q_id stringlengths 5 6 | title stringlengths 3 301 | selftext stringlengths 0 39.2k | document stringclasses 1 value | subreddit stringclasses 3 values | url stringlengths 4 132 | answers dict | title_urls list | selftext_urls list | answers_urls list |
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39ryua | When opening a carbonated beverage (beer, coke, etc.), are you "seeing" carbon dioxide when a vapor sometimes lingers at the top? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/39ryua/when_opening_a_carbonated_beverage_beer_coke_etc/ | {
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"No. The \"vapor\" you see is a fine mist of water droplets. The gaseous CO2 trapped in the bottle is under high pressure, and when it expands from opening the bottle, it cools down. On a humid day, it will cool down enough for humidity in the air to condense into a small cloud. It's the same reason for the cloud that comes out of your refrigerator or freezer on a humid day.",
"This is actually one of the cooler examples of beer physics in the sense that it's an everyday example of homogeneous nucleation. Most rain drops form by adsorbing onto dust. But the vapor in the neck of a beer bottle is pure water that condenses because, as the pressure drops instantaneously, cooling the water enough for the phase change to occur."
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21bf5h | hobby lobby supreme court case. | What should we know about this? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21bf5h/eli5_hobby_lobby_supreme_court_case/ | {
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"Hobby Lobby's owners, who are religious conservatives, do not want their company to provide contraception as part of its health insurance plan. They are opposed to it, and feel that since they are paying the bill, they should be able to choose to select a plan that doesn't include contraception. Many people agree with this position.\n\nThe government, however, has mandated the inclusion of contraception in health care plans as part of the Affordable Care Act. The idea is that the religious beliefs of the owners of a company shouldn't impact an employee's access to legitimate medical services or prescriptions. Many people agree with this position.",
" > the religious beliefs of the owners of a company shouldn't impact an employee's access to legitimate medical services or prescriptions\n\nThere are 20 forms of birth control approved by the FDA. Hobby Lobby is fine with paying for 16 of them. The 4 they do not want to cover are the 4 that the FDA says can destroy an embryo thereby causing an abortion. So contrary to what is reported in the news Hobby Lobby does not want to refuse women contraception, they do not want to pay for drug-induced abortions. Women can walk into any drug store and buy the morning after pill over the counter. I've seen it at CVS. Hobby Lobby is not limiting access to anything."
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1v05v2 | Why was the Meiji Restoration so much more successful than the Self-Strengthening Movement? | I find it interesting that two similar and closely related countries which began Westernization around the same time had such different results. From the First Sino-Japanese War it's clear that Japan was by far more capable militarily than China, even in spite of its size, and was able to surpass China's power less than three decades after reforms began. Not only that, but ten years later, Japan was able to face Russia and win, distinguishing itself as a peer to Western imperial powers. From what little I've read, it seems that the Meiji Restoration was astoundingly successful, and achieved more than could ever have been hoped for at the time reforms began.
In contrast, the reforms happening under the Qing Dynasty seemed to accomplish very little. This is especially striking because the impetus for change was seemingly much stronger in China (the Opium Wars as compared to Japan's encounter with Matthew Perry). How did an enormous country with an urgent need for military modernization and Westernization wind up weaker than a relatively small country with a more distant need for Westernization, after just a few short decades? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1v05v2/why_was_the_meiji_restoration_so_much_more/ | {
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"I found out this question has already been asked and answered (phrased differently so I didn't find it in an initial search). For those interested, see this thread:\n_URL_1_\n\nI do want to hear more on the subject however if anyone would care to share.\n\nedit: Found another, although this one seems to lack an expert. _URL_0_"
]
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y1k7w/why_did_china_fail_to_effectively_modernise/",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ge2tq/why_in_the_19th_century_did_japan_modernize_so/"
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137lq6 | why do some tv shows like tbbt and homeland make it over to prime time british tv, but parks and recreation and breaking bad don't? | Parks and Recreation has never actually been broadcast in the UK, and Breaking Bad was on an obscure channel for a bit.
However Homeland is on prime time on Channel 4 and The Big Bang Theory is played to death, is there a reason for this? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/137lq6/eli5_why_do_some_tv_shows_like_tbbt_and_homeland/ | {
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"Either the networks there believe that they will not be popular enough to justify acquiring the rights to, or the rights holders in the US are asking for more money than the British networks are willing to pay. ",
"Remember that Breaking Bad is relatively niche despite its critical acclaim and internet fame, and AMC is not a major channel, nor is it part of a big conglomerate like Showtime and HBO. The fact that it aired for a bit makes me think that not enough people watched to make it worthwhile. Or AMC is asking for so much money for the rights that no UK broadcaster can make money on it.\n\nParks and Rec is a satire of American municipal politics (which are generally terrible in real life, the show is not that far from reality). It doesn't have much appeal outside the US.\n\nOTOH Homeland is a action/political thriller and Big Bang Theory is a sitcom, both genres with much broader international appeal.\n\n\n\n"
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3lhcf9 | why do people make their beds? | The title is clear enough. The greatest trick devil ever pulled was to convince humanity to make their beds. I have wondered this my whole life. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lhcf9/eli5_why_do_people_make_their_beds/ | {
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"It looks nicer and looks cleaner. Humans like organized things, we like order and simple style. While it really is bounded by the person doing the bed-making in general people like their beds made because it looks clean, organized and much better than the messy pile of pillows and duvets otherwise lying in an unorganized pile.",
"“It was a simple task—mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that were aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle hardened SEALs—but the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over. If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter. If you can't do the little things right, you will never do the big things right. And, if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made—and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.”\n\n―UT Graduation Speech 2014\n",
"Just so you know, there was a study done recently that suggests that it is actually healthier for you to not make your bed, because making your bed in the morning traps moisture in the sheets that allow dust mites to thrive under there. Leaving your bed unmade allows the moisture to dry out more, causing many of the dust mites to die."
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42ae6h | why does paper money have serial numbers but coins do not? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42ae6h/eli5_why_does_paper_money_have_serial_numbers_but/ | {
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"Serial numbers are an anti-counterfeiting measure.\n\nThe US government is not seriously concerned about people counterfeiting coins because of the difficulty and extremely low reward for the risk.",
"printing individual serials on paper is way easier than stamping them into a piece of metal"
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2jo3gk | if the pope is infallible and supports broader gay rights in the catholic church, how can he be defeated by a vote? | I have no catholic (or even particularly religious) background. I can't understand why voting is necessary on something the pope has such a clear view on and if it is, how anyone can vote against him given he is supposedly god's representative. Surely that is like saying that they know better than god?
Any insight would be fantastic as the whole system confuses me greatly. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jo3gk/eli5_if_the_pope_is_infallible_and_supports/ | {
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"The Pope doesn't always speak for God - ex cathedra (\"from the chair\") statements wherein the Pope declares that \"this is the indisputable word of God\" are actually pretty rare. The Pope is also the Bishop of Rome and is a representative of the Church like any other member of the priesthood so he can give his opinions on Church teachings but he's not the dictator of the church. ",
"I was a Catholic for a significant period of my life.\n\nContrary to popular belief, the Pope is not infallible in all aspects of everything at all times in the eyes of Catholicism.\n\nThe pope is only infallible in the areas of ***doctrine and morals,*** and also only when he \"invokes\" papal infallibility. This has actually happened only 7 times in history, and the last time this was used was in 1950 when the Assumption of Mary was declared."
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21j0wf | how did people cook rice and beans before they had metal pots? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/21j0wf/eli5_how_did_people_cook_rice_and_beans_before/ | {
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"_URL_0_\n\nClay pots and the like can hold material and withstand heat."
]
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottery#History"
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1d0yw4 | How are the boundaries of a watershed drawn? | Do cartographers mark out a sort of bowl and call that a watershed?
Also, are terminal bodies of water considered part of a watershed or is the watershed just the area surrounding the endpoint? ex. Is Salt Lake considered part of a watershed or is it just "the lake"? same with the oceans
Thanks in advance! | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1d0yw4/how_are_the_boundaries_of_a_watershed_drawn/ | {
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"Watersheds define where water introduced to them will flow to. They can also be of different scales. For example a dome shaped lawn could be considered two watershed bounded by the apex and the streets on other side.\n\nAt the largest scale for North America you could consider the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic water sheds. Within each there are smaller water sheds that drain to bodies of water contained within the larger watersheds.\n\nThe boundaries are where water could flow in either direction (like the spine of a triangular shaped prism).",
"Water will always go straight downhill, to a scale of a centimeter or so. And with good map skills, a topo map can be better than a picture for knowing terrain features. So with that in mind, you simply look where water will flow, marking off ridges, valleys and divides, and draw a watershed. \n\nWhen determining a watershed, you start with a point that water will flow to, usually a specific poiny in a stream or water body. Remember that a raindrop on the beach will flow into the lake, just like a water drop just up the hill from the lake. And considering that oceans are essentially giant lakes, its totally ok for them to havd defined watersheds. These watershed boundaries are known otherwise as contental divides, unless its an island, in which the whole thing is an ocean watershed. "
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4w14ou | Why was Sigismund III Vasa of Sweden raised Catholic despite the fact that Sweden was, for the most part, a staunch Protestant country? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4w14ou/why_was_sigismund_iii_vasa_of_sweden_raised/ | {
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"Sigismund III's parents -- the eventual John III of Sweden and Catherine Jegiellon -- raised him as a Catholic. Or more specifically, Catherine was a Polish princess, the youngest daughter of Sigismund I of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and she was a staunch Catholic. \n\nSigismund's father John was the second son of Gustav Vasa, and did not have a good relationship with his older half-brother Eric XIV, who was a Lutheran. When Eric died without heir, John succeeded him as John III of Sweden. During his rule, he tried to give Catholics in Sweden more freedom to worship and do religious work. \n\nSo Sigismund III was raised Catholic because his mother was strongly Catholic and his father was sympathetic to Catholics. "
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173u8g | How did Jewish people successfully escape from Nazi Germany? | One thing I've never seen on History Channel and I find it hard to find on the internet is what methods and routes did Jewish People use to escape Nazi Germany? Were they able to simply book travel and leave or did they have to be smuggled out? It is a subject I would love to know more about. Thank you. | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/173u8g/how_did_jewish_people_successfully_escape_from/ | {
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"There were many different ways that they escaped, including some of those that you mentioned. Almost any way they could escape, they tried, quite understandably. [This map](_URL_1_) has some general routes used for escape.\n\nOne of the more famous ways some Jews escaped the Holocaust was the *Kindertransport*, also known as the Refugee Children Movement. After *Kristallnacht*, in the months leading up to the beginning of the Second World War, the British Jewish Refugee Committee help get passed a measure that allowed Jewish children from Germany, Austria, and other occupied areas to be smuggled by train and ship to England, leaving their parents behind. Once there, they were taken in by foster families or other groups and grew up there in England, many never returning home or seeing their former loved ones again. Around 10,000 children were saved because of the program. We had a *Kindertransport* refugee come speak at my high school years ago, and it was one of the things I remember most from those years. You can find more information on the website of the [Kindertransport Association](_URL_2_), an organization that unites the Holocaust survivors and their descendants and keeps the history of the program.\n\nOther Jews were able to escape either via legal means or by acquiring forged or false travel documents, and then simply boarding a ship or train. Many ended up in England or in the United States, but others also ended up in countries like El Salvador in Latin America. (I don't have any great sources on this on hand, but my friend is currently writing her MA thesis on Jewish migration to El Salvador and I might could find out some sources from her if you're interested in that specifically.) It was not any easy path, regardless of destination. Many countries refused to allow Jewish refugees in, even during the period before 1941 when emigration from Germany was allowed. The United States Memorial Holocaust Museum has [a bit more information](_URL_0_) on that, and probably more if you look around their website. It also has some personal accounts, which are probably more moving and interesting than the article itself.",
"Until 1938, emigration of Jews from Germany was not only allowed but actively encouraged. Three organisations were founded by German Jews, the \"Palästina-Amt\" helped German Jews who wanted to live in Palestine, the \"Hilfsverein der Juden in Deutschland\" helped German Jews who wanted to migrate to other countries and the \"Hauptstelle für jüdische Wanderfürsorge\" helped foreign Jews living in Germany to get out of the country.\n\nEmigration was risky though. In order to emigrate legally you had to give up your property. It was difficult to get money out of the country. The \"Reichsfluchtsteuer\", introduced 1931, was increased in order to get more money from emigrants. For that reason, mostly younger Jews emigrated whereas older Jews tended to stay, even though working and living became increasingly difficult for them. A total of 300,000 Jews emigrated during that time.\n\nAs a side note: Not only emigration by Jews increased during this time. Communists and Catholics emigrated as well, discontent with the political changes in the country.\n\nAfter 1938, it became more and more difficult to emigrate, and in October 1941 when the German government had decided upon the \"final solution\" it was prohibited."
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"http://www.kindertransport.org/default.aspx"
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1epcqz | How did the average 30-year old look like while life expectancy was ~30 years? | Did he look like today's 30 year olds or today's 60 year olds? I'm talking about wrinkles and other symptoms of ageing. | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1epcqz/how_did_the_average_30year_old_look_like_while/ | {
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"They looked like today's 30-year-olds, though probably with worse teeth and skin, depending on exact circumstances. The low life expectancy figures of the pre-modern age are not due to widespread die-offs once people hit 30. It's because of the almost unimaginably higher infant mortality rate. If you lived past five, you were nearly just as likely to reach your white hairs as you are today.",
"As others have pointed out, the average life expectancy of 30 is a product of statistics which gives a somewhat distorted picture of the way things actually were. These statistics end up the way the are because infant mortality rates and the likelyhood of violent deaths were very high.\nThe same is true for average height, which is influenced by the poor diets of the peasant population. The average nobleman would, for example, be of average modern height thanks to his more varied and nutritious diet."
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flla7o | Why was finland never assimilated into Sweden or Russia? | Finland never had its own state before 1917 (the Russian grand dutchy of Finland could be argued, but it was still a part of Russia) but before being a part of Russia, Finland was part of Sweden for over 6 centuries. Given all of this, how did Finnish culture survive and how did the Finns remain their own distinct, unique people? Apart from bith the Swedes and Russians? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/flla7o/why_was_finland_never_assimilated_into_sweden_or/ | {
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"The earliest references to Finns in writing occur in the first century CE, through mentions by Mediterranean geographers, the Roman Tacitus mentions the _fenni_ and the Greek Ptolemaios mentions the _φίννοι_ (finnoi). \n\nThis is a Germanic term which has reached them through Germanic, likely Scandinavian, sources. This period, starting in the first century BCE is the 'Roman Iron Age' in northern Europe, due to the fact that the peoples started interacting with the Roman Empire, such as serving in Roman legions. Roman artifacts such as glassware begin turning up in Scandinavia - and Finland - in this period, and you also see the introduction of Roman agricultural methods and the Germanic peoples inventing/adapting the runic writing system based off a Mediterranean alphabet (probably Latin). There is less Roman influence in present-day Finland though, and to some extent the Roman influence may have come through trade with Germanic neighbors. \n\nBut in any case there was a lot of Germanic contact with Rome in this period and it's not so surprise then, that it's in this era that Finns and other northern European peoples start showing up for the first time in the written sources we have.\n\nBut this also means that, to the extent we can rely on these accounts (and they're not considered very reliable) the picture we get is a Germanic one. It's not clear which people (if even _any_ specific people) these 'Fenni' actually refer to, although it is clear it's a neighboring people who the Germanic peoples consider more primitive. \n\nThe etymology of the term is uncertain but the most widely-held theory is that it shares a root with Old Norse verb _finna_ ('to find'), Proto-Germanic *finþaną. A theory here is that this would've been a generic term for people who were living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. By the Viking Age (800-1050) the meaning appears to have narrowed, with West Norse (Norwegian and Icelandic) using the term to refer to Sámi people (e.g. _Finnmark_ in Norway) while East Norse sources (Swedes) are using the term to refer to people from Finland. A hint at the broader usage is the name _Finnveden_ in southern Sweden (attested since the 6th century), which is not known to have ever had either Sámi or Finnic population, but as a somewhat remote, rocky, forested region may have been later to adopt agriculture.\n\nSo anyway, it's not obvious who these oldest sources are referring to. The earliest sources we have that certainly refer to Finns in Finland are Viking Age inscriptions on rune stones in Sweden, and sagas and other Norse sources from the 12th and 13th centuries. These sources are quite consistent, in that Finns and Finland are not the same as the present day sense. Rather, Finns are people from Finland, which is roughly the region now known as Finland-Proper (Varsinais-Suomi) or the Aura river watershed. They are one of a number of Finnic peoples occupying the regions surrounding the Gulf of Finland. \n\n[See this map](_URL_0_). Going clockwise around the gulf you have Finns-Proper (F11 on the map), the Tavastians (Hämäläiset, F12), Karelians (F8), Veps (F9), Votes (F10), Vironians (F4), Estonains (F3) and Öselians (F2). (but Veps and Votes as well as Satakunta, F13 are attested a bit later, around 1300). \n\nSo 1,000 years ago, prior to Swedish rule, Finns and Finland in the present day sense do not exist. Rather you have distinct groups of Finnic peoples who have separate identities albeit with broad cultural commonalities, and form a dialectal continuum linguistically. \n\nLikewise, Sweden was not a single country nor ethnicity in 1000 CE but divided into Svear (Old Norse _Svíar_, or Swedes-proper), Geats (ON _Gautar_) and the region now known as Småland (the 'petty kingdoms') is named such as it was divided into more petty kingdoms than people cared to count ([map](_URL_1_). At the end of the Viking Age, these people were brought under the rule of a single ruler within the Kingdom of the Svear (which is the Swedish name for Sweden). \n\nIn Scandinavia the Viking Age ends with the consolidation of power and unification of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. In Finnish historiography this is followed by the Crusader Period (1050-1250 or 1300). The Scandinavians were not the only vikings (in the sense of raiders) in the Baltic, even if they were those who traveled the farthest. In the 12th century the (relatively) new Scandinavian churches and settlements are being raided by their neighbors and the Northern Crusades begin, under the justification of being retaliatory raids on their pagan neighbors. The Swedish kings begin to establish themselves in Finland-Proper, and parts of the expanding Swedish population emigrate to coastal southwestern Finland as well. (also western Estonia) but the Novgorodians are also expanding westwards. Although we know nothing of Slavic missions to Finland, it appears that they made the first inroads for Christianity as many basic words pertaining to the religion are of Slavic-Greek origin rather than Germanic-Latin. (e.g. a cross is _risti_ from Old East Slavic _крьстъ_ and ultimately _Χριστός_ ' christ', a bible is _raamattu_ from OES _грамота_ and Greek _γράμματα_, 'writing')\n\nA Novgorodian chronicle mentions Swedes and Tavastians attacking them in 1142, although Swedish sources are silent, and in 1191 the Novgorodians and Karelians attacked the Tavastians. In 1187 the town of Sigtuna was attacked and burned by eastern pagans, Karelians in one account. In 1171 we have a letter from the pope to the Swedish king and Jarls admonishing them to send more forces to Finland to convert the population and protect the Christians there. \n\nTradition has it that the Saint-King Erik and Bishop Henry converted Finland and conquered it for Sweden in a crusade in the 1150s. Although part of the 'founding myths' of both Finland and Sweden today's historians put little stock in the story, as the only account is from far later and written by Erik's family who were lobbying to have him canonized. We can say for certain though, that inroads were being made in that era. It's not until Birger Jarl's reign around 1250 that Swedish rule over Finland (or really just southern Finland) is secured. \n\nOver a dozen wars in the following 600 years between Sweden and Novgorod and then Muscovy and then Russia, the border shifts back and forth quite a bit but on the whole it stays around the Karelian isthmus. This border is defined more by the locations of strategic border forst (Vyborg, Keksholm, Nyen/Petersburg) than by any ethno-linguistic border. On the contrary, more often than not the border ran through the middle of Karelian lands.\n\nSo it's only by the Renaissance or so that Swedes (and thereby others) begin using Finland as a _pars-pro-toto_ for the entire region (within Sweden) inhabited by Finnish/Finnic speaking people. Likewise, the Finnic names for Sweden (_Ruotsi/Rootsi_) derives from _Roden_, the coastal area north of Stockholm that was closest to Sweden, ([Yellow here](_URL_2_)) and which had been a petty kingdom of Svíar.\n\nAdministratively though, Finland was an integral part of Sweden divided into a number of administrative regions no different from those in the western half of the kingdom. Lapland was a single province extending into both countries, as was Bothnia until it was split into Westro- and Ostrobothnia. Finland was not a colony; Finns were full citizens with parliamentary representation in the Riksdag of the Estates and so forth. It was in fact a more integrated part of the kingdom than Lapland was, where the Sámi were by-and-large left to do their own thing. \n\nSweden was never really ethnically homogenous. The country was founded on a union of _Svear_ (Swedes-proper), East and West-Götar (Geats), Helsings, Njudungar, etc who'd originally had distinct identities and their own laws and so on which faded over the Middle Ages in favor of a national _Svensk_ identity. But there were and still are many regional cultural differences and dialects that are not mutually intelligible, even if few speak those dialects today. Medieval Stockholm was dominated by German tradesmen and merchants and there was a massive Low German influence on the language and culture. \n\nBut the Swedes in turn also had a massive influence on Finnish culture and language over the 600 years of Swedish rule. A large amount of Finnish vocabulary is borrowed from Swedish, some of this influence goes back as far as Old Norse and even Proto-Norse (i.e. well before becoming part of the kingdom). There is also some Finnish influence on Swedish language. \n\nBut there was never any active campaign to assimilate Finns. Once you reach the 1500s-1700s the educated and upper classes often tended to be able to speak Swedish and it had influence as being a prestige language. Finns who became ennobled tended to adopt a surname in accordance with Swedish noble surname traditions (and due to their actions in defending the eastern border, Finland ended up with a larger petty nobility) and adopt the language and manners expected of their station. Which at the same time was not really the language and manners of the Swedish-speaking peasant who lived in Finland, nor the Finnish speaking peasant who lived in Sweden - both of which were significant minorities.\n\n[continue]"
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13aui5 | how do we use our legs to walk? | More specifically, how do our muscles, bones, tendons and ligaments work together to make walking possible? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/13aui5/how_do_we_use_our_legs_to_walk/ | {
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"[Here's an episode of the Magic School Bus which may answer your question.](_URL_0_)",
"Falling with Style.\n\nWith much practice, our eyes and inner-ears work together to provide the brain with information. We aren't aware that this is going on, but fun house spinning tunnels mess with our eyes and spinning around really fast messes with our inner ears, both making walking difficult.\n\nWe don't \"think about walking\" the same way you don't think to remove your hand from something hot. You just react. When your inner-ear (very tiny hairs in a fluid which sway like trees in the wind) says \"I am falling left\" your brain reacts by shifting to the right. You are almost always falling, but the brain reacts so smoothly and consistently that you can hardly notice it. Try this. Spin around 10 times, then stop, stand on one foot, and close your eyes. Standing up becomes very, very challenging. \n\nWalking is just falling forwards and catching yourself over and over again."
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2m6u1d | how come we can land probes on comets and send satellites around the galaxy, but we can't put a high resolution color camera on these devices? | Just saw the Comet pictures and it made me wonder. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2m6u1d/eli5_how_come_we_can_land_probes_on_comets_and/ | {
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"We could now. But this probe was launched 10 years ago, and was designed and built mostly during the 90s.",
"To put it simply, more megapixels = higher resolution = larger filesize = more 1s/0s. I'm not sure about the data transfer rate between the probe and Earth, but I'm assuming that it's not a quick process. The lower resolution image probably took a little while to send, therefore a higher resolution image will take a significantly longer time to send.",
"1) we don't send probes around the galaxy\n\n2) I don't see the point for a colour camera to shoot an object that it's mostly black/dark grey\n\n3) space exploration is not for pretty youtube videos, it's for acquiring valuable scientific data. This includes high quality images at the wavelengths needed for research. CCDs with RGB filters would be just a way to waste precious weight.",
"I'm quoting the answer I gave to [this similar question](_URL_0_).\n\n > /u/Falcon9857 is pretty close to being correct.\n\n > The 28 minute delay isn't so much a problem as it is signal strength/quality. Rosetta and Philae are over 500 million km away from Earth - at those distances it's very very hard to transmit a clear signal that can be picked out from background noise.\n\n > One of the ways we combat this is by setting the transmission rate very very slowly. Iiiiidffff yyyyyooofouuuuu ssssstttttrrrrreeenetttttccccchhhhh ooooobuuuuttttt the signal it makes it a lot easier to ignore the noise and not have bad data. Note that even though I introduced the occasional wrong letter in that sequence you still had enough information to read what I was saying.\n\n > The problem is that for deep space missions like Rosetta they have to slow the data transmission way way WAAAYYYY down... like slower than a dial-up modem if you're old enough to remember those. That helps makes the data crystal clear when we receive it, but comes at the expense of not being able to do high-bandwidth things like send video feeds.\n\nThe point is, sending data at interplanetary distances is really really hard and often extremely slow. This means we have to make tough decisions about what data we want from the probe. Things like color and video and ultra high-def images don't have that much scientific value (on a lot of probes the only reason there's cameras at all is to aid navigation and for PR). Space agencies would much rather save their limited bandwidth for things like sensor data and experiment results. ",
"As others have said, transmission of the data back to Earth is really slow and error-prone so you're not going to send back a 2GB video file. So, you might as well save the weight since every ounce counts. \n\nOn the other hand, if the spaceship or satellite is going to eventually come back around to orbit the Earth then you could have a hi-res camera and take a ton of hi-resolution video. Then, when you get back to Earth you can broadcast it back easily enough. The problem is that Rosetta took 10 years to get to the comet so a round trip is another decade. It's possible that's the plan but I doubt it."
