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In a hot desert how should a canteen of water be rationed? | I'd say that pouring it over your head is just stupid if dehydration is a fear. Also, I found this:
> The current rule for water use is “Ration sweat, not water.” Water rationing is an antiquated method for land travel that probably has its origins back to sailors lost at sea. While floating about on a lifeboat with little to do but lay around, water needs are less if shade is available. The infantry, however, once practiced water rationing, telling their troops when they could drink and how much. This idea still persists with some older veterans, and is responsible for many cases of dehydration. Two survival training films from the Vietnam era for aviators and pilots are the first military references I know of to caution against water rationing in survival scenarios. Desert Survival, 3593 DN (U.S. Navy) and Sun, Sand and Survival, T.F. 1-4991 (U.S. Air Force) are both available on one videotape called Desert Survival Skills listed in the References. The advice in current military manuals is contradictory, advising against rationing while falling back on the half-century old cookie cutter admonitions to sip water or only wet the lips.
> The fact is, you cannot ration water in your canteen any more than you can ration gas in a car’s tank. If you have a quarter tank of gas and sixty miles to go to get to the next station, giving the car “a few sips” cannot do it. Instead, you use the available gasoline conservatively by driving slower, coasting downhill, and avoiding rapid acceleration. It is the same way with the body. By waiting until cooler times to walk and limiting physical activity (such as not digging several holes for stills) the available water is used wisely.
It is important to drink enough to keep the brain hydrated. The recommended sipping and wetting the lips is a misuse of available water. Such rationing causes the less important cells of the body to pirate the water away from the brain, which will result in irrational decisions and increased body temperature.
> Recently, a European tourist died in the Australian outback of dehydration with one and two thirds liters left in her water bottles, and many similar cases from rationing are on record. It is the water in your stomach that saves you, not the water in the canteen. Yet the manuals confuse the issue. Quoting the 1970 Army manual, page 226: “Don’t gulp your water. Drink in small sips. Use water to only to moisten your lips if the supply is critical.” The well known, but erroneous, technique of placing a pebble under the tongue to allay thirst is described, even though that thirst is telling you to water your brain. Ironically, the same page continues, “Rationing yourself to 1 or 2 quarts of water a day is inviting disaster (at high temperatures) as such small amounts do not prevent dehydration. Ration sweat, not water.”
So just drink when your thirsty, try not to over exert yourself and do your best to find shade for the middle of the day. | [
"A typical person will lose minimally two to maximally four liters of water per day under ordinary conditions, and more in hot, dry, or cold weather. Four to six liters of water or other liquids are generally required each day in the wilderness to avoid dehydration and to keep the body functioning properly. The U.S... |
Why is the Arab slave trade left out of textbooks and not thought in American schools? | I don't think much Arab history is taught in American schools period. Not even the rise of Mohamed. Not even the Islamic reign in Spain, even though the Middle Ages is usually roughly covered.
Although important, the Arab slave trade is relatively obscure compared to the vast arena of topics that could be but aren't covered in US history courses.
| [
"In textbooks for state-run schools, there was an effort to remove stereotypes and educate towards tolerance. In some textbooks for the Orthodox Jewish community, the researchers found derogatory adjectives, prejudices, patronizing expressions and disrespect toward Arabs. The Arab leadership was portrayed as motiva... |
If light is affected by gravity then would the stars position in the nights sky be different from what we perceive? | Oh, yes! _URL_0_ | [
"In the case of annual aberration of starlight, the direction of incoming starlight as seen in the Earth's moving frame is tilted relative to the angle observed in the Sun's frame. Since the direction of motion of the Earth changes during its orbit, the direction of this tilting changes during the course of the yea... |
when i stand far away from one person clapping i can't hear it, at the same distance i can hear 100 people clapping. why? | There are a couple concepts you need to understand to make this a bit easier.
1. Like you said, sound is basically particles vibrating. However, sound is a wave - that is, it's energy that effectively radiates out from a source as ripples radiate from a thrown rock. As the energy passes particles, it causes them to vibrate, which causes the sound you actually hear.
2. Waves look like [this](_URL_1_).
3. Loudness of sound is basically the intensity of the vibration. This can be calculated using the formula energy/(time*area). Thus, more energy at any given point would cause an increase in loudness, given the time and area remain the same.
Okay. Given one source - the one person clapping - sound would look like [this](_URL_2_). Add another source, and the waves will start to interfere with each other, creating something that would look like [this](_URL_0_) (forgive the shitty drawing, I'm eating lunch).
As you can see, there are places where the waves of energy overlap. Now, at some points, it will be the troughs - the low points of the wave - that overlap. This causes "destructive interference", which will create points where it will be hard to hear the claps - because there will be very little energy, now, because you're effectively adding energy, so when you plug into the energy/(time\*area) equation, you get something that translates to being inaudible. Where crests are interfering, however, you get something called "constructive interference." This is just adding the waves, as /u/RandomExcess said. Therefore, the result of the energy/(time\*area) will be literally double what it would be with just one source - so it's double the loudness.
Now, take this phenomenon and multiply it by 100 (or 50, if you're starting from the 2-source example). All of a sudden, you have points where the amount the particles vibrate is 100 times more intense than it would be from one source. This will translate to your ear as being much louder.
I hope that helped! If you have any questions, feel free to ask, but I am working with a high-school level understanding (as in I just took a final two days ago), so if you think something may be off, let me know and I'll look into it. | [
"To place this problem in more common terms, imagine you are talking to someone 6 meters away. If the two of you are in a quiet, empty room then a conversation is quite easy to hold at normal voice levels. In a loud, crowded bar, it would be impossible to hear the same voice level, and the only solution (for that d... |
How is louder sound different from soft sound? | Sound is a wave, specifically peaks and valleys of alternating pressure. The waves travel at the same speed regardless of volume, that instead depends on the medium. Higher volume means those peaks have a higher pressure. | [
"Loudness is perceived as how \"loud\" or \"soft\" a sound is and relates to the totalled number of auditory nerve stimulations over short cyclic time periods, most likely over the duration of theta wave cycles. This means that at short durations, a very short sound can sound softer than a longer sound even though ... |
why everybody hates
hipsters? | "Hipster" is one of the most overused and poorly defined terms on the internet today. I think the hatred towards them stems from a certain attitude of snobbery (the "oh you like mainstream stuff?" hipster archetype), which is of course an intolerable attitude for a person to have, but the hatred has spread to ANYONE that subscribes to a particular fashion or listens to a particular kind of music.
The word "hipster" is just another in a line of umbrella terms people use to hate on a particular kind of person. It's just trendy right now, like "emo" or "scene" was a few years ago. | [
"Elise Thompson, an editor for the LA blog \"LAist\" argues that \"people who came of age in the 70s and 80s punk rock movement seem to universally hate 'hipsters'\", which she defines as people wearing \"expensive 'alternative' fashion[s]\", going to the \"latest, coolest, hippest bar...[and] listen[ing] to the la... |
why do analysts claim the stock market is tanking because of the glut of oil? (more in comment) | Lower oil prices are good for most American companies, and therefore good for the stock market. They mean lower energy and shipping costs for companies, and put more money in American consumers' pockets to buy more stuff. The main exceptions are companies involved in the energy industry somehow, or that depend on consumers in a part of the country that is highly dependent on that industry (e.g. Texas, Oklahoma, Alaska). Those companies and regions will do badly with lower oil prices even if most companies and most of the US population are doing better. But overall, American stock market does generally rise as oil falls.
However, oil is a truly global market, and the US is only one part of it. When world oil prices get too low, that's considered an ominous sign of a global slowdown. There wouldn't be so much oil on the market at such a low price if there weren't serious problems in China, Brazil, Russia, and other countries. If those countries' economies were doing well, they would be consuming a lot of oil at this low price, but they aren't. So the fact that low oil prices benefit American companies doesn't outweigh the fact that the global oil glut is a sign of major economic problems across the world, and that is more of a negative for investors than the low oil prices' effect on the US companies and consumers are a positive. | [
"The 2010s oil glut is a considerable surplus of crude oil that started in 2014–2015 and accelerated in 2016, with multiple causes. They include general oversupply as US and Canadian tight oil (shale oil) production reached critical volumes, geopolitical rivalries amongst oil-producing nations, falling demand acros... |
How did the power vacuum created by the fall of the western roman empire influence the events of the middle ages? | Hello! As Roman Imperial authority collapsed, the vacuum it left was more often than not filled by those in the best place to do so: local and regional leaders who in many cases were already *de facto* if not necessarily *de jure* authority figures. Indeed, in some cases the 'fall of Rome' could be equally described as the re-establishment of provincial independence. I wrote an answer recently [here](_URL_0_) that looked at the establishment of the Kingdom of Francia in the former Roman province of *Belgica Secunda* and its expansion into (roughly) what is now France. The tl;dr of that is that the founders of that early Frankish kingdom were all very closely linked to the Imperial power structure, whether as generals, governors or administrators. The collapse of Imperial authority simply gave them the impetus to turn that pre-existing position into one with political autonomy.
Although things eventually went sideways, a similar situation also occurred in Britannia: according to Gildas, the regional Romano-British governments were eventually able to establish a relatively peaceful and prosperous series of polities despite the withdrawal of the Roman legions and the vast military and logistical problems this caused. It is eventually a particularly virulent outbreak of plague that precipitates the decline of these successor states and the arrival of the English rather than necessarily the lack of Imperial oversight.
Key to the functioning of these post-Roman successor states is in many cases the Church, which rapidly fills the bureaucratic void left by the decline of Imperial administration. Augustine of Hippo's *The City of God*, written in the wake of Alaric's sack of Rome in 410, provides the theological blueprint that underpins much of the function of the medieval Church and its close relationship with government. In essence, Augustine argues that the Church should act as a spiritual successor to the Empire, but one that concerns itself purely with spiritual matters rather than those of earthly politics. Perhaps slightly ironically, this philosophical detachment makes the Church perfect for underpinning medieval government, providing as it does a sophisticated and codified, easily replicated and - perhaps most importantly - literate hierarchy across society that can function as a pre-made civil service without actually involving itself in squabbles for power. At least on paper. Of course, the Church almost inevitably and immediately gets drawn into politics across post-Roman Europe, but the intentions at least are good, and successor state rulers often actively courted clerical support. Clovis I of Frankia, for example, actively courted the Church in Gaul even before his conversion to Christianity, seeing the importance of the Church to the kingdom he was building. | [
"A power vacuum was created in the Western Empire after the events of 454 and 455, which saw the consecutive murders of Aetius and of the Western Emperor Valentinian III, who had been responsible for the \"magister militum's\" assassination. After the assassinations, the Roman Senator Petronius Maximus proclaimed h... |
How can the phase speed of a wave of light exceed C? What does this mean? | An analogy would be if you imagine a spinning barber pole moving in space. The information, energy, etc. propagates in the wave packet (the pole), yet the speed of phase fronts (the spirals on the pole, which seem to move faster than the pole is moving) in the wave packet move faster than the packet itself.
Light waves in vacuum have both phase speed (ω/k) and group velocity (∂ω/∂k) equal to c. In dispersive media, however, these two are generally not the same. For example, light waves in cold plasma with frequency ω > ω*_pe_* (the plasma frequency) have phase speed v*_ph_* = ( c^2 + (ω*_pe_*/k)^2 )^1/2 > c, whereas they have group velocity v*_gr_* = c^2 / v*_ph_* < c.
Edit: figured out how to do subscripts. | [
"The phase speed gives you the speed at which a point of constant phase of the wave will travel for a discrete frequency. The angular frequency \"ω\" cannot be chosen independently from the wavenumber \"k\", but both are related through the dispersion relationship:\n",
"The phase velocity of an electromagnetic wa... |
Is it true that Kosovo became Albanian majority because Tito let them in? | According to the 1921 Census of Yugoslavia (i.e. before the War, before Communism, before Tito), there was a clear Muslim and Albanian majority in Kosovo. We also see this in the 1931 census and, as far as I know, all subsequent censuses except for 1991, where many Muslim boycotted (in the 2011, many Serbs boycotted--there was no attempt at a 2001 census in Kosovo, as far as I am aware).
The 1921 and 1931 censuses have people tabulated by language and religion, but not cross tabulated, so we don't know how many of the Albanians are Muslim (there is a Christian Albanian minority) and how many of the Muslims are Albanian (there are other Muslim groups, like Slavic Muslims, Romani, and Turks). Also, neither of those is self-identitified ethnicity (though I suspect in that period, the language questions was a fairly good method of determining ethnicity). However, as I mentioned, both of these show an Albanian majority, long before Tito.
There is a debate though about exactly *when* the region became Albanian majority is debated. The area was clearly Serbian majority in the middle ages. Some have argued it was a late as the late 19th century with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, some people have argued it was as early as 16th century for parts of Kosovo. It possible (but not necessary) that both statements could be correct.
[Statistical Yearbook of the Republic of Kosovo 2016, put out out by the Kosovo government obviously using statistics gathered by the Yugoslavian government 1991 and before, shows ethnicity data going back to the 1948 census on for ethnicity](_URL_0_) (in order to have an apple to apples comparison--as I mentioned above, the 1921 and 31 censuses weren't actually asking about ethnicity, but about religion and language), but you can see that already in 1948, when Tito just came to power, there was a clear Albanian majority that only gradually expanded (remember, don't trust 2011 because of the ethnic Serb boycott and note that they omitted the 1991 census because of the ethnic Albanian and Muslim boycott). Look at Tab 2.4 and Fig 2.6, both on page 28. | [
"On 17 February 2008, Kosovo Albanians unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in the Assembly of Kosovo. In a meeting attended by 109 of the total 120 MPs, the assembly unanimously declared Kosovo's independence, while all 11 representatives of the Kosovo Serbs minority boycotted the proceedings.\n",
"The... |
can police pursue you beyond their jurisdiction? city lines, county lines or state lines....any difference? | Police from one jurisdiction do have the legal authority to follow you into another jurisdiction. However, this is relatively uncommon, since they typically would have alerted that jurisdiction when approaching the boundary and that jurisdiction would have their own police waiting. Also, just because they CAN pursue, doesn't mean they WILL, depending on the situation.
