question stringlengths 3 301 | answer stringlengths 9 26.1k | context list |
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if the smell of cut grass is a distress signal, what will the grass that receives the message actually do about it? | The grass sends it's nutrients etc. to it's roots so that they won't go to waste and can use them to regrow. | [
"Grass allergy is generally linked to hay fever because their symptoms and causes are somehow similar to each other. Symptoms include rhinitis, which causes sneezing and a runny nose, as well as allergic conjunctivitis, which includes watering and itchy eyes. Also an initial tickle on the roof of the mouth or in th... |
how does the photo 51 of rosalind franklin show the evidence for a double stranded dna | This page has an interactive walkthrough of the image explaining everything along the way:
_URL_0_
It's not perfect but gives a decent understanding of it using simple terms. | [
"The X-ray diffraction images collected by Franklin provided the best evidence for the helical nature of DNA. While Franklin's experimental work proved important to Crick and Watson's development of a correct model, she herself could not realize it at the time. When she left King's College, Director Sir John Randal... |
; it’s not the volts that kill you, it’s the amps? | That saying is just plain wrong. It’s the volts *and* the amps *and* the frequency *and* the duration that kill you. Sadly there is no really simple way to understand all the nuances of electricity.
A typical static shock blasts you with a pulse of tens of thousands of volts, carrying about between 1 and 20 amps amps IIRC. 100 milli~~volts~~**amps** is enough to kill you, but that is for a sustained shock.
If you touch 170 volts DC from a source without current limiting, it will be pretty unpleasant, but you could definitely hold on to it for a bet; if you touch and hold on to 170 volts AC at a certain range of frequencies from a source without current limiting, you will die.
If you touch 5000V AC at 60Hz from a source without current limiting, you will instantly die. If you touch 5000V AC at 20,000Hz from a source without current limiting, you will get a nasty burn where you touched it, but you will live.
Electricity and biology are bizarre beasts, which is what makes them so interesting! Electricity is an oddball because we can use relatable analogies to represent many of its behaviors (like water pressure and flow rate = voltage and current, one-way check valve=diode, etc.), but there are some behaviors that we can’t really relate to more accessible concepts.
Here’s the most I could distill it down without being misleading or untruthful: *Voltage can push current (amps) through you, which can be lethal if enough current is pushed through you at certain frequencies for a long enough duration.*
**TLDR: If it were just the amps that kill you, static shocks would be 100% lethal. It is a combination of the voltage, current, duration and frequency that kill you.**
& nbsp;^(Edit: 100 milliamps, not millivolts) | [
"The ampere ( or (UK), symbol: A), often shortened to \"amp\", is the base unit of electric current in the International System of Units (SI). It is named after André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836), French mathematician and physicist, considered the father of electrodynamics.\n",
"A volt-ampere (VA) is the unit used fo... |
Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in the UK and not elsewhere? I have seen several theories, including colonialism, natural resources, Protestantism, capitalism and the rule of law. Is there any historical consensus on this? | No, there really isn't a complete consensus; there's even an entire group of people out there that believe it was a pure accident. But there is one very popular theory out there: Institutional Development Theory, which I take after.
The general conclusion drawn from the theory that the small european states developed laws and institutions fostering innovation and entrepreneurship. Sparsely populated and fiercely competitive, European states had no choice but to maximize efficiency, culminating in industrialization. If you'd like to get into some examples, u/restricteddata and I wrote two answers [in a thread earlier today](_URL_0_) answering a very similar question as to why a country like Egypt *didn't* industrialize. I'm also sure there is an AMA or feature thread on this, but I can't seem to find it anywhere.
In any case, within that framework, you can then get into the specifics of the British Isles: historically less populous than the rest of Europe, there was a significant upward pressure on wages. This means that English workers could enjoy a higher standard of living, while English employers were always on the lookout to keep their costs down. There are also a number of other factors though, like the presence of coal, England's seafaring heritage facilitating the foundation of colonies where raw materials could be obtained, and the presence of a relatively weak monarchy that had to rely on a consensus-based governmental system, fostering consistent and fair rule of law. Different authors will stress different variables, but I don't think it's accurate to emphasize one over the other. All culminated to make the industrial revolution happen.
Entire books on the topic have been written, and this post could go on for ages. Suffice it to say, you could look at:
S. Broadberry, "British Economic Growth 1270-1870"
M.W. Kirby, “Institutional rigidities and economic decline: Reflections on the British experience” (for completion's sake)
And more general texts like:
S. Broadberry and K. O’Rourke (eds.), "The Cambridge Economic History of Europe"
J.L. Rosenthal, R.B. Wong, "Before and beyond divergence. The politics of economic change in China
and Europe"
A. Greif, "Institutions and the path to the modern economy" | [
"The Industrial Revolution began in England due to the social, economic and political changes implemented in the previous centuries. Whereas absolute monarchy stayed the normal form of power execution through most parts of Europe, institutions ensured property rights and political safety to British people after the... |
How do self driving cars respond to traffic officers? | Most self driving cars right now have an actual driver in them whom can take control at any time. So this is not much of an issue.
Edit- How will it work in the future? Implementing computer recognition of lights and sirens is no more difficult than what they do already. It may be a little odd for ambulance protocol where everyone has to get over, but is really no more difficult than what we have now. | [
"Self-driving cars are already exploring the difficulties of determining the intentions of pedestrians, bicyclists, and animals, and models of behavior must be programmed into driving algorithms. Human road users also have the challenge of determining the intentions of autonomous vehicles, where there is no driver ... |
Other than learning from mistakes of past. Why would you say it is important for a person in the present times to know and understand history? I like history a lot, but I find myself unable to expose its relevance to uninterested people. How is it a useful or important knowledge? | Hello there, I have worked in the public history field for about 2-3 years giving tours of historical sites to school groups. Oftentimes, they were initially very uninterested in what I had to say, I don't really blame them since they were very tired from their trips and probably stuck memorizing for standardized tests.
& #x200B;
Not a lot of room for passion for history to develop. So how do you get them interested? Why should you learn?
Simple, because it is the story of you, I use parallels to their own lives to expand on history. Everyone loves to learn more about the human condition and it is always interesting to get to know how things were done in the past.
More importantly, people in the present must understand history (especially in an area of polarized politics) because history is often hijacked to push for one particular agenda or another. Without understanding history, it is very easy for logic and facts to get lost in the vitriol of politics, which in turn, affects policies and the populations they apply on.
& #x200B;
Without history, you cannot understand the context behind why the world is in the state it is, and without understanding the why-how can you solve the issue?
To study history goes beyond merely avoiding the past mistakes, but to actively seek how to fix the current mistakes, to make the world you live in better (as cliche as it sounds). Through the pursuit of more historical knowledge, we unlock more aspects about our own identities as human beings, reconnecting to the very soul of what it is to be human.
In the end, if we stop pursuing what is human, what are we left with? | [
"Sze as “one of the initiators of the WHO”. Mr Høybråten quoted Dr Sze as saying “Of course we can learn from history. We learn from the mistakes made if not from the successes. Learning the reasons why certain things happened often saves us from making the same mistakes again”.\n",
"BULLET::::- “It’s very import... |
how do you get into medical school in the united states? | 1. Complete a pre-medical program during undergraduate. This includes the MCAT (Medical College Admissions Test), which is a test of your knowledge in subjects such as chemistry and biology as well as your thinking andreasoning skills. Your score will be included with your med school applications.
2. Apply for medical school. This includes written and interview stages. Since there are very few slots compared to the number of applicants, you need to stand out from the pack. This usually means, at a minimum, a history of volunteer work and research lab work.
3. If you're good and lucky enough, you'll be accepted. Medical school generally consists of two years of preclinical courses and study, followed by two years of work at a teaching hospital under more experienced physicians. You also work towards your medical license.
4. After you graduate from med school, you are a Doctor but still don't have a medical license. You have to complete an internship and work towards completing your medical license.
5. Congratulations, you're a licensed doctor and can now open your own practice. | [
"In the US and Canada, a potential medical student must first complete an undergraduate degree in any subject before applying to a graduate medical school to pursue an (M.D. or D.O.) program. U.S. medical schools are almost all four-year programs. Some students opt for the research-focused M.D./Ph.D. dual degree pr... |
if a muslim was on the exact opposite side of the earth from mecca, where would they turn to pray? | They would probably move a bit. | [
"In Judaism, west is seen to be toward the Shekinah (presence) of God, as in Jewish history the Tabernacle and subsequent Jerusalem Temple faced east, with God's Presence in the Holy of Holies up the steps to the west. According to the Bible, the Israelites crossed the Jordan River westward into the Promised Land. ... |
What did those in the English speaking world in the Victorian era consider "spooky" architecture? | Decay and decrepitude are kind of universal - I can give a couple of examples from opposite ends of the Victorian era (1837-1901):
> I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
- [The Fall of the House of Usher](_URL_3_) (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe
> At one corner of the room was a heavy door. I tried it, for, since I could not find the key of the room or the key of the outer door, which was the main object of my search, I must make further examination, or all my efforts would be in vain. It was open, and led through a stone passage to a circular stairway, which went steeply down. I descended, minding carefully where I went, for the stairs were dark, being only lit by loopholes in the heavy masonry. At the bottom there was a dark, tunnel-like passage, through which came a deathly, sickly odour, the odour of old earth newly turned. As I went through the passage the smell grew closer and heavier. At last I pulled open a heavy door which stood ajar, and found myself in an old, ruined chapel, which had evidently been used as a graveyard. The roof was broken, and in two places were steps leading to vaults, but the ground had recently been dug over, and the earth placed in great wooden boxes, manifestly those which had been brought by the Slovaks. There was nobody about, and I made search for any further outlet, but there was none. Then I went over every inch of the ground, so as not to lose a chance. I went down even into the vaults, where the dim light struggled, although to do so was a dread to my very soul. Into two of these I went, but saw nothing except fragments of old coffins and piles of dust; in the third, however, I made a discovery.
- [Dracula](_URL_0_) (1897) by Bram Stoker
The Victorian horror aesthetic in Gothic fiction and ghost stories tended to mortuary architecture (tombs, cemeteries, etc.), and ruins - which could be alternately romantic or terrifying depending on the moods - but they were, just as us, looking backwards on the buildings and structures that were old to them.
This has to be contrasted with a couple other developments: the emphasis on the horror of nature (essentially, the lack of architecture), as exemplified by Algernon Blackwood's ["The Wendigo"](_URL_2_) (1910), and the horror of new technology and industrial architecture, which could be characterized as inhuman or monstrous. I recall one scene from the *Nautilus*, which Verne was careful to initially describe as a horrendous monster, but then revealed as a miracle of modern technology...and yet:
> For two hours Ned’s anger grew fiercer. He shouted and shrieked in vain. The metal walls were deaf. I could not hear a single sound in the boat, which lay as if dead. It was not moving, for I would have felt the trembling of the hull from the throbbing of the screw. It was probably plunged into the depths of the waters, far from the earth. The deathly silence felt terrifying.
- [20,000 Leagues Under the Sea](_URL_1_) (1870) by Jules Verne | [
"At this time the style was known as \"Old English\", and considered especially appropriate for vicarages and rectories, partly because they were usually next to the church, which was likely to be Gothic. Tudor style was \"almost infinitely adaptable, particularly to low, spreading houses\", and because the larger ... |
can someone explain general relativity? | Ooooh, not exactly something that you can explain in 5 minutes, but I'll give it a shot.
Keep in mind that I am far from an expert and on top of that I'm kind of bending the rules to make things easier to explain. First off, when I say "fast" I mean something like 100 thousand kilometers per second. The speed of light is 300.000 kilometers per second, we call it "c", and yes, that is the c in E=Mc2.
When I say "heavy" I mean the weight of a planet or a star. Because we weigh so little and move so slow, we almost never actually notice relativity.
Now, we all grew up learning that time always goes "forward" with a fixed speed of 1 second per second. Space is also always the same, 1 cubic meter here, another one there. etc. Then, relativity came and messed things up:
1. Nothing can ever go faster than the speed of light.
2. If you measure the speed of light relative to yours, you will always measure it to be c.
3. Heavy things can "bend" the space and slow time around them.
Without relativity, a measurement would go like this:
You are moving at 50km/h, a car passes you that is driving 120km/h. If you were to measure the speed of the car relative to you, you measure the car to go 70km/h *relative to you*.
Now, let's look at relativity:
You are standing still and measure the speed of light *relative to you*. You measure the difference to be c.
You are moving at one half the speed of light and measure the speed of light *relative to you*. You measure the difference to be c.
The last one is funny. It would imply that the actual speed of light is c PLUS your own speed. But it isn't! Remember rule 2, it's always c! Looking at this some more, and remembering rule 2, we come to a funny conclusion: Time *seems* slows down when a person is going faster. I write "seems" because it isn't. It's just that *your* time is not the same as some other person's time. If you were to ask the other person about your time, he'd tell you that your time is going too fast.
Now for rule #3. The sun, being a very heavy thing, bends the space and time around it. Time moves slower near heavy things. If you were to look at a clock on the surface of the sun, you would say it moves slower than yours. But it isn't, it just looks like that to you. If you were on the sun and looked at earth's clock, you'd say it goes faster.
Another mindbender: The earth isn't really going in circles around the sun. The earth is going in a straight line in space, but that space is "bended around the sun".
You might want to look up "Time dilation" and "Twin paradox". | [
"General relativity is the geometrical theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915/16. It unifies special relativity, Newton's law of universal gravitation, and the insight that gravitation can be described by the curvature of space and time. In general relativity, the curvature of spacetime is produ... |
Why is my non-dominant hand/arm able capable of doing some things and not others? | Simply put, practice. Your brain "learns" how to perform individual tasks by trial and error; attempting to perform a task and remembering the outcome of each attempt. The brain then incorporates the previous attempt and adapts accordingly. This is the basic concept behind [muscle memory](_URL_0_).
However, this "memory" is specific to the muscles performing the task; thus since you always write/throw/etc. with your right hand, you are more adept at performing these functions. The tasks you listed that you could perform with your left hand are things you had repeatedly attempted with that hand. So even though you may consciously understand how to grip a pen and form letters with your left hand, your brain isn't familiar with the fine neural firings necessary to perform.
