |
Hi, taking the family on vacation to Niagra Falls soon, what was life like around the falls before the Europeans arrived? | There are some errors in /u/dbcanuck's post, at least if we're thinking of the area *prior* to the arrival of Europeans. A lot of what's said in that post more closely resembles a later colonial era view. The main issue is that dbcanuck skips over the people who were living in the immediate Niagara area at the time.
At the time of European contact, or perhaps slightly before, the the Erie had been living east of the Niagara River, with the Seneca being east of them (the Genesee Valley being the boundary). In traditional Iroquoian history, the Erie were once part of the Seneca - and thus part of the Haudenosaunee (the Iroquois Confederacy). Eventually they opted for autonomy and left the Haudenosaunee to form their own confederacy; there are two versions of this story - one that says the split happened during a war and another that says the split was peaceful but a war followed sometime later. Regardless, this war is said to be the reason that the Erie Confederacy moved from the eastern Niagara region to the eastern shore of Lake Erie.
Their departure left the area between the Niagara River and the Genesee River virtually uninhabited. The Seneca were eyeing it for themselves, but so were the Wenro. The Wenro were one of the nations of the Chonnonton / Neutral Nation that existed in southern Ontario west of the Niagara River. Incidentally, the Niagara are one of the other nations in this group and river and falls were named after them. I wrote more about Chonnonton culture in [this post](_URL_0_).
The Wenro crossed the Niagara River in the late 1620s, thinking the rest of the Chonnonton would back them up if they needed to fight the Seneca. Seneca called their bluff, and the Chonnonton decided to cut the Wenro loose rather than fight the entirety of the Haudenosaunee. Since they were on their own, the Wenro decided to cede the territory to the Seneca and evacuated to the Wendat (Huron) Confederacy north of Lake Ontario. [This map](_URL_1_) so the situation in 1630, just before the Wenro exodus (**EDIT**: I just notice that the map still has "St. Lawrence Iroquois" north of the Mohawk. This is inaccurate since the St. Lawrence Iroquoians lost a war against the Algonquins and ended up merging with the Wendat and the Mohawk. So in 1630, that area should be Algonquin.) | [
"French voyagers/explorers visited the area in the early 18th century. The first documented visit by an American (of European descent) was by Philander Prescott, who camped overnight at the falls in December 1832. Captain James Allen led a military expedition out of Fort Des Moines in 1844. Jacob Ferris described t... |
How did france combat the longbow? | If you are wondering about the 100 years war and the part the longbow played in it, I believe I can help you there. In the battle of Crecy, the English victory was due in part to the cunning leadership of King Edward III. His use of longbowmen was legendary, and the first major victory for longbows over crossbows. Their astounding success was due to the tenacity of the English archers, and their ability to **keep their bowstrings dry**. The crossbowmen could not remove their heavy strings. So, on the rain drenched field of Crecy, their crossbows were proven useless. So, their knights marched on without any cover. This allowed the English knights to move around with impunity, and strike wherever they felt necessary. That, combined with the ranged assistance of the English bowmen, won them Crecy. Apparently, it took them a century to fix their poor tactics, as they suffered yet another crushing defeat on the battlefields of Agincourt, under very similar circumstances. However, the crossbowmen were able to adapt, thus giving their army much needed consistent ranged support. That, and keep in mind that the French were able to draw troops from local conscription; the English were not. It would take amphibious landings to receive additional troops. Also, as armour became more and more advanced, they were able to withstand longbows more well. This is where the crossbow became the ultimate knight-killing machine. A crossbow has much more power in each shot than a bow. It was able to puncture armour more effectively, thus rendering English knights more vulnerable. However, both sides used the crossbow, and the longbow, respectively. The French just used the crossbow more, and were able to drive the English from their land, and keep their country.
I really hope this helps!
Source:_URL_0_
_URL_1_ | [
"Longbowmen were used to great effect on the continent of Europe, as assorted kings and leaders clashed with their enemies on the battlefields of France. The most famous of these battles were Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt. The English tactical system relied on a combination of longbowmen and heavy infantry, such as... |
how does “i want my lawyer” work when being interrogated? | In the US, the right to remain silent and a request for a lawyer usually go hand and hand. You are basically saying, "I'm not talking anymore, move on to the next step or release me.
If you are arrested, you are either released after the arrest, or a bond is set. You don't need a lawyer for either of those things, although a lawyer could argue for reduction or elimination of bail.
They can also persuade the police to not charge you. If your timing is bad, you can wind up spending a night or two in jail, but that is more about waiting for a judge to set bail than finding a lawyer.
