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why would a president not choose cabinet members with longtime experience in that's cabinet's area of governance? | Qualified people will advocate for their agencies. They will effectively make the case for why their budget should not be cut and for the benefits of the work they do. Donald Trump does not want qualified people. He does not want people to advocate for their agencies. He wants people to head agencies that they clearly dislike, and whose traditional mission they disagree with. Hence, an advocate for charter schools as the head of education; an oil executive as head of the EPA, a staunch Obamacare opponent as head of Health and Human Services, a libertarian surgeon in charge of housing, etc... This is what anti-government looks like. | [
"The tradition of the Cabinet arose out of the debates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention regarding whether the president would exercise executive authority singly or collaboratively with a cabinet of ministers or a privy council. As a result of the debates, the Constitution (Article II, Section 1, Clause 1) ves... |
What were Hitler's ideas of succession? Who was to succeed Hitler should he die and what process would they have to go through to suceed as leader of his Reich? | _URL_0_
User u/searocksandtrees answered a similar question with a selection of answers from past threads. You should check them out. | [
"Two hours after Hindenburg's death, it was announced that as a result of this law, Hitler was now both Germany's head of state and head of government, thereby eliminating the last remedy by which he could be legally dismissed and cementing his status as the absolute dictator of Germany. Publicly, Hitler announced ... |
How do cells know what part of the DNA to read to function? | Yeah pretty much you have it right. I mean it's a lot more complex than that but pretty much, the cell can skip over parts of the DNA that aren't needed. There's a whole subset of molecular biology that researches gene expression and how exactly cells do this. I'll try to give it a quick overview...
First, you need to understand that a tiny fraction of the genome actually codes for the proteins. Around the coding regions are large swathes of DNA that are involved in regulation of a gene. The complexity of these regions is quite staggering. Basically, there are a host of proteins that bind to these regions -- these proteins are called "transcription factors" and enhance or suppress the binding of the cellular machinery to make an RNA molecule from the DNA (transcription). In a simple example, a transcription factor binds to a specific DNA sequence in the regulatory region of a gene and pulls with it the RNA polymerase to make an mRNA (thus turning on the gene). Sequence present, the gene is on, no sequence, the gene is off. There are hundreds of different transcription factors. They all can associate with other transcription factors, with different regulatory regions on the DNA, and with other parts of the cellular machinery and form intricate networks. They can enhance RNA production or suppress it.
How do these transcription factors come to be? Some of them are as the result of the cell sensing its environment, with signals transmitted through the cell membrane and down into the nucleus. Some are the result of intracellular processes, like knowing how far down a finger a cell is. Some are the result of developmental processes, like keeping track of how many cell divisions a cell has had. All of these signals get integrated on regulatory regions of genes.
But wait, there's more!. Just because the DNA is read out into RNA doesn't mean a functional protein will be made. In fact, only a minority of gene regulation occurs at the level of DNA- > RNA (transcription). At every step of the way, there are other regulatory points. The transcription factor may or may not be able to bind to the DNA because the DNA may be modified or packaged in a way leaving it inaccessible (or more accessible). The RNA can be processed at a number of different pathways, and some RNA is more stable than others. Then there are boatloads of RNA- > protein regulatory steps as well, as well as boatloads of protein processing steps.
Stem cells are special for a number of reasons. But needless to say, for most cells, there are certain checkpoints of development that once passed, cannot be easily reversed. The lineage of that cell becomes restricted -- for instance liver cells can beget liver cells but not other cells (easily).
Most cells in the body have passed so many checkpoints and have become so specialized that they generally don't divide at all anymore, and there are organ-specific stem cells that repopulate the tissue. For instance, you have basal cells in the skin that divide to form new skin cells. The stuff at the surface and even a few layers below is dead or dying. These are one kind of stem cell, but a limited stem cell.
The kind of stem cell that people get super excited about are cells like this that can not only form skin, but lungs and liver and maybe even blood or blood vessels. We call this "pluripotency." If we could grow these in a dish, we could feed them the right signals and turn them into the tissue of our choice. Anyway, you (hopefully) get the picture.
ninja edit for clarity not that it helped
edit 2: lemme also just add that your OP makes it seem like DNA is read in some sort of linear fashion, like a book. The DNA in the nucleus is much more like a tangled ball of string than a strip of code. All of the DNA is exposed to all of the transcription factors. Essentially, the cell is reading ALL the DNA at the same time and making decisions as to whether a gene is on or off. | [
"The information in DNA is held in the sequence of the repeating units along the DNA chain. These units are four types of nucleotides (A,T,G and C) and the sequence of nucleotides stores information in an alphabet called the genetic code. When a gene is read by a cell the DNA sequence is copied into a very similar ... |
why is it that most game developers don't include/allow modding support, when many other franchises are successful because of it? | If it's mostly/entirely played on console, there's no point. Even if it's not there's the fact that modding tools can be a bitch and they don't predict enough of a payout in extra sales to cover those costs. | [
"Mods can compete with official downloadable content however, or even outright redistribute it, and their ability to extend the lifespan of a game can work against its developers' plans for regular sequels. As game technology has become more complex, it has also become harder to distribute development tools to the ... |
Sound and Waves: How does a magnet pick up sound in an electric guitar? | The strings are made of steel, right? So the magnet is attracted to the steel string. As the steel string vibrates up and down it pulls on the magnet up and down. And that vibration of the magnet inside of coils of wire (pick up coils) generates a small amount of voltage that has a waveform directly correlated to the vibration of the string. That voltage travels down the wire as a current, gets passed through an amplifier then around another coil with a magnet inside *that*. And as the current in the wire changes, it creates a magnetic field that vibrates the magnet inside of that coil, and that magnet is usually attached to some paper cone that then pushes air back out as sound waves. And that, my friend, is how electric string instruments work. (more or less, really there's a lot of other things, like multi-coil/hum-bucker pickups that eliminate stray EM interference, passing the current through some sort of distortion circuit to produce cool effects, non electromagnetic pickups like lasers or piezoelectrics, etc.) | [
"On electric guitars and electric basses, the bridge conducts the vibrations to the body, but the vibrations of the strings are typically sensed by a magnetic pickup, so that an electric signal is created, which is then connected to a guitar amplifier and a speaker enclosure to produce the sound the performer and a... |
How much water evaporates in an underwater nuclear explosion? | Well, according to Wikipedia, the Tsar Bomba produced 240PJ, or 2.4x10^17 J. It looks like it was detonated over land, but we can ignore that and have some fun. If we make an assumption that ~10% of its energy is absorbed by the water, that would mean 2.4x10^16 J. If the water temp is 20ºC, it would mean that it would have enough energy to boil 9.25x10^9 kg of water, or 9.25 million cubic meters. That's a lot of water. | [
"Unless it breaks the water surface while still a hot gas bubble, an underwater nuclear explosion leaves no trace at the surface but hot, radioactive water rising from below. This is always the case with explosions deeper than about .\n",
"Underwater nuclear tests close to the surface can disperse radioactive wat... |
how exactly does sinus pressure build up when sick and why? | Imagine your sinuses are a water balloon. When it is empty it is all floppy because there isn't anything pushing on the sides of the balloon, this is a lack of pressure. When you fill the water balloon the water pushes on the insides and gives it a shape from the pressure.
Now when you are sick your sinuses are filling with fluids, and the lining of your sinuses are thickening due to immune cells coming to fight the infection. There is a lot of pressure, but no where to go and this pushes on some nerves that cause an unpleasant feeling. | [
"The pressure difference causes the mucosal lining of the sinuses to become swollen and submucosal bleeding follows with further difficulties ventilating the sinus, especially if the orifices are involved. Ultimately fluid or blood will fill the space.\n",
"If one or more of the paired paranasal sinuses or air ca... |
how did the north star happen? does every star revolve around it? | It's a star that happens to be mostly aligned with the Earth's axis. Watching from the surface, as the planet spins the star looks like it's stationary. | [
"Due to the precession of the equinoxes (as well as the stars' proper motions), the role of North Star has passed (and will pass) from one star to another in the remote past (and in the remote future). In 3000 BC, the faint star Thuban in the constellation Draco was the North Star, aligning within 0.1° distance fro... |
US Congressional Uses of Sanctions Against a Foreign Nation? [research question] | As you might guess from the flair, my speciality is labour history, so I can only offer you limited assistance with finding material that will help develop your thesis. Nonetheless, I have done quite a lot of work on South Africa, so I'm going to try and help point you in the direction of some useful resources.
It seems to me that the most obvious historical example of sanctions being imposed by the United States on another nation before the CAAA would be those imposed on Cuba in the 1960s; I'm not familiar with the legislative framework surrounding the Cuba embargo but I'd be surprised if it wasn't worth chasing up. You may want to take a look through Appendix I of the Foreign Assistance Act (pp1,015 - 1,035), which you can find [here](_URL_1_) and which runs right back to the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, though it is not a comprehensive list of sanction-related legislation (the CAAA isn't in there for one). The Department of the Treasury website has a summary of [ongoing sanctions](_URL_2_) enacted by the United States.
Another obvious point of comparison and one extremely relevant to your inquiry would be the sanctions imposed on Rhodesia - or Southern Rhodesia as it is sometimes referred to after its British colonial name, present-day Zimbabwe - after it declared independence from the United Kingdom. As I understand it, sanctions on Rhodesia were imposed by the President rather than Congress but became a battlefield in the 1970s, after Harry Byrd Jr. succeeded in tabling an amendment to another bill allowing imports of chrome from Rhodesia. CQ Alamanac have a [contemporary article](_URL_4_) outlining the legislative battle that you might find useful. I think the Rhodesia debate could be very useful for you.
In terms of finding primary source material, I'm going to assume that you're based in the United States rather than South Africa - if I'm wrong, do correct me! I think the best resource you can use for primary sources is going to be JSTOR's *Struggles for Freedom* collection (formerly known as the Aluka Project), which you can access [here](_URL_0_). It is filled with useful source material, and I know there are definitely congressional reports and documents in there relating to US foreign policy in southern Africa, including sanctions.
You may also want to check out the [African Activist archive](_URL_5_), which is focused on the anti-apartheid movement and probably has some relevant documents that may assist you. For material on a South Africa perspective, the [University of KwaZulu Natal's digital archive](_URL_3_) is an *incredibly* valuable resource for anyone unable to go to South Africa. Unfortunately, its search function is appallingly awful and UKZN's servers are about as modern as apartheid itself, so the website is frequently down. There may nonetheless be material in there relevant to your topic.
> I'll be honest that I don't fully understand the contemporary South African domestic issues (outside of the obvious)
If you're looking for an overview of South African economic history, Sampie Terreblanche's *A History of Inequality in South Africa, 1652 - 2002* is perhaps going to be the best single volume for a broad, sweeping look at the dynamics of racial and economic inequality. It's a very political work and its conclusions about the post-apartheid period are controversial (and, in my view, based on some deeply flawed assumptions about a few particular aspects of South African history - but about things quite peripheral to your topic), but it's certainly still a good book on the whole. It doesn't sound like you'll need to be talking in much depth about South Africa itself, and so might be useful for getting a broad understanding of the context without getting bogged down in historiography.
I hope that some of this is helpful for your research; hopefully someone else will be able to come along and offer other insights or advice. Do let me know if there's anything else you think I might be able to help with. | [
"The Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, \"CAATSA\" (, ), is a United States federal law that imposed sanctions on Iran, North Korea, and Russia. The bill was passed on July 27, 2017, 98–2 in the Senate, after having passed the House 419–3. On August 2, 2017, President Donald Trump signed it int... |
Why did the number of African American voters in the presidential election steadily decrease after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965? | One variable you're not taking into account is that voter turnout for *all* Americans was [steadily going down](_URL_0_) during this period. Whereas the percentage of the voting-age population who participated in the 1960 election was 63.1%, [by 1996 that number had fallen to 49.1%](_URL_2_).
In point of fact, the gap between the participation of black and white voters has steadily been [narrowing since the passage of the Voting Rights Act](_URL_1_):
> ...the racial gap in voter registration in former Confederate states shrank from nearly 30 percentage points at the start of the 1960s to 8 points by the start of the next decade.
> Turnout in the South saw a similar reversal. In 1956, voter turnout among blacks in once-Confederate states was roughly 50 percentage points lower than that for whites. That gap has narrowed since the Act was passed and Southern black turnout has been higher than white turnout in four of the 12 presidential elections since. | [
"In addition, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had an immediate impact on federal, state and local elections. Within months of its passage on August 6, 1965, one quarter of a million new black voters had been registered, one third by federal examiners. Within four years, voter registration in the South had more than d... |
why are old people so small and short? | Gravity. As people age, their bones start to lose mass, their spine begins to collapse on itself and there's usually less muscle mass. At least that's what my doctor tells me to explain why I'm nearly a half inch shorter than I was 40 years ago. | [
"Shortness in children and young adults nearly always results from below-average growth in childhood, while shortness in older adults usually results from loss of height due to kyphosis of the spine or collapsed vertebrae from osteoporosis. The most common causes of short stature in childhood are constitutional gro... |
What are the most revealing statistics that show the overwhelming progress made by modern medicine? | My area of expertise is cancer statistics. By far, the most progress we’ve made is with childhood cancer. In the 1950s, fewer than 20% of children diagnosed survived more than 5 years. Today survival is over 80%. I’d still love to see that number rise, but I think our progress is astounding.
