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Since we see stars as they were some billions of years ago, if I picked out one that had already died, and travelled toward it at a reasonable speed, at some point would I see it explode?
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Well, yeah. I mean...a "reasonable rate" really isn't scientific. However, assuming that you chose a star that exploded at the proper time, then yes, traveling towards that star would "speed up" (from your perspective) the explosion.
Scientists can detect the neutrino emissions from stellar supernovae a short time before seeing the visible light of a supernova. Let's say for argument's sake that this technology is "advanced" and you can suddenly detect a supernova about a year before it would become visible from Earth.
If you set out towards that star at say, half the speed of light and traveled for six months, you'd see the visible light explosion from the supernova sooner (a quarter sooner, I believe but I'm bad at math) than if you just sat there on Earth.
This is because the speed of light is a fixed number that doesn't change depending on where an observer is.
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why do companies need to put the ® or ™ symbols beside their product names every time it is written?
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The "TM" symbol is generally used for unregistered trademarks (including those that are still in the process of being registered) and doesn't do anything significant legally when it comes to violations.
The ® symbol on the other hand is used for trademarks registered with the federal government, and does have some legal importance. Specifically if you fail to use it then you forfeit the right to sue for damages unless you can prove that the defendant knew your mark was registered. This is a pretty high burden to meet.
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If you were to scream in the vacuum of space, would you be able to hear your own voice through the vibrations in your head? Or would you just hear silence?
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Barring the other physical consequences of being exposed to space vacuum unprotected....if you had air in your lungs to exhale and 'scream' with, the vibrations from your vocal chords would propagate through your bodily tissue/matter and you'd 'hear' it--just like you already do in an atmosphere (except you probably 'hear' more of your voice projection/reflection vs. internal conduction). Of course, if you didn't have a nice lungful of air to exhale in the first place, there would be no vibrating of your vocal chords because they require the pressure from the air in your lungs to vibrate.
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with most countries so far in debt, how does china have all this money to loan other countries like the u.s. and u.k.
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That's not how sovereign debt works.
Sovereign debt exists as bonds. A country offers bonds on the market, and other countries buy them as investments. A bond is basically a contract between the bond issuer (usually a government) and the bond holder (whoever buys it) that says "The issuer agrees to pay the holder the value of this bond plus X% interest on [DATE]." US Treasury Bonds are seen as a **very** safe investment because the US **always** pays when and what it says it will pay. This means that the US can offer incredibly low interest rates on its bonds.
A US T-bond is safer than a bank account, safer than gold, hell it's safer than burying your money in the yard. If you have a whole bunch of money and you want to keep it safe for a decade or so, you can't do better than buying US bonds.
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Cats & Dogs have many nipples. What creatures have the most nipples. Why?
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From _URL_0_:
"The number of nipples varies from 2 (in most primates) to 18 (in pigs)."
"The nipples and glands can occur anywhere along the two milk lines, two nearly parallel lines along the ventral aspect of the body. In general most mammals develop mammary glands in pairs along these lines, with a number approximating the number of young typically birthed at a time."
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what are current active research areas in mathematics? and what are their eli5 explanations?
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Math is a huge subject, but here are a few. If you want to know more, look up the Millenium Prize problems, and if you want to read a book about the various objects that mathematicians study, a good book is Mathematics: Its Methods, Content, and Meaning.
1. Number theory. This deals with the study of the integers. For instance, Fermat's last theorem is a statement about the lack of solutions to a certain equation. It just says that if n is any integer bigger than 2, it is not possible to find 3 positive integers x, y, and z that make the statement x^n + y^n = z^n come true. It was proven in the mid 90's by Andrew Wiles, who now works at Oxford in a building named after himself. There is a whole BBC documentary on it, and an interview on a YouTube channel called Numberphile with a mathematician named Ken Ribet, who made significant progress on the problem. The proof involves the study of objects called elliptic curves, which can be thought of as a geometric way of visualizing certain equations, sort of like how y=x+1 can be visualized as a line. These equations can then be studied by geometric methods. A whole branch of mathematics, called Algebraic Geometry, studies things like this.
There are basically 2 kinds of number theory: algebraic and analytic. Roughly speaking, algebraic number theory is about generalizing the properties of the integers (looking at other mathematical objects that resemble the integers in certain ways), and analytic number theory is about prime numbers, which are the "building blocks" of integers. There was recent progress on the "twin prime problem": are there an infinite number of pairs of consecutive primes? For example 3 and 5, 11 and 13... Terry Tao mentioned this in an interview on The Colbert Report.
Another question in number theory is called the abc conjecture. A few years ago a Japanese mathematician named Shinichi Mochizuki claimed that he solved it. Unfortunately nobody understands his arguments and in December there will be a conference where he will Skype with some of the world's top mathematicians and try to explain things to them. Some mathematicians think he might be crazy. He refuses to leave his prefecture in Japan (hence the Skyping) and his writing style is eccentric. But this is very much recent stuff! And it looks like he has produced a lot of insight into these general types of problems. There was an article published in Nature about this last month.
2. Representation theory is the study of ways to write a group as a collection of matrices. A group is a collection of objects that satisfy a few axioms which I won't explain further. A matrix is an array of numbers that represents an action on a certain kind of space called a vector space. Such an action is called a linear transformation. Knowing how a group can be represented as a collection of matrices can give more information about that group, and has found applications in chemistry and quantum mechanics!
Number theory and representation theory are actually quite related. Wiles actually proved something called the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, which is a statement relating elliptic curves to completely different objects called modular forms. A vast generalization is part of the Langlands program, which also generalizes a big part of algebraic number theory called class field theory. It ties much of number theory and representation theory together in very profound ways. It is very exciting because it takes very different parts of mathematics and blends them into each other. At this point it is absolutely impossible to give an ELI5 explanation. Most mathematicians themselves don't know much about it. There is a book called Love and Math, but it is not as accessible as the author would like to believe. The author, Ed Frenkel, also appeared on The Colbert Report.
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I often hear that the 'victors write the history books'. How are historians equipped to cut through the supposed propaganda in order to reveal the truth?
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Historians are trained to think about subjects in various ways and to question how information from the past still exists. We have excessive amounts of details on every US President, but millions of enslaved Africans and African Americans lived in the same country as these presidents with hardly any traces of their presence. As a discipline, we know this disparity comes from centuries of racism establishing a hierarchy to document/preserve certain lives while ignoring others. Stephanie Smallwood's article "The Politics of the Archive and History's Accountability to the Enslaved" focuses on how this process occurred and how historians can challenge entrenched power. Smallwood calls it reading against the grain. Our field can learn a lot from specific absences in the historical records when we know power structures in society determined who was missing from the record. For example, when reading against the grain, a historian might look at advertisements from enslavers offering rewards for the return of their property. But another way to consider this source is as part of a larger collection of advertisements. All the runaway advertisements from the southern US might show frequent routes taken by black Americans to escape slavery, which begs the question of how so many enslaved people know about successful routes. Runaway advertisements were originally a form of power against enslaved people, but historians can turn that power around to ask about how enslaved people created a communication network beyond individual plantations. Its the same sources, but historians can emphasize different voices.
Stephanie Camp's book Closer to Freedom discusses enslaved women's everyday resistance. Not every rebellion was bloody. Camp looks at how some women might take their time to fetch water from a pump. Its not a violent uprising and its not an obvious act of resistance, but historians can look for those spaces where black women could carve out brief moments for themselves. Silent resilience can leave traces, so historians take careful looks sources to find clues about erased people.
For a long time, pro-slavery forces wrote the history books (see Karen Cox's book Dixie's Daughters or this video here: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)). But historians study the history of history too, and we can challenge problematic historiographies. Kevin Levin's new book Searching for Black Confederates looks at how myths and histories formed to perpetuate narratives. We question our own field and criticize how history can maintain oppressive power structures.
More and more, historians are rejecting notions of objectivity to find these moments of resilience and survival in the lives on non-whites, women, LGBTQ people, and other oppressed groups. Our jobs are not to be objective keepers of historical facts, but to interpret the past to give greater meaning to the present. In our current moment where intersectional politics are so prominent and so many voices are escaping oppression to be heard louder and louder, historians need to look where those voices came from before now. Why did we not hear them before? Why are there silences in the past? Answering these questions can inform us how victors rewrote history to create a story, but asking questions to bring out new perspectives means that historians can resist the continuation of oppression.
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if light is mass-less, what is keeping it from having an infinite velocity?
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This is *exactly* the line of thinking which started Einstein on the path to relativity. His solution was to posit that the speed of light *is* infinite from the standpoint of the universe. This is why it is never possible to exceed, or even reach, the speed of light in a vacuum. So it’s less that the speed of light is a cosmic speed limit that nothing can ever surpass, and more that it’s a cosmic horizon that nothing can ever catch up to.
The triumph of relativity is in explaining why it is that light doesn’t instantaneously propagate between two points in space. How it does this gets quite complicated, but one way to think about it is that the time it takes light to move from one point to another is actually the time it takes for space time itself to change to accommodate a changed state in some other location. The propagation of changes in space time itself is what gives light its perceived velocity.
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Is it true that there are sexual parts left out of published Anne Frank dairy and if so why did Anne father do that?
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According to the [New York Times](_URL_2_) and the [Anne Frank House](_URL_1_) there were 5 pages that were missing when the diary was originally published. The five pages have been authenticated as a part of Anne's diary ([Anne Frank House](_URL_0_))
It seems like there were three versions. Version A is the original diary that Anne wrote. Version B is a version of the diary that Anne rewrote. And Version C is a version that her father put together. In 1998 five pages were found, that Otto, Anne's father had. These pages (at least according to the Anne Frank House and the New York Times article linked above) were not sexual in nature but it is where Anne thought about and criticized her parent's relationship.
According to the New York Times:
> In the new-found entries -- actually five pages of diary revisions > censored by Anne's father, Otto -- Anne picks apart her parents' strained marriage, analyzes her own difficult relations with her > mother, Edith, and vows to keep the diary out of her family's hands as ''none of their business.''
So according to these two sources there were parts left out of the diary but they don't seem to be sexual. However, *The Diary of Anne Frank* is challenged and attempted to be banned as recently as [2010] (_URL_3_) (see page 5) due to:
> ...the complaint that the book includes sexual material and homosexual themes.
(Edit Formatting)
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if we have to help animals like horses give birth, then how did they manage it themselves before humans started animal husbandry?
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We don't "have to help" them, but in the case of horses, a lot of time we help in the birthing process because we're invested in the animal (emotionally or financially) and want to see the animal and it's offspring do good so we benefit from it as well.
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How did the "right side up" view of the Earth, aka North = up, become the norm for all globes and maps?
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Globes have north at the top from that same convention that operates for maps; the convention is arbitrary (many early maps had east at the top, from which I believe is where the notion of 'orienting' a map stems). The choice of north at the top of the page or uppermost on a globe is not necessary in any sense - globes could be upside down or sideways (i.e. the axis horizontal), maps could have any direction to the top.
You may find the following article helpful:
_URL_0_
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why don't we breed elephants for their ivory to prevent the poaching of wild elephants?
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Ivory is expensive, but not that expensive. The amount of time and money it would take to raise an elephant for a few pounds of ivory wouldn't be a good investment.
