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instead of melting, why do objects, such as paper, trees, and human bodies, turn to ash instead when lit on fire? | Melting is a physical process. It's when a substance is sufficiently heated that it transforms from a solid to liquid state. It's *physically* changing, but it's *chemically* the same substance.
Burning/combustion is a *chemical* reaction. Specifically, you're adding enough heat to that substance that it begins reacting with oxygen, changing the original substance into new substances. When you burn carbon-based material (such as paper, trees, and bodies), the resulting substances are mostly solid (ash, smoke particulate) and gas (CO2, water vapor). | [
"Ash or ashes are the solid remains of fires. Specifically, it refers to all non-aqueous, non-gaseous residues that remain after something is burned. In analytical chemistry, in order to analyse the mineral and metal content of chemical samples, ash is the non-gaseous, non-liquid residue after a complete combustion... |
how do we learn our first language? | The TLDR explanation for this is that babies are really, really good at learning their first language.
Babies learn words through some pretty intense statistical analysis. Basically, they realize that certain words tend to be used around certain objects or in situation, and decide that's what they must mean. If the baby hears people saying "dog" a lot whenever a dog is in the room, they realize the word "dog" refers to that furry thing with big ears.
Obviously, more abstract things like verbs and prepositions and question words take more time for the child to work out. They figure out these words by closely monitoring which words tend to show up together: for example, they'll realize that the adults around them never just say "Dog is in the room," but always add "the" or "a".
I know, it seems unbelievably complicated. So complicated, it almost seems impossible. That's why many linguists believe babies are born with certain abilities to help them learn languages. Some even believe babies are born knowing what types of grammar systems are possible and which are impossible. That way, they don't have to learn grammar from scratch: they only have to figure out which of the possible grammars their parents are using, which is much easier. They may also be born knowing certain other basics like "When people communicate, they're acutally talking about something, not just making funny noises," and "When someone says a word like "dog", assume they're talking about the whole dog, not just its tail or something." Other linguists assume that babies come out knowing not very much at all, and they just really are excellent learners. This causes some pretty intense debates.
We do start learning language in the room, but we don't learn the whole thing there. Basically, the only thing we get done in the womb is learning to differentiate our parents' language from foreign languages. Newborn babies born to English parents can tell English apart from, say, Japanese. They still can't understand English, which is why we have to learn words as we grow.
Children of deaf parents learn language the exact same way as children of hearing parents. If the parents use sign language around the house, the child will grow up knowing sign language. They will also probably learn a spoken language from their teachers, friends, and the world around them. | [
"Learning a first language is not rapid for children. Children spend years learning their mother tongue, and the process continues well into their school years. At seven years old, for example, many children have difficulties creating passive-voice sentences.\n",
"It is believed that children acquiring their lang... |
why doesn't russia want to be part of the eu? | Russia has a long history of being the head of empires, not being subjects of other nations. Taking back seat to other countries is not in their nature.
Russia joining the EU as a member would go over about as well as having the US join a union of Canada, the US and Mexio that gave Canada and Mexico votes equal to the US. | [
"Russia has chosen not to participate in the European Union's European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), as it aspires to be an \"equal partner\" of the EU (as opposed to the \"junior partnership\" that Russia sees in the ENP). Consequently, Russia and the European Union agreed to create four Common Spaces for cooperatio... |
Objectively speaking, was the Roman civilization on a whole more advanced than the various Celtic civilizations? | What does advanced mean objectively? Or to you?
| [
"At that time, the Etruscans were the most advanced civilization in the region, and the ancient Romans themselves admitted that they inherited much of their knowledge and customs from them. Rome was located next to the southern edge of the Etruscan domain, which covered a large part of north-central Italy. Besides ... |
india's new gst-tax | It's a "value add tax" similar to the GST in Canada or the VAT in the UK. Many countries have a tax system like this because it's fairly simple to implement and compliance can be easy audited.
The easiest way to explain a VAT is to contrast it against a traditional sales tax.
With a normal sales tax, an additional tax is applied to a transaction when that item is sold TO THE END USER. So if I own a company that resells chairs, I don't pay the tax but I charge it to my customers when they buy the chairs. If the tax rate is 10% then and I sell a $100 chair then I charge $110. I keep $100 for myself and to pay my suppliers, and I give $10 to the government.
This is complex because it's hard to keep track of who is an "end user" and who's a re-seller. People tend to game the system by registering as a business and showing that business ID when they buy personal products. Keeping track of who's exempt and who's not is hard. Also stores often don't charge the tax and simply claim that all their customers are other businesses. It's a big administrative mess and it's hard for the government to audit.
With a value added tax, everyone pays the tax but businesses get credit for taxes that they pay. So it works like this.
I buy a chair from my chair suppler for $50 and pay a 10% vat for a total of $55. I resell that chair for $100 to someone else, again charging a 10% tax. Now unlike in the last example, I don't send the full $10 to the government, because I paid $5 to my suppler already, so I get credit for that. I only send to the government the difference between the tax that I have charged vs the tax that I paid.
Now, if the government comes along and audits me. I'm required to prove all of my GST credits by producing receipts for shit that I bought, and there's no exempt customers so there can be no cheating on that end either.
There's 2 main criticisms of a VAT. The first it shares with a sales tax. Both taxes are taxes on shit that you buy. The poorer a person is, the more likely it is that they are spending all of their income on things. Wealthy people tend to be able to save rather than spend everything. A theory in taxation is that wealthy people should pay a higher tax rate because they are better able to afford the basic necessity of life wheres poor people are not. All consumption taxes, like VAT and sales taxes violate this taxation principal. It increases the price of everything people buy, therefore poorer people are able to buy less. But wealthy people can absorb those higher prices without a lifestyle change.
An income tax is generally considered to be better in this regard, because you can just charge wealthy people more and give poor people a break. But India has a BIG compliance problem as people just lie about their income. So it gets prohibitively expensive to run an income tax system in countries like that.
The second issue with a VAT is that it's considered to be harder on businesses than a straight sales tax. The record keeping required is more extensive because you have to prove all of your credits should the government send around an auditor. While this is true, a VAT is less record keeping on the sales end of things because you are not required to track the tax exempt status of your customers as you are under a sales tax system. | [
"Introduction of Goods and Services Tax (GST) is a significant step in the reform of indirect taxation in India. Amalgamating several Central and State taxes into a single tax would mitigate cascading or double taxation, facilitating a common national market. The simplicity of the tax should lead to easier administ... |
what causes the pressure in our chest when we hold our breath? | The pressure doesn't actually increase as you hold your breath. What you are feeling is the psychological manifestation of your need to breathe. And what is ultimately driving that is increased carbonic acid in your blood.
Carbon dioxide is a bit different from other gases in that it doesn't really dissolve in water, but rather almost completely breaks down and reforms into carbonic acid. That acidity of this causes the pH of your blood to lower while you hold your breath, and it is that change in pH that drives you to take another breath long before you actually need to to get more oxygen. | [
"During inhalation, the intra-thoracic pressure lowers due to the contraction and downward movement of the diaphragm and the expansion of the chest cavity. Atrial pressure is also lowered as a result, causing increased blood flow to the heart, which in turn triggers baroreceptors which act to diminish vagal tone. T... |
why doesn't a slinky expand like normal springs do? | Springs are just coils of metal that try *really hard* to return back to their original shape. If you stretch a "normal" spring in your hands, it'll try to pull back to it's original shape just the same as it pushes against you when you compress it.
Slinkies are just springs that are wound to be completely compressed when at rest. | [
"Extension garter springs are on the opposite side of the spring spectrum. Although they are also a type of coiled spring, extension garter springs exert inward radial forces that move toward the center. Extension springs store potential energy in their extended form and want to contract. Thinner wire and a greater... |
why do people continue posting threads here when 99% of the questions can be answered w/ a simple google search? | Your question itself is very common here, a Reddit search would have turned up many examples.
Anyway, if you search on your own, you have to read through shit and come to your own conclusion. If you ask here, you'll get a couple paragraph summary and you don't have to think. | [
"In 2007, a group of researchers observed a tendency for users to rely on Google Search exclusively for finding information, writing that \"With the Google interface the user gets the impression that the search results imply a kind of totality. ... In fact, one only sees a small part of what one could see if one al... |
What is some of the oldest primary source documents from Northern Europe? | Do you want first person accounts or the oldest accounts? I doubt those two are going to be the same.
Some of the oldest sources will be saints' lives, usually written by biographers/hagiographers long after the saints were dead. See for example Adamnan's Life of St. Columba for Scotland: _URL_0_ | [
"The oldest document in the National Archives (listed in 2005) is a parchment from a missal, written in England in the late 10th century. The document came to Sweden via the British Christian missionary in Norway. Under King Gustav Vasa in the 16th century, archiving expanded and national registry and chamber books... |
branch davidians and the waco siege | The branch Davidians, an Adventist sect focused around David Koresh lived in a compound in Texas were stockpiling illegal weapons. The ATF got a warrant to investigate and approached the compound armed. The Davidians didn't take too kindly to this so fended them off. Siege ensues.
ATF have no understanding and training to deal with religious cults so they treat it like a stand off between terrorists. They shine bright light on the compound during the night, play loud sounds like heavy metal, babies crying, animals being slaughtered. Psychological warfare and that jazz.
Trapped, David Koresh looks to scripture (especially revelations) for help (he thinks he's Jesus btw). The Branch Davidians like all adventist groups have a trend of apocalyptic beliefs (which makes them volatile and more likely to turn to violence). With the psychological warfare, being trapped, and extremist religious beliefs, David concludes that it is the beginning of apocalypse they've been expecting. The ATF are agents of Satan and they are fighting a cosmic battle.
Not understanding this religious dimension the ATF continue to fulfil the Davidian world view through their aggression. FBI were concerned they all might try and kill themselves and that the children in the compound were being abused (David had many under age wives).
So they want to get the situation wrapped up. Two 'tanks' are sent to puncture the wall and shoot gas in so everyone can be rounded up. Somehow a fire starts (either caused by the breaking of the walls or started by the Davidians). Little attempt is made by the Davidians to escape. 75 people die in the fire.
Controversial because the ATF handled it so poorly. All they needed was a bit of understanding rather than force. The Davidians, although they had weapons, were no real danger to anyone other than themselves (although including the children). The ATF didn't consider the way in which the people inside would see the external aggression.
Cults and sects practice encapsulation - either social or physical (which is why they had a compound). This encapsulation is useful to create a safe space where no descenting opinions are tolerated, and the believers can re-enforce each others spirituality, the environment is completely controlled. The distancing themselves from society is crucial to maintain the religious atmosphere which is very important to members (otherwise they would realise how obscure what they are doing is and regain their sense of normality). If something threatens this boundary between the group and society it causes instability (and so more likely a chance of violence). Despite the tragedy the Davidians are considered as having very low group tension (it took a long siege and plenty of aggression on the part of the ATF to initiate a fatal response). This differs from Jonestown (Guyana cult suicide) which were a high tension group as the fatal response came about after a simple visit from a US senator.
_URL_0_ | [
"The Waco siege was the siege of a compound belonging to the religious sect Branch Davidians, carried out by American federal and Texas state law enforcement, as well as the U.S. military, between February 28 and April 19, 1993. The Branch Davidians were led by David Koresh and were headquartered at Mount Carmel Ce... |
why can motorbike batteries sit on a shelf unused without losing charge but when sitting inside a motorbike for a few weeks that hasn't been turned on, go dead? | When its on the shelf, there no where for the energy to go. In a motorbike, the battery is slowly and passively discharging. even if nothing is on. This is because the electrons in the battert have another place to go, the motor bike electrical system | [
"Battery users may attempt to avoid the memory effect proper by fully discharging their battery packs. This practice is likely to cause more damage as one of the cells will be deep discharged. The damage is focused on the weakest cell, so that each additional full discharge will cause more and more damage to that c... |
why do some airports make transit passengers go through security again and others don’t? | As /u/TehWildMan_ said, international flights can force you to go through security again. But, even within the same country you might have to pass through security when connecting between flights. The common reason for this is that many airports have multiple terminals which are physically separate buildings. Those terminals will have a secure and a non-secure side. When you land you are in the secure side. But, if you need to transfer to another terminal, there may not be a path that connects the secure sides of those two separate buildings. So, you are forced to leave the secure side, go outside and re-enter from the non-secure side of the new building. This is basically just a cost and space-savings move on the part of the airport when they added the new terminal. | [
"Passengers had to wait for hours to disembark because Transport Canada was on high-security alert. The RCMP deployed extra personnel to airports so that they could perform a security sweep of each aircraft, lined up on closed runways at most airports. They also increased their presence in the airport terminals.\n"... |
why is yellow visually/functionally the least strong color? | So there are a few things going on here. First...