[Childhood cancer survival by site and year](_URL_0_) | [
"In another 2005 paper, Ioannidis analyzed \"49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years\". The paper compared the 45 studies that claimed to have uncovered effective interventions to subsequent studies with larger sample sizes: 7 (16%) of the studies were contradicted, 7... |
why is the combo of ibuprofen and alcohol so bad for you? | I believe you're confusing ibuprofen with acetaminophen. Acetaminophen is associated with liver and kidney damage when consumed with alcohol. To my knowledge ibuprofen is not.
Acetaminophen is also known in some countries as Paracetamol.
_URL_0_
| [
"There is cross tolerance between alcohol, the benzodiazepines, the barbiturates, the nonbenzodiazepine drugs, and corticosteroids, which all act by enhancing the GABA receptor's function via modulating the chloride ion channel function of the GABA receptor.\n",
"Benzoctamine, like other psychoactive drugs has th... |
what needs to happen for a plane to fly into other countries' airspaces? | If it's playing nicely then it will have a filed a flight plan and be carrying a transponder which identifies it, so air traffic control are expecting it and know which plane it is when it appears on their radar.
If not, and it doesn't respond to air traffic control asking what it's doing, then fighters would be scrambled to go and see what it is, and eventually shoot it down if the appearance of fighters doesn't make the pilot more talkative. | [
"The United States does not recognize the right of a coastal nation to apply its ADIZ procedures to foreign aircraft not intending to enter national airspace nor does the United States apply its ADIZ procedures to foreign aircraft not intending to enter U.S. airspace. Accordingly, U.S. military aircraft not intendi... |
Would a SETI program located in the Alpha Centauri System be able to detect radio signals from Earth? | Let's say a station is broadcasting at a full Megawatt of power (the strongest, to my knowledge are usually in the half-megawatt range). Let's say they have a dish (or array of dishes with equivalent collection area equal to) of *d* meters in radius. Their collection area is pi *d*^2 , but our signal is spread out over the sphere of 4.24 light years, that's about 4 x 10^16 meters. And the surface area of a sphere is given by 4 pi r^2 , so 6.4 x 10^33 pi meters. So the signal strength is approximately their collection area divided by the surface area of the sphere, so about d^2 / 6.4 x 10^33 .
So there's a factor of 1.5625 x 10^-34 reduction in signal strength. A megawatt is 10^6 , so that leaves us 10^-28 . d^2 / 10000 Yoctowatts of power (we don't even have an SI prefix small enough to properly label it).
So now, looking at wiki's orders of magnitudes of power, the Galileo satellite was giving a 70 m pickup about 10^-21 (zeptowatt) of power. So let's say that the alien SETI program needs to pick up .1 zeptowatt (to make the math easy). So it needs 10^3 yoctowatts, so d^2 = 10^8 , so d = 10^4 , they'd need something like a 10 kilometer dish to pick up our signal. Given all the above approximations, their dish maybe needs to be between a kilometer and 100 kilometers, just to be safe.
So not *impossible* but seems like just barely possible. Certainly more distant objects are going to have even more trouble (remember again that signal decreases with square of distance) | [
"In October 2015, the SETI Institute used the Allen Telescope Array to look for radio emissions from possible intelligent extraterrestrial life in the vicinity of the star. After an initial two-week survey, the SETI Institute reported that it found no evidence of technology-related radio signals from the star syste... |
During the times corsettes where worn where they worn during pregnancies as well? Is it known how a life of wearing corsettes affected pregnancies? | hi! not discouraging other responses, but there was a similar question a month ago that's worth checking out
* [Did pregnant women wear corsets in the Victorian era?](_URL_0_) | [
"During earlier times in western countries a corset was an everyday item of apparel. In some periods, children were put in stays as soon as they could sit upright or walk. It was believed that the young body was too soft to grow upright on its own. Boys stopped wearing them once they were breeched, i.e. were change... |
Why do stable compounds react? | The key here is that "stable" is just a relative term. Thermodynamically, there MUST be an equilibrium between association and dissociation of a bond like R-Cl. Bringing energy to the system amounts to tilting the equilibrium closer towards the dissociated side. But it's still only a small fraction of the total number of molecules.
What happens next is why we have a reaction that has a direction and some yield. A given cation R+ floating around at any time could simply encounter a Cl- and go back to R-Cl. Or, if we have a lot of OH- in the flask, it could encounter an OH- anion and form R-OH.
R-OH is also in equilibrium with R+ and OH-! But R-OH is more stable (relative term) than R-Cl. So we've effectively formed a trap: it's much less likely that a molecule of R-OH will dissociate and go back to R-Cl than R-Cl to R-OH. Especially given that we typically add an excess of OH- and we only have a small amount of Cl- at any time. | [
"The stability or metastability of a given chemical system depends on its environment, particularly temperature and pressure. The difference between producing a stable vs. metastable entity can have important consequences. For instances, having the wrong crystal polymorph can result in failure of a drug while in st... |
What do antivirus scanners on your PC actually look for in a file? | Virusscanners use two approaches: Signature-based scanning and heuristic scanning.
**Signature-based** scanning involves looking for specific elements in a virus program. Some virus authors in the past left messages in their program which could be scanned for. Alternatively, certain filenames were used. Or simply the entire file contents (or a hash value thereof). The idea is that the developer of the virusscanner receives a new virus-program and adds its signature, whatever it is, to the scanner definitions.
The downside of this is that virusscanners will always be one step behind virus creators, since the scanner can only respond to threats that it has been programmed to recognize. Additionally, some virus developers will incorporate code to change the virus software automatically when it spreads, making signature-based recognition much harder.
**Heuristic** scanning on the other hand looks at the behaviour of a program. It scans the file in order to see which instructions it contains and then matches that with sets of instructions that are considered harmful. For example instructions that exploit a known software bug in order to obtain administrative privileges.
Heuristic scanning can detect new viruses that haven't been identified before. It's also more effective against malware that modifies itself automatically. On the other hand, if the scanner is tuned too aggressively, it could get many false positives. Tune it too passively and viruses that don't behave too badly will slip by it. Heuristic scanners don't need to be updated as often (though they still need updates, because virus behaviour changes over time).
Most scanners use a combination of both techniques. Signature-based scanning is primarily aimed at spotting known threats, while heuristic scanning offers some level of defense against new ones. Some scanners also include features that monitor access to certain system resources (such as the Windows Registry) and will warn the user when a program tries to access a monitored file or system. | [
"A specific component of anti-virus and anti-malware software, commonly referred to as an on-access or real-time scanner, hooks deep into the operating system's core or kernel and functions in a manner similar to how certain malware itself would attempt to operate, though with the user's informed permission for pro... |
- the east vs west hip-hop feud | This began a while ago, in the early 1990's.
Pretend there was a large african desert. In the desert, there are many different animals, but the strongest, and most powerful ones, were the Lions. The desert was kind of split into two, so you had the "Right side" and the "left side" . Each "side" had one very large, powerful lion. Every animal on each side respected both lions. But after a while, the animals on the right side decided that they liked the RIGHT lion the best, and started to say mean things about the left lion. The people on the left did the same thing, they really looked up to their lion, and thought he was better than the lion on the right, so they said mean things about the lion on the right. Eventually the two sides really started to hate eachother, and even though both the lion's knew it was wrong to hate your neighbours . they refused to just lay down and sort the stuff out. Then, one day, the lion from the right side was over in the left side of the desert, doing a dance for all the animals to see. When he was done the show, a big mean poacher came and shot him with a bow and aarow, and then the RIght side lion died. Soon after, the lion on the left was killed too.
In adult terms:
The "lion" on the right is "The Notorious B.I.G." , AKA "Biggie" , a famous hip hop artist from New york. The lion on the left was " Tupac Shakur" , an artist from California.
In the beginning of their careers, Biggie and Tupac were friends. They did shows together, recorded music together, toured together. They worked together, and did amazing things. Then, one night, Tupac was coming over to Biggies house, and when he was in the lobby of the building, some men jumped him and he got hurt badly, and hospitalized. He blamed it on Biggie, and said it was a set up. Biggie denyed the claims, saying he had noithing to do with it. Her tried to visit Pac in the hospital, but the hospital staff would not let him in. When all the hip hop fans from California gor word of this, they all automatically started a feud, hating the east coast , and eventually, these feelings were mutual.Tupac was later on killed. Then, a while later, after doing a show in California, biggie was killed by armed gunmen while driving back to his hotel from the show. The shooter was never discovered. | [
"The East Coast–West Coast hip hop rivalry was a feud from 1991 to 1997 between artists and fans of the East Coast hip hop and West Coast hip hop scenes in the United States, especially from 1994 to 1997. Focal points of the feud were East Coast-based rapper The Notorious B.I.G. (and his New York-based label, Bad B... |
why do languages vary so widely? is any proven correlation between language and the geography of the native speaker? | Languages can be made in many, many ways and so people more or less in isolation make really different ones.
Ones that grew around many others tend to make a family where there are far more similarities. The Spanish can more or less understand the Portuguese and vice-versa for example.
The geography isn't inherently related, but it does matter because obviously you'll speak what your parents spoke. | [
"Because languages develop in a given community of speakers as that society adapts to its environment, languages reflect and express the biodiversity of that area. In areas of high biodiversity, language diversity is also higher, suggesting that a greater diversity in culture can be found in these areas. In fact, m... |
why am i able to remember words to a song i haven't heard in 5 years but i can't remember the name of the person i just met 5 minutes ago? | Repetition is the key here.
When you repeat a task or something (such as hearing words to a song you like) over and over again the information gathered tends to move from the short-term memory into the long-term memory, therefore making it stick in your head.
Hope this helps. | [
"In an interview Sherman said, \"My earliest memory is that I wanted to be a songwriter. It's a strange thing to call an 'earliest memory', I suppose. But there it is. I was, perhaps two or three years old. From where I stood, my father and uncle wrote the type of music that children loved. So that's what I wanted ... |
With MRI Magnets being ridiculously strong, Why don't they affect compasses, systems, animals, etc ? | Mainly size. The Earth's magnetic field has is poles at opposite ends of the planet so the field covers the entire world. But with a magnet such as one from an MRI the polls are very close together and so the field is pretty tight, and doesn't really extend far beyond the actual magnet. | [
"MRI uses powerful magnets and can therefore cause magnetic materials to move at great speeds posing risk. Deaths have occurred. However, as millions of MRIs are performed globally each year, fatalities are extremely rare.\n",
"MRI requires a magnetic field that is both strong and uniform. The field strength of t... |
Does air resistance become harder to overcome the faster something goes? | At subsonic speeds, aerodynamic drag is directly proportional to velocity squared. Thus doubling your speed means you quadruple your drag.
| [
"[274] Air resistance shows itself in two ways: by affecting less dense bodies more and by offering greater resistance to faster bodies. A lead ball will fall slightly faster than an oak ball, but the difference with a stone ball is negligible. However the speed does not go on increasing indefinitely but reaches a ... |
how is it possible in the usa for (former) lobbyists to be elected into chairmen positions of federal commissions, when there is an obvious conflict of interest? | Big money runs the US government, so this kind of corruption is expected, and basically *intentional*. | [
"Other possible players in the lobbying arena are those who might influence legislation: House & Senate colleagues, public opinion in the district, the White House, party leaders, union leaders, and other influential persons and groups. Interest groups are often thought of as \"nonparty organizations\" which regula... |
what’s a “war crime”? i hear people throw this word around so much it’s confusing. | Many, many countries signed international agreements that define what is legal and what is not legal during a time of war. For instance, executing a prisoner of war who was not resisting or threatening his captor would be highly illegal. Targeting civilian buildings where a lot of civilians are is also illegal (like hospitals or schools). Killing civilians in general? Illegal. Wearing an enemy uniform or the symbols of an organization like the Red Cross, which is supposed to be a neutral symbol? Illegal. Attacking the Red Cross? Illegal.
It's pretty straightforward honestly. If you're attacking someone who's given up or who never even participated in the battle, you're probably doing something illegal. | [
"\"War crimes\" are \"violations of the laws or customs of war\", including \"murder, the ill-treatment or deportation of civilian residents of an occupied territory to slave labor camps\", \"the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war\", the killing of hostages, \"the wanton destruction of cities, towns and vi... |
Is there any evidence that prehistoric peoples had language? | Yes. Prehistoric just means before written records. We know for a fact that language existed before written records did because we've been able to reconstruct things like Old Chinese and Proto-Indo-European. It wasn't until later when PIE split into the many child languages like Ancient Greek and Sanskrit etc that written records were coming into use.
Through the work that goes into reconstruction we can show demonstrable relationship between related languages and point to some earlier form of that language, the proto-language. This is much of what historical linguists are looking at, these kinds of correspondences that can show relatedness.
Now, we can't put times on a lot of these things. We can't say exactly when, if ever, the reconstructed form of PIE was spoken. It's possible it was never spoken that way at a single time, that the reconstruction actual represents a range of times. Language doesn't change at a steady measurable rate through which we can make predictions going back in time. But it at least shows with clarity that it did exist in some relateable form, and this form predates written records, i.e. is pre-historic.