The only time this doesn't apply is borders between countries, e.g. the USA-Mexico border. In this case, the police cannot follow you but, again, will typically have the other jurisdiction's police waiting for you anyway. | [
"In very simple terms, this power allows constables of one jurisdiction to travel to another jurisdiction and arrest a person they suspect of committing an offence in their home jurisdiction. For example, constables from Cumbria Police investigating an offence of assault that occurred in their police area could tra... |
how much money do jewelers make knowing they have to stock their entire store with gold and diamonds? | The rule in the jewelry business is "triple key", meaning if the wholesale price is $1000 the jeweler will usually start the price at $3000. This helps deal with the extra costs of running a jewelry store, which are quite high. This may sound like a large markup, but consider most retail markups are 5x or higher compared to wholesale.
As opposed to what another commenter said, most jewelry on display will be considered "memo" merchandise, meaning it is not owned by the shop but by a wholesaler, it is being held by the shop until it sells or the memo expires. When sold, the jeweler pays the wholesaler for the merchandise and keeps the difference.
Source: nearly 10 years in the business | [
"Retail jewelers, especially the prestigious Fifth Avenue stores, prefer not to buy back diamonds from customers, because the offer they would make would most likely be considered ridiculously low ... Most jewelers would prefer not to make a customer an offer that might be deemed insulting and also might undercut t... |
Can plants feel pain? | > I understand that plants have to be sentient to at least a small degree,
What...planet are you on? Plants do not have sentience. They do not have nerve systems.
They do have the ability to react to changes in their environment, through stimulation of hormone production leading to morphological changes. But they do not have anything analogous to nociceptors. | [
"The Animal Liberation Front argues that there is no evidence that plants can experience pain, and that to the extent they respond to stimuli, it is like a device such as a thermostat responding to sensors.\n",
"Contact with a wounded plant causes itch, rashes or blistering on contact with the skin or mucosa. Ing... |
do we really need to spend 8 hours a day for sleep? can we found a way to not sleep and still be healthy? | You don't really need 8 hours of sleep. There are ways to get the rest you need, but to sleep less. You can read about it in this article:
[Alternate Sleep Cycles](_URL_0_) | [
"A 2010 review of published scientific research suggested that exercise generally improves sleep for most people, and helps sleep disorders such as insomnia. The optimum time to exercise \"may\" be 4 to 8 hours before bedtime, though exercise at any time of day is beneficial, with the exception of heavy exercise ta... |
Examples of civilizations which have died out due to poor management of natural resources. | Have you read "Collapse" by Jared Diamond? I think you would like it. | [
"In his analysis of the four cases of fallen civilizations, he notes that two (Easter Island and Sumer) failed due to depletion of natural resources—\"their ecologies were unable to regenerate.\" The other two failed in their heartlands, \"where ecological demand was highest,\" but left remnant populations that sur... |
why does drip coffee make me much more jittery than espresso, even when using the same amount of coffee beans for each? | Caffeine is water soluble, in general the more water and the longer it stays in contact with the ground beans the more caffeine is extracted from the beans. BTW, French press has something like 3x the caffeine of regular coffee owing to the long time the beans are left in contact with the water. | [
"Espresso has more caffeine per unit volume than most coffee beverages, but because the usual serving size is much smaller, the total caffeine content is less than a mug of standard brewed coffee, contrary to a common belief. Although the actual caffeine content of any coffee drink varies by size, bean origin, roas... |
How were the calendar and days of the week followed over 500+ years ago? | [Relevant previous discussion](_URL_0_)
[Slightly less relevant previous discussion, though it may lead you down different paths](_URL_1_)
| [
"This calendar was proposed during the French Revolution, and used by the French government for about twelve years from late 1793. There were twelve months of 30 days each, grouped into three ten-day weeks called \"décades\". The five or six extra days needed to approximate the tropical year were placed after the m... |
Who laid the barbed wire in No Man's Land in WWI? | **TL;DR:** Both sides!
This post of mine may be of interest to you:
_URL_0_ | [
"Groups of soldiers known as wiring parties went out at night into no man's land to position these supports. They later strung the barbed wire through the loops to form a defensive wire obstacle as a protection for their trench line. The British called this type of stake a 'corkscrew' picket because it was screwed ... |
can you develop diabetes from just drinking a lot of alcohol (separate from eating loads of sweets)? | I am a dietitian and work in a county hospital of a large city- So first off, eating a ton of sweets is not going to cause diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes is caused by a lack of insulin- your pancreas stops making it. You have to take insulin or else you'll die.
Type 2 diabetes is caused when your body becomes resistant to the insulin you make. So your pancreas still works, just your cells can't use the insulin you are making. A lot of time these patients can control their blood sugar with diet, exercise, and oral medication. However, sometimes these patients eventually require insulin as well.
Several things can cause insulin resistance including: obesity, stress, inactivity, pregnancy, illness, steroid use, and metabolic syndrome (high blood pressure, high triglycerides, high cholesterol, abdominal obesity).
One consequence of excessive alcohol consumption is high triglycerides. Typically, people with chronic high alcohol intake don't have the best diets and tend to be overweight/obese and don't exercise regularly. They have a lot of risk factors for developing type two diabetes. So I see a lot of alcoholic patients that have diabetes, but I think the main concern in the damage it does to your liver. | [
"BULLET::::- Diabetes mellitus – People with diabetes have difficulty regulating their blood sugar levels, and need to limit their sugar intake. Many artificial sweeteners allow sweet-tasting food without increasing blood glucose. Others do release energy but are metabolized more slowly, preventing spikes in blood ... |
What is the oldest mythic creature we have a record of? | Can this include artistic depictions? | [
"Depictions of mythological creatures clearly ancestral to the modern set of four creatures have been found throughout China. Currently, the oldest known depiction was found in 1987 in a tomb in Xishuipo (西水坡) in Puyang, Henan, which has been dated to approximately 5300 BC. In the tomb, labeled M45, immediately adj... |
why do we have to "wait" for our eyes to adjust? | Eyes adjust by deforming the [lens](_URL_0_) in your eyes. The shape of a lens change the path of the light that goes through it. By changing the shape our eyes makes so that the light has a path that makes the image of what you are seeing form exactly on the back of you eye, thus making it good (otherwise it would be blurry).
Why do we have to wait? There literally are muscles to deform the lens, so you have to wait for then to move and then to adjust, based on what your brain tells them. In the same way as when you want to raise your arm you have to wait for your muscles to actually raise it. | [
"When concentrating on a visually intense task, such as continuously focusing on a book or computer monitor, the ciliary muscle tightens. This can cause the eyes to get irritated and uncomfortable. Giving the eyes a chance to focus on a distant object at least once an hour usually alleviates the problem.\n",
"As ... |
How did exacly John II emperor of Byzantium ended up hiring Harald Hardrada with the rest of his fellow vikings? | Hello, can I ask at first a bit of clarification?
* Is 'John II emperor of Byzantium' you mentioned correct person in question? AFAIK Emperor John II is John II Komnenos (r. 1118-43), son of famous Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, thus born more than ca. 20 years after the fall of Harald Hardråde of Norway in 1066.
* Harald probably came to Constantinople in 1033 or 1034, under the reign of Emperor Michael IV Katallakos (r. 1034-41). AFAIK all the popular accounts (both primary sources and literature) agree that his delegated to Sicily as a part of Imperial army, under the command of Georgios Maniaces who even also appeared as *Gyrgir* in 13th century kings' sagas.
* Several Scandinavian as well as non-Scandinavian primary sources note his stay in Constantinople, but probably the most famous and generally not so inaccurate account is found in *Strategikon* by General Kekaumenos (late 11th century) as states as following:
& nbsp;
> 'After telling your majesty another story, I shall conclude my discussion of this [subject]. Harald was the son of the king of Varangia, and he had a brother [named] Ioulabos [Olaf] who held his father's rule upon his father's death, after casting his brother Harald into second place for the rulership after him. Since Harald was a young man, he wanted to come and show reverence to the most blessed emperor Lord Michael the Paphlagonian and to gain a view of the Roman system. He also brought with him a following of five hundred noblemen. He entered, and the emperor received him just as was allowed and sent him along with his force to Sicily. There, a Roman army was fighting for the island. Setting off, [Harald] displayed great deeds. Once Sicily was subjugated, he returned with his force to the emperor and [the emperor] honored him as a *manglabites*. After this it happened that Deljan rebelled in Bulgaria. And since Harald had his force, he went on campaign with the emperor and showed forth deeds against the enemy that we worthy of his good birth and noble character. After subjecting Bulgaria, the emperor returned home. At that time, I was fighting on behalf of the emperor as best I could. When we came to the city of Mosunoupolis, the emperor rewarded him for those [regions] for which he had fought, and honored him as a *spatharocandidatos*. After thedeath of the lord Michael and his nephew the ex-emperor [Michael the Caulker], Harald wished to return to his homeland and made this entreaty before Monomachos. He was not allowed but, in fact, his way out narrowed. Nonetheless, he secretly escaped and ruled over his land instead of his brother Ioulabos [Olaf]. Yet he did not grow proud because of the honors given to him — the [offices of] *manglabites* and *spatharocandidatos* — but rather maintained his loyalty and love for the Romans while he ruled. (*Strategikon*, Chap. 81, English translation is taken from: [*Oration of Admonition to an Emperor*](_URL_1_)).
& nbsp;
I'll be gladly available for any follow-up question (of course within the limit of my limited knowledge on the sources as well as academic literature, though).
References:
* [Jackson, Tatjana. 'Harald, *Bolgara brennir*, in Byzantine Service'. In: *Scandinavia and the Balkans: Cultural Interactions with Byzantium and Eastern Europe in the First Millennium AD*, ed. Oksana Minaeva & Lena Holmquist, pp. 72–82. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Pub, 2015.](_URL_0_)
* Kaldellis, Anthony. *Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A. D. to the First Crusade.* Oxford: OUP, 2017.
* Sigfús Blöndal & Benedikt S. Benedikz. *The Varangians of Byzantium.* Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978.
* Tjønn, Halvor. *Harald Hardråde*. Hafrsfjord: Saga Book, 2010. | [
"The well-known Harald Hardrada would also serve the Byzantine emperor in Palestine as well as raiding North Africa, the Middle East as far east as Armenia, and the island of Sicily in the 11th century, as recounted in his saga in Snorri Sturluson's \"Heimskringla\".\n",
"Upon conquering Fjordane, Harald demanded... |
why do certain things smell nice, even when they're not edible? | Like jet fuel or 100LL? I love those smells. | [
"Some odors are sought after, such as from perfumes and flowers, some of which command high prices. Whole industries have developed around products to remove unpleasant odors (see deodorant). The perception of odors is also very much dependent upon circumstance and culture. Cooking smells may be pleasant while one ... |
In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, did armies ignore borders? | The answer depends where and when. Various Italian states denied (or attempted to deny) France and the Holy Roman Emperor access to their territory, typically if they disagreed with the war but did not want to get involved. This mandate was ignored at the risk of opening an additional theater of war; a strong enough army could simply march through or even invade, or the general/prince could pay for passage. The former happened to Milan on at least one occasion.
Elsewhere, however, territorial boundaries were completely ignored. The example that comes to mind for me (as an early modern German historian) is the Thirty Years' War, where armies from all over Europe marched and pillaged through German lands with impunity.
Basically, whether or not armies ignored borders depended on whether the general felt confident that he could pass through the territory without angering an enemy formidable enough to hurt his war effort.
Sources:
Thomas Brady, *German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400-1650*
Peter Wilson, *The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy* | [
"As the 5th century progressed, many of the Empire's original borders had been either wholly or partially denuded of troops to support the central field army. In 395, the Western Roman Empire had several regional field armies in Italy, Illyricum, Gallia, Britannia and Africa, and about twelve border armies. By abou... |
What was the typical medical aftermath for someone who has been tarred and feathered? | fyi, you may find these related posts of interest
* [Was "tarring and feathering" fatal? And where in the world was it most often done?](_URL_0_) featuring /u/Goethite
* [How common was tarring and feathering in the American revolutionary period? Also, was this practice supported by revolutionary leadership?](_URL_3_) featuring /u/LordKettering
* [I am living in colonial Boston and am tarred and feathered, what is the day it happens like for me?](_URL_1_) featuring /u/smileyman
* [Tarred and Feathered](_URL_2_) featuring /u/quickspore | [
"The victim would be stripped naked, or stripped to the waist. Hot wood tar was then either poured or painted onto the person while they were immobilized. Then the victim either had feathers thrown on them or was rolled around on a pile of feathers so that they stuck to the tar.\n",
"The Sandakan Death Marches we... |
What was the USA's objective when using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Did they expect this to speed up a surrender more than Soviet invasion? | In short, they hoped to force Japan to surrender before the Soviets could help us, if at all possible, to avoiding having to clash with them over post-war Japan, in addition to post-war Europe.
At the Yalta conference, the Soviets agreed to join us in subduing Japan, "two or three months" after the Germans surrendered. This happened on May 8/9, 1945. However, after the Trinity test in July 1945, Truman realized that if we could build and use nuclear bombs quickly enough, we could force Japan to surrender before the Soviet Union could join us. This would mean that that US would have unilateral control over post-war Japan, and the Soviet Union wouldn't have any standing to ask for concessions. Part of these concessions, as specified at the Yalta conference, were the Sakhalin and Kuril islands.
Also, the Japanese were not quite "on the verge of surrender." They were losing, and were pretty much assured to lose at that point in the war, but the Americans were expecting heavy military casualties, and a prolonging of an already long war, if they were forced to invade the Japanese home islands. They had plans drawn up, in the form of Operation Downfall, and while estimates vary, we were probably looking at an additional 18 months of war and somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 dead, and another 500,000-1,500,000 injured. And that's just the US military casualties. That doesn't take into account the Japanese casualties, both civilian and military, or the Soviet casualties.
I don't have any hard sources at my fingertips, as I'm recalling this from memory, but I know that I read a lot about this in "The Most Controversial Decision: Truman, the Atomic Bombs, and the Defeat of Japan" by Wilson D. Miscamble. | [
"As the first combat use of nuclear weapons, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent to some the crossing of a crucial barrier. Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, wrote of President Truman: \"He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species.\... |
We have superhydrophobic surfaces (ex. neverwet) Are there superoxygenphobic/superairphobic surfaces? What would that even be like? | Superhydrophobic surfaces utilize the entropic benefit from hydrogen bonding in water (the polarity of the partially positive hydrogen and the partially negative of the oxygen can interact to hold different molecules together). The surfaces use a combination of a non-polar surface and special topography to create the hydrophobic effect.
