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why people say a college degree now is worth a high school degree from x years in the past? | No, it has to do with how many people *have* college degrees.
I don't agree with the sentiment as a whole, but I can at least understand the logic of it.
A few decades ago, fewer people went to college. You could get a good job out of high school, so college wasn't as important. Since then, a lot of those high school degree level jobs have gone overseas and the jobs that replaced them often require a college degree. So now your average person likely has a college degree because they need one to get a decent job.
Thus, a college degree today is "worth" the same as a high school degree from years ago because it is the minimum level needed to enter the work force in a lot of industries. | [
"In 2015, Statistics Canada reported that almost one-quarter of university graduates went back to school and completed another certificate, diploma or degree of equal or lesser value to their first degree. People with a degree in the humanities, or in physical and life sciences and technologies were the most likely... |
Why Australia, NZ, Canada, etc. decided to keep Queen as head of state? | Great response from u/VoilaVoilaWashington about Canada. I'll try to speak more about Australia.
As I understand it, India's experience with the British was caustic. The separation was relatively unfriendly, and things like the partition reflected the lack of understanding the British had. It thus made sense for India (and Pakistan/Bangladesh) to go their own way, having the only connection being through the Commonwealth, where the association is strictly voluntary, equal, and independent.
The Australian (and Canadian) experience was far less dramatic and conflicted. The UK had created the national governments, displacing the far less powerful and visible indigenous peoples and creating large immigration programs that meant the strong majorities of each population were immigrants. Those immigrants saw themselves as British, setting up new societies.
The governments created in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand were modelled on the UK. They didn't have to keep the Queen, but it made sense to do so as it was the simplest continuation of the governance model they had before, where the sovereign was represented by a colonial governor. It also reinforced the link between the new governments and the "mother government" back in London.
So, why has the monarchy survived? I'd suggest three reasons:
1. No alternative is better. Every time an alternative model is suggested, a host of potential problems arise. (This includes the fact that the UK pays all the costs of the royal family, so virtually any alternative will cost more.)
2. There is a lot of respect for the Queen. Whether that will transfer to her heirs remains to be seen, but if they follow her commitment to duty, then this is quite possible.
3. It symbolises ties between a host of nations - including the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, who tend to be extremely close and trusting. Speaking personally, I see the 3 other countries as basically brothers and trust them and wouldn't want to do anything to lessen that sentiment.
Looking specifically at Australia, there has been (and is) a republican push, resulting in a referendum in 1999. It failed comprehensively. The model put forward (basically, replacing the Queen directly with an appointed president) was seen as having the undemocratic aspects of the monarchy but none of the benefits of independence from the elected government. The alternative - an elected president - was rejected in the earlier constitutional convention because it would create a competing centre of political power, cost a lot of money, encourage populist leaders, etc.
Since 1999, the monarchy in Australia has become more and more popular. Given the failed referendum occurred only two years after the death of Princess Diana, when the popularity of the Queen/royal family/monarchy was at its lowest, you'd have to wonder whether there's really any prospect of it succeeding under more normal circumstances.
Hopefully that helps suggests why the monarchy is still in place in those 3 countries when it isn't in India. | [
"In Australia the present Queen is generally assumed to be head of state, since the governor-general and the state governors are defined as her \"representatives\". However, since the governor-general performs almost all national regal functions, the governor-general has occasionally been referred to as head of sta... |
when your phone is ringing, why are the electronics around it buzzing? | I don't think that's what OP is asking. You can have a phone on silent, sitting next to other electronic devices, and you'll often hear very distinct electronic buzzing type noises from the other devices specifically when the cell phone is ringing. | [
"Some users have reported a strange hissing noise during heavy usage of the phone. \"CNET\" reports it as \"faint buzzes and hums coming from the backside\". \"The Daily Telegraph\" speculates that the iPhone 7's new A10 Fusion processor is the source of the noise, linking to tweets that compare the phone's hissing... |
why does the sunrise continue to get later after the shortest day? | In short: the length of the day isn't exactly 24 hours. It varies between 24 hours and 30 seconds, and 23 hours, 59 minutes and 30 seconds. However for convenience we always use the average of 24 hours. This means that if the sun rises at 8:00, then the next day it will rise around 24 hours and 30 seconds afterwards, i.e. at 8:00:30, and the next day at 8:01, even though it's December and the Sun should be rising earlier and earlier.
Why does this happen?
Because of earth's [sidereal day](_URL_1_) and [synodic day](_URL_0_). The sidereal day is the time is takes Earth to complete one revolution around its own axis, relative to the rest of the stars. This time is approximately 23 minutes, 56 minutes and 4 seconds. So why is the day 24 hours? Well, during that time, Earth also moves approximately 1/365 of its orbit around the Sun. So it needs about 4 more minutes to finish a revolution relative to the Sun, so that it faces the exact same direction as the day before. This is the synodic day, which is what we actually use day to day.
However, Earth's orbit is elliptical - during the northern hemisphere's winter months Earth moves a bit faster, so it actually needs around 4.5 minutes extra, making the day 24 hours and half a minute long, and during the summer months Earth moves a bit slower, so it only needs around 3.5 minutes extra, making the day half a minute less than 24 hours. | [
"Locations on the Equator experience the shortest sunrises and sunsets because the Sun's daily path is nearly perpendicular to the horizon for most of the year. The length of daylight (sunrise to sunset) is almost constant throughout the year; it is about 14 minutes longer than nighttime due to atmospheric refracti... |
marcus aurelius & niccolo machiavelli | Niccolo Machiavelli was an author; he wrote a book called "The Prince", which was written in the form of an instruction manual to a leader of the time. He was explaining about how politicians should manipulate, pay false praise to their superiors, exploit their inferiors, etc. etc. This is what "Machiavellian politics" refers to. Ironically, while many people think that Machiavelli actually said that this was what made a good leader, he was actually being satirical and making fun of the present leadership. | [
" Niccolò Machiavelli met the Duke on a diplomatic mission in his function as Secretary of the Florentine Chancellery. Machiavelli was at Borgia's court from 7 October 1502 through 18 January 1503. During this time he wrote regular dispatches to his superiors in Florence, many of which have survived and are publish... |
how can you physically see things in a dream, colors and everything, even though your eyes are closed? | This is a commonly asked question here. Please see several previous postings among [these previous posts.](_URL_0_) If they don't entirely answer your question, you might create a new post with
a more specific question.
Try our handy Search function sometime. :-)
For best results in most cases, use 2 or 3 general, common words
that refer to the key concepts in your topic. | [
"Objection: \"[W]e \"see\" things… at a distance from us, and which consequently do not exist in the mind….\" Answer: Distant things in a dream are actually in the mind. Also, we do not directly perceive distance while we are awake. We infer distance from a combination of sensations, such as sight and touch. Distan... |
What is the most isolated animal taxonomically? | The microscopic (about 0.1 millimeters long) animal species *Limnognathia maerski*, which was discovered living in warm springs on an island off the coast of Greenland in 1994, is the only known member of Micrognathozoa, a clade which has been described variously as a class, subphylum, or phylum. The almost equally tiny sea-dwelling species *Trichoplax adhaerens* was previously thought to be the only member of the phylum Placozoa, but within the last couple years 2 related species have been discovered.
While it's a plant rather than an animal, the *Ginkgo biloba*, commonly known as the ginkgo or maidenhair tree, is the only remaining species in Ginkgophyta, a clade approximately at the level of a phylum. However, dozens of related plant species once existed, and are believed to have been quite widespread during the Mesozoic era (the time of the dinosaurs) before being driven to extinction with the emergence of flowering plants. | [
"All animals are posited by biologists to have evolved from a flagellated eukaryote. Their closest known living relatives are the choanoflagellates – collared flagellates whose cell morphology is similar to the choanocyte cells of certain sponges.\n",
"There are 45,000 faunal species reported. mammal species numb... |
why are the bottom of our feet so tough yet so ticklish? | You got a lot of nerves on both your hands and feet, you use the ones on your hands to handle things and the ones in your feet to handle your balance, plus checking if you aren't walking over broken glass.
If you try it, its easy to notice that "ticklish" sensation on your hands, thing is, your hand is more used to these finer sensation, while your feet are more tuned for pressure differences, for balance
In short: Both your hands and feet are ticklish, but you feel it more on your feet because they aren't as used as your hands to these kinds of sensations. | [
"The soles of the feet are extremely sensitive to touch due to a high concentration of nerve endings, with as many as 200,000 per sole. This makes them sensitive to surfaces that are walked on, ticklish and some people find them to be erogenous zones.\n",
"Because of the concentration of nerve endings in the sole... |
If one were to build a ladder into space, past the gravitational field of the earth, could you theoretically climb the ladder to escape the earth's gravity, without having to achieve escape velocity? | You do need to achieve escape velocity to escape the earth's gravity ... that is what [escape velocity](_URL_0_) actually means.
Note however (from the formula on the page linked above) that escape velocity is a function of the *distance from the center of gravity*. This means that as you climb higher and higher on your postulated ladder, the distance from the centre of gravity gets larger and larger, and so the escape velocity (at that height) gets lower and lower. Eventually the escape velocity will be so low that it is lower than your rate of climbing the ladder, and at that point you will have achieved escape velocity. You can then let go of the ladder entirely, and you will still continue to move away from the earth. | [
"The ladder paradox (or barn-pole paradox) is a thought experiment in special relativity. It involves a ladder, parallel to the ground, travelling horizontally at relativistic speed (near the speed of light) and therefore undergoing a Lorentz length contraction. The ladder is imagined passing through the open front... |
why do some dogs never stop eating? | In the wild a wolf wouldn't have any idea when their next meal might be. So, overeating when there is an abundance of food will let that wolf build fat which will see it through during times when food is scarce. This instinct has continued on with domesticated dogs. | [
"Since as such dogs are spirits (and the \"older brother\" of man), Urapmin do not kill or eat them (unlike some neighboring tribes), nor do they let dogs breathe on their food. (This contrasts with humans—the Urapmin previously had no cannibalism taboo, but they can share food with them.) In fact, the taboo on eat... |
why does florida water taste weird? | One thing to consider is not all of Florida uses similar water. There is both well and municipal sources, depending on which you got, and how it was treated or can have various different properties such as taste and smell. And well water is usually treated at location, which means system and treatment can vary even between neighbors to produce different results.
On top of this different counties also get their water supply from different places, which just like above can vary what is actually in the water, and effect how it is treated, which means even with municipal water two cities in Florida can have different tastes.
Lastly is subjectivity, in which it may also taste weird because it's not what your use to, while locals may not notice it. | [
"Florida Water is an American version of Eau de Cologne, or Cologne Water. It has the same citrus basis as Cologne Water, but shifts the emphasis to sweet orange (rather than the lemon and neroli of the original Cologne Water), and adds spicy notes including lavender and clove. The name refers to the fabled Fountai... |
How does a changing magnetic field induce a current? | If you consider electric and magnetic fields just as they are in maxwells equations, the question becomes more phillosophical. I am not aware of explanations for this in quantum mechanics but I do know how to explain it in terms of another mathematical approach.
Looking at this question from the perspective of relativistic electromagnetism, the magnetic field contains information regarding relativistic effects of the velocities of charges. From different reference frames, moving objects experience length contraction which causes a change in the perceived charge density into a so called 'proper charge density'. So in other words, from the perspective of a moving electron looking at a current in a wire, the current might not be moving and instead, the wire is. Due to relativity, the wire undergoes length contraction which changes the charge distribution from the perspective of the moving electron and hence it perceives an electrostatic force. This force is exactly the same as from a 'stationary' observer which would explain this as a force caused by the magnetic field. So you could see that a changing magnetic field to a stationary charge looks like a change in the charge distribution which causes an electrostatic force and thus a current is generated.
Note that allthough I explain this in a conceptual way, the math is quite precise and also difficult. I did not explain this in a very accurate mathematical way even though I could. If I made mistakes in my choice of words due to the lack of mathematical literacy, please correct me. | [
"To understand the origin, consider a wire loop, placed in magnetic field. According to Faraday's law of induction, if the magnetic flux is changed through the loop, an emf will be induced in this. The magnetic flux may be changed by changing the area of the loop or by changing the magnetic field. Why a changing ma... |
what would actually happen if you were ejected from an airlock into outer space without a space suit on? | All the air would rush out of your lungs, and your ears would be very painful, if your Eustachian tubes were blocked at the time your eardrums would very likely burst.
Your digestive tract would begin to swell up due to trapped gases, and some gasses would begin to leak out of your esophageal sphincter and anus.
Any moisture on the surface of your lungs and other mucous membranes would start to boil off. This would feel chilly, but not cold. EDIT: I was inspired by a comment to do some math, over a minute or two it wouldn't matter much but over a longer period of time you'd get pretty cold. But you be dead so.
Due to the lack of air your lungs would start working backwards and oxygen would start coming out of your blood.
Your body would swell as small gas bubbles started forming in soft tissues, some small capillaries near the surface might burst.
Previously dissolved gasses would begin to form bubbles in your blood vessels, but your blood would not boil because your blood pressure is high enough to keep the boiling point above your body temperature.
After 15 sec enough oxygen would have diffused out of your blood into your lungs that you would pass out.
Your body would continue to swell to somewhere in the region of 2 times your typical volume, at which point your skin would have pulled taut enough to halt further gas formation.
You now have the worst sunburn of your life on whichever side of you has spent the past minute in the radioactive hellhole that is unfiltered sunlight.
At 1min 30sec brain damage starts to occur. Repressurization anytime prior to this results in full recovery with proper medical intervention.
At approximately 2min brain damage is extensive enough to be incompatible with life, beyond this point no amount of medical intervention can save you.
EDIT 1: No don't hold your breath, your lungs will burst and you will be extra mega boned.
EDIT 2: Water boils at a lower temperature in space, your body happens to be higher than space boiling.
