question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
|---|---|---|
why do we sometimes get the urge to do violent things to cute things? | I think it's probably along the same lines of why we think about jumping off a cliff when we get too close to the edge. We are analyzing outcomes and consequences. It's a totally normal thing to do, it likely keeps us from actually doing these things because we examine the situation and outcomes instead of acting them out in real life and seeing what happens. | [
"Cute aggression is superficially aggressive behaviour caused by seeing something cute, such as a human baby or young animal. People experiencing cute aggression may grit their teeth, clench their fists, or feel the urge to pinch and squeeze something they consider cute, while not actually causing or intending to c... |
Most of the wild west shows that aired in the '50's and '60's always shows everyone drinking whiskey all the time. How accurate is that portrayal? | This is a difficult question to answer because there were so many different people coming to and living in the West in the nineteenth century - and it was in itself an enormous place with "many Wests" as historians of the period and place like to say. Even the clichéd "Wild West" with a frontier town surrounded by open expanse tended to have more foreign-born and diversity than many Eastern cities. Since tastes varied radically, different saloons would open, often catering to a segment of the population. Because of this, one saloon might sell more whiskey while the one next door might specialize in fine wines, and other with imported and/or domestic beers. Most saloons would sell an assortment of everything, but preferences of clientele is hinted at when one compares the archaeological evidence of different establishments, which shows that they weren't consuming the same proportions of wines, beers, and hard liquor in each place.
On top of this complexity is the fact that you can't trust the facts! Western communities often boasted that theirs was the hardest drinking town around with more saloons than anywhere else and an annual consumption that was unmatched. The only thing that you can count on was that they all tended to boast the same thing, and none of them were in fact the 'Hardest Drinking Town in the West" - they were all contenders! But the boast survived and influenced the popular perception of the Old West, giving it some of its "Wild" veneer.
But then ... there is at least one fact that does affect all of this, namely the demography of the nineteenth-century West. Although there were more women (and most were not prostitutes - another bit of "Wild West" hype) and more children than the cliché, there was in fact a preponderance of young single men, and young single men being who they are, they did drink a lot. One of the first businesses that would set up in a new Western mining town was a saloon, and there were always ample customers.
All this adds up to an answer with equivocations: everyone drinking something (often but not always it was whiskey) is sort of accurate, but it is based on exaggeration, and it doesn't capture the complexity of reality: not everyone drank; there were at least some families where drinking habits were different from those of single men; there was a lot of whiskey, but there were also many other types of drinks; and consumption was not as dramatic as the cliché would have it.
I hope this helps! | [
"The peak year for television Westerns was 1959, with 26 such shows airing during primetime. At least six of them were connected in some extent to Wyatt Earp: \"The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp\", \"Bat Masterson\", \"Tombstone Territory\", \"Broken Arrow\", \"Johnny Ringo\", and \"Gunsmoke\". Increasing costs of ... |
why does it sometimes look like the numbers on my alarm clock are jumping up and down? | The numbers on a digital clock look like they're constant, but they're actually turning on and off very fast. In actuality, most digital clocks only display one "segment" of the number at a time. In a number like 8, which consists of 7 segments, the display rotates through lighting up each segment individually. If your eyes aren't moving, and you're looking at the display, it looks like it's constant. If your eyes are moving, everything gets jumbled around a bit, because the light from each segment is hitting your eye at a different position than it "should'. You can replicate this phenomenon by looking at a display and clicking your teeth together (or by eating something really crunchy) which causes your eyes to vibrate a bit. | [
"An alarm clock/radio featuring a light function. The light is a green zig-zag shaped tube running across the top of the clock. The alarm function can be set to radio or one of the pre-set alarm noises. The noises always begin with a rocket blast-off noise as someone says \"3...2...1... .\" The alarms available are... |
splitting infinitives??? | An infinitive is just the phrase "to *verb*". A split infinitive is when you put an adverb in between the parts of an infinitive. So in your example, the word "never" is in the middle of the infinitive "to grow up", so it's a split infinitive. Having a split infinitive doesn't mean the sentence doesn't change meaning if you take out the adverb, it's just a description of the order of words in the sentence. | [
"In the English language, a split infinitive or cleft infinitive is a grammatical construction in which a word or phrase comes between the \"to\" and the bare infinitive of the \"to\" form of the infinitive verb. Usually an adverb or adverbial phrase comes between them.\n",
"It was not until the very end of the 1... |
Brazil is widely known to be the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. Why did it last so long in Brazil and what pressures caused it to finally end? | I'm Brazilian so I think I might help, though I'm a lawyer, not a historian. This is a topic that is really common knowledge in Brazil so I hope it's alright by the mods.
One of the reasons Brazil took very long to abolish slavery was because its economy was heavily reliant on the production of sugar, coffee, tobacco and cotton, which exclusively used slave labor up until the mid 19th century.
Also, since Brazil had such vast lands, the monetary value of slaves was actually higher than the lands themselves, making them a very expensive and important asset. This would also create a resistance to change the elite's stance on slavery.
Finally, Portugal made a lot of money on taxes charged from slave merchants. This means that there probably was no institutional interest in changing the situation.
It all started to change with England's pressures, especially the Aberdeen Act in 1845. In 1850, the Eusébio de Queiroz Law finally prohibited the transatlantic trafficking of slaves. This intensified the internal slave market and actually made their prices go up, which kept slavery going.
Intellectuals started to voice their opinion against slavery and by the 1870s, a growing part of society was against slavery. In 1871 the Ventre Livre Law was created (Free Womb Law) which made it so that any child born from a slave would be free. By then, slaves were allowed to have private property and could eventually buy their freedom (alforria).
In 1885, the Sexagenários Law (Sexagenarian Law) was approved, which granted freedom to anyone over the age of 65. In 1889, princess Isabel, acting as a regent for Emperor Dom Pedro II, approved the Áurea Law (Golden Law), which unequivocally ended slavery in Brazil.
By then, though, most of the workforce was already composed by immigrants (most notably, Italians), who were cheaper to maintain, representing a better cost-effectiveness.
| [
"In 1888 Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery completely, although in 1871 it had ensured that eventual result with the gradualist method of freeing in the womb. See Abolition of slavery timeline for other dates.\n",
"Brazil was the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery... |
why does a body pillow feel between my legs make sleeping more comfortable? | My guess would be that it raises your leg which aligns your spine and reduces lower back tension. | [
"A pillow is a support of the body at rest for comfort, therapy, or decoration. Pillows are used by many species, including humans. Some types of pillows include throw pillows and decorative pillows. Pillows that aid sleeping are a form of bedding that supports the head and neck. Other types of pillows are designed... |
what is happening at a biological level when someone mentions tequila and you can instantly taste it? | Not an expert, just a guy who reads a lot of science-y stuff. But it's been four hours and you don't seem to have any other responses. I've read that memory recall in our brains doesn't work like a computer. A computer creates some kind of physical structure to store information, then comes back and examines that structure in order to recall the information. Our brains actually have to reconstruct the memories, so recall is a complicated mixture of reading and writing simultaneously. I think the taste sensation is being recreated in your brain. | [
"Alcohol is classified as a sedative hypnotic drug. Alcohol produces a sedative effect by acting on receptors of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA. GABA receptors contain a binding site for the chemical, GABA, a chloride ion channel, and an additional binding site for alcohol molecules.\n",
"BULLET::::- Sheb W... |
Were the United States of America set up for such power and success before the revolution or was their ascent to the top of the global hierarchy only possible because of what happened after the Revolution or the Revolution itself? | I work on the history of Anglo-American relations and this question (or at least a variation on it) interests me greatly. At what point was the United States' rise to power perceived to be inevitable?
Firstly, it all depends on what you mean by "set up". On the one hand, you could argue that America's ability to compete economically against its European rivals owed a lot to its natural resources and capacity for growth. In this respect, the country started life with a number of geographic advantages. If the United States had been founded in a smaller area, with no room for Westward expansion, then it probably wouldn't have been able to challenge other world powers in the same way. That said, this kind of geographical determinism only goes so far - after all, the key is how a country *uses* its resources.
In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, some Americans were already beginning to make wildly optimistic predictions about their country's future. There was lots of talk of sweeping away the crumbling, decadent 'old world' of Europe and replacing it with a pure, vibrant, republican model of society nurtured in the new world. However, for much of the next century these comments were laughed off in Britain as the exaggerated boasts of loud-mouthed Yankees.
From a British perspective, the 'inevitability' of America's rise only started to become apparent from around the 1870s. At least, that's what I argue in my own work. Before that, the country was generally viewed as an underdeveloped frontier territory and an unstable experiment in republican democracy. British observers watched the country with great interest - and many, of course, went to live there - but it's hard to detect any sense of anxiety about its future power. With hindsight its easy to laugh at their confidence, but we shouldn't forget that post-Revolutionary America *was* an extremely unstable country and that it came close to tearing itself apart during the Civil War.
However, after the Civil War things began to change. By the 1870s people in Britain (including Gladstone, the Prime Minister) were already starting to talk in terms of a coming 'American Future' in which the United States would inevitably usurp Britain's position on the World Stage. These anxieties manifested themselves across a range of contexts (economic, political, cultural) until, by 1902, the 'Americanization of the world' was casually described by one British observer as 'the trend of the twentieth century'.
America surpassed Britain in terms of industrial production in the 1870s and started to eat into its overseas markets. Hundreds of rich Americans were marrying off their daughters to bankrupt families of the British aristocracy. In cultural terms, British audiences were beginning to demonstrate a preference for American pop culture (particularly its humour and its journalism). By the 1880s, performing cowboys like Buffalo Bill and Mexican Joe had captured the imaginations of millions of Victorian girls and boys who now started to dream about life on the American frontier. Visitors to the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893 returned with stories of an electrifying modern metropolis whose streetcars, elevators, and skyscrapers made it seem like the landscape of the future. American sportsmen were also starting to get the better of their British competitors in yacht races and boxing matches.
Another indicator of America's growing influence in this period was the spread of American English. It might be hard to imagine, but hundreds of American phrases and slang terms entered British culture during this time (including my username). For more on this, check out [an article I wrote for The Guardian](_URL_0_) a while back.
All of these manifestations of modern American vigour fed into growing concerns about the degeneration of 'old world' society and culture. Whilst many people in Britain resisted the idea of an American future - it would be wrong to suggest that the whole country was resigned to defeat - by the 1880s it was in wide circulation. The obvious analogy would be the recent emergence of China - America is still the world's top super power, but people are starting to talk openly about a power shift towards Beijing.
So, to answer your question: while *some* of the raw ingredients of America's future power were in place before the revolution, it wasn't until the final quarter of the nineteenth century that its rise to global domination began to be regarded as inevitable by the international community. Events such as the First World War helped to accelerate this process, but it was already well under way by the end of the century.
If you'd like to know more about any of this, take a look at:
1) [My PhD thesis on transatlantic journalism - free to download!](_URL_4_)
2) [This article tracking the transatlantic circulation of American jokes](_URL_1_) - free to download for a short time.
3) Various other bits and bobs on my [research blog.](_URL_5_)
4) Some previous /r/AskHistorians threads on these topics (I've copied some of my responses into this post already):
* [When did it become clear to the world that America would become a superpower? Was it only after WWII?](_URL_3_)
* [When did the relationship between Britain and the USA go from sour to friendly?](_URL_2_) | [
"According to Panitch and Gindin, the institutional foundations for American-led global capitalism were laid during the Great Depression of the 1930s when the Roosevelt administration strengthened the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury while establishing a wide range of economic and financial regulatory age... |
Can someone explain "Bleeding Kansas"? | My only qualifications to explain this is I'm from Kansas and had to study this in history classes. Also, I brushed up using the wikipedia page _URL_0_
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 gave Kansans "popular sovereignty" which basically put up the issue of whether a state would be a "free-state" (no slaves) or a "slave-state" to a vote. If the vote was truly left to Kansans the vote was most likely going to end up creating a free-state, but pro-slavery men from Missouri and nearby would come in droves over to Kansas and vote in order to sway it in their favor.
Anti-slavery people mostly settled in lawrence and other nearby towns while pro-slavery forces settled further east and north in towns such as Atchison and Leavenworth creating a sort of border war between the forces (even though both these towns are in Kansas.) In that time period every vote really did count as there were only a total of 6000 votes (only 1500 "legit" Kansas registered voters) so conflict began to arose between the groups ending in "border ruffians" (pro-slavery missourians mostly) riding over to Lawrence and burning down the Free State hotel and doing some other damage.
By this time some anti-slavery Northerners including John Brown who supplied anti-slavery forces with guns hidden in Bibles otherwise known as Beecher's bibles. Although only 56 people died in the whole "war" the conflict climaxed during the Battle of Osawatomie where John Brown's forces engaged around 400 pro-slavery forces.
There was also conflict over which state constitution would become the real one with 4 total ones written and 2 supporting slavery and 2 against slavery. The Wyandotte Constitution supporting a free state was approved 1859 officially making Kansas a Free-state and swaying the control Anti-slavery supporters had over the direction of the United States.
| [
"The \"Bleeding Kansas\" episode has been dramatically rendered in countless works of American popular culture, including literature, theater, film, and television. Its many depictions and mentions include:\n",
"Bleeding Kansas was demonstrative of the gravity of the era's most pressing social issues, from the ma... |
how did humans create perfectly flat objects prior to the invention of advanced tools/machinery? | There are no *perfectly* flat objects being made today.
