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choice theory | Hi, which choice theory are you referring to? There's a few out there.
Personally I study criminology, meaning the Rational Choice Theory is by far the most well known, so I'll explain that one:
The rational choice theory explains us how people choose to do things or take actions that might go against the social norm. It's based on the fact that we are all individuals making our own choices in life. The RCT states that we make these decisions based on our own idea about the problem, looking at the pay-off and the possible consquences.
Example: You are in a store and you see a chocolate bar, but you don't have money to pay for it. The RTC states that you will, by yourself, decide if it is worth it to steal the chocolate bar or not, based on the pay off (being able to eat a chocolate bar) and the possible consequence (being caught and possibly paying a fine or spending a day in jail). So in your head you'll make a cost-benefit scheme, and then decide to either take the risk or not. | [
"Decision theory (or the theory of choice not to be confused with choice theory) is the study of an agent's choices. Decision theory can be broken into two branches: normative decision theory, which analyzes the outcomes of decisions or determines the optimal decisions given constraints and assumptions, and descrip... |
why hasn't there been prosecution for the corruption on wall street? | First, because Wall Street has a shitload of money, which buys them political clout.
Second, because taxpayers got nearly all of the bailout money back. | [
"When large firms such as Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossing were found guilty of fraud, Wall Street was often blamed, even though these firms had headquarters around the nation and not in Wall Street. Many complained that the resulting Sarbanes-Oxley legislation dampened the business climate with regulations that... |
if for all of pre-human history and most of human history we were scavengers that relied on fruits and nuts, how are there so many humans today that have nut allergies? | This is a pretty interesting concept! Hunters/gatherers had to subside off of the land and with what they had. As of such, individuals with potentially fatal reactions to things like nuts seemingly would have been weeded out of the gene pool.
One of the main theories behind the concept as to why there are so many people with nut allergies pertains to the idea of hygiene. In ancient times, people were constantly exposed to all sorts of microbes and pathogens and as of such, built up immunity to them. Nowadays, kids are way less dirty and sick than they used to be. While this generally seen as a good thing, it means that our bodies don't have to work as hard to protect us and are subsequently weaker defenders against future problems and are more likely to make mistakes with inflammatory responses. In recent studies, mothers that passed on good microbes (through breast feeding) had children that were less likely to have severe allergies than children who were raised exclusively on formula.
Something else to keep in mind is that cultures plays a big role in this as well. Cultures like those found in East Asia have more occurrences in milk allergies (and lactose intolerance) than the rest of the world and they don't really consume milk. Naturally, since milk was never a large part of their culture, they never really started drinking it like people in Europe did. So, the fact that they consume it was less noticeable and those individuals survived to pass on their genes. | [
"During the 1970s, Lewis Binford suggested that early humans obtained food via scavenging, not hunting. Early humans in the Lower Paleolithic lived in forests and woodlands, which allowed them to collect seafood, eggs, nuts, and fruits besides scavenging. Rather than killing large animals for meat, according to thi... |
what is an apr? | APR is annual percentage rate, or otherwise, simple interest. For example, if you have a $10 loan for the year with 50% APR, that is 50% of $10 = $5. So you owe both the principal amount ($10) plus interest ($5) = $15.
| [
"APR is dependent on the time period for which the loan is calculated. That is, the APR for a 30-year loan cannot be compared to the APR for a 20-year loan. APR \"can\" be used to show the relative impact of different payment schedules (such as balloon payments or biweekly payments instead of straight monthly payme... |
The validity of Hong Xiuquan's visions?- Taiping Rebellion | EDIT: For an answer to the main question, please see [my subsequent Saturday Showcase post.](_URL_0_)
The answer to your main question is something that will require me to do a little digging into source material that I can't access till I get back from holiday tomorrow, but on the matter of the Triads, what is important to note is that Hong appears to have succeeded in gathering a following *despite* the Triads, rather than including them. Spence's later *God's Chinese Son* brings this up in more detail, but of around 10 known Triad-associated river pirate chiefs who joined the Taiping in their early years, only two – Su Sanniang and Luo Dagang – actually converted to Taiping Christianity and joined long-term, whereas the others either deserted or, most prominently in the case of 'Big-Head' Yang, switched sides entirely and supported Qing forces against the nascent uprising.
Indeed, Hong's early proclamations actively antagonised the Triads to an extent. He publicly proclaimed that he had no time for Triad pretensions of destroying the Qing and restoring the old Ming dynasty, for one becaue by that stage the Ming imperial line had effectively vanished, and for another because Hong believed that the imperial system as it then existed was inherently corrupt and blasphemous, and so a change in ruling dynasty would make no difference. Indeed, he reserved similar vitriol for the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang has he did for the Manchu emperors of the Qing Dynasty, due to the Qin emperor having been the first to usurp the apparently divine attribute of *di* 帝 from the Heavenly Father *Shangdi* 上帝 by calling himself emperor – *Huangdi* 皇帝.
For the most part, Hong presented himself not as a Triad ally, but a Triad alternative, emphasising not the comparatively mundane issue of dynastic renewal, but rather a spiritual revolution and the promise of cleansing China of (Qing Manchu) devils and demonic influences. His spiritual programme explicitly opposed Confucian, Daoist and, crucially, Buddhist 'idolatry', and his organisation was itself committed to fighting bandits, which put it in competition with the Triads, who were similarly operating as a local defence force. What would have further contributed was the Taiping's initial focus on protecting the Hakka-speaking minority population, whereas the Triads were generally more associated with the Cantonese-speaking Punti majority. So the Taiping were hardly successful in winning over Triads. Rather, they won over the Triads' potential support base.
Sources and Further Reading:
* Jonathan D. Spence, *God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan* (1996)
* Jonathan D. Spence, *The Taiping Vision of a Christian China, 1836-1864* (1998)
* Thomas H. Reilly, *The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Religion and the Blasphemy of Empire* (2004)
* Jen Yu-Wen, *The Taiping Revolutionary Movement* (1973) | [
"Du Wenxiu, who led the Panthay Rebellion, was in contact with the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. He was not aiming his rebellion at Han Chinese, but was anti-Qing and wanted to destroy the Qing government. Du's forces led multiple non-Muslim forces, including Han Chinese, Li, Bai, and Hani peoples. They were assisted b... |
What was the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis ? | *"Post Soviet Russia"* by Roy Medvedev contains a day-by-day breakdown of the events. The crisis was that the congress ruled to impeach Yeltsin after Yeltsin attempted to introduce rule by decree. Now Yeltsin attempted to dissolve the congress which was something he explicitly wasn't entitled to by the Russian constitution.
At that point the approval ratings of both Yeltsin and of the Russian parliament were below 25%. Millions of Russians were disappointed by the shock therapy liberalization and wouldn't take sides in the resultant stand-off.
Given whole army units (along with left and right wing radicals) came to the support of the congress while it was under siege the events can well be said to have been a real civil war.
As for the long run, it is not something not covered by this subreddit. The supporters of Yeltsin feared his fall would have resulted in a roll back to the soviet times or a in new right wing dictatorship (and these opinions were especially popular abroad.) Today it's his critics who note that his refusal to share or cede power resulted in a centralized and not extremely democratic system. The Russian politician Xenia Sobchak had noted the liberals in Poland had no qualms about ceding power to communists after unpopular reforms and it, if anything, made Poland more democratic. | [
"BULLET::::- The constitutional crisis of 1993: a conflict between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the Russian parliament led by Ruslan Khasbulatov. It emerged due to disagreements regarding the demarcation of political authority. Russian leaders agreed to hold a referendum in April 1993 that would determine wh... |
In England 1700s(?) How did the trend of caked face paint, absurdly large dresses and wigs come about? | You may be interested in [a recent answer of mine](_URL_1_) that begins to answer a little part of this question. To crib from the end of it,
> One thing is that hooped petticoats have a long history in western fashion, and the more extreme versions developed out of ones that looked roughly like someone wearing many petticoats. I assume the period of interest to you is the 1760s-1770s (which is the segment of this rundown that gets the most attention in film) - by that point, two or three generations of wealthy women had grown up accepting them as a normal part of dress.
Fashions do not come out of nowhere, any more than any other aspect of historical life. Full skirts are still understood as attractive today: couturiers like [Oscar de la Renta](_URL_6_) still use them in ball gowns and wedding dresses, and even the more down-market David's Bridal carries them. We achieve these looks now largely on the backs of seamstresses who came before, who made us of new materials and techniques that stiffen or hold out fabric, but for quite some time, the only way to manage this was to wear multiple petticoats. Full-body images from [before the widespread adoption of the farthingale](_URL_2_) don't show an extreme width, but there is enough fullness there that several would have been needed to make the skirt fall this way. We see something similar [in the years before the return of the hoop in the eighteenth century](_URL_3_) (as discussed in the linked answer). So, the fashion for a full skirt happens, and then someone - in this case, it seems to have been an English person - develops a way to create a larger full skirt with an under-structure. To quote myself again,
> Hoops did not come back into fashion until the eighteenth century. Around 1700, some women were wearing heavily starched or glue-stiffened petticoats in order to help hold out their skirts, but by 1710, something rather like the farthingale was back in style. This hooped petticoat was more of a [domed shape](_URL_5_), and provoked tremendous public comment relating to women taking up too much space on the city streets, flaunting their vanity, etc. etc. In the late 1730s it took on a shape that was [flatter in the front and back](_URL_9_), but still fairly rounded, which went on to develop into the stereotypical [flatness and breadth](_URL_4_) people often think of when they think of eighteenth-century hoops by about 1750. From there, they became [more rounded and narrow](_URL_0_) by about 1760, and eventually morphed into [a bustle situation](_URL_8_), with volume at the sides and back, before fading away in the very early nineteenth century.
It looks like the fashion suddenly appeared because the common pop-cultural perception of the entire eighteenth century is, boom, broad hoops from start to finish - but looking at the full progression shows the way that they started as a "reasonable" device and became an aspect of fashion that existed regardless of necessity.
Wigs and hair powder are similar. Longer hair was fashionable for men in the early seventeenth century, and by the 1660s it needed to be so thick, long, and curly that it was much easier to make use of a wig instead. Around 1700, a pale-colored wig was worn with high peaks of hair on either side of a center part; the peaks came down in height over the 1710s, and the color became grey over the 1720s. More conservative or professional men often continued to wear a "bob wig" through the middle of the century, but most fashionable wig-wearing men began to tie theirs back into a queue in the 1730s, with only minor stylistic changes occurring until the return to natural hair in the 1780s-90s. Women, on the other hand, tended not to wear wigs. On parts of the Continent, fashionable women began using powder in the 1710s, but it did not catch on in Britain until the 1750s. Their hair was actually worn rather close to the head until the late 1750s and 1760s, when a slight rise at the top became fashionable, which morphed into quite a tall hairstyle in the 1770s; by the end of that decade, it widened, and then it lowered in the 1780s while still keeping the width. As with men, a more natural, though sometimes still powdered look became fashionable in the 1790s.
Cosmetics I can't discuss in great detail, because I haven't done as thorough a study of it as I have hair and clothing, and to my knowledge nobody else has looked at how these changed over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But it would be a mistake to think of makeup as "caked on". As with big wigs and big gowns, the pop-cultural idea reflects our modern feelings that our standards are ideal and old ones are ludicrous, even though the current Instagram look requires an incredible amount of makeup and time to apply it. Eighteenth-century beauty for men and women required pale skin, but a "naturally" pale look caused by being indoors and having a clear complexion (still quite important), with pink cheeks and lips. Portraiture does not show thick, dead white makeup covered with red blotches. It's probable that - then as now - some people put it on without skill and looked awkward, but the goal was clearly to look "born with it".
> Was there any contemporary decenters? Or was it just a minority of the wealthy wearing that fashion?
Fashion could only be fully followed by the wealthy, but there was not a stark line between them and everyone else. Fashion is not just fashion, it is a paradigm for what looks normal to people (particularly before the invention of modern art-couture). In general, people dressed as well as they could afford to. John Collet's *High Life Below Stairs* (which you can see [here](_URL_7_)) shows the difference between the upper servants like the lady's maid, who dresses about as well as her unseen mistress, and the lower servants, who wear no corsetry and have unstyled and unpowdered hair. Dressing above your station could result in gossip, but dressing below it would do the same. For the most part, people tried to conform to standards for their particular spot on the social scale.
> It just all seems so inconvenient, so so so much time and effort.
Convenience above all other considerations is a very modern idea. They simply didn't even think about having a "wash and wear" hairstyle and stretchy clothes that didn't require much fitting, any more than they thought about having gas-powered automobiles or telephones; people who couldn't afford to style their hair beyond the very basics or wear anything but loose jackets or bedgowns were pitied. | [
"Among women in the French court of Versailles in the mid-to-late 18th century, large, elaborate and often themed wigs (such as the stereotypical \"boat poufs\") were in vogue for women. These combed-up hair extensions were often very heavy, weighted down with pomades, powders, and other ornamentation. In the late ... |
Trig Expression Confusion | You have a right triangle. You know the hypotenuse and one angle. How do you find the lengths of the two legs? Using the rules for cosine and sine:
cos(θ) = (adjacent length) / (hypotenuse length)
sin(θ) = (opposite length) / (hypotenuse length)
So if you want to find the length of the side adjacent to your angle, you use
(adjacent length) = (hypotenuse length) \* cos(θ)
while for the side opposite your angle you use
(opposite length) = (hypotenuse length) \* sin(θ)
[Here's a picture](_URL_0_).
So now, you have this force pointing in some direction, and you want to decompose it into a horizontal and vertical components. If you know the magnitude of the force and the angle it makes with the horizontal (or vertical) axis, you can use those rules to find the horizontal and vertical bits. | [
"A possible explanation for lag-1 sparing is that this phenomenon is heavily interconnected with attentional blink, but does not operate on the same cognitive mechanisms and requires different stimuli to occur. Specifically, for lag-1 sparing to occur, it needs visual input as practice targets. These targets can be... |
why was nafta so supported in the beginning but ended up failing as a policy | What do you mean by "failed"? The goal was to increase trade among Mexico, the US and Canada and it has succeeded in those goals. | [
"When NAFTA was being developed to include Mexico, the developers of the deal presented it as way to create more middle class jobs in Mexico by increasing development and investment in Mexico. This deal followed a trend of increased neo-liberal policies in Mexico that ultimately made the implementation of NAFTA pos... |
if the goal of an experiment is to be unbiased, why even form a hypothesis in certain studies? | To construct an experiment, you have to ask a question that needs to be answered.
