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Why did England and France develop a strong centralized government while the Holy Roman Empire stayed decentralized and fragmented?
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#**Summary**
Possible reasons for a decentralized and fragmented HRE
1. Structural causes
- Elective monarchy and papal coronation
- No single "capital city"
- Harder taxation and recruitment?
2. Religious and political causes
- Augsburg and Westphalia led to confessional stalemate
- Religious fragmentation triggered foreign interference against the emperor
- The threat of Habsburg encirclement motivated this interference
- The threat of imperial encroachment over princes' rights motivated the princes to search foreign allies
3. Other factors
- Dynastic luck?
- Geographical causes? May have a role but it's not very convincing for me.
- Failed reform attempts in the beginning (Maximilian I), lack of motivation near the end
#**Background**
In the Medieval period, the power of rulers over their subjects was very limited. It is in the early modern period that this started to change visibly, with complex political, economic and legal developments. These are dynamic historical processes and as such, a centralized France and a decentralized Holy Roman Empire (HRE) were not inevitable, and identifying their causes is difficult and usually controversial.
Here I will attempt to explain the reasons why the Holy Roman Empire was not centralized and unified, by mainly focusing on the period between 1450 and 1806. As the main differences in centralization between the empire and France and England arose in this period, I believe this focus will be largely sufficient. This has the benefit of simplifying dynastic issues in the HRE, as Habsburgs were nearly always in power in this period, but it also disregards possible paths to centralization under Hohenstaufens, Luxembourgs etc, so it won't be the whole picture.
#**Structural causes**
The first difference of HRE that comes to mind is that emperorship is elective instead of inherited like in England and France. Beginning from the Golden Bull of 1356, seven (later increased to eight) electors voted on the next emperor. Therefore the emperor had to spend political capital and money in order to secure the succession to the title. Even in the Habsburg era, there were many contested elections which got in the way of centralization.
In addition to this succession issue, emperors had to worry about the papal coronation as well. From the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 until the coronation of Charles V in 1530, nearly all emperors were crowned by the pope. Again, the emperor had to spend resources: the trip to Italy was often dangerous, incurring military and logistical costs, and the pope didn't always consent to the coronation easily.
The elective nature of the HRE also had another effect hindering centralization. There was no fixed "capital city", but every emperor used his own seat of power. Even though Habsburg domination led to this city being either Vienna or Prague, the Reichstag was held in different places (such as Regensburg, Nürnberg, Augsburg, Worms etc.) and the political organization of the empire never had a center like Paris and London were.
Neither Holy Roman Emperors nor kings of France and England could extract resources from their subjects at will. However, emperors' attempts at taxation, recruitment and reform were often blocked by the Reichstag. Maximilian I's attempt at Reichsreform is a good example, it succeeded in some legal reforms, but centralization is mainly about resource extraction, and at this point, it failed. The new tax, *Gemeiner Pfennig* was met with massive resistance and it could never be collected properly and was soon abolished. Admittedly, I don't know enough of English and French assemblies to compare them with the Reichstag, so I will leave this comparison to others.
#**Religious Conflict and Foreign Interference**
The reformation began in the empire, and there it had a very strong decentralizing effect. The conversion of many princes to Lutheranism and Calvinism brought them in conflict with the Catholic emperor, and being weak on their own, the Protestant princes formed large networks of alliances -or leagues- against him. These leagues attracted foreign support: France intervened in the Schmalkaldic War of 1546, and with the resulting Peace of Augsburg the Lutherans gained the guarantee that they can follow their religious practices in their own lands ([an old post of mine explains this in detail](_URL_0_)). Augsburg was successful in preventing another religious war for 63 years, but recatholization efforts, increasing tensions and the exemption of Calvinists from the treaty resulted in another, bigger conflict, the Thirty Years' War ([another old post] (_URL_1_)).
#**Sources and Reading List**
Normally I use page numbers with my sources as well, but this time I didn't have much time so I will list the names without them. For page numbers, you can check the two posts on Augsburg and 30YW (linked above in text) which have more detailed bibliographies.
* *Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire* by Peter H. Wilson
* *The Thirty Years' War*, edited by Geoffrey Parker
* *Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy* by Brendan Simms
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Why do many people take sniper kill counts for granted? Can we really trust any of the offical numbers, some as high as 4-500? How reliable are the figures?
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Follow up question.
Wasn't the only way to "confirm" a kill to collect the dog tags? I highly doubt that snipers collected dog tags, especially when their targets would usually be surrounded by soldiers?
Edit: had a little dig around online and found that some snipers in WW2 would claim a hit (bullet hitting target) as a kill. When in reality it could be non-fatal. This must surely mess up the numbers right?
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In fantasy it is common to read about colored or painted armor. Is there any historical basis for this?
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Oh yes. When I first read your question I thought of enameled armor but some poking around turned up [this wonderful article from The Met](_URL_0_). Depending on the fantasy story, I doubt armor was *quite* as colorful (at least anything that wasn't gold, silver, or bronze, but as the article details there were many techniques to add color) but it could get extremely elaborate and could have color.
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How common was the surname 'Hitler' in Germany/Austria prior to the 1930s? Did people later drop it because of its connotations?
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This is some anecdotal evidence.
The name "Adolf" was a relatively common one in Belgium prior to World War II. One of the most famous 19th century Belgian politicians was [Adolf Daens](_URL_1_). After World War 2, the name died out. Parents stopped naming their babies Adolf, but I don't know if existing "Adolfs" changed their name. Nowadays the frst name is non-existant here.
Sidenote: post-WW2, a lot of Belgian names were based on American/English names such as Danny, Willy, Ronny, Michael, Daisy, Bettybut are uncommon these days for newborns.
Regarding the name "Hitler". His father, Alois Hitler, was actually born Alois Schicklgruber. He started (officially) using his stepfather's name, Hiedler, in the 1870's. That name got registered as Hitler for unknown reasons. So, Hitler's father was actually the first person to take on the name of Hitler. From there, it's relatively easy to track Hitler's (male) relatives after World War II. [William Patrick Hitler](_URL_0_). He was a British nephew of Hitler and joined the US Navy in 1941. He later changed his name to Stuart-Houston.
Hitler's half-nephew, Heinz Hitler, died in World War II leaving no children behind.
I couldn't find anything else on other male relatives of Hitler, so I think the name naturally went extinct after world war II with the exception of William Patrick Hitler.
I don't know about the name Schicklgruber however.
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During timeperiods with more oxygen in the atmosphere, did fires burn faster/hotter?
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Yes. And during periods with lower oxygen levels, fires burned more slowly or not at all. Some natural fuels will burn at high oxygen concentrations but not low. [This article](_URL_0_) examines these relationships. Wildfires may actually act to stabilize atmospheric oxygen levels. If the concentration increases, fires will burn faster and consume the excess. If the concentration decreases, fires slow down and consume less oxygen, allowing the concentration to rise again. Check out [this excellent paper(PDF)](_URL_1_) to learn more about this and other relationships between fire and climate, ecology, evolution, etc.
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When in high school I remember somebody telling me the fire us made of a different sate of matter (different being not solid, liquid or gas) called plasma. Is there any truth to this statement and if so what exactly is plasma?
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> Is there any truth to this statement and if so what exactly is plasma?
Absolutely it is true!
The standard response is that plasmas are the fourth state of matter, just like you can heat a solid into a liquid and a liquid into a gas you can heat a gas into a plasma. The transition happens because individual atoms receive enough energy to ionize, ie one (or more) of their bound electrons are stripped off. You are left with a gas made up of positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons.
In a flame this happens because it is high temperature. Hot electrons collide with atoms and cause them to become ionized.
The definition actually extends broader since things like an electron+positron gas is a plasma or a collection charged dust particles with electrons is a plasma. The exact transition from gas- > plasma is also slightly blurry since we would consider things like the photosphere of the Sun (at ~6000K) to be a plasma despite it only being something like 1 part in 10^4-5 ionized. This is also the case in your flame where the gas will only be weakly ionized. However, [if you put a flame in an electric field you can easily tell it is a plasma!](_URL_0_)
Other examples of plasmas in your life are: plasma tvs and (there is a tiny plasma inside every pixel!) flourescent tube lights. Also almost everything these days has been made with plasmas at some point. All electronic chips are manufactured using plasma etching and deposition along with coatings on any number of objects...mirrors, phone screens, plastics, chrome on cars...etc.
This is how we really hone in on what makes a plasma. Plasma behaviour shares some broad similarities with a gas but due to the electric charge of the composite species it ends up very different. The reason why is simply because gasses interact mostly by short range forces during binary collisions, whereas plasmas interact via long range electromagnetic forces.
These electromagnetic forces give rise to a set of collective behaviours that are unique to plasmas, the range of these behaviours is vast. The most useful (in my opinion) definition of a plasma is that it is a gas where there are a sufficiently large fraction of charged particles to enter a regime where the collective electromagnetic response is more important than the binary collisions of a gas. This is a characteristic of all the examples of plasmas I gave before.
I could probably write several more pages on what a plasma is (and I did when I wrote my PhD thesis) but I'll stop here before every single person has stopped reading.
edit:clarity
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Why can you rename, or change the path of, an open file in OS X but not Windows?
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The Windows filesystem identifies files by their paths (including the file names)—if you change a file’s path, applications and the operating system will perceive it as a new file with no connection to the original.
The OS X filesystem identifies files by an independent file ID, which remains fixed if the file is moved or renamed.
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what are the "loudness wars", why are they happening, and why should anyone care that music is getting louder?
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Music is getting compressed so it sounds louder. Before this you're set your volume to your preferred level and would hear everything from quiet notes to very loud and distinct drum hits. Now the quiet notes are louder, the mid range is louder, and consequently the formerly loud and distinct drum hits are just barely louder than everything else.
[This](_URL_0_) video demonstrates it better than any written description really can.
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how do processors work? how is a simple silicon chip able to perform calculations?
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This is a complicated topic built on very simple ideas. If you go step by step you should be able to wrap your head around it.
**What is a semi-conductor?** Starting all the way down at the atomic level. In pure silicon crystals, the atoms are neatly arranged, and all have their outer electron shell full, so it won't conduct electricity because all the electrons are nice and cosy. By adding impurities into the crystal, we make two types of semiconductors,: P and N. N (negative) has more electrons, so it's willing to give them away and P has fewer electrons (positive) so it's glad to take in electrons.
You [put a chunk of N next to P](_URL_4_) and you have a diode. Pass electric current (aka a flow of electrons, but in the other direction) through it in the P-N direction, and the electrons will flow freely. however if you pass current in the N-P direction, the part where the two semiconducting materials meet will become "full" of electrons, like natural silicon crystals, building a wall between the N and P where electrons don't want to move, and any new electrons will hit that wall and won't be able to move forward, instead they'll just keep building that cosy wall.
So we can force electricity to only pass one way through a circuit, pretty cool...now what?
**What is a transistor?** By [sandwiching semiconductors](_URL_3_) in an N-P-N or P-N-P way, and attaching electrodes (wires), we have a component that will behave differently depending where the electron flow comes from. This was first used as an amplifier (like a transistor radio), But can also be [used as a switch](_URL_1_).
Depending which part you put current in, what comes out of the transistor will either be current or no current.
**Logic circuits.**
Now that we have this little thing that can switch depending on if it has current or not, we can string a bunch of them together in various ways to make boolean logic circuits. boolean just means you either have yes or no, or, in binary, 1 or 0.
Here's a [NAND gate](_URL_0_), meaning *not and*, as you can see it pretty much looks like a transistor, because it is! You have two inputs, and if A has current (A=1) and B has current (B=1), it will put out a 0 (because it's a *not and*).
[Here's a basic XOR, *exclusive or* gate](_URL_2_), meaning that A need to be 1 or B needs to be 1 for Q to be 1, but if A and B are both 0 or both 1, Q will be 0. This is just one way basic AND or NAND gates can be strung together.
Now slap a few billion of these together in a CPU and you have a logic machine that can do all kinds of calculations.
(sorry for the brief ending, I ran out of time, hope you learned something)
EDIT: thanks to all the other people explaining boolean arithmetic on a higher level. Teamwork, yay!
EDIT2: Fixed some links and hopefully cleared up the confusion between electron flow and current.
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Is it possible that society actually needs wars as an engine for progress in technology? What does history say about this?
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This question is so broad, the answer will depend pretty much entirely on what you want it to be. It would be easy to name many cases in which war produced technological innovations, but just as easy to cite many cases in which it didn't. Whichever point you want to prove, you can pick your examples to match. Someone who reads the question and thinks immediately of the World Wars will say "competitive arms development, and the wartime challenges of logistics and medical care, contribute to technological invention and improvement in ways that might otherwise have taken longer, if they would have happened at all." But someone who thinks of, say, the Peloponnesian War might answer "war is only a destructive force; the priorities and costs of war actually inhibit any technological development that might otherwise have received the necessary funding, manpower and thought." Whole swathes of human history attest to the fact that endemic warfare often produces anarchy and poverty, not innovation and technological change.
This is complicated by the question whether the particular technologies developed in wartime (and for the sake of fighting wars more effectively) actually matter outside of that context. Wars may make a society better at fighting wars, but does that help anyone in society at large? It's easy to point at technologies that were invented for a military purpose and have since made the leap into civilian life; but similarly, it's easy to point at technological innovations (like, say, siege towers or anti-tank shells) that serve only to solve military problems and don't contribute anything to the way people live.
The guide you offer into these hugely subjective topics is that you're asking whether society *needs* war as a way to propel technological change. The implied assumption is that without wars, such change might not happen at all, or at a much slower rate and in fewer ways. This framing would theoretically allow us to put all of the war-related technology of history onto a big pile and ask (passing by the question whether all of it has a use in society) whether war was needed to produce all that, or whether it would have been developed regardless. But the problem there is that there's no cut-and-dried distinction between "war tech" and "civilian tech." They build on each other. For example, the steam engine was invented in an entirely civilian context and applied first in industries like mining and cloth making. But then it was adopted by navies to propel ships, which then kicked off a host of military innovations related to the new energy source. Modern tanks may be marvels of offensive and defensive technology, but the first tanks were designed around readily available agricultural tractor chassis. Does society need war to generate more advanced technology, or does military technology need society to produce things that allow it to develop?
Any answer will inevitably devolve into a chicken-and-egg question. Who actually owes whom for what? Which innovations can militaries wholly claim (especially given that modern military technology is developed in a network of government contracting and liaison with civilian industry)? Can we isolate the improvements made during certain conflicts and can we assume they would not have been made without those conflicts? How do we define "need" when we say that society needs warfare to propel technological change?
Such questions can only be answered on a case-by-case basis. Technological improvements need to be seen in their historical context: not just the when and why of their development, but the origins of their parts and their principles. You don't just randomly come up with radar or nuclear fission to fight wars better. Similarly, society at large doesn't just sit there waiting for the boffins at the War Department to give them these things to play around with. The development of new technology is a process with different people contributing for different reasons - some in the military, some in universities, some in their shed or their study. It's impossible to say categorically which side needs the other to make any progress.
Just as importantly, the mere existence of a military conflict does not speed up military innovation; there needs to be a context in which new technologies are available from other spheres and new technology is thought to offer opportunities for major tactical or strategic advantage. If these conditions are absent, wars will simply be fought in the tried-and-tested manner until one side wins. Many resources will be spent or destroyed in the process. It's not by definition an ideal environment for the development of different technology.
In short, we can't simply answer this question one way or the other. It is uncontroversial that research spurred on by war has contributed substantially to the improvement of existing technologies and the development of new ones (especially in recent times). After all, people invest ingenuity and resources in things that matter to them, and warfare has tended to matter a lot. On the other hand, it is also uncontroversial that technological innovation happens outside of the military sphere, and that militaries benefit substantially from this. It is also presumably uncontroversial that war is not primarily a creative force, but one mainly interested in enhancing its ability to destroy. Any attempt to resolve these contradictions in a single universal truism about war's influence on technology seems futile to me.
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how do companies like walmart profit from selling gift cards to other services when a gift card costs the amount of credit it's worth?
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it is a strategy used to get people in the door, much like a sale, it is ok to not make as much money on one or two items because usually when people come in they buy more than they were intending to in the first place, it happens. so to get people in the door it is actually more profitable to sell some things at a reduced price or even at a loss if it means you are making more profit on other goods and or services
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The Norse people were shown to be capable raiders, especially in the British Isles. The Anglo-Saxons despite divided were socially and militarily organised, why did they, or others, never seek or attempt to attack Scandinavia?
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I afraid that I cannot offer a single definitive answer to 'why X didn't Y' type question of OP. Instead I'll make some corrections to OP's premise below.
First of all, there was no known unified large-scale kingdom in Scandinavia before the middle of the 10th century (until the rise of the Jelling dynasty in Denmark), possibly except for the kingdom of the Godfred family in its southernmost part (Southern Denmark) in the early 9th century. Three Nordic medieval kingdoms, that is to say, Denmark, Norway and Sweden have primarily been political products since the last decades of the first millennium. In other words, it was not so likely that the majority of the Norse raiders in the middle to late 9th century were under the direct influence of one of such rulers in the unified kingdom, though some Frankish rulers might have misunderstood so that they tried to negotiate the ruler of 'the Danes' to deal with the onslaughts of the raiders mostly in vain.
Apart from the apparent problem, navigation durability of the fleet of any non-Scandinavian power at that time from their homeland to Scandinavia (that I personally have much doubt), to annihilate or to conclude a treaty with one or two polities (petty kingdoms) in Scandinavia around 900 to stop raiding would not have eliminated the threat of Norse raiders' invasion since there were probably much more polities remained than the fleet could possibly handle.