Even the mirrors on giant telescopes have fluctuations on the surface.
If one wanted to make a fairly flat stone surface with only stone tools available one could use water in a bucket and grind a disk (or whatever) so that the edges and surface are even with the still water.
Metals can be pounded flat pretty easily. Polish them to see how flat they are and work at it some more if necessary. | [
"Forerunners of machine tools included bow drills and potter's wheels, which had existed in ancient Egypt prior to 2500 BC, and lathes, known to have existed in multiple regions of Europe since at least 1000 to 500 BC. But it was not until the later Middle Ages and the Age of Enlightenment that the modern concept o... |
Are there valuable or highly useful resources which could potentially be harvested from mars? | Mars has the same elements Earth does. You could build a gold mine or a titanium mine or whatever. Actually moving it from Mars to Earth would be absurdly expensive and isn't going to happen without something making space travel much, much cheaper. But settlers would use it, since getting it from Earth would be even more stupidly expensive. | [
"Zubrin, in his 1996 book (revised 2011) \"The Case for Mars\", acknowledges any Martian colony will be partially Earth-dependent for centuries. However, Zubrin suggests Mars may be profitable for two reasons. First, it may contain concentrated supplies of metals equal to or of greater value than silver, which have... |
american tv shows compared to the rest of the world. | The amount of American hate / bashing on Reddit is amazing.
| [
"Over the course of its run, the series received widespread critical acclaim, with several publications naming it the best show on television. The American Film Institute listed \"The Americans\" as one of the top ten television series of 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2018.\n",
"As a whole, the television networks t... |
why are some sports teams historically more successful (ny yankees) than others (cleveland browns)? | It's a vicious circle. Teams that do well earn more money (because they have more fans, have higher attendance, sell more merchandise) and have higher prestige, so they can attract better talent. | [
"The New York Yankees are noted for having won more titles than any other US major professional sports franchise. The Yankees' chief rivals, the Boston Red Sox, also enjoy a huge following in Boston and throughout New England. The Philadelphia Phillies of the National League are the oldest continuous, one-name, one... |
how can ebay sellers send something like 1$ phone cases with free delivery to the other side of the planet, when if i send a small letter to my neighbor it will cost 3$? do they still make profit? | Postal systems in other countries can pay a LOT less than what us westerners pay, ditto manufacturers. The companies that are selling those phone cases pay postage out of the price they receive for their merchandise, and just include it in their markup. So that three dollar phone case consists of 30 cents for postage (which is crazy cheap because it's largely container-shipped so all they have to do is deliver it to the local dock) plus $2.70 that they receive.
Then our regional postal systems receive it once it's unloaded from its container, and have to deliver it as part of their service and receive a small amount of revenue from a central finance-handling organization for international mail for doing so. (Edit: error was corrected) | [
"In 2010, the third Free Shipping Day began at 12 a.m. EST on Friday, Dec. 17, and ended at 12 a.m. EST, Dec. 18. More than 1,700 merchants from all 50 states participated and the official site saw 317,000 unique visitors. Online shoppers spent $942 million to make Free Shipping Day the third highest spending day o... |
why does basically no one speak latin anymore even though it is used in many popular countries? | It is a very slow language with very complex grammar that isn't very intuitive. The sheer amount of declensions, verb tenses, gender words, and verb forms are staggering, and makes for a very cumbersome, formal language.
The trend for languages is to become less formal over time, which is probably one of the major reasons that people find English so easy to learn the basics of (although the mastery/fluency of English is a little more difficult than some other languages). | [
"Latin, French and English not only served or still serve as \"linguae francae\" (cf. below), but also influenced the vernacular/national languages due to their high prestige. Due to this prestige, there are not only “necessity loans”, but also “luxury loans” and pseudo-loans. Many loans from these three languages ... |
What is the story behind Australia’s government shutdown in 1975 and subsequent elections? | Australia has two Houses of Parliament: the House of Representatives, with members elected by locality, which originates legislation. The other is the Senate, with each state having an equal quota of Senators, which 'reviews' legislation and has to approve it. This includes approving the Budget to ensure 'supply' (of money). Government is formed by winning a majority of Reps members.
In practice, the Senate is rarely controlled thanks to independents and it's slower rate of change (only half is elected at one time). Additionally, while if a Reps members leaves there is an election in that area, a departing Senator is replaced by the government of that state.
Okay, that's the structure, which was important in what unfolded.
In 1972 Australia ended decades of conservative government and elected a Labor Government with a fairly radical policy agenda (universal health care, public libraries, withdrawing from Vietnam, ending conscription, building regional cities). The government pursued this agenda with enthusiasm, but it was very expensive, at a time when oil prices were slowing Western economies. Union dominance saw massive wage rises, and consequent inflation of serious proportions.
But there was an ideological rift: after years in government, the conservatives were greatly threatened by all this, and having finally secured government, the Labor Party was determined to push its agenda through. The government was also threatening to the US-Australia alliance, as Labor was opposed to militarism and Cold War paranoia (The Prime Minister went to China before Nixon), and ambivalent about nuclear weapons and the alliance generally, Vietnam being a fresh and ongoing issue and many Labor members sympathising with the communists.
So, a few years in and Labor lost two Senators. By convention before and since, the relevant state government would appoint the next in line from that party. But the Queensland government, which had the characteristics of a corrupt deep-south US regime and ultimately was brought down by scandals, was not amenable to convention and replaced the departing Labor men with conservatives (or 'Liberals' as they're called here from their free trade background). Labor lost its slim majority and, given the strength of political feeling prevailing, soon found itself in the position of being unable to finance its program by conventional methods. Indeed, it was dubious fundraising that was behind the loss of Senators.
Adding to the throwing aside of convention to take Senate control, the Liberal Party blocked the passage of Labor's Budget, and thus blocked supply and 'shut down the government'. This has not happened before or since despite ruling parties seldom having Senate control. The Labor government did not call an election, which it was likely to lose, considering they had the right, by convention, to govern for their term and be judged at the end of it.
The impasse brought into effect a clause in the Australian Constitution whereby the Governor-General, as the representative of the Crown, can dismiss the government. The GG is historically a nice, revered figure that opens buildings, attends ceremonies and makes speeches.... much like the Queen herself. It is very unlikely that authorities in England had much to do with it, but the GG, John Kerr, a former friend of the Prime Minister, sacked the government and ordered elections, appointing the Liberal leader as caretaker Prime Minister. The Liberals easily won the subsequent election, due to inflation, strikes and the chaos and division of the Labor Party between its more mainstream and radical sections.
For a generation there was enduring hatred of the Liberal Party by dedicated Labor supporters and in particular of its leader, Malcolm Fraser, who was seen as an engineer of The Dismissal (as the affair is known). The abuse of precedent and take-power-at-all-costs mentality implied by the method of the government's removal epitomised, to Labor supporters, the born-to-rule attitude of the conservative side. A minority saw the Dismissal as the result of CIA-Liberal party collusion.
Subsequently, Fraser proved unequal to the economic challenges of the time and Labor won easily in 1983, holding power for over ten years. But Labor had learnt its lesson, and the government was characterised by political/economic reforms that coincided with neoliberal ideas (ending trade barriers, selling off government assets, curbing union power). These changes underpinned Australia's subsequent prosperity and success.
Fraser, hated by many in the 1980s, is today seen as a humanitarian. He accepted many refugees from Vietnam and he is a vocal critic of the Liberal Party's proudly-held policies of refugee detention on remote Pacific Islands, and general exploitation of racist sympathies. | [
"The by-election occurred in the final days of the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis, which culminated with the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (an unpopular figure in Western Australia) on 11 November. Earlier in the year, there had also been political turmoil at state level, with the National Countr... |
If the ISS was left abandoned now, will it still circle the planet in say a thousand years? | No, without monitoring and adjustment its orbit would decay and it would eventually re-enter the atmosphere.
> Even though the space station orbits in what most people on Earth would consider to be the “vacuum of space,” there still are enough atmospheric molecules that contact the surfaces of its large solar array panels, truss structure backbone and pressurized modules to change its speed, or velocity, which is about 17,500 miles, or 28,000 kiliometers an hour. The station is so large (as big as a football field with the end zones included) that the cumulative effect of these tiny particles contacting its surfaces reduces its speed and causes a minute but continuous lowering of its altitude, or height above the Earth.
> To fight this tendency, thrusters on the space station or visiting vehicles such as the space shuttle, Progress resupply vehicles or ATVs are fired periodically to “reboost” the station. These reboosts, however, come at the cost of fuel, or propellant, that must be launched from Earth at significant cost.
_URL_0_ | [
"Humanity has exhausted their natural resources, and seven remote outposts are established in distant space to extract and synthesize useful materials from their neighboring planets, to send back to Earth. The crews of the space stations must survive independently off Earth for several decades. First Station 7 lose... |
How does a car lose horsepower from the engine to the wheels? | Mechanical drag, and inefficiency with the driveline. Translating the rotational force produced by the engine and both gearing it down, and changing the direction of that force all consumes some of the engine's original power output. | [
"The size of the engine gave the car a centre of gravity that was not just rearward but higher than other cars, due to the height of the upper crankshaft above the ground and the need to have the entire engine raised slightly to make room for the lower set of exhausts which left the engine from underneath the car.\... |
where does the earth (or any other planet) find the energy to continue spinning on itself forever? | Energy isn't required to continue spinning, or continue any sort of motion in fact. One of the laws of physics is that objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by something else.
Since nothing is really stopping the earth from spinning, it spins. | [
"BULLET::::- Once spun up, objects in the vacuum of space—stars, black holes, planets, moons, spin-stabilized satellites, etc.—dissipate energy very slowly, allowing them to spin for long periods. Tides on Earth are dissipating the gravitational energy of the Moon/Earth system at an average rate of about 3.75 teraw... |
if animals can distinguish us from our smells, how do they not get confused by the smells of our soaps/colognes/deodorants/etc? | Suppose I showed you an apple. It's red, it's shiny, it has an easily recognizable shape, and I've even taken the time to write "APPLE" across it in permanent marker.
Now, further suppose that after showing you the apple, I went into another room and dipped it in wood varnish. This coating wouldn't be enough to obscure any details, but the color would be a bit darker, the shine would be a bit more pronounced, and the word "APPLE" would be slightly blurred.
Would you still be able to recognize it?
Scent works in much the same manner for animals. We can mask it or alter it in ways that are pretty profound from a human perspective... but for a creature whose nose is literally 10,000 times better *at minimum*, perfumes, soaps, and deodorants do very, very little to mute our natural aromas.
**TL;DR: Animals can recognize your scent in much the same way that you can recognize a friend wearing subtle makeup.** | [
"Animals recognise a wide variety of chemicals using their senses of taste and smell. The nematode \"Caenorhabditis elegans\" has only 14 types of chemosensory neuron, yet is able to respond to dozens of chemicals because each neuron detects several stimuli. More than 40 highly divergent transmembrane proteins that... |
Is it possible to find an effective infinity for all intents and purposes? | Assuming humanity ends at some point, then we can look at the collection of all numbers practically used and this will be a finite set, so there is some number bigger than all of these. Paradoxically, though, if we were to *use* this number as an "essential infinity", then it would have a practical use and therefore be in this set of all practically used numbers, which would mean it is bigger than itself.
So, yes, such a number exists but we can't use it. You might be able to fix this by just choosing your "essential infinity" to be the largest number in this set, but there's no way for us to know what it is before humanity ends.
Practical numbers, however, can get much larger than I assume you expect, and definitely larger than any of us can comprehend. In fact, [Graham's Number](_URL_0_) is a number that has practically been used that is so big that it is impossible to write down or even comprehend. Your "essential infinity" would have to be larger than this, which means that an "essential infinity" is highly useless. There's also no problem using infinity practically in math,it is a fairly concrete, robust thing and it is used practically in math quite often. I wrote a [short thing](_URL_1_) a little bit ago about a couple different notions of infinity and how they are used in Calculus (there are other, unrelated notions of infinity not mentioned). | [
"This is often called potential infinity; however, there are two ideas mixed up with this. One is that it is always possible to find a number of things that surpasses any given number, even if there are not actually such things. The other is that we may quantify over infinite sets without restriction. For example, ... |
Is it true that concussions and even subconcussive impacts kill neurons? | You've probably gotten a lot of mixed info because there is a *lot* of mixed info out there. [This paper](_URL_0_) would be a good read if you want a detailed and relatively recent description of what we currently understand about concussions.
But, in brief, after a (mild) concussion, the changes in brain function are less a result of structural damage to the brain, and more a result of widespread short-term neuron malfunctioning. [The initial impact throws off the balance of potassium in the brain](_URL_0_), which causes a bunch of excititory neurotransmitters to get released, which causes a whole cascade of problems that looks a lot like when the brain runs out of oxygen. During this "energy crisis", blood supply is actually *reduced* to the brain, and neurons have to slow down and take their time to pull themselves back together. Nearly all neurons recover, but [a few stragglers might actually die](_URL_2_). But the neurons that die weren't necessarily killed during the impact, just pushed too hard during the neurochemical aftermath.
Other neurons may end up permanently injured (this time as a direct result of the impact) [like when an axon gets overstreched](_URL_0_) (or snaps completely). The neurons don't *die*, but the damaged axons don't work right, and may never actually heal.