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yeemd | What are the best "home-made" chemical reactions you can make? | I'm pretty bored, and feel like doing something intelligent, so what are some cool chemical reactions/experiments I could do at home? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/yeemd/what_are_the_best_homemade_chemical_reactions_you/ | {
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"Cornflower and water to make a non Newtonian fluid. \n\nSaucer of milk, couple of drops of food colouring and then add a drop of detergent. \n\nMassive apologies for the lack of links as I'm on my phone. YouTube search for them and there should be loads of examples on there. ",
"This is a reminder that any mention of dangerous or criminal activities will be removed.",
"Diet coke and mentos are a classic demonstration of nucleation sites, but please do it outside, if you don't want to clean up.",
"There's the classical example of sticking a rod of copper and one of zinc into a sour fruit, like a lemon, to make a simple battery. Btw, lemons are superior to potatoes for this purpose. I managed to power a flash-light with one. ",
"Gather a cup. Put some tarnished looking pennies into it. Add enough vinegar to cover. Add a few pinches of salt. Shiny new pennies afterwards. Rinse with water to clean.\n\nAdd some food colouring to a dish of milk. Then add some detergent.",
"Sulfuric Acid + Zinc chips creates hydrogen gas. This can be captured in balloons if you do it in a proper beaker and then pop the balloon. Only do this outside. ",
"Make a small battery pile by stacking up pennies and nickels with saline soaked paper towel in between. I taught a metals class that did this and my students managed to get enough voltage to equal a AA battery. "
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bktsr9 | If neurons are amitotic, how is cancer of the brain possible? | Does cancer unlock some hidden potential for brain cells to divide? If so, how? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bktsr9/if_neurons_are_amitotic_how_is_cancer_of_the/ | {
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"The brain has many more cell types than just neuronal cells. Glial cells, pituitary tissue, nerve sheaths, blood vessels, etc. \n\nVery little brain cancers are of neural cells, and these usually are from very early human development stages.",
"Also, lots of “brain cancers” are metastatic- meaning a few cells from another cancer like a melanoma(skin cancer) can break off and travel around the body and start growing in others parts, if a melanoma metastasises it has a 60% chance to land in the brain- basically the patient has cancerous skin cells growing in their brain.",
"Most brain cancers are gliomas, meaning they arise from glial cells. Glia are the non-neuronal support cells in the brain and do indeed divide."
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28fw99 | why do people value privacy so much? | Like not just the NSA like why do people care if everyone knows everything about them why good why bad for us all to be connected ELI5 PLEASE | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28fw99/eli5_why_do_people_value_privacy_so_much/ | {
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"It's all about principle. Like others, I'm \"not interesting\" either, but I don't like the idea of being spied on at all.",
"OP, tell me all about yourself. Everything. Full name, Social Security Number, Bank Account Numbers, Credit Card Numbers, passwords to everything. Who if anyone do you have a crush on? What was the last lie you told? Why? How big is your penis? What time do you leave for work in the morning, and where exactly do you live? What have you done in your life that you were embarrassed by, but no one knows about? Details please.\n \n \nCan you see how this might be problematic for you if you were to start sharing all of this? Now imagine you were sharing it without even knowing that you were sharing it...",
"Not gonna tell you!"
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4e0ioe | What is the current status of the "dark triad" of personality disorders in modern psychiatric practice? | What I currently know is psychopaths and sociopaths have been merged under Antisocial Personality Disorder, there is Narcissistic Personality Disorder but Machiavellianism is absent.
Is the concept of the dark triad being researched or challenged or is it totally obsolete? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4e0ioe/what_is_the_current_status_of_the_dark_triad_of/ | {
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"As far as I can tell, the \"Dark Triad\" was just a name given to three malevolent personality traits that McHoskey thought were essentially the same. It's controversial whether these traits are distinct: McHoskey and others say no, Paulhus and others say yes.\n\nThe main thrust behind this debate doesn't seem to be an applied one, but a practical one. That is, it seems that the reason the \"Dark Triad\" is a thing is because scientists are constantly trying to design and evaluate the best way to measure personality traits, especially potentially dangerous ones. If narcissism and psychopathy have great overlap, then it doesn't really make sense from a statistical standpoint to measure them separately, and we should instead design new instruments that measure them as part of one concept. McHoskey says that all three traits overlap greatly, so we should design instruments that measure \"The Dark Triad\" rather than focusing on any one of them alone.\n\nAll that said, this stuff doesn't really matter for applied purposes. As psychiatry evolves and we get new editions of the DSM, labels for things change. A person who might once have been labeled a \"sociopath\" might later be labeled a \"borderline personality\" and might now be labeled an \"antisocial personality,\" but their signs and symptoms haven't changed, only the label has. So it doesn't make a ton of difference for most people whether we think of narcissim, machiavellianism, and psychopathy as distinct concepts or part of one over-arching personality trait, except when you try to measure or evaluate those traits."
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3g6f3y | Who drag queens behind the Stonewall Riots? | I am not sure if the title accurately conveyed what I am trying to ask. Basically, amongst the LGBT community there seems to be some discourse over who the main instigators of the Stonewall Riots were.
Many have been quick to make the conclusion that they were mostly drag queens and POC, but I have also read articles which paint assimilationist gays as the main aggressors in the riots.
Which version is the most correct? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3g6f3y/who_drag_queens_behind_the_stonewall_riots/ | {
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"The events at Stonewall are pretty highly contested. Linda Hirshman writes in *Victory,* \"The events at the Stonewall Inn in the early morning of June 28, 1969, are the most contest hours in gay history. People who were there dispute each other's accounts and people even dispute who was there at all... Reunions of the Stonewall participants only trigger renewed arguments about whether the person who acted out first was a queen, a lesbian, or no one at all.\" Cop raids weren't unusual at the bar, and many of the patrons were unfortunately used to the kind of treatment that included cops groping transwomen and drag queens to ensure their biological sex. However, that night people stayed despite the police raid and started jeering the cops. \n\n\nAgain from Hirshman, \"A cop shoved a transvestite, she hit him with her purse, and he clubbed her. A crowd started to boo and shout, \"Flip the paddy wagon.\" Most accounts pin the eruption of real violence to a person, who may or may not have been a big lesbian, resisting arrest.\" So it's not really known who really began the aggression at Stonewall and who continued it. What is known was the crowd was diverse - it wasn't just gay men, it was lesbians, transwomen, and drag queens. \n\n\nYet, by the time Stonewall happened the politics in the LGBT community had switched from more moderate, assimilationist views to more militant, independent views. From Hirshman, \"By the time Stonewall erupted, Bayard Rustin's Gandhian passive-resistance teachings had long been abandoned by the Left.\" Some of this happened because LGBT activists were veterans of other movements like the Civil Rights movement, women's movement, and anti-war protests. While the assimilationists had somewhat started the LGBT movements by Stonewall they hadn't gained much political ground. Craig A. Rimmerman writes in *The Lesbian and Gay Movements,* \"The assimilationist, accomodationist strategy prevailed within the broader movement until the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. During that time the movement as a whole gained little ground, and, in fact, experienced some significant setbacks.\" Yet, he further writes that without small scale activism something like Stonewall might have never happened. \"One scholar believes that \"without the prior activisim, Stonewall might never have occurred, or rather, it might never have been turned into a symbolic event of major importance\" (Allyn 200, 155). The Stonewall Rebellion not only escalated the call for a more activist posture within the lesbian and gay civil rights movement but also fractured the movement into two distinct ideological strategic camps.\" Essentially, Stonewall made more radical responses acceptable. \n\n\nSo overall, we're not really sure who the main aggressors were. Like you said there are contentions for both groups. We do know there were a variety of LGBT individuals there at the riots including drag queens, lesbians, and transwomen. The history of the movement shows how the assimilationists were losing ground by Stonewall, and after Stonewall more radical groups were given more room in the LGBT movement overall. Hope that helps! "
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1ust6m | How were woman treated under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ust6m/how_were_woman_treated_under_the_rule_of_nicolae/ | {
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"It's been a while since I read it, but Gail Kligman's *The Politics of Duplicity* deals with this topic quite well. My memory is a little fuzzy, but IIRC, women were treated more or less as baby factories. Birth control and abortion were made illegal in order to spur population increase. As was common in totalitarian regimes, there were awards for having X number of children, and women who for whatever reason did not bear were at least slightly shamed.\n\nEDIT: I found a review I wrote of Kligman's book. It was from early on in grad school, so take it for what it's worth:\n\nGail Kligman wrote, “reproduction serves as an ideal locus through which to illuminate the complexity of formal and informal relations between states and their citizens.” (3) This simple, yet important statement is the framework under which Kligman develops her fascinating study of the relations between Nicolae Ceausescu’s state and its inhabitants. Kligman argues that Ceausescu’s Romania sought to homogenize society to strip away social class differences and thereby achieve the communist ideal. This homogenization was to be accomplished by a very strongly pronatalist policy that asserted the state into the private sphere of sex and reproduction at a level not seen elsewhere. This pronatalism was the cornerstone of Ceausescu’s political demography – a process by which laws and decrees were used to guide the evolution of the Romanian state. \n\nKligman asserts that Ceausescu believed that the state had the right to determine and control the population it represented. Population itself was to be used for “the creation and maintenance of the labor force to build socialism.” (10) Ceausescu’s population was a strategic asset and it would be used and manipulated as he saw fit. Kligman’s later evidence, particularly that concerning how Ceausescu’s secret police enforced his decrees illustrate this argument. Kligman builds her argument in the introduction to include a statement that for Ceausescu, family itself was an “ideological construct and political-cultural practice” that was to be manipulated as the state (Ceausescu) saw fit. (11)\nTracing the history of abortion in Romania, Kligman shows that similar to the nascent USSR, upon the founding of the Romanian state, abortion was legalized in order to promote the socialist attack on family structures that clouded the loyalty of the populace to the state. Again paralleling the USSR, Romanian birth rates dropped precipitously upon liberalization of abortion law. The subsequent tightening of abortion law, going so far as to make it a crime in all but the most extreme cases of danger to the mother also parallels the USSR in outcome. Kligman argues, however that this reversal of policy with respect to reproductive choice is based not only on a desire to maintain a population to “build socialism,” but more importantly to assert the state as parent, to children certainly, but also to adult women and men. Ceausescu wanted to usurp traditional parental and gender roles in order to create a society with himself as the ultimate father figure. (31)\n\nCeausescu’s desire to gerrymander Romanian society required him to interject state authority in the most intimate and private of places, in effect making the private public. In the bedroom, certain methods of birth control were dismissed as dysfunctional and a cause of frigidity. (143) In the doctor’s office, the state asserted itself in the medical relationship, making doctors the “principle propagandists” in a “coercive[ly] pronatalist” state. (100) And perhaps most intrusively, the state asserted itself in the bodily decisions of women, where Ceausescu managed to make a body “a vehicle through which “greater” goals than those of the individual are intended to be realized.” (7) Romania’s all encompassing state had an ability and desire to penetrate deeply into the lives of Romanians, so deeply in fact that Kligman argues the “totalizing power” of the state became a “normal feature” of life. (13) \n\nKligman, a sociologist by training and profession, uses this “totalizing” intrusion into the reproductive lives of Romanians to show how Ceausescu manipulated the picture of society that he offered to the outside world. Kligman terms this process of statistical falsification, propaganda, and outright lies “duplicity” and it forms an important underlying theme of her study. Birth and death statistics became outright forgeries in order to keep the real situation – that of a disturbingly high infant mortality rate – hidden from the world. The state directed physicians to wait a longer period of time before officially recording a birth, as it is of course impossible for a baby to die if it were never born. (220) Kligman argues that as time passed, Ceausescu expanded his regime’s duplicitous propaganda into nutrition and HIV/AIDS reporting, with the state exerting pressure on the medical profession to keep real, empirical studies for “internal use” only (207) in order to hide the ugly realities of life in a failed state with a population “condemned to birth.” (147)\n\nAdditionally, the state was duplicitous in its support for the rights of women in general. Kligman shows how the state maintained an ostensible, socialist-styled inclusion of women in its power structure, in order to make women feel included and therefore more complicit with state demands. However, the real policies of Ceausescu’s state were designed not only to subjugate women to the state, but also to strip them of the one natural right women had under socialism: that right to be a mother. Ceausescu demanded that women raise their children (actually, his, in Ceausescu’s eyes) so that the children could be “[given] to the country” to serve in whichever way the state desired. (113) \n\nAs the first five chapters of Kligman’s book unfold, the narrator informs the reader, with occasional quoted snippets from various actors included to make a point. It is in chapter six, entitled “Bitter Memories: The Politics of Reproduction in Everyday Life” where Kligman relieves the almost palpable tension in the book created by an absence of societal voices. At times heartbreaking to read these real stories are drawn from various oral histories collected by the author and her assistants and provide a solid grounding for a social historian seeking to understand life in Ceausescu’s Romania. \n\nKligman’s argument, that a totalitarian Romanian state sought to interlace itself in every aspect of the lives of its citizens in order to promote a political and ideological platform of homogenization of the population through political demography, is well argued in her book. Her use of oral histories (albeit perhaps belatedly) lends strength to her assertions and leaves the reader with a strong sense of how difficult life was under Ceausescu, especially for women faced with a reproductive moment in their lives, a moment in which many women were “betrayed” by their body. (203)\n"
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bp5jt7 | Since everything has a gravitational force, is it reasonable to theorize that over a long enough period of time the universe will all come together and form one big supermass? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/bp5jt7/since_everything_has_a_gravitational_force_is_it/ | {
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"Good question, but such a theory would be incorrect, for several reasons. First, the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. This means that galaxies are generally moving away from us, and galaxies that are sufficiently far away are moving away from us faster than the speed of light. (Though their motion through local space is always less than *c*.) Second, if we ignore universal expansion, not all mechanical systems are gravitationally bound. The escape energy/velocity is obtained by integrating the gravitational force between two bodies until their distance is brought to infinity; because gravity scales as 1/r\\^2, this energy is finite. For example, the sun has an escape velocity of about 43km/s, so anything traveling away from the sun faster than this speed will slow down over time due to gravity, but only to a finite (non-zero) speed, and will continue to travel away from the sun at that final speed forever.",
"Yes it is reasonable to think this. It was actually the leading theory for the end of the Universe for a long time. It's called the Big Crunch.\n\nHowever, it wasn't too long ago that we observed that the universe expansion isn't slowing down like it would do in the big crunch scenario. Instead the universe is rapidly expanding which is the opposite of what would happen in the big crunch. We do not know why the universe is rapidly expanding and we call the unknown cause dark energy. \n\nNowadays the leading end time of the universe is the Big Freeze or the heat death of universe. They can go along with the theory called the Big Rip. When the big rip happens everything will disintegrate into elementary particles. However before that happens the Big Freeze could occur which will be when all the stars die and all the black holes disappear and spontaneous entropy decreases occur or the heat death could happen where max entropy is reached.",
"Your question is super reasonable and was one of many widely held beliefs (even among physicists) for many years.\n\nThe first discovery along those lines that surprised everyone was that the universe is expanding. Which is also what triggered the first thoughts that if you play time in reverse, it must have all been together at one point in the past: Big Bang theory.\n\nBut that means everyone assumed the expansion had be slowing down, just like a ball throw upwards, because of mutual gravity. Whether it would eventually stop and contract back to a single point, or if it had mutual “escape velocity” and would expand forever (just slower and slower) was unknown.\n\nSo to answer that question, using the trick that the farther away something is, the longer ago in the past what you see actually happened, they measured how fast the universe was expanding now versus in the past. Shockingly, they found the universe is expanding *faster* now than before, and it’s getting faster!\n\nNow the open question is: will it get faster forever? Will it reverse? We have some signs that the expansion acceleration rate has varied through time, but why? These are all questions that are hard to answer when we still have no idea what energy or force is causing the expansion in the first place.",
"Totally reasonable. It is a natural conclusion to draw, and in fact was a leading question cosmologists asked in the 70's and 80's. You failed to account for escape velocity though. Because gravity's strength decreases with distance, the further you are from a mass the weaker it's pull will be. Although it never quite drops to zero, for every mass there is a speed you can move where the strength of gravity drops off faster than it can slow you down. You will travel further and further away, at a slower and slower speed, but your speed will never hit zero.\n\nThe universe as a whole has an escape velocity too. Which means there are two possible scenarios:\n\n1. The universe has enough mass that the current expansion speed is below the escape velocity. Eventually the expansion will slow to nothing and reverse. The universe ends in a Big Crunch when all matter collapses back together.\n2. The mass of the universe is too low. The universe is expanding faster than its own escape velocity. The expansion will slow, but it will never hit zero. It expands forever.\n\nSo a bunch of surveys and estimates of the mass of the universe were made, and it looked pretty certain like there was not enough mass to slow everything down. We were probably in scenario 2. Infinite expansion. No one big supermass. No Big Crunch. \n\nThen in the 90's some new measurements were made and it turned out the expansion of the universe was _accelerating_. That was not one of our two scenarios. It should _definitely_ be slowing down, the question was just whether or not it would ever slow to zero. Wtf? And that is where the concept of _Dark Energy_ comes from. Something is driving the universe apart at a faster and faster rate. That means energy. A lot of it. But we really don't know much more than that.",
"It's entirely reasonable to theorize such! And as a matter of fact, that's one of the major theories that astrophysics has tested! Lets run some thought experiments to test the idea! So, in order to test the hypothesis, we need to look at distant objects and determine how they're moving relative to us. Doing this requires applying some other scientific ideas that we don't really have the time to go over now, but i'll link for you to peruse at your leisure:\n\n* [The effect we use to determine if a star is moving towards or away from us](_URL_0_)\n* [The effect that gives us a known reference to use with the above technique](_URL_2_)\n* [A more detailed discussion of how this all works in astronomy](_URL_1_)\n\nSo, there are three possible results from this examination: Stuff is moving towards us, moving away from us, or staying at a pretty constant distance. If it's moving towards us, theory confirmed! If it's staying constant, well, that's an odd one. Either we just happen to be looking at the point where the universe is switching from one mode to the other (cosmologically unlikely), or something is holding the universe static. If it's moving away, we need to evaluate how that motion is changing to reach more conclusions, and, in fact, this is what the observational data shows is the case!\n\nSo, the rest of the universe is moving away from us. Next we need to look at the rate of change of that motion, its acceleration, over time. Lets look at the possible results.\n\n* If the universe is slowing down enough, past a certain threshold that we can determine mathematically, that means that gravity is overall stronger than the forces of the big bang, and eventually it will suck everything back in, confirming the theory! Think of this like a ball being thrown into the air and falling back to earth.\n* If the universe is slowing down, but not doing so fast enough, then that means that things will separate fast enough that gravity can't win. This is like launching a rocket to escape velocity, causing it to leave the sphere of influence where earth's gravity can really decide its course. In this case, the universe will have a maximum size, but be stable in that size and not collapse back.\n* If the universe is moving at a constant expansion or even accelerating, this leads to the really weird case. In this instance, the universe will keep on expanding infinitely, with no upper limit. But that's not what's weird about it. This case implies that there is *something* that is actually driving the expansion, something we don't know that is acting to push everything in the universe farther apart, that is everywhere around us, but that we haven't seen.\n\nAs other people have mentioned, our observations show us that the third case is in fact the truth. This is where Dark energy comes from. It's some kind of energy that's driving the expansion of spacetime, but that we can't detect so far, outside of this effect, hence why we call it 'dark.'",
"This is one possible outcome of the universe, its commonly referred to as “The Big Crunch” as a counter to The Big Bang. \n\nHowever it was extremely shocking as you can imagine for the first astronomers to measure the doppler shift of galaxies at various distances from us and found out that the universe is accelerating in its expansion! Even if things were still flying away from each other its much more intuitive to envision a loss of velocity of these galaxies as gravity slowly but surely starts to win out. \n\nWe still don’t exactly know what is driving this acceleration ( or more precisely the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, the actual space is getting larger at a faster rate) . So we decided to just call this driving force , dark energy . It would end up comprising more than 70% of all of the content in the universe to make the math work. So we either don’t know whats really going on , don’t understand it or we just don’t know what most of the universe is made up of!",
"Yes absolutely. There is a theory that not only will the universe collapse, but that this is not the first time it has happened. We could be in the 1,021st iteration of expansion/collapse for all we know. \n\nI like to think this is the way it really is. We circle a black hole. Which likely circles bigger black holes. A constant cycle of expansion and collapse.... booom another Big Bang. More expansion, eventual collapse. Boom. \n\nAnyone saying that we have a strong understanding of exactly how the universe formed/expands/collapses is fooling themselves.",
"One of the three main theories of the end of the universe is very similar to what you described. It’s called The Big Crunch. It’s when the expansion stops and we all gravitate to form a supermass that then implodes causing the Big Bang, this theory implies recreation of the universe multiple times. \n\n(The other two theories are called ‘the big rip’ and ‘the big freeze’, if your interested)",
"If it makes anyone feel better about the universe's expansion, our Milky Way galaxy is due to collide with the Andromeda galaxy because of their crossed trajectories, so we'll have some new company in a few billion years.",
"This is called the Big Crunch, and until it was discovered that the universe was expanding at an increasing rate it was one of the theories about how the universe will end. With current information, however, it is believed that this will not happen."
]
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[],
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppler_effect",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_line"
],
[],
[],
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5ypqnt | did tipping exist in the past in europe and if so why did they stop? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ypqnt/eli5_did_tipping_exist_in_the_past_in_europe_and/ | {
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"It is normal in several countries ([Wikipedia has a list](_URL_0_)). It is a common misconception in the US that tipping wouldn't exist elsewhere.\n\nCountries where tips are uncommon often have a service charge that replaced the tips, or tips were never usual there.\n",
"German, austrian and swiss do tip, if the service was good (waiters / waitresses do have wages here, altough they suck)"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratuity#Europe"
],
[]
] | ||
3e5koc | Was there ever a real life version of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot? A Detective as brilliant as either of these characters? | # | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3e5koc/was_there_ever_a_real_life_version_of_sherlock/ | {
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"Their have been detectives that were called \"a real life Sherlock Holmes\" the most famous for me is a man called Fred Piggott who was a detective in Melbourne in the early 1900s. He is known as the man who brought modern forensics to Australia. However his reputation is no stained by the fact that his most famous case The Gun Alley Murder was a huge miscarriage of justice that lead to an innocent man hanging for a crime he did not commit.\n\nHowever he also solved many murders that were considered next to impossible to solve like the murder of a Caulfield Schoolgirl.\n\nDetective Piggotts Casebook Kevin Morgan",
"There was quite literally a real life version of Sherlock Holmes, in that he was inspired by one of Arthur Conan Doyle's lecturers whilst a medical student. Said lecturer was Dr. Joseph Bell, and he was known for amazing powers of deduction. Read this for a bit more information:\n_URL_0_"
]
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[],
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"http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/analysis/fiction-imitates-real-life-in-a-case-of-true-inspiration-172752.html"
]
] | |
3nb2ng | What was life like in Communist African countries? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3nb2ng/what_was_life_like_in_communist_african_countries/ | {
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"text": [
"I think you should be more specific in your question. How about \"What was life like in Ethiopia under the Derg/Communist dictatorship?\""
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | ||
b2i89h | why some causes of death can only be found with an autopsy ? | Why some causes of death can only be found or confirmed by an autopsy and not with a biopsy per example or other test results ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b2i89h/eli5_why_some_causes_of_death_can_only_be_found/ | {
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"There are certain illnesses that have no conclusively visible signs that can be verified while someone is still alive. For example, mad cow disease, or more accurately the human variation, can only be conclusively diagnosed after death. In order to conclusively diagnose the illness, you must look at the actual brain material. What you're looking for is confirmation of excessive prions and actual \"holes\" in the tissues."
]
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[]
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d8lyjp | how to scammers who request money into a bank account get away with it? | To open a bank account you need some documentation to verify who you are, therefore I don't understand how scammers like Ransomware attackers can withdraw money from an account but we can't identify/prosecute these people?