In gasses, molecules are placed much further apart than in liquids, so you don't experience a similar entropic benefit from the molecules "clumping together" because they are too far away to interact as many times! Also gas molecules don't just sit around, the molecules are bouncing all over the place so you are really asking is there a surface that could stop gas molecules from coming near it.
tldr:
It doesn't work the same way with liquids as gasses because the molecules are too far apart to experience the important intermolecular forces, namely hydrogen bonding. | [
"Surfaces that are superhydrophobic are desirable for non-fouling behavior because an affinity for water correlates to an affinity for contaminants. Superhydrophobic xerogels made from silica colloids have been shown to reduce bacterial adhesion, specifically \"S. aureus\" and \"P. aeruginosa\". The non-fouling app... |
With the Roman Empire being such a popular topic here, was a typical Roman citizen at all interested in or impressed with previous empires? | This is interested topic. Both Romans and Greeks were very well impressed by the remains of ancient Egypt Empire. There are several "visitors graffiti" in the Egypt and historians of that period talking with much respect about Egyptians and specially their architectonical achievements. | [
"BULLET::::- Excerpt: \"The ancient Roman boasted, with reason, of the growth of Rome from humble beginnings to the greatest magnitude which the world had then ever witnessed. But the citizen of the United States is still more justly entitled to claim this praise.\"\n",
"The Roman Empire was among the most powerf... |
Why are alligators endemic to the US and China, but nowhere else? | This is an extremely interesting question. Fossil alligators in North America predate those in Asia, so as far as we can tell, the genus originated there and dispersed to Asia. The thing is, we don't know exactly how they did that. Neither species can tolerate salt water for very long, so it wasn't an oceanic dispersal. It could have been via Eurasia, but it's typically assumed to be via the Bering Strait.
There are a number of fossil species found farther north in North America, and even a couple from Europe (like [*Arambourgia*](_URL_0_) and [*Hassiacosuchus*](_URL_1_), but these predate the first alligators in China by millions of years, and those Chinese fossils are in the same genus as the alligators found there and in the US today.
As for why they're not found more places, well, we have caimans farther south in the Americas, which are in the same family. Unlike alligators, they're not tolerant of freezing temperatures. Alligators are the only temperate crocodylians and the only who can withstand hard freezes. Their range ends basically where other crocodiles and caimans can survive, so it's thought that they're outcompeted.
I realize this is not a very satisfying answer, because it bugs the heck out of me too! | [
"The Chinese alligator currently is found in only the Yangtze River valley and parts of adjacent provinces and is extremely endangered, with only a few dozen believed to be left in the wild. Indeed, far more Chinese alligators live in zoos around the world than can be found in the wild. Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge ... |
Why don't large organisms with many cells develop cancer more often? | What you described is called [Peto's Paradox](_URL_1_): why do we not see a correlation between animal size and cancer rates.
There are lots of different mechanisms of cancer suppression/avoidance in larger animals. For example, the best studied cancer gene is called p53. Humans (and other animals) only have one copy of the p53 gene, whereas elephants have [20 copies of this gene.](_URL_0_)
Large body size has evolved independently numerous times throughout animals - elephants, whales, hippopotamus, giraffe, bison, and others. Other animals (such as the whale) have been checked for an expansion of the p53 gene and they do not have as many copies as elephants, therefore they must have evolved some other methods of suppressing cancer. These are all still being researched and can give insight into cancer development.
The exact mechanisms aside, in general, the reason why Peto's paradox exists is because, along the evolutionary path to become bigger, these animals would have evolved methods to suppress cancer. As the species got bigger, those that were susceptible to cancer would have died out and left behind those that had mutations that made them more resistant to developing cancer. As there was considerable selective pressure to evolve to become bigger, cancer would become more prevalent, and strategies to suppress cancer would also be selected for strongly. | [
"Multicellular organisms, especially long-living animals, face the challenge of cancer, which occurs when cells fail to regulate their growth within the normal program of development. Changes in tissue morphology can be observed during this process. Cancer in animals (metazoans) has often been described as a loss o... |
what would happen if charging interest on loans were to be made illegal? | If a lender could not charge interest on a loan, they would have no incentive to ever give out loans because they would be essentially throwing away their money. Even though they would get back the exact amount they lent out, the present value of it in a few years would most likely be less than it was when it was first lent out due to inflation. Basically, lenders would stop lending. | [
"If a lender charges above the lawful interest rate, a court will not allow the lender to sue to recover the unlawfully high interest, and some states will apply all payments made on the debt to the principal balance. In some states, such as New York, usurious loans are voided \"ab initio\".\n",
"BULLET::::- Unde... |
Why do people have different reactions than others to drugs? Why do some get side effects while others don't? What differences in biology could account for this? | There's a lot of reasons. One of the major ones is variations in metabolic pathways or in the targets of drugs due to genetic variation. There's a whole field of science, [pharmacogenetics](_URL_0_) that studies this.
Basically, we are all different, usually by small changes in genes. This could be what levels certain genes are expressed at, or when and where they come on, or in the actual structure of the genes. Let's say a drug targets protein X, shutting it down to cause its effect. If one person makes 50% as much of protein X, then they may need only 50% of the drug. Another common way is that a drug is metabolized before it becomes effective, or metabolized to turn off its effect. There is a lot of genetic variability in metabolic pathways and can really alter the way that a drug may work.
There are many real-world examples of this and the linked wikipedia article points to some of the more common. Nowadays, we have more and more assays to assess how drugs may work in people. The article discusses the TPMT blood test, which is now standardly done before starting a patient on azathioprine or the related drug 6-MP.
There are other reasons. A common reason is allergy. There's tremendous variability between the immune systems of different people. In fact, it's [a feature](_URL_1_) of immune development to develop this. This means different people may respond and even form a reaction to different compounds based on how their immune system has developed or on what their immune system has seen.
Other reasons may include diet (for instance grapefruit juice can alter a drug's effect), or disease. For instance, amoxicillin and ampicillin can cause a rash in people who have an active Epstein-Barr Virus infection... | [
"In medicine, a side effect is an effect, whether therapeutic or adverse, that is secondary to the one intended; although the term is predominantly employed to describe adverse effects, it can also apply to beneficial, but unintended, consequences of the use of a drug. Developing drugs is a complicated process, bec... |
how do dry cleaners avoid spreading lice and bed bugs? | Dry cleaners use perchloroethylene to clean your clothes, it's a pretty aggressively anti-bug chemical. Now those new "environmental cleaners" might be a problem. Similarly, they launder shirts and dry them at super high temperatures (because it's faster) and bugs can't stand those temps.
This is not excuse not to tell them that you're having things cleaned because of an infestation, there are people working there. However, if you tell them they can handle it. | [
"Clothes dryers can be used for killing bed bugs in clothing and blankets. Infested clothes and bedding are first washed in hot water with laundry detergent then placed in the dryer, and then after the items are completely dry, continue drying for at least 20 minutes longer at high heat. However, this does not elim... |
what makes someone professionally good at fishing? | Probably experience and perception. I'm sure a good fisherman can tell where the fish will likely be in the lake, or how deep to go to get certain fish and what patterns they follow | [
"Recreational fishing is fishing done for sport or competition, whereas commercial fishing is catching seafood, often in mass quantities, for profit. Both can have different environmental impacts when it comes to fishing.\n",
"It is difficult to estimate how many recreational fishing boats there are, although the... |
Why is digital preffered over analog when digital is limited to just on and off? | Analog signals also have a [data limit](_URL_1_)! Noise (which is unavoidable) will limit the accuracy that you can get from an analog recording. On the other hand, as soon as you record the ones and zeroes of a digital recording, you can reproduce it perfectly from then on. The fact that digital signals are definite streams of on or off is actually their greatest strength, since it's possible to correct them when the data channel is noisy (since the on and off state are much easier to tell apart than the .27336 vs .27337 of analog audio). And since humans can only hear sounds up to about 20,000 Hz, we can use the [Nyquist theorem](_URL_0_) to perfectly reproduce any sound signal with a sampling rate of at least 40,000 Hz. The only limit is the bit resolution of the sample, but it's easy to reduce that to below the level that humans can tell the difference. | [
"If a proper (no clipping/saturation) analog signal is converted to digital via A/D with sufficient samples, and then reconverted to analog via D/A then Nyquist theorem guarantees that there will be no problem in the analog domain due to \"peak\" issues because the restored analog signal will be an exact copy of th... |
What do we know about related history between Bulgarians and Macedonians? | I assume with ‘Macedonians’ you mean Slavic Macedonians living in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), who are distinct from the Greek Macedonians that live in the Greek province of Macedonia. This distinction lies at the heart of the naming conflict between the FYROM and Greece I wrote a paper about a year ago. The separation of Slavic Macedonians from the Bulgarians in terms of history is a quite ‘recent’ phenomenon and like most elements of Slavic Macedonian history a modern construct. For most of its history Slavic-Macedonian history was very much related with the history of the Serbs, Bulgarians and Greeks.
& nbsp;
The language spoken by the Slavic Macedonians, Macedonian, is closely related to Bulgarian. Indeed, the Bulgarian reading of history claims that the language of the people of the Republic of Macedonia is merely a dialect of Bulgarian. As an extension of this attitude the Bulgarians believe that the people and the territory of the Republic of Macedonia belong, both historically and culturally, to the Bulgarian nation. Because of this the Bulgarians effectively deny the existence of a distinctive Slav-Macedonian nation. The creation of the Bulgarian Exarchate in the late 19th century, a separation of the Bulgarians from the Greek Orthodox Church was what instigated the division of Macedonia amongst the Bulgarians, Greeks and Serbians. The Bulgarians state attempted to regain what it regarded as lost Macedonian territory from Serbia and Greece by aligning itself with Germany during both World Wars.
& nbsp;
It was the end of the Second World War and the founding of the Socialist Yugoslavian Republic that allowed the Slavic Macedonians to consolidate a national identity distinct from the Serbs, Greeks and Bulgarians. This effort was encouraged by the central Yugoslav government in Belgrade, which sought to dispel any Greek and Bulgarian claims on the territory. Examples of this realization of identity were the founding of the Macedonian Orthodox Church and the codification of the Macedonian language. These elements provided instruments for the Slavic Macedonians with which they could set themselves apart from their neighbours and reject any claim form Serbian, Greek or Bulgarian side that they were merely an offshoot of their respective nations and therefore not deserving of their own identity.
& nbsp;
The construction of such a new identity, separated from already established ones, saw the new Slavic Macedonian nation morphing cultural elements shared with the Bulgarians or the Greeks to fit their newly created nation’s history. The codification of ‘the separate Macedonian language’ was very unappealing to the Bulgarians, as it rejected their claim that the Slavic Macedonians belonged to their nation and were in fact speaking a dialect of their language. The Slavic Macedonians took possession of this ‘dialect’ and used it as a basis for their newly created identity.The question of Slavic-Macedonian identity is determined by the view the Bulgarians, Greeks and Slavs of Macedonia have regarding Slavic-Macedonian national identity.
& nbsp;
Sources:
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Triandafyllidou, A., Calloni, M. & Mikrakis, A. (1997). New Greek Nationalism. Sociological Research Online. 2 (1)
Engstrom, J. (2002). The power of Perception: The Impact of the Macedonian Question on Inter-ethnic Relations in the Republic of Macedonia. The Global Review of Ethnopolitics. 1 (3). Pp. 3-17
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This is my first submission here, I hope my answer clears up some of the questions you had. | [
"Bulgarians are considered most closely related to the neighbouring Macedonians. The ethnic Macedonians were considered Bulgarians by most ethnographers until the early 20th century and beyond with a big portion of them evidently self-identifying as such. The Slavic-speakers of Greek Macedonia and most among the To... |
If motion is relative, why is it (theoretically) possible for one massive object to move in 0.5c in one direction and for another to move at the same speed in the opposite direction? | It's perfectly possible for the relative velocity of two objects, as perceived by an external observer, to be greater than the speed of light. This is not a contradiction of the fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light because relative velocities are not the same in different reference frames in special relativity. Our classical intuition tells us that if the relative velocity of two objects is greater than the speed of light, it must be the case that one of the objects would see the other object travel faster than the speed of light in their reference frame. It turns out this is not the case in special relativity, even in the case where the relative velocity of two objects is greater than the speed of light in some external frame, in the frame of the objects themselves they will always see the other travel slower than light speed. | [
"Al-Baghdaadi also suggested that motion is relative, writing that \"there is motion only if the relative positions of the bodies in question change.\" He also stated that \"each type of body has a characteristic velocity that reaches its maximum when its motion encounters no resistance.\"\n",
"The motion of two ... |
When the Byzantine Empire fell in 1453, did people at the time know that they were witnessing the fall of the Roman Empire? | The continuation of Monstrelet's chronicle (which consists of almost everything in said chronicle after 1444; Monstrelet himself died in 1453), written by Mathieu d'Escouchy, which is in large part cribbing from the *Grandes Chronique's de France* as well as Jean Chartier has this to say:
> ". . . the grand Turk with a numerous army of Saracens had invaded Christendom; that he had already conquered the noble of city of Constantinople and almost all Greece; that he had captured **the emperor of Greece**, had caused caused him to be inhumanly beheaded. . ."
He goes on to accuse the Sultan of various other terrible deeds like burning down Hagia Sophia. All of this should be balanced against the well documented Ottoman policy of trying to win over their conquered subjects and the status afforded to Orthodox Christianity within the empire. Also, it would have been a bit hard for Sultan Mehmet to have turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque had he burned it down.
This account comes from a letter from the Pope to the Duke of Burgundy, who is urged to go on crusade against the Turks. And frankly, these accounts of Turkish atrocities in capturing Constantinople remind me of nothing so much as the various versions of Pope Urban's speech calling the First Crusade at the Council of Claremont.
In a later chapter the siege of Constantinople is actually described (because that's how the continuation of Monstrelet rolls) and the conflict is clearly presented as between Turks and Christians; not Romans. This is surely in part due to the coalition that was defending Constantinople. But there is also certainly an element of this being portrayed as a great clash between the Christian and Muslim worlds. The chronicle here refers to "The emperor of Constantinople".