However, during the "energy crisis", [the recovering neurons are especially vulnerable](_URL_1_). A second trauma (like, say, a second concussion) before neurons are completely healed could kill a whole lot of neurons that would have otherwise made a full recovery. | [
"Included in the cascade of events unleashed in the brain by concussion is impaired neurotransmission, loss of regulation of ions, deregulation of energy use and cellular metabolism, and a reduction in cerebral blood flow. Excitatory neurotransmitters, chemicals such as glutamate that serve to stimulate nerve cells... |
why do overweight people have higher basal metabolic rates than lean people? | > Most BMR calculators, even on reliable websites, make no distinction between muscle and fat
Yes, this is why the calculation is an estimate and not 100% accurate. A bodybuilder is in a very different place metabolically than an obese person, and a simple calculation isn't going to reveal all. It can however be useful in determining when the average person is getting a bit too tubby. | [
"BULLET::::- There is no evidence that obesity is related to slower resting metabolism. Resting metabolic rate does not vary much between people. Weight gain and loss are directly attributable to diet and activity. Overweight people tend to underestimate the amount of food they eat, and underweight people tend to o... |
Why is a fast reentry from space back to earth a better option than a slow decent? | Well, two issues, spacecraft in orbit are already moving at orbital speed, which is 7.8 KPS for LEO, and varies depending on the orbit. So, that speed has to be scrubbed in order for the spacecraft to intersect the surface at nearly zero velocity, otherwise, its a crash. The most efficient way to scrub that speed is by friction with the air. A powered descent (Like the Apollo LEM) is possible, but that would require lifting massive amounts of fuel into orbit to make it happen, which means much larger rockets for launch, etc... | [
"Any spaceflight that returns to the surface, including sub-orbital ones, will undergo atmospheric reentry. The speed at the start of the reentry is basically the maximum speed of the flight. The aerodynamic heating caused will vary accordingly: it is much less for a flight with a maximum speed of only 1 km/s than ... |
Zika virus has been known about for 70 years, why is it only now a big issues? Has it always caused microcephaly, or is this new? | We don't know.
Could be a recent mutation in ZV.
Could be that there's always been a link to microcephaly, but that ZV didn't infect enough people for anyone to notice — there is some debate as to whether the sheer number of people infected with ZV is increased in the last few years.
(Which could be due to ZV mutating to spread more easily, or it could be due to changes in human-to-human contact patterns (for example, World Cup), or it could be due to changes in human-to-mosquito contact patters (for example, due to global climate change), to name just a few possibilities.) | [
"The Zika virus was first linked with newborn microcephaly during the Brazil Zika virus outbreak. In 2015, there were 2,782 suspected cases of microcephaly compared with 147 in 2014 and 167 in 2013. Confirmation of many of the recent cases is pending, and it is difficult to estimate how many cases went unreported b... |
why is it so hard to get into medical school when there is so obviously a scarcity of doctors? | Being a doctor is hard. They don't want a bunch of sub par doctors | [
"Becoming a physician requires either several years of training beyond undergraduate education, or a professional undergraduate degree with a duration longer than that of a typical undergraduate degree. Consequently, physician supply is affected by the number of students eligible for medical training. Students that... |
losing color perception when going from dark to light areas | At a basic level, your eyes use two different types of cells to see: cones and rods.
You use cones primarily when you are in well lit areas. You use rods primarily when you are in poorly lit areas. Think of rods as what you use for 'night-vision'. However, only cones really see color (they're 3 types of cones, a red, blue and green. Your brain combines the input from each cone and bam you got color). Cones also less their response to light when exposed for long amounts of time. This basically means that it sends out less signal for the same amount of light.
Now, when you step in a bright room to a dark one, the cones need time to adjust because they've adapted to receive more light input and they aren't working very well at lower light inputs. You're now using only rods, and they don't gather color information. That's why you see grayscale initially, and that's why you gradually get more color input as more cones adjust to the change in light input. | [
"This can be seen when the eyes are closed and looking at the back of the eyelids. In a bright room, a dark red can be seen, owing to a small amount of light penetrating the eyelids and taking on the color of the blood it has passed through. In a dark room, blackness can be seen or the object can be more colourful.... |
Did the Romans practice Syncretism with Judaism and Christianity? | There's quite a lot of Jewish and Christian influence in the so-called 'Greek Magical Papyri' - a modern collection of pagan magical spellbooks from Roman Egypt (mostly later than the 3rd century AD). These texts take inspiration from lots of different religious cultures - mostly Greek and Egyptian, but also Mesopotamian and, as I said, Jewish. The angels, prophets, holy men, alongside the Jewish God appear as sources of magical power or knowledge. Take this spell for example:
PGM LXXXIII. 1-20
*For [fever with shivering fits]: ' "GOBA . . . s . . . MO . . . NOUSBA . . . EIEGE
. . . OSARK. . . AUSE fever with shivering fits, I conjure you, MICHAEL, archangel
of the earth; [whether] it is daily or nightly or quartan fever; I conjure you, the
Almighty SABAOTH, that it no longer touch the soul of the one who carries [this],
nor [touch] his whole body; also the dead, deliver, . . . the disrress IDOT . . .
YGRSBONOE. . . . "
"He who dwells in the help of the Most High shall abide in the shadow of the
God of heaven. He will say of God, 'thou art my refuge and my help; I will put my
trust in him."
"Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy will; our daily bread."'
"Holy, holy is the Lord SABAOTH, heaven is full of justice, holy is the one of
glory."'
''ANIAADA . . . IA, MIG~L' of lords, Abraham Isaac Jacob ELOEI EL~E Solo-
mon(?) I ~ABAOTH OBL. . . .
There are obvious names invoked here that would be familiar to any Jew or Christian, and also some quotes from scripture. However, their random nature and the fact that the lines from the Lord's Prayer are garbled suggests this wasn't written by someone particularly familiar with the Bible. There's no connection to any specific part of Jewish or Christian theology - God, his angels and prophets are merely being invoked as sources of supernatural power that can be harnessed to produce the desired effect, which in this case is the curing of a fever.
Elsewhere, Christ's reputation as an exorcist is combined with more pagan elements in a spell for driving out demons:
PGM N. 1227-64
*Excellent rite for driving out daimons: Formula to be spoken over his head:
Place olive branches before him, I and stand behind him and say:
"Hail, God of Abraham; hail, God of Isaac; hail, God of Jacob; Jesus Chrestos,"
the Holy Spirit, the Son of the Father, who is above the Seven, who is within
the Seven. Bring Iao Sabaoth; may your power issue forth from him, NN, - until
you drive away this unclean daimon Satan, who is in him. I conjure you, daimon, whoever you are, by this god, SABARBARBATHI~TH SABARBARBATHIOUTH SABAR-
BARBATHI~NETH SABARBARBAPHAI. Come out, daimon, whoever you are, and stay away from him, NN, now, now; immediately, immediately. Come out, daimon,
since I bind you with unbreakable adamantine fetters, and I deliver you into the
black chaos in perdition."
Preparation: take 7 olive branches; for six of them tie together the two ends of
each one, but for the remaining one use it like a whip as you utter thc conjuration.
Keep it secret; it is proven.
After driving out the daimon, hang around him, NN, a phylactery, which the
patient puts on after the expulsion of the daimon-a phylactery with these things [written] on 1 a tin metal leaf: "B~R PHOR PHORBA PHOR PHORBA BES CIIARIN
BAUBO TE PHOR BdRPHORBA PHORBABOR BAPHORBA PHABRAIE PHdRBA PHARBA PH~RPHOR PHORBA / BOPHOR PHORBA PHORPHOR PHORBA BOBOR-
BORBA PAMPHORBA PHORPHOR PH~RBA, protect him. | [
"Romans were familiar with the concept of syncretism because from their earliest times they had experienced it with, among others, the Greeks. The Romans incorporated the originally Greek Apollo and Hercules into their religion. They did not look at the religious aspects that they adopted from other cultures to be ... |
What is the evolutionary advantage of stress? | I'm a stress physiologist. We (stress researchers) take it as a given that *in the short term, the stress response is helpful*. (The stress response = sharp elevation of stress hormones - epinephrine, cortisol, and a few others - during a stressful event.) Those hormones redirect energy toward dealing with a short-term emergency - raising glucose, raising BP and heart rate, often switching behaviors toward "escape" type behaviors (and away from reproductive behaviors, e.g. a bird will abandon its nest and fly away), refocusing attention, and increasing immune response (in the short term). Simultaneously almost all investment in "long term" projects is halted - growth, tissue repair, digestion, and reproduction are all strongly inhibited, presumably so as to redirect all available energy toward running away or fighting.
This definitely helps you deal with that 1 stressful event. It's like an "emergency mode."
The problem develops if there are repeated or chronic stressful events so that the animal sort of gets "stuck" in that emergency mode. Keep glucose elevated forever and you can slip into pre-diabetes; keep attention keyed up forever and there seem to be significant problems with long-term memory; the immune system actually is inhibited if cortisol is elevated chronically; the long-term elevations in BP and heart rate are associated with cardiac problems; and the inhibition of "nonessential" systems can lead to digestive problems, loss of libido, infertility, slow wound healing, etc. Ultimately there's increased mortality and decreased reproduction with long-term chronic stress.
So the stress response is great for dealing with short-term, one-off stressful events, but becomes maladaptive in chronic long-term stress.
I usually recommend Sapoksky's book "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" for an introduction to all this. It's a great entertaining book written for lay readers, but is also well enough researched that I actually use it as a textbook in my endocrinology courses. | [
"Biotic stress is stress that occurs as a result of damage done to an organism by other living organisms, such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, beneficial and harmful insects, weeds, and cultivated or native plants. It is different from abiotic stress, which is the negative impact of non-living factors on th... |
What do I have here? | Not a car battery, it's an ignition coil from a Ford model T (missing the wooden cover panel). Every model T has four of these - one per spark plug. They take the low-voltage electricity generated by the flywheel magneto and convert it into the high voltage needed to jump the gap in the spark plug and achieve combustion. Inside that tar casing, there are two wire coils: a primary coil, which carries the low-voltage current, and a secondary coil which generates the high-voltage current. Unlike a modern ignition coil, which generates one spark per combustion stroke, the model T's vibrator coils create a series of sparks - the springy brass plate vibrates, breaking and making contact multiple times in a row. This helps ensure that ignition takes place.
The four coils on a model T sit in the [coil box](_URL_0_), located on the dashboard (for the 1926-27 model years, it was moved to a mount above the engine). In early cars, the coil box was made of wood; later, it was switched to steel.
The coils were originally made by both Ford and the K-W Ignition Company, but in 1923 Ford assumed production of all coils. That year they began stamping the Ford logo on the top of the vibrator assembly, which means yours was made after that date. | [
"In the United States, the term is frequently used to refer to a non-freestanding cabinet or tray for holding small personal items such as watches, cuff links, keys, or a cell phone. In this sense, it is a men's jewelry box.\n",
"Storables is a specialty retail chain that carries a variety of products aimed at he... |
What happens to liquids in a horizontal centrifuge? | I don't really know how milk centrifuges work or what your construction looks like, so I have no idea if it will work. I could however imagine a whole lot of things that could go wrong when it comes to a self built device that combines a fast spinning lathe, a somewhat large container and liquid. No offense, but do you know what you're doing? | [
"The inertial centrifugal force due to the bulk rotation of the liquid results in the development of an outward pressure gradient within the liquid, where the pressure is higher along the rim than in the middle. This manifests itself as the formation of a concave liquid-air interface. This pressure gradient provide... |
Some of the diseases humans catch from animals have very serious symptoms. Do these symptoms present themselves in the animals too? | Pathogens are actually not very interested in giving their host a hard time. Why? The more dangerous it acts, the stronger and quicker the host's (or its immune system's) reaction is, or worst when killing the host the pathogen can't benefit in the long term. Evolutionarily speaking it is a more favorable trait for a pathogen to act decent, maybe even nearly invisible, in order to not startle or kill the host. In fact, killing an entire species may limit the survivability of the pathogen itself. Maybe the "pathogen" could even develop beneficial traits for the host in order to increase its own chances, which would lead to symbiotic relationships.
The thing is that this is a development very specific for the primary host, which could be whichever animal. Those things when infecting a host that is not designated fall apart: either the pathogen is unable to inhabit the foreign host at all, or causes a very severe pathological reaction because limiting interactions are just not available in this new kind of habitat. Consequently the host, for example the human body, will react very violently and very symptomatically when encountering pathogens that would naturally inhabit rodents or pigs or other kinds of animals. | [
"Susceptible animals include cattle, water buffalo, sheep, goats, pigs, antelope, deer, and bison. It has also been known to infect hedgehogs and elephants; llamas and alpacas may develop mild symptoms, but are resistant to the disease and do not pass it on to others of the same species. In laboratory experiments, ... |
why does chewing (gum) increase concentration/productivity? | The action of chewing involves the Temporalis muscle and the Masseter muscle. These cause blood to flow to your brain as you chew, bringing in more oxygen, which causes increased concentration. | [
"A review about the cognitive advantages of chewing gum by Onyper et al. (2011) found strong evidence of improvement for the following cognitive domains: working memory, episodic memory and speed of perception. However the improvements were only evident when chewing took place prior to cognitive testing. The precis... |
The CIA is widely known to have used LSD and other drugs in experimental and research programmes on its own citizens (MK Ultra, Midnight Climax etc). Is there any evidence of them using these techniques in the field or on citizens of other countries? | To get this out of the way - unfortunately nearly all of the documentation concerning the US Government's research into the weaponization of pharmaceuticals was destroyed in 1973 when the various programs were officially shut down. What we now know about these programs comes from the report and declassified documents generated by the Senate's 1977 Joint Hearing into MK Ultra, which relied on what little documentation escaped destruction as well as interviews that the Senate conducted with the personnel that were involved.