We have had situations at work where phishing emails have been used to have the payroll system updated with scammers bank details - we've been catching them but if we didn't catch them I don't understand how they can get away with it. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d8lyjp/eli5_how_to_scammers_who_request_money_into_a/ | {
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"These kinds of monetary transfers are usually done using some not so mainstream services, like instead of using bank accounts, mobile wallets, cryptocurrency wallets, etc are used.",
"If money transfers into bank accounts is being used then they have either created a bank account under a fake or stolen identity, use a bank which as a policy does not give out the identity of their customers even to authorities or in most cases they hire or trick people as strawmen who can take the blame when they get found out.\n\nFor example you may trick person A into thinking they won the lotery but need to pay $2000 tax before you can send the money. You then hire person B as a personal assistant to help with the travels of a wealthy individual. You then have person A send the money to the bank account of person B and then tell person B to send you $1500 in cash. Since you have used a fake name the only thing the investigation will ucover is the names of person A and B in addition to the missing $1500 in cash that was sent to an anonymous post box in another country.",
"They sometimes offer \"jobs from home\". \nLike your \"job\" is to give your account for some money. \nThey use your account for incoming money.. then they instruct you to withdraw the money except for a small percentage as your share of the transaction. \nThe rest should be send via western union or other services like this. \n\n\nso you have an \"easy job\".. until the police knocks on your door.",
"Short answer: because the bank system is a mess, and part of it are highly outdated.\n\nLong answer:\n\nBefore answer, I will start with an anecdote: When I want to buy a train ticket trough the French official website, I get a very complex procedure where they not only need my card number and name, but also send a SMS to my phone with a code I have to enter, phone number that was registered at my bank and inaccessible from the website I'm using. No way someone will be buying a train ticket in France with my card without me being aware of it. On the other hand, there are countless other way online to use my card number to spend money without me getting any news about it. Why is this SMS security system only used on some website? Why is my bank asking for official websites to use this advanced security system, while allowing shady website to take money without anything more than just a card number? Shouldn't that be the contrary (trusted websites get less mandatory security because you expect them to have their own security protection)?\n\nThe reason is quite simple: those security systems are new (a decade, roughly), and most of the world is outdated from a security point of view. And you cannot force everyone to get security upgrade without breaking the economy (too much things to rework, too many incompetents with responsibilities that would be unable to apply the protocols correctly, and a significant slow down of everything because security takes time). As a consequences, security upgrades are usually let to the initiative of individual companies, and only those who care enough to suffer the cost of security take the time to upgrade.\n\nNow answering your question, scammers can do that stuff because they know the weaknesses, for example knowing which company actually do check in dept for fake identities before creating an account, and which don't. And they can get away with it because most of the time, it is less expensive to let the scammer scam your clients, and payback your clients from their loss (if they ask to), than actually trying to prevent the scammers to scam."
]
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brtanv | how come kids can be preoccupied with one simple thing endlessly and adults seemingly don’t have those kinds of similar fascinations | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/brtanv/eli5_how_come_kids_can_be_preoccupied_with_one/ | {
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"Adults certainly can be fascinated with one thing for countless hours, that's what our scientists and researchers are doing essentially. We think it's simple because we as adults already understand what is going on but think about all the stuff that even adults don't fully comprehend.",
"Because the instinct to be stimulated is part of our evolutionary survival strategy. And learning fulfils that instinct. \n\nKind of like when you someone tells you a joke for the first time and you laugh, you laugh because you learnt something. Say that same joke again maybe a giggle, as you hear keep hearing the same joke it's no longer funny anymore because you have already \"learnt\" it. If they're playing with a stick for hours it's not stimulating for you because it's more like a been there done that kind of thing.\n\nKids and babys can play and laugh at the same things for an extended period of time because everything is still new to them - they're still in the process of learning how things work, how social interactions are made and we have the mental capacity/intelligence of figuring things out fairly quickly and being done with it. \n\nKind of like how when people go into a sensory deprivation environment their brains are trying to create stimulation by themselves and they end up going crazy."
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1malio | How do airplanes fly with their wings perpendicular to the ground? | I understand that thrust and nose position allow planes to fly upside down, but flight in this position seems impossible. Please educate my ignorance. | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1malio/how_do_airplanes_fly_with_their_wings/ | {
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"Aircraft typically cannot fly for an extended time in this attitude. On some particularly aerobatic aircraft rudder inputs in an upward direction can help maintain level flight temporarily however this is typically unsustainable. \n\nWhen aerobatic planes fly knife edge manuevers at airshow they may appear to have their wings perfectly perpendicular to the ground however usually they are no exactly 90 degrees on their side. This allows the wings to provide some vertical lifting force. ",
"Only aircraft with a thrust to weight ratio greater than 1 can truly fly vertically. You can look at [this list](_URL_0_) and see, for example, the SR-71 Blackbird can fly straight up because it's thrust to weight ratio is a little over 3. \n\nWhat is thrust to weight ratio? Well- thrust and weight are both measured as a force- the force the rocket can produce and the force of gravity. If the rocket can produce more thrust than gravity pulls down on, it has a thrust to weight ratio which is greater than 1, and thus can fly straight up without receiving lift from wings. "
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4uuvzb | why do stressful (difficult) experiences, often help to reduce stress? | I went to my first Bikram Yoga class last night. I found it really hard, even the part where you're supposed to relax was somewhat strenuous. However I came out of it feeling great. Sorry if this question seems obvious but it made me wonder why this ironic occurrence takes place. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4uuvzb/eli5why_do_stressful_difficult_experiences_often/ | {
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"I wouldn't necessarily say that stressful experiences often help to reduce stress, but there are clear benefits to exercises such as Yoga on stress levels. Exercise has been shown to decrease overall levels of tension and anxiety, produce endorphins, elevate and stabilize mood, as well as improve sleep, focus, and self-esteem.\n\nThus your experience may not have been as mentally stressful as physically strenuous. We of course know that stress and anxiety associated with a deadline won't be alleviated by a car accident. Nor will the stress of poor posture relieve back pain."
]
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1dhv3l | How was it possible to fly a bomber into WWII Japan without anyone bothering them? | Did they have no air security at all? Was there a diversion? Was there no technology to detect incoming bombers? It just sounds too easy. Regardless of them not expecting an atomic bomb, it sounds like dropping any kind of bomb in their territory would be just as simple. | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dhv3l/how_was_it_possible_to_fly_a_bomber_into_wwii/ | {
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"By the time of the atomic bombings the Japanese Air Forces had effectively ceased to exist as a fighting force. ",
"I recall reading that it was such a small number of planes the Japanese weren't too worried about it on their radar as it was assumed to be reconnaissance planes.",
" In early 1942, forces allocated to the defense of Japan comprised 100 Imperial Japanese Army Air Force (IJAAF) and 200 Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) fighter aircraft, many of which were obsolete, as well as 500 Army-manned and 200 IJN anti-aircraft guns, which is very little for such a large country. They didn't expect serious air assaults since they conquered all bases that could be used to launch attacks on the Japanese mainland.",
"Although I am not as well versed in the aerial war in the Pacific as I would like, there are a couple of points to consider:\n\n1. The Pacific air war was fought with the Japanese using their pilots until they were killed in action -Very similar to the approach adopted by the Luftwaffe. This resulted in a very high attrition rate for experienced pilots.\n\n2. The Japanese could not compete in terms of men and materials with the Allied forces. The Japanese had over-extended themselves in their fighting and they just did not have the air power, the capacity to build the air power nor the capacity to train pilots at the same rate at the Allies.\n\n3. The Japanese had a tactical and (possibly) technical disadvantage. -I am not aware of the Japanese rolling out any new, ground-breaking fighters after the Zero. The US, on the other hand, rolled out the F6F Bearcat and the F-4 Corsair for carrier borne operations (yes, I am ignoring the teething problems of the Corsair here to keep this short). These aircraft were flown by pilots who knew and understood the limitations of their opponent's fighters, and consequently flew tactics which put the odds in their favour.\n\n4. Expanding on 3: The Zero was actually very limited and was neutralised very quickly in the war as an effective fighter. Even aircraft such as the CAC-13 Boomerang and P-40 Warhawk could beat it if they flew the correct tactics. One tactic that springs to mind is the \"Thatch Weave\"\n\n5. By the time that aerial attacks on the Japanese mainland by B-29s were happening, the US effectively had air superiority, meaning that the chances of interception were relatively low.\n\n6. In addition, the B-29 flew at altitudes and speeds that were right at the operational limits of Japanese fighters, making it difficult to affect an intercept.\n\nI think I have covered most of the major points without too many mistakes.\n\nBrisbane Alchemist.",
"During the bombing raids of 1944, where the B-29s were being used in relatively small numbers (say, 50-70 plane raids), and flown at high altitudes, the attrition rate for the bombers was something like 25%. That's pretty high, and they didn't destroy much of the targets at that height, either. \n\nCurtis LeMay famously changed the strategy completely in early 1945. Instead of flying raids high, he flew them lower. To compensate, he flew _more_ of them — just carpet-bombing the entire cities. Were the Japanese still trying to shoot them down? Of course! But when you have _hundreds_ of B-29s dropping explosives, napalm, and thermite on you, there's only so much you can do. Were the missions still dangerous for the bombers? Definitely. Even just having that many planes _take off at once_ is hugely dangerous, and _multiple_ fully-loaded planes would crash on the airstrips of Tinian during each of those raids.* But they just overwhelmed the defenses by a long stretch.\n\nSo that's the context for thinking about this. Why were the atomic bombs different? Because the raids that dropped them only contained, at most, _three planes_. (Only one had the bomb, of course; the others were observation planes.) The Japanese heard them coming, but why get all worked up about only three planes? A lone B-29 can't hit anything much with its payload in 1945, it is the massed planes that are the problem. A sole bomber, they would have reasoned, is probably just doing reconnaissance or something like that. \n\nExcept, of course, in this instance, that wasn't at all what was going on. But they didn't know that. Even by the time of the Nagasaki bombing, the fact that super small raids were dropping atomic bombs wasn't well-known. So those two raids met with basically no resistance whatsoever. \n\n*Fun question: what would have happened if the Enola Gay, carrying its crude enriched uranium bomb, had crashed on takeoff? It wasn't an impossibility at all — in fact, it was something [the people who made the bomb were acutely worried about](_URL_0_):\n > Only twice since I have been here have I been even slightly worried or nervous but both of these times the intensity of my worry made up for the relative calm of the other periods. …[T]he worst period was that between the time the B-29 engines with the Fat Man were cranked up and the time the plane was well clear of the island. The night before the takeoff four planes in succession crashed in takeoff at the other end of the island — in fact the situation got so bad a mission of 100 planes was cancelled after only 30 got off the ground. Since I have been here I have watched several fires resulting from crashes. By actual timing a very intense gasoline fire continues for over twenty minutes. Six of eight fire engines working on such a fire don’t even making a dent. After witnessing such fires and after having sweated out one FM [Fat Man] atomic bomb take off, I can’t urge too strongly the importance of complete nuclear safety in take off for future models. … The one FM take off has been my most unpleasant experience since joining the project. … _We all aged ten years until the plane cleared the Island._"
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1k1fc8 | When did the Western European powers realize that their time as the most powerful countries in the world had ended and that they were going to be overtaken by the USA, USSR, etc. | Was it after WW2 ended, or were there people before WW2 that believed the USA and other countries would eventually be more powerful due to location, resources, etc? Not to get hypothetical, but would there even have been a scenario where they stayed more powerful than the USA? It seems like it was almost inevitable at this point. | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k1fc8/when_did_the_western_european_powers_realize_that/ | {
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"The Suez canal crisis is a pretty good point for this: the failure of the Entente Cordiale at resisting the pressure put on them by the US/USSR shows that they are world powers no longer."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | |
135g8w | When did each book of the old testament first come about and where? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/135g8w/when_did_each_book_of_the_old_testament_first/ | {
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"I'd like to know this too! ",
"IANAH, but [Wikipedia](_URL_0_) has a quick answer. The dates for individual books range from the 8th to 1st centuries BCE."
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jn94w | How big is a photon? | In work today the question was raised as to how you would work out the size of a photon. If it even has a size at all.
It stirred up a lot of debate, but no real conclusions.
I was wondering if AskScience had any light (hehe) to shed on the matter! | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jn94w/how_big_is_a_photon/ | {
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"Doesn't really have a size, going by any reasonable definition of size. You can treat them as points.\n\nThere are a few quantities you could calculate to give you a number, but like I said they may not mean much as size. The minimum uncertainty in a photon's position is c/2 dw where dw is the uncertainty in frequency. I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Anyway, if there's an uncertainty of one hertz then the position has an uncertainty of 150 thousand km. Yeah that doesn't really mean anything.\n\nYou could say a photon is bigger than its Schwarzschild radius. That would be 2G hbar/c^4 , so for an optical energy photon that's about 10^-63 meters.",
"A photon is an excitation of a field mode. As such it depends on how you quantize it. Typically in free space the momentum basis is taken as fundamental, and it is infinitely long. Inside a cavity, it's the size of the cavity.",
"In some contexts (like \"what sized holes in a [Faraday cage](_URL_0_) can it fit through\"), you can think of one as roughly the size of its wavelength.",
"what does it mean to say that a photon \"hits\" an electron",
"You could relate it to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: dp dx~h/2pi,\ndp = hv/c and so on.",
"This actually makes me wanna ask something I've been wondering about for a while: If you had two plates of metal and you put them together (largest surface facing each other) how far apart would they have to be to let a photon of light pass between them ? how close together before light couldn't pass through and was forced to hit one of the plates?",
"Doesn't really have a size, going by any reasonable definition of size. You can treat them as points.\n\nThere are a few quantities you could calculate to give you a number, but like I said they may not mean much as size. The minimum uncertainty in a photon's position is c/2 dw where dw is the uncertainty in frequency. I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Anyway, if there's an uncertainty of one hertz then the position has an uncertainty of 150 thousand km. Yeah that doesn't really mean anything.\n\nYou could say a photon is bigger than its Schwarzschild radius. That would be 2G hbar/c^4 , so for an optical energy photon that's about 10^-63 meters.",
"A photon is an excitation of a field mode. As such it depends on how you quantize it. Typically in free space the momentum basis is taken as fundamental, and it is infinitely long. Inside a cavity, it's the size of the cavity.",
"In some contexts (like \"what sized holes in a [Faraday cage](_URL_0_) can it fit through\"), you can think of one as roughly the size of its wavelength.",
"what does it mean to say that a photon \"hits\" an electron",
"You could relate it to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: dp dx~h/2pi,\ndp = hv/c and so on.",
"This actually makes me wanna ask something I've been wondering about for a while: If you had two plates of metal and you put them together (largest surface facing each other) how far apart would they have to be to let a photon of light pass between them ? how close together before light couldn't pass through and was forced to hit one of the plates?"
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2tkcp3 | I know that pi is infinite, but why couldn't we calculate pi so we could find the exact area of a circle? | I basically mean why is pi infinite? Why wouldn't it end once we could use it to find the perfect area of a circle? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2tkcp3/i_know_that_pi_is_infinite_but_why_couldnt_we/ | {
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"Pi is not infinite. It is a finite number between 3 and 4.\n\nIt cannot be written as a fraction, and thus if you write a decimal expansion for the number, that decimal expansion will never end or repeat.\n\n",
"As I said in [this](_URL_0_) post,\n\nOne mildly interesting figure: Using the first 40 digits of pi past the decimal, if you knew the exact radius of the universe (about 10e26 m), you could calculate the universe's circumference to within the radius of a proton (10e-15 m).\nIn other words, we can't measure a circle accurately enough to get more than around the first ten of digits of pi.",
"u/fishify is right on target. What you're running into is something that nonmathematicians find peculiar - the way that decimal expansions can go on infinitely to describe a finite number. In much the same way, you can add up infinitely long series of fractions, and some of them \"blow up\" to infinity, while others converge on perfectly ordinary numbers. This gets into several other important topics in mathematics; it's not just some odd curiosity out on the fringe.\n\nBut as far as pi goes, part of your problem is that term \"perfect area\". How perfect do you want it? If you can measure the diameter of a circle and measure the circumference, you can use pi to however many digits you want to get the area. But the number of digits you use (the \"significant figures\") will still surely be a lot fewer than the ones in your measurements. Is that circle's diameter 1.00 meters, or 1.00000001? Can you measure that accurately? If all you can do is 1.00 with uncertainty after that, there's no point in using a value to pi out to, say, ten decimal places.\n\nSo the \"perfect area\" depends on how perfectly you can measure. If you're talking about a mathematical abstraction, a circle that's 1.00000000 (as many zeros as you want) meters across, then you can use pi to that same level of accuracy.",
"You can calculate pi as precisely as you want to, to find the area of a circle as precisely as you want to. However, pi cannot be represented as a series of digits, or even as one series of digits divided by another. So no matter how accurately you represent pi using digits, you can still be more accurate by adding more digits.\n\nYou can calculate the perfect area of a circle, but to represent it will require using something other than rational numbers.\n",
"We know the formula, it's pi\\*r^2, so the perfect area of the circle with a radius of 1 is pi, exactly.\n\nBut you want a nice round rational answer right? Well we can do that, easier to solve it backwards though. I want a circle with an area of 8! Solve for r and you find out that if the radius is exactly sqrt(8/pi), and that does give you a circle with a rational area.\n\nIn the real world, your area calculation is only as good as your measurement, so you only need to know pi to a few more digits than your measurement (past that, it's irrelevant).",
"In order to know both the diameter and the area of a circle with perfect precision, without referring to pi by name, you would have to store an infinite amount of information, which is impossible. You decide how close the area needs to be, and then calculate pi to the precision you need.",
"Pi isn't infinite. Perhaps an analogy might help. Think of writing the sum of two numbers. Okay something like 1+2=3, we can do it by taking the first number, adding it to the next one, and so on. How about 1+2+3=6? Same strategy. Okay so how about 1+2+3+... ? By hand, you're never going to get to an equal sign. So this sort of method isn't going to work. We have to find some other way to sum these sorts of things. For pi, you can also think of it as 3+1/10+4/100+1/1000+... Where the numerator is the nth digit of pi and the denominator is 10^(n-1). Again, we have a problem but through convergence techniques (studying where patterns tend towards) we know this is an actual real number value we can pinpoint (the first example being an actual infinite sum).\n\nNext, why couldn't we just find some way to specifically write pi and use it for perfect accuracy? Truth be told I don't know the answer to that, but I do know why there isn't much of a reason to do it, which turns this from a \"could we\" to a \"should we\". This is largely a computational problem, where we want to find the exact value of something, doing so through some sort of process that a computer system could do (or humans for that matter). The issue is that computers (or humans) do not have that much memory storage to handle exceedingly huge numbers (or numbers with a lot of digits) and so we've found techniques to try and reduce error as much as possible, because at that point error is unavoidable because the system has to stop at some point to actually do the work. This is where float point arithmetic comes in. Perhaps you've heard of stories of people adding 1/3+1/3+1/3 and get .99999999 or something with a calculator. This is because the system translates 1/3 to .33333333 and simply adds the decimal values together. Of course, we have better methods these days to try and find more accurate solutions to these problems, but they become tedious and time consuming. To make it worse, pi's digits do not have any noticeable pattern, thus we could only inject them into a system using a digit generator, which adds more computation time. And eventually the system will have to truncate anyway because of finite memory space (or paper!). It would be far faster and more efficient to say, use only a few digits of pi. There's really no issue in having an error difference, say 10^-6 or 10^-100, depending on your field of work. Its so tiny that it hardly makes a difference in your calculations. Rounding is okay!"
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31rdau | what is the postmodernist dilemma? | Any help is appreciated, Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31rdau/eli5_what_is_the_postmodernist_dilemma/ | {
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"The short answer is that it is the search for meaning. This is not really a new problem for philosophy, but in the context of postmodernism. \n\nThis perspective is cynical of \"modern ideas\" like science (not that science is wrong or bad, but that as a source of meaning - philosophical meaning - it isn't going to deliver). It cynical that the nation-state with progressive legislation about human rights and equality will actually result in equality and it has realized that being \"right\" or \"good\" doesn't always result in equal or fair treatment, or that debunking myths and religions will result in a better world, etc. etc. \n\nThe dilemma has then been said by some to be \"what good is this new enlightened cycnism since it just kills hope and makes us aware of our misery\" (thats a little heavy handed, but...i'm far away from my days of writing long winded philosophy papers!)"
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539cd4 | Do people who eat fewer calories live longer? | I swear I remember reading somewhere that people who are fewer calories tended to have longer lifespans, and for that reason I've tried to eat a little less (not going for a second serving, etc.). Obviously people who are overweight are less healthy than people of average weight, but does the trend continue in the opposite direction, with people who are lighter than average or eat slightly less than average living longer? Recently I thought about it and realized I don't have any idea where the original idea/assumption came from. Is there any basis in science? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/539cd4/do_people_who_eat_fewer_calories_live_longer/ | {
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"There is an idea called [caloric restriction](_URL_0_) which has been demonstrated to increase lifespan in a number of model organisms. We don't know yet whether this also works in humans (it isn't an easy experiment to pull off). Some scientists are **very** convinced that it works.\n\nIn [2012](_URL_1_), a study in monkeys suggested that it doesn't have an effect on aging. In [2014](_URL_2_), a study in monkeys suggested that it **does** have an effect on aging. Both were published in very good journals (by the same publishing group, Nature)! I'd say that the jury is still out, but plenty of scientists would disagree, and I personally know several that are applying caloric restriction to their own diets.",
"This is a field of research I work in. Caloric restriction is extremely effective but it's effect is inversely proportional to an organism's life span. For example, for the round worm C. elegans that live a few days, caloric restriction can double their lifespan. In mice that live 2-4 years caloric restriction will add a few months. For humans, the effect isn't statistically significant. \n\nedited: C. elegans is a round worm not a flat worm as I'd mistakenly first said. And typo.",
"To steal an idea I first heard in a David Brin novel... we have had people practicing CR for millions of years: poor people, mostly. For example, I've read that the average diet of non-wealthy Europeans during the Medieval period was something like 1,000-1,200 calories per day. There have also been thousands (at least) of monks and nuns from various religious sects living fairly healthy lives except for voluntary CR, over the ages.\n\nOf course, this does not constitute a well-designed study, but perhaps it makes sense to ask, if CR works as well as some of its proponents claim, shouldn't we have seen a lot more 150-year-olds all over history by now?",
"One simple theory is that it reduces overall oxidative stress in the body, which has all kinds of deleterious effects related to aging and cancer. [A Source...](_URL_0_)\n\nThe logic goes something like: more food- > more energy- > more oxygen-dependent metabolism- > more oxidation in tissues.\n\nIt's also considered one of the reasons for men having shorter lifespans than women. We've more muscle, so we must consume more calories and oxygen.",
"It's not caloric restriction per se, but insulin levels and sensitivity to insulin. Caloric restriction affects insulin directly and therefore is correlated with aging in several studies. This is probably a good layman article about insulin and aging _URL_0_. Maintaining good insulin levels have several other health benefits other than just aging.",
"Took a class on ethics stem cell biology last semester from a grad student...\n\nTelemerase activity (an enzyme responsible for controlling aging by replenishing telomeres) is shown to increase when the cells are deprived of nutrients. This activity causes the DNA in the cells to be more well-kept and uncorrupted. \n\nAll humans theoretically start off with a set amount of telomeres and it depletes as cells divide. Eating food introduces new chemicals and energy into the body to feed cells which then divide. Over time after many divisions the telomeres depletes. \n\nBy restricting caloric intake the telemorase would be around to keep the telomeres in the cells around which would raise the quality of the cells in such a way that they could divide many more times over more effectively because the DNA would be less corrupted because of the telomeres being bountiful.\n\n_URL_0_",
"There was a BBC horizon documentary a couple of years ago about the effects of various forms of fasting and caloric restriction, it's called [Eat, Fast and Live Longer](_URL_0_) and can be found on a lot of the usual video streaming sites if that BBC link won't work for you.",
"A protein in the DNA called IGF1 controls physical aging through the production of IGF-1 (Insulin-like Growth Hormone). There seem to be links between caloric intake, specifically protein intake, and the production of this hormone by the IGF1 gene. I haven't looked at any papers or studies on it specifically but by the looks of it, a relatively high caloric intake seems to be perfectly fine, up until the point when you stop growing, at which point the hormone essentially causes your body to deteriorate, and higher caloric intake makes this happen faster.\n\nEdit: Here's a study on it's effects in rodents and a small number of humans, but as another person has already said, the long-term effects on humans haven't been studied in depth yet. _URL_0_",
"There was a study with Monkeys where they fed one group only half the calories for their entire life and investigated the total life span, age related disease and General aging markers. I think this is still going on (at least it was when I read their last paper, about 2 years ago). Their results so Far where that monkeys who only ate half the calories like normal, would Show less signs of aging, aging related disases and a longer total lifespan in total. Of course this is done only with monkeys and not humans and with a drastic reduction of calorie intake, but they concluded that high metabolostic activity may actually speed up the aging process.\nWriting this on m mobile, so im sorry for the bad formatting/writing",
"My understanding of how it works is thusly:\n\nPeople who eat less have altered ratios of NAD+/NADH. NADH levels are lower among people who eat less, because the body doesn't have the energy to convert NAD+ to NADH. \n\nRatios of NAD+ and NADH play a role in the expression of the sir2 gene, which plays a role in aging. higher levels of NAD+ cause expression of genes that combat aging. \n\nIn anti-aging circles, some people now encourage the use of the supplements nicotinamide riboside and pterostilbene to accomplish the same thing. nicotinamide riboside is a precursor of NAD, and pterostilbene also helps activate the gene(s). ",
"How would this work for people who are extremely active? People who work out a lot have to eat more calories to make up for what they burned off and to build muscle, etc. If you eat a lot of calories and are in good physical shape, wouldn't that be healthier than eating fewer calories? ",
"The top post is good, but I wanted to add a bit more nuance:\nRegardless of whether or not caloric restriction extends lifespan, it is clear that even in humans it will improve your insulin sensitivity. This is good because it lowers your risk for type II diabetes (which increases with age).\n\nThe good news for people who don't want to diet per se, is that there is growing evidence that intermittent fasting reproduces many of the same effects as CR (including lifespan extension in mice). This could be something as simple as the \"eat for only 8 hours a day\" diet that seems to be getting media attention lately, to a cycle of \"25 day normal, 5 days of eating 50% calories\" that was recently tested in humans (see Brandhorst et al., Cell Metabolism 2015).\n\nSource: I am a scientist working on ageing and longevity"
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el7hpt | why can't we control wild fires/forest fires before they get out of control, given all the firefighting means that we have? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/el7hpt/eli5_why_cant_we_control_wild_firesforest_fires/ | {
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"We did that for decades. It is a major part of what is causing our problems now. If you do not allow the natural fires to clear out the dead brush then it will eventually accumulate to a degree that fires spread and grow too quickly to get under control. They literally grow to the point of not being able to be contained before they are noticed by humans and before firefighters can respond."