*Apologies for anthropomorphizing the brain a bit, made the explanation easier. | [
"BULLET::::- \"Ambidexterity\", equal ability to use both hands, is exceptionally rare, although it can be learned. A completely ambidextrous person is able to do any task equally well with either hand. Those who learn it still tend to favor their originally dominant hand.\n",
"While the human hand has unique ana... |
how does physics work in calculus? | You get something called jerk. Its how quickly an acceleration changes. For example, An object that goes from an acceleration of 20m/s/s to 30m/s/s over 2 seconds will have a jerk of 5m/s/s/s. | [
"Calculus is of vital importance in physics: many physical processes are described by equations involving derivatives, called differential equations. Physics is particularly concerned with the way quantities change and develop over time, and the concept of the \"time derivative\" — the rate of change over time — is... |
why do dogs cock their heads when their begging for something? | There are a few theories on why they do this.
1. They're trying to hear better
Dogs have movable earflaps that help them locate the source of a sound, but they also have brains that can compute time differences between the sound reaching each ear. A slight change in a dog's head position supplies additional information that the canine can use to judge a sound's distance. Essentially, tilting the head can help the animal more accurately locate the location and distance of a sound.
2.They're trying to understand us
According to Steven R. Lindsay's "Handbook of Applied Dog Behavior and Training," when a dog listens to your voice, he's trying to identify familiar words or tones that he associates with a reward, such as going on a walk or receiving a treat.The muscles of a dog's middle ear are controlled by a part of the brain that's also responsible for facial expressions and head movements, so when a canine tilts his head, he's trying to perceive what you're saying, as well as communicate to you that he's listening.
3.They can't see our faces easily
In an effort to understand us, dogs not only use our words and inflection, but also facial expressions, body language and eye movements. Because of this, it's important for them to see our faces, so Dr. Stanley Corren reasons that when dogs cock their heads they're trying to see us better. He says that dogs with longer muzzles have difficulty viewing a person's entire face and compares it to how our vision is obstructed if we hold a fist to our nose and view the world as a dog does. Corren suggests that dogs may tilt their heads to view a speaker's mouth and aid in understanding what is being communicated. He hypothesized that dogs with flatter faces, such as pugs, Boston terriers and Pekingese, might tilt their heads less because they don't have to compensate for prominent muzzles. Corren conducted an Internet survey to test his theory. Out of 582 participants, 186 had dogs with flatter heads. Seventy-one percent of the people with large-muzzle dogs reported that their dogs often tilted their heads when spoken to, while 52 percent with flat-faced dogs reported frequent head cocking.
4.We've taught them to do it
When dogs tilt their heads when we speak, it's undeniably cute and we have a tendency to respond to the behavior with positive reinforcement. Perhaps we say "aww" in a pleasing tone of voice or offer the dog a treat. Reacting in such a way encourages the activity, and the more a dog is praised for cocking its head, the more likely he is to repeat the gesture in the future. | [
"This breed is also very vocal in expressing their emotions. Kuchi dogs often growl to show either pleasure or displeasure, which can be misconstrued by many, especially children, as a sign of aggression - and lead to unwanted and potentially dangerous reactions on their part.\n",
"The dog may yawn when someone b... |
what will happen to the 0.1% of the germs that didn't get killed by the hand sanitizer? | Those that survive will often pass on this genetic advantage to their offspring, which will then be slightly more resistant and so on...This is natural selection and evolution in action. Bacteria and viruses have already evolved/mutated in response to our modern medical treatments, which has created new classes of drug resistant pathogens (e.g. MRSA, VRSA, HIV, etc..). Alcohol kills germs differently than medications do, however the same basic idea applies It's actually becoming a bit of an issue in places like hospitals, which are in a constant arms race against newly forming, drug resistant infectious agents. Because we can never truly be 100% perfect at eliminating all germs at all times, a few will slip through the cracks and become ever more resilient. | [
"If soap and water are not available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol (check the product label to be sure). Hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol is effective in killing Cronobacter germs. But use soap and water as soon as possible afterward because hand sanitizer does not kill all ... |
Can a fathers abuse of alcohol affect the number of dopamine receptors in their child? | Don't call him out. There may be a genetic connection to dopamine production or uptake; I can't really speak to that because I'm a total noob to neuroscience (sorry!). However, the effects of growing up as a child of an alcoholic (abuse/trauma) can create biological changes in systems of the brain related to emotion and it can also ingrain behavioral patterns like hiding or repressing emotions. Whether someone answers your dopamine question or not, be aware there are other ways being a child of an alcoholic can produce a reduction in affect. | [
"Severe childhood trauma is also associated with a general increase in the risk of drug dependency. Lack of peer and family support is associated with an increased risk of alcoholism developing. Genetics and adolescence are associated with an increased sensitivity to the neurotoxic effects of chronic alcohol abuse.... |
why does music in 4/4 time sounds more natural to us? | Part of it is what we are conditioned to listen to. Lots of music is in 4/4 so it has a context we can fit it into. As a professional musician, I've played lots of music in many mixed meters, so those don't sound or feel awkward to me anymore. I've been conditioned to have a way to understand them compared to lots of other examples.
But on a more biological level, a lot of it probably has to do with our two feet. Left, right, left, right. It fits the rhythm of 4/4 better than, for example, 7/8. | [
"Music inherently depends on silence, in some form or another, to distinguish other periods of sound and allow dynamics, melodies, and rhythms to have greater impact. For example, most music scores feature \"rests\", which denote periods of silence. In addition, silence in music can be seen as a time for contemplat... |
why has there recently been an increase in ultra-nationalism? | The sad truth is that it's because the economy is lousy. Historically, whenever there has been a recession or a famine, xenophobia has risen.
When things are going well, good jobs are plentiful, and opportunity abounds, nobody really cares about people of different ethnicities and lifestyles. There's a perception that even if people are making the wrong choices, there's plenty to go around.
But, when things get bad, people start to wonder why. On an instinctive level, we don't understand the economy as it is (an interconnected, flowing exchange of goods and services) but understand it in a more primeval way, like a harsh winter making fewer berries and less game in the valley. So, we look to the other tribes, and feel that we'd have more if they went away. But don't worry, as soon as the Baby Boomers are able to retire and college grads once again find middle class jobs, it'll all go back to normal.
In other words, the human race just really needs a Snickers right now. | [
"Expansionist nationalisms is an aggressive and radical form of nationalism that incorporates autonomous, patriotic sentiments with a belief in expansionism or recovering formerly owned territories. The term was coined during the late nineteenth century as European powers indulged in the 'Scramble for Africa' in th... |
the fed and why people like it and dislike it | People dislike the federal reserve because they make money out of thin air every year which causes all of our money to decrease in value. This is much like a hidden tax on your currency on top of the taxes you already pay, and people hate taxes. At times they seemingly make money according to no set rules or plan, or for reasons that do not benefit us, and this often does very bad things to our economy.
If we however had a set amount of money in circulation and that never changed all of it would increase in value every year until the point in some distant future where a penny could buy a car, so there is reason to create money, they just do it to a point where goods cost more every year (even as the technology for making them becomes less expensive) instead of keeping the value of currency about the same, which from my point of view is better.
Who gets the money that is created? Banks, the money is created from out of nowhere anytime a bank wants to borrow money to in turn play the role of a middle man to a person who wants to take out a loan from the bank, this is regulated by interest rates the fed sets. They don't necessarily just create X dollars per year, they choose the interest they wish to charge banks to borrow from them, and the lower they set the interest rate increases the amount of money people want to borrow and thusly more money gets created. | [
"\"The Fed\" controls the money supply in the United States by controlling the amount of loans made by commercial banks. New loans are usually in the form of increased checking account balances, and since checkable deposits are part of the money supply, the money supply increases when new loans are made ...\n",
"... |
How will the historian of the future sift through the billions of primary sources offered by the digital age? | That's a great question. Short answer: digital sources are readily handled by digital tools. While the amount of digital information is growing rapidly, the power of the tools we have for examining this information is already powerful, and it's fair to imagine that they will grow much more powerful in the future.
& #x200B;
Longer answer:
let's start by broadening the frame, one can ask-- "when does history start having more sources than a historian can become familiar with in a professional lifetime?"
Some ancient history is relatively easy when it comes to written sources. A classicist can read all the important Greek and Roman texts, though s/he won't be able to get through all the archaeological materials and inscriptions. But students of Sumer, Assyria and associated civilizations writing in cuneiform-- they'll not get through a fraction of the roughly 1 million tablets found so far. Indeed, a lot of them aren't published, so they'll have a hard time even making themselves aware of all of them.
By the time you get to the early modern era, volumes of written material begin to overwhelm-- any reader in, say, European diplomatic history doesn't have a prayer of reading through, say, all the material relevant to the Napoleonic Wars in national archives, not to mention memoires (seemingly anyone who did anything in these wars left a memoir). There are vast archives of banking and tax data, for example -- read only by a very few, if any. "Traditional" history offers all sorts of examples of enterprising graduate students going to the archives and discovering something that no one had bothered to read previously.
And now you get to digital. The digital legacy is immense. One of our most interesting early transects of the digital record is 9/11; this is in the millions of records. I suspect that if you set out to listen to recorded news reports from 9/11, you'd be watching tape for the next few years.
So what can a historian do with this?
Read them all? Watch every news report, read every tweet?
Nope, not humanly possible.
Fortunately, nearly all digital materials are either machine readable, or easily made to be machine readable. The academic profession of history once argued in a fashion that was some fusion of legal reasoning and narrative; I'm thinking of Leopold von Ranke, the father of our modern footnote (which I wish Reddit had!). Generations of history grad students clutched their collections of notecards, painstakingly copied out of sources, and assembled them into dissertations, mostly an artful assembly of testimonies, but less commonly with statistical power.
That happens much less in modern academic history. Becoming popular with Marc Bloch and the *Annales*, historians began to engage the quantitative, the statistical, the demography; the *Annales* weren't the first, but they moved the idea of history a field of inquiry with some parallels to epidemiology and economics into currency. A historian doesn't need to read every 9/11 blog post to extract meaning from the corpus-- there are all sorts of analytical tools for "scraping" sentiment and content from plain text. I would expect that this Reddit post (along with every other) is being scraped, and filtered for content, context and tone. A future historian need not read every post to have its \[lack of\] value surfaced by digital tools.
Future economic historians will have access to extraordinary data-- tax records, for example. Generations of historians have worked fruitfully with just one tax roll, the Domesday Book; the vastness of tax data for future historians is hard to imagine. Similarly kinds of secrets are hidden in banking and financial data. The French historian Emmanuel Waresquiel discovered records of payments by England and Austria to Talleyrand, for example-- a remarkable achievement by a 21st century historian working with 19th century records. It will be a much easier task for a 22nd century historian looking at 21st century tax and banking records; unlike Waresquiel s/he won't have to go digging through dusty old volumes in the Amsterdam Municipal Archives to find payments by foreign powers to suborn venal politicos.
Contemporary historians are already doing this with historical materials. Philologists were building frequency lists of words, using this to infer foreign influences and so on, long before digital methods made it really easy. Digital tools are already widely used, but are rapidly expanding their application in fields like "digital literary analysis". As just one example: given a reasonable amount of text, digital tools are very good at matching unknown authors against other text, identifying them-- so a future historian is likely to have a lot of information about the identity of anonymous posters and authors (including pretty much everyone posting to Reddit).
& #x200B;
Sources:
[CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Neighboring Regions: Case Studies on Archaeological Data, Objects, Texts, and Digital Archiving](_URL_4_) \- a compendium of articles illustrating the use of digital tools in evaluating ancient materials. Note that this is a harder task than working with digital native materials, all sorts of information in the cuneiform tablet isn't immediately digitally accessible (some cuneiform scholars are able to identify the "handwriting" of particular scribes, for example)
[The Footnote: A Curious History](_URL_7_) \- a book by one of the historians I most admire, Anthony Grafton. A beautifully written and erudite introduction into "how historians practice history", the development of tools and techniques which while not digital, are often amenable to digital extension.
[Library Accepts September 11 Digital Archive, Holds Symposium](_URL_0_) \- the US Library of Congress has a 9/11 collection, the last time I checked, it had some 150,000 individual items
[Informatics and New Philology](_URL_5_) \- a 1990 article, not the tools you'd use in 2018, but to give a sense that people have been thinking about this topic for quite some time.
[Mining writeprints from anonymous e-mails for forensic investigation](_URL_6_) \- just one example of the ways in which digital texts can yield additional information to digital investigation.
[Invisible Agents](_URL_8_;) \- a recent book by Dutch scholar Nadine Akkerman, who went into British archives and read long forgotten letters, demonstrating a heretofore unsuspected role for women in 17th century espionage. This work would have been far \_easier\_ if the material were in digital format; as it was it took an enterprising graduate student to go to archives, read centuries old letters in difficult hands; that's a lot more work than a historian working with digital materials has to do.
[Hope & Company Archives](_URL_1_) \- Just one example of the massive pre-digital data in archives that few if any read. These are the records of celebrated Dutch bankers of the 18th and early 19th centuries; in recent years a few enterprising historians have made big finds in these files (cf [Emmanuel Waresquiel on Talleyrand's financial relationship with the British](_URL_3_)); but most of these files are unread and unknown outside of a handful of business historians. Digitization would instantly expand their accessibility dramatically.
[QUANTITATIVE METHODS AND COMPUTING FOR HISTORIANS](_URL_2_) \- Syllabus for History 590 at the University of Albany, assembled by Gerald Zahavi; this gives you a good idea of the tools an historian can access today. If you were to imagine a historian a century from now, these will look trivial. | [
"The world's technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1986 to 15.8 in 1993, over 54.5 in 2000, and to 295 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2007, and some 5 zettabytes in 2014. This is the informational equivalent to 1.25 stacks of CD-ROM from the earth to the mo... |
why do shark cages have gaps in them, which look big enough for sharks to fit through? | Could be because most dangerous sharks are still too big to get in. Could also be that if a dangerous shark did get in, the diver could escape.