In 1955 the US Army launched "Material Testing Program EA 1729" which was designed to test the military potential of LSD. Initially these tests were confined to its use as a chemical weapon, with the goal being to create a munition carrying a non-lethal incapacitating agent. This was conducted parallel to the CIA's research, which the Army appears to have initially been unaware of.
Although these tests didn't show any military potential for LSD, they did show a potential for its use in interrogation. This resulted in the Army launching a second phase of the program in 1958 to evaluate LSD's use as an interrogation enhancer.
This second phase involved experimenting on consenting subjects who had been conditioned to resist torture. Essentially, the subjects were told that they were going to be evaluating the potential of polygraphs and sensory deprivation for use in interrogation. The subjects were then secretly administered LSD and then subjected to one of those two methods of interrogation. We don't know much else about this but presumably it showed some positive findings because, unlike the LSD munition, this branch of research was approved for field testing.
That field testing consisted of Projects Third Chance and Dirby Hat. Project Third Chance was carried out in Europe in 1960. Project Dirby Hat was carried out in "East Asia" in 1962. These projects involved using LSD in the interrogation of 17 foreign nationals and 1 US soldier, all of whom were suspected of carrying out intelligence operations on behalf of a foreign power and whom had shown resistance to conventional interrogation.
The results of the interrogations were viewed generally positively, with the Army believing that it got useful information out of the subjects in most cases. However, this information generally came about because of a severely negative reaction to the drugs, which in at least one case required medical intervention to prevent the subject from dying. Essentially, the subjects all followed the same pattern:
1) Immediately after LSD was administered the subject would enter a state of extreme psychosis for several hours during which no useful information could be gathered.
2) The subject would then enter a comatose state for another few hours.
3) The subject would begin to return to normal. As they became more lucid, they would volunteer more and more meaningful information - though this appears to be out of fear of what the Army was doing to them rather than any effect of the drug. (The subjects were unaware that they had been administered LSD, or any drug - so we can only imagine what they thought was happening).
In 1963 the Army's Assistent Chief of Staff for Intelligence was briefed on these results. He appears to have felt that the use of LSD was no different or effective than torture, and ended the Army's program.
By the time that Third Chance and Dirby Hat were carried out the Army appears to have been aware of the CIA's own research into LSD. In fact, the impetus behind Third Chance and Dirby Hat appears to have been that the CIA had not, at that point, conducted any field tests and it was hoped that the Army's field tests would provide a justification for an expanded joint CIA/Army field testing program.
Although the CIA had severely curtailed its research into LSD after the 1953 death of Dr. Frank Olson - a doctor working on MK Ultra who had secretly been administered LSD by other doctors working on the project - it too completely abandoned research into LSD following the Army's 1963 evaluation.
What we know about the CIA's laboratory experiments with other drugs shows that they were generally useless for interrogations. The most success that they had was a method involving barbiturates.
Essentially, the subject would be repeatedly knocked unconscious with a barbiturate. As the subject woke up, they would enter a minimally conscious state during which they would babble. It was possible for interrogators to direct the babbling, and while this would sometimes lead to the subject speaking truthfully it sometimes would not. Most importantly, whether the subject told the truth or not was random enough to be of little use.
So while we know that the Army did use LSD in the field 18 times, due to the destruction of most of the relevant documents in 1973 we will never know for sure whether that was the only time such a pharmaceutical was used. However, it does seem very likely that the Army's use of LSD 18 times was the only use for the following reasons:
1) The main justification for the Army's field use of LSD was the fact that the CIA had, as of that time, not field tested any pharmaceutical to the Army's knowledge; and
2) The only pharmaceutical that the CIA ever identified as having real interrogation potential was LSD, but both the Army and CIA formally abandoned the use of LSD in 1963 when the Army concluded that its use was no different or more effective than conventional torture.
Given the above, it seems unlikely that after 1963 the CIA would have gone back and field tested something other than LSD when they had already determined that every other pharmaceutical was useless in interrogations. | [
"The CIA also created The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which was a CIA funding front which provided grants to social scientists and medical researchers investigating questions of interest related to the MKULTRA program. Between 1960 and 1963, the CIA gave $856,782 worth of grants to different org... |
Were Australian Aborigines in contact with the rest of the world before the arrival of European explorers? | Yes, to a limited extent. Traders from Macassar in Sulawesi are known to have visited the north west coast in praus (small sailing boats) in search of trepang (sea cucumbers, an Asian delicacy which was in demand in China). The northernmost parts of the Australian coast are only about 90 miles south of the southernmost islands of what's now Indonesia, and as such there's no obvious reason why this trade should not have been of considerable antiquity. However, the records that survive go back only to 1751. Historians have estimated the actual start date of the Macassan voyages south at between 1640 and 1720.
The Cambridge Economic History of Australia notes that this was not simply a matter of Macassans taking what they wanted from Australian waters; it was a genuine trade, up to 3,000 Macassans lived on the Australian coast during the monsoon season, when the weather made a return voyage impossible, and "many Aboriginal people went to Macassar on praus, and amicable trading relations were established." It helped that Australians did not eat sea cucumber, so there was no competition for resources.
In exchange for the sea cucumbers, Macassans handed over alcohol, pipes, rifles and tomahawks to their Australian trading partners.
The best source for this trade is C.C. Macknight's The Voyage to Marege: Macassan Trepangers in Northern Australia (1976).
| [
"According to a 2013 German study by a team of researchers on Indigenous Australian DNA genes reveal that a wave of migrants from India arrived in Australia about 4,230 years ago. It shows that the Indian migrants settled in Australia before Captain James Cook's first recorded contact with the Australian coastline.... |
Is a bird's singing learned, is it genetically determined or a mix? | of course it's a mixture, birds learn their songs from their parents and other conspecifics - if you isolate chicks and start a new bird culture, their songs will start off very different from the wild type song; but after a few generations, the songs will have evolved back towards the wild type. so they aren't born with the songs "programmed in", but they are born with some strong constraints that shape what they learn (and how they perform).
i'm not an expert in this, but i do keep up with the ongoing study by Partha Mitra and colleagues, studying the phenomenon in zebra finches, they are super interesting papers!
e.g.
_URL_0_
_URL_1_
| [
"BULLET::::- A marsh wren can learn to sing over 150 bird songs, while the white-crowned sparrow can only learn a single song. Thus, the number of songs that can be sung varies between species of birds, due to relative limitations in their cognitive processing abilities.\n",
"BULLET::::- As the above bullet point... |
if water is always returned via the water cycle back to the earth, why are people getting concerned with "running out" of water? | Because that water is mixed up with gross stuff- the totality of H2O on the planet is unchanged, but the amount of fresh water is rapidly diminishing from pollution, irrigation, and divertment. The natural processes that scrub and clean water have been disrupted, leading to less and less usable water. | [
"Fresh water is a renewable and variable, but finite natural resource. Fresh water can only be replenished through the process of the water cycle,in which water from seas, lakes, forests, land, rivers, and reservoirs evaporates, forms clouds, and returns as precipitation. Locally, however, if more fresh water is co... |
why does sleeping regenerate/refresh/recharge is, while laying in bed awake without moving us does not? | Because laying in bed awake is generally exactly the same as standing next to the bed awake, or sitting on the bus awake, or watching tv awake. Your brain needs you to actually be unconscious so it can have a moment of low activity to get its housecleaning done. It just can't do what it needs to do while you're still conscious. | [
"The human organism physically restores itself during sleep, healing itself and removing metabolic wastes which build up during periods of activity. This restoration takes place mostly during slow-wave sleep, during which body temperature, heart rate, and brain oxygen consumption decrease. The brain, especially, re... |
Is there anything hindering the development of super long-lasting batteries? | Battery life *has* improved quite a lot. Ten years ago, you'd be happy if your laptop lasted two hours, now the best easily last six hours on a battery of similar volume.
When it comes to phones, it seems there hasn't been much improvement, but that's because mobile phones have gone from relatively simple devices to multimedia smartphones, with big screens and much more powerful processors and larger memory.
Battery research is seeing heavy investment at the moment, so it's quite likely that the performance will continue to improve significantly the coming decades. | [
"All rechargeable batteries have a finite lifespan and will slowly lose storage capacity as they age due to secondary chemical reactions within the battery whether it is used or not. Some cells may fail sooner than others, but the effect is to reduce the voltage of the battery. Lithium-based batteries have one of t... |
May sound stupid but here goes , when we are in the womb and are slowly growing where do those atoms come from that make us or do we make those atoms in the womb ? | They come from the food your mother eats while you're developing, as well as your mother herself. No new atoms are created, just rearranged cleverly from food and air and water. | [
"Democritus believed that atoms are too small for human senses to detect, they are infinitely many, they come in infinitely many varieties, and that they have always existed. They float in a vacuum, which Democritus called the \"void\", and they vary in form, order, and posture. Some atoms, he maintained, are conve... |
When horses were the main form of transportation, how did cities deal with all the waste? | hi! you may be interested in these earlier posts
* [why did medieval people put up with so much filth in their city streets? IF they didn't have the resources for modern plumbing, couldn't they at least hire armies of people to cart away waste?](_URL_3_)
* [If I were to wake up in 1880 New York City, how bad would it smell compared to the modern version?](_URL_2_)
* [It is 1890 in New York City, cars are not yet widespread. How do horses fit into the life of the city?](_URL_0_)
* [Looking for primary sources on The Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894, or other historical horse-related events](_URL_1_) | [
"Replacing horses with cars and trucks eliminated enormous quantities of horse manure and urine from city streets, greatly reducing the labor for street cleaning and also improving sanitation and living conditions. Reducing the number of horses for transportation freed up between one- sixth and one-quarter of all f... |
the atomic bomb | In chemistry, you about endo/exothermic reactions to make molecules. Normal explosives rely on chemical reactions that release large amounts of energy. All of this energy involves moving a few electrons around leaving your nuclei intact.
When you get into atomic physics you're looking at *far stronger* forces involved in holding the nucleus of an atom together. An atomic bomb actually forces atoms to split into smaller atoms. The extra energy/protons/neutrons that were involved in making a larger atom is released - flying off to trigger other atoms to split apart. The energy released is *far* greater than any chemical reaction could be.
Point of reference - the first atomic bomb used in warfare, [Little Boy](_URL_0_) contained 64kg of uranium but created an explosion equivalent to 15,000,000 kg of TNT. | [
"In July 1945, the first atomic explosive device, dubbed \"Trinity\", was detonated in the New Mexico desert. It was fueled by plutonium created at Hanford. In August 1945, two more atomic devices – \"Little Boy\", a uranium-235 bomb, and \"Fat Man\", a plutonium bomb – were used against the Japanese cities of Hiro... |
Why do rockets use fuel with oxidises when taking off in the atmosphere instead of just using the oxygen in the air? | As you increase in altitude the oxygen density in the atmosphere drops dramatically. Over 10000 feet, people need supplemental oxygen to fight off hypoxia.
At the rate a rocket burns fuel, there is nowhere near enough oxygen to maintain the burn. Basically the fire would fizzle and the rocket would fall. | [
"Propellant is conserved because the air-breathing carrier aircraft lifts the rocket to altitude much more efficiently. Airplane engines do not require on-board storage of an oxidizer and they can use the surrounding air to produce thrust, for example with a turbofan. This allows the launch system to conserve a sig... |
why is english so broken? | English is a bit of a Frankenstein language, stitched together from bits of a couple Germanic languages, French, Celtic, Latin, and Greek. This leads to a hodgepodge of rules, spellings, and pronunciations borrowed from those languages. | [
"In literature, broken English is often used to depict the foreignness of a character, or that character's lack of intelligence or education. However, poets have also intentionally used broken English to create a desired artistic impression, or as a creative experiment writing somewhere between standard English and... |
what is preventing toronto from acquiring an nfl franchise? | Football is the only major pro sport that has a viable and independent league in Canada. Toronto already has a CFL team.