And often that question takes the form of a hypothesis that needs to be either confirmed or refuted.
The hypothesis is the question you want to ask the universe. But the universe has a habit of being kind of secretive and not very obvious a lot of the time. Since you can't ask directly, you design an experiment to interrogate the universe and if you are clever, you can find gaps and clues from how the universe reacts.
Of course it is also possible to ask questions without having a hypothesis, but those questions often tend to not have much predictive and explanatory power. That's questions like "How far is the distance between A and B?" But sometimes such question also yield highly unexpected results that then need to be explained. With a hypothesis. And then that hypothesis needs to be checked by asking the universe again in another experiment. | [
"This is an investigation of whether the real world behaves as predicted by the hypothesis. Scientists (and other people) test hypotheses by conducting experiments. The purpose of an experiment is to determine whether observations of the real world agree with or conflict with the predictions derived from a hypothes... |
why can't we generate electricity by positioning magnets around turbines? | That is how we generate electricity.
Use something to spin a turbine, use the turbine output to spin some magnets. | [
"A useful technique to connect a permanent magnet synchronous generator to the grid is by using a back-to-back converter. Also, we can have control schemes so as to achieve unity power factor in the connection to the grid. In that way the wind turbine will not consume reactive power, which is the most common proble... |
how do zipline and cablecar wires get laid out long distances? | If you can get one line across the gap, you can use that to pull across larger and larger lines until you have the final cable in place.
In the case of cable cars, it's simpler because it has pylons with known distances between them, and there are different ways to do it e.g. use a crane or a helicopter to lift the end of the cable over each pylon bearing wheel. | [
"Professional versions of zip-lines used as an outdoor adventure activity are usually operated at high speeds, covering long distances and sometimes at considerable heights. Cables can be very high, starting at a height of over , and traveling well over . Riders are physically attached to the cable by a harness tha... |
why can a company ship me a package from sweden to us for free, but if i try to ship it back to their address it costs me $100? | Nothing is "free". The cost is covered by you. You've paid shipping, it's simply buried in the cost of the goods you purchased. | [
"Users can sell clothing, shoes and handbags in two ways: request a prepaid selling kit or print out a shipping label. Twice processes the items and sends an all-or-nothing offer to the user within days, which users accept or reject. If accepted, Twice offers multiple options for immediate payout including PayPal a... |
why can't task manager instantly stop a process? | It's always best if you can give tasks a chance to quit nicely. A task might be in the middle of writing data to disk, for example. If you can give a task a bit of warning that it's being killed, the task might have the chance to finish what it's doing and exit gracefully without losing data.
Sometimes that doesn't work, and tasks have to be forced to stop regardless of the consequences. | [
"Tasks waiting on user input or file reads would not normally be listed as waiting entries for operator attention. Another reason for a task to be waiting is waiting on a file. When a process opens a file, and the file is not present, the task is placed in the waiting entries, noting that it is waiting on a certain... |
how bedsores develop | They typically occur on areas where soft tissue lie over bones. When the person is immobile, the prolonged pressure between the chair and the bone causes the blood flow in the soft tissue to be decreased which leads to tissue death (necrosis). Also if there is a pull/shearing force on the soft tissue, that can break the blood vessels in the tissue leading to further damage to blood flow and oxygenation.
Risk factors for pressure ulcers are immobility but also diseases that already affect good blood flow like diabetes, hypotension, and other vascular diseases. Also malnutrition will make it generally harder for the body to repair itself from that damage.
The lack of blood flow and tissue death will ultimately be affected by infection as the white blood cells will not be able to access the site to fight infection. | [
"Sexual reproduction is more rarely reported and occurs when two adjacent sporangia function as gametangia with one transferring all of its cytoplasmic contents into the other, resulting in the development of a thick-walled, lipid-laden resting spore.\n",
"Sexual reproduction results in the formation of a zygospo... |
Is it possible to run out of tunes in music at some point? | There are really only a limited number of progressions that make any "sense" to us musically, like a V-I cadence [you'd know it when you hear it...] or open ones like I-V or I-IV ...
Things like [say] V-ii-I might sound nice [depending on the key and melody] but wouldn't function as say the end of a piece. In this way we have only so many ways to really begin/end things in a logically consistent way. Keep in mind the # of ways [specially to begin] are huge.
The middle of pieces is a lot more flexible you can throw in a I-ii-IV-V-I sequence and not assume that's the end of the piece. Inside that sequence the melody can very quite a bit, so can the rhythm inside the meter, etc...
Think of musical chords as words and their progressions as sentences. The vocabulary of music [how many different chords/presentations] is huge but it is finite. I doubt we've seen everything yet.
A lot of "pop" tunes are actually very trivial musically speaking. They often only have a few progressions and just vary the words over top. Think of it like a play with only a few unique sentences in the entire piece but each time you say the same sentence you dance around on stage differently.
If you want to experience a variety of music sadly you have to go to the past. Classical, Romantic, and early 20th century music often had complicated progressions/structure/theory and in many cases they invented forms we take for granted today. | [
"Tunes are typically binary in form, divided into two (or sometimes more) parts, each with four to eight bars. The parts are referred to as the A-part, B-part, and so on. Each part is played twice, and the entire tune is played three times; AABB, AABB, AABB. Many tunes have similar ending phrases for both A and B p... |
elon musk's 'master plans' | As a company that have a goal to eliminate our demands for fossil fuel it opens them up for critique when they are doing things that seams contradictory to their primary goal. For instance Tesla started making race cars and then luxury sedans, neither are known for being eco-friendly, and thus providing a means to increase the energy consumption of personal transport and increase the power usage which is largely based on fossil fuel. Elon decided to counter these critiques early by making his master plan public at an early stage. This showed that the early cars were only stepping stones to a better future. As Tesla completed their first master plan he have now made the current plan public again. It includes several things that by itself can be considered unhealthy for the environment but makes sense in the bigger picture. He is also doing similar plans for SpaceX public. | [
"Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future is Ashlee Vance's biography of Elon Musk, published in 2015. The book traces Elon Musk's life from his childhood up to the time he spent at Zip2 and PayPal, and then onto SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity. In the book, Vance managed to get regular interview... |
if you get a blood transfusion and your blood is found at the scene of a crime and tested, how does it effect the results? | As others have said, red blood cells have no DNA. Rather, it's other cells, such as white blood cells, that are present in blood and are the source of DNA evidence in "blood".
What you may not know is that when you donate blood (or receive donated blood), that blood is filtered and separated into its constituent components. White cells, red cells, and platelets are all sold off as separate products for different purposes. The red cells you receive are essentially "pure" red cells and have no DNA.
So, short answer is that getting or giving blood doesn't result in a transfer of DNA. | [
"Drug-testing a blood sample measures whether or not a drug or a metabolite is in the body at a particular time. These types of tests are considered to be the most accurate way of telling if a person is intoxicated. Blood drug tests are not used very often because they need specialized equipment and medically train... |
what happens when you raise a number to the power of i (the imaginary number)? | I thought this was explain it like I'm 5, not explain it like I'm in my fifth year of graduate school... | [
"In mathematics, a power of 10 is any of the integer powers of the number ten; in other words, ten multiplied by itself a certain number of times (when the power is a positive integer). By definition, the number one is a power (the zeroth power) of ten. The first few non-negative powers of ten are:\n",
"When a nu... |
why is it okay for actors to impersonate police officers when filming in public locations? are there special laws that govern filming? | Laws vary by jurisdiction. However, laws against impersonating a public official will usually have language like the following, which prohibits impersonating a public official:
> ...with purpose to induce another to submit to such pretended official authority or otherwise to act in reliance upon that pretense.
In other words, the law that I borrowed that language from says that it's only a crime to impersonate a police officer if your purpose is to make other people believe that you're a police officer, and act accordingly. So if your state uses that same language, it's not illegal to impersonate a police officer as an actor, or a stripper, or at a Halloween party. It's only illegal if you're trying to trick people.
Most or all states in the US use very similar language in their laws.
On the other hand, the use of an official police *badge* may be a crime, even in a theatrical setting, unless the use of that badge is approved by the relevant law enforcement authority. Again, this will depend on state and local law.
Edit: clarity | [
"In addition, there have been numerous examples in which police or security officers have erroneously told civilians that filming or taking pictures of a particular building is unlawful and a violation, due to either national security or homeland security reasons. Examples covered in the blog include a police offic... |
the reason for supermarket membership card and coupon | 1. Loyalty. As in "I have a card in this store, I might save some money, so lets go back there to get groceries"
2. Purchase tracking. The store can tell exactly what you bought in the last 6 months. They can deduce marketing campaigns and product stocking strategies depending on what sort of customers buy what at what time of the day etc. | [
"Store coupons are coupon-based discounts offered for a particular item or group of items. The issuing store will accept its own \"store coupons\", but some stores will also accept store coupons that are issued by competitors.\n",
"Of the \"big four\" supermarkets, Sainsburys and Tesco and Morrisons operate loyal... |
why, in the entirety of both the Islamic and Christian world, do we have a 7 day week? is there an astronomical or other historical significance to a 7 day time period? Are any European or Middle Eastern cultures in history known to have had a concept of a week of any other length than 7 days? | FYI there's a section on this in the FAQ*
[Weeks, weekdays, and weekends](_URL_0_)
*see the "popular questions" link on the sidebar, or the "wiki" tab above | [
"The Islamic calendar is a lunar one, so that there are twelve lunar months in a year of 354 or 355 days, being 11 days shorter than a solar year. Consequently, holy days in Islam migrate around the solar year on a 32-year cycle. Some countries in the Islamic world use the Gregorian calendar for civil purposes, whi... |
how does general anxiety disorder actually work, and why is it thought to occur? is it "all mental" or chemical? | there is no difference between mental and chemical. there is no difference between physical illness and mental illness, they all take place in this physical world made of chemicals.
& #x200B;
as to how it works: we don't exactly know. we don't understand the brain enough to explain most mental illnesses or their medications. we just know that some things help and some things don't. why? we have theories, but they are all big question-marks that can be completely outdated next year. we estimate that about 1/3 of it is genetical 'weakness' that gets activated by something you experience. what that something is depends wildly per person. | [
"The biological basis for anxiety disorders is rooted in the consistent activation of the stress response. Fear, which is the defining emotion of an anxiety disorder, occurs when someone perceives a situation (a stressor) as threatening. This activates the stress response. If a person has difficulty regulating this... |
Why did football overtake baseball in popularity in the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s? | One thing that should be established is that until the 60' or so College Football was much more popular then the multiple Pro leagues out there, and thus when many schools had to suspend play during WW2 that accounts for the downturn seen in the 40's.
But then when everyone comes back and tons more can go to college on the GI Bill, then all of a sudden you have more players, and more fans, and you see it take off. With more schools competitive, more Bowls popping up, and the spread of more NCAA controlled games showing up on TV.
And with more quality players coming out of college the quality of the pro game began to improve, and of course once the AFL and NFL merged and the Superbowl began it was a perfect made for TV event that could drive viewership. | [
"College football was the bigger attraction, but by the end of World War II, pro football began to rival the college game for fans' attention. Rule changes and innovations such as the T formation led to a faster-paced, higher-scoring game. The league also expanded out of its eastern and midwestern cradle; in 1945, ... |
I just mixed some Acetone and Water and the beaker warmed up. Why? | I think the answer to this question is going to be complicated, depend on the ratio of water and acetone, and ultimately have to do with the thermodynamics of how the acetone and water molecules arrange themselves. But to be overly simplified, I think you could just state that the acetone/H2O molecules fit together better and exist at a lower energy state together than they do by themselves. | [
"The mixture will set up, for handling, within 4–6 hours, but requires 15 hours (at cool temperatures) to fully cure and harden. When first mixed, J-B Weld is subject to sagging or running (slow dripping), more so at warmer temperatures. After about 20 minutes the mixture begins to thicken into a putty that can be ... |
why do so many people think prostitution is bad? | Many of those against legal prostitution would believe that every prostitute was forced into it, including those that might appear to have entered voluntarily.
Many psychologists also have shown how prostitution is damaging to the prostitute.
EDIT: Also, I, until recently, believed the best way to help the workers would be to legalize and regulate it, but then I found out what Sweden and other European countries had started doing. Their laws have it so that the Johns (clients) are the only ones breaking the law, allowing the workers to feel safer seeking help. From what I've read it seems to be working quite well in favour of the women (and a few men).
_URL_0_ | [
"Prostitution has also become associated with a number of problems, including organized crime, government corruption and sexually transmitted diseases. Due to China's history of favoring sons over daughters in the family, there has been a disproportionately larger number of marriageable aged men unable to find avai... |
What was the ratio between fighter planes and reconnaissance planes in WW1? | My copy of Amber Books' *The Essential Aircraft Identification Guide: Aircraft of WWI* gives numbers in August 1918 as being:
* France: 34% fighter, 51% observer, 15% bomber
* Britain: 55%, 23%, 22%
* Italy: 46%, 45%, 9%
* USA: 46.5%, 46.5%, 7%
* Germany: 42%, 50%, 8%
* Austria-Hungary: 63%, 28%, 9%
hope that helps! | [
"Only 403 (45 percent) of the total number of sorties flown by Fighter Command were directed at the three major German raids. A further 56 (or just over 6 per cent) were standing patrols to protect shipping off the coast. Most of the remaining 427 sorties (nearly 50 per cent) were made to engage the reconnaissance ... |
Are Ultraviolet rays more powerful on cloudy days? | Absolutely not. There is no physical reason why a cloud would increase the intensity of an incoming flux of ultraviolet photons. Even if [fluorescence](_URL_0_), the process by which material "processes" high energy photons into more lower energy ones, could occur inside a cloud in our atmosphere, our Sun does not produce enough photons with energies greater than UV for a measurable effect. Our atmosphere, even cloud-free, absorbs most incoming ultraviolet radiation. | [
"Sunlight is the most available free UV radiation source for use in reflected UV photography, but the quality and quantity of the radiation depends on atmospheric conditions. A bright and dry day is much richer in UV radiation and is preferable to a cloudy or rainy day.\n",
"In daytime, sodium and red oxygen emis... |
why is there so many different kinds of pain medication? they all seem to do the same thing (according to their descriptions), but why does tylenol work for some headaches and ibuprofen (naproxen, aspirin, etc.) work for other headaches? | Some reduce inflammation which helps relieve pain, and some block pain receptors in your cells, so you don’t feel the pain. Different drugs perform different chemical actions that help with pain in different ways. | [
"Pain medication, such as aspirin and ibuprofen, are effective for the treatment of tension headache. Tricyclic antidepressants appear to be useful for prevention. Evidence is poor for SSRIs, propranolol and muscle relaxants.\n",
"Tension-type headaches can usually be managed with NSAIDs (ibuprofen, naproxen, asp... |
if the tongue is a muscle, and muscles grow after the fibers are torn, why doesn't your tongue grow after being bitten? | Not the same type of tear. Otherwise, bodybuilders would go to the gym and cut themselves. | [
"Mineral and vitamin deficiencies can cause the tongue to appear beefy red and feel sore. Those deficiencies are iron, folate, and vitamin B12. A hairy tongue may be an indication of Epstein Barr virus infection and is usually seen in those infected with HIV. Other systemic diseases that can cause the tongue to for... |
kneeling during/sitting in national anthem disrespect to armed forces? | It's only disrespecting the armed forces in a super roundabout way. In the US, we stand to pay respect to the flag, which represents the US. If you're in uniform (military) you also salute. Maybe other professions as well, like police and firefighters, but I don't know for sure. Our military fights for the US, and in some cases comes home covered by that same flag. I don't consider it as disrespecting our armed forces personally. I just think he's a dickhead. I don't think ANYONE is super proud of America right now, what with the candidates we've chosen for ourselves, but the courtesy is to stand and remove any headgear.