It's much more cost effective (albeit cruel) to let mother nature do the first part and just take the ivory after
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how does anti-venom work, and why does it require more venom to be produced (or is this a misconception)?
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Anti-venom is made by injecting small amounts of the venom collected from the venomous animal into another animal. The animal's body creates antibodies(things in the blood which attack foreign things in your body that shouldn't be there) to fight off the venom. Then those venom fighting antibodies are extracted from the animals blood and presto. You can now give them to a person who has been bitten and give their body a huge amount of antibodies to help neutralize the venom in their blood before it does more damage. There are some antivenoms that can be used to treat multiple different venoms and also ones that are specific to one kind.
If you ever saw the princess bride you might remember that a character fed himself tiny amounts of a deadly poison to build up an immunity to it. We are doing the same thing but instead of making ourselves resistant to the venom (there are people who have done this though it's stupidity dangerous) we make another animal resistant and then use their blood to extract the antibodies and give them to people who have been bitten.
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why does my ass get sore after sitting for too long? how can i prevent it?
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Your butt gets sore from sitting on it too long because your butt is designed to be muscles used for walking and running, not so much a cushion for getting compressed by supporting all your body's weight. Prevention: sit on your butt less.
**Edit:** Alternate prevention: sit on a cushion more.
**Edit 2:** [A more advanced explanation](_URL_0_) by [/u/Bedpans](_URL_1_)
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A flu shot is a vaccine, right? But they seem to be far less reliable than other vaccines (I know many people who get flu shots each year then get the flu). What is the reason for this, and are flu shots really that important?
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> A flu shot is a vaccine, right?
Yes.
> What is the reason for this
CDC has addressed some misconceptions:
> > What about people who get a seasonal flu vaccine and still get sick with flu symptoms?
> > There are several reasons why someone might get a flu symptoms, even after they have been vaccinated against flu.
> > * One reason is that some people can become ill from other respiratory viruses besides flu such as rhinoviruses, which are associated with the common cold, cause symptoms similar to flu, and also spread and cause illness during the flu season. The flu vaccine only protects against influenza, not other illnesses.
* Another explanation is that it is possible to be exposed to influenza viruses, which cause the flu, shortly before getting vaccinated or during the two-week period after vaccination that it takes the body to develop immune protection. This exposure may result in a person becoming ill with flu before protection from the vaccine takes effect.
> * A third reason why some people may experience flu like symptoms despite getting vaccinated is that they may have been exposed to a flu virus that is very different from the viruses the vaccine is designed to protect against. The ability of a flu vaccine to protect a person depends largely on the similarity or “match” between the viruses selected to make the vaccine and those spreading and causing illness. There are many different flu viruses that spread and cause illness among people. For more information, see Influenza (Flu) Viruses.
> * The final explanation for experiencing flu symptoms after vaccination is that the flu vaccine can vary in how well it works and some people who get vaccinated may still get sick.
...
> are flu shots really that important?
I think the flu vs flu shot answers this the best:
> > Is it better to get the flu than the flu vaccine?
> > No. Flu can be a serious disease, particularly among young children, older adults, and people with certain chronic health conditions, such as asthma, heart disease or diabetes. Any flu infection can carry a risk of serious complications, hospitalization or death, even among otherwise healthy children and adults. Therefore, getting vaccinated is a safer choice than risking illness to obtain immune protection.
_URL_0_
Feel free to check out r/ID_News for infectious disease news.
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How common was illegitimate birth in medieval Western Europe? Was "bastardry" a significant social inhibitor across all levels of society?
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It was quite common among the elite social classes. William the Conqueror was known in Normandy as William the Bastard because his mother was the daughter of a tanner and his father was the Duke of Normandy. His status as a bastard did not inhibit him from becoming his fathers heir to the duchy of Normandy and eventually the King of England. However, after his ascension to the throne laws were passed to inhibit a bastard from becoming King. Royal bastards could receive royal favors and titles. Henry VIII bastard son, Henry FitzRoy, became the Duke of Richmond and Somerset and the Earl of Nottingham. Side not the name FitzRoy means "son of the king" and was a common surname given to royal bastards. There are cases where the bastard line became legitimate after the mother and father officially married. Some examples are the Beaufort and Tudor lines that were legitimized upon royal approval and the marriage of the mother and father. I'm sorry I can only speak on royal English illegitimate lines. I believe France had even looser rules and practices concerning royal bastards. The French did have the title of maitresse-en-titre, an official title held by the mistress of the French King.
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why do people in extremely poor countries have children that they will not be able to feed or adequately look after?
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There's a number of reasons.
One of the biggest is simply access to birth control. We take it for granted. They either can't afford it, or it's not available in their area. So they have a lot more babies when they follow the basic instinct and drive to have sex.
A lot of those nations don't have the same level of gender equality that we do. The women have to do what the guys want them to do, sad as it sounds. So at worst there's a lot more rape, leading to more babies. And at best a woman wants to hook up quickly with a stable guy that will help her be safe... and sex which leads to babies is one means of doing that.
And of course there's just plain standard of living coupled with educational levels. When all of your friends have babies and you don't understand what it truly means, as a young female you're going to be more open to it.
In a number of those third-world societies you don't save for retirement. Your kids are what looks after you when you retire. So you have lots of kids.
Finally, nobody EXPECTS their kids to die of starvation or famine. Those things are more common in some areas, but they're not absolutely guaranteed every year, and they move around some. What might be a great crop year when you are looking to a rosy future filled with all sorts of babies, could be a dry dusty bust the following one, and suddenly you have mouths to feed.
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If energy can't be created or destroyed how much energy is there in the universe?
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It is not actually necessarily true that energy can't be created or destroyed (which, in more formal language, is the statement "energy is conserved"). While we can often define something called the "total energy" for a system, in doing so we're making certain technical assumptions about it (specifically that there's a sense in which it's 'time-translation invariant'). When you try to apply those assumptions to the universe as a whole, you have to jump into the mathematics of the general theory of relativity and you discover that you have to be more precise about definitions. While I could go into more detail, it's been done elsewhere by people who had the leisure of taking the time to do it right. For two of my preferred examples, see
Sean Carroll's article titled [Energy is Not Conserved](_URL_1_) and
John Baez's more technical article on [energy conservation in general relativity](_URL_0_).
The short version of the answer to the question of whether energy is conserved in the general theory of relativity is given in the first line of the Baez article:
> In special cases, yes. In general — it depends on what you mean by "energy", and what you mean by "conserved".
Ultimately, I tend to side with Carroll in taking the position that
> When the space through which particles move is changing, the total energy of those particles is not conserved.
Since our universe is expanding, this statement implies (as the article title states) that energy is *not* conserved, in which case the "total energy" isn't constant.
That said, as alluded to in Carroll's article and worked out in some detail by Baez, there are other possible interpretations of the question and other possible answers. If you do it right, you can come to the conclusion that the total energy *is* conserved, and that it's *zero*. There's the positive energy of matter, radiation, et cetera, and then a negative energy of the gravitational field. But I tend to agree with Carroll's perspective in that
> I personally think it’s better to forget about the so-called “energy of the gravitational field” and just admit that energy is not conserved...
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Was working at Jimmy John's today when I customer came in and was severely allergic to cucumbers but could eat pickles, how's that possible?
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Food allergies are often caused by an allergic response to a protein. Proteins are very large molecules made out a long chain of chemical groups called "amino acids." These chains are "crumpled up" into a 3D shape, and the exact 3D shape is what the body recognizes as an allergen. If the protein is unfolded, then the body may no longer recognize it. If a protein is exposed to heat or to acidic conditions, like they would in the pickling process, it can unfold and lose its 3D shape.
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why, in old movies, do they make light fall across an actor's or an actress' eyes?
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I think it's a stylistic choice of lighting, taking inspiration from the cinema noir genre. Noir lighting has strong use of light and shadows, particularly on characters' faces. They use it to draw attention to the character, and may create a sense of moodiness or unease.
[Example of noir](_URL_0_)
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game theory (relating to mathematics and john nash. not video game creation and analysis)
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Game theory is a mathematical analysis of how logical players should behave in a game to maximise their expected reward bearing in mind that everyone else is trying to maximise their expected reward.
The applications in the real world can be "Where should I put my shop?" because you want to get the most customers but everyone else is also trying to get the most they can.
There is also the famous Prisoner's dilemma "Should I rat out my partner before he tells on me?"
Sometimes we get situations called "Nash Equilbriums" where no player can improve their lot by changing decision if no one else changes. In the prisoner's dilemma it's not good that both you and your friend will go to jail but you certainly don't want him to run off with the stolen money to the bahamas while you rot so you both stick with telling the police on the other.
Here is a scene from the film where John Nash thinks of game theory while at a bar trying to get girls. It's debateable however whether what is described is an equilibrium as the last person can get the blonde.
_URL_0_
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Does Earth's gravitational field look the same as Earth's magnetic field?
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No, Earth's gravitational field is basically a [monopole](_URL_1_), pointing inwards everywhere, whereas the magnetic field is largely a [dipole](_URL_0_), sort of the shape of the surface of an apple running from pole to pole.
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How large would the biggest star known to man look in the sky if we were to orbit the star in the so called Habitable zone?
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The size of a star in the sky is dependent on how hot it is burning, not how big it is. If the Earth were orbiting a red dwarf, for instance, the star would appear big in the sky simply because the habitable zone is closer in relation to the star's radius. Just for kicks, let's find out the angular size of one of the biggest stars we know of!
For VY Canis Majoris, one of the biggest stars that we know of in our local universe, the habitable zone is somewhere between 600AU and 1200AU. So to keep it simple, we'll say it's 900 AU. Also, the diameter of VY Canis Majoris is 1.90357e9 miles.
So, with tan^(-1) ((1.90357e9/2)/8.366e10) we get 0.652 deg. That's the inverse tan function for the radius of the star over 900 AU converted to miles, basically just some simple trig to find the angle of the star from its center to it's edge. Multiply that by 2 to get the full star in view and we have 1.304 degrees in the sky.
For reference, our sun only takes up about 0.5 deg in the sky, so VY Canis Majoris be almost three times bigger compared to our sun angularly.
This may greatly vary, as the known values for VY Canis Majoris are widely disputed, but 1.304 degrees is approximately how big it would be in the sky for a planet in it's habitable zone.
Source for Habitable zone: _URL_1_
Source for size: _URL_2_
Edited for sources and clarity
Edit2: Felosele made a good point. The area in the sky that VY Canis Majoris would take up is close to 7 times the area that the sun takes up. Thank you!!
Edit3: [LuridTeaParty made a visual compared to the moon of how big VY Canis Majoris would look in our sky](_URL_0_)
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Why does Hirohito seem to get a free pass among most historians when it comes to war crimes?
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What "every time a thread arises on this board" are you referring to? I just ran a site:_URL_3_ search for "hirohito." Nearly all the viable top results ask some version of "Did/Why did Hirohito basically get off the hook for committing war crimes?"