In order for Toronto to have an NFL franchise, they'd have to figure out how to convince the NFL that they could have two viable pro football teams. Toronto is big but it's not that big. They could, of course, shut down the CFL team, but this would likely anger fans so badly that the new NFL team would be doomed from the start. | [
"By this time Godfrey had switched his focus from an expansion team to the relocation of an existing team, saying \"I used to think an expansion franchise was the way to go but I'm quite certain now that our best chance would be to acquire an existing franchise. There are four or five franchises in the NFL that cou... |
why don't we build a 'sturdy' camera and throw it into saturn, or jupiter, and transmit what it records back to a space station? | It costs way too much to make and launch something here and there really isn't that much to record. | [
"The camera is run by the JunoCam Digital Electronics Assembly (JDEA) also made by MSSS. The JunoCam is physically mounted to the body of the spacecraft, and moves with the spacecraft. The \"Voyager\" cameras (that also imaged Jupiter) were the only spacecraft cameras that were movable.\n",
"The camera shutters m... |
It is often thought that the "self", the individual, did not exist in pre-modern time. Religious officials who act as the spiritual intermediaries to the common person is one cited example. To me it sounds more like "middle age" than "pre-modern" though. How about in the antiquity? | I'm a bit confused by your question regarding "pre-modern time" and "middle age." However, Foucault explicitly addresses the self/individual (what he calls 'subjectivity') in ancient thought in his *Lectures on the Will to Know* as well as in *Subjectivity and Truth* (unpublished still in English), *The Hermeneutics of the Subject,* and *The Courage of Truth.* He also discusses aspects of the ancient self in *The History of Sexuality: Volume 2* and *Volume 3.*
Foucault addresses subjectivity in early Christianity in his lectures *On the Government of the Living,* as well as a bit in *The Hermeneutics of the Subject* and *The Courage of Truth.* He also discusses the influence of Christian confessional subjectivity with modern forms of government in *The History of Sexuality: Volume 1.*
Foucault believes one of the biggest difference is that in ancient thought, the individual never has access to the truth by the simple fact that they exist. Foucault argues that the individual in ancient culture had to go through a long process of work, what he calls spiritual exercises (following Pierre Hadot's book titled *Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucualt* in English), in order to access the truth. He contrasts this to the modern conception of the self, in which we are entitled to say and speak the truth by our simple fact of being alive. He attributes this change to the development of scientific rationality and the privileging of self-evidence of perception as opposed to the self-transformation of ancient spiritual exercises. Indeed, your description of the modern self matches some of Foucault's own thoughts on it. One of the biggest noticable differences is that clearly we no longer require direction (in the form of a 'spiritual intermediary') by another in order to access the truth: we are capable of doing it alone now. This is all discussed in *The Hermeneutics of the Subject.*
Another difference between the ancient and modern self is due to Christian confessional practices. These have generated a picture of the modern self involving a deep connection between desires (such as sexual desires) and truths about the self. Foucault thinks that the modern individual is always interpreting their sexual desires in order to reveal a fundamental personal truth (and is always liable to their sexual desires being interpreted by others). This also involves the idea that the self may be fundamentally deceiving itself about its own nature and its own desires. Furthermore, these confessional practices have engrained in us, according to Foucault, that the confession of our sexual desires will in some way grant us freedom. Foucault thinks that psychoanalysis emerges precisely in the wake of the Christian confessional practices which have generated this form of subjectivity and also argues that the sexual liberation movement has done nothing other than reiterate the basic claims of the form of power which it is attempting to escape from (namely that the demonstration of sexuality will result in a kind of freedom). You can find more of this in *The History of Sexuality: Volume 1,* and a more detailed look at confessional practices in *On the Government of the Living.* | [
"In the pre-modern era, many people's sense of self and purpose was often expressed via a faith in some form of deity, be it that in a single God or in many gods. Pre-modern cultures have not been thought of creating a sense of distinct individuality, though. Religious officials, who often held positions of power, ... |
when calculating digits of pi, why do we start at the beginning instead of calculating from the last known digit. | For one thing, calculating digits of pi is, at this point, just an academic exercise. It's not really good for anything, except maybe as a way to benchmark computing speeds. So doing things the efficient way isn't really advantageous. | [
"Until the 20th century, the number of digits of pi which mathematicians had the stamina to calculate by hand remained in the hundreds, so that memorization of \"all\" known digits at the time was possible. In 1949 a computer was used to calculate π to 2000 places, presenting one of the earliest opportunities for a... |
When a human breaks their spine, why is it always said that they're paralyzed "below the waist"? Why does it always happen specifically at the waist? | The nervous system is severed at whatever spot they broke their spine. Since the nervous system is interconnected with the spine, it relies heavily on the spine's support. The brain sends signals through the nervous system from the top- > down. If the spine is severed, the nervous system is severed in turn, and the brain can't send signals lower than the point at which the nervous system is severed. | [
"Spinal cord injuries can be caused by trauma to the spinal column (stretching, bruising, applying pressure, severing, laceration, etc.). The vertebral bones or intervertebral disks can shatter, causing the spinal cord to be punctured by a sharp fragment of bone. Usually, victims of spinal cord injuries will suffer... |
why is there a disconnect between what we're trying to say vs what actually comes out of our mouth. especially when public speaking | Only guessing, but i would say that we think about what we want so say and not how we say it. We dthink about the message, not the words... | [
"A talking point in discourse is a succinct statement designed to support persuasively one side taken on an issue. Such statements can either be free standing or created as retorts to the opposition's talking points and are frequently used in public relations, particularly in areas heavy in debate such as politics ... |
how does uber lose so much money annually? | Uber loses money because they are investing in scaling their business...
They are spending a ton of money on litigation and lobbying to be allowed to operate, since most urban areas had strict regulations on taxi services. They are fighting law suits, they are hiring lobbyist to pitch legislation changes to allow them to operate.
Uber also needs to build a symbiotic network of drivers and passengers in order for their platform to work. Drivers don't drive if there's no passengers, and customers won't use this service is they can't dependably get a ride when they need one. This means sign-on bonuses to drivers and discounts/artificially low fares to lure in passengers to build up a base of supply and demand.
Once they've established that they can operate legally, and have a base of drivers and passengers, then those expenses taper off considerably and the make profits. | [
"In May 2017, after the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) filed a class action lawsuit in federal court in New York, Uber admitted to underpaying New York City drivers tens of millions of dollars over 2.5 years by calculating driver commissions on a net amount. Uber agreed to pay the amounts owed plus interest... |
why are flames pointy? | A flame rises because it is warmer than the air around it. The cool air rushes in to push the hot air upwards. However, as the air rises it also cools down. It cools down from the outside inwards.
A flame glows because it is hot enough to generate light. So as the flame cools down, the parts of it that are hot enough to generate light get smaller and smaller. Because it is rising and shrinking at the same time, it forms that pointy shape.
Note that a flame in zero gravity doesn't make a pointy shape, because the cool air doesn't push the hot air upwards (because there is no up). It just spreads out in all directions. | [
"A flame (from Latin \"flamma\") is the visible, gaseous part of a fire. It is caused by a highly exothermic reaction taking place in a thin zone. Very hot flames are hot enough to have ionized gaseous components of sufficient density to be considered plasma.\n",
"Fire is hot because the conversion of the weak do... |
why can you only use your thumb/ finger on the iphone's screen? as opposed to your nails or a more traditional stylus? | iPhones and all modern smartphones use Capacitive touch screens. Rather then detect touch by pressure they use electricity, there is an electric field on the screen of your phone and when you touch it the electricity runs up your hand, through your body, and back down.
The phone can detect this and determine the location of your finger(s). Since your nails and most styluses do not conduct this small charge they are not detected. | [
"A thumb keyboard, or a thumb board, is a type of keyboard commonly found on PDAs, mobile phones, and PDA phones which has a familiar layout to an ordinary keyboard, such as QWERTY. The inputting surface is usually relatively small, and is intended for typing using the available thumbs, while holding the device.\n"... |
Why does adiabatic processes change the temperature of a gas? | Adiabatic processes are those where the entropy doesn't change. Remember that and it makes sense.
The entropy in that gas can be thought of qualitatively as this: make a list of all of the positions of all the particles in your system (the gas molecules, here). Wait some short time. Recheck your list against a new one. The more similar they are, they less entropy there is in the system.
Take an adiabatically expanding gas. There is now more space in the universe for those molecules to bang around in. With no temperature change this is an *increase* in entropy. That is, with the particles moving at the same speed, your old list/new list would look more dissimilar in the expanded gas than it would in the original gas. How do we counteract this increase in energy? By lowering the temperature. Now even though there are more places that the particles could be, they are moving slower, so our old list/new list stays the same level of dissimilar as before, because there is no net entropy change between the expanded and original gas.
The converse is why a contracting gas increases in temperature.
TL;DR - Entropy. | [
"In thermodynamics, adiabatic changes are those that do not increase the entropy. They occur slowly in comparison to the other characteristic timescales of the system of interest, and allow heat flow only between objects at the same temperature. For isolated systems, an adiabatic change allows no heat to flow in or... |
Have there been experiments of keeping [wood frogs](_URL_0_) frozen for longer periods of time? How long can they stay frozen and then successfully thawed? | **Regarding length of freeze:**
Layne et al investigated this and found that anywhere from 3 to 9 days was generally fine, but that mortality rose to 50% as you approached the 28 day mark (all at -1.5C). They then loaded some of the frogs with additional glucose (the cryoprotectant) and saw "excellent" survival rates up to 49 days - but they believe that this has more to do with energy availability and metabolism recovery during thawing than ice content. I don't have access to the full text of this article, so that is from the abstract.
(Source: Layne JR, Costanzo JP, Lee RE. (1998).
Freeze duration influences postfreeze survival in the frog Rana sylvatica. *JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL ZOOLOGY, 280(2), 197-201.*)
Another more recent abstract (maybe from 2009 or 2010?) mentioned that under ideal lab conditions and controlled freezing temperatures, survival rates for periods up to 60 days were better than what I expected (like above 50%).
**Regarding longevity/survivability:**
Joanisse & Storey found that increased oxygen intake and blood saturation levels, following thawing and up to a few hours later, did not lead to an increase in oxidative damage in tissues, since the wood frog increases production of antioxidant enzymes (primarily gluthatione) during freezing and thawing.
(Source: Joanisse DR, Storey KB. (1996). Oxidative damage and antioxidants in Rana sylvatica the freeze-tolerant wood frog. *AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSIOLOGY-REGULATORY INTEGRATIVE AND COMPARATIVE PHYSIOLOGY, 271(3), R545-R553.*)
Layne & Rice investigated motor impairment in thawing/thawed wood frogs and foud that with colder temperatured, movement impairment could be observed for extended amounts of time (days to weeks). Impairment would indicate that the frogs would be more susceptible to predation and less able to take advantage of environmental conditions or food sources. They surmised that even with the motor impairment, the recovery rates were more than sufficient for spring breeding and overall recovery of the species following the winter freeze.
(Source: Layne JR, Rice ME. (2003). Postfreeze locomotion performance in wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) and spring peepers (Pseudacris crucifer). *CANADIAN JOURNAL OF ZOOLOGY, 81(21), 2061-2065.*)
This would seem to indicate that freeze recovery would put the frogs at a disadvantage for a period of time, but that long-term damage (at least for moderate freezing, both temperature and time) is not a major factor. One other paper did note that reproductive activity in the males suffered, but I can't find the paper at the moment. | [
"For the wood frog (\"Rana sylvatica\"), in the winter, as much as 45% of its body may freeze and turn to ice. \"Ice crystals form beneath the skin and become interspersed among the body's skeletal muscles. During the freeze, the frog's breathing, blood flow, and heartbeat cease. Freezing is made possible by specia... |
what are bonds, and what is the difference between stocks and bonds? | Bonds : Local bakery has a great idea for muffin tops. They need 500 for the special muffin top slicing machine and non stick pans. The local bank won't give them a loan because the idea is so new and they haven't been in business for long. But everyone in the neighbourhood is super excited. So the bakery prints out 500 bond certificates that cost $1.00 each and the certificates say that in 1 year from now they can be redeemed for $1.10 at the cash register. | [
"Bonds and stocks are both securities, but the major difference between the two is that (capital) stockholders have an equity stake in a company (that is, they are owners), whereas bondholders have a creditor stake in the company (that is, they are lenders). Being a creditor, bondholders have priority over stockhol... |
Is it possible to represent imaginary numbers on a plane? | [Yes, it's called the complex plane and it's amazing.](_URL_0_) | [
"Geometrically, imaginary numbers are found on the vertical axis of the complex number plane, allowing them to be presented perpendicular to the real axis. One way of viewing imaginary numbers is to consider a standard number line, positively increasing in magnitude to the right, and negatively increasing in magnit... |
Washing one's hands with soap kills viruses because pulling apart their lipid bi-layer membranes, right? Why doesn't soap dissolve our flesh? Our own cells have membranes are made of lipid bi-layers. | It actually does in a very minute way. We grow extra skin all the time and are constantly flaking it off. That's why we wash our hands. And it's why we shower. That skin is most of what the dust in your house is made of. | [
"A comprehensive analysis in 2007 from the University of Michigan School of Public Health indicated that plain soaps are just as effective as consumer-grade antibacterial soaps with triclosan in preventing illness and removing bacteria from the hands.\n",
"Solid soap, because of its reusable nature, may hold bact... |
Is it actually possible for an opera singer to shatter a glass with their voice? | Yes. It's not about their "power" or more precisely, their amplitude.... It's about the frequency. A lot of solid materials have a sonic frequency at which the atoms no longer hold together. Glass breaks apart when vibrated at this frequency. I don't remember all the fancy words for explaining it but this should be enough for you to do some research. There are plenty of YouTube videos demonstrating this. | [
"Adam and Jamie investigate whether a human voice could shatter glass, as perpetuated in stories of opera singers and demonstrated by Ella Fitzgerald in a commercial for Memorex and Jim Gillette in the music video for Nitro's Freight Train.\n",
"World-famous Italian tenor opera singer, Giorgio Fini, is in Boston ... |
how do "multiple year" copyrights work? | However, publishers of frequently-updated works, such as software, apparently desire to convey the idea that different versions of their works appear over time, and each is subject to copyright protection. So they provide a copyright notice with multiple years, the first year being the year of first publication.
