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Why are some charging cables faster than others even when using the same power supply? | Wire length, wire diameter, and wire material all effect total wire resistance. If you know the resistance of the cable, r, you can calculate the maximum theoretical power transfer across that cable to a phone, which is a maximum when the phone appears to have the same resistance as the cable (for an ideal power supply, which isn't the case, but we'll ignore that fact.)
Total Power = v*i
Power in device = 1/2 v*i
i = v/(2*r)
power in device = 1/2 [v] * [v/(2*r)]
power in device = v^2 /(4r)
For a 5v charger, you get
power = 6.25/r
r = 6.25/power
So, if you want to transfer 10 watts to your phone, you need a cable that has no more than 6.25/10 ohms or .625 ohms.
A 1-meter cheap thin cable might have .6 ohms and be able to charge at 10W (slightly more than 2 amps). A cheap thin 5-meter long cable might have 1.4 ohms and only be able to charge to 4.5 watts. (just over 900ma).
Real power supplies aren't ideal and have an internal resistance that must be added to that of the cable. That means the situation is a little worse than we just calculated. The good news is that while their resistance isn't generally published, it is typically small for a good charger. Also keep in mind that this is the maximum theoretical power, and not all phones can achieve it. Between the phone and charger and cable, short cheap cables generally work fine, as do longer heavy-duty cables, but cheap cables longer than about .5 meter may restrict your charging rate.
Whether they are generic or not, the main thing to look for in longer cables is thicker wiring (low AWG). Harder to check, but also important, are the quality of the USB connectors at the ends of the cable and the quality of the soldering that joins them to the wire.
Incidentally, USB-C generally eliminates this problem by adopting higher voltages as part of the official standard. Higher voltages mean more maximum power for the phone and less wasted power through the cable. | [
"Where devices (for example, high-speed disk drives) require more power than a high-power device can draw, they function erratically, if at all, from bus power of a single port. USB provides for these devices as being self-powered. However, such devices may come with a Y-shaped cable that has two USB plugs (one for... |
what exactly happens when we bend paper? why is it permanent? | [Here's what paper looks like under a microscope.](_URL_0_) These are ~~collagen~~ cellulose fibers that came from the pulp of the trees used and they all kinda mesh and weave together all tangled up - giving paper its strength. When you crease a fold, the fibers that get bunched up on the inside of the crease force the fibers on the outside of the crease to stretch and tear. If you then crease the fold the other way, you now break the fibers on this side, leaving only a thin layer of fibers in the middle to hold the two sides together (and making it now relatively easy to tear apart).
Same thing if you've ever had to use a piece of bread as a hotdog bun; the bottom of the bread always breaks in half. | [
"The degree of reduction in thickness under compressive forces or pressure is known as compressibility of the paper. It influences the ability of paper to change its surface contour and conform to make contact with the printing plate or blanket during print production.\n",
"Shrinkage is a characteristic of paper ... |
Will we ever be able "read" a brain ? | I do know that pictures you are observing can be recreated with software that uses nothing but scans of your brain. From [NewScientist](_URL_1_) in 2008:
> Pictures you are observing can now be recreated with software that uses nothing but scans of your brain. It is the first "mind reading" technology to create such images from scratch, rather than picking them out from a pool of possible images.
> Earlier this year Jack Gallant and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, showed that they could tell which of a set of images someone was looking at from a brain scan.
> To do this, they created software that compared the subject's brain activity while looking at an image with that captured while they were looking at "training" photographs. The program then picked the most likely match from a set of previously unseen pictures.
> Now Yukiyasu Kamitani at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan has gone a step further: his team has used an image of brain activity taken in a functional MRI scanner to recreate a black-and-white image from scratch.
> "By analysing the brain signals when someone is seeing an image, we can reconstruct that image," says Kamitani.
Also, apparently brain scans have been used to [reveal memories](_URL_0_):
> Scans of the part of the brain responsible for memory have for the first time been used to detect a person's location in a virtual environment. Using functional MRI (fMRI), researchers decoded the approximate location of several people as they navigated through virtual rooms.
> This finding suggests that more detailed mind-reading, such detecting as memories of a summer holiday, might eventually be possible, says Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London.
> Her team trained its scanner on the hippocampus, a region of the brain critical to the formation and storage of memories. It is known that in animals, specialised place cells in the hippocampus fire regularly as they move from place to place. | [
"Professor of neuropsychology Barbara Sahakian qualifies, \"A lot of neuroscientists in the field are very cautious and say we can't talk about reading individuals' minds, and right now that is very true, but we're moving ahead so rapidly, it's not going to be that long before we will be able to tell whether someon... |
Why is it impossible for an object to have an absolute velocity of 0? | How would you like to define absolute velocity? Which frame of reference are you choosing to be your absolute reference frame for measuring speeds, and why is that frame of reference preferred rather than any other frame you could choose?
In short, Special Relativity states that there simply isn't any preferred absolute reference frame from which to measure these speeds. Sometimes one frame may be more convenient (measuring my car's velocity relative to the moon isn't very useful), but that doesn't make it special in any way compared to any other reference frame. | [
"Aristotle proposed that the speed at which two identically shaped objects sink or fall is directly proportional to their weights and inversely proportional to the density of the medium through which they move. While describing their terminal velocity, Aristotle must stipulate that there would be no limit at which ... |
how does nasa take super detailed pictures of space? | Taking them takes ages. Whereas a normal camera requires a split-second worth of light to produce a picture, the big telescopes (such as Hubble) stare at a single point in space for weeks, sometimes even months. That way much more photons hit the camera, and thus produce a better picture. | [
"The crew also photographed the Earth from orbit. Despite instructions not to do so, the crew (perhaps inadvertently) photographed Area 51, causing a minor dispute between various government agencies as to whether the photographs showing this secret facility should be released. In the end, the picture was published... |
How were French soldiers who participated in the mutinies during WWI punished? | Your history lecturer (I'm assuming University by lecturer) refused to talk about somthing because it was too horrific? ...how is he/she not the worst history lecturer ever? A fairly large proportion of history is horrific, surely?
| [
"BULLET::::- French Army Mutinies – The French Army began to crack down on mutinying soldiers, resulting in 3,427 courts-martial. Close to 3,000 soldiers were sentenced to hard labor, and 629 were sentenced to death, although only 43 executions were actually carried out. Rather than severe discipline, French army c... |
gluons | Ok since you understand the principles of bosons, and fermions, I'll step the cutesy analogies, and just explain it simply. Gluons are basically the exchange particle of the Strong interaction. The strong interaction is what keeps the quarks together. It works just like electromagnetism, where the photons are the exchange particles, where the force is carried between two other particles, making an interaction.
Now this force (strong force) is very important, as quarks are the building blocks of Protons and neutrons (as well as other particles), which make up the nucleus of an atom. Also this force is extremely strong, much stronger than gravity. Which is what the basis for how nuclear power, bombs, etc. works. The amount of energy expelled from breaking this force is huge!
Now what exactly does the gluon do? Well it doesn't do anything more than other exchange particle (or gauge boson), except in the matter of "Color change". The idea behind is that there is three different "states" (not to be confused with the 6 different quarks, but rather the state of each quark at a given time) at which a quark can be. This represented by colors, Red, Blue and Green. There is also the anti-colors: Anti-Red, Anti-Blue, and Anti-Green; which make up the states of the anti-quarks. Now gluons carry both an anti-color, and a color. This means that a Blue quark can emit a blue-anti-red gluon, that when interacting when a Red quark, the red quark becomes Blue, and the Blue quark becomes red. This works because the anti-state cancels out the "color" of the Red quark, and replaces it with the color of the gluon. This also means that the first quark has to be Red since it "gave up" it's blue state.
This is something that you don't find in the other forces, since for example, in the electromagnetism field exchange, there is only two: Positive and Negative; and the Photons that exchange that force will either be positive carrying or negative carrying (so the number of total states of the particle, matches the states of the exchange particle). But in the strong interaction, quarks can only be three possible states, while gluons can be six (Red-anti-blue, Red-anti-green, Blue-anti-red, Blue-anti-green, Green-anti-red, Green-anti-blue).
If you want me to explain down any further, I can try, but I figure if you understand bosons, then this shouldn't too much of a step upward. | [
"The two aims of GLUT are to allow the creation of rather portable code between operating systems (GLUT is cross-platform) and to make learning OpenGL easier. Getting started with OpenGL programming while using GLUT often takes only a few lines of code and does not require knowledge of operating system–specific win... |
Has there ever been a city that feigned defeat, letting in enemy troops, to only trap them once inside the city walls? | Sorry, we don't allow ["trivia seeking" questions](_URL_0_). These tend to produce threads which are collections of disjointed, partial responses, and not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for. If you have a specific question about an historical event, period, or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact. For further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_1_). | [
"After besieging the city, the enemy force did not immediately attack, but instead, made preparations by building fire support stations and digging trenches that extended all the way to the foot of the city wall. The fire support stations were built by creating hills higher than the city wall with earth so that the... |
why do male orgasms get more intense in relatively short amounts of succession? | Well everyone is different. Wildly so, in fact. Some people are capable of sustaining multiple, repeating orgasms of increasing intensity. This is more common in women, but certainly possible in men. Others can only have one orgasm of great intensity, after which they lose sexual stimulation for a long refractory period.
What you experience is relatively rare compared to the general male population. But the reason they escalate in intensity is probanly because none of these are "true" orgasms that kick off a refractory period. Theyre more like partial orgasms that heighten sexual stimulation and pleasure, so the orgasms continue to build in pleasure until the satiation signal is triggered. | [
"The observation that women tend to reach orgasm more easily when they are ovulating also suggests that it is tied to increasing fertility. Evolutionary biologist Robin Baker argues in \"Sperm Wars\" that occurrence and timing of orgasms are all a part of the female body's unconscious strategy to collect and retain... |
what is the feasibility of a (manufactured) organic computer, and what are the scientific obstacles to making it a reality? | Women have been pushin' those things out for years now. | [
"The subfield of organic computers and wetware is still largely hypothetical and in a preliminary stage. While there has yet to be major developments in the creation of an organic computer since the neuron based calculator developed by William Ditto in the 1990s the research mentioned in the sections above continue... |
i spent a frustrating hour with gimp before coming to you guys, please eli5 how to make animated .gifs. | You'll need each individual 'frame' to be on a separate layer. If you already have all your pictures you want to turn into a .gif made (and named in proper order), simply go File > Open as layers, select all pictures, and it will imported as layers.
Once you have every frame on it's own layer, select File > Save As. Select .gif image. You should have two options, to flatten the image, or to save as an animation. You want to click "Save as animation" and then export. The only necessary thing left to do is to adjust the delay in miliseconds. It may take one or two shots to get the proper speed.
I really hope this helped, I tried to use the simplest terms possible. (FYI this post is coming from a guy who downloaded GIMP for the sole purpose of making animated .gifs easily :P) | [
"GIF lets users make a custom animation with a background and a series of frame. With the Blockly programming language, four images can be constructed which will then cycle so as to form an animation. The first step is to select the background, which includes characters such as Licky Ricky, Mayday Mary, Puss in Moo... |
What would happen, physiologically, if you drank Febreze? | [Here](_URL_0_) we go. Looks like beta cyclodextrin is the one in Febreze, and the listed instructions in the event of ingestion are:
> "Do NOT induce vomiting unless directed to do so by medical personnel. Never give anything by mouth to an unconscious
person. Loosen tight clothing such as a collar, tie, belt or waistband. Get medical attention if symptoms appear."
Alpha cyclodextrin, on the other hand, instructs you to seek medical attention immediately and try to resuscitate if the victim isn't breathing. Seems that beta cyclodextrin is probably mostly harmless. | [
"In addition to its cytotoxicity, cereulide causes nausea and vomiting. This effect is believed to be caused by its binding and activation of 5-HT receptors, leading to increased afferent vagus nerve stimulation.\n",
"Health experts have warned that the herbal ingredients in Drank and similar beverages induce dro... |
georg cantor and set theory | He came up with a new proof technique, called diagonalization, and was able to show some infinities were bigger than others. It goes something like this:
There are an infinite number of natural numbers, and also an infinite amount of real numbers. If these infinities are equivalent, it should be possible to come up with a process that matches all real numbers to a natural number:
1 - 0.12345....
2 - 3.14159....
3 - 2.71828....
etc.
Let's construct a real number, *s*, such that:
* the 1st digit is different than the 1st digit of the real assigned to 1
* the 2nd digit is different than the 2nd digit of the real assigned to 2
* the *n*th digit is different than the *n*th digit of the real assigned to *n*
*s* is clearly a valid real number, but it also is different from every real number on the list. This means it is impossible to create such a list, and the infinity of real numbers of "bigger" than the infinity of natural numbers. Such infinities, that cannot be mapped to natural numbers, are called uncountable.
| [
"Cantor's work initially polarized the mathematicians of his day. While Karl Weierstrass and Dedekind supported Cantor, Leopold Kronecker, now seen as a founder of mathematical constructivism, did not. Cantorian set theory eventually became widespread, due to the utility of Cantorian concepts, such as one-to-one co... |
how would the earn it act negatively affect end to end encryption? | Hopefully a simple example:
No matter how good a safe you install to store your valuables, the government wants the safe manufacturer to make a door at the back with a key available to the government. This is just in case, the government feels that you might be storing something illegal in the safe. This means the safety provided by the safe is only as strong as the "back door".
The problem is similar for encryption. Any time (for software) you try to make a "back door" available, it becomes the vulnerable point for hackers. And what is worse, if the method for breaking the "back door" is found, ALL messages are potentially vulnerable.
This is like the government asking for a "skeleton key" for all the safes - if anyone steals or copies the key, then every safe built is now vulnerable to the thief. | [
"BULLET::::2. Encryption provided by service providers can prevent unauthorized third party access, but the service provider implementing it would still have access to the relevant user data. End-to-end encryption is an encryption technique that refers to encryption that also prevents service providers themselves f... |
Why is the clock industry so strong in Switzerland? | The history of the Swiss horology industry is a surprisingly cyclical one. As others have pointed out, many of the most notable early master watchmakers were not in fact Swiss (France, Germany, and to a lesser extent, England were leaders in the early development of mechanical timepieces), but by the 18th century as technology progressed to the point where it was practical to miniaturize a timekeeping mechanism to pocket size, enough talent and knowledge had been imported or imparted to Switzerland that by the turn of the 19th century Swiss watches were wildly popular around the world.
As with many other traditional industries, however, the Industrial Revolution had a large impact on watchmaking. A mechanical timepiece is made up of hundreds of tiny parts, each of which has to be machined to very high tolerances. Prior to the invention of machine tools, the process of creating a watch had to be done by hand, and as a result, as one can imagine, it was a very time- and labor-intensive process. By the middle of the 19th century, American companies had perfected the process, making watches cheaper, more accurate, and more accessible to the masses. While the Waltham Watch Co. in Massachusetts was one of the first and most successful ones, others that started around the same time include Elgin, Bulova, and Hamilton. This was the first crisis for Swiss watches, and while they struggled to catch up, the reputation suffered mightily, to the point where America, Britain, and other nations insisted that the now-sought-after 'Swiss Made' label be affixed to Swiss timepieces to ensure that consumers were not swindled into buying substandard, poor-quality pieces.