What we can't do is say things like if Neanderthal's had language, or what it would look like. We can speculate based on brain size and what we know of anatomy, but just having the potential for language isn't the same as having language. We are still not in agreement as to where certain language families like IE first originated either. But we can say PIE existed, and at least have a rough estimate at who was speaking it. The same can't be said about Neanderthals because we don't have a bunch of extant child languages upon which to base out analysis.
So yes, there's not only evidence but certainty that prehistoric peoples had language. | [
"How many Pre-Indo-European languages existed is not known. Nor is it known whether the ancient names of peoples descended from the pre-ancient population actually referred to speakers of distinct languages. Marija Gimbutas (1989), observing a unity of symbols marked especially on pots, but also on other objects, c... |
if the world is round and rotates, how do we appear to be standing upright at all times? | Because gravity pulls us toward the center of the planet. Just like if you take a plunger and stick it on a beach ball, it doesn't matter the orientation of the ball, the stick of the plunger sticks away from the center. | [
"The shape of the Universe as described in Jainism is shown alongside. Unlike the current convention of using North direction as the top of map, this uses South as the top. The shape is similar to a part of human form standing upright.\n",
"Perhaps the most commonly encountered rotating reference frame is the Ear... |
when we bend our elbows/knees why don’t our blood vessels flowing, like a hose? | Our arms an legs bend, not fold. When a hose folds it cuts the liquid supply, when it bends the flow is uninterrupted.
There is too much going on in the limbs with bone, muscle, adamantium, cartilage, etc, to fold. | [
"The falciform ligament can become canalised if an individual is suffering from portal hypertension. Due to the increase in venous congestion, blood is pushed down from the liver towards the anterior abdominal wall and if blood pools here, will result in dilatation of veins around the umbilicus. If these veins radi... |
superdelegates... | Keep in mind that the population as a whole doesn't really vote for the DNC representative directly. Much like the electoral college as the real last step for voting for president, the real candidate selection process involves "delegates" who attend the big event where the party selects its nomination. Those delegates are supposed to be representing the will of the people who voted for them to attend.
Superdelegates are delegates who didn't need to be voted in. They get to vote for the presidential candidate at the big event for free. | [
"Superdelegates are elected officials and members of the Democratic National Committee who will vote at the Democratic National Convention for their preferred candidate. Also known as \"unpledged delegates,\" they comprise 15% of the convention (712 votes out of 4,763) and they may change their preference at any ti... |
what properties do cooking oils contain that make them beneficial for cooking? | They should be cheap to produce in large quantities.
They need to withstand high temperatures without burning (despite what some other user said).
They must be non-toxic, not including any carcinogenic compounds they form when they're used. | [
"Cooking oils are composed of various fractions of fatty acids. For the purpose of frying food, oils high in monounsaturated or saturated fats are generally popular, while oils high in polyunsaturated fats are less desirable. High oleic acid oils include almond, macadamia, olive, pecan, pistachio, and high-oleic cu... |
Was there any form of public transport in the Roman Empire similar to what we find today in that it had standardised routes and fees? | I have removed all of the comments below, including a lot of discussion about the History Channel. Please remember the Rules for Ask Historians before posting.
There is no need to "fill the void", if you don't really know the answer and are not ready to back it up. Someone knowledgeable will come along in a little while.
It's also [explicitly mentioned in our rules](_URL_0_) lack of previous answers isn't an excuse to not follow the standards. Either someone knowledgeable will answer the question or they won't, your posting a partial answer is unlikely to change that and yes we'd *much* rather have questions stay unanswered rather than be answered with incomplete or misleading information. | [
"The cursus publicus (Latin: \"the public way\"; , \"dēmósios drómos\") was the state mandated and supervised courier and transportation service of the Roman Empire, later inherited by the Eastern Roman Empire. It was system based on obligations placed on private persons by the Roman State. They provided as contrac... |
Why are ice cubes white towards the centre but transparent towards the edges? | The water freezes from the outside edges towards the centre. At the start, there is still enough liquid water present to keep the dissolved gasses in solution so the ice at the edges is clear. At a certain point though, there is no longer enough water to hold the dissolved gasses and since it is now surrounded by ice, the gasses coming out of solution form bubbles in the ice as it continues to form. It is these bubbles that make the ice at the centre of the cube white. | [
"Douglas Hofstadter, in the July 1982 issue of \"Scientific American\", pointed out that Cubes could be coloured in such a way as to emphasise the corners or edges, rather than the faces as the standard colouring does; but neither of these alternative colourings has ever become popular.\n",
"On the original class... |
the mathematics behind the vanishing point (as best as you can) | Objects are typically located in three dimensional space, but when they are displayed, like in a computer game, in two dimensions, you need to do a projection. This is like taking a picture, it takes a three dimensional object and spits out a two dimensional image.
This image is dependent on where you are located when you take the picture, and where you aim your camera. When a computer tries to figure out what the picture will look like in a game, it can be complex, especially if it also needs to figure out things like lighting and shadows.
Where math comes in is that these projections are actually examples of something called a *linear transformation*, which is the basic object of study in the field of math called *linear algebra*. This field gives us a lot of tools to study linear transformations, and thus projections. It turns out the locations in 3D can be thought of as a series of numbers called a *vector*, and then a projection can be written as a *matrix* a rectangular array of numbers. You can then perform various operations on vectors using matrices.
Performing linear algebraic operations is one of the most basic functions of a computer, they need to be able to compute these objects very fast in order to play fancy computer games. | [
"The vanishing point theorem is the principal theorem in the science of perspective. It says that the image in a picture plane of a line in space, not parallel to the picture, is determined by its intersection with and its vanishing point. Some authors have used the phrase, \"the image of a line includes its vanish... |
how do whales regulate their temperature in the vastly different seas they travel? | The blood going to vessels in the skin (outside the blubber) is shut off to raise body temperature in the cold, and increased to cool off in the tropics. | [
"An alternate theory is that sperm whales, including \"Livyatan\", can alter the temperature of the wax in the organ to aid in buoyancy. Lowering the temperature increases the density to have it act as a weight for deep-sea diving, and raising the temperature decreases the density to have it pull the whale to the s... |
if everything in universe is made of lots different chemical elements, then how on earth exist things like human cell, flesh, neurotransmitter, heart, nucleus, etc? | > like, does dna have structure like say N5H3O8, something like that
Of course. After all, DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic acid. [The wikipedia page has good images for the chemicals making it up.](_URL_0_)
The key is that chemistry is a bit more complex than it would seem at first. Its not as rigid as x chemical is made of y elements. It goes far more complex, for example, DNA is a molecule called a polymer, which is a long chain of smaller identical or similar chemical segments. Each segment in DNA is called a nucleotide, which encodes some kind of information. As it turns out, chemistry is a bit more mushy and not rigid like you probably learned in chemistry class.
DNA is a chemical but much else of what you listed are bigger structures than just chemicals. The nucleus consists of many chemicals including DNA, other proteins, water, fat molecules, ect. The mitochondria as well consists of many chemicals as well.
> isn't it impossible? how on earth can something exist out of rules of chemistry?
Why not? The rules of chemistry are sufficiently complicated to allow for complicated beings like us.
Everything in the body consists of parts, which consists of other parts, which once again consist of other parts, until you get down to parts small enough we call molecules. | [
"This is probably the only place on Earth where one can find all five elements (fire, water, sky, earth and air) from which all material things in the universe are made, according to Hindu and Buddhist traditions.\n",
"Although five times more elements are metals than nonmetals, two of the nonmetals—hydrogen and ... |
how do celebrities get their "premium" usernames on social networks (like @justinbieber, etc...)? and if they pay for these usernames, how much? how does such a purchase usually pass off? | Awesome, something that I can answer!
Background about me: I currently have over 200 unique twitter usernames that I have 'saved' and occasionally sell to others. Lots of 3 character usernames, with a couple 1/2 letter ones as well. Work for a big brand that spends over 500k monthly on Twitter/FB.
If an account directly impersonates someone or infringes on a brand you can contact support and they will 'release' the username to the rightful owner. (i.e. If someone had the name @Audi and actually pretended to be Audi that gives them the right to claim the username.)
In terms of 'purchases' they can vary. I have sold a few verified accounts for $2k-$5k. Sold lots of unique handles for a $1k-$10k and 1/2 letters for 25k+.
If this sort of things interests you, do a quick google search of the twitter account @N and a crazy fiasco where the original owner was being blackmailed to give up access to the account.
Cheers! | [
"A celebrity is something you have to become, although the spouses and offspring of celebrities get an extra boost. Celebrities are granted access to better clubs and VIP lounges. They are given discounts around town. Like free drinks or food at the club. They are invited to hang out at exclusive parties with other... |
why does it matter that fat cells don't ever go away when losing weight? | Nutritionist here.
Think of fat cells like empty water balloons kept in a bucket. If the water balloons are empty, they'll be able to get filled with water more quickly as compared to when they are partially or completely filled. Similarly, more the water in the bucket, more water can enter the balloon. Simple physics, right?
Apply this logic to fat cells. These cells never disappear or decrease in number. Their size is what changes during weight loss or gain. So, more fat gets available in the body, the faster these adipocytes get bigger in size.
What matters is your energy output. If the output is greater than the input, meaning you're exercising and burning more calories than your consuming, you'll lose weight. If the output equals the input, weight remains constant. And if input is more than the output, you will put on weight by providing more fat to the adipocytes. Smaller the adipocytes, faster will their fat uptake happen. | [
"It has been known since the 1970s that when fat cells become too big, they may become bloated and dysfunctional, or \"sick\". It has also been known since the 1940s that if fat gain occurs in the belly or abdominal (visceral) region, that this is another example of sick fat that promotes metabolic diseases. Finall... |
why are many english words used in asian culture? | Speaking from the Chinese language, its because Chinese is a very old language, and new things are being invented in the West. So when something becomes new to them, and they learn the English name, most of the time they try and make it sound similar in their language. | [
"While the term may refer to spoken English, it is more often used to describe written English. In Japan, it is common to add English text to items for decorative and fashion purposes. Such text is often added to create a cosmopolitan feeling rather than to be read by native English speakers, and so may often be me... |
why are some atoms able to violate the octet rule in covalent bonding? | Chemist here:
All answers referring to d orbitals are flat out wrong. The idea that an element can handle only as many bonds as it has valence orbitals is false. Multiple bonds can be made from a single orbital and many valence orbitals don't participate in bonding.
The main reason that elements below the second row can start to accomodate more bonds is that the orbitals start to get more diffuse and can participate in 3 center 4 electron bonds where you effectively create two "half bonds".
I realize this isn't an ELI5 answer but I needed to put a stop to the misinformation. | [
"The octet rule is only applicable to main group elements and there are many molecules that do not obey the octet rule. These molecules can be divided into two types: unstable intermediates that react so as to attain stability, and stable molecules that follow other electron counting rules. Although stable odd-elec... |
How did the Japanese start the "kamikaze"/suicide ethos into its people? | In short, it was because of the extremely successful and pervasive effectiveness of the Japanese Imperial propaganda department.
They were very persuasive in convincing the Japanese civilians as well as Japanese soldiers that Allied troops were the scum of the Earth and the worst thing that could possibly happen to you and your family was fall into their hands alive.
**They believed that capture would result in a fate worse than death.**
For a few things, they thought their women, even little girls, would be gang raped until they died or disposed of when they got bored.
They were told that their children would be tortured for sport and then would be eaten, dead or alive.
The disabled, elderly or otherwise infirm that could not be put to slave labor would be tied up and used for target or bayonet practice.
**Imperial soldiers were taught to expect no mercy and to in turn give none.**
This became a sort of self fulfilling prophecy because the grim determination of the Japanese forces encouraged the Allied forces to be extremely liberal in their application of fire power and force. Taking Japanese soldiers alive as prisoners was a risk to their lives rather than a duty of war and soon many gave up trying.
Rumors of total annihilation and few to no survivors only fueled the beliefs of Allied and American cruelty. When Japanese soldiers heard of one garrison falling and none of the men making it out, they had no reason to believe that the same would not happen to them.
Civilians were very much the same, and if anything the stories only grew more exaggerated and worse through rumor and hearsay because of the intense censorship meant very little actual news circulated. At least soldiers could know something through information circulating through the military channels. Civilians made due with what little scraps of information they had.
Because of the horrors of total war, especially once the fire bombings and saturation bombings of cities, factories, and ports began, **people in the homeland soon no longer had to talk in abstracts or point to numbers and reports.**
They could point down the street to where an entire family, women and children burn to cinders, their brains crushed to bits by falling debris.
They didn't have to talk about unnamed soldiers dying in a far away land. Here and now, their neighbors were maimed or worse. They feared for their friends, their children, their parents, for themselves.
Many were wholly convinced that the Americans had come for total blood vengeance and would not rest until every last Japanese person was extinct. And it would not be a death that was easy in the coming. No, they believed it would be like hell on Earth until they were allowed to pass into a final peace from unbearable agony.
**The soldiers were desperate in buying as much time for their family and fellow Japanese as possible**, either to secure a surrender or at least let their families and friends escape. They knew what the stakes were and were wholly committed to the cause. It was important for their families, but also for their greater family of the nation, of their fellow Japanese brothers and sisters, and of their Emperor, literal god father of the Japanese people.