Such a notice is not a problem. Even though multiple years are not expressly permitted, the three required elements are present, albeit with some extraneous information.
_URL_0_ | [
"Essentially, the 1988 Act and amendment establishes that copyright in most works lasts until 70 years after the death of the creator if known, otherwise 70 years after the work was created or published (50 years for computer-generated works).\n",
"Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 50 to 1... |
why don't above-18s (adults) in usa have the right to determine their choice on alcohol consumption? | Well, it wasn't always so. I first began legally drinking at age 18, a million years ago (it seems).
As I recall, there was a law that was passed after a bunch of studies which said that drunk driving age 18-21 auto fatalities were more than all other auto fatalities combined. (I could be totally wrong there, its' just what i rememer) and so they passed a federal law to raise the drinking age. And, the law actually set that certain states who adopted the new age 21 could get additional federal money for road maintenance. So, it tool a little while, but soon all states changed their drinking ages....
So, suing to get it changed would need to occur in the separate states, since they control the drinking age. | [
"In 2007, the drinking age debate in the United States was renewed when Choose Responsibility began promoting the lowering of the drinking age coupled with education and rules to persuade people to drink responsibly before they are of legal age. Before one is eligible to buy, possess and consume alcohol, an alcohol... |
Why are coronaviruses coronaviruses? | The organization of their surface envelope proteins forms a ring which looks like a crown. Viruses from different families look wildly different, some have lipid envelopes like corona, some do not like polio. HIV has fewer number of envelope proteins on it’s surface and they are irregularly spaced, as compared to say herpes. Look up cryo-EM studies of viral envelopes. HIV’s capsid (the protein shell directly below the envelope looks totally different than say herpes). Morphology and what types of nucleic acids are used in the replication are two of the major ways viruses are [classified.](_URL_0_) | [
"Coronaviruses are enveloped viruses with a positive-sense RNA genome and with a nucleocapsid of helical symmetry. They infect the upper respiratory and gastrointestinal tract of mammals and birds. They are the cause of a wide range of diseases in cats, dog, pigs, rodents, cattle and humans. Transmission is by the ... |
Does the entropy of a system sometimes randomly decrease if its macrostate deviates from equilibrium? | > Does this mean it is possible (however unlikely) that if you waited around long enough a system would randomly appreciably deviate from equilibrium and briefly lower its own entropy?
Yes.
The probability is **much** higher that the entropy will increase (or at least stay the same), but it can fluctuate downwards too. | [
"Suppose we start from an equilibrium situation and we suddenly remove a constraint on a variable. Then right after we do this, there are a number formula_58 of accessible microstates, but equilibrium has not yet been reached, so the actual probabilities of the system being in some accessible state are not yet equa... |
why is it considered moral to put a dog down when it gets rabies or becomes too vicious and endangers others, but immoral when we do the same to a vicious person whose existence endangers others? | the issue for humans is where to draw that line of "to be killed". some people would put that line at drug use, some people not even for mass murderers. Along with that, how do you make sure the process is completely unbaised and 100% right? there have been many cases of the death penalty being used on a person that was later found innocent. Its never a question if a dog has rabies or not | [
"Life-threatening signs usually include those due to the degeneration of the nervous system. Dogs that have been infected with distemper tend to suffer a progressive deterioration of mental abilities and motor skills. With time, the dog can develop more severe seizures, paralysis, reduction in sight, and incoordina... |
If you looked at the earth from 1000 lightyears away through some kind of ultra magnifying glass, would you see events that happened 1000 years ago? | Yes, you are right. The way we see the stars, we see them how and where they existed long ago. If you're observing the sun from the Earth, and witness a coronal mass ejection, that ejection actually occurred about 8 minutes ago, and the light from it is just now reaching us. | [
"Just hours before Clarke's death a major gamma-ray burst (GRB) reached Earth. Known as GRB 080319B, the burst set a new record as the farthest object that could be seen from Earth with the naked eye. It occurred about 7.5 billion years ago, taking the light that long to reach Earth. Larry Sessions, a science write... |
What role (if any) did the United States play in China's Taiping Rebellion? | If we set aside the missionaries, the answer is not much of one. Remember that the Taiping Civil War was largely concurrent with the Arrow War in addition to the US Civil War. You had various individual Americans such as Frederick Ward who were there as independent soldiers of fortune (see [this post from earlier today](_URL_0_) for a bit about him), but you didn't have much an active official American presence there otherwise.
There were Americans stationed in the area leading up to the Arrow War, and there were engagements between China and the US at the time, such as the Battle of the Pearl River Forts in the 1850s, but after the limited conflict between the two sides, they went back to peacemaking. The Treaty of Wanxia was only about a decade old at this point, and after the Battle of the Pearl River Forts America took up an official position of neutrality in the conflict between China and Britain.
Most of the significant people involved on the US side to returned stateside for the Civil War if able, and by the time Hong had moved to Nanjing, there was very little official contact on the US side. America was hedging their bets at the beginning. By the end, missionaries and diplomats alike had become irritated with the Taiping government.
There's really not that much to be said about American interaction in an official capacity. | [
"Through the mediating influence of the United States a military truce was arranged in January 1946, but battles between the Kuomintang and Communists soon resumed. Public opinion of the administrative incompetence of the Republic of China government was escalated and incited by the Communists in the nationwide stu... |
why hasn't life been replicated in the lab yet? | I got 2 answers;
1) the ethical ramifications.
2) there's always the possibility that someone has done it, and just not come forward because (see 1) | [
"In 2011, New York University scientists have developed artificial structures that can self-replicate, a process that has the potential to yield new types of materials. They have demonstrated that it is possible to replicate not just molecules like cellular DNA or RNA, but discrete structures that could in principl... |
During the 18th and 19th centuries, most armies had a standardised coat colour - red for Britain, green for Russia, white for Austria. How were the colours determined and was consideration given to not using the same as a likely opponent? | So, generally during this time period, the color of the uniform would vary. While Britain became famous for their red coats, up until the Napoleonic era and afterward, the regimental uniforms would be up to the decision of the regimental officer, and the same for foreign regiments in the French service (such as the Swiss Guard, which wore red coats as well).
Coat colors ended up being connected toward a nation's color or to the financial needs of a nation: Prussia, known for creating/finding Prussian blue, Britain had a connection to red from England, while France & Austria had large armies, so they couldn't afford the expensive dyes that smaller armies like Prussia and Britain would field. In fact, the reason why Royalist France and Habsburg Austria used white is due to the ease of making a uniform white again (simply dusting chalk over a stain). However, even then armies would have variation in collars and button colors, all of which are dependent on the commander's choice and the regiments tradition.
Further, the cost of the uniforms would be paid by both the state (usually the first uniform, a very basic set of uniforms) and the regimental commander (whom would use his regimental funds to either replace or add to the existing uniform given). From here, it would depend on the taste of the commander, if the commander didn't take all the money from the regimental funds or cared at all.
So, to the main problem about the perceived impracticality of similar uniforms, well that's the thing, the uniforms really didn't matter. While the uniforms do add to the perception of "us vs. them", it doesn't really matter when the house/national flag is at the head of the battalion/company. Flags were used to show who's who on the battlefield, which is why the capture of a standard is very important and daring (as the battalion/company would fight as hard as possible to keep it in order to keep their identity). From far away, it is easiest to tell who's who by the flag they're flying, is it the black and yellow of the Habsburgs or the white with gold fleur-de-lis of France?
Further, Empire Total War doesn't give the full range of a nations uniform variation as the mechanics of representing regiments is simplified for technology's sake. | [
"The epithet \"redcoats\" is familiar throughout much of the former British Empire, even though this colour was by no means exclusive to the British Army. The entire Danish Army wore red coats up to 1848 and particular units in the German, French, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Bulgarian and Romanian armies retained re... |
Can anyone recommend any good books on the reign of Henry VIII? | It depends; how academic/dry/scholarly are you willing to go? Geoffrey Elton wrote some excellent stuff about the constitutional, administrative, and political changes of the Tudor period, significant enough in his view to warrant being called a 'revolution.' His work is, however, pretty short on 'juicy' or biographical information about the monarch. The other thing is you have to ignore what he says about Ireland, since it borders on racism and, while being a fair representation of what many British historians thought in the 60s, is discredited today. | [
"Donnelly returned to historical fiction with \"Fatal Throne\", a book about Henry VIII and his six wives published by Random House/Schwartz & Wade in May 2018. For this project, Donnelly joined six other authors (Candace Fleming, M.T. Anderson, Stephanie Hemphill, Deborah Hopkinson, Linda Sue Park, and Lisa Ann Sa... |
bush v. gore. why did the supreme court stop the recount? | The Court cited the Equal Protection Clause because each county's methods and standards for determining "the voter's intent" could vary. Two identical inconclusive ballots could be counted in two different ways if one was in Miami-Dade County and the other was in Broward County, so they ruled that each person's vote could not be given equal protection in a county-by-county statewide recount.
They didn't demand a new recount because they also ruled that there was no method for completing a statewide recount by the result certification deadline that *wouldn't* violate the Equal Protection Clause. | [
"BULLET::::- \"Bush v. Gore\" (2000): In a controversial per curiam decision in which four justices dissented, the Supreme Court overruled the Florida Supreme Court and halted a manual recount of the 2000 presidential election ballots cast in Florida. The court ruled that the recount violated the Equal Protection C... |
how can the 35-year-old hp-12c calculator still be in production and selling for over $50? | Basic math hasn't changed much in a few hundred years, so the calculator probably wouldn't either. | [
"The HP-12C is HP's longest and best-selling product, in continual production since its introduction in 1981. Due to its simple operation for key financial calculations, the calculator long ago became the \"de facto\" standard among financial professionals. Its popularity has endured despite the fact that even a re... |
What are the main differences between Ancient British Cultures (Picts, Celts, Gauls etc)? | OK, so this is a complicated question because with Britain we have an incredible level of archaeological detail. I'll give a *very* simplified version and am happy to expand on anything you would like.
OK, so broadly speaking "Celtic" is a language group which incorporates the modern languages of Welsh, Irish, Cornish, Breton, Manx and Gaelic. Befire the Roman expansion however the Celtic languages spread from more-or-less eastern Spain all the way to Austria. Remember this is a language *family* and not a language, so think "Romance" rather than "French". In Britain, Celtic languages were spoken at least south of Scotland (will clarify soon) and possibly across the entire island. This language family is more or less correlated to the [La Tene archaeological culture](_URL_0_), so there seems to have been a real cultural complex spread across much of what is now northern and central Europe.
"Gaul" was the Roman word for the territory of more-or-less modern France with some expanded borders, and the Gauls were those who lived within. Immediately before Roman conquest, southern Britain was very tightly bound to Gaul, to the point that southeast England was considered "Belgic". Because of this, it exhibited an unusually high level of material development that made it really distinctive from the rest of the island. To be absurdly simplistic, we can divide Britain into four major zones: southern England, in the "Belgic" zone, the decentralized and less materially rich zone of northern England, the still less materially rich zone going into Scotland, and then the densely populated and materially rich zone of northern Scotland and the islands. So even though much or all of the island was Celtic speaking there was a great deal of diversity in lifeways and culture.
The Picts emerge near the end of Late Antiquity and in the Early Middle Ages. they are a somewhat "mysterious" group in that establishing their cultural geneology and even their language is extremely difficult. They were probably the descendants of the Caledonians of the Roman times, but some have even suggested their language was non-Indo-European. They were certainly considered distinctive by Bede, who divided the peoples of Britain into fives groups of the Latins, Angles, Welsh, Scots and Picts. They are, unfortunately, a bit of a tangle to understand. | [
"The cultural syncretism of Roman and Germanic traditions overlaid the earlier syncretism of Roman culture with the Celtic culture of the respective imperial provinces, Gallo-Roman culture in Gaul and Romano-British culture in Britain. This results in a triple fusion of Celtic-Roman-Germanic culture for France and ... |
how does formalin preserve dead organs? | It stops decomposition. There are a lot of microbes and bacteria that would love to eat up those organs (destroying them in the process). There are plenty of other chemicals that could do that (like bleach). But bleach would also rip apart the cells and, as you might imagine, bleach the pigment out of the organ. A bleached organ with a lot of ruptured cells wouldn't look very nice, though, eh? So formalin is used because it kills bacteria without damaging the integrity of the cells.