The lawyer comes into play when:
* you want to talk to the police, but be protected from yourself
* you want to negotiate with the district attorney
* you are on trial | [
"The person in custody must, prior to interrogation, be clearly informed that he has the right to remain silent, and that anything he says will be used against him in court; he must be clearly informed that he has the right to consult with a lawyer and to have the lawyer with him during interrogation, and that, if ... |
why can't people who are very light in weight donate blood? | Because the medical common "unit of blood" represent too large a proportion of their total blood - it would be unsafe for them to donate. | [
"In patients prone to iron overload, blood donation prevents the accumulation of toxic quantities. Donating blood may reduce the risk of heart disease for men, but the link has not been firmly established and may be from selection bias because donors are screened for health problems.\n",
"Blood accounts for about... |
How did the Roaring Twenties happen when the decade before saw both WWI and the Spanish Flu Epidemic, essentially wiping out an entire young generation? What were the lasting negative effects of losing so many young people from 1914-1920? | With the greatest respect, your question is based on a largely false or flawed assumption that most western countries did experience unprecedented levels of economic prosperity following the years 1914-1920. Certainly this is true of the US, not so much for Europe. The places where the ravages of the Great War, and/or Spanish Flu hit hardest were the ones that fared worst during the 1920's, which is also partly the reason why fascist leaders came to power in Italy in 1922 with Mussolini, in Germany in 1933 with Hitler, and in Spain in 1936 with Franco. Countries that could not take advantage of the post war economy were even less prepared to weather the Great Depression and, as Franklin Roosevelt said in his State of the Union address in 1944, "People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."
**Let's start with the UK:**
Of all European nations, the UK probably fared the best during the Roaring Twenties. However, economically, times were still very tough. Soldiers who returned from the war faced huge levels of unemployment. Between the years 1900-1910, unemployment peaked at 7.8% with it as low as 3.8% in 1913. In 1921 unemployment had risen to 16.9%. Unemployment stayed well above 10%, briefly dipping to 9.7% in 1927, but rose again in '28-'29[.pdf Source](_URL_1_)
The big reason for this level of unemployment was the lack of demand for British goods. Before the war, the British economy had largely depended on its industrial production of goods and resources. In Liverpool, Manchester, and much of the North East, textiles, particularly in cotton from Egypt and jute from India were enormously important, but developments in new synthetic fabrics from the US, particularly in cotton substitutes like Rayon, hurt the British economy enormously.
Steelworks in Newcastle and Sheffield, without the demands of a war, suffered layoffs and cutbacks from which they would never recover.
Coal mining in Wales was still strong, but as shipping, factories, even domestic heating moved away from coal to petroleum and gas, demand was stagnating. This coupled with frequent strikes and labour disputes put the future of British coal mining on a knife edge.
As evidenced, the UK's problem wasn't so much a lack of manpower (they hadn't fared nearly so badly as Germany or France), but a shift in the global economy as the US moved to overtake the UK and a global production powerhouse. Massive immigration from Europe helped the US enormously in this regard.
**France:**
France, on the other had, hand virtually no unemployment. Hovering between 2%-5%, peaking in 1927 at 11%. [.pdf Source, unemployment tables on page 9](_URL_0_)
For France, the problem was manpower. Between 1914-1918, French casualties were estimated at 1.6-1.7 million, roughly 4.3%-4.4% of the total population, roughly 1% higher than German casualties as percentage of population. It's important to note that French casualties were higher, or more concentrated in the North and North-East with huge damage done to infrastructure.
France made enormous strides in terms of industrial production, as the country continued to industrialize largely rural areas. However the lack of manpower continued to hamstring them. The result was a mixed bag. France struggled to repay its foreign debts, so the nation remained largely poor, but the plentiful work and (comparatively) low working population meant that the coming Great Depression was less severe in France than in the UK or Germany. Many historians have pointed to this as a partial explanation for why fascism failed to make significant inroads in French politics in the 1930's, though communism did. That and the right-wing parties, who were in power during the war, were blamed for the scale of the destruction.
**Germany:**
Famously, Germany fared pretty badly post-war. Not only did it have to make reparations payments for its part in the war, but also trade restrictions and tariffs were placed on German made goods, making reliance on an export economy rather difficult.
Rather like France, unemployment was actually fairly low intially, around 2% in 1921-1922, again owing to the casualties from the Great War. For Germany the issue was twofold. Firstly, the German government under Gustav Streseman had tried to kickstart the economy by spending heavily on social services which, without a strong private sector, is very difficult to sustain and was coupled with the aforementioned reparations. Secondly, though industry was on the rebound, exports struggled so they stubbornly refused to become profitable.