And yes, there were indeed some attempt of non-Scandinavian European powers, especially some German rulers, to invade the southernmost part of Viking Age Denmark in the 10th century, as I illustrated in [The Danes or Vikings from later Denmark would often raid the Frankish Empire and later what would become the Holy Roman Empire. How were they so successful and how did the Danes avoid being conquered by the big powers?](_URL_0_). I suppose that main force of such German invasions comprised of cavalry and infantry, not the fleet, as long as attested in narrative sources and based on the location of the battlefield (Danevirke, the palisade built by Danish rulers).
On the other hand, I should also point out the fact that not all the Norse raiders didn't probably directly came to the British Isles from Scandinavia. Many Viking war bands were active around the British Isles as well as the English Channel in the middle of the 9th century, and now researchers suppose that they kept 'stayed' in this area for more than a few years, and sometimes took shelter in one of 'their' new political centers nearby, such as Dublin in Ireland or Rouen in Normandy, or further, York in Northern England, instead of Scandinavia. Then, targeting one of these 'diaspora' polities rather than distant petty kingdoms in Scandinavia would be much more realistic and successful tactic against the Norse raiders, and some local rulers actually did so (note that the Norse ruler was once expelled from Dublin in the early 10th century (from 902 to 917)).
References:
* Brink, Stefan & Neil Price (eds.). *The Viking World*. London: Routledge, 2008.
* Garipzanow, Ildar H. 'Frontier Identities: Carolingian Frontier and the Gens Danorum'. In: *Franks, Northmen, and Slavs: Identities and State Formation in Early Medieval Europe*, ed. Id., Patrick Geary & Przemyslaw Urbancyzk, pp. 113-43. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008.
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islands like hawaii seem to very quickly get diverse vegetation even though they pop up in the middle of the ocean, so where do the first seeds come from?
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Seeds travel in many ways. Some get there by water, traveling on air currents (think dandelion) or by animals (bird eats seed, undigested seed from excrement finds new home), and by humans.
In Hawaii's case, many of their trees and plants were brought to the island by early settlers.
Edit: removed inaccurate information about the quantity of native flora and fauna. Thanks for correct info!
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If photons are smaller than atoms, why don't they pass through solid matter?
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The closest thing to "size" for a photon is its wavelength. Different types of light have different wavelengths: x-rays have really short wavelengths, while radio waves have really long wavelengths. Visible light is somewhere in the middle.
If the wavelength is small compared to whatever we're dealing with, then you can treat the photon like a particle - i.e. it's a "bullet" that either hits, misses, or bounces off whatever we're dealing with. Visible light is 100s of nanometres in wavelength, which is way smaller than say, a window, and so you can think of it as a bunch of light "particles" flying towards the window: some of the particles go through the window, some bounce off the frame etc.
But if the wavelength is *big* compared to whatever we're dealing with, you really need to treat the photon like a wave - i.e. instead of a bullet being fired at a solid object, imagine a bunch of objects floating around in the ocean being shoved around by a water wave. This is the case for visible light and atoms. Visible light is 100s of nanometres in wavelength, but atoms can be even smaller than 1 nanometre. So you can't really "miss" with visible light - the photon passes through hundreds of atoms at the same time. This means there is definitely some interaction going on, and so the photon can be changed a little by the atoms, and that allows you to "see" the atoms when the photon hits your eye.
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I know of absolute zero at -273.15°C, but is there an absolute hot?
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We don't know if there's a maximum temperature.
In certain models -- string theory is one of them -- there is a maximum temperature called the *Hagedorn temperature*. This arises because the number of possible high energy states increases sufficiently fast that as you put more energy into the system, it gets spread out over more and more states in such a way that the temperature decreases less and less for a given amount of heat put in. Net result is that there's a temperature that is the upper limit of the temperatures that can be reached.
I'll add that even in string theory, some people think the Hagedorn temperature might not be an actual limit, but more an indication that there is a phase transition (like when a liquid turns to gas), but that's even more speculative.
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why does light only penetrate 1000 meters of the ocean and not the entire ocean?
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Roughly speaking, every metre of water will reduce the light by a fraction. Let's say that after 10m half the light is gone. After 20m, only a quarter would be left. After 100m, only a thousandth of the light would be getting through. (Number pulled out of my thin air.) In practice, presence of creatures/debris/different pressures/etc will affect it, but broadly speaking it will decrease exponentially with depth.
Sonar is a wave in the water itself. As it propagates differently, it does not decay exponentially in the same way, allowing it to potentially propagate far longer distances. How it does propagate is rather complicated, and dependant upon a lot of variables, especially the frequency. Most frequencies would not work, sonar uses frequencies specially chosen for how well they function at the task.
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Did the Soviet Union have competitive entrance examinations for Universities? If yes, how did they differ from the ones in Europe and US?
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As a follow up question to OP's question, how common was it for Soviet universities to increase the difficulty of the entrance exams for, so-called, "undesirables"?
[This article](_URL_0_) highlights the unfairness of entrance exams given to prospective Jewish students at the mathematics department of Moscow State University. Was this the norm?
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What is the significance of the use of "I am" instead of "I have" when Vishnu says, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds"?
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You would probably receive a more thorough and knowledgable answer if you asked this question in /r/linguistics.
However, I can tell you that the [present perfect](_URL_1_) construction "I am become" is not the result of a direct translation of Sanskrit, but an artifact of early modern English that most likely stems from the [Germanic influence upon the language](_URL_0_). The construction may still be found in modern German.
In addition to "I am become death," you may find similar constructions repeated in the Bible ("I am come in my father's name," John 5:43 KJV), in Christmas carols ("Joy to the world, the Lord is come"), and in much of English literature prior to the 20th century.
Additionally, this type of present perfect construction survives with verbs other than *come/become*, both in one-off archaic phrases ("He is risen,") and in standard English ("The box of Oreos is gone.")
edit: added some links.
supra-edit: not surprised to learn from /u/mambeau that /r/linguistics has already [answered this question](_URL_2_).
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On YouTube I can watch extremely detailed videos of ancient Roman battles that show what each section of the army did and at what time. How is this known, exactly? Was there just a scribe sitting on a hill recording the battle?
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Well yes, there were always reporters for the [*Novum Eburicum Tempora*.](_URL_0_)
But seriously, it is worth just looking at the source material for this. The reconstruction of Teutoberg is more complicated than most in part because batlefield archaeology has actually played a role in shaping our understanding of it, so instead I will use Cannae as one of the most famous battles of the ancient world and one that tends to feature in these sorts of battlefield reconstruction. From Polybius' *Histories* 3.113-116:
> Next day it was Terentius' turn to take the command, and just after sunrise he began to move his forces out of both camps. Crossing the river with those from the larger camp he at once put them in order of battle, drawing up those from the other camp next to them in the same line, the whole army facing south. He stationed the Roman cavalry close to the river on the right wing and the foot next to them in the same line, placing the maniples closer together than was formerly the usage and making the depth of each many times exceed its front. The allied horse he drew up on his left wing, and in front of the whole force at some p281 distance he placed his light-armed troops. The whole army, including the allies, numbered about eighty thousand foot and rather more than six thousand horse. Hannibal at the same time sent his slingers and pikemen over the river and stationed them in front, and leading the rest of his forces out of camp he crossed the stream in two places and drew them up opposite the enemy. On his left close to the river he placed his Spanish and Celtic horse facing the Roman cavalry, next these half his heavy-armed Africans, then the Spanish and Celtic infantry, and after them the other half of the Africans, and finally, on his right wing, his Numidian horse. After thus drawing up his whole army in a straight line, he took the central companies of the Spaniards and Celts and advanced with them, keeping rest of them in contact with these companies, but gradually falling off, so as to produce a crescent-shaped formation, the line of the flanking companies growing thinner as it was prolonged, his object being to employ the Africans as a reserve force and to begin the action with the Spaniards and Celts.
> The Africans were armed in the Roman fashion, Hannibal having equipped them with the choicest of the arms captured in the previous battles. The shields of the Spaniards and Celts were very similar, but they swords were entirely different, those of the Spaniards thrusting with as deadly effect as they cut, but the Gaulish sword being only able to slash and requiring a long sweep to do so. As they were drawn up in alternate companies, the Gauls naked and the Spaniards in short tunics bordered with purple, their national dress, they presented a strange and impressive appearance. The Carthaginian cavalry numbered about ten thousand, and their infantry, including the Celts, did not much exceed forty thousand. The Roman right wing was under the command of Aemilius, the left under that of Terentius, and the centre under the Consuls of the previous year, Marcus Atilius and Gnaeus Servilius. Hasdrubal commanded the Carthaginian left, Hanno the right, and Hannibal himself with his brother Mago the centre. Since the Roman army, as I said, faced south and the Carthaginians north, they were neither of them inconvenienced by the rising sun.
> The advanced guards were the first to come into action, and at first when only the light infantry were engaged neither side had the advantage; but when the Spanish and Celtic horse on the left wing came into collision with the Roman cavalry, the struggle that ensued was truly barbaric; for there were none of the normal wheeling evolutions, but having once met they dismounted and fought man to man. The Carthaginians finally got the upper hand, killed most of the enemy in the mellay, all the Romans fighting with desperate bravery, and began to drive the rest along the river, cutting them down mercilessly, and it was now that the heavy infantry on each side took the place of the light-armed troops and met. For a time the Spaniards p285 and Celts kept their ranks and struggled bravely with the Romans, but soon, borne down by the weight of the legions, they gave way and fell back, breaking up the crescent. The Roman maniples, pursuing them furiously, easily penetrated the enemy's front, since the Celts were deployed in a thin line while they themselves had crowded up from the wings to the centre where the fighting was going on. For the centres and wings did not come into action simultaneously, but the centres first, as the Celts were drawn up in a crescent and a long way in advance of their wings, the convex face of the crescent being turned towards the enemy. The Romans, however, following up the Celts and pressing on to the centre and that part of the enemy's line which was giving way, progressed so far that they now had the heavy-armed Africans on both of their flanks. Hereupon the Africans on the right wing facing to the left and then beginning from the right charged upon the enemy's flank, while those on the left faced to the right and dressing by the left, did the same, the situation itself indicating to them how to act. The consequence was that, as Hannibal had designed, the Romans, straying too far in pursuit of the Celts, were caught between the two divisions of the enemy, and they now no longer kept their compact formation but turned singly or in companies to deal with the enemy who was falling on their flanks.
> Aemilius, though he had been on the right wing from the outset and had taken part in the p287 cavalry action, was still safe and sound; but wishing to act up to what he had said in his address to the troops, and to be present himself at the fighting, and seeing that the decision of the battle lay mainly with the legions, he rode along to the centre of the whole line, where he not only threw himself personally into the combat and exchanged blows with the enemy but kept cheering on and exhorting his men. Hannibal, who had been in this part of the field since the commencement of the battle, did likewise. The Numidians meanwhile on the right wing, attacking the cavalry opposite them on the Roman left, neither gained any great advantage nor suffered any serious loss owing to their peculiar mode of fighting, but they kept the enemy's cavalry out of action by drawing them off and attacking them from all sides at once. Hasdrubal, having by this time cut up very nearly all the enemy's cavalry by the river, came up from the left to help the Numidians, and now the Roman allied horse, seeing that they were going to be charged by him, broke and fled. Hasdrubal at this juncture appears to have acted with great skill and prudence; for in view of the fact that the Numidians were very numerous and most efficient and formidable when in pursuit of a flying foe he left them to deal with the Roman cavalry and led his squadrons on to where the infantry were engaged with the object of supporting the Africans. Attacking the Roman legions in the rear and delivering repeated charges at various points all at once, he raised the spirits of the Africans and cowed and dismayed the Romans. It was here that Lucius Aemilius fell in the thick of the fight after receiving several dreadful wounds, and of him we may say that if there ever was a man who did his duty by his country both all through his life and in these last times, it was he. The Romans as long as they could turn and present a front on every side to the enemy, held out, but as the outer ranks continued to fall, and the rest were gradually huddled in and surrounded, they finally all were killed where they stood, among them Marcus and Gnaeus, the Consuls of the preceding year, who had borne themselves in the battle like brave men worthy of Rome. While this murderous combat was going on, the Numidians following up the flying cavalry killed most of them and unseated others. A few escaped to Venusia, among them being the Consul Gaius Terentius, who disgraced himself by his flight and in his tenure of office had been most unprofitable to his country.
From this account you can get most of the details you will see in videos like the one you posted: the weak Carthaginian center that fell back to allow the double envelopment of the Roman lines, the cavalry action on the sides, the screening by the skirmishers, etc. What you *don't* see is the conceptualization of the army into neat "blocks" that tend to dominate [popular representations of battles.](_URL_1_) The Romans did organize their army in a way that could sort of allow that as the armies were dvided into named legions (~5000), cohorts (~600) centuries (~80) and conturbium (~10),^1 but it is very rare to see that reflected in battle literature unless a subdivision of the army did something remarkable (such as Cato's detachment during the Battle of Thermopylae). That is largely a modern convention, and someone more familiar with the development of modern military theory can probably comment on that better than I can.
^1 These numbers are *very* approximate and vary across time and space, and the *conturbium* may not have been thought of as a tactical unit.
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How exactly does the rabies virus control human beings (stop them from drinking)?
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Rabies infects neurones that control respiration and swallowing.
There is an automatic cycle you usually don’t notice around breathing and swallowing.
The rabies infection of the neurones controlling that cause it to become unreliable.
An infected person starts to have trouble swallowing and the negative reinforcement of trying to swallow and choking causes an involuntary anxiety or fear around doing it.
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how come when you crack your knuckles underwater, it is incredibly loud, but when you try and scream underwater, the sound is muffled to a whimper?
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Water transmits sounds quite well, so if an action vibrates the water to make a sound, you'll be able to hear it clearly in the local area. However, sound does not cross mediums very well. When you're trying to talk (or scream) underwater, the sound is being generated by vibrating air in your vocal chords. When this hits the water just outside your mouth, only a little of that energy is transmitted into producing underwater sound waves. The rest is lost, reflecting back into your mouth.
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Did 'Population: ' signs actually appear outside towns in the American West? If so what was their purpose?
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American expansion always included strong elements of boosterism: wanting to believe that your town was bigger and better, or would soon be bigger and better, than other nearby towns. Because I’ve never seen any suggestion that population signs were posted for view by passing railway passengers, I believe the practice really arose in the early days of automobiles and cross-country motoring. In much of the nation, the new highway network was cobbled together from pre-existing county roads, including the section-line roads that run parallel at one-mile intervals. With so many routing possibilities, there was great rivalry among small towns to be on the new marked route that would attract motorists, and I speculate that booster clubs put up signs at junctions and crossroads touting their towns: listing the services such as hotels, repair garages, and tourist campgrounds to be found there, and also showing a population figure that would suggest a greater variety of eateries, services, and attractions. No doubt there was some inflation of those figures, and so state highway departments and their official signs noting entrance into municipalities became the trusted arbiter of such figures.
Some states also show the altitude of towns on city-limit signs, a holdover from railway days when that was a figure of interest to both the drivers of the locomotives and travelers passing through. In the early days of motoring, altitude was also a factor in engine adjustment and performance, and useful for motorists to know.
Alas, I’ve never found much in the way of sources on this topic, so its informed more by broader understanding of the rise of the automobile and civic rivalry in the early 20th century. The rivalry of towns wanting to be included on the pioneering coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway is chronicled in Drake Hokanson’s book *The Lincoln Highway: Main Street Across America.* John A. Jakle and Keith Sculle’s book *Motoring: The Highway Experience in America* gives a pretty good picture of the landscape that faced early cross-country motorists. The various papers in *Roadside America: The Automobile in Design and Culture,* edited by Jan Jennings, give more detailed insight into various aspects of the roadside culture.
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why does orange juice after brushing my teeth with mint tooth paste feel like the gods are punishing me?
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Orange juice is very sour and very sweet. Your tooth paste temporarily makes you unable to taste sweetness. Without the sweet there to balance it, the sourness of orange juice becomes kinda overwhelming.
[A similar thing happens with the miracle berry, which blocks sour and salty tastes](_URL_0_)
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Is there anything special or discerning about "visible light" other then the fact that we can see it?
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It's not amazingly special, but there are some good reasons why animals have similar ranges of vision (although some go a little bit into infrared and ultraviolet). I can't talk about evolutionary pressure because that's not my field, but I can talk about the physics of light and why if I was the engineer tasked with designing a biological eye, I would use visible light.
1. While the Sun emits light at all sorts of wavelengths, the peak is in visible light - in green to be specific. So we get the brightest light at visible.
2. The atmosphere is partially opaque at a lot of wavelengths. There are convenient "windows" where the atmosphere is transparent: at radio wavelengths and at visible wavelengths. So it's much easier to transmit and receive information over long distances using radio or visible light.
3. Our eyes detect light with chemical reactions. So the light photons need to have a similar energy to the range of energies used in chemical reactions, and visible light has energies of around 1-10 eV, which is just right. It also means that this light is easily absorbed and reflected by objects we interact with, and that's what allows us to see things: things like gamma rays or radio waves aren't very well absorbed by things like people, trees, or computers, so it's very difficult to get a proper image of those types of object at these wavelengths.
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How were the Romans able to replenish so much of their manpower despite devastating losses in battles such as Cannae?
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I take it your question is less about Roman logistics and more about the specific fact that the forces at Cannae were effective crushed as a standing army, and how did Rome recover from something like that?
First thing is first, with Cannae specifically there were very real and very profound consequences. Several city-states defected from Rome and turned to Carthage. Most estimates put Rome's total loss at over 70,000 with almost 40,000 of those being straight up casualties.
The Second Punic War devastated Rome.
So what was their response?
Well, for lack of a better term, conscription.