Personally speaking, there's lots of things I think are atrocious about America, but that's why we need to strive always to make America better. I still manage to stand on my feet when the anthem is played, because America is imperfect, but I work to make it more so.
Essentially, the dude acted like a teenager getting punished, acting out because he didn't like a situation. | [
"During the Litany, Dr. Stewart was ordered by an attending Union officer to say the Prayer for the President of the United States that Dr. Stewart had omitted without saying any other prayer in its place. Dr. Stewart proceeded without paying any attention to the interruption; but a captain and six of his soldiers,... |
How did Tenant Farmers get paid in Medieval England? Did they farm for a season, sell, then run down their savings until next season, or did they have some type of reliable income? | I have not heard any specific English form of tenancies, but tenant farming followed was broadly similar across Europe. That is not to say to say that European farming was similar everywhere, rather that tenant farming was just one of many different forms of farming.
So, tenant farming was the practice where landowners who owned more land than they themselves could cultivate, but did not legally control other people to do the farming for them (no slaves or serfs). So the hired tenant freemen are given parcels of the land to cultivate, and then pay the landowner with a part of the harvest, the land rent. The tenants would live and work at the farms all year round. And their pay would have been the rest of the agrarian surplus they were not obligated to pay their landowner or taxed away, which they then lived off of for the rest of the year. As for off season work, there was always work to be done at a farm, but winter was undoubtedly the low-intensity season. But it was then that the animals were butchered, wood collected from the forest, and most of the agricultural equipment maintained for the new year (fences, ploughs, etc) | [
"By the late Medieval period, most farming was based on the Lowland fermtoun or Highland baile, settlements of a handful of families that jointly farmed an area notionally suitable for two or three plough teams, allocated in run rigs to tenant farmers, known as husbandmen. Runrigs usually ran downhill so that they ... |
Since modern OS's store the hashes of passwords, not the passwords themselves, is it possible for there to be another password that would also work because it has the same hash? | This is known as a [collision.](_URL_0_) The answer is yes, though in practice this is incredibly rare. They're suitably rare so as to not be a problem unless you're deliberately trying to exploit the vulnerability. | [
"Roger Needham invented the now common approach of storing only a \"hashed\" form of the plaintext password. When a user types in a password on such a system, the password handling software runs through a cryptographic hash algorithm, and if the hash value generated from the user's entry matches the hash stored in ... |
what happens in a free falling elevator? will you go to the ceiling or stay on the floor? | If the elevator is free falling then you too are free falling inside the elevator. So you would be neither in the ceiling or on the floor. However there are a few practical concerns. First of all you most likely start off standing on the floor. So when the elevator starts to fall you will be pushed slightly upwards by the elastic forces. So you will fall a bit slower then the elevator and likely go up to the ceiling. Then as the elevator picks up speed it is going to encounter air resistance from the bottom of the elevator shaft and slow down the acceleration. However as you are inside you do not get the air resistance and will still fall with the same acceleration and will therefore fall down to the ground. However the forces involved here that send you to the ceiling and then to the floor is very tiny compared to the forces of gravity you are used to so it is unlikely that you will get any injuries. Even if you land on your finger it is not enough to break it. | [
"On the last word of Serling's narration, the elevator starts its drop sequence. Rather than a simple gravity-powered drop, however, the elevator is pulled downwards, causing most riders to rise off their seats, held down by their seat belt. At least once during the drop sequence, wide elevator doors in front of th... |
AskScience AMA Series: I'm Dr. Kathryn Bywaters and I am an astrobiologist at SETI working on developing new ways to look for life! Ask me anything! | What other types of life besides carbon-based can we look for on other planets? | [
"Sara Imari Walker is an American theoretical physicist and astrobiologist with research interests in the origins of life, astrobiology, physics of life, emergence, complex and dynamical systems, and artificial life. Walker is currently a fellow at the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems and an assistant p... |
Is there any reason 2 unflavored vodkas should taste any different? | The perfect "pure" vodka is an ethanol grain-neutral-spirit diluted with pure water to a palatable level. The differences in flavor between vodkas come from impurities or contaminants, since no process is perfect. | [
"A study conducted on NPR's \"Planet Money\" podcast revealed negligible differences in taste between various brands of vodka, leading to speculation as to how much branding contributes to the concept of \"super premium vodkas\".\n",
"Vodka is traditionally drunk \"neat\" or \"straight\" (not mixed with water, ic... |
How did the Europeans manage to pull of the First Crusade? | A combination of factors.
a) Right after leaving byzantine territory, the crusading armies found themselves on the brink of disaster. At Dorylaeum (July, 1097), the vanguard was surrounded by the Turks and only lived another day thanks to the quick judgement of Raymond of Toulouse and Godfrey of Bouillon, who arrived with the main host in the nick of time. The green troops of 1097 had become by 1099 a hardened force: most of the troops had adjusted to a life of self-sufficiency in food, equipment and horses and took at heart the communitarian, militant, religious character of the enterprise. Feudal loyalties gave way to military necessities - Godfrey of Bouillon began the campaign as head of the Lotharingian hosts - he ended it as leader of all northern french troops, a sign that his leadership had succeeded in creating a true esprit de corps.
b) When crusaders arrived from the West, they were profficient in what historians call "the charge and skirmish" type of warfare. They quickly discovered that Easterners did it differently, by employing light cavalry (usually mounted archers) and the rapid tactics of the feint and ambush. By 1098 they were able to successfully counter such tactics; by 1099 they were using them successfully in the march towards Jerusalem.
c) The political situation was a key factor in their success. After the death of Malik-Shah, the Seljuk dominion had fractured beyond repair. Tutush, the emir of Damascus, had taken all of Syria in 1094; in 1095 his realm split between his two sons, that were more interested in fighting each other than making an united front against the invading armies. Worse yet, the Fatimids took Jerusalem in 1098, even by going as far as offering the Crusaders an alliance. A perfect storm.
d) I would add a fourth reason: true religious fervor. While good, cynical opportunists like Baldwin or Bohemond preferred to maintain power over the realms that they had obtained in 1098 (Edessa and Antioch), the rest of the army took down Jerusalem in a haze of religious symbolism and imagery. "Army of God", "Blessed Journey", "Dead Martyrs" were some of the phrases you can find in the letters that participants sent back home. This militant piety, enforced by pope Urban and their past victories, had achieved wonders at the siege of Antioch and would prove invaluable at Jerusalem.
Source: "God's War" (Christopher Tyerman). | [
"The crusade set forth from Dijon on 30 April 1396, heading across Bavaria by way of Strasbourg to the upper Danube, from where they used river transport to join with Sigismund in Buda. From there the crusader goals, though lacking details of planning, were to expel the Turks from the Balkans and then go to the aid... |
why the depth matters with water resistant devices? | The deeper you dive in water, the more pressure is applied across the entire exposed surface of an object. Gaskets (rubber components designed to keep water out) in a device can only stand so much pressure before they're breached and water begins to flood in. | [
"BULLET::::- Water resistant (soft shell) most materials block water only partially, however as technology in the outdoor industry moves forward more fully waterproof soft shells are emerging such as polartec neoshell or DryQ Elite. On the other hand, they are usually more breathable and comfortable, thinner, and c... |
What happens if a GPS satellite gets KO'd? | Apparently, the minimum amount for the GPS system to be operational is 24 satellites. However, as at the moment 31 are operational, there is small chance of harm to the GPS system. If one satellite were to fail, there are enough others to keep the system working. Satellites do age and get decommissioned all the time (see [wikipedia list](_URL_0_) ), and new ones (with updated technology) are launched to take their places.
If a satellite were to fail right now due to a meteoroid strike or any other problem, it wouldn't get replaced immediately, although if a few satellites were to fail at the same time, it's well possible the GPS satellite production gets a boost from the US gov to get the full constellation up to speed again.
Edit: added [source](_URL_1_) | [
"However, in dense urban areas with congested high-rise buildings, the satellite signals to the GPS receiver are often blocked and the accuracy of the results adversely affected. KMB claims that GPS would only be installed to the whole fleet until the problem is solved.\n",
"The actual process of connecting a BGA... |
Danish / Norwegian resistance during World War II | I don't know too much about the Danes, but my impression is that they were pretty much overrun before they had time to react.
In Norway, the government had time to get out of Oslo before the Germans could capture them. One thing I believe was important was the attitude of Haakon VI, king of Norway. He refused to cooperate with the Germans or capitulate.
It might also be a factor that the battle for Norway was still on for a couple of months before the military capitulation.
As far as I know, the major difference was simply that the Norwegian government had the opportunity to flee while the Danish did not. | [
"Neutral Denmark was invaded by Nazi Germany on 9 April 1940, and was occupied for the remainder of World War II. Food shortages, communication restrictions, and transport closures followed. As Olga's sons, Tikhon and Guri, served as officers in the Danish Army, they were interned as prisoners of war, but their imp... |
Why did the Guild system collapse? | Simple answer: emergence of routinized labor in a factory. Call it Taylorization, [division of labor,](_URL_0_) or whatever you like, it was the change from craft control of labor to factory-based production that ended most guilds.
Longer answer is *very* long. Involves immigration, changes in technology, populism, anti-unionism, "robber-barons," and a whole dissertation's worth of stuff.
There are some professions that still resemble guilds: medicine, academia, and the legal profession maintain near-complete control over their own work. They select, train, employ and regulate their professional members, much as guilds did.
EDIT: Missed the last part of your question. Strengths of the system depend on whose point of view. From the worker's POV, they could control their output, regulate the price for that output, control entry to the profession, and control the conditions of their work. For example, a cigar roller's daily "stint" was to roll X cigars. If he rolled fewer, he was a poor worker. If he rolled more, he was a poor union/guild member. Rolling too many would mean that fewer people would be employed. From the point of view of a shop owner, the guilds guaranteed quality (usually,) and that there would always be a certain number of workers available. Shop owner laments would include: resistance to change, more-or-less fixed labor costs (not always bad,) and a complicated hiring system. | [
"The guild system became a target of much criticism towards the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. Critics argued that they hindered free trade and technological innovation, technology transfer and business development. According to several accounts of this time, guilds became increasing... |
if the single use plastic is already made, how is my refusal to buy these items helping the planet? they are already made and someone else will buy them? | If not as many single use plastic items get bought, companies will cut back on how many more they make in the future. That's important too. | [
"In 2017, the Thai government said that it might tax plastic bags. An \"endless debate\" has ensued in government, but no action. One reason might be the interests of powerful petrochemical firms. They maintain that plastic is not an issue if it is reused and recycled. Thai exports of polyethylene pellets and plast... |
islands like hawaii seem to very quickly get diverse vegetation even though they pop up in the middle of the ocean, so where do the first seeds come from? | Seeds travel in many ways. Some get there by water, traveling on air currents (think dandelion) or by animals (bird eats seed, undigested seed from excrement finds new home), and by humans.
In Hawaii's case, many of their trees and plants were brought to the island by early settlers.
Edit: removed inaccurate information about the quantity of native flora and fauna. Thanks for correct info! | [
"The plants are zoochorous; their seeds will stick to clothing, fur or feathers, and be carried to new habitat. This has enabled them to colonize a wide range, including many oceanic islands. Some of these species occur only in a very restricted range and several are now threatened with extinction, notably in the H... |
In popular culture and meme posts there's a stereotype correlating living in Southern states and incest. Is there any historical reason why this stereotype is a thing? Why aren't Northern American states associated with this stereotype instead? | The word "hillbilly" had spread far enough to make its first known appearance in print in 1900, though perhaps not quite far enough that it didn't need defining:
> A hill-billie is a free and untrammelled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.
This is useful for two reasons. First, it sets out 1900 as the point by which the image of the hillbilly/redneck/poor white southerner had gelled in the American imagination (the quote is from a New York publication). Second, it focuses our attention on a particular sub-region of the American South, that is, on [Appalachia](_URL_1_) (and as John Otto points out, the oft-overlooked/morphed into 'western Appalachia' [Ozarks](_URL_0_)). The place of Appalachia in American settlement and economic history, and its function in 19th century literature, roll into the stereotypes we know today--including the myth of rampant incest.
Already by the early 19th century, Appalachia was developing a reputation as the "backwoods" of America from the eastern seaboard. Part of this was emotional: as white Americans geared up to force Native Americans further and further west, the backwoods served as a buffer zone or no man's land of protection. Part of this was geographic: duh. But part of this was economic, and on its way to becoming an enduring culture.
Scholars following Otto use the term "plain folk", and sometimes "plain folk agriculture" to stress its economic origins. Characteristics included small-scale farming in forest clearings, free-ranging pastoralism, and geographically isolated homesteads. But not socially isolated:
> Each farmstead
belonged to a dispersed rural neighborhood, or community, whose members
were united by friendship, marriage, and kinship. Though dispersed over
several square miles, the members of a community called on their friends,
relatives, and in-laws for aid in clearing land, gathering crops, shucking corn,
collecting livestock, slaughtering animals, and building log houses.