EDIT 3: We know this cause some poor sap (Jim LeBlanc) mega fucked up by managing to dislodge the air hose on his suit while in a vacuum chamber. For his bravery he earned 87 seconds of vacuum and a bad earache but was otherwise ok. Also some fucked up dudes thought that trying it out on some dogs would be an OK thing to do (another comment further down has the link).
EDIT 4: Omg I get it Total Recall has a scene like this.
EDIT 5: After some questions about the dog tests I have poached the [link](_URL_0_) from u/clocks212 bellow, go show him some love! | [
"When space suits below a specific operating pressure are used from craft that are pressurized to normal atmospheric pressure (such as the Space Shuttle), this requires astronauts to \"pre-breathe\" (meaning pre-breathe pure oxygen for a period) before donning their suits and depressurizing in the air lock. This pr... |
Who was in charge of soviet nuclear launches during the cuban missile crisis? Did they disobey orders to launch at any time? | There were a number of officers with launch authority.
Many Soviet subs carried nuclear torpedoes as well as SLBMs; at one point during the crisis (accounts vary) a captain ordered his sub's torpedoes armed and fired at a US Navy ship that had been harrassing his submarine. His first officer persuaded him not to launch. In the event of a full-scale war, the Soviet subs could have launched their missiles even if Moscow was incapable of giving orders.
Nuclear missiles in the Soviet Union and Europe were more tightly controlled and would have required direct orders to fire; again, in the event of a full-scale war, they would have been able to act independently.
General Issa Pliyev, the Soviet commander in Cuba, was also under this standing order; his ballistic missiles (with 1-megaton payloads) were under central control but he had authority to deploy tactical weapons (12-kiloton warheads for his cruise missiles and bombers) if he was attacked.
When the blockade began, Moscow revoked Pliyev's launch authority, terrified of escalating to a full nuclear exchange. Pliyev moved to combat readiness just in case, rushing deployment of his missiles and moving the warheads close to the launchpads.
On October 26, Pliyev told Moscow he would use "all available means of air defense" if attacked. The Kremlin approved this but again warned Pliyev not to arm his missiles with warheads unless specifically authorized.
On October 28, Pliyev received new orders, allowing him full control over his defensive actions. That meant that at the height of the crisis- a day after Pliyev's AA crews shot down an American U-2 and a Russian sub nearly nuked a U.S. Navy vessel, Khrushchev OKed the use of nuclear weapons to react to a conventional assault. Castro, although out of the nuclear command loop, was convinced a sneak attack was coming and urged Pliyev and Moscow to mount a pre-emptive nuclear war. Luckily, he was ignored.
The next day, Khrushchev ordered all nukes in Cuba stood down. | [
"On October 28, 1962, during the peak of Cuban Missile Crisis U.S. Strategic Forces were at Defense Condition Two or DEFCON 2. According to missile technicians who witnessed events, the four MACE B missile sites on Okinawa erroneously received coded launch orders to fire all of their 32 nuclear cruise missiles at t... |
how come i can smell my fart when i'm running? | Because you aren't running fast enough | [
"(I'm in the ox's tummy/ Where it doesn't snow or rain./ When the ox farts/ Patufet will get out). After a while they hear Patufet's little voice and his mother feeds the ox with herbs that make it fart faster.\n",
"Then he goes out for a walk. The flowers along the path from his home wither and fall as he passes... |
When and how was February 29th accepted internationally as leap day? | The ancient Romans originally had ten months, the forerunners of March - December. (this is the reason the later months have names which correspond to latin numbers two less than you would expect). Originally the season of Winter was outside the calendar, its days were undated, but eventually January and February were invented to allow all days to have a calendar date.
There was now a problem, however. Remember that a Month lasts around the time it takes for a Moon to turn full then turn dark again. However, it does not do this an exact number of times during the year. So some years, on an ad-hoc basis, they would end February a few days early and have a whole new month called Intercalaris in their place. March would then follow Intercalaris.
A problem was that there was no set mathematical system for deciding this, instead a religious official would make the decision. Now, imagine this was happening today and the official was a Republican while the current leader was a Democrat. Since they'd want to keep the leader's term as short as possible, the temptation is to decide not to add the Intercalaris month. Now imagine both the official and the President are Democrats. The temptation would be to add the Intercalaris to keep him in power longer.
When Julius Caesar took power, he shook quite a few things up. One of them was to end the idea that a Month correspond exactly to the lunar cycle. Instead of adding a whole month after February (which, remember, is the twelfth month if you start counting from March), he simply lengthened a festival towards the end of February by one day, every four years. Technically, the day he added was the 24th day of February, not the 29th, but in modern times we only think about the numbers rather than the ancient Roman festivals.
Technically they made an error and added the leap day every three years instead of every four, they realised their mistake after about a generation and corrected it.
This calendar was the Calendar of the Roman Empire, so as the Romans spread across Europe it was introduced to places that previously had no calendar. When the Roman Empire fell, the calendar remained among its former subjects. | [
"The set leap day was introduced in Rome as a part of the Julian reform in the 1st century BC. As before, the intercalation was made after February 23. The day following the Terminalia (February 23) was doubled, forming the \"\"bis sextum\"\"—literally 'twice sixth', since February 24 was 'the sixth day before the ... |
- if the earth is a sphere, why is north america considered "the west?" | Back in the day, if you started from Europe, you see Asia to the east and an undefined amount of water to the west. When we found out there's actually several Americas there the West/East dichotomy had already been established.
And overall, USA is extremely similar with Europe in terms of culture. If the Chinese had found and conquered the new world we'd see it as "East". | [
"The visible rotation of the night sky around the visible celestial pole provides a vivid metaphor of that direction corresponding to up. Thus the choice of the north as corresponding to up in the northern hemisphere, or of south in that role in the southern, is, prior to worldwide communication, anything but an ar... |
Why has nature been able to reclaim Chernobyl and Pripyat so well, but humans cannot safely live there? Has the life adapted? | Life hasn't adapted. There's more habitat for animals, but the animals there (that aren't miscarried) have a greater chance of mutation, cancers, cataracts:
*Møller et al. (2005) suggested that the reproductive success and annual survival rates of barn swallows are much lower in the Exclusion Zone; 28% of barn swallows inhabiting Chernobyl return each year, while at a control area at Kanev, 250 km to the southeast, the return rate is around 40%.[62][63] A later study by Møller et al. (2007) furthermore claimed an elevated frequency of eleven categories of subtle physical abnormalities in barn swallows, such as bent tail feathers, deformed air sacs, deformed beaks, and isolated albinistic feathers.[64]*
even:
*"The Chernobyl area has not received very much biological study, although studies that have been done suggest that apparently healthy populations may be sink instead of source populations; in other words, that the apparently healthy populations are not contributing to the survival of species.[53]"*
_URL_1_
Some of the radioactive atoms bioaccumulate - instead of being evenly distributed through the water column, radiostrontium ends up preferentially in fish bone and more so in animals higher up in the food web.
There's other hazards as well, this is why for example they hand out iodine pills after nuclear leaks to fill up your thyroid before it accumulates radioactive iodine:
*Residents who ate food contaminated with radioactive iodine in the days immediately after the accident received relatively high doses to the thyroid gland. This was especially true of children who drank milk from cows who had eaten contaminated grass. Since iodine concentrates in the thyroid gland, this was a major cause of the high incidence of thyroid cancer in children.*
Note that the radioactive iodine has a short halflife of about eight days, so it's not a concern this late after a leak, when there's only (1/2)^(11000days/8days) < 9 * 10^-302 of the stuff around.
_URL_2_
In order to adapt to these conditions, you'd need the environmental selection pressure (nicer tail feathers, wolves eating the weak, etc.) causing higher-fitness individuals to breed more successfully, by ... selecting for a random mutation that makes more antioxidant molecules in the body, or more "error correcting?" cell machinery snipping out broken dna. That would take many generations for a mammal or fungus.
The one organism that has adapted is a fungus that may use its melanin pigment to capture gamma rays and use the resulting chemical energy to run its metabolism like a plant's chlorophyl pigment captures visible light:
*Radiotrophic fungi are fungi which appear to use the pigment melanin to convert gamma radiation[1] into chemical energy for growth.[2] This proposed mechanism may be similar to anabolic pathways for the synthesis of reduced organic carbon (e.g., carbohydrates) in phototrophic organisms, which capture photons from visible light with pigments such as chlorophyll whose energy is then used in photolysis of water to generate usable chemical energy (as ATP) in photophosphorylation or photosynthesis. However, whether melanin-containing fungi employ a similar multi-step pathway as photosynthesis, or some chemosynthesis pathways, is unknown.*l
_URL_0_
| [
"The loss of human population in Chernobyl, sometimes referred to as the exclusion zone, has dramatically improved the area in many ways, giving the radioactive impact a silver lining. Agriculture in the area has dissipated, and along with that went herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. The absence of man's infl... |
why countries sell each other guns | You sell things to other people to make money. For example, the US sells fighter jets to Israel to make money, yet national security isn't threatened because Israel is 1) far away and 2) a friendly nation (to the US). If you have surplus weapons and equipment sitting around at cost, then selling it makes sense. | [
"Weapons are purchased from the USA, UK, France or a private arms dealer. (Each country sells weapons that it itself produces, except the private dealer, who is a South African providing access to Soviet weaponry.) Each source offers a different range of weapons with different prices and most countries will only of... |
What is this strange stuff growing on my lawn? | This is called [slime mold](_URL_0_), which is actually a protist (like algae), not a fungus.
[Here's a link to a GIS search for "slime mold grass"](_URL_1_).
It is not harmful to your lawn, as you can see by the healthy look of the plants upon which it's growing. | [
"It is often found in areas of high anthropogenic activity and disturbance. Primarily, it grows in the lawns of urban areas, cemeteries, forest edges, roadsides, and among discarded lawn clippings. On the Pacific coast, is considered a troublesome lawn weed.\n",
"It is native to the United States and southern Can... |
why are sprouted grains touted as being so much healthier than non-sprouted? | The stuff that is in the grain is basically nutrient storage for the plant, packed tightly in a format that doesn't easily start rotting. That makes it difficult to digest - which is the reason we have to cook them before getting any nutrients out of there.
Now when the plant starts sprouting, it converts all the starches into sugar and the protein into amino acids, which can then be used to grow the plant cells. The same process makes them easier for us to digest.
The plant also produces all the vitamins it needs itself, so they are not necessarily stored in the grain. For example, there is basically no vitamin C in the raw grain, but quite a bit in sprouts.
Cooking always destroys some of the vitamins, but it's not a big deal. | [
"Because grains are small, hard and dry, they can be stored, measured, and transported more readily than can other kinds of food crops such as fresh fruits, roots and tubers. The development of grain agriculture allowed excess food to be produced and stored easily which could have led to the creation of the first p... |
Why did the Irish not think of fishing, during the Great Famine? | The following is a quote from [The Irish Famine](_URL_0_) by Peter Grey (1995):
> ...the fisheries of Iraland, were undeveloped, and in Galway and Mayo the herring fishermen were too poor to buy salt with which to preserve a catch.
> ... A large part of the Irish coast, in the south-west, west and north-west is perilous: there are cliffs, rocks, treacherous currents, sudden squalls and above all the Atlantic swell surging form America across thousands of miles of ocean. By the nineteenth centruy timber was short in Ireland; in the west, practically speaking, there was none, and fishing-boats were small, the largest being 12-15 tons. The national boat of Ireland is the 'curragh', a frail craft, often of considerable length, made of wicker work covered originally with stretched hides and latterly with tarred canvas. The curragh rides easily over the great Atlantic swells, is fast, and with four oarsmen can cover suprising distances. The Curragh was not suitable for the use of nets in deep-sea fishing, and according to an expert writing at the time the fish off the west coast of Ireland lay many miles out at sea in forty fathoms of water. A vessel of at least fifty tons was needed, capable of going out for several days, laden with nets, to face 'the frightful swell of the Atlantic'. If a gale blew from the east the nearest port of refuge was Hailfax, in Nova Scotia. The curraghs and small fishing-boats of the Irish were 'powerless in these circumstances'; and an inspector, reporting from Skibbereen, wrote that the failure of Irish fisheries was due to the want of boats suitable for deep-sea fishing, 'though this coast and the coast of Kerry about with the fines fish in the work' another report commented that the courage and skill of Irish fishermen were remarkable; 'the native fishermen' were 'out in thier frail curraghs whenever an opportunity offers, and in weather when nobody else could think of venturing themselves in such a craft'.
> ...but the heavy swell off the west and south-west made deep-sea fishing in curraghs impossible. 'The poor cottier had a miserable curragh, fished for his family or neighbours and got paid in potatoes. | [
"During the Famine, Ireland produced enough food, flax, and wool to feed and clothe double its nine million people. When Ireland had experienced a famine in 1782–83, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban,... |
Did females entering the workforce cause a drop in wages due to a much larger supply of labourers? | Lets make this question more specific. After the U.S. entered world war II many females assumed jobs that were vacated by men who went to fight the war. This caused a surge in female employment. What happened to wages in the country when the men returned from the war? | [
"Inequality in wages was to be expected for women. In 1906, the government found that the average weekly factory wage for a woman ranged from 11s 3d to 18s 8d, whereas a man's average weekly wage was around 25s 9d. Employers stated they preferred to hire women, because they could be \"more easily induced to undergo... |
Within your area of expertise, do you feel that, in general, the course of history is inevitable? | One of the major challenges in the study of history is rejecting the inherent desire to place events into a narrative. Narratives are great when you want to get a story across, but they can make us perceive things as inevitable.
Specifically, and this comes up a lot when talking about the industrial revolution until today, we need to consider the narrative of 'progress'. History isn't a linear development from one 'stage' to another, and it's very difficult to compare differing cultures and regions to each other.