Edit: I found a video in which a man uses the gap on the side to escape _URL_0_ | [
"A shark-proof cage is a metal cage used by an underwater diver to observe dangerous types of sharks up close in relative safety. This can include various species of shark, but the most commonly observed within the confines of a cage are the great white shark and the bull shark, which are both known to be aggressiv... |
How exactly do scholars decipher an unknown writing system? | There are many ways. One of them, and probably the ideal case, is if you find a document where the same text is written in several different languages and scripts. The best example of that is the Rosetta Stone.
_URL_0_ | [
"The difficulty in deciphering these systems can arise from a lack of known language descendants or from the languages being entirely isolated, from insufficient examples of text having been found and even (such as in the case of Vinča) from the question of whether the symbols actually constitute a writing system a... |
At what stage is cryonics and medicine at where a cryopreserved human body could be resuscitated? | Anhydrobiosis is a technique used naturally by living organisms to survive in a desiccated (dry) state. Surviving the extreme cold uses the same techniques, as it all boils down to preserving the lipid bilayers that make up cell membranes.
One way to do this is "water replacement." Normal membrane function relies on a water-rich environment, but you can have other molecules act like water to form a dry glass-like state. Sugars can perform this function, for instance cyanobacteria use a slime of polysaccharides. This can be enhanced with specialized proteins.
The glassy state, or vitrification, requires a membrane "melt temperature" to be lowered beyond the substance's "glass transition temperature." Rapid cooling can help prevent cell damage due to cold shock. [This image](_URL_0_) shows an animal organ that has been flash frozen. The left shows normal saline, the right has a solution of trehalose (a sugar serving the function described above) and other stabilizing agents. Note the drastic difference in how well the samples are preserved.
Here's our state of progress when I last was looking into this a while ago:
* 2000: Fruit fly embryos
* 2001: Blood platelets
* 2008: Human gametes
* 2013: DNA stabilization
* Ongoing work: Dry vaccines
We have a long way to go for full-body cryogenics. | [
"Cryonics is the process of cryopreservating of a body to liquid nitrogen temperature to stop the natural decay processes that occur after death. Those practicing cryonics hope that future technology will allow the legally dead person to be restored to life when and if science is able to cure all disease, rejuvenat... |
How is dry ice made? | The CO2 gas is first compressed to about 150 psi or 1.0 MPa. The compression causes the gas to heat up significantly.
The gas is then run through a heat exchanger a.k.a. condenser. cooling it back down to room temperature. This causes most of the gas to condense into liquid CO2.
The pressure is then lowered back to normal atmospheric.
What happens at this point is the the liquid both boils and freezes simultaneously, since liquid CO2 can't exist at normal pressures. This creates carbon dioxide snow.
In a more specific sense, what happens is the fastest moving molecules in the liquid fly off into a gas, and carry much of the liquid's heat energy with them. This cools the remaining, slower moving molecules down to −78.5 °C at which point they freeze into a solid.
| [
"Dry ice is the solid form of carbon dioxide. It is used primarily as a cooling agent. Its advantages include lower temperature than that of water ice and not leaving any residue (other than incidental frost from moisture in the atmosphere). It is useful for preserving frozen foods where mechanical cooling is unava... |
why does usb have fewer reliability issues than older interfaces? | USB was actually built to be hot pluggable, so they've got the ability to shut it down, reload it, and refresh the drivers, device everything HOT. This means that if there's a hiccup, timing issue, or crash during load they can handle it. Whereas the old games and such were built very bare bones, streamlined for speed and performance, and much simpler and older languages in use. If there's a hiccup, timing issue, or a crash when it loads.. it has nothing to handle it, you need to reinitialize it to make it work. So, you have to turn it off, make reseat it, and power it back on. | [
"The standard connectors were designed to be more robust than many past connectors. This is because USB is hot-pluggable, and the connectors would be used more frequently, and perhaps with less care, than previous connectors.\n",
"More recent standards such as USB, FireWire, and Ethernet take advantage of declini... |
why every storm we get the radar shows it moving one way but the wind blows the opposite? | Because the wind is not pushing the storm along. That's not how storms work. Wind moves from areas of high pressure, to areas of low pressure. A storm front is a low pressure area, so wind will flow from the high pressure area in front of the storm, back into it. This also moves the storm, because as the wind moves it moves the low pressure area along inn front of the storm. Of course there are many other factors involved, such as warm and cold air, up and down drafts, etc. | [
"Weather radars are capable of detecting Doppler shift in returning waveforms. This information is used to extrapolate a mean relative velocity for all objects within the sampled airspace. Aeroecologists have used this information to distinguish among objects drifting with the wind (particulates such as dust, seeds... |
in islamic countries, how are women who wear a face veil identified for official purposes? | As I live in an arabic country, I can tell you, that on their passport, or official ID card, women have a picture of their face. This is taken by a female photographer.
At official purposes (such as imigration on the airport) they lift it just enough that the officer can check and the camera can scan the face. | [
"Most Islamic scholars and most contemporary Islamic jurists have agreed that women are not required to cover their face, though a number of scholars, particularly among the Salafi movement consider it to be obligatory. There exist a number of reasons why women may cover their face in public, and this practice must... |
how does net neutrality continue to be threatened through legislation? haven't we already shot this down? | Unfortunately, there's no "double jeopardy" on bad legislation. They can try and try and try to pass it as long as they want. | [
"Net neutrality rules would prevent traffic from being allocated to the most needed users, according to Internet Pioneer David Farber. Because net neutrality regulations prevent a discrimination of traffic, networks would have to treat critical traffic equally with non-critical traffic. According to Farber, \"When ... |
Why would someone be listed as a "Slave" in a 1910 US census? | Here is my thought: the constitution bans slavery except as punishment. It is possible that he was on some form of work-release from the prison. If he was not being paid as part of this, it would be slavery as punishment.
That, or your great grandparents were real hard-asses, and the guy was being a smart Alec. | [
"The 1820 Census built on the questions asked in 1810 by asking age questions about slaves. Also the term \"colored\" entered the census nomenclature. In addition, a question stating \"Number of foreigners not naturalized\" was included.\n",
"The first United States Census in 1790 classed residents as \"free whit... |
how does fat in the body create more flesh? | You have dedicate fat cells that are specialized in storing energy as fat. To if you eat more food that you need you can stor it as fat in those cells.
If you eat food with less calories then you need you start to remove the fat from the cells and use it for energy. When you use fat for energy you convert fat+oxygen- > water +carbon dioxide.
The carbon dioxide is exhaled from you lungs to the air. The water is used or excreted like other water you drink.
So you convert fat stored in the body to thin that you excrete so you lose weight. | [
"However, other subcutaneous fat tissues also might contribute to metabolic disease, if the fat cells become too enlarged and \"sick.\" Admittedly, subcutaneous fat cells typically are larger, and capable of storing more fat when needed. However, subcutaneous fat tissue represents the largest proportion of fat tiss... |
Is there a substance that burns with a flame cold enough to touch? | The only reason that fire is fire, is because the chemical reaction is powerful enough to emit light(via electrons moving up and down specific orbits.) If you were to suppose a similar reaction, like oxidation of iron in the prescence of an oxidizer, you can often get the same kind of reaction albeit slowly.
When you think of fire, it is better to think of it not as a substance but as the light coming off of a transient stage in a chemical reaction. Because of this, any reaction which does oxidize and become gaseous like combustion but is less exothermic, will not make fire. | [
"In addition some solvents, such as methanol, can burn with a very hot flame which can be nearly invisible under some lighting conditions. This can delay or prevent the timely recognition of a dangerous fire, until flames spread to other materials.\n",
"Solid objects that are hot can also cause contact burns, esp... |
what the scientific meme is? | Are you talking about the Sociological concept of a meme? Well essentially it's a thought virus, a concept that quickly spreads from person to person. Most cultural norms would be considered memetic in nature. | [
"Susan Blackmore has made contributions to the field of memetics. The term \"meme\" was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book \"The Selfish Gene\". In his foreword to Blackmore's book \"The Meme Machine\" (1999), Dawkins said, \"Any theory deserves to be given its best shot, and that is what Susan Blackmore ha... |
"The [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross... In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians." How accurate is this statement from a history textbook? | I took AP US history in the South too, welcome to the "Lost Cause" narrative.
I started high school in the midwest, before moving south, everything remotely involving the civil war is taught differently.
The ante-bellum period in the South was characterized by a sense of victimization, that the North came down and told them what to do, tried to change their traditions and ways. This happened to some extent, but I'd judge it was also exaggerated by a combination of pride, and the fact that those saying these things were people no longer eligible to participate in politics due to their prior affiliations (look up Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the KKK, fascinating story, interesting man, with some massive exceptions).
I find it hard to excuse a terrorist organization responsible for the torture and killing of an awful lot of people as "fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross". By that logic, if I go around nailing babies to a cross does that make me a good Christian? | [
"The Ku Klux Klan was a secret organization of whites that resisted what they saw as the excesses of Reconstruction. They sometimes terrorized and even assassinated Union League leadership. Founder Nathan Bedford Forrest grew uneasy about the group’s tendency to lawlessness, and disbanded it in the late 1860’s.\n",... |
Worth your salt? From my understanding salt was worth more then gold at one point in time. If that's the case then how come people used to "salt the Feild's" of there enemy's wouldn't that be a cost prohibitive measure? Also couldn't they just boil down sea water to produce salt? | Hi, not discouraging further answers here, but meanwhile, you may be interested in a few previous posts on salt
Salt vs gold
* [Why was salt so important in trade? Was it ever "worth its weight in gold"?](_URL_0_)
* [Why was salt so expensive in ancient times (close to it's weight in gold)? If so, how did poor people survive if salt is an essential nutrient?](_URL_3_)
Salting the earth
* [How effective was literal salting of the earth?](_URL_1_) - includes a link to the FAQ
Boiling seawater
* [I'm given to understand that in the pre-modern world salt was a very valuable commodity. If you lived near a coast line what (if anything) was to stop you just making unlimited salt by boiling sea water?](_URL_4_)
* [Why was salt so scarce and valuable when it is in the ocean everywhere?](_URL_2_)
| [
"BULLET::::- \"Sea salt\" (): The most important source. In earliest times, coastal and island salterns used earthen and then iron boiling pans to reduce sea water to salt. By the 3rd century BCE, workers filtered sea water through flat beds of ashes or sand into pits to produce a brine which could be boiled or eva... |
Why do LEDs sometimes appear to "bounce" (e.g. if you chatter your teeth)? | There's a few possibilities. In each case, the light is pulsing on/off too fast for you to notice until you jar your eyes quickly and it becomes apparent because there is a part of your retina that gets more (or less) light than expected.
With a clock radio, the displays are usually multiplexed to save on circuitry. 6 digits with 7 segments each would need 42 IC outputs and 42 wires or PCB traces. Instead they enable each digit in turn and they share segment drives. So 6 digits plus 7 segments means only 13 outputs are needed. It is called multiplexing.
With LED lighting, it is more economical to dim them by switching them on/off rapidly. It is called pulse width modulation.
Lastly, some LED lighting drivers do not filter the DC power. They rectify the AC and let the pulses of DC turn the LEDs on/off 60 or 120 times per second depending on whether the rectifier is full or half wave type (50 or 100 in some places). The LEDs require a certain voltage to start working and they go dark when it is below that threshold.
A similar effect can be seen on CRT televisions. | [
"LEDs start blinking immediately upon being turned on, but slight manufacturing differences mean the frequency is slightly off between them, and the LEDs soon appear semi-random when there are several together. Small groups may sometimes converge and then diverge again in the way that a group of cars may have turn ... |
what happens in the brain when you decide to move a hand or leg? | It is a VERY long answer in reality, but I'll try to make it short. Your brain sends signals from the zones that are responsible for initiating movement to the muscles needed. It generates this signal based on various information (sight, balance, etc).
While the muscles contract and perform said movement, your cerebellum, eyes, and inner ear check for any error and correct it by sending appropriate signals to the brain (that then convey the signal to the muscles to correct any error). | [
"In a variation of this task, Haggard and Eimer asked subjects to decide not only when to move their hands, but also to decide \"which hand to move\". In this case, the felt intention correlated much more closely with the \"lateralized readiness potential\" (LRP), an event-related potential (ERP) component that mea... |
the situation in brazil right now. | Okay.
Brazil's economy is really bad right now. The public are blaming corruption at the federal level. President Dilma Rousseff is being accused of altering the countries financial records to make Brazil look less in economic disaster. She's also being accused of being involved in a grand scheme by many involved in her political party, the Workers Party, to use public funds for their own use by exploiting government contracts from a large corporation, which she was formerly the head of the board for.
Her predecessor as President, Lula, had his phone calls tapped and it looked like he was aware of this corruption. The current president has made him immune to prosecution by appointing him as a minister on her cabinet. (He can now only be prosecuted by the Supreme Court.) Lula had been arrested and interrogated about these corruption charges.
Basically, the public is sick and tired of the massive rampant corruption in the highest level of the government, but the President is not going to step down and she's claiming that all of this is a smear campaign meant to keep the Worker's Party, which was elected due to their socialist promises to help the poor of Brazil, from being re-elected. | [
"From mid 2014 to 2016, Brazil experienced a severe economic crisis. The economic crisis became coupled with a political crisis in Brazil that resulted in the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff and in widespread dissatisfaction with the political system.\n",
"During the 2015–2018 Brazilian economic crisis, t... |
why are some people so smart without even trying? | Genetics, just like some are born with faster building muscles, some are born with a brain that can make connections and send signals faster. | [
"\"I’ve made a career out of asking dumb questions. I mean, that’s our job—not to prove how smart we are but to elicit answers, and I think you sometimes have to ask what appears to be a dumb question. I am not out there to impress the audience that I have brilliant questions all the time. I am old-fashioned enough... |
Are plant cells significantly more or less succeptible to radiation damage than animal cells? Also, how does damage typically manifest - do plants get cancer? | I don't know about the radiation part, but the pathogenic bacterium Agrobacterium tumefaciens causes something like cancer in trees. Crown gall disease. One big difference between plant and animal cancer, and also how body patterning develops, is that that plant cells have stiff cell walls and can't move.
