question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
|---|---|---|
how does the 20 questions electronic game work? |
First, come up with a bunch of yes/no questions that would be good for a 20 questions game.
Second, collect a bunch of objects, and answer some or most of these questions for each object.
Now, you have a good database of objects and an associated list of the yes/no answers for each object.
When it comes time to ask a question, have the computer look through the list and find a question that has roughly half of the objects with a yes and half with a no. When the player answers, your list of objects is now half as small. If some of your objects didn't have an answer for that question, keep those too. Now, look at your remaining objects, and repeat the process, always picking a question that splits the objects into about half yes and half no. After 20 questions, halving each time, you will have sorted through about 1,000,000 possible answers. The questions might not always seem to make sense, but to the computer, this is the most efficient way to find your item.
At this point you have a working system, but it takes a long time to get this data. If you are smart, you can make your game even better the longer it gets played
Now, have a bunch of people play the game. LOTS of people. Keep track of their answers as you go. Put it on [A WEBSITE](_URL_0_) so you can get answers from thousands of people. If they have an object you couldn't guess, add it to the list, and save the answers you got, or update the answers you already have. If you get lucky and narrow the answer down before all 20 questions are used up, look at some of the other questions for that object you don't have answers for and ask those so you always get more data. This is why if you play the online version it might seem like it's on the right track and suddenly ask if your potato "wears a cape". It already knows the answer is "potato" ; it's just collecting more info about potatoes to make it even smarter. You could even ask the player if there is a particular question they should have asked and if so add that to the list of possible questions for next time. If people sometimes answer differently for the same question, keep track of the percent yes vs no and take that into account when asking your questions (i.e. If "are potatoes healthy" gets 50/50 yes or no, don't eliminate that answer right away if you ask that question.
Last, grab your latest version of the database, put it in the toy, and done. | [
"The abstract mathematical version of the game where some answers may be wrong is sometimes called Ulam's game or the Rényi–Ulam game. The game suggests that the information (as measured by Shannon's entropy statistic) required to identify an arbitrary object is at most 20 bits. The game is often used as an example... |
Why was the Avro Arrow destroyed? | During the late 50’s the threat perceived to radiate from the soviets was changing.
It is argued that the Canadian Government was operating in an information vacuum with regards to this threat.
As a reaction to the detonation of the Soviet Hydrogen Bomb in 1953 NORAD was under development, a system that should provide early warning for the US when Russian Bomber approached the Continent, and would coordinate the responsive measures. In order to push the warning line forward units would have to be stationed on Canadian soil.
This came into play around the same time a new government came into power in Canada, that of Diefenbaker. A discussion broke out whether or not the Norad agreement would mean that Canada was giving up it’s sovereignty, as Canadian units would fall under American control. In the end the Canadians perceived the Russians to be a greater thread and agreed to NORAD.
Coincidental with the development of NORAD was the development of the Avro CF-105 Interceptor. Many people around Diefenbaker noted that he was not open to take advice on defence. Thus the government at first ignored some important views by not taking advice from a group of military advisors that upheld the view that the perceived Bomber Threat was quickly turning into an IBCM threat.
The main thought with regards to air power at the time was an offensive one: Namely that it was important to strike first. From WWII the notion survived that of a large bomber force only a small number of bombers would be shot down. In the case of these bombers carrying an nuclear load even a handful of survivers could have a devastating effect. To quote prof J.I. Jackson:
“the real air defence is the thermonuclear retaliatory or counter force, supported by the radar warning system that will allow it to take off before it can be destroyed on the ground. The defensive interceptor and electronic weapons are no longer the teeth of the air defence system, but rather comprise a subsidiary arm of the warning net, and have the same purpose in this as civil defence and defence against missile bearing submarines in helping to dissipate the casualties of the attack.” (1)
To repudiate the claim that Canada was bullied into stopping the program. Recent declassification of documents (around 2011) shows that in fact the US was interested in absorbing the biggest part of the costs of procuring the CF-105 for both the RCAF and the RAF air defence squadrons. The tragedy is that this information never reached the Canadian decision makers. The US was not interested in the CF-105 for use in the USAF, mainly as a result of the F-108 that they had on the drawing board.
“. While the confused decision-making structure, dislike of committees, and seeming mistrust of senior military leadership were inescapable features of Diefenbaker’s personality, there is evidence that he was failed by those entrusted with ensuring needed information was pushed forward. In this case, information that told of a potential US commitment to assist in the acquisition of larger numbers of CF-105s to meet NORAD requirements and answer an enduring threat to the continent did not reach Diefenbaker.” (2)
The CF-105 was cancelled on the prevailing thought that now existed with the Canadian decision makers: Namely that the bomber threat was waning, and that IBCM’s now were the main threat. This proved to be erroneous as the bombers of the USSR still were a threat, at least until the late 1960’s In addition the critical information on the US’s willingness to purchase a number of CF-105’s for the RCAF never reached Diefenbaker. Thus the decision was made based on economics: Do we buy aircraft to defend against a threat we think is waning, or do we participate in NORAD and stationing of the BOMARC missille system, which is cheaper than the number of CF-105’s we need? They decided for the latter. If Diefenbaker had the relevant information available to him it is quite likely that the decision would have been different.
**Sources**
(1) Brad W. Gladman, Continental Air Defence: Threat Perception and Response, (2012) p 14.
_URL_1_
Ibid, p 37.
Norad at 40, historical overview
_URL_0_
| [
"After Green Arrow (Oliver Queen) lost his fortune, the Arrow-Car became too expensive to keep. Various wrecks of the cars became highly prized among collectors of super-memorabilia, such as the Arrow-Car once destroyed during a fight between Green Arrow, Arsenal, and Solomon Grundy. When a fully functional Arrow-C... |
Has there been a time in Western culture when muscular men were not considered sexy/attractive? | > The cultural standards by which a woman's weight and shape have determined her sexiness have changed dramatically over time in Western/European societies. For example large, curvy "rubenesque" women were deemed sexy for much of the 17th and 18th centuries whereas today, thinness is praised > curves.
Your premise is really a pretty bold claim and mostly seems like a simplistic misinterpretation of art, it has been addressed here many times, for example here _URL_0_ by u/chocolatepot , who also, if briefly, addresses male beauty.
In any case, one should really differentiate between various "considerations" of "sexy/attractive":
Is a depiction meant to be idealistic or maybe just realistic, is it about some general expectations from the opposite sex, or rather *self*-image, or artistic ideas, or tastes of particular artists (what's their sex? sexual orientation? status?), or just detached symbolism, or idea(l)s of particular groups... All of those are related yet ultimately very different questions requiring their own kinds of sources.
Just consider how you'd evaluate what modern bodybuilding vs regular fashion magazines vs pornography vs various movie genres vs what men/women expect vs what they fantasize about vs what they tend to end up with (don't) say about beauty ideals... | [
"\"Strongman\" is often incorrectly used to describe a person who does weightlifting or bodybuilding. Due to the circus and entertainment background, nineteenth-century bodybuilders were expected to mingle with the crowd during intermission and perform strength feats like card tearing, nail bending, etc. to demonst... |
how is chewing bones good for dogs teeth, and can it benefit humans? | Their teeth are specifically designed to crush softer bones like ribs and vertebrae unlike our teeth. When dogs eat lots of softer foods like commercial dog food their teeth can't get tartar build up on it just like our teeth; gnawing on bones will help scrape the build up off. | [
"While the media often portrays domestic dogs chewing bones, this is slightly misleading. Dogs chew bones only to eat any residual meat and bone marrow left on them, so it is not truly a form of osteophagy. Most modern toy \"bones\" for dogs are actually rawhide, which is simply dried animal skin, as animal bones a... |
how do audio recordings that are stored in binary code on devices get re-converted to the sound that comes out of my phone’s speakers? | It is covered thanks to a device called a DAC (digital to analogue converter).
When audio is traveling in a speaker wire, it is just an electrical impulse - it has a voltage and a frequency based on what the sound is. That voltage and frequency is then amplified (by an amplifier) and pushed to a speaker cone, which vibrates at that specific amplitude and frequency to make sound waves in the air.
A DAC is able to take the bianary data and create impulses in the speaker wire at that specific voltage and frequency, which then travels down the wire. | [
"In digital recording, audio signals picked up by a microphone or other transducer or video signals picked up by a camera or similar device are converted into a stream of discrete numbers, representing the changes over time in air pressure for audio, and chroma and luminance values for video, then recorded to a sto... |
[Meta] Book List Meta Thread | General question (as in every sources thread): What about non-English language sources? Yay/Nay? Only for country specific topics? ...? | [
"OttoBib.com is a website with a free tool to generate an alphabetized bibliography of books from a list of International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) with output in MLA, APA, Chicago/Turabian, BibTeX and Wikipedia format. Each query also generates a \"temporary\" permalink (self-destructs in about one month) which... |
Is it possible to make 3D contact lenses similar to 3D glasses given out at Movie Screenings? | I think it's a great idea, and I see no reason it shouldn't be doable. Indeed, polarized contact lenses have already been [patented](_URL_0_). And whereas linearly polarized contact lenses to reduce glare like polarized sunglasses would be impractical (since the effect depends on the orientation of the lens), 3D movies use circular polarization, so the rotational orientation of each lens wouldn't matter. And I bet having the polarizer cover the eye's entire field of vision would produce a much more comfortable effect than looking through awkward glasses.
All of Balthanos's critiques are pretty easily dealt with, too: Let people buy these things on their own (so the burden of idiocy is on the consumer, not the theater); and if leaving polarizing eyewear on during the day were a safety hazard, polarized sunglasses probably wouldn't be a thing. | [
"This allows the observer to view the 3D subject from different angles as they move their head, simulating the real-world depth cue of shifting parallax. It also reduces or eliminates the complication of pseudoscopic viewing zones typical of \"no glasses\" 3D displays that use only two images, making it possible fo... |
how can a 60hz monitor have a response time of 5ms when 1/60hz = 16.7 ms? | The response time is usually the time it takes a pixel to change from black to white, or some predetermined gray to another gray value to estimate the average real usage. This will determine the amount of time it takes the average pixel to change to the updated value after a new frame is received by the monitor; the shorter the response time, the quicker the screen updates. If the response time is as long as a frame update interval, the screen never finishes updating, and you get a blurry mess when you are watching video or playing games; the shorter response time helps eliminate this effect. | [
"A Slow measurement (yellow line) will take approximately 5 seconds (attack time) to reach 80 dB and around 6 seconds (decay time) to drop back down to 50 dB. S is appropriate when measuring a signal that fluctuates a lot. \n",
"BULLET::::- Response time is the time a pixel in a monitor takes to go from active (w... |
what is the root cause of what appears to be unequal treatment of minorities by police? | From my point of view as a late 20s black male. The root cause is cultural conditioning, and that is something that will never go away which is why I strongly believe it's a problem that will never be solved. Now if you don't know what I mean by cultural conditioning, everything from kids movies, TV shows, commercials, what you hear on the news etc has an impact on the way you think. It's so deeply engrained in our society that it's impossible to break. Caucasians automatically think, whether they are racist or not that African Americans are more violent. African Americans feel from a very young age that the world is against them, you hear it a lot in rap songs on TV shows etc, so the mind state is completely different. I was taught at a very young age that it isn't a fair playing field and it would be something that I will have to live with the rest of my life. Now luckily I am semi successful, and have a family of my own and a son, I find myself passing on those same teachings to him. Fair or unfair, it doesn't matter, some people call it white privilege and I don't necessarily see it as that. To me it's more so of a black disadvantage. | [
"Research suggests that police practices, such as racial profiling, over-policing in areas populated by minorities and in-group bias may result in disproportionately high numbers of racial minorities among crime suspects. Research also suggests that there may be possible discrimination by the judicial system, which... |
do animals get sick from licking another of the same animal it's wounds/blood? | Whenever an animal hunts other animals and eats meat, they're eating some of their blood. Their stomachs just pulverize everything. Same for if they were to lick another of the same species. Same for humans, too, pretty much. Something like a blood transfusion would probably cause problems, though, because it bypasses the stomach. And humans can get problems from having too much iron, not sure if carnivores experience anything similar. | [
"Wound licking is an instinctive response in humans and many other animals to lick an injury. Dogs, cats, small rodents, horses, and primates all lick wounds. Saliva contains tissue factor which promotes the blood clotting mechanism. The enzyme lysozyme is found in many tissues and is known to attack the cell walls... |
why can't a human be frozen while still alive, and jumpstart and come back to life when they thaw out (like avatar)? | Someone with more knowledge can come by with more info, but the primary reason is that our cells cannot withstand the ice crystals that form when they are frozen. When our cells freeze they rupture and die. If all of our cells freeze, they all die. | [
"Ma Dong-chan (Ji Chang-wook) and Go Mi-ran (Won Jin-ah) are both frozen during an experiment. They wake up 20 years later instead of 24 hours later and must keep their body temperature above 30°C in order to survive.\n",
"Centuries, or possibly millennia, later, his frozen body is found by researchers who thaw h... |
What did Stalin do the first week of Barbarossa? | Stalin chose to let secretary of State Molotov announce the German invasion to the citizens of the USSR. According to Molotov's own words: "[Stalin] didn't want to be the first to speak. He needed a clear picture. He couldn't respond like an automaton to everything. He was a human being after all." During the first couple of days Stalin was simply swamped in work, formulating a military answer to the situation at the front which was quite disastrous.