Generally speaking, nothing is strictly 'inevitable', but given certain circumstances, some outcomes are more likely than others over a given time period; eg. the power of artillery but lack of mobility leading to fairly stagnant trench warfare, etc. | [
"BULLET::::- The main reason for studying history is not because we should assign praise or blame, or simply because it is interesting, but because we need to study past experience to understand the present and the future. History can be seen as a \"laboratory\", the lab-record of which shows how, under given condi... |
what is arp cache poisoning? | Every network device has a MAC address, it's just a number, and every network card is built with it's own unique number. When you connect to a network (like your home Network), your computer asks for an IP (an address on the internet). Unlike a MAC, IPs are made in such a way that you can narrow down where to send data based on just part of the address just like how mail says to Bob, 123 St, NY, NY, you can read it and send it to the NY office and let them figure out where in NY to send it, you don't actually need to find Bob's house on a map.
Anyways, things in your home typically sort data just by MAC, they have a list of every MAC on your network (every computer in your home for example), and what wire it's connected through. Now people access stuff with IPs, so when you go online you need to first take the IP, then find what IP it needs to go to (your modem, to get to the internet), then you need to find the MAC of your modem, and then send the data to the MAC. The ARP cache is the list of IP to MAC mappings for all known devices on your network. The ARP protocol is used to allow other devices to tell you their MAC.
ARP cache poisoning is a network attack where you just listen on the network for other people's IP and MAC, and then lie and use the ARP protocol to tell everyone actually you have that IP. This will typically cause all devices to then send data to you, even if it wasn't supposed to be destined to you, you then look at it and or change it, and then using your old list of MAC-IP mappings send it to the right destination. This means that you can connect on WiFi on a home Network and see the traffic destined for the internet, even for devices not on WiFi (so you can force wired devices to transmit their data over WiFi for you to see). | [
"An ARP cache is a collection of Address Resolution Protocol entries (mostly dynamic) that are created when an IP address is resolved to a MAC address (so the computer can effectively communicate with the IP address). An ARP cache has the disadvantage of potentially being used by hackers and cyber attackers. An ARP... |
Is Joan of Arc an historical anomaly? Are there other examples of young women in roles of military leadership? | [Gustavus_Adolphus](_URL_0_) led the Swedish Army when he inherited the crown at age 16.
Edward, Prince of Wales (known as The Black Prince) commanded the English vanguard at Crecy, being 16 years old.
Alexander the Great led the left wing at the battle of Chaeronea aged 18 and was in overall command of the Macedonian army at age 20.
Cyrus the Younger was 23 or younger when he led the rebellion against his older brother described in the Anabasis.
George Custer was a (brigadier) general at age 23 during the American Civil War.
| [
"BULLET::::- A Woman as Leader of Men: Joan of Arc's Military Career (by Kelly DeVries). Kelly DeVries, author of \"Joan of Arc: A Military Leader\", addresses as his main concern the question as to why the French soldiers followed Joan? After a brief outline of Joan's military career, he argues that Joan, in contr... |
why does a scale give different readings when i'm standing, crouching, or on my tip-toes? | It has to do with the way your weight disperses across the internal plate that's connected to the scale. If you stand on a corner, it's going to affect the way your weight makes it to the sensor, if you crouch with your ass out, your center of gravity is off of center, and the same thing happens. That's why they have a little picture on most scales showing you how to stand and where to place your feet. | [
"Because the index scale is linear (and not logarithmic, as is often the case when measuring things such as brightness or sound level), it is reasonable to assume that one hour of exposure at index 5 is approximately equivalent to a half-hour at index 10.\n",
"In music theory, the term scale degree refers to the ... |
why do school district have to pay for special aids for students who are deaf or with major disabilities? why not health insurance? | Why should a school pay for health insurance? That's a private decision up to parents and families. They make these videos as it falls within their realm of responsibility to educate children regardless of condition of learning. | [
"On the other hand, not all handicapped students are recommended to go to these schools. Students who are autistic or even hearing impaired are encouraged to attend the public schools because educators want a blended environment with no child being left out. Additionally, the students will receive realistic scenari... |
assuming they are not shot out if the sky. how long will satellites function without human interaction? what would make them fail? | Usually the limiting factor in sattelite missions is funding.
If the project stops being funded the sattelite is either deorbitted and burns up in the atmosphere or left dead in space.
If communications with the sattelite is severed then it will drift for a very long time. However due to different factors sattelites drift lower towards the earth and after many hundreds of years would burn up.
There are some orbits that a sattelite can occupy where it will never drift however currently there are no sattelite occupying these orbits. | [
"For testing purposes, satellites in low earth orbit have been destroyed by ballistic missiles launched from earth. Russia, the United States, China and India have demonstrated the ability to eliminate satellites. In 2007 the Chinese military shot down an aging weather satellite, followed by the US Navy shooting do... |
Resurrection is recorded in the Bible. Where did the idea originate? Is this the first recorded instance of someone (or something) rising from the dead? | I am not by any means a historian, but your question is more literary than historical, feel free to remove is any of this is viewed as questionable.
From a purely literary perspective, the theme is pretty much as old as we have recorded stories in writing or pictures. It has been largely linked to agricultural cycles, the birth, death and regrowth of crops. An older sumerian mythology is actually referenced within the old testament of the bible -
> Ezekiel 8:14-15 New International Version (NIV)
>
> 14 Then he brought me to the entrance of the north gate of the house of the Lord, and I saw women sitting there, mourning the god Tammuz.
_URL_0_
The story of Tammuz, involves him being pulled into the underworld for half the year coinciding with the agricultural winter, his worshipers mourning his death at the solstice (as referenced above), then he returns from the underworld as the crop growth begins again.
He is just one of many dying and rising deities, so really what you are actually looking for is [Joseph Campbell's work regarding the Hero's Journey aka monomyth](_URL_1_), which says this structure of myth surrounding a heroic transformation, even if not a literal death and resurrection, is the same story repeated through all of time, all cultures and peoples. | [
"The writings in the New Testament do not contain any descriptions of the moment of resurrection itself, but rather two types of eyewitness descriptions: appearances of Jesus to various people, and accounts of seeing the tomb empty.\n",
"However, the moment of the Resurrection is not described as such in the Gosp... |
why does something just smelling/tasting bad make some people physically sick, even though they haven't consumed any of the item in question? | It is something called taste aversion.
Basically, you have smelled something similar to the bad smelling thing in your past and it has done some sort of harm to your body, and your brain makes a copy of that smell so that your brain knows "If we smell/taste this again, get it away immediately!".
| [
"In the care of paediatric patients, young children may be unwilling to take medication with an unpleasant taste or smell, or due to fear of the unfamiliar. In these cases, the medication is mixed with food or drink to make it more acceptable.\n",
"Smell disorders can result in the inability to detect environment... |
how are the bubbles when you spit formed? | I'm assuming this is referring to when you simply spit on the ground.
When you spit you are forcing saliva out of your mouth by mechanical (muscular) forces and also by forcing air out of your lungs. The gases you exhale when spitting do not all dissipate. Some of these gases may become "trapped" in the liquid saliva. Since the gases are going to be molecularly attracted to each other they will create bubbles. If you poke out all the bubbles in your spit you'll probably notice only the liquid remains.
Picture cannonballing into a pool with goggles on. You'll see tons of bubbles all around you because your brought them in with you. Except spit holds onto these bubbles, most likely due to its lower viscosity (flow). | [
"The bubbles are formed by gases that are not removed in time during the manufacture or processing of the optical component. Since the pressure of the gas in each direction is evenly distributed, the shape of the bubble is usually spherical.\n",
"Bubble nucleation happens when the a volatile becomes saturated. Ac... |
Can anybody recommend a good/best biography of Chiang Kai-Shek? | The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern China by Jay Taylor. Taylor breaks from the common rhetoric of Chiang being an inept dictator who mismanaged China until he was ejected from the Mainland by Mao, after which he ruled Taiwan for the rest of his life under the protection of America. Instead he was able to keep an objective view and describe the chaos that was China in those days. | [
"In \"The New Republic\", Columbia professor Andrew J. Nathan, reviewing the book along with Jay Taylor's \"The Generalissimo\", observed that Chiang Kai-shek and his wife had been eulogized during the Second Sino-Japanese War but also denounced as \"corrupt, venal, and weak.\" With these two biographies, he contin... |
liberalism vs socialism | Making an assumption you are from the US - apologies if that is not the case.
Liberalism everywhere apart from the US is the polar opposite of Socialism, it's what I think most people in the US would recognise as Libertarianism.
For some reason the US uses liberal as a bye-word for left wing. No idea why this has happened and it only seems to happen there. If the person who responded to you was not from the US then they were almost certainly using a different definition of the word. | [
"Liberal socialism is a socialist [[political philosophy]] that includes [[Liberalism|liberal]] principles within it. Liberal socialism does not have the goal of abolishing [[capitalism]] with a [[socialist economy]], instead it supports a mixed economy that includes both [[public property|public]] and [[private pr... |
What does our solar system orbit? | It orbits the center of the Milky Way. [See here](_URL_0_). | [
"A Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO, also called a heliosynchronous orbit) is a nearly polar orbit around a planet, in which the satellite passes over any given point of the planet's surface at the same local mean solar time. More technically, it is an orbit arranged so that it precesses through one complete revolution e... |
how did "chinese" food in the u.s. get so standardized? | The Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1800s banned Chinese immigrants from doing pretty much any good jobs which drove Chinese Americans to slums. Chinese food was considered dirty and for poor people as a result. The act was repealed during WWII because China was considered an ally. As a result Chinese food didn't really catch on in the US until fairly recently. During this time, the majority of Chinese immigrants to America came from a handful of places in China, most of them ended up in New York, and most of them were illegal immigrants who found work in restaurant kitchens. They adopted their cooking styles to what was locally available, i.e. General Tso's Chicken is just chicken nuggets smothered in sauce. There's a very good documentary on Netflix called ~~General Tso's Chicken~~ The Search for General Tso which better answers your question.
Edit: thanks u/deuce232 for the correction | [
"Along the way, cooks adapted southern Chinese dishes such as chop suey and developed a style of Chinese food not found in China. Restaurants (along with Chinese laundries) provided an ethnic niche for small businesses at a time when the Chinese people were excluded from most jobs in the wage economy by ethnic disc... |
Can you tan from the moon? | Nope, sorry. The theory is there, but it doesn't work out in real life. The sun is about a half million times brighter than the moon, so you would have to be out for half a million nights to get the same amount of sun you can get in one day. Also, the moon isn't as good at reflecting UV rays, the ones that tan you, so you would be getting even less than a millionth.
But hypothetically, yes. It is possible for a ray of light to travel from the sun, bounce off the moon, hit a receptor in a melanocyte, and generate some small amount of extra pigment in your skin. | [
"The Man in the Moon refers to any of several pareidolic images of a human face, head or body that certain traditions recognize in the disc of the full moon. The images are composed of the dark areas of the lunar \"maria\", or \"seas\" and the lighter highlands of the lunar surface.\n",
"Sunless tanning products ... |
Chinese Imperialism | I am trying to determine what efforts you have made in the past century to stem the growth of power and influence of the Chinese. I cannot actually comment on this first question though, as it is far out of our rules for the subreddit.
The bonus question is another matter.
The borders of "China" and it's many neighbors have shifted countless times over the last 3000 years. Therefore, there are many possible answers to your question. I will work backwards.
Early 19th Century Qing borders were broadly similar to the PRC borders, except that Tibet was never officially a Qing territory, despite Qing military presence. However, before the Qing, large areas were under their own sovereignty at most times, but under the Empire at others, including Manchuria, inner and outer mongolia, Gansu and Xinjiang provinces, Vietnam, most of southwestern China, Southeastern China around Fuzhou, and Taiwan. | [
"The Han Chinese civilization influenced neighboring states Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Thailand and other Asian countries. Although Han Chinese superiority had only been sporadically reinforced by displays of Chinese military power, their Sinocentric system treated these countries as vassals of the emperor of China,... |
how does applying to college work, with paying, scholarships, admittance, and etc. | Its a lot of paperwork, and it varies based on the school.
But the basics are these -
You apply to college by filling out an application. Many use the "Common App" or the "Universal App" but some schools have their own application they want you to use. In either case a quick trip to their website will direct you.
Applying for financial aid is equally easy. You will need to fill out a FAFSA which will cover the majority of your financial aid. This is online and not very hard. Many schools will offer need or merit based scholarships to those who qualify and they will inform you if you qualify. Finally, some scholarships/grants are separate things. For these you will need to (again) go online and find out what the requirements are an apply.
As with everything else, its almost entirely online and not very difficult. This is a very common road to travel so Google will help you a lot.
To the question of "If accepted do you go" only you can answer that. Its a personal choice. | [
"Students apply to one or more colleges or universities by submitting an application which each college evaluates using its own criteria. The college then decides whether or not to extend an offer of admission (and possibly financial aid) to the student. The majority of colleges admit students to the college as a w... |
do people calmly wake up from comas? | I've been in a coma( 2 days) and so have a few of my family members, from what I've seen no, they usually jump up or make a loud gasp, in my case it was screaming. | [
"People may emerge from a coma with a combination of physical, intellectual, and psychological difficulties that need special attention. It is common for coma patients to awaken in a profound state of confusion and suffer from dysarthria, the inability to articulate any speech. Recovery usually occurs gradually. In... |
What was the advent of 'modern' military R & D? | The first documented instance (in Italy) when military engineering was specifically removed from the ad-hoc efforts of an officer or commander to the purview of a noncombatant specialist for a sustained period of time was in early 16th century Italy, when Leonardo Da Vinci was handed letters patent making him "General Engineer and Architect" of the Papal Armies by captain-general cesare Borgia. If you'd like a precise date, it happens to be August 18th, 1502. However, military engineering was so far in its infancy that Leonardo found himself falling back on art multiple times.
So how did Leonardo become the first military engineer? Well, let's go back twenty years: Lorenzo Medici, the behind the scenes ruler of the Republic of Florence, needed to get Ludovico Sforza of Milan in his good books: although Ludovico's teenage nephew Galeazzo Maria Visconti-Sforza was technically duke of Milan, Lodovico had managed to imprison the boy's mother, Bona of Savoy, in the castle of Abbiategrasso and have himself proclaimed regent.
