question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
|---|---|---|
what is this vault everyone is talking about? did i miss something? | Dude recently moved in a house previously owned by drug dealers. Finds safe/vault in basement. Asked reddit how to open. Spawned a huge subreddit.
[/r/whatsinthisthing](_URL_0_) | [
"Inside the Vault is an American news magazine television show hosted by Cris Collinsworth that focuses on today’s American man. The show debuted online on February 3, 2011, and February 4, 2011 on WGN America. After its first season no plans were announced for a second season.\n",
"The treasure ends up not being... |
Why does it seem that revolutions break out in waves (eg. 2011, 1989, 1968, 1848)? | It has been shown to be directly related to spikes in food prices. People can tolerate a lot of bullshit, but when they are starving they might as well revolt: _URL_0_
| [
"There was a wave of revolutions in Europe, collectively known as the Revolutions of 1848. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history, but within a year, reactionary forces had regained control, and the revolutions collapsed.\n",
"The Revolutions of 1848 were a series of uncoordinated p... |
what causes people (recently highlighted young muslims) to become radicalized? | Well, to give you the ELI5 answer it would be education. There is a lack of education in the Middle East, which in turn affects the income of the average person. Eventually, when you're stuck in poverty and your government (Iraq), which is created by some other Western Democracy (The U.S.), does nothing, you tend to blame the U.S. because they created your government, so you create a group of like-minded individuals, such as the Muhajadeen, you fight off the government, and you choose to fight in the name of your God.
That's how I view it. | [
"According to the George-Soros-funded Open Society Institute, after the murder of Theo van Gogh in November 2004, Minister of Integration and Immigration Rita Verdonk commissioned an inquiry into the radicalisation of young Muslims. The conclusion was that many of them experience alienation, feeling disconnected wi... |
How long would it take, in SUBJECTIVE time, travelling at just below the speed of light (say, 299,000 km/s) to reach Alpha Centauri? | [Wolfram Alpha](_URL_0_) makes it really easy to calculate this stuff.
Go to that site and enter: relativistic time dilation at 299,000 km/s
You'll get a calculation page with another input box for moving time. Enter: 4 years
The calculation will come back and tell you that the subjective time is 0.2906 years, or 106 days. That's about three months.
If you're interested in learning the math instead of just reading the answer, any necessary equations and constants are included at the bottom of the page. | [
"The journey to Alpha Centauri B orbit would take about 100 years, at an average velocity of approximately 13,411 km/s (about 4.5% the speed of light) and another 4.39 years would be necessary for the data to reach Earth.\n",
"The fastest outward-bound spacecraft yet sent, Voyager 1, has covered 1/600 of a light-... |
What would happen if we put tons of radioactive waste on the Sun? | nope. 'a drop in the ocean' wouldn't even do it justice. | [
"For instance, over a timeframe of thousands of years, after the most active short half-life radioisotopes decayed, burying U.S. nuclear waste would increase the radioactivity in the top of rock and soil in the United States () by approximately 0.1 parts per million over the cumulative amount of natural radioisotop... |
Was there a Tsarist secret police? What was the transition from the Cheka to the KGB? How much continuity has there been throughout the history of Russian espionage services, in general? | Pushing the character limit here — I hope this answers most of your questions, but happy to clarify anything I've glossed over. Anyway, let's get into it...
#From Okhrana to Cheka
There was indeed a Tsarist secret police force — or rather, a series of them, starting with the [Oprichina](_URL_5_) of the 16th century and eventually evolving into the [Okhrana](_URL_14_) (formally, the Department for Defense of Public Security and Order), created after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by a proto-socialist militant in 1881. Part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Okhrana was tasked with monitoring and disrupting the growing assortment of left-wing revolutionary groups that had sprung up within Russia.
The Okhrana proved a dangerous foe for revolutionaries in Tsarist Russia: highly adept at the recruitment of agents-in-place and the infiltration of *agents provocateurs* into revolutionary groups, and a pioneer in the field of cryptography. The perennial fear of penetration by the secret police made revolutionaries deeply anxious and paranoid — with good reason, it turns out: well-placed Okhrana agents included Roman Malinovsky, leader of the Bolsheviks in the Duma and a key ally of Lenin; Georgy Gapon, the priest and populist ideologue who led the Bloody Sunday march in 1905; there have even been [longstanding \(though never definitively proven\) allegations](_URL_13_) that Stalin was an Okhrana informant.
As one of the most feared and despised components of the Tsarist apparatus of repression, the Okhrana was quickly abolished after the February 1917 revolution. After the Bolsheviks seized control in October 1917, the need for their own internal security force to defend the nascent revolutionary state was immediately apparent. In December, the All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage — better known by the abbreviation [Cheka](_URL_3_) — was established.
The Cheka is the direct ancestor of the KGB (and, by extension, most of the modern Russian intelligence services) — long after the Cheka name was abandoned in 1922, officers of the Soviet security services proudly called themselves '*chekists*', and, according to intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, "were paid their salaries not on the first but on the twentieth of the month ('Chekists' Day') in honor of the Cheka's birthday."
There was, initially and very deliberately, no continuity whatsoever between the Okhrana and Cheka. The founder and first chief of the Cheka, [Felix Dzerzhinsky](_URL_10_), was a longtime revolutionary and zealous Bolshevik who had spent many years in Tsarist prisons. The Cheka was to be the 'sword and shield' of the state (a symbolism that carried over into [the insignia of the KGB](_URL_8_) — and even into [that of the post-Soviet FSB](_URL_16_).) Chekists were ideological enforcers, not just professional intelligence officers.
There were some cases of former Tsarist personnel being brought into the fold, usually to provide specific technical expertise, but they are exception rather than rule. Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, who served under Tsar Nicholas II as First Deputy Minister of the Interior, overseeing the Okhrana, and as chief of the Special Corps of Gendarmes, became an unofficial advisor to Dzerzhinsky and his successor, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. Ivan Zybin, one of the Okhrana's most talented cryptanalysts, became a key figure in the Spetsotdel, a department of the Cheka created in 1921 as the Soviets' first cryptography and signals intelligence service.
But, lacking any institutional expertise in intelligence or counterintelligence, Dzerzhinsky and the first chekists had little choice but to learn from and mimic the tactics employed by the Okhrana. Again, per Andrew:
> Dmitri Gavrilovich Yevseyev, author of two of the Cheka's earliest operational manuals, *Basic Tenets of Intelligence* and *Brief Instructions for the Cheka on How to Conduct Intelligence*, based his writings on a detailed study of Okhrana tradecraft. Though the Cheka was "an organ for building the dictatorship of the proletariat," Yevseyev insisted—like Dzerzhinsky—that it must not hesitate to learn from the experience of "bourgeois" intelligence agencies.
A while ago I came across [a very interesting doctoral thesis](_URL_1_) which explores in detail the methodological/tactical continuity between the Okhrana and the Cheka — and how the Cheka and its successor services built on that foundation to develop their own complex doctrines of internal security, political policing and counterintelligence. [Christopher Andrew](_URL_17_), meanwhile, has done peerless work on Soviet foreign intelligence — a unique and challenging discipline which had not been a particular specialty of the Okhrana — beginning in 1920 with the INO (the Foreign Department of the Cheka) and eventually evolving into the First Chief Directorate of the KGB.
# From Cheka to KGB
The Cheka underwent a long series of reorganisations and rebrandings between 1920 and 1954, when the KGB was formed, but the core of the organisation and its missions remained more or less the same. Here's the chronology of names:
* Cheka (1917-22)
* GPU (State Political Directorate, 1922-23)
* OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate, 1923-34)
* GUGB (Main Directorate of State Security, 1934-41)
* NKGB (People's Commissariat for State Security, 1941)
* GUGB/NKVD (Main Directorate of State Security/People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, 1941-43)
* NKGB/SMERSH (People's Commissariat for State Security/'Death to Spies', 1943-46)
* MGB (Ministry of State Security, 1946-54) and KI (Committee of Information, 1947-51)
* KGB (Committee for State Security, 1954-1991)
Most of these reorganisations were simply down to fairly banal administrative reorganisations: the secret police function was repeatedly shuffled between ministries — sometimes it was independent, and given various ranks (Directorate, Main Directorate, etc.); for the most part it was under the supervision of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), later the Ministry for Internal Affairs; eventually it was made a standalone ministry/all-union committee.
Other changes were more substantive: SMERSH was a wartime reorganisation of the counterintelligence function, and KI was a decidedly unsuccessful experiment in unifying the foreign intelligence departments of the MGB and the Red Army's intelligence service, GRU. (That particular experiment was a kneejerk response to the news that the United States was unifying its foreign intelligence functions into the new CIA.)
These reorganisations often also reflected shifting power dynamics in the Politburo: the re-merger of MGB and MVD in 1953 was a power-play by Lavrentiy Beria, who sought to shore up his control over the Soviet security services; the splitting-up of regular and political police forces and the creation of the KGB in 1954 was a direct effort to undo that centralisation. But despite the dizzying array of acronyms (and a great deal of turmoil in personnel and leadership, particularly during the Stalinist purges), there's a direct line of evolution from Cheka all the way to KGB — and beyond.
#Post-Cold War
I wrote at some length about the post-Cold War evolution of the Soviet security services in [this thread](_URL_11_). The short version is that the KGB wasn't so much abolished as it was dismantled; its subordinate directorates were hived off and merged together to create the modern Russian security and intelligence services, particularly the SVR and FSB, with a great deal of continuity in terms of personnel, institutional philosophy and methodologies. (That breaking-up of the KGB now looks like it's in the process of being [substantively reversed](_URL_18_), however — but it'll be another 19 years or so before we can talk about that on /r/AskHistorians without incurring the wrath of the mods...)
# Sources for more information
## Tsarist Russia
* Jonathan W. Daly — *[Autocracy Under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866-1905](_URL_12_)*
* Jonathan W. Daly — *[The Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1906-1917](_URL_9_;)*
* Fredric S. Zuckerman — [*The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880-1917*](_URL_0_)
## Soviet Union
* Christopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokhin — *[The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB
](_URL_4_)*
* Christopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokhin — [*The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World*](_URL_2_)
* Jonathan Haslam — [*Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence*](_URL_19_)
* Amy Knight — *[The KGB: Police and Politics in the Soviet Union](_URL_6_)*
## Post-Soviet Russia
* Andrei Soldatov & Irina Borogan — *[The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB](_URL_7_)*
* Mark Galeotti — [*Putin's Hydra: Inside Russia's Intelligence Services*](_URL_15_)
| [
"In the Russian Empire, the secret police forces were the Third Section of the Imperial Chancery and then the Okhrana. After the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union established the OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MVD, and KGB.\n",
"There was a succession of Soviet secret police agencies over time. The first secret police afte... |
what is the difference between the european union and the european commission and the european community? | The European Union (EU) is a group of 25 countries that have signed various treaties giving them close political and economic ties.
The European Community is an older name for the same thing.
The European Commission is the executive governing body of the EU, it is responsible for proposing legislation that will affect each of the member countries. | [
"The European Commission is independent of national governments and its job is to represent and uphold the interests of the European Union as a whole. It drafts proposals for new European laws, which it presents to the European Parliament and the Council.\n",
"The European Commission derives from one of the five ... |
when we look at stars in the sky that are light years away, are the stars there at the moment we look, or are we looking at a years-old after image? | Simply, yes - we're seeing stars after the light has travelled all the way to us. Ten light years isn't that far (space-wise) so some of the stars we see have already died. And there's lots of stars that exist that we can't see yet, because the light hasn't reached us. | [
"The star's apparent magnitude, or how bright it appears from Earth's perspective, is 14. It is too dim to be seen with the naked eye, which typically can only see objects with a magnitude around 6 or less.\n",
"The star's apparent magnitude, or how bright it appears from Earth's perspective, is 14. It is too dim... |
Is their a psychological or physical benefit to tennis players who "moan", "groan" or scream every time they hit the ball? | Comming from a martial arts background where we scream at the end of some of our techniques, here's why we do it:
1) Psychological - anything that distracts or disrupts the other person's concentration is a benefit to you. It doesn't take much when two people are evenly matched. If you're outclassed, this isn't going to be the thing that puts you over the top.
2) Physical - Breathing out when tensing muscles for impact is the best situation. It means all your muscles are contracting at the same time, and your body is in unison on doing so. You don't have your chest expanding from intake, wile you're arm is trying to tense for control and strength. Again, this is going to add a 'smidge' to your technique. But when you're playing at the top of the sport with other people a 'smidge' is sometimes all it takes.
Both of these things are applicable to tennis, or any physical competition. We have other reasons we do it, but worrying about getting hit when you attack and other stuff doesn't apply to tennis.
As for why didn't they do it before? It was considered a more gentile sport. Think about when Andre Agassi wore denim shorts and how much that upset the tennis elite. There were unofficial rules of decorum that don't become official until someone decides to test the bounds.
I personally have no problem with it, but then I don't think sports should be played in silence.
Golf... I'm looking at you. | [
"Louise Deeley, a sports psychologist at Roehampton University, believes that grunting is part of the rhythm for tennis players: \"The timing of when they actually grunt helps them with the rhythm of how they're hitting and how they're pacing things\". She also believes that banning grunting isn't the solution: \"T... |
Did women of the renaissance have a renaissance? | In my very humble opinion, the question is ill posed.
The *renaissance* is not a renaissance of man. It refers to the rebirth of interest in concepts of Antiquity, and encompasses changes and new ideas in science, society and art. It is described as a radical change in the view of the world. Women certainly were affected by it. | [
"The influences upon the development of Renaissance men and women in the early 15th century are those that also affected Philosophy, Literature, Architecture, Theology, Science, Government, and other aspects of society. The following list presents a summary, dealt with more fully in the main articles that are cited... |
how are structures able to be built such as oil rigs or bridges where the foundations are hundreds of meters deep in water? | oops didn't realize oil rigs float | [
"The bridge has 49 piers of different heights, extending to a maximum water depth of 13.8 metres. Each pier rests upon concrete foundations cast on the excavated bed of the sea, inside a cofferdam. Some piers could be excavated and cast with the cofferdam empty of water, where the soil was sufficiently waterproof, ... |
why is it called "latin" america when spain/portugal are the biggest european influences to the region? | Spain, Portugal, France and Italy(and a few other minor countries) make up Latin Europe. The all speak romance languages which evolved from Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire. Since as you mentioned Spain and Portugal had the biggest influence on them they are subsequently known as the Latin America similar to their European counterpart. | [
"Latin America generally refers to those parts of the Americas of Spanish and Portuguese culture and language: Mexico, most of Central America, and South America. There is also an important Latin American cultural presence in the United States (such as in California, Florida, the Southwest, and cities such as New Y... |
why do people rub their faces when they are tired? | Do you mean [rubbing your face in general,](_URL_1_) or [rubbing around the eyes?](_URL_2_)
The second one is doing a multitude of things, such as clearing mucous from your eyes, moving the set mucous membranes, and very importantly, stimulating the [lacrimal gland](_URL_0_) to secrete its lubricant.