The Carthaginians attempts to parley after Cannae and it was rejected. Instead, Rome conscripted *everyone* they could get their hands on, including peasants with no ties to land, as well as slaves. Furthermore, Rome flexed its legendary resilience by quickly adapting military doctrine and tactics, developing ways to counter Hannibal's classic flanking technique and changing their strategy to *never put that many people under one command again*, instead relying on much smaller, independent forces to face future foes.
In short, Rome survived because it was never too proud or too stubborn to find a way to make things work. Making the best of what they could gather, and getting mad rather than despairing. They took on totally new tactics and exploited the weakness of Carthage; attacking everywhere Hannibal was not.
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Why do you see double when drinking or sometimes experience the situation where you need to close one eye to concentrate on written text? More specifically, what mechanisms in the brain create the situation where hemispheres of the brain might not communicate correctly in this situation?
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Thank you for this question, there is some fascinating work in the brain going on here.
Alcohol is a "depressant". This means that it slows down the brain. When we are intoxicated with alcohol our eye tracking slows down (along with a lot of other brain processes).
Eye tracking is what makes both of our eyes look at the same thing. As it is slowed down by alcohol this causes the eyes not to sync up correctly and both eyes are looking at slightly different points.
Our brain interprets sight by comparing both eyes. So it effectively takes two images and blends them into one. Because the images are now not tracked we get a double vision effect.
Closing one eye removes one of the two images and therefore alleviates this problem.
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How come Ireland adopted the language of England, but not its religion, while Finland adopted the religion of Sweden, but not its language?
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I can't speak to Finland and Sweden, but in Ireland, English was pretty heavily enforced as a language by the British colonists. Irish was prohibited in British National Schools, and the famines hit the rural areas, where Irish was a majority language, much harder than urban areas where English was more popular. There's also the fact that English naturally presented more opportunities as a high-esteem language.
Religion pretty much was adopted from Britain in Ireland. Roman Catholics brought it over in the 5th century. The English reformation was just much harder to enforce later on, as Catholicism had become a large part of the Irish identity. It's much harder to convert people when they don't speak your language, and while many English speakers in Dublin (and obviously Ulster) were Protestants, Irish speakers remained Catholic.
Daniel O'Connell is a pretty famous Irish historical figure who championed Catholic Emancipation during the 19th century. He founded the Catholic Association which campaigned for and succeeded in getting the Catholic Relief Act passed in 1829. The act allowed Roman Catholics to sit in Westminster and generally signalled the turn of public opinion against the persecution of Catholics in previous centuries.
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why do all animals, even insects, seem to go nuts over the red dot?
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> Felidae (all kinds of cats from large to small) brains and eyes are geared to a) notice motion and b) play with their prey. Playing with prey is the best way to kill possibly dangerous animals... especially things like venomous snakes. Dodge in, bat the hell out of it before it can strike, dodge out. After 5 or 6 repetitions of this, the snake is bleeding to death and/or has massive internal injuries. The same thing goes for any other animal that might fight back, like a cornered rat or mouse.
> Lasers are BRIGHT. You don't think of the little red dot as very bright because it's so small... but if you measure its brightness, it's usually much brighter than the average lightbulb.
> So laser light is a intensely bright spot of color (despite the fact that cats don't see red well. It looks mostly green to them) and motion, much brighter and more intense than anything it would be exposed to in nature. It hits all those feline eyes and brain cells like a ton of bricks and kicks their 'play with the prey' instincts and emotions into full gear.
> The cat will happily exhaust itself chasing the laser dot in circles.
> Imagine yourself watching a really good, suspenseful, action movie that gets your emotions up and makes you want to cheer. It's probably more intense than anything you'd experience in real life.
> Same exact emotions and feelings, but kitteh gets it from running itself ragged chasing the dot.
_URL_0_
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why has no one crossed a dandelion with a carrot or parsnip, thus creating a nutritious vegetable that grows wild as a weed?
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A few things. First, dandelions *are* nutritious vegetables that you can eat lots of ways.
Second, a weed is just any unwanted plant - they typically grow more aggressively than cultivated plants because they are evolved specifically for the environment in which they are found and because they don't waste any energy producing something extra for humans. For example, there are wild carrots, they just don't produce as large and tasty a root as cultivated carrots. Cultivated carrots need more support, because we've bred them to be *inefficient* as plants in order to be efficient as food. It's hard to get the weedy-ness of a weed and the wasteful extravagance of cultivated plant.
(Also, it's typically only possible to cross plant varieties of the same species or at least the same genus. Otherwise you're crossing wildly different species - it's like trying to get a chicken and a pig to successfully mate. Maybe it would produce delicious bacon flavored wings, but too bad cuz it ain't gonna happen.)
You might be interested in heirloom plants varieties, though - these are older varieties of cultivated crops that typically offer a lot more variety than more modern versions and tend to be more adapted to specific areas.
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if george washington warned us about the power of parties, how was he imagining the government to work?
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A multiple party system is fine. The more groups there are, the more they have to work together as a team to meet the majority set in the rules and pass a law. Thus, the things that get passed are generally what the majority approves of.
A two party system leads to black-or-white, zero sum thinking. If my team didn't win, then we lost. All ideas are boiled down to three options: agree with group A, with group B, or just don't participate because you don't agree with either. That leads to us vs. them mentalities, or voter apathy.
Washington's famous quote about this starts: "The alternate domination of one faction over another". He's really saying when two parties trade off, alternating running a country, this is a Bad Thing.
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What was the truth behind the Allies' accusations that the German Army committed horrific war crimes/atrocities in Belgium during World War One?
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This is an important and complex question. The **TL;DR** on it is "yes, more or less, but it gets complicated."
To begin with, [here is a proclamation](_URL_3_) by the German General Otto von Emmich, distributed widely in Belgium in the autumn of 1914 as the German army crossed the tiny nation’s borders and began its slow march south. The declaration it makes is rather incredible:
> It is to my very great regret that the German troops find themselves compelled to cross the Belgian frontier. They are acting under the constraints of an unavoidable necessity, Belgium’s neutrality having been violated by French officers who, in disguise, crossed Belgian territory by motor-car in order to make their way into Germany.
It goes on to insist that the Belgian people should look upon the soldiers of the German army as “the best of friends,” that those soldiers would “pay in gold” for anything requisitioned by that army in the course of its uneventful passage through Belgium, and closes with von Emmich’s “formal pledges to the Belgian population that it will have nothing to suffer from the horrors of war.” The document carries an ominous tone throughout, however; the reader is coolly informed that von Emmich “hope[s] the German army of the Meuse will not be forced to fight you,” and that any Belgian destruction of their own bridges, tunnels and railways “will have to be looked upon as hostile acts.” The Belgian reader could be forgiven, perhaps, for looking upon the above assurances with a degree of skepticism.
This skepticism was more than borne out by the course of events.
On August 4th, 1914, the German army began crossing the border into Belgium. The Belgians, understandably unwilling to allow such a thing to occur without offering firm protest, chose to stand and fight. Bridges were indeed destroyed. Roads were blocked. Barricades were put up — and, while the nation’s small and ill-equipped army could not hope to defeat the German invaders, it did manage to slow them down to such an extent that the carefully drafted timetables of the planned invasion had to be rewritten from scratch, and the British Expeditionary Force was able to arrive in time to further delay the attempted conquest of Belgium and passage into France. In an abstract sense, the First Battle of the Marne was won in the fields outside of Liège.
When the dust had settled, only a small sliver of Belgium south of the inundated Yser remained unoccupied — the rest of the kingdom, including the great cities of Namur, Liège, Antwerp, and the capital Brussels, had been taken. The popular Belgian King, Albert I, remained at liberty and in command of the ~150,000-strong army that held the ground from Nieuwpoort through to Ypres.
All of this is fairly straightforward, but a peculiar thing has happened when it comes to the popular Anglo-American memory of the events that transpired in Belgium during the autumn of 1914: once the narrative of the war reaches the establishment of the trench system and the commencement of the long-standing stalemate that is viewed as such an essential aspect of the war in the West, Belgium and its people seem to vanish from the story entirely. Why might this be?
The answer to this question is the one your post here suggests: the troubled history of “propaganda” and its complex role in the war. I've [written elsewhere](_URL_5_) about the roots of modern propaganda in the First World War, but in the meantime let it suffice to say that a great deal of propagandistic hay was made of the sufferings of Belgium in the war’s early stages — especially by British journalists, statesmen and public intellectuals. The most notorious example of this is likely the *Bryce Report* (or, more extensively, the [*Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages*](_URL_4_)), first released in 1915. The report has long been a bête noire for those cultural historians examining popular attitudes during the war, it having been concluded by some very emphatic commentators in the 1920s and 1930s (such as Arthur Ponsonby in *Falsehood in War-Time* and Irene Cooper Willis in *England’s Holy War*) that the Report was simply a tissue of lies. Modern research, as we shall see, has confirmed that the *Report*’s conclusions were substantially correct.
As a consequence of this and other dismissals, the quite real sufferings of this nation and her people have since (in my view) been unjustly swept away along with everything else that now smacks of the sensationalism, hate-mongering and outright invention that are believed to have been the propagandists’ stock in trade. This would be a too-simple evaluation of the situation in general terms, but, in the case of the plight of Belgium, it is a very serious error indeed.
As we approach the beginning of the war’s centenaries, it is only fitting that pieces of the puzzle that have hitherto been missing finally be put back into place. So:
It is true that many of the more sensational stories of German “outrages” perpetrated in Belgium during the course of the invasion and ensuing occupation are very hard to believe, much less corroborate. German soldiers eating Belgian babies; German soldiers hanging Belgian nuns between church bells and ringing them to death; German soldiers crucifying dozens of farmers by the roadside; and so on — these are stories that are familiar to us through the fact of them having now become standard examples of why “propaganda” is not to be trusted. Claims like these (it is said) poisoned the home front’s understanding of the war; works that made such claims disgusted the war poets and memoirists so much that they rose up in reaction against them; stories of this sort caused the English-speaking peoples to be so skeptical of atrocity reports that they were too late in reacting to the events of the years leading up to 1939. All of this is considerably more complicated than these summaries suggest, but that's more than I wish to get into just at the moment.
The point is that we need not dwell on such extreme suggestions to see much in the German occupation of Belgium worth acknowledging. Let us consider some numbers:
- The total Belgian deaths during the war amount to some 100,000 — 40,000 military deaths and 60,000 civilian deaths.
- Of those civilians who died as a direct result of the war, some 6,000 were deliberately and premeditatedly executed. More on this below.
- Nearly 1.5 million Belgians were displaced by the German occupation of their land, with impoverished refugees fleeing in every direction. Some 200,000 ended up in Britain, and another 300,000 in France. The most, by far — nearly a million — fled to the Netherlands, but did not always have an easy time in doing so. The German army constructed a 200km-long [electrified fence](_URL_0_), called the *Dodendraad* by the Dutch, that claimed the lives of around 3,000 attempted escapees during the course of the war.
- Some 120,000 Belgian civilians (of both sexes) were used as forced labour during the war, with roughly half being deported to Germany to toil in prison factories and camps, and half being sent to work just behind the front lines. Anguished Belgian letters and diaries from the period tell of being forced to work for the Zivilarbeiter-Bataillone, repairing damaged infrastructure, laying railway tracks, even manufacturing weapons and other war materiel for their enemies. Some were even forced to work in the support lines at the Front itself, digging secondary and tertiary trenches as Allied artillery fire exploded around them. I've gone into some more detail on this subject [here](_URL_2_), though some of what I've already provided above draws on that content already.
In all of this, then, it would seem that there is plenty that deserves the benefit of modern memory and which cannot easily be dismissed as mere invention for Allied propaganda.
How, then, might it be best to remember this suffering? What place might it play in the ongoing debate over just what tone and tenor the upcoming centenaries should take? The advent of the hundredth anniversaries of so many events provides an ideal moment for reflection and re-evaluation — particularly when it comes to things that “everyone knows.” It is now a commonplace that “everyone knows” the British state and news media lied about German atrocities in Belgium to maintain popular support for the British war effort, but it is well past time to re-examine what is commonly said about those lies and that support.
Alan Kramer and John Horne, in their magisterial volume on this subject (*German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial*; 2001), have painstakingly reconstructed the reality behind the propaganda in a way that should leave no reader in doubt. Through years of careful archival research they have reached the conclusion that there was indeed a systematic program of civilian executions — sometimes en masse — conducted in Belgium, by the German army, with the purpose of breaking the spirit of resistance and striking terror into the heart of the population. The anniversaries of the worst of these catastrophes are upon us; on August 23rd, 1914, the German army took revenge upon the Belgian city of Dinant for what it falsely believed to be the actions of Belgian *francs-tireurs* (“free-shooters”, or non-military partisans). This revenge took the form of the burning of over a 1,000 buildings and the execution of some 674 civilians. The oldest among them was in his 90s; the youngest was barely a month old. These civilians were killed in a variety of ways. Some were bayoneted, others burned alive; most were bound, put up against walls, and then executed by a volley of rifle fire — all in reprisal for something that had not actually happened. Two days later (August 25th), the same spirit of reprisal played out again elsewhere — [in Leuven](_URL_6_).
It is important to note, in closing, that we need not examine events such as those described above and come away with nothing but a “[Blame Germany](_URL_1_)” perspective. Alan Kramer has convincingly shown in his 2007 follow-up volume, *Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War*, that the increasing radicalization of military occupation was a feature of the war to be found in numerous theatres, not solely in Belgium or solely at the end of a German gun. As ever, it is very hard for anyone involved in the war to come away with their hands clean.
Nevertheless, with the transnational turn that has been taken by much of First World War historiography in recent decades and the centenary-inspired willingness to re-evaluate long-held assumptions about the war’s meaning and conduct, it is perhaps well past time for the wartime sufferings of Belgium and her people to move out of the realm of convenient fiction and back into that of uncomfortable fact.
All of this is a very long-winded way of saying, to conclude, that -- yes -- the German army did indeed do some pretty nasty stuff in Belgium. It was not alone in doing so in occupied territory, and some stories about its activities are certainly inventions or exaggerations, but what it did do should probably be enough to give the reader pause.
**Suggested Readings**
- Kramer, Alan and John Horne. *German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial* (2001).
- Kramer, Alan. *Dynamics of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War* (2007).
- Stibbe, Matthew ed. *Captivity, Forced Labour and Forced Migration in Europe During the First World War* (2009).
- Thiel, Jens. *‘Menschenbassin Belgien’: Anwerbung, Deportation und Zwangsarbeit in Ersten Weltkrieg* (2007).
- Hull, Isabel V. *Absolute destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany* (2005).
- Becker, Annette. *Oubliés de la Grande guerre* (1998).
- Jones, Heather. *Violence Against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France, and Germany, 1914-1920* (2011).
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why does a knife need to be moved to be sharp? if you touch a knife it's ok, but if you drag your finger down the edge it hurts.
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Knives are still sharp straight-on and can cut that way. However, at a microscopic level, even straight-edged knives have tiny teeth. So when you move the edge against the item to be cut, you are actually running a tiny ultra-sharp saw across it.
[Micro photo of a razor's edge can be seen here.](_URL_0_)
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When and why did golf become the default "upper-class hangout/dealmaking" activity? What filled that role before?
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In ancient Persia, there was quite an exciting sport that we've been able to reconstruct from artistic depictions, and also the preserved fragments from the ancient Persian *On the art of entertaining officials*, an important handbook for satraps and other royal officials. Whenever a group of royal officials were seriously bored, they would first locate a cliff, or a mountain. They would also bring with them a large herd of camels, and then send down observers to the bottom of the mountain (this being pretty important for what followed). Each noble would then choose a camel. The camel would be strapped into a harness, and then attached to a large brightly coloured canvas. And when I say large, I mean several metres wingspan. Then the camels would, one by one, be forced to run off the edge of the mountain or cliff. They would quite literally hang-glide from there to the bottom, and the competition was won by noble whose camel travelled the greatest distance. Camel harnesses breaking was a big problem, which is why there were so many brought up the hill. It seems to have been a pretty obscure sport in the rest of Persia, all told, but nobles seem to have loved sending camels hang-gliding off cliffs.
A reconstruction of the hang-gliders for camels can be found in Samuel P Langley's papers, currently stored in the Smithsonian Institution Archives; the man simply insisted on attempting to recreate one. A more recent and direct look at the subject can be found in Louis Nockton-Draffer's *The Persian Funeral Glider: Reconstruction and experiential perspectives*, presented at the 7th Experimental Archeology Conference in Cardiff
[WARNING THIS IS TOTALLY A JOKE NONE OF THIS IS REAL. READ MOD NOTE HERE](_URL_0_)
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How different is breast milk to formula in terms of the baby's health?
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Please remember that this is /r/askscience. While it may be tempting to share your own experiences as a parent, this forum is for a discussion of science. **Please refrain from sharing your own experiences or speculation/guesses.**
There is a lot of research on this topic, so please make sure to use scientific sources (not popular media articles or parenting websites).
Thanks, have a wonderfully scientific day!
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The new kilogram definition seems complex. Why not define it in terms of the mass of a proton?
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It is not possible to precisely collect X protons under conditions that it could be used for a standard of mass. You could try for example saying that a kilogram is the mass of (0.1 m)^3 of water, but then you'd have to control precisely for temperature, pressure, isotopic composition, etc in a way that is precise to 10 parts per billion. The new Planck's constant definition is sufficiently precise.
There was an attempt to do as you suggest, and make it based on the [number of atoms in a very pristine sphere](_URL_0_), but it wasn't as practical as the Planck's constant way.
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growing up my mother always told me to never start a pot of boiling water from hot tap water only cold. what's the logic behind that if any?
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In the past, hot water was stored in a separate holding tank where it was kept heated. This water was not necessarily "safe" for drinking as the same water could be sitting for days at a time.
I've also heard that old lead pipes leach lead into hot water, but not into cold water. This explains why hot water would be fine for bathing, laundry, etc., but not for consumption. Can anyone verify this?