If a plant gets cancer, it can't spread so it's less harmful than an animal cancer. | [
"Cells accumulate damage over time, but this may be counterbalanced by natural selection to remove damaged cells. In particular DNA damage, e.g. due to reactive oxygen species, leads to the accumulation of harmful somatic mutations.\n",
"Irradiation to a tissue creates response to both irradiated and non-irridiat... |
How can I read history on Wikipedia in a responsible way, knowing what is useful information and what to be skeptical of? | As far as wikipedia goes, and I am thinking mostly of my subject area, one of the pitfalls is the extremely dated nature of many of the tertiary sourced used- or sometimes their inappropriate usage: miscitations, misuses, or misappropriations- generally claiming they say something they do not.
Wikipedia's goal is not to display current or recent scholarship- but then that's not really a goal of any encyclopedia. So it can be hard to actually know what to question if you don't already know the subject and the citations the information seems to rest on.
An example for me would be an attempt at a recent page by an obviously dedicated editor on the [Franco-Tahitian War] (_URL_0_). While some of the sources the author used are good- they are missing a number of the admittedly small canon of works on this event and they rely almost entirely on English language scholarship. They also use a number of highly political and partisan popular history/travel/literature books not written by Pacific or Tahitian specialists and take their information at face value.
The problem is not necessarily whats wrong with the information in the article- though some of it is a bit off, its that its missing perspective and has an implicit bias towards the narrative of the conflict written as written by the Protestant missionaries, because thats the bias embedded the sources they used- but you wouldn't know any of that without either tracking the information backwards- or already having a good familiarity with the published and unpublished sources on the event.
So that is the gap I think you risk falling into with Wikipedia- the often completely invisible bias of the often dated, occasionally dubious secondary literature that a well meaning and hard working editor may have used. There is no vetting or specialty required, so biased perspective, especially biased language seeps in most often by accident and ignorance. | [
"In the essay, \"Can History be Open Source?: Wikipedia and the Future of the Past\" (2006), the academic historian Roy Rosenzweig criticized the encyclopedic content and writing style used in Wikipedia, for not distinguishing subjects that are important from subjects that are merely sensational. That Wikipedia is ... |
how is the universe constantly expanding when there is no edge? | The space between two points grows. Literally the space between them. It's not expanding *into* anything, and therefore the edge of space never becomes an issue.
The space between the Milky Way and the next Galaxy (in this case, Andromeda) literally grows. It just grows a very small amount. On a solar system-scale, the effect can be ignored. On a Galactic scale, it's negligible. Even on an *intergalactic* scale the space that gets added between galaxies is miniscule. But over the scale of the universe, over a long enough period of time and between objects on opposite sides of the observable universe... the effect is really quite large.
So the answer to your question is that space itself grows larger over time. | [
"Even if the overall spatial extent is infinite and thus the universe cannot get any \"larger\", we still say that space is expanding because, locally, the characteristic distance between objects is increasing. As an infinite space grows, it remains infinite.\n",
"The expansion of the universe reaches an infinite... |
how do escort ads still exist and how are they not all set ups? | ELI5: have you been browsing my web history?!?
There are certain people who enjoy pie. They form an online community of pie lovers and pie makers. The pie makers get rated on their pies, from appearance to quality. If a pie maker hers a bad reputation, pie lovers will avoid in the future.
Sometimes, a new pie maker comes along. Usually, someone from the community of pie lovers will try the new pie (taking one for the team).
The pie lover isn't paying to eat the pie, but only to spend time with the pie. If the pie gets eaten, then it's between the pie lover and pie maker. | [
"It is very common for escorts to enter the business through referrals from friends who have been in the business. The effectiveness of ads in weeklies or specialized sites has been questioned by some operators as there are so many that they are diluted. Typically, an escort will interview with an agency.\n",
"An... |
why isn't there a list of ingredients on a pack of cigarettes, when it seems like anything else you buy has that information on their products? | Same reason there isn't an ingredients list on beer (assuming you're asking about the US). Food is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, under the Department of Health and Human Services. Alcohol and Tobacco are regulated by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Trade Bureau, under the Department of the Treasury. Because of this, tobacco products don't have to comply with the FDA's labeling rules. | [
"As a result of tight advertising and marketing prohibitions, tobacco companies look at the pack differently: they view it as a strong component in displaying brand imagery and a creating significant in-store presence at the point of purchase. Market testing shows the influence of this dimension in shifting the con... |
If humans evolved different colored skin from living in different climates, will skin colors change to some equilibrium now that people of all races live in the same areas? | We're not one breeding population. Obviously a lot of humans aren't constantly leaving their home countries to miscegenate, so we're not going to evolve to be in any environment on earth. Japan and Portugal have ethnic homogenity rates of 99%, and North and South Korea are both at 100%, although I'm not so sure if South Korea's are accurate. (that doesnþ mean there isnþ a single non-ethnic Korean resident in them, that means it's closer to 100% than 99%.)
So, no. | [
"Approximately 10% of the variance in skin color occurs within regions, and approximately 90% occurs between regions. Because skin color has been under strong selective pressure, similar skin colors can result from convergent adaptation rather than from genetic relatedness; populations with similar pigmentation may... |
how is it that your veins/arteries don't simply cut off whenever you sit or compress the body in normal circumstances? | For the most part veins and arteries are not on the surface so simply sitting won't compress them enough to "cut off" flow, but it can be significant enough to reduce flow to the point your leg "goes to sleep" , also why you should not have legs crossed when taking your blood pressure, etc.
Also the circulatory system is remarkably complex and closing one pathway often is compensated for by blood rerouting through alternate, less restricted, paths. | [
"One reason veins are preferred over arteries for intravascular administration is because the flow will pass through the lungs before passing through the body. Air bubbles can leave the blood through the lungs. A patient with a right-to-left shunt is vulnerable to embolism from smaller amounts of air. Fatality by a... |
How was the food on columbus' ship and other jouneys that span over several months? | The food carried aboard ship varied a bit between nations and years. I don't have my books handy right now to find out exactly what the Spanish would have provisioned their ships with, but the recurring elements across the board are salt meat(often beef), hard biscuit, peas, and oatmeal. Drink would have been water, beer, wine, or later rum. Live animals could be carried on the deck in cages and butchered as needed. Pigs and chickens traveled well and were commonly carried.
This food would be stored in casks and barrels. Spoilage was a serious problem as water would become scuzzy with algae, bacteria, etc... after only a few weeks at sea. Many captains were extremely concerned with getting new barrels with a tight seal. Food would spoil slower as heavily salted meat and dried vegetables keep for a while. But if water or insects got into provisions they would also spoil quickly.
| [
"On 30 June 1503, Christopher Columbus beached his two last caravels and was stranded in Jamaica. The indigenous people of the island welcomed Columbus and his crew and fed them, but after six months, the natives halted the food supply.\n",
"On 30 June 1503, Christopher Columbus beached his two last caravels and ... |
When and why did commissioning art die as a cultural concept? (ie. if I go to a museum it feels like 80% of art older than one century was a commission and only 1% of art made within the last 50 years was a commission) | In NYC, 1% of commercial real estate budgets above some threshold must be allocated for the commission of art projects. I know nothing of the rest of the world but this is how it works here......_URL_0_
| [
"Modern and Contemporary Art has moved away from the historic value of craft and documentation in favour of concept, leading some to say, in the 1960s, that painting as a serious art form is dead. This has not deterred the majority of living painters from continuing to practice painting either as whole or part of t... |
p-hacking and how to detect it? | _URL_0_ is probably the simplest example.
Suppose you run a test on your data and find something that's highly unlikely to occur purely by chance: in fact, there's only a 1% probability it could occur by chance.
That result would seem important, unless we learn that you've run over 100 (independent) tests on your data. At that point, we'd say it's not important, because you've run enough tests to "insure" you'll get some unlikely results purely by chance.
The more tests you run, the worse it gets. If you run "parametrized" tests (where you combine test data using different weights until you find the "best fit"), the situation is worse, since you're effectively running an infinite number of tests (albeit not independent) with a very high chance of purely coincidental success.
I could say a lot more about this and how it's been used to massively defraud people, but to answer the other part of your question:
1. Insist on hypothesis PRIOR to experimentation. In other words, the experiments should test a given hypothesis. You should not use the experimental data to retroactively create hypotheses.
2. Insist on replication. This is really the same as (1). If your experimental data shows an apparently important result, the result is null and void until you create a new separate experiment to test it. Simply using random coincidences in one study is insufficient evidence. | [
"Hackers will uncover the IP address of the targeted person through interception software. They can also uncover personal information by discovering the Internet Services Provider of the IP address. Installing spyware and virus to the computer could misappropriate personal information either easily.\n",
"Penetrat... |
Is there any evidence of a slave trade in Eastern European and Asian countries? | Sure, there’s plenty of evidence.
Let’s just look at the history of Tartar slave raids amongst the Russians, only in the period after the Russians began gaining independence from the Mongol and Tartar steppe hordes. (There was plenty of slaving of Russians earlier, and plenty of slaving of non-Russian peoples as well.)
*The tide begins to turn 1480, The Great Stand on the Ugra:*
Ivan III became emboldened to stop paying tribute to the Great Horde. In 1480 Akhmat, khan of the Great horde advanced his Steppe Army towards Moscow to enforce the tribute. The Russians dug in to defend the fords of the Ugra River against the Horde.
The Horde tried multiple skirmishes to try to force the fords of the Ugra, but were turned back by Russian cannon and harquebuses at every attempt.
Then the two armies glared at and skirmished with each other all summer long. The Russians were not going to leave their defenses and mount an attack and the Horde feared to assault across the narrow fords, protected by defenses and guns.
Eventually, winter approached, and both sides withdrew without fighting a major battle. This was known as “The Great Stand on the Ugra”, and to the Russians it was the turning point when they ‘threw off the Tatar yoke’.
*The Russians hang on 1480-1572:*
Although the Russians had stopped paying tribute, and achieved independence, they were still hard pressed and on the defensive for a long time.
In 1507 and 1514 the Tatars raided into Russia. In 1521 the Tatars ravaged the outskirts of Moscow for two weeks with 50,000 men, taking thousands of slaves.
In about 1533, the Russians built the “Abatis” defensive line south of the Oka river to protect against the Tatars.
Between 1533 and 1547 there were over twenty large Tatar raids on the frontier, taking thousands of Russians as slaves, some of which breached the Abatis line.
In 1555, 1562, 1564, 1565, the Khan led large armies in major raids into Russia.
In 1571, an army 120,000 strong of Crimean Tatars and Ottoman Turks, broke through all the defensive lines and reached Moscow, which was crowded by thousands of refugees fleeing before the Steppe horde. Moscow was burnt to the ground with estimates of 80,000 Russian casualties and 150,000 Russians taken as slaves.
At this point, things looked pretty bleak for the Russians. The Tatars, however, returned to the Steppe for the winter, planning to come back the next summer and finish the conquest of Russia once and for all.
*Decisive Battle – Molodi, 1572:*
In 1572 Devlet Giray, khan of the Crimean horde and his Turkish allies again rode into Russia with 120,000 men. They were met by Prince Mikhail Vorotynsky and Prince Dmitriy Khvorostinin commanding 60,000 Russians at Molodi, about 40 miles south of Moscow.
The Russians had two relatively new factors deployed in this battle. One was large numbers of “Streltzi”, Russia’s first standing army, originating about 1550, armed with matchlock muskets, and deployed at Molodi in large numbers. The Streltzi had also constructed “Gulay Gorod” which were large portable wooden walls with cannon and musket ports, which could be moved by man power and latched together to create a mobile fortress.
The battle lasted for 7 days. The Tatars attacked and destroyed 3,000 Russian troops caught outside the Gulay Gorod, but the rest of the Russians were inside their mobile fort and unleashed a continuous fire while slowly moving the entire fortress in a slow retreat. On day 7, the Tatars launched an all out assault. They tried to drag down or tip over the wooden walls forming the Gulay Gorod, taking massive casualties. While they were occupied, a large force of Russians exited unobserved out the rear of the fortress, circled round the Tatars, and then the Russians both inside and outside the fort (now pretty desperate due to running low on food and ammunition) launched a two prong charge against the Tatars. The Steppe army was routed with great losses. It is said that only 20,000 Tatars returned to the Crimea.
*Russian advance, 1572-1783:*
The battle of Molodi might have marked a turning point in the long conflict between the Russians and the Steppe armies, but for 100 years it was not so easy to see that.
In 1591, Russian cannon stopped another Tatar raid at a line of fortifications called the “Bank Line”.
In 1614, the Tatars raided to within sight of Moscow again. In 1633 30,000 Tatars broke through the Abatis and Bank lines of fortifications raiding extensively into Russia and taking thousands of slaves, but this was the last deep raid into Russia.
In 1644 and 1645 the Tatars raided extensively in Southern Russian territories, taking 16,000 slaves (mostly sold to the Turks to man the galleys for a war against Venice).
In 1650, the Russians pushed forward 300km south of the Abatis Line and built the Belgorod line of forts.
In 1680 the Russians pushed south again and built the Izium Line of Forts within 150 km of the Black Sea.
In 1687-1689 The Russians tried to invade Crimea, but failed.
In 1769, the last big Tatar raid into Southern Russian territories captured thousands of slaves.
In 1774 Russia compelled Crimea to become a vassal state.
In 1783 Russia annexed Crimea.
It took the Russians 300 years from breaking free of the Tatar yoke to finally defeating the Steppe Hordes as a threat. During that period, hundreds of thousands of Russians were seized by the Tartars and sold into slavery. The combination of forts and guns is what allowed eventual Russian victory. Even though the Tatars had guns as well (generally supplied by their Turkish allies), forts defended by guns could not easily be taken, and the need to haul cannon around the steppe and resupply with ammunition greatly reduced the advantage of extreme mobility which Steppe Armies had enjoyed in the pre-gunpowder era.