> it seems odd that one of the three primary colors seems so submissive to the others.
Yellow is not a primary color, at least not in the way you're thinking of it in. In additive color (e.g. adding light together) normally it's red, green, and blue (RGB), which roughly aligns with the 3 different color receptors in the eye to give you color vision.
In subtractive color (e.g. inks, pigments, paints, etc.), especially in printers, it's cyan, yellow, magenta, and black (CYMK).
Going back to your original question, if we're looking only at color response I don't think yellow is unusually special regarding how intense the color is - it's just most of the time the background on which you're viewing the color tends to be lighter, making bright colors seem washed out.
Yellow text? That's probably on a white background (either a monitor or paper). Looking at a painting with a sun? It's probably on a light blue background (and actual sunlight is more white than yellow, so the yellow used is going to be even brighter to try and reflect that).
There are also plenty of instances where you see yellow that doesn't seem washed out. I doubt you've ever looked at a banana and said "man I can hardly see that, it's so washed out!", and if you look at [this snake](_URL_0_) you'd probably say that the yellow helps it stand out (which is what it's meant to do, alert other animals it's dangerous).
It probably doesn't help that bright yellow is frequently used as a stand-in for sunlight, which as mentioned is actually white light and not yellow light. This means that stereotypical "yellow" is intentionally very bright and close to white. Also, generally when you start delving into the darker shades of yellow that might pop on a bright background it tends to look more like orange.
> Say you're drawing with colored pencils or markers, or painting with watercolors.
With subtractive color, if you mix two colors the darker one almost always wins. If you took a real dark yellow and colored over a bright pink or green the yellow would win. Again, this goes back to the fact that stereotypical "yellow" is that super bright color that people associate with sunlight. | [
"The color was chosen because it attracts attention and is noticed quickly in peripheral vision, faster than any other color. Scientists describe this as follows: \"Lateral peripheral vision for detecting yellows is 1.24 times greater than for red.\"\n",
"Black and white have long been known to combine well with ... |
Why did the Ustaše initially recognize Islam and "Muslim Serbs" as more Croatian than Orthodoxy and Orthodox Serbs? | There is a strong connection, almost complete correspondence in fact, between religion and nationality in Bosnia (and Croatia, Serbia, etc.). Usually nations were defined not so much by what they have in common, as by how they are different than others. In this case, language couldn't be the differentiation factor, so religion took the role.
However, neither Croat nor Serb nationalist recognized Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) as a nation, but considered them as islamicized Croats or Serbs. Adding them to either of the two nations would make that nation clearly a majority in Bosnia and Hercegovina. I don't know where is that wikipedia reference coming from, but the separation of nationhood and religion does not fit the time described. It would hardly fit today. Do you know the old joke about the Troubles in Ireland ending with "Yeah, but are you a protestant atheist or catholic atheist"? Change the denominations, and it fits perfectly.
So, Ustaše wanted a ethnically homogeneous state. Muslims were proclaimed to be Croats. But both Croatia proper and Bosnia and Hercegovina had large native Serbian population. Therefore Ustaše had an unofficial (not written down but consistently implemented) policy to expel one third of the Serbs, to kill one third and to convert one third.
Soon all those came to their limitations. As both "Independent State of Croatia" (NDH) and Nedić's Serbia were German quisling states, expulsions into Serbia destabilized it, so Germans ordered Ustaše to stop it. And killing in NDH itself resulted in a determined resistance. Establishment of Croatian Orthodox church was an attempt to both pacify some Serbs, and more importantly for Ustaše to disconnect them from the common religious center.
As for conversions of Serbs from Orthodox to Catholic, it was by no means a guarantee of safety. Many were killed after conversion, and some of the most brutal atrocities (not by the number of victims, but by the method) were done in fact after an invitation to convert. For example in Glina, with significant Serb population, they were invited on two occasions to convert. First group was gathered in the Orthodox church in Glina, trucked to nearby woods and killed. Second group was closed in the church, that was than burned down.
The topic is still controversial in respect to the relations between Catholic church and Ustaše. Some claim that conversion were mostly done sort of with fingers crossed behind the back, just to save the people who would return to original religion after the war, and that clergy didn't seek benefit in that way from Ustaše regime. Undoubtedly there were some clergy who did so, even saying as much openly to Serbs and stating that Christians no matter the denomination, can't be christened again. But those were minority. Some claim on the other hand that church supported the Ustaše all out, and used an opportunity for a sort of Catholic crusade in Bosnia. Many did, especially among Bosnian Franciscans, but again not all. There are however examples of priest condoning, even personally leading the massacres. | [
"The Ustaše recognized both Roman Catholicism and Islam as the national religions of the Croatian people while rejecting Orthodox Christianity as incompatible with their objectives (with the exception of the Croatian Orthodox Church intended mainly to assimilate the Serb minority). Though the Ustaše emphasized reli... |
What would the treatment of an RAF pilot at a German POW camp in WWII have been like? | > How would they have travelled to Germany?
Potentially by train; the Luftwaffe wanted to get prisoners to their Dulag Luft interrogation centre at Oberusel rapidly to extract information so captured airmen would often travel under guard on civilian trains. Around the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, though, when large numbers of Allied troops had been taken prisoner (about 40,000 British) a pilot might well have been in the columns of prisoners forced to march hundreds of miles towards Germany followed by transport in terrible conditions on overcrowded trains or barges (though officers didn't have it quite as bad as other ranks). After interrogation at Dulag Luft RAF prisoners would be moved on to one of the Stalag Luft camps.
> Would they likely have survived, and stayed put in the camp for the duration of the war?
Probably; relatively few British POWs died in captivity. There was some movement between camps as things were reorganised (e.g. Sergeant "Dixie" Deans was moved from Stalag Luft I to III to VI over the course of the war), and towards the end of the war extended marches as Allied and Soviet advances approached camps.
> Were there any Allied rescue attempts, or many successful escapees?
Not rescue attempts, there wasn't a safe way of freeing prisoners deep in enemy territory (a raid on Amiens Prison in 1944, Operation Jericho, killed around 100 prisoners and few managed to escape for good). There were escape attempts, though not many successes; less than 30 out of 10,000 Air Force prisoners escaped and made it to Britain or neutral territory according to Aidan Crawley's *Escape from Germany*. The best chance was in evading capture in the first place, then escaping during transit to a prison camp, it was much more difficult once behind wire. To take a couple of examples of pilots captured around the time of *Dunkirk* Wing Commander Basil Embry was shot down on May 27th 1940, but slipped away from the column of prisoners as he was marched towards Germany and, over two months, managed to make his way across France to Gibraltar and back to Britain. Squadron Leader Roger Bushell was shot down and captured on May 23rd just before the Dunkirk evacuation; he later masterminded perhaps the most famous of attempts, The Great Escape, in which 76 airmen tunneled out of Stalag Luft III. Only three made it to freedom, though, 73 were recaptured, and 50 of those including Bushell himself were murdered.
Stories of camp life, particularly escape attempts and focused on Colditz Castle, Oflag IVC, became rather popular in 1950s Britain. *The Colditz Myth : British and Commonwealth Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany* by S. P. MacKenzie takes a wider view, pointing out that perhaps only 5% of POWs were really fanatical about escaping, though larger numbers were involved in supporting escape attempts. It's very accessible, and a good overview of the situation as a whole.
| [
"The camp's 800 Luftwaffe guards were either too old for combat duty or young men convalescing after long tours of duty or from wounds. Because the guards were Luftwaffe personnel, the prisoners were accorded far better treatment than that granted to other POWs in Germany. Deputy Commandant Major Gustav Simoleit, a... |
What would happen if one face of the Earth faced the sun year round, for ever? | Here's a better answer: _URL_0_
| [
"The following phenomena would occur if Earth is a perfect sphere, in a circular orbit around the Sun, and if its axis is tilted 90°, so that the axis itself is on the orbital plane (similar to Uranus). At one date in the year, the Sun would be directly overhead at the North Pole, so its declination would be +90°. ... |
how does a flute produce sound? | It helps to think of the air in the flute and around the mouthpiece as a squishy fluid, like Jello or jam. We usually think of air as flowing like water, but you can compress air (squish), and compressed air will push back, like when you squeeze a bike tire.
When you blow over the flute, you have to hit just he right angle at just the right speed. With the correct configuration, the air in the flute is squished (compressed) and then rebounds and pushes back only to be squished again by the moving air. This squishing and rebounding of the air itself produces the vibrations that make sound. It's the same as when you blow over the top of a bottle. | [
"The flute is a transverse (or side-blown) woodwind instrument that is closed at the blown end. It is played by blowing a stream of air over the \"embouchure hole\". The pitch is changed by opening or closing keys that cover circular tone holes (there are typically 16 tone holes). Opening and closing the holes prod... |
Is it possible to cause light to travel in an "orbit"? | This happens at 1.5 times the Schwarzschild radius outside a stationary black hole. | [
"Rather than exceeding the speed of light within a local reference frame, a spacecraft would traverse distances by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it, resulting in effective faster-than-light travel. Objects cannot accelerate to the speed of light within normal spacetime; instead, the Al... |
how does intuition or instinct work? | We have senses, you are normally taught about the 5 cardinal senses, taste, touch, sight, sound and smell.
But in truth, depending on the definition, we have more. Including the sense of direction, the sense of pain, your sense of balance, and the sense that allows you to know where you limbs are without seeing them (close your eyes and clap your hands).
Because of this, we actually have other senses that are less descriptive, like a sense that allows us to perceive danger, or a sense that allows us to know when to go into "flight or fight".
But that's a bit of a tangent, instincts are preprogrammed muscle reactions in some cases. Like instinctively covering your stomach when being attacked, or instinctively covering your head when falling.
Instincts are our natural reactions. Reactions that have become ingrained in our subconscious as
Intuition is the conscious use of those instincts to know things. ie Instinct tells a person that a crying baby is a bad thing, but intuition is looking at the baby and knowing that it's not hungry, it needs a diaper change.
Intuition only seems to occur in some instances, because it truly does only occur at certain times, it's an insight, and sometimes you just have no insight into a situation. | [
"Intuition is an assumed truth with an unknown, or possibly unexamined, source. It is a judgment that is not dependent on a rational examination of the facts. It is usually experienced as a sudden sensation and/or rush of thoughts that feel \"right\". Many persons experience intuitive epiphanies which later prove t... |
is it possible to manipulate your voice? such as make it raspier, more hoarse or deeper? | Permanently? Not without outside help. | [
"Voice teachers teach different techniques, but long-term use will still take its toll if done incorrectly – these techniques are designed to reduce rather than eliminate harm. However it has been shown by many vocalists (ex. Christian Älvestam) that long-term use of these techniques can occur without causing harm ... |
Was there a moment that was agreed upon to be the basis for clocks moving forward? | The globally agreed upon standard for time is called [Coordinated Universal Time or UTC.](_URL_1_) The wiki has plenty of information on the standard, but basically in 1960 a bunch of national labs (e.g. _URL_0_ from NIST in the US) agreed upon the standard. Prior to this (and importantly prior to the invention of the hyper-accurate caesium clock) a reference midnight time was set based on astronomical observations. | [
"The clock was officially set in motion on 30 August 1905, by Joseph Carruthers, the Premier of New South Wales, who noted that he \"thought that the day on which peace had been declared between Russia and Japan was a fitting time to set it in motion\" and that \"he hoped there would be peace and goodwill on earth ... |
indians: what is the deal with the train system in india? | South Indian here. In my 22 years of life I have never seen anyone sit on top of the train. But have seen people hanging on train and bus. Even I have hanged on to the door sometimes during some short distance bus travel. I never had fear of falling down. Its more like a positive attitude that I won't fall off the bus. Moreover at peak hours in metro cities no matter how much transport system is available there is simply too much demand. I don't think its ever possible at all by the government to meet such a huge demand especially in peak hours(Morning 8-10 A.M., Evening 5-8 P.M.). Ultimately its all down to overpopulation and government not simply being able to meet the demand.
However there are some other kind of people(Mostly college students, teens) that do it for the fun and thrill. Its fun for them to hang on to the doors.
As for as the top of the trains is concerned its not prevailing in south India. I have only seen them in TVs. But the reasoning is the same. 1.) Not enough transport facilities due to overpopulation. 2.)Our mentality is not to fear for those things. 3.) There are people who do it for the fun and thrill of doing it 4.) For some people its the only way of transport.