**The ones I skimmed with viable answers cite multiple historians who straight-up implicate American and Japanese strategic interests involved in Hirohito's treatment.**
[This answer](_URL_2_) by /u/restricteddata even shows up with the preview blurb on the Google results page:
> The choice to allow Hirohito to remain was made by General MacArthur, who oversaw the Occupation. For MacArthur, keeping Hirohito in place, but making him essentially a figurehead, allowed him to keep a firm had on the existing Japanese bureaucracy and mandarin classes.
and if you're looking for a historian who is an expert on the specific topic, restricteddata writes, "The book to read on this period is John Dower, *Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II*."
Or at the top of the Google results page (native reddit search is terrible, but turns up similar results):
[This answer](_URL_4_) by /u/TheWinStore draws on Eiji Takamae, *Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and its Legacy*, which has likewise been called "the best overview of the allied occupation of Japan yet written" (Hans Baerwald, 2004).
Two other comments in the same thread (one of which would not be permissible as a top-level response under today's rule, LOL) cite Moore and Robinson, *Partners for Democracy: Crafting the New Japanese State Under MacArthur*; and Dower, *Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II*, to exactly the same end:
US strategic interests directed why and how they manipulated the emperor's position before and after the war to maneuver towards surrender and then have an easier time controlling a defeated Japan.
[This answer](_URL_5_), [this answer](_URL_0_) (not within today's AH rules, but I found it easily with Google still), and [this answer](_URL_1_) likewise cite multiple historians to the same effect.
And [this answer](_URL_6_) by /u/kieslowskifan goes into depth on the strengths and weaknesses of Bix's "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan", **a book that--cautions and all--won a Pulitzer Prize for arguing what you're claiming no historians do.**
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Is it a coincidence that the two most important former Axis countries, Germany and Japan, now have one of the strongest economies in the world? If not, what is the reason that despite their losses in WWII, they managed to create a robust economy?
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The fact that Japan and Germany were the major parties in WWII, means that they were powerful industrial nations, with large and educated populace. Even though WWII devastated Japan and Germany more than most other Great Powers such as USA, UK or even France, they still had a decent platform to build their nation up again.
One shouldn't also forget that after the war, both Germany and Japan stayed strongly within the American sphere of influence. USA was interested in helping to build up Europe and Japan to stop the spread of communism. Japan also benefitted from the Korean war, where it was the major supplier of UN forces, giving a boost to Japanese economy.
Both Germany and Japan have been at peace after WWII, have had stable economic policies and been members of international trade. They were strong nations before the WWII and they are still today.
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Did any known rulers actually use Machiavelli's "The Prince" as a guide, or at least draw influence from it?
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Heya guys, just a friendly note from your favourite Princ- er, mods here. Please remember when commenting on this post to ensure that your post adheres to both the [rules](_URL_0_) and the [standards](_URL_1_) of the subreddit. This includes the self-examination, which I'll cross-post here.
If you're choosing to answer a question in /r/AskHistorians, there are three questions you should ask yourself first in turn:
- **Do I, personally, actually know a lot about the subject at hand?**
- **Am I essentially certain that what I know about it is true?**
- **Am I prepared to go into real detail about this?**
Furthermore, please make sure that your post actually *answers the question.* If you preface your post with "IIRC" or "as it says on the Wikipedia page," you should reconsider submitting it. Thanks much!
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If men have XY and women have XX what would happen if scientists created a YY human or if it is impossible, why?
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Well, the short answer is that the X chromosome has a lot of important genes on it that males require for living. Our system is sort of a "default female" system; meaning that we only develop into males if the proteins from the Y chromosome are present and get expressed. If there is no Y chromosome, we just continue development as female. Both boys and girls use the genes from the X because they are essential, and the Y carries mostly "male" development signals. Girls actually have to deactivate one of their two X chromosomes to avoid over expression of those genes (google search Barr body if you're interested). So, a YY baby would be missing a lot of functional genes and would not survive long past zygote or whatever means were used to create it.
Now, since you're probably interested, plenty of XYY humans exist (as well as XXX or just X). It's interesting to see what effects that has on the carrier. XYY males have actually theorized to be more aggressive by nature, and I think someone actually did a study on a bunch of death-row murderers to find a connection, but I can't remember what they found.
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why did hitler think blonde-haired blue-eyed people were genetically dominant when he had neither of those traits?
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He thought *Aryans* were genetically dominant. The stereotypical Aryan was blonde-haired and blue-eyed, but that's just like the stereotypical Japanese person having straight jet-black hair; few people thought that you had to look like the stereotype to be Asian.
In general, the Nazi beliefs about race weren't nearly as extreme as people like to think. They *acted* on their beliefs in extreme ways, but the belief in white northern European supremacy was pretty widespread among white northern Europeans, and the Nazi version wasn't all that much different.
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Iceland is remote and sparsely populated. Why does it have such a large medieval literary corpus?
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Icelandic historian Jón Viðar Sigurðsson gives three reasons for the saga-writing of the Icelandic aristocracy:
* To create and maintain social differences between chieftains (the aristocracy) and the rest of the population.
* To compete socially with other members of the aristocracy. Books were expensive, thus a symbol of power and status. Sigurðsson theorizes that Iceland has such a distinct literary tradition in part due to a lack of other status-seeking options. There were, for instance, no opportunities for glory in warfare in the second half of the 13th century and 14th century.
* Later (late 13th century and 14th century) saga-writing, in particular, was motivated by the desire of the Icelandic aristocracy to maintain/reconnect links with the Nordic countries (Iceland became more isolated during the same period, which was not good for such a peripheral entity, see the collapse of the Nordic settlement in Greenland when ties broke with Norway for example) by tracing the ancestry of Icelandic aristocrats to well-known kings and heroes that the contemporary Nordic kings could also trace their origins to.
See [this source](_URL_1_) and [this source](_URL_0_).
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if the notion that electrons orbit around a nucleus is a misconception, what type of motion do electrons have? do they just float in one position?
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Electrons don't exist in one location until they interact with something. The location they appear at when they do interact is random, with a probablility described by an equation similar to a standing wave (like a plucked guitar string, but in three dimensions instead of one).
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When did the divergence between the people that would become Spanish and Portuguese begin in medieval Iberia? What caused the two identities to become very separate?
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Followup: was there *ever* a cohesive Iberian identity?
It appears that you've had various disparate groups fighting themselves, each other, and invaders throughout the entire history of Iberia. And when you look at various movements in Catalonia, The Basque Country, Galicia, etc. it seems like Spanish identity is more of a Pan-Iberian thing of dubious unity. So I'm curious about the wider divisions within modern Spain as well.
Why it is that Portugal is a separate nation, but those other places aren't?
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In the Roman Empire, was there ever any significant debate about the moral issues with slavery?
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"Abolitionist," not that I know of, and "moral" is going to be a difficult term to pin down here, but certainly ancient authors discussed the institution, whether it was good or natural or vise versa.
Now, before we start, some basics about ancient slavery, (all of which can be found in K. R. Bradley, *Slavery and Society at Rome* (Cambridge 1994), or in just about any other Roman history textbook):
* Slavery is much older than recorded Roman history, so we cannot sufficiently answer how it started.
* In Rome, **Anyone could be a slave.** Unlike "modern" slavery, the ancient system was in no way race-based, primarily because the fraught modern concept of "race" didn't exist. [See this Stanford Encyclopedia on "Race" for more](_URL_4_). Now, this topic demands not only its own thread, but its own library. Suffice me to summarize, with regards to our discussion: ethnicity / skin color in the ancient world was not related to slavery.
* Most slaves were prisoners of war; many were sold into slavery by their fathers, some sold themselves into slavery; others were forced into slavery as a legal punishment, or abducted by pirates and enslaved.
* Slaves did all kinds of work. The worst lot was to work in the mines; the most fortunate were teachers or scribes. Cicero, a famous Roman orator/lawyer/rich guy, was on very good terms with his slave Tiro, whom he freed upon his death. Many gladiators were, of course, slaves -- it was not exactly a glamorous job!
* Roman slaves had no legal personhood. They were the property of their masters. However!
* **Manumission** (from Latin *manus* - hand + *mitto* to send, meaning to free a slave) **was relatively common in Rome.** In fact, Rome was full of freedmen, called *liberti* (singular male *libertus*, female *liberta*). The *liberti* had many citizenship rights (Roman society was highly hierarchical and many religio-political positions were still off-limits), and, importantly, could amass amazing amounts of wealth and popularity. The famous playwright Terence was a libertus as was Horace's dad (probably), as well as Trimalchio of Petronyius' *Satyricon,* one of the most famous characters in Roman literature. (Trivia: *The Great Gatsby* was originally to be called *Trimalchio in West-Egg,* as the titular character was based on Petronius' Trimalchio!) Upon manumission, one's former-owner would give the new *libertus* [this cool hat](_URL_5_).
* This certainly did not mean all was peachy for ancient slaves. Many were treated very harshly or worked to death. Rome fought three **Servile Wars** (from *servus*, "slave"), the third most famously a slave revolt led by Spartacus.
Okay, on to the ancient sources:
The most famous ancient argument was Greek, not Roman, but many Romans (and thinkers throughout history) followed *Aristotle's argument about "Natural Slavery"* which he lays out in his [*Politics* (and here is Jowett's 1885 translation, since it's free)](_URL_1_). Essentially, so it goes, some humans are fundamentally - by nature - worse than others. So, they are fit for slavery. Read 1.1.3-1.1.8 for a fuller discussion. Here's a bit pulled out, 1.1.5:
> But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature? There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule, and others be ruled is a thing, not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.
This argument should sound familiar, although warped: the justifications of modern slavery fused Aristotle's theory of natural slavery with Darwin's ideas of evolution to come up with the idea that some "races" had developed to servile to other, superior races. The modern development of racism is intimately related to modern slavery as an economic system, in sharp contrast to the ancient world.
Another must-read, this time an actual Roman, and much closer to a debate of morality, but about treatment of slaves rather than abolition: [Seneca's letter to Lucilius 47, "On Master and Slave."](_URL_3_) He discusses that being a slave is basically just bad luck -- the fault of fortune -- and that owners should always treat their slaves well because their fortune could make them slaves at any time. From his opening:
> "They are slaves," people declare. Nay, rather they are men. "Slaves!" No, comrades. "Slaves!" No, they are unpretentious friends. "Slaves!" No, they are our fellow-slaves, if one reflects that Fortune has equal rights over slaves and free men alike. ... (.10) Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies. It is just as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave.
So both writers are concerned with what makes one a slave, although neither here cited necessarily call the institution itself a "moral" issue. But I am no expert in ancient slavery (I focus on Latin poetry), and I know more sources exist! These are just a couple I remembered off-hand.
Here are three college syllabi for courses on ancient slavery, which you should poke through as you keep moving down this path of inquiry!
* [Rutgers](_URL_0_)
* [Colorado](_URL_2_)
* [York](_URL_6_)
EDIT: With regard to your question: "How did the perception of slavery change throughout roman history," I'm afraid I am going to have to basically say "it's complicated." Any more response would be painfully reductive, so I am going to encourage you again to read some of the fantastic secondary source material on this! All the syllabi have biblios inside :D
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Western films often purport a stark difference between Southwestern "village Indians" like the Pueblo and Yuma, and "warrior Indians" like the Apache and Comanche. Were these cultures really so distinct in lifestyle?