From Junqueira's Basic Histology:
> The lacrimal glands produce fluid continuously for the tear film that moistens and lubricates the cornea and conjunctiva and supplies O2 to the corneal epithelial cells. Tear fluid also contains various metabolites, electrolytes, and proteins of innate immunity such as lysozyme. The main lacrimal glands are located in the upper temporal portion of the orbit and have several lobes that drain through individual excretory ducts into the superior fornix, the conjunctiva-lined recess between the eyelids and the eye.
If you're just playing with your face, I don't really know what you're doing.
Just realized which Subreddit I'm in, so ETA... **ELI5: You rub it to make it wet.** | [
"Dry eyes can be exacerbated by smoky environments, dust and air conditioning and by our natural tendency to reduce our blink rate when concentrating. Purposefully blinking, especially during computer use and resting tired eyes are basic steps that can be taken to minimise discomfort. Rubbing one's eyes can irritat... |
why don't television shows and movies show male genetalia as much as they do female genetalia? [nsfw] | You don't see pussies, you don't see dick.
You'll see both topless, and the ass of both. | [
"The unusually strong female presence in a series about a boy—all major characters except Steven and Greg are female—is intentional according to Sugar, who intended to \"tear down and play with the semiotics of gender in cartoons for children\"; she considered it absurd that shows for boys should be fundamentally d... |
Can the effect of semantic satiation occur in things other than words? | Maybe this is too far off topic, but it's reminiscent of the way we think about cliches and colloquialisms. If you hear a phrase repeated to you throughout your lifetime, you may stop thinking consciously about the literal meaning of the words while still understanding the implication of the phrase. | [
"The characteristic of orthographic satiation as opposed to semantic satiation is that meaning remains intact. It was suggested that this is different from semantic satiation and from the stimulus familiarization effect because orthographic satiation occurs after the perceivers have access to lexical meaning.\n",
... |
why don't women ever have "butt-chins"? | Women do have chin clefts. I'm not sure why you think they don't. It happens.
[Here is incredibly famous actress Sandra Bullock for one such example.](_URL_0_)
You can Google Image Search "Woman Chin Cleft" to see plenty more examples. It's usually not as prominent on women as it is on men, but it definitely exists. | [
"In humans, females generally have more round and voluptuous buttocks, caused by estrogen that encourages the body to store fat in the buttocks, hips, and thighs. Testosterone discourages fat storage in these areas. The buttocks in human females thus contain more adipose tissue than in males, especially after puber... |
why did people use to pickle vegetables to preserve them? | Because if you remove the oxygen from something and drop the pH below 4 or so nothing dangerous can grow. Pickling is the process of growing specific bacteria that consume oxygen and lower the pH. Yes these bacteria can survive, but they are safe to consume. Other bacteria that are dangerous can survive, but they can't grow, and thus can't become dangerous if not already so.
So the benefit of pickling is you can take food, put it in a jar that you rinsed the dirt out of and put a top on it to keep the bugs out. You only need to do a moderate job at sealing it, and you have no requirements to sterilize it. The food will keep for years in this condition. Not even a fire is needed to prepare the food. No fancy canning equipment is required either. | [
"Historically, pickling was an affordable and practical method of preserving lemons for use long after their season and far away from where they are grown. Early 19th-century English, American, and (in translation) Indian cookbooks give recipes for lemon pickle and mention its use in sauces for salmon, veal, etc.; ... |
why can't helicopters deposit large oxygen bottles strategically on mt. everest or pick up people in trouble by harness? | The air pressure at the top of Mt Everest (29,000ft) is only about 1/3 as much as at sea level so your helicopter can only generate 1/3 of the lift. In addition it's cold so you risk ice forming on the rotors, fuel and hydraulics freezing and finally the weather isn't always very nice. | [
"Helicopters do fly further, and higher, up to Everest Base Camp, but only for picking up exhausted or injured mountaineers or dropping critical supplies. Without altitude acclimatization, Syangboche is the highest point it is advisable to reach by aircraft. It is not uncommon for people visiting Syangboche to be o... |
gear mechanics? | To ensure proper tooth mating, your "diametral pitch" on both gears has to match. Read [this](_URL_0_) for a technical brief if you want to know more. | [
"Gear works on numerical analysis, computer graphics, and software development. He is known for the development of BDF methods (originally introduced by the chemists Charles Francis Curtiss and Joseph Oakland Hirschfelder in 1952), a multi-step method for solving stiff systems of differential equations. Gear first ... |
why can a baby scream endlessly for hours on end while an adult loses their voice after a short period? | It is because babys use the full potential of their lungs - kind of like opera singers. That way they don't Stress their vocal cords that much. We as adults don't do that anymore, our breathing is much more shallow, so we have to use our muscles as a compensation. And that is exhausting and you lose your voice.
Source: i watched a documentary about it and thats what i remember... | [
"Diana König, journalist and broadcasting author, writes: “If the scream of babies is their first communication method, then the scream of adults is a recession from communication. By screaming, in the opposite of calling, the voice becomes overloaded and over-amplified, and it loses its control, its fundamental so... |
What would happen to a small piece of neutron star matter if you were able to remove it from the star and place it alone in space? | The star matter stays so dense due to the immense gravity. If you plucked a chunk out and placed it into space, I bet it would explode rather violently. I'm no scientist, just dig physics, so don't take my word for gospel... | [
"If such a system emits signals that can be directly traced back to the compact object, it cannot be a black hole. The absence of such a signal does, however, not exclude the possibility that the compact object is a neutron star. By studying the companion star it is often possible to obtain the orbital parameters o... |
how does the lever, one of 6 simple machines, work? | A first class lever trades range of motion for force, second and third class levers the opposite. | [
"A lever ( or ) is a simple machine consisting of a beam or rigid rod pivoted at a fixed hinge, or fulcrum. A lever is a rigid body capable of rotating on a point on itself. On the basis of the location of fulcrum, load and effort, the lever is divided into three types. It is one of the six simple machines identifi... |
History teachers of reddit, I have a question... | It depends very much on the class. Mostly I TA sections for large (500+) survey lectures (I'm scheduled to teach my second class as instructor this summer - yay!); I don't know if you have those in Europe. They usually fill a GER, and that means you get a spread of students: Freshmen who never had a class before, seniors who just realized they need a GER to finish, and then some students who are genuinely interested.
I've TAed all of our World History courses (11000 BC-Present) and Western Civ courses (1000 AD-Present), and a lot of Greek Myth, so more often than not I'm working with material I'm not too familiar with (I'm pretty good with Myth - WW2 not so much), which is actually really fun. The assigned primary sources are usually straight forward, and when things go well I'm there not really to be too active - ideally the students would just sit in a room for an hour and discuss the texts themselves, but reality, right? - I talk the students through the assigned texts (by which I make them talk me through them) and show (again, get them to show me) how the assigned texts are related.
If the students have done the reading and are willing to participate, it's really fun. Engaging with the students is cool, seeing learning accomplished is cool. As a matter of fact, my favorites are C students who want to do better. As don't need me, and other students just aren't trying. Even when students completely misunderstand a text (and incredibly often students read a text and take *the exact opposite* of the intended meaning from it), walking them through the argument of the text and helping them understand what's going on in it is rewarding.
On the other hand, sometimes groups of students come without having read a damn thing, and it becomes habitual. Total refusal to engage with the course. Those sections are just torture. They wreck my self esteem, they eat of tons of energy as I try to figure out how I am going do class next time, they basically make me hate life. Is this happening because I'm a bad teacher? What can I do to fix it? Myth is the worst. I go into Myth sections wanting to talk about psychoanalysis or sexual politics or experiences of war or the hero cycle or all kinds of things that require the students to have read the texts, and I find out they just want me to tell them the stories. Sigh.
These aren't isolated students - you get good and bad students in almost every class.
Sometimes the whole class picks up an attitude, both good and bad. Getting a section go bad on you is just the worst. I remember one 8AM section I had where I absolutely could not convince the students to read anything. One morning I just gave up and straight up asked them what I could do to make them participate, and one kid in the back said "bring us coffee." I'm not buying 30 students coffee, so I took them to a coffee shop next time. No improvement. Someone in their eval of my teaching that term wrote "LegalAction is too hands-on. He should just let us fail." Worst feeling ever.
I'm friendly with several of my old students, and many of them take multiple classes from me. That's pretty cool (and good for getting a section on your side - "Now, I know that quiz schedule looks scary, but Jessica was in my class last year. It wasn't so bad was it?" "No, it's really not." A little manipulative, because Jessica is never going to say to my class in front of me "It was hell," but it keeps people from complaining).
Sorry I can't help you with the British system admission requirements. | [
"The History Teacher is a quarterly academic journal concerned with the teaching of history in schools, colleges, and universities. It began in 1940 at the History Department at the University of Notre Dame as the Quarterly Bulletin of the Teachers' History Club. Nuns attending the graduate history program in the s... |
why do some sound systems not hurt your ears at high volume levels? | 100% deaf here, and the loudest volumes possible do not hurt my ears but they hurt my eyes, and makes the hair inside my ears itchy.
Like putting head next to speaker. | [
"Extremely high-power sound waves can disrupt or destroy the eardrums of a target and cause severe pain or disorientation. This is usually sufficient to incapacitate a person. Less powerful sound waves can cause humans to experience nausea or discomfort. The use of these frequencies to incapacitate persons has occu... |
What would William Shakespeare's (~1564 - 1616) education have entailed? | Stand back, finally an r/askhistorians question I am qualified to answer!
Shakespeare is often depicted as uneducated, but we have to understand what that means in context. Many literary figures of the day were Oxford or Cambridge graduates or drop-outs, and so it is tempting to depict Shakespeare as a simple country rube by comparison. Some of his fellow writers actually did so. The first mention of Shakespeare in print as a playwright is from Robert Greene (MA from Oxford *and* Cambridge), who wrote of Shakespeare as "an upstart Crow" who thinks he can compete with properly (by Greene's standard) educated writers. Perhaps from these attitudes grew the popular image that persisted for many years of Shakespeare as an "untutored genius". Shakespeare authorship conspiracy theories take this further and insist that someone of his education *could not* have written the Shakespeare plays, which is certainly inaccurate.
The problem is when we hear "grammar school" and try to compare Shakespeare's education with the grammar schools of today. We don't know anything about Shakespeare's specific education, but we know quite a bit about the school he, as a child of his social rank, certainly attended, and the schools in England of the time. The curriculum was far more rigorous than today's grammar schools. We know the names of the headmasters at the King's New School when Shakespeare would have attended, and we know they were both Oxford graduates. His education would have included reading, grammar, and writing in English and Latin, including exposure to Cicero, Ovid, and other classical authors. Shakespeare scholar James Shaprio writes: "Scholars have exhaustively reconstructed the curriculum in Elizabethan grammar schools and have shown that what Shakespeare...would have learned there...was roughly equivalent to a university degree today, with a better facility in Latin than that of a typical classics major." (p. 276)
Sources:
* Ben Shapiro, *Contested Will*, 2010, p. 273-276
* Ian Wilson, *Shakespeare: The Evidence*, 1993, p. 40-42 | [
"Shakespeare was educated at Radley College, Oxfordshire, taking A-levels in English, History, and History of Art; and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1984 to read Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. He gained a MPhil degree from King's College, Cambridge, in 1991.\n",
"A close analysis of Shakes... |
Are the number of biological discoveries increasing or decreasing? | Even if you only categorize biological discoveries as finding new species, there is so much in the ocean, and still some in jungles we have likely not discovered yet.
However, to classify biological discoveries as finding new species would be like classifying physical discoveries as finding new elements. There is so much incredible research going on in protein function, cell structure, evolution theory, neuroscience, computational biology, and vastly many more areas that is far more exciting (in my opinion) than trying to classify species.
In short, we have not come even a tiny bit close at all to discovering all biology. | [
"The EUR reported by the 2000 USGS survey of has been criticized for assuming a discovery trend over the next twenty years that would reverse the observed trend of the past 40 years. Their 95% confidence EUR of assumed that discovery levels would stay steady, despite the fact that new-field discovery rates have dec... |
What happens to the umbilical cord when twins, triplets, etc. are formed? | It depends on what kind of twin it is. With fraternal (dizygotic) twins, each fertilized egg produces its own placenta (and umbilical cord), and thus each twin is completely independent of the other. With identical (monozygotic) twins, it depends on the stage at which the twins separated. If they separated very early on, they would each produce a placenta and cord, similar to dizygotic twins. If they separate at a later stage, they may [share a placenta, but still have independent umbilical cords](_URL_1_) - basically, instead of one umbilical cord coming off the placenta [there will be two](_URL_0_). | [
"In placental mammals, the umbilical cord (also called the navel string, birth cord or funiculus umbilicalis) is a conduit between the developing embryo or fetus and the placenta. During prenatal development, the umbilical cord is physiologically and genetically part of the fetus and (in humans) normally contains t... |
if regular sun exposure increases your chance of skin cancer, why do people in warmer states generally have lower rates of skin cancer? | Those statistics don't take into account racial distributions in the statistics. People with increased skin pigmentation have lower rates of skin cancer.
Basically, the whiter the state, the higher the incidence of skin cancer. | [
"Greater than 90% of cases are caused by exposure to ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. This exposure increases the risk of all three main types of skin cancer. Exposure has increased partly due to a thinner ozone layer. Tanning beds are becoming another common source of ultraviolet radiation. For melanomas and ba... |
What makes metals like iron melt when exposed to very high tenperature? | Temperature is a representation of the kinetic energy within the molecules of a given material. In other words, temperature is a way for us to quantify how fast the molecules in an object are travelling - longitudinally (side to side), rotationally and vibrationally.