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3uk9qf | why people think freedom of speech is about being able to say anything you like without consequence | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uk9qf/eli5_why_people_think_freedom_of_speech_is_about/ | {
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"Because the constitution is no longer taught in detail in schools. People also think they have freedom of speech on the internet. While it is not popular reddit and other sites hold no obligation to give anyone freedom of speech. The owners of the sites have every legal right to determine what speech is allowed. People get mad and then think of the first catchy thing they remember from the constitution; 'freedom of speech' and take no time to understand it and or put it in context.\n\n",
"There are two concepts that often get confused.\n\nIn a formal sense 'freedom of speech' is actually 'freedom from government restriction of speech'. These are the rights that are enshrined in constitutional or human rights documents like the 1st amendment. They don't apply at all to private organizations who are free to tell you not to say something they don't like within a sphere that belongs to them. They also don't prohibit any social censure from other people.\n\nThere's also a broader, more ambiguous sense of the concept. We protect free speech formally because in liberal democracies we *value* having freedom of speech. It means *more* to us than merely protection against the government. As a society we want people, generally, to be free to speak their mind, but even more than the right to speak, we want the right to *listen*. We want an open, permissive environment where people don't have to fear unwarranted censure or perhaps for their physical safety just for speaking an unpopular opinion. And this is where it gets tricky. Since these are societal values and cultural norms, there are necessarily reasonable disagreements about where to draw the line. There are disagreements about what an appropriate response might look like. There are disagreements about whether *any* speech deserves some kind of tolerance from the wider community at all.\n\nIn different situations these two concepts of free speech might be more or less prominent. Sometimes the relation to government action is critical. Should neo-nazis be permitted to march peacefully through a Jewish neighbourhood? The core of this question is the government's regulation of an activity. The answer is yes. But the residents don't have to visit that area of town or pay any attention to the parade. Their choice to ignore it doesn't undermine the underlying free speech values in that situation - they can choose not to listen.\n\nSimilarly, the WBC is routinely ignored while they protest, that does not harm the WBC's right to speak, and it does not harm the passer-by's right to listen for he *chose* to ignore them. But sometimes counter-protests also block the WBC from an audience altogether. Now that's starting to slip down a slope isn't it?\n\nLet's take it further. What if a significant portion of society decides that not only do they want to ignore an opinion, they also want to prevent that opinion from being voiced in the first place? So they direct immediate and visceral responses to anybody who dares utter those words that they've deemed offensive, they stage disruptive protests, and they attempt to drown out that voice on a grand scale.This has next to nothing to do with government, so the social *value* of free speech takes center stage. Not only are they depriving the speakers the opportunity to communicate, they are depriving the rest of society the opportunity to hear what the speaker has to say and decide for themselves. Do we want to create an environment where unpopular opinions are immediately shut down, not by government, but by your peers? Or do we respond to unpopular opinions with argument and debate - perhaps even critically examining our own beliefs in the process?\n\nFreedom of speech clearly does *not* mean freedom from any and all consequences of speech. But there are also clearly cases where the private reaction and censure of speech is such that it does undermine the values of free speech. Where does a particular situation fall? It depends.",
"Eli5: what is a loaded question?"
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d26l0r | how do individually addressable led strips work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d26l0r/eli5_how_do_individually_addressable_led_strips/ | {
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"These strips contain power traces, LEDs, control trace(s), and controllers. Most modern strips have the controller embedded inside the same case as the LEDs, DNS I'll refer to the combination of the LED emitters, and controller as the LED. \n\nDepending on which specific control chip is being used, a computer would put out a control signal on the control trace or traces that specified how each LED is supposed to light up its various emitters. The most common case is to use a single control trace, which goes to the DATA_IN pin on an LED, the controller grabs the data it needs (generally some control bits and the next 3 bytes) , and sends the remaining stream out the DATA_OUT pin, where the cycle continues until you run out of LEDs or the computer stops putting out a signal. \n\nSince only one signal is used, the timing is fixed to a certain frequency which requires fairly tight constraints to get the LED controllers to recognize a valid control signal.",
"Gonna assume you're talking about WS2812 (\"NeoPixel\") type. \n\nYou send data down the data line to the first LED. Short pulse for 0 or long pulse for 1. And by pulsing like that you communicate color data in binary to the first LED. During all this, the first LED is not talking to the others. Once the LED has received a full set of color data, THEN it starts forwarding all pulses over to the next LED who does the same thing. Reads in a color, then forwards the extra to the next LED.\n\nOnce you're done sending color data, you wait a little bit of extra reset time for the LEDs to notice that the data stopped. Then the first LED will start intercepting everything again and you're back to the beginning.\n\nSome LEDs have a separate clock pin, so they don't need strict timings on the pulses. They're also generally less flicker-y. But WS2812-type LEDs are very cheap so very popular."
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dwlvt9 | How did people historically explore across ocean with no knowledge of where they were actually going? | So let’s say that I’m an explorer in 500-is BCE and I want to explore across the oceans for new land masses. I have no idea which direction to go. My ship can only carry so many supplies before I need to restock, which I obviously can’t do in the middle of the goddamn ocean. So how does it work?
How did people with no knowledge of where to go find new land back before pretty much the entire world (excluding the americas) had been discovered | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dwlvt9/how_did_people_historically_explore_across_ocean/ | {
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"In antiquity people rarely travelled straight through the sea or ocean as this was extremely dangerous. The main method of navigation was sailing along the shore line with ocasional island hopping to prevent disorientation. This was because people in antiquity did not have acces to compases, coordinate systems or reliable navigation maps to be able to safely sail across large bodies of water so they relied on masses of land as landmarks for orientation.\n\nNavigation across the open ocean/sea was usually on short distances such as from Carthage to Sicily for instance and in this case, navigators relied on watter curents and winds to carry them across the ocean or sea. \n\nWhen out in the open sea celestial navigation was used\n and in Europe it is first recorded to have been used by the minoans.\n\nAs for exploration, explorers followed the shore line, watter curents or wind curents and see where it would bear them, this is how the arabs and indians reached each other across the open sea by following the monsoon winds across the Indian Ocean.\n\nEDIT because i forgot: Of course it was not fault proof, expeditions often ran out of suplies and where forced to turn back home, for example the greeks made a series of expeditions in east africa and the phoenicians explored east and west africa both in an attempt to circumnavigate it but decided to turn around because it was too dangerous, see the expeditions of Hanno and Eudoxus of Cyzicus."
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bbyq27 | why did ecuador terminate assange diplomatic asylum? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bbyq27/eli5_why_did_ecuador_terminate_assange_diplomatic/ | {
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"He was a poor house guest and they got enough political cover in assurances that he would not be extradited to any country with the death penalty.",
"Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno, has issued a video explaining his decision to withdraw Julian Assange’s asylum status after seven years. Moreno complained about Assange’s behaviour and accused him of being involved in “interfering in internal affairs of other states” while in the embassy.\n\nHe said the asylum of Assange “is unsustainable and no longer viable” because he had repeatedly violated “clear cut provisions of the conventions of diplomatic asylum”, citing the recent leak of Vatican documents by Wikileaks.\n\nThe statement continued:\n\nThe patience of Ecuador has reached its limit on the behaviour of Mr Assange. He installed electronic and distortion equipment not allowed. He blocked the security cameras of the Ecuadorian mission in London. He has confronted and mistreated guards. He had accessed the security files of our embassy without permission. He claimed to be isolated and rejected the internet connection offered by the embassy, and yet he had a mobile phone with which he communicated with the outside world.\n\nWhile Ecuador upheld the generous conditions of his asylum, Mr Assange legally challenged in three difference instances the legality of the protocol. In all cases, the relevant judicial authorities have validated Ecuador’s position.\n\nIn line with our strong commitment to human rights and international law, I requested Great Britain to guarantee that Mr Assange would not be extradited to a country where he could face torture or the death penalty. The British government has confirmed it in writing, in accordance with its own rules.\n\nFinally, two days ago, WikiLeaks, Mr Assange’s allied organisation, threatened the government of Ecuador. My government has nothing to fear and does not act under threats. Ecuador is guided by the principles of law, complies with international law and protects the interests of Ecuadorians.\n\n_URL_0_",
"WikiLeaks recently released a leak that was highly embarrassing to the Ecuadorean government. Ecuador is also looking to improve relations with the USA, who would very much like to get hold of Assange.",
"Why did the embassy agree to take him in orginally?",
"There are official reasons and explanations. They may or may not be the true reasons.\n\nAssange is involved in high stakes international dramas and intrigues, on a level where things are not usually visible to the public. So we don’t know.",
"We talked about this in my political science class! The short version is that he's an absolute slop and didn't respect the embassy. The workers and cleaning crew at the embassy lodged multiple complaints and just *didn't want to work anywhere near that mess of a human*",
" > citing the recent leak of Vatican documents by Wikileaks.\n\n\nWhat where in those leaks is the question we should ask, though.",
"It's sad that 1 country rules the world and everyone has to abide by it. No country in the world can say no to U.S. economic sanctions is enough threat"
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46f4xf | the articles of confederation vs the u.s constitution? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/46f4xf/eli5_the_articles_of_confederation_vs_the_us/ | {
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"The articles were the first form of government in the US in place from 1776 to 1789.\n\nThe federal government barely existed under the articles. It consisted of a single legislature with 1 rep. per state. Most important decisions require unanimity.\n\nIt's important to remember that the colonies were basically a bunch of different small countries that banded together to fight Britain, so a weak central government was really all they could agree on. Also, they were fighting a war against a tyrannical central government, so they weren't eager to put another one in place.\n\nUnfortunately for the Articles, it went terribly. The only two things the articles government did successfully were win the war (which had a lot to do with Washington often acting in opposition to congress) and lay out the methodology for how the territories in the Ohio river valley would eventually be settled and become states.\n\nMany leaders in the country felt the articles sucked even during the war, and when a convention was held to revise the articles, they ended up scrapping them and forming a new charter of government, the constitution.\n\nWhen compared to the articles, the constitution has a much stronger federal government including a federal court system and a federal executive. The government has much more power relative to the states when compared with the articles. Overall, it functions much better (it's lasted 227 years which beats the Articles' 13 pretty handily). \n\nIt took a lot of convincing to get people on board with a stronger federal government, and a lot of the framers who favored a stronger government (principally John Jay and Alexander Hamilton) wrote a bunch of essays as to why they thought it was a good idea called the federalist papers. They're a good read if you want to learn more about the debate going on at the time."
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8awlxz | whats the difference between 60hz, 120hz, and 144hz on gaming monitors? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8awlxz/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_60hz_120hz_and/ | {
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"The number of hz is how many times the screen will refresh per second. It isn't technically frames per second, but it is directly linked to it. If your screen can only refresh 60 times per second (60hz), it can only show 60 different frames in a second, so you would appear limited to 60fps. ",
"Our eyes don't actually see individual frames, since they're not quick enough for that. What they see is the sum of all the light hitting our eyes over a short period of time, which makes fast moving objects become blurry like a photograph with long exposure. So when a ball moves through our field of vision, it looks like a blurred line rather than a ball.\n\nBut games have a very hard time with that, since each frame is an instantaneous moment of time. So when the ball moves through the field of vision, it will be at a different position at each frame, and our eyes lay those frames on top of each other - so the ball appears to be at multiple locations at the same time. This can be smoothed out somewhat with post processing motion blur effects, but it's very difficult to actually get it to look naturally. And that is where 120 and 144 Hz screens come in: The more frames per second the game can reproduce, the smoother the movement of rapidly moving objects will become.\n\nYou can test this effect very easily if you start a game with first person camera and make some rapid camera movements while looking at objects with high contrast. You'll easily notice that there are multiple copies of the object on screen if there's no motion blur effect."
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4dm3ja | Was Tito as popular in Yugoslavia as often claimed? And to what extent did state repression exist in Tito's Yugoslavia? | I'm familiar with the basic timeline of events in Yugolsavia from WW2 until the modern day but not much beyond that. Two things I often see stated as fact, but havn't seen much proof of eitherway, is Tito being incredibly popular and loved within Yugoslavia and admired by other Eastern Europeans. Those seem true with people from that part of Europe today but that is just anecdotal.
The other I see is that Tito was extremely opressive and Yugoslavia was a policestate, sometimes said to be on the same level as the USSR with killings, etc. | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4dm3ja/was_tito_as_popular_in_yugoslavia_as_often/ | {
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"**This is rather long one, so before I write anything else, here is the summary:**\n\n**tl; dr**: Tito was central figure in Yugoslavia and held practically absolute power, so Tito gets credit for everything that was good between 1945–1990 (creation of social state, industrialization, creation of universal health care, relatively open borders), but at the same time is held responsible for bad things (dictatorship, police state, mass murders after WWII, political prisoners). ~~A~~ On top of that he was a bon vivant and womaniser.\n\n**_______________________________________________________________________________**\n\n\n > Tito being incredibly popular and loved within Yugoslavia and admired by other Eastern Europeans\n\n > Tito was extremely opressive and Yugoslavia was a policestate, sometimes said to be on the same level as the USSR with killings, etc.\n\nI can't give you an answer, I can only try to elaborate those pictures a bit.\n\nAs for supporters:\n\nFirst, you must consider how Tito got to the power. He was a rather successful leader of partisan guerillas against Nazi Germans and their collaborators, and by the time the war ended he was de facto ruler of Yugoslavia. It seems he was charismatic enough even without this warrior aura, which boosted his reputation. His army counted hundreds of thousands of soldiers, some of which were mobilized (even forcefully), some were opportunistic and wanted to end the war on winning side, but others were either communists or people that were saved by partisans – they were given chance to fight back to Nazis and collaborators. Those were the people that were either targeted by Nazis (like Jews or political opponents), or they didn't agree with Nazi policies. There was also lot of supporters that haven't joined partisans, but gave them food, shelter, clothes, etc.. Large parts of that population groups became hard-line Tito supporters after the war, and many of them and their family members are fond of him even today. \n\nSecond, there was that [split with Stalin](_URL_4_), where Tito successfully broke relations with Stalin effectively ending Soviet mending in Yugoslav affairs and thus reducing their sphere of influence. That basically enabled him free hands in both internal and external policy. He was independent of either Blocs, but still could cooperate with both of them. That policy led to foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement. This apparent independence gave rise to Tito's prestige abroad as well as home. And because Tito was independent of USSR he could proceed somewhat more liberal approach in internal matters. \n\nThird, being a communist Tito initiated campaign of industrialisation, which meant employment for many young people from rural areas, who started to move to towns and cities. As socialist state Yugoslavia was trying to provide housing for those people, which created entire city quarters of [commieblocks](_URL_5_). One could relatively easy afford apartment there (of course there were privileged like Army and communist party members who got it easier than others) Those people that solved their existential problems because of this policies are now rather old, but still many of them credit Tito for that. On top of that, Yugoslavia gradually developed universal health care, which is also often connected to Tito in popular perception.\n\nFourth, one of the main differences between Yugoslavia and other Socialist states is that Yugoslav citizens could travel abroad, especially after [Ranković](_URL_6_) fell from power in 1966. That meant that many otherwise hardly employable young people (usually from peasant background and very little if any schooling) could leave and find the job elsewhere, most often in Germany. Those people were very grateful for that possibility because they were able to rise from poverty and became rather well of citizens when they returned home. That wasn't possible in other communist countries, so Tito was seen not only as courageous and powerful enough to successfully stand to Soviets (which other communist leaders mostly didn't succeed) but also reasonable enough to let his people seek their fortune elsewhere (unlike [Ceaușescu](_URL_10_))\n\nFinally, there was a cult of personality which was meticulously constructed by Communist party. It ensured that Tito is seen as infallible, as only true leader. Indoctrination started at school age, even before, through education system, and, well, something of that image of Tito kind of stick with many of them. On top of that he liked a luxury, was a womaniser, looked rather well, dressed nice, and was seen as both man's and ladie's man. All of that makes Tito seen in rather positive light by many. You can hear things like [“Look how many leaders came to his funeral!](_URL_11_) These blokes today that call themselves statesmen – even their own mothers wouldn't come on theirs.” and such.\n\nOn the negative side:\n\nWell, ~~he~~ while he was all that what was mentioned above, he also was a dictator, which means you had all the things that goes with dictatorships: police state, political prisoners (especially notorious was [Goli otok](_URL_15_) prison, but there were many others), opposition wasn't tolerated, [Army](_URL_16_) had a great influence on civilians, [secret services](_URL_7_) were notorious for tracking and murdering dissidents, and so on. \n\nHis actions immediately after the WWII are dubious at best. After notorious [Bleiburg repatriations](_URL_1_) lot of people were executed because they ended war on the wrong side without exemption for those drafted against their will or innocent of crimes committed by collaborators (mostly by [Ustaše](_URL_17_), but also [Chetniks](_URL_3_) and Germans as well as others ). There were Kangaroo courts, mass executions, and politically motivated processes. Mass graves from that period are founded till this day ([Macelj](_URL_0_), [Barbara's pit](_URL_8_), and many others. Those that weren't immediately killed were subjected to extremely rough treatment, and were often sentenced to longish prison terms, usually with hard labour. Many of those people were released till 1960's, but they were broken men most often than not.\n\nAlso, lot of people were subject to ideologically motivated processes because of their anticommunist views, or were just seen as class enemy, be that private enterprisers or well off peasants. And you didn't need to have much to be considered class enemy. Process of [collectivization](_URL_12_) was based on the[Soviet model](_URL_9_) for the few years after the war, there was forced [nationalization](_URL_14_), and private property was restrained. Many were beaten, jailed, and/or left impoverished during those processes.\nThose particular policies ended or undertook considerable modification after Tito-Stalin split, but effects and consequences stayed.\n\nMembers of collaborator forces had very limited access to employment, especially in public services,and that often extended on their families. If you were born in wrong family you could say good bye to state sponsored scholarships (and there weren't any other), which were often necessary for getting higher education.\n\nTito resolved [national question in Yugoslavia](_URL_2_) (I just don't have time to get into that) by simply putting it under the rug. All nations were to be considered equal, as were all the republics. Macedonians got their own Republic, Kosovars got autonomous region, Bosnian Muslims were recognized as nation. Tito is still popular in those regions because of this facts. However, Serb and Croatian nationalism, even in most benign form (financial, see [Croatian Spring](_URL_13_) for example) was heavily suppressed. That, a top of everything else, left some Serbs and Croatians, but others also rather uncontented, which ~~created~~ set the stage for dissolution of Yugoslavia.\n\nThere are many more things, like tensions between more and less prosperous Republics, longish mandatory military service that made lot of young men resentful towards the system symbolized by Tito, but all of this is rather very long as it is, so be free to correct my mistakes, and ask if something isn't clear enough or if you like to know more, I'll answer if I can.\n\nedit: typo, format, grammar, phrasing, missing words"
]
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"https://www.google.hr/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=under+the+rug&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=hFEGV4CSH6OP8QeEuoGIDQ#channel=fs&q=national+question+in+yugoslavia... | |
5m8cl4 | why after a perfect nights sleep why do some people find it so hard to get out of bed and are still tired while other people would be full of energy and find it easier to get up | I always do be tired after a nights sleep and Find it so hard to get up just wondering a few reasons as to why I'm like that? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5m8cl4/eli5_why_after_a_perfect_nights_sleep_why_do_some/ | {
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"Because there are other factors like the persons' physical and mental health. You might also want to be checked for Sleep Apnea, especially if you wake up with a sore throat or partners complain you snore. ",
"Circadian rhythm could be part of it. \n\nSome people fall asleep and wake naturally at different times than our jobs / commitments make us wake up. \n\nNaturally, i'll fall asleep about 4am, wake about 11/12. That's my body clock. \n\nAny sleep that doesn't mesh with those times is always less productive. \n\nHow long are you actually asleep for? \nDo you have any other medical issues?\n\nEither way, speaking to a doc isn't a bad idea, as there could be many reasons, and sleep is very important. You could be sleep walking, having trouble getting into deep sleep, or have sleep apnea. \n\n"
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rnalu | Is it possible to make a food that only has required nutrients in it, such that excretion is not required after eating it? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rnalu/is_it_possible_to_make_a_food_that_only_has/ | {
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"This question is asked regularly and the answer is no. Astronauts eat diets which reduce waste, but excrement is necessary for healthy living.",
"No. Feces is not just \"undigested\" food. It's about 30% bacteria and other waste products from your body, like dead red blood cells. Even if you could eat to produce no waste, you'd still have cellular waste that would need to be excreted.",
"related question: Is it possible for a food product to use more energy in it's metabolism than it provides for the body?\n\nor will it just pass through undigested?",
"All food will produce some waste product in digestion, some more than others. Food high in fiber will add bulk to your stool whereas a lean piece of meat – that basically consists of water and protein – produces mainly urea that will be execreted by your kidneys in the form of urine.",
"There is [TPN](_URL_0_), which dramatically reduces what comes out your ass.\n\nIt should be noted that having waste come out of your ass is generally good for your health. There are limited circumstances when you want to shut down the GI tract.\n\nObligatory anecdote: I was really glad to start crapping again."
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12ozbh | Why is Ohio a historic Swing State? | I know more presidents are from Ohio than any other. But why is this? Why has it always been such a swing state and why does this trend continue to this day? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12ozbh/why_is_ohio_a_historic_swing_state/ | {
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"A swing state in modern American politics is a state which splits about 50/50 between the two main parties. The reasons Ohio meets this criterion are very complicated, among them: it's got a mix of large cities and rural areas, industry and agriculture, and is culturally and geographically one of the more Southern-oriented of the industrial northern states; these contrasts mean that both Republicans and Democrats have good chances. States with wider splits (60/40, 70/30, etc.) are not valuable swing states because their votes are so hard to sway one way or the other, so they get less attention from presidential campaigns.\n\nThe reason that Ohio is such an *influential* swing state (that is, it decides elections) is that it has a large population. Because most states award all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the statewide vote, and electoral votes are tied in large part to population, large swing states are very important factors in a presidential election. Florida has overtaken it in recent years as the largest swing state, but Ohio remains very influential.\n\nAs for producing the most presidents? It's probably sheer chance, and Ohio has good chances as a large state that's been around for a while. There have only ever been a few dozen presidents, so I don't think we can draw many conclusions from that particular statistic (although my Ohioan relatives would insist that the state innately breeds greatness). Ohio has also produced an very disproportionate number of astronauts, for what it's worth.",
"Ohio produced seven presidents between 1868 and 1920. All of them were Republicans. The Republican Party of that era was absolutely dominent on the national stage given the legacy of the Civil War. Within the GOP, the Ohio Republican Party was an undisputed powerhouse. It was the Republican version of Tammany Hall. The reason was because the Republican Party was the party of manufacturers and Ohio was one of the most important industrial staes in the union. Ohio manufacturers had a major incentive to fund the Republican Party in order to keep tariff rates high on foreign manufactured goods and the Ohio GOP was their method of distribution. This situation gave the Ohio delegation an etraordinary level of power at national conventions and thus resulted in the large number of Ohioan presidents.",
"[Just thought I would point out that Virginia has had more presidents than any other state, though Ohio is a close second, and third place is a long way back.](_URL_0_) Of course, Virginia hasn't had much luck since the Civil War broke its streak, which is about the time Ohio got going interestingly enough."
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3c4d0k | what's preventing someone from listening in on my cell phone traffic when i'm speaking on my mobile phone? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c4d0k/eli5_whats_preventing_someone_from_listening_in/ | {
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"In theory: your connection is encrypted in some way.\n\nIn practice: that encryption sucks and is somewhere between easy and trivial to break with the right equip\n\n[Further reading](_URL_0_)",
"It's slightly complicated to do it. \n\nIn the Olden Days cellphones used analogue signals, and if you knew the right frequency you could easily listen in to cellphone calls. \n\nNowadays they're all digital, so even if you know the frequency you're just going to get \"noise\" as the voice data is digitally encoded. \n\nIn theory this data is also encrypted, so you can't just listen in and decode the digital code. \n\nIn practice, as /u/YMK1234 points out, this encryption is not super strong. \n\nThe bottom line here is that if someone *really* wants to listen to your conversations, they can. Might be easier for them to just plant a microphone on you, though. ",
"In all probability you aren't exciting enough to bother to bug. If you believe this isn't the case then you probably have got someone listening to your conversations.",
"What's preventing someone from listening the cell phone traffic? Primarly the law and secondly the complexity of the technologies involved in wireless communications. \n\nLegally, carriers are required to provide means of lawful intercept for authorites (e.g. via CALEA equipment in the core network switch, that works like plugging a headset or recording device to the pair of wires your call goes through) when a warrant is provided.\n\nAir intercept is much more complicated but the level of complexity depends of the technology. For example the defunct European NMT analogue sytem was easily intercepted w/ a scanner while the digital technologies such as GSM, CDMA, EV-DO, UMTS or LTE are more end more coplex and harder to intercept. \n\nOn top of the fact that the information over the air - either voice or data - is highly processed, (digitized, channel protection coded, scrambled and modulated) and as mentioned by other people here, most of these technologies encrypt it as well. As usual, decription is more or less solid depending of the algorithm used for this and will vary from one technology to the other. \n\nThis is why intercepting over the air is very hard. Still there are ways to attempt this either by using fake wireless cells (i.e. the Stingray equipment used by some police departments and not 100% lawful) and trying to trick the mobile attach to them or by eavesdropping on the air signals directly. "
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5k6q9v | why does nostalgia make me feel sick? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5k6q9v/eli5_why_does_nostalgia_make_me_feel_sick/ | {
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"Thoughts and memories can trigger hormone releases in your body, they trigger physical responses like feeling flutters or queasiness in your stomach. There's a very strong link between your brain and your gastrointestinal system, since it has the most noticeable impact from hormone release."