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Your assertion that this idea is much more complicated than Hollywood portrays is absolutely correct. This idea of Navajos, Comanches, Apaches, etc. as especially violent comes out of the Indian Wars fought by the U.S. Military against these groups from the end of the Mexican-American war in 1848 up to to early 20th century (around 1924). During this time, sedentary agricultural groups like the Pueblos and the O'odham (the "Pima") largely did not mount violent campaigns against the U.S. This idea of the pacifist Southwestern farmers was further bolstered by early anthropologists working the early 20th century (like Ruth Benedict) who portrayed especially the Pueblos as incredibly peaceful and egalitarian societies.
**The Myth of Peaceful Pueblos**
This perception of pacifist Pueblo people has a precedent all the way back to the Spanish rule of New Mexico (beginning in 1598), wherein the (especially missionary) perspective was of the "peaceable" Pueblo people - docile, civil, and ideal converts to Christianity. This was in contrast to the savage, violent, and heathen nomadic people living on the periphery of the new colony of New Mexico, generally glossed as "Apaches" though this could include just about any non-Pueblo group. Similar sentiments are expressed by missionaries colonizing southern Arizona later on at the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century.
To quote from Knaut (1995: 33-34):
> As daily contacts between Europeans and Pueblos increased, the Spaniards found themselves astounded by the Indians' unwillingness to challenge the newcomers, and several chose to perceive this as evidence of an unusual civility inherent among New Mexico's aboriginal inhabitants. Fray Francisco de Escobar called the Pueblos 'very affable and docile,' noting that 'they all live in pueblos which, for Indian dwellings, are very well arranged... They are satisfied with little, but they do not have enough.'
Yet, not all Spaniards shared this perception, and the historical record casts it in doubt. It was clear (and is clear from a modern historical perspective) that the Pueblos were willing to challenge the newcomers on multiple fronts. The very first interaction between Pueblo people and Europeans was between the Zunis in the village of Hawikkuh and Esteban, the dark-skinned moorish member of the Spanish expedition led by Fray Marcos de Niza in 1539. The story from the Zunis goes that they killed Esteban after he made arrogant demands of them and threatened them with violence (Knaut 1995: 21-22).
Just a year after claiming the colony of New Mexico for the Spanish crown in 1598, the new governor Juan de Onate sent a siege against the famous fortress town of Acoma Pueblo after the soldiers he sent to collect tribute where killed by the Acoma as an act of resistance. The Spanish ultimately won the siege and captured 500 of the inhabitants of the town, 80 of whom where men. Onate then sentence each man over the age of 25 to have a foot cut off and serve as labor for Spanish encomenderos for twenty years.
At least eight other rebellions against Spanish authority occurred following the siege of Acoma (Liebmann 2012: 47). In 1680 the largest rebellion yet actually forced the Spanish out of the colony, not to return until their second conquest of New Mexico in 1692. This Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was a mass rebellion against the Spanish coordinated among nearly all the different Pueblo groups in New Mexico.
Importantly, many of these revolts (including the 1680 Revolt) were conducted cooperatively between the Pueblos and "Apaches" (a term used generally by the Spanish to refer to any number of nomadic groups living along the edges of the colony of New Mexico).
I should stress that this is true of other sedentary groups in the Southwest. For instance, the Pima Revolt of 1751 was a 3 month long rebellion in southern Arizona of O'odham people against the Spanish that resulted in around 100 Spanish deaths. I focus here only on the Pueblos because that is where the majority of my expertise is.
This history of rebellion by the Pueblos continued even after the second Spanish conquest of New Mexico, but largely diminished after 1700 due largely to two factors. First, that the lessons of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt meant the Spanish were largely more lenient in their policy towards the Pueblos subsequent to their second conquest in 1692. The two primary concerns that had driven the Pueblo revolt was Spanish persecution of Native religious practices (and insistence on conversion to Catholicism) and economic hardship resulting largely from excessive tribute demands and the use of unfree Pueblo labor by Spanish elites and missionaries (Knaut 1995; Liebmann 2012; Preucel 2002).
Both the tribute and labor demands of the Spanish on the Pueblos were diminished following the 1680 Revolt, and further by the mid-18th century Bourbon reforms. Likewise, religious persecution was significantly lessened following the 1680 Revolt and the church in New Mexico was far more lenient towards secretive practices of Pueblo religion as well as syncretic beliefs.
Second, changing demography made outright violent revolt by the Pueblos increasingly nonviable. During most of the 17th century, the Pueblos significantly outnumbered the Spanish in New Mexico. This advantage in numbers allowed for their success in the 1680 Revolt. However, from the first conquest of New Mexico in 1598 and up into the American period, Pueblo populations steadily declined from a combination of Spanish exploitation, introduced disease, and famine due to excessive tribute and drought. In contrast, Spanish settler populations (and mestizos) increased over this time period. These changes made overt rebellion less and less viable.
Edit: Typos
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Would a Roman from the 1st-2nd century AD recognize anything in the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine) in the 11th-12th century as "Roman"?
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In religion, language, and many other respects, the Byzantine Empire of the Comnenian period was very different from its Roman ancestor. It continued, however, to preserve many of the cultural traditions, some of the institutions, and one of the great cities of the Roman world.
In the second century, the Roman provinces that made up the future heart of the Byzantine world were linguistically divided. In the Balkans, heavily influenced by the legions along the Danube, the lingua franca was Latin. Greece and Asia Minor, however, were almost entirely Greek-speaking. A Roman time-traveler to the Byzantine world would find that Greek (albeit a very different-sounding Greek) had persisted in Greece and Asia Minor, but that Slavic languages had replaced Latin in the Balkans. He would also discover that - despite a modest tenth- and eleventh-century revival in Byzantine legal circles - knowledge of Latin had virtually disappeared. But if, like many educated Romans, he was a fluent reader of Greek, he would be gratified to find that knowledge of the Greek classics was alive and well among the Byzantine elite, and that many Byzantine authors continued to use a classicizing literary style quite similar to that employed by educated speakers of his own day.
If a Roman time traveler found himself in court, he would also discover that Byzantine civil law was still based on the Code of Justinian (and thus on the legal traditions of his own day). That law had of course been translated into Greek, and modified by the various later compilations; but it was very clearly, and proudly, part of the Roman legal tradition.
A visit to the imperial palace, with its cadres of officials and pneumatic throne, might disconcert a time traveler accustomed to the pseudo-republican governing style of Trajan or Hadrian. The autocratic and bureaucratic Byzantine court, however, was far from being un-Roman; it just late Roman, based on a model of imperial rule pioneered by Diocletian and Constantine.
Perhaps the most impressive demonstration the Byzantines were still Romans, however, was the city of Constantinople itself. Before it was burned and pillaged by the crusaders, Constantinople - alone among the cities of the medieval Mediterranean world - continued to look like a classical city. Our Roman visitor would of course have been baffled by the churches; but the grand public squares and impressive galleries of bronze and marble statues would have reminded him of Rome - just as Constantine intended.
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Why are all the place-holder names of the incoming elements to the Periodic table all Unun-something?
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They just refer to the latin names of the numbers. For example, Ununoctium (118) might be converted to english as one-one-eightium.
Linguists are welcome to correct me on the details, but the main point is that they're placeholders that refer literally to the number of the element.
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why do some websites and programs seem to not be able to process apostrophes and instead replace it with a series of nonsensical characters. for example: instead of "john's", the site would show "john’s".
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Issues like this are usually due to mishandling of character encoding.
Inside computers all data is stored a series of numbers. Basically, the old way of storing text is to use exactly one byte (eight bits; each bit is a 0 or 1) for every single letter. This is what ASCII is; in ASCII the numbers from 0 to 255 each correspond to a letter, for example the number 97 is lowercase a.
The issue with this is that there are a lot more than 255 different characters that people want to use in text; even many Western European languages didn't have some of their symbols available. Asian languages, Eastern European, Hebrew and so on don't have any of their letters available in ASCII.
This problem is solved by having a much larger range of letters called [Unicode](_URL_0_). Using this scheme they have an extremely large space for symbols, which allows them to have characters for silly things like smiley faces and snowmen. There are different ways for storing the Unicode characters; some of them just always use 16 or 32 bits for each character but that ends up not being very efficient for most Western-biased usages where almost all of the letters are from ASCII and only a few are "special".
The most common way of encoding the charaters is called [UTF-8](_URL_1_) which is the same as ASCII for characters numbered 0 to 127, but the other characters use multiple bytes. UTF-8 has some nice properties that are beyond what I will mention here, but the important thing is if you accidentally try to read UTF-8 text as ASCII, any of the simple letters or numbers will look normal.
The particular issue you are seeing is usually because they didn't use the actually ' character, they used what is called "smart quotes" that are curved in one direction or the other (it looks like this: ’ or ”, it is more obvious in a different font).
So the server tries to tell your browser to show a curved quote, it uses a UTF-8 encoding that is 2 or 3 bytes. Due to some sofware misconfiguration, the browser thinks that it is ASCII so it takes each of those bytes and tries to show them each as letters, which ends up with the weird unrelated symbols.
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what happens in our brain, when we forget what we wanted to do while starting to do the action?
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Our brain reinforces pathways we take more than once. Often what happens when we forget what we wanted to do while starting to do something is that a more reinforced brain pathway is triggered when we start the action, causing us to forget the rest once it leaves short term memory.
Sort of like the challenge of patting your head while rubbing your stomach.
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why do led lights look jittery or like they're strobing when you look at them quickly?
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They're often dimmed using PWM(pulse-width modulation) in cheap applications. Basically they're turned on and off really quickly and by changing the ratio of on time to off time you can change how bright it appears to your eyes.
The problem with this is that when they move through your vision(you turn your head or they move) or you wave something in front of them you'll get weird results because its not on all the time. There is a distinct image that only appears at specific locations on your retina instead of being a blurry smear across it like your brain expects from a continuous source.
Good applications will instead provide constant power and control how much current is flowing through the LED. Providing constant power means they aren't turning on and off and don't leave you with the weird jittering effect.
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Are the hamburgers you get from traditional fast food chains like McDonald's really THAT terrible for you?
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Regarding the non-decay, there's quite a good debunking here: _URL_0_
A normal burger kept in warm moist conditions will decay just like any other food.
(edit: last sentence removed because it was really just my opinion - I'm no dietician)
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Do galaxies have clearly defined borders, or do they just kind of bleed into each other?
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I guess strictly speaking they don't have "clearly defined borders." It's not like there's some force holding every start within a specific hard boundary. They're just all orbiting the same gravity well, so they hold together-ish, but the edges are fuzzy because a galaxy isn't a single solid thing.
The thing is though that for the most part galaxies are so staggeringly, unfathomably far away from each other that they don't remotely "bleed into each other."
Even in cases where galaxies are "colliding" there's basically zero collisions happening, because even within a galaxy the **vast** overwhelming majority of the space is empty space between stars.
I guess my point is that space is mostly, well, space.
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How much electricity would be created per day if every Walmart and Home Depot in America covered their roof with solar panels?
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Some quick googling tells me there are roughly 9000 Wal-mart stores, with an average club size of 134,000 sq. ft. Assuming an average solar panel output of 10 W/sq. ft. and an average day of 12 hours, I get a result of 144,720,000 kW*Hrs.