Despite this, the Swiss did not stop the fine watchmaking tradition, and while many of their offerings at the time were subpar compared to the precision-machined American products, the 19th century saw the establishment of many more of what are today quite notable brands, including Jaeger-LeCoultre, Tissot, and Audemars Piguet, among others. Interestingly, this coincided with the rising popularity of wristwatches, which until 1910-1920 or so were considered largely female accessories only, while gentlemen strictly carried pocket watches. World War I played a large role in the transition, as soldiers were unable to use a free hand to pull out a pocket watch to check the time.
By the outset of World War II, high-end Swiss brands had once again regained position as industry leaders. Brands such as Jaeger-LeCoultre provided pilot's watches to both the RAF and Luftwaffe; stories such as [this one](_URL_0_) and [this one](_URL_1_) (the wiki link has a pretty good overview of the stories) suggest that the Swiss brands were seen as markedly better and more desirable than standard-issue watches from other manufacturers at the time. This would continue after the war, as the Swiss would continue to cement their position as the most prominent luxury watches in the world.
As mentioned in other comments, however, the Swiss watch industry was soon rocked by another crisis, which almost crippled them: the invention of quartz timekeeping. By the 1960s, manufacturers were experimenting with electronic timekeeping methods. One of the most successful early versions was New York-based Bulova's tuning fork-powered Accutron models, which were successful enough to gain a permanent place in the company's logo, and which remain highly sought-after by collectors today. Meanwhile, a competition broke out between the Swiss and the Japanese broke out to create the first quartz movement; the Swiss actually managed to beat the Japanese, but in one of the worst business miscalculations in recent memory, decided not to pursue the technology, believing that mechanical watches were here to stay.
A timepiece, in simplest terms, is powered by a balance device that oscillates at a known interval. The back-and-forth motion of the device drives the shafts connected to the hands, which turn them. Generally, the higher the oscillation frequency, the more accurate a watch becomes. Mechanical watches range from 18000 beats per hour to 36000 bph, or 2.5 Hz to 5 Hz, with outliers on either end; quartz watches, powered by a tiny crystal (quartz, naturally) vibrated by an electric current, oscillate at *32,768 Hz*, making them exponentially more accurate than even the best mechanical watch (for reference, a mechanical movement is considered to be excellent if it gains or loses less than 5 seconds per day; the vast majority of quartz movements routinely gain or lose less than 5 seconds per month, with many remaining within those boundaries in a year). They also contain far fewer moving parts, making them much cheaper to manufacture. Japan's Seiko became the first company to mass-produce quartz watches in 1969, and as you might expect, people around the world thought it much better to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars less for a much more accurate watch. Mechanical watch sales plummeted, and many companies folded. American companies did not escape the carnage either; Waltham, Elgin, Gruen, and many others went under, and while the rights to the company names were bought and are still used today to create cheap, mass-produced timepieces, these companies have zero in common with their historical predecessors.
By the 80s, the Swiss watch industry was on the ropes - while some companies had bowed to the pressure and adopted quartz movements to stay afloat, many of those that did not had gone under. Amusingly, the Swiss watch industry was saved by Swatch, which in the 80s started producing cheap quartz watches with rather whimsical designs, which caught on in a big way. As Swatch began to become more and more successful, it began to quietly buy up other companies, such as Omega, Tissot, and the American Hamilton; they also acquired ETA SA, the world's largest maker of Swiss mechanical movements. They began to reposition these brands as luxury alternatives to the cheap brands, and played up the history of Swiss watchmaking (the good parts, of course) as a marketing technique. Other companies joined the party, including the Richemont Group, which has come to dominate the high-end luxury watch market, acquiring such names as Vacheron Constantin, Piaget, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and IWC. Since the mid-90s, the mechanical watch has seen a steady rise in popularity, despite the ongoing supremacy of quartz. As mechanical watches remain largely the territory of luxury brands, and many of the big luxury timepiece manufacturers remain Swiss, the country has once again become one of the major players in the horology world... until the next crisis, of course. | [
"Switzerland established itself as a clockmaking center following the influx of Huguenot craftsmen, and in the 19th century, the Swiss industry \"gained worldwide supremacy in high-quality machine-made watches\". The leading firm of the day was Patek Philippe, founded by Antoni Patek of Warsaw and Adrien Philippe o... |
how someone can recover from being paralyzed. | Your brain uses nerves to tell your body to move (think of your brain as a power strip and your nerves as the outlets) sometimes an injury destroys ALL the outlets, and your brain can't do anything causing a paralysis. Other times, only one outlet is destroyed, and the brain can just plug the function into another part to make the appliance work. hopefully that makes sense! | [
"Critically ill people that are in a coma can become completely paralyzed from CIP/CIM. Improvement usually occurs in weeks to months, as the innervation to the muscles are restored. About half of patients recover fully.\n",
"In case of a serious disability, such as caused by a severe spinal injury or brain damag... |
Did the Romans understand what inflation was? | It's not exactly inflation, but debasing the quality of coinage has a similar effect, and Romans did understand that. The reason to debase coinage is because you want to pass off the cheaper coin for the value of the more expensive coin. This periodically produced economic crises, such that people like Constantine had to re-establish a trusted coinage such as the solidus. Another option was fiat currency - the government simply declares the value of the coin regardless of its silver (or other precious metal) content, and that was sometimes tried. The most extreme example would be the [edict of Diocletian](_URL_0_), which set prices in terms of denarii regardless of metal content. Some ancient people were able to make this work; I think both the Ptolemies and the Attalids were able to run an economy on fiat currency (but I don't know too much about those). Republican Rome never seemed to make fiat currency work for whatever reason.
| [
"The very notion of inflation leads the origin of the Latin word inflare, which means to inflate, or to say inflatio which means overwhelming. The word inflation, in the sense of inflating the money circulation, was used for the first time in economic literature in the book \"The Big Paper Deception or the Approxim... |
why is autism seemingly more common now that is has been in the past? | The answer from the medical community is: 'we're not entirely sure'
One factor may be increasing awareness so cases that were previously undiagnosed or misdiagnosed are coming under the ASD umbrella.
It's also not entirely clear what causes autism, and there may be multiple causes - there's certainly a genetic component and some cases have been linked to specific genetic abnormalities. Higher maternal age at childbirth might also be playing a role in the increase. Studies have also been looking at environmental triggers with some evidence pointing towards various organic pollutants. Some research is also linking ASD to immune system functioning in the mother. | [
"Diagnoses of autism have become more frequent since the 1980s, which has led to various controversies about both the cause of autism and the nature of the diagnoses themselves. Whether autism has mainly a genetic or developmental cause, and the degree of coincidence between autism and intellectual disability, are ... |
the fine print on the xkcd website | It was a viral marketing campaign that XKCD took over, [like a boss](_URL_0_).
No idea why they're still there. Probably because the author thinks they're funny, or is proud of them.
Edit: For a less disappointing response, ask again in r/shittyaskscience. :D | [
"Using this steganographic process, high-quality copies of an original (e.g. a bank note) under blue light can be made identifiable. Using this process even shredded prints can be restored: The 2011 \"Shredder Challenge\" initiated by the DARPA was solved by a team called \"All Your Shreds Are Belong To U.S.\" cons... |
why are dogs no longer found in the wilderness? | There are dogs in the wilderness; they're known as coyotes, dingoes, wolves and foxes. Modern domestic dog breeds are all descendants of these species that have been bred to have certain traits and split off into subspecies. | [
"Dogs are not permitted on any trails in the park due to the presence of bears and other large mammals. Dogs are permitted at front country campsites that can be accessed by a vehicle and along paved roads.\n",
"\"This dog is an athlete of all terrain able to make many miles along rugged landscapes, protecting bo... |
This Mathmatical problem has been bothering me for over a week | What you want is called a [de Bruijn sequence](_URL_1_). They are well-studied and also awesome.
In this case, you have an alphabet of *k* = 10 symbols (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) and want all words of length *n* = 4, so the total number of de Bruijn sequences is (10!)^10^3 / 10^4 , [which is approximately 5.79*10^6555](_URL_0_), which is a lot.
Edit: bonus fun: there are algorithms right there on the Wikipedia page. How neat! | [
"BULLET::::- Nightly math problem: Bedtime Math's core offering is its daily math problems for kids, broadcast by email and posted daily on the website's homepage and Facebook page. The mental math problems are designed “to promote both giggles and mathematical thought” as a means to “increase ‘math awareness’ in o... |
Suppose I'm a typical voter in the U.S in the late 18th century. Am I aware the founders based the structure of the country on the work of other enlightenment philosophers (John Locke & so fourth), or do I think they made it all up them selves? | The short answer is that the typical voter in the US in the late 18th century was well aware of both the work of American and non-American enlightenment thinkers.
In the late 18th century, a "typical voter" would be, in most states, a white, land-owning male. [*Charters of Freedom - The New World At Hand*](_URL_0_) (an _URL_1_ online exhibit) has this to say:
> At the time of the first Presidential election in 1789, only 6 percent of the population–white, male property owners–was eligible to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment extended the right to vote to former male slaves in 1870; American Indians gained the vote under a law passed by Congress in 1924; and women gained the vote with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
As Harvey Graff writes in *Legacies of Literacy*,
> In the "new world," the level and social distribution of literacy were not static during the eighteenth century. Regional differences, as well as social divisions, had not been erased. New England again led the way. **The male literacy level there rose slowly to 70 percent by 1710, and by 1760 it had leapt to 85 percent.** Even comparatively impressive literacy levels and a cultural impetus toward schooling, the data suggests that many New Englanders in the eighteenth century still were **"closer than we have imagined to the credulous word-of-mouth world of the peasant, closer to its dependency on tradition and on the informed few"**
Graff argues (and his arguments are echoed by Lawrence Cremin in *American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876*, among other sources if you're interested) that the gulf between "the informed few" and other moderately literate white men was roughly as great as the gulf between someone who is moderately literate and someone who is completely illiterate. That is, the upper echelon of literate folks were not just literate, but highly literate, i.e. widely read. While this *would* change as the 18th century turned over into the 19th century and more and more folks gained a greater degree of literacy, but remained relatively narrow in terms of their reading choices (think newspapers, the Bible, some spellers/primers, etc.), within the parameters of your question it suggests that there is fairly direct correspondence between "being a voter" and "being widely read."
Now, the real question is does "being widely read" mean "being widely read in the philosophies of the Enlightenment?" And to that I directly to Cremin who, considering Thomas Paine's intellectual heritage, writes this:
> Paine could easily have imbibed Newton and Locke, Collins and Toland, Rousseau and Condorcet, without ever having read a word of them. Like others of his generation, he received Enlightenment affirmations from newspapers and magazines, from informal study groups and itinerant lecturers, from conversations in taverns and disputes in coffeehouses. **And, like others of his generation, he mulled them, argued them, and translated them into his own terms, producing a new and powerful version that was at the same time coarse and clear, simple and persuasive, audacious and reasonable.
What this indicates (something that Henry Mays' *Enlightenment in America* points out) is not only that the so-called "philosophies of the Enlightenment" circulated throughout America, but that America was an equally important site of Enlightenment-era philosophizing. Though he calls for a clearer demarcation between these American and non-American Englightenment-era thinkers, Mays writes,
> Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Jefferson can be described and admired together. These men shared certain very generous loyalties....The distinctions among them and their followers must be clearly made if one is to treat successfully the *history* of the Enlightenment: its spread, its victories, its defeats.
So, to return to your question, there is a problem with the formulation that the founders *based* the structure of the country on the work of other enlightenment philosophers. It is more accurate to say that both the founders, in their writings and their doings, participated in the same, very roughly drawn thought era as did other thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Newton, Condorcet, etc. And the residue, if you will, of this thought era (i.e. all the writings) circulated widely within and was influenced by a class of highly literate folks (mostly white guys), both in the US and abroad. And this class of highly literate folks was, for the most part, the "typical voter" in the late 18th century United States. | [
"Most of the Founding Fathers rejected political parties as divisive and disruptive. By the 1790s, however, most joined one of the two new parties, and by the 1830s parties had become accepted as central to the democracy. By the 1790s, the First Party System was born. Men who held opposing views strengthened their ... |
Could a really skilled knight or swordsman really take on and kill 5 or so other opponents at a time? Or is that just movie bs? | It's been done, so it's clearly possible.
One example: William MacBean. From his VC citation, "For distinguished personal bravery in killing eleven of the enemy with his own hand in the main breach of the Begum Bagh at Lucknow, on the 11th March, 1858." In the Indian Mutiny, he fought, single-handed, against 9 troopers, 1 *naik* (corporal) and 1 *havildar* (sergeant), and killed them all with his sword.
You can find similar feats on the battlefield in VC citations from the mid/late 19th century (and equivalents with firearms from then and later). Sometimes the VC winner faces a group in order to rescue a wounded soldier. Sometimes the VC winner doesn't kill them all - maybe only 1 or 2, and the rest flee, or merely holds them all off until help arrives. Sometimes the VC winner is wounded.
People also failed trying to do it. For example, the death of Francisco Pizarro. He was trying to defend himself against his assassins, and killed two of them. He then ran a 3rd opponent through with his sword (according to some versions, a 4th opponent pushed the 3rd onto his sword), and he was killed before he could free his sword. (And sometimes, the VC winners discussed above are killed.)
Such feats are exceptional - that's why they have resulted in the award of VCs, and the creation of legends and stories.
There are tactics and techniques that the lone swordsman can use against a group, and these tactics and techniques can be effective against relatively unskilled opponents. However, it isn't always possible to apply these on the battlefield, the opponents might not be sufficiently unskilled for such methods to result in victory, and bad luck (e.g., breaking one's sword) can happen. Plenty can go wrong, and one-against-many on the battlefield often results in the death of the one. | [
"BULLET::::- The Red Cross Knight, who almost won the battle all on his own, and could not be beaten, \"not by goblin or troll or giant. Not by the dozens or the hundreds.\" He was finally killed when the enemy set a dragon against him.\n",
"BULLET::::- The Red Cross Knight, who almost won the battle all on his o... |
what is the difference between constant and variable bitrate mp3 files, and what makes the latter supposedly "better"? | Bitrate means how many bits are used per second of song. In general, the more bits you have the higher quality the recording.
The thing is, some sounds are more 'complicated' and have finer details (higher frequencies). To accurately capture this, you need more information per second. You could just record the entire song at really high bitrate, but then you are just wasting space on the sections that are simpler and don't need as much information.
Variable bitrate is the middle ground, the sound is analyzed before hand and the more complex parts are assigned a higher bit rate, simpler parts are assigned a lower bitrate. That way you still get good reproduction of the original sound, but don't waste a lot of information; makeing the file smaller. | [
"Variable bitrate (VBR) is a term used in telecommunications and computing that relates to the bitrate used in sound or video encoding. As opposed to constant bitrate (CBR), VBR files vary the amount of output data per time segment. VBR allows a higher bitrate (and therefore more storage space) to be allocated to t... |
How can every point be the center of the universe if it isn't homogeneous? | The best current models indicates that the universe is flat and infinite.