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6uw779 | what function, if any, does that indent/crease thing between our nose and lips serve? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6uw779/eli5_what_function_if_any_does_that_indentcrease/ | {
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"I saw a documentary in biology once years ago. From what I remember, when the in the womb, the first feature of the foetus that is formed is that very indent/crease and from that the rest of the face is formed. I don't know how accurate that is or if even at all. Seems pretty important though. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'd love to learn. ",
"In humans it doesn't have a function (as others said). In animals like dogs (the \"split\" in their nose pad is their equivalent of this), it traps odorant (particles), and this allows those particles to make their way down into the mouth, where they have additional scent organs that can detect smells that aren't volatile (smellable out of the air itself).\n\nIt forms because when an embryo is developing, facial tissue (skin) starts growing from five \"lobes\": one around your forehead which grows down to your upper lip, two around your cheeks, which grow towards the center and also help form the upper lip, and two around your jaws which grow towards the center and constitute the lower lip.\n\nThe ridge is basically the leftover of the \"seam\" when your face skin grew together as a baby in your mom's womb. How exactly they grow together is responsible for conditions like cleft lip/palate, but also everyday variation like a widows peak (because the two sides didn't overlap enough to make a straight hairline), or a cleft chin (same reason but with those bottom two \"lobes\"), or a unibrow."
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2u76w9 | rather than make it a separation of parent(s) from children, why aren’t children deported with illegal-immigrant parents? | It seems like this would remove the heart-string statements (used for political statements/bills usually) people use.
Specifically they say things like their children are born here in the US, how can you separate them from one another just because the parent(s) are here illegally?
----
See [PBS documentary](_URL_0_) on this as well. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2u76w9/eli5_rather_than_make_it_a_separation_of_parents/ | {
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"Legally, children born in the US are citizens. They are born with the inalienable rights afforded to all citizens. We don't exile our citizen just because they're inconvenient. ",
"Because the child has not broken any laws. We generally try to avoid punishing the innocents for crimes of their parents.\n\nAs far as I know (IANAL, please correct me if I'm wrong), the parents are allowed to take their child with them. That is, if they go through all the required legal procedures. Or they can take them with them illegally."
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a4wldt | Is it possible to have life forms which have the 8 characteristics of life which are not made of carbons or hydrocarbons? | I was talking with my father when we began pondering the question if you can have an organism which is considered living but not made of carbons (the characteristics to be considered living are cellular organization, reproduction, metabolism, homeostasis, heredity, response to stimuli, growth and development, and adaptation through evolution).
I was hoping maybe reddit can answer this one. | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/a4wldt/is_it_possible_to_have_life_forms_which_have_the/ | {
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"The simple answer is yes. A number of alternatives to carbon have been proposed such as silicon. But they lack certain features like a good blend of stability and reactivity (silicon, for example, has such a strong affinity for oxygen that silicon dioxide is almost inert). Consider reading up on xenobiology and astrobiology.",
"A few years ago there were a number of articles speculating whether a sustance called \"Desert Varnish\" which forms as a surface on the soil and rocks in very dry areas of the planet was actually an unknown form of life. It was mostly mineral based, but I think it did incorporate some carbon compounds so would not meet the strict definition of no carbon you've outlined. However, it was operating without RNA or DNA and other basic components we consider essential to life. \n_URL_2_ \n\n_URL_1_ \n\n_URL_0_ ",
"The chemistries we see here on earth are least partly due to the physical conditions of our environment: ambient temperature, pressure, etc all constrain the possible chemistries that elements can do (other, more universal properties provide more general constraints, but these should be valid everywhere), so it's possible that if an environment were radically different and stable over a very long period of time, it could lead to the emergence of life with vastly different chemistry than what we observe here on earth. For example, it has been shown that spontaneous membrane formation is possible in the methane-rich environment we think exists on Saturn's Moon, Titan. As far as we know, membranes are essential for life. \n\nThe challenge with this idea is that life formed via radically different chemistries than those possible on earth would likely not be observable to us without very specific technology, because we could not exist in the environments it requires (and it could not exist here on earth). For example, the membranes that can likely form on Titan would require the exact same conditions here on earth to exist, and currently those conditions only exist in a computer.\n\nNow, even if we could observe life formed via radically different chemistries, we might not be able to comprehend that it is even alive, because these radically different chemistries might operate on timescales that make no sense to us. Gradual changes caused by life forms like these imaged ones could be too long for us to understand them as being due to living processes vs a geological process, for example.\n\nSo, I guess my answer is that yes, radically different chemistries than what we observe here on earth could lead to life elsewhere in the universe, but all of the questions that immediately follow from that answer are deeply fraught. ",
"probably, but it doesnt matter.\n\nlife on earth is made up of the same ratio of the most abundant elements in the universe as exists in the universe, so it would make sense that everywhere in the universe where the conditions exist as they do on this planet, that life would exist in a similar fashion.",
"I've read that scientists have considered six different combinations of solvents and macromolecules that could create life. These include fluorosilicones in fluorosilicones at about 200-500 degrees Celsius, fluorocarbons in molten sulfur at 113-445 c, proteins in water (confirmed!) at 0 to 100 C, proteins in liquid ammonia at -77 to -33 C, lipids in liquid methane at -183 to -161 C, and lipids in liquid hydrogen at -253 to 240. Source: _URL_0_",
"In theory, sure, definitely. Silicon would be the most obvious candidate for a carbon replacement. But carbon based life is far more probable. Silicon chemistry is the closest there is, but it's still no carbon; it lacks much of the diversity of possible and stable compounds that makes carbon so favorable, despite being similarly tetravalent. And there's little need; carbon is plentiful. Similarly, you could hypothetically have life that used a different solvent than water, but water is far more likely; it has the perfect properties and it's plentiful throughout the universe.",
"A world with lots of boron and silicon, but not carbon is unlikely. Non-carbon life could evolve in response to poisons. Earth may be evolving towards a world where most life forms are poisonous. A boron creature might be immune to carbon based poisons and it might be poisonous to carbon based life.",
"As a biologist and a physician, I’m going to point out that you’re using the typical biological description of life. It’s potentially a fairly narrow one because it basically only describes life as being that which is organized like us, essentially carbon based life that is a self contained system requiring only chemical energy from its environment to sustain itself and reproduce.\n\nThere are certainly other things that could be considered “life” using a different definition.\n\nAre viruses life? Well they certainly operate in exactly the same manner using the same chemistry as us, they simply lack independent reproduction without Josy cellular machinery.\n\nIs artificial intelligence life? Is Google? Is the internet? \n\nWhat about an entire galaxy and all the stars making all the elements creating all the entropy and Enthalpy locally. Is that life?\n\nAre communities of organisms and all\nOf their histories, social conventions, and dynamic emergent properties of interaction life? \n\nIs all of humanity a hive-mind? Do we create a common consciousness with our language and quest for knowledge, wisdom, and understanding? \n\nIn extreme environments with different concentrations of matter than what is typical on earth, would the prevailing chemistry that self-organizes tend to use different matter from what we commonly find? Silicone based or otherwise?\n\nIn the early states of universe that preceded matter, when all was a density of energy of a nature that defies our comprehension and exists outside of time and space, if there was at some point turbulence and also infinite opportunity for random organization despite any statistical Improbability, and if order organized st random into an intelligence capable of steering the very nature of our physics into the creation of our universe, would that be a deity? Would that be life?\n\nYours is perhaps unintentionally existential\nQuestion about the nature of life. I propose that the biological definition is useful and gives a cohesive standard of rigor to which we can assign other organisms to be part of the sufficiently same kind of life that we exist as. \n\nHowever, I think it would be incredibly naive to decree that which is most exactly like us as the only possible definition of life. \n\nIt’s a question without a single correct answer.\nInteresting to ponder.\n",
"It's okay as a scientist to say that we don't know things. Your question presents one thing that it seems we may not yet know. No answer provided here has any source that verifies whether the answer to your question is yes or no. I can't provide a source that verifies \"we don't know\" but I will give a recent example of how the conventional wisdom of biological chemistry has stringent rules that are difficult to overcome and would require an understanding of chemistry beyond what anybody is doing right now.\n\nDNA contains nucleic acids chained together by a phosphorous-sugar backbone. DNA is necessary for living organisms because specific traits of the organism must be given to the next generation; with no information, there would be no way for the subsequent generation to grow and function. Phosphorus is considered necessary, yet a recent paper in Science, funded by those at NASA, suggested that perhaps the [phosphorus can be substituted with arsenic](_URL_1_). However, studies trying to replicate or verify the results have failed. Why? Because it is very unlikely that arsenic can perform the same function as phosphorus as [arsenic molecules will fall apart quickly](_URL_0_).\n\nSo take this into consideration when people talk about other elements possibly being useful. Heavier elements often don't have the same stability or rate of formation, whether it be electronic or steric principles. Though elements down a column on the Periodic Table may function similarly, they are not the same in terms of their reactivity because their electron density is not going to be the same.\n\nI nor anyone else who has a healthy dose of skepticism on non-carbon-based life forms can prove a negative. All we can say is that we don't know since there's still a lot of chemistry left to explore. But remember: we can't even prove that *phosphorus* is not necessary."
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"https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2006/07/solving-mystery-desert-varnish"
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f52vg9 | what are analog cameras and how are they different from other types of cameras? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f52vg9/eli5_what_are_analog_cameras_and_how_are_they/ | {
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"Analogue cameras is what film cameras became named when digital cameras came out.\n\nFilm instead of sensor and memory cards.",
"So analogue Cameras tend to be what the mass see as \"old\" cameras, they write the light information to a 35mm (or other size) film, this is called a negative, which is then used to transfer onto photo paper.\n\nInteresting stuff really, if you're a student or any local photoclubs, definitely go and check out a printing session, lots of fun!",
"Anything analogue means that there are direct mechanisms at work and there is usually no electronic processing. Most analogue cameras can operate entirely without electricity as the electricity is usually only needed for the flash.\n\nOlder film cameras were \"analogue\" since they not only functioned in a mostly mechanical manner, but because the data was transferred and stored on a physical medium. That is, the image was directly transposed onto the film rather than encoded as a series of zeroes and ones in a system.\n\nThe main difference between anything analog or digital, then, is that an analog device depends upon a physical change in state while a digital item can rely on purely electronic changes.\n\nFor instance, a digital camera encoding an image directly to flash storage as data rather than light physically hitting and changing a strip of film!"
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5lrz55 | why are products "for gamers" always red and black? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5lrz55/eli5_why_are_products_for_gamers_always_red_and/ | {
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"I guess because it makes such a badass, futuristic combination on one hand, just like the black and green (also a very popular colour scheme for gaming products). And possibly because they don't hurt your eyes in the darnkness since they're darker yet softer colours, maybe? That'd would be my guess.",
"Probably to appeal to the younger generation.\n Red is usually associated with performance (power) spec equipment. Even the bad guys in tv or movies usually wear red, or have some association with the color. Bad guys are powerful, and usually takes team work to take that single guy down. Now that im a bit older, I care a lot less what my pc looks like.\n\nAlso want to point out - anything \"gaming\" related cost more than other performance items. Even if its half the product, it will still cost more. Sometimes its worth the price tag, most the time its not though."
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dqwg5g | I am a wealthy property-owning white man in the U.S.A. during slavery. Can I buy slaves purely for the purpose of freeing them? Are there any examples of this happening? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dqwg5g/i_am_a_wealthy_propertyowning_white_man_in_the/ | {
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"[Here](_URL_0_) is a previous /r/askhistorians posts with answers to this question. \n\nAlso, for a famous example, 15th President of the US James Buchanan did this. Though he did so to maintain his image of being neutral on the issue after discovering family members were slave owners."
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erhwjj | how do subway tunnels handle rain water and flooding? | Edit: answered | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/erhwjj/eli5_how_do_subway_tunnels_handle_rain_water_and/ | {
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"If they're lucky the subway tunnels are above the water level, so natural drainage can happen. But most subways and underpasses are not. So these drain into cisterns at the bottom-most part and are pumped from there into the normal storm drain/sewer system. \n\n_Wait, if there's a flood won't there likely be power outages?_ Yep. Most will have a backup system in place, likely more than one, but sometimes your tunnels just fill up. In any case, if the power is out and a subway tunnel pump stops, you're not going to be running electric trains anyway."
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5l1z6s | When it's said that areas of the brain "light up" via electrical signals, are there actual photons in the brain that get emitted? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5l1z6s/when_its_said_that_areas_of_the_brain_light_up/ | {
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"I assume you're referring to fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) or PET (positron emission tomography), the results of which are often talked about in terms of the brain 'lighting up'. Both don't measure electrical activity but other markers of brain activity. \n\nIn the case of PET, a radioactive tracer molecule is injected, that way, you can infer where brain activity has taken place by looking at where the signal coming from its radioactive decay is the most active. The tracer molecule will typically be chemically very similar to either glucose (used to provide energy) or some other molecule used in the brain. For example, you might find that the radioactive signal is greater in brain region a than b on a given task, so you'd conclude that it's involved in task performance, but b might not be.\n\nfMRI makes use of the fact that the magnetic properties of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood are different - this means you can distinguish between the two using magnetic resonance imaging, although the signal is quite faint. The maker of activity measured is called the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) response - this is based on the assumption that brain activity will use up oxygen, so areas that were particularly active will change over time in terms of the oxygenation levels of the blood. \n\nThe statistics are pretty complex, but when you see colourful images of both PET and fMRI results, the bright spots where the brain 'lights up' really are just statical maps of your signal, with the signal being the markers of brain activity described above. So in this sense, nothing in your brain literally lights up, but the measured signal shines some light on where and how brain activity might occur under specific conditions "
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2h8w4u | how did extreme sports create the current energy drink "culture"? | I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this. I'm wondering how they become so common place in extreme sports, but not in mainstream sports? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2h8w4u/eli5_how_did_extreme_sports_create_the_current/ | {
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"I'm not sure I understood the question correctly but the way I'm seeing it is that the energy drink companies (mainly Red Bull) have simply targeted the extreme sports market in their advertising. By doing this for a long time the two have sort of grown together.",
"Extreme sports used to be on the sidelines. Energy drink companies, starting with Red Bull, sponsored these guys early on, which they loved since nobody else was throwing money at them for travel, equipment, etc. So, for relatively minimal investment, Red Bull and others became closely identified with their chosen sports. It costs astronomically more to get less prominent exposure in a mainstream sport - Bose just paid well over $50mm / yr just to have NFL coaches wear their headsets.\n\n\n"
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eeff3q | is there truth in eating bread to soak up the alcohol to prevent alcohol poisoning? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eeff3q/eli5_is_there_truth_in_eating_bread_to_soak_up/ | {
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"Not really. More bulk material in your stomach/intestines might be able to slightly slow down the absorption of alcohol from the GI tract into your blood stream resulting in a lower peak concentration, but all the booze you drink needs to be metabolized eventually.",
"Having other things in your stomach will slow down the rate at which your body absorbs the alcohol, but it will still absorbs the same amount. So you may feel less drunk and the alcohol poisoning may take longer to take effect, but it will still happen. And it probably won't make that much difference anyway.\n\nAnd I don't think it matter much whether you eat bread specifically. Just something else the stomach has to also digest.",
"No, it’s not true. If you have alcohol poisoning, they’ll probably pump your stomach or induce vomiting to get as much alcohol out of your body as possible. Any alcohol in the bread you ate would still be in your body and get into your blood eventually \n\nThere’s a related myth that eating bread before you start drinking will soak up the alcohol and keep you from getting drunk as fast. It’s also not true. However, eating a large meal high in protein before drinking will slow down how quickly your stomach can process alcohol. Not a lot, but some. Don’t drink on an empty stomach unless you want to get drunk fast."
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1fslcn | the differences between gas and electric fires | And any other types of fires there are. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1fslcn/eli5_the_differences_between_gas_and_electric/ | {
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"The differences between fires are really based on what the fire is actually burning. A fire in a fireplace or a fire in a car really are the same fire, but the fuel used is different.\n\nA fire needs three things to occur:\n\n- Oxygen\n\n- Fuel\n\n- Source of Ignition\n\nTake any one of these out, and the fire goes away. This is how fire extinguishers work, depending on the type. Some, like CO2, remove oxygen from the area which extinguishes the flame. Water, on the other hand, affects the fuel and heat - wet stuff doesn't burn as easily, and cold water cools the fuel to below it's burning temperature.\n\nIn a 'gas fire', the primary source of fuel, at least in the beginning is gasoline (i assume you meant gasoline), but once that starts to burn, anything surrounding it heats up and can potentially become fuel as well. This is similar to how lighter fluid is used on charcoal. The lighter fluid catches fire easily and while it's burning, heats the charcoal enough to be able to itself catch fire. The flame of the lighter fluid is also the source of ignition for the charcoal.\n\nIn an 'electrical fire', the electrical component is only used to create a source of heat and/or ignition. Electricity itself doesn't burn, but often the insulation on wires (usually a type of plastic) can burn. So in this case, the source of ignition is the spark or heat generated by a constant electrical arc, and the fuel is the wire insulation or anything near the wire heated up by the electricity. Since wires in a house are usually inside walls, the fire from the burning insulation heats up anything inside the wall - wood, drywall, insulation, dust, etc) which can then burn, causing a chain reaction.\n\nOil fires, such as in kitchens, use the oil itself as the fuel. Once the oil reaches a certain temperature (the 'flash point'), the vapors from the heated oil can react with oxygen and ignite, being both the fuel and source of ignition. Even before it reaches that flash point, you could throw a match in the vapors, assuming the oil is hot enough (its 'smoke point') and the oil would catch fire. That type of fire should never be put out with water, EVER. Oil and Water don't mix. If you throw water on an oil fire, you're going to have a bad time (Mythbusters did a great episode on this, and there's likely bunches of youtube videos out there if you're curious)."
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2bm2rp | Did Hitler continue making art after he rose to power? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bm2rp/did_hitler_continue_making_art_after_he_rose_to/ | {
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"**MOD NOTE**: Please stick to the topic at hand, which is \"Did Hitler continue making art after he rose to power?\" If you have comprehensive and informative knowledge about Hitler's artistic endeavors, please do share them. A score of people giving their one line reviews of Hitler's painting abilities is neither helpful nor the topic at hand. Such comments should be directed at /r/NaziArtReviews.",
"All of the paintings by Adolf Hitler that are *known* to be by him seem to end in 1917. Though it is believed that Hitler made hundreds of paintings, we simply are not aware of which are his and which are not. The United State's government has many of his original paintings in storage somewhere, but does not allow them to be displayed.\nWe do know that he personally deigned many German buildings and bunkers during his time in power, and [this site](_URL_1_) features many of his known sketches and drawings.\n\nThough not exactly a piece of art, [this sketch](_URL_2_) by Adolf Hitler in 1932 is what lead to the creation of the VW Beetle. \n\n**Sources:** \n\n- [Marc Fisher, \"The Art of Evil; Half a century later, the paintings of Adolf Hitler are still a federal case\", The Washington Post, Apr. 21, 2002, p. W.26](_URL_0_)\n\n- [Jonathan Wood (2003). The Volkswagen Beetle. Osprey Publishing. pp. 3–5.](\n_URL_3_)\n\n*edited for adding links.*",
"Although he simply didn't have time to paint like he did in Vienna when he tried to live off of sales of his paintings and postcards, I would argue that he did continue to \"create\" art, but in a more indirect role. I don't think it's a stretch to call him an art director.\n\nHitler spent 1908–1913 painting as a profession in Vienna. He had already been rejected as a painter. So, by that time, I don't think Hitler wanted to become a great artist with his paintings hanging in the halls of museums. I think he wanted to build the museums themselves. It seems to me that painting served merely as a means to an end, which was to study the architecture around him.\n\nFrom Mein Kampf Vol. 1, Ch. 2:\n\n > ...my talent for painting seemed to be excelled by my talent for drawing, especially in almost all fields of architecture. At the same time my interest in architecture as such increased steadily, and this development was accelerated after a two weeks' trip to Vienna which I took when not yet sixteen. The purpose of my trip was to study the picture gallery in the Court Museum, but I had eyes for scarcely anything but the Museum itself. From morning until late at night, I ran from one object of interest to another, but it was always the buildings which held my primary interest. For hours I could stand in front of the Opera, for hours I could gaze at the Parliament; the whole Ring Boulevard seemed to me like an enchantment out of -The Thousand-and-One-Nights.\n\n > Now I was in the fair city for the second time, waiting with burning impatience, but also with confident self-assurance, for the result of my entrance examination. I was so convinced that I would be successful that when I received my rejection, it struck me as a bolt from the blue. Yet that is what happened. When I presented myself to the rector, requesting an explanation for my non-acceptance at the Academy's school of painting, that gentleman assured me that the drawings I had submitted incontrovertibly showed my unfitness for painting, and that my ability obviously lay in the field of architecture; for me, he said, the Academy's school of painting was out of the question, the place for me was the School of Architecture. It was incomprehensible to him that I had never attended an architectural school or received any other training in architecture. Downcast, I left von Hansen's magnificent building on the Schillerplatz, for the first time in my young life at odds with myself...\n\n > In a few days I myself knew that I should some day become an architect.\n\n > When after the death of my mother I went to Vienna for the third time, to remain for many years... I wanted to become an architect, and obstacles do not exist to be surrendered to, but only to be broken...\n\nAlbert Speer attributed his own rise in power due to Hitler's love of architecture and the talks they shared about their mutual passion. Speer gave Hitler daily briefings about renovations and construction projects when Hitler was Chancellor. Hitler told him his architectural dreams for Germany, and they shared common stylistic visions with a Neoclassical foundation. So Speer was tapped to become the lead architect for Germany's massive construction and rebuilding projects. For some early projects, Hitler consulted on, and even drew sketches.\n\nMost later projects were completed without personal oversight by Hitler, once he had three trusted architects. But he did continue to contribute ideas, visions, and sketches for select projects, such as directing Giesler on what he wanted his mausoleum to look/feel like, and giving Speer ideas and sketches for the (uncompleted) Volkshalle (these sketches were from the 1920's).\n\nSo, I'd say that Hitler did continue making art. He just did it by submitting sketches and setting policy in a general supervisory role, as a sort of visionary / art director.",
"Although he is known for his paintings (besides, you know, World War II), Hitler had a passion for architecture.\nHe even once said that \"If Germany had not lost [World War I], [He] would have not got involved in politics and would have been a great architect, some kind of Michelangelo\"\n\nAccording to Albert Speer (architect and friend of Hitler's), architecture was his favorite passion.\nHe even modified the final plans for the operas of Cologne and Linz.\n\nSeveral times, some of the works given to Speer were done from drafts made by Hitler.\n\n**Sources:**\n\n*[Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich](_URL_1_)\n\n*[Guyot & Restellini, L'art Nazi (in French)](_URL_0_)\n\nEdit: typos\n"
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1jdgw4 | how does communication with satellites, astronauts, rovers and space probes like discovery or voyager work? what type of tx/rx signal is used? | My understanding was that for radio waves (radio communication) to propagate you need an atmosphere. I also understand that, for satellites to communicate with earth, they need a direct line of sight with no solid obstructions (dense trees, in a tunnel, inside a building, etc).
I imagine that communication with astronauts, rovers and space probes must be similar or the same as with satellites, and therefore a direct line of sight is also required, is this true?
If not radio waves, what forms of communication are typically used to maintain communication in these cases? Why is a direct line of sight required? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jdgw4/how_does_communication_with_satellites_astronauts/ | {
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" > for radio waves (radio communication) to propagate you need an atmosphere\n\nNope, electromagnetic waves actually travel best in a vacuum. Adding particles in the way only causes interference. Are you thinking of sound waves?\n\n",
"A direct line of sight is most efficient, but not required. Radio waves can pass through matter, but (for certain types of radio waves) matter reduces the detectable power. Radio waves pass best through vacuum. Radio tends to act like most matter is a fog; slows it down but takes a lot to stop it. "
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fwmmwz | why are there so many different types of glue? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fwmmwz/eli5_why_are_there_so_many_different_types_of_glue/ | {
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"There are a lot of different types of surfaces you might want to bond together, and a lot of different conditions you may want that bond to survive.\n\nThe kind of glue you'll want to hold your posterboard project together is a lot different than the kind of glue you're using to seal windows on the space station.",
"There is [a whole website](_URL_0_) dedicated to recommending what kind of glue is the best application for what you're trying to stick to what.\n\nEach one has different properties that make it adhere better to some surfaces, less well to others, and some may be corrosive to certain materials (ex: super glue tends to partially dissolve/melt some plastics, which can make it super useful and a strong bond if you stick them together, but can mar fine detail work, so it's best used in places that won't be noticed); some glues may leave stains in fabrics and should be avoided when working with textiles, some glues may cause warping in certain materials, some glues contain water which is not necessarily great when you're working with paper, many glues give off noxious fumes when used and shouldn't be used for indoor crafts projects, etc."