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What is the white stuff inside pimples? What it's made out of, why we have it, and why does it exit in this way?
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A pimple is an infection. Bacterial infections begin with a bacterial pathogen and an inflammatory response to the pathogen. For pimples, anaerobic bacteria colonize a hair follicle and consume the sebum produced by sebaceous glands. This forms lipid byproducts which irritate the surrounding area. This inflammatory reaction recruits immune cells called neutrophils (a type of WBC). Neutrophils come in and dump bleach on the bacteria. As neutrophils die, they accumulate and form what we call pus or the “white stuff”. It only has one immediate way out; through the hair follicle to the skin surface. That’s why it exits that way.
Edit: correction about sebaceous glands (not sweat glands)
Edit2: I’m getting a lot of questions about the one way out. Added that exit to the skin surface is the only immediate way out. After a few days the pimple will resolve following absorption back into the body.
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why i can't recharge normal household batteries? when they build them they charge them, so why can't i?
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They don't charge them when they build them. The current is generated by a chemical reaction, and the batteries are built with the required ingredients for the chemical reaction. They don't build an empty battery and then charge it up. When you make a "battery" by sticking nails in a lemon, you don't have to charge up the lemon first.
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does a company forcing you to change your password every 6 months (for example) actually increase security? as far as i'm concerned it just causes me to forget my password.
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Studies have shown that mandatory password changes actually reduce security because people tend to either use simpler passwords that are easier to remember, or they just write them down in easy to find places.
Edit: since so many people have asked.
_URL_0_
Edit: don't know how this turned into my highest karma post. I went from 1.3k this morning, to this!! Lol
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What was considered "junk food" in the early 1900's?
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[Edit: Sorry, I've written a pretty disorganized post here, and I've played with it a bit; apologies for the messiness.]
I can answer this for Britain; other Anglophone and European countries followed some of the same patterns, but with important variations that are beyond my knowledge. This answer does require some consideration of just what "junk food" actually is, because the early twentieth century existed in a world that still saw the problem of food as one of scarcity, not abundance.
Our current definition of junk food is based on abundance. "Junk" food now is such because it will make you fat; say, burgers and fries or fish and chips. Modern medical knowledge tells us that fatty, salty, fried foods, or foods with a lot of sugar like soda or candy, are bad for our health, leading to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. They're a "guilty pleasure" because they taste good but are unhealthy--but the real "problem" of those foods is that we eat too much.
In the early twentieth century, that kind of cultural-medical discourse just doesn't exist. People eating too much is just not seen as a problem (socially--individuals certainly could do it). The wealthy might eat extravagant, multi-course meals that we would see as ridiculously opulent and unhealthy because of the amount of fat, salt, red meat, and so on; however, you just don't see contemporary physicians looking at those things are problems socially, because that was basically fine *for the wealthy*, because they could afford it. If poor people were eating that kind of thing, then that would be a problem, but it would be a problem because it was wasteful. Instead, the problem then was people eating too little. And in Britain in the early 20th century, the people doing most of the looking and judging of this were not necessarily physicians, but middle-class "reformers" looking at the working class. For them, the "junk food" of the day was white bread and tea--sort of a "guilty pleasure," but not because they worried about poor people getting too fat, but because they claimed that such a diet was wasteful.
The globalization of Britain's food supply chain in the second half of the nineteenth century, combined with a revolution of flour milling technology in the 1870s and 1880s meant that by about 1900, white bread was available for everyone. Prior to about 1870 or 1880, people certainly ate white bread, but it was not as ubiquitous as it was by the end of the century, and it was frequently "white" only thanks to adulteration with alum, a bleaching agent (that's its own story, but alum went from nearly universal or practically gone between about 1850 and 1890). Tea underwent a similar pattern slightly earlier in the nineteenth century: the preserve of the wealthy in the seventeenth century, it became a common luxury in the eighteenth century, and a universal necessity across the nineteenth century. In part, this was possible through the expansion of cultivation in India and Ceylon, across the nineteenth century, which obviously increased the supply and drove down prices. By 1900, white bread and tea (and sugar) were universally available, and cheaper than ever across Britain.
Middle-class reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were concerned with working-class diets, and there were many who conducted surveys of what working people ate. They found that many subsisted on a diet of white bread and tea, working men eating as much as a pound of white bread per day, and tea the preferred drink. How common this actually was is difficult to determine; certainly after 1850, there was a rise in real wages across Britain, and a much wider variety of food products became available at lower and lower prices. These included imported tinned or frozen meats, processed food like tinned fruit, bottled sauces, and prepackaged biscuits and sweets, and even some fresh fruit. A variety of local fruits and vegetables had also been available in British cities, including cabbages, kale, and root vegetables like potatoes and carrots. With this variety available and with the increase in real wages, we know that by 1900 the British working class was eating considerably better than it had from, say, 1830 to 1860. Still, there was likely a subset of the very poor who continued to scrape by on the very cheapest foods available, white bread and tea. These were families that probably couldn't afford meat more than one a week or even once a month, couldn't afford the fuel to cook very much, and very likely had little time away from working to do so anyway. Bread, especially freshly-baked bread, and tea were warm, and provided enough energy and chemical stimulation to keep them going.
Middle class reformers were horrified by this revelation, but for complex reasons. White bread was not at the time seen as necessarily less healthy than brown bread; in fact, many physicians considered it a far more efficient food, and thereby preferable. The idea that there were micronutrients necessary for health that might not be provided by white bread and tea was certainly there, but it was not a culturally dominant idea until really after World War I. No, the problem with white bread and tea, I would argue, is that they represented poor people eating above their station. White bread and tea had both been traditionally the preserve of the wealthy, and though globalization had pretty much made that consumption pattern obsolete, those cultural ideas continued. Middle class reformers were offended by the poor eating white bread and drinking tea because, to them, the poor shouldn't be wasting their money on them. They should, in the eyes of reformers, eat brown bread or oatmeal, and drink milk--never mind that those products could actually be more expensive, so that white bread and tea was not necessarily an uneconomical choice. At the same time, the middle class thought it was fine for them to eat white bread, because their diets were more diverse.
So, in this way, "junk food" at the time was basically what poor people ate.
The main scholarly texts for this are Christian Petersen, *Bread and the British Economy*; Derek Oddy, *From Plain Fare to Fusion Food*; John Burnett, *Plenty and Want*. If you want more specific references, let me know.
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Why is it that I can safely eat a rare steak but eating undercooked chicken, fish, or pork could land me in the hospital?
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Actually fish can be eaten raw, ever heard of sushi?
Pork can also can now be eaten undercooked but it doesn't taste that much better. The main problem used to be a parasite (_URL_0_) which has been pretty much eradicated.
The only bad one is chicken, which can contain salmonella. The reason it does is because salmonella is a pretty resistant bacteria which can make us pretty sick but doesn't affect the chicken (or most birds/reptiles for that matter).
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what is actually happening when you "charge" something that is glow in the dark?
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The chemical bonds in the glowing component can temporarily store energy and then release it at a constant rate. When "charging" it, you're exposing the chemical to ultra violet light (or any wavelength of light i guess it depends), the photons excite the molecules and energy is stored. The energy is then released as the molecules go back to their typical energy state. This released energy takes the form of light.
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How come every native religion in Europe - Norse, Slavic, Hellenic, Baltic etc - got wiped out by Christianity? Why were they all so weak?
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First, it's important to recognize that in most cases it took centuries, if not a full millennium, for these traditions to be fully uprooted.
Christianity had a few things going for it as a missionary religion that the divergent local pagan traditions couldn't match: it came out of Roman late antiquity with a strong and international institutional identity and organization; it was better able to integrate itself into both the local and royal political orders; and it demanded exclusive worship of its followers, which sapped the support of other traditions. And apparently the beliefs were appealing to people from a wide variety of backgrounds (never underestimate the role of either women or desperate royals looking for political backing in the spread of Christianity)
The pagans, meanwhile, were mostly just local communities worshiping in their traditional manner.
This is possibly a terrible analogy, but each branch of paganism is somewhat like a bunch of locally owned restaurants run by individual owners, all serving similar cuisines, who couldn't compete when the giant Mediterranean franchise (under a regional manager called a bishop) rolled in and took their lunch-money, all with the support of the government.
For a different, but excellent perspective, check out this recent thread:
_URL_0_
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what are those swarms of bugs actually doing when they seem to just be flying around in a small area?
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Could be for various reasons, depends on the situation, species, etc.
Usually it's somewhere with a damp breeze (downwind of a river or pond), and food. They see something you don't and are hanging around where the food is for them.
Another reason is a mating swarm. At certain times of the year some bugs swarm up to make the task of finding mates a lot easier (basically like a big mixer).
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Why Do Certain Chemicals Cause Different Individuals To Experience Similar Complex Thoughts/Hallucinations? Where Is The Information Coming From?
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There might be confirmation bias going on here, just because "many report" is not necessarily indicative of the expereinces of most users. My own experience with DMT was like a kaleidoscope with no other "entities".
All brains are wired differently but pretty much all of them use the same chemical schematics to do the job, so shared expereinces can come from that. A chemical change that causes one person to perceive an unknown entity may cause the same effect in another, or it may not.
Keep in mind with altered states of conciousness it be difficult to perceive what is influencing you, one person may say "I'm bring eaten by butterflies!" And cause the rest to manifest the same hallucination.
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if a flight's overbooked, why would a seated passenger be forced to leave for someone who isn't seated? wouldn't it be first come first serve?
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With regards to the [recent situation involving United Airlines](_URL_0_) it wasn't that the flight was overbooked, but rather it was full and United needed to transfer four employees to another airport and therefore needed space on the plane.
They took ~~the last four passengers to book the flight~~ four passengers chosen randomly by a computer and asked them to leave. They are allowed to do this.
This is my understanding, anyway.
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why are english accents used in most film/shows that are set in ancient times?
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That's a pretty good guess. In some cases that's exactly why the Queen's English is used, as that dialect helps to convey the idea of monarchies. In some cases, it's simply to convey the idea that the story takes place in an exotic location, while still keeping the language intelligible.
Ultimately though, most films and shows (coming out of Hollywood at least) are intended primarily for viewers in the US. Would you be looking forward to the next season of Game of Thrones if the Starks had Boston accents and the Tyrells and Martells had Texas or Mississippi accents?
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Are there any poisons/toxins which, if taken separately, are fatal, but if taken simultaneously, are not?
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It depends on what you consider to be a poison or toxin. Hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide are both things you wouldn't want to ingest by themselves, but mix them in just the right quantities and you get salt water. Reactions like this are called [neutralization reactions](_URL_0_).
That said, **do not try this**, as even a small imbalance will leave behind enough of one or the other to give you serious chemical burns. For an example, look at the titration curve in the linked example. It swings very suddenly from being a very strong acid to a very strong base -- you would have to be extremely lucky to get anything near neutral.
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Is the gravitational force the only force that distorts space-time and if so, why is that ?
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In the mathematical framework of general relativity, gravitational force doesn't distort spacetime, it *is* the distortion of spacetime. It isn't the case that the existence of the force does the distorting.