> The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has confirmed that the observable universe is **flat** with only a 0.5% margin of error. Within the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) model, **the presently most popular shape of the Universe found to fit observational data according to cosmologists is the infinite flat model**, while other FLRW models that fit the data include the Poincaré dodecahedral space and the Picard horn.
Our observational sphere is based on the amount of time that light has had to travel since first light appeared roughly 370,000 years after the big bang (first light meaning light that could persist to today - this first light is the CMB).
We can not see past the observational sphere because light from there has not reached us.
So - you personally are centered in your observational sphere.
If you move one foot to your right - your observational sphere also moved one foot to the right. You can now see one foot farther (light wise) in one direction, than you could in the other.
Now this amount of difference is too small to make anything meaningful... but the relationship stands. If you moved 50 million light years, your observational sphere also moves 50 million light years. So you would see new things.
Consider if we could instantly teleport to the edge of our observational sphere... we would now have a new center. Half of what we observe would be half of our original observational sphere - and the other half would be totally new space with totally different galaxies, stars, etc.
Are we 100% certain of this? No... but so far all indications point in this direction. | [
"In cosmology, if one assumes the Copernican principle and observes that the universe appears isotropic or the same in all directions from the vantage point of Earth, then one can infer that the universe is generally homogeneous or the same everywhere (at any given time) and is also isotropic about any given point.... |
Some planes from WW2 were designed in such a way that the bullets they fired had to go between the propeller blades. How did the designers make sure they won't hit a blade and was the fire rate affected? | > How did the designers make sure they won't hit a blade
As far as I know the trigger mechanism to fire each bullet was coupled via a [cam](_URL_0_) to the shaft of the propeller. As the propeller shaft turned to a particular position the cam would trigger the gun to fire the bullet. This would mean that the bullet would fire and leave the barrel of the gun and pass through the rotating propeller blades only when the blades were in a position out of the firing line no matter what the rotational speed of the propellers. | [
"Following World War I, automatic propellers were developed to maintain an optimum angle of attack. This was done by balancing the centripetal twisting moment on the blades and a set of counterweights against a spring and the aerodynamic forces on the blade. Automatic props had the advantage of being simple, lightw... |
Was the Holy Roman Empire really a singular state? Or was it at best a loose league of states? | The answer to your question(s) would be a resounding "neither", I'm afraid. I'll try to get a bit more in-depth for the 1648-1806 period of HRE history where I'm best informed in, but hopefully you'll get other answers expounding on the many centuries before that. I can already give you a tl;dr though, if you like, and that's "It's fiendishly complicated".
The political and structural framework of the HRE was the following: There was the German King (who often also wore the Imperial Roman Crown) who stood at the top of the feudal structure of the Empire. Every lower-ranking prince received his (in rare cases also: her) fief from the King's hands, and throughout the HRE's history every time a fief passed hands or a new King/Emperor (I'll simply say "Emperor" from now on since throughout the entire early modern era, every German King also styled himself Emperor) there was a corresponding ceremony where the fief-holder would ritually swear fealty to the Emperor. So, a singular and centralised state with a strong monarch on top, no?
Well, of course it was much more complicated than that. In practice, the Emperor being the feudal overlord was more a legal theorem than political reality, and while the aforementioned ceremonies continued to be followed, in most cases from the late 17th century on, the various German lords sent representatives instead of appearing themselves as a subtle sign of defiance towards Imperial claims. Also, the Emperor was basically alone, as he had no governmental bureaucracy to his side...
...instead that this isn't the whole truth, either. Emperor Maximilian I, who ruled at the turn from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern, was very ambitious in his plans to centralise the Empire and create a functioning bureaucracy. For various reasons (the continuing resistance of the various princes being the central one), his plans didn't fully pan out and could only be realised in part. The most important achievements of Maximilian on this front were probably the establishment of an imperial court system, with the Imperial Chamber Court and the Imperial Aulic Council serving as the supreme appellation court in the Empire. But even there, we have to qualify that statement, since over the centuries many German territories tried (and often succeeded) in securing the privilege of their subjects not being able to appeal to the Imperial judiciary. Another enduring legacy of Maximilian's was the introduction of "Imperial districts" (*Reichskreise*), which ultimately got tasked with organising and supervising the mint, collecting the imperial taxes (well, tax - there was only one, and it didn't exactly constitute a lot of income), gathering and training Imperial Army troops and enforcing sentences of the Imperial judiciary. There also were a number of other, minor tasks, but it's more important to note that there were vast differences between the various districts; some of them were highly active, whereas others mostly existed on paper.
But there was an Imperial Judiciary and an Imperial Army so it can't have been too decentralised, right? Well, yes... and no. The two imperial courts had overlapping jurisdictions and sometimes worked openly against each other, the aforementioned *privilegia de non appellando* weakened the Imperial judiciary especially within the strongest individual member states, and the Imperial Chamber Court was notoriously underfunded; many of the cases brought before it took literal centuries to finally be resolved. Some never were, because the HRE's end in 1806 got in the way (although to be fair, those century-long cases also tended to be the politically most charged ones. In less exciting cases, the Court could be astonishingly quick, even!). The army was provided by the individual member states who generally speaking weren't all that inclined to supply the Emperor with a powerful standing military. In addition to that, there was no centralised Imperial Army doctrine or drill and the various units never exercised together, which in turn meant that their efficacy in actual warfare wasn't always a given.
On the other side of the scarce Imperial bureaucracy, there were the many (many, many) individual territories, who in themselves were highly varied and distinct. They were organised in the Imperial Diet (Reichstag), a mammoth parliament that until the 17th century would only come together sporadically. In 1663, the Reichstag met again in Regensburg, but when its members couldn't reach a consensus in several highly important questions they simply deferred the official end of the session (also because some princes feared that due to those debates the Emperor would refuse to call for another session) until perpetuity, creating the "Perpetual Diet" in the process which legally speaking was just one long, never-ending session of the Imperial Diet. This parliament didn't represent all of the Empire, however, since not every ruler in the Empire was allowed a seat (I'll tell more about them later on), and because Bohemia and Imperial Italy weren't represented either for a variety of reasons which all eventually end at "they were arguably no longer a part of the Empire, anyway".
The minor princes that were part of the Diet were divided in various groups. At the top were the prince-electors, a group of seven powerful princes and bishops whose most important job and privilege was to elect the Emperor. Who exactly was part of this elite group changed slightly over the centuries, and towards the end of the Empire the prince-electoral college even expanded to ten members. One of the prince-electors, the Archbishop of Mainz, also had the office of "Imperial Arch-chancellor of Germany" - in theory he led the imperial chancellery (in practice this was done by the "Imperial Vice Chancellor") and, most importantly, directed the sessions of the Imperial Diet. His prince-elector colleagues, the Archbishops of Cologne and Trier, also were Arch-chancellors of Italy and Burgundy, respectively, but those titles had long since lost virtually all of their practical power. The prince-electors even used to come together for parliamentary sessions of their own where they debated various imperial matters, but those mostly ceased with the Thirty Years' War.
Below the prince-electors came the Imperial Princes and Prelates. Those included powerful princes who didn't make it into the prince-electoral college, but also most Catholic bishops of the Empire and also all those abbots and abbesses who had the distinction of leading an "Imperial Abbey". This group had about 100 seats altogether, but six of those seats were "curial votes", i.e. one single vote cast together by a larger number of Diet members who didn't make the cut for a vote of their own. If I didn't miscount there were 166 of those unlucky princes and prelates.
At the lowest rung of the ladder were the Imperial cities, i.e. city-states (some of them very big and influential, others tiny) who weren't part of any larger territory, answered directly to the Emperor and took part at the Imperial Diet. Towards the end of the Empire there were 51 Imperial cities who had a whopping two votes inbetween them. | [
"The Holy Roman Empire was not a highly centralized state like most countries today. Instead, it was divided into dozens – eventually hundreds – of individual entities governed by kings, dukes, counts, bishops, abbots, and other rulers, collectively known as princes. There were also some areas ruled directly by the... |
Why couldn't Chiang Kai-Shek lead a unified Kuomintang, despite being appointed by Sun Yat-Sen to be the new leader? | Chiang Kai-shek didn't want to lead a unified KMT. In fact, he totally planned, executed, and then perpetuated the persecution of communists and the CCP from 1926-1937. And to be fair, Sun Yat-sen also had no interest in seeing the party unified with communists either, he was forced to by the USSR who was funding the KMT's Northern Expedition.
The KMT's creation led it to attract a plethora of plural-minded individuals. The three major groups can be broken down into "Liberals:" Those who sought to create a sort of modern capitalist-federation in the likes of the US; "Communists:" by 1926, no one had universally agreed to what communism was or meant. They just knew that it had to make China a better, modernized state like it did for Russia in the USSR; and finally "Nationalists:" This group is kind of nebulous. Some in recent years have likened them to being fascist minded, while others note that these men adopted their own Chinese concepts of modern military totalitarianism. So Liberals, Communists, and Nationalists, and they're all working "together" under a singular party, the KMT. The Chinese didn't really have the whole 'political parties' thing nailed down the way it is in federal state like the US. But they were all unified in one major goal: Unite China, Modernize China, and Make China Great Again by any means possible!
**Solidifying Chiang's Power; the Canton Coup and the Northern Expedition**
When Sun died, there was no real successor for the KMT. Chiang and Sun, although friends, had a very tense political relationship due to Chiang's refusal to cooperate with the CCP. Upon Sun's death, Chiang had an edge over other generals; he was the head of the Whampoa Academy, which meant that he not only had a professional corps of loyal officers, but an army at his disposal located right in Canton. But he himself really had no legitimate means of being the leader of the KMT in the eyes of every other KMT general. They were all the same; a group of former cadets trained in the art of military at the Imperial Japan Military Academy that were unified by their youthful bravado to return to a fragmented homeland and not just unify it, but also turn it into a great world power that could stand up to the Westerners. All of them would play a key role in modern Chinese history, and *most* of them wanted the leadership role, along with various politicians.
Chiang needed to act fast if he was to keep his position as head of KMT, or even his head. Chiang chose a combination pretty common to most dictators, assassinating/arresting those who could threaten him, and then accelerating war preparation to give other generals something to be busy with other than plotting his demise. One of the first things he did upon the death of Sun was killing Liao Zhongkai and arresting Hu Hanmin, getting rid of two potential rivals. Next, Chiang instigated the "Canton Coup" (also known as the Zhongshan Incident), where he used his power as head of the Whampoa Military Academy to attack certain communists, arresting Zhou Enlai and exiling Wang Jingwei, but also in the process forcing Soviet advisers to flee. Despite the close calls and tensions, Stalin decided to continue his backing of Chiang and the CCP stayed as an artery of the KMT, though not for long.
After ensuring he had control over the communists, Chiang then had to deal with fellow military generals. They weren't communists and they all weren't unified in who should replace Chiang, but many were convinced that Chiang should be disposed, a feeling that would soon dissipate as Japanese aggression became more and more belligerent. In order to cull the generals, Chiang basically took a gamble; he would launch the Northern Expedition in 1926 rather than later, against the advice of the Soviet advisers the year prior. Today we know the NE was a stunning success in many ways for the KMT, although it ultimately fell short. But at the time there was no guarantee the campaign would succeed. Fortunately for Chiang, as the KMT Army marched further north it became apparent that certain warlords had no real allegiance to their leaders, and Chiang's willingness to use what he called "Silver Bullets" (Bribes) meant that most of the warlords fell apart quite quickly; some even proved to be loyal allies in the future (Tang Shengzhi). But by 1928, Chiang was the undisputed leader of the KMT due to a combination of a successful war solidifying his leadership and him assassinating or exiling potential rivals. | [
"Chiang Kai-shek's entire tenure as \"de facto\" leader of the Republic of China from 1928 until 1948, when the Nationalist army was decisively defeated by Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army and the KMT fled the Chinese mainland to establish the ROC on Taiwan; was maintained under the auspices of his position as... |
A question about how American right-wing religious rhetoric shifted around the end of the Cold War | The soviet union's potential connection to scripture was based on a relatively pragmatic reading of the passages regarding Gog and Magog. These are the two allied forces that are supposed to invade Israel. Gog and Magog have long been thought to be connected with the scythians(and central asia), who would have existed in area largely occupied by the soviet union. Having both the army and the geographic positioning, they simply fit the prophetic bill most closely. But as the USSR broke up and no longer regarding as nearly as an imposing military power, they simply seem to be less and less likely to fit the bill for being gog/magog. | [
"America's isolationist philosophy after World War I gave rise to a xenophobic feeling across the nation. This was concentrated in rural areas and especially in the Southern United States and Indiana, where the Ku Klux Klan gained widespread support and sought to persecute immigrants and minorities in the 1920s. At... |
why does it feel so nice/good to sing along to a song? | There's complicated theories behind why this happens but basically we get pleasure out of having an anticipation satisifed, which is why "catchy" songs tend to have repetitive lyrics and melodies which you can easily catch on to and remember. Since you know what's coming, you have an anticipation which is then satisfied when you hear the actual part of the song you're anticipating, triggering a pleasurable response. Singing along enhances the effect. Add the factors of "letting loose" and if you happen to not be alone sharing something with others and all adds up to the good feeling.
Edit: "As scores of theorists and philosophers have noted...music is based on repetition. Music works because we remember the tones we have just heard and are relating them to the ones that are just now being played. Those groups of tones—phrases—might come up later in the piece in a variation or transposition that tickles our memory system at the same time as it activates our emotional centers...Repetition, when done skillfully by a master composer, is emotionally satisfying to our brains, and makes the listening experiences as pleasurable as it is." From _URL_0_
| [
"Chapin said, \"there's not a single line that tells how the guy or the girl felt. It's a very cinematic technique. But it's also a very uneconomical technique. That's why my songs are so long. I literally put you in that cab and let you experience. It's a more involving form of music than sitting and hearing someb... |
why is reddit composed mostly of male, middle class liberals? | Reasonable conjecture:
Because young teenagers tend to be more liberal.
Also, reddit draws a lot of focus towards technology related issues, which men are on average more interested in.
Finally, middle class americans have more free time to blow on reddit then lower class americans.
Also, upper class americans are less numerous. | [
"“Sexism in the systematic inequitable treatment of girls and women by men and by the society as a whole”. Implications of sexism include girls having lower expectations of their own capabilities and also being subject to ridicule for being assertive. These factors have a direct effect on women who want to run for ... |
if one company buys out another company for a monetary fee, wouldn’t the money go back to the parent company, therefore the parent company essentially gained capital for free since they own the other company? how does that work? | No, because when the company is bought it is bought from its owners. You know, the shareholders? They get the money from the buyout.
The only way it would stay with the company is if the company owned itself which is silly. | [
"When a company spins off part of its business as a new separate company and gives shareholders new shares in that new company, the taxpayer's cost base of the original shares is split between the original and the new holding. The company advises the appropriate proportions and the shareholder would allocate the or... |
Can Allergies be inherited? If not, how do they develop? | Your immune system is constantly creating new antibodies. It does this basically by throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, except with DNA from a certain region of the genome. Allergic reactions happen when the immune system recognizes a substance (such as peanut proteins or pollen) as dangerous and vehemently mounts a response against it, when the substance really is not dangerous. You can be predisposed to this, or you could develop it by the immune system creating a new antibody against, for example, shellfish protein, and deciding this was a good antibody to have, causing you to swell up in hives the next time you had shrimp. This is a very simplified explanation, of course.