It's safe now (unless you live in a very old house), but in the past people had to be careful of these things.
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I have heard that H. P. Lovecraft came to regret his racist views later in his life. Is this true?
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It's hard to answer the question of how someone felt inside, but to the extent we can judge a man's feelings and thoughts based on his words, the answer is no, he didn't. Or, at least, he didn't state in a public way that he did.
S.T. Joshi, certainly one of Lovecraft's most devoted historians, biographers, and, it must be said, fans, admits in his biography *A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time* that not only were Lovecraft's racism, anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism, and snobbery atypically vitriolic for his own time, but that Lovecraft failed to keep step with the generality of America as it moved away from said vitriol about race and culture:
> "There is no denying the reality of Lovecraft's racism, nor can it merely be passed off as "typical of his time," for it appears that Lovecraft expressed his views more pronouncedly (although usually not for publication) than many others of his era. It is also foolish to deny that racism enters into his fiction."
Joshi goes on to recount an episode of correspondence between Lovecraft and a Mr. Charles D. Isaacson, in 1915, in which Lovecraft attacked Isaacson for espousing views of racial tolerance and for Isaacson's attacking the new film *Birth of a Nation* for stoking racial violence (Joshi, p. 97-99). Isaacson wrote back, publicly attacking Lovecraft for "[being] against tolerance of color, creed and equality, uphold[ing] race prejudice…"
Clearly, even in 1915, people's attitudes were shifting, but Lovecraft was doubling down on his viewpoints, even regressing on some. Indeed, his private writings, of which there are many thousands of letters over the course of his life, are virtually universally negative on non-WASP white ethnic groups such as German immigrants, Irish, and Catholics when he discusses them at all.
Part of this, it must be said (and Joshi points out), was almost certainly wrapped up in Lovecraft's Anglophilia and the 18th-century mannerisms and character which he affected for himself. As Lovecraft's friend Wilfred Branch Talman noted: it was only natural that a poseur of an 18th-Century English aristocrat should affect an attitude of racism and ethnic superiority, after all (Callaghan, p. 8). And because these attitudes were wrapped up very much in the way Lovecraft saw himself and the way he wanted to portray himself to the world -- and, indeed, in his writing, which is festooned with Anglicisms and archaisms -- he never really let go of them, even in later life.
Now, Joshi does argue that Lovecraft's viewpoints were more *ethnocentric* (or, to use a contemporary term, "nativist") than outright racist, as Lovecraft did sometimes express tolerance, or even praise, for groups he felt were "well assimilated." (Joshi, *A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft.* pp. 107-108). Indeed, Lovecraft married a Jewish woman, Sonia Greene, who had emigrated to the U.S. as a child from Russia. So he was, at least, willing to make exceptions to his rules when he felt the candidate was culturally assimilated enough -- or when it suited him. It is worth noting, perhaps, that the marriage did not last.
To sum up, there is nothing in Lovecraft's letters or in his works of fiction -- which consistently demonstrate racist tendencies, such as portraying African natives as pseudo-beast-men -- to show that his attitudes toward race tempered or that he came to regret them, despite the changes in general American attitudes going on around him. He died at only 46, so he may not have had time to reach the age of reflection. Or, perhaps he simply held the beliefs too strongly for various personal reasons.
**Sources**
* Callaghan, Gavin: *H.P. Lovecraft's Dark Arcadia: The Satire, Symbology and Contradiction* (2013)
* Joshi, S.T.: *A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft. (1996); *A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time.* (2001)
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Are there any mammals with the same or similar vocal range/abilities as humans?
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Dogs actually have pretty similar ranges as humans, from a deep bark to a high pitched wimper.
More interesting is vocal ability question... Both birds and (some) whales are known to be able to imitate human speech.
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"At near-light speed, we could travel to other star systems within a human lifetime, but when we arrived, everyone on earth would be long dead." At what speed does this scenario start to be a problem? How fast can we travel through space before years in the ship start to look like decades on earth?
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It follow the formula for the Lorentz factor, which is 1/sqrt(1-v^(2)/c^(2)). At 86% the speed of light, you age one year for every two years on Earth, at 99% the speed of light you age one year for every seven years on Earth.
edit: I have to go now so stop asking me about warp drives!
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why do so many games have a "start" screen where you have to push a button before they decide to start a several minute loading process? (i'm looking at you, battlefield 4)
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The primary reason is going to be player input. Let's say you omit that start screen, and just begin loading. All of a sudden, the player is sitting there, as you say, for minutes at a time, before anything happens. Is the game working right? did I do something wrong? is it frozen?
By forcing a player to hit start, it provides feedback that indeed, things are proceeding correctly. If it doesn't work, then you can safely begin troubleshooting reasons it might not be.
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How did some species (i.e, humans) come to require proteins that they could not produce themselves?
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I think what you meant to ask is why some species have come to lose the ability to synthesize certain amino acids - not proteins. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. In the process of digestion, any protein that you consume are actually decomposed into the amino acid building blocks, which are then absorbed by your body for whatever use.
Now, as for why species have come to lose the ability to produce certain amino acids? Well, that's kind of a tricky question to answer. The really unsatisfactory answer is that at some point in our past, our diet had these amino acids in sufficiently consistent and large enough supply that when our genes that conferred us the ability to synthesize the amino acids were damaged or lost, the impact on our fitness was minor enough that it wasn't really a problem.
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how did humans develop such that a well balanced human diet consist of a wide variety of foods when throughout most of human history we only had access to a few foods?
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Eating sub optimally does not mean a swift certain death. It means a slightly lower quality of life (think of how you feel from a week of eating fast food vs a week of eating healthy), deteriorating more quickly (your brain may slow down faster as you age), a slightly higher risk of developing disease, etc.
Good nutrition is just maximizing your optimal health, not something as polarizing as going from dying of every disease at 20 vs living forever.
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What happened to the French Foreign Legion during WWII? Was the legion divided, or did most of the legion go to either side? Were there ever any attempts by Petain's government to establish a foreign legion from Axis Powers?
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I think this is a question that I can actually answer. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the French Foreign Legion's demographics from 1914 to 2014.
The French Foreign Legion was very fractured during the Second World War. There was no central command that organized all of the different garrisons and formations of the Legion. You have Legionnaires fighting for the allies, for the axis and not fighting at all. Furthermore, they change sides depending upon France's status as a liberated/occupied state.
A large part of the Legion fell under the command of the Vichy Government, who subsequently released 2,000 German Legionnaires to the Nazis. Most of them were communists, or of Jewish heritage. On a related note, when Italy joined the war, many of the Italian Legionnaires were sent back to their homeland. To fill the manpower shortages France ends up activating many elderly, unfit Legionnaires living in retirement. I should also note that not all German legionnaires were sent back to Germany. Germans made up an incredibly large part of the Legion's non-commissioned officers corps. In 1934, 44% of the Legion was German/German speaking and 21% of the NCOs were German/German speaking. This prevalence of German speakers actually alarmed the French government, who worried that if another war broke out that the Legion would be incapable of defending France from a German invasion. There were actual fears that the Germans were purposely sending young men to the Legion in order to subvert it. There is little evidence that this was the case, but the paranoia was sufficient enough that little in the way of material/emphasis was placed on the Legion in the years leading up to World War 2, and by 1939 it was a bent and broken sword that France would have much rather pretended did not exist.
So, you have some Legionnaires fighting for Vichy France. Those that were stationed in North Africa get folded into the German Afrika Korps. They fight in North Africa, and they fight in the Levant. When the Germans are defeated on that continent, many of the Legionnaires switch sides and begin fighting for the allies again.
In Asia, you have the French garrisons in Indochina. Eighty to one hundred Legionnaires escape European France and seek solace with the 5th Infantry Regiment in Indochina. The French forces in this part of the world sit out the war. They allow the Japanese to occupy Indochina, but are not taken into custody by Imperial forces.
In 1941, you have Legionnaires landing with the allies during Operation Torch (30% of them were Spaniards who had fled Spain when they lost the Civil War in that country). They had fought in Norway, and were under command of the *Armee d'Afrique*, which would go on to see service not only in North Africa, but Italy, France and even Germany. This is one of the fighting formations of the exiled French Government under Charles de Gaulle.
Now, I must admit that I do not know what you mean by, "...any attempts by Petain's government to establish a foreign legion from Axis powers." The best I can gleam off of that portion of your question is whether or not Petain's government accepted foreign volunteers into it's armed forces. I must admit, I am ignorant, but an educated guess based upon my research would suggest that the Legion under Petain was struggling to survive as a military unit; fending off the awkward attempts of the other axis powers to absorb it completely.
Sources:
Geraghty, Tony. *March or Die: France and the Foreign Legion*. London: Grafton, 1986. Print.
McLeave, Hugh. *The Damned Die Hard*. New York: Saturday Review, 1973. Print.
Porch, Douglas. *The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force*. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1991. Print.
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why do cultures who rely heavily on rice in their diet typically use white rice which has less nutritional value than other types of rice?
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One of the reasons why Asians have used mainly white rice over the years is that white rice lasts longer in storage than brown rice. The essential fatty acids found in brown rice usually begin to go bad after approximately 6 to 12 months of storage, the exact amount of time depending on how much oxygen is available. When brown rice is polished down to make white rice, many of the essential fatty acids are lost, allowing white rice to last longer than brown rice without going bad.
Another reason why many Asians prefer white rice is that they have become accustomed to how easy it is to chew and digest. Brown rice requires more chewing power to properly digest than white rice does.
Some Asians refuse to eat brown rice because to them, it's a sign of poverty. Many Asians who are above 40 years of age have been deeply conditioned to believe that prosperous people eat white rice while peasants eat brown rice.
Finally, many Asians choose white rice over brown rice because white rice is less expensive. White rice is far less expensive to produce and distribute because it is in greater global demand and produces higher profits because of its longer shelf life.
[Source](_URL_0_)
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If Christianity came from the Middle East, why are there no Middle Eastern countries with a Christian majority?
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Christians in the Middle East largely converted to Islam over the centuries. However, there are still substantial Christian minorities in some Middle-Eastern countries.
Lebanon has a large Christian population, currently making up 40% of the population. Christians were, in fact, the majority religious group in Lebanon from its independence in 1943 to the Lebanese Civil War of 1975. Christianity is still the majority religion of the Lebanese diaspora.
In terms of absolute numbers, Egypt and Syria have the most Christians of any Middle Eastern country, although in both countries they make up only around 10% of the population.
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If heat is the jiggling of particles which can't exceed the speed of light, does this mean there's an "Absolute Hot" similar to absolute zero?
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"There is no agreed-upon value, among physicists, for a maximum possible temperature. Under our current best-guess of a complete theory of physics, the maximum possible temperature is the Planck temperature, or 1.41679 x 10^32 Kelvins" - [Source](_URL_0_).
That's 141,679,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 K.
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How come so many contemporary English words about spycraft are French words? (espionage, sabotage, reconnaissance, coup, rogue, etc...)
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For a few hundred years, the English court all spoke French. Because of this, the English language absorbed thousands of French terms through this period. So, words that would have been the concern of those in power are often going to be French. For example, a Cow is an animal, Beef is food. The nobility used the French word.
The average peasant would have no need for a term regarding spycraft, so you'd find the gentry using French terms.
I see a great irony in the fact that the French are very concerned with keeping their language pure. There is literally a [French Academy](_URL_1_) responsible for introducing new words into the French language, so they aren't tainted in reverse by cultural influences of other nations.
If you really want to get into this, I can recommend:
- [The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language](_URL_0_)
- [The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way](_URL_2_)
Also, an endorsement for [The History of English Podcast](_URL_3_). The episodes can get quite dry, but I rather enjoy the detail it goes into.
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when i'm on a cell phone, and i can hear the other person crystal clear, but they say the quality is so bad on their end that they can hardly understand me, what's going on?
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Cell towers have more power than a phone, so "tower to phone" is more reliable than "phone to tower". For example, if you are close to your tower and the other person is far away from their tower, they can hear you fine, but their return signal may have trouble reaching the tower.
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What was Mexico and Canada's reaction to the American civil war? Were there any foreign volunteers or mercanaires?
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Mexico was busy fighting France. The Cinco de Mayo holiday originated around the same time, after the Battle of Puebla, and even spread to camps in the states.
Canada was still British. The South begged Britain to join their cause, and they thought that the British would want to break the blockade for access to American cotton. The general feeling in the UK was anti-slavery (they abolished slavery 30+ years before us), and the British had access to other cotton rich areas in Egypt and India, so they didn't need the south. For the most part, Britain stayed out of the conflict, and so did Canada. FWIW, Canada was granted Dominion status only 2 years after the conclusion of the Civil War, thought I'm not sure if the two events were in any way related.
I can't speak to the possibility of mercenaries or foreign volunteers, though I doubt there were any Mexicans, since they were busy fighting their own war.
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Why did camels never catch on as transport animals in the American West, as they did in almost every other desert/plains on earth?
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Interestingly, both camelids and equines are native to North America - after having colonised Eurasia, both vanished from North America, most probably having been hunted to extinction after humans colonised the continent, roughly 8-10 000 years ago.
HORSES:
Horses returned in 1494, with the second expedition of Columbus (to Hispaniola at that time). Later explorers and colonists also took horses. In a very literal sense, they returned home, and lost or escaped animals quickly established a large population of feral horses. This time though they were appreciated by the natives as more than meat, and they quickly became an important part of indigenous culture.
The homecoming of the horses was so successful, in fact, that the US government started exterminating them in an organized manner, since with the decline of large predators, they quickly became pests. It's still a recurring [problem](_URL_2_) actually.
CAMELS:
As for camels, they were also brought to North America, though much later, only when arid lands in the west became a major logistics issue. There have been [attempts](_URL_0_) by the US army to use camels in pack trains, and about 75 animals were imported. The experiment was ultimately a failure for a variety of reasons: The Civil War started and the "experimental camels" were seized by confederate forces, and also the camels were reportedly treated very poorly by drivers who were opposed to using them. After the Civil War, the expanding railroad network delivered the last blow to the camel project. The animals have been sold to various places, from slaughterhouses to zoos. Not all the animals have been accounted for though, and some have clearly wandered off, but probably far too few to start a population. There are rumours of sightings, though :) .
EDIT: To give you a short answer, I think above information indicates that horses and mules dominated the field mostly because they were there first, had a huge population advantage, they were accepted by people of predominantly european heritage, and because the people who built business on them were wary of any kind of competition and replacement.
Sources:
Stephen Budiansky - The Nature of Horses
_URL_1_
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how do humans taste things like smoke and metallic flavors if there are only five tastes (salty,sweet, sour, bitter, umami)?
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While the tongue only detects 5 ‘tastes’, smell is also a compnent, and it is this that creates ‘flavour’. Without any sense of smell an apple and onion would taste VERY similar. Food is ‘smelt’ through olfactory glands in the nose, via the internal nasal cavity.
EDIT: Corrected location of glands per several commenters below. Thanks guys.
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In space, can magnetic material orbit a magnet using magnetism the same way mass orbits each other using gravity?
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No it can't, for ways that are difficult to explain without math. Basically, there are only two types of forces that lead to stable orbits: Coulomb/Newton forces that obey an inverse square law, and harmonic/elastic/spring forces that obey a linear force law. This is proven as [Bertrand's theorem](_URL_1_)
Forces between magnets are not like these, they are complicated and generally fall off as higher inverse powers of distance. _URL_0_
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what is the difference between dna and rna, and how do the work in biology?
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DNA is like a book in the reserve section of the library. It’s the full complete section of your entire genetic information that can’t leave the nucleus.
RNA are the photocopies/notes of the book. You can take those anywhere and use them to study, and they are only going to be the pages that you actually need at that moment.
Edit: Thanks everybody for the gold and the karma.
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why do we wake up to alarms even if we seem oblivious to background noise while asleep?
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There are two forces in play:
The sound of an alarm is annoying. While the radio or TV can be annoying, it's not annoying enough. For example, I often fall asleep during a radio program, but I get woken up at the hourly beeps before the news.
Training: Your brain learns to recognize the alarm sound and the requested action with it: Waking up.
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How much do we really know about the Roman Kingdom (and the founding of the city)?
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EDIT: [Much more detailed response](_URL_0_).
This is very much an open question. Twenty years ago, at least in English language scholarship, the answer would have been practically nothing, or at least nothing worth mentioning. However, my understanding is that in the past decades scholars such as TJ Cornell in his *Beginnings of Rome* have done a great deal to argue that legitimate historical information could have been passed down to the Republican annalists, and thus to Livy, through oral tradition, temple records, dedicatory inscriptions and the like, and focusing on institutional development. The argument is academic in the most mind numbingly literal sense of the word, and I may as well note that I lean skeptical.
Archaeology can fill some gaps but it asks and answers fundamentally different questions than history. The sixth century sees a great development in urbanization and extra-communal exchange, including a great deal of Hellenic material. Rome's introduction to Greece is often given to the mid Republic, but in reality it was part of Italy and thus part of its emerging interconnectedness with the wider Mediterranean. But absent an inscription saying TARQUIN WUZ HERE it is unlikely your questions will get definitive answers.
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After divorcing or beheading 80% of his wives at that point, what did Henry VIII's last wife expect to happen to her?
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I understand where you are coming from, but the question far oversimplifies the politics and reality facing Henry VIII during the early sixteenth century. Let's take a look at this one wife at a time.