Sources: _URL_3_
_URL_1_
_URL_4_
_URL_2_
_URL_0_
_URL_5_
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"European slave trade in the Indian Ocean began when Portugal established Estado da Índia in the early 16th century. From then until the 1830s c. 200 slaves were exported from Mozambique annually and similar figures has been estimated for slaves brought from Asia to the Philippines during the Iberian Union (1580–16... |
why is honey and lemon good for singers when it never gets near the vocal cords? | Not sure what the honey does, but lemon water helps cut the phlegm in my throat. Makes it so I can sing without rattling or hitching. | [
"For chronic and acute coughs, a Cochrane review found no strong evidence for or against the use of honey. For treating children, the systematic review concluded with moderate to low evidence that honey probably helps more than no treatment, diphenhydramine, and placebo at giving relief from coughing. Honey does no... |
Why are certain planes used in specific areas during WW2 | Note, this answer largely deals with the Americans. Of the major warring powers, the US had the most extensive and far-flung aerial operations. And for clarity's sake Pacific Theater (PTO) and European Theater (ETO) speaks for these theaters in the broadest sense, including areas like the Mediterranean (MTO) or China Burma India (CBI) that were nominally separate in this nomenclature.
The differences between the type of planes employed in the ETO and PTO was largely the intersection of immediate tactical needs, the prioritization of certain theaters over others, and institutional rivalries between the USN and the Army. This constellation of factors varied throughout the war, but it did result in certain types of planes dominating the picture of the American air effort in their theater.
The Army Air Forces in [Southwest Pacific Theater](_URL_0_) in 1941-early 1944 exemplified this trend. In 1941/42, the SWPac's 5th Air Force did receive then front-line equipment like the P-40, P-39, and B-17s to stem the Japanese tide in New Guinea and the Solomons. But these aircraft tended to be adequate for the job, they were roughly on par with their Japanese equivalents. The emerging 8th Air Force campaign against German industry in late-1942 meant that the 5th Air Force received fewer B-17 spares and replacements. Moreover, the B-17 level bombing was inadequate for destroying Japanese shipping even though the bomber's performance envelope and robust construction made it difficult for Japanese planes to intercept. 5thAF commander George Kenney thus pushed for twin-engined bombers in the interdiction role such as the A-20 and B-25 and built upon skip bombing techniques developed by the RAAF. These medium bombers were in less demand for the ETO and their performance was ideal for the New Guinea theater. Medium bomber successes like the Battle of the Bismarck Sea and other strike successes, coupled with their often garish schemes such as those of the [499th Medium Bomber Squadron](_URL_2_) imparted to these medium bombers a wider public memory postwar. Many of the same medium bombers were used in the ETO, especially in the Mediterranean, but they did not have the same historical record or memorialization associated with them, *Catch-22*'s B-25s excepted. Conversely, the 5th AF often had to make do with the older generation of fighters as the ETO sucked up a number of the more modern fighters. The 35th Fighter Group had to swap out its P-39s and P-38s for P-47s in late 1943, but would only receive P-51s in 1945. The P-38 was a major success in the SWPac, where its heavy armament and range were clear advantages, but proved to be a disappointment in the ETO where high-altitude operations played havoc with its engine fluids, and the high performance of the *Luftwaffe* fighters brought compressability problems to the fore as the ETO P-38s engaged in dogfights. Therefore, although the P-38s in the ETO had a decent record, they did not have the type of aces like Richard Bong or Thomas McGuire. The SWPac Mustangs and Thunderbolts also found while they outclassed their Japanese enemies, the attritional battles of 1942/43 and collapse of the Japanese logistical network meant there were far fewer targets as Japanese airbases were short of fuel, pilots, and planes.
In some cases, interservice rivalries played an outsized role in the absence of plane types in certain theaters. In theory, the F4U met a number of requirements for an AAF long-range fighter in 1943. But this was a *Navy* plane. There were long-standing prejudices within the Army against using an aircraft developed for use on aircraft carriers. This was not as myopic as it would appear at first sight. Carrier aircraft need specialized equipment such as strengthened landing gear, tailhooks, and like which added a significant weight penalty. Although the performance gap between carrier and land-based aircraft rapidly closed during the war, many of the officers in Army procurement had experience with the types of planes in the 1930s. The preconception was that a Navy aircraft could not meet the needs of the Army. But, in addition to the "not developed here" syndrome, both the Navy and the Marine Corps had earmarked the Corsair for their own uses, as well as the various Lend-Lease navies and air forces of the Allies. Sorting out the procurement priorities would have taken time, and updated P-47s and the new P-51s offered a more convenient plane of the ETO. Moreover, while it was possible to make the F4U into a land-based fighter, as the USMC did to great effect, making the P-51 or P-47 into a carrier fighter would have been quite difficult given their landing envelopes and lack of carrier equipment. Therefore, the only Corsairs and Hellcats used in the ETO in large numbers were the FAA's lend-lease, which were involved in strikes in Scandinavia and the invasion of Southern France.
Other aircraft became the unique preserve of one theater because their performance made them the only ones suitable for the job. The B-29 fit in this category. Existing B-17s and B-24s could hit most of the targets in the ETO by 1944, but the ranges to attack the Home Islands from bases in China and the Pacific needed the B-29. Assigning the B-29s to this area fit this need as well as providing a salve to the Army and Navy men in the Pacific who were stung by the "Europe First" priority of the Roosevelt administration.
Finally, as the examples of *Catch-22* or various models of the 499th show, postwar culture played an important role in emphasizing some aircraft types over others. The B-17 had an advantage over the B-24 postwar as movies like *Twelve O'Clock High*, *Command Decision*, *Memphis Belle*, and *Red Tails* helped to make it the face of the 8th AF's bombing campaign. While the quality of this media was quite variable, it helped fix the image of the B-17's tall tails in public memory. The WWII documentaries produced postwar scrambled for newsreel footage and often elected for B-17s, especially since the Boeing plane's durability provided dramatic images of shot-up aircraft returning to base. In contrast, the B-24's most prominent brush with postwar memory was the discovery of the ill-fated [Lady Be Good](_URL_1_) in Libya, which inspired the classic *Twilight Zone* episode "*King Nine* Will Not Return," albeit using a B-25. Although veterans of both planes wrote their tales and created their own reunion cultures, the B-17 fit more easily into existing public memory as the plane that fought over Europe (and it helped that B-17 veterans had a much fonder experience with the docile Boeing plane than the more difficult to fly B-24). This postwar memory-making process- replicated, repeated, and reified in a myriad different forms and media- helped some aircraft types become more prominent in the public's mind even if their less famous stablemates served with distinction as well. | [
"During World War II, new technology was used to create aircraft, which were used in air raids. Aircraft during the war were used for transporting resources from different military bases and dropping bombs on enemy, neutral, and friendly targets alike. These activities damaged habitats.\n",
"During World War II, ... |
I just bought a re-usable toy hand warmer for my son that works by "clicking" a small metal clip inside the sachet of clear liquid. The liquid turns opaque in an instant and the sachet becomes warm. How does it work? | The sachet is filled with a supersaturated solution of [sodium acetate](_URL_0_). By clicking the metal clip, you're providing a nucleation site for crystals to form. Since the crystallization of sodium acetate is quite exothermic, heat is released.
When you place the sachet under hot water, you're heating the solution up to redissolve those crystals, turning it into a supersaturated solution again. So the energy provided in the water is stored in the form of the dissolved solute - that is, breaking up the lattice energy of the crystals and driving the sodium acetate into solution. This energy is returned when the solute forms crystals. | [
"The last two were filled with a granular solid in place of the viscous liquid found in the other figures. A vacuum pump, which attached to the heads of these figures, removed the air from within, which \"froze\" the toy in its stretched position.\n",
"In 1999, Paddle Pop Malaysia & Indonesia market launched thei... |
Universal expansion: movement in space or movement of space? | Not movement at all. Space is *added* between objects. (what you'd call movement of space, I guess).
When we talk about accelerated expansion or gravitational collapse, what we mean is that the rate at which space is *added* is growing as time goes on. Similarly, if the universe didn't have dark energy, or had less of it, the universe would eventually start *eliminating* space between objects.
Note too that this addition, or elimination, only occurs on the largest cosmological scales. It only happens in the vast voids between galaxies and galactic clusters. | [
"Spacetime (the fabric of the universe) is expanding meaning everything in the universe is stretching like a rubber band. This motion is the most obscure as it is not physical motion as such, but rather a change in the very nature of the universe. The primary source of verification of this expansion was provided by... |
How *exactly* did the dinosaurs die out? Why did the mass extinction target some types of animals (dinos) but not others (mammals, fish)? | I think there's still a lot of debate about many of these questions you raise. And some of them might be impossible to answer - 65 million years ago was a long time ago, and an event that took place over just a thousand years is really just the blink of an eye in geological terms. We do know some fairly well, though. This is not my specific area of expertise, but here's some of what I understand:
The impacts of the asteroid probably took place of a relatively short period of time. Huge tsunamis would have ripped across coastlines, as the asteroid struck in the mouth of a shallow inland sea in North America. These tsunamis would have been far bigger and more destructive than the ones in Japan this year, or Indonesia in 2004. In addition, as you mention, there would have been large amounts of particulates in the air, playing havoc with climate and light availability. This would be exacerbated by massive forest fires, particularly in North America. The atmosphere had about 10% more oxygen than it does now, which increases the likelihood of fires. The atmospheric shock of impact would have flattened forests, leaving piles of timber around, ready to burn given a source of ignition. It seems like there is a global soot layer, that lends credence to the hypothesis of massive forest fires. There is also a hypothesis (I'm not sure how strongly supported) that large amounts of sulfur were injected into the atmosphere, creating conditions for acid rain that would have been far worse than what occurred in the Northeast USA over the past few decades.
As for why certain species survived, again, this is open to debate. Some think that any animal over about 50 lbs was probably wiped out. Marine environments were probably badly impacted, because once phytoplankton populations crash, the whole food chain will follow. Terrestrial and freshwater systems probably fared better, particularly aquatic ecosystems. They use lots detritus for energy, instead of direct primary producers, and may have been sheltered from the brunt of the asteroid impact. That might also be why crocodiles, alligators and turtles did relatively well, despite their large size and cold-blood compared to dinosaurs and terrestrial reptiles. Anything that couldn't deal with abrupt, drastic changes in climate probably bit the dust.
| [
"Around 66 million years ago, a mass extinction event took place, known as the Cretaceous–Paleogene (\"K-Pg\" or \"K-T\") extinction event. The event wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs and many other species, and paved the way for mammals and eventually human beings to dominate the earth at the present time. It is n... |
what’s hpv and how does it differentiate from herpes | Hpv is a skin virus that typically causes warts. Most people have hpv at various places on their body occasionally throughout their life. One type causes genital warts which is an std. herpes is a disease that causes skin blisters and again becomes an std when on the genitals | [
"HPV is the sexually transmitted virus that is known to be the cause of genital warts. There are currently more than 100 different strains of HPV, half of which can cause genital infections. It is worth noting here that although it is not usually the HPV strains that cause genital warts that are associated with the... |
is there a highest temputare the human body can feel? | Well first, I don't think someone would notice the slight change of temperature. It's like feeling the difference between 73 degrees and 74 degrees but hotter. Also the heat would start to burn your skin and damage nerves which would tell your brain that it is hot. So the highest temperature someone could feel is the temperature is when their nerves are damaged enough to where they can't feel anything. | [
"Tehuantepecers can be felt up to out to sea in the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean. Sustained winds at sea have been recorded as high as , with gusts as high as , with a wind event in February 1974 which sandblasted the ship which took the observation. These winds cause waves which then propagate as swell and are s... |
how can lg and samsung produce amoled or oled screens for phones with great resolutions for relatively low price but can't do the same for tvs? | The manufacturing process doesnt scale up easily, is the short of it | [
"In June 2013 Samsung announced the Korean availability of a 55-inch curved OLED HDTV. Priced at 15 million Korean won (around $13,500). Samsung also reiterates the claim LG made when it launched its own curved OLED model that \"keeping all parts of the screen an equal distance from the viewer makes for a better vi... |
why is it so much more difficult to chug cold water vs room temperature? | Ik for me the cold water can make my teeth hurt and kinda gives my mouth and throat a sort of "brain freeze". | [
"Mpemba paradox is that under certain conditions, hot water will freeze faster than cold water even though it must pass through the same temperature as the cold water during the freezing process. This is a seeming violation of Newton's law of cooling but in reality it is due to non-linear effects that influence the... |
What makes electronic money officially money? Why can't people forge electronic money? | Assuming you're talking about money in banks' computers, the answer boils down to:
1) Becoming a bank isn't easy.
2) Being a bank is very profitable.
3) Cheating and just assigning yourself a bunch of money isn't worth risking getting caught (from the bank's perspective). An employee might want to, but they would have to get past the bank's security and audits to get away with it.
| [
"Paper money or electronic money can be used as long as it is backed by one of these commodities at a fixed exchange rate (in other words the paper is just a contract stipulating that the bearer can redeem the paper for a fixed measure (weight) of that particular commodity). Until 1971 most currencies of the world ... |
Monday Mish-Mash | The Human Body | There's been some good research in the past fifteen years on so-called "freak shows" in the 19th century. Scholars have examined what individuals with physical abnormalities or transsexual characteristics meant in a modern world increasingly concerned with normalizing categories.
P. T. Barnum [advertised dwarfs and giants](_URL_11_) as part of their main attractions. Several shows had ["midget reviews"](_URL_0_) of little people performing show pieces. Until the 18th century, such individuals were treated like collectables; kings would employ dwarfs in their courts for the purpose of entertainment, as they typically elicited delight instead of disgust. In the 19th century, that perception began to shift.
[Francesco Lentini](_URL_8_) (**WARNING: DISTURBING IMAGES**) was born in Sicily with three legs, two sets of genitals and an extra foot growing from the knee of his superfluous leg. In his [adult life](_URL_7_), he emigrated to the U.S. and became an act for the Ringling Brothers Circus. Of course, many pairs of conjoined twins also became famous worldwide, such as [The Tocci Twins](_URL_4_) and [Chang and Eng Bunker](_URL_3_).
However, these abnormalities need not be inherited from birth. Here is a picture of a so-called [Hungerkünstler](_URL_9_), or "hunger artist" (**WARNING: GRAPHIC**). This particular man was exhibited in Turin in 1910 to an audience of 10,000. Supposedly, he subsisted on a diet of caffeine and nicotine. There was an acute fascination with the limits to which the human body could go in this era.
I could also post pictures of Victorian-era hermaphrodites, but I'll leave that to everyone's personal discretion. You can probably find those images on Google; Félix Nadar did a series of photographs on French hermaphrodites. You can also look up some of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld's studies on sexuality. There's been some good work done showing how our modern notions of sex and sexuality were constructed.