Natural selection has not filtered out severe ones simply because they have not killed a sufficient proportion of people having them before they could reproduce, the same reason other lethal or debilitating diseases are have not been filtered out. | [
"Allergies in children are those causes, pathophsiology, treatments, management, practices and control of allergies that develop in children. Up to 40 percent of children suffer from allergic rhinitis. And children are more likely to develop allergies if one or both parents have allergies. Allergies differ between ... |
What does "thinness" or "thickness" of air imply and how does it happen and change? | Thick and thin are referring to density, I.e. how much air is contained in a given volume. On planets like earth the atmosphere's density changes because gravity pulls it down. The air high in the atmosphere pushes down on the air lower in the atmosphere, compressing it and increasing its density. So, in places with high altitudes, the air is less dense (thinner) and so it can feel harder to breathe because you have to work harder to get the same amount of oxygen. | [
"The terminology \"thin\" may be justified by the fact that if \"A\" is a thin subset of the line over Q then the number of points of \"A\" of height at most \"H\" is ≪ \"H\": the number of integral points of height at most \"H\" is formula_1, and this result is best possible.\n",
"Another type of thinning is cal... |
John D. Rockefeller - man of greed or a visionary? | I doubt you'll get a meaningful answer. 'Man of greed' and 'visionary' are personal judgements. So what causes some to call Rockefeller a man of greed causes others to call him a visionary.
That said, I'd seriously reconsider those 'sources' you posted. The first seems to be a site about Linux, the second one is an activist group and the third one... well, it's an objectivist shill site, meaning you shouldn't trust a word it says. (I mean, "Reason, egoism and capitalism."? Really?) Try to look for more academic sources and consider each one: who wrote this? Why did they write this? Is it trustworthy? etc | [
"The Rockefeller wealth, distributed as it was through a system of foundations and trusts, continued to fund family philanthropic, commercial, and, eventually, political aspirations throughout the 20th century. John Jr.'s youngest son David Rockefeller was a leading New York banker, serving for over 20 years as CEO... |
Why did Germany colonize Africa in the late 1800s and what did they gain from it? | I agree with czela's point, but I'd like to expand a bit. There were really two types of Imperialism: Old Imperialism and New Imperialism. The Old Imperialism consisted of the exploration of the New World and the search of spices. The motives for this exploration was mostly gold (economic), God (the spread of Christianity), and for king (prestige, ability for a nation to claim land). This imperialism led to the discovery and claiming of North America, the Far East, and parts of South America.
There were 4 main motives for New Imperialism: Jingo/The Great Game(the idea that a nation was measured by how much land they controlled and the race for colonies), national unity(it's a political unifier for a nation), discovery/adventure(the idea of going to an unknown land to discover things and battle with nature), and the White Man's Burden (the idea that Europe and white men were the best and they needed to spread their knowledge/government/culture with the rest of the world).
Edit: In the New Imperialism, many nations actually lost money. An example in Africa was the race between Britain and France to build the first trans-African railroad, which was a huge economic endeavor that failed. | [
"The German colonization of Africa took place during two distinct periods. In the 1680s, the Margraviate of Brandenburg, then leading the broader realm of Brandenburg-Prussia, pursued limited imperial efforts in West Africa. The Brandenburg African Company was chartered in 1682 and established two small settlements... |
how does the "vote weight" system work--on reddit/res and elsewhere? | Vote weight simply tracks the total net points you have given to a certain person. The ability to manually set it to whatever number is a novelty feature.
Also, I believe the creator of xkcd (Randall Munroe) wrote reddit's ranking algorithm. | [
"A weighted voting system is characterized by three things — the players, the weights and the quota. The voters are the players (\"P\", \"P\", . . ., \"P\"). \"N\" denotes the total number of players. A player's weight (\"w\") is the number of votes he controls. The quota (\"q\") is the minimum number of votes requ... |
how does championship unification in boxing work, and how do championships get separated again? | In boxing, there are 4 major sanctioning bodies that offer World Championship titles. (The WBO, WBA, WBC, and IBF)
So in each weight class, there are four world championship titles. That means in each weight class up to four separate fighters can each say they are the world champion in that weight class. (There's actually more than 4, explanation below)
For example, lets take a look at the world champions in the welterweight division.
Organization |Fighter |
---------|----------|
WBA| Keith Thurman |
WBC| Keith Thurman |
IBF| Errol Spence
WBO| Manny Pacquiao
So basically, Keith Thurman is the welterweight champion of the world. Manny Pacquiao is also the welterweight champion of the world. In addition, Errol Spence is also the welterweight champion of the world. They each have a championship title from a different sanctioning body. (Yeah, it's a bit strange)
A Championship unification occurs when two world champions fight each-other. The winner gets both championship titles: the one they already had, and the one other fight had. In this division, you will notice that Keith Thurman has two championship titles, from the WBA and from the WBC. This is because he unified them. He held the WBA championship title and then fought and defeated Danny Garcia, who held the WBC championship title. Therefore, Thurman now has both of those titles.
Lets says that Manny Pacquiao and Keith Thurman agree to fight each-other. That will mean that three championship titles are on the line. Both of Thurman's and Pacquiao's WBO title. The winner will unify all three.
When championship titles are unified, there are many ways that they can separated:
*If a boxer retires while holding multiple championship titles, the titles are vacated and each sanctioning body will then have two new boxers fight for the titles.
*Fighters have to pay a sanctioning fee to the each of the organizations. So sometimes, they will voluntarily drop one of their titles and only keep one to avoid the fees.
*Each sanctioning body has their own rules. If a fighter is inactive for a period of time, their title can get stripped. If they reject a mandatory opponent pushed by the sanctioning body, they can also get stripped of the title.
There are so many other factors that I didn't bring up. It's gets really bizarre and confusing when it comes to boxing titles. For example, there's really 5 titles in each division because one the sanctioning bodies decided to split their titles and offer a "super" and "regular" version. Also when two championship boxers fight each-other, their titles are not always automatically on the line. Sometimes they'll choose not fight for them for various reasons, like not wanting to pay sanctioning fees. | [
"A two-ring variation on a battle royal, the wrestlers start in one ring and try to throw wrestlers into the second ring, after which they can be eliminated by being thrown out of that ring. The last remaining wrestler in the first ring can rest until only one wrestler was left in the second ring, after which they ... |
If global warming continues at its current rate is sea level rise an inevitability? If it is what will the rate be? | First, sea level rise isn't an inevitability, in the sense that it will happen some time in the future. It is happening now, and it has been happening quite steadily since the start of the increase in greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere through anthropogenic behaviours about a century ago.
From the [IPCC](_URL_0_) documents on sea level rise we find out that there are two major contributing forces to sea level rise: thermal expansion and the exchange of water reservoirs (i.e. the melting of land-ice like Greenland or Antarctica). "Global mean sea level change results from two major processes, that alter the volume of water in the global ocean: i) thermal expansion and ii) the exchange of water between oceans and other reservoirs (glaciers and ice caps, ice sheets, other land water reservoirs - including through anthropogenic change in land hydrology, and the atmosphere.
**What were past sea levels like?**
"Global sea level rose by about 120 m during the several millennia that followed the end of the last ice age (approximately 21,000 years ago), and stabilised between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago. Sea level indicators suggest that global sea level did not change significantly from then until the late 19th century. The instrumental record of modern sea level change shows evidence for onset of sea level rise during the 19th century. Estimates for the 20th century show that global average sea level rose at a rate of about 1.7 mm/yr."
**What are current rates of sea level rise?**
"Satellite observations available since the early 1990s provide more accurate sea level data with nearly global coverage. This decade-long satellite altimetry data set shows that since 1993, sea level has been rising at a rate of around 3 mm yr–1, significantly higher than the average during the previous half century."
**What do the climate models predict?**
The IPCC has 6 models which they input real data into. Because human behaviour modifies the scenario 6 models have been created. The first model assumes we do everything within our power to reduce emissions and mitigate climate change. The last model assumes we do nothing, and in fact increase our emissions.
In the best case scenario they predict a sea level rise of 0.28m by 2100, in the worst case scenario they predict a sea level rise of 0.43m by 2100. Now we all know humans havn't exactly been following the best scenario, and more recent studies have pointed towards a sea level rise closer to the worst case scenario (or worse then that). So *I* wouldn't bank on a sea level rise lower then ~0.43m by 2100.
Now 0.43m might not seem like much but...using this [site](_URL_1_) or a similar one you can see what 1m change can do to low lying areas like many large costal metropolitan cities (New York) or island nations (South Pacific). Basically they are flooded. Back at the [IPCC](_URL_2_) site you can get more details about how specific areas (rocky shores vs. deltas) or how different economic situations (able to mitigate or not) will be effected by sea level rise.
When people say that "If Greenland and Antarctica melt it will 200+ feet sea level rise". This is more or less pretty accurate statement, but what they fail to state is the time scale on which this will take place. It won't be over night, more like a few to several centuries. However, there is a "tipping point" where if we pass a certain level of warming we won't be able to stop them from melting - like a run away train - it will happen, eventually.
> I'm just wondering if maybe in 40 years it would be a good idea to buy property that isn't near the coast.
Depends... are you buying a house on a low-lying delta floodplain? or are you buying a house on a very high cliff that overlooks the sea? Not all shores will be affected the same way.
| [
"BULLET::::- under the IPCC business as usual emissions scenario, an average rate of global mean sea level rise of about 6 cm per decade over the next century (with an uncertainty range of 3 – 10 cm per decade), mainly due to thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of some land ice. The predicted rise is ab... |
why is it when you take a nap, you get indents and marks from your sheets/body, but when you sleep normally you don't? | There would be no difference, other than when you sleep normally you move around a lot so you're not in one position for long enough for your skin to be indented. When you take a nap you tend to move less as you only really enter 1 R.E.M. cycle. | [
"A nap is a short period of sleep, typically taken during daytime hours as an adjunct to the usual nocturnal sleep period. Naps are most often taken as a response to drowsiness during waking hours. A nap is a form of biphasic or polyphasic sleep, where the latter terms also include longer periods of sleep in additi... |
why do(almost) all police cars use the same car/model? | buy in bulk for a cheaper rate. | [
"Terms for police cars include area car and patrol car. In some places, a police car may also be informally known as a cop car, a black and white, a cherry top, a gumball machine, a jam sandwich or panda car. Depending on the configuration of the emergency lights and livery, a police car may be considered a marked ... |
How would a vaccine against a different strain of flu minimize symptoms of the other flu? | The immune system fights viruses and bacteria by recognizing foreign [antigens](_URL_3_). There are essentially two arms of adaptive immunity: humoral and cellular. The humoral response is the one people are most familiar with, as most people know about antibodies and how they target pathogens that might be a part of an infection.
The cellular arm on the other hand is responsible for taking out virus-infected cells, among other things. [Cytotoxic T cells](_URL_0_) learn to recognize foreign peptides that are presented by cells, and once they receive a signal from an infected cell (in the form of a viral peptide attached to an [MHC class I molecule](_URL_4_)), the T cell will kill the infected cell.
The proteins which are known to be highly mutable in influenza, the hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA), are located on the outside of viral particles and are therefore common targets for neutralizing antibodies. Other viral proteins, such as the viral polymerase proteins PB1, PB2, and PA are [highly conserved](_URL_2_) among different strains of flu. The immune system mounts a response against all viral proteins. While antibodies may be made against viral proteins other than HA and NA, they will be unable to bind them as they're either sequestered within viral particles or within infected cells.
Cytotoxic T cells on the other hand, can respond to otherwise sequestered proteins that are presented as fragments on the surface of infected cells. Highly conserved [epitopes](_URL_1_) in flu PB1, PB2, and PA are common targets for these T cells, and so these T cells can effectively react across different strains of influenza, providing some protection as opposed to none at all. | [
"The CDC recommends the flu vaccine as the best way to protect people against the flu and prevent its spread. The flu vaccine can also reduce the severity of the flu if a person contracts a strain that the vaccine did not contain. It takes about two weeks following vaccination for protective antibodies to form.\n",... |
How diverse was the Mongol Empire at its peak? | Carpine came a little bit early for the diversity that would define the [Pax Mongolica.](_URL_0_) However, within the next 100-200 years the mongol empire was extremely diverse. Kublai khan was heavily influenced by the chinese during his reign, and later many leaders were influenced by islam and arabic architecture. From roughly 1250 to 1350 the mongol empire was extraordinarily diverse. Local cultures were left alone, and artisans from southeast asia and other parts of the empire were brought to the west to "re-construct" samarkand by Timur.
The mongols did everything they could to facilitate trade from one end of the empire to the other, naturally the exchange of cultural beliefs would follow suit. Religious tolerance was enforced, and this played to their benefit. When The mongols attacked Khwarezm, the other muslim leaders would not join the fight, believing it wasn't a "holy war", as the mongols had always been tolerant of islam. They also promoted the arts and cultural exchanges in other ways; lawyers, teachers, and artists were exempt from taxation and could freely travel the empire on excellent roads. At the very top of the hierarchy, I don't believe there were many foreigners however. If someone had foreign people in places of great power, it probably would have been kublai khan with the chinese. | [
"This article discusses the political divisions and vassals of the Mongol Empire. Through invasions and conquests the Mongols established a vast empire that included many political divisions, vassals and tributary states. It was the largest contiguous land empire in history. However, after the death of Möngke Khan,... |
Why is the major key considered cheerful and the minor key considered sad? Is this a nurtured trait or a natural predisposition? | There's a lot of unscientific speculation in the answers to this post, and repetition of folk stories of music composition that were discredited by psychoacoustic research in the mid 20th century.
[actual research](_URL_0_) has shown that some characteristics of music (lively vs. calming) tend to generalize between cultures while others (positive vs. negative affect) are unrecognizable outside of their original context. | [
"Many musicians have pointed out that every musical key conjures up specific feelings. This idea is further explored in a radio program called The Signature Series. American popular songwriter Bob Dylan claimed the key of C major to \"be the key of strength, but also the key of regret.\" French composers such as Ma... |
We seem to agree on the metric system, but why not UTC? | I think there's something interesting to be said here about the fetishization of units of measurement, but I can't quite seem to put words to it at the moment.
Maybe it'll come to me. | [
"Australia has kept a version of the UTC atomic time scale since the 1990s, but Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) remained the formal basis for the standard times of all of the states until 2005. In November 2004, the state and territory attorneys-general endorsed a proposal from the Australian National Measurement Institu... |
why do we, humans need to have wars when we can just talk problems over?u | You ask me for some ice cream.
I say no.
You really want the ice cream.
I say no.
I'm the only one with the ice cream.
I say no.
You try to talk to me nicely about it.
I say no.
You try to negotiate.
I say no.
You beg me.
I say no.