Add to this the infamous hyperinflation Germany suffered in 1923, and the Wall St crash of 1929, which largely scuppered the Young Plan (which was a US led plan to lessen the strain of reparation repayments and to replace the failed Dawes Plan of 1924) and led to many US banks recalling loans to Europe, meant that any small gains the German economy made between 1920 and 1929 were quickly extinguished. As the world economy crumbled, and governments (particularly the US) sought to protect industry at home rather than abroad, world trade fell through the floor and unemployment in Europe soared leading to the Great Depression of 1933 and contributing to the rise of fascist powers in Europe
**Further points:**
Unfortunately, I haven't time to flesh this out properly, so I won't hold it against the mods if they see this as an incomplete answer and choose to remove it, but I hope it provides some context to show that the Roaring Twenties didn't exactly 'roar' for everyone.
A couple more points I want to make very quickly:
While I in no way wish to disparage the American contribution to the war effort, American casualties expressed as a percentage of the US population is only around 0.13% which was a loss of manpower the US economy could weather comfortably. Combine that with the mass influx of migrants from Europe and the challenges facing industrial power in UK, France, and Germany, and the relative un-industrialization of the rest of Europe, meant the US was poised to become the dominant economic power, which it achieved comfortably by 1929.
As an aside, Bill Bryson's *One Summer; America, 1927* provides fantastic context for how America emerged as the dominant economic and cultural power in the mid-late 1920's, essentially, an explanation for why the Twenties Roared so loudly in the US. | [
"The death of young men as soldiers in World War I, coupled with the Flu Pandemic of 1918 wrought their eventual harm to the economy as a whole. The increase in secularization during the 'Roaring Twenties', as automobiles became widespread, and availability of electricity and electrical appliances and such, may hav... |
Why do antibiotics cause rapid growth in animals? | You're right, this is a real effect. And as of right now, we're not really sure how it works, though there are a few ideas. I'll quote verbatim from [this paper](_URL_0_):
> At least four mechanisms have been proposed as explanations of antibiotic mediated growth enhancement: [1] inhibition of sub-clinical infections, [2] reduction of growth-depressing microbial metabolites, [3] reduction of microbial use of nutrients, and [4] enhanced uptake and use of nutrients through the thinner intestinal wall associated with antibiotic-fed animals.
None of these seem like particularly satisfying explanations, but that's what we're working with.
Of course, the use of antibiotics for growth promotion alone in feed animals is a huge problem, and regulatory agencies are only starting to impose restrictions on this practice. I've written about this in more depth, [here](_URL_1_). | [
"Antibiotics given in concentrations too low to combat disease are called “subtherapeutic.” The administration of these drugs when there is no diagnosis of disease result in decreased mortality and morbidity and increased growth in the animals treated. It is theorized that subtherapeutic doses kill some, but not al... |
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"As testosterone is critical for libido and physical arousal, alcohol tends to have deleterious effects on male sexual performance. Studies have been conducted that indicate increasing levels of alcohol intoxication produce a significant degradation in male masturbatory effectiveness (MME). This degradation was mea... |
twitter reported a q2 loss of $144.6 million. how do they still afford to run a company and attract investors? | Investors think they will be very profitable in the future, so they keep investing money, despite it currently operating at a loss. At some point, it becomes necessary to monetarize Twitter, which means (you guessed it) ads. | [
"On January 29, 2008, Yahoo! announced that the company was laying off 1,000 employees, as the company had suffered severely in its inability to effectively compete with industry search leader Google. The cuts represented 7 percent of the company's workforce of 14,300.\n",
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github, including what branches, commit and repositories are. | GitHub is just a git-based code repository. It's used for maintaining a code base, including distribution and version control. There are a lot of them, but git-based ones are popular these days because they work well.
Repositories are communal places to store code and code changes. They can be free and available to all, or restricted to only certain users with certain abilities.
Commits are pieces of code that users have pushed up (committed) to the repository. These commits are changes to code by a user, published so that all other users can see them
When I branch code, I'm taking a version that exists, and creating a new version from it. My new version is going to be a new branch, which keeps your changes separate from mine until I...
Merge the branches. Which means I take your code and combine it with mine, to make a single set of code. This new single set of code can be a new head to the tree, or simply a new head to your individual branch, but it's taking multiple branches and making them one. | [
"GitHub was developed by Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett, Tom Preston-Werner and Scott Chacon using Ruby on Rails, and started in February 2008. The company, GitHub, Inc., has existed since 2007 and is located in San Francisco.\n",
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