> Frequently, a church was the focus of a community, and many communities adopted such Biblical place names as Pisgah, Hebron, and Gilead. The county seat towns, the churches, the schools, and the rural
neighborhoods were the physical setting for social and recreational life. The
simple pleasures of court sessions, church meetings, and neighborly socializ-
ing did much to overcome the spartan material conditions of life. Folks owned
modest amounts of property and pursued a self-sufficient life style which left
little room for material luxuries. They fashioned their own agricultural tools,
household furnishings, and clothing, and they bought little more than salt, ammunition, ironware, and the occasional book.
This is rather a vision or a version of the "yeoman farmer" stereotype, almost pioneer-like, and before the Civil War its presence was hardly limited to Appalachia (and, again, the Ozarks). But by 1820, eastern writers were recognizing that the urbanizing North and turn towards plantations in the south were crafting a divide. As Anne Newport Royall, editor of the Maryland proto-feminist magazine *The Huntress* wrote in 1826:
> On the bosom of this vast mass of mountains . . . of Virginia . . . there is as much difference between the people of the western states and those in the east as there is between any two people in the union...these present a district republic of their own, every way different from any people.
The impression of difference was being communicated eastward by the pens of travelers, but even more so by the propaganda of revivalist missionaries seeing the backwoods as fertile ground for evangelization. As America spiraled towards civil war, too, northern antislavery writers crafted an view of Appalachia as a bastion of white abolitionism. Not entirely unrooted in reality, at least through the 1830s, this highly charged image depended on Appalachians as poor white people either victimized by slavery or opposed to it with fiery religious zeal. (To say nothing of, you know, black Appalachians and slave-owning whites...)
Around and after the Civil War, two economic developments isolated the Appalachian backwoods both physically and culturally. First, the construction of railroads created, you might say, "winners and losers" out of Appalachian towns. Where the tracks went, David Hsiung argues, residents stayed both economically and *emotionally* connected to both Northern and deeper-Southern culture. In the deeper South, plain folk agriculture evaporated with the evolution into larger cotton-farming "post-plantation" plantations, essentially. But the *mountains* of Appalachia are not conducive to that pattern of planting. Plain folk agriculture *and the society/culture that accompanied it*, described above, lived on in the mountains.
The over 100 known accounts of outsiders Describing And Defining Appalachia from before the Civil War show their influence in the fiction of the day, and even the titles are revealing: *Wooing and Warring in the Wilderness*, *Fallen Pink, or a Mountain Girl’s Love*, *Sut Lovingood’s Yarns.* By 1860, writers are already trafficking quite profitably in the uneducated, backwoods, raw, yokel stereotype.
One thing that almost never comes up on AskHistorians is the impact of the Civil War on American *culture*. In fact, the expanding rift leading up to the war and then the war itself caused Americans to pretty seriously reassess what "America" was in all its (white) diversity and regional cultural pride. (You can tie this into the broader nationalist-imperialist movements in the late 19th century west, too). Literary scholars call one result of this, awesomely, the "Local Color" body of literature; Mark Twain is probably the most famous writer who gets retroactively caught in this net, but you can also think of all the pioneer literature, too. *Sut Lovingood's Yarns* and its ilk paved the way for the particularly Appalachian vein of Local Color.
John Fox and Mary Murfree (writing, of course, as Charles Egbert Craddock; a *lot* of Local Color authors are women writing under men's names) were two of the major names driving home the culture of backwoods Appalachia at the end of the 19th century. In 1800, plain folk and their isolated homesteads with a strong central community had been somewhat distinctive but also normal. By 1900, railroads and changing economy had not only made the way of life an aberration, but had highlighted the *isolation* of it all. Geographically (railroads bypassed; terrain hard to travel), economically, and culturally isolated from the rest of the US...which focused even more attention on the isolation of individual farmsteads from each other. Fox's enormously popular body of work, in particular, highlighted the effects of this isolation enduring over time: depravity, drunkenness, slovenly personal hygiene, and incest.
Writers told stories of large, isolated families struggling through romanticized but dire poverty that audiences across the rest of the U.S. ate right up. Allen Batteau's *The Invention of Appalachia*, sees this time period--leading up to that first mention of "hillbilly" in eastern print--as the rest of America using the (white) poverty, perceived simplicity, and lack of morality in backwoods Appalachia to define itself against: *this is what we don't want to be*.
The evolution of Appalachia and the Ozarks into the internal white American other was long in the making. And once fully formed, it managed to revitalize with each generation. 1910s-30s scholarship on the folklore, religion, lifestyle that painted Appalachia as almost a foreign land sometimes. The resulting Depression-era turn to Appalachian music, arts and crafts, dancing, old women's wisdom, as America's "old-fashioned, original" folk tradition that modernity had wiped away elsewhere. Complaints about white migrants' "strangeness," their too-tight family ties and inability to integrate into wider communities, and their inability to understand laws and how to follow them arose with major migration north after World War II. The war on poverty from the late 1960s highlighted the "white working class" of Appalachia as its balance on the "inner city." In the early 1970s, CBS had the sterling lineup of Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Hee-Haw to communicate the (more family-friendly) stereotypes of Appalachia to audiences on an unprecedented scale.
By the 1990s, Anne Shelby argues, the descent of the Appalachian stereotype (including that *other* type of "family friendly") into mass-comedy derived its staying appeal both inside and outside Appalachia from four basic points:
* It's okay to be a redneck
* I used to be a redneck and thank goodness I'm not anymore
* I'm okay because I'm not like *those* rednecks
* At least someone is worse off than me
* "If it wasn't funny, it would be scary as hell"
And so the stereotypes consolidated in the late 19th century of backwoods Appalachia as isolated, poor, too-close families live on as the nonexistent white America that makes actual white America feel a little bit better. | [
"Through such tests, it is known that American southerners exhibit less egalitarian gender views than their northern counterparts, demonstrating that gender views are inevitably affected by an individual's culture. This also may differ among compatriots whose 'cultures' are a few hundred miles apart.\n",
"Strong ... |
From 1000 to 1500 CE, how centralized were European countries? Which country was the most centralized? Most decentralized? | 1000CE to 1500CE was an exceptionally formative period for the rise of the nation-state, especially emerging out of the destablization and fragmentation of the Byzantine (Late Roman) Empire. Byzantium is an excellent example of the condition of empires and states at the time. From approximately the 7th century CE to the 10th century CE, the Byzantines had been consumed by conflict concerning interpretation of Christianity: Trinitarians of the Western Church clashed extensively with Monophysites of the Eastern Church-- the former being foundational to the modern Catholic Church and the latter the Eastern Orthodox.
One of the biggest problems with this protracted religious conflict within Byzantium was its effect on taxation, particularly as pertaining to taxation because of religion. In the 11th CE, Emperor Alexius I Comnenus instituted a tax system called "pronoairios," designed to avail himself and his emperorship to the largely Monophysite landowners in the Eastern part of what was left of the Empire. (It was [greatly reduced] (_URL_0_) by 1000 from its size during the rule of Constantine.) Essentially, landowners had the sole ability to tax the peasants who worked their land; the Emperor sold lifelong "passes" which enabled the owner to be tax-emept for the duration of his life, but not his descendants'. Landowners got a discount, but they were free to tax their "employees" with impunity-- which wasn't terribly popular among the peasants for obvious reasons. Conversely, Muslim rulers emerging out of Syria and Egypt charged all non-Muslim Christians and Jews, peasant or not, a flat 10% as "people of the book." As a result many Byzantine lands were lost through the 11th century, not through war but through deliberate selection.
While his lands shrunk continuously, the Byzantine Emperor had absolute authority over his empire... At least in theory. Increasingly, the Byzantine Emperor was unable to hold power outside of Constantinople, the capital, and perhaps Adrianople. The other communities remaining in the Empire were rural and didn't see much imperial influence, if at all.
Meanwhile, the Venetian merchant city-state (The Most Serene Republic of Venice) was rising to prominence in the wake of the formative constitution and its near-singular grip on trade. Venice was governed by an elected figure called a "Doge." He was given power of governance over the city-state until his death. Initially, at the establishment of the position at the inception of the Republic in 697CE, the Doge was a representative of Byzantium; by 1000CE, he was completely divorced from the Empire, as was Venice. It was a completely, or at least largely, independent state. It was about as centralized as a European state would be, its trade providing it with leverage enough for independence, even though its navy was mostly mercantile and not militarized. The Most Serene Republic existed largely unchanged constitutionally for a full 1000 years, and began a model for the European city-state, and later the secular state in general.
Its fleet of ships transported goods across both the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim Caliphates of the [Fatimids] (_URL_1_) from the 10th through 12th centuries and the Mamluks from the 13th to 16th centuries. These Caliphates functioned somewhat like empires, and acted as the predecessors to the Ottoman Empire, which ruled the region from the 16th century to the 20th.
There were also some fascinating things occurring in Eastern Europe, with the establishment of the Russians following the downfall of the Slavs and the emergence of Christianity, but unfortunately I am not an expert in this area. I would recommend that you look up Rastislav of Moravia and Photius for the relationship between Russia and the Byzantine Empire. In Western Europe the rise of feudal kingdoms was noteworthy too, but unfortunately that is not my area of expertise either! Only Byzantium, hahaha.
So, the long and short of your question: those five centuries were integral to two historical processes-- the downfall of the Western Empire and the rise of the Western City-State, the spiritual and political predecessor to the state. There was regional variance, but during this period both types of political structures existed across Europe and Central Asia/North Africa.
SOURCES:
* Anna Comnena, The Alexiad (contemporary text: 11th c)
* Alexander Kazhdan, “Latins and Franks in Byzantine perception and reality from the 11th to the 12th century” in Angeliki Laiou & Roy Mottahedeh, eds., The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks (1997): 83-100
* James Howard Johnston, “The two great powers in late antiquity: a comparison” in Averil Cameron (ed.), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East III: States, Resources, Armies, Princeton: Princeton UP (1995): 157-226
EDIT: Fixed formatting | [
"According to Wallerstein there have only been three periods in which a core nation dominated in the modern world-system, with each lasting less than one hundred years. In the initial centuries of the rise of Europe, Northwestern Europe constituted the core, Mediterranean Europe the semiperiphery, and Eastern Europ... |
Are there any other purposes of there being so much nitrogen composition in the air, other then to provide an inert atmosphere? | _URL_0_
*All* species need the element nitrogen, it's a building block of proteins. It was discovered that some species can use nitrogen gas and "fix" it from the air in the 19th Century. Most species however obtain their nitrogen from compounds.
The atmospheric composition doesn't have any "purpose", but Earth's atmosphere and life influence each other. Unlike carbon dioxide, life hasn't used nitrogen to the point of mostly removing it. | [
"There is an abundant supply of nitrogen in the earth's atmosphere — N gas comprises nearly 79% of air. However, N is unavailable for use by most organisms because there is a triple bond between the two nitrogen atoms in the molecule, making it almost inert. In order for nitrogen to be used for growth it must be “f... |
what causes extreme heat on atmosphere re-entry and was this discovered prior to the first mission or a lesson learned later? | Not exactly air friction. Friction would be the air rubbing against the body so much as to raise the temperature to extremes. But what happens is different.
In the upper atmosphere air is very thin - is not dense at all. As a body falls through that atmosphere at staggering speeds, the few air particles there are literally can't get out of the way fast enough. As the air density increases, that same issue causes the air to compress until, much like a diesel engine, it heats to the point of combustion. | [
"The flight was an almost complete success, marred only by a heater that had inadvertently been turned off prior to liftoff and that allowed the inside temperature to drop to , a bout of space sickness, and a troublesome re-entry when the reentry module failed to separate cleanly from its service module.\n",
"Orb... |
Would firing something like a Star Trek phaser create recoil? How about a real life military weapon that uses lasers? | Realistic answer: No.
Actual answer: Yes, a tiny, tiny, stupidly minuscule bit of recoil. The emission of photons (light) will have a bit of recoil but this will be so small, it would be very difficult to detect this. An example of this phenomenon is the potential usage of [solar sails](_URL_0_) to move spacecraft via the interaction with solar radiation of high energy light and particles.
Even though phasers / military laser weapons emit much more energy per unit area than would be on a solar sail, it is over a very short period of time whereas on a solar sail, these effects are calculated over months/years of exposure.
*Edit: As we went through below, a 10 MJ laser would produce a roughly 0.03 Newton recoil for one second if the laser emitted this much energy over one second, which is roughly the force applied by gravity to 3 grams, 3 mL of water, or a bit less than a teaspoon of water for one second. | [
"The plasma projectiles would be shot at a speed expected to be 3000 km/s in 1995 and 10,000 km/s (3% of the speed of light) by 2000. A shot has the energy of 5 pounds of TNT exploding. Doughnut-shaped rings of plasma and balls of lightning exploded with devastating thermal and mechanical effects when hitting their... |
Why do some viruses stay in the body forever and others not? | It usually depends on the life cycle of the virus. Most viruses that you think of as being "beatable" reproduce in a highly active life cycle. They invade a cell, hijack its machinery to replicate, and then burst out when the cell can no longer hold all the virus particles. Those viruses then spread to new cells.
The other family of viruses, however, have a second latent portion of the life cycle. These viruses can do the same steps as above (which is what you'll notice with a herpes outbreak, for instance), but they can also remain dormant inside cells. If a virus can remain dormant, without replicating and without its host cell signaling that it's infected, it can live in the host indefinitely. That last bit is also important, because some cells can signal that they're infected, and can recruit immune cells to kill them. | [
"Viruses are only able to replicate themselves by commandeering the reproductive apparatus of cells and making them reproduce the virus's genetic structure instead. Thus, a virus cannot function or reproduce outside a cell, thereby being totally dependent on a host cell in order to survive. Most viruses are species... |
Was there any benefit to Hitler going to war with the USSR? | > But that got me thinking, was there any benefits to him going to war with The USSR that helped his efforts on the western fronts and semi-neglected the loss of manpower?
No, not really. Hitler's arrangement with the Soviet Union provided Germany with valuable oil and raw materials, allowing Germany to bypass the Blockade of the continent. With the Invasion of the USSR, the Blockade was now truly effective. There were certainly resources in the USSR worth taking, but what little industry and agricultural produce came into German hands was hardly compensation for the losses in manpower, and the tightening of the Blockade, as well as steadily declining strategic options from 1941 onwards.
David Stahel's books on the Battles of Moscow and Kiev, and Operations Bagration and Typhoon are good reads. Alexander Hill also has a document reader on the Great Patriotic War, which is valuable as a concise account of the Eastern Front. For economic, Adam Tooze's *Wages of Destruction* is the best book I'm aware of.
