question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
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what is causing that effect in the centre of the sky? picture in comments | That's an [upper tangent arc](_URL_0_), one of a variety of effects produced by a bunch of ice crystals high in the air. They line up and form, essentially, one gigantic lens that bends the sun's light in interesting ways. | [
"Relief displacement is prominent when photographing a variety of elevations. This situation causes objects above sea level to be displaced outward from the centre of the photograph and objects below ground level to be displaced toward the centre of the image (Figure 2). The severity of the displacement is negative... |
why does the back of a rollercoaster train feel like it's going faster than the front? | The back of the roller coaster *does* go faster over bumps and down drops.
Take the initial drop for example. When the coaster first starts going over the drop, it's moving very slowly. But as more and more of the coaster clears the drop, the more weight there is pulling the rest of the coaster down.
Thus the front cars go more slowly over drops, and the back cars go more quickly. | [
"When going around a roller coaster's vertical loop, the inertia that produces a thrilling acceleration force also keeps passengers in their seats. As the car approaches a loop, the direction of a passenger's inertial velocity points straight ahead at the same angle as the track leading up to the loop. As the car e... |
Why did the first humans originate in Africa? Is there any particular reason that they appeared there first, instead of Asia or Europe? | This is really a question for r/anthropology, I think, as its prehistory. | [
"This recent out of Africa migration derived from East African populations, which had become separated from populations migrating to Southern, Central and Western Africa at least 100,000 years earlier. Modern humans subsequently spread globally, replacing archaic humans (either through competition or hybridization)... |
Were there ever any instances of executions through an archer "firing squad." | > "And the archers shot at him till he was as full of arrows as an urchin, leaving him there for dead."
There is some mention of this happening, [Saint Sebastian](_URL_0_) is one. Although it might never had happened that way.
| [
"Execution by firing squad is distinct from other forms of execution by firearms, such as an execution by shooting to the back of the head or neck. However, the single shot by the squad's officer with a pistol (coup de grâce) is sometimes incorporated in a firing squad execution, particularly if the initial volley ... |
Why isn't there cobalt in the Earth's core? | This is a very good question and the answer is so counterintuitive, that you posted it in the wrong section. As you probably know, heavy elements are produced inside big stars. These stars then explode and enrich the interstellar gas clouds with the produced elements. The gas clouds collaps and form new star systems - just like ours.
It seems logical that these elements are more or less distributed equally, especially when they are so close together like iron, cobalt and nickel. But we didn't focus on a very important property: **The number of nucleons in each atom.**
To understand why this plays a role, you have to know, that different isotopes aren't stable or unstable randomly. They follow a pattern which was discovered by Josef Mattauch and therefore named [Mattauch isobar rule](_URL_1_) after him. The rule basically says, that neigboring isobars (nuclides with the same number of nucleons) could never be both stable.
Now looking at a [nuclide table](_URL_0_), you'll see that there are plenty of stable isotopes for iron and nickel (note, that similar isobars of different elements lie on a diagonal line). Since two neighboring isobars cannot be stable at the same time, the iron and nickel literally block the cobalt to be stable - with one exception.
All isotopes, except for Cobalt-59 are radioactive and if like this wasn't enough, the all decay in only two elements - iron and nickel. So its not that Cobalt is so rare, although it is between iron and nickel, but **because** of exactly that reason. And the kind of decay gives it the rest - all radioactive cobalt atoms that could possibly have ever existed decayed into iron and nickel aswell.
That said, you might want to know why iron is so much more abundant than nickel. In giant stars, two silicon-28 nuclei fuses to nickel-56(!), which is radioactive and decays to cobalt-56. this is radioactive aswell and decays to iron-56, which is stable. And guess, what's the most abundant isotope of iron out there. Right. Iron-56 makes more than 90% of all iron.
The fusing of silicon-28 is the last energy winning process that could happen in a star. All other are either to rare or they take energy instead of releasing it. And this is why these 3 almost same elements are so different in abundance. | [
"Cobalt is a chemical element with the symbol Co and atomic number 27. Like nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth's crust only in chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal.\n",
... |
I know nothing about pre-Colombian civilizations. Can you point me towards some good bibliography on them? | hi! you can get started on this sub's *Book List* - [here](_URL_0_) | [
"Colombian literature dates back to pre-Columbian era; a notable example of the period is the epic poem known as the \"Legend of Yurupary\". In Spanish colonial times, notable writers include Juan de Castellanos (\"Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias\"), Hernando Domínguez Camargo and his epic poem to San Ignacio... |
how is flying in a "v" shape better for birds? | The aerodynamics of the wind currents from the front bird help the birds in the back have to do less work. They rotate in and out of that front position, too.
Have you ever been kayaking or rowing? When you're in sync, it becomes easier to paddle because everyone is helping the person behind them pull the water. Same situation. | [
"The V formation possibly improves the efficiency of flying birds, particularly over long migratory routes. All the birds except the first fly in the upwash from one of the wingtip vortices of the bird ahead. The upwash assists each bird in supporting its own weight in flight, in the same way a glider can climb or ... |
How does the food, medicine, drink that we take go to specific parts of our system? | For the most part, they don't get *properly* distributed, they just get distributed. How or whether a cell in that tissue uses any particular molecule in the interstitial fluid is up to that cell.
That said, things aren't evenly distributed, since certain organs and tissues get more blood flow than others, so that can have an effect on biodistribution. Also, hydrophobicity of a molecule, charge, and size all play a role in what biological compartments a molecule ends up in. For example, some molecules are more likely to stick to serum proteins like albumin and get filtered out by the liver, while others are more likely to get filtered out by the kidneys. | [
"When drugs are taken orally, they enter the gut lumen to be absorbed in the small intestine and sometimes, in the stomach. In order for drugs to be absorbed, they must pass through the epithelial cells that line the lumen wall before they can enter the hepatic portal circulation to be distributed systemically in b... |
Would a modern day human be able to reproduce with a 200,000 year old Homo Sapien? Other hominids? If so would there be any complications? | Almost certainly. [Genetic evidence indicates that the modern human and Neanderthal lineages diverged well upwards of 500,000 years ago.](_URL_0_) We also know that the two lineages were able to interbreed much more recently (all modern populations outside of Africa have ~2-4% Neanderthal DNA), so it's extremely unlikely that jumping back 200,000 years within our own lineage would introduce enough genetic distance to prevent reproduction.
Hell, I'm of the opinion that modern humans could probably interbreed with many of the *Homo* populations that are considered their own species. Many hominid paleontologists have demonstrated themselves to be far too quick on the trigger when it comes to designating new species. | [
"300 years hence, the anatomically modern humans that stayed behind on Earth have split into the Hitek (\"Homo sapiens machinadiumentum\"), almost totally dependent on cybernetic technology, augmenting and keeping their bodies alive well past their natural lifespans, and their handlers (still \"Homo sapiens sapiens... |
Coworker asked me about the legitimacy this DNA study on Homo sapiens cognatus "bigfoot". Article says 3 "bigfoot" genmoes sequences in a 5-year study | The first thing I did was click through to the paper at _URL_0_. Pretty flashy site for a scientific journal. Not much there except for the 'bigfoot' study. So then I googled "DeNovo Scientific _URL_1_", the parent org, supposedly. Again, not much there except for this one 'study'.
I leave you to draw your own conclusions. | [
"\"Homo sapiens\" has been proposed as derived from \"H. heidelbergensis\" via \"Homo rhodesiensis\", present in East and North Africa from around 400,000 years ago. The correct assignment of many fossils to a particular chronospecies is difficult and often differences in opinion ensue among paleoanthropologists du... |
do bones scar after a break? | Not in the same way as skin does, but sometimes you can see a little kink or bump in an xray if it's a serious enough fracture.
source: have broken things, used google :)
edit: phrasing (lana.........) | [
"When a bone is fractured as a result of an injury, the two fragments may be displaced relative to each other. If they are not, usually no treatment is required other than immobilisation in an appropriate cast. If displacement does occur, then the space separating the fragments fills with blood shed by the damaged ... |
Were there really Samurai in Mexico? | I'm going to refer you to another post of this exact same question:
_URL_0_ | [
"Several of Aztec's early employees were Texas cowboys whose abilities made them legends among their fellow ranchers during their years in Arizona. Some were involved in Arizona's Pleasant Valley War in the late 1880s and early 1890s, a decade-long feud between cattlemen and sheep herders over rangeland and resourc... |
what is clickbait, jailbait | Jailbait is the term for an attractive but underage (under 18) girl, so anything you did with her would be legally obscure at best, but the laws vary from place to place.
You got clickbait correct. | [
"Jailbait or jail bait is slang for a person who is younger than the legal age of consent for sexual activity and usually appears older, with the implication that a person above the age of consent might find them sexually attractive. The term \"jailbait\" is derived from the fact that engaging in sexual activity wi... |
when asked for the gdp of a country, what gdp is generally wanted? | The first two are just about how to convert the NZD value to USD for international comparison. The per capita just divides the first one by population.
For the healthcare one it makes no difference, or rather, it uses the original NZD value. | [
", the country's GDP per capita at purchasing power parity is $37,370 (similar to Israel, Italy or Slovenia) and $22,850 at nominal value. According to Allianz A.G., in 2018 the country was an MWC (mean wealth country), ranking 26th in net finacial assets. The country experienced a 4.5% GDP growth in 2017, giving t... |
If all life in Earth originated from the same source, what is the common ancestor between animals and plants? | It was a single-celled lifeform 1.6 billion years ago. _URL_0_
You share some 44% of your genes with a cabbage because so many are to do with microscopic processes such as cell respiration. Our common ancestor would be a load of single-celled organisms which hadn't settled on which genes to activate for pattern formation I.e. which end is the head or the tail, which bit is the flower or the root. Different individuals within this collection of single-celled organisms mutated different methods of pattern formation (activating different genes which both plants and animals have)and plants and animals embarked on their divergent paths. | [
"In this system the multicellular animals (Metazoa) are descended from the same ancestor as both the unicellular choanoflagellates and the fungi which form the Opisthokonta. Plants are thought to be more distantly related to animals and fungi.\n",
"All life on Earth shares a last universal common ancestor (LUCA) ... |
what are the black rope-like things sometimes put on roads across lanes? are they counters? how do they work? | Yep. Those types are usually hollow rubber hoses sealed off at one end and attached to a pressure sensor at the other end. When a car drives over the hose it increases the pressure in the hose slightly triggering the counter to go up 1. If two cars go over at the same time it will probably count it as only one, but the frequency of that happening is low enough that they'll still get a good idea of how much traffic is going by. | [
"On some roads, lanes are marked only with a mix of Botts' dots and conventional reflective markers, eliminating the need to repaint lane divider lines. Botts' dots are rarely used in regions with substantial snowfall, because snow plows damage or dislodge them.\n",
"In the United States, crosswalks are sometimes... |
what is the purpose of this wall outlet? | Is it a connector for cable television service?
Cable television wall plates are typically a single "F" type RF connector on a plate by themself, or sometimes on the same plate with a phone jack.
(/Short comment) | [
"A \"water pipe\" is a pipe or tube, frequently made of plastic or metal, that carries pressurized and treated fresh water to a building (as part of a municipal water system), as well as inside the building.\n",
"The East Side Big Pipe is a large sewer line and tunnel in Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon. It i... |
I need help on identifying some of the items in an old photo | hi! while you might get help here, it would be worth x-posting this to /r/WhatIsThisThing: identifying items is their specialty | [
"BULLET::::- British Museum collection online: each item has a page on the database, which may be found by searching on the acquisition numbers 1866,1229.1 to 1866,1229.59 inclusive . Not all objects have photographs, but the major ones have several.\n",
"Many photographs in \"\"Objects\"\" depict possessions tha... |
What are some good sources on ancient/middle age Eurasian nomad cultures? | "The Silk Road: A New History" by Hansen is a good document-based summary of the cultures that lived in Central Asia in that time period. Not necessarily the ones you're thinking of though; it talks a lot about Sogdians, Tocharians, Uyghurs, etc.
"The Horse, the Wheel and Language" covers pre-historical Eurasia, not the time period you're asking about but goes into great details about the cultures that emerged between Ukraine and Kazakhstan around 3000 BC. | [
"After the fall of the USSR, Zuev was able to publish a number of works on ancient and medieval history of nomadic peoples of the Central Asia and Kazakhstan. These are \"Sarmato-Alans of Aral (Yancai\\Abzoya)\" (1995), \"Ancient Turkic social terminology in the Chinese texts of the 8th century\" (1998), \"Creation... |
Is it possible for only one twin to have Downs Syndrome or would they both have it? | Contrary to what has been said, it is not impossible for only one identical twin to suffer from Down's syndrome. It would be very unlikely, however.
Around 95% of Down's syndrome comes from either the egg or the sperm carrying an extra copy of chromosome 21 due to meiotic nondisjunction (messed up cell division). In these cases, all the fertilised embryo's cells will carry an extra chromosome 21, and if the embryo cleaves to form identical twins they will both suffer from the condition.
However, around 5% of Down's syndrome is caused by mitotic nondisjunction of one of the embryo's cells; the egg and sperm were fine, but one of the embryo's cells screwed up and the embryo is now composed of a mixture of cells with and without an extra chromosome 21. This event could affect only one of the twins' embryos, either because it happened after the cleavage event or because the cleavage took with it all the cells descended from the cell that suffered the nondisjunction.
If this happens, you will end up with two identical twins, one of which will suffer from Down's syndrome (technically Mosaic Down's syndrome) and another with no issues.
More info:
+ _URL_1_
+ _URL_0_ | [
"In identical twins, if one is affected there is a 50–60% chance that the other will also be affected. In non-identical twins the risk is 15%. These risks are greater in those with generalized rather than focal seizures. If both twins are affected, most of the time they have the same epileptic syndrome (70–90%). Ot... |
How was adultery viewed in late-15th/early-16th century Italy? | Something even more interesting for you, OP! After Lucrezia "broke up" with Pietro Bembo, she had a pretty steamy affair with Francesco Gonzaga -- the husband of Isabella d'Este. Who is Alfonso d'Este's *sister.* And thus Lucrezia's sister-in-law. So all those rumors about incest? *Technically* true (according to the moral standards of the time) but Lucrezia was into her brother *in-law*, as opposed to her brother Cesare or something. :9 ^despite ^what ^Assassin's ^Creed ^and ^most ^Borgia-themed ^media ^would ^tell ^you.
The thing is about Lucrezia's fling with *Bembo* in particular was that it was actually pretty in line with the idea of courtly love popular at the time. Courtly love played a huge role in dictating the norms of a behavior between (noble)men and women, and this was especially true if there was a male party who was, say, an artist in need of patronage. Bembo was a poet, and Lucrezia was his patron and muse. She was his *boss.* Any flowery poems or prose he wrote for her were as much (the Renaissance equivalent to) cute-flirty-texts-with-monkey-emojis as they were *paid work.* It may look like adultery to our modern eyes, but in reality it was probably far more nuanced, and chaste, and economically-driven.
That's not to say that adultery is out of the realm of possibility. Once Lucrezia's husband Alfonso d'Este caught wind of this, however, Bembo pretty much hightailed it out of Ferrara. ^which ^is ^like. ^lol.