When a metal like Iron absorbs a lot of heat, the kinetic energy stored in the molecules becomes stronger than the chemical bonds keeping them together - they basically shake themselves loose. As the molecules break down the links between themselves, they become softer, until they become liquids or even gases. | [
"Metals are heat resistant materials, marking metals requires high-density laser irradiation. Basically, the average laser power leads to melting and the peak power causes evaporation of the material .\n",
"This strengthening occurs because of dislocation movements and dislocation generation within the crystal st... |
How was stone transported all the way from Egypt to Rome? | The Parthenon is in Athens, not Rome. The Pantheon, built by Marcus Agrippa is in fact built of granite, although I don't know whether it's Egyptian stone or not, though I have no reason to doubt it (there were major granite quarries in Egypt that supplied the city). People in antiquity were perfectly capable of transporting stone by boat, the same way they transported everything else. The marble trade, for example, was one of the more lucrative trades in the Mediterranean, especially in imported stone from Paros, Naxos, and Mount Pentelicus in Attica. Between 10, B.C. and 367, A.D. the Romans brought to the city some seven Egyptian obelisks, all of which still stand in the city. Transporting some granite presented no difficulty | [
"Egyptian paper, made from papyrus, and pottery were mass-produced and exported throughout the Mediterranean basin. The wheel, however, did not arrive until foreign invaders introduced the chariot. They developed Mediterranean maritime technology including ships and lighthouses. Early construction techniques utiliz... |
What would be the best method for us to use if we wanted to send and receive information across vast interstellar distances? | I don't know about the 'maser' wonderfuldog mentioned, so it's worth looking into that. I also don't know about this talk on Cosmos about the Arecibo Observatory. Last time I checked, there really wasn't any feasible way to transmit data over interstellar distances - the power required to overcome the inverse-square law when it comes to communicating to other star systems with current technology is absolutely mind-boggling, and practically insurmountable. Probably we would have to rely on good old space-ship communication; much slower than the speed of light.
That being said, it's been a few years since I've looked to see how things are going, so there could be something with that observatory or some other new technology. But my 'hunch' is that neither option is too realistic (so considering this is askscience, feel free to ignore that hunch as it should be ignored).
A laser would not reach too far. My post [here](_URL_0_) details an estimate of the strength of a standard laser reaching Mars. The area of the laser, which would start off at a few square millimeters, expands to 1.3 x 10^11 square kilometers by the time it reaches Mars, something extremely close relatively speaking. By the time this laser reached even the closest star at 4.2 light years distance, the beam would have expanded to be about 79 billion kilometers across. This would give a beam 'area' of about 2 x 10^22 square kilometers - or enough that you would get (roughly) 1 photon from the original laser occupying every million square kilometers of the final laser beam at this star, per second. That's already so far beyond un-detectable that it's silly, and that's just the closest star.
Specialized lasers could of course greatly improve power outage and cut down on this expansion rate quite a lot - but unless technology is improved tremendously, the inverse square law will still overpower any linear increase in laser technology quite fast. | [
"In a sequel, ironically, it is stated that the development of the Bistromathic Drive is to allow people to cross vast interstellar distances quickly \"without all that dangerous mucking about with Improbability Factors\".\n",
"promises instantaneous communication across interstellar distances. This would allow E... |
What happened in America during the English Cromwellian period, and how much did the influence of parliamentarians influence the nascent "American" ideology?
| During the Cromwellian period we don't see a King James, James I was the king before Charles I, (the start of the Cromwellian) and Charles II whose directly after the Cromwellian, James II is after him.
However we see a large migration of Puritans in this period, Cromwell himself was getting ready to leave directly before Charles' I attempted to arrest Members of Parliament. New England colonies then became much more puritanical, and colonies were often either Catholic or Protestant with resentment in between, many of these were immigrants throughout the Thirty Year War in Europe, or Catholics and Puritans moving from England and Scotland due to increased hostilities between them.
I'm not especially sure on the effects in America as I studied the English Civil War, rather than America in this period | [
"As a result, the English Parliamentarians or Cromwellians (after Oliver Cromwell) were generally hostile to Scottish Presbyterians after they re-conquered Ireland from the Catholic Confederates in 1649–53. The main beneficiaries of the postwar Cromwellian settlement were English Protestants like Sir Charles Coote,... |
Is 'staying up late' a new habit since the advent of the electric light, or have humans always been night owls? | The evidence from medieval Latin Europe is mixed. While we can trace adaptations to the shorter winter days even at the institutional, official level, it's clear there was plenty going on in the dark.
I'd like to direct your attention to the wonderful discussions in this thread by me, /u/mikedash, /u/Limond, and /u/alriclofgar (truly, the whole thread is worth reading):
* [What would an English serf do to occupy his time during the long dark evenings and nights of fall and winter?] (_URL_0_) | [
"Early research into circadian rhythms suggested that most people preferred a day closer to 25–26 hours when isolated from external stimuli like daylight and timekeeping. However, this research was faulty because it failed to shield the participants from artificial light. Although subjects were shielded from time c... |
Did the Romans have a sign laguage for deaf people? | You ask for Rome, I answer with Greek (but perhaps it will be a little bit helpful).
So the Greek word for deaf - κωφός (kophos) - also means mute and unintelligent. In an oral culture where literacy rates are low, hearing, speaking, and intelligence are tightly associated. There aren't very many people who are explicitly described as being deaf, but there are a few. For example, Herodotus talks about one of the sons of the king Croesus:
> ἦσαν δὲ τῷ Κροίσῳ δύο παῖδες, τῶν οὕτερος μὲν διέφθαρτο, ἦν γὰρ δὴ κωφός, ὁ δὲ ἕτερος...
> For Croesus had two sons, one of whom was destroyed, for he was deaf, but the other...
That's a pretty emphatic verb and later on when the king is explaining some of the things he has done to the not deaf son, he says:
> εἷς γὰρ μοι μοῦνος τυγχάνεις ἐὼν παῖς: τὸν γὰρ δὴ ἕτερον διεφθαρμένον τὴν ἀκοὴν οὐκ εἶναί μοι λογίζομαι.
> You are my one and only son: for I do not consider the other whose hearing is destroyed to be mine.
Which is... pretty harsh. Maybe a little considerable since it would probably be difficulty to be a deaf king at this time, but it shows you a little bit about how sever the ancients saw this disability as (good news for anonymous Lydian prince though, he recovers his ability to speak the day his father dies).
Now this is pretty much our only explicit source on deafness in ancient Greece and while some scholars have argued for a sign language at this period, there just isn't enough evidence to say either way. Certainly it was not a widespread or standardized phenomenon, but it is possible that there were some ad hoc sign language systems used on a local scale.
To turn to another piece of evidence - this time a Greek language source from the Roman empire - there is an evidence for some kind of signing system in the gospel of Luke. When Gabriel makes Zechariah mute (Luke 1:20), the word used is again kophos and is described in a way that indicates he is both deaf and mute. When Elizabeth tells her neighbors that she's going to name her baby John, they go to check with dad. The Greek uses the verb ἐνένευον which means to nod, Zechariah gets the message that they're asking him what to call the baby and asks for a tablet to write it down on.
While it's a lot of work for one little word to do, a number of scholars have taken this to mean that there was some kind of rudimentary sign language. Some have taken it to mean that there was a developed system, but it's more likely that this was a more localized phenomenon. You see similar descriptions of communications by gesture or nod when Greeks/Romans run into peoples with whom they share no mutual language. | [
"Prior to the 1860s, the American hearing community viewed manualism, sign language, as an art, and naturally beautiful. They also thought of deaf people who signed as being like the Romans because of the pantomimes that are a part of the language.\n",
"An early reference to gestures used by deaf people for commu... |
why do some analog watches contain quartz/rubies/other gems? | Synthetic rubies are used to mate moving parts to prevent metal-on-metal contact and wear. The reduced friction created by the rubies' hardness increases the lifespan of the tiny metal parts.
Quartz is used in most modern electronic movements as a way of keeping time because it vibrates at a very precise frequency when exposed to current. | [
"Watches of any quality will be jeweled. A jewel in a mechanical watch is a small, shaped piece of a hard mineral. Ruby and sapphire are most common. Diamond, garnet, and glass are also seen. Starting in the early 20th century, synthetic jewels were almost universally used. Before that time, low grade natural jewel... |
If it's true that the brain alone uses 25-30% of our calorie intake? How do they even measure that? And do smarter people or people who think more actively in general burn more? | > 25-30% of our total calorie intake for the brain seems like a lot
The typical estimate is that your brain uses about 300-400Kcal per day (typically around the upper end) which is about 18-20% of an average height man's daily calorie intake. Yet the brain is only about 2% of your body weight. It is often erroneously cited that the brain requires these calories in the form of glucose and in turn this is used as justification that you should consume at least 100g of carbohydrates per day (as there are 4Kcal per g of carbohydrate).
> How is that even measured
Flux in oxygen consumption (masks over people's faces), changes in neural blood flow and pressure have been used to estimate how much more calorie burning is being done while thinking hard. Today Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRI) can be used to directly measure oxygen flow/consumption in the brain from there you can directly calculate the amount of respiration and calorie consumption.
> Do thinkers and dreamers burn more calories via the brain than a "stupid mindless person"?
It turns out that the brain's energy consumption is somewhat constant irrespective of the cognitive load. To my understanding it is changes in the neuron firing patterns and connectivity that represent changes in thinking. It is not simply that increased thinking increase the amount of neuron firing across the board, however this is not my field and perhaps someone with deeper expertise can fill in more details there.
> Again how is that even measured if research is done on it?
To do the experiment about the effects of thinking hard you have someone lie at rest in the MRI machine to get baseline data and then you get them to solve hard problems (often arithmetic) while still in the MRI machine.
> On a brain to calorie% ratio, what animals are in the top with us humans?
To my understanding energy consumption per neuron is not that much different for most animals. What is usually seen as an important measure is the brain-to-body-mass ratio. Humans are nowhere near the top here. Ants can have 15% of their body mass in their brains. Animals which are similar to humans (ratios within the same order of magnitude) are small rodents, small birds, many primates. Animals towards the bottom are things like hippos and whales where there brain might be less than a 2000th of their total body weight.
> What parts of the brain functions spends the most energy?
I don't know this but from the info above it seems unlikely specific bits of the brain use much more than other bits. I hope someone can infill some more information here
Citations:
_URL_1_
_URL_2_
_URL_0_
_URL_3_ | [
"A number of theories in evolutionary psychology that are hinged on the assumption that sheer number of calories constitute the only important bottleneck in nutrition are challenged by research on hidden hunger, types of malnutrition in which deficits of specific essential micronutrients cause diseases or even deat... |
Am I really looking at individual atoms here? | Yes, it is an image reconstructed from [scanning tunnelling microscopy](_URL_0_). | [
"An atom is the smallest constituent unit of ordinary matter that has the properties of a chemical element. Every solid, liquid, gas, and plasma is composed of neutral or ionized atoms. Atoms are extremely small; typical sizes are around 100 picometers (, a ten-millionth of a millimeter, or 1/254,000,000 of an inch... |
Can historians help explain the truth behind African Americans being Israelites and Africans being Hamites? | I haven't seen the meme, but the argument seems similar to the argument that was made in early US history when it came to defending slavery.
When the abolitionist movement really began building up in the states, various ministers went to the Bible in order to show that slavery was not just unChristian, but also was not Biblical.
In response, those supporting slavery also went to the Bible, and what they came up with as a defense revolves around the Curse of Ham, or Noah's Curse. Stephen Haynes wrote a great article on this subject awhile back, called Original Dishonor.
So a bit of back of background. Noah's curse appears in Genesis 9:20-29. This story happens post flood, and also is somewhat of an origin story of wine. Noah makes wine for the first time, and gets drunk. He passes out naked in his tent. Ham, who is said to be the father of Canaan, finds Noah like this, and tells his brothers Shem and Japheth. So Shem and Japheth take a blanket, or some garment, and walking into the tent backwards, places it on their naked father. Noah later wakes up, and the text says that he saw what Ham did to him, and curses Canaan. That curse is that Canaan will be the servant of both Shem and Japheth.
Its a fascinating story, because the Hebrew isn't quite clear on what Ham did to his father, and scholars have long speculated. It is likely that whatever was done to Noah was left out of the final text, and we just get a hint of it. Some speculate that maybe Ham castrated Noah, or performed some lewd sexual act on him. We don't know, but whatever it was, it angered Noah, and there is the curse.
So how does this story relate to slavery, and how was it used in defense of slavery? That is a wild road. But keep the name Ham present, as it is where Hamites comes from.
Now, the curse of Canaan, or Curse of Ham, was the primary Biblical justification for slavery in the south. Religious tracts from that time don't really delve into what Ham's crime was, but they make it clear that whatever it was, it was worthy of eternal punishment. What their arguments also make clear is that idea that the descendent of Ham, Hamites, were Africans.
So, for those southerners, slavery of Africans was justifiable because of Noah's curse. The descendants of Ham, Africans, were bound by eternal servitude, or slavery, as the Bible never states that the curse is ever broken.
Why they chose the curse of Ham as defense, I have no idea. If one wanted to argue for slavery, there seems to be a lot easier passages to use, but that was their primary justification. And it is where we get the association of Hamites with Africans.
Now, for African Americans being Israelites. This is a much newer idea, and is associated with Black Hebrew Israelites. Now, it needs to be mentioned that for the most part, Jews don't recognize them as part of the faith, or being Israelites.
So this view really begins in the late 19th century. It somewhat formalized in 1886 when Frank Cherry founded the Church of the Living God. Not saying that Cherry was the originator of the idea, but it appears he started the first church. The idea was somewhat of an offshoot a traditional view of Black Christians who, from a spiritual standpoint, identified with the Israelites. This, in the late 19th century, transformed to some Black Christians going one step further, and claiming to be biologically related to Israelites.
This was done for a couple reasons. One, it was an attempt to piece together their history. Basically, it allowed them to regain something of their past. The other reason was in response to socio-economic realities associated with slavery and discrimination, as well as the view that Blacks were inferior to Whites. Attaching themselves to the Israelite identity helped make sense of this.
Ironically, within this group, an extremist fringe did develop, that is seen as black supremacists. They believe that Jews are devilish imposters, and that whites are evil personified. But it has to be acknowledged that this is a fringe group within the larger movement.
& #x200B;
Now obviously, the meme is rather ridiculous, as African Americans are descendants of Africans, at least in part. Some may be descendants of Israelites, but that has nothing to do with them being in America, or being African, or anything like that. But there are other reasons why the idea is ridiculous. First, it has to do with Ham and Canaan. Canaan didn't move to Africa. He isn't the ancestor of Africans. That was never the idea within Judaism (even though this story is largely taken as fictional). Canaan was seen as the ancestors to the Canaanites, in the Middle East. The story with Noah acts as just one more justification, or sign, that the Israelites were the proper rulers of the land called Canaan. Its one of these origin stories that often pops up in the Torah. So the descendants of Canaan would have been Middle Easterners. So the argument makes no sense on that ground (and the fact that they would take a racist idea and promote it is beyond me).
Second, the claim for Israelite dependency also doesn't make any sense, as the whole argument with the Curse of Ham, and the designation of Hamites, was specifically made to justify slavery in the United States. Now, not all African Americans in the United States are descendants of slaves, but many were, and this whole idea of being a Hamite revolves around just that. So to keep the terminology and the ideology around the Hamites would mean that these Black Hebrews weren't Israelites (at least many of them wouldn't be) but were in fact themselves Hamites.