> no I do not wish that the Germans won WWII, WWI maybe, but not WWII
Frankly, history is better off that they lost both
EDIT:
> Like, if Hitler ignored the east and focused on the west, do you think he could've won or at the very least faired better
It's hard to imagine Hitler 'ignoring' the East; it was the center piece of his aims, the lebensraum for the Aryan race and the source of the resources that would allow Germany to achieve autarky and challenge Britain and America. With the Royal Navy still very much in control of Britain's territorial waters at least, and with RAF Fighter Command preventing the Luftwaffe from attaining the control of the air needed to launch Operation Sea Lion (to say nothing of how ersatz German preparations were for that invasion), there was nowhere else to look. North Africa was Italy's sphere, and Rommel was only sent there to assist the Italians in retaining their positions in Libya. After the defeat of France, the Soviet Union was the next logical (using that term relatively) step in Hitler's "programme" as Andreas Hillgruber or Gerhard Weinberg would put it. | [
"In autumn 1940, high-ranking German officials drafted a memorandum on the dangers of an invasion of the Soviet Union. They said Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic States would end up as only a further economic burden for Germany. It was argued that the Soviets in their current bureaucratic form were harmless and t... |
Primary source from the Rape of Nanking? | [Try this digital exhibit from Yale, a collection of materials from Christian missionaries who witnessed the Rape of Nanking.](_URL_0_)
For the future: If you're trying to find primary sources with Google, don't use the term "primary sources," this is a "schoolroom" history phrase and it's not used outside of teaching settings. Sometimes if you google "thing primary resources" they will turn up, but usually because a teacher has already gathered them and labeled them that. Some search terms you can try are "[subject] + archives," "[subject] + digital collections," "[subject] + oral history" or "[subject] + interviews." Also try different words for the subject - for instance, Rape of Nanking is also called the Nanking Massacre. It depends on what the topic is, but in general try to think what people would title the things you're looking for if they were listing them in a library catalog, and try lots and lots of different searches.
Good luck with your paper. :) | [
"\"The Rape of Nanking\" is structured into three main parts. The first uses a technique that Chang called \"the Rashomon perspective\" to narrate the events of the Nanking Massacre, from three different perspectives: that of the Japanese military, the Chinese victims, and the Westerners who tried to help Chinese c... |
Why is Belarus? | Not to discourage other answers, but you might be interested in this post:
[How did Belorussians and Ukrainians evolve as distinct national identities from Russia?](_URL_0_) with the top answer from /u/cheapwowgold4u.
It's an older post from when AskHistorians allowed wikipedia as a source, but it's a well thought out answer. I'd link more posts but I'm on mobile, but if you search 'Belarus' in the search bar, a good amount of relevant posts come up. Hope that helps! | [
"Belarus (; , ), officially the Republic of Belarus (, ), formerly known by its Russian name Byelorussia or Belorussia (), is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe bordered by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital and most populous... |
why does my iphone say i have 4.4 gigs of memory used in pictures and yet i have no pictures on my phone | It's photos saved in messages, possibly cached photos. Delete some conversations, or (I highly recommend) jailbreak your phone, install iCleaner and it will clear ALL that crap out. | [
"iOS 8 added iCloud Photo Library support to the Photos app, enabling photo synchronization between different Apple devices. Photos and videos were backed up in full resolution and in their original formats. This feature almost meant that lower-quality versions of photos could be cached on the device rather than th... |
Was Emperor Jimmu a real person? Who were his parents? | In mythology Jimmu was a descendant of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu. Ugayafukiaezu no Mikoto, a Kami (a god) is his father. Considering that both of these people are gods, it is unlikely that he was a real person. But that's the short answer. The long answer is a bit more in depth:
The Japanese migrated to the Japanese Islands, that much is known but it's not known when or from where (though probably from Korea and that region). Largely the Japanese were concentrated in the south and seem to have been organized in small villages during what is known as the Yayoi and Kofun Periods. During the end of the Kofun and the beginning of the Asuka Period, the villages became more fortified and larger, and local leaders developed into clans known in Japanese as Uji.
Officially, the Uji are unified under the Yamato Family by the eight century C.E. As the Yamato claim descent from the Sun Goddess, this is probably where the idea of Jimmu comes from. The Japanese State seems to just sort of...happened, and like all states that seem to come out of nowhere, they invented a mythological history for themselves as an easy way to explain what was most likely a convoluted series of wars and deals for Yamato hegemony. Rather than recalling all the conflict that undoubtedly took place, Jimmu becomes an easy way to explain unification. Who established the armies? Jimmu. Who unified the clans? Jimmu. See where I'm going with this?
In all reality though, what the myth of Jimmu represents is a case where mythology has preserved actual history (we see this in cases like Romulus, and Hercules, indeed if you live in America Washington seems to very very slowly be moving towards this). A local strongman may have had enough strength and guile to begin unification, who was then mythologized as Jimmu. Or perhaps he, like Prince Yamato, is an example of a blending of various stock characters in order to explain the past.
I hope this helped answer your question! | [
"The origins of the Japanese imperial dynasty are obscure, and it bases its position on the claim that it has \"reigned since time immemorial\". There are no records of any Emperor who was not said to have been a descendant of other, yet earlier Emperor ( \"bansei ikkei\"). There is suspicion that Emperor Keitai (c... |
how do we know there are more colors than can be seen with the naked eye, if we can't... see them? | A color is just a particular wavelength of light that happens to trip some of the cells in our eyes to some degree.
We know for a fact that there are wavelengths of light that do *not* activate those cells in our eyes--but those are still wavelengths of light, which can be called a color.
Additionally, we know for a fact that there are other animals that those wavelengths *do* activate some of the cells in *their* eyes, which is reason enough to call those wavelengths "additional colors that humans can't see." | [
"Humans are able to see an array of colours because light in the visible spectrum is made up of different wavelengths (from 380 to 760 nm). Our ability to see in colour is due to three different cone cells in the retina, containing three different photopigments. The three cones are each specialized to best pick up ... |
apple vs. samsung lawsuits | Basically, the evidence shows the Head Design Team from Samsung went through the iPhone point by point and compared it to their own TouchWiz OS and phone. They made suggestions that Samsung adopt hundreds of little features and design cues from the iPhone. You can look at the final OS changes on a phone and see they followed most of the advice released in [THESE INTERNAL DOCUMENTS.](_URL_0_) | [
"Samsung counter-sued Apple on April 22, 2011, filing federal complaints in courts in Seoul, South Korea; Tokyo, Japan; and Mannheim, Germany, alleging Apple infringed Samsung's patents for mobile-communications technologies. By summer, Samsung also filed suits against Apple in the British High Court of Justice, in... |
Could the Industrial Revolution have happened earlier in history, or did it happen as soon as the world was "ready" for it? | This is basically directly taken from Ian Morris' *Why the West Rules for Now* which I highly recommend. Its a great read.
There were a few reasons why the Industrial Revolution happened when it did. Technology continued to accumulate over centuries and centuries making a breakthrough to industrialization possible, something earlier Empires did not have the luxury to rely on. Due to this increase in technology countries were more able to protect themselves with the invention of guns and other military equipment. This prevented empires from being overrun by enemy migration allowing them to focus on other concerns. Also ships could now sail virtually anywhere creating an economy that the world had never seen before. The Industrial Revolution was more easily instituted in Britain because of their massive economy, weaker monarchs (compared to other European powers), freer merchants, coal mines,more open institutions, and also dumb luck.
Again Ian Morris covers most of this in his book and does much better than I can, but none the less I hope this brief response helps somewhat. | [
"The \"industrial revolution\" is the historical event that ushered in industrial civilization. The modern world has evolved further following development in mass production and information technology (allowing service economy, and information society).\n",
"The Scientific Revolution changed humanity's understand... |
eili5 how does file encryption work? | Encryption takes a key, and combines it with the message mathematically to scramble it.
A simple encryption scheme might move the letters of the message forward in the alpha. If my key was 1 2 3, and my message was REDDIT, it would encrypt it like this:
R, 1 - > S
E, 2 - > G
D, 3 - > G
D, 1 - > E
I, 2 - > K
T, 3 - > W
So the encrypted message is now SGGEKW. And even if you knew what the encryption was, you'd have a hard time finding the message without a key.
In practice, the actually scrambling method is more complicated, but the principle is the same. | [
"With transparent encryption, the files are accessible immediately after the key is provided, and the entire volume is typically mounted as if it were a physical drive, making the files just as accessible as any unencrypted ones. No data stored on an encrypted volume can be read (decrypted) without using the correc... |
why are wall outlets 110v or 220v? those seem like such arbitrary values; why not 100v? | In many parts of the world, electric companies sprung up, each making their own flavor of power (certain voltage, amperage, cycles per second, etc.). This caused one really big problem: you buy a lamp and it works in your house, then you move to another part of town, and it won't work because the power is different.
& #x200B;
At some point, it was necessary to standardize the way power works so that there was interchangeability, technicians didn't require retraining, etc. In the end, 110/220 were completely arbitrary. It could have been 150 or 200 for all that matters, as long as everyone used the same one in the same country. | [
"For example, in 2012, Hawaii residents had the highest average residential electricity rate in the United States (37.34¢/kWh), while Louisiana residents had the lowest average residential electricity costs (8.37¢/kWh). Even in the contiguous United States, the gap is significant with New York residents having the ... |
What exactly is the reaction happening when I clean tarnished silver with bicarb, Aluminium, and hot water? | Aluminium is naturally very reactive, but is often covered in a thin layer of passivating aluminium oxide that prevents the rest of the aluminium from reacting. Aluminium oxide is amphoteric, and thus easily soluble in alkaline or acidic solutions. The hot bicarb solution is alkaline, and dissloves the aluminium oxide, and allows the underlying aluminium to react with water into more aluminium oxide, that gets dissolved, and it repeats until the metal is entirely gone.
The oxidizing aluminium, in turn, reduces the silver tarnish into silver when placed in contact with the aluminium.
The strong smell is probably the silver sulfide (black silver tarnish) reducing into silver metal and hydrogen sulfide, which smells like rotting eggs. | [
"Ethyl alcohol is sometimes added to the slurry mixture to help dry out excess water. The slurry mixture is applied throughout the piece until completely polished. Dark tarnish spots are sometimes located on the surface and may need to be polished more than once to remove. Over polishing is an issue with silver and... |
why are doctors england on strike? | The UK government wants to introduce a new contract for doctors. The changes would include modification of standard working hours which will result in unsafe working practices and reduced pay, as well as potentially causing issues with staffing and recruitment.
The contract aims to "introduce" the idea of a 7-day NHS, as though care is currently withdrawn at 5pm every evening and is non-existent at weekends. One way of providing this is by classing Saturday, Sunday and evenings as normal working hours, as opposed to overtime or unsociable hours. Proposals have also included calls for only a 30 minute break during 10 hour on call shifts. These longer hours have the potential to result in doctors working while tired which can impact on their and patients' safety.
The other outcome of these changes in hours is one of pay. By changing unsociable hours to normal working hours, a lot of doctors will essentially be taking a paycut as they will no longer receive the same bonuses and incentive payments for working overtime or unsociable hours.
Understandably, junior doctors are not happy and, after many attempts at negotiation with the health secretary, have concluded that industrial action is the best way of getting their voices heard | [
"On the 12th of January 2016, Junior Doctors in England took part in the first general strike across the NHS, the first such industrial action in 40 years. Emergency care was still provided. There have been claims that the Medical Director of NHS England, Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, has used performance target level... |
tuition is increasing faster than inflation. cable prices are increasing faster than inflation. healthcare costs too. isn't that the definition of inflation? | First, you need to understand how Inflation is measured. Its simply not practical to have the primary inflation number we talk about include every possible product that you could by or spend money on, not to mention the problems of deciding how to weight different items. Instead, a "basket" of goods is selected that is designed to represent common consumer items, and their prices are tracked and used to produce an inflation number. The problem is that what is included in that basket is a political question. The basket used to consider fuel prices, now it doesn't, etc... | [
"With higher education costs on the rise, many students are becoming sensitive to every aspect of college pricing, including textbooks, which in many cases amount to one tenth of tuition costs. The 2005 Government Accountability Office report on college textbooks said that since the 1980s, textbook and supply price... |
Did they have ads as we know them centuries ago? | Aha! What a fun topic! For me, this one is gonna go back....well, a couple of millenia, but I hope you'll be alright with that. I can't speak much to advertisement later than the Roman period, but advertisement in the Roman city is a wonderful thing in itself!
Some notes before we start: Shorthand in the Latin quotes. Parentheses () indicate that I'm expanding on a shorthand - so if I have a D M, I'll expand it to D(is) M(anibus). Brackets [] are letters that are no longer extant, but we know ought to be there.
Obviously, as you might imagine, we don't have much of that left. What we do have is generally categorized in a field called "epigraphy" - the study of stuff that's written on stuff. The absolute most common unit of study here is [the generic gravestone](_URL_6_). For an easy example of this, there's an [online database of Latin inscription](_URL_5_) (not 100% complete, but not bad!) that's mostly only browsable if you're reasonably fluent in Latin. There are also mistakes here and there, but again - only a big issue if you're in the field. The above reads:
> D(is) M(anibus) / T(ito) Fl(avio) Vero Aug(usti) / lib(erto) tab(ulario) rat(ionis) / aquarior(um) co(n)/iugi bene me/renti Octa/via Thetis fecit
which translates toooo
> To the departed spirits, Octavia Thetis made this for her well deserving husband, Titus Flavius Vero, freedman of Augustus, scribe of the regulation of the water supply.
But that's a tangent I'll address later. For now, let's go to specific shop signs, 'cause that's what it looks like you're looking for! Luckily, there are a couple that are extant that are *very* clear as to what they're doing. [They say so!](_URL_2_) Now, if you'll do me a favour and follow that link, it'll show you a picture of a page from a book that's on my desk^1 ~~that I'm supposed to be actively reading right now instead of browsing reddit~~. The page is mostly self explanatory: the inscription, written in both Latin and Greek, has a large, bold, eye catching note at the top, which in both Greek and Latin translates directly to: "INSCRIPTIONS HERE." The rest of the details follow in close order (and in smaller text, since we already have your attention). The grammar and spelling is....imperfect at best, but you definitely know what's going on inside and how nice they can make things (that stone is OLD and it still looks good). [Here's another one, from Rome this time!](_URL_3_). That one employs another cheeky way of grabbing the eye. See the DM at the top? That's the universal marker for "gravestone" (see above, the Dis Manibus/To the departed spirits). So that'd catch the eye, and following up it says:
> D M / titulos scri/bendos vel/ si quid o[pe]/ris marmor/ari opus fu/erit hic ha/bes
or, in translation...