After a couple of days though, Stalin seems to have suffered some sort of mental breakdown. After a meeting with, amongst others, NKVD-chief Beria and Molotov in Stalin's dacha he supposedly uttered these words: "Everything's lost. I give up. Lenin left us a proletarian state and now we've been caught with our pants down and let the whole thing go to shit." After that meeting Stalin remained in his dacha and went incommunicado. According to Molotov 'Stalin shut himself away from everybody, was receiving nobody and wasn't answering the phone'.
Because conducting a war without the leader of the country in office is quite difficult seven members of the Politburo decided to go check on Stalin themselves. They found him 'thinner, haggard, gloomy'. He asked the Politburo-members if he would still be able to lead the country to victory. They responded favourably and Stalin was appointed head of the State Defence Committee. The next day Stalin returned to Moscow and on July 3rd he held his first radio speech since the German invasion.
So did Stalin really have a breakdown? According to Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar (the main source for this answer) the breakdown 'was real enough: he was depressed and exhausted'. But Montefiore also points to quotes from Molotov and Politburo-member Anastas Mikoyan who said it was also 'for effect'. Stalin used his breakdown to see if he still had the trust of the Politburo.
EDIT Request for the downvoters: if you don't like my answer, please do give an alternative or point me towards the mistakes in my answer. | [
"Skorzeny took part in the invasion of the Soviet Union with the SS Division Das Reich and subsequently fought in several battles on the Eastern Front. In October 1941, he was in charge of a \"technical section\" of the German forces during the Battle of Moscow. His mission was to seize important buildings of the C... |
how do radio stations broadcast album art? | Radio stations have extra radio bandwidth that they don't need for the audio alone. They can use this bandwidth to send additional data to your radio such as the station name, song title, artist, or I guess the album art. It's essentially sending data over a wireless internet connection, point-to-point from the station to your radio. This is not an efficient connection though due to the distance and interference, so its uses are limited.
You usually need a radio capable of receiving this kind of data (and a station properly equipped) otherwise your radio doesn't know how to interpret this data and display it for you. It would just think it was noise and ignore that part of the signal. This system is also heavily regulated in how it can be used. | [
"The artist who works in radio art is not necessarily a trained DJ, programmer, producer, or engineer, but one who uses sound to make art. The radio medium can be used in ways which are different from what it was intended for. In that sense, the way the message is transmitted and received by an audience is as impor... |
What determines what wavelength of light is reflected from object? | The transmission/reflection spectrum of a material is a function of the [electronic structure](_URL_1_) of the molecules composing it. You can imagine an electron as a charge on a harmonic potential; the electric field in passing light excites the electron into an oscillatory motion. When the frequency of the excitory field is much slower or much faster than the electron, it doesn't move much and transmits most of the light. Near resonance, it absorbs more of the light, and just above resonance frequency, it reflects most. The overall reflection spectrum will have features of all of the atoms and molecules in the material; for example, you can see the contributions of various gases to the [atmospheric transmission spectrum](_URL_0_). If you want a more quantitative treatment of this, MIT opencourseware has [some good slides](_URL_2_) on the topic. | [
"Apart from the transmitted light there is also a reflected part. The reflection angle is equal to the incidence angle, and the amount of light that is reflected is determined by the reflectivity of the surface. The reflectivity can be calculated from the refractive index and the incidence angle with the Fresnel eq... |
the us is known as the "no vacation nation", the only developed nation without mandatory pto. | "Because why should I pay someone not to work?" That's what it amounts to basically, you can always find someone for the same job that will work for less pay or less benefits. | [
"According to the U.S. Travel Association, Americans collectively did not use 662 million vacation days in 2016. More than half of all working people in the United States forfeited paid time off at the end of the year. Two-thirds of people still do work while they are on vacation.\n",
"In all twenty-five European... |
Mathematically speaking, if a given game of Sudoku, in its initial state, has only one possible outcome, will it always solvable without having to resort to guessing a cell's value? | Sure, if it has a unique solution, it's "solvable" by giving that unique solution. Whether it's solvable by some particular algorithm is going to be very dependent on the details of that algorithm. | [
"For a standard formula_57 Sudoku this results in a probability of formula_58 for a unique solution. An analog calculation is done for all cardinality combinations. In the end the distribution of output cardinalities are summed up from the results. Note that the order of the input cardinality is interchangeable. Th... |
How can I find a certain persons coat of arms from the 1000s? | You almost certainly won't find it at all. Formal heraldry, in which each individual possesses a unique, identifying coat of arms based on symbols inherited from the father and mother, did not develop until the 13th century. It's likely that 11th century Normans decorated their shields, but this would have been cosmetic rather than heraldic in nature. | [
"The coat of arms first appeared on a seal dating from 1652 AD and later in the coat of arms collection of Arnsberg of 1700 AD. It was officially authorized on October 26, 1911 with Enkhausen's patron saint St. Laurentius holding the shield.\n",
"The earliest known coat of arms was recorded in 1724 by Sir John Hi... |
What happened to all the Aquatic Dinosaurs? | First off, the obligatory "Giant marine reptiles were not technically dinosaurs" (some were actually pretty closely related to certain lizard groups, others were in completely different groups, none were dinosaurs proper)
Second: These marine reptiles tended to be large, active top predators. Life is always a bit more precarious for top predators. Blot out the sun for a few years and you'd see phytoplankton populations crash, leading to a crash in small fish. This would decrease populations of the larger fish that top predators eat. Lacking food, many would starve. And top predators usually have pretty low populations because their food supply is limited even during the best of times, and each individual needs to eat a lot. Fewer individuals mean lower chance of survival. | [
" Nonavian dinosaurs have been found in the Niobrara Chalk despite it being located hundreds of miles out to sea at the time. The most reasonable theory is that the carcasses drifted out to sea. It is unlikely that the bodies were carried out by outgoing tides along the shorelines where they died, but rather it is ... |
when i’m driving, the wind can blow my car all over the road. when i’m parked, the wind can’t move my car one inch. why? | But it does move your car. If you're driving down the road and a gust of wind hits the side of your car it's going to push it off to the side until you correct it. That's because your car is already in motion but it's shifted slightly to the side during that motion. However while it's parked that same gust of wind will cause it to rock back and forth a bit. The only difference is that it doesn't feel as extreme because you're not in motion. | [
"However, this system causes \"wind up\" in the transmission (inter-component stress) as all the wheels are forced to rotate at the same speed, which during cornering is impossible. This led to rapid wear and breakage of the bevel gear boxes if the vehicle was used on firm surfaces, such as tarmac or concrete – in ... |
why do the us elections need donations? what for? what would happen if that was not allowed? | Funding for the various candidates does not come from the Government in the US save for a very small pool of funds used to get things started. So the money that the candidates use has to either come from their own personal savings, come from party coffers, or come from donations made directly to them for the campaign.
The parties also do not charge dues from their members as is common in many European countries. So all money that the parties have is from donations made to the party, or unused funds from candidates as they full out of the race.
The money that is collected is spent on the campaign. You have the costs of paying workers in every state to spread word of your campaign and your stances, paying pollsters to collect data, paying campaign managers and policy advisers, paying for ad time on TV and in other media, travel costs to go do speeches and to attend debates, renting locations for various events, etc. Money that is not spent can be used to reimburse any personal money spent, donated to charity, or sent to the party general fund.
If donations were not allowed the richest person would win elections because they would be able to buy the most ads and get their platform known to more people. | [
"Another method allows the candidates to raise funds from private donors, but provides matching funds for the first chunk of donations. For instance, the government might \"match\" the first $250 of every donation. This would effectively make small donations more valuable to a campaign, potentially leading them to ... |
Why are 6- (and sometimes 5-) membered rings far more prevalent in chemical compounds than rings with 4 or 3 members? | 3 and 4 membered rings have high energy bond angles that are strained and unstable. 5 and 6 membered rings allow the bond angles to relax and that allows the compound to be more stable and energetically favorable. | [
"A molecule containing one or more rings is called a cyclic compound, and a molecule containing two or more rings (either in the same or different ring systems) is termed a polycyclic compound. A molecule containing no rings is called an acyclic or open-chain compound.\n",
"Five-membered carbon rings are ubiquito... |
If it was possible to look at from close, what would the ignition of a star look like ? | It wouldn't be easily perceivable. Externally, it's actually a gradual process. Most people don't appreciate that stars begin their lives hot even before fusion starts. This is due to the energy of gravitational contraction. When you compress something to make it smaller you heat it up, and a proto-star is very highly compressed (through gravity) compared to the light-year sized nebula that spawned it. All of that energy that used to be in the form of gravitational potential energy is now in the form of heat.
As the star contracts the surface will stay at around the same temperature though the core will get hotter until fusion kicks in. Afterward the star will heat up a bit and contraction will halt as an equilibrium between fusion energy production and heat output becomes balanced. Interestingly, stars generally become better behaved and large explosive outbursts become less common as fusion kicks on. This is because in the early stages the primary mode of heat transport is convection (due to the high opacity of the plasma), which isn't very efficient and leads to large variations in temperature on the star (which can cause violent flares, mass ejections, and contributes to a very strong stellar wind). As the interior of the star heats up, radiative energy transport becomes more prominent and the star becomes differentiated into layers of material that are all at very close to the same temperature at a given radius from the core. | [
"BULLET::::- In the region of the constellation \"Perseus\", a star not visible to the naked eye, and 1,533 light years distant from Earth, explodes in a nova. The light from the star, now called GK Persei, will first be seen on Earth on February 21, 1901\n",
"A star with ≲ M ≲ explodes because of the energy cons... |
How did attacking a city generally work in the 11th/12th-ish centuries? | I will assume that you mean Europe, and specifically Western Europe.
A walled city was a very tough nut to crack for any attacking force. A walled city would have the local militia, and quite likely at least a small garrison of professional soldiers under the employ of the liege.
Now, an army needed to have overwhelming force if they were to attack a fortified city. Sun Tzu states that a three to one advantage is needed, but even that wasn't always enough. At the [Siege of Rhodes](_URL_0_), the Knights Hospitaller, numbering only about 3,500 knights and soldiers, held off 20,000 soldiers, including 3,000 janissaries of the Ottoman Empire.
Obviously, the quality of the attacking and defending forces means a lot in a situation where one is actually going in in that fashion. Such a means, however, usually wasn't the case. Sending your men at the walls with ladders, rams, and towers was usually only done when the city HAD to be taken, usually because reinforcements were coming to help the defenders, or other such situations.
Typically, it would turn into a siege. Simply put, during a siege, the attackers were trying to wait out the defenders. If possible, entrances to the city would be blocked off, your own forces would entrench (protecting them from the defenders as well as possible reinforcements), and you would starve out the defenders.
This was not always easy. Sometimes the attacking force could not block all points of supply, such as if the city were on the coast, had several gates, or the attacking force was small. Cities could hold out for months of years in this fashion. Many cities had their own sources of water such as wells within the walls for just such a situation. There were usually supplies inside for at least a short siege. Things could get pretty dire, however, with people eating horses and mules, and sometimes even people.
This isn't to say the situation was great for the attackers. Dysentery was very common with besiegers, and the risk of disease decimating an attacker was huge. In pre-modern armies, disease killed more soldiers than anything else by a huge margin.
Attackers, as stated, also had to worry about reinforcements coming to aid the defenders. Often, besiegers would build a fortress around the city, made of wood or other materials, to protect themselves from defenders sallying forth or attempts to break the siege.
And, of course, the attackers had to worry about supply as well. During the First Crusade, the crusaders ran so low on supplies that they would cut meat from dead soldiers and horses and eat it.
If the defenders surrendered early, they might expect some mercy (ie not be killed in the streets). If they tried to fight it out, there was typically no mercy. Either way, looting was very common, and soldiers generally expected to supplement whatever pay they were given with this looting of cities. | [
"Scholars had thought that invaders attacked the city in the 7th or 8th century, sacking and burning it. More recent evidence, however, seems to indicate that the burning was limited to the structures and dwellings associated primarily with the ruling class. Some think this suggests that the burning was from an int... |
basic bonsai tree care. | Bonsai are trees that are deliberately grown in a way to dwarf them, and are often sculpted into specific shapes. So you start with the standard "give it the right amount of water, food, pot space and light" that applies to almost all houseplants.
But the species, age and size of the bonsai all make a huge difference in how much of each it should be given when, and how it should be pruned.
So to avoid posting a book, it's probably best you go to bonsai care-related sites like this one: _URL_0_
and look up the specifics. | [
"Bonsai is the art of growing trees in small containers. Bonsai uses techniques such as pruning, root reduction, and shaping branches and roots to produce small trees that mimic full-sized mature trees. Bonsai is not intended for production of food, but instead mainly for contemplation by viewers, like most fine ar... |
gold trading and how it's used to "back" currency and the like | Gold was money, used in trade, made into coins or bullion, sometimes by governments, most often by gold specialists.
Currency is a substitute for the real money (though not only gold was used as money). Currency was usually a paper substitute for real money that were called "Bank Notes." Ideally, for every one unit of currency, there should be an equal amount of actual money secured somewhere, usually a bank's vault.
Instead of trading the gold itself, because it was a heavy metal and could be a target of robbery, people would leave the gold in the vault and trade the paper notes (that could be kept in pocket, even in large denominations) that represented a claim to the gold in the vault.
The USA started with BOTH a gold and silver money system. An ounce of silver was $1. An ounce of gold was $20. These were denominations set by law. About 1873 the government stopped allowing people to bring silver to the mint to make silver coins. So, essentially gold was the only public money, and all Bank Issued Currency (and all currency is bank issued, with one exception during the civil war era) was denominated by dollars, but "backed" by the appropriate proportion of gold money.