Lorenzo's diplomatic modus operandi was to contrive, outside of the normal appointment of ambassadors, the employment of Florentine artists (normally painters) on projects commissioned by his allies. King Ferdinand of Naples, for example, had two Florentine painters working for him, while a group of painters had also been dispatched to Rome. This tactic got Lorenzo in everyone's good books, plus when he wrote to check up on how his dear artist friends were doing he could, by extension, find out what was going on in rival courts.
The Duchy of Milan had been a historic ally of Florence, but artistically didn't lag very far behind and Lorenzo Medici was more than a little unsure of where precisely he stood after Galeazzo Maria's death. Lorenzo's solution was to send Leonardo Da Vinci.
Leonardo had some success as a painter, but there's a weird four-year "blank period" immediately following his breakthrough successes in the 1470's in which there isn't a trace of his work. Following this period, his questionable work ethic gets worse; starting some works without finishing them, even taking commissions without even starting them.
Somehow, Leonardo entered the circle of Lorenzo de Medici. We know for sure he took up small-scale architectural drafting, but we don't know where he picked up Military Engineering. We can only hypothesize that his boredom with painting had (perhaps starting in his period off the grid) given way to more practical pursuits. Did Lorenzo know this? We don't know. What we do know is that in 1482 Leonardo da Vinci traveled to Milan with a golden lyre officially to take part in a music contest at the Milanese court, but unofficially to deliver a nine-paragraph letter to Lodovico Sforza.
[The letter is preserved in its entirely in the Ambrosian Library in Milan](_URL_3_). In it, Leonardo outlines his skills (quite literally, as he includes copious sketches); and defines himself not as a painter, but as a multi-talented engineer.
Leonardo's welcome was tepid, but he seemed determined to adapt quickly. While at first his rural Tuscan accent was a barrier to making headway in the Milanese court, even his personal writings would soon be peppered with Lombard-isms. He had been awkward and passè in the refined and lettered Florentine high society (he would bitterly describe himself a "man without letters" both figuratively and literally; his handwriting was so bad he asked a scribe to transcribe his letters to Lodovico) while in the Milanese court his military imagination was fueled by the veterans of Duke Galeazzo Maria's near constant campaigning and the uneasy peace over which his successor Lodovico presided. Milan had been bullying other cities in Italy for some two hundred years, this was the prefect environment for an aspiring military engineer. The ruling House of Sforza themselves were a cadet branch of the House of Visconti who had distinguished themselves as military commanders before Francesco Sforza came to the throne by marrying Duke Filippo Maria Visconti's only child and daughter, Bianca Maria.
Leonardo's candid letters to Lodovico (which can often be summarized with, "Give me more commissions!") testify to how well he got on in the Milanese court. At first he had lodged with two fellow artists in a workshop near the Ticinese Gate, but by 1485 he had his own workshop with three apprentices, a servant and a housekeeper. Leonardo maintained himself by painting portraits, but was slowly entrusted with engineering commissions, first of which involved the city's [canal system](_URL_2_) and was sent multiple times to Pavia to oversee stones being cut for the city's cathedral (where he also took the chance to read up on anatomy). He built an elaborate model of the Solar System for the wedding of little Gian Galeazzo Maria Sforza and Isabel of Naples, as well as plan an [absolutely massive equestrian statue](_URL_4_) of Lodovico which was never built.
Although we can't know the extent to which Lodovico encouraged Leonardo's military drafting, Leonardo filled entire notebooks on his plans for war machines (the Codex Atlanticus, so called because it's nearly the size of an Atlas, has the greatest number of military contraptions, and it's digitized somewhere but I can't find it. The Codice Trivulziano also has a large section on military architecture).
Leonardo's interest makes sense given military doctrine in Italy at the time, as I wrote in a [previous answer](_URL_0_), shovels, brick and mortar were just as important as swords and pikes:
> In addition, even when armies were within striking distance few actual pitched battles were fought; maneuver and positioning became exponentially more important, as captains tried to keep their companies intact. When two armies finally gave battle, the encounter was often short and relatively bloodless; as soon as one side worked out an advantage, the "loser" often attempted to swiftly withdraw in good order (often to the frustration of their employers; "They avoid defeat just as long as they avoid battle" wrote Macchiavelli).
Sieges were more common, especially early in the century. Between the 13th and 15th centuries, the Milanese, Paduans, Veronese and Florentines were almost continuously involved in some kind low-level warfare, often bullying smaller surrounding towns into submitting in order to establish a ring of fortified burghs around their capital. Oftentimes, these sieges were perpetuated by the mercenaries themselves, who needed to be occupied lest they start pillaging; perpetuating a vicious cycle by which larger, richer cities were constantly hounding out weaker ones.
But Lodovico wouldn't give Leonardo his big break as an engineer. Leonardo would have to wait till 1499 when Louis XII of France [pressed his claim on Milan](_URL_1_). Leonardo first fled to Genoa with Lodovico's court (Genoa was a Milanese puppet-state at this point) before becoming somewhat itinerant around Italy, painting in Mantua, Venice and Florence. Somehow, he managed to come to be employed by Cesare Borgia, the most powerful vassal of the Papacy (and son of Pope Alexander VI). Here, he is finally employed as the first military engineer. Apart from examining enemy fortifications, in his letters patent (written by Cesare in a mix of Spanish and Italian) also entrusted to, "see, measure, and well examine our encampments, fortifications and states [...]" and to do what was needed to strengthen them. Leonardo also invented a new variety of gunpowder at this time.
After the deposition of Cesare Borgia in 1503, Leonardo moved back to Florence, where he took a bizzarre interest in birds (perhaps due to melancholy caused by his father's recent death). He was very briefly employed by the Florentine state as a military engineer and dispatched to the siege of Pisa, where he was entrusted with diverting the river Arno in an attempt to starve out the city. However, a miscalculation caused the project to fail and infuriated the Florentine commander. He would then dedicate himself to painting until around 1509 when the French military governor of Milan offered him a generous stipend to come back to Milan (he had sold many paintings to the French in the past and was well-regarded by them). Unfortunately,the French were soon ousted before he could start any projects apart from personal studies of anatomy at the University of Pavia. His last feat of engineering would be draining swamps in the vicinity of Rome in the employ of Pope Leo X, a Florentine (and a Medici, to boot) in 1514. He would dedicate himself to painting thereafter, joining the court of the French king Francis I in his later years. | [
"From the founding of the Army through the early 1900s, the Army did not have an effective R&D program — production and procurement were emphasized and the R&D during this era was limited to product improvement. Prior to World War II, the Army’s R&D was controlled through the G-4 as a function of the supply arms an... |
[Geology] Can metals be minerals? | Yes. Minerals have five defining characteristics:
1. Naturally occurring
2. Stable at room temperature
3. Represented by a chemical formula
4. Usually abiogenic
5. Ordered atomic arrangement
Now, a metal meets those requirements. You seem to be talking about "native metals" (_URL_0_). These are usually rarer in nature, but still meet the 5 requirements (for ex, copper has a chemical formula that's simply Cu, since the element is the ~only constituent).
Most of the time, metals are found in ores, basically minerals with a large metal component--for example, cinnabar (HgS) and sphalerite (ZnS).
A man-made alloy isn't really a mineral by the given definition above, although 4 is debated (especially since we can make rubies and other gems). | [
"A mineral is, broadly speaking, a solid chemical compound that occurs naturally in pure form. Minerals are most commonly associated with rocks due to the presence of minerals within rocks. These rocks may consist of one type of mineral, or may be an aggregate of two or more different types of minerals, spacially s... |
what does it mean that a city was founded by someone ? | Generally a city is "founded" by whoever was in charge when it was decided there was going to be a city there. That can mean that Alexander the Great rolled up on some villages in a nice spot for a port and "founded" a city on top of them, or Peter the Great (lots of the Greats here) decided he wanted a new capital and forced thousands of people to die in a horrible swamp building it.
Could also just be whoever lead the pilgrimage/wagon train/etc to a new spot and set up a town. | [
"The city is precisely the place created by man. It is the affirmation of man taking his life into his own hands, independently of God; it is the expression of man's rebellion against God. God has placed man at the garden, a place adapted to him. But man refuses the life for which God has destined him, which is uns... |
Were Christains killed for their faith in the Colosseum? | I don't have much time but I will eventually elaborate on this. =P
Basically Christians we're being killed for not participating in the sacrifises all Romans must participate in. Ea. their personal "contracts" with their Gods. Not doing this was treason. The commentary with the sources will explain in a bit more detail.
Sources:
Tert. Apol. 10.1: Christians would neither worship Roman gods nor sacrifice to emperors,
so they were accused of ‘sacrilege and treason together’; cf. 24.1, 28.2. At Smyrna
(Mart. Pionii 15.2.1–2, 18.13–14) Christians were asked to offer sacrifice (and to eat of
sacrificial meat) in the cult of Nemesis, associated with the emperor and with social
order. Refusal was taken as both secular and sacral treason: see Hornum (1993) 130–
1; Bowersock (1993) 29, 47, 53.
L. Hertling and E. Kirschbaum, The Roman Catacombs and their Martyrs, rev. ed., trans.
M. J. Costello (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1960) 82–3,
| warn against believing fantastic numbers: ‘There were certainly not tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of martyrs at Rome during the persecution of Diocletian since the Christian community
at that time did not number a hundred thousand souls.’ They suggest that executions of
martyrs did not exceed, and were usually smaller than, groups of 40 or 50 in number.
Fox (1987), 592, estimating that around 5 per cent of the population around 300 was
Christian, feels, 315, that martyrdom was a rare occurrence. He, 434, notes that no
governor in Africa is known to have executed Christians before 180, and he cites
Origen’s comment (C. Cels. 3.8) in the 240s that ‘few’ Christians had died for their faith.
Following de Sainte-Croix (1954) 102, 104, Fox adds, 597, that the numbers who
died in the ‘Great Persecution’ are uncertain, ‘but the impact of a persecution was
always greater than the numbers executed or sentenced to the mines’. Similarly,
Rouselle (1988), 130–1, correctly notes that the numbers may not have been that
large, but that the fear of persecution greatly influenced Christian ideas; see Bynum
below. | [
"The Colosseum is generally regarded by Christians as a site of the martyrdom of large numbers of believers during the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, as evidenced by Church history and tradition. On the other hand, other scholars believe that the majority of martyrdoms may have occurred at other ven... |
how do christmas lights flash individual bulbs? | Many are done as an arangement of 3 strings. If you look closely you can see three wires on many strings or icicle lights. If you really look closely, there's never a need for the entire string to be off and a individual bulb lit. You can get away with controlling 33% of the string at a time for it to look random.
It will iluminate each string independantly and it will look like every bulb is independantly flashing but in reality, every third bulb is iluminating at the same time.
Sometimes they switch up the order so its not uniformly every third connected for randomness.
Some new light strings have a tiny IC on every light which is really interesting. Power, ground and data is shared for all lights and every single bulb understands a giant string of pulsed numbers and what ID it is and what colour and brightness it should be at. This happens every milisecond or quicker. Believe it or not, these are actually cheaper since the entire bulb and silicon processing core is integrated and produced in the billions without manual labor. | [
"A twinkle bulb is a special type of light bulb which blinks on and off for decorative effect. They are most commonly used on Christmas lights and other string lights, but can also be used for other ornamental purposes like electric jack-o-lanterns for Halloween and replica traffic lights.\n",
"Thermal switches a... |
"The Umayyad Caliphate actively discouraged Islamic conversions because of the jizya tax" how true is this statement? | Quite true. It wasn't just because of the jizya either; Islam at the time of the Umayyads was not a cosmopolitan religion. It was supposed to be for the still-tribal Arabs--foreigners just wouldn't "get it".
However, even though it was discouraged, Islam still did spread chiefly among the Iranian peoples, most importantly the nobility (I will explain why this is important later), who found understandably Islam to have much in common with Zoroastrianism, such as:
* Monotheistic [I know someone will get pedantic and say that Zorastrianism is technically dualistic but for our present purposes I don't think that is very important]
* Prayer 5 times a day
* Heaven and Hell (interesting aside: in modern Persian we can interchangeably use both the Zoroastrian and Islamic terms even today: *pardiz* [paradise] and *doozakh* are the Zoroastrian terms w/ indo-european roots, *behesht* and *jahanam* are the Islamic terms w/ semitic roots)
* Afterlife and judgement leading to end-of-time apocalyptic battle between good and evil
* Omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence of God
and many other things (Boyce's *Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices* for more). The Arabs had already mad much exposure to Zoroastrianism, and the Iranians had already much exposure to Abrahamic religions--both Judaism and Christianity--and I think it is quite easy to see the cross-cultural influences between the religions.
I mentioned the nobility adopting Islam as important, this is because the nobility were also at the head of the Zoroastrian clergy. Whole noble families even converted (such as the Samanids), perhaps because they genuinely liked Islam, or perhaps because they wanted to keep their noble status. But with the gradual conversion of the nobility came the loss of influence of Zoroastrianism and the growing influence of Islam. It is also important to note that Zoroastrianism was not very uniform in practice--depending on where in Greater Iran you were, Zoroastrianism could very well be a mix of Indo-European semi-nomadic or tribal customs (Frye goes into this in great detail in *The Golden Age of Persia*) to where the Zoroastrianism practiced in one part of Iran could be almost like a totally different religion than in another.
So I mentioned the gradual conversion of the nobility to Islam--this started towards the end of the Umayyad reign. As more non-Arabs joined the ranks of Muslims, the more apparent the discrimination towards non-Arabs (or *Ajam*) became. This gradually led to the downfall of the Umayyads in place of the far more cosmopolitan Abbasids; in fact most of the Abbasid revolts were led by Iranians, most famously [Abu Muslim Khorasani](_URL_0_), who stormed Damascus and helped solidify Abbasid rule.