Now you might ask that even china is overpopulated but that is not an issue for them. Its because China have a better economy. | [
"The Indian Railways are broadly organised from functional groups within the Indian Railway Service. India's rail system is managed at a regional level since Indian Railways have divided themselves into eighteen zonal railways. Each zone, headed by a General Manager, is semi-autonomous and this creates a matrix org... |
Explain the application of Five Sigma for me? | Let's define a few terms first:
Sigma (σ) in this case represents standard deviation. Standard deviation is the mean distance of values from the mean (μ) of the set of values.
A normal (or Gaussian) distribution is probably the most common probability density function. It's some function like e^-(x-μ)^(2)/2σ^2 and gives curves like [these](_URL_0_). μ is the central value of a Gaussian, and σ parametrises the width at some height (I forget where).
If you measure something with purely random variance/deviation, you should get a Gaussian distribution. (See the [Central Limit Theorem](_URL_1_))
The number of sigma, when talking about the strength of a signal, is a measure of probability of being within (or outwith) so many standard deviations away from the mean.
e.g. the probability of a point being within or outwith 1σ of the mean in any Gaussian distribution is 68.3% or 31.7% respectively.
[This might explain it a bit better.](_URL_2_)
When we say that we have a 5σ signal, we've calculated the local standard deviation around our peak and measured that our signal is 5 times that. This has an associated **probability that the signal is a statistical fluctuation in the data**, which is the approximately 1 in 2 million figure you quote.
With more data points, the precision increases. If there is a real signal, the significance also increases. This can be demonstrated with the approximation that σ^2 ∝ N where N is the number of events. If we have S events in our peak and B events around and underneath the peak, the significance is S/sqrt(S+B) so if both S and B increase with the same proportion as we collect more data, then the significance goes up.
The choice of 5σ is completely arbitrary. It's a number that was agreed upon by consensus to be enough to make claims of discovery (once it has been independently confirmed by another experiment). However it's not completely perfect, take for example the 5.1σ [pentaquark](_URL_4_) signal at [LEPS](_URL_3_) | [
"According to an article by John Dodge, editor in chief of \"Design News\", use of Six Sigma is inappropriate in a research environment. Dodge states \"excessive metrics, steps, measurements and Six Sigma's intense focus on reducing variability water down the discovery process. Under Six Sigma, the free-wheeling na... |
Were their any internal anti-imperialist movements at any time during ancient Romes existence? | I don't really know about any internal rebellions against the Imperial system, rather than an individual emperor, but I'll try to answer your question. (Note that I'm in no way a historian.)
Rome was first ruled by Kings. Romulus is fabled to have founded Rome and was her first King. It had several kings until [Tarquinius Superbus](_URL_2_) got exciled and Rome turned into a Republic. In this case you could say it was against a system in which one man held power (though a King, rather than emperor).
At the end of the Republic, it became clear that the current system could no longer reign in the ambitions of several men, including Gaius Julius Caesar. He got murdered for, well, being a dictator and destroying the Republic. Again, this was done in fear of Caesar keeping all the power, so they plotters definitely would have objected to an Imperial system that emerged a bit later.
After Caesar, there was a civil war, after which Augustus came to power as the first emperor. He ruled for 40 years and the Republic wasn't functioning quite well beforehand, so after his death, there weren't a lot of people who remembered the glory-days of the Republic and who had lived most of their lives in the [Pax Augusta](_URL_3_), whereas the last days of the Republic were those of continuous civil war. I doubt many *wanted* back to those days. Since Tiberius (Augustus successor) was doing okay and the transition between Augustus and Tiberius was smooth, few objected to him either. Nero, though, is a very different story.
Besides, we must realize that being emperor must appeal to a lot of ambitious men, so most wouldn't have objected against the institution, rather the current emperor. So I don't think a substantial group wanted to move back to the old system, where they would have to share power with another consul, and could only be a consul for 1 year. There are, however, some important notes I have to make on this:
* The Christians were prosecuted at first for not recognizing the divinity of the emperor. I don't think they really objected to having an emperor or a single ruler per se, especially since they had no problems with the emperors whatsoever once they turned Christian.
* The Roman Empire was once split into two and ruled by four people: a [Tetrarchy](_URL_1_). Again, not really against the imperial system, as Diocletian (emperor who installed it) simply realized the empire had become to big and complicated for one man to rule.
There have been a lot of revolts against emperors in the Imperial period, but most simply resulted in a new emperor who was a bit more careful in keeping the people happy. These were not really revolts from recently conquered people, but really the people within the Roman Empire, and especially the people in Rome, as they would notice first when an Emperor was becoming too tyrannical.
If you want to know more about the revolts against all the emperors (or which emperors were actually really loved by their subjects) I recommend reading Fik Meijer's [Emperors don't die in bed](_URL_0_). | [
"Edward Gibbon suggested that the increasing use of Oriental-style despotism by the Roman emperors was a major factor in the fall of the Roman Empire, particularly from the reign of Elagabalus: As the attention of the new emperor was diverted by the most trifling amusements, he wasted many months in his luxurious p... |
The Science behind HAARP? | [Searched](_URL_4_)
Relevant [discussion](_URL_6_)
Original question by [permanentmarker](_URL_2_)
> [the comment in question](_URL_9_)
> Above is a link to the top rated comment on a post about the atmosphere above Japan heating rapidly before the March 11 earthquake.
> I have heard one person on reddit go off about HAARP before, but the guy could barely formulate a sentence and could not explain why he thought [HAARP](_URL_8_) was responsible for the earthquakes in Japan.
> I guess my question is, what is the deal with HAARP, and why do some people think that it's responsible for [all kinds of stuff](_URL_0_)? Sorry if this is a lame question, I just don't understand how something like this could be responsible for such a diverse list of things (earthquakes and flooding to the downing of TWA flight 800 and Gulf War Syndrome..)
> Thanks for reading and thank you in advance for enlightening me on the subject if you are able.
Relevant comment courtesy [mobilehypo](_URL_5_)
> I'm not an expert but I can give you the basic answer: The HAARP doesn't have any role in these things. It heats the ionosphere. That's about it. If you read the whole HAARP wiki article you'll see that popular fiction has contributed to the conspiracy theories.
> Your question isn't lame, but when faced with this kind of information you need to consider what is the logical conclusion. You have a really great resource in your brain. Asking this question is good, but you also should have confidence in your own conclusions. :)
> Hopefully someone with a different color tag will show up if you've got more questions.
Relevant [follow-up](_URL_1_) courtesy [Sannish](_URL_3_)
> HAARP will always be a subject to conspiracy theories because people don't understand the ionosphere, don't know what HAARP does and because it is in a remote location.
> There is also [some evidence](_URL_7_) that earthquakes can have effects on the ionosphere. So they read "Earthquake = Ionosphere" and then hear about a remote station that effects the ionosphere and get "Government Controls Ionosphere", which leads them to the conclusion "Government Controls Earthquakes".
> As far as plane crashes the plane would need to fly directly overhead of HAARP while it was running to see any effect and even then it would probably just give them some heavy static on their radios.
> Flooding and other things being caused by HAARP is just nonsensical. It puts out less power then lightning and there worldwide transmitters operating at ~200-500 kW that don't appear to have any effects. | [
"HEPEX was founded in 2004 with NOAA and ECMWF as co-chairs. It is an international research initiative with the aim to \"\"demonstrate the added value of hydrological ensemble predictions (HEPS) for emergency management and water resources sectors to make decisions that have important consequences for economy, pub... |
how do sinks work? | I think you mean how do _faucets_ work, or _water pipes_. Pressure. The utility supplier pumps potable water into the top of the system. Boost pumps along the system keep the pressure up throughout the underground mains. This supplies the pressure to your house. When you open a faucet you are creating a point for the water to escape, so the system begins to depressurize and is repressurized by the pumps.
edit: speeling | [
"A sink — also known by other names including sinker, washbowl, hand basin and wash basin—is a bowl-shaped plumbing fixture used for washing hands, dishwashing, and other purposes. Sinks have taps (faucets) that supply hot and cold water and may include a spray feature to be used for faster rinsing. They also inclu... |
What happens to the body when it falls into lava? | Probably not. The average density of human flesh is far lower than that of lava, so you wouldn't so much as fall into it as you would just fall onto the top of the lava. It would be similar to falling onto a frozen lake, instead of into the water.
Except you'd be seared and burned horribly at first. Your clothes would flame up so quickly there'd be no time to extinguish it. The hot air and toxic fumes would sear your lungs and you'd start to asphyxiate. Next, the heat would cook you like a sausage on a grill, and as the water inside you rapidly turned to steam, you'd pop here and there or maybe even explode. Trying to move would likely result in layers of body tissues being torn apart. Your body would largely be burned to a cinder, and some of your large bones might leave evident mineral traces future geologists would puzzle over until the archeologists got a glimpse.
It would be an agonizing death to experience from either perspective - as victim or rescuer. Once you're on that lava, you don't have much of a chance of survival, even if you actually get off it. | [
"The floor is lava (also known as hot lava) is a game in which players pretend that the floor or ground is made of lava (or any other lethal substance, such as acid or quicksand), and thus must avoid touching the ground, as touching the ground would \"kill\" the player who did so. The players stay off the floor by ... |
what is bearing in navigation and how is it different from heading? | Bearing is the direction to any given point or object. Heading is the direction you are travelling in. | [
"BULLET::::1. In land navigation, a 'bearing' is ordinarily calculated in a clockwise direction starting from a reference direction of 0° and increasing to 359.9 degrees. Measured in this way, a bearing is referred to as an \"azimuth\" by the US Army but not by armies in other English speaking nations, which use th... |
How can potential energy be relative? | Voltage is not potential energy, it is potential. A charge has to be introduced into the potential in order for there to be "potential energy", and it is the charge that contains the potential energy, not the potential itself.
> However, if you can do that, why can you not just test 2 points that are infinitely far away from your test charge, and call that potential difference zero, and use that as an absolute scale?
That is often what is done in undergrad physics - voltage is given as an absolute V(b), where it really should be V(b)-V(a), but V(a) is set to zero.
> Can you do the same for gravity, or whatever other potential energy that you have?
Yes, you do that for gravity also. When you say U=mgh, you are saying U(h=0) = 0, and setting the reference point. Thus, gravitational potential energy is also relative. If we aren't doing the small distance approximation (where mgh is valid), then U(r=inf)=0 is the typical zero-point of reference.
This is the same as kinetic energy. Both are measured in reference to some point, typically a zero-point. Other things that are relative: speed and distance/position. Speed is measured relative to some rest frame, and distance is measured relative to some origin.
When dealing with relative quantities, all that matters is the difference between two points. Setting absolutes doesn't improve the situation or simplify things, really. I wish I could give a better mathematical description but I am sick and my brain isn't working as well as I would like. | [
"Potential energy is closely linked with forces. If the work done by a force on a body that moves from \"A\" to \"B\" does not depend on the path between these points, then the work of this force measured from \"A\" assigns a scalar value to every other point in space and defines a scalar potential field. In this c... |
why is it preferable to keep apps running on android lollipop instead of closing them frequently? | The phone is a high tech piece of equipment that is better at deciding at what to keep open and not in order to maximize battery life and performance.
The app is not actually running when it appears in the recent app list. It might not even be in the phones memory. The recent app list is there as a convenience feature to the end user.
Now why might closing the app be bad? The operation of closing the app removes the app from memory which uses energy. Additionally next time you open the app it must be loaded back into the phones memory and must be reinitalized which too uses energy. The combination of these two operations may be more energy consuming than leaving the app in memory in the first place.
Do you want to figure that out? Probably not. Hundereds of hardware and software engineers at Google and all the other companies that went into making your device have written algorithms to make the phone smart enough to make these types of decisions so you don't have to.
Tl;Dr: the phone is smarter than you | [
"\" Xiaomi seems to be running an overly aggressive background app killing setting that'll close most apps running in the background if they've not been used for a while. It's difficult to assess exactly how long this time period has to be, but I found common apps like GroupMe and Hangouts, among plenty of others, ... |
how can different operating systems able to read programs written in different programming languages. | When you write a program in some programming language, you can't just run it. You need to pass the code through a *compiler*, a program that translates the code into binary code that the processor can understand.
Even then, the executable binary code is platform specific. You can't run a program compiled for Windows on a Mac or a Linux, or on a different kind of CPU (for example running program for an x86 processor on an ARM processor). If you want to be able to run your program on multiple platforms, you have to compile it for each platform separately.