To use a strained analogy, the question is a little like asking 'is swimming the only way to propel yourself through water using the movement of your limbs, and if so, why is that?'. This doesn't make sense because swimming *is* the process of propelling yourself through water using the movement of your limbs, not a way to make that happen.
~~I'm not sure if we can describe other forces using mathematics similar to that of general relativity.~~ Edit: As localhorst explains below, the theory of gauge fields does this.
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Why do the British isles have so many castles in comparison to the rest of Europe?
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What's the source of that map? At a first glance it seems wildly inaccurate. There are way more castles in France and Austria than listed here (and that are just the places I'm familiar with).
If this is some kind of crowd-managed map, much of the difference might be due to reporting bias.
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during exams, what actually happens in your brain that causes your mind to go blank?
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One possible explanation is the stress of exams makes your body go into fight or flight mode where stress hormones such as cortisol diverts glucose (energy) away from the hippocampus and thus decreasing your ability to recall memories. For our ancestors, this gave them the extra punch needed to survive, as it was more likely for their survival to be hinged upon beating the predator threatening them than beating the test curve. Sadly, this means when you're stressed it'd be harder to recall specific memories.
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What happened to the 170 German defenders of Tsingtao who were taken as POW's and chose to remain in Japan after WW1.
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A small amount of information about the lives of those German POWs who chose to remain in Japan can be found in an account by Mahon Murphy of Trinity College Dublin, "Brücken, Beethoven und Baumkuchen: German and Austro-Hungarian Prisoners of War and the Japanese Home Front," published as a chapter in Bürgschwentner, Egger and Barth-Scalmani, Other Fronts, Other Wars: First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial, by Brill in 2014.
Murphy points out that 4,800 POWs were transported to Japan, and they remained interned for a long time – until early in 1921. This gave them more time to learn the local language (for the most part they were kept in less than arduous conditions, often near major population centres, and there seem to be many photos showing them mixing with their captors and even local people). Assimilation does not seem to have been a significant goal of most prisoners; they insisted, for example, on a European style diet heavy on beef, cabbage, cheese and potatoes, which were difficult for the Japanese to supply; the only cattle and milk available had to be brought down from Hokkaido. Eventually prisoners were given the chance to farm their own cattle. Murphy adds, however, that "there was much interest" in the prisoners and that locals would gather to hear the "red haired devils" sing drunken songs within the confines of their camps. At Hiroshima, a local Japanese football team was put together to play Japan's "first international" soccer match against the POWs. Exhibitions of German culture were also organised for the benefit of Japanese visitors to the camps - Murphy's chapter title refers to a first-ever performance in Japan of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (June 1918).
Local response seems to have been good natured curiosity - POWs were treated very much better in Japan in WWI than they would be in WWII. Several camps organised German food fairs which offered the first opportunity for Jaoanese to sample tomatoes, cured bacon, and German style beer.
Of the Germans who chose to remain in Japan after release, the most prominent was Karl Jucheim, who had run a sweet shop in Tsingtao (Qingdao) before the war, and used that expertise to set up what became a brand-name desert business selling traditional German baumkuchen - pastry desserts. These were a significant success, and his baumkuchen can still be found on sale in Japan today. Jucheim set up his business in Yokohama, then moved to Kobe after the great earthquake of 1923. He died in August 1945.
Less is known of the other 177 prisoners who stayed on,but several seem to have followed similar career paths. Hermann Wolschke set up a sausage factory. Hermann Ketel and August Lohmeyer both opened European style restaurants in Tokyo – the former lasted until 2004 and the latter is still doing business under Japanese ownership.Others became German teachers or worked in cultural relations.
Incidentally, Murphy draws much of his information from the Tsingtao War German Prisoners Research Society (that's a translation from the Japanese), which apparently publishes an annual journal – so I suspect there is more to find out about these unusual cultural migrants.
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what does the phrase "twice removed" or even "removed" mean when referring to a family member?
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So your father's brother's son is your first cousin. You go up one generation, then a sibling over, and down one generation. 1 = first.
Your grandfather's brother's grandson is your second cousin. Up two, a sibling over, and down two. 2 = second.
But what about your grandfather's brother's son? Up 2, sibling over, down 1. How do you handle that difference? You call them a first cousin (using the smaller of the two numbers) once removed (using the difference of the two numbers.
Your great great grandfather's (4) brother's son (1) is your first cousin 3 times removed. Your great great grandfather's (4) brother's great grandson (3) is your third cousin one removed.
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Why do antique dolls often look so creepy? Did people not experience the uncanny valley in the past?
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Well, Ernst Jentsch published *Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen* in 1906 and Sigmund Freud's *Das Unheimliche* is 1919, and both of them turn to simulacra of human beings as components of their respective understandings of "the uncanny." So while Uncanny Valley itself is a recent coinage, we can rule out the general *concept* as a modern-day invention. (Whatever its proven or unproven actual psychological underpinnings).
However, neither Jentsch nor Freud is talking specifically about dolls in the sense of Bratz or Cabbage Patch Kids. In fact, Jentsch specifically asserts that "A doll which closes and opens its eyes by itself, or a small automatic toy, will cause no notable sensation of [the uncanny]." *(trans. Roy Sellars; [PDF](_URL_2_))*. Instead, what he (and to a lesser extent Freud, who simply stipulates Jentsch's point here) circles as the uncanny in terms of mock-humans is automata--that is, "the life-size machines that perform complicated tasks, blow trumpets, dance and so forth."
For Jentsch, the uncanny lies in the question of whether something/someone is human or a machine. Critically, this can go in either direction--he identifies the jerking, unconscious movements of a person having a tonic-clonic (grand mal) seizure as triggering the sensation of the uncanny in the same way. But his exemplar par excellence, also picked up by Freud, is E.T.A. Hoffmann's short story [*Der Sandmann.*](_URL_0_)
From the beginning, in the protagonist's recounting of his childhood nightmare/fever dream/vision/reality, the story blurs the line between human and doll-automaton. Creeptastic Coppelius, the reified "Sandman" of Nathanael's childhood terror, seizes the boy in his father's room and treats him like an automaton:
> "We will examine the mechanism (*Mechanismus*) of his hands and feet."
> And then he seized me so roughly that my joints cracked, and screwed off my hands and feet, afterwards putting them back again, one after the other. "There's something wrong here," he mumbled. "But now it's as good as ever."
Fast-forwarding in time, Nathanael is engaged to a (genuinely lovely) woman named Clara. However, through the lens of a telescope, he becomes obsessed with another woman named Olimpia--the lens of the telescope being, in a way, artificial/mechanical eyes. Of course the drama of the story is that beautiful, dancing Olimpia, who always responds, "Ah, ah!" is actually an automaton.
And in the story's finale, when Nathanael and Clara have been reconciled, they go sightseeing one day, observing the land around them from a tower. Clara spots an apparently triffid, and Nathanael wants to take a closer look:
> Nathaniel mechanically put his hand into his breast pocket--he found Coppola's telescope, and pointed it to one side.
But before he sees the seemingly-walking shrub, he spots Clara. And his mind flashes back to dancing Olimpia, always through the telescope lens:
> He shrieked out in a piercing tone, "Spin round, wooden doll! Spin round!" Then seizing Clara with immense force, he tried to hurl her down, but with the desperate strength of one battling against death she clutched the railings.
Clara survives! But in his madness over the confusion of living and doll, Nathanael hurtles himself off the steeple. Throughout the story, then, the boundary between human and machine is repeatedly blurred, right into insanity and death.
(Freud thinks the real issue in Hoffmann's story is that eyes are a penis and women don't real, but...you know, *Freud*.)
Scholars of Gothic literature in particular have traced this theme of automata as the creepy uncanny, in an age where they were meant first of all to be a wondrous scientific and mechanical achievement, back to the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment. The idea of the human body as mechanism or machine (an automaton animated by the soul, if you want to be Cartesian about it) runs strongly through the writing of philosophers like La Mettrie. As Hoffmann's story shows, the idea could be inspiring to some, fearsome to others, and most importantly, *both at once*.
The theme of human/machine as horror is so prominent in 18th and 19th century Romantic and Gothic literature that Terry Castle even called her anthology of "greatest hits" academic articles *The Female Thermometer and the Eighteenth-Century Invention of the Uncanny.*
...Of course, Castle is not a medievalist. And just as the medieval Near East, Byzantium, and (somewhat later) western Europe had both literary and practical traditions of awe-inspiring automata, the era's literature reveals a sense of the uncanny surrounding them.
However, as (AskHistorians AMA alumna!) E.R. Truitt points out, the creepy sensation for medieval authors wasn't a question of human and/versus machine. Instead, it was the twilight between life and death. Automata guard tombs, including ones meant to be a direct replication of the deceased; they guard castles populated by spectres. In some stories, automata resembling dead people are employed as a purposeful fraud to pretend the person is still alive.
So the overall point is: what is uncanny to the people of one era might not be to those of another, or it might be equally uncanny but for different reasons.
As to why some people today find antique dolls creepy, I was unable to find any solid research beyond the usual "dolls in horror movies" (fun fact: in the 19th century, it's more often the puppet *masters* who are the bad guys) as well as some info that suggests the phenomenon isn't limited to antique dolls. But this will be quite interesting in light of the above, I think:
In Francis McAndrew and Sara Koehnke's study "On the Nature of Creepiness," ([PDF](_URL_1_)) their respondents rated "collecting something" as the creepiest hobby--provided that something was "*dolls*, insects, reptiles, or body parts such as teeth, bones, or fingernails." McAndrew and Koehnke identify, overall, creepiness as the sensation of ambiguity over whether something is or isn't a threat. The things that people find creepy to collect are, they point out, either things that humans have an instinctive fear of--snakes and spiders--or things that relate to the living/dead boundary--pulled teeth, clipped fingernails, or outright bones.
Or dolls.
Our sense of the uncanny, it seems, has more traces of the medieval than one might expect from this side of industrialization and the microchip.
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How has the awkwardness of puberty and early teen years been viewed at different points in history?
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I'd say a good deal of the awkwardness is relatively modern. You basically didn't have teenagers at all before the 19th century. You could argue that 'adolescence' is a social construct that arose when countries started to force people over the age of 13 or so to go to school. Suddenly, the West found itself with an entirely new type of person - a person who was a biological adult for all intents and purposes, but who was deemed not yet ready to be a contributing member of society. As a result, you get all the social quirks you associate with teenagers - questioning authority, trying on different identities, experimentation, rebellion, and so forth. None of this, of course, is helped by the puberty situation.
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Why do American high schools and universities use the nomenclature "freshman, sophomore, junior, senior" instead of, e.g., 1st-year, 2nd-year, etc.? How did that develop?
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A reasonable trawl through the Internet will inform you that American universities borrowed the terminology from Oxford and Cambridge, where they had come to describe different levels of "sophester" or sophist--someone who *thinks they are* wise. (Sophomore adds on either a simple Latin -or 'operator' ending, or *possibly* Greek *moros*/fool--either way, the meaning is clear; the adjective "sophomoric" means immature). In the sixteenth century, *sophister* sometimes had an additional connotation of someone who takes money for teaching wisdom instead of ~~being an exploited adjunct~~ living a pure life of the mind or something--basically, a philosopher who sold out. This would track with the use of more advanced students employed to tutor earlier ones.