Of course serving their nation and the Emperor had something to do with it but it was not blind faith to some super Shinto state religion that drove them where most armies would have broken and scattered. And I doubt a great many truly wished to die.
**It was simply that they saw no other alternative.**
They believed they were doing what had to be done. No more, no less. | [
"Kamikaze is a word of Japanese origin, which in the English language usually refers to suicide attacks carried out by Imperial Japan's military aviators against Allied ships towards the end of the Pacific campaign of World War II, by crashing their explosive-filled planes into warships to stop and block the advanc... |
if israel just vanished overnight, would the tensions in the middle east get better? what would happen? | I'm willing to bet things would be worse world-wide is such an event happened. Mass panic would erupt since a nation, quite literally, disappeared and people would be wondering who would be next. Some would take it as a religious sign, signaling the apocalypse, no doubt leading to chaos and instability. | [
"In October 2011, the new American Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, suggested that Israeli policies were partly responsible for its increasing diplomatic isolation in the Middle East. The Israeli government responded that the problem was the growing radicalism in the region, rather than their own policies.\n",
"M... |
what are the differences between the functions of a president, chairman, ceo, cfo, and coo in the corporate structure? | The management of most corporations starts with a Board of Directors.
The **Board of Directors** represent the interest of the shareholders and investors. In public companies, **Directors** are elected to the Board by the shareholders. In private companies, the Directors may be appointed by the owners/investors.
The **Chairman** is the person who presides over the Board of Directors. He or she is typically elected by the other members of the Board, although, again, may be appointed in a privately-held company.
There are technically two types of Chairman: a **Non-Executive Chairman** and an **Executive Chairman**. A Non-Executive Chairman *only* presides over the Board. An Executive Chairman *both* presides over the Board of Directors *and* has an operational role in the company. The Non-Executive Chairman sort is overwhelmingly more common, however you frequently see the Executive Chairman role in start-ups where the founder holds both the Chairman & CEO title or where you have two co-founders -- one might be CEO and the other might be Executive Chairman.
Boards might also elect a **Vice-Chairman** and it's technically possible to be a **Co-Chairman**, i.e. two people sharing the role (although that's fairly rare).
The purpose of the Board of Directors is to represent the interest of the shareholders by hiring (or firing) the CEO, guiding the overall strategy of the corporation, approving the annual budgets, etc.
The **Chief Executive Officer (CEO)** is the highest ranking executive in the company. He or she is hired by and reports to the Board of Directors. The CEO is responsible for all aspects of the corporation, and all the other executives report to the CEO.
The **Chief Financial Officer (CFO)** reports to the CEO and is responsible for the financial operations of the company, including budgeting, financing, accounting, etc.
Pretty much only the CEO and CFO are required positions that *every* company has.
There can be many other **C-level executives** (sometimes also called **C-Suite executives**), depending on the company. Some common ones are:
* A **Chief Operating Officer (COO)** reports to the CEO and is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the company.
* A **Chief Information Officer (CIO)** reports to the CEO and is responsible for the information, network, and data systems of the company. These are usually *internal* facing information, network, and data systems to distinguish them from a CTO (see below).
* A **Chief Technology Officer (CTO)** reports to the CEO and is responsible for the creation and management of technology products the company sells or offers. These are usually *external* facing technologies. I.e. while the CIO might maintain the company's HR system (which it buys from some other company), the CTO is responsible for building the software product that the company sells.
* A **Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)** reports to the CEO and is responsible for marketing across all the company's brands and products.
* A **Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)** reports to the CEO and is responsible for driving revenue for the company, i.e. for sales.
* A **Chief Legal Officer (CLO)** reporst to the CEO and is responsible for all the companies lawyers and legal activity. Frequently paired with the title "General Counsel."
And so on and so forth. Besides the CEO and CFO, there's really no limit on the types of C-suite level offices that a company can create. What they all have in common is that they report directly to the CEO of the company.
A **President** is an optional role in most companies' organizational structure. Many times you will see the CEO have this title as well, i.e. "CEO & President, John Doe."
It's possible, and not uncommon, for a company to have a separate CEO and President. In those cases, the President almost always reports to the CEO and takes over some of the responsibilities that would otherwise normally fall on the CEO.
Some times a corporation may have multiple divisions within the company and *each* will have a President that leads it. For example, a single, large multi-national company could still have a single CEO, but *also* have a President of North America, a President of Asia-Pacific, a President of Europe, etc. In this sort of structure, the Presidents are responsible for the company operations in their region. It doesn't have to be organized regionally, though. For example, a big media company might have a President of Broadcast Programming, a President of Film Production, a President of Interactive Media, etc. It's just another organizational layer.
Below the C-suite officers and/or President(s), the next layer down is usually one or more layers of **Vice-Presidents**. Depending on the company size there may be multiple layers of Vice-Presidents. When there are multiple layers of VPs they are usually labeled (in descending order) Executive Vice-President, Senior Vice-President, Managing Vice-President, and Vice-President as necessary ... although that layering and naming will vary widely from company to company
Below Vice-Presidents, you frequently have **Senior Directors** and **Directors** ... though not to be confused with the Directors who sit on the Board of Directors!!!
Note: all of the above is from the perspective of US corporations. Outside of the US, terminology and corporate structure can be very different!
| [
"In a similar vein to the COO the title of corporate President as a separate position (as opposed to being combined with a \"C-Suite\" designation, such as \"President and CEO\" or \"President and COO\") is also loosely defined. The President is usually the legally recognized highest rank of corporate officer, rank... |
why are pencils hexagonal while pencil crayons, pens, and mechanical pencils are round? | The way they are made. Crayons are basically extruded. They flood molds with colored wax and the crayons are cooled and solidified pushed out and wrapped. Mechanical pencils are melted plastic shoved into molds and then put together.
Pencils are made with two sandwiched, half pencil, pieces with lead between them. Then they are cut apart. If they were extruded, they would likely be round.
Hope this helps. | [
"Another class of applications of the Reuleaux triangle involves cylindrical objects with a Reuleaux triangle cross section. Several pencils are manufactured in this shape, rather than the more traditional round or hexagonal barrels. They are usually promoted as being more comfortable or encouraging proper grip, as... |
Books about Steppe Warriors | I can't recommend the following books enough:
* *Early Riders: The Beginnings of Mounted Warfare in Asia and Europe* by Robert Drews
* *Nomads of the Eurasian Steppes in the Early Iron Age* by The Kazakh/American Research Project
* *The Horse The Wheel and Language - How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World* by David W. Anthony
* *Mongols, Turks, and Others - Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World* by Brill's Inner Asian Library
* *Cumans and Tatars - Oriental Military in the Pre-Ottoman Balkans, 1185-1365* by Istvan Vasary
* *Polovtsi* by Svetlana Pletnev
* *The Bulgars and the Steppe Empire in the Early Middle Ages - The Problem of the Others* by Tsvetelin Stepanov
* *The Empire of the Steppes - A History of Central Asia* by Rene Grousset
* *The Other Europe in the Middle Ages - Avars, Bulgars, Khazars, and Cumans* by Florin Curta and Roman Kovalev
* *The Seljuks* by V.M. Zaporozhets
* *Warfare, State, and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500-1700* by Brian L. Davies | [
"The Steppe (), subtitled \"The Story of a Journey\", is a novella by Russian writer Anton Chekhov. In a narrative that drifts with the thought processes of the characters, Chekhov evokes a chaise journey across the steppe through the eyes of a young boy sent to live away from home, along with several companions, i... |
the best soccer leagues, and players and what i should watch. | Start watching the English Premier League...The season just ended a few weeks ago with a good finish. Manchester City won the season by only 2 points with Liverpool in 2nd place and Chelsea in 3rd. Its fast paced soccer that is the most popular league in the world. A lot of good players | [
"League-based programming includes the National Premier Leagues (NPL) and Premier Leagues, a collection of US Club Soccer's top leagues from around the country. Champions of the various NPLs advance to the NPL Finals, the organization's annual league-based national championship competition. In addition, US Club Soc... |
How/what does an electroencephalogram detect? | You are correct in assuming that the EEG is a result of EPSP/IPSP contribution from pyramidal cortical cells. This is due to collective current sinks/sources resulting from these synaptic activities. Here's a simple [illustration](_URL_0_) detailing the phenomenon.
As for the specifics of cranial electrode placements, it would be unwise for me to comment since I use intracranial implants. The reason being is that scalp EEG has rather poor spatial resolution. This is because the skull can pick up activity from around the brain- and EMG artifacts. Further, it doesn't allow for much information coming from activity below the cortical pyramidals. Of the information they do supply, you cannot adequately detect high-frequency oscillations because of an effect called "spatial summation".
| [
"Electroencephalography, or EEG, measures brain activity through electrodes attached to the scalp of a subject. The object is to identify the recognition of meaningful data through this activity. Images or objects are shown to the subject while questioning techniques are implemented to determine recognition. This c... |
how come cutscenes aren't preloaded in video games? like a 4k hd video? | It depends on how the cutscene is rendered (how it is drawn in the game).
If it's a scripted cutscene, then everything is being shown in the actual game itself, which means everything has to be loaded as if you were playing the game even though you probably can't control anything except for the camera if that.
If it's a "computer-generated imagery" (CGI) video, then it can load like a regular video file which cuts down on the amount of time needed to load and play it. | [
"Pre-rendered cutscenes are animated and rendered by the game's developers, and take advantage of the full array of techniques of CGI, cel animation or graphic novel-style panel art. Like live-action shoots, pre-rendered cutscenes are often presented in full motion video.\n",
"Cutscenes often feature \"on the fly... |
i don't really "feel" like a male. how come people experiencing gender dysphoria "feel" like the other gender? | The way I try to imagine it is if I woke up tomorrow as a man (not my original gender). Nothing wrong with being a man so no offense, but I'd be horrified. This is not who I am. I'd spend every waking minute of my life from then on trying to change my body into a girl's, because that's what feels right. Of course this analogy has its limitations because transgender people don't just wake up one day as the opposite gender, but this is as close as I can get to imagining it. I definitely feel my femaleness after imagining that | [
"Gender dysphoria (GD) is the distress a person feels due to their birth-assigned sex and gender not matching their gender identity. People who experience gender dysphoria are typically transgender. Evidence from studies of twins suggests that gender dysphoria not only has psychological causes, but may have biologi... |
if earth had rings like saturn, how would that affect sending satellites into orbit? | Short answer: life would be very difficult trying to orbit satellites in the presence of rings.
Rings exist in circular orbits in a very flat plane exactly above the equator (the equatorial plane). Satellites would need to avoid passing through this plane at the same altitude as the rings or they're likely to hit a ring particle and be vaporised. While there are gaps in rings and they have a limited extent, the boundaries are not sharply defined; there's just a smaller but non-zero chance of encountering ring material away from the rings.
Every orbit is going to pass through the equatorial plane twice per orbit, except an exactly equatorial orbit which is on the plane all the time. The safest orbit for a satellite would be for it to pretend to be a ring particle and have a circular, equatorial orbit and be a part of the rings. Getting into that orbit in the first place would be tricky but not impossible. It might require a few risky plane crossings between launch and final orbit but the level of risk would depend on the exact nature of the rings.
Our large, close moon means that we can't have rings like Saturn, or at least not for very long. The moon doesn't orbit exactly in the equatorial plane so its gravity is going to move the ring particles out of the plane and out of circular orbits so that they start to collide with each other. Any realistic ring scenario for earth is going to involve changes to the moon. | [
"However, calculations performed after the recent detection of a possible ring system around Saturn's moon Rhea indicate that satellites orbiting Rhea could have stable orbits. Furthermore, the suspected rings are thought to be narrow, a phenomenon normally associated with shepherd moons. However, targeted images t... |
if conjoined twins share a stomach, do they both feel full or hungry at the same time? | It's hard to make general statement about conjoined twins because literally every case is different, but the feeling of hunger is regulated by hormones, most importantly Leptin and Ghrelin, which circulate in the blood. So if the conjoined twins share their circulatory system (which they *have to* if they share a stomach), then these hormones will always affect them at the same time. However, there might still be a different reaction in the brain to the hormones. | [
"Pim and Ploy are twins both conjoined at the stomach. Pim is very sweet and protective of Ploy, though Ploy's nature is harsh and jealous. The girls promised each other to stay together until they die.\n",
"The twins are joined at the abdomen and pelvis, have four arms, and three legs, two of which are fused int... |
if everyone says california is so expensive, how do people afford to live there? | Some make so much money it doesn't matter -- if you make $200k/yr, it's not a big deal.
Others request and accept cost of living adjustments from their employers. -- in Kansas, a position might be worth $60k/yr. In SF, it might be $90k/yr
Others just live in small places, drive small cars, and enjoy the sun. | [
"California has a major hospitality and tourism economy. According to California’s Travel website (www.visitcalifornia.com), California had 335 million visitors in 2009 that spent approximately $87.8 billion. California has the largest share of visitors in the U.S. domestic travel market. A majority of the tourists... |
why does the visible light spectrum appear cyclic to the human eye if the spectrum is based on specific linear wavelengths of light? | It doesn't appear cyclic to the human eye. It appears cyclic to the human *brain*.