Third and final, tracings one lineage back to the Israelites is extremely difficult. One can trace back to a Jewish heritage, but that doesn't necessarily make one a descendant of the Israelites. Whenever one makes such a bold claim, the need to have some bold evidence. | [
"Afrocentrist thinkers in the nineteenth century insisted that the Egyptians were black Africans, making it possible to provide an ancient and noble lineage that countered the degrading images proliferated by racist science and pro-slavery polemic. Prominent contributors to this debate include David Walker, James M... |
Photographs from WWII almost always seem to show Soviet soldiers as not wearing helmets. Why? | There was no strict rule of wearing helmets in Red Army (and in memoirs Soviet soldiers were amused by US soldiers wearing helmets at all times).
In early years of war lot's Soviet soldiers didn't want to wear helmets since they're were cumbersome, heavy and sometimes it was considered an 'unmanly cowardice' to wear a helmet.
It was changed in late years of war, because 'cowards with a helmet' tend to survive more.
Edit: And even in late years Red Army was no 100% helmet wearing. | [
"The Soviet equipment used in the film, including uniforms and weapons, are authentic captured Soviet stock. The Soviet officer's uniforms were made before the 1943 reforms of the uniform. The only exception are the aircraft used, the AT-6, which were captured in the Battle of France.\n",
"The typical \"frontovik... |
Are Bound Muons More Stable? | No.
The binding energy of ~3 keV doesn't matter for the muon which releases 105 MeV in the decay. Even heavier nuclei won't affect its lifetime much. You can get "muon capture" as additional process, however, similar to electron capture. | [
"The muon is an unstable subatomic particle with a mean lifetime of , much longer than many other subatomic particles. As with the decay of the non-elementary neutron (with a lifetime around 15 minutes), muon decay is slow (by subatomic standards) because the decay is mediated by the weak interaction exclusively (r... |
Is the earth a perfect sphere? How/why did it become this form? | I don't think the actual "why" of your question has been sufficiently answered so I'm throwing my hat in.
First off, no, the Earth is not perfectly spherical. This can be easily surmised by noting that mountains exist, whereas a perfect sphere wouldn't have any protrusions. Even on a planetary-scale the rotation of the earth causes it to bulge slightly at the equator giving it a non-spherical form. However, it is still a very "smooth" object from a planetary scale (check [this](_URL_0_) out for math).
The reason the Earth is quasi-spherical is actually very simple. The Earth is held together by the gravitational attraction of all the matter that composes it. The lowest energy configuration for matter under a radial force like gravity (meaning it extends outward in all directions and reduces in strength in proportion to distance) is a sphere. If the Earth was another shape, say a cube, then the corners of the cube would have so much mass that they would collapse into a less energetic, more spherical configuration.
The same concept (though with differing forces) leads to bubbles being round when blown, the surface tension forces the matter into a low-energy configuration. | [
"The 'sphere of the world' is not the earth but the heavens, and Sacrobosco quotes Theodosius saying it is a solid body. It is divided into nine parts: the \"first moved\" (\"primum mobile\"), the sphere of the fixed stars (the firmament), and the seven planets, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury and th... |
how does a python digest an alligator? | Pythons swallow all of their food whole. Large pythons often over estimate their ability eat something.
_URL_0_
| [
"Many amphibians catch their prey by flicking out an elongated tongue with a sticky tip and drawing it back into the mouth before seizing the item with their jaws. Some use inertial feeding to help them swallow the prey, repeatedly thrusting their head forward sharply causing the food to move backwards in their mou... |
why is it that spicy tastes considerably amplify when a person chokes on it and it gets into the throat, compared to swallowing normally? | Your mouth is literally made to eat and experience taste, it's specially equipped to eat stuff!
Your throat is made to transport all the goop you just chewed up into your stomach and the rest of your body, after your teeth break down the major chunks and your saliva gets in there and breaks it down even further.
Therefore, your throat just isn't made for taking in things like spice. It's not equipped to do it!
Your body sends you those painful feelings because it's freaking out, basically. It's saying, "dude, what the hell is this stuff get it out!" because your mouth is better equipped to deal with it and your throat is getting beat up by the spice. | [
"This affliction is a common cause of throat irritation. Normally the stomach produces acid in the stomach which is neutralized in the small intestine. To prevent acid from flowing backwards, the lower part of the swallowing tube (esophagus) has a valve which closes after food passes through. In some individuals, t... |
if our eyes have a large field of view why cameras with wide field lens distort images spherically and our eyes don’t? | Being that a camera shows that distortion is a very good indication that there is in fact a distortion with the field of view of our own eyes, the reason why you don't perceive the distortion from your eyes, whether or not it's there, is because your brain regularly makes up for distortions and makes corrections to our perception. A good example of our brains making such corrections are the illusions created from optical illusions, our brains can literally fill in the gaps, even if they don't nessisarily exist. | [
"Knapp's Rule states that lenses placed at the anterior focal point of the eye, generally 15 mm in front of the eye, will create similarly sized images on the retina, whenever the disparity between the two eyes is due to a difference in axial length of the eyes.\n",
"Correctly made rectangular or square lens hood... |
why do the numbers on dice have the orientation that they have? | I don't know about larger sided dice, but the 6 sided dice is arranged such that the front and back of every orientation adds up to 7. If this is true with 20 sided dice, that would be part of the explanation. Otherwise, it is just a fluke with the 6 sided version. | [
"You'll notice that some sides of your dice have multiple symbols. This means that it can count as either, depending on what you are rolling the dice for. Sometimes you'll roll the dice because a card tells you to and you'll just look for the symbols the card asks for.\n",
"Four dice are rolled, having symbols wh... |
Suicide in the trenches. I have never heard of any discussion about this topic, but it had to occur. What information do we have about it? | As a clarification on your question. How would you distinguish between a fatality and a suicide, when the simplest form of suicide would be intentionally getting yourself killed? For example, simply standing up in some areas would be an almost certain death by enemy snipers. | [
"\"Suicide in the Trenches\" is one of the many poems the English poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) composed in response to World War I, reflecting his own notable service in that especially bloody conflict. Sassoon was a brave and gallant upper-class officer who eventually opposed the war, but he never lost his a... |
why does smoking kill slower than smoke inhalation? | You're not totally absent of oxygen when smoking. If you're inside a burning room, the oxygen is helping to keep the fire going and is being replaced by smoke.
Edit: I should add that firefighters are increasingly looking to test their gear to see if they've been exposed to anything harmful. I kinda sorta helped on a project for just that. So that's a potential death closer to regular smoking than smoke inhalation. | [
"BULLET::::- Smoking – Smoking causes a delay in the speed of wound repair notably in the proliferative and inflammatory phases. It also increases the likelihood of certain complications such as wound rupture, wound and flap necrosis, decrease in wound tensile strength and infection. Passive smoking also impairs a ... |
why are china and korea still litigating japan's ww2 behavior in the press, while the western ww2 countries have moved on? | Because Japan has been horribly negligent regarding their atrocious behavior during WW2. From ridiculous and furious denials after the war to a refusal to teach their younger generations about their transgressions. If the debate still rages it is because Japan has yet to fully make amends...if it had China and Korea would not be hounding her to do so like in the west
In the West Germany and Axis powers took the fall and the spotlight was placed on their atrocities but Japan really scraped the bottom of the morality barrel in order to pull off her exceedingly sadistic crimes | [
"While there was initial hesitance by some in the US government to get involved in the war, considerations about Japan played a part in the ultimate decision to engage on behalf of South Korea. Especially after the fall of China to the Communists, US experts on East Asia saw Japan as the critical counterweight to t... |
when you hear about pharmaceutical companies lobbying congress, what are they actually doing? | They're trying to prevent laws that might hurt them from being passed. This includes, but is not limited to, laws regarding the patents of medicines that are nearly identical to one that is public domain, regulation of the "disease mongering" ads where they take normal human behaviour and call it a disease (for example, calling natural testosterone decline due to age "low T"), and changes is FDA approval requiring medicines to be tested against more than a placebo. | [
"The process aims to be fully independent of government and lobbying power, basing decisions fully on clinical and cost-effectiveness. There have been concerns that lobbying by pharmaceutical companies to mobilise media attention and influence public opinion are attempts to influence the decision-making process. A ... |
The Chinese have historically always controlled large areas of land. The Korean peninsula is comparatively very small. Why have the Chinese never occupied the Korean Peninsula? | I think it's worth pointing out that under the command of Ögedei, the Mongols did conquer the Korean peninsula, and the Mongols are a recognised Chinese dynasty (the Yuan dynasty), so you could almost make the case that the Chinese *did* conquer Korea. Unless you mean specifically the Han Chinese dynasties, but in that case I'd like to remind you that many Chinese dynasties weren't Han Chinese, the most prevalent being the Manchu. | [
"The Korean kingdoms had traditionally become client states of China under nominal tributary status. As western colonial and trade expansion into Asia occurred, it exposed the weakness of China due to centuries of isolation, and led Japan to modernize and nurture its own colonial designs, but many of the skirmishes... |
In WWII European theatre and Pacific theatre, how would combatants on both sides dispose of slain enemies? | In both the European and Pacific Theaters, the primary U.S. Army unit tasked with the location, transportation, identification, and burial of friendly and enemy dead was the Quartermaster Graves Registration Company. Mass graves registration operations in the interwar period remained basically confined to the theoretical, and large-scale organization of these units only began in early 1942; before then, and after when these units were not available, combat units themselves were to appoint a Graves Registration officer and gather, identify, and bury their own dead. Quartermaster Graves Registration Companies in the Mediterranean, European and Pacific Theaters during the heaviest periods of combined action for the most part operated under the general guidance of Table of Organization and Equipment 10-297, dated 1 July 1943 (minor changes followed; note earlier and later tables of organization and equipment displayed in my third link at the bottom of my answer). The company had 6 officers and 124 enlisted men. A more heavily modified table of organization and equipment, 10-298, with 5 officers and 260 enlisted men, was issued on 26 September 1944. Experience with this organization was limited, as few units converted.
The Quartermaster Graves Registration Company under T/O & E 10-297 of 1 July 1943 was organized as follows;
* Company headquarters with 2 officers and 24 enlisted men
* 4 platoons each with 1 officer and 22 enlisted men
* Platoon headquarters with 1 officer and 4 enlisted men
* 3 squads, each with 6 enlisted men
* Medical Department detachment with 12 enlisted men
> It was recommended that unburied dead be removed as rapidly as possible and buried. The removal was to be carried out in a most considerate manner and with the least confusion in order to sustain the troops’ morale. Bodies were to be covered, especially if mangled or in an unpresentable condition, when carried or transported to the cemetery or other place of interment. Routes were to be selected in order to avoid contact with troops as much as possible, and places of burial were to be screened from roads if feasible. The removal of the bodies and remains was to be accomplished with a reverent attitude toward the dead. If any wounded were to be found, their removal would be the task of the Medical Department and troops detailed for that purpose. In all cases the bodies were to be wrapped in clothes, parachute material, sheets, blankets, mattress covers, or shelter-halves fastened securely with large horse-blanket safety pins (there were no body bags in WWII, and sheets and blankets being in short supply, white cotton mattress covers were normally used in lieu of body bags) before burial, if possible. When interments were made by Company Commanders they were instructed, as soon as possible, to report all facts to the GR personnel operating in the sector, in order to maintain complete data and records of the burials.
> Normally, a Graves Registration representative was to be present to supervise the burials and the preparation of burial records. If not, a Chaplain, a Medical Administrative Officer, or some other Officer could be designated as a burial Officer. Whenever possible, it was recommended that a Chaplain of the Faith of the deceased should perform the burial rites.
....
> Procedures for collection, evacuation, and burial of enemy dead took place following same procedures, with the exception that information concerning enemy dead was to be handled through the Prisoner of War Information Bureau, and as prescribed by the Geneva Convention. Enemy dead were then buried in a separate section of the cemetery apart from regular burial sites of members of the own or Allied Armies within the cemetery (separate American and German cemeteries would be established later). Such graves were to be properly marked and registered and remained in the custody and care of the Quartermaster Corps. A metal Tag marked “ED” was to be prepared and attached to the temporary grave marker.
After World War II, the several hundred temporary cemeteries established across Europe, Africa, and the Pacific began to be closed. Fourteen large permanent cemeteries and memorials administered by the American Battle Monuments Commission were opened, and the families of American deceased could have the bodies of their loved ones returned home, or reinterred in these cemeteries.
Cemetery|Identified burials|Listed on the Tablets of the Missing
:--|:--|:--
Ardennes American Cemetery and Memorial|5,317|463
Brittany American Cemetery and Memorial|4,409|500
Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial|3,812|5,127
Epinal American Cemetery and Memorial|5,254|424
Florence American Cemetery and Memorial|4,399|1,409
Henri-Chappelle American Cemetery and Memorial|7,992|450
Lorraine American Cemetery and Memorial|10,489|444
Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial|5,075|371
Manila American Cemetery and Memorial|17,184|36,286
Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial|8,301|1,722
Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial|9,385|1,557
North Africa American Cemetery and Memorial|2,841|3,724
Rhone American Cemetery and Memorial|860|294
Sicily-Rome American Cemetery and Memorial|7,860|3,095
The Honolulu Memorial has a Court of the Missing with 18,095 names of American servicemen missing in action from the Pacific Theater. The East Coast Memorial has 4,611 names, while the West Coast Memorial has 413; most of these men were declared missing while engaged in antisubmarine or merchant shipping operations. The Suresnes American Cemetery and Memorial, while primarily a World War I cemetery, also bears the names of 24 Americans missing in action from World War II.
**Sources:**
[American Battle Monument Commission History](_URL_0_)
[American Battle Monuments Commission Cemeteries and Memorials](_URL_2_)
[Quartermaster Graves Registration Company](_URL_1_) | [
"Footage for \"A Defeated People\" was shot in the British Zone of Occupation, covering the north-west of Germany. Filming started in August 1945. The main location chosen for filming was the area in and around the devastated city of Hamburg, with scenes of Cologne, Essen and Aachen also used.\n",
"During World W... |
why do webpages seem to lose all aesthetic features on a bad internet connection? | The page's style is usually located in a separate file - the CSS file. This is done on purpose, in order to separate the page's contents from its appearance. | [
"There are two forms of linking: surface linking (which delivers the consumer to the linked website's homepage) and deep linking (which delivers the consumer to a non-homepage link of the website). Websites usually do not object to surface linking because it contributes to a growth in traffic and popularity, which ... |
how does china justify censorship to its citizens? | Chinese here...
Original answer got removed because it's too short. But in fact they don't admit censoring anything, so they don't need to justify it either.