I hope this makes sense and was understandable because I haven't really proofread it lol, if you have any questions please ask. The main sources for this were Frye and Boyce. | [
"There are a number of historians who see the rule of the Umayyads as setting up the \"dhimmah\" to increase taxes from the \"dhimmis\" to benefit the Arab Muslim community financially and by discouraging conversion. Islam, during the Umayyad Caliphate, was initially associated with the ethnic identity of the Arab ... |
Was Middle/Late Bronze Age a time of societal and technological stasis in the Near East? | The Middle and Late Bronze Age spanned nearly a thousand years, and naturally there were quite a few changes during that time period. I wrote about many of these changes from an Egyptian perspective in [Ancient Egypt is often described as the longest continuous human civilization, and seems to have maintained a surprising amount of cultural continuity. How accurate is this description?](_URL_0_)
From the Babylonian perspective, note that Kassite Babylonia has been massively understudied, and the majority of texts from the time period have gone unpublished. For example, the University of Pennsylvania excavated at Nippur back in the late 1800s, and the university's archaeology museum holds about 5000 tablets from the Kassite period. More were found in the excavations done by the Oriental Institute of Chicago, which ran from about 1950 to around 1990. All told, about 12,000 tablets from the Kassite period have been found, about 80% of which have yet to be published. These are mostly official archives, especially texts relating to the governor's activities.
| [
"The Late Bronze Age collapse involved a Dark Age transition period in the Near East, Asia Minor, the Aegean region, North Africa, Caucasus, Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, a transition which historians believe was violent, sudden, and culturally disruptive. The... |
what is the point of image-based captchas if there are already lots of bots that can solve them? do ticket-reselling websites have some secret ocr/high performance photo recognition software that google doesn't? | Captchas don't need to be perfect to be useful. If robots are making 5 accounts an hour then it's not really the end of the world, if they are making 5 accounts a second then a service quickly can get overwelmed. A speed bump can be as useful as a stop sign. | [
"Static image-based CAPTCHAs are routinely used to prevent automated sign-ups to websites by using text or images of words disguised so that optical character recognition (OCR) software has trouble reading them. However, in common CAPTCHA systems, users often fail to correctly solve the CAPTCHA 7% - 25% of the time... |
how does comparable gpu's have completely different power needs? | More modern manufacturing process, using smaller transistors that leak less heat during operation, and improvements to the arrangement of those transistors that results in a more efficient architecture. | [
"Graphics processing units (GPU) have continued to increase in energy usage, while CPUs designers have recently focused on improving performance per watt. High performance GPUs may draw large amount of power and hence, intelligent techniques are required to manage GPU power consumption. Measures like 3DMark2006 sco... |
Did medieval knights fight with any particular style? | In fact they did. It varied from the region and weapon used but many knights and fighters were trained in a specific style. Unfortunately not too many records exist before the 1300's but after that they are many training manuals and records from many different countries. If you're looking for an over view of all styles around that time try [this](_URL_2_). It's short but very well organized. If you're looking for historical European martial arts [this](_URL_1_) site is devoted to its study. [This](_URL_0_) is a wiki of western European fighting styles, but verify the information. | [
"In peacetime, knights often demonstrated their martial skills in tournaments, which usually took place on the grounds of a castle. Knights can parade their armour and banner to the whole court as the tournament commenced. Medieval tournaments were made up of martial sports called \"hastiludes\", and were not only ... |
Relative value of Roman Currencies in Julius' Caesar's day? | Egypt would have used the Tetradrachm during this time period near the end of the Ptolemaic Empire. Rome would modify the Egyptian currency slightly but allow it's own form of currency since it was specially under the direct control of the Emperor.
A denarius was supposedly a single days wage (the Romans manipulated their currency to be worth basically what they wanted, not necessarily it's actual metallic value) whereas a half a drachma was considered enough for subsistence for a day. Therefore by this calculation a drachma was roughly twice the value of a denarius and a tetradrachma would be worth 4 drachma and 8 denarius.
Of course these are extremely rough and crude estimations, as actual conversions are nearly impossible to come by (especially given the fineness and purity of coinage regularly changed) | [
"Before the time of Julius Caesar the \"aureus\" was struck infrequently, probably because gold was seen as a mark of un-Roman luxury. Caesar struck the coin more often, and standardized the weight at formula_1 of a Roman pound (about 8 grams). Augustus (r. 29 BC – 14 AD) tariffed the value of the \"sestertius\" as... |
if uranium has a half life of 4.5 billion years, why do uranium fuel rods used in nuclear reactors need to be replaced every six years? | Because half life is from natural decay, not fission. Inside a nuclear reactor, we're actively causing the fuel atoms to split at a much higher rate than decay would happen in nature.
Plus there's also a significant difference between natural decay and atomic fission. | [
"The plutonium-238 used in these RTGs has a half-life of 87.74 years, in contrast to the 24,110 year half-life of plutonium-239 used in nuclear weapons and reactors. A consequence of the shorter half-life is that plutonium-238 is about 275 times more radioactive than plutonium-239 (i.e. /g compared to /g). For inst... |
How do you increase tolernce to alcohol? | Consumption-induced alcohol tolerance can be divided into functional tolerance and metabolic tolerance. There are some other minor changes but these are probably the most important.
Functional tolerance is when your body (particularly the central nervous system) adapts to compensate for the increased alcohol concentration by decreasing its response. This mainly acts by desensitising alcohol-sensitive GABA receptors in the CNS. In simple terms this just means that the receptors that alcohol would normally bind to don’t respond to it as easily so you need more alcohol to reach the same level of activation.
Metabolic tolerance leads to increased breakdown of alcohol in the liver. It is unclear exactly how this occurs but it involves increased activity of the enzyme which breaks down alcohol (alcohol dehydrogenase) inside liver cells (hepatocytes). This means that more alcohol is being processed so you must consume more of it in order to reach the same blood alcohol concentration.
You also mention digestion by the pancreas but you should remember that no digestion occurs in the pancreas itself. It produces enzymes which help with digestion but it secretes these into the small intestine. | [
"The Low Level of Response Model proposes that individuals who are less sensitive to the effects of alcohol are at greater risk for developing alcohol use disorder. One explanation for this phenomenon is that the experiences of elevated intoxication constitutes a feedback mechanism, which prompts drinking cessation... |
why do racecars have to change tires so often? usually tires are good for much longer than a day. | Race car tires are quite different from the tires on your car and are experiencing a lot more stress
Racing tires are quite soft at temperature compared to a normal tire, the softer tires give more grip than harder ones and more grip means faster laptimes. Even your softest street tire is still going to be on the order of a hard racing tire while many racing series have soft, super soft, and even ultra soft tires.
Your touring tire is going to be a solid compound designed to give you 30-75k miles at sustained speeds of up to 85 mph, and cornering forces of about 0.5 gs max. An F1 tire will be experiencing 2 g acceleration, 5 g braking, and up to 6 g turns at speeds of up to 230 mph which will get them far far hotter than your car tire.
Racing tires have traded tire longevity for grippiness and its up to the teams to balance the time loss of swapping tires in a pitstop against the time gain of running grippier tires | [
"Every year we change fewer wheels, because the wheels and tyres are getting better and better. We changed about 20 wheels today. Five years ago, it was much worse — we'd be choosing about a hundred. Tyres are becoming much better than before. So, yes, our job is easier — except that the race generally goes faster ... |
jpeg compression | Let's take an image that is 1000 by 1000 pixels. Each pixel requires some number of bytes of data to tell you what color it is. Now, that's a significant amount of data, so a compression algorithm tries to reduce the amount of data you need to store that picture.
I'm not sure if this is how JPEG specifically works, but one 'lossy' way to compress an image is to reduce the number of pixels you store. So, you could divide the picture up into clumps of 4 or 9 pixels, take the average color of that clump, and replace the clump with a single pixel of that color. Now you've cut the amount of data you need to store by 1/4th or 1/9th. Of course, you've also lost a lot of valuable information about the picture.
One way some algorithms compensate for that loss is in how they reconstruct the image when you open it to view or edit. For example, when re-expanding each pixel into the clump of 4 or 9 it came from, they adjust the color of each pixel based on both the clump's color and the colors of adjoining clumps. This works because images rarely have perfectly sharp lines between color spaces. Instead, colors tend to have gradients or blur together. | [
"JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptib... |
why do people lose weight during sleep? | You body is taking in oxygen, and breathing out oxygen plus hydrogen (water) and oxygen + carbon (carbon dioxide).
That is basically how *all* long term weight is lost, and over the course of 8 hours, it adds up. Also, you perspire while you sleep, and that contributes too.
In addition, bathroom scales are not terribly accurate, and differences in temperature and humidity between evening and morning can skew their results. | [
"Lack of sleep has been strongly associated with weight gain in a variety of studies across all ages, though research suggests children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable. Sleep deprivation is believed to influence the brain's response to high-calorie food, making it more attractive, while also affecting t... |
the difference between men's and women's deodorant, aside from price | > and thirdly, does that drive the price difference at all
No. The price difference is almost entirely due to marketing. The main differences between mens and womens is the scent and the packaging. It's the packaging you're paying more for in womens deodorant. | [
"Eau de toilette () literally translated as toilet water (but more appropriately described as \"grooming water\") is a lightly scented cologne used as a skin freshener. It is also referred to as \"aromatic waters\" and has a high alcohol content. It is usually applied directly to the skin after bathing or shaving. ... |
Were any of the prominent writers and thinkers of Enlightenment Age-era Europe aware of Buddhism? And if so, what were their thoughts on Buddhism as a religion and/or school of philosophy? | Most of the historical work on the West’s encounter with Buddhism has focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is generally assumed that there was not a great deal of information in Europe about Buddhism before this. It is true that Buddhist texts in Sanskrit and Pāli were not widely studied in the West until the nineteenth century (de Jong, 20), and there was little popular knowledge of Buddhism there until the end of that century (Almond), but Buddhism was known before 1800.
Urs App has done a lot of research on the period prior to the nineteenth century and argues that some thinkers were indeed impacted by the knowledge about South and East Asia that was filtering back to Europe from the sixteenth century onward, mostly via Jesuit writings. A scholar of Zen Buddhism himself, App even argues that the Jesuits’ first systematic study of the texts of a non-Abrahamic religion was their study of Japanese Zen Buddhism (App, 9-10). The fact that the Jesuits served as the mediators in early European encounters with Asian religions naturally introduced some biases as their writings often focused on the religious arguments they were having with Buddhists and Confucians in China (Lee), and Brahmins in India. Nevertheless, App argues that their reports did allow some Enlightenment thinkers to learn about traditions such as Buddhism. Here are two of his examples:
1. Voltaire helped popularize Jesuit writings on Asian religion. Although he was generally more interested in the Indian *Vedas*, he shared a general approval of the artistic and particularly humanistic traditions of China (App, 41). He also drew from Jesuit writings on Buddhists and Hindus to support his arguments for universal human history and a universal human religion that was Deistic in nature (App, 33-35).
2. Diderot accepted the notion, which was becoming common among French intellectuals, that Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufi Islam were simply facets of a single Asian religious system, and that this system was fundamentally atheistic (App, 151-153). As with Voltaire, the existence of an ancient and supposedly atheistic tradition helped Diderot make his case.
Thus, Enlightenment thinkers tended to treat Buddhism as part of a larger, ancient pan-Asian religion that was atheistic or Deistic in nature, but which had become corrupted by priests who kept these esoteric teachings to themselves while teaching an exoteric doctrine that was ritualistic and superstitious. Of course, this attitude appears to be much influenced by the Enlightenment thinkers’ own philosophical commitments, but App argues that influence was a two-way street, and missionary writings about Asian religions actually contributed to the formation of these commitments.
& #x200B;
**Works Cited**
Almond, Philip. *The British Discovery of Buddhism*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
App, Urs. *The Birth of Orientalism*. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
de Jong, J. W. *A Brief History of Buddhist Studies in America and Europe*. Tokyo: Kōsei Publishing, 1997.
Lee, Thomas H. C. *China and Europe: Images and Influences in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries*. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1991. | [
"When European Christians made more direct contact with Buddhism in the early 16th century, Jesuit missionaries to Asia such as St. Francis Xavier and Ippolito Desideri sent back detailed accounts of Buddhist doctrine and practices. Ippolito Desideri spent a long time in Tibet, learning the Tibetan language and Tib... |
How do amino acids from food enter cells and become proteins? | The family of proteins called solute carrier proteins comprise a very large number of proteins, that were identified early, but not quickly characterized. We know now that many of them serve the role of transporting various amino acids into cells.
you can read more in this review: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_) | [
"Amino acids must first pass out of organelles and cells into blood circulation via amino acid transporters, since the amine and carboxylic acid groups are typically ionized. Degradation of an amino acid, occurring in the liver and kidneys, often involves deamination by moving its amino group to alpha-ketoglutarate... |
why don't word processors like ms word have extensive autocorrect like smartphone keyboards do? | Extensive autocorrect on smartphones exists because typing on them is hard for most people. When you have a full keyboard, and in a word processor for desktop you are expected to, it's more annoying than helpful for the program to make guesses about what you *meant*. | [
"Apple now allows third-party developers to make keyboard apps that users can replace the default iOS keyboard with. For added privacy, Apple added a settings toggle called \"Allow Full Access\", that optionally enables the keyboard to act outside its app sandbox, such as synchronizing keyboard data to the cloud, t... |
Have there been any cases of sterile kings using "other" methods for producing progeny? | > Would they adopt children to serve as heirs?
Indeed, this is the practice in Roman empire, when emperors lack legitimate child. Most famously this was practiced by the first four of Five Good Emperors:Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius. They chose their successor by adopting them. Marcus Aurelius, having his own natural, legitimate son in Commodus, did not practice adoption. Commodus, unfortunately, turns out to be shitty ruler and ended his reign violently.