> To the departed spirits! You can get inscriptions written here or any other sort of marble work you need done!
Nice and blatant there ;) Regarding other shop signs, there's one that *might* be [a shop sign for poultry from Ostia](_URL_0_), but the issue is that there's no text there - it could just as easily be a funerary inscription. We're not entirely sure.
On to other forms of advertisement, known as the *programmata*! These generally take the form of things like graffiti and pottery stamps. This general category of epigraphy is heavily focused on Pompeii/Herculaneum, mostly because of preservation.^2 Oftentimes, these were related to elections and generally consist of the candidate's name (or initials) and the office for which he's running. This is followed by a bunch of abbreviations, such as OVF (*oro vos faciatis* - I ask that you make [insert name] a [insert office]), VB (*virum bonum* - "good dude"), or DRP (*dignum rei publicae* - worthy of the republic). Sometimes these have the supporter who sponsored said *programmata*, sometimes not. Generally, they take a format that looks something like this:
> L(ucium) P(opidium) S(ecundum) Aed(ilem) O(ro) V(os) F(aciatis) D(ignum) R(ei) P(ublicae) Successa Rog(at) | *CIL 4.1062*
or...
> Successa asks that you make Lucius Popidius Secundus, worthy of the Republic, an aedile. **nota bene: the Latin is ten ways of hilariously messy here, but this is what it's saying. Essentially.**
The graffiti would have just been written on walls in various locations, while pottery stamps would have been put on...well....pottery. Bowls, cups, plates, roof tiles, amphorae...you get the idea. If someone could pay a tiny bit to get their candidate's name out there, it was gonna happen.
Finally! A form of advertisement that you might not have been intending, but that I feel like rambling about anyway ;) Inscriptions that were put out as announcements! Advertisements that you might not think of as such, but...well...advertise to the people what's up. One fun such piece is actually a glorious pain in the ass to read because it's so damn old: [the Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus.](_URL_4_) Nope, I'm not translating the whole thing (again x.x) because it's hella long, but it essentially is a decree from the Senate banning the Bacchanalia throughout all of Italy. It's a pretty gigantic step to snuff out any hint of this kinda stuff, which is pretty interesting because the next time such a stance was taken with regards to religion was with respect to some crucified sophist in Palestine.
The other fantastic piece of advertisement (besides [the inevitable signatures of "I made this" on every piece of Roman architecture ever)](_URL_1_), that I love to talk about is Augustus' *Res Gestae*, the only surviving copies of which were written, first on massive bronze columns outside his tomb (lost), and then all over the temples of the Roman Empire. It's a hilariously self-promoting piece, obviously exaggerates, very specifically skips over anything negative that he did, and, in short, makes him out to be practically perfect in every way. You heard it here, Gussie = Mary Poppins. And if you don't think that's advertisement, then I'm disappointed.
Hope this helps you out!
1. Said book is the *Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy*, edited by Christer Bruun and Jonathan Edmondson. I VERY highly recommend this if you're interested in Roman epigraphy, as the price tag is actually manageable for such a tome. Or you could just use the library, that works too.
2. This quick intro on *programmata* is taken from *Women and elections in Pompeii* by Liisa Savunen. | [
"The history of advertising can be traced to ancient civilizations. It became a major force in capitalist economies in the mid-19th century, based primarily on newspapers and magazines. In the 20th century, advertising grew rapidly with new technologies such as direct mail, radio, television, the internet and mobil... |
why does radiation in a disaster stay for so long? (like in chernobyl) | All radioactive materials have a half-life. The half-life is the amount of time it takes for half of the material to decay into something else.
If the material from Chernobyl has a half-life of 1000 years then after 1000 years only 1/2 of it will be gone. After 2000 years, 3/4 of it will be gone. Etc.
Some radioactive materials actually decay into other radioactive materials. Then those materials need to decay, too.
Obviously, this is a problem. Modern nuclear reactors have been designed with safety in mind because nobody wants to deal with the consequences of a meltdown. | [
"At Chernobyl, approximately 10 times the amount of radiation was released into the atmosphere as was released from Fukushima I through 12 April 2011. The total amount of radioactive material still stored at Fukushima is about 8 times that stored at Chernobyl, and leakage at Fukushima continues.\n",
"Although the... |
Does leaving a refrigerator door opened for about 20 seconds actually use up a large enough amount of energy/ power to consider not leaving it open for that long? | I vaguely recall actually calculating this for a question long ago.
The answer is basically no, it's not a huge waste. For starters, the air in the refrigerator is essentially stagnant; you're not going to get a large amount of mixing of the cold air with the surroundings in the span of 20 seconds, unless you have a fan pointing at it. Secondly, if you have a decently stocked fridge, the thermal mass of the physical items inside it (think of a fully stocked beer fridge), and the walls of the fridge, is far higher than the thermal mass of the air. | [
"A defrosting procedure is generally performed periodically on refrigerators and freezers to maintain their operating efficiency. Over time, as the door is opened and closed, letting in new air, water vapour from the air condenses on the cooling elements within the cabinet.\n",
"Disposal of discarded refrigerator... |
Are there any indications that there are elements beyond the 118 we have currently discovered or synthesized? If so, is there any indication that there is a finite number of elements, other than their increasingly short halflives? | A neutron star is very similar to an extremely heavy atomic nucleus. Consider that neutron stars contain ~10^57-58 particles. If a neutron star grows much heavier than this it will collapse into a black hole. Therefore there is a **finite** limit to the number of possible atomic elements, but it's a very large number. A periodic table that detailed all the elements up to and including element number 10^57 would be so large and massive that it would collapse into a black hole. | [
"The elements from atomic numbers 1 (hydrogen) through 118 (oganesson) have been discovered or synthesized, completing seven full rows of the periodic table. The first 94 elements all occur naturally, though some are found only in trace amounts and a few were discovered in nature only after having first been synthe... |
Actual health impacts of eugenics programs | It's not really possible to know. These programs were not scientifically rigorous or adequately controlled, and the sheer number of factors that may or may not impact how individual people or entire societies develop means that it cannot be said with any degree of confidence whether or not eugenics programs worked. | [
"A major criticism of eugenics policies is that, regardless of whether \"negative\" or \"positive\" policies are used, they are susceptible to abuse because the genetic selection criteria are determined by whichever group has political power at the time. Furthermore, \"negative eugenics\" in particular is criticize... |
How much air in one breath came from the previous one? | [Anatomical deadspace](_URL_0_), which is the term for the air that doesn't participate in gas exchange within the body is roughly 1ml/kg.
However, it's not this simple to example, at the small airways, there really is no flow-rate to be measured, it's purely diffusion.
If we take into consideration that the first gas you inhale is the last gas you exhale, and don't account for changes in physiological deadspace on inhalation and exhalation, you'll find that roughly the first 1/3 of inhalation is *old* gas. The po2 in this air isn't significantly lower because of diffusion though, nor is the pc02 higher for the same reason.
So, you could sort of say it's a 1/3, but it really isn't.
| [
"A typical human breathes between 12 and 20 times per minute at a rate primarily influenced by carbon dioxide concentration, and thus pH, in the blood. With each breath, a volume of about 0.6 litres is exchanged from an active lung volume (tidal volume + functional residual capacity) of about 3 litres. Normal Earth... |
What were the main arguments American Anti-Federalists made against the first article of the Constitution? | I assume you have looked at the anti-federalist papers? | [
"The Anti-Federalists proved unable to stop the ratification of the US Constitution, which took effect in 1789. Since then, the essays they wrote have largely fallen into obscurity. Unlike, for example, The Federalist No. 10 written by James Madison, none of their works are mainstays in college curricula or court r... |
What's the most expensive part of launching a spacecraft? | Fuel is pretty cheap. The problem is that you need so much of it that you have to shave every ounce of weight off your structure and engines in order to be able to make it to space. This means that your safety margins need to pretty small, leaving little room for error and uncertainty.
To reduce this uncertainty, you need to spend a lot of money on engineering analysis, tests, quality assurance, inspections, etc. Some of these are non-recurring (only done once), but a lot of work still has to be done for each launch. | [
"Present-day launch costs are very high – $2,500 to $25,000 per kilogram from Earth to low Earth orbit (LEO). As a result, launch costs are a large percentage of the cost of all space endeavors. If launch can be made cheaper, the total cost of space missions will be reduced. \n",
"The cost of the mission was $327... |
What was the public reaction in Australia after gun control laws were enacted? | A journalist on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's main news and current affairs show *The 7:30 Report*, said on May 9th, 1996, that "Australian massacres have a dulling familiarity. Public shock and outrage is soothed by assurances of tougher gun laws. But as public outcry dissipates, often so does political will in the face of the gun lobby."
The journalist was speaking less than two weeks after the Port Arthur massacre, in which Martin Bryant killed 35 people and wounded several others; this was the deadliest mass shooting in Australian history since the Frontier Wars between white Australians and indigenous peoples. As the journalist implies, Martin Bryant was not the only mass shooting in recent memory; there were mass shootings in 1984, 1987, 1991, and 1993.
However, change was in the air. The day after the Port Arthur massacre, Prime Minister John Howard announced sweeping changes to gun laws, and May 10th was to be a meeting of the state and Federal governments to enact these sweeping changes (which is likely what Frank McGuire on the *7:30 Report* was editorialising about.
Howard had been in the job for a couple of months after decisively winning the 1996 election against the then-rather-disliked Labor PM Paul Keating; the Coalition between the Liberal Party and the National Party had won 94 seats to Labor's 49. Paul Keating had described Howard as "Lazarus with a triple bypass", referring to Howard's never-say-die attitude to politics; 1996 was his second attempt at gaining the position of Prime Minister, after losing the 1987 election and then losing the leadership of the party in 1989.
Howard came from the conservative wing of the Liberal Party (who, it should be said, were *economically* liberal in a free-trade way, and had been put together as something of a centre-right party). For American readers, Howard's political instincts circa 1996 were somewhere between Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. There was a belief that Howard had followers amongst a sort of Nixon-esque silent majority styled 'Howard's battlers' who were meant to represent the 'real Australia', and Howard had positioned himself as a someone moderate conservative in the 1996 election, trying to convince everyone that he had changed and that he had become something of a moderate.
With such a recent and large electoral win, Howard had political capital to burn, and he seems to have seen gun control as something that would consolidate his 1995-1996 stance as a moderate conservative (something that there was some suspicion about given how he campaigned in 1987). The sheer amount of seats in Parliament also helped; what conservative MPs with ties to the gun lobby were in the Liberal and National parties would probably not have been numerous enough to block the legislation had Labor not supported it (Labor supported it).
According to [Simon Chapman, in his 1998 book *Over Our Dead Bodies*](_URL_0_) about the debate in the three months following the Port Arthur massacre:
> Port Arthur made gun control almost undeniable as a political response because the preceding years of advocacy for gun law reformhad succeeded in positioning them as sensible, easily understood and above all the course that any decent society committed to public safety should adopt. When Port Arthur occurred, the seeds sown during these years of advocacy erupted out of an angry community who made it plain they would countenance no more of the political equivocation that had characterised gun control in the past.
Chapman, as a public health professor, was a prominent advocate of gun control, and he says in the book that his experience in the three months following the massacre was that:
> In the three months after the massacre, the volume of anger against the gun lobby remained so intense that whenever a gun lobby initiative needed a response, the public was more than obliging. This response included everything from ordinary people expressing their heartfelt, untutored reactions to gun lobby rhetoric, to those who had particular personal experiences relevant to the argument. On many occasions we read and heard arguments, analogies, and factual perspectives on gun control from people who had no connection with the NCGC. Frequently, we recognised these as identical to arguments and analogies that we and others in gun control had sown in the media in preceding years on issues like gun registration, safe storage and international comparisons. Our past media advocacy efforts were bearing fruit in the form of articulate and informed public comment.
Gun control advocates and the media also successfully made the gun lobby appear unhinged, and media coverage did not favour the gun lobby. Perhaps the most prominent media event in the time period related to the gun lobby was a gun rally in Sale in rural Victoria on June 15th that attracted 3000 protesters. John Howard was on a tour of country regions to sell his reforms, and he gave a speech at this rally, while protesters shouted 'Nazi' and 'Heil Hitler!' at him. It became known that Howard had worn a bulletproof vest at the rally, on the advice of security. This was not good publicity for the gun lobby. Despite the generally rural nature of opposition to gun control, Howard's popularity in polling had risen to 66% in country regions in a poll released the weekend of the Victorian rally.
Chapman is not the most unbiased voice here, of course, but opinion polls from the time, however, suggest that the gun control lobby very clearly represented mainstream Australian views on gun control. Most notably, at that May 10th meeting, when a couple of states threatened to walk away from the deal to control guns, Howard threatened to call a referendum on the topic (which presumably would have enshrined gun control into the Australian constitution, in an interesting reversal to the rights in the American amendment). The ministers from those states at the meeting folded; they decided they'd rather sign this legislation rather than have to deal with the binding vote of a referendum that almost certainly would have been won.
An opinion poll in July 1995, less than a year *before* the Port Arthur massacre, found that 82% of people either supported or strongly supported 'laws that make it more difficult to buy guns in NSW'. In the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, an opinion poll was conducted in early May, which found that 91% of city people and 88% of rural people supported a ban on all automatic and semi-automatic guns. In Tasmania, where the Port Arthur massacre had occurred, this was as high as 95%.
In June, once the legislation was enacted, a national poll found that 80% agreed with the gun laws, while 18% disagreed - something of a drop compared to the initial revulsion after Port Arthur. However, only 4% would vote against a political candidate based on the word of a gun group (which is likely a good representation of the amount of Australians who strongly disagreed with the legislation, rather than just disagreed).
In a (normal) Australian Federal election, six Senators are elected for each state, and the maths work out to a party needing ~14% of votes (which in Australia are not necessarily just first votes, because of the preferential voting system); this feels like an achievable goal to some minor parties and interest groups. However, after the gun control legislation there was not much political will amongst the gun lobby to run candidates for the Senate. The Shooters Party in NSW, which had gotten 1.8% of the (Federal) Senate vote in 1993, and 2% in 1996, did not run in 1998, despite that you'd expect the increase in their profile to translate into more votes. While they had run candidates in other states in 1998 (who were not as successful as the NSW candidates in 1993 and 1996), the party did not run in the Senate in 2001 and degistered in 2004.