That means, theoretically, anyone should be able to take the piece of paper they got from trading to the bank that issued the paper, and get gold. FDR outlawed Americans from doing that in 1933 (and confiscated peoples gold money), and Nixon outlawed foreigners doing in in 1971 (which was only partly allowed after WWII though the "Bretton Woods" agreement.)
The reality was, of course, far more paper currency was made than ounces and tons of gold to back it up. Which is ultimately why a "gold standard" usually becomes a fraud. | [
"A return to the gold standard was considered by the US Gold Commission back in 1982, but found only minority support. In 2001 Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad proposed a new currency that would be used initially for international trade among Muslim nations, using a Modern Islamic gold dinar, defined a... |
why does the speed of a car seem slower when i'm inside it rather than outside? | Relativity!!!
when you are in a car you are in car's frame (in other words you are moving with speed of car) and when you look from window all objects have a speed equals to object's speed minus car's speed (vector addition) which slows down everything which seems to you like car is moving slow | [
"which says that the instantaneous speed of the user is proportional to the width of the tunnel. This makes intuitive sense if we consider the analogous task of driving a car down a road: the wider the road, the faster we can drive and still stay on the road, even if there are curves in the road.\n",
"The more ca... |
how does the body correctly sort food and fluid (especially when you eat and drink together)? | > When it gets down your food pipes* how does the stomach and bladder get their individual shares of what’s been consumed??
The sorting happens in the intestines. It makes intuitive sense that the solids you eat become poop and the liquids you drink become pee, but that isn't actually true!
Everything you swallow goes to your stomach, where it all gets mixed and broken down into a soup-like consistency. Then it goes to the intestines. Your intestines absorb the water out of it (including water that used to be in solid food), and absorb the nutrients. What's left over at the end of all this absorbing is poop. Poop also contains a lot of old, dead cells from the intestinal walls, and bacteria.
All the water and nutrients that got absorbed will flow around in your bloodstream, going where they need to go. Once this is done, the extra water is filtered out by the kidneys, because a lot of the waste products we need to pee out (like urea) have to be dissolved in water. | [
"Water and saliva enter through the rumen to form a liquid pool. Liquid will ultimately escape from the reticulorumen from absorption through the wall, or through passing through the reticulo-omosal orifice, as digesta does. However, since liquid cannot be trapped in the mat as digesta can, liquid passes through th... |
Why were there fewer African American soldiers in Vietnam than in other American-waged wars? | It does seem unusually low. Where did you get that statistic? [This site](_URL_0_) claims (my emphasis):
> The Vietnam War saw the *highest proportion* of blacks ever to serve in an American war. During the height of the U.S. involvement, 1965-69, blacks, who formed 11 percent of the American population, made up 12.6 percent of the soldiers in Vietnam... the percentage of black combat fatalities in that period was a staggering 14.9 percent.
Source: *The Oxford Companion to American Military History*. 1999. | [
"The Vietnam War saw many great accomplishments by many African Americans, including twenty who received the Medal of Honor for their actions. African Americans were over-represented in hazardous duty and combat roles during the conflict, and suffered disproportionately higher casualty rates. Civil-rights leaders p... |
why are germs so difficult to wash off, and yet so easy to spread? | Because even a tiny bit that gets off or that remains can then apread to cover the whole surface in a relatively small timeframe, since when bacteria multiplies, its population size basically just straight up doubles. | [
"Poorly maintained scrubbers have the potential to spread disease-causing bacteria. The problem is a result of inadequate cleaning. For example, the cause of a 2005 outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in Norway was just a few infected scrubbers. The outbreak caused 10 deaths and more than 50 cases of infection.\n",
... |
why can some people only twist their tongues in one direction? | I can't twist my tongue at all. I just tried. | [
"All the children have multicolored tongues; Antonucci said that the idea came after he saw his son and his friends with different-colored tongues because of eating different candy while he was working on a storyboard. The characters went through a number of \"walking cycles,\" a process used to determine how each ... |
Is there any facts to back up the claim that before the Vikings came, North American Indians had a homogeneous culture that covered a large portion of the Continent but due to foreign diseases brought along by the Vikings most of them died out? | You're kind of mixing up two different claims. And it's a little difficult to disentangle them in a short answer. You might start with the popular questions page topics about [Native Americans and European Diseases](_URL_0_). | [
"New studies shed light on the founding population of indigenous Americans, suggesting that their ancestry traced to both east Asian and western Eurasians who migrated to North America directly from Siberia. A 2013 study in the journal Nature reported that DNA found in the 24,000-year-old remains of a young boy in ... |
Can we tell the exact moment a subject begins to fall asleep by looking at the brain activity? Or is it a more gradual process? | The clear definition of sleep onset is not yet clear (mainly because people can report being awake, even though there are clear behavioral changes that can indicate the presence of sleep). There are various measures that can be used however to measure sleep onset.
- EMG (electromyogram) shows a gradual decrease in muscle tone as sleep approaches.
- EOG (electrooculogram) shows slow possibly asynchronous eye movements.
- EEG (electroencephalogram) will show different 'types' brainwaves that depend on different sleep stage
Generally it is thought that EEG changes to stage 1 sleep, accompanied by slow eye movements identifies the transition to sleep. So to answer your first question, it is possible to quite reliably measure the onset of sleep. Not within the millisecond but generally within a couple of seconds. To answer your second question, in what part of the brain are the most changes observed is a harder question. An EEG measures mainly cortical activity and based on this activity can make inferences about what sleep stage someone is in. However, the brain areas that are responsible for initiating and maintaining sleep are subcortical areas (areas in and near the brainstem and midbrain) and can not be measured using an EEG.
Various other measures have been used to discover which brain areas are involved in sleep (lesion studies, MRI, ERP etc). The current view proposed by Saper is that the transition between wakefulness and sleep is governed by a 'flip-flop switch' between various arousal promoting neurotransmitter systems in the brainstem and midbrain involved in waking (such as noradrenalin, histamine, acetylcholine, serotonin, dopamine) and the ventrolateral preoptic area (VLPO) involved that uses the neurotransmitter GABA. Oxerin/hypocretin plays an important role in the interaction between these two systems through the flip-flop switch i mentioned earlier, a good overview of all this is given in this short video (_URL_0_).
Consciousness in the sense of being active and responsive (which relates to sleep and therefore to measures of arousal and attention) and consciousness in the general sense (which is way more complex and involves more things) are two different things. But looking at sleep definitely gives us an understanding of one part of what consciousness is.
Sources:
- Cascardon & Dement - Normal human sleep: an overview
- Saper - The neurobiology of sleep
| [
"Using powerful brain imaging methods and electrical recordings Blumenfeld recently found that normal conscious perception of visual stimuli is accompanied by a cascade of activity moving through the brain in less than one second. These pictures provide a new view of how the brain normally processes information to ... |
why is the "peace sign/victory sign" with two fingers used with positive connotation, if it was first used by winston churchill, a british man, and the "v-sign" is an offensive hand gesture there? | Sorry I only have time for a small part of an answer, but take a careful look at the position of the palms when people make these signs: v-sign with palm out means "victory" or "peace", v-sign with palm in means "the finger" in the UK and its relatives. | [
"By July 1941, the emblematic use of the letter V had spread through occupied Europe. On 19 July, Prime Minister Winston Churchill referred approvingly to the V for Victory campaign in a speech, from which point he started using the V hand sign. Early on he sometimes gestured palm in (sometimes with a cigar between... |
Why was the Ashanti "Sika 'dwa" translated as "Golden Stool", not called the "Golden Throne"? | Slightly unrelated: stools were also given as grave goods in some Bronze Age burial mounds and Iron Age graves in Denmark and Germany, also regarded as symbols of power but still called 'stool' in the literature. Similarly, in the Caribbean chiefs also had special stools.
I am unaware of the semantics behind the distinction between a stool and a throne, and I guess that a throne could be either a chair or a stool, as your dictionary quotations show. Still, you must agree that these portable seats are quite different from, for example, [Charlemagne's throne](_URL_0_). | [
"The Golden Stool represents the Ashanti symbol of unity which is believed to possess the sunsum (soul) of the Ashanti people. In Ashanti legend, (the Golden Stool; Sika 'Dwa in the Ashanti language) of the Ashanti people—descended from heaven in a cloud of white dust and landed in the lap of the first Ashanti Empe... |
when hearing a very loud noise, that blowing sound/feeling in your ears | Sound is vibrations in the air. Loud sounds = stronger vibrations. If the sound is loud enough, you can feel the vibrations in your ear. | [
"Another example is watching someone blow up a balloon beyond its normal capacity. This is often an unsettling, even disturbing thing for a person with ligyrophobia to observe, as he or she anticipates a loud sound when the balloon pops. When balloons pop, two types of reactions are heavy breathing and panic attack... |
Did Libraries face the same issues as Digital Media currently experiences? | Copyright law is quite recent.
You probably ought to ask u/caffarelli about this matter, as it is her specialism.
I published a brief case note on this issue late 2011, however, translated roughly:
"It was not until 1837 that Prussia and the German Bund introduced copyright law. Prior to this, authors needed to ensure sufficient compensation with their first publication run because, as soon as the text was available 'in the wild', no legal remedies were available against (in today's parlance) so called 'pirates', i.e. other publishing houses. It was this - from today's perspective - ironic situation that Immanuel Kant drew attention to in 1785 in his essay, 'On the Illegality of Book Republishing' with the following remarks:
'The volume which the publisher allowed to be printed is a work of the author (opus) and belongs to the publisher after it has been printed or acquired in the form of its manuscript entirely, in order to do anything with it, as he desires, and which can be done in his own name; since this is the requirement of having a complete right to an item, i.e. ownership. The use, however, which he makes of it in a way not different from another [...] is a transaction (opera)[...].' (Kant in Berlinische Monatszeitschrift 5 (1785), p. 403 et seq.)
Insofar as this, Kant distinguishes between the item (res) and transaction (opera). Fichte concretizes this idea: 'We could make two differentiations with respect to a book: the bodily aspect thereof, the printed paper, and the intellectual content.' Fichte, however, does not see a violation of ownership in the perpetuation of use of intellectual property without a license but, rather, a transaction without assigned agency [in Common Law: agency of necessity]: 'And how is the book republisher to be treated? He is taking possession - not of the property of the publisher, not of his intellectual content, not of his thoughts - but rather of the usufruct of the property. He is acting in the name of the publisher without having been given agency to this effect, without having reached a consensual transaction with him, and is seizing the benefits which arise from this representative position[...].' (Fichte in Berlinische Monatszeitschrift 5 (1793), p. 443 et seq.)
It is indeed the case that in ius commune as in today's valid German law the transfer of ownership of an item requires its physical transfer (ius commune: traditio), and for this reason Kant and Fichte consider it to be physically impossible to transfer ownership of the intellectual contents of an item. For this reason they speak exclusively of an usufruct and not - as in today's common and incorrect parlance - of 'theft' or 'piracy', but rather of agency of necessity. Viewed historically the polemicisation of the 'copyright' debate is clearly evident." | [
"In the 21st century, there has been increasing use of the Internet to gather and retrieve data. The shift to digital libraries has greatly impacted the way people use physical libraries. Between 2002 and 2004, the average American academic library saw the overall number of transactions decline approximately 2.2%. ... |
what and how are hot jupiters formed, and what does this mean about the creation of our own solar system? | Hot Jupiters are basically gas giants that orbit very close to it's star. Usually at half earth distance or closer (less than 0.5 AU), usually towards the closer end. As a result they get very hot, to the point of glowing from the heat.
The top theory about how they form is that they form at normal gas giant distance (Jupiter range, ~5 AU or more) and make their way inwards by slurping up the rocks and gasses closer to the star, causing it to gain mass and lose kinetic energy. Another theory is that the gravity of other planets or asteroids change it's orbit over time and bring it closer to the star.
For out solar system it doesn't mean anything special, only that we don't have a hot jupiter planet. | [
"There are two general schools of thought regarding the origin of hot Jupiters: formation at a distance followed by inward migration and in-situ formation at the distances at which they're currently observed. The prevalent view is formation via orbital migration.\n",
"Although Jupiter would need to be about 75 ti... |
the difference between a fee antivirus software like avg, and a paid antivirus software like norton 360? | Computer science major here so I know a bit about this stuff, I could drag this out but to try to explain simply, a number like 98% of viruses are just evolutions if precious viruses. All antivirus softwares look for these base differences. Free antivirus software finds these and eliminates. When you start getting paid software, their goal is to now try to up sell you from "starter" to premium. So paid programs like Nortan are notoriously hated for trying to be over protective blocking programs even trying to access the internet. Go for s free program like AVG, windows security essentials, or malware bytes I promise that if your computer ever gets Fubared to the point these can't fix it, not even Nortan can.
Tldr Why pay when free programs will do it without pissing you off | [
"AVG provides \"AVG AntiVirus Free\" for Windows, \"AVG AntiVirus for Mac\" for macOS, and \"AVG AntiVirus for Android\" for Android devices. All are freemium products: They are free to download, install, update and use, but for technical support, a premium plan must be purchased.\n",
"John Dunn of \"PCWorld\", w... |
why peanuts without shells are way cheaper than peanuts with shells if it takes labor to shell them? | My fiance worked in a peanut shelling plant for years and it basically boils down to them wanting to get equal profits from shelled vs. unshelled.