Medieval rulers in Christian Europe did not practice adoption. If they were childless they would arrange a cadet branch of their dynasty to succeed them or, lacking that, will have to settle with claimants who married woman of their dynasty to succeed the tittle. To an extent such practice survived into early modern Europe. The Capetian of France is the most famous example, when the main line died out, the Valois branch succeeded as king of France. And when the Valois branch died out, the Bourbon branch took over.
Ottoman sultans have plenty of women in their harems so succession is rarely a problem. Furthermore, in late Ottoman, succession is not primogeniture from father to son, but by seniority, namely a sultan will be succeeded by his eldest brothers, or lacking that, by eldest son of his brothers.
| [
"Some clones of \"D. magna\" that do not produce males reproduce by automictic parthenogenesis, in which two haploid cells produced by meiosis fuse to produce a female zygote without fertilisation. This tends to make the resulting daughters homozygous, which may be deleterious.\n",
"Proponents claim that human re... |
Are there any books regarding indigenous peoples of the extreme north? | Check out Yuri Slezkine,[ *Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North*](_URL_0_) | [
"Joseph Bruchac (born October 16, 1942) is a writer of books relating to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a particular focus on northeastern Native American and Anglo-American lives and folklore. He has published poetry, novels, and short stories. Bruchac is from Saratoga Springs, New York, and is of Ab... |
I'm hoping to make an in-depth timeline of events to help my research. To anyone who's done the same, do you have any software or method recommendations? | I can recommend the free website Time Graphics. My example timeline is actually only semi-historical, as I used it to plot events in ancient history against the ancient timeline of the show *Steven Universe*, but hopefully it will serve as a good example of what the website is capable of: _URL_0_
As you can see, you can plot both individual events and long blocks of time. These can be colour coded (I personally colour coded according to continent since I was plotting broad brush strokes of world history.) You can also add images and descriptions to each item that you add. Hope that helps! | [
"BULLET::::- Ender, Gabriela; E-Book (2005–2011) about the OpenSpace-Online Real-Time Methodology: Knowledge-sharing, problem solving, results-oriented group dialogs about topics that matter with extensive conference documentation in real-time. Download https://web.archive.org/web/20070103022920/http://www.openspac... |
how do venus flytraps digest? | They secrete digestive enzymes. Interestingly enough, the digestive action of venus fly traps seem to have come from defenses against insects that were co-opted into carnivory. Jasmonic acid, which is used in other plants to activate defense mechanisms, is used by the venus fly trap to activate digestion. | [
"The Venus flytrap is a carnivorous plant that catches its prey with a trapping structure formed by the terminal portion of each of the plant's leaves, which is triggered by tiny hairs on their inner surfaces. When an insect or spider crawling along the leaves contacts a hair, the trap prepares to close, snapping s... |
how does a new show get on tv? | Someone comes up with an idea and pitches it to a network.
If the network likes the idea they create a "pilot episode" so they can see if they still like it and show it to other people to see if they like it too.
If that goes well then the show is made and broadcast on TV. | [
"TV shows are organized in several ways: by show, by network, or by mood. Shows are accessible from the major networks including ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, as well as others including Comedy Central, Disney Channel, HBO, PBS, and the History Channel. TV shows available include current programming such as Flight of the... |
...why does flash seem to be universally hated? | It takes forever to load,
sometimes you need to install shit to make it work at all,
it takes control of your keyboard unless you click outside the flash box,
you can't search in it, I can't see it with my iPhone,
it belongs to a big corporation that forced it down our throats....
Shall I continue? | [
"The Flash is one of DC Comics' most popular characters and has been integral to the publisher's many reality-changing \"crisis\" storylines over the years. The original meeting of the Golden Age Flash Jay Garrick and Silver Age Flash Barry Allen in \"Flash of Two Worlds\" (1961) introduced the Multiverse storytell... |
I am a Soviet Army soldier fighting in 1980s Afghanistan. I have been captured by the mujahedeen. How will I be treated as a prisoner? | So the most infamous results of "treatment" were quite horrifying. Stories of death and mutilation abound, and certainly were the common image for the scared, 18 year old conscripts being sent to 'fulfill their international duty' of the fate that awaited them, but the Mujahideen was hardly a monolithic entity, and treatment could vary greatly, although the sample size is quite small, as prisoners, generally, were a rarity in the conflict.
I'll start off with the worst of it, from Svetlana Alexievich's oral history of the war "Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War", and preface this by saying it is not for the faint of heart. It should also be said that as with any oral history project, it can sometimes be hard to separate fact from fiction, especially in the case of unattributed quotations. It undoubtedly captures the *feel* of the time, but this absolute most horrifying and striking mention of the treatment of prisoners is also one which offers no provenance, and may very well be nothing more than unsubstantiated rumor passed around. Alexievich attributes it simply to "snatches of conversation" overheard waiting for a flight to Kabul:
> They do take prisoners. They cut off their limbs and apply tourniquets so they won’t bleed to death. They leave them like that for our people to pick up the stumps. The stumps want to die, but they’re kept alive.
Just how true this *specific* account is, or how widespread it was, aside, it absolutely speaks to the more general expectation of treatment. A soldier who went missing would, far too often, be found by his comrades a few days later, his tortured and mutilated body purposefully discarded in a place to be stumbled upon. Even then, they might have been the lucky ones. The 860th Regiment saw one of its men, Pashanin, taken by the Mujahideen during an operation in 1984. It was reported back to them from spies that Pashanin had been castrated by his captors, who kept him alive in their village for over a month, kept naked and on a leash that attached to a ring put through his nose. Six months later, a local boy sold the regiment the location of the body, which was so unrecognizable that he officially remained listed as MIA.
Such brutal excesses were not always the case, but the high visibility of it was hard to ignore, and definitely dictated the general sense that capture should be avoided at *all* costs, even death. Simple execution out of hand, which also happened, would have been a blessing most likely, but death was by no means a *guarantee* in any case. Often, if a Muj commander had someone in mind - or just wanted a 'get out of jail free' card in his pocket - captives would be held for exchange. Of course this too could end badly. Evgeni Okhrimiuk, a civilian geologist captured in 1981 was held by a local Muj commander who wished to make a trade for his brother. The trade fell through due to the technicality that the brother had been executed. After a year of half-hearted negotiation for a ransom instead, Okhrimiuk was simply executed.
There were other types of exceptions. Almost two dozen defectors were able to make their way into Western hands eventually, a small propaganda coup. It also wasn't unknown for Russians to end up turning and fighting for the Mujahideen. Officially, of those who had gone MIA during the conflict, 44 were known to have taken up arms with the Muj, although the number may have been more. Unsurprisingly, this was most common for soldiers who defected or otherwise were willing to cooperate following their capture, although even then it could take years of captivity to earn real trust. Aleksei Olenin, a young Russian who had been captured and held prisoner eventually fought with the Mujahideen detachment for the next six years, and recalled that four other Russian defectors/captives fought in the unit during that time. Nominally though, he was still a prisoner. After the collapse of the of the Soviet efforts and their withdrawal, remaining prisoners were generally ransomed for return, Olenin one of them. He felt out of place upon his return in 1994 however, and soon went back to Afghanistan and married. He would eventually return to his russian village a decade later, family in tow, living as a devout Muslim. Similarly, an 18 year old draftee at the time, G.A. Tsevma deserted from his post in 1983 and after several years in captivity, eventually converted to Islam and began a family, and was still living in Afghanistan as of 2003, at least.
Not all captives had quite the happy ending. Even for the above treatment could be terrible at first. Olenin was beaten repeatedly before finally being incorporated into the group, and for those who simply remained prisoners, again, it could run the gamut based on the whims of your captors. Although ransomed or otherwise released eventually, the poor quality of their treatment didn't compensate suspicion of desertion, and many faced prison sentences when they returned to Russia.
In fairness, it of course should be said that the Soviets themselves could be absolutely brutal in their treatment of prisoners too. One veteran, a private from a grenadier battalion, discussing the horrors of the conflict, and wondering whether he was a criminal for his participation, remarked:
> Should I tell [the people back home] that I’m still scared of the dark and that when something falls down with a bang I jump out of my skin? How the prisoners we took somehow never got as far as regimental HQ? I saw them literally stamped and ground into the earth. In a year and a half I didn’t see a single live dukh in captivity, only dead ones. I can’t very well tell the school kids about the collections of dried ears and other trophies of war, can I? Or the villages that looked like ploughed fields after we’d finished bombarding them?
So anyways in short, there was no standard of treatment. As a soldier, you would likely *expect* something terrible involving torture and a slow, painful death. This certainly happened, but you might very well end up married with a family, and just trying to live a quiet life in a remote Afghan village two decades later...
Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989 by Rodric Braithwaite
Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War by Svetlana Alexievich
Carlotta Gall, "A Stranger in Afghanistan, Too Torn to Go Home" in the New York Times, July 31, 2003 | [
"Leonid Khabarov (; born May 8, 1947) is a former Soviet military officer whose battalion was the first Soviet Army unit to cross the border into the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan on December 25, 1979, serving as the \"de facto\" beginning of the decade-long Soviet–Afghan War. He received widespread media atte... |
Does writing helps us remember? | Check out levels of processing. _URL_0_
I don't remember the citation, but the idea is that writing something down (specifically, putting it in your own words instead of copying it) forces you to process the information more deeply and thus retrieve the information better. It's outside my area of expertise but I remember it from my undergraduate courses. | [
"The \"cognitive account\" suggests that memories are remembered best because they occur during a period of rapid change followed by a period of relative stability. There is an assumed memory advantage for the novel and distinct events that is followed by a period of stability. The novel events are subject to great... |
what does the recent increase in arctic ice say about global warming and climate change? | One year does not a trend make on a long term global temperature graph.
Therefore, this really says nothing at the moment. Come see me in a couple or 10 years. | [
"The Arctic is especially vulnerable to the effects of any climate change, as has become apparent with the reduction of sea ice in recent years. Climate models predict much greater warming in the Arctic than the global average, resulting in significant international attention to the region. In particular, there are... |
when we first started measuring temperature how did we decide how large a degree would be? was it merely and arbitrary figure that worked, or was there a specific reason behind it? | It's based on water. They froze some water and decided that would be 0, they boiled some and decided that would be 100. So it's arbitrary in the sense that 100 is an arbitrary number but that's what it's based on.
The temperature of boiling water will always be the same whether they decided to say it would be called 100 degrees or something random like 41 degrees. | [
"Attempts at standardized temperature measurement prior to the 17th century were crude at best. For instance in 170 AD, physician Claudius Galenus mixed equal portions of ice and boiling water to create a \"neutral\" temperature standard. The modern scientific field has its origins in the works by Florentine scient... |
How much blame could we actually give to Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression? | Hoover had, in my opinion, little to do with the actual ONSET of the Depression and merely suffered the wrath of the fact that people need to blame...someone. And you can blame the President, while you cannot blame faceless brokers at the NYSE.
An unregulated and unmonitored Stock Exchange, which had been doing...whatever it wanted since long before Hoover was essentially your primary cause.
I'm sure you could argue Hoover could have done things, but that's like trying to say Louis 16 could have prevented the French Revolution. Several of Hoover's plans to fix the depression actually backfired or had to be labeled as a 'No Gain' at best.
I would encourage a period-appropriate expert to weigh in! | [
"The causes of the Great Depression remain a matter of debate, but Hoover viewed a lack of confidence in the financial system as the fundamental economic problem facing the nation. He sought to avoid direct federal intervention, believing that the best way to bolster the economy was through the strengthening of bus... |
Why were the Americans able to fly such large bombers over Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Where were the air defences? | USAAF B-29s started bombing Japan in 1944, from China in July and the Mariana Islands in November. Similar to the strategy employed against Germany, they first targeted the Japanese aircraft industry. Though early raids were not always accurate or successful they did force the dispersal of aircraft production, the later area incendiary attacks continued the process. (*The Strategic Air War Against Germany and Japan: A Memoir*, Haywood S. Hansell, Jr; he includes [a Strategic Bombing Survey graph of aircraft production] (_URL_0_)).
The capture of Iwo Jima in March 1945 allowed long range fighters to escort the B-29s, but by this time attrition had already severely weakened the Japanese air forces: "... by late spring and summer Japanese air strength in the home islands deteriorated so rapidly that bomber formations again went out unescorted" (*The Army Air Forces in World War II: Volume V*).
The first practice missions of the 509th Composite Group, the unit formed to drop the atomic weapons, were flown in July; "After June 26, Japanese fighters were rarely encountered in numbers (...) The JAAF was virtually powerless to react against the invaders, and it was told to keep its remaining aircraft in reserve for the final battle, expected in the autumn. Japan's industrial power had been weakened, and the means to defend its airspace was lacking." (*B-29 Hunters of the JAAF*, Takaki & Sakaida).
The 509th carried out several raids in July and August using "pumpkin" bombs that simulated the size and weight of the Fat Man atomic bomb. To gather data and gain experience the 509th first flew training flights around outlying islands such as Rota and Marcus Island, then from July 20th there were 18 bombing sorties of two to six Silverplate B-29s against targets in Japan, starting with Koriyama, Fukushima, Nagoka and Toyama. Only the heaviest anti-aircraft guns could threaten B-29s flying at 30,000ft, and these were in short supply; the 509th suffered no losses during the "pumpkin" missions, only one B-29 suffered minor damage.
(Based on my post from a [lengthy thread on more or less the same subject] (_URL_1_) a few months ago that got a little messy.) | [
"Its primary mission during World War II was to train the aerial gunners who would defend bombers. In 1942 and 1943, most American fighter planes didn't have the range needed to keep up with the bombers. This would leave the bombers and their crews unprotected on lengthy flights over enemy territory. Sitting in tur... |
Why are the flags of the Mughal Empire of India and the Safavid Dynasty of Persia/Iran so similar? | With regards to Iran, you can find a great article about historical Persian flags on the [Encyclopaedia Iranica](_URL_0_) website. To summarize, the Lion and Sun symbol has a rather long history. Both the Sun and Golden Lion are symbols of kingship and royalty and were in use from ancient times, as reliefs carved into various temples and palaces attest. A Golden Lion is also the emblem of the house of Godarz, a character in the Shahnameh, an extremely influential epic poem and the national epic of Persia.