Also sometimes here on Reddit, I see some people think censor equals to banning the use of this word altogether, which is not the case. | [
"Censorship in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is implemented or mandated by the PRC's ruling party, the Communist Party of China (CPC). The government censors content for mainly political reasons, but also to maintain its control over the populace. The Chinese government asserts that it has the legal right to... |
what are the main technologic advancements that make it possible to store so much more data in increasingly smaller circuits? | Our ability to make tiny transistors which is largely driven by the machines that build them. I wouldn't say there is on specific thing that allows it, chip companies put a lot of effort into developing the machines that make the chips, and it's many advancements that come together to make what it ultimately a smaller process that can pack more stuff into a smaller space. | [
"Technological advances have enabled very powerful and versatile computing systems to be implemented on smaller chips. As this allows a larger number of functions to take place in the same area, both current density and the associated power dissipation become more concentrated compared to larger chips. The power co... |
Does Heartbeats per minute have anything to do with the length of a life? | So I spend my day as a cardiac electrophysiologist and academic dealing with questions of heart rates in people, and I can tell you that when you compare heart rates between species there may be some correlations you can draw between life span and heart rate. But within a species, and in particular among humans, there would almost certainly not be any meaningful causal association between the two. Lots of people live very short lives with slower heart rates or longer lives with relatively faster heart rates. A correlation very well could be drawn between the two, but it would likely be only an association because healthier people tend to have slower resting heart rates. But they also have less diabetes, hypertension, obesity, other obesity related problems and such. | [
"A resting heart that beats slower than 60 beats per minute, or faster than 100 beats per minute, is regarded as having an arrhythmia. A heartbeat slower than 60 beats per minute is known as bradycardia, and a heartbeat faster than 100 is known as a tachycardia.\n",
"For a healthy human heart the entire cardiac c... |
is there any real danger of muslims implementing sharia law in western societies? | There are already Sharia courts in the UK. These are for religious matters and for arbitration - when both parties agree to be bound by the decision of the Sharia court. They are not for criminal matters - needless to say it is a contentious subject.
_URL_0_
Edit for clarity: legal matters to criminal matters | [
"The \"Sharīʿah\" () of Islam broadly influences the legal code in most Islamic countries, but the extent of its impact varies widely. In Africa, most states limit the use of Sharia to \"personal-status law\" for issues such as marriage, divorce, inheritance and child custody. With the exception of northern Nigeria... |
Are there contemporary accounts of how early modern bayonet versus sword encounters played out? | This would be modern, rather than early modern, but *D.A. Kinsley's "Swordsmen of the British Empire"* has a 30 page chapter comprised of contemporary accounts of Bayonet vs Sword combat in Indian and other colonial wars. The format of this book is just the first hand anecdotes rather than analysis, but I'll do my best to summarize.
Bayonets were generally found inferior to swords in a swirling melee or chaotic assault. The swordsman was either able to parry (or block with shields and bucklers) and get inside the bayonet, or even if stabbed, fatally or otherwise was able to close with his opponent and deliver an equally fatal counter attack. There are dozens of firsthand accounts of Afgans, Sikhs, and Baluchi swordsman doing just that after receiving bayonet wounds. Despite it's general inferiority, Bayonets were thought to have the advantage when troops fought in very close order or charged in a close packed mass. These accounts are by both officers and enlisted men, but of course are almost entirely from the British point of view rather than from their colonized adversaries. As may perhaps be expected, there is a great deal of complaining about the quality of arms (both bayonets and swords, but especially the sword-bayonet) given to British soldiers by the British government with Indian Tulwars and other swords (as well as Zulu Assegai's and other weapons) given lavish praise in contrast.
However, all in all, I don't find the accounts totally convincing that the bayonet was always inferior to the sword. Perhaps the most we can say from this work is that men equipped with Bayonets by no means felt themselves better equipped than their sword wielding foes! | [
"Prior to World War I, bayonet doctrine was largely founded upon the concept of \"reach\"; that is, a soldier's theoretical ability, by use of an extremely long rifle and fixed bayonet, to stab an enemy soldier without having to approach within reach of his opponent's blade. A combined length of rifle and bayonet l... |
why does sleep paralysis usually only occur when sleeping on one's back? does it have to do with blood flow or the inner ear? | I get it when I lay on my stomach most of the time. Only once on my back. Laying on your belly during sleep paralysis is worse IMO. More terrifying. | [
"The pathophysiology of sleep paralysis has not been concretely identified, although there are several theories about its cause. The first of these stems from the understanding that sleep paralysis is a parasomnia resulting from dysfunctional overlap of the REM and waking stages of sleep. Polysomnographic studies f... |
why was /r/creepshots not ok (perv pics taken in public places), while it is ok to have entire subs dedicated to pictures of freshly murdered woman, or bloody babies recently aborted? | 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. | [
"A year after the closure of r/jailbait, another subreddit called r/Creepshots drew controversy in the press for hosting sexualized images of women without their knowledge. In the wake of this media attention, u/violentacrez was added to r/Creepshots as a moderator, and reports emerged that Gawker reporter Adrian C... |
Marco Polo is quoted to have said on his deathbed, "I did not tell half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed." What things may he not have described to the public and why? | Jacopo da Acqui's report of Marco Polo's last testament should be put in its proper context. His family members were trying to get him to repent and disown all the lies he'd written, to which Polo sneered that he had not told even *half* of what he'd seen.
Assuming the anecdote is true (or even if it's an invention by Jacopo, defending his subject, which seems just as likely), there are two ways to take it. First, if Polo told the other half, it would be realistic enough to make the whole story seem plausible. Second, the stories in the other half were *even wilder*.
Fortunately, we have ways to investigate both possibilities. Boring one first.
**Scribes Gonna Scribe**
The manuscript tradition of the Travels is a mess. It's maybe not as bad as Piers Plowman, but it's a mess. We don't have the original. There's no single surviving manuscript from which all others derive. Which is to say, there is at least something missing from/added to every existing version.
Some changes are surely accidental, or the result of translation problems. Others, though, are substantial omissions/additions. In those cases, it seems likely that somewhere along the way, a scribe/translator either thought the text needed that story, or saw that story and thought it did not belong for whatever reason.
One good example is the large void in the overall narrative, which occurs when Polo is basically hanging out in the East. Some manuscripts don't really say anything. Others explain that he was specially chosen as governor of a city for three years. Oh, and that he, his father, and his uncle pretty much single-handedly won a siege for the Khan by reinventing the trebuchet.
A passage like this one, especially since it was almost certainly added to some rather than omitted from the rest, suggests a couple of possibilities for reconciling skepticism/maintaining the book's veneer of "plausibility," fully aware it was just a veneer and part of the genre.
First, it fills in a large temporal gap at least in part. Useful in and of itself. Second, it casts the Europeans in a *really* good light. It's usually thought that even when pointing out good qualities of non-Christians, medieval European travel narratives relate tales and descriptions in ways that emphasize their Otherness. Massaging the awesomeness of the Polos serves those ends quite well--especially useful in a post-fall of Acre world.
A lot of additions seem to point to scribes feeling that the version they had in front of them was just missing a few details. Like a description for how horse thieves or bar brawlers were punished will have the procedure for punishing murderers added to it in later recensions. If the scribes thought the story needed it, Polo's friends and family could well have thought the same.
But really what you're here for is shipwrecks and cannibals, right?
**Diamond Poop, or, 1001 Mediterranean Nights**
In [this earlier answer](_URL_0_), I discuss how one episode that Marco Polo recounts traces back in time to amazing 12th century Persian poet Nizami, to a 10th century natural history text in Arabic, to a 4th century Christian bishop, to...Herodotus. From Polo:
> Among these mountains there are certain great and deep valleys, to the bottom of which there is no access. Wherefore the men who go in search of the diamonds take with them pieces of flesh, as lean as they can get, and these they cast into the bottom of a valley...When the eagles [who also eat the deadliest snakes known to the ENTIRE WORLD] see the meat thrown down they pounce upon it and carry it up to some rocky hill-top...
> The people go to the nests of those white eagles, of which there are many, and in their droppings they find plenty of diamonds which the birds have swallowed in devouring the meat that was cast into the valleys.
The details of the story change (Polo's diamonds are Herodotus's cinnamon sticks), but the underlying "plot" is the same.
This matters for present purposes because it shows how stories like this one are circulating around the Mediterranean-Asian world, crossing geographic and linguistic barriers as though they didn't exist. Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, any interested traveler might well have heard the same basic story, with different details (snakes? no snakes? Alexander the Great? Random peasants?) from multiple sources. Heck, the valley of the diamonds story will even eventually be recorded in *1001 Nights* (the messiest manuscript tradition yet), although the MS is more recent than Polo but the story was probably part of the collection beforehand.
The Mediterranean-Asian world was a world of stories. So in addition to whatever Polo did/did not see with his *eyes* firsthand, there's what he "saw" in the sense of having heard or overheard. And thus, the question becomes: what stories or what kinds of stories might we expect, that Polo nevertheless leaves out?
Looking at a 10th century Arabic text known as the *Marvels of India*, I'm going to suggest that what he left out includes shipwrecks and cannibals.
*Marvels of India*, like Polo and Ibn Battuta, is a collection of anecdotes, although it doesn't really attempt to be a cohesive travel narrative of any sort. The reason I think it's particularly useful for present purposes is that taken as a whole, the book is *really, really repetitive.* How many stories do you need that emphasize THIS FISH IS REALLY BIG? (At least four in a row, at one point, to say nothing of elsewhere in the text). It's a mishmash of tales, of the "1001 Mediterranean Nights," just like Marco Polo. (And yes, it includes the 'valley of the diamonds' legend.)
And some of the most common themes suicide, monkeys, snakes, REALLY BIG FISH...shipwrecks and cannibals.
Mind you, cannibals and shipwrecks both appear in Marco Polo's books. But not like this. The cannibals of *Marvels* sometimes have tails. Sometimes the book's author goes into *way* too much detail about how the cannibals cook their meals. And over and over, we read the trope--that survives to day--of the shipwrecked sailors on the island of the cannibal king.
In a world of travelers, merchants, and educated people across cultures (or the product of one author with a really thorough education), Marco Polo would have heard a lot of stories from a lot of people. One way or another, some of them wound up in his *Travels.* And one way or another, Jacopo da Acqui had his character Polo defend the "truth" in his own voice--whether that truth was what Polo saw--or what he had heard from someone who had heard it from someone. | [
"Given that Marco Polo dictated his book in prison several years after he returned from China, the accuracy of his remarks may be suspect. Either his memory was clouded by that time, or his ghost writer was more imaginative than he was. Some suggest that he did not visit this part of China at all. Nevertheless, he ... |
was there any efficacy to leaches or bleeding as a medical treatment? if not why was the practice so well accepted? | The practice of blood-letting was based on the idea that all medical problems are due to an imbalance in the four humors, blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phelgm. If you were sick, doctors would try to fix you by bringing the humors in balance, and blood-letting was a way of doing this.
Now that we know more about medicine, we don't do this very much anymore. There are some conditions that benefit from blood-letting, but not so many that we should blood-let to the extent that doctors in the past did. | [
"which is important for speeding the healing of chronic wounds. Some researchers have experimented with the use of tea tree oil, an antibacterial agent which also has anti-inflammatory effects. Disinfectants are contraindicated because they damage tissues and delay wound contraction. Further, they are rendered inef... |
Why was it so important for us to take all the beaches involved in Operation Overlord. | The securing of the beaches also meant the denial of causeways leading *to* the beaches. An invasion on a broad front had to be accomplished fully to prevent traffic jams (which occurred anyways as resistance inland was fierce) and to deny the Germans a salient from which to hit the flanks of a beach-head. The deliberate avoidance of assaulting a port directly meant that as much real estate as possible would be needed; especially since the Allies had to begin landing supplies directly onto the beaches in addition to their improvised harbors.
Consider: If say, Omaha beach repelled the assault battalions back into the ocean (as indeed, Bradley at one point feared would happen), the units destined to land at Omaha would instead jam up into Utah. The Utah beachhead would then have been open to attack from its flank from the still-secured Omaha causeways. You have to understand the logistical difficulties of defending a beachhead on two fronts while simultaneously attempting to expand it.
As for pockets of Germans surrendering...unlikely. For reasons of politics and (arguably) sound military principles, pockets would hold out for as long as possible; and evidence for this on all fronts are manifold. Leaving large pockets of Germans in such a critical area of supply would be unimaginable to a military planner, and considering the beaches necessitated a steady build up of manpower, would be impossible to crush in an acceptable amount of time. It would be a dangerous tying down of forces that would need to be pushing in land and setting up blocking positions for inevitable counterattacks. | [
"In the immediate aftermath of the landings, the priority for the Allies at Utah Beach was to link up with the Allied landings further east. This job was tasked to the 101st Airborne, who had landed in the area and had been conducting raids against inland targets, such as artillery emplacements, and securing and cu... |
how does the supreme court's decision affect laws nation wide? | In Law there is a concept of precedence which means that if judges make a decision in one form or another this is how decisions on similar cases should be made in future.
Literally a lawyer will stand up and say that in this previous case,this happened and I'd like it to happen again and the judges will most likely agree if the situation is indeed similar.
Additionally the supreme court is the court with the highest authority, so if they rule one way on something they are likely to again if someone brought their case there again. Even if other lower courts initially disagree, they can be overruled. | [
"However, in the same document Madison explicitly argued that the states retain the ultimate power to decide about the constitutionality of the federal laws, in \"extreme cases\" such as the Alien and Sedition Act. The Supreme Court can decide in the last resort only in those cases which pertain to the acts of othe... |
How many African countries aside from Egypt have a legitimate basis for national unity that goes further back than their colonial institutions? | I believe the question being asked is if there are any African nations that owe their shape and/or territory to native institutions (cultural or legal), or if they owe it to colonial politicking and treaties.
I don't think Egypt is too proper an example. Its territory had been reduced and culturally developed through numerous invasions prior to the European colonial period. | [
"This is a list of the dates when African states were made colonies or protectorates of European powers and lost their independence. It only deals with modern times, thus the expansion of the Ancient Greeks, Roman Empire, and barbarian tribes into Africa is ignored. A number of regions such as the Congo and the Sah... |
how is it that we can take our pulse and not completely block out veins/arteries when we do so? | You may temporarily reduce blood flow when you do this, but the body isn't *so* delicate that this would hurt you. | [
"Arteries and veins are part of the human cardiovascular system. Arteries carry blood away from the heart to the lungs or the rest of the body, where the blood passes through capillaries, and veins return the blood to the heart. An AVM interferes with this process by forming a direct connection of the arteries and ... |
sun tzu - why exactly was he so great? | He carefully put into words many strategic principles and philosophies that hold true in all aspects of life. The art of war isn't simply his view or opinion on war, they are principles that have been proven time and time again to be correct.