*However*, some programming languages, such as Java, are compiled into an intermediate language. The computer still can't understand this language, but you run them using a special program called a Virtual Machine, which translated the intermediate code into the platform's actual binary code at runtime. There is a version of the Java Virtual Machine for each platform - one for Windows, one for Linux, and so on. If you want to run a java program, you just download the JVM for your operating system and then you can run. | [
"Under Linux and other Unix-like systems, a program easily accommodates to any of the three cases because the same interface (namely, standard streams) controls the display and keyboard. Also, specialized programming libraries help to output the text in a way appropriate to the given display device and interface to... |
how come when i use "end task" programs that aren't responding close instantly but when i "x" out of them it takes a while | Analogy:
Pressing the X is telling the program that it's fired and kindly ask it on clear its desk and be out of the building by close of business hours.
Using "End Task" is calling building security and having them tossed out immediately. | [
"The \"end\" case is a very simple case that works to simply delay the program to allow the user enough time to check that they have received their change and picked up their item. After 5000 milliseconds (5 seconds) the wait timer is used, up and the program continues back to the start page to wait for another use... |
why do me teeth feel loose? are they really loose, temporarily, or is my brain just playing tricks on me? | Your teeth do move very slightly over time (they tend to crowd as wisdom teeth come in, for example), but they shouldn't be loose. If you tap on them while looking in the mirror, do you see any motion? Or is it just a feeling? If it's the former, see a dentist *immediately*, that shouldn't ever happen. If it's the latter, it's likely an issue with your gums rather than with your teeth. You should still see a dentist about it, though. | [
"Clinically, because of its reflex function, the mesencephalic nucleus can be tested with the jaw jerk reflex. Because of its function in oral proprioception, lesions of the trigeminal mesencephalic nucleus cause effects on feeding. The mesencephalic nucleus can be thought of simply as the \"nucleus that keeps your... |
Cutting someone in half and they still live for a few seconds? | Yes, it is possible, and during the French Revolution, there were some doctors that were experimenting to see if the brain was still functional after decapitation by guillotine [[1]](_URL_0_) | [
"Nevertheless, physical altercation resulting from cutting is rare. It was reported that an 18-year-old National Serviceman in Malaysia was bludgeoned to death after he attempted to jump the queue at a food counter. Another notable incident occurred in New York City at The Halal Guys food cart, resulting in the dea... |
What will happen to the Voyager spacecraft if they never come into contact with anything? | It has a pretty good chance (well north of 50%) of outliving the Sun, at least in some sort of semi-recognizable form. After trillions or quadrillions of years, I'm not sure, it will eventually essentially completely evaporate (even metals have vapor pressure). Although it'll cool down to the temperature of the CMB eventually, and the CMB itself will cool, so I have no idea how long that process will take, but it'll eventually happen. | [
"Meanwhile, the crew of the \"Voyager\" finds the gravimetric distortion that the away team's shuttle went into. A probe is launched to determine if contact could be made, however the situation is complicated by the arrival of an alien salvage team bent on closing the distortion, an action which would crush everyth... |
What exactly is happening when a cyclist rides hand-free? | [Trail on Wikipedia](_URL_0_)
If you draw a line representing the steering axis, through the headtube, down to the ground, where that line hits the ground will be in front of where the tire touches the ground. When the ground exerts force on the tire, because that force is pulling the wheel back from a place behind the steering axis, the wheel will naturally want to point straight ahead. | [
"Freeride is a discipline of the sport longboarding. Freeride is the compound word referring to the act of descending a riding surface interspersed with various maneuvers such as semi-perpendicular slides by breaking traction and carving (riding in an 'S' shaped path). Riders often change their riding stance as a r... |
how did fungi develop antibiotics fast enough to kill bacteria? and why couldn't bacteria just develop faster to overcome the antibiotics fungi made, therefore becoming resistant? | Many bacteria HAVE evolved to become resistant to penicillin due to its widespread use as an antibiotic when it was first discovered.
From what I understand, it might be opposite of what you think. Bacteria have poor DNA repair mechanisms due to their rapid generation time, so they often accumulate mutations. A random mutation leading to antibiotic resistance and selection quickly allows a bacteria population to become resistant to an antibiotic. On the other hand, fungi are eukaryotes (like humans) with better DNA repair mechanisms than bacteria so they don't develop mutations as rapidly. Seeing as how bacteria are growing resistant to penicillin, it would probably take longer for the fungi to adapt to the situation and counteract.
> Fungi and Bacteria are mortal enemies.
In many cases, that is not correct. There are various symbiotic relationships where bacteria live within fungi. In return, the bacteria aid with metabolism and help provide nutrients. | [
"Development of fungal resistance can be prevented by not using cyproconazole \"repeatedly alone in the same season\" or by not using it late in the infection, that is, curatively. Fungi can develop resistance if the same fungicide is used repeatedly or when fungicides with the same mode of action are repeatedly.(p... |
why do truckers always pass other cars/truckers when going uphill? i seem to notice this mostly on the interstates and it always results (obviously) in the “fast lane” getting backed up. | They don't always pass when going uphill. Sometimes they pass going downhill and sometimes they pass on the level (source: I've seen them do it many times).
You probably notice it more when they do it going uphill because it inconveniences you most then. It's OK though: in all the jurisdictions I'm aware of, trucks are allowed to use the passing lane when passing, even if it takes a long time.
Fun fact: the Germans have a word for it: "elefantenrennen" which translates to "elephant racing." | [
"Despite the conjecture, there is reduced chance of pedestrians using the truck apron as a sidewalk if there is a large vehicle approaching. Even when a truck apron is not present, most pedestrians will step back from the edge of the road when there is a large vehicle or semi-truck approaching for two reasons: to a... |
how is it that although we don't know all of the words in the dictionary by heart, we can easily spot when something is not a word? | 1. Recognition is easier than recall, so if you see a real world you usually recognize it, even if it's not one you use.
2. In a specific language, certain letter combinations are rare or completely unused. Here are some realistic non-words: famp, droom, pank. Here are some plainly unrealistic ones: qqaq, eoao, thethith, yfg. | [
"To properly identify senses of words one must know common sense facts. Moreover, sometimes the common sense is needed to disambiguate such words like pronouns in case of having anaphoras or cataphoras in the text.\n",
"A common strategy for finding all the words is to go through the puzzle left to right (or vice... |
why black holes cause infinite curvature? | Black holes are only infinite right in the center. The curvature at the event horizon **is** "curved so much that not even light can escape", but that isn't infinite. You don't need infinite anything to stop light from escaping. | [
"BULLET::::2. The singularity at the heart of the black hole, where conventional black hole theory says there is infinite spacetime curvature due to an infinitely intense gravitational field from a region of zero volume. Modern physics breaks down when such parameters are infinite and zero.\n",
"With classical-mo... |
why do charley horses (the type of painful muscle cramp) seem to mostly happen while you're asleep? | Because you sleep in weird positions and your muscles can't properly relax, or it's too cold and your body won't bother shivering, but the muscle still has to warm itself up,so it stays active and pulsates,and eventually it gets stuck | [
"Charlie horse (or charley horse) is a popular colloquial term in Canada and the United States for painful involuntary spasms or cramps in the leg muscles, typically lasting anywhere from a few seconds to about a day. It is less likely to refer to a bruise on an arm or leg and a bruising of the quadriceps muscle of... |
Would a gladiator beat a trained soldier in combat? | Well, to be fair, the terms "gladiator" and "soldier" are really meaningless terms and describe a very wide variety of persons. For instance, the majority of "gladiators" if we are referring to people that fought in the gladiator games, were just slaves that were sold to whomever happened to be putting on the festivities; ergo, given equivalent equipment, they would likely lose in a duel with a trained soldier. On the other hand, the term “soldier” can also refer to a broad spectrum ranging from the members of the Praetorian Guard down to, again, conscripts that were little more than slaves.
Now to answer the question in the way that I assume that you intended it, yes the gladiators portrayed in the series, highly unrealistic as they are, would likely be able to outmatch the average legionnaire. Bear in mind that Spartacus was an actual historical figure that fought in the Third Servile War in which they actually did fight Roman legion troops and stood their ground for a few battles. On the other hand, no they were not like super-soldiers and the show can be thought of as akin to the film, 300 in terms of historicity; in that, while based on historical events, the actual historical versions of the persons portrayed did not kill hundreds of people single-handedly. Hope that answers your question!
EDIT: syntax
| [
"Combats between experienced, well trained gladiators demonstrated a considerable degree of stagecraft. Among the cognoscenti, bravado and skill in combat were esteemed over mere hacking and bloodshed; some gladiators made their careers and reputation from bloodless victories. Suetonius describes an exceptional \"m... |
When people were put in stocks as punishment back in colonial times, was it just a given that they'd be raped? | Hi, not to discourage further discussion, but you may be interested in this answer from a past question that deals directly with your question!
_URL_0_ | [
"Colonial forces arrested seventy blacks and jailed them. Six are reported to have committed suicide. Twenty-seven were put on trial, 21 of whom were convicted and sentenced to death. Twenty were burned to death and one was executed on a breaking wheel. This was a form of punishment no longer used on whites at the ... |
If two planets were of the same gravitational pull(earth's for example) and were close to each other what would happen if an object(or human) was directly in the middle of it? | If the object was perfectly placed in the center, it would remain there, since the force of gravity from the planets would be equal in magnitude but in opposite direction.
However, this would not be stable. Any minor change in the system would cause it to accelerate one way or another. All it would take would be for some other object to pass by, and its gravity my nudge the object in the center off balace. | [
"It can be said that two objects in space orbiting each other in the absence of other forces are in free fall around each other, e.g. that the Moon or an artificial satellite \"falls around\" the Earth, or a planet \"falls around\" the Sun. Assuming spherical objects means that the equation of motion is governed by... |
why do gas stations offer mid grade gas | In my state (Montana) premium gas is 91 octane, but regular gas is 85.5 octane. From what I understand the low-octane gas is acceptable because of the altitude, at least for older cars without engine-management computers. So the mid-grade gas is 87 octane, which is what my engine requires. Thus, I buy mid-grade gas because it's the cheapest grade for my car.
| [
"Convenience stores located within many petrol/gas stations sell pre-packaged sandwiches, doughnuts, and hot food. Many gas stations in the United States and Europe also sell frozen foods, and have microwave ovens on the premises in which to prepare them. Petrol Stations in Australia sell foods such as hot pies, sa... |
when people sing in a tonal language (like chinese), how do they keep the tones in their voice? | The short answer is, they don't. You can't really tell the tones when listening to a song. The meaning is usually pretty clear from context.
The tones are basically lost when whispering Chinese too. It's still understandable.
| [
"All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch acc... |
Has mercury been successfully employed to treat anything? | Mercury is an ingredient in many vaccines, albeit not as the element purely. It's a component of the preservatives, and this is declining as well.
I can't find anything in my journal access offhand, nor am I specifically aware of anything of this sort. That said, there are plenty of elements that we don't use, and used to, and compounds as well. | [
"Today, the use of mercury in medicine has greatly declined in all respects, especially in developed countries. Thermometers and sphygmomanometers containing mercury were invented in the early 18th and late 19th centuries, respectively. In the early 21st century, their use is declining and has been banned in some c... |
how can tv shows like south park and family guy still use the “all persons fictitious” disclaimer when they are clearly making fun of an actual person/celebrity? | That disclaimer isn't protecting them from a celebrity suing them.
What is protecting them from a celebrity suing them is the fact that the 1st Amendment has been held to allow you to use someone's name and likeness in certain limited ways when that person is a "subject of public interest." The short of it is that celebrities are "subjects of public interest" and the manner in which they are being depicted in those tv shows is one of the limited ways in which the 1st Amendment permits someone else to use their likeness.
That phrase is just some generic legalese that has been stuck in the credits of every movie and tv show going back decades. It's designed to stop some random, non-celebrity from claiming that a non-celebrity character in the movie/show is so similar to them that the movie/show is using the random person's likeness.
In all likelihood that blurb of legalese doesn't actually do anything - if some random person could actually prove that their likeness was being used the phrase wouldn't protect the movie/show producers. And if the random person can't prove that their likeness was used, well, they can't win a case against the movie/show producers.
But it does protect the movie/show owners from the one in a billion case where a judge says "well you didn't put that phrase in your credits so I'll let this go to trial." While the random person still won't win in that situation, going to trial costs money while putting that phrase in the credits does not, and so that phrase ends up in every movie/show's credits.