From the Encyclopaedia:
> The sun (imagined as a male) had always been associated with Persian royalty: “a crystal image of the sun” identified the royal tent of Darius III (Quintus Curtius, 3.3, 8); the Arsacid banner was adorned with the figure of the sun (Tertullian, Apologeticum 16); Sasanian crowns were surmounted by a ball symbolizing the sun. Malalas (18.44) quotes the salutation of a letter from the “Persian king, the Sun of the East,” to the “Roman Caesar, the Moon of the West” and the Šāh-nāma (Moscow, V, p. 90, vv. 76f.) quotes the Turanian/Turkish hero-king Afrāsīāb (q.v.) as saying: “I have heard from wise men that when the Moon of the Turks rises up it will be harmed by the Sun of the Iranians (ke čōn māh-e Torkān barāyad boland, ze ḵoršīd-e Īrān-š āyad gazand).
The Lion was also a very common symbol of royalty in the ancient and medieval world. Lion hunting scenes are somewhat common in Assyrian reliefs, showing the power of the Assyrian kings over nature. Persia was no different, and neither were the neighboring areas:
> Islamic, Turkish, and Mongol traditions also stressed the symbolic association of the lion and royalty (Grünert; Kindermann; Ackerman; Köprülü; Spuler, Mongolen4, pp. 282 f.). They likewise reaffirmed the charismatic power of the sun (Milstein), and the Mongols re-introduced the veneration of the sun especially in its rising phase (Spuler, Mongolen4, pp. 140 f.). As a result of these developments the heraldic use of the lion and sun symbol gained popularity and was extended, appearing on banners (literary evidence in Mīnovī, p. 97) as well as on coins and textiles, metalwork, and luster tiles (Nafīsī, 1949, pp. 54-60).
Also:
> Clavijo (pp. 207 f.) describes a palace which Tīmūr had seized from the former Chaghatay khans of Samarqand, and states that the lion and sun symbol ornamented the gateway of the main building and the arches around the courtyard. He was told (ibid, p. 208) that this emblem “was the armorial bearing of the former lords of Samarqand.”
By the time of the Safavids (at least Shah Abbas), the symbolism of the Lion and Sun was ubiquitous, and eventually was adopted as the symbol of Persia. It also had Shi'a implications, given that Ali ibn Abi Talib was known as *Asadullah* (أسد الله), the Lion of God, and the sun symbolizing God's glory.
As to the Mughals, they were a very heavily Persianized dynasty to begin with, to the extent that Farsi was the courtly language before the development of Urdu, which is a highly Persianized form of Hindustani. Also, during the initial political instability in the Mughal Empire, the second Mughal Emperor Humayun was given shelter in Persia during his exile before being restored to the throne. There were also many Persian officials in Mughal courts. The reasoning for adopting the Sun and Lion as a Mughal symbol is largely the same - both the Lion and Sun being symbols of royalty. | [
"The Mughal Empire had a number of imperial flags and standards. The principal imperial standard of the Mughals was known as the \"alam\" ( ). It was primarily moss green. It displayed a lion and sun ( ) facing the hoist of the flag. The Mughals traced their use of the \"alam\" back to Timur.\n",
"The Mughal Empi... |
why hasn’t cancer been bred out of the gene pool by natural selection? | Because cancer isn't an inherited disease. Cancer isn't even one single disease. You can inherit genes that predispose you to types of cancers, but cancer is just random mutations in cells that make them grow out of control. They can happen in in any person at any time; sometimes in response to carcinogens or mutagens, and sometimes just randomly for no reason at all. | [
"A number of authors have questioned the assumption that cancers result from sequential random mutations as oversimplistic, suggesting instead that cancer results from a failure of the body to inhibit an innate, programmed proliferative tendency. A related theory developed by astrobiologists suggests that cancer is... |
What did the understanding of the elements of the periodic table look like in the 1500s? | /u/billbillbilly nails it pretty well.
The modern atomic theory didn't exist until the early 19th century, and things like conservation of mass, etc until the 18th century.
So forget the periodic table. "elements" were the four elements that all matter was made of: earth, air, fire, and water, going back to aristotle, except add a millenia of arabic commentators adding to the theory.
Like billbillbilly also mentioned, metal in 1500 was thought to be made up of mercury and sulphur. Salt minerals being needed to change the ratio. By changing the ration you change the metal.
Metals were thought to "ripen" in nature. This is based off of empirical evidence: there are traces of silver in copper ore, and traces of gold in silver ore, etc.
And so alchemists thought this process from lesser metals to precious metals can be done artificially. That's alchemy.
Basically you can break things down to their "elements" (base earth, air, fire, water) and then build them back up carefully into what you want (gold).
Alchemical recipes also have aspects of cabbalah, hermeticism, sympathetic magic, astrology, and all other sorts of mystyical aspects. See [the History of Alchemy Podcast](_URL_1_) for a lot more.
Feel free to ask follow up questions if you want more details. You might also be interested in some of the [other alchemy questions I've answered](_URL_0_)
The periodic table itself is also interesting.. but not direct to your question. In the 18th century chymists started noticing that some matter really can't be brocken down, not matter what. The new "atom" (the old "atom" was from Democritus and was really just theoretical)... at some point they noticed that these new elements had characteristics and things in common with each other. In fact three elements often had things in common with each other. These trifecta were some of the first patterns noticed that lead to the periodic table. | [
"His book, \"Die modernen Theorien der Chemie\", which he began writing in Breslau in 1862 and which was published two years later, contained an early version of the periodic table containing 28 elements, classified elements into six families by their valence—for the first time, elements had been grouped according ... |
Does exercise reduce blood pressure by sweating out excess salt? | Not a very large role, I'm afraid. BP is regulated by multiple different salts (and a host of other factors). I suspect if you sweat just pure NaCl, you would decrease blood pressure, but it would be fatal since the sodium to potassium ratio must be preserved. Therefore you [sweat out a mixture of salts](_URL_0_), which preserves this ratio, and thus you don't really get a BP decrease as a consequence of releasing multiple salts. That said, exercise in general is a great way to lower your BP by reducing stress and increasing cardiovascular health!
Actually, dehydration from profuse sweating would decrease BP, but that's another health issue in itself. :| | [
"It is widely believed that excessive sweating due to strenuous exercise can lead to muscle cramps. Deficiency of sodium and other electrolytes may lead to contracted interstitial fluid compartments, which may exacerbate the muscle cramping. According to this theory, the increased blood plasma osmolality from sweat... |
the price of eggs have skyrocketed, but why hasn't the price of chicken gone up? | The chickens we eat are not the same chickens that lay the eggs we eat. Apples and oranges. | [
"In 2015, the national flock suffered due to the spread of bird flu, affecting birds in fourteen states, leading to layoffs. In a May 2015 report by the \"Associated Press\", it reported that 10% of egg laying chickens were dead or dying due to bird flu. Beginning in June 2015, rationing of eggs has begun, leading ... |
Is an invisible material physically possible ? | Yes, it is possible to a certain extent.
Scientists are currently working with "metamaterials" which are usually composed of metals and ceramics.
Scientists are making small things appear and disappear but for an invisibility cloak which is seen in Harry Potter - We are a long way from.
The Army are also developing some invisibility technology | [
"BULLET::::- \"So my flesh is not only the principle of the constitution of my objective body, it hides in it its invisible substance. Such is the strange condition of this object that we call a body : it doesn’t consist at all in the visible appearance to which we have always reduced it ; precisely in its reality ... |
what exactly happens when a music producer "masters" a song/album? | When most people hear the term 'mastering', they are think of the mixing process, aka balancing volumes and adding effects, etc. Mastering is actually a specialized subset of mixing that is a form of audio quality control or quality assurance. Only a relative handful of people and studios are capable of mastering, compared to the thousands of mix studios out there. The goal of mastering is to get every track sounding as good as possible across multiple systems, meaning that the end product should sound great through your car, stereo, headphones and laptop speakers. Along with this, many artists' songs are recorded and mixed in multiple locations, and it's the mastering engineer's job to get them to sound like they all are polished to the same standard. Lastly, mastering produces the final CD or vinyl format for distribution and archives the tracks (often separated into clean lyrics versions, a capellas and instrumentals) for the publishing company. | [
"A \"record producer\" or \"music producer\" has a very broad role in overseeing and managing the recording and production of a band or performer's music. A producer has many roles that may include, but are not limited to, gathering ideas for the project, composing the music for the project, selecting songs or sess... |
what makes ab+ plasma and platelets a universal donor? | AB+ is a good platelet donor because their platelets dont contain any antibodies towards the other blood types. They have the A, B and + on their red blood cells so they dont see any of those as foreign if a donated cell has one of those on it | [
"From 1979 to 1981 he was executive vice president of the Hyland Therapeutics division of Baxter Travenol in Glendale, California. In the United States, plasma donors were paid for their time as the time commitment for regular donors is over 200 hours per year. Standards for donating plasma are set by the U.S. Food... |
With recent generations being immunized against the chicken pox, how will the frequency of shingles cases be affected? | That would be the idea. It's all herpes zoster infections - shingles is just the recurrence of the same infection. When there are no new cases of chickenpox then, eventually, there would be no new cases of shingles. But it'll take a long time - all the people who have had chickenpox need to get old and die and all the young ones need to be vaccinated, or otherwise avoid being infected. | [
"During 2003 and the first half of 2004, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported eight deaths from varicella, six of whom were children or adolescents. These deaths and hospital admissions have substantially declined in the US due to vaccination, though the rate of shingles infection has in... |
what is an actual good strategy for taking those personality tests you find on job applications? what exactly are they looking for? | the more elaborate ones have a combination of questions that let them see if you're honest.
Not being able to sleep because of stress cannot be good in my view. Bad stress management.
It's like saying yes to the question "do you have psychological problems?".
The everything is possible one is trickier indeed, it depends on how shallow the test is. I guess that when in doubt, I'd just answer honestly.
| [
"Employers may also view personality tests as more accurate assessment of a candidate's behavioral characteristics versus an employment reference. But the problem with using personality tests as a hiring tool is the notion a person's job performance in one environment will carry over to another work environment. Ho... |
Can we measure dark energy? | That depends on what you mean by measure. For all practical intents and purposes, however, the answer is no. Dark energy is just the name we give a phenomenon about which we understand very little. So far, the only measurements we've made regarding dark energy is its relative abundance: we know it makes up ~75% of the observable universe. The remaining 25% is composed of matter and radiation.
Other than that, we really know nothing about dark energy. For the moment we're firmly seated in the realm of speculation and hypothesis. Future instrumentation will help us to gather more clues, but we've a long road ahead!
edit: grammar | [
"Dark energy can be considered as a measurement of the cosmological constant. In scale relativity, dark energy would come from a potential energy manifested by the fractal geometry of the universe at large scales, in the same way as the Newtonian potential is a manifestation of its curved geometry in general relati... |
how does a program that is a 2mb download take up 30mb of space when installed? | It depends. There's really 3 scenarios:
1. It's a compressed installer that extracts itself as part of the installation
2. The installed runs a bunch of scripts that generate placeholder files
3. It's a stub installer that actually is just downloading additional files as part of the installer (See: [Java](_URL_0_) Online installer (stub) - 718kb vs Offline (full program install) - 47.94mb
Edit: Option 1 was extremely common back in the day, but option 3 is very prevalent nowadays, and is used for most update packages, mostly because it's implied in today's world that your computer is going to be always online, so they can use an online installer (stub) in order to always deliver new files as opposed to a single installer getting circulated inside a company for years. | [
"In theory, a standard 48K program may take about 5 minutes to load: 49,152 bytes × 8 = 393,216 bits; 393,216 bits / 1,365 baud ≈ 288 seconds = 4:48 minutes. In practice, however, such a program usually takes between 3–4 minutes to load (because of different number of 0s and 1s encoded using audio frequency shift k... |
how are home run distances in baseball calculated as soon as the ball lands? | They point a laser range finder at the spot it landed. | [
"From 1973 to 1979, fans could estimate the distance of home run balls, since there were several signs beyond the outfield wall giving the distance in feet from home plate, in addition to the nine markers within the field.\n",
"The baseball field dimensions had varied slightly over the years. In 1969, the distanc... |
Can someone explain Lupus to me? | Aeina has a great explanation, so I won't retread any ground. I'd just add that in Lupus it's specifically diagnosed by the presence of a antinuclear antibody (ANA), meaning there's an antibody targeting the nucleus, or part of the cell that contains DNA. While there are actually a few variations on this disease, and ANA is associated with diseases other than Lupus, ANA is among the more common and important findings. If you're concerned, I would highly recommend making an appointment about seeing your PCP/GP, and asking about it. The good news is that Lupus can be fairly well controlled for a long time using non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), and earlier detection can help avoid a lot of the complications like arthritis or renal failure. | [
"Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), also known simply as lupus, is an autoimmune disease in which the body's immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissue in many parts of the body. Symptoms vary between people and may be mild to severe. Common symptoms include painful and swollen joints, fever, chest pain, hair... |
why the american constitution is still the same yet laws change | The Consitution has been changed 27 times (although the first 10 changes happened at the same time). These changes are called "Amendments." The procedure for passing an Amendment is described in the Constitution itself. The way to pass an Amendment is to have it approved by 2/3 of both branches of Congress (the groups of people who are in charge of making laws), followed by having 3/4 of the states approve it as well. As you can see, lots of people need to vote in favor of a proposed Amendment for it to succeed, so you can only pass one if it's really popular. Time needed to approve an Amendment varies, but in some cases it has taken less than a year. | [
"Each of the United States has its own governing Constitution. The States Constitutions are usually longer and written in much more detail than the U.S. Constitution. For example, the Alabama Constitution has more than 600 pages and the New Jersey Constitution of 1947 is three times longer than the U.S. Constitutio... |
why does society have "girl stuff" and "guy stuff" | > Is it more of a result of nature or nurture?