It's also important to note that formalin works by being *poisonous as shit*. It won't preserve LIVING tissue, it'll kill the cells just as easily as it will any bacteria. | [
"Tissue preparation or \"fixation\" is essential for the preservation of cell morphology and tissue architecture. Inappropriate or prolonged fixation may significantly diminish the antibody binding capability. Many antigens can be successfully demonstrated in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissue sections. Howeve... |
I have this theory that a lot of "traditional British food" became popular due to rationing in WW2. I am thinking of foods like Baked Beanz and tinned tomatoes. How accurate is this, and how big is the lasting impact of WW2 rationing on British cuisine? | Rationing didn't have much of a long-term impact on British cuisine, "traditional British" dishes tend to either pre-date the 20th century (fish & chips, various pies, stews, hotpots, roasts, puddings etc.) or post-date rationing (when "traditional" becomes more problematic, e.g. chicken tikka masala). Rationing restricted key elements of many dishes - meat, butter, cheese, fats, sugar - so wartime recipes were focused on improvisation and substitution, using unrationed foods (largely fresh fruit and vegetables) as far as possible. Bread, for example, was standardised as the National Loaf, a wholemeal recipe that made the most efficient use of flour but was not particularly appetising. King's College, London have the [Potato Pete recipe book] (_URL_1_) online featuring such delights as "Pink and Green Purée" (mashed potato with carrot and watercress and "a small piece of margarine or dripping if it can be spared"). [Lord Woolton Pie] (_URL_0_), named after the Minister of Food, was a vegetable pie topped with potato or wheatmeal pastry, "forced on somewhat reluctant tables" during the war and hardly a staple of post-rationing dinners; likewise [carrot flan] (_URL_4_). The replacement of ice creams with a [carrot onna stick] (_URL_3_) was another innovation rapidly forgotten post-war.
I'm not sure I'd jump to tinned tomatoes being a traditional British food, except perhaps as part of a "full English" breakfast, but tinned foods were more of a luxury than a staple. In 1942 a points system of rationing was introduced to cover "processed foods such as canned fish, meat, beans, and fruit; biscuits; rice, oats, and other cereal products; cheese and condensed milk; dried fruit and pulses; and certain preserves". These were items where supply fluctuated, so guaranteed rations by weight were impractical, but a points system meant that the rich were unable to corner the market where they were available, and points values could be adjusted to reflect supply. A person had 20 points to spend in a month; in 1942 tomatoes required 6 points for a medium tin, 9 points for a large tin; tinned beans in tomato sauce were 4 points, tinned beans in brine were 1 point.
A full English breakfast isn't a bad way of demonstrating the restrictions of rationing. Let's say you fry up four rashers of bacon, an egg, sausages, and fried bread, and serve it with tinned tomatoes, baked beans, and toast with plenty of butter. That's used up most of an entire **week's** ration for an adult (as shown in [this photo] (_URL_2_) from the Imperial War Museum).
Rationing did have a democratising effect on food consumption, and was in some ways quite healthy with the focus on fresh vegetables, but was hardly conducive to appetising dishes that would outlast the restrictions. | [
"During the World Wars of the 20th century difficulties of food supply were countered by official measures, which included rationing. The problem was worse in WWII, and the Ministry of Food was established to address the problems (see Rationing in the United Kingdom). Due to the economic problems following the war,... |
why are sperm count in men decreasing? | From _URL_0_:
> The analysis did not explore reasons for the decline, but researchers said falling sperm counts have previously been linked to various factors such as exposure to certain chemicals and pesticides, smoking, stress and obesity.
> In contrast, no significant decline was seen in South America, Asia and Africa. The researchers noted, however, that far fewer studies have been conducted in these regions.
> Richard Sharpe at Edinburgh University added: "Given that we still do not know what lifestyle, dietary or chemical exposures might have caused this decrease, research efforts to identify (them) need to be redoubled and to be non-presumptive as to cause."
So, the scientists are not sure about it yet.
| [
"There has been speculation that falling sperm counts in males may be due to increased estrogen exposure in utero. Sharpe in a 2005 review indicated that external estrogenic substances are too weak in their cumulative effects to alter male reproductive functioning, but indicates that the situation appears to be mor... |
why can't the human heart "get used to" having to work harder in an individual with restricted arteries, causing it to get stronger under the increased work load like normal muscles? | You are really talking about two different things here, without realizing it.
First of all, the heart does "get used to" having to work harder. If it is pumping against a higher blood pressure (because the patient has hypertension and it isn't being treated), then over time it was develop hypertrophy. This sounds great, right? The heart is stronger! Except the problem is that it will have a harder time relaxing, so it is harder to fill with blood. This leads to congestive heart failure, which is bad. Please note, I'm not going to go into depth with congestive heart failure. Yes, there are two types, and I've only talked about one of them here, but I'm tired and this is ELI5.
Second, when you talk about restricted arteries, I presume you mean partial blockages in the coronary arteries. The issue here is a lack of blood making it to the heart muscle cells, not lack of strength of the heart itself. The muscle cells can only work so hard with a limited amount of oxygen and other nutrients. | [
"Because vital tissues such as the brain or heart muscle are vulnerable to ischaemia, arteries often form anastomoses to provide alternative supplies of fresh blood. End arteries can exist when no anastomosis exists or when an anastomosis exists but is incapable of providing a sufficient supply of blood, thus the t... |
Are there parts of the brain that can be physically damaged without immediate catastrophic effect? | Yes, there are many areas of the brain that can be damaged without causing death/unconsciousness. The bizarre effects that have resulted from some such brain injuries has actually provided a huge amount of information about the brain. The most famous case is [Phineas Gage](_URL_0_) | [
"Brain injuries are very hard to predict in outcome. Many tests and specialists are needed to determine the likelihood of the prognosis. People with minor brain damage can have debilitating side effects; not just severe brain damage has debilitating effects. The side- effects of a brain injury depend on location an... |
Why does adding water to whiskey open up the flavor? | Adding water to whiskey affects two things.
1. Cuts down on the alcohol content, so you're burned less by the alcohol and can taste more of the other flavors.
2. It releases more of the aromatics in the whiskey that are not water soluble. Smell has a huge impact on taste, so getting a bigger whiff of the aromatics helps the taste.
There are a lot of other drinks you can do this with, [notably coffee.](_URL_0_) | [
"Consumers often add water to cask strength whiskies in order to reduce the \"heat\" – the \"burn\" sensation that goes with the drinking experience – and bring out different whisky flavors. Diluting the whisky with varying amounts of water will modify the flavor profile, and some consumers like to have control ove... |
How much variation tends to exist between fingerprints, assuming no two fingerprints are the same? | So at first level detail you have four basic ‘shapes’ within fingerprints - arches, tented arches, loops and whorls. You can have just a single one of these on each finger or occasionally you will get combinations such as two interlocked loops etc... Each person will have one of these on each finger.
These shapes are created by the ridges on your fingers (second level detail). Each ridge can be complete and stand alone, or it can have breaks in it, or it can split and join up with adjacent ridges, or bifurcate (split in two) and create two ridges. Combinations of this can form shapes such as islands (very short ridge section) or lakes (a bifurcation that appears for a short distance and then joins back into a single ridge). Each person’s ridges will have breaks and joins and bifurcations in different places.
Then, on each ridge, there are tiny pores where sweat and oil come out. Again, each person’s pores have slightly different spacing and form their own pattern (third level detail).
So, although it is theoretically possible that each of those three levels of features could exactly line up twice in two separate people, the chance is so astronomically small that it is considered that nobody will have the same.
However, small fragments of fingerprints can have very similar features between people. Often, when searching fingerprints on the police databases, multiple ‘hits’ will appear. This is because it is actually far more common to get only a fragment of a fingerprint than a whole one at a crime scene (or at least only a fragment that isn’t smudged from the natural movement when a person touches a surface). In these cases, each fingerprint has to be compared manually to see any tiny details (like fainter second level detail or any visible third level details). | [
"In a Royal Institution paper in 1888 and three books (\"Finger Prints\", 1892; \"Decipherment of Blurred Finger Prints\", 1893; and \"Fingerprint Directories\", 1895), Galton estimated the probability of two persons having the same fingerprint and studied the heritability and racial differences in fingerprints. He... |
how are online games (say wow or guild wars, etc) synchronized over all the players' individual games? | 1. They're not synchronized over *all* players' games. The players are distributed across different "realms" or "worlds", that are actually different physical servers, and your game is (usually, barring specific cross-server interactions) never updated about players on other server.
2. The server only sends you data about other players that are within your view distance.
So in short, you only get sent data about nearby players who are on the same server as you, which is a tiny, *tiny* fraction of the total number of players. | [
"Games where the map and starting position is different every time you play it, in for example strategy games with a random map generator, also tend to have long-lasting appeal. The community-developed mods for many games also contribute to increased replayability and long life for many games. Due to the limits of ... |
why do humans feel the need to do things that are bad for us? | Because unfortunately our lifestyles have evolved faster than our genes. If you look at humans as animals that went through natural selection just like any other, a lot of our "destructive" behaviors made sense in the context of nature and survival, but things became so much more convenient and we haven't yet evolved to really deal with that. Like, our bodies only ever expected to find sweetness in fruits and the like, which were healthy to eat. It never expected that we'd extract sweeteners and put them into processed foods. So our body doesn't "know" that it's bad, it thinks it's good, and it rewards us with the enjoyment of eating something sugary, even though it's actually not at all what evolution intended. This applies to many other things, though perhaps not as easily explainable for some things. | [
"Everything we do or do not do, wish or do not wish, and have or do not have has an explicit or an implicit relevance to how good or not good we perceive our lives to be. Because the preference for a good life over a bad life underlies all facets of our lives, understanding what constitutes and influences a good li... |
why are so many people struggling with basic grammar - you're/your, it's/its, there/they're, etc. | So, before an answer can be attempted, a few misconceptions are going to have to be addressed:
1. What you think of as the things that determine whether a text is grammatically correct aren't actually, linguistically speaking (that is to say, according to the scientific model of language), the things that determine grammatical. That is to say, what you seem to think of as being 'grammatically correct' in English is only correct within a very specific, and very artificial, prestige dialect that, in many ways, has never actually been spoken save by people who are trying way too hard. English, by virtue of its enormous size and many other factors, is a language with very many dialects, and there are some pretty significant grammatical differences between, e.g. Standard Written English (the aforementioned prestige dialect) and African American Vernacular English. The extremely important thing to know is that someone saying something that very ungrammatical in SWE could (and probably is - native speakers of do not make grammatical mistakes very frequently; they have an enormous amount of practice speaking correctly) be perfectly grammatical in AAVE or any number of other very widespread and very well-attested dialects.
2. You're in part confusing orthography with grammar. I say 'in part' because the ubiquity of written language in many parts of the world nowadays has confused the matter. But: the core of language, in many respects, is spoken, and in many (perhaps all) dialects of spoken English, 'you're' & 'your', 'it's' and 'its', 'to, 'two' & 'too' are all homophonous, and there need be no distinction made between them because context can perfectly (or, at least, almost perfectly) disambiguate. This is also the case in written language: notice how you're always able to understand what they meant when someone writes 'you're' in place of 'your', because the alternative - that they are writing is actually what they mean - would result in a grammatically nonsensical sentence. So, because many people who don't spend a great deal of time interacting with written language in a dialect that strictly distinguishes orthographically between those words (e.g. SWE), many people aren't at all used to having to make split-second distinctions between those words, and can often get it 'wrong'.
In many ways, it *would* be hard for you, as a non-native speaker of English, to understand (at least, directly; the situation is the same, presumably, for non-native speakers of your native language), because you are used to having to be constantly aware of your English, while native speakers have been producing and understanding English since before they have memories of being able to. | [
"Critics have objected that people-first language is awkward, repetitive and makes for tiresome writing and reading. C. Edwin Vaughan, a sociologist and longtime activist for the blind, argues that since \"in common usage positive pronouns usually precede nouns\", \"the awkwardness of the preferred language focuses... |
How many nukes would it take to end the world? | That could depend entirely on your intent, you could potentially do tremendous damage by targeting something specifically in order to damage the environment instead of humans. There have also been hypothetical "doomsday devices" that could kill most life on Earth with a single weapon by polluting the atmosphere with radioactive Cobalt-60. Alternatively you could target something like a nuclear fuel storage facility to scatter fallout all over the place. There were a few tests of nuclear detonations in space during the cold war which also destroyed several satellites with EMP, you could do substantial damage to our infrastructure with a few weapons to knock out most/all of the thousands of satellites in orbit as well as simultaneously destroying the fiber optic cables running under the sea to cut off most global communication. | [
"The Global Zero plan for the phased, verified elimination of all nuclear weapons is a four-phased strategy to reach a global zero accord over 14 years (2010–2023) and to complete the dismantlement of all remaining nuclear warheads over the following seven years (2024–2030).\n",
"These nuclear weapons are being f... |
water vapor vs. steam vs. mist vs. fog vs. cloud | In a sense, they do just describe water in air, but they also provide you an idea of what that water is like. Basically, different connotations
Vapor: gaseous and dispersed
Steam: high pressure/temperature, maybe more tightly packed (Vapor you might not see, steam you would see)
Mist: ambient (it's from the natural environment; steam doesn't have this conntation, but it definitely can be from natural sources). Doesn't really obstruct view that much or is only in a limited area.
Fog: obstructs view, covers a wider area.
Cloud: Altitude is high. | [
"Mist is a phenomenon caused by small droplets of water suspended in air. Physically, it is an example of a dispersion. It is most commonly seen where warm, moist air meets sudden cooling, such as in exhaled air in the winter, or when throwing water onto the hot stove of a sauna. It can be created artificially with... |
say i have a bad cold with an impossibly stuffed up nose. no way to breathe through my nostrils. now say i get kidnapped, and they put duct tape over my mouth. would my body react to un-stuff my nose so i could breathe to live? | I wouldn't worry about it. Next time you have duct tape (and preferably no facial hair) take a strip and put it over your mouth and try to get it off without your hands. It's absolutely trivial. The whole "I have duct tape over my mouth so now I can't talk" thing is just for the movies. Honestly it's one of their sillier gags since anyone with a roll of the gray, shiny stuff can show how implausible it is.