The continuation *does* mention Rome, but not in association with the Byzantines:
> ". . . the grand Turk, when only twenty-tree or twenty-four years old, was more cruel than Nero, and delighted in shedding blood: he was bold and ambitious, and more ardent to conquer the world than Alexander or Caesar."
Interestingly, the comparison with Alexander also appears in Greek sources and appears to have been part of how Mehmet saw himself. Later, as this Chronicler is setting out his grand and definitely plausible plan for a great crusade he says:
> ". . . the Greeks will be anxious to recover their lands by the sword"
Again, Byzantium is clearly conceived of as a lost Greek empire; there's no association in the chronicle between it and Rome. Where allusions to antiquity are coming up they're in comparing Mehmet to ancient conquerors.
The Chronicler recounts a letter from the Sultan to the Pope. The French used is "desquelles la teneur s'ensuit" which the translation I've been using renders as "The tenour of the last was as follows". I'm not sure whether to interpret this as a claim to providing the literal content of the letter, or just the gist of it - anybody with more knowledge of Middle French would be a big help here. Regardless, this letter, the text of which we should take with an entire shaker full of salt (considering that not only is he highly unlikely to have actually seen correspondence between the Pope and Sultan for himself, but he's absolutely hostile to the Sultan) says:
> "We marvel, therefore, and grieve, that the Italians should be our enemies - for we are naturally inclined to be attached to them, as being, like to ourselves, of the issue of the trojan race, and of ancient birth. We are sprung from the same blood, and regularly descended from king Priam and his line. . ."
Again, there's an attempt to locate the Turks within the context of the classical past. Indeed the Aeniad quite famously attempts to connect the Romans to the Trojans.
Another interesting passage:
> "We have also the intention of restoring Troy the great, and to avenge the blood of Hector and the queen Ixion, by subjecting to our government the *empire of Greece* and punishing the descendants of the transgressors."
This is actually pretty definitive in establishing a link between classical Greece and the Byzantine Empire and not classical Rome in the mind of this chronicler. I feel pretty comfortable saying here that the chronicler is putting words in the Sultan's mouth; none of this jives with his actual policy, which was one of substantial leniency towards Orthodox Christians. Nor does it jive with his presentation of himself as 'Kaysar-i-Rum' which sort of doesn't work so well if the thing you just took over was a Greek and not a Roman empire.
The chronicler also denies the Venetians a claim to the Roman past:
> "we know the Venetians to be a distinct people, in their manners and laws, from the Romans."
Then he has Mehmet invoke Jupiter and assorted other Roman gods. Again, this is another sign of the chronicler putting words in the Sultan's mouth because I am pretty sure Sultan Mehmet II did not worship "our great god Jupiter". I'd absolutely love somebody more well versed in Ottoman history to weigh in on how much they think this chronicle is carrying echoes of Mehmet's own propaganda. /u/Chamboz if you have the time?
So, let's call this a Franco-Burgundian perspective. The Chronicler himself is a shameless partisan of the Duke of Burgundy and the stuff he cribs from Chartier and the *Grandes Chroniques* represents the French perspective. He is, clearly, part of a long medieval tradition of identifying the Byzantine Empire as Greek, as the Greek Empire. He shows no knowledge of Constantinople's ties to ancient Rome, looking instead to classical Greece for historical parallel. To the Chronicler the fall of Constantinople represented a major blow to the Christian world. You can see this is just how much space he devotes to it - the continuation is fixated on France in a way that Monstrelet himself was not, so this is quite the exception. But, it does not appear to this chronicler to have represented the fall of the Roman Empire in any meaningful sense.
Jean de Waurin, another Burgundian chronicler, of this period, gives basically identical details. I'll spare you the horrors of my attempts to translate it into English but again, it's described as the conquest of "Constantinople and almost all of Greece". Again, as we saw with Mathieu d'Escouchy the focus is on Constantinople as a Christian city.
Whilst I'm not even going to try and claim that I can speak for the writers of any other region than those that I've mentioned I hope this gives you some idea of how the fall of Constantinople was perceived in French and Burgundian chroniclers. The event was a big enough deal that we could be here all day going through the reactions to it in Christian histories and art.
Famously, Mehmet himself *did* recognise the connection between Constantinople and Rome and titled himself 'Kayser-i Rum'. But the couple of books on Ottoman history I have don't really go into this, so hopefully somebody else can give you actual detail on the way continuity manifested itself.
The divorce of the Byzantine Empire from its Roman legacy came about fairly early on; centuries before the city fell. A good example of this is in Liudprand of Cremona's history of the Reign of Otto I from the 10th century. Here Liutprand is already referring to the Byzantines as Greeks, for example: "At this same period Simeon of Bulgaria began to press the Greeks very hard." Nevertheless, Liutprand is well aware of the connections between Byzantium and Rome, for example when he's attempting to insult the Emperor Nikephoras he says "For us the word Roman is comprehended every form of lowness". This is shortly after the Emperor has tried to insult Liutprand by pointing out that his people, the Lombards, aren't Romans.
As for the Greek sources, as you might expect, they view the fall of the city as something of a calamity. Furthermore, they're keening aware of the ties between Constantinople and Rome. For example, when Doukas is scolding the citizens of the city he says "You miserable Romans, you wretches". Kritoboulos says that the destruction of the Romans was a huge event. Yet, these sources also make reference to the 'Hellenes' which evokes a classical mold of Greek identity. I really would be so far out of my lane as to just be speculating on how 'Roman' and 'Hellene' as categories of identity interacted in the late Byzantine world, so any help on this one would be hugely appreciated.
Sources:
Enguerrand de Monstrelet, *Chronicles*, trans. Thomas Johnes, 1810 (my kingdom for a modern critical edition of Monstrelet with facing text).
Jean de Waurin, *Chronicles Vol. 5*, edited by Sir William Hardy.
Liutprand of Cremona, *History of Otto*.
M. Nikolić, 'The Greatest Misfortune in the Oikoumene Byzantine Historiography on the Fall of Constantinople in 1453', in *Balcanica*, vol. 47 (2016), pp. 119-133.
H. Inalcik, *Essays in Ottoman History*
| [
"The event also marked the end of the Byzantines—the final remnants of the Roman Empire—and the transfer of the control of the Bosporus into Ottoman hands, who made Constantinople their new capital, and from where they expanded their empire in the centuries that followed.\n",
"Eventually, following their repeated... |
how do certain drugs cause you to see things in high detail that aren't actually there? | _URL_0_
Hallucinogens work by shutting down neurons that have the effect of calming other cells in the visual cortex (the bit of the brain that works out what you are seeing). So these cells start firing as if they are really dealing with real visual information.
Human eyes are actually not that great and the brain has to do A LOT to make the partial information from the eye into a proper picture. Mess that with slightly and not only does weird stuff visual stuff happen, the brain acts as though it's all real. | [
"The drugs are also difficult to detect. Because of the very small amounts of drugs typically administered to achieve these effects, it is difficult to test for the presence of these drugs since they are quickly eliminated from the body. The lack of confirmation through toxicology cannot necessarily be equated bein... |
On brain activity and perception: Can we slow down how we perceive time? | [This](_URL_0_) Wikipedia article talks about time perception, and it's field of study. It probably doesn't answer all of your questions, but it goes over a lot of what's in your post. | [
"In the popular essay \"Brain Time\", David Eagleman explains that different types of sensory information (auditory, tactile, visual, etc.) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures. The brain must learn how to overcome these speed disparities if it is to create a temporally unified repres... |
Why does banging 2 objects together produce sound? e.g. knocking on a door | Take a look at how [this drum head moves when it gets hit](_URL_0_).
The door does almost the exact same thing from your fist, but to a much smaller degree. As it shakes back and forth, it creates waves in the air that create sound.
Most doors probably are partially hollow as well--in that case, the air in the middle of the door acts like a spring, transferring the energy back and forth between the front and back of the door and making it all vibrate for longer.
Something that is extremely stiff and won't move much at all will be very quiet when you hit it because it won't vibrate enough to move air around. Try knocking on a big rock sometime and you'll see what I mean. | [
"BULLET::::- In Brazil, (\"knock on wood\") is something actually done physically, three knocks are required after giving an example of a bad thing eventually happening. No verbalization is required, just the three knocks on the closest piece or object of wood. In the absence of wood, someone can say , to prevent t... |
Are we physically affected by reading left to right? | I'm also interested to know how it affects other parts of our lives, such as when crossing the road, do LR reading people look left first? Or is that more dependent on what side of the road people drive on? When looking at a tapestry or large 'busy' painting, do RL readers start from the right? | [
"Normal reading is typically a function of a left hemisphere-based system. The right hemisphere plays a minimal role in reading. One hypothesis, the \"left hemisphere hypothesis\", supports the idea of a damaged left hemisphere-based reading system associated with deep dyslexia. Deep dyslexics may be attempting to ... |
why is it in the west hiv infections are still primarily related with homosexual activity and drug use but in africa where the vast majority of worldwide cases is it primarily spread through heterosexual transmission? |
Better access to contraceptives in the West. Less contraceptives are used in homosexual activities because no risk of pregnancy, drug use because sharing needles. | [
"Because reported AIDS cases in Africa and other parts of the developing world include a larger proportion of people who do not belong to Duesberg's preferred risk groups of drug addicts and male homosexuals, Duesberg writes on his website that \"There are no risk groups in Africa, like drug addicts and homosexuals... |
how can median household incomes in an area be ~$50k but average home price be $5m? | If you read that page, you will see that the $5M home price was for a specific *part* of that area, and the average income was for the city.
So, basically, that area is a very upscale part of town that also has other, less affluent neighborhoods. | [
"In 2018, the median household income was $70,824; most people spend more than 30% of their income on housing costs. In August of that year, the median home price was $583,000; this is lower than the median home price in Los Angeles, and Orange, counties.\n",
"The median household income was $40,358, with the per... |
Why was the USMC such a small military branch before 1941? | Well, I think your question would be better phrased as "Why did the USMC get so *large* after 1941?"
It should be noted that the USMC is totally unique worldwide in terms of size. Every other marine corps in history has been quite small, and this is simply because of the traditional mission of marine corps.
Marines have traditionally acted as naval infantry, boarding/landing parties, and port security. Historically marines have not operated very far from coastal or littoral areas and have not operated on land for extended periods simply because of their role as naval auxiliaries. Because of this, there is simply no reason for any nation to ever have a large marine corps. In fact, since the USMC expanded, there has been a lot of controversy over why the USMC is as large as it is. It has been accused of acting as a second land army and a third air force (duplicating the US Army, USAF, and USN's capabilities), and for this exact reason no other marine corps has expanded like the USMC has.
Now, as for *why* the USMC expanded, a lot of it has to do with the US's need for mobile, rapid response forces post WW2. Naturally, the USMC's relationship with the Navy gave it a unique position to be that forward rapid response force. The US Army has traditionally been the branch with vast, heavy, mechanized forces (almost all of the United States's artillery and armor) that can take a long time to mobilize. Outside of a few units (like the Airborne or SF), the Army can take 30 days or longer to muster its forces for combat. The USMC, under the expeditionary force model, is supposed to be able to provide forward deployed forces that fill the gap in time until heavier Army units can arrive. Marine Expeditionary Forces are designed to sustain combat for about 30 days at a time, which is about the time heavy Army units will take to get to theater.
Now, whether or not this model is still relevant to today's realities is probably outside the scope of this subreddit. But in a nutshell, the USMC was always small because that's what marine corps are traditionally supposed to be according to their missions. The USMC only later expanded because of the need for rapid response forces, but the debate continues on shrinking the USMC because they duplicate many of the capabilities already provided by the other branches.
| [
"Beginning in World War I, with the U.S. Marine Corps' participation with the U.S. Army in the American Expeditionary Force, in which the 5th and 6th Marines (along with the 6th Machine Gun Battalion) formed the 4th Marine Brigade of the U.S. Army 2nd Infantry Division (United States), the Corps began organizing la... |
Fire in zero oxygen | Yes, you can definitely have a fire without oxygen. However you would need a different oxidizing agent. For instance fluorine gas reacts with hydrogen gas in [such a fashion](_URL_0_). There would be a number of differences such as the maximum temperature of the flame, how fast the fire would burn, what color the fire would have, etc. | [
"The limiting oxygen index (LOI) is the minimum concentration of oxygen, expressed as a percentage, that will support combustion of a polymer. It is measured by passing a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen over a burning specimen, and reducing the oxygen level until a critical level is reached.\n",
"Without sufficien... |
Did Britain plan an invasion of Norway during WWI? | There were no such plans that I'm aware of. From 1917, the Allies, mainly as a result of American pressure, began laying a mine barrage across the northern exits to the North Sea. In response to this, the Germans began diverting U-boats through Norwegian waters. These waters were not initially mined, and could not be due to Norwegian neutrality. Instead of planning an invasion of Norway, the Allies brought diplomatic pressure to bear on Norway. The Norwegian Navy was forced to lay mines in the vicinity of Karmoy, completing the North Sea Barrage. This meant that no invasion of Norway was necessary. Other than this, the Norwegian coastline had little strategic significance during the war.
The majority of British planning for amphibious operations during the war had a primary focus on the German and Belgian coasts. An invasion of islands off the German coast would allow the RN to base ships off the main German naval bases. Plans for invasions of Sylt and Borkum were drawn up in 1914-15, but were cancelled in favour of the Gallipoli landings. Landings on the Belgian coast would allow the British to neutralise the ports at Zeebrugge, Ostend and Bruges, from which German ships and submarines could operate against the shipping routes into London. Several plans were drawn up for this, including one where troops were landed from trawlers in Ostend harbour, and another where troops and tanks would be landed from large pontoons (which I've written much more about [here](_URL_0_)). | [
"In March and April 1940, British plans for an invasion of Norway were prepared, mainly in order to reach and destroy the Swedish iron ore mines in Gällivare. It was hoped that this would divert German forces away from France, and open a war front in south Sweden.\n",
"On 1 March 1940, Adolf Hitler ordered the in... |
what is the difference between being depressed and being bored? | Depression is a sort of relentless apathy. If you're just bored you can dispel the boredom through some form of entertainment easily enough. It's not a constant base state of your existence. Depression on the other hand saps away pleasure as well, leaving just emotional numbness. | [
"In conventional usage, boredom is an emotional and occasionally psychological state experienced when an individual is left without anything in particular to do, is not interested in his or her surroundings, or feels that a day or period is dull or tedious. It is also understood by scholars as a modern phenomenon w... |
why do people still use yelp, even though they manipulate reviews? | This post is not asking for a layman-friendly explanation to something complicated or technical, so it doesn't belong here and it's been removed. Entirely subjective questions generally belong in /r/askreddit. | [
"As Yelp became more influential, the phenomenon of business owners and competitors writing fake reviews, known as \"astroturfing\", became more prevalent. A study from Harvard professor Michael Luca analyzed 316,415 reviews in Boston and found that fake reviews rose from 6% of the site's reviews in 2006 to 20% in ... |
How different are mitochondria and other organelles between eukaryotic species? | In case of most organelles (Golgi apparatur, ER, peroxisomes, etc.) the main difference is in proteins so if organisms are relativelly close (in evoilutionary terms) there should be no problem in "transplanting" say ER of a rat into a dog cells but there MIGHT be a problem if you wanted to transplant ER from a fruit fly to dog's cell.