And he didn't write one or two well aimed statements, he wrote a comprehensive work on the subject. As a thought experiment, switch the word "war" with "conflict" and his writings hold just as true.
> “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
At face value a noble statement. It's also an efficient one. Defeating an enemy without fighting means you suffered no losses, expended little and have caused a minimum of animosity in your opponent. This sentiment is as true in war as it is in an office meeting.
> “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”
Preparation is everything. Like GI Joe said, knowing is half the battle. Going into a task unprepared, half assed and hoping to wing it, will leave you helpless at the hands of an opponent who knows what he's doing.
> “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.”
If you put someone with his back against the wall, he'll have no alternative but to fight you tooth and nail. If you want compromise, leave him room to compromise.
Sun Tzu's art of war is the truth of life. And part of what made it so long lasting is that while it is absolutely the art of *war*, all of life is conflict. His lessons can be as easily applied in the workplace, school or even simply the way you live your life as on the battlefield. Everyone can learn from his work. | [
"The \"Records of the Three Kingdoms\" (\"Sanguozhi\") describes Sun Quan as a tall man with bright eyes and oblong face. He was known as a wise and outgoing man who was fond of making jokes and playing tricks. Because of his skill in valuing the strength of his subordinates and avoiding their shortcomings, as well... |
what does chemo do to your body? | There are many different categories of chemotherapeutic anti-cancer drugs, all of which have varied effects, but most of them are involved in disrupting the cell division and DNA / RNA synthesis of cells in the body.
A cancer tumor is really just a large mass of cells that have stopped responding to the rest of the body. Normally your body regulates how many times a cell can divide, and can induce a cell to kill itself. Cancer cells have stopped responding to this, and are just reproducing uncontrollably
Cancer tumors require a certain threshold size to be "cancer", and to withstand the body's immune system. A general rule of thumb is that the larger a cancerous mass is, the more powerful it is. That is why a large part of treating cancer is reducing its size.
Enter chemotherapy drugs - drugs that hurt the ability for cells to divide. Now, it is important for *many* cells in your body to divide, but because your body regulates the process, most cells divide much slower than cancer cells. So chemotherapy harms cancer tumors *more* than most other cells in your body.
It is an extremely delicate balance, and that is why oncologists have a very difficult job. They need to ensure that the drugs are strong enough to hinder the tumors ability to replicate, but *not* so powerful that they make it impossible for your own immune system to fight the tumor.
Chemotherapy is often used with spot-radiation therapy, which is where doctors bombard cancer tumors with powerful radiation, which shreds the cells DNA and kills them. This is an extra attack on the tumor to ensure that your immune system is stronger than the tumor.
In the end, it is the body's immune system that ultimately needs to destroy the cancer. Chemotherapy is a double-edged sword, but doctors try to make the side that's stabbing the cancer cells *longer and sharper* than the one stabbing your immune system. Since cancer cells divide more rapidly, they're more vulnerable to chemotherapy, so the goal is to give your body the edge.
| [
"A Chemo-protective agent is a medical term that describes a drug that helps to reduce the side effects on the body while undergoing chemotherapy. These agents protect specific body parts from the harmful anti-cancer treatments that could potentially cause permanent damage to important bodily tissues. Chemo-protect... |
How much did medieval and renaissance society know about the Ancient World? | This question is a difficult one to respond to, since it's both difficult to quantify, and of course the early Middle Ages were right after the Classical era, so it was, essentially, yesterday to them. By the time you get to the Early Modern period, Shakespeare is still writing plays about classical figures for popular audiences (for example, *Julius Caesar*), clearly expecting even the groundlings to know who these figures were.
So, it strikes me that the answer to your question is probably "a lot." Heck, since the classical education wasn't really replaced by liberal arts education until the early 20th century, educated people in the Middle Ages/Early Modern Era almost definitely knew **more** than educated people in the 21st century -- but again, this is difficult to quantify, and so hard to defend.
Perhaps you could word your question in a more pointed way? | [
"The knowledge of the ancient \"Western world\" was partly preserved during this period due to the survival of the Eastern Roman Empire and the introduction of the Catholic Church; it was also greatly expanded by the Arab importation of both the Ancient Greco-Roman and new technology through the Arabs from India an... |
How is it that DNA is like a computer even though it seems nothing like a computer? | The DNA encodes a series of commands using a four-letter code. This code then has commands written into it for starting and stopping replication into RNA. Within the part that can be copied into RNA are three-letter instructions to direct ribosomes to make proteins. In this way, there is essentially a programming language with sequences of code that direct how a cell should function.
So DNA isn't a computer. It is the code...computer language. The computer is the cell, directed by the code to function in specific ways.
Edit: also, the analogy between DNA/cells and computer language/computers is a huge stretch. Biology isn't nearly as literal as computer function. Nothing in biology is as exact as that with errors and mistakes being expected and even sometimes used as a feature. | [
"DNA computing is a form of parallel computing in that it takes advantage of the many different molecules of DNA to try many different possibilities at once. For certain specialized problems, DNA computers are faster and smaller than any other computer built so far. Furthermore, particular mathematical computations... |
Did any Roman emperors attempt to have themselves elected to the papacy? | Essentially no. The position of pope as we recognise it now didn't really exist, and no emperor ever attempted to claim the position of the time we now call "pope". Those in the time period that we now call "pope" would have been seen at the time as simply the bishop of Rome. While this was certainly one of the more important bishoprics, it was not seen as the undisputed master of Catholicism as it is today - Alexandria and Constantinople were of at least similar influence.
Given that, the emperors had a vast amount of power over the Catholic church, and at points were very involved in major church rulings, for example with Theodosius I and the second ecumenical council. This meant that in a way the emperors were able to act as an ultimate arbiter above all the bishops, like the pope, but were far from the enshrined head of the church. More of a point of interest rather than meaningful, but the Roman emperors were the holders of the title "pontifex maximus" before it was passed to the bishop of Rome. | [
"The election of a Holy Roman Emperor was generally a two-stage process whereby, from at least the 13th century, the King of the Romans was elected by a small body of the greatest princes of the Empire, the prince-electors. This was then followed shortly thereafter by his coronation as Emperor, an appointment that ... |
can ocean water be used to extinguish large scale forest fires? | Ocean water is full of salt.
Salt interferes with plant growth.
Scooping up a bunch of ocean water and dumping it on vegetation might help put out a fire, if you ignore the logistics needed to transport ocean water like that, but you'd be screwing up the long-term health of the place. | [
"Water has long been a universal agent for suppressing fires, but is not best in all cases. For example, water is typically ineffective on oil fires, and can be dangerous. Fire-fighting foams were a development for extinguishing oil fires.\n",
"The United States Environmental Protection Agency has approved conden... |
why does it feel like hitting concrete when you jump into a body of water from 50 feet or higher? | Liquids have viscosity that differ. The thicker a viscosity the more it can mimic (for lack of a better word) the properties of a solid. Water has a relatively low viscosity compared to oil, but when you get to a certain velocity, that viscosity is enough to injure. | [
"If concrete is exposed to very high temperatures very rapidly, explosive spalling of the concrete can result. In a very hot, very quick fire the water inside the concrete will boil before it evaporates. The steam inside the concrete exerts expansive pressure and can initiate and forcibly expel a spall.\n",
"Conc... |
the science behind having naturally really dry skin | Many people wash their skin too much. Soaps strip the skin of the naturally occurring oils that protect skin and keep moisture in. | [
"Dry skin results from lack of water in the outer layer of skin cells (the stratum corneum). When this layer becomes dehydrated it loses its flexibility and becomes cracked, scaly and sometimes itchy. The stratum corneum contains natural water-holding substances that retain water seeping up from the deeper layers o... |
Why is the eastern United States so different in climate compared to to the western United States? | One of the reasons is that the ocean water by California is much colder than the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean (currents push the water from near Alaska all way down to California). Colder water evaporates less and cools the air. Cooler air can hold less moisture as well.
Also, mountains and hills filter moisture from the air mass as it moves westward. By the time it reaches central California, it's basically desert air. | [
"The eastern United States was part of Pangaea's interior for most of the Triassic Period of the Mesozoic era. At the time, the area lay close to the equator and was connected to western Europe and Africa. The union of all of Earth's continents into a single land mass changed the way the atmosphere and oceans circu... |
What was Adam Smith denouncing with his plea for ‘laissez-faire’? | I can't say much about all the English guilds in the 18th c. But I can say something about state-granted monopolies, or monopoly patents.
& #x200B;
The origin of such things seems to have been a recognition that some industries were useful and needed to be encouraged. If some French glass-makers, say,were interested in coming over and setting up their shops in Tudor England, they would be incurring lots of costs and there would be some risk that, if they established themselves, they would suddenly be faced with competition from others and it would be difficult to make up their expenses. So, they might be granted exclusive rights to making glass for a period of some years. This would make the French an attractive venture for investors ( note that this is before the existence , really, of what you'd call banks) and a useful industry could be established. And the cost to the government would be nothing, at a time when most wealth was land and so most monarchs had to be very careful about gifting it away. It might not be glass: it could be a company wanting to start anything expensive, like a coal mine, and they needed to attract lots of up-front investment. Or someone who had intellectual property- like, a way to dye cloth- and wanted to develop it, but didn't want someone to jump in and copy his methods after he had spent much time and money making it go. In the 16th c. there would usually be some investigation into how the new monopoly would affect the current trades: the French glass makers would not be granted their monopoly until it was determined that what they were doing was not already being done ( this actually happened: they weren't, and got their patent).
However, the system began to be greatly expanded under Elizabeth and her chancellor Burghley. Courtiers could ask for money for advancing a petitioner's patent application, and more patents began to be awarded to those courtiers and their clients for no new industry or invention, just for money to the Crown, or just so the Crown could reward a courtier. A patent could be granted for the right to exclusively judge dyed silk, or sell beer in Bristol. There were some attempts to at least make the awarding of them consistent and systematic, but it was too attractive a source of revue for the Crown- and by the 1620's King Charles really needed a source of revenue, so abuses grew. It began to be recognized that the monopolies were actually quite costly. One historian has noted that as much as 200,000 pounds each year were drawn from the public in order to hand only 1,500 pounds to the king. The granting of monopolies was high on the Committee of Grievances list of abuses of the royal prerogative in 1640, and later in the 17th c. it was thought to have been a major reason for the Civil War.
Efforts to reform the system were complex, not uniform and went in fits and starts, but a patent system more based on protection of intellectual property came into being by the late 16th. c.. By the Adam Smith's 18th c., "monopoly" was a very pejorative term.
Christine MacLeod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System 1660-1800
& #x200B;
& #x200B;
& #x200B;
& #x200B; | [
"Other writers have argued that Smith's support for \"laissez-faire\" (which in French means leave alone) has been overstated. Herbert Stein wrote that the people who \"wear an Adam Smith necktie\" do it to \"make a statement of their devotion to the idea of free markets and limited government\", and that this misr... |
when i have a tube filled with marbles and push in on one end, another pops out instantly. what if the tube was a mile? would it still be as quick? | > What if the tube was a mile? Would it still be as quick?
Nope. There is the limit to the speed that a physical force can propagate through a medium. In fact, we have a name for this speed, based on one of the most common examples of a physical force propagating though a medium. It's an example that you're very familiar with: Sound.
The speed of sound is nothing more than the speed at which physical forces move through a material. Assuming that the marbles were all touching each other, the amount of time it would take for the marble at the end to pop out would be the length of the tube divided by the speed of sound in the material that the marbles were made of.
Assuming glass marbles, we can take the speed of sound in glass as 13,000 ft/s, and get a time of ~0.41 s. So just under half a second for the marble at the other end to move.
And, interestingly enough, this will work for a solid rod, as well. If you had a mile-long rod of solid glass, and you pushed on one end, it would take ~0.41s for the other end to move. | [
"Tube being hollow, it's not practical to use a simple punch operation to notch it, as it would be squashed. Although punching is possible, it requires support mandrels and awkward handling. Where tube is worked with a punch press other than for side notching, this is generally described as \"slotting\".\n",
"The... |
why are canadian and american accents almost indistinguishable, even to residents of either country? why are the two countries so similar? | Canadian and American accents both vary wildly. It's pretty easy to distinguish. | [
"There are a considerable number of different accents within the regions of both the United States and Canada, originally deriving from the accents prevalent in different English, Scottish and Irish regions of the British Isles and corresponding to settlement patterns of these peoples in the colonies. These were de... |
pink lemonade. if it's not strawberry or raspberry, then what is the pink? | There is a pink lemon, but it's not used.
Pink lemonade is just normal lemonade colored pink. It's dyed using artificial dye, raspberries, cherries, red grapefruit, grapes, cranberries, strawberries, grenadine, or, as in the origin story, cinnamon candy. The flavor may or may not be different. | [
"BULLET::::- Pink lemonade is a variant of lemonade that uses artificial flavors and colors as well as natural sources of juices (such as grenadine, cherry juice, red grapefruit juice, grape juice, cranberry juice, strawberry juice, and pomegranate) to give it a \"pink\" coloration. The earliest reference to the in... |
why doesn't wifi quality correlate with wifi range? | Excellent question, I used to work on corporate and hospitality systems (think like the Marriott or Sheraton wifi) and this I had to learn fast.
So a wireless signal transmits also called broadcasts a lot of information in the signal. Some of your signal is the data (we call it throughout), some of it is the wifi name (also called the SSID), and then there's some technical information transmitted that we won't get into (depending on the system).
You computer clumps data together in small bursts called a packet, think of it like a snowball. So when you ask for _URL_0_ you computer begins sending packets, or throwing snowballs to servers on the Internet, and as the servers process they throw snowballs back. The ideal is you have to collect all the snowballs (packets) before you can build a fort (web page, image, etc.).
Your wifi has a radius (circle which is your wifi name like mine is District13) in which it broadcast, think of this like a large frozen water disk above you making sure the sun can't melt your snowballs (packets). So as you move away from the center of your protective circle, the circle melts and the sun comes through. You can still see the frozen water (your network name) but now the sun (interference) is melting your snowball (we call it packet fragmentation). So now you see the circle (name) but instead of getting back 10 whole snowballs you got 1 and a half, which isn't enough.