Our eyes can detect 3 "regions" of color: red, green, and blue. If we detect some combinations of those, we typically perceive that as an "in-between" color. For example, orange light stimulates both the red and green sensing cells in our eyes. So stimulating the red and green cells is what we perceive as "orange". And, interestingly, if we just use red and green light (no orange light), we can stimulate those cells exactly the same as orange light, and so we still see orange. In fact, that's the basis for how computer and phone displays work: They only emit red, green, and blue light, and our brains perceive combinations of those as other colors.
But here comes the strangeness! What happens when you stimulate the red and blue cells in the eye with red and blue light? Well, your first guess is that we should perceive the color that is "in between" red and blue on the spectrum. But that color is green, and we're specifically *not* stimulating the green-detecting cells in our eyes. However, your brain isn't really capable of seeing it as two different colors (red and blue) simultaneously, so it invents a new color! Purple!
That's right, purple, the color that allows our sense of the spectrum to be cyclical, *isn't a real color*. There is no such thing as a purple photon of light. Purple can *only* be perceived by the human brain as a side effect of the limitations of our visual system. | [
"Whereas the human eye sees color of visible light in mostly three bands (long wavelengths - perceived as red, medium wavelengths - perceived as green, and short wavelengths - perceived as blue), spectral imaging divides the spectrum into many more bands. This technique of dividing images into bands can be extended... |
Do we have evidence to prove that the Pyramids in Bosnia were constructed 10,000 years ago to even 24,000 years ago? | They *are* just ordinary mountains. A few cranks (most definitely not archaeologists) have been trying to convince people they're pyramids for years now, and unfortunately had some success within Bosnia, but there is zero support for the theory amongst actual archaeologists and never has been. There are no chambers or cut stones. The pyramidal shape is the result of a well known, natural geological process and there is no evidence of any sort that they have been artificially shaped. It's pure, unadulterated pseudoscience and unfortunately in their quest to "prove" their theory (by digging ridiculously deep holes every year and misinterpreting natural fissures in the bedrock as "cut stone") the pyramidists have damaged genuine archaeology on the mountains. So if your dad is interested in Bosnia's heritage you'd do well to warn him against supporting these people. | [
"The 'Bosnian pyramid complex' is a pseudoarchaeological notion to explain the formation of a cluster of natural hills in central Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since 2005, Semir Osmanagić, also known as Sam Osmanagich, a Bosnian businessman now based in Houston, Texas, has claimed that these hills are the largest human-m... |
since a normal human can run 8-10 mph but top athletes can run over 20 mph, if a cheetah "trained", could it potentially sprint much faster? | Almost all cheetahs are clones of each other. Theoretically every cheetah is already a top athlete since they are all pretty much identical.
[source](_URL_0_) | [
"In April 2007 Habana competed against a cheetah in a 100-meter race to help raise awareness of the imminent danger of the cheetah being classified as an endangered species, according to De Wildt officials. He lost, because cheetahs can run 70 mph, instead of 22 mph.\n",
"The cheetah is the world's fast animal an... |
why do you feel hot when you have a blanket on, cold when you take the blanket off but if you leave one leg out of the blanket, it’s perfect? | When the blanket is on there is too much insulation so your body warms up. With the blanket off there is too little. So you need something in between. Having a leg out allows heat to leave your body. Therefore, you’ve achieved that in between that you needed. | [
"A blanket is a piece of soft cloth large enough either to cover or to enfold a great portion of the user's body, usually when sleeping or otherwise at rest, thereby trapping radiant bodily heat that otherwise would be lost through convection, and so keeping the body warm. \n",
"Therefore, the longer one stays up... |
if source code is readable, and executable programs are not, what happens to cause that? | what is lost is variable names, method names that make the program human readable.
while you can probably figure out what mystring.left(5) does just by looking at it, you probably won't be able to tell what "on the object at memory location 0x12343, invoke method in library 0x342424 at location 0x242425"
| [
"Source code viruses are a subset of computer viruses that make modifications to source code located on an infected machine. A source file can be overwritten such that it includes a call to some malicious code. By targeting a generic programming language, such as C, source code viruses can be very portable. Source ... |
Prior to the US Civil War, was it common practice to euthanize slaves who were too old or sick to work? | If I can expand - what about sterilizing slaves to control population? Or abortion? | [
"Records show that one quarter of the 66 people living under slavery at Doctor Brome's plantation in St. Mary's City escaped during the Civil War and at least two of them then joined the Union Army. Even before slavery was legally abolished, the Union Army had a policy allowing enslaved men to gain their freedom if... |
Is there a psychological reason why people with NO attraction to their own family members, find incest so arousing? | There is a psychological effect known as the Westermarck effect which basically prevents us from having sexual attraction to our siblings. We are conditioned throughout our lives to seek sexual partners outside our immediate kin groups. One of the ways this manifests is in the dampening down of feelings of attraction to our siblings and parents.
As to why we are aroused by incest? I can't say for certain, but one hypothesis regarding the formation of sexual attraction put forward by Daryl Bem suggests that exotic stimuli become erotic stimuli. At the level of the nervous system, arousal is arousal, no matter what the source. This effect has been demonstrated with crossover between fear and sexual excitation, as well as physiological exertion and sexual excitation. When something excites us because it is taboo, because it is strange and exotic, we can mistake this excitement for eroticism. If this sort of mistake happens at the right stage of psychological development, it can become fixed as a sexual proclivity.
TL;DR: We have developed a mechanism to stop us having three-eyed babies, but weird shit still makes us hot. | [
"Sexual activity between adult close relatives is sometimes ascribed to genetic sexual attraction. This form of incest has not been widely reported, but evidence has indicated that this behavior does take place, possibly more often than many people realize. Internet chatrooms and topical websites exist that provide... |
what happens to all the water after a hurricane/flood? does it just recede back into a body of water? | Civil engineering major here with background in water resources and hydrology. In urban and suburban areas, eventually the majority of the water will go into the wastewater system to either be reclaimed (cleaned for use) or the excess will be directed through the appropriate channels to points that can accommodate the influx. The remainder will seep into the ground or slowly evaporate, and some will follow naturally formed channels into tributaries and eventually rivers and other large bodies of water. In rural areas with less hydrologic infrastructure, natural channels will take away a good portion of the water, and the rest will seep into the ground (farmland has a higher water capacity than urban areas), although due to lack of proper drainage, some water will sit in large puddles until manually removed or until sufficient time has passed that it seeps down or flushes out. | [
"When hurricanes surge upon shore from the ocean, salt is introduced to many freshwater areas and raises the salinity levels too high for some habitats to withstand. Some are able to cope with the salt and recycle it back into the ocean, but others can not release the extra surface water quickly enough or do not ha... |
Why does buoyant force only work for fluids? | There is no mechanism preventing it. In fact, if you gently shake the container, the larger pieces _will_ rise to the top. This is known as the [Brazil nut effect](_URL_0_).
Buoyancy exists in fluids because they are free to flow and fill a container, which is what allows them to "push out" a buoyant object. Likewise, if you choose a very viscous fluid and submerge a buoyant object, it might take a while before it floats up. | [
"The buoyant force component is in the inward radial direction. It is in the opposite direction to the particle's centrifugal force because it is on a volume of fluid that is missing compared to the surrounding fluid. Using formula_9 for the density of the fluid, the buoyant force is:\n",
"Buoyancy force is the d... |
How closely (i.e. distance from the surface) can something orbit the Earth? | Below about 200 km (120 miles), orbits decay rapidly due to atmospheric friction. On the moon, where there is no atmosphere, there is really no minimum orbital altitude, though you couldn't really put something in orbit a foot off the ground since the ground isn't perfectly flat. Almost all satellites are in Low Earth Orbit, which starts at this minimum distance and extends to about 2000 km. There's no reason to spend extra fuel (and money) to put something in orbit farther away unless there's a good reason to do so. | [
"The distance between the Earth's and the Moon's surfaces is, on average, approximately . This distance is sometimes used in the same manner as the circumference of the Earth; that is, one might say that a large number of objects laid end-to-end \"would reach all the way to the Moon and back two-and-a-half times\".... |
Around 400 before christ, when Greece became a democracy. What was the tasks of the king? | I think you have the wrong view of how Greece worked in those days.
Greece was divided into a multitude of city states, some of the allied in Legues, but not all. These city states were spread from the Crimea to Iberia, with Sicily and southern Italy (Magna Graecia, or larger Greece) as prominent places.
Some of these city states were oligarchies, were a few powerful families ruled. Some were tyrannies (which simply meant a single ruler back then) and a scant few others were democracies. A few others were monarchies.
Those that were democracies did not have a King and thus no tasks for him. Athens, the most prominent democracy, would probably be considered a failing democracy under today's standard - citizens could vote other citizens out of their citizenship and voting rights (which happened on a massive scale on at least one occasion).
The two Kings of Sparta were not Kings in the meaning we give the name now - they were more like military commanders, and they were appointed by the Spartan assembly, which included all Spartan citizens (who were a very small minority of Spartan society), so Sparta can probably be called more of an oligarchy than a monarchy or democracy.
Macedon was a Monarchy, but was not a city state and was during the classical era considered only semi-Greek by the other Greeks.
Argos, Thebes and Corinth all developed from oligachies into monarchies during the era though.
But to answer your question - there were no democracies in the Greek world that also had a monarch. | [
"During and after the Greek War of Independence (1821–29), a series of elections for national assemblies had taken place, and promulgated a series of liberal constitutions that enshrined democratic principles. Nevertheless, the Kingdom of Greece, established in 1832 under the Bavarian prince Otto, disregarded the e... |
what forces, on a molecular level, hold together a solid object and how are those affected when the object breaks in separate pieces? | It kind of depends on what sort of material you are talking about. I'll give you one example in (a bit of) detail, and then I will just name a couple of other forces that also could (not should per se) play a role. Here it goes:
Basically every molecule has an interaction with it's neigboring molecule, that interaction is either attractive or repulsive. We call all these interactions Van der Waals (VDW) interactions/forces . Named after the Dutch scientist Van der Waals. We are only going to look at the attractive part of the VDW forces, since this is what you want to know. I always look at them as if they are the 'gravity' between two molecules. Meaning the VDW forces are stronger between two molecules that have a higher mass than between two with a lower mass. What happens when we break the material apart? When we break something we are pulling the two molecules far from eachother (we say: we broke the VDW bond), this cost energy (either heat, or mechanical like a scissor).
Now, as I mentioned earlier there are possibilities to break other bonds as well, most notably the hydrogen bond. Here, like with the VDW force, we just move two molecules far from eachother and nothing really happens with the molecules themselves. One of the other things that could happen (in some cases, certainly not all) is we actually break a bond inside of a molecule (a covalent, or atomic bond). This will actually cause the molecule to break up in multiple pieces. There are some others and some technicalities that I'm not going to get into right now aswell. If you want to break something, what you are doing is breaking the weakest force available, whichever one that is. Most of the time it will be the VDW bond, but not necessarily.
Hope this helped!
| [
"In a solid, constituent particles (ions, atoms, or molecules) are closely packed together. The forces between particles are so strong that the particles cannot move freely but can only vibrate. As a result, a solid has a stable, definite shape, and a definite volume. Solids can only change their shape by force, as... |
Does the age at which someone begins puberty affect anything for the person's life later on down the line? | This is just something I remember from a report I did on adolescent psychology but one of the most affected areas is self-esteem. Girls who hit puberty early are more likely to get male attention, negative and positive. It is usually from boys that are older than she is. The more negative attention, the lower the self-esteem. The attention that was seen as positive when she was younger can backfire and affect her negatively later in life, too. Boys who hit puberty late are often made fun of more by their classmates who may have hit puberty sooner. | [
"Age of onset of puberty is influenced by many factors such as genetics, nutritional status, ethnicity and environmental factors including socio-economic conditions and geographical location. A decline of age at onset of puberty from 17 years of age to 13 years of age has occurred over a period of 200 years until t... |
Why is the derivative of the volume of a sphere equal to its surface area? | Consider a sphere of radius r, where you want to increase the volume very slightly. You can do this by adding a layer of paint, covering the entire surface area, with a tiny thickness dr. The volume of paint you've added to the sphere is dV=(area)\*dr.
Integrate both sides, which acts like adding infinitely many tiny layers. Start from radius 0 until you've built up a sphere of the desired size. The result is the volume formula, which you used as the starting point of your calculation.
You can do exactly the same thing for the area of a circle: consider a circle, of radius r and circumference 2pi\*r. Paint such a thin circular ring, of thickness dr. Repeat this process (integration), until you've made a (filled) disk of the desired radius. The area will be the integral of 2pi\*r: pi\*r^(2).
*Obligatory thanks-for-the-gold edit:* I'm glad that so many people have found my explanation useful. This gives me a bit of hope that I won't be a completely crappy teacher when I get that far in my career. | [
"is the cosine of the angle between and . A simple consequence of this formula is that if \"u\" is a harmonic function, then the value of \"u\" at the center of the sphere is the mean value of its values on the sphere. This mean value property immediately implies that a non-constant harmonic function cannot assume ... |
why do i max out at around 3.2mbps wired and 2.5mbps wireless download speed when i pay for 30mbps? | I'm pretty sure you know this already, but what they sell you is in mega bits per second, and when downloading it is displayed in mega bytes per second.
Every 8 bits is 1 byte, so a 30mbps connection is a 3.75 MB per second.