Once the peanuts are shelled, they're graded and sold for different prices. There's splits, jumbos, mediums, #1s, etc. I forget all the names, but there's a few more. Even the hulls and 1416s (aka the smallest bits that fall through the sorting screens) can be sold for things like livestock feed and some other random things.
So basically, if they break the peanuts up and grade them, they can potentially make a lot more money sending them off to different places. If they get sold whole, then they have to set a price that will somewhat match up with what they would be worth sorted and graded.
To add, peanut shelling plants really aren't that different from the plants that sort whole peanuts. They all go through similar sorting machines to grade them by size/weight/color/etc. The main difference is that a shelling plant has to send the nuts through the sheller bars (which is what shells them). So there's really not that much more labor involved between the two.
NOTE: This is a very rough transcript of how my fiance explained it to me, as I asked him about it before. Also a friendly note that if you ate anything from Mars that included peanuts in the past few years, he probably touched them. | [
"Because of lack of commercial availability of moriche palm nuts, shelled unsalted peanuts have been used as a staple in the diet of captive birds. They must not be fed commercial bird seed, especially fatty seed like Sunflower.\n",
"Crushed shells are added as a calcareous supplement to the diet of laying poultr... |
Why is it that all macroscopic organisms (that I know of, anyway) are left-right symmetric? | Generally, locomotion requires two equal sides to be most efficient. On land, feet come in pairs, so do wings in the air, and fins in the water, and most things that want to move right also want to go left. So when you find things that don't move, you start to see more variety like in trees and other plants.
Yes there are non symmetric animals. Starfish, sea anemone, and many other radially symmetric creatures are examples. I guess they are still right left symmetric, but they are radially symmetric first and bilaterally symmetric as a result. Also things like sponges don't really have a body plan the way you are thinking of yet are still animals.
And there are fiddler crabs which have one arm way bigger than the other in males.
Oh and on the inside, we aren't very symmetric at all. Heart is on the left, liver on the right and so on. So we only have symmetry when we need it.
| [
"Left-right asymmetry (LR asymmetry) refers to differences in structure (symmetry breaking) across the mediolateral (left and right) plane in animals. This plane is defined with respect to the anteroposterior and dorsoventral axes and is perpendicular to both. Because the left-right plane is not strictly an axis (a... |
what's going on with the fcc? six months ago all i saw were how corrupt the fcc is. over the past month though i've seen a lot of positive articles about the fcc shifting towards public opinion. what's really going on? | The FCC has a long history of holding "hearings" and "information sessions" about decisions and then deciding based on what the incumbent telecoms want. Basically the process of public consultation was a farce to cover for a decision that already been made.
When they announced the stuff about net neutrality and that there would be public consultations almost everyone who knew about this stuff rolled their eyes so far back that they passed out.
Then something strange happened. After the elections in November, Obama waded in and went against what the telecoms wanted. This shocked basically everyone. Most people thought that the FCC chairman would just do what he wanted anyway. (While the FCC chairman is appointed by the president he does not work "for" the president as the FCC is designed to be independent).
So after Obama's proclamation most people were still skeptical. however, over the past few months each bit of information points to the FCC ruling against the telecoms. This shocks people because it so rarely happens.
Now, I stop shot of saying that this is all happening because of Obama. Wheeler (the FCC chairman) is a former telecom lobbyist and everyone basically assumed he was in the pocket of the telecoms. It's possible that everything would have happened this way regardless of what Obama said. It's possible that Wheeler is a stand up guy who's actually going to do his job... possible. | [
"Congress gave the FCC vast powers to regulate and de-regulate all digital markets when it passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by digital signature of President Clinton in the Library of Congress in February 1996. The FCC then essentially re-wrote the regulatory landscape for wireless and wireline com... |
why sms messages cannot come in bold/italic/underlined, etc | Technically, they can.
But the support for such formatting has to be widespread and unified between phone hardware manufacturers for it to be useful, which is obviously not the case now.
Also, the SMS protocol has been designed with a limited message length in mind, adding the formatting would make the message even shorter. | [
"The characteristics of the display were fairly restrictive. The text display contained only two lines of six characters each, making the use of text messaging (SMS) and data services less practical than on standard LCD displays. The display used a fixed 'digital clock' style font, with no functionality for changin... |
How did illiterate conquistadors transact business with the Spanish crown? | Illiteracy is a spectrum, not an absolute. More importantly, conquistadors were usually members of the 'middling' class, including artisans, craftsmen, and professionals (like lawyers and scribes). Most conquistadors probably could read some and at least write their names. Even if they couldn't there would have been a scribe on the expedition in their professional capacity or as just another member. Conquest expeditions were business ventures as much as they were military ones. The members of the company had shares in the enterprise and had contributed varying amounts. Bookkeepers and scribes were essential to the basic running of the expedition.
As to the general question of accommodating an illiterate population, yes, there were professional scribes and official notaries that were paid to write for others. When it came to petitioning the crown, Spanish law recognized the importance of protecting the poor and destitute. Consequently, the legal system had its own bureaucrats tasked with representing the poor and any legal matters they might have or petitions to the bureaucracy/crown (sometimes called the abogado de pobres, procurador de pobres, defensor de pobres). In the Americas, a special position was created just for indigenous petitioners/litigants (procurador de indios). If one qualified for the service, the fees for producing and submitting documents were waived as were the legal/notarial fees.
For some more on these issues see
*Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest*
*The First Letter From New Spain*
*The Men of Cajamarca*
*Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-real*
*Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500-1700*
*Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico*
| [
"By 1528, Spanish colonial power had been established in the Chiapas Highlands, and \"encomienda\" rights were being issued to individual \"conquistadores\". Spanish dominion extended from the upper drainage of the Grijalva, across Comitán and Teopisca to the Ocosingo valley. The north and northwest were incorporat... |
why does nasa go to such extreme measures to remove bacteria before traveling in space? | Imagine that NASA comes out and announce that they have found bacterial life on Mars and launches the world into a religious hysteria... Only to find out months later that "oops, it was actually just Earth bacteria that hitchhiked over there!"...
Or... imagine that we send a rover to Mars without sterilizing it. And there happens to be bacterial life on Mars... or at least, there used to be... before our stowaways killed it all off.
We want to discover life on other planets, not take it there accidentally and either a) think we found it new life b) destroy what life was actually there. | [
"There are over one hundred strains of bacteria and fungi that have been identified from manned space missions. These microorganisms survive and propagate in space. Much effort is being made to ensure that the risks from exposure to the microbes are significantly reduced. Spacecraft are sterilized as good control p... |
How did societies without any "currency" survive and do business? | * [Has any society in the last 1000 years ever successfully operated as a "cashless" society?](_URL_1_)
* ["The Inca as a nonmarket economy: Supply on command versus supply and demand" by Darrell La Lone](_URL_0_) | [
"When the great empires in Rome and India collapsed, the resulting checkerboard of small kingdoms and republics saw the gradual decline in standing armies and cities. This included the creation of hierarchical caste systems, the retreat of gold and silver to the temples and the abolition of slavery. Although hard c... |
why are interest rates so low for me if i deposit money, but so high for students who lend it? | Because you're a very small fry and the bank makes almost no money on your deposit. And you want *services*, like ATM fee forgiveness, customer service, cash back credit cards, and just putting up with your smell is going to cost you half a percent!
People with very large accounts can get 'OK' interest rates on a deposit - up to 4% for multi-millionaires who decide to keep millions in cash on hand. Because multi-millions makes a lot more for the bank than small fry's do and they don't require much more in the way of *services*.
And students get juicy bank anal lovin' because they are risks. The *real* risk is just about zero because the government buys the loans, but they like to pretend students are a big risk to lend money to. So they jack up the rate to pay for the students who can't ever find good jobs, sell the loans off to the government to eliminate the risk, and laugh all the way to the bank, only they are the bank, so they are just enjoying a hearty laugh at how they forced you to work through the motherhood years and now you're a haggard old crone and can't afford a 3rd mortgage to coax one of your rotten eggs into becoming a baby. | [
"Higher interest rates reduce the economy’s money supply because fewer people seek loans. When banks make loans, the loan proceeds are generally deposited in bank accounts that are part of the money supply. Therefore, when a person pays back a loan and no other loans are made to replace it, the amount of bank depos... |
how does a car tire maintain the same psi measurement weather or not it is on the car? | Disregarding changes due to temperature for the moment:
While you're right that the weight of the car influences the pressure, it only causes an increase in pressure in proportion to how much the weight of the car deforms the tire and causes a reduction in the volume of the tire.
Think about it like it's a balloon. A balloon that's just sitting there, with no weight on it, has whatever the static pressure is. Placing a book on that balloon will cause it to first get flat, and then burst because the pressure inside the balloon grows too high.
It really has to do with how much the tire's volume is reduced.
See [Boyle's Law](_URL_0_) | [
"There are simple hand-held tire-pressure gauges which can be temporarily attached to the valve stem to check a tire's interior air pressure. This measurement of tire inflation pressure should be made at least once a month. Accurate readings can only be obtained when the tires are 'cold' - that is at least three ho... |
South Africa | Following the Second Anglo-Boer War, the Transvaal and Orange Free State were barren. Scorched earth tactics from the British had left farmland ruined, and the concentration of the Boer population in camps had lead to a huge depopulation, with around half of the Boer children in these camps dying from disease and malnutrition. The Afrikaner population of the Free State and the Transvaal, the 'Boers' (Dutch for farmer) were a conservative agrarian people. They toiled on the land, and most had little formal education outside of learning to read the Bible. Afrikaners from the Cape Colony were distinct, they tended to have a better education and were more 'cosmopolitan'. Prior to the Witwatersrand Gold Rush which lead to the foundation of Johannesburg, neither the Transvaal or Orange Free State had any sizeable cities outside of their capitals which were also rather small. They were both very rural states, with most of their citizenship economically engaged in agriculture. Ruined farms following the war lead many families to migrate to cities, the so called ''die trek na die stad''. This lead to cities growing in size, and Johannesburg which was effectively run by English speaking business owners, was the main draw to these internal migrants. This wave of migration was later exacerbated by the modernisation of farming forcing more to move on to the cities. When moving to these cities the Afrikaners were left on the fringes, often in the worse areas, sometimes close to the informal settlements of the native bantus who were used as a pool of cheap labour primarily in the mining sector. The language of business, commerce, the civil service and in some cases even education was primarily conducted in English. The Afrikaners were mostly looked down upon as a simple people, and there was much prejudice against Afrikaans which many considered a ''kitchen language'', only suitable for communication with your black workers. With poor command of the English language and little formal education these poor Afrikaners had to resort to manual labour, working for little. So you had the Afrikaners living in an alien place, looked down upon by established English speakers, at a disadvantage socially and in many cases competing with blacks for jobs.
The animosity the Afrikaners had towards the British was considerable from the memory of the Second Anglo-Boer War, and following South Africa's entry into the First World War, a small minority attempted an uprising on behalf of leaving the Empire and joining the Germans, the 'Maritz Rebellion'. This was crushed, and politically the consensus was still on the whole for reconciliation and Afrikaners and English working together in South Africa as a part of the British Empire. However a group of Afrikaners, recognising the need for their people to expand their political power formed the Afrikanerbond, a secret society which was the main driving force behind the Afrikaner nationalist movement.
The close proximity of blacks and Afrikaners, and their competition in the labour market led to a series of labour disputes. The most notable of these was the Rand Rebellion in 1922. Upset at the use of black labour being exploited by business owners thereby depressing the wages of white workers and leading to unemployment for whites, along with blacks being promoted to positions of authority, white workers backed by the South African Labour Party and communists held a strike which almost became an uprising. Their slogan was ''Workers of the world unite, and fight for a white South Africa'', which is ironic given the role socialist movements had in the eventual democratisation of South Africa and the downfall of Apartheid and the non-racial aspect of socialism in general. The government put down the rebellion with brutal force. They attempted to meet some of the demands, passing legislating allowing for trade unions and also banning black membership of trade unions. But the memory of the Army and Air Force using deadly force against citizens, bombing them with tanks, planes and artillery was too fresh, and the policy change too weak and too late. The nominally pro-British party, the South African Party, lost to a coalition of the Afrikaner nationalist National Party and Labour party which sought to promote the interests of Afrikaners and white workers respectively. The National Party grew out of dissatisfaction with the direction of the South African Party, and the desire to promote the interest of Afrikaners and ensure that ties with Britain were kept to a minimum with the eventual goal of a republic. This government introduced a number of populist measures which restricted blacks participation in the workforce to menial roles and legally favoured the hiring of white workers. On top of this they ensured that white workers were paid a minimum wage, introduced improved working conditions and expanded social welfare. Dutch and English had both been official languages of the Union, however in practice very few people spoke 'proper' Dutch, with Afrikaans by this point being rather distinct. Also in practice English had a far more prominent role as an official language. In an effort towards equality, they introduced an act ensuring that Afrikaans had equal standing with English and Dutch, and promoted the use of Afrikaans in the civil service.
Years later following the impact of the Great Depression, the National Party and South African Party merged into the United Party. This would steer South Africa through the Great Depression, which further exacerbated the problem of white poverty. There was an uneasy peace between the Afrikaner nationalists and the South African Party faction, both based on a belief in white supremacy although differing in their eventual vision for the country uniting to help mitigate the effects of the depression. Following the start of the Second World War, there was considerable arguments within the party with those wanting South Africa to remain neutral lead by J.B.M Hertzog, and those wanting to join the British being lead by Jan Smuts. Following a vote the parliament decided to declare war on Germany, Hertzog resigned and Jan Smuts took leadership of the United Party and became Prime Minister. Hertzog started a breakaway nationalist party, and in his absence the United Party rather than being a coalition of white interests, increasingly became more liberal and representative of the views of those who supported relations with the Empire.