Lucrezia's affair with Francesco Gonzaga was a little trickier. He was a powerful nobleman roughly on par with Alfonso d'Este. He was married to Isabella d'Este. Though Lucrezia and Francesco kept the steamier parts of their affair relatively discreet; being married to a d'Este sibling made them *related,* and probably justified a lot of their more "official" correspondence. And because this marital dodecahedron was much more politically-charged, Alfonso d'Este probably couldn't just intimidate Francesco Gonzaga into leaving/quit being in a relationship with Lucrezia like he did Pietro Bembo.
probably **tl;dr** -- there were avenues dictated by Renaissance gender roles and (courtly) social norms where noblewomen were allowed flirtatious behavior. Sometimes, depending on the circumstances, this led to affairs, which might've been the case with Lucrezia. Even so, it remained very dangerous for noblewomen to be as open about it as noble *men* were about their mistresses. | [
"16th century Spaniards are known to have been pessimistic about marriage. Many of the initial conquistadores had left their wives in Spain and engaged in adultery in Chile. Examples of this is Pedro de Valdivia who held Inés de Suárez as lover. Adultery was explicitly forbidden for Catholics and the Council of Tre... |
why stimulant and depressant drugs wont cancel each other out | They can. But, there are lots of different kinds of stimulants and depressants, so sometimes the matchup isn't perfect, and you get some stimulant effects that aren't offset by depressants, and vice-versa.
Imagine you had two cars parked bumper-to-bumper. If they are identical, and perfectly lined up, and they push exactly at the same force, they should offset one another and go nowhere. But, if they aren't perfectly aligned, or one has slightly better tires, they may push each other off in strange and unexpected directions. | [
"In rare cases antidepressants can make users obsessively violent or have suicidal compulsions, which is in marked contrast to their intended effect. This can be regarded as a paradoxical reaction but, especially in the case of suicide, may in at least some cases be merely due to differing rates of effect with resp... |
why are there so many competing small plug types | So 2 factor.
1 improvement and obsoletion. USB - C is objectively better than USB - 3, 2 B and A. The problem is that everyone is on USB 2 architecture so everyplace uses the same USB 2 stuff and it's hard to move forward. You don't want to make a cable no one will buy. But eventually everything will move to USB - C unless something better comes out soon.
2 exclusive proprietary designs. Apple likes to come out with their own designs as it keeps people using the newest technology whether they like it or not. This started as a form for quality control, as they would sell you only something good and you couldnt find a cheaper, worse alternative. Until they started making really bad cables and the cheaper alternatives were better. Now they are just annoying everyone. But they will continue to do it as they feel it adds to their uniform design of "apple" everything. | [
"There is a range of plugs and sockets of different sizes with differing numbers of pins, depending on the current supplied and number of phases accommodated. The fittings are popular in open-air conditions, as they include IP44 weather-proofing. They are also sometimes used in situations where their special capabi... |
why is it wasting water when we let it run while we brush our teeth? | Water that goes down the drain has already been purified once, and will now have to be purified again before it can be discharged.
The water itself can be reclaimed, but the energy used to purify it is wasted. | [
"Brushing teeth properly helps prevent cavities, and periodontal, or gum disease, which causes at least one-third of adult tooth loss. If teeth are not brushed correctly and frequently, it could lead to the calcification of saliva minerals, forming tartar. Tartar hardens (then referred to as 'calculus') if not remo... |
What happened in a lunatic asylum during the 19Th century when a patient became pregnant? | This is a really fascinating question that is best served by first understanding the way women were treated during that time period, and why they would be sent to an asylum in the first place. I'm also writing this from the American perspective and I have *no* idea how to answer it from the non-American perspective. Also, heads up, my references are out of order because I added a couple after I did some proofreading.
In the 1800s, there was a lot of overlap between institutionalizing women (i.e. putting them in "a lunatic asylum") and, as the 1900s approached, incarcerating them. For example, Pouba and Tianen^(1) wrote that during the 19th century, "women were placed in mental institutions for behaving in ways that male society did not agree with" (p. 95). The process, according to that article, was that a woman would go to a doctor because of some "symptoms" that her family (usually, her husband) did not agree with. There, she would receive a diagnosis and ultimately get institutionalized. It was *very easy* for women to get institutionalized at the time - it's not like today where there's a lot of "red tape" involved in putting someone on a mental health hold or sent to a community mental health facility. Back then, the diagnosis would be something along the lines of "insanity by way of nymphomania" (where "nymphomania" refers to a manic condition of desiring/having too much sex) or "insanity by way of suppressed menstruation" - women could literally laugh too much or express too much interest in sex and a "well-meaning" family member could bring them to a doctor to have them institutionalized.^(4) I mean seriously, look at the table on [reference #4](_URL_2_) on p. 141 - it's a study looking at women who were institutionalized in the late 1800s and all the reasons for being admitted - out of 567, 70 were admitted for "irritability towards the family," 17 were admitted for "masturbation" and 2 were admitted for "refusal to have sexual relations with spouse."
So anyway. Here's the thing. Moral deviance was increasingly being seen as, really, a form of crime. When the first women's prisons started opening up in the mid to late 1800s, women could be incarcerated for those reasons listed above as well.^(2) Now, I don't mean to imply that women were *commonly* incarcerated - even today, there are far fewer women's prisons than men's prisons. I also am not using the word "criminal" to mean someone violent or someone who steals things (although women could certainly be incarcerated if they did those things). In fact, many criminologists (including criminologists from almost a hundred years ago!^(3)) will argue that a "criminal" is just someone who violates a social norm. Today, one need only look as far as drug laws to see how we are currently moving to re-define "morality" in terms of drug use. So what was happening in the mid-1800s was women were being put in asylums for behavior that was outside of the norm and at some point, society collectively began to decide that behaving in this way was not just abnormal, but it was also actually a *crime* for which women could and should be punished. In [reference #2](_URL_1_), the authors write:
> we discovered that an acclaimed doctor who cared for the women and girls at the \[first women's prison, Mount Pleasant\] from 1873 to 1883 advocated female circumcision and removal of women’s ovaries to cure nymphomania and masturbation.
Now that I've given you a little bit of historical context for what women were dealing with and why they could be institutionalized and/or incarcerated at the time, I want to try to address your actual question.
> **What happened in a lunatic asylum during the 19Th century when a patient became pregnant?**
What you wrote implies that the patient became pregnant **while in** the asylum. If this is the case, well, to be honest, these events are not well-documented. Below is the best I could come up with by combining the historical context and a few sources.
If a women became pregnant while in an asylum, it would imply one of a few things: a) the woman was impregnated by a male staff member; b) the woman was impregnated by another patient; or c) the woman was impregnated by a visitor. Furthermore, there are really only a few different options for what she could do with it -- abortions were not really safe or 100% effective at the time, and having an abortion could be described as "morally ambiguous" at best (that's a story for another time). Furthermore, carrying to term may or may not be an option because women were subject to all kinds of horrific abuses while they were institutionalized (which could lead to unintentional miscarriages or the death of the woman). You can read "[Ten Days in a Madhouse](_URL_0_)" for the account of a journalist who pretended to be insane so she could be institutionalized - the "quality of life" in some of those asylums was horrific. If you've ever seen *American Horror Story,* this is where that one season got its inspiration (except that one particular season doesn't make asylums look quite as bad as they were).
In prisons, women could actually be punished for becoming pregnant because it implied that they were engaging in sexual relations when they shouldn't have been (at that point in history, "rape" wasn't really something to be considered). In Auburn Prison (NY, 1825), women were simply housed in a segregated unit of the men's prison. A woman got pregnant while in the men's prison (and the implication from some documents is that it was due to sexual assault by an inmate), she received lashings for it, and some scholars argue that this is one of the main reasons why women-only prisons were first opened (so that women could be totally separated from men so as not to tempt the poor men into inappropriate sexual relations).^(5) Other accounts say that a woman who was raped at a separate institution died in childbirth, leading to the first women's prison being opened. This implies that she did not receive adequate care for her pregnancy, or perhaps that the guards did not even realize she was pregnant (or did not want to admit that she was pregnant).
The long story short is, if a woman became pregnant in an asylum, she would *probably* "try" to carry to term, but she wouldn't receive adequate care and/or she would be blatantly abused. Thus, either she or the fetus/child (or both) would die. If it was a prison rather than an asylum, she would likely be punished, but would still not receive adequate care and she or the fetus/child would die. I'll close with a narrative from a dissertation^(6) I found while researching your question:
> After her release from the asylum, Lathrop continued to fight for her cause in exposing the abuses in asylums, especially in Utica where she spent two years of her life. \[...\] Lathrop asserted that she was drugged and sexually abused by male attendants. She said, "I was at the mercy of unscrupulous and vicious men, with no one to appeal to for help or redress, with no escape, no refuge, powerless to protect myself." She was not the only one who knew what went on with the attendants. \[...\] Further, she stated, "I was also cognizant of the fact that a patient who had been confined in the asylum for about two years had given birth to a child \[while in the asylum\]." That this woman had a child was something unhidden from others, "this fact was generally known to the attendants and patients alike in the asylum." The child did not live and a patient saw the dead body as it was taken away. \[...\] Lathrop declared, "I believe that few patients escape the wanton lust of the physicians."
\---
**References formatted half-assedly**
1 Pouba, Katherine and Tianen, Ashley (2006). Lunacy in the 19th century: Women's admission to asylums in the United States of America.
2 [_URL_1_](_URL_1_)
3 Fuller, Richard (1942). Morals and the criminal law.
4 Warsh (1988). The first Mrs. Rochester: Wrongful confinement, social redundancy, and commitment to the private asylum, 1883-1923.
5 Rafter, Nicole (2009). Partial Justice: Women, Prisons, and Social Control. Chapter 1: "Much and Unfortunately Neglected": Women in Early and Mid-Nineteenth Century Prisons.
6 Walter (2011). Insanity, rhetoric, and women: Nineteenth-century women's asylum narratives. | [
"Throughout the colonial period, \"isolation of the insane with proper justification was then thought necessary and custodial care was the mainstay of the day\". Treatments were administered under the belief that mental illness was caused by \"a foreign body that had to be expelled from the body\". Hence, all lunat... |
what is it exactly that sunlight "quality" (brightness, intensity, clearness, etc) cannot be completely/very closely replicated by man-made lightbulbs? | It's mainly a problem with brightness. At the brightest, sunlight provides 1050 Watts per square meter of area. That's about the power of a regular microwave for just for a square meter! If you plug two microwaves into the same circuit and turn them on, you'll most likely blow the breaker. It would take a great amount of energy just to approximate sunlight especially if you want to illuminate a large room.
You also have to take into account that a lightbulb cannot completely convert energy into light so the overall power draw is going to be higher than the light energy coming out of the bulb. | [
"Although inefficient, incandescent light bulbs have an advantage in applications where accurate color reproduction is important, since the continuous blackbody spectrum emitted from an incandescent light-bulb filament yields near-perfect color rendition, with a color rendering index of 100 (the best possible). Whi... |
Why don't wireless phone chargers mess up the rest of the phone's circuitry? | There is a standard that regulates the amount of power that inductive chargers can transfer for purposes of charging a mobile device: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)
In terms of circuitry there are also techniques such as reducing the area of the loop that involves the semiconductors to diminish the potential induction in unwanted regions of the circuit.
Also important to note is that pretty much only the semiconductors hate induced currents and it's the resulting voltages that are potentially able to damage the semiconductor.
The Qi standard limits the maximum transferred power to 5 Watts for wireless mobile phone charging devices. This is to comply with the sensitive electronics inside. There are also more technicalities with this standard that further help protect the circuits on both ends but I think the most important part is the limitation of the output power.
English is my 2nd language so please excuse any mistakes. | [
"Most mobile phone chargers are not really chargers, only power adapters that provide a power source for the charging circuitry which is almost always contained within the mobile phone. Older ones are notoriously diverse, having a wide variety of DC connector-styles and voltages, most of which are not compatible wi... |
How common were wild lions in ancient Greece? | I don't know much about the history of lions on the European continent. I know lions went extinct in Ancient Greece roughly around 100 BC. They had been becoming increasingly rare in the centuries prior to that. But it's not an area I have any expertise in.
However, I can say a little bit about discussions of lions in Ancient Greek literature.
Herodotus writes that lions were very common in the Balkans around the time of the Persian invasion under Xerxes. He claims that the lions would come down at night and attack the camels carrying the Persian supplies. But they wouldn't touch anything else. Xerxes didn't know what to do about this because he wasn't familiar with lions.
As with much of Herodotus huge grain of salt with that (although I adore him) and obviously it's highly, highly unlikely that lions just kept attacking Xerxes and nothing else (although not completely impossible if the train was disturbing them, I suppose). But it suggests that Herodotus had reason to believe lions were fairly common north of Greece around the time of the invasion, which was roughly 480 BC. (This is in Herodotus Book 7).
Aristotle discusses lions in his History of Animals. It's not necessarily exclusive to Greek lions. He discusses animals from all over the world.
Lions are a common theme in Greek art, literature, and mythology. | [
"Today, lions are not part of the Greek fauna. The Asiatic lion subspecies formerly ranged in southeastern Europe. According to Herodotus, lion populations were extant in Ancient Greece. George Schaller asserts that they may have been present in the area until circa. 100 BC.\n",
"Lions were present in the Greek p... |
[META] Do any users here have historical blogs or podcasts that they update regularly? | If you check the [user profiles](_URL_0_) page, some people link to their blogs. | [
"Audiences are interested in current events. They include other professionals, such as journalists and campaign managers and politicians, who can use the podcast's content as source material for future articles that they might write or produce. Some podcasts focus on a specific region; there are podcasts which focu... |
What was the extent of the Soviets efforts to relocate its industry away from the onslaught on the eastern front and how much of a factor did this play in the outcome? | Not super knowledgeable in this but from a soviet history class we read a book by John Scott, Behind the Urals, whom went to the Soviet Union for work during the Great Depression. They were building a new industrial city called Magnitogorsk. So in short, industry had already started moving before the war itself to the interior of the country. Later on though I know that when fleeing from the western front the soviets basically sabotaged what they could like pulling up rail lines, burning farms, destroying factory equipment, etc. so the enemy would not get to use it against them. To what extent industry was moved in not sure; I just know that it was moving beforehand.
| [
"During the invasion of the Soviet Union in the early months of the war, rapid German advances almost captured the cities of Moscow and Leningrad. The bulk of Soviet industry which could not be evacuated was either destroyed or lost due to German occupation. Agricultural production was interrupted, with grain crops... |
I just read that, when they tested the atomic bomb, there was a belief it might light the atmosphere on fire. If they believed this, why did they still test it? | There wasn't much of a belief that this could happen, because it had been considered and refuted by the scientists involved in the development of the first nuclear weapons. [In a 1991 interview with renowned physicist Hans Bethe](_URL_1_) about this very question, he credits Edward Teller as the physicist who first brought up the concern at a 1942 conference in Berkeley.
> Teller said, "Well, how about the air? There's nitrogen in the air, and you can have a nuclear reaction in which two nitrogen nuclei collide and become oxygen plus carbon, and in this process you set free a lot of energy. Couldn't that happen?" And that caused great excitement...
> Teller at Los Alamos put a very good calculator on this problem, [Emil] Konopinski, who was an expert on weak interactors, and Konopinski together with [inaudible] showed that it was incredibly impossible to set the hydrogen, to set the atmosphere on fire. They wrote one or two very good papers on it, and that put the question really at rest. They showed in great detail why it is impossible. But, of course, it spooked [Compton].