You get fed up and get all your friends to come and force me to share the ice cream. | [
"War is often used as a last ditch effort to prevent deteriorating economic conditions or currency crises, particularly by expanding services and employment in the military, and by simultaneously depopulating segments of the population to free up resources and restore the economic and social order.\n",
"Various p... |
What are the main differences between Valence Bonding Theory, VSEPR Theory, and Molecular Orbital Theory? | The best place to start is probably VSEPR theory. VSEPR theory is basically concerned with the geometry taken by the bonds in a certain molecule as a function of basic electron-electron repulsion; bonds between atoms (which constitute the sharing of an electron pair basically at this stage) want to be as far from one another as possible. They also want maximum distance from lone pairs and so you get the basic shapes of small molecules.
BUT, VSEPR theory just places electron pairs in "bonds" or "lone pairs" - it doesn't take into account any real notion of quantum function or in other words, it does not concern itself with the nature of the orbitals that are associated with each atom of the molecule, such as methane having a carbon and 4 hydrogens.
This is where valence bond theory comes in. After Lewis and Kekule, and with the contributions of quantum theory we knew that electrons were localised discreetly between nuclei in orbitals and it was the orbital interactions (overlaps) which gave rise to chemical bonds. So, atomic orbitals being 1s, 2s 2p x/y/z and molecular orbitals being pi and sigma bonds. Each orbital therefore was calculated to have it's shape ( from electron density calculations, but I'm just an organic chem grad so someone could give a much better explanation about the equations etc) and **using** the same ideas of electron repulsion etc. However, having orbital shapes allows a better grasp of reactivity, geometry and bond energy of molecules.
Like our methane example the contribution of Pauling took into account hybridisation, the mixing of atomic orbitals to account for carbons four bonds, giving 4 sigma molecular orbitals from their overlap and the tetrahedral geometry being a result of equidistance from the 4 orbitals... And each C-H bond is the same energy
...*but they are not in fact equal*! It turns out that [the ESCA spectrum of methane shows 2 peaks corresponding to the removal of electrons from the 4 C-H bonds](_URL_0_). BUT VB theory predicts these should be equal in energy
This is because of Molecular Orbital Theory (MO). What this model contributes is that in fact, electrons are NOT localised to just bonds between distinct atoms. The orbitals of all the atoms in the molecule are combined in accordance to the *sum of all the atomic orbitals to each molecular orbital* So, for methane again, we have 4 1s orbitals from methane and the 2s, 2p x/y/z orbitals from carbon. This gives 8 possible MO's (because of the symmetry requirement for orbitals) but crucially, this predicts that one molecular orbital will have NO nodes arising from the 2s and 4 1s all bonding interaction, and 3 MO's which each have 1 node because of the contribution of a p orbital. Giving two different C-H bond energies
Again, I'm just an organic/biochem grad so I hope this helps | [
"Modern valence bond theory now complements molecular orbital theory, which does not adhere to the valence bond idea that electron pairs are localized between two specific atoms in a molecule but that they are distributed in sets of molecular orbitals which can extend over the entire molecule. Molecular orbital the... |
What were major differences between the Federalist Party and the Democratic Republican Party? | The key differences were on issues of nationalism and localism. The best way to compare the two parties is to compare their ideological leaders. Alexander Hamilton was a driving force behind the Federalists while Thomas Jefferson was the founder of the old Republican Party (Democratic-Republican, Jeffersonian Republican).
Alexander Hamilton served as Washington's first Secretary of the Treasury (he is on the $10 and the treasury building is on the back of that bill) and he put forward a number of centralizing plans for economics, including a tariff, a national bank, and bounties for industrial production. He wanted to use the power of the newly minted federal government to develop the economic and industrial power of the United States along the lines of the British.
Jefferson (First Secretary of State under Washington), on the other hand, was far more in favor of local economics. He supported the yeoman farmers. He wanted America to be run by the states more than the federal government, no tariff as he and his fellows were exporters of raw materials and Europe had more demand for Tobacco and Cotton (a new industry for the USA thanks to the Cotton Gin), and other cash crops than the USA had. He was also more in line with the French over the British.
From about 1796 through about 1815 the two parties were dramatically opposed the key issues of economics (plantations or factories), location of political power (national vs local), banking (yes or no), and trade policy (protect our factories or export our goods).
By the war of 1812 the Federalist party was in shambles. No presidential victory since 1796, only Marshall on the supreme court to have any power, an aborted attempt to break New England off as its own country failed and the party dissolved. The Republican party was unopposed in the election of 1820.
Some good sources to read on these differences would be found by looking up Hamilton's economic plans, the election of 1800 which was a major battle between the two parties for control of the 15 states and the federal government, and the even the war of 1812 which we see the beginning of the end of the Federalist Party.
Text sources archive:
_URL_0_
Hamilton's Manufacturing plan: (federalist economic policy)
_URL_1_
Jefferson and Madison's Kentucky resolution: (a reaction to federalist legal policies)
_URL_2_
I hope these help answer your question. | [
"The American two-party system began to emerge as political parties coalesced around competing interests. A Congressional caucus, led by Madison, Jefferson and William Branch Giles, began as an opposition group to Hamilton's financial programs. Hamilton and his allies began to call themselves \"Federalists\". The o... |
If we were to create a bottomless vacuum on Earth and dropped a ball in it, could it ever reach a "terminal velocity?" | So just to be clear, you mean you apply a constant force forever on something in a vacuum?
In this case, it would accelerate forever. It wouldn't ever reach a terminal velocity, except in the sense that as it reaches high relativistic speeds its velocity asymptotically approaches that of light. However, in its rest frame its acceleration wouldn't have changed, so it can't really be said to reach a terminal velocity. | [
"Aristotle proposed that the speed at which two identically shaped objects sink or fall is directly proportional to their weights and inversely proportional to the density of the medium through which they move. While describing their terminal velocity, Aristotle must stipulate that there would be no limit at which ... |
What were movies like in Soviet Russia during the Cold War? | Could you explain your question? Soviet cinema is a broad subject, one that cannot be explained in a single answer. What are you looking for? Major themes? Cold war via cinema? Prominent figures in its development? | [
"Between 1946–54, the Soviet Union mimicked the US adoption of cinema as a weapon. The Central United Film Studios and the Committee on Cinema Affairs were committed to the Cold War battle. Under Stalin's rule, movies could only be made within strict confines. Cinema and government were, as it stood, inextricably l... |
How are we able to put more space/memory into processors, GPU's, ram, hard drives, etc. as time progresses? | The process which circuits are made is called photolithography. A source of UV light shines on a film and the exposed parts harden. Then the remaining soft film is washed off and some etching fluid is applied. The hard film controls which parts of the silicon wafer is etched, allowing you to get very precise patterns for each circuit.
The major improvements which have led to increased computing power are: higher wavelengths of UV light, better optical equipment to focus the UV light, advanced in materials technology for the photoresist film, better quality of silicon and so on.
Right now, we are close to hitting the fundamental limit of how small we can make the circuit channels, which are essentially a nanoscopic trench dug into the silicon wafer. I believe the current achievement is a 14-atom distance between trenches, which is really pushing the limits of physics due to quantum tunneling.
Right now there is a shift from denser IC chips to better parallel processing (quad, 8 or 16 core) to continue the growth in computing power, since the limit of circuit density is near and unless some fundamental technology is discovered it will remain as a hard limit to computing power. | [
"As microprocessors are becoming faster, mainly because of the cores being added every few months, memory latency gap is becoming wider. Memory latency was few cycles in 1980 and it is reaching nowadays almost 1000 cycles. If the micro-processor has enough cores and hopefully they are not sending requests to the ma... |
why can i kick a soccer ball farther when it's rolling towards me? | Soccer balls deform under stress.
When it's moving towards you, there's a certain momentum in that direction, which causes it to deform more when your foot impacts it than it would if it was stationary.
Then when it snaps back to its normal shape, more energy is imparted to the ball causing it to fly off with more force.
Basically, movement towards you lets you add the energy of that movement onto the energy imparted to the ball by your kick (it also means that the ball will equally impart more energy to your foot, but feets are strong and can generally withstand that without trouble - as overall the ball is much less massive than the person kicking the ball) | [
"The result is a towering ball which should rotate end on end. The height of the kick makes the ball susceptible to wind which causes the ball to change direction. Also, the ball gathers speed as it falls closer to the ground and this combined with the swirling can also cause the ball to change direction, making it... |
Were there classical/medieval versions of ambulances? | Yes and no.
The idea of an ambulance where a sick or injured person is transported, treated on route and brought to a place of medical care didn't exist for civilians until 1832 when London's Cholera outbreak lead the city to setup horse drawn carriages to transport the ill that served as the first form of the ambulance.
Prior to that, the only form of medical transportation for civilians was the forced removal of those suffering from mental illness or leprosy. These people would be taken almost always against their will to a quarantined place separated from the public, usually a place run by the local monastery. You have to remember, the vast majority of people couldn't afford medical care and even if they did, didn't live close enough to a hospital (if the country had any) where being transported would be more beneficial than just having someone with medical knowledge come to you. Also remember these are the days before sterile rooms and advanced medical equipment. And it also wasn't uncommon for the doctor to also be the local barber.
However, in 1487 the Spanish began using horse drawn carts to serve as mobile hospitals to follow their armies. This is the earliest form of care where a person is taken from the place of injury or illness to a place of care and treated en route. But this was strictly for military use only.
Sources:
Katherine T. Barkley (1990). The Ambulance. Exposition Press.
Cholera Epidemics in Victorian London.” Cholera Epidemics in Victorian London | The Gazette, Authority, 1 Feb. 2016, _URL_0_.
“History of Ambulances.” EMT Resources - for New and Experienced EMTs, _URL_2_, 2016, _URL_1_. | [
"The history of the ambulance begins in ancient times, with the use of carts to transport patients. Ambulances were first used for emergency transport in 1487 by the Spanish forces during the siege of Málaga by the Catholic Monarchs against the Emirate of Granada , and civilian variants were put into operation in t... |
the different parts of web development and the languages/tools that are used for each part. | This explanation is a huge oversimplification but this is ELI5 after all... there are basically three levels of code in any code base as follows:
1. Database Tier (MySQL, Oracle): this consists of database tables which contain all the data for your website like user name, address info, etc. This tier also contains all the commands to interact with the database tables like retrieving the data to show on the webpage.
2. Business Tier (Python/Java): this consists of most of the logic involved in your website. For example, when you submit data on reddit this is where that data is validated before it is stored in the database.
3. Presentation Tier (Angular/HTML/Jquery): this consists of building the HTML to show you the webpage. By this point all the data has been pulled from the database and validated in the Business Tier and we are ready to show you the results.
Again, this is a super simplified version of one way to look at a code base and super nerds will say this is old fashioned and blah blah blah. But in the end you have to perform these 3 things no matter what. | [
"Web development is the work involved in developing a web site for the Internet (World Wide Web) or an intranet (a private network). Web development can range from developing a simple single static page of plain text to complex web-based internet applications (web apps), electronic businesses, and social network se... |
what happens when your body "adjusts" to a high-fiber diet | Any dietary change can cause rumbletummy. Your gut flora adapts to dealing with slower digesting food. However, some people have more difficulty than others. I eat lots of bran fiber as well as raw and cooked vegetable fiber... And chicory root (in fiber bars, some yogurts, and fiber cereals) gives me awful rumbly tummy even when I eat it for a week.
Beans have undigestable starches in them that cause gas. Soaking beans overnight and discarding the water helps remove the starches. | [
"Fiber is defined by its physiological impact, with many heterogenous types of fibers. Some fibers may primarily impact one of these benefits (i.e., cellulose increases fecal bulking and prevents constipation), but many fibers impact more than one of these benefits (i.e., resistant starch increases bulking, increas... |
- why is microwaving metal objects dangerous? | Microwaves can induce electric current in metallic (or any conductive) objects. They are, quite literally, antennas. And while normally antennas receive signals of low power, these are high power signals meant for transferring energy.
The effect of these currents depends alot on the object's makeup. "Pure" metal in a smooth shape tends to disperse the current pretty easily. If, however, the metal is mixed with other things, or has sharp edges, or air gaps, this makes it much harder for all the electric forces to equalize and you can get sparking which becomes a fire hazard. The classic example here is that usually forks cause sparking, but spoons do not. | [
"Great potential exists in the scrap metal industry for accidents in which a hazardous material present in scrap causes death, injury, or environmental damage. A classic example is radioactivity in scrap; the Goiânia accident and the Mayapuri radiological accident were incidents involving radioactive materials. Tox... |
What is it about the American Revolution that allowed it to"work" when there are so many other revolutions (the French and Russian Revolutions come to mind) that end up horribly? | To my consideration, the answer lies within the terms. While the Russian and French revolutions were, basically internal affairs, as they wanted to overthrow the government held by actual Russians and French people respectively, the American revolution was actually an independence, as the government that was sought to be overthrown was English. As the source of the problem leaves the country, problems aren't as prone to reappear. | [
"The Revolutions of 1917–1923 were a period of political unrest and revolts around the world inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution and the disorder created by the aftermath of World War I. The uprisings were mainly socialist or anti-colonial in nature and were mostly short-lived, failing to have a long-... |
how is tv static from the big bang? | Most of the TV static is from the amplifier itself; only ~1% of that is cosmic background radiation. CBR is spread across a pretty wide band, 0.3 GHz to 630 GHz, which broadcast TV is within that band. It's also really quiet, which is why almost all the static is local (part of the TV circuit itself) electrical noise. | [
"Cramer's simulation of the sound of the Big Bang, created using Mathematica, attracted some mainstream press attention in late 2003 and again in 2013. The simulation originated with an \"Alternate View\" article, \"BOOMERanG and the Sound of the Big Bang\" (January 2001). Cramer describes the sound as \"rather lik... |
Why would some knights during the Middle Ages name their weapons? | I would put forward the following -
- Possessions were few and far between in the middle ages; a sword was one of the most valuable things a person could have. As a result, knights wanted to show off their pride for their weapons by naming them.
- The tradition of naming weapons probably arose in the early middle ages, such as in the anglo-saxon and viking cultures. For example, the Viking King Magnus Barelegs had a sword called "Legbiter".
- Not only swords were named, but other weapons also, and sometimes armour and shields as well. In such warrior cultures weapons and armor were very prized possessions, and men would form a strong psychological bond with such items. Much like an American Frontiersman who named his rifle, these names represented the life and death relationship warriors had with their arms and armour.
- Later in the middle ages, in the more continental traditions of knighthood in the high and late middle ages, this tradition was not formally practiced, although it is likely that some individual would have given their weapons informal nicknames.
Other examples of named swords I can think of -
- Edward the Confessor had the "Sword of Mercy" or "Curtana", which forms a part of the French epic you name above and according to legend, once belonged to Ogier the Dane.
- El Cid had a sword named "Tizona" which is on display in the Museo de Burgos, in Burgos, Spain.