The reason its showed at the start of the intro for South Park, rather than in the credits, is as a joke.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
edit: This is more in depth so feel free to skip it if you're just looking for a basic explanation on why South Park doesn't get sued, but I'll just add a bit in because I wasn't very clear on *why* that phrase keeps getting put in the credits of every movie and tv show despite not doing anything and I'm getting two general lines of comments.
The first line of comments is "I'm a lawyer and its because it protects against defamation!" I too, am a lawyer, though if you're making this comment I doubt you are. You cannot say "I'm not defaming X but by the way X is a child molester" and think that does not constitute defamation (which was one of the examples a "lawyer" used). But perhaps the best response is the fact that the phrase is usually put in the credits where no one sees it anyways. If no one sees it, it doesn't affect how they view the defaming material.
The second line of comments is "but they put it in for other countries where they don't have the 1st Amendment!"
The best response to this is just to be more clear why the phrase is put in the credits. As /u/ByeByeLiver and several others have stated there was a historical reason for putting it in the credits.
But modernly its put there solely because of inertia, that is to say, there is no one alive today that remembers a time when it wasn't in the credits. It also costs nothing to put it in the credits. But there is an extremely remote possibility that removing it from the credits might result in a situation that costs money - nobody knows how that situation could actually come about, but nobody can say *with absolute certainty* that it won't come about if that phrase is removed. So it gets put in the credits because the default position is that its in the credits, its free, and free is cheaper than a remote possibility of "something bad happening."
In other words, its not being added because it contains some magical protection against non-US laws. Its largely being added in the US and just exported along with the rest of the movie/show. In countries where its being added domestically, the sole purpose for its addition is because people in that country are just assuming that it does *something* in the US or other English speaking countries and adding it, and again doing so is free.
| [
"On Day 70, there was a controversial Head of Household competition where the HouseGuests were to determine if certain statements were \"fact\" or \"fiction.\" Many fans of the show, including \"\" co-host Dick Donato, were displeased with the final \"fact or fiction\" statement, which dealt with how many preexisti... |
how rainbow tables work and how they're used for password cracking. | Passwords are stored by "hashing" -- to explain this intuitively, think of it like you give me your password, I run it through a machine, and the machine gives me an output that I store. The main point of this machine is
1. The only thing that can cause the it to output what it just did is your password -- any other password outputs something else.
2. You can't use this machine in reverse.
Hopefully, I don't actually have direct access to what goes in this machine, so now you can trust me to store your password and I can never actually use it (since I can't reverse what the machine gave me and I don't have your original password). On the other hand, if you ever want to use your password, you simply pass it through the machine and give me the output; I can check if that matches your username, and if it does, I know you had the right password (even though I don't know what that password is).
So I'm storing a bunch of people's passwords, which are actually just the transformed versions of their passwords by this machine. The thing is, lots of sites use the same machine to transform the passwords, so if your password was "password", the output that all these different sites are storing is the same. Someone can get their own version of this machine, and just start storing every pair of password and transformed password linked together (by testing a password, seeing the output, and joining them together so looking up one gives you the other). Now, if I steal some site's table of transformed passwords, any of those that I've already seen in my table of pairs I immediately know what password gives that transformed version, and now I have your password.
This table of pairs is a rainbow table. | [
"A rainbow table is a precomputed table for reversing cryptographic hash functions, usually for cracking password hashes. Tables are usually used in recovering a password (or credit card numbers, etc.) up to a certain length consisting of a limited set of characters. It is a practical example of a space–time tradeo... |
Is it possible to set something on fire by pouring boiling water on it? | yes, if it is a water reactive substance like calcium carbide water will react exothermically and ignite the gases produced | [
"Using water is one common method to extinguish a fire. Water extinguishes a fire by cooling, which removes heat because of water’s ability to absorb massive amounts of heat as it converts to water vapor. Without heat, the fuel cannot keep the oxidizer from reducing the fuel in order to sustain the fire. Water also... |
how does a cvt(continuously variable transmission) work? | A normal geared transmission switches between larger and smaller gears to change speed to power or power to speed.
A CVT uses pulleys that can move apart or back together. The inside of the pulley is inclined, so as it moves apart, the diameter that the belt rides on gets smaller, and then larger again as it moves back together - simulating different sized gears. This effectively gives a CVT an "infinite" number of gears if it can move the pulleys together and apart smoothly.
EDIT: Grammar | [
"The continuously variable transmission (CVT) is a transmission in which the ratio of the rotational speeds of two shafts, as the input shaft and output shaft of a vehicle or other machine, can be varied continuously within a given range, providing an infinite number of possible ratios. The CVT allows the driver or... |
Recently I read that recombination (the coupling of electrons and protons to form atoms) happened 378,000 years after the Big Bang. How can this estimate be so precise? | The answer is that there is a direct relationship between the age of an object and the redshift of an object. This comes out of the [ΛCDM model](_URL_0_) of the universe, which basically just says we trust that general relativity keeps working on really large scales.
If the current distance between you and another point in the universe is d, and in the past the distance between those points was d', then the ratio d'/d defines the cosmic scale factor a(t). At the present time, a(t*_0_*)=1. At the moment of the big bang, a(t=0) was zero. Therefore we can see that a(t) increased from 0 to 1 over the age of the universe.
Now, once light is created its wavelength expands proportionally with the size of the universe, creating the cosmic redshift. So there is a very simple relationship between the redshift (z) of the light coming from an object and the value of a(t) when that light was created:
a(t)=1/(1+z)
When we look at the CMB, the "object" we are looking at is all the hydrogen in the universe at the moment it became transparent. For a given density of hydrogen gas, there is some temperature where it shifts from plasma to gas (this isn't a perfectly sharp phase transition as others have pointed out, but it is sharp enough for this argument). A plasma is opaque, because the free electrons can absorb light at any frequency. Hydrogen gas is transparent because there are only a few distinct lines that can absorb light. We see this when we look at the sun: the surface of the sun we observe is the place where the temperature gets cool enough for the hydrogen to recombine.
So, if we know the temperature that hydrogen recombined at (T*_R_*), we can compare that to the current temperature of the CMB and get a redshift:
T = T*_R_*/ (1+z) = T*_R_*\*a(t)
If we know what a(t) was, then we can invert that function to calculate t. | [
"In cosmology, recombination refers to the epoch at which charged electrons and protons first became bound to form electrically neutral hydrogen atoms. Recombination occurred about 379,000 years after the Big Bang (at a redshift of \"z\" = ). The word \"recombination\" is misleading, since the big bang theory doesn... |
how does a single firework explode more than once and every explosion all at once. | The first is just a rocket pretty much. it explodes and a bunch of shells are released ("shells". they're not hard like artillery ones.) with a fuse, of a very specific length and material that is lit by the initial one. this process repeats with the last ones.
We've been making these things for thousands of years. We've gotten very good at making fuses that burn for very specific amounts of time, in sequence. | [
"The explosion manifested itself in a volume of flame and dust at the number two or downcast shaft, followed seconds later by a volume of flame from the upcast or number one shaft which set fire to the wooden sheds or headings above it.\n",
"In fireworks, a burst charge is a pyrotechnic mixture placed in a shell ... |
how does voluntary/involuntary breathing work? | From what I understand the nervous system doesn't really do anything differently per se. I think it's more a matter of which part/parts of the brain are sending the signal. I believe the Medulla is what normally controls things like breathing, but once you start doing it consciously, it may be that more frontal lobe parts of the brain that involve decision making and motor functions take control. | [
"Breathing (or ventilation) is the process of moving air into and out of the lungs to facilitate gas exchange with the internal environment, mostly by bringing in oxygen and flushing out carbon dioxide.\n",
"Breathing is the repetitive process of bringing air into the lungs and taking waste products out. The oxyg... |
how does fast charging work? | A lot of wrong answers here. Quickcharging happens when the charging adapter communicates with the power management chip (pmic) about the current state of the battery. You see when a battery is empty its chemical state can absorb a lot more current than when the battery is almost full. Quick charging optimizes the electricity throughput with the state of the battery. It requires the charger and the phone pmic to communicate. | [
"A typical intelligent charger fast-charges a battery up to about 85% of its maximum capacity in less than an hour, then switches to trickle charging, which takes several hours to top off the battery to its full capacity.\n",
"Quick Charge is a technology found in Qualcomm SoCs, used in devices such as mobile pho... |
How did the Practice of buying and selling an Officer's Commission become so widespread in the British military, and did having incompetent rich officers contribute to the decline in their military power? | I don't see how the sale of commissions could be related to the decline of British military power: purchase of commissions was abolished in 1871 by William Gladstone's Liberal government under the Cardwell Reforms, largely as a response to the debacles of the Crimean War (in particular the Charge of the Light Brigade). The British Empire didn't reach its territorial peak until 1921, and militarily it was arguably at its strongest in 1918.
Prior to the abolition of purchase, the assumption was that a "gentleman" of proper education and birth would be fit to lead troops without much additional training: though the Royal Military Colleges at Sandhurst and Woolwich already existed, attendance at Sandhurst was optional and Woolwich was more of a technical college for the Artillery and Engineers. This expectation was not entirely unfounded: cowardice could easily lead to social disgrace, and so most gentlemen officers demonstrated extraordinary bravery on the battlefield. High officer casualties during the Napoleonic Wars discouraged true incompetents and dilettantes from purchasing commissions.
The real rot set in during the long peace after 1815: as the British Empire grew, so did the Army (peaking at 109 infantry regiments, plus the Brigade of Guards and Rifle Brigade, and 31 regiments of cavalry), and with it the numbers of officers required to lead. Purchase had originally been designed to ensure politically-reliable officers, i.e., moneyed men who had an interest in defending the status quo and would not lead the Army in revolution. However, as the Army grew, it became increasingly difficult for the Military Secretary to vet potential applicants, and so instead, the technically-illegal practice of selling commissions for higher than their paper value was tolerated. Officers' pay was also allowed to stagnate, while "smart" regiments like the Cavalry and Guards squeezed out the less-wealthy by requiring huge numbers of extravagantly-tailored uniforms, sometimes changing the uniform pattern twice a year or more. The effect was that as the Army's social prestige grew, with royals lending their patronage to regiments, all-but the upper class was priced out and the officer corps was largely restricted to those with a private income from land or business.
Even at the nadir of the purchase system, the Crimean War, it was not entirely ineffective: it is easily forgotten that the Earl of Cardigan actually led the Charge of the Light Brigade from the front and never looked back, reaching the Russian guns and surviving the fight. However, what Cardigan did next was emblematic of many of the problems the British Army experienced with its officer corps: after the charge, he went back to his yacht moored in Balaclava harbour and enjoyed a champagne dinner. For all their bravery and however well-intentioned they may be, the man-management skills of British officers were appalling, and many spent the winter in the fleet offshore while their men froze on the Crimean Peninsula. Purchase died a death soon afterwards and was replaced by compulsory attendance at Sandhurst with a rigorous entrance exam.
Rather amusingly, Gladstone's abolition of purchase was not, as commonly thought, to open the officer corps to young men of the middle classes. It was because the younger sons of wealthy middle class families that had come up from trade and industry were now able to afford commissions and were pricing out the gentry. The abolition of purchase gave men from "traditional" military backgrounds the chance to compete with the newcomers.
Sources:
Richard Holmes, *Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket*
Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, *The Queen's Commission: A Junior Officer's Guide* | [
"The purchase of officer commissions in the British Army was the practice of paying money to be made an officer in the cavalry and infantry regiments of the English and later British Army. By payment, a commission as an officer could be secured, avoiding the need to wait to be promoted for merit or seniority. This ... |
"live within your means" as the saying goes. but why is austerity not a good thing when you are a debt stricken country in a deep recession? | The reason it's good for you to save money as an individual is because you may need the safety net and because one day you may like to keep existing without working for an income. Saving, for an individual, is selfish but necessary.
But for an economy, everyone saving money is a bad deal, because borrowing makes growth. If I make you wait to open a pizza shop until you have the cash saved to finance it completely, you may never get to open it, and if you do, you'll probably be old and not run it for very long. You may even choose not to do it because keeping your stash is safer. But if I let you borrow money from me to do it, then I can charge you interest. And *you* can make even *more* money selling pizzas than the interest I charge you. And we both make money. Your shop may flop, but that's the bet. You're somewhat insulated by being able to default, and I'm somewhat insulated by charging you interest and making lots of other loans (bets). Of course, if I don't think you'll pay me back, I might charge you more interest or not offer the loan.
If you're a country, you don't want money hoarded. You want it out in the economy being lent out to people who use it to create more value, like by starting businesses or buying, maintaining , and improving homes.