Bethe seems to place blame for the popularization of this idea to Arthur Compton, a colleague of his when working on the Manhattan Project. The addendum to the above article contains links to ["The Ultimate Catastrophe"](_URL_2_), a 1975 editorial by H.C. Dudley in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists warning of the possibility, as well as a [rebuttal by Bethe published some months later.](_URL_3_) "The Ultimate Catastrophe" references [this 1959 interview](_URL_0_) of Arthur Compton on the matter. In his 1956 *Atomic Quest: A Personal Narrative*, he provides his own detailed perspective, but ultimately concedes that the fears had been laid to rest.
> These questions could not be passed over lightly. Was there really any chance that an atomic bomb would trigger the explosion of the nitrogen in the atmosphere or of hydrogen in the ocean? This would be the ultimate catastrophe...
> In due time, the calculations gave the firm result that while the nuclei of hydrogen and nitrogen are indeeed unstable, the conditions under which they can explode are far removed from anything that can be brought about by atomic explosions. (p. 127)
In *Memoirs: A Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics*, Teller refers to the 1942 conference where the prospect of runaway atmospheric fusion was dismissed as a statistical impossibility. Enrico Fermi brought the subject up again in 1945 on the eve of the famous Trinity test, the first detonation of an nuclear weapon. Teller, among other scientists, once again performed the calculations necessary to show that such a catastrophe could not occur.
> But when we had completed our proof, Fermi insisted that we go one step further. All we had proved, he pointed out, was that such an explosion could not occur according to known laws of physics. But what presently undiscovered phenomena might exist that, under the novel conditions of extreme heat, might magnify the consequences and lead to an explosion? (p. 210)
Teller admitted that this question occupied his mind in the weeks leading up to the test, but it was at this point more of a curiosity than a genuine concern. | [
"Time magazine also took note on November 19, in a somewhat satirical article titled \"Great Balls of Fire.\" In the article, they lightheartedly speculated that the green fireballs were connected to the atomic testing.\n",
"The Discovery Channel series \"MythBusters\" explored the incendiary paint hypothesis and... |
I heard someone make the claim that in WW2 the allies were complicit in the Holocaust because "They could've bombed the death camps but chose not to." How much of this is grounded in reality and how much is plain revisionism? | Until a historian can Write an answer more specific to your question you may be interested to read the excellent answers to a previous post [Why didn't the allies bomb the railway tracks leading to the Concentration/Extermination Camps in WWII?](_URL_0_) | [
"Other researchers have challenged such criticism. Some have argued that the idea that the Allies took no action is a myth—that the Allies accepted as many German Jewish immigrants as the Nazis would allow—and that theoretical military action by the Allies, such as bombing the Auschwitz concentration camp, would ha... |
Why didn't they use Guillotines for amputations during the Civil War? | Amputation wasn't just a matter of cutting a limb off. There was a surgical procedure to be followed.
If you used a guillotine to remove a limb you've simply sliced open a whole new bunch of blood vessels with a very clean cut. The patient would either die of blood loss, or take months and months to grow skin over the stump.
The procedure for amputations that I've seen from surgical diagrams was as follows:
1) the muscle and tissue at the amputation point was cut down to the bone, leaving a larger area of flesh on one side of the cut. Throughout this blood vessels would be tied off or cauterised to reduce blood loss.
2) The now detached muscle tissue was slid up the bone and the bone sawed through at a higher point than you'd expect. Otherwise the end would keep ripping through the healing skin or be much more open to the environment and infection.
3) the tissue was allowed to slide back down the bone, the extra flap of flesh folded over the stump and sewn up.
Also there's the fact that a guillotine would be a lot harder to transport with an army than a bag of knives and saws, and not as easy to make as you described. You'd need a LARGE specially made blade to fall from a great height on well made tracks. A sword would not have the mass to fall through an arm or leg.
EDIT: Added a source: [Amputation procedures from civil war](_URL_0_)
Note the flaps of muscle and skin to be folded over the stumps. | [
"During the American Civil War, chloroform was used during surgery to reduce pain and allow more time for operations. Due in part to the lack of sterile technique in hospitals, infection was the leading cause of death for wounded soldiers.\n",
"During the American Civil War (1861–1865) the bayonet was found to be... |
How much did Albert Speer really have to do with the increase of munition production in wartime Germany? | Quite a bit. Before and during the early years of the war, the German armaments industry was very fragmented and uncoordinated. The military had a great deal of control over it, but they were not suited for it. As was so typical of Nazi Germany, there were also a number of other factions playing politics and vying for control. There was also a tradition of carefully craft built weapons, which the military liked, ignoring the virtues of true mass production and sheer quantity. German weapons had beautiful craftsmanship, but they weren't producing anywhere as many as they could.
Hitler put Speer in charge of armaments production in 1942, and gave him an unusual amount of power. Some claim that Hitler liked the fragmented nature of power in Nazi Germany, and the infighting, because it was hard to organize against his power. Others say it was just bad management. Nevertheless in Speer's case he was given power to control pretty much the whole industry, and step on toes as needed. The effect was dramatic. War production continued to increase almost until the end of the war, despite things like strategic bombing. Mass production techniques were adopted, petty fiefdoms destroyed, and a centralized approach to planning instituted. Before anyone says that "central planning doesn't work", remember that US war production was also centrally planned, under the auspices of the War Production Board. I'm not taking a position on central planning under other circumstances, but for the duration it worked quite well in a number of countries.
In the US companies were told more what to do than how to do it, and there was quite a bit of innovation. This differs from what people may think of as central planning. Interestingly, and contrary to stereotype, that approach was also used in the USSR, whose ability to produce materiel under the worst of circumstances was amazing. When Speer adopted it it worked equally well, so it seems like a winning formula.
Source: Richard Overy, "Why the Allies Won".
| [
"In 1942, after the death of Armaments Minister Fritz Todt, Hitler appointed Albert Speer as his replacement. Wartime rationing of consumer goods led to an increase in personal savings, funds which were in turn lent to the government to support the war effort. By 1944, the war was consuming 75 percent of Germany's ... |
Was belief in extra-terrestrial life common in any society before the discovery of extra-solar planets? | The earliest (of those later confirmed) exoplanet discoveries [was in 1988.](_URL_0_) Before that, it was all theorization (in the "hypothetical" sense)--but that didn't stop science-fiction writing and film from being broadly popular in various societies around the world, going back at least to the 19th century (in Europe). I don't know if Giordano Bruno was the first modern figure (in the 1580s) to suggest that stars were other suns and might have other planets, but leaving aside early ideas of cosmic pluralism in the classical world, Johannes Kepler might be the first to float a general idea of extraterrestrial life in a particular location (the moon, in *Somnium* of 1634). But the real popularization in the north Atlantic complex (if we can use that term) is really 19th century. But travel to the stars and an understanding of the scale of distance involved is more recent of a concept still, which awaited studies of stellar parallax in the late part of that century. I am not however sure when the first stories of "life around other stars" in a sci-fi sense became popular.
To give you an idea of just how popular it was before anyone had confirmed even one exoplanet, look at Carl Sagan's *Cosmos* series--and its wide appeal--not to mention more fantastic tales like the original *Star Wars* trilogy. | [
"In a prologue, the Journalist notes that in the late 19th century few people had even considered the possible existence of extraterrestrial life, and yet, planet Earth had in fact long been enviously observed by advanced beings.\n",
"The idea that planets beyond Earth might host life is an ancient one, though hi... |
Do those "sunrise" alarm clocks, which wake you up by imitating the light of the rising sun, really work? | Anecdotal evidence: I suffer from depression in the winter, and those 10,000 Lux SAD lamps really help. So I imagine light during waking is similarly powerful. But I haven't tried one. | [
"An alarm clock is a clock that is designed to alert an individual or group of individuals at specified time. The primary function of these clocks is to awaken people from their night's sleep or short naps; they are sometimes used for other reminders as well. Most use sound; some use light or vibration. Some have s... |
What were the proportions of different ethnicities, languages, and colors among the population of the Roman Empire? | Historical demographics are extremely tricky when you're looking outside the modern era, since detailed records on language, religion, population, and the like weren't kept as thoroughly as they are in modern nation-states.
I will point out that there was a massive part of the empire (the majority of the eastern region) that spoke Greek alongside the Latin West, which is why Biblical Roman subjects like the Apostles and Paul wrote in Greek. When the empire split, the Eastern part with its capital in Constantinople continued to be a Greek-speaking entity.
As for ethnicity, the areas of Western Europe that were conquered by the Romans (such as Gaul and Britannia) were primarily inhabited by people of Celtic stock, which later intermingled with Latin settlers. It's important to remember that the Germanic peoples didn't come onto the scene in large numbers until the empire was already in decline, so the people in Roman Britainnia were not 'English', nor were the people in Roman Gallia really 'French' (These groups are derived from the Angles and the Franks, respectively, which were Germanic peoples that later conquered these areas).
Source: My Roman History professor | [
"Known as the three \"Romulean tribes\", these first tribes have often been supposed to represent the major ethnic groups of early Rome: the Ramnes representing Rome's Latin population; the Tities representing the Sabines; and the Luceres probably representing the Etruscans. Rome lay on the Tiber, the traditional b... |
If I stood in front of an infinitely wide mirror that started accelerating sideways, what would happen to my reflection as the mirror approached the speed of light? | Nothing. From the POV of the mirror, light always travels at the speed of light, even though the mirror is moving sideways relative to you. It is still a mirror and will behave the same way. | [
"BULLET::::- The excited portion of a reflecting mirror acts as a new source of light and the reflected light has the same velocity \"c\" with respect to the mirror as has original light with respect to its source. (Proposed by Richard Chase Tolman in 1910, although he was a supporter of special relativity).\n",
... |
Why didn't Romans take a ship to the far east? | They did at least reach southeast India as early as in the 1st century, as is proven by coins and pottery and some buildings (amphi-theatre). _URL_0_ Pepper was imported form south India since this time and is found in excavations in roman castles in Europe. Some nice coin pictures are at the wiki page: _URL_1_ | [
"Rather than sail direct from Phintias for North Africa, the Romans sailed west, intending to cross the Strait of Sicily at its narrowest point. This would minimise the time the fleet spent in the open sea; ships of the time, especially the less seaworthy galleys, kept in sight of land whenever possible. The Cartha... |
how come rainforests are so lush if tropical soils are generally low in nutrients? | Pretty much any nutrients that that become available are immediately used up. The trees also have partnerships with fungi that live in the soil and on their roots which help to break down dead plant matter, etc. The fungi hand all the nutrients they manage to produce over to the trees, and the trees give them some sugar and protection in return. | [
"Soil types are highly variable in the tropics and are the result of a combination of several variables such as climate, vegetation, topographic position, parent material, and soil age. Most tropical soils are characterized by significant leaching and poor nutrients, however there are some areas that contain fertil... |
how long can a phone charger be before it affects the amount of time it would normally take to fully charge your phone? | As long as the specification allows. In the case of USB 3, this is 3.0 meters or 9.8 feet. You can extend past that, but charging speed will decay as the line loses some power over distance. | [
"If a battery has been completely discharged (e.g. the car lights were left on overnight) and next is given a fast charge for only a few minutes, then during the short charging time it develops only a charge near the interface. The battery voltage may rise to be close to the charger voltage so that the charging cur... |
is it possible that dinosaurs could exist on another planet like earth | Technically possible but extremely unlikely that another planet would have nearly the same conditions and evolutionary path that would lead to dinosaurs existing. Actually, it's so unlikely that it is almost impossible. | [
"In the McNinja universe dinosaurs are not extinct, but still alive and thriving on a remote island owned by Rupert Murdoch and a deserted, Pacific island housing the ruins of an old Amerindian civilization. Also, when Earth was hit by the meteor that killed off most of the original dinosaur population, some of the... |
how do the servers know a game is pirated, like if you had a pirated copy of c.o.d what happen s to stop you playing online? | Old games used to just want to connect so servers would let them play.
Now a days with faster connection, the first message your game sends to the server is the exact version of the game and the serial number of the copy and a signature of all the parts of the computer(processor, Ram, graphics card, sound card ect) and the IP address exact version of the Operating server ect.
The server then looks up the serial number of the key with its database to realise that it has already been given to an other completely different computer with a different IP and not the same patch of the OS.
It now safe to say it is a copy.
Eli5: you call from a number. It is linked to your voice, speech pattern, the noise in the back and the caller ID.
Same day, somebody with a different voice on a different caller ID, and a thick different accent call the same number pretending to be you. The person at the other end now knows it is not you. | [
"Another method consists of modding the BIOS to insert the SLP 2.1 table, which can be used to replace blacklisted keys, or to add the SLP table to motherboards that do not have it (such as Gigabyte). Some brand-name computers such as Dell, already have the SLP table in their BIOS, which means that using software r... |
blood type inheritance | ###The long answer
There are four different blood types: A, B, AB, and O. These are called "phenotypes". It's the traits that are displayed, genetically. However, they are represented as "genotypes", the actual genetic makeup. For example, the blood genotype AA means type A blood. But the genotype AO is also type A blood. Here's a quick list of the different types of genotypes and their corresponding phenotypes:
| Genotype | Phenotype
|:-----------:|:------------:|:------------:|
| AA | A
| AO | A
| BB | B
| BO | B
| AB | AB
| OO | O
^(Reminder: **Genotype**: The actual genetic makeup; **Phenotype**: The traits exhibited by this makeup)
As we can see, there's three possibilities (A, B, and O), which are found in groups of two (one from the mother, one from the father) that make up six different combinations (order doesn't matter). However, A and B are considered *dominant* over O. So if either type A or type B appears with type O, the O is ignored. Even further, type A and B are considered *codominant* over each other, meaning if they appear together, they have their own traits (their own phenotype).
Now, that's the different blood types. In the short, reproduction will give one of the types from each parent. So if the parents are AA and BB respectively, the child is going to have a combination of A and B (in fact, in that case, the only possibility is type AB). We can find out the possible blood types of offspring by arranging the parents' genotypes in a square which we call a *Punnet square*:
| | A | A |
|:-----------:|:------------:|:------------:|
| **B** | |
| **B** | |
As you see, we have arranged this simple 3x3 box with the parent's genotypes (AA and BB). This works like a multiplication table. We can get the type at the column and row where they intersect, allowing us to fill the table out like this:
| | A | A |
|:-----------:|:------------:|:------------:|
| **B** | AB | AB
| **B** | AB | AB
That's a simple example. In the Macdonald case, the father was type B (genotype of either BB or BO), the mother was type A (genotype of either AA or AO), the one daughter was type AB (genotype of AB) and the other daughter was type O (genotype of OO).
A bit of mental work tells us that in order for one daughter to have type O blood, the mother and father both had to have some type O. This means the mother and father must be BO and AO respectively. We can put this into a Punnet square:
| | A | O |
|:-----------:|:------------:|:------------:|
| **B** | AB | BO
| **O** | AO | OO
As we can see here, the offspring of a type AO and type BO person could have four different blood types! They could be either AB, B, A, or O. That explains both of the daughters.