Finally, Howard's 'net satisfaction' rating in the polls was never higher than it was in the immediate wake of the Port Arthur massacre, and in the wake of several scandals and unpopular decisions following that poll, it still took him two years after that poll to fall into negative territory. | [
"The then Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, initiated another review of Australian gun laws, the last having been after the Port Arthur massacre, after it was discovered that Xiang had acquired his firearms legally. The Victorian State Government prepared new laws doubling the punishment for misuse of handg... |
Salt and Ice | I would say that the ice chest *without* the salt added stays colder for longer. The chest with the salt gets colder as the ice melts and absorbs the latent heat of fusion. However, since heat transfer is proportional to the temperature difference between the substance and its environment, the 'cryo bath' will warm faster than the other chest. The liquid formed from the melting ice can also facilitate heat transfer and thus expedite it's melting. On the other hand, the ice in the chest without the salt warms more slowly because it is closer to thermal equilibrium with the room, and it still needs to absorb the same latent heat as the 'cryo bath' ice to melt. Thus, the chest with the salt would be expected to fully melt sooner. | [
"Halite is also often used both residentially and municipally for managing ice. Because brine (a solution of water and salt) has a lower freezing point than pure water, putting salt or saltwater on ice that is below will cause it to melt. (This effect is called freezing-point depression.) It is common for homeowner... |
serious question - is there science behind a face that appears more desirable to punch? aka: "punchable face" | There is no definitive single answer, but there are some answers. It probably shouldn't be a surprise that given how sensitive to facial expressions humans are, that we'd have the capacity for a strong reaction. By the way, there is a German word for the phenomenon you're describing, called "Backpfeifengesicht"... or roughly, "A face that should be struck."
The answer seems to be that people who's faces, for any number of reasons, don't express a comfortable and familiar range of expressions. A great example, and a good discussion of this can be found here: _URL_0_ | [
"Punch is aggravated by his whining child, nagging wife (Judy), and ineffective bureaucracy. This eventually leads to Punch hitting other characters with his slapstick, but it is a very ritualized form of violence. Traditional shows ended with Punch defeating the ultimate evil and proclaiming \"Huzzah, Huzzah, I've... |
what is a senator and what is a congressman? | Congress is more or less the US equivalent of the UK's Parliament. Like the UK Parliament, it has two houses.
The lower house is the House of Representatives. The people who sit in that are called Congressmen/women. It's very much like the UK's House of Commons. The entire country is split into districts (same concept as UK constituencies) which each elect a single representative via the First Past The Post system. They have fewer Congressmen than the UK has MPs and a much larger population, so the districts are much bigger than in the UK. There are fresh elections every 2 years.
The Senate is the upper house of Congress. However it's very different to the UK's upper house, the House of Lords. Each state elects 2 senators, regardless of its population. Senators have 6 year terms, but they are not elected all at once. They are staggered so 1/3 of them are elected every 2 years.
Another difference is that the Senate is much more powerful than the House of Lords. Most bills have to be agreed by both houses before a bill can become law. Where as in the UK, the House of Commons can ultimately pass legislation through even if the Lords doesn't agree.
So I'd say Congressmen are the closest equivalent to UK MPs. But Senators are more senior in a sense because they serve longer terms, and there's fewer of them.
edit - I suppose I should point out that technically Senators are also Congressmen, as they are part of Congress. The people in the House of Representatives are Representatives. But people commonly refer to them as Congressmen, and refer to Senators specifically as Senators. | [
"Congress is a bicameral legislature. The upper house, the Senate, is composed of 24 senators elected via the plurality-at-large voting with the country as one at-large \"district.\" The senators elect amongst themselves a Senate President. The lower house is the House of Representatives, currently composed of 292 ... |
why do people become outraged and upset at other people's sexual preferences? | My theory is this: we humans have found the need to become self-controlled and disciplined for the good of our society. We keep our basic instincts in check so that we can focus on working together to build things and to make our lives better and free of danger.
Obviously most of us like sex... but we also don't have sex anywhere, anytime we want. Society expects us to deal with our basic instincts in privacy. Those who cannot do this are frowned upon because it shows a lack of self-control, a personality flaw that is seen as harmful to the well-being of our society. However, heterosexuality is more widely accepted (or tolerated) because it's essential to life - that's basically how you make babies. If you're alive right now, chances are that your biological parents did the nasty at least once before.
Homosexuality on the other hand isn't as widespread as heterosexuality so many people have trouble relating to it. They don't understand its appeal. Because of that and because it doesn't follow "the norm", some people see homosexuality as a personality flaw, as the result of someone not being able to take control of their urges. It also doesn't help that some gay people are extremely vocal about their sexual preference and may be attracted to heterosexual people, something which isn't reciprocated and can be the source of discomfort.
In my opinion, the reason why some idiots are outraged about what gay people do in their own home is because they think their supposed "lack of self-control" is going to have a negative effect somewhere else in society. | [
"The increase in sexual content in modern society often results in a more nonchalant approach to sexually suggestive behavior. People, predominantly women, often act in a way that they themselves do not consider to be sexually suggestive but which can be misinterpreted by others. For example, wearing clothes or ski... |
why constant friction leads to orgasm? what makes the brain think "yeah... i wasn't sure you were having sex, but now that 20 minutes has passed i'm certain... take the reward now"? | As far as I know (not a biologist) human males generally last so long because they train to, because they want to get human females off, which i'm guessing have a longer time to orgasm to encourage them to have more sex, to guarantee pregnancy. Since monogamy and marriage and stuff is a human cultural thing, from nature's perspective we should absolutely just be fucking any woman we see just about all the time if we're not out hunting or whatever.
If you take a human male who hasn't had sex or masturbated in a while, he will pop basically as soon as he enters the vagina, if he even lasts that long, which lines up with most animals natural abilities and is indeed, the 'optimal' speed from nature's perspective.
This is mostly conjecture and shouldn't be taken as fact. but it's what I can work out with the knowledge i've got. | [
"An orgasm is believed to occur in part because of the hormone oxytocin, which is produced in the body during sexual excitement and arousal and labor. It has also been shown that oxytocin is produced when a man or woman's nipples are stimulated and become erect. Komisaruk also relayed, however, that preliminary dat... |
What was up with the Anti-Masonic Party? Why was Freemasonry considered such a pressing issue in 17th century America that people created a whole political party over it? | I can give you a brief answer, copied from an earlier question I answered on this sub. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can step in to supplement:
An incident occurred in the 1820s that sparked a wave of anti-masonry. A man claimed he was going to publish the masonic "secrets" (rites and symbols) ...and then went missing. Some blamed the masons for his death. This spark was fanned both by religious groups who just so happened to be going through a massive religious revival, and an anti-Jacksonite political party (as Jackson was a mason) who were running non-masonic candidates. The sentiment and political party largely diminished after a few years.
& nbsp;
^(Edit: I just noticed that you said '17th century America' ... I'm assuming that's a simple typo, as the political party was formed in the early 19th century / 1800s.) | [
"The major opponent of Freemasonry was the Roman Catholic Church so that in countries with a large Catholic element, such as France, Italy, Spain and Mexico, much of the ferocity of the political battles involve the confrontation between what Davies calls the reactionary Church and enlightened Freemasonry. Even in ... |
what happened to the panama papers story? it was supposed to be this giant scandal, yet it seems to have disappeared. | 1. It's still a thing, but given that there haven't been any new major revelations (e.g. The Pope) most news organizations have chosen to focus on more topical things (The Euro 16, Brexit, etc.)
2. No prominent Americans were listed, hence why it's gotten little to no attention in the US. Most Americans don't give a shit if some Saudi Minister hid money off-shore. Now if some Mega Church Pastor was named you'd see the media explode on this. | [
"The documents were dubbed the Panama Papers because of the country they were leaked from; however, the Panamanian government expressed strong objections to the name over concerns that it would tarnish the government's and country's image worldwide, as did other entities in Panama and elsewhere. This led to an adve... |
what factors cause people from different countries to protest differently? | Nothing's to say that can't happen in the US, but a part of it comes out of necessity. Many parts of Asia are heavily populated, and not just heavily, but densely. The need to be clean isn't just a good idea, it has roots in survival. And it's convention. People do it so you do it. People see you do it so they do it. It's just something done. Some cultures hold the door, others don't. However, picking up trash has more of an actual impact, so it *should* be done everywhere.
Beyond that, many protests in the US happen this way. Right now in North Dakota the protests are *very* peaceful and clean, considering. It depends how it's portrayed. What protests are you talking about or comparing?
Koreans are protesting their president, but many people as of late in the US are protesting the needless killing of its citizens by an armed force that almost always gets away with it. The idea that people should politely protest everything is also absurd.
| [
"Protesting outside of one’s home country is a relatively new phenomenon. Nicole Constable, professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, has noted that the potential ability for them to protest relies upon their pseudo stateless nature. While FDWs receive visas to live and work temporarily within thei... |
At what point did Australians and New Zealanders begin to consider themselves as distinct from the British? | I wrote about this partly in my undergraduate thesis.
Similar to the colonization of America, settlers in the Antipodes experienced a lifestyle hugely different from what they or their parents had experienced in Europe. Australian/American/Canadian/New Zealand (to an extent) evolved as a response to their new environment and a different understanding of their role as settlers and within the Empire. Dealing with (often) hostile natives in an unhospitable environment changes the character of the individual and society as a whole. The 'frontier' played a pivotal role in shaping the idea of white settler national identity, and the heros of the frontier (explorers, outlaws etc.) remain an important aspect of national mythology. Essentially these societies grew outside or even against the traditional notion of state authority, so individuals who defied the oppression of the state were idolized and subsequently hold a vital place in their national histories (Lewis & Clark, Ned Kelly).
However, Australia, New Zealand and Canada remained strongholds of the British Empire even as they gradually gained increasing amounts of political and economic sovereignty throughout the 19th century as they transitioned towards 'Dominion' status. Settlers from Britain and other European countries continued to arrive so there is no doubt that the societies being created were 'European' societies at the base level.
The 'heroic' fairytale idea is that Australian and New Zealand identity was born after the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. As a part of the Empire, ANZAC forces were under the command of British generals and suffered huge losses in the poorly-planned and orchestrated campaign against the Ottomans. Many historians have played up the significance of Gallipoli in identity construction because it is picturesque and allows them to point to a specific point in history.
When the Second World War broke out and the British surrendered their Empire in South-East Asia to the Japanese, it became clear to Australians and Kiwis that they could not rely on the British for military protection and instead found another willing and capable ally across the Pacific in the USA. The Australians and New Zealanders were finally asserting their political and military sovereignty and the ANZUS treaty which resulted form their wartime alliance with the USA has been a vital aspect of Australian foreign relations throughout C20 and up until today.
So to answer your question. There is no specific date when a distinct national identity emerged but it gradually developed due to a variety of environmental, political and economic factors over the course of centuries. Let me know if you have any questions as I have only provided a very simplified overview of 200 years of Antipodean political history | [
"As a result of many shared linguistic, historical, cultural and geographic characteristics, Australians have often identified closely with New Zealanders in particular. Furthermore, elements of Indigenous, American, British, and more recent immigrant customs, languages, and religions have also combined to form the... |
how on earth do batteries work? | They have a chemical inside that is capable of holding extra electrons. When you charge them, you use the energy from the power plant ( or solar panels/ wherever the hell it comes from) to pump the chemical to a higher energy state (lots of extra electrons). When you discharge a battery you complete a circuit from the negative to the positive terminal. The positive terminal is a different substance that wants more electrons. It pulls them from the negative terminal through the circuit (the device the battery is powering).
It's like a little pressurized container for electrons. You pump it up with energy and it holds it to high pressure, the pressure is released and utilized when you connect the negative to positive terminal. | [
"An Earth battery is a pair of electrodes made of two dissimilar metals, such as iron and copper, which are buried in the soil or immersed in the sea. Earth batteries act as water activated batteries and if the plates are sufficiently far apart, they can tap telluric currents. Earth batteries are sometimes referred... |
If dark matter is a matter, then what would it look like if you held it in your hands? | Dark matter, according to the most popular theories at the moment, consists of **w**eakly **i**nteracting **m**assive **p**articles, or WIMPs. Because they interact so weakly, in particular having no electromagnetic interaction, WIMPs stream through you much like neutrinos do. Thus, you can't really hold dark matter in your hands, and if you could, somehow, it wouldn't look like anything, since it wouldn't interact with photons. | [
"Dark matter is defined as hypothetical matter that is undetectable by its emitted radiation, but whose presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter. It has been used in a variety of fictional media, including computer and video games and books. In such cases, dark matter is usually attribu... |
if things with different mass fall at the same velocity, why do heavier things cause more 'damage' when they land? | Force = mass x acceleration
As you point out, objects fall at the same rate, i.e. acceleration is constant. So, for falling objects, force is proportional to mass. Using your example, a 1 ton (1,000 kg) ball will hit with exactly 1,000 times more force than the 1kg ball. | [
"The reason why the object does not fall down when subjected to only downward forces is a simple one. Think about what keeps an object up after it is thrown. Once an object is thrown into the air, there is only the downward force of earth's gravity that acts on the object. That does not mean that once an object is ... |
how does a charger charge your phone for a split second after it was removed from the socket? | Do you think because the icon shows charging that it is actually charging?
Or the software just hasn't updated the screen yet? | [
"The charge control consists of a pressure switch built into the cell, which disconnects the charging current when the internal cell pressure rises above a certain limit (usually 200 to 300 psi or 1.4 to 2.1 MPa). This prevents overcharging and damage to the cell.\n",
"If a battery has been completely discharged ... |
Why do mitochondria need their own DNA? | As has been said, endosymbiotic theory which is pretty widely accepted states that both chloroplasts and mitochondria were once bacteria of their own right. We believe the modern day equivalents are cyanobacteria and proteobacteria respectively.
Some nice sets of evidence:
* Circular genomes as seen in bacteria
* No nucleus of their own and no chromatin packaging (prokaryotic features)
* No introns as in eukaroytic systems
* Double membrane akin to the inner and outer membranes of gram-negative bacteria.