These bets, over time and on average, have always worked out for the better. It's how the whole economy basically works. If you sum up all the people in a country's assets and subtract all the debts, you may be surprised to learn that the total is negative. We owe more than we have. And that's because we bet that, in the future, there will be more value because there will be more people and they will be more productive through innovation and technology.
So, if I'm Greece, I want to bet on my economy's growth and be able to spend at a deficit, but that only works if I make good bets. If I'm Germany, I want to bet on Greece's economy too, but I've been burned recently, and it's more important to me to ensure that my citizens are paid back.
| [
"Paul Krugman wrote in July 2014: \"The logic of a balance sheet recession is straightforward. Imagine that for whatever reason people have grown careless about both borrowing and lending, so that many families and/or firms have taken on high levels of debt. And suppose that at some point people more or less sudden... |
why does rolling he windows down help car sickness, but the vent / air conditioner doesn't? | I have found that breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth helps with car sickness, is there a reason why? | [
"Air-conditioning for automobiles came into wide use from the late twentieth century. Although air conditioners use significant power, the drag of a car with closed windows is less than if the windows are open to cool the occupants. There has been much debate on the effect of air conditioning on the fuel efficiency... |
what is the difference (if any) between medical grade nitroglycerin (like for angina) and "omg explosion" grade nitroglycerin? | They are exactly the same thing, except the medical grade is in the range of milligrans, while you need at least a few grams of the stuff to create any kind of noticeable explosion. The medical grade is also very pure due to the fact that you're putting it in your body, a constraint that the explosive doesn't need. | [
"Nitroglycerin (NG), also known as nitroglycerine, trinitroglycerin (TNG), nitro, glyceryl trinitrate (GTN), or 1,2,3-trinitroxypropane, is a dense, colorless, oily, explosive liquid most commonly produced by nitrating glycerol with white fuming nitric acid under conditions appropriate to the formation of the nitri... |
Why was Jesus poor as a Child? | I can not answer for the Jesus of Christianity, /u/husky54 or /u/koine_lingua might be able to help with that part and their answers should (hopefully) at least to some degree correspond with what I can tell you about the historical Jesus.
Jesus is usually said to have been a carpenter and the son of a carpenter, this is however not entirely correct. Jesus was actually the son of a τέκτων(tekton) (Mathew 13:55, Mark 6:3 etc). A tekton *can* be a carpenter but he doesn't have to be. The root word for tekton is the same one that words like technology, technician etc comes from and usually includes a broader range of craftsman that might, for lack of a better word, have been considered the engineers of the ancient world. Professions usually included in the word tekton are things like builders, masons, carpenters, metal workers etc. In either case, Jesus and Joseph were considered skilled craftsmen.
So what does that mean in the region at the time? Well, truth be told we can't even say for certain that Nazareth existed at the time, we do however know a little bit about the surrounding area. Nazareth was not far from Sepphoris, a significant town at the time. Right around the time of Jesus birth, Sepphoris had a bit of a misunderstanding with Roman authority and the town was destroyed (how is a little unclear, Josephus says it was burnt down but that is probably not true as archeological evidence does not support it). What we do know is that the town was rebuilt and that this was done in a time when skilled craftsmen were relatively rare in the region. These two pieces, when put together, means that Joseph was probably not poor. Work for a tekton would have been relatively abundant, even more so with the reconstruction of Sepphoris going on only an hours walk away.
Was Joseph, and through him Jesus, poor? Historically speaking, no, probably not.
*Jesus the Galilean: soundings in a first century life* - David A. Fiensy
*Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus: A Re-examination of the Evidence* - Jonathan L. Reed
*The Archaeology of Ancient Judea and Palestine* - Ariel Lewin | [
"BULLET::::- \"Though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor\": From having the fullness of the Godhead in Him, for the sake of human being, Jesus had become human and was exposed to outward poverty, born of poor parents, had no place to lay His head, was ministered to by others, had nothing to bequeath His... |
how do airport codes work when there are 17,678 commercial airports but only 17,576 possible combinations of letters? | IATA codes are only used for airports that have scheduled passenger service. Pilots use ICAO codes for airports. Ticket booking and baggage systems use IATA codes and there are only about 3000 airports that need those. | [
"For many reasons, some airport codes do not fit the normal scheme described above. Some airports, for example, cross several municipalities or regions, and therefore, use codes derived from some of their letters, resulting in DFW for Dallas/Fort Worth, DTW for Detroit–Wayne County, LBA for Leeds–Bradford (Airport)... |
Why don't strong magnetic fields disrupt the normal electrical activity of cells? | So most magnetic fields only very weakly effect the eletrons in your body, and generally not enough to displace them from the nucleus of the atom. Basically the local forces tend to dominate the energetic landscape compared to the external field. Now you can have Zeeman splitting, where electrons of different spins will assume slightly different energy levels, but again this is usually not enough to drive distinct chemistry under normal body conditions. One exception to this is thought to be the magnetic field sensing of birds and flies, which are believed to have a UV sensitive protein in their eyes, which does quarum sensing based on the magnetic field. (Basically has two reactions that can occur based on the field strength). This in theory allows them to “see” magnetic fields in a way that we can’t. There are also a species of mud dwelling bacteria that synthesis magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles, which they use to find direction in the dark mud. I would also look up reptiles third pseudo eye if your interested, as this can also detect magnetic fields to some degree, although I believe that it’s usefulness is still up to some debate | [
"A strong changing magnetic field can induce electrical currents in conductive tissue such as the brain. Since the magnetic field penetrates tissue, it can be generated outside of the head to induce currents within, causing transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). These currents depolarize neurons in a selected par... |
How popular was jesus by the time of his death? | This is truly an excellent question. One that could actually take pages and chapters to answer (which many have done and I will cite below) but I will do my best to try and help answer it briefly. I have also answered similar questions to this in the past, so I hope you don’t mind if I copy and paste some of my past answers into this thread and just prune it to answer your question.
Right off the back, it can be safely argued that Jesus was pretty unpopular around the time of his death (which we can safely argue was probably around the year 30, plus/minus 5 years) but he would have had to have had at least a somewhat sizeable number of people for his teachings to gain followers. Why do we know that? Well there are a few things that make us think this way.
First, the first person to start writing about Jesus was Paul, who started writing sometime around the year 50. Now it’s important to recognize that Paul never met Jesus while he was alive, so he never writes about many things Jesus did or said. Historian Bart Ehrman actually wrote about this in his book last year: [How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee](_URL_2_) Where in it, Ehrman explains:
> The problems with Paul are that he didn’t actually know Jesus personally and that he doesn’t tell us very much about Jesus’s teachings, activities, or experiences. I sometimes give my students an assignment to read through all of Paul’s writings and list everything Paul indicates Jesus said and did. My students are surprised to find that they don’t even need a three-by-five card to list them. — (Page 88).
It is important to note that it is widely believed that other Christians had started writing about Jesus prior to this period, but that their work no longer exists.
So why do I mention this about Paul? Well, it’s because it shows that Jesus’ followers had started to pick up by this time period (20 years after his death). It also shows that by the time Paul started writing, there had to have been a sizable and somewhat diverse group of people who started following Jesus’ message. The writings of Paul are quite well-written (for their time) and the Gospells (which would be written in the following few decades) are even more professionally written for their time (Mark being the least well-written and Luke being the best). This does suggest that in order to get a sizable amount of well-educated people to write down these stories, regardless of their errors, there had to have been a decent size following or their population would have faded away (like many other cults during this time period.)
I will say though, that his followings couldn’t have been too large. I argue this because there isn't a whole lot about Jesus written by non-Jewish/non-Christians (I use this last term loosely when applying it to the first century CE) prior to the second century. As some people may note, the first person to write about Jesus and his followers who was **not a Jesus follower** was the Jewish historian Josephus, who would only briefly mention Jesus in his twenty plus volume history of the Jewish people called The Antiquities of the Jews. Here Josephus discussed the execution of a man named James, whom Josephus described as “the brother of Jesus who is called the messiah” (Ant. 20.9.1) (I’d also like to note that Josephus never believed in Jesus being the Messiah, he was merely stating what others had said). He does also discuss Jesus again, but I won’t bore you with ancient quotes that would take me far too long put into context.
Long story short: Followers of Jesus would have had to have had a decent number behind them by the time Josephus left the Levant (area near present day Israel) in order for him to have mentioned them at all, but due to the fact that he barely says more than a paragraph about him in all his writings suggest that Christianity (as it would soon be called) was not too popular.
TL;DR: It’s likely that Jesus was not too well-known at the time of his death (the average Jewish peasant was unlike to have heard of him had they not lived un Judea), but his following would have had to have been sizeable enough to spread the stories of his life by oral tradition in order to gain such a noticeable following by the second half of the first century CE. It’s also worth reading John Dominic Crossan’s book: [The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant ](_URL_1_) to gain more information about this very topic.
**EDIT to add one more source** Another great book that actually deals with the very people we are talking about (early Christians in the immediate aftermath of Jesus' death) was done by an excellent historian named John Dominic Crossan, who wrote a book called: [The Birth of Christianity : Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus](_URL_0_) . This is definitely worth a read for anyone who is interested in this topic. I'm ashamed I didn't remember it earlier. | [
"In his book \"Did Jesus Exist?\", Bart Ehrman surveys the arguments \"mythicists\" have made against the existence of Jesus since the idea was first mooted at the end of the 18th century. As for the lack of contemporaneous records for Jesus, Ehrman notes no comparable Jewish figure is mentioned in contemporary rec... |
the entire plot of bioshock infinite. still haven't figured it out completley. | Spoilers obviously.
Booker DeWitt fought in the battle at wounded knee, which was a very bad thing if you weren't aware. Afterwords he felt strong remorse for what he did and considered going to a baptism to try and absolve himself of his sins.
Now in the universe of Bioshock there are an infinite amount of alternate dimensions where people made different choices and things went differently. So at the baptism two different universes where created. One in which Booker didn't get baptized and developed no coping mechanism for dealing with his guilt, and one where he coped with his crimes by convincing himself they where all just and noble actions, and in order to do this he became super racist.
Evil booker became comstock and invented a flying city of racism, but discovered he was sterile, so in order to have a biological child he sent the Lutices into another dimension to buy good booker's kid. Elizabeth left a finger in one universe and as such got superpowers because whatever. Latter the lutices became pan dimensional omnipotent platonic life mates because whatever but felt very guilty so they gave good booker a chance to redeem himself by saving his magic daughter from another dimension.