###Short answer
The blood types of a person depends on their parents. Blood types can have a "recessive gene", which is present, but doesn't "do" anything. Combining two recessive genes (via the Baby Machine^(tm)) can make that recessive trait a "dominant trait" (meaning that it is shown). In this case, the parents had a combination of blood types that allowed their offspring to have any of the four different blood types.
###Addendum
Some of the biology in this post has been simplified. Also noteworthy that there's another major factor in blood types: Rh positive and negative. However, that's not important in this particular question. In the short, Rh positive means there's a specific type of chemical in the blood, while negative does not have that chemical. The vast majority of people are Rh positive. An Rh negative mother who has an Rh positive baby is a medical risk, as mother's blood will consider the infant's to be "foreign" and attacks the baby. This is only a problem for the second birth on, and there's a type of medicine that prevents this. | [
"In Mendelian inheritance, genes have only two alleles, such as \"a\" and \"A\". In nature, such genes exist in several different forms and are therefore said to have multiple alleles. A gene with more than two alleles is said to have multiple alleles. An individual, of course, usually has only two copies of each g... |
why do the chinese who lost family in mh370 have strong distrust of the malaysian government? | It's also possible (though I have no direct evidence to support this statement) that the Chinese government is feeding it's people anti-Malaysia propaganda. | [
"On 12 December 2012, Perkasa chief Datuk Ibrahim Ali commented that of late the Malaysian Chinese have been playing up political sentiments and accused the country's second-largest ethnic group of forgotten how living in Malaysia is \"like heaven\". He also commented that the Chinese community will become a nation... |
When and why did 'Once upon a time...' become the go-to opening phrase for a story? | The use this sort of phrase is widespread in Europe - and elsewhere - for the way to begin a folktale, the traditional "novel" of the folk. [This wiki page](_URL_0_) is useful in the way it provides numerous common introductions for various cultures, most of which can be boiled down, in English, to "Once upon a time..." It is interesting as well to note that the page indicates that some sort of this has been around since the 14th century in English, but I am not prepared to evaluate this assertion. The page is wrong when it links this to literature for children. That is simply not the case, and it is a serious error in the page.
The point of introducing a folktale in this way was to let the audience to know that the story that follows was not to believed, and that it took place in some remote fantastic time. This was in direct contrast with legends, which were told in an immediate fashion to be believed: "My cousin in the next valley saw a ghost..." And legends were short while folktales were long.
The following is from an Introduction to Folklore that I am assembling and hope to have online in 2014. This may be helpful (and ask if you have additional questions):
European folklorists, following the lead of the folk themselves, have long recognized two forms of oral tradition, Sagen and Märchen, legends and folktales. While there are many other forms of oral tradition, legends and folktales stand in opposition to one another, yet share a great deal.
Legends – or Sagen as the profession often prefers – are short, single-episodic stories told chiefly in the daytime, and the teller intended the listener to believe the story. Sagen often have horrible ending, meant to underscore the story’s important message. A large number of them are, after all, typically meant to be instructive, to serve as warnings in some way. Legends are not necessarily long lived. Their point is to reinforce and prove the legitimacy of a particular belief. Nonetheless, some Sagen take on a traditional character and migrate over considerable spans of time and space.
Folktales – or Märchen. Again using the German, technical term – are longer stories with more than one episode. They are restricted, in theory at least, to evening presentation. A folktale is not to be believed, taking place in a fantastic setting. A folktale also requires a happy ending, the cliché of “happily ever after.” Any given folktale can be told with considerable variation, but they are traditional in basic form, and European folklorists have spent decades tracing the history and distribution of these stories.
A word here about the term “fairytale” is appropriate. At the end of the eighteenth century, various writers, most prominently the Grimm brothers, began publishing children’s stories based on Märchen. These collections became extremely popular, particularly among the urban and increasingly literate emerging middle class as it found itself removed from the peasant soil that served as home to the stories. Fairytales often cause misunderstandings. In a culture that knows more about fairytales than Märchen, people assume that the folktale was intended for children. This is certainly not the case since the stories were often violent or sexual in ways thought inappropriate for children. Indeed, the telling of Märchen was usually delayed until the children had gone to bed. While fairytales provide the modern reader with the easiest access to the many stories that were once told internationally, one should always realize that they are a step removed from the primary inspiration. The original stories and their content provided serious entertainment for adults.
The evolution of fairytales had a profound effect on the subject of fairies, elves, and trolls. Because fairytales became the literary domain of children, many people – including writers and publishers – assumed that the same was true of the supernatural beings. In the original context of these supernatural entities, nothing could be further from the truth. These were not cute diminutive creatures whose sole purpose was to delight children. They were powerful, dangerous, and capable of great harm. The European peasantry feared and respected them, and their stories underscore this, conveying in uncompromising terms the code of ethics and behavior that one must employ to survive an encounter with that dangerous world of magic.
| [
"The phrase entered popular culture in the 1970s, often describing ordinary or mundane events with an implication that the said events were being overly sensationalized, or as a short-hand expression akin to \"tell you later.\"\n",
"\"Once upon a time\" is a stock phrase used to introduce a narrative of past even... |
why can't someone take a glass of coca cola in a lab and learn the secret recipe? | The ingredients and quantities are far less important to cooking times and ingredient order. The cooking process results in chemical reactions fundamentally altering the structure of the mixture (compound I forget my chemical terminology).
TLDR: its impossible to know how long X and Y were heated before Z was added which contributes significantly to taste | [
"Curiosity Cola is made using the following ingredients: carbonated water, fermented ginger root extract (water, glucose syrup, ginger root, pear juice concentrate, yeast), sugar, flavourings, colour: caramel (E150d), phosphoric acid (E338), caffeine\n",
"BULLET::::- Merchandise 7X, the \"secret ingredient\" or \... |
why do mlm/pyramid schemes inspire such cult like behavior | Once people have invested in the idea they don't want to admit the loss, so they deny it. | [
"BULLET::::- Pyramid schemes – Work by recruiting “members” to invest into a scheme. Most of the money is made by recruiting new members and a prime characteristic of the scam is the product is of little value. The people at the bottom of the pyramid pay the people at the top. Inevitably they will run out of new re... |
why will there be a 5-10 year appeal process before the boston bomber is executed? don't we already have complete evidence of his guilt? | In order to have a fair justice system, we need to allow for appeals. And, as much as some people are kinda horrible, we need to allow appeals for them too because the minute we start denying legals such as appeals and presumption of innocence to even one person, we open up the possibility of denying them to other, potentially actually innocent. | [
"Immediately after entering the plea, however, Olson told reporters that she was innocent and that she had decided to take a plea bargain due to the climate after the September 11 attacks, in which she felt an accused bomber could not receive a fair trial from a jury. \"It became clear to me that the incident would... |
if things like nuts and seeds are not properly digested by our bodies, then how do we benefit from their nutrition? | Nuts and seeds are made of more than one material. While you might not be able to digest the fiber, you can digest the protein, fat, etc. | [
"Nuts are an important source of nutrients for both humans and wildlife. Because nuts generally have a high oil content, they are a highly prized food and energy source. A large number of seeds are edible by humans and used in cooking, eaten raw, sprouted, or roasted as a snack food, or pressed for oil that is used... |
What was, historically, the highest tax ever placed on the American people, how and why was it put in place, and what effects did it have on the economy? | During the Truman and Eisenhower Administration the top income tax rate was absurdly high. This was to pay off the huge debt run up by World War II. Yet, the income tax was far more progressive in those days, meaning there were a lot more tax brackets. People who earned less than $ 200,000 a year payed a lower rate, and there were twenty-four brackets below that. So a union worker who earned $10,000 a year paid a much lower tax rate, of 20%. Prices of everything were much lower in the fifties. You could buy a brand new three bedroom house for $15,000 and a new Chevy or Ford for less than $2,000. Gasoline was roughly 25 cents a gallon. Yet, the top tax rate was extremely high, and if you ever watch old movies or TV shows from the fifties, you hear people carping and moaning about it all the time. | [
"The history of taxation in the United States begins with the colonial protest against British taxation policy in the 1760s, leading to the American Revolution. The independent nation collected taxes on imports (\"tariffs\"), whiskey, and (for a while) on glass windows. States and localities collected poll taxes on... |
what specifics are there when war is declared? is there a start date? is there a specific region that is designate as warzone, and are there boundaries? i know modern warfare is a little more complex than this. | It has always been quite nebulous and needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
As a modern example, the Iran-Iraq War started with a downgrade of diplomatic relations and persecution/deportation of civilians of the opposing country. This was followed by small skirmishes in disputed territory, then a full-scale invasion. Both countries started mobilizing their armies after the diplomatic breakdown, but the gap between that and the Iraqi invasion was about 6 months from March-September 1980. If you only count full invasion as "war", then it started on 22 September, 1980.
A modern counterexample is the US invading Panama in 1989, which despite including a proper invasion isn't usually considered a "war". The US deposed the leader and dissolved the country's military, installing an opposition leader. We have a clear date of invasion, but it's unclear if this actually qualifies as a war.
Sometimes a government will declare war, which makes things a little more tidy, but doing so can have legal consequences in a country. The US hasn't officially declared war since WW2, despite various invasions of other countries over the years that we still commonly recognize as wars (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again). If you are a defending country, a declaration of war isn't necessarily that meaningful in the face of defending yourself.
As for what counts as a "warzone", that's a little unclear as well. Generally, a warzone is "wherever the killing is happening". When the US invaded Afghanistan, the mainland US was definitely not a warzone, but all of Afghanistan was considered a warzone. From a civilian perspective, the important factor is how safe your area is. A warzone is any area where you have a significant likely hood of getting killed by military action, with the meaning of "significant" really being important to the individual. For a military, a Warzone is anywhere where they can conduct operations with an actively hostile enemy. Again, all of this varies case-by-case.
A given government might put out travel advisories describing the safety of traveling to particular areas. That government may designate an area unsafe due to war or violence, essentially defining a "warzone", but this definition is specific to the safety of the civilians of that country. | [
"Warzone takes place in a fictional dieselpunk future in which a space faring humanity has explored beyond Pluto and has uncovered artifacts which unleashed an evil entity known as the 'Dark Soul' and a magic force known as 'Dark Symmetry'. This is a force which corrupts both man and complex machines (chips and bey... |
Do we know of the first example of someone writing purposefully for future historians? | Sorry, we don't allow ["example seeking" questions](_URL_0_). It's not that your question was bad; it's that these kinds of questions tend to produce threads that are collections of disjointed, partial, inadequate responses. If you have a question about a specific historical event, period, or person, feel free to rewrite your question and submit it again. If you don't want to rewrite it, you might try submitting it to /r/history, /r/askhistory, or /r/tellmeafact.
For further explanation of the rule, feel free to consult [this META thread](_URL_1_). | [
"He began by publishing numerous essays on his work in the drafting stage, limited to specific subjects, but his major work is undoubtedly the \"Dictionnaire topographique du département de l'Aude\" published in 1912, providing details on all the cantons and villages of the department, from archival works now missi... |
What were the defenses of the English Channel like during WWII? | My favorite Channel defense was the tiny [Romney Hythe & Dymchurch light railway coastal armored defense train](_URL_0_). The efficacy of a 15 inch gauge armored train is *highly* questionable. To me, though, it epitomizes the idea of 'British pluck.' If it could be used to resist the Germans, it was bloody well going to be employed to resist the Germans.
I can't speak to the ground defenses past the employment of this train. The British Army was in the process of rebuilding their force after Dunkirk, where they lost a good deal of equipment. However, the idea of resourcefulness in defense extended to air defense. Civilians helped with spotting duties, fire brigades, and rounding up downed German pilots. This was in addition to the radar net, military spotters, military units dedicated to listening for German planes with specialized equipment, the airfields with their air crews and ground crews, and anti-aircraft artillery units. Further, the Royal Navy was fully up to speed and ready to respond.
In my opinion, given the RAF's survival and the continued existence of the Royal Navy, even the tiny armored train mentioned above was more than sufficient to guard the Channel. Without knocking out the RAF and neutralizing the Royal Navy, any landing would have been extremely ill conceived. | [
"Allied Command Channel was established in 1952 to defend the sea areas, including allied shipping, around the English Channel. In case of war with the Warsaw Pact American reinforcements, crucial to defeat a Soviet advance towards the Rhine, would have passed through the English Channel and disembarked mainly in t... |
Would a person on the moon see the Earth in different phases, i.e. "full earth", "new earth", waxing and waning gibbous/crescent, etc.? | Yes -- if the person could see the Earth.
Because one side of the Moon always faces the Earth and the other points away, only those on the Earth-facing side of the Moon could even see the Earth, with the Earth sitting at basically one spot in the sky. (Note: Actually, the part of the Moon that faces the Earth at some point in its orbit is a little bit more than half and the Moon has a little wobble, but we'll ignore those for now.)
The phase of the Earth would be opposite the phase of the Moon. When those on Earth see a new Moon, those on the Moon would see a full Earth, and vice versa.
Take a look at [this web page](_URL_0_) for a fuller discussion, and this [one](_URL_1_), which contains some details and refinements. | [
"The Earth phase, Terra phase, Terrestrial phase or phase of the Earth, is the shape of the directly sunlit portion of the Earth as viewed from the Moon (or elsewhere extraterrestrially). From the Moon, the Earth phases gradually and cyclically change over the period of a synodic month (about 29.53 days), as the or... |
With an adjustment to inflation and modern equivalence, what is the comparison of British Pounds Sterling to today's US dollar in worth? | Hello! Hope you don't think I'm stalking you (I have you as a friend on Reddit).
Anyway, it all varies on the source you use for the rate of inflation, how it's calculated (there are different ways) etc.
Although no longer updated, the National Archives offers a tool to convert the value of the currency, both pre and post-decimal, to the value of the most modern equivalent (in this case, the pound as it was in 2005). _URL_2_
Going back 100 years to 1915 with that, it tells us that £100 had the value of £4,306.00 in the pound of 2005. That one old penny (1d) was worth the equivalent of £0.18 in 2005 currency, and one shilling (1/-) as the value of the 2005 pound, £2.15.
However, another source (_URL_0_) gives £100 in 1915 to be £10,064.21 in 2013 (you can tell the date from other drop-down boxes they give you for information), which as you can see, if quite different compared to HM Government's National Archives.
Although, even going to this source _URL_1_ You get told that 'In 2013, the relative value of £100 0s 0d from 1915 ranges from £6,992.00 to £53,820.00', which shows how difficult it can be to work out the value of the current. Although inflation may erode the actual value of the currency, what it is able to buy can vary greatly, which is the same as today to an extent. In 2007, £350 would've bought you a new Xbox 360, but obviously now, one can buy one for much less.
What the last site does though, is give you varied statements on the possible equivalent it can have, depending on how it's calculated.
I'm not an economist, so perhaps another person could comment further on this matter. | [
"The pound and the euro fluctuate in value against one another, although there may be correlation between movements in their respective exchange rates with other currencies such as the US dollar. Inflation concerns in the UK led the Bank of England to raise interest rates in late 2006 and 2007. This caused the poun... |
Latvia and the Soviet Union/Russian Revolution | in Orlando Figes' *A People's Tragedy* (a very good history of the revolution), the Latvian Rifle Brigades are referred to as 'the staunchest defenders' of the Bolsheviks in the Civil War, alongside the Kronstadt sailors and the Red Guards.