- Charlemagne's "Joyeuse""
| [
"The medieval heralds also devised arms for various knights and lords from history and literature. Notable examples include the toads attributed to Pharamond, the cross and martlets of Edward the Confessor, and the various arms attributed to the Nine Worthies and the Knights of the Round Table. These too are now re... |
50 years ago $20 was a lot of money, today it's almost spare change. where does all the extra money come from? | The more money printed the less it's worth. Why QE is so controversial. But that is what happens constantly. | [
"As of June 30, 1969, the U.S. coins and banknotes in circulation of all denominations were worth $50.936 billion of which $4.929 billion was circulating overseas. So the currency and coin circulating within the United States was $230 per capita. Since 1969, the demand for U.S. currency has greatly increased. The t... |
Since flames burn at different temperatures, are there any flames that are safe to touch? | They are borderline for "safe to touch", but some materials burn as so-called ["cool flames"](_URL_0_) with temperatures in the 200-400 degree C range | [
"In addition some solvents, such as methanol, can burn with a very hot flame which can be nearly invisible under some lighting conditions. This can delay or prevent the timely recognition of a dangerous fire, until flames spread to other materials.\n",
"An air-only torch will burn at around 1,995 °C (3,623 °F), l... |
I can't seem to understand what a virtual image is in optics. Secondly, is a rainbow an example of a virtual image? | When you look at something, your eyes see and your brain interprets rays of light diverging from individual points of the object. This is called image formation.
When you look through a magnifying glass at something, you still see rays of light that *appear to be* emanating from a common point, but those rays of light didn't actually start there. They actually started from the object and bent at the lens, then went to your eye. Because the rays you see don't actually touch each other, the image is called a **virtual image**. | [
"In optics, a virtual image is an image formed when the outgoing rays from a point on an object always diverge. The image appears to be located at the point of apparent divergence. Because the rays never really converge, a virtual image cannot be projected onto a screen. In diagrams of optical systems, virtual rays... |
What is the significance of the use of "I am" instead of "I have" when Vishnu says, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds"? | You would probably receive a more thorough and knowledgable answer if you asked this question in /r/linguistics.
However, I can tell you that the [present perfect](_URL_1_) construction "I am become" is not the result of a direct translation of Sanskrit, but an artifact of early modern English that most likely stems from the [Germanic influence upon the language](_URL_0_). The construction may still be found in modern German.
In addition to "I am become death," you may find similar constructions repeated in the Bible ("I am come in my father's name," John 5:43 KJV), in Christmas carols ("Joy to the world, the Lord is come"), and in much of English literature prior to the 20th century.
Additionally, this type of present perfect construction survives with verbs other than *come/become*, both in one-off archaic phrases ("He is risen,") and in standard English ("The box of Oreos is gone.")
edit: added some links.
supra-edit: not surprised to learn from /u/mambeau that /r/linguistics has already [answered this question](_URL_2_). | [
"\"God is Dead\" (German: ; also known as the Death of God) is a widely quoted statement by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche used the phrase to express his idea that the Enlightenment had eliminated the possibility of the existence of the Abrahamaic God or of deities in general. However, proponents... |
how does giving to charity save rich people money? | This is just a basic example and not 100% accurate, but it will give you the idea. Lets say I make $1000. Normally I would pay taxes on the whole $1000.
Lets say I make $1000 and give $200 to charity. I would now only pay taxes on $800.
In reality, it doesn't really save you money. Because even if you were paying the maximum amount of taxes on that money, you would still end up taking more money home than if you didn't give to charity.
The real tax writeoffs are the ones you claim as expenses for your business. For example, you can claim you drove your car for work and get a writeoff for a certain amount based on how many miles you put on the car. Then you have people that cheat the system and go to dinner with their wife and call it a "business" expense. | [
"\"There is one kind of charity common enough among us... It is that patchwork philanthropy which clothes the ragged, feeds the poor, and heals the sick. I am far from decrying the noble spirit which seeks to help a poor or suffering fellow being... [However] what advances a nation or a community is not so much to ... |
why do we work so hard against extinction of any species, when 99.9% of species naturally die out? | you don't really adapt to having no food. learning how to stop killing bees is probably more worth our time than walking around with cotton swabs pollinating plants by hand
also "it was going to happen anyway" is not a good argument. everyone dies eventually murder is still illegal | [
"Currently, environmental groups and some governments are concerned with the extinction of species caused by humanity, and they try to prevent further extinctions through a variety of conservation programs. Humans can cause extinction of a species through overharvesting, pollution, habitat destruction, introduction... |
what are the properties of hydrogen/helium that enable physicists to distinguish them from 'metals'? | _URL_0_
> Metals are commonly:
>
> * Shiny
> * Good conductor of heat and electricity
> * High melting point
> * Malleable (this means that they can be hammered or distorted)
> * Ductile (this means that they can be drawn into wires)
> * Usually solid at room temperature. An exception to this is mercury, which is liquid in nature.
> * Generally have low electronegativities.
Metals are defined according to their position on the periodic table. Every other element (including hydrogen and helium) is non-metal. | [
"Hydrogen is highly soluble in many rare earth and transition metals and is soluble in both nanocrystalline and amorphous metals. Hydrogen solubility in metals is influenced by local distortions or impurities in the crystal lattice. These properties may be useful when hydrogen is purified by passage through hot pal... |
how do we know what the earth looks like on the inside? | In the simplest way I can think to explain it, different parts of seismic waves behave differently when they travel travel through different substances (solids, liquids, and different types of each.) Parts of the waves pass through fluids unaffected, parts bounce off, parts are absorbed, parts slow down, and so on. By studying the data gathered from seismic activity like earthquakes and using that knowledge, you can draw a pretty accurate picture of what layers are where. Densities, chemical properties, melting/boiling points, etc. come into play also when the exact composition of each layer is stated. | [
"The internal structure of the Earth is layered in spherical shells: an outer silicate solid crust, a highly viscous asthenosphere and mantle, a liquid outer core that is much less viscous than the mantle, and a solid inner core. Scientific understanding of the internal structure of the Earth is based on observatio... |
when not hunting, what do predators do when they meet prey animals? | Predators don't want a drawn-out stand up fight. A predator is only fighting for its food; the prey will be fighting for survival. Neither animal *wants* to get hurt, but the predator is the one that can afford to break off at any time and try again, so that means it'll be picky about starting one. Therefore if the prey animal is big enough to fight back, the predator is going to be mostly interested in some combination of stealth, surprise, or wearing down its energy with a chase.
This means that if a predator isn't already "in" stealth mode and actively hunting, but just saunters into an area obviously, few of the prey animals in that area will be good targets, because they all already know it's there. Making a move would be a waste of energy when the target is fresh, rested, healthy, and can react immediately. So a lot of the time both sides will appear to be "ignoring" each other simply because it isn't worth being the first to burn energy on a sprint. The prey will keep a minimum safe distance and leave at its own pace. | [
"Predators may actively search for prey or sit and wait for it. When prey is detected, the predator assesses whether to attack it. This may involve ambush or pursuit predation, sometimes after stalking the prey. If the attack is successful, the predator kills the prey, removes any inedible parts like the shell or s... |
why are data measurement units (mb, mb, gb, tb) not even numbers of bytes? like why is a gigabyte not exactly 1000 megabytes? | Because computer measurements are based on multiples of 8. (Base 8)
This is why you've heard the term 8 bit, 64 bit and so on.
A gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, a megabyte is 1024 bytes and so on.
It's all in multiples of 8. There have been attempts to metricise this, but they've not really taken off. | [
"Many operating systems compute file size in mebibytes, but report the number as MB (megabytes). For example, all versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system show a file of 2 bytes as \"1.00 MB\" or \"1,024 KB\" in its file properties dialog and show a file of 10 () bytes as 976 KB.\n",
"Despite its offici... |
Did he British ever plan a direct naval invasion of Germany in World War I? Were there any defensive fortifications on the German coast? | There were a number of plans for amphibious assaults on German islands in the North Sea and even the Baltic coast of Germany, formulated in 1914-15, but these came to nothing as it was chosen to focus on knocking the Ottoman Empire out of the war instead. In 1916-17, planning focused on moves to outflank German lines in Flanders, but these were cancelled due to German coastal defences and the failure of land-based offensives these assaults were to link up with. Finally, in 1918, the RN raided the German-controlled ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge, with the aim of rendering them useless as U-boat bases. For more information on these, see my answers [here](_URL_2_) and [here](_URL_0_). There were also a number of raids made on targets along the German North Sea coast by RNAS (and later RAF) aircraft operating from seaplane and aircraft carriers, which I've covered [here](_URL_1_). | [
"The German Navy had decided on a strategy of bombarding British towns on the North Sea coast in an attempt to draw out the Royal Navy and destroy elements of it in detail. An earlier raid on Yarmouth on 3 November 1914 had been partially successful, but a larger-scale operation was later devised by Admiral Franz v... |
Vonnegut says that the Texas Revolution was based on the idea that Mexico had outlawed slavery, which caused Texas to rebel. Any truth to that? | Kind of a perfect storm.The Texans wanted slave ownership legal and church attendance voluntary; the Mexican government forbid slave ownership and had mandatory Catholic church membership. Not a few Texans had "absquatulated" from Mississippi and the South, losing their plantations and fleeing their debts when Jackson took down much of the US banking system, so there was an element that would have felt it had no where else to go. And of course General Santa Anna is generally reviled in Mexico today for his ability to make terrible decisions, and many were made in dealing with the Texans. | [
"In 1829, slavery was officially outlawed in Mexico. Austin feared that the edict would cause widespread discontent and tried to suppress publication of it. Rumors of the new law quickly spread throughout the area and the colonists seemed on the brink of revolt. The governor of Coahuila y Tejas, Jose Maria Viesca, ... |
How different are brains in "normal" people, and their structure, genetics and other things? | This answer to that really depends on the scope that you're looking at. In terms of brain structures and regions (cerebellum, amygdala, etc.), you can safely bet that most healthy people have these structures, the way most healthy people have fingers and a nose. When you zoom in to the actual neural networks and pathways, things get a bit more tricky. The brain is "plastic" and can change. Neural networks can be created and broken. Think of someone who is more artistic vs someone who loves numbers - they have the same brain structures, but they're wired differently (from genetics, environment, experience). Brain power can be developed through training. | [
"Genetic background determines such features as height, eye color, and potential to develop certain diseases like diabetes, but it also determines all the chemicals and structures that make up the brain, therefore playing a role in Epilepsia partialis continua. The chemicals and structures that make up the brain ha... |
Historical context of the film Lincoln (2012) | Don't consider this a full and proper answer, but it seems relevant to point out that the movie in question was largely based on a book about Lincoln's cabinet and political work during the Civil War, also touching on his election and position within the Republican Party. Check out Doris Kearns Goodwin's *Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln* if you're interested in further reading. | [
"\"Lincoln\" is a 2012 American historical drama film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as United States President Abraham Lincoln and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln. The film is based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of Lincoln, \"\", and covers the final four months... |
Isn't classical conditioning of animals basic "If this then that" reasoning? Doesn't this mean that cats/dogs could think? | Of course cats and dogs can think.
Classical conditioning is more of an association than logical If/Then reasoning, since it's very easy to create associations which 'break the logic' e.g. salivating when a bell is rung. | [
"Classical conditioning is when an animal eventually subconsciously anticipates a biological stimulus such as food when they experience a seemingly random stimulus, due to a repeated experience of their association. One significant example of classical conditioning is Ivan Pavlov's experiment in which dogs showed a... |
Were people in Europe honestly religiously motivated to go to war or were religious tensions used more similarly to what we would call a "casus belli", by ambitious rulers? | I would contend that there were elements of both sides of the argument in warfare in pre-modern Europe. On the one hand there was a level of belief extant in that period that is almost unimaginable to a modern person. This served as the basis for the mass appeal for events like the crusades and the wars of religion. Moreover events such as the relative ferocity of the wars of religion are hard to reconcile without recourse to religion as a causative factor.
On the other hand you have an entirely valid point. Many rulers cynically used religion as one leaver to control both their own populaces and justify their expansion. A good example of this would be the actions of the French kings regarding the Avignon papacy. By `protecting`the Popes in their kingdoms the Kings of France extracted many favors and advantages at a low cost. And their opposition to the eventual return to Rome of the papacy points to a motive other then the purely religious.
However at the end of the day we should be aware of our biases. Even the most religious modern historian has a hard time getting into the mindset of the absolute belief that many in the period experienced. This makes it very easy to dismiss the religious aspect of the period. However equally we should not romanticise the past, the Kings and other powerful people of the period were not any stupider then our current leaders. They were able to make decision that were based on self interest even in religious matters. But my readings indicate to me that as a significant factor in these decision was religion. | [
"According to Jeffrey Burton Russell, numerous cases of supposed acts of religious wars such as the Thirty Years' War, the French Wars of Religion, the Sri Lankan Civil War, 9/11 and other terrorist attacks, the Bosnian War, and the Rwandan Civil War were all primarily motivated by social, political, and economic i... |
what is happening to our brain when we go to speak and the start of the words get switched? | The basic idea is that your brain has to go through a bunch of steps to put together sounds and words into a sentence, and sometimes it messes up a step. Linguists call these slips of the tongue "speech errors." Linguists study them to figure out how our brains store and combine all the parts of a sentence.
We know that people make speech errors regularly, every day. We also know people are more likely to make speech errors when they're tired, nervous, or drunk. But we actually don't know exactly what happens when you make a slip of the tongue, because we still don't know the details of how our brains store or combine words in the first place.
Source: undergrad in linguistics and cognitive science
References: _URL_0_
_URL_1_ | [
"When a person produces a word, they are essentially turning their thoughts into sounds, a process known as lexicalisation. In many psycholinguistic models this is considered to be at least a two-stage process. The first stage deals with semantics and syntax; the result of the first stage is an abstract notion of a... |
the tree of life | The Tree of Life is primarily about sublime experience more than it is about deep story.
_URL_0_
Sublime is a philosophical concept about the sensation of being incapable of taking in the entire power and magnitude of something, especially something natural. Looking at the night sky and imagine all the stars, looking out at the vastness of the ocean, standing at the foot of an enormous mountain.
Tree of Life's "story," is more about Mallick resolving his thoughts on his childhood, but the point of Tree of Life (for audiences) isn't the story. Tree of Life is about pushing sublimity, the overwhelming power and beauty of imagery. I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it, but for many people (the Academy included), looking at the Tree of Life is the cinematic equivalent of taking in the Sistine Chapel. | [
"The tree of life is a diagram used in various mystical traditions. It usually consists of 10 nodes symbolizing different archetypes and 22 lines connecting the nodes. The nodes are often arranged into three columns to represent that they belong to a common category.\n",
"The tree of life or universal tree of lif... |
When Book 10 of the Iliad was written? | The so-called Doloneia has been debated for some time, since antiquity in fact. There isn't really a consensus, though most scholars consider it an interpolation. The tradition that the Doloneia is an interpolation goes back to a Homeric scholiast in antiquity, who attributed the Doloneia to Pisistratus. More likely, if the scholiast is right, the Doloneia was part of an alternate version of the *Iliad* (there were many such versions surviving well into antiquity, even after the relative standardization of the text by the Alexandrian scholars) that was added by Pisistratus, possibly as part of the so-called Pisistratean Recension (if it existed). Certainly the passage is suspect, as it lacks certain distinctive features of the rest of the poem besides not really making sense, but it's been pointed out that the Homeric Poems were the result of a centuries-old oral poetic tradition, and that anomalies shouldn't be unexpected. Many such anomalies were culled from the text by the Alexandrian scholars as interpolations, some of them quite long, and there are lots of passages in Homer that certainly look like interpolations but may well be genuine products of the oral tradition (I dunno, I'm not really a Homeric scholar, they get all tied up in knots about this sort of thing). But the Doloneia is unusually long and if it is an interpolation it probably represents a fairly early one, probably inserted from another part of the epic cycle--the Doloneia appears to be linked to an epic tradition surrounding Rhesus, who is of course murdered in his sleep in the passage, that we know existed
> So my theory is it was written in the 5th to 4th century B.C. The reason behind this is the character Dolan. In my opinion a character like him would have been very popular to add due to the traitor at Thermopylae, Ephialtes of Trachis, in 480 B.C.