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2x6uca | if i secretly burned $1,000,000,000, what would be the effect on the us economy? world economy. would this same effect be the same if i lost change in my couch? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2x6uca/eli5_if_i_secretly_burned_1000000000_what_would/ | {
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"If it is your money, nothing happens. You could also put the money on an account and never spend a cent of it.",
"If you're the Pentagon you can be missing trillions and it won't affect anyone\n\n_URL_0_",
"The effect of burning 1 billion dollars would actually have a relatively small impact on the US economy and an even smaller one on the World economy. The effect of course would be some amount of deflation (an increase in the relative value of the currency). Take for instance the inflationary effect of printing 1 billion dollars (which the US does quite frequently in the form of selling treasury debt to the federal reserve). For years following the financial crisis in 2008, the Federal Reserve injected billions of dollars a month into the economy and the effect was barely enough to combat the deflation in the US dollar that was occurring from other sources. Furthermore the Federal Reserve measures the level of inflation and deflation in the economy and adjusts their monetary policy accordingly. Provided the amount of money that you burned was large enough to be measured by the Fed, they would adjust for it by either lowering the reserve ratio or purchasing additional treasury debt.\n \ntl;dr: A very very small amount of deflation which would be virtually unnoticeable to the economy as a whole."
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3cjh6w | what is about aids that actually kills you? | Is it that the AIDS attacks your body until you are unable to function or that it leaves your body in such a weakened state that even the common cold could kill? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cjh6w/eli5what_is_about_aids_that_actually_kills_you/ | {
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"Yes. It essentially attacks your immune system until you are literally incapable of handling any sickness at all. It's not aids that kills you, it's everything after aids that kills you.",
"From what I understand which isn't much mind you. It weakens your immune system to the point that your body can't fight off diseases. Most people don't die from AIDS even though that is the main reason for their failing health. It is usually brought on by say something like pneumonia that your body just doesn't have the strength to fight off. I hope this helps. ",
"You are right, the AIDS virus attack CD4 cells in your body, which are the white blood cells that defend you against bacteria and other viruses. With lower CD4 cells you are more likely to get sick and unable to overcome things such as the common cold as you state.",
"Basically it breaks down your immune system and eventually something simple like a cold or very mild pneumonia kills you as you just have no way of fighting it. So you don't technically die of AIDS but you die of AIDS induced 'insert illness here'",
"HIV uses your body's CD4 helper T cells to replicate. Each newly replicated HIV particle pinches at the cell's membrane as it buds out of the cell before the cell eventually loses enough membrane, shrivels up, and dies. A normal CD4 cell count in an average person can be anywhere from 900-1200 (per ml of blood iirc). As the HIV progresses, it can mutate over millions of times per day. this battle between your CD4+ helper T cells and HIV can go on undetected for over 10 years. Within those ten years you may see a gradual decrease of CD4 cell concentration. AIDS is defined by two things: a CD4 cell count below 200, or the presence of one of the many opportunistic infections (e.g. Karposis sarcoma). After somebody is officially diagnosed with AIDS, they generally have around 2-3 years before they die from the opportunistic infections. Remember that AIDS is not a virus, it is a syndrome as a result of HIV. ",
"HIV impairs your immune system leaving you vulnerable to opportunistic diseases. I watched Kaposi's sarcoma eat a childhood friend back in the late 70's. Fucking horrible.",
"Good answers. The HIV virus kills your helper T cells, which are an important part of your immune system. There's a host of diseases that crop up in AIDS patients that we almost never see in other people because our immune system usually handles them so easily.\n\nThe classic example is Kaposi's sarcoma, which is a cancer caused by a virus. Specifically Human Herpesvirus-8 (HHV-8). This is so rare in people with functional immune systems that having Kaposi's sarcoma - all by itself - is considered diagnostic of AIDS. That is, if you show up to the doctor with it, he will immediately conclude that you have AIDS and begin treatment.",
"It doesn't leave \"your body\" in a weakened state, it kills an important type of immune system cell.\n\nIf you had HIV but could avoid 100% of infections it wouldn't be an issue, but it's impossible to live your life safe from common viruses, fungal spores, bacteria, etc.",
"AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) kills immune cells, especially T-Helper (CD4) cells. These cells are responsible for the mobilization of the immune system, they recognize bacteria and viruses and target them for destruction.\n\nWhen HIV infects T-helper cells, they die. With the CD4 count drops below a threshold, the immune system can't keep up and bacteria that are otherwise harmless become dangerous. Serious infections such as tuberculosis become a major problem, and bacteria that normally live on our skin, such as Staphylococcus Aureus (known for MRSA) cause infections.\n\nHowever, even if you lived in a bubble away from bacteria and viruses, if your CD4 count was low enough to have AIDS then you would have lots of other problems. T-helper cells also mark cancerous cells for death. Cancers such as Karposi's Sarcoma are basically diagnostic for aids.\n\nFurthermore, eventually the HIV infection reaches the brain, causing HIV related dementia. While this isn't deadly it causes a major loss of quality of life.\n\ntl:dr: Other infections will probably kill a person with AIDS, but if they don't, then the person is likely to die of cancer or end up with dementia.",
"AIDS is not the \"thing\" that attacks your body, HIV is the \"thing\" - a virus. \n\nThis HIV virus attacks your body's immune system, leaving you systemically prone to all sorts of illnesses that others can naturally defend against. This syndrome - of being systemically prone to illness - is what we call AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). \n\nI think it is very important to understand every word in the AIDS acronym, as the acronym is pretty good ELI5 in and of itself. \n\nSo, the HIV virus causes a deficient immune system. All sorts of other complications are what actually kill you, as your immune system is deficient.",
"Supposedly Magic Johnson has a rare mutation that does not permit the HIV from completing a total infection of his body, this limiting him only to a carrier.",
"Think of your body as a fortress. Your immune system is the security staff that guards the fortress. AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) is the result of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) taking out your security team like a spy in a movie. \n\nExcept, the spy in a movie just wants to get in. HIV would be a bloodthirsty psychopath spy that seeks out every member of the security team and takes them out. They don't care about the fortress, they just want to kill your security team. \n\nEverything else that wanted in the fortress (your body) now has free reign, with your security team dead. This is what kills you.",
"Top answer is good. AIDS allows other things to kill you.\n\nIt's worth clearing the terminology up though.\n\n**HIV = Human Immunodeficiency Virus** An actual pathogen (biological agent which causes a disease) that infects the body through contact with fluids etc that contain the virus. The viruses enter your body and multiply. If you have \"got HIV\" it means the HIV virus is in your body.\n\nIf HIV is detected in a person, they are given antiretroviral drugs to stop the multiplication of the virus so that the symptoms of infection (damaged immune system) are slowed right down.\n\nAfter the virus has multiplied a lot and the symptoms start showing, it is described as... \n\n**AIDS - Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome** You have **acquired** (through being infected by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus) a **syndrome** (a set of medical signs and symptoms that are correlated with each other and may indicate the presence of a disease) which has made your **immune system deficient**.\n\nAIDS *describes* the state of having a severely compromised immune system as a result of something that has happened to you (such as infection with HIV.)\n\nThe meanings of these acronyms are important when you consider questions like \"why has person A got **HIV** but not **AIDS**?\" what do people mean when they say \"full blown AIDS?\" (they mean that your HIV infection has progressed to the point that you exhibit the symptoms of the syndrome.)\n\nThe most accurate way to describe somebody who is unwell because of all this is that they have, or are suffering from, \"HIVAIDS\" (pronounced H.I.V. aids)",
"HIV attacks your immune system until you get aids. Aids is \"auto immuno deficiency syndrome.\" It's a syndrome. Aids is just the name for when HIV reaches its final stages.\n\nPeople don't die from aids, its just the name for the syndrome they're facing due to hiv. People don't die from hiv either, its a virus that weakens peoples immune system so that rare diseases are able to take hold of them and kill them",
"People are still dying of AIDS but its just a few thousand a year now--1995 was the worst year, 50,000 died in that year alone in the USA",
"It basically strips you of your shields and armor and leaves you open for attack by any kind of harmful bacteria.",
"There are people who are naturally immune to the HIV virus as they have no receptors on their \"T\" cells. Many of Irish Decent have this trait, but this is not an excuse for Gingers to go out and start buggering each other... It is still not worth the risk",
"My dissertation centered around HIV mutations but to really understand what happens here.\n\nImagine your a dodgy guy with a windows PC. Getting HIV is like turning off your antivirus/antimalware. Now imagine what happens to that PC overtime as you keep going to all your dodgy porn sites.\n\nWithout your immune system (antivirus) eventually all the other things out there combine to brick your performance. ",
"Nothing. Aids doesn't kill you, but what it does to your immune system is the catalyst to everything else killing you. You are left defenseless, all those things that are trying to grow inside you, use you as food, have free reign. ",
"In the early days of AIDS most gay men died of Kaposi's sarcoma and initially AIDS was called gay cancer because this was the \"symptom\" the medical field could identify. Pneumocystis pneumonia was another frequent killer. \n\nBacteria that we all carry and is normally kept in check by our immune system can go wild if unchecked by a weakened immune system. While the current cocktails keep HIV in check those who are on these drugs for long periods of time develop other problems.\n",
"AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.\n\n\"Immune Deficiency\" is the main point. It means that your immune system stops working properly. This happens because HIV attacks it and severely weakens it and wipes it out. \n\n\"Syndrome\" means AIDS itself is not a disease, it is a bunch of stuff that happens to people after their immune systems have been weakened and destroyed by HIV (human immuno-deficiency virus). \n\nPeople who die of \"AIDS\" typically in fact die of some other disease, like pneumonia, which would not kill a healthly person. AIDS victims die from these sorts of ordinarily non-fatal diseases because their immune systems have been so badly damaged.",
"Remember in Star Trek when the Enterprise was under attack (PEW PEW) but they were ok because of their deflector shields? Well, AIDS lowers your body's deflector shield (immune system) and lets bad things (like, germs or a fungus) come in and kill you. ",
"Think of it this way. You are being invaded by a army made up of one man. Generally it would be easy to stop with hundreds of soldiers but a plague sickened your nation and killed all of your soliders. \n\nYour body basically has nothing left to defend itself from disease. ",
"3rd year MD student working in a city with a fucking ridiculously high number of non compliant to medication AIDS patients.\n\nThe same way a virus may specifically go after the cells in the back of your throat and give you a sore throat or a virus may be attracted to the cells in your lungs and give you pneumonia, the HIV/AIDS virus targets cells of your immune system, gets inside of them, replicates, and kills them. The metric we use to monitor \"how someone is doing\" with their health after infection is a measurement of their CD4+ T lymphocytes/helper T cells/CD4 cells. These are the specific cells that get infected. As the virus gets out of control, it kills more and more of these cells such that they are no longer able to coordinate the rest of your immune system to deal with normal, common infections that everybody and their mother has, but is too healthy to need to worry about. \n\nThe result is that HIV/AIDS patients become immunosuppressed, in that their immune system can no longer deal with shit that wouldn't bother you or me. When the CD4+ count gets low enough you become susceptible to specific bugs we call \"opportunistic infection\", called this because they take the opportunity to attack you when you are vulnerable/immunosuppressed. Some of these are annoying things like [candida albicans aka \"thrush\"](_URL_2_), other things that you become susceptible to are a bit more nasty, like tuburculosis. You also become likely to develop certain kinds of cancer like [kaposi's sarcoma](_URL_0_) which was extremely common back in the 80s and 90s; one of my current patients has something called [plasmablastic lymphoma](_URL_1_), that photo is pussy shit compared to what he came in with, massive lesions everywhere on his body compressing nerves and making him unable to use one of his legs, open his mouth or eye, one of which is on his back and is at least 7x4x2.5 inches large (we're giving him chemotherapy now and they're just melting away before our eyes). HIV patients disproportionately present with Hepatitis C, which can kill you on its own by destroying your liver and sending all sorts of toxins through your body. Other fungi and viruses and bacteria and crap can attack essentially anything in your body, especially your brain. \n\nWhen you become suppressed a lot of the infections can set up shop in your brain and cause encephalitis (inflammation of your brain), meningitis (inflammation of your spinal cord), or meningoencephalitis (inflammation of both). These can cause mental status changes, brain tissue destruction, screw with important regulatory functions in your brain (ex. if the part of your brain stem gets infected that deals with respiration, you may just stop being able to breath).\n\nThe thing to also keep in mind though, is that while these opportunistic infections are often what kills people, the virus itself can ruin your shit as well. The HIV/AIDS virus can cause fever, it can cause brain infections all by itself, it suppresses appetite and jacks up your metabolism so you lose a shit ton of weight and become malnourished, it causes muscle break down (one of the reasons that in the male gay community it is so glorified to be in increadible physical shape is because in the 80s/90s, before there was effective antiviral therapy, doctors would give patients anabolic steroids to build muscle mass, essentially saying that the virus was going to waste away their bodies, so give yourself a buffer zone and get jacked now, so people were working out literally to \"save\" their lives). \n\nSo, yes, even the common cold can kill you (immunosuppressed patients have to be careful of which vaccines they take because some vaccines have samples of the disease they help to prevent, kinda a little \"alive\" in them, though super weakened, normally your body sees that, learns what it is, kills it, and can kill it in the future, making you immune. Immunosuppressed patients might not be able to handle that tiny tiny little vaccine opponent though, and thus the vaccines can be a threat to them if they get the wrong type) and so seasonal flu is a big concern for AIDS patients. That being said, even just the HIV virus alone can kill you, although usually something else gets you first.\n\nTherapy for HIV/AIDS is called HAART, Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy and is aimed at preventing the virus from successfully replicating in those CD4+ cells and killing them in the process. The drugs we have now are incredible at controlling the infection. I read somewhere that in ideal situations HIV patients can live just about as long as non infected individuals, I'm remember 5 years less, but I'm not 110% sure about that. The medications have side effects, for sure, but if you take them you can live a pretty normal life, even to the point where the virus isn't identifiable in your system anymore and you legally wouldn't even need to disclose to a sexual partner that you have it, because your risk of transmitting the infection to someone new is so profoundly low."
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2i2ad6 | if sex with someone under 18 is a punishable crime, why do most states have an age of consent under 18 and how do they affect one another? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2i2ad6/eli5_if_sex_with_someone_under_18_is_a_punishable/ | {
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"Sex with someone under 18 isn't always illegal.\n\nSome states have age of consent laws that are pretty weird.\n\nNew Jersey for example, you can have sex with someone under the age of 18 if you are within 4 years (to the birth date) of age to each other. So a 20 and a 17 year old, no problem. A 18 and a 14 year old, and you need to check your birthdays.\n\nIn Georgia, a person over 18 can have sex with anyone over 16, anyone under 16 can only only have sex with those under 18, between 16 and 18 you can consent to sex with anyone.",
"Your question doesn't really make sense because this is not a universally accepted ethic. You might as well ask \"if drinking alcohol under 21 is illegal in some states or countries, how come it is legal in others?\". It's up to individual states and countries to set their own age limits for various activities, and not all of them agree on what is the appropriate age."
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574lcu | why does lighting have such a massive affect on how we see ourselves in the mirror/in a picture? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/574lcu/eli5_why_does_lighting_have_such_a_massive_affect/ | {
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"Because the only thing you can actually see is light. \n\nEverything you see comes as the result of how light reflects off other objects, so changing the nature of those reflections changes what you are seeing, too. ",
"Different types of lightbulbs give off a different band of colour. The old incandescent bulbs gave off a lot of infra-red light, by way of example. \n\nSince different colours on your body reflect different colours of light, the light reflected is the light that you see. And if the light that is given off is restricted, the reflection that you see is going to be equally restricted. \n\nThis is the reason why so many different forms of media and advertising have very specialised lighting - so that they can manipulate how the object in question is actually viewed by other people, and captured on camera. \n\nAnd if you are wondering, the light from standard LED bulbs is the closest type of lightbulb to natural sunlight"
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1a49av | state of the middle east: why have the taliban been able to operate so easily? who do they receive their resources from? why is the government so corrupt? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1a49av/eli5_state_of_the_middle_east_why_have_the/ | {
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"the Taliban are in Afghanistan and Pakistan, neither of which are in the Middle East. Those are both Asian countries. "
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1y6al8 | How did the ancient Ice Age glaciers get so gigantic? | I saw some pictures of frozen ice waves on Lake Huron and the brief explanation got me thinking...is this how the great glaciers were formed, albeit on a much larger scale?
[Pictures of ice waves are here](_URL_0_) | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1y6al8/how_did_the_ancient_ice_age_glaciers_get_so/ | {
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"Essentially what happened was that we have cycles of insolation (radiation from the sun) minimums that correspond to orbital eccentricity (i.e., circular or elliptical orbit) and changes in the tilt of the earth's axis.\n\nWhen the earth is tilted so that the Northern hemisphere is closer to the sun, and the orbital eccentricity makes it so that the earth is slightly closer to the sun, this is an isolation maximum and results in the northern land masses receiving more energy from the sun.\n\nIn times when the N.A. landmass is receiving an insolation minimum ice can grow. Eventually ice will build up and the glacier will 'surge', carrying soil and debris with it. The ablation (melting) of the glacier causes the soil to become more fluid and lets the glacier move into lower latitudes, which receive relatively more energy from the sun. \n\nEventually these glacial and non glacial periods resulted in just bare rock being exposed in the northern hemisphere. This allowed the glaciers to anchor themselves and grow upwards instead of surging south. Eventually they got so large that ice was able to survive all but the strongest insolation maxima. "
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7nl3en | In Everett's multiple worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, do the other worlds already exist prior to splitting, or do they come into existence after? | Wish I could get more information on this theory, but most of what comes up when I google it is critiques and the bio-doc with his son. | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/7nl3en/in_everetts_multiple_worlds_interpretation_of/ | {
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"Essentially they come into existence as a result of the splitting.\n\nHere's a rough overview of the interpretation, as maths-light as possible, feel free to ask more questions:\n\nIn quantum mechanics, the state of a system is described by a wavefunction. There are a certain set of wavefunctions which describe a special set of states that can be observed; these are called eigenfunctions. All other states are represented by adding up the eigenfunctions in different combinations. A state that isn't an eigenfunction is a superposition state. Remember that a superposition state is made up as the sum of different observable states (eigenfunctions).\n\nNow, when a system in a superposition state interacts with a much bigger system, the state of the system undergoes a process called 'decoherence'. This means that the single wavefunction splits up into multiple wavefunctions -- one for each eigenfunction making up the superposition. This means the system is now described by many different states all at the same time.\n\nThat's all purely mathematical from the theory, nothing controversial yet. Now is the interpretation part: MWI says that that's it. The system is now described by many different states, and each state is an equally valid version of reality; each one is a different world. The alternative interpretation is that one of the possible states is somehow 'selected' at random by the universe, in an unknown undescribed process called collapse.\n\nNeither one has been shown to be true (though there are hypothetical experiments that can be run), but MWI is the most direct (Occam's Razor) interpretation of the mathematics as we know it right now."
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13rzb8 | Did the japanese rationalize the invasion of china in the second sino japanese war to their own people? How did they motivate their soldiers to be so ferocious? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13rzb8/did_the_japanese_rationalize_the_invasion_of/ | {
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"Posting from a mobile phone, so here is a quick answer.\n\nFor years before the full scale war started, japan had international treaties with china. They had the right to station troops in china to protect japanese merchants, whom enjoyed special legal status in china. The treaties were based on treaties that other great powers had made china sign. \n\nWhen war broke out, Japan claimed its troops, who were legally allowed in china, had been attacked by chinese. So Japanese people were told it was a war of self defense.\n \n\nThere was a culture within the military that let atrocities happen. Physical beatings were common punishment in the imperial japanese military. Soldiers were not taught anything about ethical treatment of prisoners. facing regular guerrilla attacks, they treated every single chinese as an enemy. And officers rarely punished soldiers who brutalized civilians. It was a situation that allowed soldiers to engage in extreme acts of violence against helpless prisoners and civilians.\n",
"The term \"bushido\" is one that was created to appear like an ancient term, as if the samurai class was filled with thousands of brave, young soldiers dedicated to rooting out injustice and saving the emperor. Note, I said created--the term did not appear until AFTER the Restoration (and if memory serves me correctly, it appeared in the late 1890s). The Japanese were spending roughly 70-90% of their money on industry and the military: it was seen as the most important way to tear down the injustices that faced Asia. \n\nRemember that Japan wanted to create a Pan-Asian empire (see Japanese imperialism) but did not see their actions as being akin to that of the Dutch, Germans, Americans and so on. No, they were a different breed, a different nation. So when the Chinese turned them away when they allowed them to begin to re practice popular religion (Chiang was trying to get rid of the temples in order to encourage education ie take the temples for schools) and SURRENDERED then something must be wrong. Why would the Chinese, fellow Asians, not support the Japanese? Why would they fight in brutal ways ie Chiang destroying dams causing thousands of natives to die? \n\nLastly, because they could. I know its an odd argument but it one that is so obvious that it is overlooked. The Japanese government did not train their soldiers to behave in any way, did not punish those that acted like sociopaths, and they pumped up each soldiers ego with comfort women, the idea they were of an ancient tradition given to them from the Emperor! \n\nMy last point will be directed at your first question: the Japanese wanted to get rid of WESTERN imperialism in Asia by establishing their own empire. Remember, there was the popular idea of the most favored nation status aka if you lost a war to the British then other favored nations would also be elevated with the British. Japan did not want to appear like the \"Sickman of Asia\" like China was. To be honest, the \"attack\" that kicked off the war was a long time coming. The Japanese spent a long period of time trying to goad the Chinese into firing at them, they attempted to kidnap people, they shot or harassed people, and did everything in their power to start a war that Chiang did not want. "
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14mi17 | In what period of time did humans (or their ancestors) jump to the top of the food chain? | In terms of evolutionary growth, there was clearly a point in which we weren't at the top of the food chain. Perhaps when we more closely resembled apes than humans. At what period did we unanimously reach the top?
Sorry if I'm wording this poorly. It just came to my mind while I was eating a can of tuna. | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/14mi17/in_what_period_of_time_did_humans_or_their/ | {
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"I'd say after the end of the Younger Dryas (c. 10,000 years ago) when we started developing agriculture, i.e as soon as we started domesticating cereal crops and livestock. Moulding our environment to our needs.\n\nSo actually, way later than many people would think. In the aeons of pre-farming prehistory humans were far from the apex predator.\n\nEDIT: for reference, I'm an archaeologist."
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2n1qcc | What is actually happening when soap "lathers", and why is water so crucial for a good lather? | Also, why do some soaps lather more easily, with less water, than others?
I was just in the shower, and my body wash wasn't lathering as much as I wanted it to on my loofah. So I stuck it under the water for a second, and then of course it did a much better job of lathering.
And I started wondering why some soaps need more water than others to lather well, why (liquid) soaps need water to lather at all, and what lathering actually *is*.
The only example I could think of, for a soap that doesn't need water added to lather well, is chlorhexidine. (I'm a veterinary technician, and we use chlorhex as a surgical scrub. Not sure what is commonly used in human medicine). Anyway, you can lather up a gauze sponge with chlorhexidine scrub really well, without adding any water at all.
Why is this?