Additional resources:
* Alice Dreger, [_Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex_](_URL_10_).
* Lillian Craton, [_The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in 19th Century Fiction_](_URL_5_).
* Nadja Durbach, [_Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture_](_URL_6_).
* Rachel Adams, [_Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination_](_URL_1_).
* Elena Mancini, [_A Brighter Shade of Pink: Magnus Hirschfeld, The Third Sex, and the Sexual Freedom Movement in Germany_](_URL_2_) (Ph.D Dissertation).
| [
"\"Our Bodies, Ourselves\" is an international book written by 12 women, for women in 1969. The women at the workshop were talking about their experiences with doctors and trying to make a list of decent doctors. When they realized their list was too small, they decided it was time to take matters into their own ha... |
When they simulate neural networks in Google deep-mind and other similar AI systems are they writing code that simulates neural networks or are they litterally building hardware that simulates neural networks? | Depends on the word "similar". Most neural networks are based of a very simple code... infact... I'll go grab one from when I wrote a neural network to recognize hand written digits:
function g = sigmoid(z)
g = 1.0 ./ (1.0 + exp(-z));
end
That is the activation function for each "neuron" in the network. z is the input, and g is the output.
Each neuron receives an input, which then produces an output, and then that output is fed into the next neuron in the network, and that goes on and on. In "deep learning" usually 5, 6, 7 or 8 times, while in typical neural networks, it might just happen twice, with an input layer that receives data from the image your presenting, a "hidden layer" of neurons, and then an output layer. In the case of my code to recognize hand written digits, there were about 200 input neurons (one for each pixel in the input image), I think about 20 neurons in the hidden layer, and then 10 neurons in the output layer. The neuron that was activated the most then said which number it was (i.e. if the 2nd neuron in the output layer was the most active, then the input was a 2).
On the other hand, there are so called "neuromorphic chips". Specifically designed hardware, realized with typical electronic components, transistors, resistance and capacitors, that have been designed to function like neural circuits. IBM have made some, and so have various other companies. This are of course very specific, and difficult to use. (i.e. anyone who can program can write programs for any personal computer, but these pieces of hardware require specific programming for each type of chip).
| [
"BULLET::::- Google DeepMind – The company has created a neural network that learns how to play video games in a similar fashion to humans and a neural network that may be able to access an external memory like a conventional Turing machine, resulting in a computer that appears to possibly mimic the short-term memo... |
how do we know/guess how many died in historic plagues? | > but it got me thinking- how do they know?
People wrote stuff down. Even back then it was important if people died, and keeping track of population was important for things like taxation. Researchers can look at a period of time and see how the deaths differed from normal and deduce about how many people died from a certain plague. | [
"In 1851, the census commissioners collected information on the number who died in each family since 1841, and the cause, season, and year of death. They recorded 21,770 total deaths from starvation in the previous decade, and 400,720 deaths from disease. Listed diseases were fever, diphtheria, dysentery, cholera, ... |
Is it possible to predict where and how a glass will break? | It depends.
With structural analysis finding the general areas and different modes of fracture is more or less straightforward. However, the specific fracture crack pattern and exact positions are very difficult or impossible to calculate because the outcome is sensitive to very small differences and imperfections.
Engineers need to know how, where, when, etc. a part will fail. They also need to know the speed a crack propagates and its general behavior. These things aren't easy, but they are certainly possible. Predicting the exact chaotic pattern of a fracture isn't generally useful or practically possible. More and more information will get you a better prediction, but there's certainly a point when it stops being interesting. | [
"Even though the result of striking a glass object with a hammer does not exist before the act of striking it, that does not mean the broken glass is a creation of the observer. A particle accelerator is a sophisticated type of hammer, and the target particles are liable to end up as a heap of broken shards.\n",
... |
Pictures used to load from the top down, now they load blurry and clear up as more data is received. Why? | Basically it's all about the file format and bitmap encoding.
Certain file formats (as an example, JPEGs) can be saved in a interlaced encoded bitmap^^1 . This encoding works by sending a "rough draft" of sorts for what the image is. This "rough draft" is really just a subset of the image's pixels in which each pixel sent actually represents a larger number of pixels (in other words, when the image is really blurry, each pixel you see represents X number of pixels in the fully rendered image image.)
As more data is sent, more pixels are rendered and the image's resolution increases as now instead of 1 pixel representing, lets say 16, now 1 pixel represents 8, then 4, then 2, then the image is loaded. (Example of a 16 x 16 image being rendered progressively^^2 )
The other form of image encoding is (please correct me if there is an official term as there might be but I can't think of it, so for lack of a better word) baseline encoded bitmaps, where each line of pixels is individually received and loaded, leading to a top down progression of pixels being rendered (pretty self explanatory).
As long as you don't need a picture to be 100% rendered at max resolution to get what you're trying to use it for, interlacing is the best option because slow connections are a thing, and interlacing doesn't require an image to be downloaded to its entirety to understand what the image represents. That being said, it's not necessarily as common as it might seem. Interlacing and baseline are pretty interchangeable in this day and age as the internet isn't running on kbps anymore (in most areas*). If it's not a hassle, it's definitely courteous to use interlacing should someone be using an image intended for a wide audience, but under no circumstances is it some horrible faux pas not to use it.
1: _URL_0_
2: _URL_1_ (from the Wikipedia article)
| [
"Early image and data storage servers also initially left the uploaded content unchanged. This would sometimes result in undesirable web page display problems, such as too high resolution causing page layout problems in discussion forums, or too high detail causing intolerably slow page loading times. The sharing o... |
what's the appeal of 4chan? every time i try to read it doesn't make sense | Much of what happens on 4Chan is what's called shitposting. I.e intentionally posting drivel (either harmless or inflammatory drivel). There are also lots of inside jokes and bits of jargon that originated on that site, which a new viewer might not know. Kind of like how redditors might joke about Kevin, or a young man breaking his arms, or decoy snails. | [
"\"4chan\" is an English language imageboard based on the Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel. This imageboard is based primarily upon the posting of pictures (generally related to a wide variety of topics, from anime and popular culture to politics and sports) and their discussion. The Guardian describes it as \"at... |
how can we feel tense / bad atmospheres in certain places? | It's a purely psychological effect. The "atmosphere" isn't real, but lots of symptoms are -- these can include an odd smell, an unusual quiet, the presence of nervous-acting people, or objects arranged in a manner that's unusually messed up or unusually tidied up. | [
"People inhabiting tropical and subtropical climates acclimatize somewhat to higher dew points. Thus, a resident of Singapore or Miami, for example, might have a higher threshold for discomfort than a resident of a temperate climate like London or Chicago. People accustomed to temperate climates often begin to feel... |
why do arcades use coins instead of quarters? | Arcades can also give you more tokens than you would normally get quarters to entice you to spend more and use it all in one visit.
So, instead of 20 quarters for $5, they can give you 25 tokens for $5 and you're more likely to spend $5 than going to get 4 tokens for a dollar five times. $10 will get you 55 tokens and $20 will get you 120 tokens.
People will see that the $20 is the best value and just put in a twenty.
It's harder to get someone to spend all 80 quarters if they get change for a $20. | [
"The coins were never very popular, primarily due to their large size and weight which made them inconvenient to carry and the fact that very few vending machines were designed to accept them. They saw the greatest use in casinos, and one-dollar tokens in many United States casinos still approximate the size and we... |
how does solid state memory work with no moving parts? | Essentially, Solid State memory functions by creating "cells" that can be written on to, and require no energy to maintain.
To be more specific, like with the interior of a CPU, we encase super-tiny mechanisms called Floating Gate (FGMOS) transistors into divots in sheets of ultra-thin colorless sapphire (like what we use for high end watch faces). These tiny transistors can store very specific electrical charges for exceedingly long periods of time, as they are insulated with highly electrically resistant materials.
We essentially cram millions of these onto tiny chips, then stack several of these onto a single device. It's worth noting that as transistor sizes get smaller, SSD density rises. This is why a [1 TB USB 3.0 flash drive](_URL_0_) is possible. | [
"Solid-state storage devices typically store data using electrically-programmable non-volatile flash memory, although some devices use battery-backed volatile random-access memory (RAM). Having no moving mechanical parts, solid-state storage is much faster than traditional electromechanical storage; as a downside, ... |
Where does the flap-flap sound of a helicopter come from? Do all helicopters sound the same? | The "thup thup" sound comes from the disturbance in air caused by the interaction between the main rotor and the tail rotor. They are both moving a lot of air, and the way those airflows interact cause a bunch of noise. The way those interact based on number of blades, speed, and general design change how they sound. A Huey sounds very different from a HH-65.
There are ways of reducing this noise. Some helicopters have their tail rotor embedded inside their tail, which reduces the interaction of air when the blades pass each other. Other helicopters use NOTAR, (NO TAil Rotor) which uses the jet exhaust from the engines instead of a tail rotor. Leaks of stealth helicopters the military uses show advanced rotor design and odd angles which presumably help with the noise. | [
"While most noise from a helicopter is generated by the main rotor, the tail rotor is a significant source of noise for observers relatively close to the helicopter, where the higher-frequency noise of the tail rotor has not yet been attenuated by the atmosphere. Tail rotor noise is particularly annoying to the hum... |
Why did we cultivate onions even though we couldn’t eat them the same way as apples or oranges? | Its more of an historical questions then biology. As you can very well eat an onion just like an apple - > if you use one that is not as strong in flavor like red onions. You can also eat it raw and make pickles...Onions where used hundreds of years before... to spice up food. As regular food (as it holds quite well on storage - so you can use it as rations for long journeys).Therefore cultivation occurred naturally - but regarding the original onion - > it went extinct so we don't have enough info on it.
Wikipedia already explains it quite well (Quoting) :
> Because the wild onion is [extinct](_URL_20_) and ancient records of using onions span [western](_URL_18_) and [eastern](_URL_8_) Asia, the geographic origin of the onion is uncertain,[\[17\]](_URL_7_)[\[18\]](_URL_14_) with likely domestication worldwide.[\[19\]](_URL_17_) Food uses of onions date back thousands of years in China, [Egypt](_URL_9_) and [Persia](_URL_0_).[\[17\]](_URL_7_)[\[18\]](_URL_14_)[\[19\]](_URL_17_)
>
> Traces of onions recovered from Bronze Age settlements in China suggest that onions were used as far back as 5000 BCE, not only for their flavour, but the bulb's durability in storage and transport.[\[20\]](_URL_4_)[\[19\]](_URL_17_) [Ancient Egyptians](_URL_5_) revered the onion bulb, viewing its spherical shape and concentric rings as symbols of eternal life.[\[19\]](_URL_17_) Onions were used in Egyptian burials, as evidenced by onion traces found in the eye sockets of [Ramesses IV](_URL_10_).[\[21\]](_URL_2_)
>
> [Pliny the Elder](_URL_3_) of the first century CE wrote about the use of onions and cabbage in [Pompeii](_URL_19_). He documented Roman beliefs about the onion's ability to improve ocular ailments, aid in sleep, and heal everything from oral sores and toothaches to dog bites, [lumbago](_URL_1_), and even [dysentery](_URL_6_). Archaeologists unearthing Pompeii long after its 79 CE volcanic burial have found gardens resembling those in Pliny's detailed narratives.[\[19\]](_URL_17_) According to texts collected in the fifth/sixth century CE under the authorial aegis of "Apicius" (said to have been a [gourmet](_URL_12_)), onions were used in many Roman recipes.[\[19\]](_URL_17_)
>
> In the [Age of Discovery](_URL_16_), onions were taken to [North America](_URL_15_) by the first European settlers,[\[17\]](_URL_7_) only to discover the plant readily available, and in wide use in [Native American](_URL_11_) gastronomy.[\[17\]](_URL_7_) According to diaries kept by certain of the first English colonists, the bulb onion was one of the first crops planted by the [Pilgrim fathers](_URL_13_).[\[19\]](_URL_17_)
& #x200B; | [
"Because the wild onion is extinct and ancient records of using onions span western and eastern Asia, the geographic origin of the onion is uncertain, with likely domestication worldwide. Onions have been variously described as having originated in Iran, western Indian subcontinent and Central Asia.\n",
"Traces o... |
why is heart cancer so rare? | This is because muscle cells (also called muscle fibers) don't divide, and cancer is most common in cells that divide a lot. Dividing cells are primed for cancer because:
1) a lot of the machinery needed to divide rapidly is already present in the cell so not a lot extra is needed to make it grow uncontrollably into a tumor/cancer
2) the more a cell divides the more chances it has to make errors. DNA replication isn't perfect, and over time these errors can accumulate into dangerous mutations (this is also why cancer is more common in the elderly)
This is why we see a lot of cancer in tissues with a high "cellular turnover" rate - skin, liver, colon, etc. Cells that never divide (muscle fibers, neurons) almost never get cancer. Brain cancer is usually caused by a special type of brain cell that can divide (but not signal) call neuroglia, which forms the cancerous "glioma."
Bonus biology fact - because muscle cells fibers don't divide, you have the same number your whole life. Arnold Schwarzenegger has the same number of muscle fibers now as he did as a baby, they're just more packed with the good stuff.
Source - biochemistry major, medical researcher. | [
"Ovarian cancer usually has a relatively poor prognosis. It is disproportionately deadly because it lacks any clear early detection or screening test, meaning most cases are not diagnosed until they have reached advanced stages.\n",
"Most heart tumors begin with myxomas, fibromas, rhabdomyomas, and hamartomas, al... |
What was life like for a Canadian infantry soldier in NW Europe during WW2? | If you haven't read Tim Cook's work, start there. His novels are incredibly easy to read and he does an excellent job capturing WWI and WW2 (The Necessary War, Fight to the Finish) in his two volume sets. That would be a good starting point anyway.