Anyway since the organelles would be transplanted, all new proteins and lipids would be synthesised as specified in recipient cell's genome so soon enough all proteins and lipids from donor would be degraded and after few cell divisions you would hardly be able to tell a difference between "normal" cells and cells originating from recipient.
As for mitochondria, it has it's own genome and it has it's own genes INSIDE NUCLEAR GENOME. So if there is a specific protein coded inside nuclear genome, you MIGHT have problems with transplanting mitochondria. But again, it all depends on evolutionary distance between organisms.
As for the last question... Short answear is yes, provided organisms are evolutionary close to each other (e.g. dog and mice). Once you transplant nucleus, all proteins should be synthesised from new DNA and soon enough you won't be able to see the difference between "normal" and "transplanted" embryos.
Also in case of nuclear transplant... Recipient cell should have a diffence mechanism against foreign DNA so you would have to knock that out before transplant. And then there would be no need to destro the original nucleus because soon after transplantation, cell would start synthsising defence mechanism from new nucleus which hopefully would destroy old dna. | [
"Not all eukaryotic cells have each of the organelles listed below. Exceptional organisms have cells that do not include some organelles that might otherwise be considered universal to eukaryotes (such as mitochondria). There are also occasional exceptions to the number of membranes surrounding organelles, listed i... |
what makes oil, natural gas, and coal sources of energy when other materials aren't? | Hundreds of millions of years ago, because our atmosphere had less oxygen in it, things did not break down as quickly as they do now. You see, nowadays, pretty much anything that is 'organic' is food for something or another. The coal, oils, and gases is the result of all this past uneaten "food" being collected and trapped underground where nothing could eat (nothing could utilize its energy); the type of fuel it becomes is heavily dependent on the storage circumstance.
Now, why do these things have energy, while rock doesn't? It comes primarily from how we harvest electricity. The most conventional methods include heating up water, which turns into steam, which rotates a turbine, and that creates electricity (it's the spinning motion of the turbine that creates energy). The fuel that we collect primarily goes into heating this water. The reason coal, gas, and oil are used is because they can be used in what is known as a combustion reaction. This is similar to the type of reaction in our bodies when we eat that gives us energy. Notice how these power plants release carbon dioxide (CO2) just like us!? Anyway, this reaction release a lot of heat to boil the water.
This isn't to say 'rocks' cannot be utilized for electricity, however. While a lot of hard rocks like granite are stable, and rarely involve themselves in chemical reactions, some (for instance, uranium in nuclear power plants) still react and can release quite a bit of energy.
ELI3: Those things are food that weren't eaten millions of years ago. We're digging them up and using them for energy to generate electricity. | [
"Petroleum is used mostly, by volume, for refining into fuel oil and gasoline, both important \"\"primary energy\"\" sources. 84 percent by volume of the hydrocarbons present in petroleum is converted into energy-rich fuels (petroleum-based fuels), including gasoline, diesel, jet, heating, and other fuel oils, and ... |
How do aquatic plants in places like the Chesapeake bay resist algae buildup on themselves? | Marine biologist here. Submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) actually has a very hard time dealing with epiphytic algae growing on them, as they are outcompeted for light. This is actually one of the major causes of the loss of SAV beds in many areas, as eutrophication increases the prevalence and growth rate of said algae.
Tldr; they don't | [
"An algae scrubber filters water by moving water rapidly over a rough, highly illuminated surface, which causes algae to start growing in large amounts. As the algae grow, they consume nutrients such as nitrate, phosphate, nitrite, ammonia, ammonium and even metals such as copper from the water. These nutrients are... |
What evidence is there that women trained in combat sports in Ancient Sparta or other civilizations? | Evidence for women participating in sport and games is significant, however, women were expressly barred from participating or viewing the Olympic Games. The Heraean Games were a single sex series of events in which women competed against each other, divided by age. Greek society as a rule was repressive towards women however they were allowed to participate in sport while they were young. There was a significant difference drawn between a girl and a woman with girls allowed to train and compete while women were, for the most part, barred. The exception to this rule (as it usually is with Greek society) was Sparta. Sparta allowed women to train as the men did while other cities had a more restrictive repertoire.
Training for the Olympic Games feel in line with the training undertaken by citizen soldiers for each respective city-state. The Agoge is often referenced as the training regimen of Spartan society, however, the word itself means training; each city had varying Agoge to train their citizens. Varying cities and their colonies could develop reputations for particular events and as such their training would reflect that.
There were two forms of wrestling during the Ancient Olympics. Palé, standard wrestling similar to today (however far fewer rules and more focus on forcing submission through painful maneuvers) with points won through forcing submission, touching your opponents back if shoulder to the ground, or forcing your opponent from the arena. The Pankration (pronounced pan-kra-tee-on) was the more brutal cousin of Palé with a similarity to modern MMA fighting, with almost no rules. The Pankration had only rules against eye gouging and biting and, with the gradual introduction of the Cestus, became one of the most brutal of events. The Cestus started as a rudimentary boxing glove of leather, however, it developed into a brutal pugilistic weapon with metal/leather lumps or plates woven into the contact surface of the glove (the Romans were involved in developing the brutal nature of the weapon and combat). By this point Cestus fighting was reserved only for slave combatants, often to the death, due to the excessive damage and vicious damage caused by the weapon.
As for women in Roman games, the Gladiatrix became an extremely popular, albeit somewhat uncommon, combatant. Fighting in the arena was seen as the sole occupation for those of the lowest of classes, however, gladiatricies were often from the highest of classes, equestrian and senatorial, which caused a schism of opinion on their use. Septimius Severus even outlawed their use in the Flavian Amphitheatre due to such disputes, although it has been asserted he did so to avoid comparisons between the Gladiatrix and the women of the Imperial Family. This also appeased the conservative element of Roman society and reaffirmed Septimius' inset it's as a defender of traditional values, harkening back to the golden age of Augustine morality and values. Nevertheless gladiatricies continued to be used throughout the empire in arenas outside of Rome.
Training and practices of both the Greeks and Romans focused mainly on forcing submissions through exerting pain and pressure on the opponent. Most of the training was for military service which required high levels of stamina and pain tolerance which directed the training.
I am not as well versed on the particular training practices of the Greeks so I cannot provide much in the way of specifics, however, I will do some research and update what and when I can.
Please excuse any errors as this was typed on mobile. I will also add more sources when I am able to properly quote and cite them.
Sources:
Cruelty and Civilization: The Roman Games by Roland Auguet
Historia Romana by Cassius Dio
The Ancient Olympics by Nigel Spivey
Martial's Epigrams | [
"Descriptions of women’s sport during Archaic Period mainly come from literary sources, and there are a few examples of female sporting events. One of the most popular forms of physical activity for ancient Greek women is running. The bronze statuettes of athletic Spartan girl, which depicts Spartan young women inv... |
Other than submitting yourself to Hitler and hating on the Jews, what did the Nazi political party "stand" for? Did they believe in low taxes? Or social welfare? Communism? | Well here is the 25-point party platform published in 1920. And I believe as late of as 1933 it was unchanged. I'm not sure if Hitler had it changed after that time. But by and large this was representative of the party stances.
Edit: I've been asked by the mods to add a lot more commentary to bring this up to the standards of this sub.
The platform generally focuses on two major themes: German Nationality and Socialism. But in practice the Nazis were not socialists as we tend to think of them. The goal, as George Orwell might say, was never to make all animals equal. It was explicitly to make some animals more equal than others. The goal was to set up a German state where all Germans shared in the benefits, but non-Germans did not. It was National Socialism.
And there are many points that Hitler either compromised on, or never really believed in. So implementation was less than perfect.
In the first three points we see several issues that led directly to the war. The Nazis wanted to bring all Germans into a Greater German State. This would include those living in Austria and the Sudetenland. They wanted the treaty of Versailles reversed. And they wanted lebensraum (living space) for all these Germans. Eventually Hitler decided he wanted this space to come from Russia.
After that we see the seed of the racial laws. Many (most) of these were implemented to some degree or another. And they always fell especially against Jews. But it does make it clear why Hitler formed "protectorates" of some areas, rather than outright annexing everything during the war. He wanted a Germany, for Germans, composed of Germans. Bohemians, Moravians, Slovaks, and the like had to have their own little countries to live in... because they weren't welcome in Hitler's Germany.
Then it moves to the socialism in the National Socialist agenda. This was followed poorly at best. There was some nationalization of corporations, most notably in banking and transportation... but it is hard to say that any of these were implemented in any real sense. Although some were. department stores were abolished, so as to protect small business owners.
But I think the line between points 24 and 25 contains the core of the whole platform: *Public Interest before Private Interest*. That is the core of Nazism, the German state before the individual Germans.
> The Program of the German Workers’ Party is a program for our time.
The leadership rejects the establishment of new aims after those set out in the Program have been achieved, for the sole purpose of making it possible for the Party to continue to exist as the result of the artificially stimulated dissatisfaction of the masses.
1. We demand the uniting of all Germans within one Greater Germany, on the basis of the right to self-determination of nations.
2. We demand equal rights for the German people (Volk) with respect to other nations, and the annulment of the peace treaty of Versailles and St. Germain.
3. We demand land and soil (Colonies) to feed our People and settle our excess population.
4. Only Nationals (Volksgenossen) can be Citizens of the State. Only persons of German blood can be Nationals, regardless of religious affiliation. No Jew can therefore be a German National.
5. Any person who is not a Citizen will be able to live in Germany only as a guest and must be subject to legislation for Aliens.
6. Only a Citizen is entitled to decide the leadership and laws of the State. We therefore demand that only Citizens may hold public office, regardless of whether it is a national, state or local office.
We oppose the corrupting parliamentary custom of making party considerations, and not character and ability, the criterion for appointments to official positions.
7. We demand that the State make it its duty to provide opportunities of employment first of all for its own Citizens. If it is not possible to maintain the entire population of the State, then foreign nationals (non-Citizens) are to be expelled from the Reich.
8. Any further immigration of non-Germans is to be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who entered Germany after August 2, 1914, be forced to leave the Reich without delay.
9. All German Citizens must have equal rights and duties.
10. It must be the first duty of every Citizen to carry out intellectual or physical work. Individual activity must not be harmful to the public interest and must be pursued within the framework of the community and for the general good.
We therefore demand:
11. The abolition of all income obtained without labor or effort.
Breaking the Servitude of Interest.
12. In view of the tremendous sacrifices in property and blood demanded of the nation by every war, personal gain from the war must be termed a crime against the nation. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
13. We demand the nationalization of all enterprises (already) converted into corporations (trusts).
14. We demand profit-sharing in large enterprises
15. We demand the large-scale development of old-age pension schemes.
16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a sound middle class; the immediate communalization of the large department stores, which are to be leased at low rates to small tradesmen. We demand the most careful consideration for the owners of small businesses in orders placed by national, state, or community authorities.
17. We demand land reform in accordance with our national needs and a law for expropriation without compensation of land for public purposes. Abolition of ground rent and prevention of all speculation in land.
18. We demand ruthless battle against those who harm the common good by their activities. Persons committing base crimes against the People, usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished by death without regard to religion or race.
19. We demand the replacement of Roman Law, which serves a materialistic World Order, by German Law
20. In order to make higher education – and thereby entry into leading positions – available to every able and industrious German, the State must provide a thorough restructuring of our entire public educational system. The courses of study at all educational institutions are to be adjusted to meet the requirements of practical life. Understanding of the concept of the State must be achieved through the schools (teaching of civics) at the earliest age at which it can be grasped. We demand the education at the public expense of specially gifted children of poor parents, without regard to the latters’ position or occupation.
21. The State must raise the level of national health by means of mother-and-child care, the banning of juvenile labor, achievements of physical fitness through legislation for compulsory gymnastics and sports, and maximum support for all organizations providing physical training for young people.
22. We demand the abolition of hireling troops and the creation of a national army.23. We demand laws to fight against deliberate political lies and their dissemination by the press. In order to make it possible to create a German press, we demand:
a) all editors and editorial employees of newspapers appearing in the German language must be German by race;
b) non-German newspapers require express permission from the State for their publication. They may not be printed in the German language;
c) any financial participation in a German newspaper or influence on such a paper is to be forbidden by law to non-Germans and the penalty for any breach of this law will be the closing of the newspaper in question, as well as the immediate expulsion from the Reich of the non-Germans involved.
Newspapers which violate the public interest are to be banned. We demand laws against trends in art and literature which have a destructive effect on our national life, and the suppression of performances that offend against the above requirements.
24. We demand freedom for all religious denominations, provided that they do not endanger the existence of the State or offend the concepts of decency and morality of the Germanic race.
The Party as such stands for positive Christianity, without associating itself with any particular denomination. It fights against the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a permanent revival of our nation can be achieved only from within, on the basis of: Public Interest before Private Interest.
25. To carry out all the above we demand: the creation of a strong central authority in the Reich. Unquestioned authority by the political central Parliament over the entire Reich and over its organizations in general. The establishment of trade and professional organizations to enforce the Reich basic laws in the individual states.
The Party leadership promises to take an uncompromising stand, at the cost of their own lives if need be, on the enforcement of the above points.