Edit: I know this is really stupid, but hopefully I categorized this acceptably. I was (am) trying to decide if it belongs in Physics or Chemistry... | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2n1qcc/what_is_actually_happening_when_soap_lathers_and/ | {
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"As the other user posted. Lather is just a gimmick. Studies have been done with market groups to determine how individuals FEEL about lather and what is the right amount. Chemists are constantly manipulating contents of conditioners, soaps and shampoos depending on their target market's feelings about the physical nature of products. "
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4xcg3h | in history we always learn about the jewish extermination in the holocaust, how come nobody ever talks about the other millions who perished? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4xcg3h/eli5_in_history_we_always_learn_about_the_jewish/ | {
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"People do [talk about them](_URL_0_) and there's a lot of other sites dedicated to them. The Jewish persecution was simply a core element of the Nazi rise to power and their central ideology, and it was the biggest of the extermination targets, so it gets the most attention.\n\nIt looks like the next biggest in the victim count are [Soviet POWs](_URL_1_), followed by ethnic Poles.\n\nAs an aside, I think Jews also count as 'regular people' :P",
"People are *constantly* talking about all the non-Jews that were killed in the Holocaust. More attention is paid to the Jews because they were the primary target of the Nazi's propaganda & they account for roughly half of the victims.",
"Turkey officially deny that the [Armenian Genocide] (_URL_0_) ever happened, but they are an important NATO ally in the region. So some countries including the USA are cautious when talking about it, for diplomatic reasons, but this is changing. Israel's Knesset recently gave it formal recognition. The state of California is expanding its school curriculum to include more about this and other genocides, including Native Americans. However, President Obama recently [passed] (_URL_1_) on an opportunity to use the G word, presumably after pressure from the State Department. ",
"Since nobody said it so far, the Holocaust itself refers only to the killings of the Jews. \n\nIn Germany we learn about all the other victims like gays, christians, political opposition, disabled and Roma, but the word Holocaust is normally used for the Jews.",
"Jews aren't regular people?\n\nSpeaking as a Jew, I certainly heard about the Holocaust as something that happened to Jews as a child, but when we studied it the queers, Roma, and political prisoners were also included in the discussion. ",
"I believe that we talk about the holocaust more because the jews are more influential in the united states. Think about all the jewish holidays we have that let the children off school. Compared to Lunar new year (Chinese new year), where NYC just started to recognize as a holiday for asians. Think about all the things we do for the jewish community in united states to accommodate them, like the day where they cannot touch electronical things with a finger or w/e. The biggest hospital mount sinai hospital in new york has the elevators to run every floor for them automatically all day. There are obviously more people killed in different situations like the atomic bombs we dropped on japan. We never really explore into what happened to japan afterwards, only that we dropped two bombs and that japan attacked pearl harbour that \"instigated\" that.",
"In rural Tennessee circa 1977 public school I was taught about the 6 million Jews exterminated during WWII. It wasn't until many years later when I heard a radio talk show talking about politically correct history books calling the black victims African Americans that I even knew there were non-Jewish victims.",
"Several reasons including textbooks that overlook these facts so children don't learn it in school, human bias that empathizes more with some ethnic groups than others, and hollywood. Look at how many movies there are about the Jewish perspective on the holocaust and then look at how many movies there are about the gypsy perspective for instance. \n\nThere are actual laws in Europe now to prevent hate speech against Jewish people yet Gypsies are still treated like street trash. There are many places in Europe even today where Gypsy ghettos are walled off by city officials to separate them from the rest of the city. \n\nSince it's not the celebrity cause of the moment, people don't know and people don't care. \n\n\nFinally there is something like a public consciousness. Think of it as common sense, all those little things we pick up from each other that collectively everybody knows. Everybody knows Nazi's were bad. Everybody knows about the holocaust. But other than the occasional insightful question on ELI5, or talking to somebody who was affected by the holocaust as a non Jewish person, how would you know? \n\n\nIf you want to see an example of unintentional bias, look at the USA, Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and all of the countries of the new world. Do you associate them with Nazi's? What about genocide? Probably not. Yet massive genocide was committed in the new world against native peoples and they were also enslaved. But if you think about slavery do you think about Indians being given the choice of converting to Catholicism or being enslaved? Or do you think about Africans in Georgia? \n\nIt's the same reason that when you hear genocide you think about WW2 or Bosnia, but not about Cuba, or California or Ontario. \n"
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rtpyx | how most animals get older even though cells "reproduce"? | To be honest, I am not that far through education and I will probably learn it in a year or something, but I am really wondering why it is that we get wrinkles, weaker, grey hair etc. even though cells "change" themselves. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/rtpyx/eli5_how_most_animals_get_older_even_though_cells/ | {
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"We get old because we are programmed to. From an evolutionary perspective, a species can only adapt to its environment over time if the old generation dies and makes way for the new generation after reproducing.\n\nA species in which the older generation never aged and died wouldn't be able to evolve; the environment would reach its carrying capacity relatively quickly and there wouldn't be any room for new individuals.",
"[Strands of DNA molecules called DNA](_URL_0_)\n\nTL;DR version: The telomeres are like the cannon fodder in a time of war. They are the ones that get killed and killed so that the Lieutenants and Majors and Colonels don't have to get killed. As the cannon fodder gets killed and killed more, there are less and less of them. Once they all go out, then only higher-ups are left. This is the part where the higher-ups lose.\n\nScience version: The telomeres are repetitions of the same code of DNA at the end of our entire genetic mapping. Whenever cells reproduce, evolutionary constraints force the tip of our DNA to be lost. The telomeres, whose DNA is expendable, takes the full force of this. So, as the telomeres shorten, we can't reproduce as fast, and when they are finished, we start the dying process, which is headed by the aging process.\n\nHope this isn't too much.",
"A teacher back in high school explained it beautifully. She said, you know how when you make a copy of a document or picture using a copy machine, it looks fine, but then, when you go to make a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of the original, over time, it just starts to looks awful and you can barely make out what it even is? That's kind of like the aging process in cells."
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1tuyse | Were there any nationalities other than British on the Mayflower? | So, I was thinking, were there any countrymen other than British countrymen on the Mayflower? Also, I'm talking about the whole ship. Passengers, Crew and Captain. | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1tuyse/were_there_any_nationalities_other_than_british/ | {
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"I just made a quick scan of Nathaniel Philbrick's \"Mayflower\" and couldn't find any passengers who weren't English. Several of the children had been born in Leiden, Holland, while the Pilgrims were living there.\n\nOf the crew of the *Mayflower* whose names are recorded, all are English."
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2sgnmc | is the sperm that creates offspring the most dominant or does it rely more on chance? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2sgnmc/eli5_is_the_sperm_that_creates_offspring_the_most/ | {
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"Dominant isn't necessarily a useful concept here.\n\nThe sperm that fertilizes the egg is generally longer and slower than average. Arriving sperm fight the already present sperm, so the slower sperm arrives later and does less fighting, and is longer so it's more successful. \n\nHowever, other long sperm can arrive later and miss fertilization, or arrive earlier but be overcome by other combative sperm. So it's probably best to say it's largely left to chance."
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jg32w | how does facebook gets income if they offer their website and all of its contents for free? | I suck at economics | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jg32w/eli5_how_does_facebook_gets_income_if_they_offer/ | {
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"They have advertisements. ",
"Facebook users aren't their customers; the users are the product. Facebook's customers are advertising agencies and gaming companies.",
"Facebook has a three pronged approach to income: facebook credits, advertising, and deals. I come more from the advertising side so I understand that part a bit better. Facebook makes money the same way Google predominantly makes money: through targeted advertising. \n\nFacebook allows you to target their ads based off keywords found in user profiles. For example, I used to have to sell a Dexter costume for Halloween. I would obviously target if a person liked the show Dexter, but I also might target Showtime, CSI, and male ages 18-34. These are all sort of related to each other and roughly fit the demographic that watches Dexter. I might even include other Showtime shows like Weeds or Californication to capture as much of that market as possible. Facebook works on a CPC (Cost per click) basis so everytime someone clicks on one of our ads, we pay FB an amount of money that is based on what key words are present in the person's profile who clicked. \"Dexter\" specifically may cost less than \"Showtime\" which is a bit broader and thus covers more people. The more targeted and minute the term used, the less it generally costs. A term like TV, Food, or Sexy would be so broad that it covers a lot of people, but also costs more per click to use.\n\nOn the other side, FB also has created \"credits\" which people buy for real money. They can then use these credits to purchase tractors in Farmville, weapons in Mafia Wars, or a limitless other number of online knick knacks found in social games. Facebook takes a cut out of each credit purchased so this is an alternative income for them.\n\nThe third avenue that is very new for them is in local deal placement. This is essentially just like sites like Groupon or livingsocial.\n\nELI5:\nFacebook has three ways to make money.\n\nThey make money first by looking at what you like. They can then show you ads that are just like the things that you like. So if you say you like Nickelodeon, they may show you a way to go look at and buy posters of Spongebob. Every time you go and look at this other place that sells posters of Spongebob, facebook is being paid by the store owner of Spongebob posters.\n\nThey also make money whenever you are playing your online games like farmville. When you ask your mom or dad to buy you that super fast tractor or those plants that give you lots of food, your mom and dad have to spend real money to get that for you. They give some of this money to facebook.\n\nFacebook also makes money by helping you and all your friends find something fun to do. Sometimes they tell you about a really cool place you might want to try, but you have to get all your friends together first to go there. If you can get all your friends together and all buy a pass to go to this cool place, facebook makes a little money from being the person that told you about it from the place you are going to.\n\n\nTried my best, let me know if it is too complicated or not good enough.",
"Remember: If you're not paying for it, you're the product. \nAdvertisers pay facebook for access to YOUR web browser.",
"They have advertisements. ",
"Facebook users aren't their customers; the users are the product. Facebook's customers are advertising agencies and gaming companies.",
"Facebook has a three pronged approach to income: facebook credits, advertising, and deals. I come more from the advertising side so I understand that part a bit better. Facebook makes money the same way Google predominantly makes money: through targeted advertising. \n\nFacebook allows you to target their ads based off keywords found in user profiles. For example, I used to have to sell a Dexter costume for Halloween. I would obviously target if a person liked the show Dexter, but I also might target Showtime, CSI, and male ages 18-34. These are all sort of related to each other and roughly fit the demographic that watches Dexter. I might even include other Showtime shows like Weeds or Californication to capture as much of that market as possible. Facebook works on a CPC (Cost per click) basis so everytime someone clicks on one of our ads, we pay FB an amount of money that is based on what key words are present in the person's profile who clicked. \"Dexter\" specifically may cost less than \"Showtime\" which is a bit broader and thus covers more people. The more targeted and minute the term used, the less it generally costs. A term like TV, Food, or Sexy would be so broad that it covers a lot of people, but also costs more per click to use.\n\nOn the other side, FB also has created \"credits\" which people buy for real money. They can then use these credits to purchase tractors in Farmville, weapons in Mafia Wars, or a limitless other number of online knick knacks found in social games. Facebook takes a cut out of each credit purchased so this is an alternative income for them.\n\nThe third avenue that is very new for them is in local deal placement. This is essentially just like sites like Groupon or livingsocial.\n\nELI5:\nFacebook has three ways to make money.\n\nThey make money first by looking at what you like. They can then show you ads that are just like the things that you like. So if you say you like Nickelodeon, they may show you a way to go look at and buy posters of Spongebob. Every time you go and look at this other place that sells posters of Spongebob, facebook is being paid by the store owner of Spongebob posters.\n\nThey also make money whenever you are playing your online games like farmville. When you ask your mom or dad to buy you that super fast tractor or those plants that give you lots of food, your mom and dad have to spend real money to get that for you. They give some of this money to facebook.\n\nFacebook also makes money by helping you and all your friends find something fun to do. Sometimes they tell you about a really cool place you might want to try, but you have to get all your friends together first to go there. If you can get all your friends together and all buy a pass to go to this cool place, facebook makes a little money from being the person that told you about it from the place you are going to.\n\n\nTried my best, let me know if it is too complicated or not good enough.",
"Remember: If you're not paying for it, you're the product. \nAdvertisers pay facebook for access to YOUR web browser."
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2wvf97 | How much did maps have to be altered once satellites began to be used in cartography? | Did they find large pieces of previously undiscovered land? Islands? Did it not make a difference as we had already used earlier technologies in order to map our entire world? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wvf97/how_much_did_maps_have_to_be_altered_once/ | {
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"Piggybacking off this question; did radar and sonar have an effect on cartography as well in their early days? ",
"Not discouraging other responses, but fyi, you can get started in the FAQ \n\n[History of Cartography](_URL_0_) ",
"Follow-up question: how accurate was the famous map of India that was elaborately surveyed?",
"Hello. First up I am Surveyor not a historian. but I will do my best to remain factual and cite some sources. \n\nGPS changed the way movement of the earth was mapped more than anything else. Although maps were not drastically changed per say, New coordinate systems and projections were developed to better utilize GPS and satellites. In New Zealand (where I studied) all of the legal maps derived their coordinates from system developed in 1949 (New Zealand Geodetic Datum 1949, or NZGD1949 for short). This system was developed by conducting a survey across the whole country using theodolites to measure angles and steal tapes to measure distance. The land itself was already mapped. This system was how things were defined relative to each other. The NZGD1949 survey was a time consuming process (it took years to do the survey) and inaccurate because the distances involved. \n\nIn the year 2000 the system was upgraded (NZGD2000). Instead of conducting a survey off the whole country, GPS systems were set up all around the country that are constantly measuring. These GPS units have accuracies of +/- 5cm and can transfer that accuracy to nearby marks and surveys. The GPS systems can be used to map in close to real time how much the whole country is moving and deforming (This is important as NZ is of a fault line and constantly changing). All of this made all of the maps and plans more accurate than the previous system that relied on one relativly inaccurate survey. Another imporant aspect of this is the whole system is dynamic and can change. When the city of Christchurch was hit by an earthquake in 2011 the Land Information New Zealand was able to patch coordinates that had shifted due to the quake. \n\nThe change did result in some changed in maps. But these were a the meter level. nothing drastic. And were only enforced when legal land boundries were being changed or being updated because of a dispute. I believe similar changes occured around the globe but I know less about them.\n\nSo I do not know whether any large or small bits off land were discover because of satellites. People have been traveling and navigating off the stars for hundreds of years so I would find it unlikely. But the greater accuracy available with GPS resulted in maps changing but at a much smaller (meter level) and these changes were staggered.\n \nThe following website has more info about NZGD1949 and NZGD2000\n_URL_0_ \n\nThe book 'Surveying for Engineers' (fith edition) by J Uren and W Price is what we used as a text book in Uni goes into lots of detail regarding the development of techniques from Theodolite to GPS.\n\n",
"The satellite didn't make much difference to mapmaking outside polar regions. Aerial photography had been available for more then 50 years, and the world's coastlines and islands had been pretty well mapped for a couple of centuries. Sailors have a very great interest in not running into unexpected land masses, and coastlines are among the easiest things to map. You can move your observation point about quite easily, and you don't have to try to see through hills or even through thick forests. As I often show schoolchildren, a 19th century map of the Iberian Peninsula differs very little from a modern one.\n\nSatellite imagery did make mapping of polar regions much more practical, and GPS allowed much better measurement of the precise heights of mountains.",
"The first decently accurate maps were developed during the 1600s.\n\nCassinni is credited with the first reasonably accurate map of France. His family dedicated decades to the measurement of France by laborious triangulation of every part of the country. \n\n[As noted here](_URL_0_), the phenomena you imagine had more to do with the discovery of how to accurately measure Longitude, long before the invention of modern satellites \n\n > “Earlier maps had underestimated the distances to other continents and exaggerated the outlines of individual nations. Now global dimensions could be set, with authority, by the celestial spheres. Indeed, King Louis XIV of France, confronted with a revised map of his domain based on accurate longitude measurements, reportedly complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies.”\n > *― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time*\n\nalso noted elsewhere regarding use of the moons of Jupiter:\n\n > In the meantime, however, the French had made a different use of satellite eclipses. If it was not feasible to make observations from the deck of a moving ship, it was certainly possible to observe the satellites on land. In the 1670s French astronomers, under the leadership of Cassini, began making observations of the satellites in many locations in France. The resulting map of France, finished in 1679 showed that the west coast of France was too far west by an entire degree on existing maps and that similar adjustments had to be made to the Mediterranean coast. It is said that upon seeing this map, King Louis XIV remarked that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies."
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"https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/king-louis-xiv"
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1j1cqi | Is Voyager still orbiting the sol system or is it on a total escape trajectory from our system? | If on a total escape trajectory, where is it heading? Will it have an encounter with another system in say the next 100 million years? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1j1cqi/is_voyager_still_orbiting_the_sol_system_or_is_it/ | {
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"They are on escape trajectories.\n\nIt's impossible to predict where they will be in 100 million years, the dynamics of the galaxy are too complex to forecast out that far. Neither spacecraft will get within a light year of any known star, other than the Sun, within the next million years at least."
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9jtt09 | what is alcohol poisoning? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9jtt09/eli5_what_is_alcohol_poisoning/ | {
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"Alcohol is a poison in of itself. When you have enough of it in your body it affects your ability to think clearly or remember things. This is because it goes to the brain and disrupts it. If you continue to take in more alcohol, it starts to cause problems in other body functions automatically regulated by your brain like balance, and even breathing and the beating of your heart in extreme cases.\n\nTechnically alcohol poisoning starts when you feel that first warm buzz. That is your body going \"Hey! There is something funny going on inside me...\"\n But as you take in more, the effects become much more damaging. But it is short term, your body will eventually break down the poison and you will begin to return to normal. But only if you did not overwhelm your body all at once with more alcohol than it can process deal with.\n\nYour body will also try to forcibly remove the poison by forcing you to throw up if it detects a lot of alcohol in your blood. \n\nLong story short, alcohol is a poison, your body knows it, and when you have more of it than your body can deal with, then you have alcohol poisoning.",
"You can be poisoned by too much of any substance. The exact amount varies dramatically depending on the substance.\n\nToo much lead will give you lead poisoning, then you will be very very sick and you are likely to suffer organ failure and die if immediate help is not available.\n\nToo much alcohol will give you alcohol poisoning, then you will be very very sick and you are likely to suffer organ failure and die if medical help is not sought.",
"Alcohol poisoning occurs when the ethanol in recreational alcohol reaches a concentration that it starts to mess with your cell membranes.\n\nBecause of the structure of ethanol, it readily inserts itself into a cell membrane and disrupts the cellular chemistry. At lower concentrations when this happens to your nerve and brain cells it leads to intoxication. \n\nAt high enough concentrations ethanol (and other alcohols) can basically shut down both the voluntary (somatic) and eventually the involuntary nervous system, which leads to death via hypothermia and suffocation (along with a few other symptoms). ",
"Whenever you eat or drink something, it goes into the stomach, then liquids and nutrients go into the blood, relatively fast. Then it's the job of the liver to \"process\" all the nutrients and substances present in the blood, and convert to usable stuff (metabolize them). And it's the job of the kidneys to remove waste chemicals and excess water from the blood.\n\nSo, the liver takes some time, a few hours. The kidneys take time, at least a few minutes to an hour. If you drink too fast, the concentration of alcohol goes into your blood very fast, and before the liver has a chance to neutralize it, the blood spreads it everywhere, including to your brain, where it affects you. \n\nLow concentration of alcohol in the blood and in the brain: you're drunk. High concentration: you're poisoned. Super-high concentration (OD): you possibly die.\n\nThis can happen with anything, even water. There is such a thing as drinking too much water / water poisoning.",
"Our body doesn't like alcohol. So it makes friends to beat it up. The more you drink, the more friends it makes. If you don't drink often but then drink a lot, your body doesn't have enough friends and gets beat up instead."
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aaona2 | why do some shirts seem to shrink horizontally when washed and dried, whereas others seem to shrink vertically? | For example, I've bought a couple of the 'same' shirts in different colors in the past, and I've noticed one shirt getting tighter around the midsection (horizontal shrinking) while the other shirt seems to get shorter when dried (vertical shrinking). | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aaona2/eli5_why_do_some_shirts_seem_to_shrink/ | {
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"not entirely sure from this,\ncan't see the shirts, but have seen similar situations. some fabrics, especially knits but also others, have a direction to them, the fabric is made in a way that the way the fibers are put together is not identical in all directions, like vertical vs horizontal, these tend to also stretch and shrink in non symmetrical ways. it's possible that you're shirts are made with fabric like that,but cut in different directions."
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101wsw | how can porn companies legally make movie/tv show parodies (i.e. ironman, jersery shore, etc.)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/101wsw/eli5_how_can_porn_companies_legally_make_movietv/ | {
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"Copyright laws are explicitly written to allow parodies."
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ak2k8j | What happens to the Cochlear fluid of the astronauts? | Thought about this last night, couldn't find an answer online. So what happens to Cochlear fluid in low-g environments? How do Astronauts not get violently sick all the time? | askscience | https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ak2k8j/what_happens_to_the_cochlear_fluid_of_the/ | {
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"Actually astronauts do often get sick when they first get in orbit. It is called Space Adaptation Syndrome or \"Space sickness\", and it can last even a few days, during which they get used to the much different signals that are coming from their balance sensoring organs.",
"Basically when you first enter low gravity, this fluid starts floating around in your ears in an unnatural way. This makes the body think something is wrong with you (it thinks that you have been poisoned). So of course it will try to rid itself of the \"poison\". The next few days are usually spent being violently ill until the body realizes you are fine and then you stop feeling sick."
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1iiv6k | If Hollywood constructed the Cowboy era, what was the reality of those towns and that time period? | I am really struggling to imagine what the 'old west' would be like if the Cowboy era was completely made up. I was recently told that cowboys are Hollywood productions so I'm really interested about how extensive this fictional era is. I also want to know what elements of the cowboy image was adapted from reality and which parts weren't. Books such as Blood Meridian and True Grit, as well as movies such as The Lone Ranger and Shanghai Noon have always fed my imagination so I'm curious about what is and what isn't true.
For examples, some questions I would pose are:
1. Was the architect of small towns in rural american similar to what we imagine from Hollywood? For example, the black antiquated typography, the hitch posts, the dirt tracks and the always present saloon?
2. Was Law and Order just a town sheriff with a couple of lackeys, or was their generally a larger and more complex system present?
3. What parts of the 'cowboy town' are fantasy?
4. Did women and men dress similar to how they appear in movies?
5. Did the towns have any immigrants, africans or native-american residents? All the movies present the towns as being completely caucasian and I have no idea of whether that would have been true or not.
Thanks in advance for any answers. For context, I am not an American so I've never been taught American history or visited an 'old west' town. So all of my assumptions are derived from books or movies. | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iiv6k/if_hollywood_constructed_the_cowboy_era_what_was/ | {
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"Another few questions I have:\n\n* It seems that every old west town has a quite public brothel on top of its saloon. I understand that brothels might be common near mines, where women are scarce and morale needs to be maintained, but was this common of most towns to just generally have?\n\n* Are there any recorded duels and was this a legal practice? From what I've read, if you're facing an opponent with the guns that they had, you'd be more likely to hit the person next to you than your target. \n\n* Where did the original cowboy stories derive from? \n "
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25pitx | So, What was the difference between USA and Russia nuclear weapons back in the 1950s? | Holy, Shitsnacks, I just got home from school like, This was a tiny question didn't except it to be big thanks guys | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25pitx/so_what_was_the_difference_between_usa_and_russia/ | {
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"Leading up to the 1950s, the U.S. enjoyed its nuclear monopoly, since nobody else had developed their own Bomb.That changed in 1949 when the Soviets detonated their first atomic device, igniting the nuclear arms race. \n\nIn short order, the pace of development increased, and by 1952, the U.S. had developed the more powerful thermonuclear warhead (otherwise known as the H-bomb). The Soviets caught up faster this time, testing their own H-bomb in 1953. \n\nThis technology leap allowed explosions in the megaton range (many orders of magnitude greater than the first A-bombs alone), with notable demonstrations including the American \"Castle Bravo\" 15Mt blast, and the infamous Soviet \"Tsar Bomba\" 57Mt monstrosity, although that was in '61. [More on these milestones here.](_URL_1_)\n\nBut the story wasn't just about technology - it was also about delivery systems. The Soviet Union was still recovering its industrial base from the War in the 1950s, and as such, the U.S. had much more capacity to deliver its bombs (although even that was still quite limited until the mid-50s). And this was well before the development of ICBMs, so both sides relied on strategic bombers first and foremost in this decade. So when you think about sparking 1950s nuclear war, it's not the \"30 mins 'til doomsday\" scenario of the Cuban Missile Crisis ('62) -- there would be a bit more time than that for things to develop.\n\nAnd as for stockpile, the U.S. ran away with an overwhelming lead in the 1950s. [Here is a visual](_URL_0_) for how the stockpiles matched up over the entire Cold War. Note that even into the 60s, it wasn't even close. The U.S. was far-and-away more prepared to produce nuclear devices, both in terms of materials processing, and physics & engineering expertise.\n\n & nbsp; \n\n^(This was a quick little summary, but my master's focus area is nuclear weapons -- if you'd like some harder citations on this decade, just let me know.)",
"In terms of numbers, the US basically just got its weapon production system online around 1950. So at that point it was suddenly able to produce well over 100 bombs a year, with the numbers growing each year out. Prior to 1950 it was producing far fewer bombs per year. [You can see this trend here](_URL_1_).* The Soviets took time to catch up in terms of quantities.\n\nIn terms of the actual weapons, by 1949 the Soviets had weapons that were more or less on par with American weapons. This is largely because US weapon development technology had not advanced very quickly over the course of the late 1940s. (There are many reasons for this.) The US had a slight edge but the Soviets had made good on catching up in terms of technology, and this, incidentally, was _not_ because they were good at stealing secrets (the Soviets could have developed a far better weapon for their first test, but were required to duplicate the first US bomb in the name of being certain it would work). \n\nThe US figured out how to make an H-bomb in 1951, and tested it in 1952, but could not really weaponize it until 1954. The Soviets detonated a \"thermonuclear device\" that is not what we would call a real H-bomb in 1953 (it was not megaton-range), but it was still a big bomb. They tested a deliverable, \"true\" H-bomb in 1955. So US and Soviet capabilities here were approximately equal. \n\nThe real areas of difference are not the weapons themselves. They are the quantities of the weapons (the US had many more), and the delivery vehicles. The Soviets had no reliable ways of projecting nuclear weapons to the continental United States until the 1960s. This is because ICBM technology took a long time to develop and the Soviets lacked heavy bomber technology that could reliably make the long voyage over the pole without getting tracked and probably shot down. \n\nThe United States here had a huge advantage in that it had already been investing in long-range heavy bomber technology since WWII and had built up a huge body of technical and tactical experience with them. But more importantly they had many advance bases in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia that allowed them to put their nukes very close to Soviet territory. When I lectured on this to my students [I showed them this little map I made](_URL_2_) which gives some indication of how the geopolitics made a huge difference in the 1950s. \n\nThe Soviets could certainly project nuclear weapons to Europe and Asia, however, so that's not nothing. However not until the development of reliable ICBMs could they project them to targets further than this. The early Soviet ICBMs were not accurate enough to be relied upon (they could destroy a lot of the USA, but they would have trouble aiming them at anything in particular; also, they didn't have very many of them for a lot of that time). The Soviets increased their capabilities by the late 1960s and early 1970s. This strategic imbalance is one of the reasons for the Cuban Missile Crisis situation.\n\n\\*Why did it take so long for the US nuclear production system to get up and running? There are a lot of reasons. One is that the Manhattan Project infrastructure fell into disarray between 1945 and 1947, when the Atomic Energy Commission took it over, and it took time to get things back on track, get good people running it again, to get all of the technical stuff ironed out. They had serious problems with the Hanford plutonium-production reactors for many years, and they did not have weapons designs ready to use U-235 in their bombs — they didn't want to use gun-type weapons but hadn't yet quite figured out how they were going to use U-235 in an implosion weapon. So the fissile material they could easily use (plutonium) was relatively scarce for awhile, and they had an abundance of U-235 but they couldn't easily use it. During [Operation Sandstone](_URL_0_) in 1948 they first tested mixed fuel cores, which were very successful, and allowed them to start more rapidly growing the stockpile. But getting everything into place takes time — you can't turn around an industry overnight. By 1949/1950 they had got things rolling and could more or less produce the exponential rate of weapons development that you see in the stockpile graph."