Some other quotes from Figes that might be interesting - 'The only real troops [the Bolsheviks] could rely on were the three brigades of Latvian Rifles, 35,000 strong, which stood alone between them and disaster in the first months of their regime.'
'... the bulk of the Latvian Rifles, the only crack troops in the capital on which the Bolsheviks could rely...'
'Thousands of Red Army reinforcements were dispatched to Tula, including the famous Latvian Rifle Division, stalwart supporters of the Bolshevik regime.'
| [
"The Soviet re-occupation of Latvia in 1944 refers to the military occupation of Latvia by the Soviet Union in 1944. During World War II Latvia was first occupied by the Soviet Union in June 1940 and then was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941–1944 after which it was re-occupied by the Soviet Union.\n",
"The Latvia... |
how did england politically justify keeping a chunk of ireland (northern ireland) after the war of independence, and why don't they come under more pressure from the international community to hand it back? | If it was up to England, Northern Ireland would probably have been handed back in the 70s or something. Generally speaking, most people in Great Britain (so including Wales and Scotland as well as England) would have preferred giving Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland. At least that was the case until recently, if you excluded don't knows and undecideds.
The majority of the population in Northern Ireland want to remain part of the UK. That's the fundamental reason why it's still part of the UK.
Giving it to Ireland despite the majority being against it would cause huge problems. It would probably immediately descend into civil war. There are a lot of people in Northern Ireland who will fight to keep it from being ruled by the rest of Ireland.
So most people now would prefer Northern Ireland stays in the UK to avoid that happening. Now that violence from republican groups has mostly died down, people don't want to upset the status quo too much and take the risk that unionist groups will start the violence up again.
edit - I guess you're also asking about the history too.
England conquered Ireland (the whole thing) a long time ago. They solidified their rule in the 16th Century.
After that there were a few waves of colonisers from England and Scotland, particularly in what is now Northern Ireland. This meant that by the time the war of independence happened, most people there were protestants who were descended from the settlers. So they did not want to be ruled by Irish Catholics.
As a sort of compromise, the UK agreed to partition Ireland into two, and each one would get to vote to remain in the UK (well technically rejoin it) or become part of the Irish Free State. But the borders were drawn in such a way that the outcome was inevitable, and Northern Ireland stayed in the UK.
Of course this was all really unfair. The native Irish were being ruled by a "Protestant elite" and their rights were limited, and they were generally oppressed. But stuff like that was pretty typical between the 16th and 19th Centuries. Britain and other European powers were doing it all over the world. Not that it excuses it, but it was how it was. By the time this sort of colonial behaviour was starting to be considered unacceptable, Northern Ireland already had a large number of people who were there because of it. | [
"A brief period of limited independence for Ireland came to an end following the Irish Rebellion of 1798, which occurred during the British war with revolutionary France. The British government's fear of an independent Ireland siding against them with the French resulted in the decision to unite the two countries. ... |
Nineteenth Century Folks: What am I looking at? _URL_0_ | [Working link to OP's image](_URL_0_) | [
"The museum gives visitors the chance to take a look back in time to the nineteenth century to see how the people in that century were transported. There are examples of the different types of vehicles there. For example, there are funeral wagons, carts, pleasure vehicles, carts a milkman would have used and a lot ... |
Since beta particles are electrons, can they be directly converted to electrical energy? | Yes, this is done through a [betavoltaic cell](_URL_0_). These used to be use to power pacemakers. Nuclear decay is also used to power space probes, except it's through excess heat rather than direct betaelectricity. | [
"These beta particles, having an average energy of 50 keV, undergo inelastic collisions with other carbon atoms, thus creating electron-hole pairs which then contribute to an electric current. This can be restated in terms of band theory by saying that due to the high energy of the beta particles, electrons in the ... |
Why do we find relatively pure elements such as gold in concentrations in the earth? Shouldn't the atoms be more or less randomly distributed as the earth formed? | The earth has a very large number of concentration processes active on it. In order to concentrate a mineral or element you need some kind of sorting process - whether through density, chemical reactivity, or other physical parameter.
You can imagine earth starting off as a big molten homogenous ball. Because it's hot and fluid, you get convection cells setting up - hotter material rises, comes to the surface, then sinks. This still happens in the outer core, and even in the mantle over geological timescales.
Now, what we also find is that dense minerals will sink through this body to find themselves at the bottom. Equally, lighter ones will rise. Once that density separation starts to happen, it then inhibits the convection (light things at the top will not sink through dense things below them). That leads to a differentiated earth; dense core, less dense mantle, less dense crust above that, then finally a gaseous atmosphere.
Because these things have been density fractionated, we find concentrations of particular elements (or at least minerals, which are stable chemical structures of several elements together) within each of those layers. For example, aluminium is exceedingly common in the crust, nitrogen is exceedingly common in the atmosphere, and nickel is very common in the core.
It's important to realise that this fractionation process is neither complete, nor 100% efficient, so we see a spread of elements across numerous sections. Hence we can find a lot of iron in the mantle and crust as well as the core.
So that gives us a broad vertical differentiation. How do we get more concentrated deposits?
These are usually a product of some kind of geological or sedimentological process (or both). Let's take as an example your gold seam.
Many gold seams are associated with igneous intrusions. What happens is that a hot body of magma is injected into a rock. That magma heats up the groundwater throughout that rock, and as it becomes hotter it starts dissolving some of the elements and minerals around it (including very very low trace levels of gold or other metals). That fluid then moves away from the magma body (essentially we've set up another convection cell), and new fluid is drawn in from cooler areas. As the hot fluid moves away, it cools down, and as it cools down it starts to deposit the things it has dissolved in it. Certain things will precipitate out at particular temperatures. That means we have another concentration mechanism - any gold, or copper, or tin dissolved, for example, will precipitate out at about the same point. These fluids will often be concentrated in fractures within the rock, hence you get veins of minerals.
Many other gold deposits are what are known as 'placer' deposits. These are where you find nuggets of gold within sands and gravels. The cause of these is much simpler. The aforementioned gold veins may well be tiny, and distributed over hundreds of square kilometers. As this area is eroded by rainwater, the unreactive gold is transported within the river. Because it is dense, it settles to the river bottom. Lighter particles are transported faster and farther. That means the gold nuggets and flakes concentrate in the river. So now we're using density sorting to concentrate the deposit further. If that river channel gets abandoned, we might find it preserved thousands r millions of years later, or - if it's still active, we can go and pan that river now.
Similar concentration processes apply for any mineral or element you care to name; the specifics will vary, but ultimately it's all about fractionation and differentiation through physical processes. | [
"Because they are so concentrated in the dense core, siderophile elements are known for their rarity in the Earth's crust. Most of them have always been known as precious metals because of this. Iridium is the rarest transition metal occurring within the Earth's crust, with an abundance by mass of less than one par... |
why do fruits and vegetables always feel cold, even when they should be room temperature? | How cold things feel to the touch is a reflection of their ability to conduct heat. Items which are better heat conductors will feel colder, whereas items that don't conduct heat well, will feel less cold.
Put a glass cup, a plastic cup, and a metal cup on your counter and let them all come to room temperature. The metal one will feel coldest, because it has high heat transfer. The plastic one will feel least cold, for the opposite reason.
Fruits have a high water content, and so generally conduct heat fairly well. Thus they feel cold. | [
"Fruits in this category are not hardy to extreme cold, as the preceding temperate fruits are, yet tolerate some frost and may have a modest chilling requirement. Notable among these are natives of the Mediterranean:\n",
"Directly following the heat treatment, vegetables/fruits are quickly chilled by cold water. ... |
Could you recommend a text which describes military uniforms during the British Raj? | Definitely:
*For the Indian Armies-*
W.Y. Carman's *Indian Army Uniforms* vols. 1 and 2 is, in my experience, the most comprehensive overview of the Indian Army (under both the Presidencies and the Raj) up till 1947. Volume 1 covers the Cavalry, whilst Volume II covers Infantry, Artillery and Engineers. Carman's volumes are well illustrated with contemporary images, and contain tables laying out diverse regimental distinctions amongst the arms of the Indian Army.
Less comprehensive, though still thorough, is Boris Mollo's *The Indian Army*. Like Carman's, it is well illustrated and contains a wealth of information. Mollo also includes backgrounds of campaigns involving the Indian Armies during the period.
There are a multiple Osprey Publishing titles on the subject, namely *MAA 453: Armies of the East India Company* by Stuart Reid, *MAA 92: Indian Infantry Regiments 1860-1914* by Michael Barthorpe, *MAA 91: Bengal Cavalry Regiments 1857-1914* by R.G. Harris and *ELI75: The Indian Army 1914-1947*. These are all fairly slim volumes, mostly noteworthy for their color reconstruction of military uniforms.
*For the British Army-*
Again, Carman has an excellent single volume work- *British Military Uniforms from Contemporary Pictures* which chronicles the development of dress in the various arms of service in the British army. However, his organization, dividing the book into the reigns of monarchs, is a little iffy.^1
The best overview of British Military costume is, in my opinion, Michael Barthorpe's *British Infantry Uniforms since 1660* and *British Cavalry Uniforms since 1660*. Barthorpe combines an excellent chronology of British uniforms, accompanied by numerous black and white reproductions of contemporary images and color reconstructions of military uniforms (by Pierre Turner).
Also by Barthorp is the excellent four-volume series *The British Army on Campaign: 1816-1901* which covers British uniforms worn across the globe, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the death of Queen Victoria. The four volumes are published by Osprey, and I consider them far and away the best of the *Men At Arms* titles. Color plates illustrated by Pierre Turner.
Barthorp also has a passage, included in I.T. Schick's *Battledress*, which covers British Uniforms worn in colonial campaigns of the 19th century. It reads like a truncated version of the material in *British Army on Campaign*. Furthermore, whilst including good B & W reproductions of period material, the uniform reconstructions are amateurish, and a far-cry from Turner's gorgeous art.
*For Both-*
The only volume I know of which gives a chronological history of British and Colonial uniforms is R.M. Barnes' *Military Uniforms of Britain and the Empire*. I have not read Barnes' work- So I cannot speak for the quality. However- He is cited in many of the above volumes.
Additionally, John Mollo's *Military Fashion* contains an extensive index of books on Military Uniforms, with a lengthy section of books on British uniforms.
I hope this was helpful- Please tell me if you have any further questions.
***
^1 This might make sense in the case of, say, the sartorially-obsessed George IV, but is confusing in the case of George III, who saw a massive change in the cut of military costume 8 years into his reign. | [
"Battle Dress (BD), later called \"No.5 Dress\", was the official name for the standard working and fighting uniform worn by the British Army and the armies of other Imperial and Commonwealth countries in temperate climes from 1937 to the late 1960s. It was a pair of trousers and a close fitting short jacket \"Blou... |
I am researching a photo taken of my great grandfather from World War 1. From what my family has told me the picture includes my great grandfather Jakub Postl and Adolf Hitler. Is this a family myth? | Could you clear some things up for me? Czechoslovakia didn't exist as a country until 1918, and your great grandfather was born in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Furthermore, it is unlikely that your great grandfather is in that picture with Hitler, considering Hitler served in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment in France, as part of the German army. (Kershaw, Ian, Hitler: 1889-1936). | [
"For his solo exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery, Mother, Hod created a series of paintings that reference the iconic photograph, taken by the Nazi photographer Franz Konrad, of Nazi soldiers clearing out the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War. Although most of the scholarship and speculation about this photo... |
How does the collision of quarks create elementary other particles? | The process at root is this: energy is conserved, but the form that energy can take can vary. Energy comes in three generic forms: kinetic energy (energy of motion), potential energy (energy of position), and rest energy (energy of existence, also known as rest mass).
In an accelerator, particles are accelerated to great speeds, so that they have a huge amount of kinetic energy. When the protons in the LHC collide, their kinetic energy is thousands of time their rest energy. When these collisions occur, the energy can be rearranged (the incoming particles can disappear, in fact) and reconstitute to form some new particles at their own speeds -- provided the total energy of the final state is equal to the total energy of the initial state.
There are some other constraints; for example, the total momentum and total electric charge of the final and initial states must not change, and so that will affect the particular sets of particles that we can find at the end.
| [
"The elementary quark and gluon particles involved in a high energy collision are not directly observable. The interaction produces jets of newly created hadrons that are observable. Those hadrons are created, as a manifestation of mass-energy equivalence, when sufficient energy is deposited into a quark-quark bond... |
when a bug gets stuck in your car and travels a few miles with you before it gets back outside, does it ever find its previous home/nest/colony again? does it care? | That depends on the bug. Some bees have been shown to be able to re-locate their hive after being separated by a reasonable distance. Over time they learn the area while foraging and can find their way back if they're not moved too far.
Ants trace their location carefully with scent and would be lost if moved.
Most non-social insects don't really have a permanent "home" and would just do bug stuff in their new location. | [
"Bugs, feeling as though he's safe, stops to catch his breath, not knowing Smidgen is right behind him. Before he knows it, Bugs is licked by the dog's enormous tongue, which lifts him off the ground each time. Bugs tries to run away, but stops at the sight of something. He calls Smidgen's attention to a giant redw... |
why is caucasian the only racial category for white people? is it for the sake of simplicity, or because the caucasian hominids are the ancestors of europeans? why not have italic/slavic/germanic etc. instead? | It's got a long history, but the term is really obsolete and meaningless. In the late 18th century, European philosopher divided the world into three races, Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid. Christoph Meiners chose the term for white people in 1785 because Caucasians had the "whitest, most blooming and most delicate skin."
Johann Blumenbach agreed: "Caucasian variety – I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men."
So, in the original usage, it was a form of flattery. As an aside, neither philosopher had been to the Caucuses, and their conception of people there as being particularly beautiful came not from any contact, but from art: European artists were freer to paint erotic scenes when setting them in Ottoman harems, where 'caucasians' would typically refer to the slave girls, concubines, and odalisques. So, they were taking their own lurid fantasies as true, and then calling those women their racial mothers. Waifu for the 1700s.
From the mid-20th century forward, race is not considered to have any objective, biological meaning, and racial categories are entirely from how a society treats people. | [
"Racial categories remain widely used in medical research, but this can create important problems. For example, researchers Raj Bhopal and Liam Donaldson opine that since white people are a heterogeneous group, the term \"white\" should therefore be abandoned as a classification for the purposes of epidemiology and... |
I'm a totally new to World History, what should I watch? | Try Crash Course: World History's playlist on YouTube. Very interesting and entertaining. Its not very in depth but it covers up most of the timeline. | [
"\"Our World\" was created by ABC News president Roone Arledge. The show had its genesis in a 1985 ABC News special called \"45/85\", a three-hour documentary that reviewed post-World War II history with an emphasis on the Cold War. That special was produced by Avram \"Av\" Westin, who also produced \"Our World\". ... |
Do writing, typing, speaking, and sign language use the same parts of the brain? | Absolutely. Comprehension of language is controlled by [Wernicke's area](_URL_0_), including reading, spoken language and I presume sign.
Language expression by [broca's area](_URL_1_). In the same way.
This is exploited medically to find out where a brain problem is located. If someone can understand and follow instructions wernicke's is intact. If someone can speak or write in full, comprehensible sentences then Broca's is okay too.
EDIT as said below, Wernicke's takes input from the sensory parts of the brain, our hearing, eyesight, sense of touch for braille and others.