I am sorry if that sounds ridiculous, it's the analogy I once used to explain it to a middle schooler. There are a lot of other things to consider too. Ever hear the term 802.11a or 802.11n, also called wireless N? 802.11 tells techs what the protocol or language is, the letter specifies a version and sometimes frequency range. A/B/G were some of the first, followed by N and AC (5G). If you are on say A or B then max speed at the wifi point is 11mbps, walk 50 feet away it's now 8mbps. Compare that to Standing next to an AC home wifi point, 7GBps, that more than 700 times faster (approximately 875 or so). Walk 50 feet away the AC wifi point, speeds are now 3GBps. | [
"In wireless networks, the \"link spectral efficiency\" can be somewhat misleading, as larger values are not necessarily more efficient in their overall use of radio spectrum. In a wireless network, high link spectral efficiency may result in high sensitivity to co-channel interference (crosstalk), which affects th... |
synthetic meat | No one has figured out how to make it cheap enough yet. Consider the price of ground beef, if you have a multimillion dollar lab making lab-grown beef then you're going to need to make millions of pounds to have it pay for itself.
There are a bunch of companies work on it, but none of their products are commercially viable yet. | [
"Meat is produced by killing an animal and cutting flesh out of it. These procedures are called slaughter and butchery, respectively. There is ongoing research into producing meat \"in vitro\", that is, outside of animals.\n",
"Animal sourced materials include both animal manures and residues from the slaughter o... |
what is a white dwarf star made out of? | To an extent it depends on the star that died. A White dwarf is essentially the exposed inerds of a sunlike star once the outer atmosphere has been cast off and nuclear fusion has ceased. What it's made of depends on it's mass and what it was last fusing before the reaction ceased.
Stars begin and spend most of their life fusing hydrogen into helium, then either stop or move on to Fusing Helium into elements like Carbon and Oxygen and Silicon (plus a few others)
Really heavy stars can go on to start fusing them into other things, but I think your average white dwarf is probably going to be a ball of mostly carbon, oxygen and silicon | [
"A white dwarf, also called a degenerate dwarf, is a stellar core remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. A white dwarf is very dense: its mass is comparable to that of the Sun, while its volume is comparable to that of Earth. A white dwarf's faint luminosity comes from the emission of stored thermal... |
What is the evolutionary reason to losing all hair on our faces besides eyebrows and, for men, beards? | We obviously lost quite a bit of hair if we compare humans and our cousins the chimapanzees, though maybe not as much on [the face](_URL_2_). Humans probably lost our hair [roughly 1.2 million years ago](_URL_0_). I don't know of one dominant theory of why there was hair loss in general, but it could be for cooling more efficiently or to [get rid of parasites](_URL_4_).
So why do we have hair on our beards and eyebrows then?
As a general rule, if a feature differs between men and women there is a good chance it offers some sort of sexual selection advantage. For beards, that would mean they offer some combination of making men more attractive to females, making it easier to identify sexually mature males, or helping to establish dominance over other males. The [wiki page on beards](_URL_1_) has references supporting all of these theories.
For the eyebrows, I've often heard that they protect the eyes from dirt and bright light, but I couldn't find a paper backing that up. I did find [this study](_URL_3_) showing eyebrows play a major role in facial recognition, even larger than the eyes. That makes sense given that eyebrows are a useful way of communicating non-verbal information. | [
"The general hairlessness of humans in comparison to related species may be due to loss of functionality in the pseudogene KRTHAP1 (which helps produce keratin) in the human lineage about 240,000 years ago. On an individual basis, mutations in the gene HR can lead to complete hair loss, though this is not typical i... |
what is redshirting in ncaa sports? | NCAA rules say that a player can only play for 4 years. They don't want students essentially becoming professional college sports players. The primary reason they're in college is supposed to be to get a degree.
But, the team might not want a player to play in their first year. They may want a particularly good player to practice with the team for a year, develop their skills and generally become a better player. So, they don't let the player play in any games for his first (or even second) year. They aren't allowed to put on a normal uniform. They can still be on the sidelines during a game, but they have to wear a red shirt to make it clear that they're not eligible to play.
This way they still get the full 4 years of eligibility but the player gets to develop a little bit more. | [
"Redshirt, in United States college athletics, is a delay or suspension of an athlete's participation to lengthen their period of eligibility. Typically, a student's athletic eligibility in a given sport is four seasons, aligning with the four years of academic classes typically required to earn a bachelor's degree... |
Did early humans (cavemen) have access to or eat rice, sugarcane, potatoes, etc.? | Hunter-gatherers ate the same plants we do today, but in their wild forms. Most plants we eat today, including rice, sugarcane and potatoes, are domesticated versions. These were only domesticated after the advent of agriculture, so they were not available to hunter-gatherers before agriculture, but their wild forms were.
A "wild state" means that the very features that have made them staples today, such as high yield, good nutrient profile, pleasant taste -- did not exist, or were much attenuated. However, they must have provided *some* useful nutrition, or they would not have been eaten.
For example, [here is a picture](_URL_0_) showing the domestication of corn. The image at the left shows wild or undomesticated corn, the middle image shows an intermediate during the process of domestication, and the right image shows modern domesticated corn. As you can see, the number of kernels have increased dramatically due to domestication. What you can't see is that the nutrient profile has also changed, and each of those kernels now has a lot more starch and calories than it used to. In many cases, domestication has also improved the taste, turning bitter and unpalatable fruit or vegetables into the familiar tasty varieties. Or [removed inedible seeds](_URL_1_) such as in the case of the banana.
Humans are limited by their physiology, not being able to digest cellulose and not being able to chew tough fibers to extract nourishment from them. We (and our ancestors) could overcome some of these problems (using stones to crush or grind foodstuffs that were too tough to chew, cooking to break down nutrients to make them easier to digest), but we still have our limitations. Humans selected plants that contain nutrients suited to our physiology - lots of starch/sugar, protein, fats. This includes grains (precursors of all modern cereals), roots and tubers, fruits, berries, nuts, seeds, etc.
The wild versions of these plants have been used by humans ever since there have been any humans. Agriculture began by deliberately planting foods that we were already accustomed to eating as hunter-gatherers, and over the course of time we selectively bred traits that were useful, which is what plant domestication is all about. | [
"The earliest residents were living in temporary camps in an ancient wetland eating avocados, chilies, mollusks, sharks, birds, and sea lions. The oldest discovery of an avocado pit comes from Coxcatlan Cave, dating from around 9,000 to 10,000 years ago. Other caves in the Tehuacan Valley from around the same time ... |
how is phobias treated? | Education and Exposure mostly, depending on severity, you can generally treat phobias first by educating yourself on the actual risk and facts of the phobia, then exposing yourself to it. This doesn't mean if you're afraid of spiders you need to go handle a live spider, but it does mean approaching the situation in a way where you can adapt to being able to cope rationally in the same environment with them.
In most cases people won't get rid of phobias but they will learn to manage them. You can get to a point where it's not a crippling fear that sends you screaming and running but manage it down to a point where it just makes you uncomfortable. | [
"Exposure therapy is the most successful known treatment for phobias. Several published meta-analyses included studies of one-to-three hour single-session treatments of phobias, using imaginal exposure. At a post-treatment follow-up four years later 90% of people retained a considerable reduction in fear, avoidance... |
microfiber cloths. they seem to be recommended to clean everything? what are they and why are they so amazing? | 1 they are cloths with a far higher surface area than more common ones
2 the surface area means holding more water and particles, so you can clean more easily. All are synthetic, and high quality ones can be squeezed almost completely dry as well.
3 no they are not the same. oh I don't know about brands
4 for most, the safest/only way is to rinse in water. Some are more tolerant of soaps, but all will loose their qualities more quickly this way.
5 Yes they do. It varies widly by the model. You should learn the purpose for the particular cloth, and follow the manufacturers care and use instructions. Also, if you were shopping for microfiber cloths for a particular purpose, you can safely bet that price and quality will line up lineirly. So the 2$ cloth for cleaning glasses will be inferior to the $10 one, but may serve you well. | [
"For microfiber to be most effective as a cleaning product, especially for water-soluble soils and waxes, it should be a split microfiber. Non-split microfiber is little more than a very soft cloth. The main exception is for cloths used for facial cleansing and for the removal of skin oils (sebum), sunscreens, and ... |
Is the lava from different volcanos around the world made out of the same material, or do different volcanos have diffetent lava composition? | There are indeed several different types. Lava is classified in various ways, SiO2 content increases from Komatiite (ultra low), to basalt, andesite, dacite and rhyolite (high) ([example of SiO2-based classification](_URL_0_)).
There are also more subtle geochemical signatures recognized by trace elements (Zr vs Y, or normalised REE spectra), such as Tholeiitic and calc-alkaline series ([example](_URL_1_)). The series is more of a geo-tectonic indicator. Thus, one can distinguish basalts formed at a mid-ocean ridge (which would be tholeiitic) from basalts formed in a collision zone (which would typically be calc-alkaline).
| [
"Lava domes are built by slow eruptions of highly viscous lava. They are sometimes formed within the crater of a previous volcanic eruption, as in the case of Mount Saint Helens, but can also form independently, as in the case of Lassen Peak. Like stratovolcanoes, they can produce violent, explosive eruptions, but ... |
What was the Stalin era Soviet leadership's stance on Tsar era or before Russian military heroes and leaders like Nevsky, Suvorov and Bagration? | The 1930s witnessed a return of sorts by the Soviet state towards its Great Russian past. Both during the Revolution and the 1920s, the state had looked at the historical past of tsardom and its various forms of commemoration of it with a rather jaundiced eye. The Soviet government of the 1920s devoted relatively little effort to historic preservation and sometimes sold off the valuables in museums and archives abroad to foreign parties as a way to raise needed hard currency. This 1920s leeriness towards the Great Russian past covered two interconnected ideological bases for the bolsheviks. One, valorizing the past was one of the chief legitimization tactics of the tsarist empire and upheld the Great Russian culture and its past as superior to the non-Russian subjects of the empire. Lenin and his cohorts were deeply concerned that Great Russian chauvinism would undermine the Bolshevik experiment and took active measures to discourage it ranging from promoting national cadres of non-Russians into the nascent Communist Party and the state apparatus (*korenizatsiia*/ indiginization) to engaging in an iconolcastic approach to the mores and celebration of the past. Secondly, the Bolshevik state was one that was self-consciously and avowedly *new* and took great pains to advertise that the results of 1917 was a solid break from the tsarist past. The state embellished tales of the tsarist past as a time of decadence and wanton cruelty in which the new Soviet state had transcended.
The shift towards the Great Russian past in the Stalin period caught a number of contemporaries by surprise and a number of Stalin's opponents abroad connected this shift in cultural policy with Stalin dictatorship. The Russian emigre sociologist Nicholas Timasheff in a famous 1946 book collectively termed these policies "the Great Retreat" in which the state backed away from the modernism and internationalism of the 1920s when it recognized that such sentiments had little persuasive power outside a narrow circle of intellectuals and true believers, and instead embraced a more conservative culture and society. For example, the Stalin state backed away from the relatively liberal divorce laws of the 1920s and recriminalized abortion in 1936. Soviet art policy under Stalin moved away from the avante garde experimentalism and into more recognizable forms and aesthetics. Although Timasheff was more neutral about the Great Retreat, he connected it with the imperative to fight fascism and saw it as a normalizing factor for the USSR's international position, Stalin's opponents, particularly the factions surrounding Trotsky, took up the paradigm of Great Retreat as part of Stalin's larger betrayal of the grand ideals of 1917 in exchange for the USSR becoming just another normal state, and a dictatorship to boot.
There certainly was a good deal of justification to the charge that the Stalin turn served the Stalin dictatorship and emerging cult of personality. The titular hero of the Eisenstein film *Alexander Nevsky* shared many of the treats associated with Stalin such as his personal remoteness and stalwart and decisive leadership. The state's rehabilitation of the two tsars, Peter I and Ivan IV, was in no small measure because they were two historical figures that built up the Russian state from comparative backwardsness. History textbooks and fictional portrayals toned down Ivan IV's personal cruelty and emphasized his *étatisme*. Stalin famously harangued Eisenstein over his portrayal of Ivan IV's degeneracy into cruelty when the latter was preparing for *Ivan the Terrible, Part II* with the dictator noting that the such cruelty was often necessary for a leader.
However, the idea of that the cultural politics of the Great Retreat represented a complete break with the 1920s practices obscures some important lines of continuity between the Stalin and Lenin eras. Some of the policies of the Stalin state were the rather logical responses to the consequences of the more liberal Lenin decade. Liberalized family law, for example, created a larger number of divorces and broken families than the Soviet state expected and the authorities connected the rise of various social ills such as youth hooliganism in part to the breakdown of the family. The writers of the Lenin-era family laws expected that the new socialist society would eliminate the social conditions that led to the breakdown of the family; higher divorce rates were not expected by these men and women who conceived of these reforms. The Lenin state also was just as willing to instrumentalize the tsarist past as its successor. In former imperial cities like Leningrad and Moscow, the state appropriated various palaces and historical art treasures and reopened them as museums for the masses. This reinvested the surviving relics of the tsarist past with a new, somewhat politicized, meaning in which the Soviet state was the national curator of the past and preserved what it felt was relevant for the present. The cultural politics of the 1920s practiced a highly selective and politicized reappropriation of the past and created a pattern subsequent Soviet governments followed.
The Stalin state's reappropriation and celebration of tsarist military figures highlights this process. Historical personages like Suvorov and Bagration imparted a useful heritage to the growing Red Army of the 1930s and had added importance with Barbarossa as these men had fought off invaders before and won. Drawing connection to these figures served a useful propaganda purpose, as in this [famous poster](_URL_0_) which dramatically superimposed the advancing Red Army in front of Nevsky, Suvorov, and an anonymous fighter of 1917 urging them onward. But there was more to the celebration of the martial past than an exigent need for a historical narrative in wartime. The biographical background of these men made them relatively safe figures for the Soviet state to celebrate. Although the Russian imperial army upheld the Romanovs, many of its leading figures did not come from the elite nobility, but rather from the provinces and margins of Russian elite society. Bagration was Georgian-born and Suvorov was alleged to have Armenian background, a convenient point that the Stalinist histories emphasized in that it drew parallels between the present Soviet state's attempt to draw together non-Russians and Great Russians together in a grand project. Additionally, the Russian imperial army was an institution of its own during the tsarist period and even though being a part of the nobility was a usual precondition for officer status, the officer academies and other forms of training emphasized technical skills and practical knowledge for its cadets. So while these men may have belonged to an innately counter-revolutionary class and upheld a counter-revolutionary order, the Soviet state maintained these generals were more akin to specialists than the nobility. Biographical accounts of the generals from the Soviet era, which sometimes verged on hagiography, emphasized the generals' common sense and plainspoken qualities as well as their sympathies for progressive politics and dislike for tsarist discipline. In short, they were the idealized picture of a Red Army general, but in tsarist garb. In a process of appropriation similar to the state's approach to cultural luminaries like Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Tchaikovsky, state media portrayed these historical figures as individuals whose biographies show they *would* have been Bolsheviks had they been alive during 1917; but had the singular misfortune of having been born when the social preconditions of Russia were not present for such a movement.