Katherine of Aragon - This is obviously the most contentious, and is often oversimplified as Henry desiring to get rid of Katherine because she could not produce an heir. This view, while compelling in popular culture, doesn't hold up to historical scrutiny. The still standard biography of Henry is J. J. Scarisbrick's *Henry VIII*. In the book, Scarisbrick goes to great length to show the theological problem facing Henry over his marriage to Katherine. Katherine had been married to Henry's older brother Arthur for a few brief months. Scarisbrick maintains that Arthur and Katherine did not consummate their marriage, & another major biographer John Guy, (*Henry VIII*, 2014) does claim that the marriage was consummated. Which ever is actually true is not the important part. What does matter is that Henry believed that his inability to produce an heir was God's punishment for breaking divine law by marrying his brothers wife. Leviticus 18:16 and 20:21 are clear texts that forbid a man from marrying (or potentially having sex with) his brother's wife. There is a counter text in Deuteronomy (25:5) but Henry felt that the divine punishment of a lack of heir was indicative that the text of Leviticus was more important. Since Henry believed he was violating God's law, his annulment (not divorce) makes sense as his only real option.
Anne Boleyn - Boleyn is a more difficult case, because the accusations she faced seem political in nature, as charges of incest seem more like wild accusations as opposed to actual crimes. The best modern biographer of Anne Boleyn, Eric Ives, argues that the charges again Boleyn were political, but masterminded by Thomas Cromwell (Ives, *Anne Boleyn* (1984) pp. 358-360). G. W. Bernard, in his response to Ives, argues that Anne Boleyn was actually an adulteress (Bernard, "The Fall of Anne Boleyn", *English Historical Review* 1991, pp. 584-610). While much of Bernard's account is fixated on proving the adultery, a more important aspect for our purposes to to see that whether or not Boleyn had committed incest or adultery, Henry believed she had. Both Ives and Bernard indicate that Henry & Cromwell went to great lengths to discover or prove the adultery, and once Henry was convinced that she had, Boleyn's case was hopeless. It makes sense for Henry to see adultery - with his advisers and trusted friends - as treasonable and worthy of an execution. Boleyn could be completely innocent, but to Henry's mind, along with the advisers unrelated to the Howard family & Cromwell, her adultery was proven and her execution inevitable.
Jane Seymour - Not much needs to be said here, as she was the most beloved of Henry's wives. She bore the future King Edward VI, and Henry was buried by her side upon his death. She died within a two weeks of giving birth to Edward (October 1537) and Henry deeply mourned her death (Loach, *Edward VI*; Scarisbrick, p. 497).
Anne of Cleves - Henry's marriage to Anne of Cleves was short lived, and technically annulled. Henry had only a portrait to see what she was like, and when he saw her for the first time, instantly found her plain and distasteful. Henry said of his first meeting with her that "I am ashamed that men have so praised her as they have done, and I like her not," (Scarisbrick, p. 370). The two married in January of 1540, and annulled due to the marriage being unconsummated in July (Kelly, *Matrimonial Trials of Henry VIII*, pp. 270-274). Anne actually lived out the remainder of her life in relative comfort in England. Though Henry is often charged with barbarity, it is worth noting that he maintained a friendship with Anne until his death, and the two exchanged letters casually for years (Warnicke, *Marrying of Anne of Cleves*, p. 252).
For Catherine Howard, the historian Henry Kelly explains how she was done in by her own indiscretions. She had been previously engaged to a Francis Dereham, and had had sex with him multiple times before her marriage to Henry. Kelly argues that she continued to do so after her marriage, which is why Henry's marriage to her was annulled and she was executed (Kelly, pp. 275-278). Scarisbrick agrees with this assessment, arguing that Catherine probably found her new husband repugnant and moody. Henry was, by this time, 50 years old and fat, as his portraits of the 1540s show, while Catherine Howard was about 18 and an item of desire among the men of the Tudor court (Scarisbrick, pp. 431-433). While Anne Boleyn was possibly innocent of any wrong doing, Catherine Howard without a doubt was an adulteress, though probably a young and naive one, unaware of the personal and political consequences.
So now we come to Henry's last wife, Katherine Parr. Luckily, Katherine Parr's writings and correspondence have now all been published by Janel Mueller (2011). About a week after her marriage to Henry, she wrote her brother how God had helped Henry select her, among any other woman. She continues with, it "is, as of reason it ought to be, the greatest joy and comfort that could happen to me in this world," (*Katherine Parr: Complete Works*, p. 46). This is a woman happy with the choice she has made. While Catherine Howard had expressed jealousy of Henry's treatment of Anne of Cleves, Katherine Parr never mentions her. In a letter Katherine Parr wrote to Henry while he was in France reads "the want of your presence, so much beloved and desired of me," (Parr, p. 63). Henry seems returns Parr's affections, and the two were known to discuss and even debate theology with one another (Scarisbrick, p. 479). When Katherine was charged with heresy (that she held Protestant sympathies is almost beyond doubt), Henry protected her and prevented her conviction and execution (Scarisbrick, pp. 479-481).
So, where does this leave us? Katherine Parr probably expected to be treated with some respect, and kept materially well during her marriage to Henry VIII. She personally took a role in helping educate Henry's three living children (Guy, *Children of Henry VIII*). Katherine was almost as beloved by Henry as Jane Seymour. While we look back on Henry's relationship with his wives as barbaric, it is worth looking at how Henry saw it. He thought he broke God's law with his first wife, and his second and fifth wives had betrayed him sexually and personally. His fourth wife may have had her marriage annulled and been exiled from the court, but overall she did well for herself, even gaining enough material wealth at the end of her life to send presents abroad to family members (Warnicke, *Marrying of Anne of Cleves*). Katherine herself did not see Henry as a danger, but as a companion and lover. She helped raise his children, was the first woman author to publish in English in 1545, and was allowed to pursue her exploration of early Protestant faith. Katherine Parr expected to be a Queen Regent of England, and in the end, that is what she was.
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What was the woman's role in Viking society, particularly but not limited to when men were out on conquest?
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Jenny Jochens wrote the definitive treatise on women in Old Norse society in her creatively named, *Women in Old Norse Society*, where she examined what could be gleaned about approximately half of the human population in Scandinavia (though she focuses almost entirely on Iceland), from a few select texts including sagas and law codes (which explains her focus on Iceland).
Life for women in Norse society is not easy to describe in generalities. Women existed at every level of society from field hands, to sex slaves, to the wives of powerful chieftains, to important political figures and landowners in their own right. Christianity also brought many changed to the lives of women when it was adopted among the Norse during the 9th-11th centuries, and much of her book is focused on the relationship between women and the male dominated Church.
Jochens succinctly describes Norse women's life pre-Conversion as a mixture of rights and limitations. This might seem a little on the nose, but one need only glance around at pop-history available on any number of websites to come away with an incredibly skewed view of what life was like for women in Norse society. Popular media of today has further reinforced false ideas about the power and independence that Norse women were able to achieve. Her main focus is on the increasing legal and reproductive restrictions that accompanied the march of the Middle Ages in Scandinavia, however she is also quick to point out that many of the later Christian practices in Scandinavia likely had antecendents in pre-Christian life for most women.
For my examination, I'm going to work my way down the socioeconomic ladder of Norse women.
Jochens posits that the most powerful women in Iceland were independently wealthy women who were widowed, between marriages, or whose husbands were away, either in warfare, raiding, trading, or any combination of the above. These women would have been in control of the property they lived on, including animals, farms, businesses, slaves, and the people who were attendant. These could be related families, children, or just merely dependent families. However even these women had strict impairments in their ability to function in larger society. They could not function as witnesses in court, they could not give testimony, they could not initiate lawsuits, and their purchasing power of consumer goods was extremely limited. She did not have legal recourse to crimes or offenses committed against her, except those allowed and advanced by her male relatives, usually a father, brother, husband, or in some cases a son. Indeed were she to be assaulted, the crime technically would not be against her, but her male custodian, and every female, independently powerful or not, needed to have one. Female religious participation, even before conversion, was likewise extremely limited. After conversion Jochens posits that sexual crimes and offenses *by* free women became the subject of greater Church scrutiny, especially focusing on infanticide, a well attested pagan practice. Marriage restrictions also became much more stringent with divorce being severely restricted, (pre-conversion women could initiate divorce, post-conversion it still appears in certain law codes but seems to have become much rarer), and illegitimate births seem to have remained incredibly high among Icelandic society.
Post-conversion religious avenues for well to do women did expand to include some limited religious participation, however there were only two nunneries in operation in Iceland throughout the Middle Ages, so the number of women who were able to engage in this sort of lifestyle was likely extremely limited.
However what do other scholars have to say about the highest rungs of Norse society and the women who inhabited the most visible and influential parts of the Norse world? Judith Jesch makes a mistake by correlating furnished burials with paganism and unfurnished burials with Christianity, but her focus on archaeological evidence in the first part of her *Women in the Viking Age* makes her a useful counterpart to Jochens' literary focus. She posits the most well off women would have had access to luxury goods such as silk and metal and glass jewelry in greater amounts, though glass beads are a common burial item across socioeconomic status. Archaeological finds from preserved textiles also indicate that down and felted textiles were also used to make clothes more water resistant or warm.
Other archaeological evidence does lead us to some surprises. For example, sacrifices, of both people and animals, are commonly found in Norse burials pre-conversion. However even in graves where the "primary" occupant is female there are attested human sacrifices, often theorized to be slaves that are killed to accompany their master. Other burials of high status women feature horse sacrifices, another extremely high status good.
Free women who were not the heads of important and wealthy households, naturally had even fewer ways to express power and influence. Many of them would have remained as field workers, engaged in in agriculture, namely livestock (dairy, wool, and some limited meat) with some supplemental farming, and the preparation and storage of food (ie salting, smoking, and so on), or engaged in some limited enterprise, largely centered on textiles, following the proliferation of the textile industry across Iceland following conversion to Christianity, though its roots in Norway is attested. These women worked in the home and and had limited opportunities for their own advancement. Jochens also points to saga evidence that women were responsible for maintaining the cleanliness of the members of the household, overseeing the bathing of their husbands and children, before themselves. Women would have overseen the home in the absence of their husbands, including livestock, slaves, children, and so on, but their ability to operate indpendently was still ultimately reliant on their male relations.
Slave women would of course be expected to do all of the above as well, coupled with sexual exploitation, lack of legal status or protections (limited as they were), an inability to have legitimate children, and uncertain societal status following conversion to Christianity and official condemnations of concubinage (though the practice certainly persisted). These women could have been born to slaery, captured in raids, or ended up in slavery through various legal offenses. Slave women however were scarcely remarked upon in the extant sources detailing Norse life, both law codes and Sagas (problematic as sources as they are), so much of their life remains deeply obscured to us.
The ubiquity of sacrifices in popular culture around the Norse might lead one yo believe that at the end of a master's life the noose, knife, or sword awaited many of their former servants, however sacrifices are relatively rare in Norse burials when all is said and done. Judith Jesch posits that the "average" Norse woman would have no realistic expectation of ending her life as a sacrifice.
There is of course more to life than just working in the home or in the fields, legal rights (or lack thereof), and marriage/reproduction. What did women, who were able to engage in sport and leisure, do for fun, in the limited free time that they had? Jochens points to a few familiar practices, ball games, swimming, board games, drinking parties, storytelling (or as the sagas are often quick to call it, gossiping), and word games were all available and acceptable actions for women of various social standings to engage in. They almost certainly had more restricted free time than their male counterparts however.
In their day to day life most Norse women would wear an underdress/shift made of wool or linen with a strapped overdress over top of it, all held together with loops and brooches. Brooches are some of the most ubiquitous items that survive from the viking age and they are present in the vast majority of furnished burials for women. Post-conversion however one burial good remains very common, silver crosses.
Now there is one other expression of female life in Icelandic/Norse life, and that is of the literary exemplar/exceptional woman. The exceptional woman who transcended the boundaries of her gender and was able to win acclaim and praise for her own merits. Such examples are few and far between, even in the fantastical accounts of the sagas, and Jochens is quick to point out that even in these cases female virtues and still secondary and inferior to male ones. She points out that members of even the highest socioeconomic status in the real world might aspire to this sort of status, but in reality likely rarely attained such acclaim in their own lifetime.
These leaves the status of "shieldmaidens" or female warriors as a final possible category. Jochens in her books is extremely skeptical of such status being achieved by women in Iceland, even pre-Conversion. For one she points to the extremely limited ability of women to exercise their autonomy as legal individuals, she also posits that women were increasingly barred from even pagan religious authority pre-Conversion. She does not explicitly rule out the existence of women warriors elsewhere in Scandinavia, but she seems convinced of their absence in Icelandic life from the 9th to 13th centuries. Jesch is likewise skeptical of the actual presence of viking warrior women, and dismisses them as an object of mythological curiosity and male fantasy.
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There has been some claim that the Dalai Lama presided over a feudalistic/slave Tibet until Chinese Communism abolished the system. How accurate is this?
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Using the term 'feudalistic' and 'slavery' as a comparative isn't a very appropriate way to view either system. Feudalism implies an aristocracy who owns land by inherited right, but also have a duty to the bonded serfs who work the land and recognition of a greater authority. Slavery implies the use of people as liquid capital, buying and selling their labor as capital and complete subservience to the owner. Serfs had the right to justice, allowed limited mobility, and could accumulate personal wealth (if circumstances allowed).
In terms of Tibet, the argument that it was a religious society based on a feudal system is accurate -- but it was accurate for a large number of nations in that region at that time, and was not out of the ordinary. Russia was, to a certain extent, a feudal society until 1917 as an example. Tibet was in a process of modernization starting in the 1930s; partly due to the external pressures of Nepal, India, and China encroaching on their territory. Due to their geographic remoteness, sustained trade was difficult, and the federal government had problems both with ensuring taxation and maintaining relations with Britain as a primary trading partner in the 1920s and 30s.
In short, Tibet effectively had a series of regional overlords who were accountable for local administration and governance. But there was a recognized federal authority and at the time of occupation Tibet was undergoing a series of initiatives to modernize and open their economy. Tradition, religion, geographic remoteness, and a weak economy all contributed to a slow transition away from a feudal government.
Reference material:
A History of Modern Tibet, 1913-1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State, By Melvyn C. Goldstein
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Is there any meaning to the phrase "twice as hot" or "twice as cold" as 0 degrees?
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**tl;dr: Yes you can double or half the temperature of something, but not in the way you're probably thinking.**
The confusing part of this topic for most people is that the temperature scales that we use in day-to-day life are kind of...arbitrary. The "zero" on the Fahrenheit scale was based on [the temperature of a mixture of ice, water, and ammonium chloride](_URL_17_), while the "zero" on the Celsius scale is based on the melting point of pure water. While both of these are solid reference points that anyone can measure, they really don't have any deeper physical meaning relating to the nature of temperature.
When we measure things, we tend to start at 0 and work up. A ruler starts at zero length no matter what units you use, a speed of zero mph or kph always means you're standing still, the pressure of outer space is zero[^^\(not ^^exactly)](_URL_15_) whether you're using [PSI](_URL_2_) or [millibars](_URL_6_) or [inches](_URL_14_) or [torr](_URL_21_) or [atmospheres](_URL_12_), etc. But what about temperature?
Temperature is, in rough terms, a measure of the amount of random "motion" atoms and molecules have at extremely small scales. For a gas, this essentially means [the average speed of a given molecule in the gas](_URL_5_). For solids and liquids, it roughly corresponds to the amount of "jiggling" the molecules do on a microscopic level. More motion/jiggling means higher temperature, less motion/jiggling means lower temperature. Many of us learned this from high school chemistry. So what would you think a proper "zero" for temperature would be? Naturally, you would think that "zero" temperature would be the temperature at which there is no motion/jiggling at all. And that's exactly what we see in physics and chemistry: [absolute zero](_URL_18_) is the temperature at which atoms would ([theoretically](_URL_13_)) have no random "jiggling" at all.
So if you measure the temperature of something on a temperature scale that starts at absolute zero, then you can properly talk about "doubling" or "halving" the temperature. By far the most common scale that fits this definition is the [Kelvin](_URL_7_) scale, which is basically the Celsius scale but it starts at absolute zero. So while absolute zero is -273.15C, on the Kelvin scale it's just 0 (and, conversely, the melting point of ice is 273.15 Kelvin). 2000K truly is twice as hot as 1000K, and 50K truly is twice as cold as 100K. Using our day-to-day scales like Fahrenheit and Celsius, this wouldn't be true: it would be like measuring things with a ruler that starts at -4 "blinches", which is the same as inches but it starts at -4. We know that something that's [10 inches long](_URL_20_) is twice as long as something that's [5 inches long](_URL_0_), but if we used our strange ruler then something that was 6 blinches long would actually be twice as long as something 1 blinch long, which really doesn't make any sense if we're just doing simple calculations!
Now that you have the background, we can finally get a proper answer to your question. If it was 0F today, and tomorrow it were going to be twice as hot, you might want to consider evacuating you and your loved ones, because [0F is 255.4K](_URL_10_), and [2×255.4K=460F](_URL_8_), which is pretty close to the [autoignition temperature of paper](_URL_16_). If it was 0C today, then tomorrow's doubly-hot weather will be even more unbearable: [2×273.15K=273C](_URL_9_), which is getting close to the [melting point of lead](_URL_4_).
Interestingly, if you doubled the [lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth](_URL_1_) (184K, which is −89.2 °C or −128.6 °F), you would get [368K, which is 95 °C or 202 °F](_URL_3_), which is close to the boiling point of water, and way above the [hottest natural temperature recorded anywhere on Earth](_URL_11_) (outside of a volcano or a forest fire). So, in practice, it's never possible for today to be "twice as hot" or "twice as cold" as tomorrow. Unless, of course, [set up a homestead on Mercury](_URL_19_).
Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!
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How can TSA/Airport security workers stand next to X and T ray machines all day everyday without any ill effects?
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Like any radiation worker, they apply ALARA. That means that you should take steps to make your radiation exposure "As Low As Reasonably Achievable". The ways to do this are the maximize distance from the source, minimize time near it, and use shielding when possible.