The backdrop to the 1948 election was interesting. Smuts was incredibly popular for his role as an elder statesman and his leadership of the country, and arguably even the Allies, during the war. However despite having been a general for the Boers during the Second Anglo-Boer War, and being a considerable military and political leader through both world wars, his efforts toward reconciliation with the British and his support of the British Empire made him despised by a considerable number of his kin. On the issue of race, the United Party was nominally in favour of the limited existing political representation that existed for coloureds, blacks and Indians, while vaguely acknowledging and paying lip service to an eventual racial political integration, even if not acceptable for the foreseeable future. In contrast the nationalists promised to introduce laws permanently separating whites and blacks, and enshrine white supremacy de jure. The 1940s lead to a huge moral panic over black violence and crime against whites, a part of the ''swart gevaar''. Blacks were now starting to organise more, and protest against injustices which further fed the fear of a black uprising. The nationalist used this in order to attract poorer whites voters who were scared of black crime and black political power and racial equality harming their livelihoods. Despite the United Party winning more votes, the United Party lost it's majority with a coalition of Afrikaner Nationalist parties taking power lead by D.F. Malan. By carefully targeting and playing on the concerns of urban Afrikaners and relying on the support of rural Afrikaners they were able to get a majority under first past the post. Malan would introduce harsher laws enshrining segregation against blacks, coloureds and Indians into law which is what we now know as Apartheid. The country was run by the National Party from 1948 until the first universal democratic elections in 1994.
So in summary, yes Afrikaners were at a disadvantage to English speaking South Africans following the union of South Africa, and discriminated against, even if not legally. A large bloc of poor urban Afrikaners were competing with blacks for jobs and resources, although I must insist on saying that they were still always considerably better off than the black population. This, coupled with tensions between Afrikaners and English speaking South Africans led to the rise of Afrikaner nationalism, which helped improve overall conditions for white workers but at the expense of black workers. Backlash to Jan Smuts and his pro-British stance, coupled with fears of the black population contributed to the nationalists victory in 1948, with the rise of Apartheid.
sources:
South Africa: The First Man, the Last Nation - R.W. Johnson
Diamonds, Gold and War: The Making of South Africa - Martin Meredith
Churchill and Smuts: The Friendship - Richard Steyn
A History of South Africa - Leonard Thompson
Cry, the beloved country - Alan Paton
(it's fiction, but I feel it helps a lot in understanding the general feeling of South Africa during the 1940s) | [
"In 1930 Walker gave an influential lecture in Oxford, printed as \"The frontier tradition in South African history\" (Oxford University Press, London, 1930), in which Walker outlined his theory that the origins of the apartheid system in South Africa lay in conflict between blacks and whites on the frontier region... |
what is the purpose of using gpa instead of a percent average? | GPA is an easier way for people to tell at a glance, what grades you got more often at school:
4 is A
3 is B
2 is C
1 is D
and anything lower than that, you fail at life. | [
"The GPI indicator is based on the concept of sustainable income, presented by economist John Hicks (1948). The sustainable income is the amount a person or an economy can consume during one period without decreasing his or her consumption during the next period. In the same manner, GPI depicts the state of welfare... |
how can clouds can get in the way of the sun, but don't block out the light? | Clouds do not block the sun, they change the speed of the light and defuse the light coming though them from the sun. This is why the tops of thunderclouds look like they are glowing while the bottom are dark, the light has slowed so far down it is no longer defuses. | [
"There is essentially no direct sunlight under an overcast sky, so all light is then diffuse sky radiation. The flux of light is not very wavelength-dependent because the cloud droplets are larger than the light's wavelength and scatter all colors approximately equally. The light passes through the translucent clou... |
what is fiber-optics? how does it differ from traditional sources of internet? | It's basically a laser fired down a hair-thin glass cable. It travels at the speed of light, has very little signal degradation due to interference, and by using different freq of light multiple signals can be sent at the same time.
If you have fiber internet there will be a special modem installed where it connects to your home network. | [
"A fiber optic display is a light-emitting display that uses fiber optics to display images or text. Fiber-optic displays can either be static or dynamic, with the typical lighting source being halogen light bulbs.\n",
"Optical fiber is used as a medium for telecommunication and computer networking because it is ... |
why did i prefer eating sweets as kid but now as i got older i prefer savory food. | Children prefer sweet foods because, as a general rule, sweet foods contain more energy and children need more calories in relation to their body weight. Children also have more tastebuds and dislike bitter tastes because they experience them more intensely. | [
"The process of acquiring a taste can involve developmental maturation, genetics (of both taste sensitivity and personality), family example, and biochemical reward properties of foods. Infants are born preferring sweet foods and rejecting sour and bitter tastes, and they develop a preference for salt at approximat... |
I know probiotics have been discussed before, but on the question of "recolonizing the gut" with good bacteria- is this even possible without a fecal transplant? | From what I've read in journal articles probiotics only cause a transient change in the gut microflora. There is now good data to suggest they can have an effect improving many conditions, such as lactose maldigestion and antibiotic associated diarrhea (particular attention must be paid to the specific strain of micro-organism used, however). Whereas prebiotics may have a lasting effect. Prebiotics are defined as "a selectively fermented ingredient that allows specific changes, both in the composition and/or activity in the gastrointestinal microflora that confers benefits upon host well being and health". A combination of prebiotic and probiotic is a synbiotic. Today, only bifidogenic, non-digestible oligosaccharides fulfill all the criteria for prebiotic classification.
One very good article I found which sums up the current field nicely is - Probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics (2008) De Vrese, M. , Schrezenmeir, J.
Google that and you should be able to read the abstract. | [
"Current research suggests that manipulating the intestinal microbiota may be able to treat or prevent allergies and other immune-related conditions. Various approaches are under investigation. Probiotics (drinks or foods) have never been shown to reintroduce microbes to the gut. As yet, therapeutically relevant mi... |
why does sex, for most people, feel good. i understand the release of hormones but why are they released. | A lot of questions about biology can be answered this way:
"Is there a good evolutionary reason why people who had that trait would be more successful than those who didn't?"
In the case of sex feeling good, yes.
Imagine at some point a bunch of human ancestors had a certain amount of sex. Then one was born with a mutation that released extra endorphins during sex, making it extra pleasurable. That leads to that individual having more sex and having more offspring, passing on that gene.
Over time, that gene is *selected for*, meaning that eventually most individuals have that gene.
So why does sex feel good?
Because if it didn't, your ancestors wouldn't have had as much sex, and then you wouldn't be here today to ask that question.
| [
"Sexual intimacy, as well as orgasms, increases levels of the hormone oxytocin, also known as \"the love hormone\", which helps people bond and build trust. Sexual activity is also known as one of many mood repair strategies, which means it can be used to help dissipate feelings of sadness or depression.\n",
"Oth... |
What did Roman provincial aristocracy and wealthy citizens do for fun? | Believe it or not, they engaged in the same types of leisure as their counterparts back at Rome: they went to the horse races in the circus, they saw animal hunts, they watched gladiators, they went to the theater, and they went to their country villas to get away from the hubbub and relax. At Colchester, for instance, there was a Roman circus and a theater, and an amphitheater (for animal hunts and gladiators) at London. Britain is also littered with Roman-style elite villas (just do a quick search). There are numerous examples of such structures in Spain as well. Check out Merida, or Toledo, or [Italica](_URL_0_). | [
"The youth of Rome had several forms of athletic play and exercise, such as jumping, wrestling, boxing, and racing. In the countryside, pastimes for the wealthy also included fishing and hunting. The Romans also had several forms of ball playing, including one resembling handball. Dice games, board games, and gambl... |
First King or Queen of England | We have no particular idea who the first person to call himself a king in what's now England; the word in various forms (*cyning, kyningas, cyningas, cyninges, king*) goes back to Old English. But if you're asking about the first person to be king of "England" as a political entity, the answer is fairly straightforward. The first king of "the English" as he was styled was Alfred the Great, of the house of Wessex, whose descendants ruled England until the time of Queen Anne; Alfred's grandson Æthelstan (son of Edward the Elder and his first wife Ecgwynn) is generally considered the first king of "England." There were multiple small kingdoms in what's now England in Alfred's day, and as king of Wessex he made it a political priority to unite the other "English" kingdoms (roughly, Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria) into a political entity that could stand against the Danish invasions.
Here are some older threads on the topic: _URL_0_
and
_URL_0_ | [
"In 1604 James I, who had inherited the English throne the previous year, adopted the title (now usually rendered in English rather than Latin) \"King of Great Britain\". The English and Scottish parliaments, however, did not recognise this title until the Acts of Union of 1707 under Queen Anne (who was \"Queen of ... |
the difference between a turtle and a tortoise. | Turtles are aquatic. They mostly live in water and have webbed front feet. Tortoises are land animals; they have regular feet. I think that's the main difference. Besides that, I am sure they in live different parts of the world, have different diets, and have different shells and other anatomy. | [
"Tortoises () are reptile species of the family Testudinidae of the order Testudines (the turtles). They are particularly distinguished from turtles by being land-dwelling, while many (though not all) turtle species are at least partly aquatic. However, like turtles, tortoises have a shell to protect from predation... |
why can't allied forces bomb these long isis military parades we see pictures/video of. | They just keep forgetting to apply for the permits, so there is no way of knowing where the next parade will be held, whether it will be large enough to warrant bombing or just strafing. Damn terrorists. | [
"Small drones and quadcopters have been used for strikes by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. A group of twelve or more have been piloted by specially trained pilots to drop munitions onto enemy forces. They have been able to evade ground defense forces.\n",
"During the Battle of Mosul it was reported that com... |
why do emergency services wrap people in a blanket, if they're in shock? what does this do? | Preventing hypothermia, and psychological comfort. Avast ye! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:
1. [ELI5:Why is it after a person is saved from a fire, they are wrapped in a blanket afterwards? ](_URL_0_) ^(_66 comments_)
1. [ELI5: Why is it that people are given the grey 'safety blankets' after traumatic events? ](_URL_1_) ^(_14 comments_)
1. [[ELI5] How do shock blankets work? ](_URL_2_) ^(_4 comments_)
| [
"A blanket is often used since hypothermia is a major risk for a casualty. The blanket must be wrapped around the casualty to avoid the heat leak from below (this is not necessary when the stretcher has a mattress, e.g. a vacuum mattress, or in case of an ambulance stretcher). For this purpose, the blanket is put b... |
How do bacterial vaccines (like whooping cough vaccination) work? I was always told growing up only viruses could be vaccinated against. | Originally, bacterial vaccines were made from killed bacteria. These vaccines generally have more side effects because of the presence of parts of the bacterial membrane called endotoxins that trigger fever and inflammation even in very small quantities. In addition, many times vaccinating with the whole bacteria wasn't protective. The immune system would still target the bacteria, but the only part that usually matters is the toxins it makes or the molecules it uses to stick to your cells.
Most modern bacterial vaccines have only a few components. Tetanus vaccine for instance only has the tetanus toxin, not the whole bacteria. Whooping cough also make specific toxins and adhesion molecules that are targeted. These vaccines have fewer side effects and are chosen so they are just as effective as the older vaccines, but are rarely as long lasting as actual infection. But many infections don't lead to life long immunity either, like whooping cough which even if you are infected as a child you can still get the same strain as an adult. | [
"While most antivirals treat viral infection, vaccines are a preemptive first line of defense against pathogens. Vaccination involves the introduction (i.e. via injection) of a small amount of typically inactivated or attenuated antigenic material to stimulate an individual's immune system. The immune system respon... |
with the japanese being very strong in the automotive industry - why are most passenger jets made by airbus (french) and boeing (american)? | From _URL_0_
> Now, to the two nations you specifically mentioned in your question. First, Japan provides significant airframe components used in the production of Boeing airliners -- Mitsubishi Heavy builds 787 wings in Nagoya, and Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd will be building "wing boxes" for the coming 777X fleet. The Japanese aerospace industry is quite capable of designing and building its own aircraft, but there's a huge capital investment associated with doing so, and it seems to me that, over time, they've made a conscious decision to position themselves to buy and improve on end products (like fighters) rather than creating them themselves.