Broca's gives output to the motor areas of the brain that control motor movements for writing, typing, signing, vocal cords, mouth etc. for speaking and so on.
Word (or sign etc.) finding also requires the part of your brain responsible for memory. | [
"These regions are where language is located in the brain – everything from speech to reading and writing. Language itself is based on symbols used to represent concepts in the world, and this system appears to be housed in these areas. The language regions in human brains highly resemble similar regions in other p... |
When I shine a light into stained/colored glass, the glass' shadow is the same as the glass' color. Why is that? | Shadows mostly aren't an absence of light, they are just less light than their surroundings. Coloured glass absorbs other coloured wavelengths. So green glass, for example, absorbs the other colours and only reflects green light back to you, so it looks green. It is also transparent, so it lets some green light through. As its shadow is at least partly made up of the light coming through the glass, it is also tinged green. | [
"The glass is coated with, or has encased within, a thin and almost-transparent layer of metal (usually aluminium). The result is a mirrored surface that reflects some light and is penetrated by the rest. Light always passes equally in both directions. However, when one side is brightly lit and the other kept dark,... |
How did the deer, moose, elk, caribou and reindeer of the family Cervidae, develop cranial appendages(antler) throughout history? | This is actually a pretty big mystery, and we don't know all the details. Deer ancestors seem to have had more standard horns that weren't shed (a bit more like the bony horns of a pronghorn), but transitioned to shedding and regrowing them in the Miocene. It's not really appreciated because of how common deer are, but antlers are some of the weirdest structures produced by any vertebrate. Exposed bone? Grown and lost every year? It's just bizarre. Way weirder than the horns of some other ruminants.
I will note that all the animals you list with antlers are descended from some single antler bearing ancestor, so they didn't show up multiple times. | [
"Large deer with impressive antlers evolved during the early Pleistocene, probably as a result of abundant resources to drive evolution. The early Pleistocene cervid † \"Eucladoceros\" was comparable in size to the modern elk. † \"Megaloceros\" (Pliocene–Pleistocene) featured the Irish elk (\"M. giganteus\"), one o... |
why wont older printers connect with newer operating systems? | It's all about the drivers. If no one writes a driver for the new OS you are out of luck. You can try generic drivers but you will lose some functionality. | [
"Until approximately 2000, PC computers could still be purchased with a mix of ISA and PCI slots, so it was still possible that manual ISA device configuration might be necessary. But with successive releases of new operating systems like Windows 2000 and Windows XP, Microsoft had sufficient clout to say that drive... |
Why was the Christian Church so dogmatically pro Aristotlean philosophy when Aristotle was a pagan? | If you are interested in this topic, you might want to read Hannam's „God’s Philosophers“ as it answers this question more thorougly than I ever could.
To paraphrase: The Church as a whole was not “dogmatically” pro-Aristotle, and their attitude changed over time. In the absence of serious alternatives, Aristotelianism is a *very* attractive paradigm. Because it seemed well-thought-out and offered a holistic world view it was very embraced both by Muslims and by Early Medieval Christians (as far as the fragmented translations they had during the Early Middle Ages went). Once Christian armies occupied some Muslim territories in Spain and they got their hands on the full body, it partly triggered the Renaissance of the High Middle Ages where it was *very* influential at the early universities. Personally, I also find it stunning that they embraced Aristotle so quickly. It was not just that Aristotle was pagan; it was also that Aristotle was next to incomprehensible for uninitiated readers except by commentaries that were written by Arabs of all people (e.g. Averroes). And these very same commentaries were the texts that were read by the Christian scholars. Again, the holistic approach of logic, physics and a range of other subjects was very attractive. Especially logic was very important at medieval universities, in part because it enabled skilled speakers to out-argue any opponent with ease, which was crucial, both for questions of religious orthodoxy and personal pride (and both were sometimes mixed).
Now, it is important that there were some frictions between Aristotelianism and Christianity, both on a theological level and on a “scientific” level. The former was e.g. that Aristotle believed that nature could not produce a vacuum, which was taken to contradict God’s omnipotence. Another point of contention was that Aristotle believed the world to be eternal while Christians believed the world to have been created at a certain point (this is not to be confused with Young Earth Creationism vs. Modern Physics. The debate was more or less abstract and metaphysical on both sides. Neither Aristotle nor the Medievals could prove anything).
It is also important to understand that Christianity could easily tolerate “foreign” ideas. E.g. Augustine of Hippo (one of the most important Church Fathers) speaks very warmly of Neoplatonism (unlike his former religion of Manichaeism, which he condemns). But statements that non-Christian philosophers could have stumbled on some nuggets of theological gold or that philosophy is a “handmaiden of theology” only serve for so long. Ultimately a fundamental question needed to be answered: What is stronger, philosophy or theology?
Ultimately *Thomas of Aquinas* “proved” compatibility of Aristotle and Catholicism, e.g. that reason could not possibly contradict faith, that searching for tangible “secondary causes” for God’s will was a worthwhile pursuit (roughly: “science is good”)… And sometimes he simple disagreed with Aristotle and said that he (Aquinas) believed the philosopher to have erred (Aristotle is only human after all). By this proof everybody could finally embrace Aristotle in a safe way and he became entrenched in Catholicism for centuries to come (well, except for die-hard-Averroes-disciples). At the same time, this solution also resulted in a clearer separation of the realms of natural philosophy and theology. Essentially, “scientific” theories would not have theological implications as they did not stray into the area of faith in the first place, and thus they became non-heretical by default. Furthermore their authors (natural philosophers who did not have a degree in theology) lacked the theological training and understanding to mount serious heresy anyway. At the same time, theologians would not waste their time with mundane natural philosophy and focus on the mysterious of real importance. Furthermore, the Catholic Church banned “fundamentalist” Aristotelianism by saying that it was wrong to claim that God was limited to what Aristotle thought was possible (the no-vacuum-idea from above).
On the matter of (proto-)science (the second area of contention), the thing is that Aristotle is wrong on a huge number of points (e.g. vacuum not only exists, space-wise (NPI) there is actually quite a lot of it). To be fair to him, though, how could he have known?). And as the Middle Ages went on Catholic clergymen and laymen eventually designed theories that are closer to modern physics than Aristotle was, e.g. with the impetus theory or descriptions of magnetism (something that is next to incompatible with Aristotle’s world view).
To sum it up, Christians greatly appreciated Aristotle’s achievement but were aware that he was human and thus not infallible. Therefore, they did not “dogmatically” follow him.
But you are probably really asking about heliocentrism and not boring stuff like the “why do apples fall down?”-impetus theory.
The reason the Church adhered to geocentrism was, that the vast majority of “scientists” at the time believed it to be true and while Galileo could offer serious evidence that legacy geocentrism was wrong, he could not yet really *prove* heliocentrism (especially not with perfectly circular orbits, as these are noticeably wrong). At the same time, there were issues with heliocentrism from an empirical (“stellar parallax”) as well paradigmatic perspective. For these reasons, the Church did not look too kindly on heliocentrism although it was accepted as a heuristical mathematical model, due to it being much easier to use than the geocentric model, which required convoluted mathematics.
HOWEVER:
The Galileo Affair was about muuuch more than astronomy. It was also about politics, deception, friendship, betrayal, … even before later people started to use it as a surrogate for whatever political goals they pursued. But I think that if you search this sub, you will find ample of commentaries on that episode already.
Edit: Minor clarifications right after submission. | [
"If the philosophy of Aristotle, as revived and enriched by Thomas Aquinas and his school, may rightly be called the Christian philosophy, both because the church is never weary of putting it forward as the only true philosophy and because it harmonizes perfectly with the truths of faith, nevertheless it is propose... |
how are ip addresses identifiable by location? | Blocks of IP addresses are assigned to organizations on request by a handful of non-profit organizations responsible for maintaining the IP space. These are the Regional Internet Registries.
In North America this organization is ARIN, in Europe its RIPE, in Asia it's APNIC, etc
These organizations each have certain number of IPv4 and IPv6 ranges that they can issue to companies upon request.
When you get an IP range assigned to your company or organization it's registered into their database along with your head office location. That's what defines those IP ranges as belonging to a certain country + state + town.
We don't usually think about top-level organizations like ARIN though, because most people and companies get their IP's assigned to them by an ISP. But the ISPs in turn get their IP ranges from ARIN, RIPE, etc
Only very large organizations tend to get dedicated IP ranges all to themselves. Apple, HP, and the US government for example have massive IP ranges that belong to their organizations. | [
"IP address location data can include information such as country, region, city, postal/zip code, latitude, longitude and time zone. Deeper data sets can determine other parameters such as domain name, connection speed, ISP, language, proxies, company name, US DMA/MSA, NAICS codes, and home/business.\n",
"An IP a... |
does pickle juice have the same effect as grapefruit juice for intensifying medications? | No. The acidity is not the issue with grapefruits. The problem is that there enzymes in Grapefruit that mess with the medications in various ways. | [
"The effect of grapefruit juice with regard to drug absorption was originally discovered in 1989. The first published clinical report on grapefruit drug interactions was in 1991 in \"The Lancet\" entitled \"Interactions of Citrus Juices with Felodipine and Nifedipine.\" However, the effect only became well-publiciz... |
why does fruit taste sweeter when it decomposes? | The complex sugars are broken down by bacteria, turning them in to simple sugars which are much sweeter | [
"Fruits such as sweet detar can contribute to successful interventions to improve local livelihoods as they are rich in nutrients, require minimal preparation, and have flavours that appeal to many tastes. Storing sweet detar at temperatures around 4 degrees Celsius will preserve its quality by limiting the loss of... |
how would aliens figure out how to decipher the voyager 1 golden disk? | The instructions are written using chemical and physical knowledge any advance civilization should have. It's also written in the most basic numeric system that exists, which is binary. So any alien race which is capable of logic, knows the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom (Most common in the universe) can probably decipher it.
_URL_0_ | [
"The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 missions, which started in 1977, were designed to deliver color imaging amongst scientific information of Jupiter and Saturn. This resulted in increased coding requirements, and thus, the spacecraft were supported by (optimally Viterbi-decoded) convolutional codes that could be concaten... |
why do brightly lit objects stay in our vision for a few minutes after we look at them, especially when blinking? | Your vision works by damaging easily repaired parts of your eye. Brighter objects damage it more. You see outlines until they’re repaired. | [
"Changizi says that visual illusions are due to a neural lag which most humans experience while awake. When light hits the retina, about one-tenth of a second goes by before the brain translates the signal into a visual perception of the world. \n",
"The eye is able to detect a visual stimulus when the photons (l... |
Historians, Who exactly were the Ustase and Chetniks and what did they do? (I'll expand on this in text.) | Sorry to be so brief with these answers (and to ignore some outright), there's A LOT of questions to tackle and I'd end up dumping a huge essay in here otherwise. I'm sticking to the Ustasha if that's okay, as I've written a lot about them in the past.
> 1: Why did the Ustase form? What were their goals?
At the beginning of the 20th Century fascist movements were seen - in the eyes of their supporters - as a revolutionary, 'energising' creeds capable of transforming moribund modern states built on compromise into bold new industrial titans. The Ustasha Croatian Revolutionary Organisation formed in 1930 out of assorted student organisations, far right groups and the militant wing of the Croatian Party of the Right (HSP) with a view to creating an independent Croatian state separate from the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia, with its Serbian monarch and its Serb-dominated administration. This 'Greater Croatia' would include Bosnia and Herzegovina, and be purged by force of all undesirable "aliens" - specifically Serbs. Much like Italian Fascism and the British Union of Fascists, anti-Semitism wasn't originally a characteristic of the Ustasha - indeed there were right wing Jewish students among its early ranks - but this changed as the ground entered the orbit of Germany's National Socialists.
It seems very modern, but with the blessing of Mussolini's Italy the Ustasha leadership fled Yugoslavia and set up - for lack of a better word - terrorist training camps, attended not just by radicalised young Croats from Yugoslavia but members of the larger emigre population in Central Europe. These camps were run on strict military lines and recruits swore blood oaths to the leadership, including future 'Poglavnik' Ante Pavelić, and the graduates of this school undertook campaigns of bombings and assassinations in an attempt to destabilise Yugoslavia.
> 2: How much of Croats supported the Ustase? How much were Partisan or Peasant Party? Some say that Croats were ecstatic when the Usatse took over others say opposite.
The Independent State of Croatia formerly sprang up in April 1941 in the wake of the Axis advance and the reception from Croats was largely popular. Writers within Croatia compared it to the euphoria of Croatia being detached from Hungary in 1918 and a US diplomat reported on cheering crowds greeting the German army as it rolled through Zagreb. By the end of 1941, the Ustasha gained approximately 150,000 new members. As for the Croatian Peasant Party, in August 1941 a right wing faction of the party actually entered the Ustasha government, with regional branches of the party swearing allegiance to the Ustasha regime. The Croatian Union of Workers followed suit.
I can't answer comprehensively about the exact nature of the support, I would suspect (from an educated perspective, as much as one is allowed to suspect anything in AskHistorians) enthusiasm for an 'independent' Croatia bled into enthusiasm for the Ustasha. It's worth remembering that during the Habsburg era, many Croatians were fiercely loyal to the crown but dismissive of Hungary and the Hungarians they were officially attached to, and would petition the monarchy to intercede on their behalf. To that end there's definitely a rose-tinted nostalgia toward the Germanic world as the guarantor of Croatian interests and dignity as it was easy to see "noble Austria" as the distant father who doesn't know that the older brother - Hungary - is beating all the younger siblings.
Not all Croats supported the Ustasha, many remained invested in the Yugoslav state and some of them supported the Partisans. But alas, I don't have numbers to hand. There's reports from the Wehrmacht of the Ustasha's murderous excesses "horrifying many conscious Croats" in the summer of 1941 and there were sporadic attempts to curb some of the bloodlust across the rest of the war, which suggests that Ustasha popularity hinged largely on Croatian independence and not ideology.
> 3:Why did Nazis support Usatse and why did Ustase like the Nazis considering Nazis hated Slavs?
By the time Italy and Germany rolled into Yugoslavia, the Axis war machine was becoming stretched. Troops were needed for the impending Operation Barbarossa and so local collaborators were being increasingly relied upon to garrison and maintain order behind the frontline. The Ustasha were Slavs, but thanks to Croatia's legacy as a frontier of the Habsburg Empire, they were sufficiently Germanised culturally to be passable - the Ustasha themselves contrived an Aryan linage to smooth things over, insisting that Croats were in fact the descendants of Vlachian people, positioning them neatly as the antiquity's last line of defence between Central Europe and the "Asiatic" South Slavs and Turks.
> 4: Is it fair to say Croatia was a united Nazi state like Germany, as in is there a parallel? Or were Ustase seen more as a terrorist organization?
Ustasha ideology had been woefully vague on exactly the brand of government they were attempting to create and how it would be run, and the lack of ideological focus attracted a wide variety of adherents on the far right - from deeply Catholic clerical fascists seeking to overturn the secular new world or the Orthodox overlords to metropolitan romantic "Glory to the soul of the flaxen haired peasant" types seeking to overturn the homogenous new Yugoslavia to working class atheist anti-Semites in the National Socialist mould seeking to overturn the 'worldwide Jewish conspiracy'. The biggest division, meanwhile, was between the Ustasha who had lived in Yugoslavia throughout the organisation's exile and the Ustasha who had trained in the camps, the latter were far more confrontational in their politics and in their vision for an independent Croatia than their sedentary colleagues.