There is also a video set that a Manitoba historian has been working on the details every unit from Manitoba ever. I cannot remember for the life of me what the name of it is at this moment though. If I finally remember I will update this post. | [
"In the summer of 1919 the First World War had been over for over half a year, but many of the British Empire's soldiers still had not been sent home. Unhappy at the delay in being returned to Canada, the men of some Canadian regiments stationed at Woodcote Camp on Epsom Downs became increasingly restive.\n",
"Th... |
when your body is submerged in cold water, it feels freezing at first, then starts to feel warmer and warmer. when your body is exposed to cold air, it feels okay at first, then gets colder and colder. what causes this phenomenon? | I'm no expert, but I think it has to do with body heat. In the water, your body heat and the temperature of the water find an equilibrium where both are at the same temperature, whereas in the air, it's always moving so it cools your body while your body heat doesn't have time to affect the air temperature. | [
"Cold shock response is the physiological response of organisms to sudden cold, especially cold water, and is a common cause of death from immersion in very cold water, such as by falling through thin ice. The immediate shock of the cold causes involuntary inhalation, which if underwater can result in drowning. The... |
Do quantum computers, if developed to the same scale as regular PC's, have any use to a regular person? | you can do everything you can do with a normal computer with a quantum computer. Because of how quantum computers work, every step needs to be reversible.
you can add 1+3 on a normal computer, and in the end you have 4, without knowing if the input was 4+0,1+3,2+2,3+1 or 0+4. You can not do that on a quantum computer. the calculation would output something like 4;1, and thus you know if the result is 4 and one summand is 1 the other has to be 3.
this adds lots of complexity to circuit design, thus more expensive (and slower). On the other hand you could receive radio 60 years ago without any logic gates but my mothers alarm radio needed to be restarted a few days ago, because the radio had crashed
At the moment it looks like quantum computers will be used for tasks quantum computers are good at, and normal computers will be used for everything else (including handling quantum computers input/output), like GPUs are specialized to parallel vector operations.
One of the most prominent problems for quantum computers is the Traveling salesman problem, which even for end users has lots of useful applications.
Quantum cryptography on the other had is already on the market. It is still very expensive (and there is an [exploit](_URL_0_) for some hardware), and if the political and social circumstances were different (NSA needs have access to encrypted information, because...uhhh...terrorists) it might come to end users as an encryption chip. But at the moment I see more of a quantum cloud service in the future | [
"Quantum computers are expected to have a number of significant uses in computing fields such as optimization and machine learning. They are famous for their expected ability to carry out 'Shor's Algorithm', which can be used to factorise large numbers which are mathematically important to secure data transmission.... |
Are there any records, from ancient civilizations, of stars (or other celestial objects) that cannot be seen or found in the sky today? | > I'm assuming that thousands of stars that were visible during ancient times have supernova'd
---
Answer is **yes**.
But let me intrude a bit into r/askscience :
There are just ~5,600 stars visible by [naked eye](_URL_7_).
Strict definition: *visible [by naked eye]* are stars with V < =+6^m. That's [*apparent astronomical magnitude*](_URL_5_) for brightness, in logarithmic scale. Thus, any changes to *visible* stars is very rare event. Previously invisible (to a naked eye) star could become visible during supernovae event and then fade out (a case of Chinese *Guest Star* of 185 AD) - this is more common case.
Note that there are several class of variable stars, most well-known is eclipsing variable star [Algol](_URL_2_) and oscillating red giant [Mira Ceti](_URL_4_). Changes in Algol's brightness are visible to naked eye and are documented in all civilizations. Some variable stars could change brightness dramatically - [novae](_URL_0_), for example could flare almost as bright as supernovae and do that many times (supernova event happens once per 'qualified' star lifetime).
*Just ~10 supernovae* were identified in our Galaxy. Most notable are:
* SN 1572, Star in Taurus constellation, which remnants are seen as [Crab Nebula](_URL_6_)
* [Tycho Brahe's Nova](_URL_8_) in Cassiopeia. It was called Nova, but now classified as supernova.
**Sources**
1. [The astronomical magnitude scale](_URL_1_)
2. [List of known supernovae and some candidates in the Milky Way](_URL_3_) Sources referenced
3. [List of all known supernovae and some candidates](_URL_9_) Note that all extragalactic supernovae were discovered with telescopes. And only supernovae in M31 (Andromeda galaxy) came close to being visible. Some people in very good conditions could see +8^m, so in theory it could be spotted by naked eye, as it had peaked at V=+7^m. | [
"Unexplained aerial observations have been reported throughout history. Some were undoubtedly astronomical in nature: comets, bright meteors, one or more of the five planets that can be readily seen with the naked eye, planetary conjunctions, or atmospheric optical phenomena such as parhelia and lenticular clouds. ... |
if the airline industry is struggling, wouldn't it be better for them to sell unbooked seats for less at the last minute than operate at a loss? | They do it to some extent, although lowering prices too much is very bad business practice.
* People who tend to book last-minute NEED the flight urgently and are willing to pay a premium. Suppose if the ticket costs $1,000 and one person books it at the last minute - that gives the airline $1,000 of revenue. If they really wanted to fill up the airline they could reduce it to $200. However, that means that they need to attract at least four more last-minute customers to get the same $1,000 revenue (remember that your first last-minute customer is now happy he got the ticket for $200 when he was willing to pay $1,000!) Your profits also decrease due to extra fuel and service needed to serve the other four customers.
* Repeatedly doing this trains customers to avoid booking until the last minute (or book cancellable tickets and then re-book at the end). This dilutes your revenue significantly if your pricing becomes predictable.
* /u/Antechronos is right about flying standby - but realize that you need to show up at the airport at the last minute to do so. This is a tactic that allows the people who are absolutely willing to go through the pain of showing up at the airport to get the discounted ticket, while stopping everyone else from seeing the prices drop and cause the problems mentioned above.
Source: I do revenue management in the hospitality industry. | [
"Airlines may ask for volunteers to give away their seats or refuse boarding to certain passengers in exchange for a compensation that may include an additional free ticket and/or an upgrade in a later flight. They can do this and still make more money than if they booked only to the plane's capacity and had it tak... |
What are some ancient Roman spooky tales? | My first article, which appeared in Arv: The Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore in 1979, dealt with two legends from the 1st-century primary source, The Satyricon. One legend dealt with a soldier who changed himself into a wolf. The second described some witches who abducted a baby. These stories were characterized as being told at a Roman feast, and the intention of the telling was to scare the people at the dinner part. I highly recommend this source for many of the insights one can gain into everyday Roman life. | [
"Roman Tales () is a 1955 Italian comedy film directed by Gianni Franciolini. It is based on several short stories collected in \"Racconti romani\" by Alberto Moravia. The film won two David di Donatello Awards, for best director and best producer.\n",
"Racconti romani (\"Roman Tales\") is a series of sixty-one s... |
how can a government block targeted internet access once starlink is available vs traditional isp? | The first and simplest way would be to demand that SpaceX stop providing service when the government demands. Almost certainly they are going to agree to do so.
Otherwise the government doesn’t give them a business license and makes doing business with them illegal. Now most people can’t get access because they can’t pay, and it would be very unlikely that SpaceX would want to become involved with overtly illegal business in other countries, regardless of the reason.
But suppose it is free for some reason. Then the government just makes it illegal to access and flies aircraft over population centers with directional antenna tuned to the frequencies used to uplink to the satellites. They pick out anyone talking back to the satellites and then send some police on the ground to seize the equipment and whoever is using it. That relatively small portion of the population ends up in a mass grave somewhere. | [
"On 21 March 2006, the Labor Party committed to requiring all ISPs to implement a mandatory Internet blocking system applicable to “all households, and to schools and other public Internet points” to “prevent users from accessing any content that has been identified as prohibited by the Australian Communications an... |
how do the graphics card, ram, and processor all work together to determine performance of a pc? | CPU is its ability to do math. Everything a computer does is dictated by math, so this makes things faster. However you can't get faster than almost instant (dictated by speed of electrons wizzing around inside) so if the CPU is able to go at that speed, other things may slow it down instead.
This is where we get to RAM. RAM (Random Access Memory) is the computers ability to remember things quickly. The CPU can't remember things on its down, so if you want it to, say, remember the keys you are typing in your keyboard, it needs RAM to hold that information until the CPU needs it. If the RAM is smaller than is needed, we get issues. On solution is to temporary store information on your hard drive, that that is orders of manitude slower, so your CPU has to twiddle it non-existent thumbs and sit around and wait for the numbers it needs to get to it so it can do more math.
The Graphics card (GPU) is just another specialized CPU that has it's own RAM built in with it. 3D graphics involved LOT of very complicated math done very quickly. The GPU does that math so the CPU doesn't have to bother and it's custom build to do that specific math very well. If it's not good enough, you graphics will go behind. See the above two explanations for details, as either the GPU or it's dedicated RAM will be at issue. You're CPU can't handle it's own work and modern 3d graphics at once.
Things that do not require 3d graphics do not use the GPU at all, usually. Crytocurrency happens to use similar math to 3d graphics, so that's why those are used for that. Hope that helps! | [
"Like other processor registers, the PC may be a bank of binary latches, each one representing one bit of the value of the PC. The number of bits (the width of the PC) relates to the processor architecture. For instance, a “32-bit” CPU may use 32 bits to be able to address 2 units of memory. If the PC is a binary c... |
why is the tip of the human nose made of cartilage? | The actual reason, although rather vague, is that natural selection leads to traits that are more advantageous for survival to be selected for and thereby become more prevalent in a population. So having a cartilaginous tip to the nose allowed for better survival to reproduction. Probably because the nose sticks out relatively unprotected, and cartilage has some give that is more forgiving when hit compared to bone which would be more likely to break, possibly causing increased bleeding or chance of infection by breaking through the skin. | [
"Several bones and nasal cartilages make up the bony-cartilaginous framework of the nose, and the internal structure. The nose is also made up of types of soft tissue such as skin, epithelia, mucous membrane, muscles, nerves, and blood. In the skin there are sebaceous glands, and in the mucous membrane there are na... |
what exactly makes cheap beer taste much worse than something more expensive? | Some of the big boys use rice in their beers. And their light beers are just overfermented then watered down. You can really taste poor quality ingredients. | [
"IBU is not determined by the perceived bitterness of the taste of the beer. For example, the bittering effect of hops is less noticeable in beers with roasted malts or strong flavours, so a higher proportion of hops would be required in strong flavoured beers to achieve the same perceived bitterness in moderately ... |
why can my ipad play videos for hours straight without even having a fan, while my laptop reaches 85deg c and higher after streaming netflix for only 2 minutes? | > I would think the technology in my Macbrook Pro surpasses that inside of my iPad
Not really. Tablets are a miracle.
| [
"In contrast to desktop PC, laptop and notebook typically do not have power supply fans or video card fans, generally use physically smaller hard drives and lower power components. However, laptop CPU fans are usually smaller, so may not necessarily be quieter than their desktop counterparts - and limited space, li... |
How did technology evolve from analog to digital? | The first step in digital electronics was the [flip-flop](_URL_1_), at around 1919. A flip-flop is a circuit with two stable states (which can be thought of as 0 or 1).
Why is digital a good thing?
Let's start with what analog is. Analog means an electronic circuit deals with a continuously variable signal. You have values that are continuous, this means you can get any possible value within the operating parameters. Say, you have some value that can range from 0 to 10. That means you can get ANYTHING, 0.0001 is just as acceptable as 8.000011 or 9.9998376...
What if there is some noise (random disturbances or variations)? Yeah, that complicates things. Signal can degrade when it is transmitted over large distances (or if there is something messing with it), copying it can also add some more variation. There are ways to handle all those things, but this implies more complications and expenses, and you might run into cases where you just can't work within some parameters...
What is digital? Digital means you deal with fixed, discrete states. That means you could exclusively work with, say, 0,1,2 and 3. No 2.5, no 1.12244 rubbish. Everything has to be just one of those states.
Digital circuits represent signals by using bands instead of continuous ranges. All values within a band are considered equal, so that you only work with the desired discrete values. In practical terms, you can say anything from 0 to 4 is considered a 0, and anything from 6 to 10 is considered a 1. What about 4-6? Well, you do all you can to avoid those and keep things simple and predictable. It's MUCH easier to deal with that kind of tolerance than with smaller values.
Digital simplifies working in a precise and organized way. You can apply crafty algorithms to check if messages were transferred properly, you can make infinite copies of things without being concerned about errors. In many ways, you have much less to worry...
Digital can have some issues, too, but it makes things easier.
For more detailed information, see:
* [Ifrah - The universal history of computing: from the abacus to the quantum computer](_URL_0_) | [
"However, digital technology has slowly replaced analog technology in all these domains in the past 40 years. The transformation began with the telephone system, in the 1970s and microchips and microcomputers in the early 1980s. Indeed, it was the combination of the telephone system and computers through a common d... |
how do protesters have time to protest for days on end? | (I know, I know, not for literal five year olds, but this one was just too easy to convert)
So you know when you come home from school, and you get to play with your toys after a long day of fingerpainting and learning your letters?
Well some people who care a lot about a certain issue, like, say, their nice teacher getting fired, use that play time to protest against the school authorities. The problem is that you only get to play AFTER you are done with school, so the amount of time you can protest is limited. But, there are other kids who go to school in the afternoon, meaning they can protest in the morning, and then as soon as they have to go back to school you can take over for them.
And, there are some other kids whose parents will let them take a few days off of school to protest something that they really believe in. Those kids become sort of like anchors, and maintain the constancy of the protest.
And there are also some kids who can only come out for a few minutes or a few hours, because their parents are very strict. Usually, the other kids will invite these kids to come only on big days when the need to show a big prescence, like when the superintendent is going to address the protesters, or when the governor is in town.
So, with all the different kids taking different roles and giving different time commitments, you can have a continous protest for days on end without giving up too much schooltime.
**TL;DR - Most people who protest are employed, because most people are employed. Continous protests are maintained by cycling people in and out, with a few anchors to maintain continuity.** | [
"\" We will not stop our protests until our demands are realized right ! As warned before the gate of the Rector, the ten protests will be held on Monday, 10 February 2014 at 12:00. As in previous protests, students will gather in the Student Center dormitories, while others will gather at the square ' Skanderbeg '... |
What were the reasons behind the rise of the Caliphate? | In short, it was a great number of factors. Early Orientalist scholarship loved to lay the blame on the "weakness" of the classical empires of Byzantium and Persia due to decades of near constant war between the two, but the reality is that this is a gross oversimplification. The older source that i_like_jam has cited is definitely among this early Orientalist scholarship, which likes to raise it's nose at the thought that that rabble-Bedouin could possibly be able to overtake the great classical established order if not for the fact that they were simply unable to fight.