If you are downloading at 3.2 MB per second and not mbps like you say in the title then they aren't screwing you :) | [
"BULLET::::- 11 April - The Ministry of Communications and Information announced that Wireless@SG speeds will increase from 2Mpbs to 5Mpbs by end-2016, as well as the doubling of hotspots to 20,000 by 2018.\n",
"Because of its location, Internet in Kiribati is much more expensive than in other regions. 500MB can ... |
which is better for the environment on the small scale: using a plastic fork once to save water on cleaning silverware, or washing and reusing a stainless steel fork so a plastic fork won't end up in a landfill? | Considering the resources that go into extracting, refining, and machining the material in the steel fork, you'd have to use the SS fork hundreds if not thousands of times before you came out ahead from an energy expenditure standpoint.
There was a study done with ceramic vs. styrofoam coffee cups asking basically the same question. I'll try and find it.
edit: [okay, so it wasn't a single study but it was an analysis that cited several studies](_URL_0_). | [
"Use of recycled water in industrial settings is increasing as strained freshwater supplies are decreasing. Recycled water is used industrially in pulp and paper plants and in the cooling towers and boilers of power plants. It can also be used for mixing concrete and other applications that do not involve consumpti... |
How Historically accurate is "Hellstorm-Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947" by Thomas Goodrich. It backs up all its claims with large amounts of detailed proofs, citations, sources on each and every page. However a lot of people call it Neo Nazi propoganda to gain sympathy for Nazi. What is the truth | It is a piece of Nazi propaganda, plain and simple.
The problems with this book start right in the text describing it: It talks about the millions who perished in the greatest mass migration known to men, meaning the flight and forcible expulsion of Germans from the Red army and from Eastern Europe, the "post-war death camps" and "torture chambers", and calls these all "dark secrets".
From this short description alone, several things can be gleaned:
* The book plays hard and lose with facts and interpretations: It mixes flight and forcible expulsion of German populations from Eastern Europe and claims it was "the biggest mass migration known to man", when in fact the extend of both phenomena, which are distinctly different (one being voluntary flight, one being forcible expulsion of a population by a state) affected the same number of people the Nazi forced labor program did, about 12 million people. Coupled with the German policy of ethnic expulsion and forcible resettlement in Eastern Europe, whose victims also number in the millions, this moniker Goodrich is trying to impose here shows in which direction he is heading with his book.
* In the same vein and reinforcing this direction is the use of the term "post-war death camp". Nazi death camps such as Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno were camps designed to kill hundreds of thousands of people in little through gassings and shootings. In Treblinka alone 900.000 people were killed. Equating this with the – at times very unpleasant conditions – in Allied POW and war-criminal camps does not capture the historical reality of the latter (where due to initial problems with supplying food and water in April and May 1945 and the food shortage imposed supply of 1200 to 1500 calories per day – Nazi concentration camp prisoners receiving 700-900 calories per day – resulted in the death of 3000 to 5000 German POWs in 1945).
* Calling the above "dark secrets" is like almost any book claiming to write the "dark" or "secret" history of something implying a huge revelation. This is not the case with Goodrich's book and tells us something about his very political intentions. Both the expulsion and flight of Germans from Eastern Europe as well as the death rate in Allied POW camps are facts that have been known for a long time. From the political power lobby organizations of those who fled and were forced out of their homes in 1945 developed in West-Germany to the report of the Maschke Committe on Allied camps in Germany in 1972, there is no "dark" or "secret" history to uncover here.
Rather, what is happening here is typical for Neo-Nazis and holocaust deniers: Citing incomplete facts and narratives or refusing to contextualize them, they seek to either negate the historical record or impose a new narrative. Goodrich is trying very hard in his book to create a moral equivalent between Allied policies and events from post-war history and the Holocaust, essentially arguing that the latter wasn't that bad in light of what the others did.
Furthermore, Goodrich has no real interest in the explaining or even showing the full extent of the history he portrays in his book. While ostensibly adhering to the standards of the profession by supplying citations, he purposefully leaves things out in order to fit his narrative of the Germans being the real victims of WWII because of Allied policies.
Let's take a look how he does this:
The book starts out in the prologue with building up Erich Koch, former head of the civil administration of occupied Byalistok and Reichskommissar of Ukraine and responsible for – among other things – killing thousands of Poles and Jews. He is built up as heroically mounting a last line of defense in Eastern Prussia against an "onslaught of hostile Slavs" in 1944. Though he justifies Koch's harsh measures in his defense, which included shooting civilians trying to flee the advancing front line, he also claims they were not necessary because – paraphrasing – Prussians laughed in the face of the dangers of the advancing Red Army.
Enter Nemmersdorf: Goodrich describes with glee what happened in the first village beyond the border of the then Reich. He cites extensively from documents describing the alleged horrors inflicted by the Red Army upon the villagers of Nemmersdorf, including how the Soviets allegedly nailed women and children to barn doors. Now, Nemmersdorf is not just an obscure example: It is well known among historians for what happened there and especially for the controversy that ensued from it, and for what people like Goodrich like to use this example.
What we know is that in Nemmersdorf on October 21, 1944, between 23-30 German civilians were killed. At least 13 of them were shot by a Soviet unit after having been discovered in a German bunker. For the other 10 to 17, the cause of their deaths remain unclear as do the motives of the Soviet troops who shot the 13 civilians in the bunker.
When the Soviets had to retreat from the place shortly after and it was taken back by the Germans, Goebbels ministry of propagnda manufactured evidence of Russian atrocities and enhanced the death toll greatly. As we know now through extensive research conducted in the early 1990s, the sources Goodrich cites in his book about Russians nailing Germans to barn doors were made-up by the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter in order to motivate the German populace to resist more fiercely. They neither match the recollection of survivors of Nemmersdorf nor the official and initial Wehrmacht and NSDAP reports from Nemmersdorf in 1944.
Long used as a symbol for Soviet atrocities, the history of the massacre in Nemmersdorf has since been greatly revised and re-interpretated though the exact reason for shooting 13 civilians still remain unclear.
But Goodrich isn't interested in that and despite having had access to all this research when he wrote his book, neglects to mention any of it. Rather, he is trying to built a politicized narrative of "tu quoque", which portrays the Allies in a negative light in order to rehabilitate the Nazis.
Goodrich isn't really interested in the story behind the Nemmersdorf massacre or in painting a historically accurate picture of it, the expulsion of Germans, or the conditions in Allied POW camps. All the people he cites describing bad conditions, their experience of sexual violence on the hands of the Soviets or their expulsion from their homes are just arguments to build his narrative of a victimization of Germans with the intention of relativizing the Holocaust and German war-crimes and thus rehabilitate Nazism.
Through purposely omitting and changing facts, sources and interpretations, he shows that his real interest lies not in these stories and unraveling them historically by contextualizing them but in writing his version of a fantasy history that takes suffering from the people forced from their homes and subjected to violence to portray Nazism as a positive thing.
Rather than treating history with the seriousness and professionalism it deserves, he just peddles Nazi propaganda, going so far as alleging (also in the prologue), an Allied intention driven by Jews to commit genocide against the Germans. Again, taking stuff out of context or citing it not in full, he twists and turns history to fit his ends and blame Jews. He essentially makes demonstrably false Nazi propaganda his main source.
This is a typical endeavor of Holocaust deniers and neo-nazis and goes to show that just because a book cites something, it is necessarily true or has the meaning it assigns to it. | [
"Oxford historian Harrison Ashcroft, preparing to publish his biography of Adolf Hitler entitled \"Herr Hitler\" along with his daughter Emily Ashcroft, receives a letter from a stranger in West Berlin informing them that the book could be wrong if published with the popular version of Hitler's suicide as its end. ... |
If written to once and then left turned off (no power, in a dry temperature-regulated environment), how long would flash memory last until you can no longer read it? | There is no one answer. Each manufacturer makes different claims about the shelf life of their flash memory products. A common estimates is [around 10 years](_URL_0_). A product sheet (from a company I won't mention) that I have next to me claims "_25 years of daily usage_", with daily usage clarified later in the sheet as "_one read, write, erase cycle per day_". You can see those claims can vary and be quite vague as well, as they are marketing material.
At this time, I'm not aware of any peer-reviewed study on flash memory longevity experiments to cite. | [
"A flash memory storage system with \"no wear leveling\" will not last very long if data is written to the flash. Without wear leveling, the underlying flash controller must permanently assign the logical addresses from the operating system (OS) to the physical addresses of the flash memory. This means that every w... |
why does water evaporate faster outdoors than indoors? | Yes, temperature. But also other factors, such as humidity and wind.
_URL_0_
There are definitely less wind indoor, so that's a big factor.
If you have a puddle in a small room, as the puddle evaporate, the room gets more humid, thus slowing slowing down the evaporation. In the outdoors, the humidity quickly disperses.
More importantly is surface area. A puddle and water in a glass, of the same volume, the puddle with evaporate faster, even when both are outdoors, or both are indoors.e | [
"Evaporation also tends to proceed more quickly with higher flow rates between the gaseous and liquid phase and in liquids with higher vapor pressure. For example, laundry on a clothes line will dry (by evaporation) more rapidly on a windy day than on a still day. Three key parts to evaporation are heat, atmospheri... |
why do pharmacists complete 4 years of post-grad schooling learning about drugs but physicians actually pick the drugs to use. | Pharmacists are the last line of defense against a patient taking a drug or combination of drug that may be harmful, especially if that patient is taking over the counter drugs/supplements or filling prescriptions from multiple doctors.
Because of this, knowledge of the function of many drugs and potential drug interactions can be critical here. | [
"There are different requirements of schooling based on the area of pharmaceuticals a student is seeking. In the United States, the general pharmacist will attain a Doctor of Pharmacy Degree (Pharm.D.). The Pharm.D. can be completed in a minimum of six years, which includes two years of pre-pharmacy classes, and fo... |
why is the president immune from the ethics laws, when the ethics in government act of 1978 expressly states otherwise? | Standard disclaimer: political, keeping bias to a minimum.
The current President is immune to ethics laws because the majority party at the moment (the Republicans) aren't holding him to those ethics laws.
Simply put: right now, they're a police officer who's blatantly looking the other way as someone's getting mugged. | [
"The Court held that the independent counsel provision of the Ethics in Government Act did not violate the principle of separation of powers because it did not increase the power of one branch at the expense of another. Instead, even though the President cannot directly fire an Independent Counsel, the person holdi... |
What are some lesser known Genocides in World History? | The definition of Genocide is VERY slippery and controversial, but if we can at least agree that it involves intentionally attempting to wholly eradicate a specific ethnic group, then I would mention the Zunghar Genocide perpetrated by the Qing Dynasty as one of the lesser known tragedies in world history.
The Zunghars were an Oirat Mongol people who ruled a state in modern day Xinjiang in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1757 the Qianlong Emperor and the Qing Dynasty defeated the Zunghars and conquered Xinjiang in the name of ending the nomadic threat. Initially Qianlong attempted to divide the region into six or more vassal states, but the Zunghar chieftan Amursana rebelled and attempted to unite the region under his own rule. Qianlong was enraged by this betrayal (Amursana had fought with the Qing in the previous campaigns).
After the onset of Amursana’s rebellion, Qianlong ordered the wholesale massacre of the Zunghar people. The Emperor’s commanders resisted the order, but Qianlong was adamant. “Show no mercy at all to these rebels,” he wrote his generals, “Only the old and the weak should be saved. Our previous campaigns were too lenient.” In no uncertain terms, Qianlong stressed that it was necessary to “completely exterminate them.” All able bodied men were to be executed, while old men, women, and children were to be forced into slavery and stripped of their Zunghar identity. Qing forces hunted down rebel bands and slaughtered them by the thousands. Deliberate starvation tactics were used to kill tens of thousands more.
All told, of the roughly 600,000 Zunghars before the massacre, 40% died of smallpox, 30% were killed by Qing forces, 20% fled to neighboring Russia, and the remaining 10% were enslaved and stripped of their identity. Xinjiang was dramatically depopulated, and the Zunghars ceased to exist as a people.
Peter C. Perdue, a professor at Yale university and the main source for this post, was the first to label this event as a Genocide in his 2005 work *China Marches West*. His claim is supported by Central Asian and Xinjiang Historian James Millward, a professor at Georgetown, in his own 2007 publication *Eurasian Crossroads*.
Sources:
Millward, James. *Eurasian Crossroads*, 2007, 94-96.
Perdue, Peter C. *China Marches West*, 2005, 282-287.
| [
"Considered to have been the first genocide of the 20th century, the Herero and Namaqua Genocide was perpetrated by the German Empire between 1904 and 1907 in German South West Africa (modern day Namibia), during the scramble for Africa. On January 12, 1904, the Herero people, led by Samuel Maharero, rebelled again... |
why, with all our advancements in telecommunications and phone technology, has phone call audio quality stayed virtually the same as ten or twenty years ago? | In simplest terms; because the telephone system is an internetwork of individual links, it is limited by the least capable link in the system. Think of having a road between two cities that starts out as a five-lane Interstate highway, drops to a dirt road, then goes back to a five-lane highway and then arrives at the destination - the traffic is limited to the capacity of the stretch of dirt road in the middle.