The Stalin state's approach to commemorating the past was often laden with ideological meaning, and in this regard, it was not too dissimilar from its Leninist predecessor. In the post-Civil War period, the Russian past and its heroes was still too closely associated with the departed Romanov state to be employed easily by the state, but the Bolsheviks established a pattern of depoliticizing the past and then repoliticizing it that the Stalin dictatorship was able to capitalize upon to meet either the immediate needs of the moment like the war, or to appease Stalin's emerging cult of personality.
*Sources*
Brandenberger, David. *National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Hoffmann, David Lloyd. "Was There a" Great Retreat" from Soviet Socialism? Stalinist Culture Reconsidered." *Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History* 5, no. 4 (2004): 651-674.
Lenoe, Matthew Edward. "In Defense of Timasheff's Great Retreat." *Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History* 5, no. 4 (2004): 721-730.
Maddox, Steven. *Saving Stalin's Imperial City: Historic Preservation in Leningrad, 1930-1950*. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2015.
Platt, Kevin M. F., and David Brandenberger. *Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature As Stalinist Propaganda*. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
| [
"Ivan's notorious outbursts and autocratic whims helped characterise the position of Tsar as one accountable to no earthly authority, only to God. Tsarist absolutism faced few serious challenges until the late 19th century. Ivan's legacy was manipulated by Communist Russia as a potential focus for nationalist pride... |
How were the cracks and streaks on Europa formed? | The current theory is the moon is being flexed by Jupiter's gravitational tides, and the ice crust that floats over a liquid sea continually heaves and buckles under that stress. Water then percolates up through the cracks and leaves streaks of material behind on the surface of the ice, within those cracks. | [
"Europa displayed a large number of intersecting linear features in the low-resolution photos from \"Voyager 1\". At first, scientists believed the features might be deep cracks, caused by crustal rifting or tectonic processes. The high-resolution photos from \"Voyager 2\", taken closer to Jupiter, left scientists ... |
why do tv shows and movies sometimes have to change the names/logos on items for copyright reasons? wouldn't it just be free advertisement for the company/product? | There are a number of reasons for this.
Firstly, it limits liability for trademark violations. If, for whatever reason, the company who has their products featured on a given show doesn't like the way in which the products are presented (or doesn't want to be associated with that particular show for some reason), that company may then try to take legal action against the show's producers for trademark violations (unauthorized use of the company's brand name/logo).
Secondly, advertisers generally don't like it when shows feature products from other companies (especially competing products) at no cost because the advertisers feel it's not fair that they should have pay for the privilege to have their product shown in the program when other products are featured freely. So basically, products which are not official sponsors of the show are often blurred out or modified to be generic in order to attract advertisers and sponsors to the show and make it look like the show provides more value (and advertising exclusivity) to them. | [
"A trademark identifies the brand owner of a particular product or service. Trademarks can be used by others under licensing agreements; for example, Bullyland obtained a license to produce Smurf figurines; the Lego Group purchased a license from Lucasfilm in order to be allowed to launch Lego Star Wars; TT Toys To... |
What's the difference between an ionised hydrogen atom and a proton? | A ^(1)H^(+) atom is exactly the same thing as a proton. | [
"A hydrogen-like ion is any atomic nucleus which has one electron and thus is isoelectronic with hydrogen. These ions carry the positive charge formula_1, where formula_2 is the atomic number of the atom. Examples of hydrogen-like ions are He, Li, Be and B. Because hydrogen-like ions are two-particle systems with a... |
how did disney delay mickey mouse from being in public domain? | Every time the copyright for Mickey Mouse is about to expire a bill goes into law stating that the length of time a copyright lasts is longer than the last one.
First it was creators death, then +25 years, +50 years, ect. Honestly I wish it would end so we could listen to "I Have A Dream" and "Happy Birthday"... | [
"There have been multiple attempts to argue that certain versions of Mickey Mouse are in fact in the public domain. In the 1980s, archivist George S. Brown attempted to recreate and sell cels from the 1933 short \"The Mad Doctor\", on the theory that they were in the public domain because Disney had failed to renew... |
union between countries (denmark-norway, austria-hungary etc) | In the case of Denmark-Norway the king of Norway (Håkon Magnusson) married one of the daughters of the Danish king (Margrethe). They had a son, Olav, who was hair to the Norwegian throne. All of Margrethe's siblings died, and her son, Olav, now was chosen as hair to Denmark to. Olavs grandfather, Valdemar king of Denmark died when Olav was five years old. When Olav was ten, his father Håkon of Norway died. Olav was now king of both countries. His mother ruled trough her son. Unfortunately Olav died when he was only 16 years old. The nobles choose Margrethe's nephew, Erik of Pommern as hair to both Denmark and Norway. He choose Copenhagen as his seat, but ruled both kingdoms as separate countries. Later on more and more power was moved to Denmark, with the dissolving of the Norwegian Riksråd (council of realm) as the final blow to Norwegian self government. | [
"The Kalmar Union (Danish, Norwegian, and ; ) was a personal union in Scandinavia that from 1397 to 1523 joined under a single monarch the three kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden (then including most of Finland's populated areas), and Norway, together with Norway's overseas dependencies (then including Iceland, Greenland... |
what's the"resolution" of film photography? | There isn’t a specific “resolution.” It depends on two main physical characteristics of the film itself - the size of the film and the speed of the film - as well as the way that film is exposed.
The first physical aspect is what format of film you’re using - there’s small, like a standard 35mm film that your average point-and-shoot camera would take; medium, which takes a range of film sizes (popularly 120mm); and large, which takes film sheets with dimensions of several inches.
The second physical aspect is the speed of the film, or how long it takes for light to affect the film; the higher the speed, the lower the quality of the image. This speed references the density of the film’s grain- a higher speed has a larger grain, and thus the image is a lower quality, because a finer grain has the ability to capture more detail. This is probably the most direct similarity to digital photography and resolution, because the grains are essentially like pixels; more pixels = more details.
The combination of film size and film speed essentially boils down to how many grains of film the image is being captured on - a large format film with a low speed will capture the most detail, because it has the most crystal to capture the details with.
These physical factors are then combined with the way the film is shot - specifically, the length of exposure - because again, the longer the film is exposed to light, the more time that light has to affect the film in greater detail. | [
"The resolution of film images depends upon the area of film used to record the image (35 mm, medium format or large format) and the film speed. Estimates of a photograph's resolution taken with a 35mm film camera vary. More information may be recorded if a fine-grain film is used, while the use of poor-quality opt... |
how computer languages work in different (spoken) languages. if i wanted a computer to communicate with a computer in russia, would i have to speak russian, or is there some international standard? | Pretty much every programming language is in English, if that's what you're asking. People who can't speak English well have a very hard time learning to code, since it's harder to remember what (for example) an "if/else" command's name is if you don't know what if and else mean. | [
"Machine languages and the assembly languages that represent them (collectively termed \"low-level programming languages\") tend to be unique to a particular type of computer. For instance, an ARM architecture computer (such as may be found in a smartphone or a hand-held videogame) cannot understand the machine lan... |
Regression after the Fall of the Western Roman Empire | Britain and Italy were two special cases of regression, it's not possible to guesstimate how things would have continued to evolve if the Roman Empire hadn't withdrawn from the West and how that compares to what happened in real life, but it's worth noting that each region was different.
France, the Low Countries, and Western Germany relatively quickly came to be dominated by the Franks, who had sophisticated and powerful states. There was certainly change from the Roman Empire, but Gallo-Romans and Franks co-oexisted in the Frankish state(s). I would rather have been born in France in 500 AD rather than 400 AD for sure.
The Visigoths had a relatively stable kingdom in the Iberian peninsula for over 200 years, it wasn't as stable or prosperous as their Frankish neighbours, but it was a functional state with an impressive culture. The man known as the "last scholar of the ancient world", Isidore, Archbishop of Seville, was a key player in this kingdom. Romans and Visigoths also coexisted peacefully in the Visigothic Kingdom.
The Vandals in North Africa were not as high functioning. North African Trinitarian Christianity had been beset by significant internal challenges for over a century when the Vandals showed up, and in an unfortunate accident of history, the non-Trinitarian Vandals were the most aggressive of the Germanic peoples in promoting their version of Christianity. This persecution led to social division and was a factor in allowing the Eastern Romans to retake North Africa relatively easily about 100 years after the Western Romans lost North Africa. The contentious history of Christianity in North Africa is, IMO, the principal reason why Christianity vanished so quickly when the Muslims invaded, in contrast to Egypt, where Christians remained the majority for centuries after the Muslim conquest, and still constitute a significant minority in Egypt.
Italy functioned relatively well and with a great degree of continuity under the Ostrogoths, they continued to recognize the Eastern Roman Empire in theory, and kept many Roman institutions. Ironically Roman Italy was truly destroyed when the Eastern Romans conquered Italy in the Gothic Wars. Ultimately the Lombards invaded and were much less interested in equality and coexistence with Romans, but the Roman society and economy had basically been destroyed by decades of war at that point.
England was another special case. The Anglo-Saxon invasion and settlements were much less organized, there was very little continuity, the economy was disrupted, Christianity retreated into the hills, and there was significant population decline. While historians don't like to use terms like "Dark Ages" to describe post Roman Europe, it is pretty accurate to describe the situation in England for large parts of the 5th and 6th centuries.
The Welsh maintained a consciously post Roman identity and held onto their Christianity, but there were impacted as well by interactions with their new Anglo Saxon neighbours. | [
"The Fall of the Western Roman Empire was the process in which it failed to enforce its rule. The loss of centralized political control over the West, and the lessened power of the East, are universally agreed, but the theme of decline has been taken to cover a much wider time span than the hundred years from 376. ... |
what was going on in libya when gaddafi was in power and why was he killed. | Gaddafi was about to introduce a new currency, the gold Dinar, made from real gold for the african countries. He would have then sold the petrol from libya for gold only, wich the usa cannot afford. So the usa went in to abolish the gold dinar | [
"On 20 October, Muammar Gaddafi was captured and killed, by rebels, in the city of Sirte. On 23 October, the National Transitional Council (NTC) officially declared an end to the 2011 Libyan Civil War.\n",
"In February 2011, protests in Libya began against long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi as part of the Arab Sp... |
why are recorders still taught in music classes in school if they all sound so terrible? | Because they are really cheap instruments you can't make everyone buy a $1000 violin. | [
"Manufacturers have made recorders out of bakelite and other more modern plastics; they are thus easy to produce, hence inexpensive. Because of this, recorders are popular in schools, as they are one of the cheapest instruments to buy in bulk. They are also relatively easy to play at a basic level because sound pro... |
Why did Battleship design in the Pre-And-During WW2 Era seems to settle on the A-B X turret arrangement? | Balanced ship designs tended to have 8-9 guns for complex reasons linked to the interaction of armament weight vs armor weight to stop the same caliber of shells. A smaller number of guns makes it hard to fire rapid salvos, required to spot your fall of shot and thus shoot accurately against moving targets. Salvo spotting BTW works on the basis of the mean point of impact, the center of all the splashes. That tells you where your aim of all your turrets is actually landing, any one splash tells you very little. Before the 1943-44 period you had to do all of this by visual observation, from the spotting top or an aircraft. Even the earliest radar could provide accurate range, but not bearing, nor track your splashes prior to this. But no battleship laid down after 1942 was ever completed anyway.
A larger number of guns then 9 meanwhile tends to rapidly increase the ship size, which means much greater cost. People would rather build more battleships then mount more guns. You see more guns in earlier dreadnoughts, but those dreadnoughts tended to both be slow and have little deck armor because they did not expect to fight at long ranges. Increased speed and deck armor greatly increased ship sizes. The earlier ships could 'afford' the extra guns while still controlling size and cost growth. The trend towards more speed and deck armor began around 1914-1915, but was greatly accelerated by the battle of Jutland.
I don't know of a reasonable short form way to explain the armor interaction issue past that but the springsharp warship design program can let you do your own experiments with reasonable accuracy. Friedman's US battleships book is also an excellent place to read about the detail design processes that lead to this, it's expensive but most major library systems can get you a copy in the US. If you like battleships you'll love this book and it's very approachable as a text.
The problem with all the treaty battleships was 35,000 tons wasn't enough for a ship with 16in guns and armor against 16in guns and 30 knot speed, South Dakota came closest to this combo but all such designs were compromises. So they all gave up one thing or another, or several things, in an effort to mount a reasonable balance of guns, armor and speed.
At that point two quads uses the least weight, but means half the armament can be lost to one hit, the French quads had a bulkhead of armor down the middle to make this less likely. Nobody else would accept that risk. The French ship however had excellent armor. Four twins uses the most weight but most redundancy. Three triples weighed little more then four twins and gave the most gun barrels, but the worst distribution of fire.
So now we have three triples... why two forward?
The reason to have two turrets forward and one aft is two fold at that point. One is aggression, you can use the forward turrets while closing with the enemy, increasing your chances of winning an offensive battle. One reason the Germans stayed with the 38cm twin was they knew they had a smaller navy and might need to run away. They also indeed did not have a triple turret ready for this caliber of gun, but they really didn't want one either. Their H-39 battleship laid down with 40cm guns also still used twins. These ships were cancelled as soon as WW2 began.
In contrast the French all forward gun ships, and RN forward gun ships were built on the basis of 100% aggression. Though by 1940 the French had decided that the next quadruple turret ship was in fact going to move one turret aft, for equal fields of fire but slightly greater weight.
The other big factor is weight balance in the ship, the engines and reduction gears are aft and very very heavy, battleships, and even missile armed warships all tend to be stern heavy because of that engine weight. You want them stern heavy to a point so the bow doesn't plunge into the waves as well. This improves habitability of the ship and lets you keep up your speed in bad weather. Which can be an important advantage if you are trying to run down an enemy with similar speed in calm weather, or just get somewhere in the world in a hurry. This favors putting more main armament forward to maintain the proper weight balance without excessive displacement.
| [
"During the lengthy design process, new battleships being built abroad, particularly the British s, led to a re-design of the last four members of the class, resulting in the \"Liberté\"s. Foreign battleships began to carry a heavy secondary battery, such as the guns of the \"King Edward VII\"s, which prompted an i... |
what exactly does "airplane mode" do and how does it keep my phone from disrupting airplane functions? | It disables the cellular transceiver in your phone. It just turns off the part of your phone that sends and receives data from cell towers. The idea is that you will not be creating electromagnetic interference that could potentially interact with the aircraft's instrumentation. The reality is that everything is so well shielded now, it probably wouldn't matter. | [
"Communication is a vital part of the job: controllers are trained to focus on the exact words that pilots and other controllers speak, because a single misunderstanding about altitude levels or runway numbers can have tragic consequences. Controllers communicate with the pilots of aircraft using a push-to-talk rad... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.