Munich, Germany
February 24, 1920. | [
"In Germany during the Nazi era, a 1933 decree stated that \"No National Socialist may suffer detriment... on the ground that he does not make any religious profession at all\". However, the regime strongly opposed \"godless communism\", and all of Germany's atheist and largely left-wing freethought organizations s... |
when people read text, do they "hear" it in their minds? | Yes. It's called [subvocalization](_URL_0_). Some people "hear" words as they are reading them, while others don't. I know I am a subvocalizer because if I try to listen to music with words and read a book at the same time, I can't understand what I'm reading because I'm "hearing" two things at once. | [
"When reading aloud, people must decode written language to decipher its pronunciation. This processing takes place in Broca's area. The reader might use previous knowledge of a word in order to correctly vocalize it, or the reader might use knowledge of systematic letter combinations, which represent corresponding... |
How are generics of high-end medications created when pharmaceutical companies can patent their chemical formulas? | They aren't sold until the patent expires. There is a whole business in slightly altering pharmaceuticals to keep renewing the patent. | [
"The pharmaceutical formulation, an oily resin in capsules, is available by prescription in the US, Canada, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. Possible exceptions for off label use may be in US states passing laws reserving the right to differ from particular FDA regulations.\n",
"When a pharmaceutical company f... |
the nonsense behind the hip-hop illuminati conspiracy theory | In a nutshell rappers keep mentioning it to make them seem more important than they are. I'm a huge Hip Hop fan, and you can see a lot of rappers are desperate for people to think they are successful (see: huge gaudy chains etc). When you see these images in videos, it's often rappers trying to show they are so powerful, they are in the illuminati. Then people keep talking about it so it never goes away.
Kid Cudi actually did a video like this for a joke and the comments were still as ridiculous | [
"Conspiracy theories have been referenced in hip hop lyrics for some time. Elements of the Five-Percenter philosophy that has fundamentally influenced hip hop culture revolve around conspiracy theories. Artists such as Professor Griff, Jedi Mind Tricks, and Hopsin have become infamous for their support of New World... |
What happens to the gravitational potential energy of mass lost in nuclear fusion? | Nothing, since gravitation is based on energy density rather than mass. As long as the energy quanta don't leave the star, its gravitation will remain the same from the outside. When particles leave the star, its gravitation gradually decreases. | [
"In nuclear fusion, two low mass nuclei come into very close contact with each other, so that the strong force fuses them. It requires a large amount of energy for the strong or nuclear forces to overcome the electrical repulsion between the nuclei in order to fuse them; therefore nuclear fusion can only take place... |
why does cat food and dog food smell repulsive while the meat i eat smells delicious. | Speak for yourself, I love the smell of the soft, canned cat treats! But 10 year old me found out that I do not enjoy the taste of soft, canned cat treats. | [
"Dogs, as with all mammals, have natural odors. Natural dog odor can be unpleasant to dog owners especially when dogs are kept inside the home, as some people are not used to being exposed to the natural odor of a non-human species living in proximity to them. Dogs may also develop unnatural odors as a result of sk... |
how do scopes work? (firearms) | The scopes reticle/crosshairs arnt parrell with the barrel, it aim downwards slightly and meet the travel of the bullet at certain distances. So if you zero your scope for 200 meters. The bullet will travel lower than the point your aiming at untill it hits 200 meters, then it will travel higher untill it drops back below. Here's an image of this._URL_0_ | [
"Any sights, telescopic or metallic may be used. Scopes may not be more than 2 inches above the rifle as measured from the top of the receiver to the underside of the scope tube, nor may the scope be offset from the top center line of the receiver. Any sighting device programmed to activate the firing mechanisms is... |
how come you can "spot increase" muscle (by doing isolation movements) but you can't "spot decrease" fat? | As your question implies, if a muscle is isolated then that is the one that will grow. There is no analogous way to isolate fat for consumption. Fat loss occurs throughout the body at equal rates. | [
"Spot reduction refers to the claim that fat in a certain area of the body can be targeted for reduction through exercise of specific muscles in that desired area. For example, exercising the abdominal muscles in an effort to lose weight in or around one's midsection. \n",
"The word tone or toning can be misleadi... |
why are some plates and cutlery not dishwasher safe? | Pots and pans are usually excluded because they are made of materials that react with the harsher chemicals used in a dishwasher (Just like a human hand would be damaged). As a result, they will be damaged.
Other things, like some glassware, are so fine that rattling in the dishwasher is enough to make them bump against something and crack and break.
Knives will rattle against their rack and dull themselves out from repeated blunt impact to the side. | [
"Most dishwasher detergents are incompatible for use with silver, brass, cast iron, bronze, pewter, and goldleaf. They can also harm disposable plastic, anything wood, knives with hollow handles, and fine glassware.\n",
"Hand dishwashing is generally performed in the absence of a dishwashing machine, when large \... |
after giving blood, is it harder to gain and/or maintain an erection? | No, our bodies very quickly compensate to keep blood pressure the same despite a loss of volume. One way is to just increase the fluid content of the blood, thinning it out until more blood cells can be made. Another is to constrict the blood vessels, decreasing the total volume of the circulatory system.
But ultimately gaining an erection is performed by your body restricting the flow of blood out of the penis's tissue. That works pretty well if you have a strong heart regardless of a slight blood pressure drop. | [
"Physiologically, erection is triggered by the parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system, causing nitric oxide (a vasodilator) levels to rise in the trabecular arteries and smooth muscle of the penis. The arteries dilate causing the corpora cavernosa of the penis (and to a lesser extent the corpus sp... |
silly math regarding supermassive black holes and average density. | > Now, this conflicts with things I've heard, that the average densities of supermassive black holes are in fact very light, some even lower than water.
I thought this was totally wrong at first, but then I [ran the numbers myself in wolfram alpha](_URL_0_) and got a density drastically lower than water. Things I never knew before!
As for your math, I think you may have made an error in calculating the volume. Since the radius is about 5 x 10^13 m, and the volume V = (4 pi r^3 )/ 3, the volume should be something like 6 x 10^41 cubic meters, which is way higher than what you have in your post.
This refers only to the average density within the event horizon; it is thought that the mass actually all piles up in the center (possible/probably in a singularity with infinite density).
edit: in general, since the Schwarzschild Radius of a black hole is 3 km per solar mass, the volume is proportional to the cube of the mass, so higher-mass black holes will have lower densities. | [
"The first quantitative estimates of the mass density in supermassive black holes were 5-10 times higher than Sołtan's estimate. This discrepancy was resolved in 2000 via the discovery of the M-sigma relation, which showed that most of the previously-published black hole masses were in error.\n",
"Supermassive bl... |
why am i "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law", but only found "not guilty" and not "innocent"? | You (and your lawyer) are under no obligation to prove your innocence, nor your "not-guilty mess." The onus (burden) is on the prosecution to prove that you are guilty, and your job is to refute their accusations and show, if possible, that they can't be true.
That's what presumption of innocence means. If nobody shows that you're guilty, then there's no reason to believe guilt; you're "not guilty." The prosecution has to prove you are guilty well enough that you can't poke holes in their accusations, otherwise we default to our presumption. | [
"Another common notion is that guilt is assigned by social processes, such as a jury trial (i. e., that it is a strictly legal concept). Thus, the ruling of a jury that O. J. Simpson or Julius Rosenberg was \"guilty\" or \"not innocent\" is taken as an actual judgment by the whole society that they must act as if t... |
growing up my mother always told me to never start a pot of boiling water from hot tap water only cold. what's the logic behind that if any? | In the past, hot water was stored in a separate holding tank where it was kept heated. This water was not necessarily "safe" for drinking as the same water could be sitting for days at a time.
I've also heard that old lead pipes leach lead into hot water, but not into cold water. This explains why hot water would be fine for bathing, laundry, etc., but not for consumption. Can anyone verify this?
It's safe now (unless you live in a very old house), but in the past people had to be careful of these things. | [
"BULLET::::1. Boiling: Bringing water to its boiling point (about 100 °C or 212 F at sea level), is the oldest and most effective way since it eliminates most microbes causing intestine related diseases, but it cannot remove chemical toxins or impurities. For human health, complete sterilization of water is not req... |
how the eurozone is facing economic crisis yet the euro remains stronger than the dollar. | When an economy is doing badly, governments have two common answers: make their money worth less, so people from other countries start buying their stuff, and borrow money to spend, to make sure people in their own country have jobs. Governments can afford to borrow this money, *because* they are also devaluating their currency (when you borrow 100 Euro's, and the Euro becomes worth less, you end up with less debt, despite the fact it's still 100 Euro's).
What the Euro does, however, is take away from governments the possibility to devaluate a currency by giving this responsibility to the European Central Bank (ECB). The ECB hasn't been devaluating the currency, mostly because countries like Germany don't want it to (they're doing fine, so they *want* a strong currency).
So now investors are getting scared that countries that would usually handle their problems by devaluating their currency, cannot do this, so might end up not paying their debt. This is what is causing the trouble. | [
"Despite initial fears by speculators in early 2009 that the stress of such a large recession could lead to the break-up of the eurozone, the euro's position actually strengthened as the year progressed. Far from the poorer performing economies moving further away and becoming a default risk, bond yield spreads bet... |
as seen in movies, can you actually run and jump on top of and across moving train cars? | _URL_0_
of course you can. Its just hilariously dangerous and theres never a reason to actually do it | [
"Like its counterpart at Disneyland, it was not a thrill ride, but it was not slow and quiet like most dark rides. It made sudden turns and often the vehicle would move at full speed towards an obstacle, which would move out of the way at the last second. At one point the vehicles on different tracks would head dir... |
today in britain, the sky went really orange for a few hours - why? | I've found out what it was - orange-ish dust has been picked up by Hurricane Ophelia and spread across the atmosphere. | [
"A red sky – in the morning or evening, is a result of high pressure air in the atmosphere trapping particles of dust or soot. Air molecules scatter the shorter blue wavelengths of sunlight, but particles of dust, soot and other aerosols scatter the longer red wavelength of sunlight in a process called Rayleigh sca... |
How accurate is the portrayal of a sadistic slave owner whom would whip and beat his slaves for seemingly trivial stuff? | There is abundant evidence that maltreatment ([whipping](_URL_1_), and [worse](_URL_0_)) of slaves was not uncommon, [NSFW](_URL_3_). However, whenever you see a movie like *Django Unchained* for example, you have to realize that whatever their historical motivations, the movie makers have to tell a story in 2 hours, and that violence and brutality are entertainment ... so they will make sure to pack everything needed to tell their story into those two hours, which will likely include enough abuse to cover a much longer period of time. This isn't unique to portrayal of slavery; almost every war movie is the same in that they overemphasize the amount of time spent in combat vs just sitting around. That's where the entertainment is.
Given the economic value of slaves (great article [here](_URL_2_); see figure 4), it's very unlikely that slaves were constantly beaten. As another article put it (paraphrasing), "there was a rapid and constant background negotiation between owners and slaves as to the least amount of work that the slaves could do without getting whipped, and the amount of whipping that was needed to get the required work done". Again, paraphrased.
This is not in any way an apologia for the brutality of slavery in the United States.
| [
"Besides slaves' being vastly overworked, they suffered brandings, shootings, \"floggings,\" and even worse punishments. Flogging was a term often used to describe the average lashing or whipping a slave would receive for misbehaving. Many times a slave would also simply be put through \"wanton cruelties\" or unpro... |
I have heard that H. P. Lovecraft came to regret his racist views later in his life. Is this true? | It's hard to answer the question of how someone felt inside, but to the extent we can judge a man's feelings and thoughts based on his words, the answer is no, he didn't. Or, at least, he didn't state in a public way that he did.
S.T. Joshi, certainly one of Lovecraft's most devoted historians, biographers, and, it must be said, fans, admits in his biography *A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time* that not only were Lovecraft's racism, anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism, and snobbery atypically vitriolic for his own time, but that Lovecraft failed to keep step with the generality of America as it moved away from said vitriol about race and culture:
> "There is no denying the reality of Lovecraft's racism, nor can it merely be passed off as "typical of his time," for it appears that Lovecraft expressed his views more pronouncedly (although usually not for publication) than many others of his era. It is also foolish to deny that racism enters into his fiction."
Joshi goes on to recount an episode of correspondence between Lovecraft and a Mr. Charles D. Isaacson, in 1915, in which Lovecraft attacked Isaacson for espousing views of racial tolerance and for Isaacson's attacking the new film *Birth of a Nation* for stoking racial violence (Joshi, p. 97-99). Isaacson wrote back, publicly attacking Lovecraft for "[being] against tolerance of color, creed and equality, uphold[ing] race prejudice…"
Clearly, even in 1915, people's attitudes were shifting, but Lovecraft was doubling down on his viewpoints, even regressing on some. Indeed, his private writings, of which there are many thousands of letters over the course of his life, are virtually universally negative on non-WASP white ethnic groups such as German immigrants, Irish, and Catholics when he discusses them at all.
Part of this, it must be said (and Joshi points out), was almost certainly wrapped up in Lovecraft's Anglophilia and the 18th-century mannerisms and character which he affected for himself. As Lovecraft's friend Wilfred Branch Talman noted: it was only natural that a poseur of an 18th-Century English aristocrat should affect an attitude of racism and ethnic superiority, after all (Callaghan, p. 8). And because these attitudes were wrapped up very much in the way Lovecraft saw himself and the way he wanted to portray himself to the world -- and, indeed, in his writing, which is festooned with Anglicisms and archaisms -- he never really let go of them, even in later life.
Now, Joshi does argue that Lovecraft's viewpoints were more *ethnocentric* (or, to use a contemporary term, "nativist") than outright racist, as Lovecraft did sometimes express tolerance, or even praise, for groups he felt were "well assimilated." (Joshi, *A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft.* pp. 107-108). Indeed, Lovecraft married a Jewish woman, Sonia Greene, who had emigrated to the U.S. as a child from Russia. So he was, at least, willing to make exceptions to his rules when he felt the candidate was culturally assimilated enough -- or when it suited him. It is worth noting, perhaps, that the marriage did not last.
To sum up, there is nothing in Lovecraft's letters or in his works of fiction -- which consistently demonstrate racist tendencies, such as portraying African natives as pseudo-beast-men -- to show that his attitudes toward race tempered or that he came to regret them, despite the changes in general American attitudes going on around him. He died at only 46, so he may not have had time to reach the age of reflection. Or, perhaps he simply held the beliefs too strongly for various personal reasons.