Also, being good at making cars does not automatically mean a country will excel at making airplanes. | [
"BULLET::::- Japan Airlines announces that it will purchase 31 A350 airliners from Airbus for $9,500,000,000 to replace its fleet of Boeing 777s. The announcement ends Boeings decades-long dominance of the Japanese market; before the Japan Airlines deal with Airbus, Boeing and Airbus had competed head-to-head in al... |
how can geese be so intimidating to bigger animals? would a human be able to do the same? | I don't know if you've ever been attacked by a goose. But they are mean motherfuckers and they can hurt you. Plus zero fear, a 5' wingspan, and usually hang out in gangs. That strategy also tends to work for humans wanting to intimidate others. | [
"The same aggressive, territorial behavior can be utilized in the guard capacity. Geese are intelligent enough to discern unusual people or sounds from usual stimuli. Their loud honking will alert humans when the geese are alarmed.\n",
"Like their wild ancestors, domestic geese are very protective of their offspr... |
Who are the mysterious invaders who ended the Bronze Age? Why have I never heard this before. | Not to forestall further (in-depth comprehensive) answers, but you are likely thinking of the 'Sea Peoples', and there's been a bunch of discussion of that topic in this subreddit! There's [a section of our Frequently Asked Questions page about the Sea People](_URL_3_) featuring not only a great explanation of [where the term 'Sea Peoples' comes from, and why it isn't that mysterious by /u/bentresh with regards to the Philistines](_URL_4_) and [with regards to other groups in a separate reply](_URL_2_). Additionally there's not only [a good summary of what we know about the phenomenon by /u/kookingpot](_URL_1_), but even [an AMA with the author of *1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed*](_URL_0_). | [
"The late Bronze Age (14th–13th–12th centuries BCE) saw a vast migration of the so-called Sea Peoples, described in ancient Egyptian sources. They destroyed Mycenaean and Hittite sites and also attacked Egypt. According to Giovanni Ugas, the Sherden, one of the most important tribes of the sea peoples, are to be id... |
why does stropping a blade with leather make it sharper? | Basically, when you use a blade, the edge gets tiny imperfections which bring the edge out of alignment. Stropping realigns the edge of the blade without removing any material like a stone would.
[This](_URL_0_) website is great for visualising what is actually happening, as it has pictures of blade edges using a scanning electron microscope so you can really see what is going on at each stage of sharpening. | [
"A sharp object works by concentrating forces which creates a high pressure due to the very small area of the edge, but high pressures can nick a thin blade or even cause it to roll over into a rounded tube when it is used against hard materials. An irregular material or angled cut is also likely to apply much more... |
why did/do the mafia get involved in industries such as waste management and construction? | It's easier to launder money through a legitimate business, especially one with extremely variable costs | [
"The 1950s saw the Mafia heavily penetrate the construction and cement industries. The cement business was appealing to the Mafia because it allows high levels of local economic involvement and is a good front for illegitimate operations.\n",
"The Mafia plays a key role in both public and private corruption. Aris... |
why is fresh food considered better than packaged food? | Packaged food is usually filled with preservatives that allow it to be packaged and stored for a while. These preservatives aren't particularly tasty or good for you, so fresh food is valued more. | [
"Many food banks don't accept fresh produce, preferring canned or packaged food due to health and safety concerns, though some have tried to change this as part of a growing worldwide awareness of the importance of nutrition. As an example, in 2012, London Food Bank (Canada) started accepting perishable food, repor... |
what would happen to animals that sleep during the winter if there where a sudden ice age? | They'd quite possibly die from the unusual weather conditions, as would many animals that don't hibernate. A 'sudden ice age' would be a very traumatic event for any and all ecosystems. | [
"Winter rest in an animal is different from true hibernation, since the metabolism is not reduced drastically. The body temperature is not significantly lowered, however the heart rate is reduced. This means that animals like the raccoon can quickly become active again if temperatures rise or the snow melts. Other ... |
How did scientists discover that mars had a magnetic field? | The Mars Global Surveyor was a probe sent to Mars with the purpose of detecting its magnetic field. It had a magnetometer on board that mapped the entire magnetic field of Mars from orbit.
Another way is by observing the effects of the magnetic anomalies on particles. Basically magnetic fields will deflect charged particles. If there is a small region on Mars with a stronger magnetic field the particles will be deflected more strongly there. This was seen by the electron spectrometer on Mars Express.
Some sources:
_URL_2_
_URL_3_
_URL_0_
_URL_1_
| [
"Observations made of the magnetic field of Mars by the \"Mars Global Surveyor\" spacecraft in 1999 showed patterns of magnetic striping discovered on this planet. Some scientists interpreted these as requiring plate tectonic processes, such as seafloor spreading. However, their data fail a \"magnetic reversal test... |
how do capacitors work? why do they explode? | The simplest capacitor is two metal plates separated from each other by something that doesn't conduct electricity (a dielectric). They store charge because when a voltage is put across them, this causes some of the electrons on the positive plate to move to the negative one. If you then disconnect the capacitor, the electrons stay where they are in the capacitor, because there's no path. Reconnecting the capacitor into a circuit causes the charge stored on the plates to go to zero - the extra electrons on the negative plate move through the circuit until there are as many on the positive plate as the negative.
For capacitors that need to store a lot of charge for a given voltage across them (I.e.high capacitance), someone realised all you have to do is have a couple of bits of aluminium, one of which is coated in oxide. You then put both of these in a solution of ions that conducts electricity (an electrolyte, hence the name electrolytic capacitor) and wrap the two bits of aluminium up really tight and pot them in a metal can so it doesn't take up to much space.
The reason these guys blow up is if the external voltage to charge up the capacitor is the wrong way round, the voltage makes the oxide layer break down (the same way you can make hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysing water). When that happens, not only are you releasing oxygen un a sealed vessel, but the two bits of aluminium are no longer insulated from each other, so you get a short circuit, which heats up the electrolyte and makes it boil. It is this which eventually leads to a rather loud bang. | [
"Capacitors may catastrophically fail when subjected to voltages or currents beyond their rating, or as they reach their normal end of life. Dielectric or metal interconnection failures may create arcing that vaporizes the dielectric fluid, resulting in case bulging, rupture, or even an explosion. Capacitors used i... |
How did taking ships as prizes actually work? | (1/2)
The procedures surrounding this varied a lot by country and time and place but typically in the 17th-18th centuries there wasn't much of a rigid legal procedure that was followed.
The mid-17th century Caribbean was famous for the totally corrupt English and French governors who unscrupulously sold privateering commissions/letters of marque to anyone who could pay, often whether or not there was actually a war going on. Even when buccaneers didn't have ostensibly valid commissions at all, they would commonly just continue using outdated ones or lie and claim they had them when attacking a ship, and they could easily get away with this by paying off the same local governors who sold them their phony or semi-legal commissions in the first place and profited off their plunder. The line between privateer and pirate was often very fuzzy and that's what the term "buccaneer" mainly describes. Famous "pirate havens" like Tortuga and Port Royal were based on this type of corrupt relationship between buccaneers and local authorities which essentially gave the buccaneers or "privateers" free reign in the Caribbean to plunder what they liked even in times of peace as long as they stayed away from ships of their own nation. I made [another post](_URL_0_) that talks more about this.
As for how plunder was divided up, buccaneers had a system for that but the government was usually cut out of it. They also didn't have any standard pay. Nearly all privateers famously operated according to the expression "No prey, no pay" meaning that the only payment they could expect was plunder from what they captured. And they wouldn't return to port to divide up their loot either because they didn't have to. Instead they would almost always either do it at sea or go to some isolated beach or cay or island where they didn't have to be under the watchful eye of any government officials. The former French buccaneer Alexandre Exquemelin in his book *The Buccaneers of America* published in 1678 describes the custom for buccaneering voyages like this:
> When the provisions are on board and the ship is ready to sail, the buccaneers resolve by common vote where they shall cruise. They also draw up an agreement or *chasse partie,* in which is specified what the captain shall have for himself and for the use of his vessel. Usually they agree on the following terms. Providing they capture a prize, first of all these amounts would be deducted from the whole capital. The hunter's pay would generally be 200 pieces of eight. The carpenter, for his work in repairing and fitting out the ship, would be paid 100 or 150 pieces of eight. The surgeon would receive 200 or 250 pieces of eight for his medical supplies, according to the size of the ship.
> Then came the agreed rewards for the wounded, who might have lost a limb or suffered other injuries. They would be compensated as follows: for the loss of a right arm, 600 pieces of eight or six slaves; for a left arm, 500 pieces of eight or five slaves. The loss of a right leg also brought 500 pieces of eight or five slaves in compensation; a left leg, 400 or four slaves; an eye, 100 or one slave, and the same award was made for the loss of a finger. If a man lost the use of an arm, he would get as much as if it had been cut off, and a severe internal injury which meant the victim had to have a pipe inserted in his body would earn 500 pieces of eight or five slaves in recompense.
> **These amounts having first been withdrawn from the capital, the rest of the prize would be divided into as many portions as men on the ship. The captain draws four or five men's portions for the use of his ship, perhaps even more, and two portions for himself. The rest of the men share uniformly, and the boys get half a man's share.**
> **When a ship has been captured, the men decide whether the captain should keep it or not: if the prize is better than their own vessel, they take it and set fire to the other.** When a ship is robbed, nobody must plunder and keep his loot to himself. Everything taken -- money, jewels, precious stones and goods -- must be shared among them all, without any man enjoying a penny more than his fair share. To prevent deceit, before the booty is distributed everyone has to swear an oath on the Bible that he has not kept for himself so much as the value of a sixpence, whether in silk, linen, wool, gold, silver, jewels, clothes or shot, from all the capture. And should any man be found to have made a false oath, he would be banished from the rovers, and never more be allowed in their company.
From that last part, you can see how ships themselves were not always the main prize and they wouldn't always be brought back to port (the main prize was usually the money and cargo and slaves that a ship carried). Exquemelin says that buccaneers would either burn the captured ship or switch their ship for that before burning it, but when they were feeling friendlier buccaneers would sometimes simply give the ship back to the captured crew after looting it and send them on their way -- there are many examples of this. Other times, if the buccaneers had an excess of crew or they wanted to keep both ships, they might split into two companies with each taking command of one ship.
When buccaneers eventually did return to ports such as Tortuga or Petit-Goâve or Port Royal to spend their plunder, all they would pretty much have to do is *say* they captured it legitimately and no one would bring them to trial, least of all the governor who they were most likely paying off with a cut of their plunder. The Spanish, who were by far the most common targets of both English and French buccaneers, often bitterly complained at being attacked liked this even when there wasn't a war going on, but prior to 1670 their complaints pretty much got laughed off and ignored by local governors and the English and French governments. Even after 1670, Charles II of England tacitly condoned many buccaneers like Henry Morgan, who sacked the Spanish city of Panama in 1671 in clear violation of the 1670 Treaty of Madrid, and actually knighted him in 1674 before making him the new governor of Jamaica where he served until his death in 1688. Charles II also granted a royal pardon to the buccaneer Bartholomew Sharp and others in 1682 after they had spent several years plundering Spanish possessions along the Pacific coasts of America, again despite there being no war. Probably one reason Charles II did this in the latter case was because Bartholomew Sharp along with his compatriots (Basil Ringrose, William Dampier and others) were among the first Englishmen to penetrate and explore the Pacific Ocean since Sir Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish had a century earlier, and they all published extensive and valuable descriptions of their voyages soon after returning to England. | [
"Taking the prize before a prize court might be impractical for any number of reasons like bad weather, shortage of prize crew, dwindling water and provisions, or the proximity of an overpowering enemy force — in which case a vessel might be ransomed. That is, instead of destroying her on the spot as was their prer... |
Did France ever consider intervening in the English Civil War? If not, why not? | [This answer](_URL_0_) from /u/ETFox explains the limited involvement of the continent. | [
"The English at this point were unable to prosecute the war any further: the English territories in France could not withstand more taxation, whereas the English state was nearing bankruptcy, especially after the costly but failed expedition of the Duke of Somerset in 1443. A truce would provide the English a much ... |
how does the human body/mind know to growing when your young? and when to stop? | **Hormones** and **DNA** regulate when and how our bodies grow and age.
DNA encodes all of the information on the physical structure of our bodies, from the overarching human form to the microscopic insides of our cells. This information is translated into physical structures, like proteins, which then make up successively more complicated parts of our bodies. Each part that is made helps regulate how other parts attach to it, but this information was all originally contained within DNA.
One of the most important parts of growth patterns comes from hormones, especially testosterone, estrogen, and human growth hormone. These are chemicals which are released into the bloodstream to send general signals to all parts of the body. Whenever some cells receive these signals, they 'know' to grow. However, all of this growth is regulated at the most basic level by the information encoded in our DNA. | [
"Development of the human body is the process of growth to maturity. The process begins with fertilisation, where an egg released from the ovary of a female is penetrated by sperm. The egg then lodges in the uterus, where an embryo and later fetus develop until birth. Growth and development occur after birth, and i... |
why is the yogurt on the rim of the cup always a little different in texture from the rest of the yogurt? | You mean the stuff that's seperate from the rest right? It's a smaller quantity and is exposed to the bit of air inside the container so it dries out.
It's a little thicker because of a lower moisture content. | [
"The American franchise of Yoplait added a rim on the bottom of the yogurt containers to keep animals such as skunks from accidentally getting their heads caught. A label was added to the container stating: \"Protect Wildlife: Crush Cup Before Disposal.\"\n",
"The beverage has a light, somewhat milky, and slightl... |
Can children eat rare or med rare steak? | None that I can think of. The inside of a piece of uncut meat(beef) is sterile. Make sure that the meat isn't mechanically tenderized or injected with a brine solution.
The problem arises when meat is ground because then the potentially contaminated outside becomes the same as the previously sterile inside.
Other meats are different. As long as pork isn't injected, you can probably serve it slightly pink but do so with care. Don't do it with chicken. | [
"Alternatively, the tenderized steak may be cut into strips, breaded, deep fried, and served for breakfast with eggs and toast or for other meals in a basket with fries and cream gravy. Either is then known as \"finger steaks\".\n",
"BULLET::::- Salisbury steak – Dr. James H. Salisbury (1823–1905), early U.S. hea... |
why summer night air has that discinct "peaceful" smell? | **TL;DR:** *Dust mostly is gone because the wind dies, air is moister and cooler and so conducts smells better, there's not as many "bad smells" that you get from a hot sun, and a lot of plants that bloom at night smell awesome.*
So, lots of reasons. Let's get started.