There is a lot to this subject, but I'm going to focus on this bit.
This question is generally bogus. Nature and nurture are both important aspects when understanding behavior. In this case, there are clearly biological differences between males and females and these differences are a reasonable explanation for the development of cultural gender differences, but many of the cultural differences are not consistent between cultures or across time (e.g. pink used to be considered too masculine for girls).
When we look at infants, we find statistically significant differences between sexes in many ways, but just because they are statistically significant, doesnt mean that all boys are more geo-physically oriented and less emotional-socially oriented than girls. The numbers of sensitive boys and rowdy girls are very high and the degree by which these stereotypes are reinforced as they age varies between cultures.
In short, gender differences have their basis in biology, but culturally we have taken these biological foundations and amplified them in all sorts of interesting, and sometimes bizarre ways.
> Also, why would a child want to have a doll that is essentially a child to take care of? Especially the ones that pee themselves?
For the same sorts of reasons that children might want toys which let them pretend to kill things or cook things. The impulse to care for each other is very deep and the ability for children to play to practice their impulses is very important for their development. | [
"Since the 1990s, \"It Girl\" or \"It-Girl\" has been used slightly differently, referring to a wealthy, normally unemployed, young woman who is pictured in tabloids going to many parties often in the company of other celebrities, receiving media coverage in spite of no real personal achievements or TV hosting / pr... |
sometimes police can enter a house saying they have a warrant, but do not need to produce it for proof to the people in the house? | Under the Federal Constitution there is no requirement to show the warrant. There is a standard of reasonableness with regard to the manner of execution of the search or arrest, and some decisions have cited the display of the warrant, but the Supreme Court has affirmatively held it is not a requirement.
Some states do have statutes dictating the manner with which warrants are executed.
Keep in mind, as with all personal rights (i.e. limitations on government power) under the Federal Constitution, states can always expand the proscription (i.e. give you more rights) but they can never limit your rights under the Federal Constitution.
In short, requiring a warrant to be shown is an additional right, but it is not required everywhere in the U.S. | [
"The Court reasoned that searches \"incident to arrest\" are limited to the area within the immediate control of the suspect. While police could reasonably search and seize evidence on or around the arrestee's person, police were prohibited from rummaging through the entire house without a search warrant. The Court... |
I am a merchant traveling along the Silk Road during the first century. What is life like for me and what kinds of things am I concerned about? | My suggestion to you is to read Susan Whitfields "Life Along the Silk Road", it is a historical fiction book, but it beautifully illustrates the trials that people faced along the Silk Road routes.
The Silk Road, as I'm sure you're aware was not just one long trail that stretched from East to West. There was just as much trade North to South between the newly settled civilizations thanks to the threat of violent reprisal from the Han and Qin Dynasty, who had eliminated the nomadic tribes such as the Hsiung-nu.
That being said, just because the routes had become settled enough to traverse with goods, it did not mean that one was entirely safe from brigands and the like. Very often you would hire protection if you could pay for it, the journey could take months if you were planning on going from one end to the other, which you often were as the silk in the East was a *very* precious commodity throughout most of the Silk Roads lifespan.
Sources:
Waugh, Charles. University of Washington, "Narratives of the Han Dynasty." Last modified 1999. _URL_1_
_URL_0_
| [
"In the late Middle Ages, transcontinental trade over the land routes of the Silk Road declined as sea trade increased. The Silk Road was a significant factor in the development of the civilizations of China, India, Ancient Egypt, Persia, Arabia, and Ancient Rome. Though silk was certainly the major trade item from... |
why does my husband get an erection when he's tired? | Your body needs to tense a muscle to *prevent* an erection. When you're tired this muscle relaxes and you become erect. Same reason you get morning wood. | [
"Erections during sleep or when waking up are medically known as nocturnal penile tumescence and colloquially referred to as \"morning wood\". The penis can regularly get erect during sleep and men or boys often wake up with an erection. Once a boy reaches his teenage years, erections occur much more frequently due... |
Were there eunuchs in Pre-Columbian American civilizations? | I've researched this a little, in precisely the same thinking as you! It's a solid *sort of...* If you, fellow eunuchologist, mean as I think you do "other-gendered people occupying a distinct social role or roles with their gender made manifest through the act of literal castration" then no. Which is boring. But if you mean any concepts of non-binary gender and social role for that, then yes, there are certainly some comparable concepts in different American cultures to eunuchs, including social roles you and I would consider very eunuchy, like religious leaders. But they didn't get physical about it. Katherine Ringrose actually makes the comparison in her Byzantine book, that they are all an approach to a universal social need for a "liminal" gender. As for instances of castration-yet-not-eunuch-creation, as castrating a man does not necessarily make him a eunuch with a proper eunuch's social role as we know, I believe castration was used as punishment/torture in some places, but frankly I'm really not interested in punitive/torture castration so I haven't researched it.
Unfortunately this can be pretty tricky to research, as there's lots of secret words, some of the words are old and wince-y, and library catalogs are still stuck with a lot of old words for things, and of course, cataloging is an art practiced by human beings of varying skill and sensitivity, and we don't update old book entries if we can help it. There's MARC records in American academic libraries that got directly ported off the hard card catalog in 1975 and have been imported and exported unchanged from one cataloging software to another since then. I could go on a little subrant about the evolution of library cataloging terms but safe to say, to research this vein of history you need to think in a distinctly old-timey lens to really use a catalog.
More modern North American work has agreed on [Two Spirit](_URL_4_) as the umbrella term of choice in English, this is also a modern personal identity, for instance there were 2 separate PBS specials on two different people from cultures an ocean apart but both were identified as Two Spirit, so you see a lot of non-historical stuff here. You see some stuff classified under [berdache](_URL_2_), but it people stepped away from that word in the 90s, as it's pretty darn colonial. You do not find anything classified under the "real" words, i.e. native ones, but [Google Books can be fruitful here.](_URL_5_) [This subject heading](_URL_1_) is messy but has a few things of interest. [Other things clearly are in the vein of other-gender](_URL_3_) but are classified only under "homosexuality," which can be a bit sticky, but in the 90s-00s they lumped a lot of disparate things under "gay stuff, whatever" and called it a day. North America has been written about a lot more than South America, or at least in English. And as you pick through these you'll probably see one name over and over again - Will Roscoe - because he's made himself a little cottage industry of non-Western LGBT+ studies.
If perhaps you weren't looking for a master-class in un-woke cataloging research methods and just a simple reading rec... if you want to read something short, easy to find in libraries, and eminently citable for your dissertation, I would recommend [the next-to-last chapter of this book.](_URL_0_) :) | [
"A small number of eunuchs were also acquired by the slave traders in the southern parts of Ethiopia. Mainly consisting of young children, they led the most privileged lives and commanded the highest prices in the Islamic global markets because of their rarity. They served in the harems of the affluent or guarded h... |
how do people "let go" and choose to die? | I would add an alternative explanation: the (inopportunely named, in this case...) survivorship bias.
For every person who died at just the right moment to create a memorable and touching story about how they "hung on" until the right time, there are quite possibly 99 other people who died far too early or much later (or not at all!) to make it story-worthy. We only hear about those rare cases where people die at just the right moment, giving something of an illusion that the people may be exerting control over when they die.
Not to say that's not what is happening, in some cases. But it is important to consider such observational biases which are often a simpler explanation for the stories we perceive. | [
"Killing others lead to short life if one becomes reborn in the human plane instead of the four lower States of Deprivation. By abandoning the very acts of killing and harming, one gets to be reborn in a heavenly world. Alternatively, one gets to be reborn in the human world being endowed with long life.\n",
"Dea... |
why are ncaa basketball rules so different from nba rules? | The NCAA wants to differentiate itself from the NBA to minimize the perception that the players in one billion dollar league are very well compensated while the players in the other are lucky to get a scholarship. | [
"The rules of basketball are the rules and regulations that govern the play, officiating, equipment and procedures of basketball. While many of the basic rules are uniform throughout the world, variations do exist. Most leagues or governing bodies in North America, the most important of which are the National Baske... |
Why does Tyrannosaurus rex have a second set of rib bones? | They're called gastral ribs. Last I read we're not entirely sure what purpose they served or if they had any purpose. That's all I really know about the subject a paleontologist can tell you more. | [
"Like many other fossils of \"Tyrannosaurus rex\", the skeleton of Stan shows many broken and healed bones. These include broken ribs and damages in the skull. One of the most prominent injuries are in the neck and the skull. A piece of bone is missing at the rear, and the skull also bears a hole 1 inch wide, proba... |
modern germany's outlook and regulations on naziism? | They do acknowledge naziism in school. Nazi paraphernalia is banned for collecting purposes, although museums can display it. Same goes for Mein Kampf, not allowed to be sold or distributed.
Source: My mother is German, told me about all this. | [
"From 1933 to 1945, the Nazi regime ruled Germany and controlled much of Europe. During this time, Nazi Germany shifted from the post-World War I society which characterized the Weimar Republic and introduced an ideology of \"biological racism\" into the country's legal and justicial systems. The shift from the tra... |
if gas pumps can accurately measure high speed flow, why do they always slow to a crawl at the end? | Think of it like filling a water bottle from a faucet. If you open the tap all the way and try to fill it you will have to stop when the water starts bubbling out of the top from the air trying to escape. The result is that you have a bottle that isn't actually full. Now if you start to close the tap and slow down the flow as the water reaches the top you let the air escape without causing the water to bubble up.
The same thing happens to the fuel tank in your car. To counteract this the pumps slow down the fill rate when it senses the tank getting full allowing for a full tank without the need to repeatedly restart the pump. | [
"Large ports and valves can show high flow rates on a flow bench but the velocity can be lowered to the point that the gas dynamics of a real engine are ruined. Overly large ports also contribute to fuel fall out.\n",
"Pumping speed refers to the volume flow rate of a pump at its inlet, often measured in volume p... |
Why does it hurt when disinfectant is applied to wounds? | Disinfectants are not picky about the type of cells they kill.
[Alcohol](_URL_2_) dehydrates cells and denatures proteins. Proteins and cell walls have the shape they do partly from interaction with water and if you change the solvent everything dies. Antibiotics are an off switch for bacteria and disinfectants are nuking the site from orbit.
Ethanol burns partly because you're losing a few cells and partly because it triggers the same [VR-1](_URL_0_) heat receptors as spicy food.
For small wounds you usually [aren't really supposed to use disinfectants much.](_URL_3_) Cuts and scrapes should be [carefully washed with clean water.](_URL_1_) This is how I was trained as an EMT. If you really need topical disinfectants then they will probably be applied by a doctor or a nurse. | [
"which is important for speeding the healing of chronic wounds. Some researchers have experimented with the use of tea tree oil, an antibacterial agent which also has anti-inflammatory effects. Disinfectants are contraindicated because they damage tissues and delay wound contraction. Further, they are rendered inef... |
we always hear that the military is "fighting to protect our rights." but who are they fighting and why do they want to take away our rights? | That statement is not meant to be taken literally. The implication is that if, *hypothetically,* someone were to bring us harm, the military would stop them.
By that logic, anyone who joins the military has signed up to (maybe, someday) die for our freedom. | [
"BULLET::::6. We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America. We will prote... |
what problems do modern mathematicians attempt to solve? | They're working on impossibly hard problems like:
- Is every even number the sum of two primes?
- Start with any natural number x. If it's even, go to x / 2. If it's odd got to 3x + 1. If you do this the cycle 1, 4, 2, 1... repeats forever. Are there any other cycles?
- ~~A Pythagorean triple is three natural numbers so a^2 + b^2 = c^2. Are there any four numbers such that a^2 + b^2 + c^2 = d^2 ?~~ (Oopsies. I did *not* think this one through. Hat tip to /u/Usion and /u/RelentlessPessimist)
- Corrected: A Pythagorean triple is three natural numbers so a^2 + b^2 = c^2. If you make a triangle with lengths a, b and c, it will be a right triangle. Now put two of those together to make a rectangle. Can you make a cuboid (brick shape) from rectangles like these?
- Pick any number N, no matter how big. If you start adding up the fractions 1/1 + 1/2 + 1/3 ... the sum will eventually get bigger than N. This is called divergence.
- When the gaps in a sequence 1, 3, 5, 7 ... are all the same size it's called an "arithmetic sequence". For any arithmetic sequence, the sum of reciprocals (1 + 1/3 + 1/5 + 1/7) also diverges.
- Corrected: If the sum of reciprocals of a sequence diverges, it seems that you can always find arithmetic sequences inside (at least three numbers with equal gaps between them). Is this true? If it's true, can you always find longer sequences? How long? (Hat tip to /u/Spetzo and /u/FUZxxl )
- When sequences do not contain an arithmetic sequence (e.g. 1, 3, 9, 27, 81...), the sum of the reciprocals do not seem to diverge. Are there any exceptions to that rule?
- Pi is irrational and e is irrational. Is pi * e rational or irrational?
- What is the [largest sofa](_URL_0_) that can fit around a 90-degree L-shaped corner between two hallways of equal width?
- We know you can fit one that's 2.2 times bigger than the width squared. And we know that 2.83 times is too big.
Recently solved very hard problems include:
- Imagine you are coloring countries on a 2-dimensional map. How many colors do you need to keep the shapes distinct? You usually need three and sometimes you need four. Do you ever need five colors?
- No.
- Go back to Pythagorean triples (a^2 + b^2 = c^2). Finding triples a + b = c is easy, Pythagorean triples are a little harder but not too hard. Triples that satisfy a^3 + b^3 = c^3 seem impossible to find, but are they? What about other powers (a^n + b^n = c^n)?
- There are no triples (a, b c), if n > 2.
but the proofs are very long.
| [
"BULLET::::- Problem solving: the cultivation of mathematical ingenuity, creativity and heuristic thinking by setting students open-ended, unusual, and sometimes unsolved problems. The problems can range from simple word problems to problems from international mathematics competitions such as the International Math... |
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