**Sources**
* Callaghan, Gavin: *H.P. Lovecraft's Dark Arcadia: The Satire, Symbology and Contradiction* (2013)
* Joshi, S.T.: *A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft. (1996); *A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time.* (2001) | [
"Also noted is Houellebecq's exegesis of Lovecraft's racial preoccupations, which he traces to a 24-month period during which Lovecraft lived in the comparatively racially mixed New York City of the 1920s, where, Houellebecq says, Lovecraft learned to take \"racism back to its essential and most profound core: fear... |
how do antibiotic pills work? if there's an infection say in the mouth, how does the body know to send the medication back through the bloodstream to fight the infection? how does the body know that the medication is made to fight infection? | The others are correct, though I'll expand a bit. Antibiotics are absorbed (generally) through the small intestine where they enter the blood stream. As they permeate the blood, they are dispersed to all tissues in the body (except those that cannot cross the blood-brain barrier). So, if you have an infection in the mouth, the infected tissue there is receiving the same antibiotic exposure as the healthy tissue of the foot. (this is a generalization of course as different tissue types have different vascularity).
Two short things to add:
1. Many antibiotics are NOT effective against all bacteria. For example, penicillin works by disrupting the the thick peptidoglycan walls of Gram positive bacteria and therefore is only effective against those organisms (though there are exceptions such as Pasteurella multocida which is sensitive to penicillin but is a Gram negative organism). As most of the normal enteric flora of the gut are Gram negative, they are unaffected by penicillin use.
2. Not all antibiotics are designed to kill bacteria. Antibiotics come in two categories: bactericidal and bacteriostatic. Bactericidal antibiotics actually kill the organism when coming into contact with it (usually by disrupting its cell wall or inhibiting the activity of its ribosomes) while bacteriostatic antibiotics only prevent the organism from replicating, giving the host immune system a chance to not be overwhelmed and therefore do its job.
Source: I'm a medical microbiologist.
**TL;DR Antibiotics go (almost) everywhere there is blood and the body plays no role in their action.** | [
"There are many different routes of administration for antibiotic treatment. Antibiotics are usually taken by mouth. In more severe cases, particularly deep-seated systemic infections, antibiotics can be given intravenously or by injection. Where the site of infection is easily accessed, antibiotics may be given to... |
why is compulsive hoarding so common among baby boomers? | Baby Boomers are the children of those who went through the Great Depression where all supplies and food were hard to get and you had to save every scrap of everything that could potentially be useful. They were raised by people who developed these habits as a matter of survival and many passed on the tendencies to their children. But since the baby boomers were raised in an era of surplus and prosperity these tendencies tended to focus in on random things rather than that which could be useful. | [
"Economic instability is the primary justification for this phenomenon, as articulated in Kimberly Palmer's 2007 \"U.S. News & World Report\" article \"The New Parent Trap: More Boomers Help Adult Kids out Financially\". In particular, the term Boomeranger has been used to draw reference to those Gen-Xers and Gen-Y... |
how can the government involve itself with sports-related issues? | > What is illegal (by national laws that fall under FBI jurisdiction) about a company giving individuals money?
Bribery of a government official is illegal. You will note that state universities are controlled by the government and the employees are state employees. If you bribe a state employee that is a crime.
> Another incident that points to my question is where Roger Clemens had testified in front of Congress to speak on doping.
Congress has broad powers to demand testimony in order to investigate pretty much anything they want. It doesn't even need to be illegal; if Congress thinks they need to look into it they can call people to testify and they *must* comply. | [
"Political responsibility for sport is a devolved matter. As England has no parliament of her own, the United Kingdom Department of Culture, Media and Sport which is headed by a cabinet minister -though the Minister for Sport and Tourism is not in the cabinet- deals with English sport in addition to United Kingdom-... |
the differences between a nation, a state, and a nation-state. | A nation is a group of people with several factors in common like land inhabited, religion, ethnicity, language, or culture.
A state is the government over an area of land
A nation-state is a state that governs an area that primarily consists of one nation. | [
"A nation state (or nation-state) is a state in which the great majority shares the same culture and is conscious of it. The nation state is an ideal in which cultural boundaries match up with political ones. According to one definition, \"a nation state is a sovereign state of which most of its subjects are united... |
Where in the universe does time run faster than what we currently experience here on Earth? | Anywhere the gravitational field is weaker than on Earth will see time running faster. Empty space far from any objects will see the fastest time flow. | [
"Time flows more rapidly the higher one ascends in the worlds; Able spends short times in Aelfrice and Muspel and returns to Mythgarthr to discover weeks or months have passed; similarly, he spends decades in Skai and returns to find only a week has passed. It is implied that time stops completely in Niflheim and i... |
why are semi-trailer trucks so deadly in crashes? | The weight difference is the biggest factor. Cars, SUVs, and pickups weigh less than 10,000 pounds. The average loaded semi weighs 80,000 pounds. Cars are also built to transport their own weight and the weight of their passengers, meaning that their frames, bodies, and suspension parts are designed for lightweight service. Trucks must be designed to carry 80,000 pounds, and are therefore built much sturdier with heavier materials. | [
"According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Large Truck Crash Causation Study 7% of U.S. trucking accidents are caused by improper cargo securement or cargo shifts. Shifting cargo can cause the truck to destabilize or the load can fall off completel... |
In 223BCE how different would the different versions of Greek spoken across the Eurasia, have been from each other? Were they all mutually intelligible? | Koine Greek (from the Greek word for "common") was a variety of Greek spoken throughout the Greek world, including at the least the Greek Islands, Asia Minor, Egypt, and the Levant. The term "koine language" today refers to a lingua Franca used amongst speakers of related languages.
Koine Greek was based mostly on the Attic dialect, from the area surrounding Athens, but also included features from other dialects. I've read two different stories for its creation: it emerged in the seaport of Athens, or it emerged in Alexander's army. Either way it emerged as a way for speakers of different dialects to communicate with each other.
Setting aside the question of how different the dialects were, **in 223BC a person from one part of the Greek world would've been able to communicate with people from other parts of the Greek world.**
By definition, a group of dialects that undergo koineisation are different enough to encourage the creation of a koine, but have enough mutual intelligibility that the creation of a creole (which, to simplify, is a stripped-down hybrid of two languages) is not necessary. | [
"Although Greek was in common use around the Mediterranean and into Asia Minor even beyond Imperial borders, linguistic distribution in the eastern part of the Empire was complex. Now-extinct languages in Anatolia included Galatian (the form of Celtic introduced by invading Gauls in the 3rd century BC), Phrygian, P... |
Does people that have lost limbs have higher blood pressure? | Baroreceptors are specialized neurons which line the walls of mammalian blood vessels. As pressure in the vessels change, they expand and shrink. The baroreceptors are sensitive to that change and fire action potentials (thats science for nerve impulses) back to the hypothalamus (the part of your brain that regulates homeostasis).
From here the hypothalamus is able to send many types of chemical signals which can alter the blood pressure. For instance, it could release vasopressin to signal the kidneys to retain water and increase blood volume. Since the volume of water in the system increases, so too must volume.
If you wanted to reduce blood pressure, the hypothalamus might stop releasing vasopressin, or perhaps it might secrete epinephrine (adrenaline) to relax the smooth muscle of the arteries. This epinephrine would increase the volume of the circulatory system without increasing the volume, thereby reducing pressure.
All of this is happening every moment of your life. If some limbs were to be lost, the hypothalamus would simply reduce blood volume to maintain its baseline blood pressure.
Source: Am a biologist with a focus on human physiology and disease
Disclaimer: For a more complete understanding, we will need to cover several years of foundational coursework. Here is listed a simplified illustration of how these mechanisms work.
Edit: regarding the comment which states how 'perfect' our bodies are, consider the following. These processes are not thinking, or reasoning. In the event of trauma, the hypothalamus immediately releases epinephrine to speed the heart and to increase oxygen flow to the muscles. This in turn relaxes smooth muscle and rapidly decreases blood pressure, causing poor perfusion of blood to the end organs. This is the mechanism that causes people to go into circulatory shock after a trauma. Plenty of people die from circulatory shock as it causes things like hypoxia, cardiac and respiratory arrest. Our bodies are by no means perfect. Our biology can be beautiful and elegant in its ingenious mechanics, but it is often horribly imperfect. Just about everything in our bodies could be better designed if we could do it from the ground up. You can't fly, you can only process one type of atmosphere, you can't regrow limbs, you aren't radiation resistant, your digestion is terribly inefficient, your eyes are all wrong for use outside of water, and on and on. Beauty and interest does not imply perfection, that's all I am saying. | [
"Observational studies demonstrate that people who maintain arterial pressures at the low end of these pressure ranges have much better long-term cardiovascular health. There is an ongoing medical debate over what is the optimal level of blood pressure to target when using drugs to lower blood pressure with hyperte... |
Dry erase on wood? | As wood is very porous I don't think it's possible. Depending of course on the type of wood you work with. Most woods would need to be lacquered or heavily polished to work with a dry erase marker. | [
"Wood restoration can be an invasive process: to repair warping, for example, shallow cuts are often made in the surface of the wood to allow it to be pulled back into its original position and secured in place. Cracks can be filled with adhesive to both disguise them and prevent them from expanding, while holes or... |
Can dogs observe and recognize aging in adult humans? Do they differentiate between young adult, middle-aged and elderly humans? | I’m not sure about this specifically, but the most common way people find out whether animals and babies can differentiate between things is by using a habituation test.
A habituation test is an experimental procedure where you show images or objects to the subject over and over until they get habituated to it (like getting bored). The most common way to measure this habituation is by measuring how long they look at the object.
If you show a baby a picture of a cat thirty times in a row, they’re not going to stare at the thirtieth cat as long as they did the first one. But if you switch to a dog, they go right back to paying attention. That’s how we know that babies can tell the difference between some kinds of animals and objects.
If you wanted to objectively study whether dogs can tell how old a human is, this is probably the easiest way to do it. Show them pictures of older people until they stop paying attention, then switch to an infant. | [
"As with humans, advanced years often bring changes in a dog's ability to hear, see and move about easily. Skin condition, appetite and energy levels often degrade with geriatric age, and medical conditions such as cancer, renal failure, arthritis, dementia, and joint conditions, and other signs of old age may appe... |
When did it become common for Europeans outside Britain/Ireland to learn English? | Of interest would also be when the Irish started learning English... | [
"Before the arrival of the British, the official language for hundreds of years, and one of the educated elite had been Italian, but this was downgraded by the increased use of English. In 1934, English and Maltese were declared the sole official languages. That year only about 15% of the population could speak Ita... |
where did all the cereal prizes go? | Down some toddler's throat. Now we have stickers and website codes which are much more difficult to choke on and far less expensive to package. | [
"W.K. Kellogg was the first to introduce prizes in boxes of cereal beginning in 1906. The marketing strategy that he established has produced thousands of different cereal box prizes that have been distributed by the tens of billions. The first breakfast cereal prize was \"The Funny Jungleland Moving Pictures Book\... |
why do we have to pasteurize cow milk but not breast milk? | Milk is sterile when it comes out of the cow or human. But as soon as it touches anything it becomes contaminated with bacteria. Milk is also an amazing growth medium for bacteria, its impossible to keep the milk totally sterile and even a small amount of bacteria will very rapidly multiply.
What matters for the consumer of the milk is how long it will take those initial bacteria to multiply until the milk is no longer safe to drink, which is itself a matter of the type and quantity of bacteria that get into the milk.
If you're talking about a woman pumping breast milk and storing it in the fridge for a day or two, its fairly safe to assume that the equipment she's using is relatively clean and that the woman wasn't rolling around in her own feces moments before milking herself. Because of that, the initial quantity of bacteria in the milk is going to be low and there isn't going to be anything too bad in there. As long as the milk isn't being stored for more than a few days the risk it poses is negligible.
But neither of those things is safe to assume with a cow. And in your worst case scenario where the cow was rolling around in feces and milked using dirty equipment, the milk you get is going to be filled with large amounts of listeria and other pathogens. Which is ultimately why we pasteurize cow milk - its a simple, low cost method of completely mitigating against a serious health risk.
That being said, its entirely possible that you could find a dairy that follows extremely high standards of cleanliness selling unpasteurized milk and that milk will last just as long as your average woman's breast milk (and there are certainly small dairies out there that try to do just that). The problem you have in drinking milk like that is you're relying on everything with the dairy being perfect - which is something that you have absolutely no control over. And all it takes is no one noticing a cow shitting all over itself a few hours before getting milked for anyone drinking that milk to develop a serious illness. | [
"Proponents of raw milk (in the U.S.) advance two basic arguments for unpasteurized milk. They state that pasteurization destroys or damages some of the milk's nutrients, and that while pasteurization may kill dangerous bacteria, it also kills off good bacteria that raw milk supporters have stated to have health be... |
why is "district attorney" in the us often an elected and political position? | How do you suggest they get appointed, if not by election? Who decides what the test looks like? Who administers it for? Who decides what crimes will be focused on? Who decides what crimes won't be focused on?
Electing a person seems like the only reasonable way to answer all of these questions. | [
"\"District attorney\" and \"assistant district attorney\" are the most common titles for state prosecutors, and are used by several major jurisdictions within the United States, such as California, Delaware, Georgia, Massachusetts, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wiscon... |
Without ready access to sugar, what were popular desserts in early Colonial America? | Settlers in the area lacked traditional cane sugar, but they were not without sugar. The Northeast is full of many sugar maple trees that were used to create maple syrup, used by natives long before Europeans settled the area. Sap is harvested, boiled into syrup, and if you boil it some more you get a crystalline sugar that can be used as a substitute for cane sugar. Honey is another sugar substitute that was available from local bee populations. The history of collecting honey is ancient, and could be done the same in America as in Europe. Either of these options have a wide variety of potential uses in baking, or as a general sweetener for most dishes.
The Northeastern colonies are also good for growing a wide variety of plants useful for baking. Apples were quickly imported from Europe and used to make cider and pies. Pumpkins are another popular food item that were better for storing in the winter months. The innards of a pumpkin can be pureed into a semi-sweet sauce that may be used as pie filling or to flavor other baked goods like pumpkin bread. Grapes, strawberries, blackberries, pears, raspberries, cranberries, and mint can be grown in the Americas and used for an assortment of different baked goods as well. | [
"The first candy came to America in the early 18th century from Britain and France. Only a few of the early colonists were proficient in sugar work and sugary treats were generally only enjoyed by the very wealthy. Even the simplest form of candy – rock candy, made from crystallized sugar – was considered a luxury.... |
Are there any mammals with the same or similar vocal range/abilities as humans? | Dogs actually have pretty similar ranges as humans, from a deep bark to a high pitched wimper.