The first reason is that evening air during the summer usually comes with a reduction in wind. If you're living in a dusty area, such as a city with lots of concrete or a rural place that's off a dirt road, all the wind dying means the dust or grit settle out, and the air "feels" cleaner and no longer carries the smell of all that dirt.
Second, sun bakes asphalt surfaces and makes any spilled gas, tar or rubber on them smell stronger. At night, this heating effect goes away and so does its acrid smell (as does a lot of car exhaust). You might not notice it being there during the day, but you will likely notice it not being there as much at night.
Next, the air's moisture content goes up and its temperature goes down. We smell things much better when the air is moist. You can see this yourself by going out of a room where someone had a shower with scented soap and then going back into it - the wave of moist air smells a lot stronger - or going into a room with an indoor chlorinated pool. This can be amplified a LOT if there's a late-day shower that passed through.
And a lot of night-flowering plants like jasmine have really nice smells because they rely on scent rather than visible light to attract the types of creatures that pollinate them. A summer's evening near a jasmine hedge is wonderful.
Probably other reasons too. | [
"Due to its high altitude the city temperatures can reach temperatures below 0 °C. Many homes burn firewood for warmth in cold weather. This can give the city a slightly smoky smell although the number of homes burning firewood for warmth has dropped in the last two decades as more homes are integrating climate-con... |
Birds such as pigeons and sea gulls are extremely successful in urban environments, why don't we see proportional numbers of predatory birds in cities as well? | Peregrine falcons were actually quite common in cities [for at least two centuries.](_URL_1_) What happened was that people started spraying DDT and the falcons saw their populations collapse as it moves up the food chain.
Not that DDT is banned, they're [coming back to the cities](_URL_0_). One problem they face though is that they're not nestbuilders, they naturally prefer to lay their eggs on cliffs, in a small indentation. Human buildings tend not to have such indentations so there is a problem with the eggs starting to roll around. An unintended consequence of modern architecture it seems. | [
"Large flocks of pigeons and starlings in cities are often considered as a nuisance, and techniques to reduce their populations or their impacts are constantly innovated. Birds are also of medical importance, and their role as carriers of human diseases such as Japanese encephalitis, West Nile virus, and influenza ... |
caffeine jitters | Caffeine like all chemicals, can change the way your body functions. Caffeine stimulates the adrenal glads, producing adrenalin. Your body literally is chemically tricked into thinking it's a in a fight or flight situation.
This can eventually lead to things like heart palpitations, sweaty palms, and all sorts of adrenaline produced symptoms.
Large amount of caffeine is essentially what a panic attack can physically feel like, without the mental components.
| [
"Caffeine, alcohol, modafinil, over the counter medicine, and other drugs are all forms of neurohacking. Every one of these substances alters or \"tricks\" the brain into desirable conditions. When ingesting caffeine, the brain is fooled into thinking the body has energy and keeps the consumer awake. The brain's ne... |
If space is expanding, why has the Big Crunch been discredited? | Because we have an accelerating expansion, meaning that there must be a dark energy or similar component.
Dark energy accelerates the expansion while matter slows it down. Moreover, the expansion itself dilutes matter and makes its density smaller while dark energy stays the same.
Therefore the expansion certainly never stops accelerating, therefore it never slows down.
In the simplest model of dark energy the Universe will approach a de Sitter situation where it expands perfectly exponentially with time, and all non dark energy components get diluted away.
All of this wouldn't be true if the Universe had a significant positive spatial curvature, but that's kind of a messy bussiness. It looks like we're not allowed to be able to measure the sign of the curvature (it's compatible with zero), and if inflation is correct then we really aren't. | [
"The Big Crunch scenario hypothesized that the density of matter throughout the universe is sufficiently high that gravitational attraction will overcome the expansion which began with the Big Bang. The FLRW cosmology can predict whether the expansion will eventually stop based on the average energy density, Hubble... |
Are new archaeological discoveries still being made in Egyptology? | The Egyptian civilization lasted for thousands of years from the pre-dynastic period (5500 B.C.E) to The Roman Period (30 B.C.E-~300 C.E). (1) There is a wealth of information still to be discovered. There are archaeologists in the deserts now still making discoveries. There are several academic journals on the subject of Egyptian Archaeology and if you have access to JSTOR, I'd recommend you check them out. If you would like to keep up with archaeological discoveries, I'd suggest checking out this site (_URL_0_) With any type of archaeology, there is always more to find even when those findings are simply more pottery sherds.
(1):Wilkinson, Toby A. H. The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt. New York: Random House, 2010. | [
"Active support by the museum for excavations in Egypt continued to result in important acquisitions throughout the 20th century until changes in antiquities laws in Egypt led to the suspension of policies allowing finds to be exported, although divisions still continue in Sudan. The British Museum conducted its ow... |
how a company changes when it is acquired by another company | Every merger or acquisition is different. There is no single answer here | [
"Companies view acquisitions as an opportunity to expand product lines, increase distribution channels, hedge against volatility, increase their market share, or acquire other necessary business assets. A takeover bid or mergers and acquisitions through the stock market is one of the simplest and most common ways f... |
Does Jupiter's "spot" move around like a hurricane, or is it a stationary storm? | The spot stays almost stationary in latitude (North/South) but it moves longitudinally (is that even a word? > . > ). Because Jupiter is so large, the distance and speed it travels East/West varies quite a bit with even a few degree latitude shift. | [
"Every 15–17 years Jupiter is marked by especially powerful storms. They appear at 23°N latitude, where the strongest eastward jet, that can reach 150 m/s, is located. The last time such an event was observed was in March–June 2007. Two storms appeared in the northern temperate belt 55° apart in longitude. They sig... |
Is the Earth orbiting the sun in a straight line? | Kinda. Freely-falling objects follow [geodesics in spacetime](_URL_1_). Whether or not these are straight lines is probably a matter of semantics.
As a simpler example, consider whether you might call [geodesics on the surface of a sphere](_URL_0_) "straight lines" or not. | [
"Earth's orbit around the Sun is an ellipse. The semi-major axis of this elliptic orbit is defined to be half of the straight line segment that joins the perihelion and aphelion. The centre of the Sun lies on this straight line segment, but not at its midpoint. Because ellipses are well-understood shapes, measuring... |
how do criminals crack 3-4-5 digit codes on safes,locks etc? | They generally don't crack such codes. For safes and locks, they drill them open, or otherwise use physical force. For phones and computers, they tend to trick users into entering their passwords into fake sites, or just try every single password until one works (if the software will allow it).
Most "hacking" is just brute force or social engineering. | [
"Electronic combination locks, while generally safe from the attacks on their mechanical counterparts, suffer from their own set of flaws. If the arrangement of numbers is fixed, it is easy to determine the lock sequence by viewing several successful accesses. Similarly, the numbers in the combination (but not the ... |
inside the brain, how do a bunch of neurons translate to a piece of information? | This is an interesting question. The answer is I don't know, no one knows, and if you figure it out, can I get an invite to your Nobel acceptance.
Certain neurons are activated when we do certain things. Let's use vision as an example. When we see something, our primary visual cortex activates. Soon after, other areas in our visual streams activate somewhat sequentially. Through experiments, we know some of these experiments are sensitive to color, others are sensitive to motion, others are sensitive to faces. Somehow, all of these brain areas activating leads to our understanding of an object as an object. How? We don't know. If you're more specific about your question, I can give you more specific answers. But your question is just too general to get a very specific answer, since we don't know that much about the brain. | [
"Neurons are the basic functional unit of the brain and process and transmit information through signals. Many different types of neurons can be identified based on their function, such as sensory neurons or motor neurons. Each responds to specific stimuli and sends respective and appropriate chemical signals to ot... |
why are jet engines so much faster and powerful than propeller engines | It's worth noting that jet engines aren't *inherently* faster and more powerful than propeller engines (also, as pointed out elsewhere, most propeller driven planes use turbines these days). Rather, the jet engine as a concept has the *potential* to be much faster and more powerful.
Piston-driven propeller engines pretty much maxed out their potential in late WWII. They just had *so* many moving parts, weren't all that efficient, and required sophisticated turbo or super-chargers to climb to a useful altitude. Turbine engines can spin far faster, have far fewer moving parts, and can adapt to changes of altitude far better. Even so, the British flew a jet aircraft years *before* the famous German Messerschmidt 262 was terrorizing Allied bombers towards the end of the war.
But even though the Brits flew a jet in 1941, it took several more years before they could refine the design enough to even compete with the piston-driven fighters out in the field. It's weird today to imagine a jet that can't keep up with a piston+propeller plane, but that was where Allied (1941) and Axis (1939) powers were from for most of the war. They *had* jets in development, but they couldn't keep up with the far more refined existing technology, though that technology was reaching its limits, while jets were just starting to show what they could do. | [
"Motorjet engines provide greater thrust than a propeller alone mounted on a piston engine; this has been successfully demonstrated in a number of different aircraft. A jet engine also can provide thrust at higher speeds where a propeller becomes less efficient or even ineffective; in fact, a jet engine gains effic... |
how do laser rangefinders work? | The rangefinder measures how long it takes for a laser beam to travel there and back, and then uses that data to calculate distance.
| [
"A laser rangefinder is a rangefinder that uses a laser beam to determine the distance to an object. The most common form of laser rangefinder operates on the time of flight principle by sending a laser pulse in a narrow beam towards the object and measuring the time taken by the pulse to be reflected off the targe... |
How did family members find out if a relative died during WWII? | As with most countries, by telegram. Typically they would inform the family that the relative was missing, e.g.: _URL_3_
As noted, a letter (usually from the CO) would follow.
Of course, some of the missing turned up, I believe the Red Cross would get lists of POWs and inform the armed forces, who would then inform the families. This is a poor picture, but you can just make out the message: _URL_1_
If the person was found to have survived and not in enemy hands the good news would be shared: _URL_2_
In some cases the individual themselves would send a telegram basically saying "I'm still alive!".
Sadly, all too often a telegram was received, confirming the relative as dead.
Of course for those confirmed dead the telegram was rather final : _URL_0_
If you search for "ww2 telegram" on google images you will find may scans/pictures of similar telegrams from all over the world. | [
"The only family member who would still be alive at the end of the war was the baby. The authorities sent Wilfriede to a children's home run by the National Socialist People's Welfare [organisation] (\"\"Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt\"\") in nearby Waiblingen. Fairly early on she understood that her mother ... |
why if i slowly submerge an oreo in milk will it completely sink in less than a minute but if i simply drop it in, it seems to float forever? | The surface tension of the milk holds it up.
If you look at water, you will see that the surface is like a thin rubber skin. This keeps the cookie afloat. Also, since most of it is above the liquid, it does not soak up as much. | [
"When raw milk is left standing for a while, it turns \"sour\". This is the result of fermentation, where lactic acid bacteria ferment the lactose in the milk into lactic acid. Prolonged fermentation may render the milk unpleasant to consume. This fermentation process is exploited by the introduction of bacterial c... |
Did the Soviet Union have competitive entrance examinations for Universities? If yes, how did they differ from the ones in Europe and US? | As a follow up question to OP's question, how common was it for Soviet universities to increase the difficulty of the entrance exams for, so-called, "undesirables"?
[This article](_URL_0_) highlights the unfairness of entrance exams given to prospective Jewish students at the mathematics department of Moscow State University. Was this the norm? | [
"The German university model was also used in Russian universities, which hired lecturers trained in Germany and which dedicated themselves to science. At the same time, Russian universities were meant to train the bureaucracy in the same way as the French grandes écoles. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Rus... |
How good were the Confederacy's other generals in regards to Robert E Lee? Or the Northern generals for that matter? Were they second-rate, or just as good as Lee himself? | It might be best to start on a discussion of Lee just to clear up what we're looking at in terms of a measuring stick. OP's question presupposes that Robert E. Lee was one of, if not THE best general of the American Civil War. By "best" I assume this is a combination of factors including (1) scoreboard, or win/loss ratio, and (2) post-war tactical evaluation. For both categories, while we can get into a discussion about them, one has to understand that there are few contemporaries with whom we can compare Lee. From the Battle of the 7 Days onward, Lee wasn't commanding just a division or a corps, but an entire Army. In this way, on the southern side, we can really only compare him to Beauregard, Bragg, Albert Sydney Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston, and maybe Hood. No one else on that side commanded at the same level as Lee, really, so comparisons further down the line are somewhat moot. On the northern side, there are more comparisons, and we will get to those in a moment.
But for starters: was Lee a good general, nay, the best the Confederacy had? Most modern scholarship is still in agreement that Lee was indeed a very good general, and probably the very best the Confederacy had to offer, yes. While he wasn't perfect, and certainly made his fair share of mistakes, Lee did pretty well for himself through a combination of skill, intuition, attitude, and luck. When he had to run a defensive campaign (think Fredericksburg or the Wilderness Campaign), Lee was outstanding, and when we was on the offensive, he could also be superb (2nd Bull Run & Chancellorsville being wonderful examples). The man did have his faults, however, including a reluctance to commit his resources and energies to the western theater campaign, and his insistence on seeing a battle through despite evolving circumstances (Antietam and Gettysburg, though in the former instance, luck was on his side and it worked out for him). Lee also ran hot and cold when it came to communicating to his subordinates, and while some of them seemed to intuitively understand the vagueness of his orders and their intention (Jackson), others had difficulty (Ewell), and disastrous results followed. Except for Longstreet, though, Lee's win/loss record when comparing similar circumstances of battle is tops among the Confederate generals.