As for your actual question in a non-duct-tape scenario, I can tell you that in my experience adrenaline has a lovely head-clearing effect. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a normal reaction to extreme fear. | [
"BULLET::::- The \"Lowry Technique\". A combination of Valsalva and Toynbee: pinching the nose to close the nostrils, and blow and swallow at the same time. The nose can be closed without using a hand, using the compressor naris muscles; it can be described as \"wrinkling the nose as if there was a bad smell\". A h... |
would it be possible to divert the nile to irrigate the sahara? | Yes. But then the rest of lower Egypt would have to go without the Nile which would make it a desert. | [
"The team toured the area from February 11 to March 25, 1903. The report signed by Kessler and the other members concluded that the project depended on water supply and, therefore, that the Egyptian government should give permission to divert some water from the Nile. The Egyptian government, calculating that the p... |
when countries like north korea spend money on war supplies like missiles, nukes, guns, planes etc. who sells it to them? | The North Koreans have purchased weapons largely from the Soviets/Russians and Chinese over the decades as well as having left overs going back as far as WWII from American and Western manufacturers. They have their own arms manufacturing industry which produces two Main Battle Tanks based on Russian/Chinese designs as well as smaller weapons. Some of the tech was purchased from the Russians when the Soviet Union collapsed nominally as scrap metal, but the North Koreans were able to learn from it to produce their own tanks. The have purchased Scuds (Soviet origin missiles) from Egypt, and now produce their own variant.
As far as nukes they purchased a lot of the know how from Pakistan illegally. The former head of Pakistan's nuclear program is in prison for selling secrets to the North Koreans.
Basically anyone in the world except the U.S., Japan, South Korea and Western Europe will sell to them. And even some of those countries will sell "non-military" items that end up being used in the military (the NKs have a number of German trucks). Depending on how public the deal is, how much U.S. pressures the other country not to sell, and the age/design of the weapons anything could be sold to them. Selling off the last generation of weapons to other countries is a time honored tradition, this is a lot of the stuff NK buys from overseas. | [
"North Korea supported Iran during the Iran–Iraq War for oil and foreign exchange by selling both domestically produced arms to Iran and serving as an intermediary for deniable sales by the Soviet Union, Soviet satellites, and China. Sales began with a delivery of Soviet artillery ammunition in October 1980 after t... |
Are there any animals who stay strictly in the air? | The closest there is to an animal that spends their entire life in the air is probably the Alpine Swift. They have recently been found to spend upwards of 200 days in a row airborne and only land at their breeding ground. They eat, sleep, and drink all while airborne.
Nature Paper:
_URL_0_
But probably easier to read the Wikipedia article:
_URL_1_
I suppose that, theoretically, creatures like bacteria could spend longer airborne but I'm not aware of any studies done (they'd be very hard to track individually unless we find some type of bacteria that spends its whole life cycle airborne) | [
"Laws and regulations that allow service animals to be taken into business or onto aircraft may give the service provider discretion to deny admission to unusual service animals. For example, under the Air Carrier Access Act, airlines are never required to accommodate unusual animals such as snakes and other reptil... |
Question about Saladin and King Richard's relationship during the Third Crusade. | To my knowledge, none of the letters supposedly exchanged between Saladin and Richard I survive to this day. However, one of our best sources for the Third Crusade is chronicle evidence, supplied from both the Latin and Arabic traditions. Some of these have been (mercifully) translated into English through the Crusade Texts in Translation series, published by Ashgate. Of particular interest for the Third Crusade is Ibn al-Athir's chronicle الكامل في التاريخ (The Complete History) and the *Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi*. A couple other authors have also compiled other sources related to this crusade.
D.S. Richards, *The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi'l-ta'rikh. Vol. 2*. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
Helen J. Nicholson, *The Chronicle of the Third Crusade: The Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi*. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997.
Peter W. Edbury, *The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade: Sources in Translation*. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996.
Gabrieli's *Arab Historians of the Crusades* probably has some useful sources as well, although I cannot remember which ones off the top of my head.
Finally, I would caution readers to be wary of popular histories with regard to the Third Crusade. The relationship between Richard I and Saladin has been sensationalized in the past as a sort of clash of civilizations, which doesn't necessarily hold up under closer scrutiny. James Reston Jr.'s *Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade* is particularly guilty of this, in my opinion. For narrative overviews of the Crusade, I would recommend sticking to Thomas Madden, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Steven Runciman (a bit dated, but still very useful), and Christopher Tyerman. For narratives focusing on the Islamic side of things, try Carole Hillenbrand and Paul Cobb. Hope that is useful! | [
"Although largely a footnote among the greater events that unfolded during the Crusades, the battle was a decisive encounter, in that it forced Saladin to negotiate an end to the immediate hostilities. The battle illustrated the determined spirit of Saladin and the courage and tactical skill of Richard. It was the ... |
how do printers work so accurately and fast? | I don’t know what exactly you are looking for as an answer...
They work accurately because the motor that controls the printing head works in very small increments (typically 96 positions per inch) and the ink injectors can inject extremely small quantities of ink.
They work fast because the motor is fast. | [
"Computer printers are slow. On the S/34, computer programs could write data to the printer much faster than the printer can print and there can be more than one program writing to a printer at the same time.\n",
"Line printers are the fastest of all impact printers and are used for bulk printing in large compute... |
all the types of steaks, such as sirloin, prime rib, filet, ribeye etc. what should i consider when choosing which one to order in a restaurant? | Personally, i think ribeye is the best all around for flavor, tenderness, texture and reasonable pricing. Of course, some of that depends on where you buy it, and how you have it cooked. | [
"A rib steak is a beef steak sliced from the rib primal of a beef animal, with rib bone attached. In the United States, the term rib eye steak or Spencer steak is used for a rib steak with the bone removed; however in some areas, and outside the U.S., the terms are often used interchangeably. The rib eye or \"ribey... |
If there are only 5 white rhinos left is there enough diversity in the gene pool to breed them back to non borderline extinction levels? | It's hard to say, since inbreeding problems are quite specific to each species and context. For example, pretty much all the golden hamsters in captivity are descended from one batch of siblings captured in the 30's, and they seem to be doing ok. But other species don't do so well in similar situations. | [
"Wild-caught southern whites will readily breed in captivity given appropriate amounts of space and food, as well as the presence of other female rhinos of breeding age. However, for reasons that are not currently understood, the rate of reproduction is extremely low among captive-born southern white females.\n",
... |
how do genders like genderqueer, genderfluid, etc work? do any scientists believe in them or are they just teens online trying to be special? | Sex is what you have between your legs. True hermaphrodites are so rare that they basically don't exist; a fetus can go down the male track or the female track or split the difference and wind up [intersex](_URL_1_). So, male, female, none or intersex.
Gender is what's in your head, and is something you'd ask an anthropologist, a sociologist or possibly your parents about. It is a social and cultural thing that never translates well. Many cultures have [more than two genders](_URL_0_).
| [
"Gender-associated information is predominantly transmuted through society by way of schemata, or networks of information that allow for some information to be more easily assimilated than others. Bem argues that there are individual differences in the degree to which people hold these gender schemata. These differ... |
why does breathing on glasses before wiping them clean off fingerprints so much better than wiping alone? | Breath contains small amounts of water vapour, so when you breathe on the glass you moisturise the glass before whipping it to off. It's like using water to clean glass, but in very small amounts | [
"To prevent a mask from fogging up due to condensation on the glass many divers spit into the dry mask before use, spread the saliva around the inside of the plate and rinse it out with a little water. The saliva residue allows condensation to wet the glass and form a continuous film, rather than form droplets. The... |
how does [family member] once, twice, (etc) removed worked? | [Here's a good visual.](_URL_0_)
So your sibling shares the same parents as you. Your first cousins share the same grandparents as you. Your second cousins share the same GREAT grandparents as you.
Your cousin-once-removed is the parent of your second cousins. So their GRANDPARENTS are your GREAT grandparents.
The GRANDparents of your cousin-TWICE-removed would be your GREAT-GREAT grandparents. See the number of greats and the number of removals line up. | [
"The immediate family is a defined group of relations, used in rules or laws to determine which members of a person's family are affected by those rules. It normally includes a person's parents, siblings, spouses, children, or an individual related by blood whose close association is an equivalent of a family relat... |
can some explain the differences in handgun ammunition calibers? | [This is a decent article on ammo type](_URL_0_). Basically the grain count is referring to the amount in weight of gun powder in each round. A grain being 0.002 ounces (or just under 65 mg). The higher grain count, the bigger the boom (and subsequently more recoil experienced by the user).
As far as which type of round is better, there are so many variables that come into play with home defense, that I wouldn't feel comfortable saying "x is better than y". It sounds like you're new to the world of firearms. I would read up, practice at the range with friends or other people there who can help guide you, and find what you're comfortable with. | [
"It is generally agreed that most intermediate handgun calibers will perform similarly, since their wounding principles are the same. A list of many handgun calibers can be found at List of handgun cartridges.\n",
"There are automatic, revolver, and single-shot .50 caliber handgun designs. Handguns of this calibe... |
Why don't I feel a shock when touching both ends of a household battery? Or even a car battery? | Humans are not that good of a conductor. They are better conductors than plastic but not better than for instance metal. When you measure the resistance between your left and right hand you might find something like 1MOhm. With a car battery of 12 volt there will only flow 12 microampere(12x10^-6) between your fingers. You need at least 1 to 5mA(5x10^-3) to feel it. so even if your body has a resistance at 4000 Ohm you might not feel it.
Edit: Grammer | [
"In power transmission systems, one side of the circuit, known as the neutral, is grounded to dissipate static electricity and to reduce hazardous voltages caused by insulation failure and other electrical faults. It is possible to get a shock by only touching the \"hot\" wire, due to the person's body being capaci... |
Book recommendation for history of the U.S. 14th Armored Division in the Second World War | So, of a fairly minor note- your great-uncle’s discharge papers list him as a member of Able Company, 14th Armored Infantry [Battalion], which is a subordinate unit of the 1st Armored Division- which fought in Africa and Italy. Are you sure that he fought as a member of the 14th AD during his time in Europe? If so, the paperwork discrepancy is a likely result of him being transferred when the 14th AD was inactivated.
With that out of the way, and provided that he did indeed serve with the 14th Armored Division, the division has an outstanding website at _URL_1_ that has subordinate websites to the various subordinate units. If he served as an armored infantryman with the division he would have been a part of one of the three armored infantry battalions organic to it: the 19th, 62d, or 68th. All three host copies of the battalion histories as well as the divisional history. There’s a tab on the division site that gives a brief overview of the division’s combat history, and under this tab a link to the official US Army history for the Seventh Army’s campaign in France and Germany is included. Several battalion sites include a link to an Armor School paper on the Battle of Hatten-Rittershoffen as well. All of the battalion sites host battalion histories and several documents and photographs pertaining to that particular battalion and the division at large. There is also a contact tab where you can get in touch with the division association as well as the site manager. They may be able to help you learn more about your grandfather, while the materials on the division and battalion websites should be more than enough to inform you on the war as the outfit experienced it.
As an aside I did some looking in the files hosted by all three battalions on their websites and did find several photographs on the 19th AIB website that include a “Johnson” that resembles your grandfather. You can find them at _URL_0_ scroll down to “19th Armored Infantry Battalion Photos” and there’s about a dozen. I’m not sure that it’s him; but its worth looking at. | [
"At the end of World War II, two 6th Armored Division G3 officers, Majors Paul L. Bogen and Clyde J. Burke along with Aide-de-Camp Captain Cyrus R. Shockey, compiled a \"Combat Record of the Sixth Armored Division in the European Theatre of Operations 18 July 1944-8 May 1945\". The official history by George F. Hof... |
why do cellphone companies pay x dollars for the trade in of y phones when buying a new phone? marketshare? | A lot of companies probably get loads of phones at various prices, then mass sell them for their gold inside them, Get more bang for ya buck that way | [
"From 1993 to 2010, Chinese companies have been involved as either an acquiror or acquired company in 25,284 mergers and acquisitions with a total known value of US$969 billion. The number and value of deals hit a new record in 2010. The number of deals that happened in 2010 has been 3,640, which is an increase of ... |
When did humans first figure out that other planets existed and weren't just stars? What was the reaction to this idea when it was proposed? | hi! fyi, one or more of these threads may be relevant
* [What is the earliest record of a person theorizing that stars are suns and planets?](_URL_2_)
* [When did scientists recognize the planets in our solar system as (relatively) nearby planets, and not as other stars. How did they know that these celestial bodies were planets and not stars?](_URL_3_)
* [When did people realize that planets were not just moving stars?](_URL_0_)
* [When did humans become aware that they were on planet Earth, in a solar system, and part of the Universe?](_URL_1_)
It might also be worth x-posting to /r/AskScience (astronomy) for info on early astronomical theory, and /r/AskAnthropology | [
"Throughout antiquity, there have been many Classical Planets, once \"wandering stars\", not all of which are now considered planets. With the advent of the telescope, the moons initially discovered around Jupiter and Saturn, were also considered planets by some. The development of more powerful telescopes resulted... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.