* Encode their own tRNAs
* Replicate at a different point in the cell cycle to other organelles
But do they "need their own DNA". No they don't. But it's the system that works and nature is good at keeping systems that work, even if they're not the optimal system. A considerable amount of mtDNA and chDNA has migrated to the nucleus such that mtDNA no longer fully encodes for a functioning mitochondrion. Why doesn't all the DNA migrate to the nucleus? Because this system works :)
[See quantum_lotus' comparison of eukaryotic and prokaryotic mitochondria including chimera activity recovery](_URL_0_) | [
"Mitochondria are thought to be organelles that developed from endocytosed bacteria which learned to coexist inside our cells. These bacteria maintained their own DNA, the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which codes for components of the electron transport chain (ETC). The ETC is found in the inner mitochondrial membran... |
the senate bill 5 being discussed in today's filibuster in the texas senate. | Might be a little over EIL5, but meh...
The bill does a few things. From [_URL_1_](_URL_4_):
* The bill would restrict abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy
* Require all clinics to be certified as ambulatory surgical centers
* Require abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a local hospital.
Problems with these are:
1) the Supreme Court and many doctors agree, kinda sorta, that "life" (more like viability) starts at about the 24th(?) week of the term. [Radiolab story about it is really heartbreaking](_URL_7_). This would hamper and go counter to what's been established as a litmus test. Thus, it limits the woman's right to choose.
2) The ambulatory surgical clinic provision seems like a good idea, till you actually look into what's needed to run one of these.
> "There's a whole bunch of requirements that have to do with airflow, temperature, humidity, size of the room, that kind of thing for operations that may take three or four hours. But for an abortion that takes five or ten minutes, it's sort of mismatched."
From a [KXAN article](_URL_0_). While [this](_URL_3_) article can be argued to be slightly biased, the oldest citation is from 1990. 97% of all women in the US suffer no complications, 2% suffer minor complications that can be handled in clinic or outpatient, and about .5% suffer serious complications.
Outpatient knee surgery has nearly the same, if not slightly worse numbers according to [this](_URL_8_) with 94% meeting discharge criteria, with 3.6% readmission. Granted, the numbers for the knee surgery study are smaller than the abortion study, but there's more care needed.
Also, who is to say that once the majority of abortion clinics in Texas get up to the standard, that they will be licensed to practice? [Here's the requirement](_URL_5_) for clinics in Texas. And according to this [Washington Post article](_URL_6_), "the majority of abortions are not surgical procedures, and 37 of the state’s 42 abortion clinics don’t meet that new standard, so many would need to relocate and spend millions of dollars to reach it." Which means that these clinics would have to change how they operate completely.
3) Admitting privilege sounds like a great idea. I personally agree with it in principle, but in real life, things aren't as simple. For starters [this shows how doctors are "employed'](_URL_2_). Then, each hospital seems to have it's own rules and standards for who and what can get admitting privileges as well as limited number of slots. I could be wrong on this, but I believe that general practitioners in Texas do not need admitting privileges to operate. There's also the fact that many communities in Texas do not have a "local" (however it's defined legally) hospital.
So, let's look at it simply: the 20 week limit is shorter than what the Supreme Court of the USA, medical ethicist, and others agree upon viability (to live outside of the womb) of the embryo, the regulations then put on an abortion clinic could mean that no abortion clinics could be licensed to practice, and there's nothing to say that doctors who provide abortions will be able to get admitting privileges. This bill can deny a woman's constitutional right to seek a legal abortion. | [
"On June 25, 2013, Davis held a thirteen-hour-long filibuster to block Senate Bill 5, a measure which included more restrictive abortion regulations for Texas. The filibuster played a major role in Senate Democrats' success in delaying passage of the bill beyond the midnight deadline for the end of the legislative ... |
Are they any cases of animals using covering or "clothes" to protect themselves from the environment as humans have done? | Hermit crabs are an obvious example.
Pigs will slather themselves in mud to cool off.
You could call a burrow a kind of "clothing" that animals "put on" to protect themselves from the environment.
The biggest problem is that the natural world doesn't present a lot of things which you can really use as a covering (which is why we need to do complicated things like weaving fibres or skinning animals). So without a high degree of intelligence and dexterity it's very hard to make "clothes".
Heck, a lot of human tribes didn't have clothes.
edit: Another thing is that we need clothes mostly because a lot of us live outside our natural habitat. If we still lived in Kenya then they would be less necessary. | [
"Animal rights activists generally protest the use of animal hides for human clothing. Forms of protest range from PETA's \"I would rather go naked than wear fur\" campaign, although more shocking and direct action, like damaging furs with red paint in imitation of blood, has been toned down, like the \"Ink, not Mi... |
What were relations between medieval Muslims and medieval Buddhists like? | As I mention [in this post](_URL_0_) to almost the same question, the initial Buddhist literary response to Islam was highly negative. I'd welcome other perspectives, of course, especially from the Muslim side and on a more subaltern level. | [
"During the Middle Ages, Muslims came into conflict with Zoroastrians during the Islamic conquest of Persia (633-654); Christians fought against Muslims during the Byzantine-Arab Wars (7th to 11th centuries), the Crusades (1095 onward), the Reconquista (718-1492), the Ottoman wars in Europe (13th century onwards) a... |
why does a magnetic field do no work on a stationary particle but yet electric field does work on it? | A magnetic field does no work on a point charge under any circumstances. The magnetic force on a stationary charge is zero. If the charge is moving, then there is a magnetic force of q**v**x**B**, which is always perpendicular to **v**, so it doesn't do any work. | [
"Because the magnetic force is perpendicular to the velocity, it performs no work and requires no energy—nor does it provide any. Thus magnetic fields (like the Earth's) can profoundly affect particle motion in them, but need no energy input to maintain their effect. Particles may also get steered around, but their... |
why do we sometimes twitch or spaz when we get a random chill? | Those are transient myoclonic jerks . These are just short burst of muscle contractions that you see especially when you are falling sleep. These are similarly seen in many physiological and pathological conditions.
If excessive they are called myoclonic seizures. | [
"Chills are commonly caused by inflammatory diseases, such as the flu.. It is also common in urinary tract infections. Malaria is one of the common reasons for chills and rigors. In malaria, the parasites enter the liver, grow there and then attack the red blood cells which causes rupture of these cells and release... |
why does your arm shake when you flex really hard? | When you stretch or flex your muscles, they can affect the body’s nervous system, which in effect controls the body’s muscle movements. When the body becomes overly stressed, it can cause involuntary muscle spasms.
| [
"The overuse of the coracobrachialis can lead to stiffening of the muscle. Common causes of injury include chest workouts or activities that require one to press the arm very tight towards the body, e.g. work on the rings in gymnastics. Symptoms of overuse or injury are pain in the arm and shoulder, radiating down ... |
What would we see if the speed of light was, say, 1ms^-1? | This is actually a common thought experiment in special relativity. The answer is, nothing would really change, but massive relativistic effects would be observable in everyday life. Also, everything in the universe would be limited to a speed of 1m/s since the speed of light is the top speed that anything can travel (including information). This means that when you leave for school, you could walk there, but in the 20 minutes it takes to walk there, hundreds if not millions of years will have passed once you get there. The speed of light actually has nothing to do with its intensity, but running forward will actually narrow your visual range. Kind of like tunnel vision. The backwards question is even more interesting. If you were facing forward, and you started running backward at near the speed of light, your visual range will increase. You would be able to see things that are behind you. If you are more interested on the topic, just look up special relativity. The fact that in our universe, the speed of light is constant has lots of wacky consequences. Things like time dilation, Lorentz contraction, and loss of simultaneity. If you are interested, I could describe more of it here, but I would recommend you look around the web at videos. These kinds of questions are what got me really interested in physics and I would be glad to try and answer more questions that people have. | [
"The speed of light is (by definition) exactly 299,792,458 m/s, very close to 300,000,000 m/s. This is a pure coincidence, as the meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance between the Earth's pole and equator along the surface at sea level, and the Earth's circumference just happens to be about 2... |
What are the recommended sources for the history of mercenaries and, to a lesser extent, the development of professional fighting forces in Europe from the collapse of the WRE to the early medieval period? | Absolutely try to find a copy of David Parrott’s *The Business of War.* It’s also a massive book, and it’s more focused on the late medieval and early modern periods. BUT it does contain a very useful introduction that will give you an idea of the way mercenaries have been written about in European history. It also contains a little information in the first chapter that’s kinda high/late medieval. I imagine the bibliography and footnotes would give you some further reading as well. See what you think of the price and if it’s too hefty, try to find it at a library.
| [
"During the Late Middle Ages, mercenary forces grew in importance in Europe, as veterans from the Hundred Years War and other conflicts came to see soldiering as a profession rather than a temporary activity, and commanders sought long-term professionals rather than temporary feudal levies to fight their wars. Swis... |
plasma, in the electrical sense. why is it its own state/phase? | Plasma forms when you heat up a gas to really high temperatures. The electrons get ripped away from the atoms due to their high energy. This is called ionization. This makes plasma highly electrically conductive. Plasma is its own state of matter because its properties are so fundamentally different from a gas, in the same way that a liquid's properties are fundamentally different than a solid's. | [
"Plasma is a state of matter in which an ionized gaseous substance becomes highly electrically conductive to the point that long-range electric and magnetic fields dominate the behaviour of the matter. The plasma state can be contrasted with the other states: solid, liquid, and gas.\n",
"Plasma consists of a mixt... |
why are vehicles insured, instead of people/drivers? | I some countries it's actually both. The vehicle is insured, but the insurance won't cover driver liability, so the driver needs their own insurance too. | [
"With the onset of fully autonomous cars, it is possible that the need for specialized automobile insurance disappears and that health insurance and homeowner's liability insurance instead cover automobile crashes, much in the same way that they cover bicycle accidents. Moreover, as cases of traditional negligence ... |
what's the point of the russians visiting the moon in 2029 when we're planning on visiting mars in the 2030's? | Why go on holiday to the caravan park this year when you know you're going to go on holiday to DISNEYLAND next year?
There's still things for us to Do on the Moon - places yet unmapped, below surface exploration, samples to collect. Sure we're going to Mars, but that doesn't mean we should Not go to the Moon as well, or explore the Mariana Trench, or have some tasty ice cream at Disneyland. | [
"A number of Mars mission concepts and proposals have been put forth by Russian scientists. Stated dates were for a launch sometime between 2016 and 2020. The Mars probe would carry a crew of four to five cosmonauts, who would spend close to two years in space.\n",
"Three spaceflights to the Moon are planned to t... |
How can meteor fragments found on earth possibly be so frequently described as 'martian'? How can we possibly assert their origin? | The quote below is taken directly from the [Martian Meteorite](_URL_0_) page of Wikipedia:
By the early 1980s, it was obvious that the SNC group of meteorites (Shergottites, Nakhlites, Chassignites) were significantly different from most other meteorite types. Among these differences were younger formation ages, a different oxygen isotopic composition, the presence of aqueous weathering products, and some similarity in chemical composition to analyses of the Martian surface rocks in 1976 by the Viking landers. Several workers suggested these characteristics implied the origin of SNC meteorites from a relatively large parent body, possibly Mars (e.g., Smith et al.[4] and Treiman et al.[5]). Then in 1983, various trapped gases were reported in impact-formed glass of the EET79001 shergottite, gases which closely resembled those in the Martian atmosphere as analyzed by Viking.[6] These trapped gases provided direct evidence for a Martian origin. In 2000, an article by Treiman, Gleason and Bogard gave a survey of all the arguments used to conclude the SNC meteorites (of which 14 had been found at the time) were from Mars. They wrote, "There seems little likelihood that the SNCs are not from Mars. If they were from another planetary body, it would have to be substantially identical to Mars as it now is understood."[3] | [
"A Martian meteorite is a rock that formed on the planet Mars and was then ejected from Mars by the impact of an asteroid or comet, and finally landed on the Earth. Of over 61,000 meteorites that have been found on Earth, 224 were identified as Martian . These meteorites are thought to be from Mars because they hav... |
after the initial sleepiness feeling, why do we suddenly feel more alert after a few hours pass your normal sleeping time before you suddenly feel lethargic and sleepy again? | A certain sleep writer suggests it's because there is a metabolitic release timed to coincide with the early part of sleep intended to for the heavy lifting your lymphatic and endocrine systems will do in the early part of sleep. Apparently this is the "second wind" we feel at approximately 10pm, and being asleep at this point results in higher quality sleep.
This is the only thing I've come up with on the topic so far. It seams reasonable that one's body would benefit from a release of energy for homonal/repair/immune function that does happen during sleep; however, I traced the reference chain back finally back to an Ayurvedic medicine writer, and haven't found any peer-reviewed empirical research on the topic (yet), so I think the jury is still out on this one. | [
"Disrupted sleep patterns are characteristic of Smith–Magenis syndrome, typically beginning early in life. Affected people may be very sleepy during the day, but have trouble falling asleep and awaken several times each night, due to an inverted circadian rhythm of melatonin.\n",
"Diagnosing sleep apnea usually r... |
why do fermented foods turn into alcohol and cause intoxication? | Yeast. Yeast is a microscopic fungi that is intentionally added to the process of making alcoholic drinks. It consumes the sugars, and excrete alcohol. As the alcohol content rises, the yeast dies off. They also produce CO2, which is why beer is carbonated (at least traditionally, now its added)
So beer is essentially fungal shit | [
"Several species of the benign bacteria in the intestine use fermentation as a form of anaerobic metabolism. This metabolic reaction produces ethanol as a waste product. Thus, human bodies contain some quantity of alcohol endogenously produced by these bacteria. In rare cases, this can be sufficient to cause \"auto... |
Were places like New Jersey, New York, New South Wales, etc. so named because of a resemblance in climate/topography to Jersey, York, Wales, etc., or because the original settlers were from those regions of the British Isles? | New Jersey was so named because the land it encompasses was an award from the King Charles II to Sir George Cartalet for his loyalty during the English Civil War. Sir Goerge was both originally born on the isle of Jersey and served as a governor there, so the land was eventually renamed, in his honor, by the Duke of York as "New Jersey".
So, in the case of New Jersey, it seems to be the latter.
Source: [Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 09](_URL_0_)
EDIT - Just found my book on Scottish colonialism to confirm: Nova Scotia (Latin for New Scotland) was so named because while originally settled by the French and called a different name, it was eventually taken over by Scotland, which was technically a separate kingdom at the time of settlement, and renamed.
Source: [The Scottish Empire, Michael Fry](_URL_1_) | [
"The region of New England in the United States has numerous place names derived from the indigenous peoples of the area. New England is in the Northeastern United States, and comprises six states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Listed are well-known names of towns, sig... |
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