I'm not so sure about this. I've never heard any connection supposed between Ephialtes and Dolon, they seem to me to have very little to do with each other. I mean, Dolon exists literally to be killed--the New Pauly suggests that maybe he was an invention of the author of the Doloneia, who created a character to link a tradition about a night expedition by Diomedes and Odysseus with the death of Rhesus. His name is certainly suspect (Δόλων isn't really a name, its a derived form from δόλος, "craft, cunning") and his lack of any personality or importance despite taking up so much of the book is more than a bit odd if the character existed in the epic cycle before his inclusion in Homer. Ephialtes is certainly too late to be an influence on the Doloneia, as it appears to have been named very early, attributed to Pisistratus by the scholiasts and possibly known to Herodotus. It lacks features common to the rest of the poem, but its language still appears to be close enough to Homer's that it's probably at least in some way derived from some part of the epic cycle. The New Pauly's explanation of the passage as an interpolation of Rhesus' part of the epic cycle into Homer is as convincing I think as any, but there are *lots* of alternate suggestions out there and there's still not even a consensus on whether it's an interpolation or not | [
"The \"Iliad\" is paired with something of a sequel, the \"Odyssey\", also attributed to Homer. Along with the \"Odyssey\", the \"Iliad\" is among the oldest extant works of Western literature, and its written version is usually dated to around the 8th century BC. In the modern vulgate (the standard accepted versio... |
What do former-soviet nations teach about WWII? | When I was attending Soviet public school in the 80s, the Pacific theater wasn't mentioned beyond Soviet involvement. The Western Front was looked upon as 'too little too late' and Lend Lease wasn't mentioned all. Keep in mind that this is at the elementary/middle school level, and WW2 was a topic from kindergarten on.
I would assume that the same continues in the Russian Federation. I would be very curious to lean about how the topic is presented in the various former republics, especially the Baltic States that don't have the most favorable opinion of Russia. | [
"1945 is an alternate history written by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen in 1995, describing the period immediately after World War II wherein the United States had fought only against Japan, allowing Nazi Germany to force a truce with the Soviet Union, after which the two victors confront each other in a co... |
Why was there such a gap between the earliest stone tools and the earliest metal tools? | "Having fire" and begin able to smelt metal are not at all the same thing. First off you have to recognize the ores that contain metal. You also have to get the fire pretty hot (hotter than a campfire will get if you want to smelt copper, so you probably need to have a knowledge of pottery so you could make a clay kiln of some sort) and pretty consistent. You also have to be able to do the final step in an air-starved environment because you're trying to strip oxygen out of the mineral to get your metal. That's a lot of stuff to figure out from nothing. | [
"The earliest stone tools were irrelevant, being little more than a fractured rock. In the Acheulian era, beginning approximately 1.65 million years ago, methods of working these stone into specific shapes, such as hand axes emerged. This early Stone Age is described as the Lower Paleolithic.\n",
"Stone tools are... |
Zhuge Liang: Fact vs. Fiction | Pretty much everything about Zhuge Liang popularized in *Romance of the Three Kingdoms* is false. Some notable examples:
**Borrowing Arrows with Straw Boats:**
The *Sanguozhi* does not mention this at all, which means it is probably pure fiction. The SGZ does quote *Weilue* about a similar incident. During the Battle of Ruxu, Sun Quan sent a ship to observe Cao Cao's positions. Wei archers fired on the ship, which caused it to list. Sun Quan ordered the ship to turn around so that the Wei arrows would hit the other side and restore balance. Sun Quan then sailed back to his camp.
From the *Weilue*:
> [Sun] Quan boarded a large ship to inspect [Wei] camps, our lord [Cao Cao] ordered archers to fire, the arrows lodged into the ship, and the weight caused the ship to list. Quan ordered the ship to turn around so that the arrows would strike the other side. Once the ship was balanced, he returned to camp.
**Praying for Eastern Wind:**
Yeah, this never happened. In fact, the entire Battle of Red Cliff was fought primarily by Wu forces. Liu Bei at the time was simply a beggar prince with very little land, resources, and men. Major credit for the battle belongs to Zhou Yu, not Zhuge Liang.
**Fire Ships:**
The idea did not come from Zhuge Liang, it came from Wu general Huang Gai. Even then, this tactic was already well known by that time.
**Guan Yu letting Cao Cao escape:**
ROTK had Zhuge Liang order Guan Yu and Zhang Fei to lay ambushes in strategic places and Guan Yu allowed Cao Cao to escape at Huarong Trail. This was not recorded in the SGZ and is entirely fictional. Liu Bei did plan on ambushing Cao Cao, but by the time he arrived, Cao Cao was long gone.
**Zhou Yu's death:**
Zhuge Liang did not troll Zhou Yu to death with his wisdom and stratagems. The SGZ simply states that Zhou Yu died of illness.
**Capturing Meng Huo Seven Times:**
Pei Songzhi's annotation of the SGZ only contains a single line about this, with no details. Therefore, it is likely that this is fiction. The rebellion itself was glossed over in historical texts, as it was not considered that important.
**Inventing Things:**
Zhuge Liang did not invent the repeating crossbow or the ox wheelbarrow, but merely improved upon already existing designs. He also did not invent the flamethrower/cannon. That part is fiction.
**Empty Fort Strategy:**
Pei Songzhi's annotation of the SGZ points out that Zhuge Liang's use of the Empty Fort Strategy against Sima Yi is entirely fictional, as Sima Yi was probably not even in the area during that time. There are also other inconsistencies with the story, such as why didn't Sima Yi send scouts or why he didn't surround the city when he clearly had the numerical advantage. The Empty Fort Strategy was actually first used by Cao Cao against Lv Bu. Zhao Yun also made notable use of this strategy, as described in Pei Songzhi's annotation of the SGZ:
> In the twenty-fourth year of Jian'an (219 AD), Zhao Yun went with Liu Bei to attack Hanzhong. After the Shu army had killed Xiahou Yuan, Cao Cao gathered a large army to Hanzhong in response. There was an incident whereby the Cao army was transporting a large supply of grain to the bottom of the Northern Mountain. Huang Zhong saw that as an opportunity to intercept the food supply and he led his followers as well as Zhao Yun’s to attack the food supply chain. When Huang Zhong failed to return by the scheduled time, Zhao Yun brought along some light cavalry to assist Huang Zhong. After a short period of journeying, they met up with Cao Cao’s main force. Zhao Yun fought with Cao Cao’s vanguard but the latter’s troops were quickly reinforced in large amounts, forcing Zhao Yun to beat a retreat. The Cao army had Zhao Yun’s troops surrounded and by the time Zhao Yun managed to break out of the enemies’ lines, he realized that his subordinate Zhang Zhu was injured. Zhao Yun charged back into the enemies’ midst to rescue Zhang Zhu before they retreated back to their camp. At that time, the governor of Mianyang county Zhang Yi was helping to defend the camp. When he saw the size of the Cao army coming, he shut the gates and refused to defend. Zhao Yun realized of the immensity of the enemy’s troops and found it impossible to defend the camp. Thus he ordered for the gates to be opened, the flags taken down and the beating of drums ceased. When the Cao army arrived at the camp, they suspected of a possible ambush and retreated hastily. Zhao Yun then ordered for the drums to be beaten and also arrows be shot. The Cao army was taken by surprise by the sudden noise and was put to disarray and stampeding and many were drowned in the River Han nearby. The next day, Liu Bei came to Zhao Yun’s camp to inspect the outcome of the battle and could not help but praise Zhao Yun for his bravery.
**Predicting his own death:**
Didn't happen.
Zhuge Liang was a very capable political leader and administrator - Shu lacked the manpower and the resources of Wei and Wu and Zhuge Liang did the best with what he had. As Prime Minister, he employed capable officials and generals and knew how to delegate tasks. As a military leader, however, he was subpar. He was overly cautious and refused to take even the slightest risk, which was why Wei Yan grew disillusioned with him, and it led to the failure of all his Northern Expeditions, as his cautiousness gave time for his opponents to prepare their defenses. Sima Yi only had to stay in his camps and hold a defensive position and wait until Zhuge Liang ran out of supplies.
Many of the stratagems were falsely attributed to Zhuge Liang in ROTK because Luo Guanzhong idolized him and made him into the greatest strategist who ever lived. As *Romance* popularized and spread, so too did tales of Zhuge Liang's exploits, until it became deeply embedded in modern pop culture. You should really read his biography in the SGZ. He is a great individual, skilled in organization and administration, but far too overrated. The best battle commander in the Three Kingdoms should really be Cao Cao. | [
"Zhuge Liang is a Chinese television series based on the life of Zhuge Liang, a chancellor (or prime minister) of the state of Shu Han in the Three Kingdoms period. The plot is based on stories about Zhuge Liang in the 14th-century historical novel \"Romance of the Three Kingdoms\". The series starred Li Fazeng as ... |
why do we tear up when we rip out nose hair or rip off a inner nose scab? | Probably because there are lots of nerve endings in the mucosal lining. And it hurts like a bitch. The worst is when you get a zit in there. | [
"\"Cutting off the nose to spite the face\" is an expression to describe a needlessly self-destructive over-reaction to a problem: \"Don't cut off your nose to spite your face\" is a warning against acting out of pique, or against pursuing revenge in a way that would damage oneself more than the object of one's ang... |
So another earthquake hit the PH today. Just 1 day apart, but from different places. Is there a connection between the 2? Should we be worried here in the PH for another big one? | For reference, the first large event was this [one](_URL_4_) occurring on 4/22 in the northern part of the country. The more recent event occurring on 4/23 was this [one](_URL_2_) in the more central/southern portion of the country.
Local geologists / seismologists have indicated that these two earthquakes occurred on different fault systems, and given the distance between these two earthquakes (relative to their magnitude) it is not possible that they are related as either foreshocks or aftershocks (i.e. they are far enough part that [coulomb stress transfer](_URL_0_) between the source faults is basically impossible). They're within the time range that one could potentially argue for [dynamic triggering](_URL_1_) of the latter earthquake by the first, but this is a proposition that would require a lot of investigation before anyone would make this claim (and it's probably unlikely, as in most cases the original triggering earthquake is significantly larger than the original 6.1 magnitude event). In short, there's probably no direct connection between them.
So what's the most likely explanation for these two events happening in close spatial and temporal proximity? Random chance superimposed on the fact that the [region is generally characterized by a lot of seismicity](_URL_3_), so the presence of strong earthquakes is in no way surprising. There are [~150 earthquakes of between 6.0 - 6.9](_URL_5_) per year globally, so that two of them might happen in a seismically active area, a few days apart, isn't really that unlikely. As to whether you should be worried about a larger earthquake in the region? No more than you would on any other day, i.e. as stated before, the region has a high seismic risk in general, so there's always a measurable risk of a large event. People can certainly expect aftershocks from both events, but these will be smaller than the original events. | [
"On 22 July 2013, a series of earthquakes occurred in Dingxi, Gansu. The first quake struck at 07:45 China Standard Time with the epicenter located at the border of Min County and Zhang County. The magnitude of the initial earthquake was placed at M 6.6 by the China Earthquake Data Center with a focal depth of . It... |
why are vietnam veterans praised so much in america? | Mainly , and this is my opinion/take on it, because a majority (FC?) of the military was drafted and there were *lots* of protests against the Vietnam war and how we shouldn’t have been there. It was a horribly gruesome war, and the veterans of it deserve the praise because of what they were forced to endure meaninglessly. | [
"There are persistent stereotypes about Vietnam veterans as psychologically devastated, bitter, homeless, drug-addicted people, who had a hard time readjusting to society, primarily because of the uniquely divisive nature of the Vietnam War in the context of US history.\n",
"Mainstream veterans groups had tended ... |
how come peripheral vision is blurrier or less clear than whatever you're directly focusing on? | The brain can only handle so much information at once. In fact, only a tiny area of vision is ever clear, if you look at the middle of your phone keyboard the letters on the side already are not clear. But you know what's there because it's held in very short term memory.
Fun fact, your peripheral vision is also black and white because color sensitive cells in your eye are only right in the middle. But your brain knows what color most things are so it fills it in with "fake" color.
Edit: your brain also only NEEDS a small amount of information at one time. It's so good at filling in gaps that between the brain and how quickly eyes move there's really no evolutionary need for your entire field of vision to be crystal clear
Edit 2: another fun fact. Because your peripheral vision does not have color receptors, it can have more brightness receptors. Your peripheral vision is brighter than your straight ahead vision. | [
"Peripheral vision is weak in humans, especially at distinguishing detail, color, and shape. This is because the density of receptor and ganglion cells in the retina is greater at the center and lowest at the edges, and, moreover, the representation in the visual cortex is much smaller than that of the fovea (see v... |
How often do cancer cells divide? | The doubling time of cancers cells depends on the characteristics of that cancer, like what it has mutated, deleted, ect. Below I have linked a website that lists different types of Lymphomas and blood cancers. The different Cell lines are on the left, and a simple google search looking for each of their doubling times will give you your answer! Good Luck
_URL_0_ | [
"Cancer cells are cells that divide relentlessly, forming solid tumors or flooding the blood with abnormal cells. Cell division is a normal process used by the body for growth and repair. A parent cell divides to form two daughter cells, and these daughter cells are used to build new tissue, or to replace cells tha... |
Why haven't we sent any more probes to Uranus and Neptune since Voyager 2? | Part of the reason is the funding.
Another big reason is that the Voyager crafts had gravitational assists; basically, the planets' orbits were aligned in such a way that their gravity "slingshotted" the Voyager crafts forward. This meant that they didn't need as much fuel as a direct fuel-powered mission. Without any gravitational assists, it will be much harder to reach that far in the solar system. Picture: _URL_0_
The good news is that we can use more gravitational assists in the future to achieve similar results. | [
"After the fly-by of Saturn, the camera platform of \"Voyager 2\" locked up briefly, putting plans to officially extend the mission to Uranus and Neptune in jeopardy. The mission's engineers were able to fix the problem (caused by an overuse that temporarily depleted its lubricant), and the \"Voyager 2\" probe was ... |
what causes a car's head gasket to blow and why do certain car brands seem to have a bigger issue with this than other brands? | For manufacturing reasons, the cylinder head is fabricated as a separate piece of metal than the cylinder body. These two pieces of metal are bolted together, to enable maintenance, at a point where there are very high combustion gas pressures. These high pressures are essential to generate power with the engine, so the assembly must contain them. Neither metal has infinite stiffness and there are only a few bolts holding the head to the cylinder. This combination could easily allow combustion gas pressures to separate the two pieces of metal at the seam and allow gas to leak out - causing mischief. To resist this a compressible gasket is installed between the two pieces of metal and compressed by the bolts. The compression forces the gasket to conform to the gap between the two metal objects elastically, so that further pressure from combustion gas further compresses the gasket making the seal tighter rather than letting gas out. It's a great design, everybody uses it.