All that being said, it is hard for one to think of another General in the Confederacy except, perhaps, for Longstreet, who could have done a better job in the role. Lee knew how to get the most out of his army (both in terms of numbers and resources), and how to use them effectively regardless of the situation. He understood the political calculus of the conflict (hence his insistence on invading the north twice despite the tactical disadvantage), and managed his generals well on most occasions. When in battle, he knew how to place his men effectively, and was even better at making adjustments in the heat of battle to address breakthroughs and openings. Again, except for Longstreet, no other Confederate general demonstrated effectiveness on these levels with such consistency. What's more, Lee knew how to carry himself like a general, and understood the drama of leadership, and how one's bearing can move and influence an army. Like McClellan (whose battlefield acumen didn't come anywhere near Lee's), Lee's men truly loved him, and would do anything for him. This isn't something that can be discounted when discussing good generalship in the Civil War.
So, except perhaps for Longstreet, who seemed to be as good of a general on paper as Lee, and was just as sharp, pragmatic, and disciplined, I think it could be said that Lee was the best general the Confederacy had on their side. Joe Johnston was too timid and cautious, A.S. Johnston lost the one big battle he did fight (and died doing it), Beauregard was unrealistic, and Hood and Bragg were pretty much disasters from the word "go" in a commanding army role. As mentioned earlier, it is difficult to compare Lee with any other Confederate generals because the resumes just don't line up.
As for a comparison of Lee against northern generals, again, it is hard to compare. Lee was fighting a completely different campaign under circumstances lightyears removed from his Union counterparts (transportation and supply networks alone make this an apples v. oranges discussion). Tactically, one could make the argument that Grant, fighting a very cagey, experienced, motivated, and disciplined foe, displayed generalship on the same level as Lee during their head-to-heads of '64 and '65. Grant made several dynamic moves with his army that nearly flanked Lee on two occasions before successfully doing just that on route to Petersburg, where Grant bottled Lee up. Earlier, in 1863, Grant pulled off something just short of a miracle when he abandoned his supply lines, marched south of Vicksburg, crossed the Mississippi River, then fought to a siege that would eventually force the surrender of a massive Confederate garrison (and open the river back up to the Union). This was maybe the most impressive military feat of the entire war. Sherman's march to the sea and eventual dismantling of Hood's forces was nearly as impressive, as was the initiative showed by a young Major named Emory Upton who developed tactics during the Spotsylvania Courthouse campaign that leap-frogged military theory to where it would be in World War I.
TD:LR - In the south, yes, we can reasonably argue that Robert E. Lee was one of, if not THE best general that the Confederacy had. When comparing Lee to generals in the north, it is more difficult, but an argument can be made that Union generals accomplished feats that were on the same level as Lee.
[Sources: Bruce Catton: Army of the Potomac trilogy & 'Grant Moves South'; James McPherson, 'Battle Cry of Freedom'; Doris Kearns Goodwin, 'Team of Rivals'; Ronald C. White, 'American Ulysses'] | [
"Although plagued by an overall shortage in numbers, Lee had fewer worries about the organization and quality of his manpower. Most of his soldiers had enlisted for the duration of the war, thus his army lost few regiments due to expired terms of service. Also, thanks to its better replacement system, Confederate r... |
what led to the creation of the knights templar and what was their mo? | During the Crusades, the Church controlled Jerusalem for a time, and this attracted pilgrimages to go see the holy land. The trip from Western Europe to the Levant was rough and dangerous. The Knights Templar were formed as a monastic order charged with securing the safety of pilgrims.
Besides safety, they also served as a basic form of banking for pilgrims. Before you left, you'd deposit your valuables at a local Templar place, get a certificate of deposit, and afterwards you could either withdraw once you returned, or get an equivalent in treasure when you were in Jerusalem. This financial dealing made them relatively powerful.
Despite the myths around them, their utility and purpose waned as the Muslims recaptured Jerusalem and the surroundings. Due to their power and ongoing feuds with the Knights Hospitaller, the French king eventually ordered them all arrested, and pressured the Pope to do the same. Some were killed, but most were given pensions and allowed to leave, or became absorbed into other monastic orders. | [
"The original historic Knights Templar were a Christian military order, the Order of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, that existed from the 12th to 14th centuries to provide warriors in the Crusades. These men were famous in the high and late Middle Ages, but the Order was disbanded ... |
why we flinch | Fight or flight instinct. When surprised, your body/brain makes itself ready to defend itself, or run for the hills... | [
"Flinching is showing a strong negative physical reaction to a proposal. Common examples of flinching are gasping for air, or a visible expression of surprise or shock. The flinch can be done consciously or unconsciously. The flinch signals to the opposite party that you think the offer or proposal is absurd in hop... |
what will happen if we try to land on a gas gaint, like jupiter? will we come out from the other end, never being able to land? | Think of it like a submarine going too deep into the ocean- you reach a point where the pressure is so immense you are crushed. The gas giants do not have "air" flowing over "ground" like a rocky planet, it's a dense atmosphere that gets so dense it's basically liquid, then so dense it's basically a gooey solid, much like the hot molten rock of the mantle layer on a rocky planet. While made of "gas" (Hydrogen) it's so hot, and so dense it's insane.
There may or may not be a solid core within but it's not going to be anything you can say you "landed" on considering the density on your way down. You would not say you "landed" on the core of Earth after drilling though super hot dense semi-liquid mantle. | [
"BULLET::::- 27 August – NASA's \"Juno\" probe makes a close pass of Jupiter, coming within of the cloud tops – the closest any spacecraft has ever approached the gas giant without entering its atmosphere.\n",
"A major problem in sending space probes to Jupiter is that the planet has no solid surface on which to ... |
How long did soldiers have to stand in the landing crafts during D-Day? | The convoys carrying troops departed from ports in southern England on the afternoon of June 5, 1944 and proceeded slowly across the channel with heavy air cover. They dropped anchor in their designated transport areas 23,000 yards offshore at roughly 0200 on June 6, at the same time that airborne forces were being landed. Boat teams were assembled, and loading and lowering of landing craft began at 0430, with H-Hour at 0630; so, roughly 2 hours. Elements of the 4th and 24th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadrons proceeded in their landing craft two hours before H-Hour to clear out a small German observation post on the St. Marcouf Islands off Utah Beach.
**Sources:**
* [*Omaha Beachhead (6 June-13 June 1944)*](_URL_1_), by the Historical Division, War Department
* [*U.S. Army in World War II, European Theater of Operations: Cross-Channel Attack*](_URL_0_), by Gordon A. Harrison | [
"Norman Harry Poole MC (9 April 1920 – 26 June 2015) was a British soldier who was one of the first allied soldiers to land on occupied territory on D-Day in 1944. Poole won the Military Cross for his actions on that day and subsequently as he evaded capture by the enemy for six weeks.\n",
"In World War II the bu... |
What is the origin and historical context of so called, "honor killings?" | hi! if you don't get responses here (or even if you do), it might be worth x-posting this question to /r/AskSocialScience and/or /r/AskAnthropology for their perspective | [
"Al-Qaradawi says that honor killing is a tradition that was carried out thousands of years ago by ancient civilization; the Romans, the Dark Ages, Chinese Emperors, etc. He says, it has nothing to do with Islam; neither Qur'an nor Sunnah (Prophetic Hadith). He calls on those who done it to be punishable with death... |
Would the night sky have appeared much brighter in the time of the dinosaurs? | The universe is expanding, but gravity keeps small-scale (relatively speaking!) structures like galaxies - and even groups of galaxies - together. The volume of space containing all the stars we can see is a vanishingly small part of our galaxy! So the number of stars visible doesn't really change as the Universe expands. It might fluctuate a bit as the solar system makes its long orbit around the galactic center. | [
"\"Huygens\" found the brightness of the surface of Titan (at time of landing) to be about one thousand times dimmer than full solar illumination on Earth (or 500 times brighter than illumination by full moonlight)—that is, the illumination level experienced about ten minutes after sunset on Earth, approximately la... |
why there are lions in india, but no tigers in africa? | > Lions, leopards and tigers are all part of the Felidae family of cats, which originated in Africa and share a common ancestor. At some point, probably around 2 million years ago, one offshoot of Felidae migrated east toward Asia, and those cats evolved into the orange-, black-, and white-striped beasts we know today. Once established in Asia, however, tigers never returned to Africa.
Like many species, their ancestors left Africa and evolved, and never returned. | [
"In Africa, lions are threatened by pre-emptive killing or in retaliation for preying on livestock. Prey base depletion, loss and conversion of habitat have led to a number of subpopulations becoming small and isolated. Trophy hunting has contributed to population declines in Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Zambia.... |
Why do larger land animals seemingly tend to have fewer legs (among those that have them)? | There is a huge difference in the way invertebrates and vertebrates develop, the initial stage a single fertilize egg is the same, but already after a few divisions you start noticing differences. What is important is that our legs are vastly different structures than the leg of a grashopper.
Vertebrates all share a common body plan with four limbs, in some linages they have been lost (e.g. snakes) in others they might have evolved to have a new function (e.g. wings in bats and birds, flippers in whales, ...). Also if you see how our own limbs develop and the bones fit together, it is difficult to see how an extra pair would be attached.
Insects, centipedes and arachnids have a segmented body structure where limbs can form from the fold between parts of the exo-skeleton. Here evolution also seems to favor less, but highly functional limbs. The most recent common ancestor of all these species probably was something similar to a centipede. With lots of segments all with fairly similar legs, the developmental program involved is fairly simple and this is repeated for each segment. Over time a reduction of limbs has occurred and you see the limbs becoming highly specialized for a specific niche. But still here 6-8 seems to be the current optimum.
So this vast difference in development of vertebrates vs invertebrates is why invertebrates can have any number of legs, while vertebrates are limited to 4.
Now vertebrates have evolved a host of features that allows them to grow larger then insects in most environments. There are some physical limitations to the size of insects due to their exoskeleton and circulatory system.
edit: I hope this summery is clear, I could write volumes more about this. | [
"A small bodied animal has a greater capacity to be more abundant than a large bodied one. Purely as a function of geometry many more small things can be packed into a given space than can large things into the same area. However, these limits are generally never reached in ecological systems as other resources bec... |
From my understanding hundreds of years ago when a country would steal land to absorb into their empire, they’d invade and forcibly take the land they wanted. Now when countries want land they negotiate, buy and sell it, when did that change occur? | Your understanding is pretty much incorrect.
First off, the entire idea of land being firmly and incontrovertibly owned by a particular sovereignty, with concrete territorial boundaries marked off, is roughly speaking a modern idea associated with what is commonly called "Westphalian sovereignty", after the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. "Westphalian sovereignty" is when a ruler of a territory argues they have comprehensive, exclusive control over a specific, marked-off territory; many people cite Max Weber's later definition that a national sovereign in this mode of authority has to have a "monopoly on violence" within the territory.
Prior to this point, most existing states, empires and polities in world history held territories in shifting and flexible ways. Often their claims to territory were informal and negotiable. They might claim some tax revenues, assert some rights of movement and power, but not insist that they had comprehensive authority over the inhabitants. So territories all across the world passed in and out of direct control by rulers. In a premodern context, rulers who identified land they wanted, invaded it, and most crucially kept it, are pretty rare, no matter where we're talking about. An invader might claim territory or rewards, but keeping that new conquest as part of a coherent new polity was a much less common event, and arguably a decent number of invading or conquering leaders didn't expect anything except tribute, etc.
Even in a pre-Westphalian context, the mechanisms by which sovereigns (of a great many kinds) could expect to increase their territorial authority on a permanent basis were extremely diverse. Marriage or kinship alliances were a fairly common mechanism all around the world. Treaties or agreements were another (certainly in some cases coercive). Migration--or emigration--that changed the linguistic and cultural balance in a particular territory, and its loyalties to various sovereign powers, could sometimes (usually over centuries) change who was considered to be in possession of it. And there are premodern examples of money changing hands, more or less, and allowing a sovereign in one place to command authority of another.
The OP might also take note that it's not clear that relatively contemporary modes of territorial acquisition are effective or permanent. Only 150 years ago, "countries stole land to absorb into their empire" in Africa and Asia; several centuries before that in North and South America. But only a relatively short time ago (the 1940s-1960s) many postcolonial states were created that involved some degree of forcible recombination of territories that didn't necessarily identify with one another--processes that are still very costly for us today in many respects. It does not seem that the idea of "stealing land" through invasion is totally absent today. Moreover, I'm actually pretty hard pressed to think of an actual example in recent years of a current nation buying substantial territory from another territory and having the transfer of territory happen in an amicable and accepted way. So in that sense I'm not even sure what the OP is thinking of. | [
"The completion of colonial conquest of much of the world (see the Scramble for Africa), the devastation of World War I and World War II, and the alignment of both the United States and the Soviet Union with the principle of self-determination led to the abandonment of the right of conquest in formal international ... |
why do spinning objects seem to stay in the air longer? | Spinning stabilizes the object so that it doesn't wobble or flip over. This enables it to continue moving through the air smoothly. By itself this doesn't make it stay up any longer, just travel farther.
However, if the object is also shaped like a wing (a Frisbee is), staying in the right orientation allows it to generate more lift for a longer time. | [
"Spin (rotation) has little influence on lift and drag forces but impacts a disc's stability during flight. Imagine a spinning top. A gentle nudge will knock it off its axis of rotation for a second, but it will not topple over because spin adds gyroscopic stability. In the same way, a flying disc resists rolling (... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.