Edit: oh yeah. The ending. At the end Booker says he wants to kill Comstock when he was born and Elizabeth interprets this as meaning the moment he was baptized as that is the moment Comstock was created. So hella Elizabethans from hella dimensions get together and drown all of the Comstocks the second they're baptized, leaving all of the Bookers who didn't get baptised alive, which is why Booker still has Anna (elizabeth) at the end of the game. | [
"The book ends with Jordan declaring that he will clear the No Go Zone, after Hayden runs back to the Tower and informs him of Ed's trip through London. We read reflections from Nicola, David, Jordan, Ed, and St. George himself about how things are beginning to change. Ed and The Kid believe that Wormwood may be th... |
if you melt a penny or rip up a dollar, are you combating inflation, since that cash is no longer in circulation? or is inflation less straightforward? | Yes, you are combatting inflation, but the amount of new currency that is added to the economy everyday is so massive that unless you were to orchestrate a huge money burn, you couldn’t make any sort of difference | [
"Some have proposed a \"reduced cash\" system, where small bills and coins are available for anonymous, everyday transactions, but high-denomination notes are eliminated. This would make the amount of cash needed to move large amounts of value physically awkward and easier to detect. Large notes are also the most v... |
How far from the Earth would an asteroid big enough to destroy all life be visible? | Visible to the best astronomical tools luckily pointed in the right direction, visible to back yard telescopes, visible like a star, or visible like the impending doom of a rapidly growing fireball? | [
"Data shows asteroid to have a diameter of about . Scientists think that could be the exposed core of an early planet that could have been as large as Mars and lost its surface in a series of violent collisions.\n",
"For larger asteroids ( 100m to 1 km across), prediction is based on cataloging the asteroid, year... |
why do phone companies, like the iphone, focus on making smartphones thinner rather than putting in a bigger battery? | Look at sales. There have been quite a few smart phones that have focused on battery life being the number 1 priority. The problem was that they didn't sell as well as the new phone that's 1 mm thinner. | [
"There has been an industry shift from feature phones (including low-end smartphones), which rely mainly on volume sales, to high-end flagship smartphones which also enjoy higher margins, thus manufacturers find high-end smartphones much more lucrative than feature phones. \n",
"It is high, wide, and deep, compar... |
what really happens when you re-enter earth's atmosphere in a space shuttle (gravity wise)? | Nothing happens gravity wise. Gravity is the force that pulls 2 objects to each other. A space shuttle is pulled towards the earth, the closer it get's the harder the pull. But nothing significant happens gravity wise when it enters the atmosphere. | [
"The reentry capsule and the spacecraft reentered Earth's atmosphere on 13 June 2010 at 13:51 UTC (23:21 local). The heat-shielded capsule made a parachute landing in the South Australian outback while the spacecraft broke up and incinerated in a large fireball.\n",
"Since the reaction control system no longer fu... |
are musicians brains "wired" differently than non-musicians? | A well-trained musician can hear notes and different types of instruments in pieces. They study music and can decipher music regularly. I would say anyone can learn music and be able to create a song if you learn the foundations of music. | [
"Studies have shown that the human brain has an implicit musical ability. Koelsch, Gunter, Friederici and Schoger (2000) investigated the influence of preceding musical context, task relevance of unexpected chords and the degree of probability of violation on music processing in both musicians and non-musicians. Fi... |
why cant i smell or taste when i catch a cold? | When you have a cold, phlegm blocks the passages to the olfactory receptors at the top of the nose meaning that less air is going to pass over them. Thus, fewer molecules are reaching the olfactory cells because they are being blocked by the phlegm. The taste of food is determined more by smell than taste, so the reason that food does not have as much flavor when you have a cold is because of the reduction in smell sensitivity not a reduction in taste sensitivity (taste can only indicate sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami). | [
"The experience of eating favored foods with a cold often disappoints. This is because congestion blocks nasal passageways through which air and flavor molecules enter and exit, thus temporarily reducing retronasal smell capacity.\n",
"Odors that a person is used to, such as their own body odor, are less noticeab... |
Viking height and build. | Hi there! The thing to keep in mind about your question is that, properly used, the term "Viking" refers to an *occupation*, not an ethnic group or proto-nation or whatever. That is, "vikings" were people who participated in viking activity: seafaring raiding, banditry and piracy along the coasts and even far inland in Europe during the "viking age." The term in English has been used more loosely to denote the group of people who produced viking raiders, that is the Norse population of Scandinavia, since the mid-18th century, gaining popularity in connection with the various Scandinavian nationalist movements of the 19th century. So asking how "Vikings" were built is a bit like asking how, for example US Marines are built -- they are people who self-selected for a military or militaristic lifestyle.
That said, as you await more answers, some of these older questions/answers might be relevant to you.
[How "big" was the average Viking warrior? How would they compare to average people today? What about Roman or Spartan warriors?](_URL_2_)
[Very interested in an Historian's perspective on an Icelandic myth, and if one of you could comment on whether or not it was possible for humans 1000 years ago to compete with the competitive strongmen of today](_URL_0_)
[How strong/muscular were ancient warriors? Did they know enough about muscle growth to be the same build as many athletes/bodybuilders now? When did humans start becoming adept at bodybuilding?](_URL_1_?) | [
"Viking Heights is a prominent flat-topped mountain, 2,960 m, between Tanngarden Peaks and Mount Wideroe in the Sor Rondane Mountains, Antarctica. Mapped by Norwegian cartographers in 1957 from air photos taken by U.S. Navy Operation Highjump, 1946–47, and named Vikinghogda (the Viking height).\n",
"The early vik... |
how my neighbor's radon exhaust pipe is not a health concern for me. | To dilute your neighbor's exhaust to safe levels, you need 500L of air for every L of exhaust. If you have 5m between your houses, and your houses are 10m tall, and the pipe is 10cm (3") wide, then you have 5000L of air in the slice of air between your houses that's as wide as the pipe. If you have a breeze of 10% the speed of the air flowing out the pipe, even ignoring that the atmosphere extends up much higher than the roof of your house, you are fine.
It would be much more important to run a radon test in your basement. Radon is not a localized geologic problem. If your neighbor has a problem, you probably have a problem as well. | [
"According to the EPA's \"A Citizen's Guide to Radon\", the method to reduce radon \"primarily used is a vent pipe system and fan, which pulls radon from beneath the house and vents it to the outside\", which is also called sub-slab depressurization, soil suction, or active soil depressurization (ASD). Generally in... |
why do homeless peoples dogs always seem so immaculately well trained? | I think it's a combination of several things:
1. They probably aren't fed well, so they may lack the energy to be as excitable as house-bred dogs.
2. They're out in the open all day with a constant companion. This isn't a dog stuck inside a house while their master is at work all day. Nor is it a dog that is chained outside alone for the night.
3. The dog may be one of the only things the homeless person feels they can "control." Considering they have no other assets, they may put some extra care into their dog. In my experience, I've also noticed a high level of selflessness from the owner in these situations. | [
"In contrast to service dogs who assist disabled people with physical tasks, comfort dogs are not trained in skilled tasks, but serve as constant companions with a keen sense for someone feeling down. They can provide a way for people who are distressed to find sanctuary.\n",
"Among the general human population, ... |
How would a tyrannosaurus rex have laid down to rest, and then get back up? It seems with such small arms, lying down and righting-oneself up would be a disadvantage. | Birds do not sleep on their sides, they bend their legs (and usually tuck their head under their wings) There is speculation that this is how a Dinosaur such as a T-rex would rest. Although obviously without the wing.
Mei, a dinosaur related to T-rex but much smaller has been found fossilised in this position.
_URL_0_
| [
"Though \"Kentrosaurus\" likely stood with forelimbs erect like in other dinosaurs, it is hypothesised that the animal adopted a sprawling posture when defending itself. Its neck was flexible enough to allow it to keep sight of predators, as it could reach the sides of its body with its snout and look over the back... |
what the hell is windows updating all the time? | You know how your computer isn't constantly becoming part of a botnet?
You're welcome. | [
"In October 2015, Windows 10 began to appear as an \"Optional\" update in the Windows Update interface, but pre-selected for installation on some systems. A Microsoft spokesperson said that this was a mistake, and that the download would no longer be pre-selected by default. However, on October 29, 2015, Microsoft ... |
Can small multicelled organisms sense or detect single celled organisms? | This question is too broad to answer - considering that many of these small organisms prey or live symbiotically with each other, there is not one, but thousands of ways that they detect each other or communicate.
If you consider 959 cells to be a small multicelled organism, than C. elegans can detect E. coli as it is their food source.
This trend goes all the way down to bacteria sensing other bacteria through methods such as quorum sensing. | [
"\"Pluripotent\" cells, which can differentiate into other cell types, have not yet been demonstrated unambiguously in \"T. adhaerens\", in contrast to the case of the Eumetazoa. The conventional view is that dorsal and ventral epithelium cells arise only from their own kind. \n",
"Parakaryon myojinensis is a sin... |
would inflation exist if our money were backed by something? | Sure it would--but inflation would then be tied to the supply of the backing, rather than just the supply of notes themselves. For example, the Spanish imported so much gold from the New World that they experienced dreadful inflation that was really damaging to their economy. That's the downside of the gold standard--if somebody discovers an previously unknown vein of gold, suddenly you have inflation, even when your economists really don't think that's good for the economy right now.
Inflation is typically measured by looking at the increase in prices of a standard "basket" of goods and services. When you hear the word "inflation" without qualification, that usually means inflation on the kinds of things consumers buy, as measured by baskets like the U.S. Consumer Price Index. | [
"The effect of money on inflation is most obvious when governments finance spending in a crisis, such as a civil war, by printing money excessively. This sometimes leads to hyperinflation, a condition where prices can double in a month or less. The money supply is also thought to play a major role in determining mo... |
how can there be so many different interpretations of a single religious text? | Because try as we might, words can be very imprecise. Even nonreligious, everyday phrases can be interpreted in many different ways.
And then add to that the fact that it's been translated from language to language to language, then the original meanings can be lost very easily.
As an experiment, take a sentence from your favorite book and type it into google translate from English to Spanish. Now copy that and translate it from Spanish to Japanese. Now copy that and translate it from Japanese to German. Now copy that and translate it back to English. Do you think the original message of the sentence matches the new one?
| [
"Religious texts or scriptures are the texts which various religious traditions consider to be sacred, or of central importance to their religious tradition. Some religions and spiritual movements believe that their sacred texts are divinely or supernaturally revealed or inspired, while others have individual autho... |
how are new variations of plants and fruits created? | A mating partner IS selected. Nowadays, it's all done in sterile labs, where a biologist can take pollen from one plant and purposefully fertilize another plant with it. Assuming there were two different varieties to begin with, this creates a third variety. As already mentioned, direct gene editing is also sometimes used, to add properties from a different species. | [
"There is a wide variety in the structures of fruit across the different species of plants. Evolution has selected for certain traits in plants that would increase their fitness. This diversity arose through the selection of advantageous methods for seed protection and dispersal in different environments. It is kno... |
How were Latinos/Hispanics treated in pro-Slavery America? | You may be interested in some of the past questions collected in our section on [How were other minorities treated during the period of racial segregation in America?](_URL_0_) | [
"In 1984, the media portrayed Latinos as illegal aliens that were on the run. This wasn't an accurate representation of who they really were and the lifestyles they lived in reality (doctors, lawyers, husbands, wives, etc.). The study \"Latinwood and TV\" 2000 restated that Latino Americans were not accurately pres... |
why dont my stomach acids dissolve me from the inside? | Gastric mucosa. The inner surface of the stomach is lined by a mucous membrane known as the gastric mucosa. The mucosa is always covered by a layer of thick mucus that is secreted by tall columnar epithelial cells and protects the stomach itself from the acids contained within. | [
"The highly acidic environment in the stomach lumen causes proteins from food to lose their characteristic folded structure (or denature). This exposes the protein's peptide bonds. The gastric chief cells of the stomach secrete enzymes for protein breakdown (inactive pepsinogen, and in infancy rennin). Hydrochloric... |
why does the charge in fully charged rechargeable batteries go down even if i don't use the batteries? | it's a property called self discharge. depending on the chemistry and purity of the electrolyte, it can vary from several years to a few % of total charge a month to as high as 30% a month. | [
"If a battery is connected to a significant load during charging, the end of the Uo-phase may never be reached and the battery will gas and be damaged, depending on the charge current relative to the battery capacity.\n",
"Batteries that are stored for a long period or that are discharged at a small fraction of t... |
How do these flash drives do this? | Based on the image I would assume those screens use e-ink/e-paper similar to kindle readers in that the last image on the screen is able to persist without power.
So while plugged into a USB port it checks the memory usage in the device and sets the screen to correspond to that, then when unplugged the image stays due to the nature of the e-ink screen.
Answering based off the image may be considered speculation though, and I'm not fully clued up on how e-ink screens themselves work so hopefully someone with better knowledge can follow up. | [
"A flash drive consists of a small printed circuit board carrying the circuit elements and a USB connector, insulated electrically and protected inside a plastic, metal, or rubberized case, which can be carried in a pocket or on a key chain, for example. The USB connector may be protected by a removable cap or by r... |
Since red blood cells contain no nucleus how is dna obtained from blood? | There are plenty of white blood cells, for instance, these contain DNA (I'm not sure if this is where DNA is best extracted from, but I've shown you existence).
As an aside, blood type can help to narrow people down. | [
"The formation of red blood cells is commonly known as hematopoiesis. Up to the first 60 days of life, the yolk sac is the main source of hematopoiesis. The liver is then used as the main hematopoietic organ of the embryo until near birth, where it is then taken over by the bone marrow. Most red blood cells are rel... |
During the mid to late middle ages did heavily armored knights play much of a role in patrolling, raiding, chevauchee, etc. or were those mainly limited to lighter troops? Did knights ever opt to wear lighter armor or adopt a more flexible weapon than a couched lance for these sorts of duties? | You might find [this post](_URL_0_) I made a few weeks ago useful. To expand on it, I do think there's too much distinction made between heavy and light cavalry within a western European context, and indeed between infantry and cavalry. Reality was messier than that.
Let's start with a brief primer on what John Gillingham calls Vegetian warfare. Medieval military thinkers, probably influenced by the late Roman writer Vegetius, generally tried to avoid risky pitched battles. A wholly defeated army was at best very difficult to replace, and at worst an irrecoverable catastrophe. Nor did they generally aim to wholly defeat their opponents, in the way Clausewitz would understand it. Instead, medieval rulers fought limited wars with limited forces and the goal of minimizing risk.