What the OED and blog posts *won't* tell you, on the other hand, is why the labels for students are inherently *insults*.
Medieval universities incubated a tradition that early modern ones would carry on with pride: periodically awful student behavior. (Also, you know, excellent academics & drool-worthy libraries & the foundation for modern scientific research & c & c.) Most infamous is student violence, of course--right along with universities' determination to shelter their own from charges of murder and rape.
But more to the point with the classifications is that university students also had a reputation for living up to a somewhat lower standard than what Robert Lowth wanted to see in Oxford:
> [A place] where a liberal pursuit of knowledge, and a genuine freedom
of thought was raised encouraged and pushed forward by
example, by commendation, and by authority
and somewhat more along the lines of what Edward Gibbon (yes, [our Edward Gibbon!](_URL_0_)) remembered:
> To the university of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation;
and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months
at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the
most idle and unprofitable of my whole life...
> In the
university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors
have for these many years given up altogether even the
pretence of teaching.
> As
a gentleman commoner, I was admitted to the society of the
fellows, and fondly expected that some questions of literature
would be the amusing and instructive topics of their discourse.
Their conversation stagnated in a round of college business,
Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal...The names of Wenman and Dashwood were more frequently
pronounced, than those of Cicero and Chrysostom.
The point isn't that there were no deeply studious students making serious academic gains of their own and scientific progress overall, it's the *reputation* they had for being--well, *sophists*: more concerned with the social life of debate and politics and looking/acting smart to each other, than living up to some lofty ideal. Oxford opened its first coffeehouse in 1650. And by early modern coffeehouse, we should mean something like a literary salon--a place where the literati would gather to discuss intellectual topics and current events.
Of course, to contemporary eyes, this was a great deficit from what it should be. A 1901 investigation of Oxford in the 18th century summed up its findings in this description of freshman, freshly-minted college men:
> We see the public schoolman, just freed from the rod of
Busby’s successors, strutting about town for a week or so
before entrance, courting his schoolfellows’ envy...swaggering
at coffee-houses, and giving himself a scholar’s airs at the
bookshops.
and things did not improve over the years:
> A month or two sees them metamorphosed into complete smarts...The "smart's" breakfast is scarcely over by ten.
It's important to keep in mind that these attitudes were not only *external* in the sense of town-gown relations or alumni making a point about the quality of English universities compared to continental ones. Student university hazing could be absolutely brutal. Internal university hierarchy, built upon the idea that students with less experience were complete no-nothing fools, reigned supreme.
Most infamously, there's a late medieval sort of "Latin textbook" for university students that consists of a series of dialogues we think were meant to teach students useful Latin vocabulary for surviving uni daily life. One of the settings is a violent and humiliating initiation ritual in which the freshman or *beanus* is made into an animal that must be tamed. Well, scholars will continue to dispute whether in the 15th century this was a literary fantasy that drew on a solid tradition of hazing. On the other hand, there seems to be fairly solid evidence that early modern students at some universities took the *description* as *prescription*--and performed the hazing ceremony.
The straightforward etymologies of sophomore, junior (sophister), and senior (sophister) from Greek *sophia* and Greek/Latin *sophister*, in other words, aren't really the interesting part of the story--and a much funnier one for those of us who never attended college or have already graduated.
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if i send a letter internationally through usps, do the other countries who process and deliver the letter get a cut of the postage i pay in the us? is there any revenue sharing between the postal agencies?
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The pay is portioned out by a really complex equation, which is run by a UN organization called the [Universal Postal Union](_URL_0_). Almost every country is a member of this and this organization deals with rates and lots of stuff regarding international shipping.
Their rates are currently a bit controversial, as they tend to offer low rates for developing nations (even China) to ship internationally, so the developed nations are a bit mad that about that. As a result, the US was just about to leave the UPU, but negotiated a different deal about 2 weeks ago that allows the US to be able to set their own inbound rates, instead of having it set by the UPU. Basically the deal was that China could ship stuff really cheap to the US because of the low UPU rates for China, which was a substantial advantage in international trade for China with sending goods to the US, but now the US can set the rate instead.
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Did Dr. Mengele actually make any significant contributions to science or medicine with his experiments on Jews in Nazi Concentration Camps?
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I'm not sure who in WWII Germany generated the data but there is a wealth of design data about the limits of the human body which was instrumental in laying the groundwork for manned spaceflight. Basically it's a set of data that tells you how many G's a person can be expected to survive in addition to temperatures, pressures, gas partial pressures (how much Oxygen and Nitrogen you need etc...), some of which I've been told before came from these experiments in WWII Germany.
It's the sort of data that you'd rather just not have -- that it's not worth suffering over, but begrudgingly you make use of any data available. Particularly when you have no data to start from.
I don't have any of the data off-hand or know where to reference it because it isn't typically used from that old a resource (we have other standards for man-rating vehicles today), but it's somewhat common knowledge that some of the older standards originated from Nazi-era experiments.
One other interesting note: von Braun's labor force at [Peenemunde](_URL_1_) during WWII (where he did all his early Rocketry work on the V-2 which later turned into the American A-2 and Redstone Rockets that carried our first capsules) was mostly slave-labor pulled from the concentration camps. That's not to say they were "rescued" in the way you might think from Schindler's List -- they were forced laborers.
If you've got access to JSTOR articles (going to a university usually provides free access), there's more [here](_URL_2_). There is some public info [here](_URL_0_)
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When Shakespeare's plays were first performed, was the average theater goer able to sufficiently understand the dialog to be able to follow the plot and understand the character's motivations?
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This is a complicated question to answer -- I don't think it can be a simple yes or no.
There are certainly parts of Shakespeare's work that anyone would understand, then or now. Especially in the lighter comedies. When Helena says "use me but as your spaniel" in Midsummer while waggling her butt at Demetrius, everyone knows what she is referring to. This effect is amplified through intense poetic repetition that whole speech goes like this:
Helena--
I am your spaniel. And, Demetrius,
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.
Use me but as your spaniel—spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me. Only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
What worser place can I beg in your love—
And yet a place of high respect with me—
Than to be usèd as you use your dog?
All the audience really needs to get from this speech is Helena loves Demetrius like a dog loves his master. There's nothing really very complicated there. This effect is further amplified by the actions onstage. Anyone who has seen this speech in a production will instantly understand it. Helena is fawning over Demetrius, desperately pretending to be a dog to gain his love. The action on stage would have made the meaning of the lines quite obvious.
Not all of Shakespeare's works are so easy to follow though. Take Titus Andronicus for example. The first act of Titus is extremely difficult to follow -- so many characters are introduced (a few who die immediately) and plot points fly by with a speed that makes it hard to believe that audiences could follow. While audiences might not remember that Alarbus is the name of the son of Tamora who Titus sacrifices to the Roman gods, they would certainly get the gist of the idea because Tamora repeatedly mentions the wrong done to her throughout the rest of the play. Titus Andronicus is a lot like Taken (the Liam Neeson movie), except the 10 minutes of exposition is actually 25 minutes and incredibly confusing. It wouldn't matter if Elizabethan audiences would have understood exactly what happened in the first act, because the repetition throughout the rest of the play makes it impossible to avoid -- and in the end Titus is all about blood and explosions. In fact, Titus Andronicus (often called his worst play) is the work that launched his career and was his most popular in the day.
This is a roundabout way of saying the answer is complicated. I think it would be naive to say that audiences of the time understood everything, but anyone who is really familiar with Shakespeare's work will tell you that the staging of a play and the way Shakespeare uses poetry (especially repetition) to reinforce plot points makes it very hard to leave the theatre without at least an idea of what was going on.
Sources: John Basil, artistic director of American Globe Theatre's Shakespeare lectures -- I've been producing, directing and acting in Shakespeare's work for 5+ years
Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt might be a good read for you too. It doesn't answer this question per se, but it has a lot of information about contemporary literary criticism of his work.
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The city of Rome had a population of over one million people at its apex, but by the year 1000 CE it had fallen to less than 20,000. Are there any surviving accounts of persons living in Rome from that period and what they thought of the massive ruins around them?
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Textually, we have an incredibly rich trove of accounts of visitors to Rome. On one hand, the collection is perhaps not quite as interesting as we might want: the Venn diagram of "people who were both literate and whose writings are likely to have survived" and "people with an awareness of a basic history of the Roman Empire and its decline" is basically the first circle inside the second, especially from the mid-11th century on. On the other hand, their shared knowledge of and appreciation for ancient Rome offers a good basis for comparison of different perspectives.
Benjamin of Tudela is a good place to start for an important reason: in the face of Rome's role at the heart of medieval Christianity, Benjamin was Jewish! He came from Navarre in Iberia, and his meandering travel account catalogues the Jewish communities he traveled among around the Mediterranean. You can read his full account of Rome and Roman Jews [here](_URL_0_) (Cntl/Cmd+F for "Rome" is easiest if the link target doesn't work), but to excerpt a few bits:
> There are many wonderful structures in the city, different from any others in the world. **Including both its inhabited and ruined parts,** Rome is about twenty-four miles in circumference. In the midst thereof there are eighty palaces belonging to eighty kings who lived there, each called Imperator, commencing from King Tarquinius down to Nero and Tiberius, who lived at the time of Jesus the Nazarene, ending with Pepin, who freed the land of Sepharad from Islam, and was father of Charlemagne.
> There is a palace outside Rome (said to be of Titus). The Consul and his 300 Senators treated him with disfavour, because he failed to take Jerusalem till after three years, though they had bidden him to capture it within two.
> In Rome is also the palace of Vespasianus, a great and very strong building; also the Colosseum...There were battles fought here in olden times, and in the palace more than 100,000 men were slain, and there their bones remain piled up to the present day. The king caused to be engraved a representation of the battle and of the forces on either side facing one another, both warriors and horses, all in marble, to exhibit to the world the war of the days of old.
> In Rome there is a cave which runs underground, and catacombs...In the church of St. John in the Lateran there are two bronze columns taken from the Temple, the handiwork of King Solomon, each column being engraved "Solomon the son of David." The Jews of Rome told me that every year upon the 9th of Ab they found the columns exuding moisture like water.
Although Benjamin observes that some of Rome is standing/inhabited and some is ruins, he does not distinguish which is which in his description (nor does that distinction allow for, as we will see, inhabited ruins). However, he is keenly aware of the history of the ancient Roman buildings and those who lived in them. Those stories--what Rome *was*--matter more than what they *are*. He takes note of great buildings, natural features, and smaller monuments. I also think the detail about the columns of the Temple seized and appropriated into a Christian church are fascinating and significant. Especially in recounting the miracle story of the local Jewish community, Benjamin shows that Rome could have a sacred geography for *non*-Christians--something I, at least, am not used to thinking of.
Notably absent from Benjamin's record, on the other hand, is commentary on the *fall* of Rome. For this, believe it or not, we have to turn to Christian writers. In their stylings, a very real admiration for classical antiquity aligns with the medieval Christian theology of history that saw a "world grown old," decaying towards apocalypse and only ever renewable by God. 11th-12th century cleric Hildebert of Lavardin, eventually archbishop of Tours, wrote two famous poems *de Roma* which both celebrate and mourn the ancient city as he found it at the very end of the 11th century. Here's an excerpt from one:
> The city now is fallen; I can find
> No worthier epitaph than “this was Rome.”