If you pay close attention when passing through security, you'll see that they rotate between positions throughout the day. So the people operating the x-ray machines rotate around to other positions as well.
You may also notice that some employees are wearing badge dosimeters. These are little badges that you wear on your body. Over time they will accumulate on average the same exposure density to radiation that your body does. Every few months you send them in for testing to see if you had an abnormally high exposure within that time.
I don't know much about the manufacture of their machines (I'd guess it's not something they want the public to know much about), but it's not hard to add some shielding to strongly attenuate x-rays.
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can we really clean pesticide off fruit by just rinsing them off? wouldn't that mean rain would rinse it off all the time?
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You're not cleaning off the pesticide. You're cleaning off dirt and other toxins that may have stuck to the wax they put on the fruit to make it shiny.
Pesticides stick to the fruit, but they are also absorbed by the plant and end up within the flesh of the fruit.
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what is at stake in the us senate filibuster by ted cruz that has been going on all evening?
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He is attempting to make a point about how serious he feels it is to oppose the Affordable Care Act, and holding up the business of the Senate, but other work can proceeded elsewhere and he is not preventing any votes from being held. This can not effect the Affordable Care Act itself, as that is already law. It is purely a symbolic stance. The only thing at stake appears to be his dignity.
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How did Spain transition from fascist dictatorship to its current democratic, constitutional monarchy? Is it true that Franco bequeathed the country to King Juan-Carlos and it was he that instituted democracy?
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Modern Spanish history is one of the most interesting topics I have found. Anyway, onto an answer:
Franco approved a law of succession in 1947, saying that Spain was kingdom and would remain a kingdom. Of course, Spain would have no king while Franco was alive as he was acting head of state. The law also said he could name his successor when he chose to.
Don Juan, the heir to the Spanish monarchy, and Franco decided in 1948 that Don Juan’s son - Juan Carlos - would return to Spain to be educated in Spanish schools and in Franco’s ideology. In essence, Franco groomed Juan Carlos to be his heir.
Juan Carlos completes this education and eventually married Sofia. And in 1969, Franco named him as his rightful successor to the dictatorship and Juan Carlos had to swear loyalty to Franco’s Movimiento Nacional. The two worked together after this, with Franco guiding Juan Carlos in his new role.
Franco dies in 1975 and Two days later, Juan Carlos becomes king of Spain. Now, Spain enters the period of the Restoration of the Monarchy. Juan Carlos started to issue reforms to the government and appointed Adolfo Suarez as president/prime minister (depends on your translation and understanding of Spanish government). Suarez would become instrumental in the transition to democracy and would become the first democratically elected prime minister of Spain’s new government.
In this time, many changes occur but one of the most interesting is el Pacto de olvido (the pact of forgetting), which was a political decision by both the left and right parties to essentially forget everything that happened during the Civil War and under Franco. This pact ensured that there would be no prosecutions for persons responsible for mass suffering. Important questions about the recent past were entirely ignored, so that Spain and its politicians could look towards the future and make the reforms needed.
In June of 1977, Spain held its first elections and in 1978, a new constitution was drafted that acknowledge Juan Carlos as king.
So, to answer your question: Franco did “bequeath” the country to Juan Carlos, but only after he had been groomed in his education and sworn allegiance to Franco and his ideologies. Juan Carlos did help ensure that Spain would become democratic but most of the “work” was completed by Suarez and other politicians of the time.
Some attribute these happenings as to why Spain has largely avoided the populist movements that we see in many countries today. Spanish people still struggle with The Pact of Forgetting and it’s implications to today, like should Franco’s remains be removed from El Valle de los Caídos (The Valley of the Fallen).
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Is there any validity to the claim that Epsom salts "Increase the relaxing effects of a warm bath after strenuous exertion"? If so, what is the Underlying mechanism for this effect?
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First I would ask what exactly are "relaxing effects" and how do you measure them. If they are talking about muscle pain or soreness, there is very little research and not much info on the purported mechanism.
This is a nice overview:
_URL_0_
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what is germany doing differently then america where america is trillions of dollars in debt while germany has a several billion dollar surplus?
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In the EU, there is a rule that requires every country to either keep it's debt below 60% of gdp, or actively on decreasing it.
Now, enforcement here has been generally lax, but it tightened up with the financial crisis. Since Germany is above the debt limit (a result of the reunification), they're working on reducing the deficit.
_URL_0_
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What were the religious beliefs of the Varangian Guard and how did they interact with the religion of the Byzantine Empire?
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The Varangian Guard originated as settlers and emigres from Northern Europe who traveled southwards and sold their services as mercenaries to the wealthy nobles around the Volga River, the Caspian Sea, and the Black Sea.
Throughout the history of the later Byzantine Empire the emperor became more and more dependent on these recruits from various feudal states in Northern Europe. One example given by M. R. Dawkins (1947):
> In 1195 Alexios III, Angelos, alarmed by the threats of the emperor Henry IV, sent three Varangians with golden bulls to ask help of each of the three Scandinavian kings.
Although the Varangian Guard levied troops from all over Europe, from many different religious traditions, the mercenary-bodyguards swore their service to the emperor. The Byzantine Emperor justified himself as the defender of Christ by claiming that he was the successor the first Christian emperor of Constantinople, Constantine.
So since the role of the Emperor was primarily that of defending Constantinople from rulers who were not the successors to Constantine, or who did not have the defense of the Eastern Orthodox church as their priority, [then his personal army would follow this same Christian constitution](_URL_1_).
The fact that these recruits spoke different languages doesn't necessarily mean that they brought their local traditions to Constantinople, the religious center of the Byzantine Empire. Ecclesiastical figures in Constantinople even translated the Greek liturgy into Danish, Slavonic, English, and Persian so that the Varangians could participate in Byzantine ceremonies (see Dawkins- Later History of the Varangian Guard).
One classic example of a Northern European/viking noble selling his service to the Byzantines is [Harald Hardrada](_URL_0_), who reigned as King of Norway after amassing enough wealth via plunder while commander of the Varangian Guard. Although he was a secular prince who claimed the thrones of Denmark, England, and later Norway, Harald spent ten years as a Byzantine military commander in Sicily and the Holy Land. There, he led the Byzantine assault against the Arabs and helped protect/gain concessions for Christian pilgrims heading towards Jerusalem.
Despite championing the Byzantine Crusader cause, it is argued by byzantinist Halvor Tjønn that once Harald arrived in Kievan Rus after serving the Varangian Guard, he sold military secrets to the Rus regarding the defenses of Constantinople that directly led to the Rus' attack on Constantinople in 1042.
Here you can sort of see how the religion of the Varangian Guard combined two phenomena from the High Middle Ages--the religious military order and the soldier-of-fortune. Scandinavian warriors were being handpicked to serve in the court of the successor of Constantine and fight to prevent the non-Christian domination of the Holy Land, but at the same time they retained their language, could not inherit land in the Byzantine Empire, and often sold their services to other nobles along [the Black Sea/Volga River trade network](_URL_2_).
So to summarize the Varangian Guard (the badass elite Russian-Viking bodyguards of the Byzantine Emperor) adopted the beliefs and liturgical practices of Constantinople because that was where they were employed.
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why is it called "latin" america when spain/portugal are the biggest european influences to the region?
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Spain, Portugal, France and Italy(and a few other minor countries) make up Latin Europe. The all speak romance languages which evolved from Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire. Since as you mentioned Spain and Portugal had the biggest influence on them they are subsequently known as the Latin America similar to their European counterpart.
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Is 'staying up late' a new habit since the advent of the electric light, or have humans always been night owls?
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The evidence from medieval Latin Europe is mixed. While we can trace adaptations to the shorter winter days even at the institutional, official level, it's clear there was plenty going on in the dark.
I'd like to direct your attention to the wonderful discussions in this thread by me, /u/mikedash, /u/Limond, and /u/alriclofgar (truly, the whole thread is worth reading):
* [What would an English serf do to occupy his time during the long dark evenings and nights of fall and winter?] (_URL_0_)
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Marco Polo is quoted to have said on his deathbed, "I did not tell half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed." What things may he not have described to the public and why?
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Jacopo da Acqui's report of Marco Polo's last testament should be put in its proper context. His family members were trying to get him to repent and disown all the lies he'd written, to which Polo sneered that he had not told even *half* of what he'd seen.
Assuming the anecdote is true (or even if it's an invention by Jacopo, defending his subject, which seems just as likely), there are two ways to take it. First, if Polo told the other half, it would be realistic enough to make the whole story seem plausible. Second, the stories in the other half were *even wilder*.
Fortunately, we have ways to investigate both possibilities. Boring one first.
**Scribes Gonna Scribe**
The manuscript tradition of the Travels is a mess. It's maybe not as bad as Piers Plowman, but it's a mess. We don't have the original. There's no single surviving manuscript from which all others derive. Which is to say, there is at least something missing from/added to every existing version.
Some changes are surely accidental, or the result of translation problems. Others, though, are substantial omissions/additions. In those cases, it seems likely that somewhere along the way, a scribe/translator either thought the text needed that story, or saw that story and thought it did not belong for whatever reason.
One good example is the large void in the overall narrative, which occurs when Polo is basically hanging out in the East. Some manuscripts don't really say anything. Others explain that he was specially chosen as governor of a city for three years. Oh, and that he, his father, and his uncle pretty much single-handedly won a siege for the Khan by reinventing the trebuchet.
A passage like this one, especially since it was almost certainly added to some rather than omitted from the rest, suggests a couple of possibilities for reconciling skepticism/maintaining the book's veneer of "plausibility," fully aware it was just a veneer and part of the genre.
First, it fills in a large temporal gap at least in part. Useful in and of itself. Second, it casts the Europeans in a *really* good light. It's usually thought that even when pointing out good qualities of non-Christians, medieval European travel narratives relate tales and descriptions in ways that emphasize their Otherness. Massaging the awesomeness of the Polos serves those ends quite well--especially useful in a post-fall of Acre world.
A lot of additions seem to point to scribes feeling that the version they had in front of them was just missing a few details. Like a description for how horse thieves or bar brawlers were punished will have the procedure for punishing murderers added to it in later recensions. If the scribes thought the story needed it, Polo's friends and family could well have thought the same.
But really what you're here for is shipwrecks and cannibals, right?
**Diamond Poop, or, 1001 Mediterranean Nights**
In [this earlier answer](_URL_0_), I discuss how one episode that Marco Polo recounts traces back in time to amazing 12th century Persian poet Nizami, to a 10th century natural history text in Arabic, to a 4th century Christian bishop, to...Herodotus. From Polo:
> Among these mountains there are certain great and deep valleys, to the bottom of which there is no access. Wherefore the men who go in search of the diamonds take with them pieces of flesh, as lean as they can get, and these they cast into the bottom of a valley...When the eagles [who also eat the deadliest snakes known to the ENTIRE WORLD] see the meat thrown down they pounce upon it and carry it up to some rocky hill-top...
> The people go to the nests of those white eagles, of which there are many, and in their droppings they find plenty of diamonds which the birds have swallowed in devouring the meat that was cast into the valleys.
The details of the story change (Polo's diamonds are Herodotus's cinnamon sticks), but the underlying "plot" is the same.
This matters for present purposes because it shows how stories like this one are circulating around the Mediterranean-Asian world, crossing geographic and linguistic barriers as though they didn't exist. Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, any interested traveler might well have heard the same basic story, with different details (snakes? no snakes? Alexander the Great? Random peasants?) from multiple sources. Heck, the valley of the diamonds story will even eventually be recorded in *1001 Nights* (the messiest manuscript tradition yet), although the MS is more recent than Polo but the story was probably part of the collection beforehand.
The Mediterranean-Asian world was a world of stories. So in addition to whatever Polo did/did not see with his *eyes* firsthand, there's what he "saw" in the sense of having heard or overheard. And thus, the question becomes: what stories or what kinds of stories might we expect, that Polo nevertheless leaves out?
Looking at a 10th century Arabic text known as the *Marvels of India*, I'm going to suggest that what he left out includes shipwrecks and cannibals.
*Marvels of India*, like Polo and Ibn Battuta, is a collection of anecdotes, although it doesn't really attempt to be a cohesive travel narrative of any sort. The reason I think it's particularly useful for present purposes is that taken as a whole, the book is *really, really repetitive.* How many stories do you need that emphasize THIS FISH IS REALLY BIG? (At least four in a row, at one point, to say nothing of elsewhere in the text). It's a mishmash of tales, of the "1001 Mediterranean Nights," just like Marco Polo. (And yes, it includes the 'valley of the diamonds' legend.)
And some of the most common themes suicide, monkeys, snakes, REALLY BIG FISH...shipwrecks and cannibals.
Mind you, cannibals and shipwrecks both appear in Marco Polo's books. But not like this. The cannibals of *Marvels* sometimes have tails. Sometimes the book's author goes into *way* too much detail about how the cannibals cook their meals. And over and over, we read the trope--that survives to day--of the shipwrecked sailors on the island of the cannibal king.
In a world of travelers, merchants, and educated people across cultures (or the product of one author with a really thorough education), Marco Polo would have heard a lot of stories from a lot of people. One way or another, some of them wound up in his *Travels.* And one way or another, Jacopo da Acqui had his character Polo defend the "truth" in his own voice--whether that truth was what Polo saw--or what he had heard from someone who had heard it from someone.
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I keep hearing about outbreaks of measles and whatnot due to people not vaccinating their children. Aren't the only ones at danger of catching a disease like measles the ones who do not get vaccinated?
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Sadly, no. Unvaccinated people are indeed at the highest risk, however, while vaccines are very effective, no vaccine is 100% effective. Most childhood vaccines protect between 85 and 99 percent of the population. For some reason, [a small percentage of folks who are vaccinated do not develop immunity](_URL_2_). This hasn't traditionally been much of an issue because with the vast majority of the population vaccinated for a particular disease, we develop "[herd immunity](_URL_1_)." The more folks are vaccinated, the harder it is for a disease to spread, and so epidemics become less likely.
Another issue (though not strictly what you asked) is that some children cannot receive the vaccine. Often this is because they have a compromised immune system thanks to a genetic disorder, or active cancer treatment. While these children cannot receive the protection of the vaccine, they *can* indeed receive the protection afforded by herd immunity. Unfortunately, as more people choose not to vaccinate their children, immunocompromised are put in particularly bad risk. In the case of measles, these children[ have up to a 50% mortality rate](_URL_0_).
**EDIT: Thank you everyone for the extensive and productive discussion, but please remember that personal medical anecdotes are not allowed in /r/askscience.**
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Vikings are famous for raping and pillaging, and undoubtedly more than one woman must have given birth to a half-Viking child who was a product of rape. How did societies treat these children?
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Rape was the fear, expectation, the weapon, the reward for soldiers, and the terrible reality of medieval (ancient, early modern, *modern*) warfare. And by warfare, we're talking about short raids, longer "campout" raids that could last a week or a month, the stereotypical protracted siege culminating with "taking the city," an enemy army passing through a village, a *"friendly"* army passing through a village or demanding quarter, or just two feuding lords sending out parties to wreak havoc on the land with an eye towards ruining their enemy and/or claiming it for themselves. It was a given on all sides. In his version of the call to Crusade, Robert of Rheims has Pope Urban say, "What can I say about the evil rape of women [by Muslims], of which it is worse to speak than to be silent?" For his part, Ibn Hayyan writes of the rape and plunder by Christian soldiers rampaging through Barbastro (Iberia) in 1063: "There is no pen eloquent enough to describe them."
This diffidence in the sources is insightful. All sides face first the difficult reality that condemning their opponents as rapists is a quick and dirty way to cast them as barbaric and evil, but their own side's soldiers are just as guilty. (Legal decrees trying to reign in a wayward lord or lord-bishop, and, from the early modern era, firsthand accounts tell us that the accounts of devastation are not just propaganda.) But second, Latin Christians in particular could never quite shake the belief that while being a rapist was proof of a man's barbarity, *being raped* polluted a woman forever. Augustine had argued passionately c. 400 that as long as a woman didn't "enjoy it", rape did not pollute her *soul*. But his passion was directed at the argument he was actually making against suicide. Augustine was as concerned with the lives and emotions of women as the 10 commenters and 112 upvoters in this thread who think a question about the experiences of women who were brutally raped, and their children is best answered by *the distribution of haplogroups in the 21st century.*
On the other hand, Augustine looks postiviely cushy from a modern standpoint next to his sometime-correspondent and translator of the Vulgate Bible. Jerome took the position that virgins should kill themselves rather than "let" themselves be raped. The Latin Middle Ages inherited both of these traditions, and...well, they didn't quite know what to do. In theoretical mode as a safely-ensconced university scholar, Thomas Aquinas followed Augustine in accepting that a woman could still be pure so long as her will had remained pure. For vehement promoter of religious women Jacques de Vitry, ranging all over Christendom but always coming back to his beloved acolytes/spiritual mothers in Liege, the dilemma for his flock--and himself as their publicist--was anything but theoretical. And so he could recount with zeal, but also relief, that when Liege was sacked in 1212, the beguines (semi-nuns) of the city flung themselves into sewers and canals to *drown* rather than suffer rape--but, "miraculously," they were all spared.
So the Western chroniclers of life and war will tell us that the Earl of Buchan led an arm of the Scottish army on a rampage of raping "women dedicated to God as well as married women and girls, either murdering them or robbing them after gratifying their lust" (even here, rape is an *afterthought* of the chronicler). They will tell us that Abbess Ebba of Coldingham monastery, knowing her community would be raided by Vikings on the morrow, led her nuns in slicing off their noses and lips with a razor to make themselves too ugly to rape. (Of course, Roger of Wendover continues, the Danes were so upset at having their prizes ruined that they slaughtered everyone--thus averting the theological problem of rape and pollution.)