Some manufacturers produce parts with higher precision than others. Larger gaps allow the combustion gas to apply more pressure, allowing the gas force to exceed the strength of the gasket material.
Some manufacturers make engines with larger displacement than others. This encourages performance boosting behaviors which also can lead to pressures that exceed the gasket material strength. | [
"BULLET::::- The cylinder head was prone to warping, especially when the car was driven frequently. This problem was more pronounced in the later fuel injected models, due to increased engine temperatures and greater stress on that component.\n",
"While the oil shock certainly affected sales, many far more profli... |
the accounting equation (assets = liabilities + equity) | Things in your possession - Things that you borrowed = Things that belong to you.
The "Things in your possession" are your assets. They are the things you can use to do fun stuff.
The "Things that you borrowed" are your liabilities. You can use them to do fun stuff, but they need to be returned eventually. Further, if you break or lose these things while doing your fun stuff, you'll need to either replace them with your own stuff or borrow someone else's stuff to replace them, which will eventually need to be returned, and so on. If you borrow too much without giving back or you get a reputation for losing/breaking stuff, people will stop lending you their things and you won't be able to do as much fun stuff.
The "Things that belong to you" are your equity. You can always use your own things to do fun stuff, and you don't need to give them back when you're done because they belong to you. If you lose or break them, it's not quite as bad since no one will come knocking on your door asking when they can have them back.
Thus,
Assets - Liabilities = Equity,
or rearranged,
Assets = Liabilities + Equity. | [
"In financial accounting, owner's equity consists of the net assets of an entity. Net assets is the difference between the total assets and total liabilities. Equity appears on the balance sheet (also known as the statement of financial position), one of the four primary financial statements.\n",
"BULLET::::3. Eq... |
How did the natives of Indonesia and the Pacific Islands treat punctures, scraps, infections, and other injuries that might occur while hunting or foraging? | Speaking of cuts, and of Pacific Islands off the coast of British Columbia, apparently through cleaning, and regularly applying of spruce pitch to the wound, and replacing it regularly. I'm curious about practices in further south though. | [
"Japanese savages fighting the Australians in New Guinea committed cannibalism. Japanese forces were sent to New Guinea in 1942 but without sufficient preparation – they were simply abandoned. In late 1943, forbidden to surrender and cut off from their supplies, they began to starve – some resorted to cannibalism o... |
how do guitar pickups get the strings sound? | Inside the pickups are magnets wrapped in coils of wire with an electric charge running through them. Those magnets are what "pickup" the vibrations | [
"The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that usually has six strings. It is typically played with both hands by strumming or plucking the strings with either a guitar pick or the finger(s)/fingernails of one hand, while simultaneously fretting (pressing the strings against the frets) with the fingers of the oth... |
Could all of earth's life survive if the atmosphere was only oxygen and carbon dioxide? | No, nitrogen has an important role to play in the ecosystem, too. There are soil bacteria that convert N2 into ammonia that is taken up by pretty much everything that lives in the soil and anything that is further down the food chain. The ultimate source of virtually every atom of nitrogen in your body is the air. | [
"The presence of oxygen alone, however, is not conclusive evidence for life. Jupiter's moon Europa, for example, has a tenuous oxygen atmosphere thought to be produced by radiolysis of water molecules. Numerical simulations have shown that under proper conditions it is possible to build up an oxygen atmosphere via ... |
bayes' theorem in probability | To understand Baye's theorem, we must first understand the concepts of conditional probabilities and probabilities. A probability is the chance of an event happening, often denoted P(A), where A is the event, i.e. P(A)=1/6 where A is rolling 1 on a six-sided die. A conditional probability is the chance of an event occurring given that another event has occurred. This is denoted P(A|B), the probability of event A, given that event B has occurred.
Baye's theorem gives us a method to relate probabilities and conditional probabilities. This can be combined with other theorems (such as the law of total probability, which provides a method to generate probabilities from conditional probabilities), to allow for a more complete analysis. | [
"Bayes' theorem says that to find the conditional probability distribution of \"p\" given the data \"X\", \"i\" = 1, ..., \"n\", one multiplies the \"prior\" (i.e., marginal) probability measure assigned to \"p\" by the likelihood function\n",
"Bayes' theorem calculates the renormalized pointwise product of the p... |
When did Europeans start bathing with soap rather than oil and a scraper? | The differences between soap and olive oil is actually smaller than you think.
Rancid olive oil contains lots of free fatty acids, which have emulsive properties similiar to soap.
Furthermore, traditional soap is made from olive oil, and/or other triacylglycerides. If a base is added to olive oil it transforms into soap, through a process conveniently called saponification. Usually the base was ash. This process is relatively simple and was known to the Babylonian and Romans. You can buy this type of soap at any natural grocery store today, branded as glycerine or castille soap. However ancient soap was not as luxurious as these. Modern industrial techniques were needed to make it clear and pure. Roman Soap was probably more of a thick gloppy mess.
Since the mid 1800s soap quality has improve immensely, but its still fundamentally the same stuff the Romans, Carolingian, and Founding Fathers used.
Note: I am not a historian. I am a lipid chemist. I hope I didn't break any rules.
| [
"Contrary to popular belief and although the Early Christian leaders, such as Boniface I, condemned bathing as unspiritual, bathing and sanitation were not lost in Europe with the collapse of the Roman Empire. Soapmaking first became an established trade during the so-called \"Dark Ages\". The Romans used scented o... |
Do any animals besides mammals and bees make food for their young? | Bees don't actually make honey for their young, they make it for adult bee consumption during the winter. They do produce substances to feed to larvae, including royal jelly, in glands inside their heads.
Otherwise, good question! Some birds perform premastication, chewing up food and regurgitating it for babies. Not sure if this is what you have in mind though. | [
"When young, its diet consists mainly of insects. As an adult, it mostly eats invertebrates (notably insects and snails), but regularly take fruits and can function as a seed dispersers. They may also take small vertebrates prey such as small birds and reptiles (including other anoles), but studies indicate that th... |
Does anyone have primary sources on the Seleucid government? | You're having a hard time finding any because Seleucid administration is actually not so easy to study.
We have lots of information about the Seleucid Kings/Emperors, we know they utilised a satrapal system like Persia, and we know the results of some of their actions. But in terms of civil service, administrative practice, that kind of nitty gritty, we actually know more about the Assyrian Empire in that respect than the Seleucids.
Why? Because the Assyrians wrote everything down on clay tablets, not papyrus. That's just downright unlucky. That's not to say there are no sources on the Seleucid government however. If you want Roman sources, kevink123 has given you some help. If you want to understand the Macedonian origins of part of Seleucid Kingship then I recommend reading Diodoros Siculus as well.
This is a book I seem to shill at every opportunity, but I absolutely think you need to read *From Samarkhand to Sardis* by Susan-Sherwin White and Amelie Kuhrt. It is the most extensive book written on the Seleucids, is from 1994 so is relatively recent, and should help you answer your question. Furthermore, their bibliography and references will in turn help you find more resources, especially primary sources.
*The House of Seleucus* by Edywn R. Bevan should also help you.
Both of these books should be available on Google Books.
If you're familiar with Alexander the Great then good. If not, I recommend on reading up on that at least a little because he's vital to understanding much of the development of Hellenistic Asia in general.
I also cannot insist enough that you should try to learn a little about the Achaemenid Persian state too, because the biggest mistake that Greek historians used to make was to write about the Persian Empire without knowing anything about the current state of scholarship on Persia. This meant that in the 1970s you'd get people writing about Alexander and the Greeks as though the Persians were like something from 300. So, even a little introduction from a book on Achaemenid Persia will help you avoid that, and I'd recommend *From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire* by Pierre Briant. I warn you now though, Briant has an incredibly positive view of the Achaemenid Empire. That may be preferable to seeing them as an cackling evil Empire, but it colours his work a lot and therefore you should take some of his glowing reviews of the Achaemenids with a pinch of salt.
Distrust any source written about the Seleucids in modern scholarship written before the 1980s at least, since I'm sure you will end up reading some by necessity. Especially mistrust the source a little if they decide that the Seleucids were a failure of an Empire. Also mistrust sources written about Alexander the Great before the 1970s at least and preferably before the 1980s, they tend to have no real links to archaeological sources that actually help the study of Alexander quite a lot. | [
"In Herodotus (book 1, chapters 95–130), Deioces is introduced as the founder of a centralised Median state. He had been known to the Median people as \"a just and incorruptible man\" and when asked by the Median people to solve their possible disputes he agreed and put forward the condition that they make him \"ki... |
Why was the latin word for left-hand "sinister"? Did they prefer the right hand over the left and for what reasons? | [It meant left before it meant evil.](_URL_2_)
It might have originally meant the slower or weaker hand, but it also could be a euphemism meaning the more favorable hand. If the latter was the case, it would mean that the left hand already had a negative connotation (else why have a euphemism?)
The word took on sense of foreboding from the interpretation of omens from the left hand side, a practice I don't know enough about to comment on.
However, I'm hesitant to say that the bad associations of the word inhere entirely in its use in augury. Words for left and right often have negative and positive meanings, respectively, e.g. "gauche," "adroit," and whatever word was too taboo to say so as to require the euphemism "sinister," if thst etymology is correct. Furthermore, the English words ["right"](_URL_0_) and ["left"](_URL_1_) meant meant proper a d weak, respectively, and "left" replaced Old English "winestra," a euphemism for the left because the left was seen as bad.
Tl;dr: Right supremacists have been around a long time. | [
"Moreover, apart from inconvenience, left-handed people have historically been considered unlucky or even malicious for their difference by the right-handed majority. In many European languages, including English, the word for the direction \"right\" also means \"correct\" or \"proper\". Throughout history, being l... |
Why do scholars always imagine recorded troop sizes to be larger than reality? | More input is always welcome; for the meantime, you'll be greatly interested in these two answers from previous threads:
* On the matter of Herodotos versus numbers, in this thread u/Iphikrates [breaks down just how Herodotos got his numbers](_URL_0_).
* As for how modern scholars can be confident in lower numbers than the ancient sources provide, u/FlavivsAetivs here [expounds on the difficulties of fielding large armies](_URL_1_). | [
"The discrepancy in army size estimates is mainly due to uncertainty about the size of \"limitanei\" regiments, as can be seen by the wide range of estimates in the table below. Jones suggests \"limitanei\" regiments had a similar size to Principate auxilia regiments, averaging 500 men each. More recent work, which... |
European colonists often referred to Native Americans by grouping them into categories like "Cherokee" or "Choctaw" on an ethnolinguistic basis. How relevant were such distinctions to the indigenous groups themselves? | One of the most difficult things that students of prehistoric and protohistoric cultures in the western portions of North America have to confront is the relationship of political entities to linguistic or other classifications. In most of California, and all of the NW coast south of the Tlingit and Haida areas, there was no political organization above household. Rich men had more influence. There may have been a shaman or doctor that had influence over a larger population but it was not formal. In addition, there may also have been religious leaders, often called dance leaders, that had influence that extended beyond the household. But the concept of tribe itself has virtually no utility.
Early anthropologists recognized that tribes were a construct invented by anthropologists to compare and contrast cultural traits (see P. E. Goddard *Life and Culture of the Hupa* 1903), but investigations at the scale of extended family just were not feasible. They therefore focused on the larger ethnolinguistic unit - using groups of people with homogeneous or mostly homogenous languages. This was in part because of the linguistic training of early anthropologists, but mostly because it was a seemingly reasonable way to divide populations up.
The problem is perhaps most clearly exemplified by the far Northwestern California and far Southwestern Oregon groups. This is an area where virtually each river drainage was occupied by a different language group from very different language families yet the cultures were virtually identical. Compare, for example NW California where the Tolowa (Athabascan) are bounded to the south by the Yurok (~~Algonkian~~ Algic), to the east by Karuk (Hokan), to the Southeast by other Athabaskans (Hupa, and its subtribes or tribelets, the Chilula, Whilkut, and Tsnungwe), but these Athabaskans were unintelligible to the Tolowa. Further south are other Athabaskan groups that were not intelligible to any of the others and a variety of other ethnolinguistic groups. All these groups shared many dances, regalia, mythologies and other traits.
This area has been the site of extensive ethnological research beginning in 1871 and marked by fairly monumental research projects by Kroeber (see his work on the Yurok) and his students. While these "tribes" held many unique traits, having to do with aspects of religion, and customs, they were, for all intents and purposes, identical cultures. Complicating matters is the fact that Northern California natives were notorious polyglots. Powers once noted an elderly informant that "had one eye and six languages in his head".
So how relevant were the distinctions to the native groups themselves? In the area I study, I don't think it was very relevant. As an example, almost all natives that lived near boundaries of linguistic groups were bilingual so intercourse of both an economic and social nature was unimpeded between groups. People routinely married outside their linguistic groups. In fact, certain villages held alliances with other villages in different language areas. Alternatively, villages within the same language group were traditional enemies.
Many groups that have been identified as subtribes or tribelets of the Hupa, because they spoke dialects of the Hupa language felt no affiliation with the Hupa proper, in fact they felt the opposite. So my conclusion is that it probably made a little difference in that the natives recognized that there were other people that speak our language, but ethnologically and to the natives it was largely irrelevant.
See:
[*All Those Things that You’re Liable
To Read in the Ethnographic Literature
They Ain’t Necessarily So* Thomas Keter,
Paper Presented to
The Society for California Archaeology, 2009](_URL_0_)
*Handbook of California Indians*, A. Kroeber 1970 (originally published 1926)
*California Indian Languages*, Victor Golla, 2011
*Life and Culture of the Hupa*, P.E. Goddard, 1903
California Athabaskan Groups, Martin Baumhoff 1958.
Edit: economic for economical
Edit II: Algic for Algonkian
| [
"The historic peoples encountered by the Europeans did not make up unified tribes in the modern sense, as they were highly decentralized, operating in bands of a size adapted to their semi-nomadic cultures. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, the European explorers, missionaries, traders and settlers referred to t... |
What would happen if two tidal waves hit one another in the middle of an ocean? | You get a super position of waves. The waves would add up. Where the 2 peaks align, you would get a wave twice as high (assuming equal waves), where a peak meets a trough, you would get no wave. As they parted, you the waves would look unchanged.
This can lead to some freak waves, where a large number of tiny waves sum up to create a monster wave. This has been know to catch ships out in open water. | [
"\"Tidal resonance\" occurs in the Bay of Fundy since the time it takes for a large wave to travel from the mouth of the bay to the opposite end, then reflect and travel back to the mouth of the bay coincides with the tidal rhythm producing the world's highest tides.\n",
"Tidal flows of seawater are resisted by t... |
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