This meant, essentially, positional warfare, built around holding - and contesting - key fortified points which both controlled the countryside and served as bases for offensive action. In order to weaken these fortifications, medieval rulers struck at the land. When a raiding party burned and plundered, it struck its opponent twice, weakening him economically and harming his reputation. Depending on the stakes, this might be enough to resolve the conflict. When, or if, the time came to strike directly at a fortification, further plundering (euphemistically foraging) supported the army on the march, which with few exceptions was dependent on mass theft to stay in the field. In this situation, the defender would take advantage of his better logistics, keep his force concentrated, and try to drive in the foraging parties; if the invading army couldn't pillage, it had to retreat or give battle.
So, this is the small beer of medieval warfare: an awful lot of raiding and skirmishing. In this context, mounted soldiers, regardless of their skill as cavalry, had an advantage in mobility over any infantrymen. A *lot* of what are commonly called light cavalry were basically just mounted infantry who expected to dismount to fight. And, indeed, knights and men at arms were not averse to fighting on their own two legs. Regardless of how horsemen fought, they could get where they needed to be quicker and in better shape than walking men.
Let me reiterate that knights and later men at arms were not limited to fighting in any one particular style. They did not depend on the couched lance charge to secure victory - full stop. All indications are they took a full and active part in the "irregular" warfare that dominated in the Middle Ages. My personal opinion is that the heavy horsemen probably occupied a reserve role, standing by and waiting for an enemy force to sortie against the raid. | [
"However, during the initial Mongol invasion and the subsequent raids afterwards, heavily armored knights and cavalry proved more effective at fighting the Mongols than their light-armored counterparts. During the Battle of Mohi for example, while the Hungarian light cavalry and infantry were decimated by Mongol fo... |
Why does the sun shine in a "star" shape? | This is caused by the movable aperture blades in a camera lens. _URL_0_ | [
"Due to their great distance from the Earth, all stars except the Sun appear to the unaided eye as shining points in the night sky that twinkle because of the effect of the Earth's atmosphere. The Sun is also a star, but it is close enough to the Earth to appear as a disk instead, and to provide daylight. Other tha... |
Why do you see double when drinking or sometimes experience the situation where you need to close one eye to concentrate on written text? More specifically, what mechanisms in the brain create the situation where hemispheres of the brain might not communicate correctly in this situation? | Thank you for this question, there is some fascinating work in the brain going on here.
Alcohol is a "depressant". This means that it slows down the brain. When we are intoxicated with alcohol our eye tracking slows down (along with a lot of other brain processes).
Eye tracking is what makes both of our eyes look at the same thing. As it is slowed down by alcohol this causes the eyes not to sync up correctly and both eyes are looking at slightly different points.
Our brain interprets sight by comparing both eyes. So it effectively takes two images and blends them into one. Because the images are now not tracked we get a double vision effect.
Closing one eye removes one of the two images and therefore alleviates this problem. | [
"Most speed reading courses claim that the peripheral vision can be used to read text. This has been suggested impossible because the text is blurred out through lack of visual resolution. At best the human brain can only \"guess\" at the content of text outside the macular region. There simply are not enough cone ... |
what's the difference between looney tunes and merrie melodies? | Silly Symphonies was Disney
Looney Toons was Warner Brothers
Merry Melodies was made by an independent studio until being purchased by Warner Brothers in 1944 | [
"More \"Looney Tunes\" characters were created (most of which first appeared in \"Merrie Melodies\" cartoons) such as Tweety (debuted in 1942's \"A Tale of Two Kitties\"), Sylvester (debuted in 1945's \"Life with Feathers\"), Yosemite Sam (debuted in 1945's \"Hare Trigger\"), Pepé Le Pew (debuted in 1945's \"Odor-a... |
is gravity the only measure of mass? | Mass is a property, gravitational force is a force. Forces and masses are not the same thing, though there is a relationship between them: F=ma.
The problem is that many people think that weight is the same thing as mass, especially due to conversions from imperial (lb) to metric (kg), as if these quantities were equal. They are not.
Mass can be measured in a variety of ways. On Earth, we use a balance beam, comparing known masses to other masses, or some kind of spring system that is calibrated using known masses. But it is possible to measure a mass in the absence of gravity by observing its inertia. The mass of an object is a property of an object related to how "difficult" it is to change inertial reference frames.
As for objects that speed up - it is true that an object moving at a fast velocity will have an apparent mass different from that of the object at rest, but I would not agree that it increases the gravitational pull. I think a general relativity expert would need to comment further on that, though, as it is GR that deals with the gravity side of relativity. | [
"The distinction between mass and weight is unimportant for many practical purposes because the strength of gravity does not vary too much on the surface of the Earth. In a uniform gravitational field, the gravitational force exerted on an object (its weight) is directly proportional to its mass. For example, objec... |
How historically accurate is the architecture in the Asassin's Creed series? | I wrote this historical analysis of Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flags if that will help:
_URL_0_ | [
"Former director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and art historian Wilbur Peat described the building's architecture as a Neo-Jacobean style, which is characterized by an irregular-shaped floor plan, projecting wall sections and bays, a hipped roof, expansive veranda, multiple gables, and prominent chimneys. The ... |
why did vhs tapes show a blue screen on the tv when they started up? | That was the VCR, not the tape itself.
It's the precursor to the HDMI no signal screen. Used to be blue. | [
"While VHS and Beta tapes have a break-off tab to protect recordings from erasure (as in audio Compact Cassettes and, once broken, the cavity left by the missing tab must be covered or filled before the tape can be reused), VCCs employ a reversible solution: a switch on the tape edge can be turned to red/orange to ... |
why do events that have a negative effect on oil production cause immediate rises in prices of gas but when production is back to normal prices don't plummet back to where they started? | The underlying factors behind the consumer price and the wholesale price for gasoline are very different.
The gasoline sitting at the pumps in your service station was paid for months ago. While the service station has to eventually average out its costs/expenses, the consumer price it charges isn't actually linked to what it paid.
Rather, the consumer price is based on what the market will bear. If a new gas station moves in across the street and tries to undercut them, they'll lower gas prices - despite the fact that their cost for gas hasn't changed.
In terms of events like a hurricane, the gas station ends up in a situation where it incurs a temporary shortage due a disruption of the supply chain. So the gas station knows that it will only be able to sell X gallons of gas over the next two weeks no matter what else happens because they're not getting resupplied before then.
The best way for them to accomplish this isn't to hold prices firm and sell out in an hour and a half. It's to raise prices to the point where X gallons lasts them the next two weeks because relatively few people are desperate enough to buy much gasoline.
Interestingly enough, this is also the *socially* best outcome as it encourages a more equitable distribution of gasoline based on the perceived need of the consumer rather than hoarding. | [
"During the significant oil price rise through 2007, a theme among several industry observers was that the price rise was only partially due to a limit in crude oil availability (peak oil). For example, an article by Jad Mouawad cited an unusual number of fires and other outages among U.S. refineries in the summer ... |
What are the long-term physiological effects of heavy body building in pre-teen years? | [Here](_URL_1_), with plenty of citations if you want to look into it further.
The important part
> Epiphyseal plate (growth plate) fractures may be the key concern in this controversy. Damage to these plates induced by weight training is frequently cited as a reason for avoiding weight training in children. The existing medical and scientific data do not support this as a valid contraindication. One instance of epiphyseal fracture attributed to weightlifting has been reported in preadolescents (Gumbs, 1982). In pubescent athletes, five publications have reported instances of fractures related to weight training (Benton, 1983; Brady, 1982; Gumbs, 1982; Rowe, 1979; Ryan, 1976). **The overwhelming majority of these injuries were attributed to improper technique in the execution of the exercises and excessive loading**. Each report failed to consider that the injury may actually have occurred as a result of contact with the floor or other object subsequent to loss of balance and falling, and not be attributable to the actual weight training movement. Further, proper diagnosis and treatment of this rare injury resulted in no detrimental effect on growth (Caine, 1990).
It's inherently safe, but can be made unsafe through poor execution. [Which is also](_URL_0_) [true of adults](_URL_2_) | [
"The early physical effects of obesity in adolescence include, almost all of the child's organs being affected, gallstones, hepatitis, sleep apnoea and increased intracranial pressure. Overweight children are also more likely to grow up to be overweight adults. Obesity during adolescence has been found to increase ... |
In massed infantry warfare (pikes, Roman legions, muskets, ect.) were casualties higher for soldiers in the front row? How did they convince anyone to be in front? | There is always more to be said, but you may be interested in this answer by /u/iphikrates:
[Did the people in the front lines of ancient armies basically know they are going to die?](_URL_0_) | [
"The pike and shot infantry had by this time adopted a system in which arquebusiers and pikemen were intermingled in combined units; both the French and the Imperial infantry contained men with firearms interspersed in the larger columns of pikemen. This combination of pikes and small arms made close-quarters fight... |
can "playing dead" really trick bears? whats the reasoning behind this? bears dont eat/kill seemingly dead things? | Playing dead is only suggested for Brown and Polar Bears and it does two things.
1 - It makes them think you're not something they would want to eat, bears aren't usually scavengers.
2 - It makes them think you're not a threat and therefore they don't want to fight you. | [
"The Bears met first and decided that they would make their own weapons like the humans, but this only led to further chaos. Next the Deer gathered to discuss their plan of action and they came to the conclusion that if a hunter was to kill a Deer, they would develop a disease. The only way to avoid this disease wa... |
why do people's voices generally get higher when attempting to sound polite? | A low voice sounds big and intimidating. A high voice sounds like a harmless little child. So it implies "no offense intended!" instead of "hey get out of my way". | [
"In London, Professor Henry Higgins, a scholar of phonetics, believes that the accent and tone of one's voice determines a person's prospects in society (\"Why Can't the English?\"). At Covent Garden one evening, he meets Colonel Hugh Pickering, himself a phonetics expert who had come all the way from India to see ... |
Question about alaska | The concept that it's just a lease appears to have originated as a plot element in the novel A Matter of Honour by Jefffrey Archer.
This theory has no basis in reality and the Alaska purchase of 1867 was just that - a purchase. | [
"Alaska is a populated place in Cibola County, New Mexico, United States. The name was collected by the United States Geological Survey between 1976 and 1980, and entered into the Geographic Names Information System on November 13, 1980.\n",
"The name \"Alaska\" () was introduced in the Russian colonial period wh... |
why do we do things, which we know are dangerous or bad for us long term? | Some reasons:
*It's easier.
*The short term benefits outweigh the long term risks. (For example, drinking coffee to keep you awake and alert for work.)
*It's common behavior for your culture/environment.
*Lack of better options. (For example, cars in the US are reliant on fossil fuels. If you want to get around anywhere and you don't live in a major metropolitan area, a car is the best option for travel.)
*Life is full of risks. There is no way you can avoid everything that can potentially kill you or hurt you, so you just cancel out the riskiest things, like drugs, but still go with milder risks, like an occasional glass of wine.
*The addictive nature of some of the substances, like sugar or caffeine.
*People reason that bad things can happen to them even if they do everything for their body and the environment. They decide they would rather enjoy themselves now than spend their entire lives avoiding anything that poses the slightest risk to them.
| [
"People may rely on their fear and hesitation to keep them out of the most profoundly unknown circumstances. Fear is a response to perceived danger. Risk could be said to be the way we collectively measure and share this \"true fear\"—a fusion of rational doubt, irrational fear, and a set of unquantified biases fro... |
Why does North Korea have a poor record launching ICBMs | Developing ICBMs is very complex. They are not simple things to design and manufacture.
The US had plenty blow up in the process of coming up with ones that worked. Thing is the US could afford to test many rockets till they got it right. North Korea is very poor and very isolated so they cannot build lots and lots till they come up with a workable one.
As such it seems they cannot get it right but frankly, given their isolation and lack of resources, it is amazing they get as far as they do.
| [
"The Chinese expert in the video has estimated that North Korea can have a true ICBM within range of the US mainland between 2021 and 2026 if they can successfully master their Hwasong-10 missile. He stated that the technology and the theory behind an Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile is exactly the same as an I... |
why is the "black lives matter" toted towards police when statistically they seem to matter least to other black lives? | Because the police aren't actually supposed to be killing people, perhaps? Besides, statistically, white people kill mainly white people, and the same for the other ethnic groups.
They're angry that a group who are supposed to *avoid* killing are not only killing anyway, but keep getting videotaped killing in situations where it's clear no attempt to de-escelate was made. | [
"\"Black Lives Matter doesn't care about black people, they just want to cause trouble and hate white people. If they truly cared they'd be in the ghettos of America trying to help there instead of screaming about white America. That's where the murders of black people are happening, but according to BLM it's all w... |
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