What we *don't* see from the male chroniclers are women's lives *after*. There are a couple of medieval women writers who touch on rape. Margery Kempe (15th century England) is scared to sleep alone at night in a town for fear of intruders; Christine de Pisan (14th-15th century France) describes the aftermath of rape as *grieving*, as mourning the death of a dearly beloved. They don't tell us about the "after", either. So can we pull anything out of the sources?
Gwen Seabourne and Jeremy Goldberg both make the point that over the course of the Middle Ages, the older practice of "kill the men and kill or enslave the women and children" more and more often gave way to "ransom the men and leave the women behind", although there are plenty of exceptions. Women who stayed in a town under siege were typically treated as enemy combatants and slaughtered if the town fell, for example. Or women might be seized (*rapio*) and held captive temporarily, for ransom and/or repeated sexual abuse. (To be clear, this is average towns- and village women, not the elite nobility). That sets out some of the guidelines for how sexual violence could affect women survivors of war: captivity and (typically) concubinage/servitude, temporary captivity and possible to probable rape, rape amidst devastation.
We have hints, first of all, that theological ideas about pollution in the case of rape, or a woman's perceiving "wanting it," had such deep roots they tore apart families. A group of raiders in Chester and Lancaster in 1378 were accused of operating a ransom scheme in which they would kidnap a woman from across jurisdictional boundaries, then demand a ransom from her parents. But it wasn't for the life of the daughter--it was for the life of the *parents*. They would die if they didn't pay. But if they did, they would be "forced" to take their daughter back. Let that sink in a moment.
It's undoubtable that rape would have resulted in pregnancy sometimes. Due to a combination of lack of sources and disinterest among scholars (no, really), we don't actually know that much about illegitimate children in the Middle Ages. There are plenty of articles about the illegitimate kids of an individual noble, or an individual natural child's life. But these are elite nobles. Illegitimacy mattered to the *child* when it came to inheritance, or possibly (for men) becoming a priest. (Although the ban on illegitimate sons taking holy orders had more to do with enforcing clerical celibacy by preventing natural sons from inheriting their fathers' trades, and was basically guaranteed an episcopal waiver anyway). We don't "see" illegitimate children on the average level.
One source I thought of checking was cases of infanticide. Margaret Lewis looking systematically at the more plentiful early modern German cases matches what I observed in reading some secondary scholarship on medieval English records: women just don't talk about rape in the context of infanticide. That obviously doesn't mean it didn't happen (Lewis calls it "extremely rare"), but we can assume that women who were raped and found themselves pregnant did not all kill their children (before or after birth), and, statistically, did not all miscarry.
Given the intense stigma on rape, and the potential for a rape case to turn into an adultery allegation (especially if pregnancy was involved, because there was an association of sex that led to pregnancy and having an orgasm, so being pregnant was often taken as a consent of the will), it seems likely that many rape survivors claimed the child was their husband's, if they were married; or found a husband, if not. The frequency of men's deaths in warfare-type situations may have abetted this. We know, after all, that flurries of marriages after a battle or a period of army encampment were not uncommon, and that this was treated as an especially crucial action for *women*. That would have legitimated a child, reduced *public* (certainly not internal) shame for the woman, and ideally created a more stable financial situation for her and her baby. The prospects for single mothers in medieval (and early modern, where we have more data) Europe were not great. They show up on poor rolls and in poverty-related petitions with sad frequency.
I want to caution against interpreting modern haplogroup percentages and geographic spreads as flat-out indications of rape. Contact, including sexual contact, and including between enemies or "enemies", took many forms in the Middle Ages and beyond: trade, raids, cohabitation, open warfare, embassies, encounters on pilgrimage, prostitution. Just looking at Iberia, for example, it's clear that Muslim, Christian, and Jewish women all entered into consensual relationships with men of other faiths despite their own religion's laws against it. Especially with a topic as hard-hitting and *modern* as rape in warfare, we can't let emotionality strip away all agency from women who made choices under differing amounts of pressure, to go to Iceland with that hot Viking or take that job as the crusader knight's "cook." But we also can't ignore the testimony of soldiers like the Thirty Years War's Peter Hagendorf, who threw a lavish wedding for his second wife and went to great lengths to secure an education for his beloved son. Hagendorf noted in his meticulous diary:
> [In Landshut] I got a pretty lass as my plunder. [...] I took a young girl with me from Pforzheim, too, but I let her go...I was sorry about this because at the time I had no wife.
~~
Some Further Reading:
* Jane Tibbets Schulenberg, *Forgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, 500-1100*
* Gwen Seabourne, *Imprisoning Medieval Women: The Non-Judicial Abduction and Confinement of Women in Medieval England, 1170-1509*
* Mary Elizabeth Ailes, "Camp Followers, Sutlers, and Soldiers' Wives," in *A Companion to Women's Military History*
* John Gillingham, "Crusading Warfare, Chivalry, and the Enslavement of Women and Children," in *The Medieval Way of War*
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how do batteries (aa, aaa, b, c, d, etc.) get their names? what do they mean?
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Every time you step up a letter, the batteries get bigger. Because we don’t have a letter smaller than A, we repeat the letter.
AAAA < AAA < AA < A < B < C < D
Edit:
Yes, there’s an A battery. Yes, there’s a B battery. No, they didn’t name them after bra sizes. No, that joke you stole from another post about “the louder they scream” isn’t hilarious.
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Why is meat, specifically bacon described as lasting days or up to a week without refrigeration in older books, but these days it’s recommended to throw out bacon left at room temp for more than two hours?
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Keeping food over long periods of time was a great challenge in the pre-industrial world, before refrigeration. Even things like ice boxes ( and icemen to fill them) didn't become a common thing until the later 19th c. , after ice was developed as a commodity. The methods were few: but most still exist. Some things could be salted- fish, pork and beef. Some things could be kept in brine and allowed to ferment- ( pickled cucumbers, sauerkraut, kim chee) Some things could be dried- fruits, beans, fish, and other meats. Some meats could be smoked. Sugar could be used, as well. And if there was a place that was relatively cool and dry, salted meats could be hung and kept for a very long time. Potassium nitrate, sodium nitrate, wood ashes and even lye could be employed ( Norwegian lutefisk)
Hams and sides of bacon were generally salted, smoked, and hung in a dry larder. Sometimes they were also painted with a sugar solution as well. The salt content was high enough, however, that to be consumed they would typically be first soaked in water. To quote Lydia Maria Child's [The Frugal Housewife](_URL_0_):
> The old-fashioned way for curing hams is to rub them with salt very thoroughly, and let them lay twenty-four hours. To each ham allow two ounces of salt-petre, one quart of common salt and one quart of molasses. First baste them with molasses; next rub in the salt-petre; and, last of all, the common salt. They must be carefully turned and rubbed every day for six weeks; then hang them in a chimney, or smoke-house, four weeks.
>
> They should be well covered up in paper bags, and put in a chest, or barrel, with layers of ashes, or charcoal, between. When you take out a ham to cut for use, be sure and put it away in a dark place, well covered up; especially in summer.
>
> Some very experienced epicures and cooks, think the old-fashioned way of preparing bacon is troublesome and useless. They say that legs of pork placed upright in pickle, for four or five weeks, are just as nice as those rubbed with so much care. The pickle for pork and hung beef, should be stronger than for legs of mutton. Eight pounds of salt, ten ounces of salt-petre and five pints of molasses is enough for one hundred weight of meat; water enough to cover the meat well—probably, four or five gallons. Any one can prepare bacon, or dried beef, very easily, in a common oven, according to the above directions.
The bacon you find in the grocery now is nowhere near as salty as this. If you encounter country ham ( especially in the southern US) you will get a better idea of what bacon would be. Bacon today also is typically sold sliced up. The bacon in the days of Child ( 1830's) would remain in a large hunk until pieces were sliced from it, and that hunk would be salted and glazed- and likely some more salt rubbed onto where a piece had been cut. Sometimes mold would form over the outside of dried meats- that would be scraped off.
TL:DR your bacon is not their bacon.
& #x200B;
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Is there a reason all the planets orbit the sun in approximately the same plane and direction?
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Yes. Conservation of angular momentum. Our solar system started out as a rotating gas cloud. Over time, this cloud collapsed and denser regions formed the sun and the planets. But due to conservation of angular momentum, the rotation had to remain, which means that the solar system as a whole rotates around the same axis that the original gas cloud did.
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How did the sections of US states become known as "counties" even though they have never been ruled by counts?
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Point of order: The British counties have never been ruled by counts (or viscounts): it stems from the Normans, who simply took over the Saxon shires (that's why it's all "Hampshire", "Cheshire", "Renfrewshire" etc.), but brought their Norman French with them (counts actually being a thing on the continent).
Historically, British counties started out as either kingdoms in their own right ~~after~~ from before Alfred the Great, or just happened to be the administrative division used for taxes (and sheriffs and things).
^(edit: spelling; edit 2 19:23 UTC: slip of tongue)
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why does your neck get tense when you’re stressed and how does a massage fix it?
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When you are stressed, you experience fight-or-flight, even if the stressor is emotional/psychological in nature. When this response occurs, it causes you to produce more adrenaline. Adrenaline causes muscle tension (muscle tension being a sign of stress). If you massage a muscle, you can cause that muscle to relax. So stress increases adrenaline, causing muscle tension, massage relaxes muscles.
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how did humans in asia evolve to have narrower eyes, why did africans skin stay black while arabic and european peoples became lighter?
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If you live in the tropics, dark skin is a helpful adaptation, because it protects your skin from sunlight (fewer sun burns and cancers).
If you live in the northern latitudes where there is significantly less sun certain times of the year, light skin is a helpful adaptation, because it allows more sunlight to penetrate the dermis, thereby creating more vitamin D.
The primary characteristic of east Asian eyes is called the *epicanthic fold*, and we believe it may have evolved to protect the eye from harsh winds, but the jury is still out on that one.
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How were teen pop idols such as Elvis Presley or The Beatles perceived among male teens?
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Apparently the French boys loved the Beatles even more than the girls did.
> Ringo recalled, “These boys chased us all over Paris. Before, we'd been more used to girls. The audience was a roar instead of a scream; it was a bit like when we played Stowe boys' school.”
[George wasn't very enthused about that though, recounting their Parisian tour in 1964](_URL_0_)
> “The French audience was dreadful. We had visions of all these French girls, ‘Ooh La La’, and all that, but the audience, at least on the opening night, was all tuxedoed elderly people and a bunch of slightly gay looking boys were hanging round the stage door shouting ‘Ringo, Ringo!’ and chasing our car. We didn’t see any of the Brigitte Bardot’s that we were expecting.”
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Can satellites be in geostationary orbit at places other than the equator? Assuming it was feasible, could you have a space elevator hovering above NYC?
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Geostationary orbits can only occur along the equator. Any orbit occurs on a two dimensional plane that passes through the center of mass for the object it is orbiting. For a satellite orbiting earth anywhere north or south of the equator the position directly below the satellite would have to move north and south with the satellites orbit, not geostationary. This also means that a space elevator could only work at the equator but there is a simpler reason that is easier to visualize. In theory, a space elevator would use centrifugal force to cancel out the force of gravity trying to pull the structure down. Anywhere outside of the equator the centrifugal force would not be in line with gravity causing a sideways force on the elevator.
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what is the big deal with stradivarius violins, can't the just make an exact clone of it by analyzing it?
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They're made of denser wood due to the "little ice age" which took place during their construction, and this supposedly gives them an unique sound.
In reality, the effect comes from their name. In double-blind tests they perform just as well (or worse) as your average violin.
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When groups of animals that use echolocation do so, how are they able to differentiate which sound was theirs? Can a dolphin that’s in the middle of a group pick up on the sound of another dolphin that’s on the outer edge of said group and know exactly what the other dolphin is seeing?
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I actually can answer this specifically for moustached bats. I’m not sure if a similar mechanism exists for other animals that echolocate, so I can’t speak to dolphins or anything.
So as you probably know, bats hunt in huge swarms, so it’s important for a bat to be able to distinguish his own echolocation call from that of other bats. When the bat makes a call, he listens for the harmonics of that pulse in the returning echo, specifically the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th harmonics. The difference between the echo and the initial call tells the bat all sorts of information about whatever the call bounced off of, including size, shape, speed and direction of movement, etc. It’s so finely tuned that bats can tell when an insect’s wings are moving forward vs backward and use this to predict their motion.
The bat has a clever mechanism for ensuring that he only hears his own echo. The first harmonic of the call comes out very quietly, too quietly to be picked up by other bats. However, the bat itself hears the call through its own skull, rather than through its ears. The bat’s brain will only respond to a *combination* of the first harmonic with any other harmonic of the call. If it only hears the 2nd or 3rd or 4th, it won’t react. It has to hear the first and one of the others. And since it can’t hear the first harmonic of any other bat, he can only be following his own call. So the first harmonic acts as a sort of password to ensure that the bat is not even hearing any of the other hunting calls
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why cant we just stop media outlets from covering terrorism? wouldn't that effectively make it pointless?
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Freedom of the press.
If you prevent the media from reporting something, that opens room for abuse.
Police beating that man to death? Fits most definitions of terrorism.
That government crackdown on dissidents? Terrorism.
Invading another country? Terrorism.
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Without hindsight was Stalin's reasoning for believing Hitler wouldn't invade reasonable?
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In the books I've read I've never seen any opinion that Stalin's belief was in any way the result of a rational examination of the available evidence. From Mein Kampf, Stalin knew that Hitler intended to attack the Soviet Union. He also knew that Hitler had abrogated peace treaties in the past, indeed had helped Hitler invade Poland. Stalin, and the Soviet High command, ignored numerous warnings including :
- Warnings from Churchill, the USA and Soviet embassies in Romania and Sweden,
- Warning from the Soviet spy Richard Sorge in Japan
- Known buildup of German troops on the Soviet Border, including the entry of German troops in Rumania and Bulgaria in violation of the Nazi-Soviet pact.
- Daily incursions into Soviet airspace by reconnaissance aircraft.
- Numerous German deserters crossed the border in the days before the attack warning of the impending assault.
Stalin appears to have acknowledged that war with Germany was likely, but became fixated on two beliefs. Firstly that the Germans would not attack only two years after signing a non-aggression pact with the USSR. Secondly that the British wanted to provoke the USSR into declaring war on Germany.
This second belief basically allowed him to ignore any evidence that contradicted the first belief. It's possible that the flight of Rudolph Hess to Britain in early May 1941 reinforced the belief that Churchill was actually colluding with Hitler. Even then that doesn't explain the lack of warning to the Soviet border forces.
Sources:
The Second World War; John Keegan.
The Second World War; Martin Gilbert.
Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-45; Alan Clark.
When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Modern War Studies); David M. Glantz.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; William Schirer.
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What makes paper fresh from the copier hot? Why don't inkjet printers produce the same amount of heat as copiers do?
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Laser printers and photocopiers don't work under the same principle as an inkjet printer. When you make a photocopy, the first step is to give an electrostatic charge to a special cylinder. That cylinder is coated with a material that becomes conductive when exposed to light. When the document is being scanned, a strong source of light shines on the paper and reflects on the rotating cylinder. The parts being hit by light (i.e. what is aligned with white on the original document) become conductive and allows the electrostatic charge to be grounded and discharge. What you are left with at the end of this process is a cylinder with an electrostatic charge only on areas that correspond to the dark areas on the document. The charge then picks up toner and rolls on a blank piece of paper with a heating element, which essentially melts the toner and makes it adhere to the paper. The paper then comes out of the photocopier with an approximate copy of the original document.
Of course, modern photocopiers and laser printers will digitize the original document and then use that digitized copy as the master to apply the charge on the cylinder and make a better copy with a single scan instead of having to pass on the original for each copy, but the core principle remains the same.
Long story short, the paper coming out is warm because a heating element is required to make the toner stick to the paper.
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if it takes lawyers 3 years to learn the law, how can we trust a cop to learn it in 6 months?
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Cops don't need to know the bankruptcy code, or contract law, or probate law, etc. The part of the law they're generally concerned with is much smaller. And they don't need to be experts - anything they do is generally useless in the long term if the DA (a "real" lawyer) isn't willing to prosecute you.
There is a process (in Texas at least when I was a HS student, I'm sure there are similar setups elsewhere) called "DA Intake" where when a cop arrests someone, as part of the booking/charge process they would meet with some lowly assistant DA who was on call to determine what exactly to charge you with. Remember that once you're under arrest they have a certain amount of time to charge you (in front of a judge) or let you go.
The problem with cops is that **some** are assholes who abuse their power, not that they have a imperfect understanding of the law.
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why does depression sometimes cause cognitive dysfunction issues, such as reduced attention span, memory, concentration, information processing capability and executive functioning, that sometimes persist after a depressive episode is over?
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Depression still exists in a depressed person's brain even after an "episode". Depression is more than just in your mind, it is like a mental disorder that actually causes physical changes in your brain's structure and neural network, and it is those changes that can cause the other symptoms you mentioned.
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Do more physically attractive people tend to have more pleasant (or even sexy) voices? What role does voice play in human mate selection?
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Not so much. The markers identified for physical attraction (facial symmetry) and voice preferences (vocal tract size) do not correlate in either direction. Furthermore, the studies that have discovered these preferences lack cross-cultural validation.
**Voice:** Even within a population, these preferences appear to shift. In one study of native English speakers, men appear to prefer ladies with higher-pitched voices while women's preferences shifted to higher-pitched during breastfeeding and lower-pitched elsewhere (Apicella & Feinberg, 2009).
Vukovic et al. (2010) demonstrated that women's preference for male voice pitch depends on the woman's own vocal pitch.