In standard telecoms that limitation is the enduring use of [G.711 encoding](_URL_3_) to convert analog sounds from the two ends of the call into digital information that will be carried over digital [trunk circuits](_URL_5_) in the middle. Those circuits, at least in North America, are built around the [T-carrier architecture](_URL_0_) (with the ulaw variant of G.711), which has a hard limit of 64kbps of information per circuit which, skipping over a whole bunch of technical stuff, translates into only carrying sounds between [300 and 3400Hz](_URL_4_) \- everything else within the typical range of hearing of 20–20,000Hz is simply discarded.
Various methods of delivering [wideband audio](_URL_1_) over conventional digital telephone networks do exist (eg. [G.722](_URL_6_)), but if the call will eventually terminate on a conventional analog telephone (or cellphone) then the extra effort to capture and transmit that extra audio information just goes to waste as the signal must be [transcoded](_URL_2_) to meet the capability of the lowest common denominator in the end-to-end circuit.
On the other hand with pure VOIP calling, for example with Skype-to-Skype calls, most of the internetworking issues are eliminated as the sound is transmitted entirely as a stream of data which is controlled exclusively by the two ends of the call, and so the system can transmit as much audio spectrum as the designers wish.
& #x200B;
edit: goodness, gilding? I'm flattered! | [
"Traditional telephone calls continue to be the industry's biggest revenue generator, but thanks to advances in network technology, Telecom today is less about voice and increasingly about text (messaging, email) and images (e.g. video streaming). \n",
"The communication circuits of the public switched telephone ... |
How fictitious is the current modern perception of the samurai? | Early days of the Meiji era? The 廃刀令 (Order to restrict carrying of sword) was issued in Meiji 9, 1876, with the earliest discussion to going all the way back in Meiji 3, 1870.
The order restricted carrying to sword to soldiers and police.
On top of that, the Meiji restoration had a important policy that is to strip the power of the local lords (and samurais by extension), that was policy that long stood since Meiji 4.
I think you might want to revise the era in the question, and I think someone else should be able to answer the question. But your question is definitely not applicable in the vast majority of the Meiji era. Seeing that most of them were stripped their powers pretty early. I unfortunately lack in-depth knowledge in anything pre-Meiji. | [
"Most common are historical works where the protagonist is either a samurai or former samurai (or another rank or position) who possesses considerable martial skill. Eiji Yoshikawa is one of the most famous Japanese historical novelists. His retellings of popular works, including Taiko, Musashi and \"The Tale of th... |
why can soup (with meat) be stored at room temperature? | If it is in a sealed can, it is safe because the cans were superheated to kill all bacteria they might have had in them and since then have had no way to get outside bacteria in.
The issue with keeping food warm too long is that it allows bacteria to thrive. But if there are no bacteria to begin with and no way for any to get in, it is safe. | [
"Canned soup (condensed with liquid added, also called \"ready-to-eat\") can be prepared by simply heating in a pan, rather than actually cooking anything. It can be made on the stovetop or in the microwave. Such soups can be used as a base for homemade soups, with the consumer adding anything from a few vegetables... |
why do gas giants have such strong gravities? | Their density is lower, but they're also vastly bigger than earth or similar planets. The increase in volume means that they still have a lot more mass than smaller, denser planets, and that's what dictates their gravitational pull. | [
"For gas giants, geometric albedo generally decreases with increasing metallicity or atmospheric temperature unless there are clouds to modify this effect. Increased cloud-column depth increases the albedo at optical wavelengths, but decreases it at some infrared wavelengths. Optical albedo increases with age, beca... |
How does a respiratory infection spread from cell to cell inside of a host? | You almost had it in the first section. After the cell produces many copies of the virus, the new virus particles head toward the membrane of the cell and push out, taking part of the membrane with them to provide a protective layer. Those new virus particles then all go out and infect new cells and the cycle continues on and on until either the immune system catches up or the host dies. | [
"Bacteria typically enter the lung with inhalation, though they can reach the lung through the bloodstream if other parts of the body are infected. Often, bacteria live in parts of the upper respiratory tract and are continuously being inhaled into the alveoli, the cavities deep in the lungs where gas exchange take... |
why is the bell pepper so big, while it's mostly empty on the inside? | The plants and animals that we use for food have nearly all been domesticated and bred to fit human needs and desires. They are much different than the wild ancestors which were much smaller and denser.
_URL_0_
| [
"The terms \"bell pepper\" (US, Canada), \"pepper\" or \"sweet pepper\" (UK, Ireland, Malaysia), and \"capsicum\" (Australia, India, New Zealand and Pakistan) are often used for any of the large bell-shaped peppers, regardless of their color. The vegetable is simply referred to as a \"pepper\", or additionally by c... |
What was the plan for Nunavik (northern Quebec region governed by the Inuit) if Quebec had gained independence in the 1980 referendum? Did the separatists say what they would do about the JBNQA (the 1975 agreement giving the Inuit control over the northern third of the province)? | The question is a bit vague, inasmuch as it does not specify who was doing the planning.
On the side of the PQ, the notion of Québec partition was simply deemed untenable, and that international law was a sufficient garantee against it ([source](_URL_4_)).
However, at the federal level, the opposite was at least considered. For instance the PM at the time was quoted as stating that if Canada was partitionable, it followed that it must also be the case for Québec (Charron, Claude G., La partition du Québec: De Lord Durham a Stéphane Dion. (Montreal: vlb éditeur), 1996, p. 167.)
Meanwhile, the Inuit themselves wanted nothing to do with a sovereign Québec, and said so through some of their chief negociators, such as Zebedee Nungak and Charlie Watts. For one thing, they worried about losing their ties with the Federal government and with other Inuit in the rest of the canadian arctic ([source](_URL_3_)). Furthermore, the Inuit had long-lived concerns that the Federal responsibility to consult them as aboriginal people was steadily eroding, as witnessed by the fact that they had not been consulted when Nunavik was transferred to Québec in 1912 ([source](_URL_1_)). The also saw the prospect of being excluded from their (relatively) new Canadian identity into yet another new country through a referendum where their voices would not matter (through sheer demographic weight) as going against their own aspirations to self-determination (ibid.). As witnessed from political cartoons of the time (see: From Eskimo to Inuit in 40 Years, 2011, published by Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, p.78), passage to a sovereign Québec was also seen as fraught with the risk of forced cultural assimilation. One such image, for instance, shows a lone Inuk facing René Lévesque backed by marching ranks of language police bearing the “bill 101” standard.
Although OP did not ask about other aboriginal nations, the Cree (for instance) were also very vocally opposed to remaining within a sovering Québec and would have sought partition as well, using arguments similar to those voiced by Pierre Trudeau (see p. 50 [source](_URL_0_.) "Coon Come souligne que le Québec revendique le droit historique de déterminer son avenir sur la base d'une langue, d'une histoire et d'une culture distinctes. Comment, demande-t-il alors, le Québec peut-il affirmer que ce droit ne s'applique pas aux Cris? Les Cris n'ont-ils pas de langue, d'histoire et de culture distinctes?")
How does it all add up? As far as can be inferred from existing sources, a newly independent Québec would have had to defend its territorial integrity to a refractory Canadian Government backed by a local population which felt more attachment to its Canadian identity and wished to preserve its territorial integrity while pushing for its own self-determination. Can any of this be called a plan though? A recent book on the 1995 referendum [recent book on the 1995 referendum]( _URL_2_) showed that neither the yes side nor the no side had a coherent and well thought out strategy for dealing with “Day 1” after a “Yes” vote (I hope I'm not violating the 20 year rule by referring to such recent work). One may perhaps surmise that such was also the case in 1980, and that a “Yes” would have been followed by unforeseen chaos and partisan infighting.
EDIT: Also worth mentionning that the James Bay Agreement does not simply "give the Inuit control over the northern third of the province" as OP suggests. It gives them ownership of some lands (Cat 1), and codifies their right over hunting and fishing in Cat 2 and Cat 3 lands. It also sets the basis for the regional political and administrative structures. We are a far cry here from Inuit governmental autonomy. | [
"Rosemarie Kuptana, then the President of ITK, declared on July 27, 1995, that the Inuit of northern Quebec would boycott the October 30, 1995, referendum on sovereignty which failed to address self-government and land claim issues.\n",
"In addition to declaring Quebec a sovereign country, the bill lays out sever... |
why is ancestry from spain important to the u.s. census (hispanic) but ancestry from other latin cultures like italy or portugal isn't? | With regard to the U.S. Census, Hispanic doesn't mean from Spain -- it means people from Mexico and Latin America, ie. Spanish speakers. Hispanics make up about 17% of the U.S. population currently. | [
"Concerning immigrants and people of European ancestry, 89% of the population has some form of European roots, mostly from Spain. During the colonization and establishment of Mexico, there was a constant flow of Spanish immigrants. There have also been large influxes during instabilities in Spain, such as during th... |
why do i need glasses if i've got irises? | The Iris doesn't focus, it controls how much light enters your pupil. The lens focuses by changing shape with tiny little muscles. You need glasses because the lens is too rigid and the muscles are too weak. | [
"BULLET::::- Iris recognition - A form of authentication that uses data linked to features associated with the colored part of the eye of a user. It involves analyzing the patterns of the colored part of the eye surrounding the pupil. It uses a fairly normal camera and does not require close contact between the eye... |
how google stores caches of so many websites | There are a few methods that Google uses.
The primary one is that Google spends plenty on continually adding more servers, server space, and improving their ability to manage that ever-growing space.
Also, copies of crawled websites compress better than many types of data. Google once released that they're able to compress crawled websites to an average of 11% of their uncompressed size.
[There's also this theory of where they get all that server space.](_URL_0_) ;) | [
"The browser cache can also be used to store information that can be used to track individual users. This technique takes advantage of the fact that the web browser will use resources stored within the cache instead of downloading them from the website when it determines that the cache already has the most up-to-da... |
if alcohol helps kill bacteria and fights bad breathe (like mouthwash), why does your breathe smell like death after a night of drinking ? | Because the alcohol doesn't kill ALL of the bacteria in there and those little greebly bastards reproduce right quickly.
Then there's good odds that you didn't brush your teeth before passing out into a drunken stupor. That means there's all sorts of dilute sugar solution from the beer or wine that you drank (the alcohol would have evaporated away), coupled with oily residues and starches from the full bag of Doritos and breaded chicken wings that you ate earlier in the evening. This is wondrous foodstuff for the bastards and they go right to town, producing all sorts of atrocious-smelling byproducts as they digest them. | [
"Alcohol is added to mouthwash not to destroy bacteria but to act as a carrier agent for essential active ingredients such as menthol, eucalyptol and thymol which help to penetrate plaque. Sometimes a significant amount of alcohol (up to 27% vol) is added, as a carrier for the flavor, to provide \"bite\". Because o... |
How do water-powered batteries like this work? Are they pretty much useless? | take a look at [this](_URL_0_) - it's not powered by the water, that's just the electrolyte. the power comes from the dissimilar metals which make up the anode & cathode, at least one of which will be consumed by the reaction. they're not useless, but yeah, there are more efficient ways of making a battery. | [
"Typically, a large variety of aqueous solutions can be used in place of plain water. This battery type is specifically designed to pollute less (see environmentally friendly claims) due to the lesser use or the absence of heavy metals. Water-activated batteries have been used in radiosondes that shouldn't contain ... |
how did “hello” become the default greeting when you answer the phone? | Nobody liked 'Ahoy!' which is what the creator of the telephone wanted the standard greeting to be. | [
"The use of \"hello\" as a telephone greeting has been credited to Thomas Edison; according to one source, he expressed his surprise with a misheard \"Hullo\". Alexander Graham Bell initially used \"Ahoy\" (as used on ships) as a telephone greeting. However, in 1877, Edison wrote to T. B. A. David, president of the... |
What are some salient points about the West Coast Salish peoples and associated cultures that should be more well known? | What really differentiated the people of the PNW (Kwakiutle, Haida, Coast Salish, Squamish, ect. ect.) from many of the other tribes around North America was how settled they were, compared to even the most agriculturally based Aboriginal societies such as the Iriqouis in the east.
Because they (and we) live in a region that is so abundant with food, their survival didn't depend on depend on following migratory buffalo like the Plains tribes or the Eastern agricultural tribes, who still had to migrate settlements from time to time due to soil degradation. As a result of this relative settlement, camps in the PNW became much larger, and social structures became more complex, with tradesmen and artisans, as opposed to simply just hunters. What also developed was a social hierarchy, including slavery (for comparison with European civilization at the time).
| [
"The Coast Salish cultures differ considerably from those of their northern neighbours. It is one of the few Indigenous cultures along the coast with a patrilineal, not matrilineal, culture. They are also one of the few peoples on the coast whose traditional territories coincide with contemporary major metropolitan... |
i'm told that my daughter (14 months) shouldn't have red meat, because it's hard for her body to process. why is red meat harder to digest than other meats? | A well respected pediatrician at my medical school taught me that all types of meat were appropriate early foods (or beikost) as they tend to be rich in nutrients that complement breast milk, especially iron. She recommended meat puree in particular. | [
"Understanding the health impact of red meat is difficult because it is not a uniform product, with effects varying based on fat content, processing and preparation. Processed red meat, in particular, is linked to higher mortality, mainly due to cardiovascular diseases and cancer. There is some epidemiological asso... |
Why didn't the French just give Winston Churchill their Navy, instead of forcing his hand to destroy it? | By the terms of the armistice France signed with Germany the French Fleet was supposed to be demiliterized in a French port. Admiral Darlan scattered the French navy to French ports in Africa that were loyal to the Vichy French. The incomplete Jean Bart went to Casablanca, the Richellieu went to Dakar. The main striking force of the French navy was at Mels el Keber in Algeria. Admiral Somerville could not get the local French admiral to comply with his wishes, after six hours of negotiations. The Vichy French government feared reprisals from the Nazi occupiers, if the French just gave their navy to the British.
| [
"After the fall of France, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill feared that, in German or Italian hands, the ships of the French Navy would pose a grave threat to the Allies. He therefore insisted that French warships either join the Allies or else adopt neutrality in a British, French, or neutral port. Churchi... |
what does it mean that the eu is "imposing sanctions" on ukrainian official? | **What do sanctions do?**
The sanctions are:
* Ukrainian officials are not allowed to enter Europe anymore.