The great Arab "sport" prior to the rise of Islam had always been raiding, and the Arabs had made themselves a nuisance to the larger regional powers for a long time prior. It was because of this that the Byzantines and Persians came to rely on a number of *foederati*, or Arab clients, to serve as a buffer between themselves and greater Arabia. But the point to take away from here is that the Arabs were far more adept at warfare than early Orientalists would have you believe. A big problem, though, was that Arabia was a very fractured place before Islam. Some tribes never got along with others, and would have never worked with each other - until Islam.
Islam itself seems to have served as a unifying force for these groups, which were therefore seen in far greater numbers and organization than ever before. The commanders of the Muslim armies were veterans themselves, and are remembered not only for their tactical *nous*, but for their experience as well.
There was also the issue of the indigenous populations in the territories that Arabs conquered. Many were, by some accounts (including the Arabic sources), becoming increasingly marginalized by the ruling elites or the Emperor/King himself due to the confessional community they belonged to. Thus, Jews in the Near East had long been limited in the decades before the rise of Islam; the Miaphysites of Greater Syria, who had long disagreed with the Orthodox Christian Emperor in Constantinople and hoped for less religious restrictions, may well have seen a much greater opportunity for tolerance with the arrival of the Arabs. Groups such as these may well have chosen not to fiercely resist the Arab conquerors when they arrived: at the very least, this is a major reason that the much later Arabic histories mention as to the reasons for their success.
All of this, of course, also doesn't even consider the religious motivation Islam itself may have provided. Namely, the possibility that these young Muslims truly believed themselves to be fighting with God at their backs, or even the possible apocalyptic belief that these Muslims believed themselves going forth before the end of days (a suggestion made by David Cook in his *Muslim Apocalyptic and Jihad* (JSAI, 1996) article).
While it's getting a bit dated now, I would strongly suggest you seek out Fred Donner's *[The Early Islamic Conquests](_URL_0_)* if you are interested in this topic. It's not without its flaws, but it spends a lot of time on the military and political aspects of the dynamic conquest period. Donner is an excellent Arabist, and the book is very readable.
I would avoid Hugh Kennedy's effort on the topic, which is not very good despite his previous works. | [
"While the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258) originally gained power by exploiting the social inequalities against non-Arabs in the Umayyad Empire, during Abbasid rule the empire rapidly was Arabized. As knowledge was shared in the Arabic language throughout the empire, people of different nationalities and religions be... |
why do bugs when outside fly around the same area with a bunch of other bugs instead of being spread apart? typically gnat like bugs. | They are making more bugs via the usual route. That requires them to be in close proximity. Think of it like you are walking through a bug night club. | [
"During certain times of the year boxelder bugs cluster together in large groups while sunning themselves on warm surfaces near their host tree (e.g. on rocks, shrubs, trees, and man-made structures). This is especially a problem in the fall when they are seeking a warm place to overwinter. Large numbers are often ... |
Why are spinal discs so prone to hernias? | To add to other comments:
L5/S1 is particularly prone to injury because the disc is situated along a steep slope just above the pelvis, and so it carries the weight of the torso not squarely on its face like all the other discs, but at a fairly steep grade. Additionally (and this is true throughout the spine), the ligament that covers the rear of the disc (the posterior longitudinal ligament) is hourglass-shaped instead of broad and flat like the one in front. This creates a weak spot in the ligamentous "wrapping" of the disc on either side, at roughly 5 o'clock and 7 o'clock, which is a convenient spot for the disc nucleus to herniate should an injury occur. It just so happens that the nerves are at 5 and 7 o'clock, which is why disc herniations so frequently result in arm or leg pain. | [
"Symptoms of a herniated disc can vary depending on the location of the herniation and the types of soft tissue involved. They can range from little or no pain, if the disc is the only tissue injured, to severe and unrelenting neck pain or low back pain that radiates into regions served by nerve roots which have be... |
How do particles turn to follow the circular path of the Large Hadron Collider? | The trajectories of the particles in the beam are curved using magnetic fields. Particularly, superconducting dipole magnets. You can read more about them [here](_URL_0_). | [
"On 7 March 1960, Touschek gave a talk in Frascati where he proposed the idea of a collider: a particle accelerator where a particle and its antiparticle circulate the same orbit in opposite direction. When bunches of opposite-moving particles and antiparticles collide, they annihilate and produce new particles dep... |
music in dreams | Because your mind is beautiful and capable of an incomprehensible amount of creativity. | [
"The score to the psychological thriller \"In Dreams,\" by Elliot Goldenthal, is an avant-garde work filled with his trademark techniques and dissonance. Composed in 1999, and working again with frequent collaborator Neil Jordan, it also features songs by Roy Orbison and The Andrews Sisters.\n",
"\"From Sleep\" w... |
How did 'tribes' or 'tribal federations' work? E.g the Saxons or the Angles | I want to direct your attention to [this quite excellent post](_URL_0_) by /u/Aerandir. The context he wrote that was for a discussion about what the definition of tribe is/should be.
I don't believe the concept of 'tribal federation' is really addressed in that comment, nor is the comment really meant to address it. However, since I have mentioned him by name, it might draw his attention here and he may be able to contribute something on the topic now. | [
"In 3rd and 4th century Germany, great tribal confederations of the Alamanni, Bavarians, Thuringians, Franks, Frisii, and Saxons arose. These took the place of the numerous petty tribes with their popular tribal form of government. With the exceptions of the Saxons, all these confederations were ruled by kings; the... |
why ice molecules are closer together than water molecules, yet ice of the same mass as water takes up more space. | They're not closer together, I forget what it's called and why they do it but at the very moment of freezing the particles basically jump away from each other.
It's because of this that ice evaporates faster than water, the molecules are already farther apart. | [
"Water is an exception which has a solid-liquid boundary with negative slope so that the melting point decreases with pressure. This occurs because ice (solid water) is less dense than liquid water, as shown by the fact that ice floats on water. At a molecular level, ice is less dense because it has a more extensiv... |
How do scientists refer to specific points in space without an up or down or polar directions (E,S,N,W)? | I actually don't know for sure, but I assume an X,Y,Z system using a common central point.
I actually want to find this out now. To the Google!
Found this site : _URL_0_
Is that what you are after? | [
"Pointing in a specific direction is necessary for Earth observation, orbital maneuvers, maximizing solar power, and some scientific instruments. Directional pointing accuracy can be achieved by sensing Earth and its horizon, the Sun, or specific stars. Sinclair Interplanetary's SS-411 sun sensor and ST-16 star tra... |
movie trailers show "festival award winner". how do movies win awards before they are released? | Most movies are finished long before they're released. They're shown at certain film festivals or given limited releases in a few major cities before they get into theatres everywhere. | [
"The national film industry awards called Golden Arena are always presented at the festival. All the locally produced feature films made in the preceding 12 months are screened at the festival and everyone involved in making them automatically qualify for the Golden Arena award in their respective category. Therefo... |
if you are alone with a tire in an empty space, if you spin the tire, will it go forever? | Is the tire on the ground or floating in a vacuum? | [
"A literal flat spot can occur on car tires if the vehicle is parked without moving for some time (generally longer than a week), and the tire deformation at the bottom of the wheel becomes semi-permanent. The flat spot gradually relieves itself when the car is driven but can temporarily give similar symptoms to an... |
how did that consitition accommodate both federalist and anti-federalist viewpoints | United States 1.0, the Articles of Confederation, was a strongly federalist system. The central government in US1.0 could only act when the States were in consensus - which means each state had a veto on the actions of the whole country.
United States 2.0, the Constitution, is a system that combines a strong central government that acts not by consensus but by majority, meaning that states don't have a veto over anything. However, it was designed with the core concept of "any power not specifically enumerated and delegated to the central government remains with the States". When adopted most people understood that to mean the central government was strong, but strictly limited. Outside those limits, it could not act or impose itself on the States, and the mechanism to expand the power of the central government was the Amendment process which was designed on purpose to require a very high degree of agreement (but still not consensus) between the States.
This was the compromise between people who wanted to retain the strong federalism of US1.0 with the anti-federalists who realized the government didn't work if it was tied to mandatory consensus.
In the 1930s facing the emergency of the Great Depression the central government broke free of these limitations. In a series of cases the Supreme Court reinterpreted the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to enable the Congress to legislate on any matter so long as the subject *might* cross state lines, or *might* impact interstate commerce. Since that definition is effectively unlimited, it meant the central government could make a law about anything, and it is no longer bound by the "anything not delegated is restricted" logic of the original compromise. | [
"Anti-Federalism was a late-18th century movement that opposed the creation of a stronger U.S. federal government and which later opposed the ratification of the 1787 Constitution. The previous constitution, called the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, gave state governments more authority. Led by Patr... |
how did u.s. colleges not only get into football in the first place, but also become so extremely invested in their stadiums, teams etc. over time? | It all began back just after the Civil War, Rugby had just come over to the states, and sort of caught on at the elite Easter schools (most of which would form the Ivy League).
However nobody could really agree on the rules, so interschool play wasnt really a thing. But in 1869 Princeton and Rutgers's clubs agreed to play each other on a mutually agreed set of rules and they had a blast so they decided to do so again a few weeks later.
Now travel costs money, and the clubs realized people liked watching the games so they started having stands set up and admission charged. Then the schools saw that promoting it was a great way to get alumni energized and excited about their schools and willing to donate. Then the media saw that covering all this was a great way to sell more ads and to more people.
Then schools all over the country read about and saw what the teams were doing for their schools out east and wanted in the game, so the midwest schools started playing each other (formed the Big 10), the south started playing each other, Texas all played each other, and the West coast schools got in too.
And all of this before 1905 and the formation of the NCAA and legalization of the forward pass! So in a large sense college football in all its meaningful forms was in place even before 1900.
GREAT book on it is The Opening Kickoff by Dave Resvine who works for the Big 10 Network. | [
"College football is very popular throughout much of the United States, and the top schools generate tens of millions of dollars in yearly revenue. Top FBS teams draw tens of thousands of fans to games, and the ten largest American stadiums by capacity all host FBS teams or games. College athletes are not paid, but... |
Dorian invasion, sea peoples, and Phoenicia. Any relations? | You may be interested in [this recent AMA](_URL_0_) with Eric H. Cline, author of *1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed*. | [
"Around 1200 BC, the Dorians, another Greek-speaking people, followed from Epirus. Traditionally, historians have believed that the Dorian invasion caused the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization, but it is likely the main attack was made by seafaring raiders (Sea Peoples) who sailed into the eastern Mediterranea... |
what are the results of the indian elections, and what does it mean? | The Bharitya Janta Party (BJP; rough meaning Indian People's Party) recorded a solid landslide, gaining a clear majority in their own right in the Lok Sabha (People's house, analogous to the House of Reps), and with their coalition partners control a solid majority of the 543 member lower house. The Congress party that previously held government has been reduced to a fairly tiny 50 or so seats, and their leadership is in somewhat disarray. Most of the remaining seats are taken up by minor regional and small issue parties.
The BJP is the conservative party, right of Congress. In American terms, it is a thumping win for Republicans. Note however the Indian political realities puts the BJP somewhere around the Democrats, while the previous government could have been described as borderline socialist.
India hasn't seen a party with a clear majority for 30 years, so while the BJP are so far indicating they'll retain their coalition partners (mainly because they'll need them in the upper house, which isn't yet clear), they could push through their agenda without the compromises and delays that have dragged down politics in recent history.
PM designate Modi specifically: as a former chief minister (governor) for Gujarat state, Modi achieved significant economic growth, attracting business from overseas and other parts of the country to an area that hadn't had such development for years. As a result, he has been seen to bring a pragmatic and business focused reform agenda. India's middle class has been complaining of rising inflation with (relatively) low growth, so the hope is that he'll control the former while encouraging the latter. Modi is the _first_ prime minister of India born after Independence, though at 63 he is no spring chicken.
Modi has his critics. He is seen as being passive in the face of sectarian violence against Muslims in his state 12 years ago, and he hasn't quite shaken it. The BJP's association with the religious movements (like any Conservative party) is troubling to minorities, particularly Muslims, but with 150 million Muslims in India and two neighbouring Muslim countries in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the BJP would be suicidal to actually do anything that would be anti-Muslim. Other minorities are considered small enough or inconsequential enough as to not be worth ruffling (no perceived threat from Sikhs, Jains or Buddhists.)
Any more and you really start delving into history. | [
"The Election Commission of India held the indirect 4th presidential elections of India on May 6, 1967. Dr. Zakir Husain, with 471,244 votes, won the presidency over his rival Koka Subba Rao, who garnered 363,971 votes.\n",
"The Election Commission of India held indirect 3rd presidential elections of India on May... |
why do whiskey/bourbon have more carbs than vodka? | _URL_0_
They don't have any carbs | [
"The recent success of grape-based vodka in the United States prompted traditional vodka producers in the Vodka Belt countries of Poland, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Sweden to campaign for EU legislation that would define \"vodka\" as only spirits made from grain or potatoes. This proposition provoked heavy cr... |
what actually make the teeth grow and push through the gum? | Root resorption - simply put when the tooth is developed (which is an entire process) the adult teeth begin to push on the baby teeth which causes the roots of the baby teeth to shrink, become loose, and fall out. | [
"Since there are a standard number of teeth in humans, the size of the dental arch is of vital importance in determining how the teeth are positioned when they appear. While the arch can expand as a child grows, a small arch will force the teeth to grow close together. This can result in overlapping and improperly ... |
if vaping is just inhaling water vapor and some ingredients, why does the room get foggy with still smoke, instead of it just dissipating? | It's vapor of polyprolene glycol and glycerine. That stuff is a liquid at normal room temps. so when mechanically vaporized, it sticks around in vapor droplet form | [
"A smoke \"simulant\", usually a glycol or glycerine mixed with distilled water, is vaporised and then condensed in free air to produce the distinctive smoke-like effect. The particles produced are on average 0.2-2.0 micrometres in diameter, meaning that the fog settles very slowly (and therefore has excellent long... |
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