As most studies in this area seem to focus on pitch, an understanding of what causes a voice to be higher or lower pitch is important. Roughly, this depends on the size of the person - specifically, their vocal folds. This is somewhat akin to a wind instrument, in that short vocal folds will produce higher pitches (e.g., the mouthpiece of a trumpet) and longer vocal folds will produce lower pitches (e.g., the mouthpiece of a tuba). For a brief overview, see this [NCVS article on the fundamental frequency in voice production](_URL_0_).
**Physical attractiveness:** Again, judgments of physical appeal vary widely by culture. However, studies that have looked at this tend to identify facial symmetry as a key attribute (e.g., Grammer & Thornhill, 1994). While facial symmetry may have some relation to vocal tract shape, the size of the vocal tract bears little relationship to facial symmetry.
Does that answer your questions?
**References:**
Apicella, C. L., & Feinberg, D. R. (2009). Voice pitch alters mate-choice-relevant perception in hunter–gatherers. *Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences*, 276(1659), 1077-1082.
Grammer, K., & Thornhill, R. (1994). Human (Homo sapiens) facial attractiveness and sexual selection: The role of symmetry and averageness. *Journal of Comparative Psychology*, 108(3), 233.
Vukovic, J., Jones, B. C., DeBruine, L., Feinberg, D. R., Smith, F. G., Little, A. C., Welling, L. L. M., & Main, J. (2010). Women’s own voice pitch predicts their preferences for masculinity in men’s voices. *Behavioral Ecology*, 21(4), 767-772.
**Edit:** Corrected explanation of where the fundamental frequency comes from. Thanks to [seabasser](_URL_2_) and [badassholdingakitten](_URL_1_) for their helpful comments!
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Why do we steer vehicles from the front, but aircraft (elevators/rudder) from the rear?
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That's a good question, but in short the way vehicles and aircraft are controlled aren't really related. I can explain why standard aircraft have the control surfaces at the back on the tail (the rudder/vertical stabilizer/elevator/horizontal stabilizer assembly being called the *empennage*).
Also note, some ground vehicles like forklifts do use the rear wheels for directional steering because it enables you to align the forks more easily in tight spaces by making the front wheels near the forces your pivot point. And also note, some aircraft do have their control surfaces towards the front of the aircraft - the original wright flighter had the elevator at the front of the craft. Some modern fighter aircraft such as the Eurofighter also do this with "canards".
The first role of the empennage of a standard aircraft configuration is for *stability*. Think of it like a weathervane/weathercock: when you perturb the aircraft in a yaw or pitch motion, the vertical and horizontal stabilizers respectively return you to a straight orientation. This works because they're located far behind the center of gravity of the aircraft. If you were to reverse this configuration and had the empennage in front of the center of gravity, they would have an opposite effect on stability.
Imagine holding a large board, plywood or posterboard in the wind. If you try to orient it into the wind, it'll quickly try to pitch up or down, and it's difficult to hold it flat and level -- that's instability. Now if you hold it downwind, it's very easy to hold it flat and level, the wind helps you -- that's stability.
So knowing that you need that empennage at the rear of the aircraft for stability, it makes sense to also put your control surfaces (elevator and rudder) there as well, because you have a nice long moment arm giving you good control authority compared to something closer to the center of gravity, where you'd have no moment to work with.
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It's a common trope in 19th century fiction for a character to descend into insanity. What would 19th century "insanity" mean in modern medical terms?
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Edit: Thanks for your patience, everyone. I hope you will enjoy my answer: please scroll further down the page to find what became many hours of research for your amusement and edification.
Could you please give some examples of the texts you mean? For example, a lot of research has been done on the trope of the "madwoman in the attic" trope and hysteria, which was a medical diagnosis of the time primarily, but not exclusively, applied to women. This is the 19th century novel madness that I'm most familiar with. The classic study on this is the aptly titled *The Madwoman in the Attic* by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, from 1979. I actually just gave a presentation about Silas Weir Mitchell, the so-called "rest cure," and representations of female insanity in 19th century literature, but I'd like a confirmation that this is the sort of thing you're talking about before I delve in, for fear that I might be off-base. (Another possible contender for "madness" is the sudden shock that characters suffer that changes them completely in some books, such as what happens to Sir Leicester Dedlock in *Bleak House* or Mr. Hale in *North and South.* You might also be thinking of the kind of "madness" that Ben Gunn suffers from in *Treasure Island*, or the insanity of characters in Edgar Allan Poe's stories.)
I should also note that our contemporary understanding of psychology really can't be read onto an artifact of the past. At most, we can say that today what was diagnosed/described one way might be diagnosed as a certain disorder. Also, the way that madness is represented in a fictional story is not necessarily reflecting actual medical understanding, but as a literary device is serving some other purpose.
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If I went to 1st century Rome with 100 pounds of salt, how rich would I be?
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Are you sure you didn't mean to write pepper or some other (for that age) luxury spice? At that time the Mediterranean cultures already knew how to extract salt from the sea and salt mines were abundant. 100 pounds of salt wouldn't get you very far.
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During the 18th and 19th centuries, most armies had a standardised coat colour - red for Britain, green for Russia, white for Austria. How were the colours determined and was consideration given to not using the same as a likely opponent?
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So, generally during this time period, the color of the uniform would vary. While Britain became famous for their red coats, up until the Napoleonic era and afterward, the regimental uniforms would be up to the decision of the regimental officer, and the same for foreign regiments in the French service (such as the Swiss Guard, which wore red coats as well).
Coat colors ended up being connected toward a nation's color or to the financial needs of a nation: Prussia, known for creating/finding Prussian blue, Britain had a connection to red from England, while France & Austria had large armies, so they couldn't afford the expensive dyes that smaller armies like Prussia and Britain would field. In fact, the reason why Royalist France and Habsburg Austria used white is due to the ease of making a uniform white again (simply dusting chalk over a stain). However, even then armies would have variation in collars and button colors, all of which are dependent on the commander's choice and the regiments tradition.
Further, the cost of the uniforms would be paid by both the state (usually the first uniform, a very basic set of uniforms) and the regimental commander (whom would use his regimental funds to either replace or add to the existing uniform given). From here, it would depend on the taste of the commander, if the commander didn't take all the money from the regimental funds or cared at all.
So, to the main problem about the perceived impracticality of similar uniforms, well that's the thing, the uniforms really didn't matter. While the uniforms do add to the perception of "us vs. them", it doesn't really matter when the house/national flag is at the head of the battalion/company. Flags were used to show who's who on the battlefield, which is why the capture of a standard is very important and daring (as the battalion/company would fight as hard as possible to keep it in order to keep their identity). From far away, it is easiest to tell who's who by the flag they're flying, is it the black and yellow of the Habsburgs or the white with gold fleur-de-lis of France?
Further, Empire Total War doesn't give the full range of a nations uniform variation as the mechanics of representing regiments is simplified for technology's sake.
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when countries like north korea spend money on war supplies like missiles, nukes, guns, planes etc. who sells it to them?
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The North Koreans have purchased weapons largely from the Soviets/Russians and Chinese over the decades as well as having left overs going back as far as WWII from American and Western manufacturers. They have their own arms manufacturing industry which produces two Main Battle Tanks based on Russian/Chinese designs as well as smaller weapons. Some of the tech was purchased from the Russians when the Soviet Union collapsed nominally as scrap metal, but the North Koreans were able to learn from it to produce their own tanks. The have purchased Scuds (Soviet origin missiles) from Egypt, and now produce their own variant.
As far as nukes they purchased a lot of the know how from Pakistan illegally. The former head of Pakistan's nuclear program is in prison for selling secrets to the North Koreans.
Basically anyone in the world except the U.S., Japan, South Korea and Western Europe will sell to them. And even some of those countries will sell "non-military" items that end up being used in the military (the NKs have a number of German trucks). Depending on how public the deal is, how much U.S. pressures the other country not to sell, and the age/design of the weapons anything could be sold to them. Selling off the last generation of weapons to other countries is a time honored tradition, this is a lot of the stuff NK buys from overseas.
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Why don't I feel a shock when touching both ends of a household battery? Or even a car battery?
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Humans are not that good of a conductor. They are better conductors than plastic but not better than for instance metal. When you measure the resistance between your left and right hand you might find something like 1MOhm. With a car battery of 12 volt there will only flow 12 microampere(12x10^-6) between your fingers. You need at least 1 to 5mA(5x10^-3) to feel it. so even if your body has a resistance at 4000 Ohm you might not feel it.
Edit: Grammer
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I’m trying to better understand Marcus Crassus’ portfolio. What does it mean to be an ancient billionaire? How did he spend his money, and where did his wealth go when he died?
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Two authors estimate Crassus' wealth. According to Plutarch, he assessed his own property at 7,200 talents of gold. Pliny the Elder tells us that he possessed the equivalent of 200,000,000 sesterces. Attempts to calculate the modern equivalents of these amounts are [usually based on bullion value](_URL_0_), and so fail to take account of the greater purchasing power of money in antiquity. But it is clear that Crassus was the equivalent of a modern billionaire, and the wealthiest private citizen in the Late Republic.
The basis of Crassus' wealth was real estate. During Sulla's proscriptions, he snapped up the auctioned estates of executed men at artificially low prices - he was even rumored to have proscribed in Sulla's name a man whose estate he coveted (Plutarch, *Life of Crassus* 6.7). Later, he added to his holdings by buying tenements damaged or threatened by one of Rome's frequent fires. When notified of a fire, he or his agents would rush to the scene, and offer to buy the burning building and its neighbors at knock-down prices. When the distressed owner(s) agreed, he would send in his brigade of fire-fighting slaves, who would extinguish the blaze, and immediately begin reconstructing the building for fresh rentals.
Crassus' portfolio, however, was fairly diverse. According to Plutarch, besides owning "the greater part of Rome," Crassus possessed "numberless silver mines, and highly valuable tracts of land with the laborers upon them" (2.5). He also owned thousands of slaves, who (besides extinguishing fires and reconstructing buildings) served on his various properties as "readers, amanuenses, silversmiths, stewards, and table-servants," and so generated income by managing his estates and producing items for sale.
Crassus lent our money to friends and allies, albeit at extortionate interest rates. But like most elite Romans, he spent the bulk of his wealth on public display. Though noted for his personal frugality - unlike many of his wealthy contemporaries, he never built a lavish townhouse - he accumulated political capital by throwing public banquets. While consul, likewise, he distributed money, giving every Roman citizen enough to live on for three months (Plutarch, *Crassus* 2.2). He was also known for saying that "no man was rich, who could not maintain a legion upon his yearly income" (Pliny, *HN* 33.47) - and put his money where his mouth was during the expedition against Spartacus.
Upon his death in Parthia, the bulk of Crassus' property was presumably inherited by his son Marcus.
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My teacher says that the 1800 election was the first time in world history that power was peacefully transferred between parties. It seems too general to be true. Is he right?
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This seems to me like the kind of claim that can only be supported with a ton of goalpost moving on the terms of "peace," "transfer," and "party" against counter-examples.
EG 1 In 1714 the Throne of England was transferred from the House of Stuart to the House of Hanover. I would call this a peaceful transfer, but a) is this "between parties"? and b) does the Jacobite uprising of 1715 (a branch of the House of Stuart who had in 1688/89 been violently deposed led an armed rebellion) disqualify it as "Peaceful"? Similar questions could be asked of the transition from Tudor to Stuart England.
EG 2 [The Restoration of Charles II](_URL_2_) was hailed as largely peaceful, with the general tone of the [Declaration of Breda](_URL_0_) being of forgiveness and peace. Does the exclusion of the regicides from that forgiveness, with their subsequent prosecution and execution disqualify that from being "peaceful"? Does this qualify as a "transfer between parties"? Again, I think this meets your teacher's definition, but the goal posts could again simply be moved.
E3 Queen Anne's Tory ministry (1711-14) led by [Robert Harley](_URL_1_) both entered and exited power without violence, but his rise and fall wasn't tied to any election, rather simply shifts in Royal favour (and the rise of the house of Hanover). But this is definitely a *party* affair. Does it count as a *transfer*? And what about the rise and eventual fall of the Walpole Whig Ministry which followed him?
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if dna contains informations about our whole body, why can we not regenerate certain body parts if they gets removed?
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IKEA instructions do not equal a finished IKEA cabinet :) similarly, if you build the cabinet you no longer have the materials to build another one, even though you still have the instructions. You need more materials (which, for humans, basically boils down to stem cells).
This isn’t perfectly 1 to 1, though. Most of the genetic information that our bodies utilize is for the internal processes on the cellular level to ensure that things run smoothly and you stay alive. The most marked development that we make, which is in the womb, is only possible because of the highly malleable nature of stem cells. Those stem cells change into different cells once we’re born and are spread all over our respective internal systems, thus limiting their uses.
What I can’t answer, though, is why humans are unable to regenerate while other animals can. It’s definitely something that researchers are investigating, but there is no real concrete answer yet. The Darwinian explanation is that over the millions of years that those animals developed, evolution by natural selection ‘selected’ for traits that are most beneficial for that species’ survival. Evidently, humans did not need significant regeneration to survive!
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How do denatured proteins in cooked food get absorbed and "used" in the body?
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You already solved it - proteins are made from amino acids. Denaturing a protein just changes the conformation (shape) irreversibly. Your body would do that when you eat it. You need 22(?) essential amino acids in your diet that your body can't produce. Your body breaks down those amino acid chains and reconfigures them as needed.
EDIT - 22 total amino acids in human nutrition. 9 essential ones that cannot be synthesized from others. Thanks to /u/n00bz0rd
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Humans seem to have a universally visceral reaction of disgust when seeing most insects and spiders. Do other animal species have this same reaction?
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Actually, elephants avoid bees. Whether or not it’s disgust in particular would be difficult to decipher, but it has been useful in creating natural barriers for the animals to keep them away from crops while giving the farmers another valuable crop.
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Floating Feature: STEM the Tide of Ignorance by Sharing the History of Science and Technology
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So I get that the Soviet propaganda poster is sort of a joke, but there is an interesting Soviet tie-in to the modern study of the history of science.
One of the most impactful papers given in the 20th century study of the history of science was that given by Boris Hessen, a Soviet physicist, at the Second International Congress of the History of Science, held in London in 1931. It was a Marxist interpretation of the work of Isaac Newton, situating it within the context of 17th century England, which is to say, an economic, political, and religious context that any good Stalinist would label as "bourgeoise." This looking at the context of Newton, and showing the bridge between it and his work, had an immense influence on Western scholars, who ended up following this strain of "external" factors in the history of science to some very successful ends.
But why did Hessen give this paper? The story is quite interesting. He had been involved, in the 1920s and 1930s, in trying to defend Einstein's work, as well as the quantum physics that came after it, from accusations of being "bourgeois." In the high days of Stalin's purges, such attacks — leveled by philosophers who hated relativity theory and the ways in which it seemed to counteract the dialectical materialism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin — could be deadly for a field (Cf. Lysenkoism). Hessen was one of several brave Soviet physicists who attempted to make attempts to show that whatever the context of the creation of Einstein's theories (and that context was, indeed, bourgeois and "cosmopolitan" by Soviet standards), the work itself stood up.
How to make that defense? There were many different ways to attempt this, such as Vladimir Fok's rebranding of General Relativity as merely a "theory of gravity" (and throwing out all philosophical conundrums). Hessen's was through history: the philosophers held up Newton's laws as the ultimate expression of materialist truth, and so Hessen would show that Newton was certainly as bourgeois as Einstein et al. If he could do that, he hoped, the philosophers (or party functionaries) would perhaps accept that indeed the context could be separated from the science.
As historian of Soviet science Loren Graham writes, "the unwritten final line" of Hessen's paper "was that when Einstein wrote on religion or philosophy he also merely expressed his social context and therefore these views should not be held against physics"—what you can do to Einstein, I can do to Newton, so let's leave science to the scientists and history to the historians.
It's not clear that Hessen's paper was successful within his Soviet context; ultimately the "rehabilitation" of modern physics came when it became valuable for war, and that was just around the corner. Hessen himself was arrested by the NKVD in the late 1930s; there are conflicting accounts of his death (in one he was executed by firing squad, in another he simply died in prison). He was official rehabilitated by Khrushchev in 1956.
Outside of the USSR, "the Hessen thesis" became the spark of an entirely new line of historical inquiry — looking at how the social, cultural, economic, and religious context of scientific development influenced the context of the theories themselves — and much of this work, ironically, went to very different ends than Hessen's. Instead of being about the separability of scientific content and its context, it rather became about the inseparability. It marked, ultimately, a move away from the hagiographical and "internalist" approaches to the history of science — looking at it less as a list of discoveries or evolution of equations, and more as a realm of human society, just as fraught and complicated as any other.
For more, see: Loren R. Graham, "The Socio-Political Roots of Boris Hessen: Soviet Marxism and the History of Science," _Social Studies of Science_ 15, no. 4 (November 1985), 705-722, and Loren R. Graham, “Soviet attitudes toward the social and historical study of science,” in _Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137-155.
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Does a multi-decade concentration of Radon gas lead to an accumulation of lead particles in an enclosed environment (basement)?
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We're talking about concentrations that would be nearly undetectable if the substances weren't radioactive. Let's run some numbers.
The highest recorded residential levels of radiation from radon and its decay products have been on the order of 100,000 becquerels of activity per cubic meter of air, where 1 Bq is defined as one atom decaying per second.
For simplicity, we'll pretend that each atom is removed from the sample as soon as it decays to lead-210, and radon is added as necessary to keep the activity at 100k Bq/m^3.
For one atom to go from radon-222 to lead-210 is a total of five decays: three alpha and two beta. Dividing our 100,000 decays per second by five decays per atom, we get 20,000 atoms of lead per cubic meter per second.
Now, applying that rate to a 50-m^3 room for 100 years (3.154 x 10^9 seconds), we get 3.154 x 10^15 atoms of lead, with a total mass of about a microgram.
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