* Assets of Ukranian officials are frozen at the moment. They can't access their European bank account any more, they can't sell European stock anymore, ...
The basic message from Europe to the current officials. Fix the issues peacefully if you want be welcome in Europe territory or you want to access your bank account.
You have to note two things
* This sanctions are aimed only at officials, and not at the Ukrainian state in general.
* This kind of sanctions are quite fierce. You wouldn't freeze Janoekovytsj assets if you plan to keep him as a friend. I would view this as a bet on a change of regime.
**How will this affect the protests and violence?**
The protesters will probably not change their behavior. But Ukrainian officials might think twice before they would command to shoot at civilians. (But this is purely hypothetical).
**Will it solve any problems?**
It would be naive to think that you can solve all the problems so simply. Eventually the Ukrainian people and officials will need to resolve the conflict themselves. But Janoekovytsj could become a bit more tended to concessions during the negotiations. | [
"International sanctions were imposed during the Ukrainian crisis by a large number of countries against Russia and Crimea following the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, which began in late February 2014. The sanctions were imposed by the United States, the European Union (EU) and other countries and inter... |
do dogs have a sense of right or wrong? | They don't have a sense of guilt like we might sometimes think they do. Rather, they know something they did was bad because they know that will be punished (because it's happened before... same way they know how to sit on command). They do it for the same reason any human misbehaves - they either don't think of the consequences beforehand or they'll willing to accept them (however regretfully) | [
"As pointed out by philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke and Hume, some animals are also clearly capable of a type of \"associative thinking\", even to the extent of associating causes and effects. A dog once kicked, can learn how to recognize the warning signs and avoid being kicked in the future, but this does not m... |
how can a seemingly small amount of poison or venom be so eefective. 100 mg of venom from a black mamba snake is enough to kill a 100kg adult human. how is this possible? | I believe that poison works by interfering with your nerve cells. Many others work this way. If that is the case the molecules bind to the receptors at the very end of nerve cells that they use to communicate with the next one down the line. Nerve cells are long and skinny, so you're disabling a fairly large cell by messing with only a small part of it. Add to this that nerves make up a small amount of your body mass in the first place. You're only dealing with a small amount of poison but it's targeting a *very* small part of your body.
And because it sticks to nerve cells, it doesn't need to be highly concentrated in your bloodstream. It will eventually stick to those receptors and build up only in those critical locations, rather than staying spread out through your blood. This is different from alcohol which also effects nerve cells (in a different way) but doesn't stick to them. It remains spread out through your body even though it only effects a small portion of your body. This is why blood alcohol concentration is a good measure of how much is in somebody's system and an OK way of figuring out how drunk they are. Testing for snake venom in the blood doesn't tell you about how much damage has already taken place, or how bad things might get before the effect starts to fade. | [
"The Black Mamba can inject between 100–120 mg venom in one bite. Comparing the LD results with the amount of venom that can be injected shows that one bite is fatal. For humans a dose of 10–15 mg is enough to be fatal.\n",
"Based on how sensitive monkeys were to the venom, Whaler (1971) estimated 14 mg of venom ... |
How is glass made? | There are many different compositions of glass. In scientific terms, a glass is a solid that lacks any well-defined crystal structure.
By far the most common is Soda-lime glass. The raw ingredients for which are silica sand (silicon dioxide, SiO2), sodium oxide, and calcium oxide. Small amounts of many other chemicals may be added to affect the glass's properties. For example, small amounts of cobalt oxide give a beautiful blue stained glass.
Soda lime glass is the type used for windows and mirrors, as well as most household glassware and glass bottles.
Another common type is borosilicate glass, which is made of silica sand, sodium borate (aka borax) and sodium oxide. This has the unusual property of having near zero thermal expansion. So it can endure repeated heating and cooling without danger of cracking. It's used for laboratory glassware for chemists and biologists for this reason. It was also commonly used for glass baking dishes in the past, but because of it's expense has tended to be replaced with certain types of soda lime glass in recent years.
A third type is lead oxide glass, aka lead crystal. This is made with silica, lead dioxide, potassium oxide (aka potash) and small amounts of soda and zinc oxide. Because of it's high light refractive index and color dispersion it's popular for glass artists and optic lenses. It sparkles like cut gemstones with rainbow patterns, if cut in certain ways.
A fourth type is germanium oxide glass. This is created with ultra high purity silicon dioxide and germanium oxide, this gives it extreme optical clarity. These are used for fiber-optic cables used to carry information. Without this kind of glass the internet simply wouldn't be possible and you wouldn't be asking this question.
A fifth type is aluminosilicate glass, which is a complex mixture of silica, aluminum oxide, calcium oxide, barium oxide, and sodium borate. This is used for high strength fiberglass cloth, for composite materials such as boats, aircraft, bicycle frames, and car body parts. It has an extremely high strength-to-weight ratio. being both stronger and lighter than steel.
Other types exist. Although silica is the base ingredient of the vast majority of glasses, glasses that don't contain silica can be made. For example, glasses made with phosphate compounds. These are useful in LASER systems. Another example are glasses made from heavy metal fluorides. Some metal alloys can even form a glassy non-crystalline structure when they're cooled rapidly in thin ribbons. These are useful for making the magnetic cores of power transformers. | [
"Primary glass production involves the combination of the raw materials Soda, Lime and Silica, heated at specific temperatures in order to produce a basic glass compound (see Glass and Anglo-Saxon Glass). Traditionally, glass has been made from either the mixture of ground quartz stones (providing the silica) and p... |
When did Bank Heists become a thing? | I'll let the experts elaborate but simple answer is "when banks were invented" ...
While that might an exaggeration, highway-robbery and highwaymen are certainly a very old "tradition" and a driving force behind banks - ie not carrying money/valuables around
Seems by 1880's in USA bank robberies were fairly common ... the whole Wild West thing ... with the first verified one in 1866.
EDIT: For example, Bank of Australia was established in 1826 and robbed by 1828 - it was our 2nd bank after Bank of NSW in 1817. So at least one country was fairly quick and I'd imagine most followed. | [
"In October 1907, the United States experienced a bank run on the Knickerbocker Trust Company, forcing the trust to close on October 23, 1907, provoking further reactions. The panic was alleviated when U.S. Secretary of the Treasury George B. Cortelyou and John Pierpont \"J.P.\" Morgan deposited $25 million and $35... |
Do holocaust deniers have any valid points? | Every time this subject comes up I link to [this](_URL_0_) thread. But honestly you can sort of read between the cracks of what you posted to see that whomever was claiming that obviously has an agenda.
For example:
> No German plans were ever found mentioning any plans to exterminate Jews.
So that book about Jews being the bane of civilization just happened to be written by the guy later blamed for killing Jews? Besides, it's a well known fact among historians that Hitler's commands weren't always given as a signed letter, but manifested by underlings aiming for "the will of the Fuhrer"
> No mass graves were ever found, No piles of human ashes were ever found.
This is just blatantly false.
> All we have is postwar testimony, mostly of individual "survivors."
Notice how a single sentence devalues the extensive archives of personal testimonies given by thousand of survivors (no ""s needed). Of course they would be contradictory, you're dealing with people who were under immense pressure or children at the time. This is just the sort of thing you would see in a holocause denial argument - it doesn't matter that there is proof because any valid proof can be dismissed.
> no mounds of ashes, no crematories capable of disposing of millions of corpses
This is strawmanning. Of course millions of people weren't burnt. Some were shot, others starved, some died from illness, overwork or the forced marches. The six million were not gassed, only some of them, and for them, the existing facilities were more than enough.
We can go on, but the truth is, when people put agenda before facts, no amount of evidence would satisfy them. | [
"The claims of deniers are grounded in flawed research, biased statements, and, in some cases, deliberately falsified evidence. Courts of law have also rejected Holocaust denial claims (see Fred A. Leuchter and David Irving) and laws against holocaust denial have been passed in 14 European countries. The Nizkor Pro... |
Where were the marines during the Wild West time period? | In short, yes, the Marines were utilized for amphibious landings.
In a bit more length, the Marine Corps was declining. The U.S. Civil War, shortly before the Wild West time period (1865-1895) delegated the Marine Corps to blockade duty. They were poorly, if ever, utilized in battle for the Northern States.
Soon after the Civil War ended, the Navy (upon which the Marine Corps was attached), moved from sail boats to steam powered ships. This left Marines without a duty. Marine marksman were left without a place from which to shoot, as all the masts were replaced with smoke stacks.
Much of this time was spent in introspection on part of the Marine Brass (higher ups). The traditions of the Corps were defined in this era, and its duties were slightly broadened.
The Marine Corps had a few chances to use their skills abroad, rather than at home, during those years. First, in response to a native uprising in Taiwan (1867) that killed off the crew of an American ship. The Marines actually lost that one. One Marine died, and zero natives.
They made up for that loss in Korea (1871) when after a disastrous attempt at diplomatic overtures, Korea fired upon US ships. With no apology coming, the Marines took part in an attack that took over five forts, and left 243 Korean soldiers dead, and only 3 from US forces.
Marines were also involved in the fighting in the Samoan Civil War, though in no great numbers. Their value was proven by the 3 medals of honor earned there.
There were many smaller landings during that time, Japan, China, Egypt, Panama, Mexico.
But the only other one of historical note is the coup that overthrew the Queen of Hawaii. The conspirators used the possible danger to American citizens as an excuse to have the Marines sent in. The Marine Corps landed, and patrolled the streets, but were not required to fire any shots, or take over any buildings. Their mere presence was enough to force the royalists in capitulation.
The Marines wouldn't really come into their "fighting force" until the Spanish-American War (1898), at which point the "Wild West" had been tamed.
It may be of note, that in those years, the Marine motto *Semper Fidelis* (Always Faithful) was created, as was the Marine Corps Hymn, and the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor emblem they wear today.
I hope this has answered your question. | [
"In World War II the US Marines had four camps in the Pauatahanui area; at Judgeford, at the Porirua side of the foot of the Haywards Hill, at Motukaraka, and in the Moonshine Valley. The Judgedford camp accommodated 3,755 men, the Moonshine camp had a recreation hall and a vehicle servicing depot, and the Haywards... |
what's the difference between amd and nvidia gpus? | Ford and Chrysler both make cars. The cars have four tires, steering wheel and a horn!
Both Ford and Chrysler vehicles get you from point A to point B.
Video cards all share a primary goal. Deliver video information to a display port. | [
"With respect to discrete GPUs, found in add-in graphics-boards, Nvidia's GeForce and AMD's Radeon GPUs are the only remaining competitors in the high-end market. Along with its nearest competitor, the AMD Radeon, the GeForce architecture is moving toward general-purpose graphics processor unit (GPGPU). GPGPU is ex... |
why, when we are being put under anesthesia, does it give you a burning sensation up your arm, or from the point in which the anesthesia was administered. | If you're talking about getting it through an IV it's actually the cool temperature of the fluid going through your veins. Even lukewarm water can give that sensation since we have such a high body temp | [
"Anesthesia or anaesthesia (from Greek \"without sensation\") is a state of controlled, temporary loss of sensation or awareness that is induced for medical purposes. It may include analgesia (relief from or prevention of pain), paralysis (muscle relaxation), amnesia (loss of memory), or unconsciousness. A patient ... |
For all those b & w photos of construction workers at death-defying heights, how often did we actually lose workers on the job? | Fatalities certainly did occur. During the five years of construction of Hoover Dam for example there were [96 fatalities directly related to construction](_URL_0_). And a good number of these were falls. | [
"As least 16 workers had died during the construction from 1951 to 1959, and no figure is known for the construction during the first years. A large number of the workers eventually died from silicosis, a form of occupational lung disease caused by inhalation of crystalline silica dust.\n",
"BULLET::::- The BBC r... |
how come glass breaks when it hits the ground, but marbles bounce and hardly take damage? | Spheres.
Spheres distribute the shock of hitting the ground very evenly. A marble can still break, but it's less likely to than a cube, prism, or sheet.
| [
"Exposure of a glass surface to moisture, either in solution or from humidity in the atmosphere, causes chemical reactions to occur on and below the surface of the glass. The exchange of alkali metal ions (from within the glass) and hydrogen ions (from outside) can cause chemical and structural changes to the glass... |
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