More interesting is vocal ability question... Both birds and (some) whales are known to be able to imitate human speech.
| [
"Human beings, along with Apes, are the only mammals that do not have high frequency (32 kHz) hearing. Humans have long cochleae, but the space devoted to each frequency range is quite large (2.5mm per octave), resulting in a comparatively reduced upper frequency limit. The human cochlea has approximately 2.5 turns... |
Does History only pertain to humans? | If considered with its technical and narrow definition, "history" refers to that part of the past that is documented with written records. One can have a history of volcanic eruptions - and not even consider their effect on people - but the use of the term "history" would technically imply "volcanic eruptions" that appear in written documents.
That said, the term history is often used generically for "the past." Given the nature of the question, I don't think we can include the mass extinction of the dinosaurs since there are no documents that can be brought to bear on that event. Stick with events that are within the period of recorded documents - whether or not those documents deal specifically with the effects of natural phenomenon on people. | [
"ii) Human history is a single unique event. Knowledge of the past therefore does not necessarily help one to know the future. \"“The evolution of life on earth, or of human society, is a unique historical process… Its description, however, is not a law, but only a singular historical statement.”\" \n",
"Mandel o... |
why did some animals in the same family become hyper aggressive like geese, whereas ducks are relatively benign? | I'm going to try an ELI15:
Sometimes a lot of behaviour is evolutionary. It's a bit of a generalization to say that geese are hyper aggressive and ducks are meek (although anyone who's been in Canada can tell you Canada geese have no fear). Realistically, there's no exact answer (as far as I know), but I can talk a bit about conflict in birds.
Here's the example I'll bring up between two very closely related birds: the blue heron and the great egret.
Blue herons and great egrets lay similarly sized nests. In herons, most of the chicks coexist alright. In egrets, however, the chicks will often (85%? of the time) kill one another (exemplifying **siblicide**). Parents typically won't interfere with this behaviour - I suppose this could be defined as aggression. In fact, the parenting style was seen as an explanation for the siblicide. On the other hand, heron chicks do not really kill one another that often, since they had a different parenting style (loosely speaking). In the vein of great science, Mock & Parker decided to test out cross fostering (that is, having herons raise egrets and egrets raise herons).
They found that, in short, when a heron parents egret chicks, they still fight. I'm not going to mention the mechanism that encourages the siblicide in egrets, but the long and short is that egret chicks are vicious and will continue to kill one another, often leaving one chick to grow to adulthood. That is, the siblicide is **obligate** behaviour. When egrets parented herons, the mechanism for siblicide is there (parenting), and siblicide that *wasn't* there previously developed in the chicks, with the largest chick killing the rest of the nest. So, the siblicide (aggression, I guess) was both "innate" behaviour (again, *very* loosely speaking) and "outside" behaviour encouraged (facilitated) by the parents.
**tl;dr**: even closely related species (birds, for example) can have wildly different behaviours. Aggression is not necessarily environmental. In the case of geese and ducks it's probably many factors. There is, as far as I know, no short answer.
some sources:
_URL_2_ (Mock & Parker on the herons/egrets)
more reading
_URL_3_
_URL_0_
Edit: more in depth about the experiment is here:
_URL_1_ | [
"Once they reach adulthood, due to their large size and often aggressive behavior, Canada geese are rarely preyed on, although prior injury may make them more vulnerable to natural predators. Beyond humans, adults can be taken by coyotes and grey wolves (\"Canis lupus\"). Avian predators that are known to kill adul... |
How much explosive would be needed to destroy the moon, and if we used the debris to make rings à la Saturn, how would this affect the tides? | The gravitational binding energy of a spherical object is close to (3/5) GM^2 /R - that's the energy you need to completely overcome gravity and blow the object apart. Plugging in the numbers for the moon gives you about 10^29 J. That's the equivalent to 2 x 10^19 tonnes of TNT. The largest nuclear bomb ever detonated was the Tsar Bomba, which was 50 megatons (equivalent to 5 x 10^7 tonnes of TNT). So you'd need close to 10^12 Tsar Bombas. That is, if each and every single person in the entire world owned one hundred million Tsar Bombas, then that would almost be enough to blow up the moon.
So... it takes a lot of energy.
As to what happens next, that depends on how strongly you blow it up. If you use too much energy, the moon would just completely blow apart and never reform. If you use too little energy, the moon will just reform. If you choose just the right amount of energy, the moon won't completely blow apart into space, but the Earth's tidal forces will just be strong enough to prevent it from reforming, and you could end up with a ring of particles.
Because this ring is basically axisymmetric, you'd not expect any significant tidal forces. | [
"The carbonaceous boulder that would have been captured by the mission (maximum 6 meter diameter, 20 tons) is too small to harm the Earth because it would burn up in the atmosphere. Redirecting the asteroid mass to a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon would ensure it could not hit Earth and also leave it in a... |
how does math describe nature so well ? | I disagree with most of the other posters. Math was NOT made to understand or represent nature. It is entirely separate. Mathematics is pure logic. There is nothing in nature we could find to contradict any mathematics, nor is there any possible universe where math could be different. Mathematics is the study of implications. If we know X then Y MUST also be true. There is nothing new we learn in terms of the world. Mathematics is usually understood as starting from a set of unprovable assumptions and then deriving what you can from it. Now the history of mathematics is filled with examples of us studying the type of problems we may see in our lives. How much material do I need to construct a fence around my field. How much stone do I need to build a pyramid. So a lot of the things we study are basically the abstractions of these type of problems, but there is nothing that necessarily makes that so.
Now Mathematics is used in science mostly since it is good at showing the implications of structure and our universe has structure. The link to the world is usually grounded in the things which are seen as explaining that structure. Mass and distance are what is important about how an object moves due to gravity. We then know since the world has structure that if we know mass and distance, then we must know the gravity force. It is the same type of things as before. We find the things in nature such that we know some things, then we also MUST know these other things. Math is good at that. In some sense, the world must be predictable and uniform to some extent to even allow things like humans to exist, so predictable and uniform basically means there is structure we can codify in math. | [
"Geometry (from the ; \"geo-\" \"earth\", \"-metron\" \"measurement\") is a branch of mathematics concerned with questions of shape, size, relative position of figures, and the properties of space. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is called a geometer.\n",
"It seems to be one of the fundamental ... |
"At near-light speed, we could travel to other star systems within a human lifetime, but when we arrived, everyone on earth would be long dead." At what speed does this scenario start to be a problem? How fast can we travel through space before years in the ship start to look like decades on earth? | It follow the formula for the Lorentz factor, which is 1/sqrt(1-v^(2)/c^(2)). At 86% the speed of light, you age one year for every two years on Earth, at 99% the speed of light you age one year for every seven years on Earth.
edit: I have to go now so stop asking me about warp drives! | [
"Since one might not travel faster than light, one might conclude that a human can never travel further from the Earth than 40 light-years if the traveler is active between the age of 20 and 60. A traveler would then never be able to reach more than the very few star systems which exist within the limit of 20–40 li... |
Whether a woman is fertilized after sex or not, where does the semen go? | Since sperm cells don't last very long at warm temperatures, the cell will undergo apoptosis (cell suicide.) | [
"The human reproductive system usually involves internal fertilization by sexual intercourse. In this process, the male inserts his penis into the female's vagina and ejaculates semen, which contains sperm. A small proportion of the sperm pass through the cervix into the uterus, and then into the Fallopian tubes fo... |
How could Lewis and Clark travel all the way out to Oregon when Louisiana Purchase only included as far as Montana? | One of the greatest hopes of the period was that it would be possible to find a waterway that was navigable from the Atlantic (or at least from the Gulf of Mexico) to the Pacific. [Lewis and Clark](_URL_0_) followed the Missouri through the Louisiana Purchase and then hoped that they could find the nearest navigable river - which they did, namely the Columbia.
In their journey, they explored and documented the greatest length of the Purchase, remaining in US-owned territory. There was always an understanding that if they reached the Pacific, they would leave the Purchase and cross land that was not properly belonging to the US. Because the Missouri River pointed the way, the logical path crossing to the west was at one of the sources of the Missouri.
The alternative of crossing the Great Basin (Nevada didn't exist at the time) and then to Alta California would have documented the Great Basin, but that was not part of the objective of seeing where the Missouri pointed. And then, while crossing Alta California would have been legally and/or politically possible, but they would have found an area that was under the control of Spain. Assuming they weren't met with hostility, they would have only found what was relatively well known. | [
"Once across the sand bars and turbulent water at the entrance to the river (later called the Columbia Bar) they sailed up the Columbia River several miles while exploring the river. Gray's find was a significant claim (besides the Lewis and Clark Expedition) put forth by the United States to claim possession of th... |
the situation in israël and palestina. | Please remember to search before posting. | [
"Morten Levin, who is Jewish, is also a critic of Israel, and was one of the initiators of a petition that NTNU boycott Israel because he meant that \"since 1948 the state of Israel has occupied Palestinian land and denied the Palestinians basic human rights\". Together with Ann Rudinow Sætnan (an American-born Jew... |
how do residential solar panels 'give back' to the grid? | > How much power could you actually be contributing?
Depends on a lot of factors: Where in the world is the house? Is it summer or winter (summers have more hours of sunshine)? Are there a lot of clouds?
A very good soar panel has a power of 16.22 W/ft^2 (175 W/m^2) *peak*. This means if *a lot* of sun shines on the panel, no clouds. Typically you will also lose some power during the conversion from the panel voltage to the grid (my estimate is 10-20% loss).
> Cost effective?
In my country (Germany), the government decided to make a law, where energy companies are *required* to buy solar power from people at a certain (quite high) rate. This means that you can calculate how much money you will make over the years: usually you will break even after about 15 years (you have to invest a lot of money up front, usually from a loan). After that there are at least 5 years where the installation gives you a real profit. Manufacturers give you a warranty for 20 years, so it might very well be that the panels last longer than those 20 years, this will mean even more profit.
Overall it is an okay long term investment, but only because the price of solar power is guaranteed by law. | [
"Under the CEC community solar plan, an individual or entity can buy one or more solar panels, thereby becoming the owner of the solar panel(s). The solar panels need not be physically located on the owner's property but can be installed somewhere else. The electricity each panel generates is fed into the electric ... |
How does H.265 compress video better than H.264? | The most simplistic explanation is that video encoding is always a trade-off between processing power versus file size. The more processing power you can throw at encoding/decoding, the smaller you can get the file size. As computers become more powerful, that can be leveraged to reduce the bandwidth of the file.
The H.265 standard has a bunch of features which take advantage of using more processing power. The wikipedia article _URL_0_ explains them. Here are some of the features the best I can explain them more clearly:
When a video is encoded, the whole frame isn't encoded at once, its divided into a grid, and changes from one frame to the next are predicted within subblocks. H.265 allows for larger blocks to be in this grid, and allows for the size of the blocks to adapt depending on where the motion is. For example, a video of ball being thrown against a static background would use small blocks, where as a camera panning against a scenic background may use large blocks. This also allows for the standard to make better use of parallel processing.
The algorithm to predict motion is being forced to CABAC, where as h.264 had the choice between CABAC and CALVC, the latter was less efficient.
The way video is encoded is having a reference frame every so oftened (ie a frame that is the actual picture), with many frames that are actually just predictions of what the video SHOULD be in-between. These frames are predicted by looking at the difference between reference frames. But it gets more complicated as there are frames that are predicted by only looking forward, others that are predicted by looking both directions, etc. The process of ordering these frames and the structure has been improved.
These are the only aspects that I feel qualified enough to speak on. There are other innovations that are important beyond compression in h.265. This includes the inclusion of support for resolutions beyond 1080p for the next gen of HDTVs, as well as furthering the support for SVC (scalable video coding), which are videos that can have multiple bitrates in a file. This is a huge innovation, because it means you can watch the same video without buffering as your processing power / connection speed changes. Rather than buffering the file if you can't load enough video to watch in real time, it simply drops the resolution / quality / frame rate of the video.
| [
"High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a video compression standard, designed as a successor to the widely used AVC (H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10). In comparison to AVC, HEVC offers from 25% to 50% better data compression at the same level of video quality, or substantially impro... |
Can a two dimensional object have mass? | Well, electrons and other elementary particles have no dimensions and have mass.
But yes, these are all in fact just mathematical constructs in attempt to describe what is happening. | [
"In dimension \"d\" = 3, this reduces to Newton's theorem that the potential energy of a small mass outside a much larger spherically symmetric mass distribution is the same as if all of the mass of the larger object were concentrated at its center.\n",
"The minimal number of static equilibria of homogeneous, con... |
What is the simplest venom used by an organism? | Im going to answer based on the assumption that you specifically want formation about venom, and not generally poisons.
Off hand most venoms I can think of are mixtures of agents. The primary agent is usually a short protein, more accurately described as a polypeptide of around 20-40 amino acids like iberiotoxin, or charibdotoxin.
There are probably others but the scorpion, spider and insect venoms I'm aware of are based on protein agents | [
"Venomous arthropods include spiders, which use fangs — part of their chelicerae — to inject venom; and centipedes, which use forcipules — modified legs — to deliver venom; along with scorpions and stinging insects, which inject venom with a sting.\n",
"The definition of venom by Fry et al. (see Definitions) rega... |
Was Hitler in any way, at any point, a Zionist? | Hi. This question was answered [here](_URL_0_).
The answer is totally and unequivocally no. Being Zionist means supporting the creation of a Jewish state, and Hitler never supported it. The Nazis at one point signed an agreement that deported Jews to Mandatory Palestine, signing the agreement with Zionist groups, but this was because the Nazis wanted Jews gone, not because they supported Zionism. Further deportations to the area were ruled out precisely because Zionism was not supported by the Nazis. The Nazis opposed further deportations, in short, because they **didn't want** a Jewish state. | [
"In 1941 and 1943, Bloch was interviewed by the Office of Strategic Services (a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency) to get information about Hitler's childhood. He said that Hitler's most striking feature was his love for his mother: While Hitler was not a mother's boy in the usual sense, I never witnes... |
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