The acceleration of their programme from the political fringes to statehood resulted in a sort of feudal interpretation of government where these differences in ideological background became apparent and the further you got from Zagreb, the more it felt like Croatia was being governed by fascist warlords arbitrarily following and ignoring directions from the top. To refer back to Answer 2, the inclusion of the right-wing of the Croatian Peasant Party etc alarmed the Ustasha old guard with what they saw as the dilution of their purpose, but it does suggest that the Ustasha was seen as a single issue party that could be adopted by existing political factions.
> 5: How brutal were Ante Pavlic's Croatia? I couldn't find much info on the ladder. How many victims, perpetrators.
The Independent State of Croatia was genocidal to a degree that surprised even the Germans. While their policies for government were ill-considered, their plans for Croatia's 'foreign' population had been gestating throughout exile. The primary target of their ire was of course Orthodox Christians (Serbs), with Gypsies and Jews coming second, and to this end they established the largest concentration camp outside of German administration - Jasenovac. By the time Jasenovac was liberated at least 100,000 men, women and children had died from malnutrition, starvation or physical abuse.
Violence against the Serbs was referred to as a "revolution in blood" that would purify the nation and the Ustasha implemented a 'third' rule - kill a third, convert a third to Catholicism and drive out a third. Serbian and Jewish businesses were nationalised, Serbs and Jews were barred from public sector jobs and in some areas from public spaces such as parks and theatres. Much as they had in Nazi occupied zones, ghettoes sprung up and genocide followed in its wake.
In the countryside Ustasha militias swept through towns and villages in an orgy of violence aimed at the Serbs - men, women and children were stabbed or bludgeoned to death, shot and thrown in pits, or locked in their churches and set alight. The conservative estimate is that out of Croatia's pre-war population of 1.9 million Serbs, between 200,000 and 500,000 were killed by the Ustasha, either by death squads or in the camps.
On a day-to-day level, the Ustasha created a forerunner to the surveillance state. Newly formed propaganda ministries censored all press, while curfew turned the streets of Zagreb into a ghost town - posters blared "Nothing escapes the eyes of the Ustasha!"
**Sources:** *The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–1945* by Rory Yoemans, *In the Shadow of Hitler: Personalities of the Right in Central and Eastern Europe* by Rebecca Haynes and Martyn Rady, and *Croatia: A Thousand Year Dream* by Marcus Tanner | [
"Chetniks along with the Ustaša were vilified by Tito era historiography within Yugoslavia. In the 1980s, Serbian historians initiated the process of reexamining the narrative of how World War Two was told in Yugoslavia which was accompanied by the rehabilitation of Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović. Monographs relat... |
how a bunch of lines of code can become a complex image like a video game | Take a big piece of graph paper and a pencil
It wouldn't be hard to write a set of instructions for draw a big square in the middle of the grid.
* Erase everything on the page
* Go to the 300th column, 300th row,
* Draw a line from here to the 700th column, 300th row
* Draw a line to 700,700
* Draw a line to 300,700
* Draw a line to 300,300
Yay, we have code that can display a simple square.
Now let's say we want to display a square tilted backwards, as though someone pushed the top of it away from them.
All you do is foreshorten it a little, and bring the top corners in a bit, so you draw a trapezoid. Try drawing a tabletop on paper, that's exactly what you do. So, (numbers not to scale):
* Clear all.
* Move to 350,400
* Line to 650, 400
* Line to 700,700
* Line to 300,700
* Line to 350,400
Alrighty, we have instructions for drawing a trapezoid.
From there, it isn't so much of a stretch to imagine writing a whole *series* of sets of instructions, to draw all the frames of the square being pushed back, to make an animation.
For each number F in the range 0 to 50
Left = 300 + F
Right = 700 - F
Top = 300 + (F*2)
Clear all
Move to Top, Left
Line to Top, Right
Line to 700,700
Line to 300,700
Line to Top, Left
Rinse and repeat
Do that all very very fast (or make a flipbook with a new sheet of paper each time), and you'll have a little animation of a square slowly tilting backwards. It would be all distorted because the numbers are all wrong to keep the example easy, but the concept is there.
I'm sure you could imagine a similar version that works out the numbers for all four corners, for any given angle you want to rotate the square, then loop over all the angles from 0 to 360 degrees - and you would have a lovely little animation of a square spinning in space.
Now say we wanted to have not a simple square, but one with a logo painted on it, spinning in space. That's actually not that much harder to do.
Say you have a handy 400x400 logo you want to paint on the square for each frame. Keep it on one side ready to refer to.
For each point *on paper* that your image of the square takes up, work out which point *on the square* it represents. For example, look at our first trapezoid we drew. The point (350,300) on paper is the (0,0)th pixel of the square itself.
So, we find the (0,0)th pixel of our logo, and paint (350,300) on our graph paper with that colour. Rinse and repeat for each and every point on paper that our square takes up, for every separate frame of our animation - and boom, we have a *textured* animation of a logo-painted square spinning in space.
It's a shitload of drudgework, but that's what computers are for.
From there to a computer game is simply a matter of repeating the process for entire 3d objects constructed out a bunch of squares and triangles connected at angles - [wireframe models](_URL_0_) - and then painting them with useful textures.
And instead of simple rotation animations, have angles and positions change according to how you move the mouse and keyboard.
Just keep layering on complexity (things moving by themselves until they hit other objects, things hunting down other things), and eventually you have yourself a video game.
As it stands, the vast majority of the drudgery gruntwork is done by the specialized computer that is your graphics card - but at the end of the day, it all boils down to the same process. | [
"The extensive form can also capture simultaneous-move games and games with imperfect information. To represent it, either a dotted line connects different vertices to represent them as being part of the same information set (i.e. the players do not know at which point they are), or a closed line is drawn around th... |
light into matter? | I have no clue what that is referring to, but we have known about light making matter for quite some time. The process is known as pair production, in which two photons (light) with sufficient energy can form a electron-positron pair (or some other matter-antimatter pair). This is allowed because an electron and positron have opposite charge canceling to the zero charge the photons have, the photons momentums become the electron-positron momentum, and the photons energies cover the matter mass. | [
"At the end of the 19th century, light was thought to consist of waves of electromagnetic fields which propagated according to Maxwell's equations, while matter was thought to consist of localized particles (See History of wave and particle duality). In 1900, this division was exposed to doubt, when, investigating ... |
What liquid is the wettest? | "Wettest" or "wetting" are perfectly fine words to use. Predicting the wettest liquid for a given material requires consideration of the liquid's and material's surface energies as well as the interfacial tension between the two phases. Essentially, the wettest liquid is one that gives the lowest interfacial tension as well as having a low surface energy itself. Definitively describing this, however, is tricky as the three surface/ interfacial energies are not independent of each other and all values must be determined to fully describe/ predict outcomes in the system.
For capillary action, as you have described, the height of liquid uptake into capillaries of a given diameter can be determine from [Jurin's law](_URL_0_). The *gamma X cosine* term is equal to *(solid surface energy) - (interfacial energy)*. So to maximise this term, and in turn the height of uptake, the surface energy of the solid must be higher than that of the interface, i.e. the interface must be more energetically favourable to form.
This is why most porous solids soak up most liquids - solid surface energies are nearly always higher than liquid-solid interfaces. An interesting example of the opposite effect is liquid mercury - you cant use a paper towel to clear up a mercury spill as the mercury will not be taken up by the capillaries. Instead it's expelled from them as the interfacial tension is too high or, in other words, the mercury doesn't wet the cellulose towel. | [
"A dry ton or dry tonne has the same mass value, but the material (sludge, slurries, compost, and similar mixtures in which solid material is soaked with or suspended in water) has been dried to a relatively low, consistent moisture level (dry weight). If the material is in its natural, wet state, it is called a we... |
if our bodies are naturally 36c, why does 36c weather feel very uncomfortable? | Because our body is basically a walking heater. Our cells constantly produce heat, and our body is tuned to produce so much heat that we can maintain an internal temperature of 36°C. The amount of heat we produce can change to react to the environment, but when the environment is too hot we can't tone down our own heat production enough to still keep the 36°C, which leads to overheating.
Edit: Thank you for the gold, kind 5 year old :) | [
"Humidity is an important factor in determining how weather conditions feel to a person experiencing them. Hot and humid days feel even hotter than hot and dry days because the high level of water content in humid air discourages the evaporation of sweat from a person's skin.\n",
"The climate is tropical, though ... |
What determined borders in Roman times? | The Romans didn't have an actual concept of a "limit" to their empire - in their own view the empire was endless, there simply were areas that weren't Romanized.
The Romans denoted their borders or "limes" usually by a ditch, or a system of defensive fortifications. Such defenses ran through Arabia, on the Rhine and Danube, Hadrian's Wall, in Tunisia, South Egypt, etc.
This is typically what we use to denote the Roman borders, but in actuality the limits of the empire were obviously very porous, which is why the Romans relied more on management of immigrants and trade across the borders.
We fill in the bubbles, yes, but there is archaeology that backs up certain "borders" during certain periods - e.g. the distribution of Sommer Type C buckles shows the retreat from the Lower Rhine to the Meuse in the Early 5th Century AD (Swift, "The End of the Western Roman Empire" pages 113-115).
For more in-depth discussion on the concept of Roman "limes" and the frontiers of the empire, check out Isaac, "The Meaning of Limes and Limitanei" in Journal of Roman Studies 78 (125-147) and Kennedy, "Rome's Desert Frontiers" (Routledge, 2012). | [
"The borders of the Roman Empire, which fluctuated throughout the empire's history, were a combination of natural frontiers (the Rhine and Danube rivers to the north and east, the Atlantic to the west, and deserts to the south) and man-made fortifications which separated the lands of the empire from the \"barbarian... |
If you were to mount a flashlight on a sled moving at close to the speed of light, why wouldn't the light from the flashlight move at a greater speed? | > S(sled) + S(light) = C
That's not the formula to use in relativity. Do this instead:
S(sled) + S(light)
----------------------------- = C
1 + S(sled) * S(light) / C^2
But if you plug in `S(light) = C`, you'll notice that this is trivially true no matter what `S(sled)` is. Which means that no matter how fast the sled is moving, the light always moves at `C` and also the sled sees the light moving at `C`.
Also, try applying this same formula to the car moving 70 mph and the ball thrown forward. You get
70 mph + 70 mph
------------------------- = 139.9999999999985 mph
1 + 70 mph * 70 mph / C^2
which any measuring device on Earth would record as 140 mph. | [
"In 1913, Georges Sagnac showed that if a beam of light is split and sent in two opposite directions around a closed path on a revolving platform with mirrors on its perimeter, and then the beams are recombined, they will exhibit interference effects. From this result Sagnac concluded that light propagates at a spe... |
why do some flames (like a candle) put off a lot of light, while others (like a butane torch) put off almost none? | The temperature of the flame determines it's color. A candle has a lot of flame in the yellow and orange range. A butane torch produces blue flame.
Blue light doesn't brighten a space as well as yellow light does. At least to the human eye.
| [
"The liquid wax is hot and can cause skin burns, but the amount and temperature are generally rather limited and the burns are seldom serious. The best way to avoid getting burned from splashed wax is to use a candle snuffer instead of blowing on the flame. A candle snuffer is usually a small metal cup on the end o... |
What was the extend of metallurgy in pre-Colombian Society in the Americas? | We have a whole [section](_URL_0_) of Pre-Columbian metallurgy questions in our FAQ section. | [
"The emergence of metallurgy in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica occurred relatively late in the region's history, with distinctive works of metal apparent in West Mexico by roughly AD 800, and perhaps as early as AD 600. Metallurgical techniques likely diffused northward from regions in Central or South America via marit... |
In heterosexuals, physical attractiveness is (frequently) related with mating and offspring. In homosexuals, does physical attractiveness relate with some "rule"? | I'm no expert in this area but there seem to be a few studies that look at this kind of thing.
[This one](_URL_0_) looks at facial preference and found that both homosexual men and women prefer more masculine faces in men and women, respectively.
And [this one](_URL_1_) looks at waist-to-chest ratio (WCR) and found that homosexual men prefer a much lower WCR, which is indicative of a preference for a more developed upper body.
Both of these studies stress the large effect cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic factors can influence these types of preferences. I'm not sure what else is out there. | [
"The relationship between handedness and sexual orientation has been suggested within both sexes and may reflect the biological etiology of sexual orientation; work by Ray Blanchard has linked the relationship to the fraternal birth order effect, which suggests that a man with several older biological brothers is m... |
What are the best books on eastern Asian anthropolgy or history in general. | If you are mostly interested in ancient Japan, I would recommend picking up translated editions of *Nihon Shoki* and *Kojiki*. These are primary sources; chronicles of ancient Japan and how the Japanese people and polity came into being. BH Chamberlain did a good translation of the *Kojiki* a few years ago, and that edition has commentary that might aid you. WG Aston also did a translation of *Nihon Shoki* which he titled *Nihongi: Volume 1*. Personally, I don't like his translation, but it remains one of the better English versions.
Now, if you are looking to learn about other Asian cultures, there are a few other primary sources I highly recommend. For Korea, the *Samguk Sagi* and *Samguk Yusa* are twelfth century retellings of the history of the Three Kingdoms period in Korea. Unfortunately, as far as I know only fragmentary translations into English exist, the best of which can be found in *Sources of Korean Tradition: Volume 1, Earliest Times through the Sixteenth Century* by Peter Lee, et al. Again, the added commentary is very helpful.
For China, there is an abundance of primary sources from ancient times. For a historian, however, the most important is the *Shiji*, the records of the grand historian by Sima Qian. This was produced during the Han dynasty and records the rise and fall of Qin Shihuang as well as some aspects of earlier history. Burton Watson produced a translated version in the early 1990's, however its specific title eludes me at the moment.
About Mongolia, the end all and be all is *The Secret History of the Mongols*. The best edition right now is Igor DeRachewiltz's massive two volume translation and commentary *The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic of the Thirteenth Century*. I am using it for my current project, and it is invaluable. I recommend reading it even if you don't particularly care about Mongol history because it is simply a fascinating and beautiful piece of literature.
I've given you all primary sources because I believe you should start to form your own opinions based on the sources before delving into the opinions of others. I personally don't study Japanese history much before the Imjin War of 1592, and it sounds like you are interested in the period before that. Maybe some other historians could help out with the secondary sources on the period? | [
"The Asia Library is located on the fourth floor of Hatcher Graduate Library (North). It is one of the largest collections of East Asian materials in North America, as of June 2012 holds some 785,000 volumes of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean monographs, 2,100 currently received serials, and 80,000 titles of material... |
When did we start to enjoy food based on taste and not on necessity? | Taste is based on necessity. We evolved to enjoy and even crave meat, fatty and sugary foods because they are a good source of energy - the sort of meal that would greatly benefit a hunter-gatherer.