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1kzmcs | When did enslaving of a certain type of people (skin color) versus enslaving the enemy first become popular? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kzmcs/when_did_enslaving_of_a_certain_type_of_people/ | {
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"It began really with the Age of Exploration and the realization of Europeans that they had such a preponderance of technology that conquering and enslaving natives in faraway continents was easier than fighting for them at home. Slavery in the Ancient sense was long dead by then anyways (except for the Ottomans), having been pushed aside by the end of the Pax Romanus' Globalization 1.0 and the emergence of the Manor Style of economy. Under the Manor Style, serfs were tied specifically to the land they farmed, not to tribes or family, so it became impossible to create vast armies of slaves, as every one you took displaced one of your workers. Then came the Renaissance.\n\nThe Renaissance was the culmination of several disparate happenings, the two most important to your question being the steady growth of centralized political power and much increased trade. What this meant was that several new (or simply re-imagined) European powers now had the ability and resources to project their power and their goods to parts they never had before. The first place they went was South of the Mediterranean, to Africa. \n\nThe two powers that most benefitted from the changes that the Renaissance brought, as well as fortuitous geography, were Spain and Portugal. They were quickly able to explore down the western coast of Africa by the middle of the 15th century, primarily trading but taking already a few prisoners here and there in their skirmishes. While not slaves per se, they set a precedent.\n\nThings really started to get out of hand when Spain and Portugal began to conquer the New World. Suddenly, all the riches of two continents were open for the taking, and those natives not killed by gun or germ were made slaves in their own land to serve their conquerors. This made Spain enormously wealthy, and able to expand globally by sea. However, Spain found herself with the problem that her native captive population was dying too quickly, and proved poor slaves besides. The easy pickings of gold and treasures having already been gathered, Spain moved to the long term goal of exploiting New World agriculture to fill her coffers, but she needed manpower. This brings us back to Africa.\n\nWest Africa then even more than now was a fractious hodge podge of tribal loyalties, and the Spanish took advantage of this to begin buying Slaves from individual tribes and transporting them to the West Indies to farm and build an empire. What began as expediency quickly became established practice as the following powers of Britain, France and the Dutch moved to take advantage of this new Imperial System in their parts of the New World. Within two centuries of Columbus' landing, up to 100,000 slaves toiled to sustain the empires of half a dozen nations, and a system of racial oppression was in place to ensure that what was begun in search of profit would not be undone by quests for justice."
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1q4pwl | what happens to mercury once it enters the human body? | I've recently found a liking for tuna...only to realize I can't eat too much of it every week.... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1q4pwl/eli5_what_happens_to_mercury_once_it_enters_the/ | {
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"It hangs around on the kidneys as the body tries (and fails) to break it down. ",
"Our bodies class of enzymes called selenoenzymes that have many functions. One of these functions that is incredibly important is their ability to counteract oxidative cellular damage. The explanation of how they do this is a whole other subject that I am going to omit in this explanation to make it less complicated. Selenoenzymes, as their name suggests, contain selenium. Mercury is is highly reactive with selenium. When mercury reacts with the selenoenzymes it irreversibly inactivates them. The inactivation of these enzymes results in oxidative brain and endocrine damage. \n\nSmall amounts of tuna are not going to cause any noticeable effects. The body has ways of dealing with mercury and will get rid of it, but its not a very fast process, which is why prolonged exposure to mercury can cause it to build up to dangerous levels. Just limit yourself to 2-3 servings of tuna per week and you will be fine.\nSince mercury poisoning is dependent on concentration in the body, your size will make a difference. There are websites that can calculate the safe amount of tuna to eat. For me, 170 pound male, I can have 2.5 cans of tuna per week. "
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2ozjq7 | how do plant-based organisms survive at the bottom of the oceans if light doesn't penetrate that deep? | Do they have some mechanism other than photosynthesis to produce food? Do they absorb water-borne minerals to survive? Are there simply no plants that deep? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ozjq7/eli5_how_do_plantbased_organisms_survive_at_the/ | {
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"Life at that depth doesn't use photosynthesis.\n\nCheck out this extremely interesting read on life that lives off of hydrothermal vents: \n\n_URL_0_",
"There are two basic categories of life, prokaryotes (bacteria and archea) and eukaryotes which we are. Basically eukaryotes have a cell nucleus and prokaryotes don't. The nucleus is a region that has a membrane(like a skin) that separates it from the rest of the cell. Eukaryotes are generally much larger and have a lot more DNA. Every eukaryotes has the same metabolism. All animals from sponges to humans, all plants, all fungi, all protists get energy by breaking down organic molecules and feeding them into the citric acid cycle. After this step, intermediate products are fed into something called the electron transport chain and at the end oxygen is used to accept a electron. The energy comes basically by lowering the energy of an electron. Plants get there energy this way as well, but they make the sugar first using a photo system that produces oxygen. So plants actually consume and produce oxygen.\n\nOkay, so while all eukaryotes are pretty much the same metabolically, prokaryotes have many different kinds of metabolism. There are prokaryotes that can utilize nitrogen out of the air, there are some that produce methane and others that can consume methane. They can utilize a wide range of terminal electron acceptors like iron, sulfate, nitrate, sulfur and more. Basically they have many different ways to get energy from the environment. They even have a photosynthesis that doesn't make oxygen. So when you see an ecosystem where there is very little or no light, the primary producer (the thing that makes the energy that everything in the ecosystem consumes) is a prokaryote that is using one of these other metabolisms or material is coming in from somewhere else.\n\nFor the deep ocean, some carbon does just kind of drift down. At the vents there are tubeworms that survive entirely on bacteria that live inside them. The bacteria utilize hydrogen sulfide. This might seem odd at first, but it is not unusual for a eukaryote. So plants are made mostly of cellulose and there is no eukaryote that can break cellulose, we don't have the enzyme that can break it down. Cows which eat primarily grass don't have the enzyme anymore than we do. A bacteria that lives in it gut does.\n\nIt's actually crazier than even that, because it turns out that eukaryotes are the result of a union between a bacteria and archea (or some combination). You might have heard of mitochondria in our cells and chloroplasts in plant cells? Well, they are both the result of endosymbiosis when a cell engulfed another cell and they synced up cell replication. \n\nLife in the deep ocean lives primarily on energy made by prokaryotes and it turns out (if you consider herbivores and endosymbiosis) that multicellular life often does.\n\n"
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nhvoo | If Earth did not have its tilted axis, would life as we know it exist? | Organic life on this planet, as far as I can tell, is very adapted to dealing with seasonal shifts of some type. Are these seasonal shifts *required,* though? Would most plants and animals get along okay by having the climate stay constant year-round? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/nhvoo/if_earth_did_not_have_its_tilted_axis_would_life/ | {
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"To answer the question, let's consider regions of the Earth where seasonal shifts aren't noticable- around the equator, where temperature tend to stay fairly consistent (for example, the Savannah climate zone- _URL_0_ - stays within 20 C and 30 C throughout the year. There is not shortage of species in this region. So to answer your question, no, the Earth's tilt, which creates the seasons, does not seem to be a necessary condition for life. \n\n",
"Would life as we know it exist? Yes, but we probably wouldn't recognize any of the animals. Humans, moose, sharks and jellyfish certainly wouldn't be here as we know it, but a whole different set of organisms would inhabit the earth, whose ancestors evolved to pressures unique to a planet with no tilt.",
"To answer the question, let's consider regions of the Earth where seasonal shifts aren't noticable- around the equator, where temperature tend to stay fairly consistent (for example, the Savannah climate zone- _URL_0_ - stays within 20 C and 30 C throughout the year. There is not shortage of species in this region. So to answer your question, no, the Earth's tilt, which creates the seasons, does not seem to be a necessary condition for life. \n\n",
"Would life as we know it exist? Yes, but we probably wouldn't recognize any of the animals. Humans, moose, sharks and jellyfish certainly wouldn't be here as we know it, but a whole different set of organisms would inhabit the earth, whose ancestors evolved to pressures unique to a planet with no tilt."
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1fy7i6 | When were the aristocracies of Medieval Europe established? | Just a blanket question for any of the (now) nation-states but particularly interested in Great Britain, France, and Spain. Im curious about when nobles established themselves as nobles? | AskHistorians | http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fy7i6/when_were_the_aristocracies_of_medieval_europe/ | {
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"The biggest problem itself is defining aristocracy, which while this may not be difficult in the high medieval era onward, as what made you an aristocrat frequently involved document or royal/peer recognition of your status as such, this is a far more difficult problem in the early medieval era, before such documentation was formalized. \n\nGiven the greater mobility of the early medieval period (the peasantry weren't yet \"caged\" to their land in the same as the high middle ages), and also that the aristocracy in the early medieval period were far poorer, and it could be difficult differentiating a rich peasant/middle land-owner from an aristocrat. Not to mention that at least with \"Frankish\" Merovingian aristocracy, ancestry did not have a legal component to it, so you have to consider that early medieval aristocratic lineages could have a high turnover.\n\nWith that said, at least for France/Germany, the Carolingian Empire is a good place to suggest a start. As in that era and the Merovingian era, as previously mentioned, the aristocracies that existed were significantly poorer, and royal authority more centralized. The granting of land to aristocrats at that time was also significantly more spread out, as exemplified by the father of Berengar, the future King of Italy, who had estates in Italy through Allemania and all the way to Belgium. \n\nThis makes sense if you understand Merovingian France/Germany not from the high medieval period looking backward, but the late Roman period looking forward. Many of the Roman ideas about centralized authority carried on through the early middle ages, though obviously without the same level of efficiency, so this sporadic granting of lands was not seen as unusual.\n\nThis all turned around in the conflicts after the death of Charlemagne, as the land holders had to gamble with which one of the three Carolingian factions to support, and whether loss of granted land in one region could be compensated by new land grants from another. After a while, the land holders decided it made the most sense to centralize their land holdings within a specific geographic region under a specific one of the three Carolingian kingdoms, where they could have the most control over it. \n\nAlso because of the Carolingian conflicts, whereas previously counts were moved around all over the empire, after the triparte split, it was assumed that sons/heirs to loyal aristocrats should at the very least hold land near to their fathers in the particular kingdom that father resided in, rather than some far flung corner, thus increasing the regionalization of the aristocracy.\n\nFrom this, a more firm, ancestral as well as landed aristocracy could begin to take root and solidify. And one could argue that it is in this aftermath of the Carolingian Empire, that the landed nobility we are accustomed to thinking about in the high medieval era, got its start."
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afep62 | the gasoline shortages in mexico. what's causing this? what do both sides say? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/afep62/eli5_the_gasoline_shortages_in_mexico_whats/ | {
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"Here's what a little bird told me. There has been increasing fuel theft in Mexico from criminals tapping into the pipelines that normally transfer fuel. So to stop the theft, they shut down the pipelines and are using tankers to deliver the fuel. It's not enough to keep up with demand, so people waiting for hours at a chance to get fuel. "
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eu82g1 | why our immune system does not destroy cancer? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eu82g1/eli5_why_our_immune_system_does_not_destroy_cancer/ | {
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"Because the immune system is designed to detect bacteria/viruses and in general things or cells that don't belong to your body. Cancer cells originate from cells in your very own body. The immune system is in most cases able to detect if cells mutate in a way that's bad for you. But sometimes, the cancer cells can basically disguise themselves as normal cells or inactivate the immune system's reaction against them. So, in most cases your immune system detects cancerous or pre-cancerous cells. When they don't, a tumor can grow and you get cancer.\n\nMy references, I'm a med student and have just completed my immunology course :)",
"It does. Cancer cells pop up all the time, and your immune system (specifically, the Killer T cells, which are specialized at destroying the body's own cells when they become unhealthy, infected, or dangerous) usually is able to destroy them. You get tumors when the cancer growth outpaces the body's ability to destroy it.",
"It does. In fact, you get cancer all the time, but your immune system destroys it before it can become much of a threat. It's the rare case when your immune system isn't able to do this that you end up in danger.",
"Good answers in here already. It's also interesting that immunotherapy is one of the more promising research areas for cancer treatment. We're learning how to get the body's immune system to treat cancer like a disease while still leaving healthy tissue alone. It's really, really difficult. Still, it holds some promise.",
"Just recently started watching “Cells at Work” in Netflix. It’s like the magic school bus meets anime. And there’s an episode about cancer cells. Really awesome show. Makes biology interesting to those of us who are not normally inclined!",
"It was my understanding, that most of the time, our immunesystem DOES detect and contain cancer cells, long before they grow enough to be detected or be problematic. \nWe constantly have mutating cells in our body that are detected and killed off.\nFull blown cancer is hence a failing of the immunesystem, which is my immunotherapy is such an effective treatment? \n\nOr did I get things all wrong?",
"To clarify, your immune system DOES destroy cancer cells. At least, the ones it can recognise. What we now know and are beginning to understand is that cancer cells are very sneaky and have methods of evading the immune system. It’s one of Hanahan and Weinberg’s ‘Hallmarks of Cancer’, which are set of properties cancers can use to take a grip within the body and ultimately result in cancer taking hold."
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7nmzqz | when and why did sleeping at night become the cultural norm? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7nmzqz/eli5_when_and_why_did_sleeping_at_night_become/ | {
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"Basically since forever.\n\nHumans are diurnal (active durring the day). Our anotomy supports diurnal, rather than nocturnal, activity, so nighttime is the best time to sleep, as it is when our anatomy is least effective."
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6h7lvx | Has there even been a peaceful or nonviolent revolution that has successfully replaced a government or have all insurgencies been violent in nature? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6h7lvx/has_there_even_been_a_peaceful_or_nonviolent/ | {
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"Portugal's 1974 Carnation Revolution, that put an end to over 40 years of a Catholic para-fascist corporativist dictatorship. It was ran by insurgents in the Portuguese Army but these never used their guns. The State's Secret Police eventually fired over about 5 people but ended up surrendering without exchanging fire with the armed forces. \n\nOn the Carnation Revolution and its significance as a bloodless European revolution, Tony Judt, Postwar (even if only covering the surface). All other substantial literature on the revolution that I know of is in Portuguese. ",
"1989 Velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia that brought about the collapse of the communist regime did not result in any loss of life. Also, the 1993 dissolution of Czechoslovakia, aka the \"Velvet Divorce\", and the creation of the successor states of the Czech Rep. and Slovakia was entirely peaceful. "
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5qvfal | Was There Ever a Roman General or Emperor Born in the Lower Class? | AskHistorians | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5qvfal/was_there_ever_a_roman_general_or_emperor_born_in/ | {
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"After the first 2 dynasties (Julio-claudian,Flavian) there were men of low birth that did become emperors.Pertinax (reign January 1, 193 AD – March 28, 193 AD),Aurelian (reign September 270 AD – September 275 AD).Especially during the crisis of the third century many claimants to the throne were of lower birth (usually military commanders).Also Diocletian, one of the most noteworthy roman emperors, was of low status at birth.\nIt wasnt uncommon for lower class romans to rise through the military ranks and claim the throne.",
"Plenty, especially if you look at the so called barracks emperors of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries. \n\n* Pertinax is the first, being the son of a freed slave. \n* Maximinus Thrax was seen as a foreign barbarian of low birth, even if claims that he was a Goth are largely discounted. \n* Pupienus was the son of a blacksmith.\n* Aemilian was of low North African heritage. \n* Claudius II \"Gothicus\" was from an Illyrian family of no note.\n* Aurelian was the son of a peasant farmer. \n* Diocletian was the son of a freed slave. Actually there are versions where he himself was a freed slave.\n* Maximian was the son of a shopkeeper.\n* Galerius was the son of a Thracian herdsman.\n* Severus II was the son of an Illyrian farmer.\n* Licinius was the son of a Dacian farmer.\n* Vetranio was the son of a Moesian farmer.\n\nThere are dozens of others who we don't have good family backgrounds on. I've also skipped a lot of emperors who's only claim to nobility was being related to one of these commoner emperors. Plenty of these also are from dubious sources. Aemilian's family is vaguely mentioned at best. And a number of these come from decisively antagonistic sources. \n\nRegardless, in the third century at least, power came from the point of the sword. *Any* man of skill with an army at his back could aspire to the title of Augustus, no matter how lowly his birth.",
"There certainly were especially as the empire began to degrade. Following the assassination of Severus Alexander and the end of the Severan Dynasty, a number of emperors known as the barracks emperors took over. Many of these emperors were of the commoner class who had risen to command armies exemplified by Maximinus Thrax, the first barracks emperor. He had joined the military as a common soldier however he developed a reputation for himself through his military prowess. Maximinus was disliked by the Senatorial classes as evidenced by the multiple attempts on his life however he suppressed several of these attempts to overthrow him by powerful senatorial families, he was eventually killed by his own troops while sieging the city of Rome. \n\nThe period known as the Crisis of the Third Century was riddled with such emperors of common or of middling social status at birth. In total, 14 of the 22 emperors that reigned during the 49 years of the Crisis were barracks emperors and while not all were low born, they tended to be from the class of commoners who joined the military as soldiers.\n\nThe Third century was one of tumult for the Roman Empire as it began its march into decline. During the 49 years of the Crisis in particular, those who commanded a powerful army could take control of the Empire and many did, causing massive social and economic upheaval the the concurrent civil wars and lack of stable governance took its toll on the institutions of the Roman government.\n"
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1vxyja | why don't riots like ukraine and other countries happen in america? | I mean the only things I can remember is Occupy but not near a big enough scale or maybe the LA riots. Is it that not enough people care? This is not about one particular issue. There just seems to be big enough groups that do care greatly about a belief that I am shocked that it doesn't happen. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vxyja/eli5_why_dont_riots_like_ukraine_and_other/ | {
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"American life, even with all we complain about, is still pretty good. Most of us have all of our necessities covered and many (if not all) of the luxuries we want. Our health care system might not be what we want, but we can still see a doctor if we needed to. Our government might not be giving us what we want, but we're still free to protest and complain about it, as well as vote out those we don't like.",
"If you look around and you only see a handful of people homeless and without food, it's really not that bad. Regardless of all the politics, discussions, news articles, conspiracy theorists, this is a pretty fair life so far compared to the rest of those countries. We have food, shelter, opportunity and knowledge everywhere. And just for good measure, here's some entertainment and a few distractions. \n\nCould it change tomorrow? Absolutely. ",
"In this particular case, it started with protests over one issue (the whole EU vs Russia thing basically that kicked this off), but the police got extremely heavy-handed and began using violence back in November at some student protests.\n\nThe mayor of Kiev was dragged out by the government over allegations he'd ordered the police to use violent tactics, but then last week the government rushed out a bunch of anti-protest laws restricting freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and put them into action *without* most of the legal procedures being followed. They've been heavily criticized and dubbed draconian, with a common view being that they've essentially turned the country into a dictatorship.\n\nIt'd be kind of comparable in the US to if the Occupy movement had been met by Obama suddenly passing a bunch of emergency anti-protest and anti-free speech laws without bothering with the house of representatives or the senate. Maybe then you'd see people take to violence against the US government and a situation similar to Kiev.",
"Because people in USA have pretty good life. They have stable well paying jobs and can easily find one (compared to other countries) witch leads to having good living standard. When people leave comfortably they find it much easier to overlook at some abuses. ",
"When Ukraine seceded from the USSR it didn't become a model democracy. It still has serious corruption problems, poverty, ethnical division, and they also see their western neighbours improvement while they started from similar position, just aligned with Russia instead of the Eu.",
"What are we rioting about?",
"I don't know if you count Canada in America, but here in Montréal, we had a pretty huge student strike over tuition hike called \"Le Printemps Érable\", Maple Spring. In two or three occasion, there were at least one hundred thousand people in the streets and hundreds of arrests.\n\nBut the worst, and the best of it, came out when the government passed a special law called Bill 78. On May 22, 2012, in response to the passage of Bill 78 and in commemoration of 100 days since the beginning of the student strike, another march took place, with tens of thousands of marchers and approximately 1,000 arrests. Also, because of the special law, tens of thousands of people, who were not affiliated with the student movement, filled down the streets making noise with their casserole as a sign of protest with the special law. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n\n",
"Because we have a good life here. ",
"Even if a lot of people want a specific side on the issue, in the United States citizens still have the right to protest about it, and can express their opinion and viewpoint and at least talk about it with their senator among others. You can have as stupid of an opinion as you want, but it won't be repressed unless you violate the rights of others, or other limitations that I don't know enough of.\n\nIn Ukraine, their ability to protest legally has been repressed severely. Aside from their government being elected officials, I don't know much about their society, but taking something like that away and replacing it with arrests and potential violence sounds like something to fight against. In the United States, that just doesn't tend to happen.\n\n",
"I think the main difference between US and Ukraine or Greece is that when you live in US i.e. NYC and suddenly you don't like what the government is doing so you will pack your crap and move to Texas or somewhere else. If you could remove all the borders and language barriers in Europe people would have less reasons to riot. \n",
"Because there's a thing in America called 'Free Benefits'. The US government keeps the majority of the population happy with these 'Free Benefits' so therefor they don't have enough of a reason to do so. Logically what is happening in the Ukraine needs to happen here because of the corrupt/tyrannical government we have, but what's happening in the Ukraine is about a completely different reason.",
"It's simple complacency. We have become very materialistic and are trading our rights and freedoms in the hopes of maintaining our comfort."
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1qywd8 | why does water make weird shapes when exposed to a really low and loud sound? | Or any other liquid for that matter?
[Here's an example](_URL_0_) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qywd8/eli5_why_does_water_make_weird_shapes_when/ | {
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"The water doesn't look like that to someone standing there. [Here's the original video](_URL_0_) where you can see the mechanism a bit more. The hose is being bounced up and down by the speaker to make a wave pattern in the water stream. That wave is tuned to the camera's frequency so that every time the camera takes a picture, the water that was at the highest peak is now at the second highest peak, and so on down the line. So long as you're close to the spout, the water doesn't have time to separate much and it appears to the camera as though it's floating in the air. "
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1w9r14 | What are fields made of ? | I've learned that in quantum physics, fields are not mathematical models but real objects from which elementals particles come. But if fields are a real thing, what are they made of ? And what différenciates, let's say, an electromagnetic field from a "quark" field ? | askscience | http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1w9r14/what_are_fields_made_of/ | {
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"text": [
"First of all, it is currently a philosophical question whether the fields are \"real\" or whether they are merely a mathematical model (and to some the distinction itself has no meaning).\n\nSecond of all, asking \"what are they made of?\" is to present a [false dilemma](_URL_0_). Would you still ask the question if the field was made out of atoms? But then what are atoms made of (and so on)? Ultimately the feeling you have that things are made out of some palpable \"substance\" and that there is a distinction between that \"substance\" and abstract mathematical relationships, is a confusion. Feelings of \"substance\" are nothing more than an expression of the fact that fields attract and repel one another. Do these fields actually exist? Obviously in some sense they do! But it is a philosophical question whether they are merely an effective mathematical description of something else, or if our description is in some sense a \"true\" representative of reality.\n\nAs for your last question, different fields have different properties. There are scalar fields (like temperature -- it has a single value at each point in space), there are vector fields (like the wind -- it has a direction at each point in space), there are tensor fields (gravitational, electromagnetic). Imagining, say, a trampoline, fields can have different tension. They can couple to other fields (or themselves) to greater or less extent (put one trampoline next to another -- does the one vibrating cause the other to vibrate?), and so on. One of the big differences between the electromagnetic field and the chromodynamic field (associated with the \"color\" charge carried by quarks and gluons) is that the latter is strongly self-interacting. It is so strongly self-interacting that you cannot even separate two quarks from each other; you always find quarks bound into hadrons (like the proton or neutron). \n"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma"
]
] |
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