Of course, now we've pretty much mastered our food chain, but our brains are still wired to crave those things, so we eat them all the time, even if too much is bad for us. | [
"The people discovered new foods (such as the potato and tomato imported from the Americas), and developed new tastes during the era. The more prosperous enjoyed a wide variety of food and drink, including exotic new drinks such as tea, coffee, and chocolate. French and Italian chefs appeared in the country houses ... |
Why are Xenon and Krypton electronegative despite being noble gases? | Even though Krypton and Xenon are noble gases, they can form bonds with non-xenon and non-krypton atoms. The main reason they can do this (where the smaller noble gases like he, ne, and ar don't) this is because of the atoms relatively large size, they can access the d orbitals fairly readily. This is what allows them to form bonds (either an electron from another atom is dumped in the d orbital, or sometimes a p electron from the noble gas is promoted to a d orbital to form multiple valence bonds). The reason there is an electronegativity assigned to Xe and Kr is because electronegativity is inferred from bond formation (or bond dissociation) energies--see Pauling Electronegativity wiki: _URL_0_ Since they can form bonds, the electronegativity can be calculated for them. Since the smaller noble gases don't form bonds (because they are so small, there isn't ready access to d orbitals to form bonds), they do not have electronegativites associated with them. | [
"Xenon and the other noble gases were for a long time considered to be completely chemically inert and not able to form compounds. However, while teaching at the University of British Columbia, Neil Bartlett discovered that the gas platinum hexafluoride (PtF) was a powerful oxidizing agent that could oxidize oxygen... |
How different were American and Soviet military doctrines? | Soviet tank doctrine was completely different to the Blitzkrieg; which the Soviets believed was a failed system that channeled vulnerable armor too narrowly. Their experience and opinions in this regard were undoubtedly formed by their experiences in WWII and the recognization that a defense in depth could disrupt even the most powerful armor-centric attack. In "Blitzkrieg" warfare, a breakthrough is often caused by the armor, that is, armor leads the assault; and often in a narrowly concentrated area. Shock and firepower are meant to give the Tanks the impetus, along with concentrated supporting arms, to advance through the enemy lines and knock him permanently off balance. EDIT: I may be reaching a bit, but there's definitely something to the idea that an armor-first offensive has potentially dangerous flaws as we move through the Cold War era; perhaps Soviet thinking was further influenced by the relatively heavy tank losses Israel suffered during the Yom Kippur war to ATGMs? The idea of successful AT systems getting smaller and more portable may have further ironed the belief that Tanks must be put into the attack only at the precise moment. Couple this with Soviet crew training being a bit more haphazard through a combination of conscription and budget, and avoiding the use of armor-first attacks can be considered wise indeed.
Soviet Doctrine called for massive tank attacks, yes, but only after a clear and powerful breakthrough was achieved by Infantry elements; in the case of the Cold War to be rapidly gained by the NVA and Soviet Units posted West. Tanks could, and would, accompany the first attacks in upwards of Corps size, but they would be there to support the infantry, whereas in follow on waves the (mobile) infantry would be there largely to support the tanks. The Soviet Doctrine of 'deep battle' followed this overall idea of 'breakthrough, exploitation, envelopment' rigidly, and it was proven and tested in WWII against a foe that often had a tactical edge in armored engagements; the first infantry attacks should be alarming enough to force the enemy to commit or otherwise tie down his own mobile reserves, allowing the follow up tanks to strike *deeply* (hence the term "Deep Battle") and unmolested.
This compartmentalization of roles even influenced Soviet ordinance. MBT series like the T-62, T-72, T-64 all had relatively different roles in this way; the T-62 meant to *support* infantry and largely being assigned to independent brigades and regiments; whereas the T-64 would've armed formations meant to conduct deep Battle, and was concentrated in "Guards" units.
| [
"The Soviet meaning of military doctrine was much different from U.S. military usage of the term. Soviet Minister of Defence Marshal Grechko defined it in 1975 as 'a system of views on the nature of war and methods of waging it, and on the preparation of the country and army for war, officially adopted in a given s... |
Are there any cellular processes not affected by changes in pH? | No not really. At a super high or super low pH the cell will just die, so pH is always important at some level. Some processes may be less sensitive to pH changes, and can occur at a wider range of pH than others, but at a basic level everything in the cell (with maybe the exception of a basic cell membrane) will be disrupted at a particular pH. | [
"Phosphorylation is generally considered a reversible modification used to change enzyme activity in different conditions. However, activating phosphorylation of Cdk by CAK appears to be an exception to this trend. In fact, CAK activity remains high throughout the cell cycle and is not regulated by any known cell-c... |
how do we unconsciously put parts of speech in the right order to form sentences? | Practice. Followed by more practice. That is followed by even more practice. Did I mention practice? The whole thing is based on practice. You took years to learn how to speak. Notice how little kids screw it all up all the time? Eventually you practice it so much that you don't even have to think about it, you just do it like you ride a bike. | [
"Sentences can also be marked as questions when they are written down. In languages written in Latin or Cyrillic, as well as certain other scripts, a question mark at the end of the sentence identifies it as a question. In Spanish, an additional inverted mark is placed at the beginning (e.g.\"Cómo está usted\"). Qu... |
What did the richest medieval lords eat each night? | Set aside the wild world of [splendors for all](_URL_0_) and a 19th-20th century conception of "the gentry versus the help." The demonstration and reinforcement of strict social hierarchy was indeed a chief goal of later medieval everyday dining practices in elite households--but its structure looked and functioned somewhat differently than we might imagine.
Most importantly, there was no principle of equality in offered food. People were served--were permitted--different amounts and especially different types of food based on their rank in the lord's or king's household. In 1318, for example, royal ordinances from Edward II's court show that clerks with a rank of esquire or above were allowed the portion of ale, wine, bread, the major roasted course, and another meat course; while those with a rank of valet or below (assistants to the above, for example) could not enjoy the roast dish. From the esquires ascending to courtiers and the royals themselves, larger portions and sometimes more courses would be on offer.
Second, our distinction between "diner" and "servant" would be blurred. This applied especially not to 'public' meals, but to the private, separate meals that kings/lords and queens/ladies would take in their own residences. It was a great honor among ladies-in-waiting to be invited to dine with the queen or duchess, and that honor included being the one to serve her meal! Of course there were actual servants as well; it's just, the idea of a very highly placed noblewoman as a serving lady is not something we'd usually think of, so I wanted to mention it upfront.
Who got to dine with or near the lord and lady was a central question of medieval hierarchical etiquette, but barely scratched the surface of what went into orchestrating the social aspects of an elite medieval meal. It was good manners to start a meal off with the collective call to wash one's hands and face. "Cup and ewer" or basin sets, often gilt or fancy in some other way, adorned the table and would be used at appropriate moments. Far from "out of sight, out of mind," these sets were key heirlooms and treasured gifts. It seems that some people had their own; others were shared, although it's not entirely clear to me from the description. Towards during-meal cleanliness, places would also be set with individual cleaning cloths; I'm not sure why so many scholars have an objection to saying napkins, but...basically napkins. It was imperative that they, like tablecloths, be of high-quality fabric, often linen.
Other pre-meal rituals included ones you might be more familiar with than hand-washing at the table: blessing the food and blessing the people in attendance. (Preacher John Mirk also suggested thanking God after the meal was over.)
Medieval dining tables, hauled into place for a meal, would be covered with a tablecloth. Sometimes there would be additional cover-cloths laid over the first. This was because medieval plates--trenchers--were not always *plates*. In addition to the ubiquitous street-food technique of "bake everything into a pastry crust for easy transport," medieval food service often meant scooping the course onto a crusty, even stale piece of bread. In such a case, an over-tablecloth was by etiquette standards mandatory. However, some elite families had reuseable trenchers (perhaps with a bread trencher on top). These could be made out of fancy metal or an ordinary one, or even wood. And make no mistake, people were well aware of the monetary as well as social value of gold and silver trenchers, as well as goblets. Servants in the household of the archbishops of Canterbury in the 14th century made it a habit to search the bags of departing guests at the gates to make sure that drinking and dining vessels had not *mysteriously jumped* into their luggage!
Back in the hall: Illuminations often show extra bread-trenchers stacked on the table along with actual bread to be eaten. Ideally, there would be more than one meat course at a given meal. Note that time of year--Lent! fast days!--could switch things up tremendously. Of course, by the fifteenth century, socially ascendant nobles and urban gentry with money to burn could *buy their way* out of fasting obligations--the purgatorial version of a carbon emissions offset fee, one imagines.
Courses were sometimes brought as an individual dish to a specific person; other times, a communal pot would be shared by two people picking out the food onto their own trenchers. Sauces may have been served separately, in bowls to be scooped out of with a spoon. Knives and spoons were the utensils of choice; there was plenty of lip-smacking, finger-licking eating with their hands going on. Yes, even in polite company!
In addition to the serving dishes and eating vessels, tabletops would be adorned with several other standard items. One was what we might compare to centerpieces: some kind of display, often based around something that had started life as edible but was decorative in this purpose. Another was an amulet popularly known as a "serpent's tongue." These were either believed or superstitiously accepted to zap any poison out of food! The little ritual was to touch one's food or dish to the serpents' tongue before consuming it, which would neuter any poison. My suspicion is that for some people, this was believed to be truly effective; for others, it was a mindless little "lucky socks" kind of superstition. Note that these could be shaped like many things that were not a serpent's tongue, such as palm branches. Finally, there were elaborate decorative items in statement shapes, like the king's heraldry done in gold or a sapphire-encrusted swan.
I've talked more about the actual types of food that would be present elsewhere in this thread. I hope this helps fill in some of the surrounding details for what it would have been like to attend a lavish yet ordinary meal at court in the late medieval West. | [
"As with almost every part of life at the time, a medieval meal was generally a communal affair. The entire household, including servants, would ideally dine together. To sneak off to enjoy private company was considered a haughty and inefficient egotism in a world where people depended very much on each other. In ... |
what's the whole deal with the satanic verses and what in it caused a fatwa on salman rushdie's life? | Some Muslim scholars, philosophers and biographers tell a story called the Gharaniq Incident. Basically what happened is that Mohammed, when he was alive, set about converting the Mecca area to his new religion (Islam). People in the Mecca area worshipped Lat, Uzza and Manat at the time. One day, Mohammed was reciting words he believed to be delivered by the angel called Gabriel, when Satan entered his mind and added extra verses that implied Lat, Uzza and Manat actually existed, and can be prayed to, which Mohammd speaks aloud and commits to scripture, believing Satan to be Gabriel (which obviously hurts his attempts to convert them to a different religion). The angel Gabriel is disappointed in Mohammed, Mohammed takes back what he said. The verses Satan put in Mohammed's mind are the "satanic verses".
Now, this incident isn't actually in the Qur'an, it's an apocryphal tale, and most Muslims reject that it ever happened. You can see why it would be controversial.
Rushdie's book involves Gabriel and Mohammed as characters, and retells this incident. That's controversial enough, but many Muslim critics claim that Rushdie depicts Mohammed as too flawed, and at one point, Mohammed's friend says that he believes Mohammed is editing the Qur'an as the angels dictate it to him, to suit his own beliefs and purposes.
There's another segment in which a girl believes that Gabriel is speaking to her, and telling her to make a pilgrimage to Mecca across the sea. She and her flock will be allowed to walk on the surface of the water. She gathers her supporters and goes, but they walk into the water and vanish, with it left vague whether they actually walked on the sea (because she was really speaking to angels) or whether she drowned (because she wasn't).
The combination of these things was enough for it to be deemed incredibly blasphemous. Ayatollah Khomeini issued an order for all faithful Muslims to kill the author, Salman Rushdie, if they got the chance. Salman's still alive, but many other people were killed; bookstores were bombed, translators were murdered, and several Muslim leaders who opposed the decision were murdered by their congregations.
Rushdie was called on by Muslim leaders and some politicians in Britain to disown the book and cease publication. He issued an apology that pretty much said "sorry it offended you", but didn't disown the book or stop publishing it. There was a big debate between "We should have freedom of speech, and shouldn't cave in to violence or threat" and "You should stop offending people, it's causing problems and is disrespectful".
There was a similar controversy surrounding the novel and Scorsese film "The Last Temptation of Christ". The core idea of that novel is that Jesus of Nazareth was both fully divine and fully human, and as a human, experienced human feelings like anxiety, emotional and sexual desire, fear, and reluctance, which upset many people for many reasons. The author of the novel received death threats, and some Christian protest groups burnt down cinemas who showed the film and assaulted people who bought tickets. That incident is worth reading about because it was more localised and lacks the international-politics angle. | [
"\"The Satanic Verses\" controversy, also known as the Rushdie Affair, was the heated and frequently violent reaction of Muslims to the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel \"The Satanic Verses\", which was first published in the United Kingdom in 1988 and inspired in part by the life of Muhammad. Many Muslims acc... |
what would be some of the long term effects if a giant canal was built from the mediterranean to bringing water in the the heart of the sahara desert? | **Please read this entire message**
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"Construction of the canal was preceded by cutting a small fresh-water canal called Sweet Water Canal from the Nile delta along Wadi Tumilat to the future canal, with a southern branch to Suez and a northern branch to Port Said. Completed in 1863, these brought fresh water to a previously arid area, initially for c... |
Could the British have won the American Revolution? Or was the war only the American's to lose? | There were several times during which the British could have struck a blow that would have won the ground war, and several moments where the Americans could have lost it. Inevitability is rarely a concept that you can apply in history.
If you look at the topic from a non-military perspective (one of a social, cultural, and political context), I think it becomes more difficult to see how the British could have maintained the status quo. Certainly, even if they had won the military side of the Revolution, they still had to deal with an uncooperative population that had mounted suprisingly effective political resistence for a people who were supposed to hold little political power. At that, this political resistence had been used to relative effect for more than a decade. Even if they Americans had caused themselves to lose, I have a hard time seeing how the British could have enforced political hegemony at the tip of a bayonet. Mind, I'm not saying it was impossible, but the British certainly would have had to work uphill. | [
"The British Army during the American Revolutionary War served for eight years in campaigns fought around the globe. Defeat at the Siege of Yorktown to a combined Franco-US force ultimately led to the loss of the Thirteen Colonies in eastern North America, and the concluding Treaty of Paris deprived Britain of many... |
What is the evolutionary reason for grey hair? | Correct me if I'm wrong, layman here, but I think it's more about the *absence* of evolutionary reasons at that age. When your average life span is about 30, what happens to your body at 60-70 isn't particularly selected for by evolutionary processes. | [
"In some cases, gray hair may be caused by thyroid deficiencies, Waardenburg syndrome or a vitamin B deficiency. At some point in the human life cycle, cells that are located in the base of the hair's follicles slow, and eventually stop producing pigment. Piebaldism is a rare autosomal dominant disorder of melanocy... |
baseball contracts. what is this gray area of "might stay or be traded"? | [David Price agreed to a 1-year, $14 million contract in January.](_URL_0_)
This means he will not be a free agent until this contract expires. When/if that happens, he has the ability to sign with any team he chooses. In the meantime, while under contract, his rights are controlled by the Rays. They can trade those rights to any other team if they so choose (unless it says in his contract that they can't - this is known as a no-trade clause - but I don't think his particular contract has such terms). | [
"The Major League Baseball (MLB) trade deadline was first instituted for the 1923 season, on June 23 of that year. It was moved to July 31 starting with the 1986 season. Commissioner Rob Manfred moved it to August 1 for the 2016 season only, as July 31, 2016 was a Sunday. After the All-Star break, teams will determ... |
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