> Yet neither the flight of years, nor flame nor sword
> Could fully wipe away its loveliness
> […] Bring wealth, new marble, and the help of gods
> Let craftsmen’s hands be active in their work—
> Yet shall these standing walls no equal find,
> Nor can these ruins even be restored
> The care of men once built so great a Rome
> The care of gods could not dissolve its stones
> Divinities admire their faces carved,
> And wish themselves the equal of these forms
> Nature could not make gods as fair of face
> As man created images of gods
With Hildebert, praises of Rome move into a more emotional register, but also a more intellectual one rather than practical/geographical. His words are grounded in ancient Rome's buildings and especially its art but he evokes the splendor of a lost civilization rather than the immediate materiality of buildings rooted in history. It's also significant that Hildebert's praise, while overtly of the artistic qualities of ancient Roman art, is actually directed at the *human artists*. He elevates the abilities of humans of old especially compared to present ones, whose skills and vision could never possibly measure up.
A few years later, the English traveler known as Master Gregory famously followed Hildebert's footsteps to Rome. Gregory actually knew one of Hildebert's poems--he quotes it in his own little travel guide-like account!--but takes his commentary a step further.
> The sight of the whole city is, I think, most wonderful, where there is such a multitude of towers, so great a number of palaces, as none can count. When I first saw the city from far off, I was overwhelmed and remembered Caesar's view of it, when having conquered the Gauls and crossed the Alps, he exclaimed *substantial quote from Caesar*...
> This beauty passing understanding I long admired, and I thanked God who...yet has magnified there the works of man with immeasurable beauty. For even if Rome falls into complete ruin, nothing that is intact can be compared with it. As has been said [by Hildebert, in fact]:
> *Nothing can equal Rome, Rome even in ruins*
> *Your ruins speak aloud your former greatness*
> **The ruin of Rome shows clearly, I think, that all temporal things are near their end, especially when the worldly center of all things, Rome, daily languishes and decays.**
Rome as the "worldly" center of the word is one of those little noteworthy turns of phrase. In medieval Christian *sacred* geography, the center of the world was Jerusalem. Here, though, Gregory focuses on the human component in Christian world/salvation history--and he is even more explicit than Hildebert about the decline of the present from earlier greatness.
We're used to a "decline and fall of Rome" narrative as Christians supposedly ruining the great rationality/progress/technology of pagan/philosophical Rome. Medieval Christians actually took part in the view of a Roman golden age compared to their own; for them, however, the rise of Christianity was less a *cause* of decline than an inevitable step towards ultimate divine redemption.
Gregory relates one more detail I want to highlight here: he tells us that many of the statues from the days of pagan Roman glory were dismantled by (very important) Pope Gregory I! We can agree on one hand it's quite noteable that he's repeating a story about Christians actively opposing the preservation of pagan art, and not very approvingly. On the other, this Gregory projects the 'desecration' onto another Gregory several centuries in the past.
In fact, the appropriation and remixing of ancient Rome into a Christian city was *ongoing* throughout the Middle Ages. Even in the later 15th century, with "Renaissance" adulation of classical antiquity building to a fever pitch, prelates in Rome were still plunder the Colosseum and deserted palaces for stones for their own lavish building projects!
This brings us to the last thing I want to talk about: archaeological evidence for "what people thought" of Roman ruins, evidence that perhaps helps us get beyond the view of the absolute elite of the elite of high medieval society. The Colosseum is the famous example here, since it enjoyed many afterlives throughout the Middle Ages. Most famously, it eventually became a little neighborhood for artisans! Quarrymen and blacksmiths set up residence, even building the occasional shop for horseshoes and other goods. Eventually, a monastery was constructed in and around part of it. And all the while, tantalizing blocks of stone were usurped for building projects elsewhere.
Visitors to Rome saw "ruins" and "desertion," and the ashes of of past splendor. People who lived in Rome may well have seen that, too. But they also saw promise for the present and the future: what could be out of what had been.
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Why are smaller animals generally able to survive high falls with little damage compared to humans?
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You and the mouse accelerate exactly the same, at 9.8 m/s^2. Therefore, falling from the same height, you and the mouse would hit the ground at the same speed. This means the mouse caries a FAR lesser momentum than you, since momentum is the product of your mass and velocity. Since your mass is much greater, and the velocity is the same, your momentum is much greater.
The change in momentum can be approximately stated as the product of Force and time. Since the amount of time you guys are slowed down by the impact is the same, and since a much greater change in momentum must be delivered to you to stop you, you must experience a MUCH greater force than the mouse does.
Since the force on lesser mass organisms is much less than greater mass organisms, they're able to survive equally high falls much more easily if they have the same structural rigidity/ resilience.
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After Constantinople fell, when did the Greeks stop considering themselves Roman and start considering themselves Greek?
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It was really not until the founding of Greece itself in 1821, and the eventual settlement in the 1830s, that those Greeks who now lived in "Greece", called themselves "Greek". People who spoke Greek, and still lived in the Ottoman Empire (where most Greeks continued to live until post-WW1), would have continued to call themselves Romaioi (Roman), or more specifically Christians (along with everyone else in the Balkans). You have to remember that the Ottomans called the Balkans: Rumeli, meaning Rome.
However for many Greeks, living within Greece, the idea of a "Greater Greece" (Megali Idea), in restoring the Roman Empire, was still a live dream and aspiration, up until 1923, when they were finally driven out of Turkey, by Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk" and the Turkish nationalists. After that, there were the only large scale population transfers, post-WW1, between "Greek" Turks/Muslims (including Albanians), and "Turkish" Greeks. After that level of homogenization, any aspiration of restoring the Roman Empire, died with the ethnic cleansing, and so did any pretense to the identity of being Roman.
Today in the area of Trabzon (Trebizond), there are communities of Pontic (Old) Greek speakers, who still consider themselves to be Romaioi.
If you want me to expand on any given topic, just ask.
Source: The Balkans: A Short History - Mark Mazower
If you want other sources I can also provide them, Mazower's book is just the most recent one I read that mentioned this issue.
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why in every zombie movie has no one ever heard of zombies? it's never an issue with other horror monsters (vampires, ghosts, aliens, etc). so what makes zombies so special?
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Because really the zombie plague represents an unknown pathogen that spreads rapidly. Like a pandemic. It is the visual representation of something taking hold and killing many, spreading rapidly, and breaking down modern society.
There are movies that actual deal with real illnesses and uncontrolled spread, but it's far less exciting. The unexpected initial onset is important for the plots because they represent our fear of the government withholding information or trying to reduce panic.
At least, in one of my college classes, that's what we came up with. Like ten years ago.
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Tell me about IBM's new molecule pictures. Is this what molecules actually "look" like?
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The short answer is that no, this is not what they "look" like, because "look" refers to _sight_, and no visible wavelength can resolve those molecules.
However, that's not to say it's not an accurate representation of the structure of the molecule. Atomic force microscopy is analogous to a blind man running his finger over an object to "feel" it's shape. While that may not correspond to what it "looks like", it is a way to detect its structure and shape. In this case, AFM detects electron density.
So like all other visual representations of phenomena we can't see - for example, electric fields or magnetic field lines - it isn't what it "looks like", but it reflects the structure and shape of what we're talking about.
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When dinosaur bones were initially discovered how did they put together what is now the shape of different dinosaur species?
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When they were first found, people had no idea they were the skeletal remains of extinct species from 65+ million years ago. However, ancient people definitely were able to tell they were the skeletal remains of some strange animals.
In many cultures, these remains gave rise to legends like dragons - since the remains looked an awful lot like lizards, crocodiles and other critters they knew, but way, way bigger - so it was a logical assumption.
Other mythical explanations arose as well, such as legends of the mammut from Siberia - a huge creature with tusks like a walrus that lived underground. If it came into sunlight, it turned to stone and died. Not a bad explanation for mammoth bones found eroding out of the tundra.
It wasn't until the Enlightenment that anatomists like Georges Cuvier were able to look at the fossils in detail, and realize that they had similarities to modern animals, but also important differences. Using his knowledge of how modern animals were put together, he was able to come up with pretty accurate reconstructions of how these critters would have actually looked.
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How is it that such an unwieldy animal such as a horse was so effective in combat, especially when used to charge heavy infantry formations.
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First I have to ask you; are you aware how large a typical war horse was? A good Destrier could average and even exceed 15 hands, other breeds similar; making an average warhorse or charger over a meter and a half in size. Asides from being incredibly close to the height of (for a good chunk of human history) an above average man, it suggests quite a bit of muscle mass.
Secondly I posit this to you; particular breeds of horse were bred for aggression and unruliness. Finally, bear in mind that horses, like any animal, can be socialized to certain situations, even one as egregious and harrowing as combat. In short, chargers and Destriers had the perfect temperament and body-type for hazardous environments.
So this is not necessarily true:
> What I mean is that it seems like any wound landed on a horse would freak the animal out making it hard to effectively control.
It would take a great deal of trauma, and perhaps the death of its rider (i.e: no one to reign the creature in), to cause a *Destrier* or other war-like breed of horse to panic to the point of being uncontrollable, if it was properly raised, broke and socialized. This is of course discounting more material accessories to aid in keeping the Horse calm and under control, such as blinders.
> Also when a pack of horsemen charging at galloping speeds hit a organized unit of infantry, sure it would hurt alot of men on the ground but it seems like the horses would just trip over eachother [sic]
Well, sure, if it was a disorganized rabble. A charge is rarely 'hell for leather' - it certainly isn't if it wishes to be effective. A charge begins at a trot, and slowly evolves from trot to a short gallop before the moment of impact. The reasons for this are manifold but I'll touch on a few relevant ones: (1) preventing the horses from 'blowing' their charge with wasteful movement, and (2) keeping the formation from being 'strung out' and in good order (addressing your issue, I believe). It is worth noting that a charge against still disciplined infantry is high risk and was rarely done as well. Heavy Cavalry break formations, true, but they have to be breakable to begin with; tired, panicking, strung or thinned out, etc.
> Are horses just more agile
Horses are incredibly agile creatures, and they are far from ungainly or awkward in gait. They have consistently shown their strength and intelligence, and their ability to bear great weight and retain the ability to put on great bursts of speed, if even for a short time.
I recommend, especially for the Napoleonic period, reading books by Dodge, Chandler and Elting's *Swords Around a Throne*; all of which go out of their way to explain the intricacies an discipline necessary for a coherent charge, and how the right breed and training of the mount can make all the difference. Chandler even goes out of his way to say that French horses and horsemen were rather lackluster, but the training and coherency for both rider and mount gave them quite a presence on the battlefield despite the lack of equine skill on part of the rider. He likewise heaps praise on Russian and British cavalry, which was often as well disciplined and as skilled if not more so than their counterparts.
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why are tight rings so much harder to take off than they are to put on?
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When you put a ring on, your joints are braced against all your other bones, giving you something solid to push the ring down against. When you go to take it off, joints have ligaments and such that allow them to stretch a bit, which makes it so that you’re basically pulling your finger off rather than the ring.
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why do older emulated games still occasionally slow down when rendering too many sprites, even though it's running on hardware thousands of times faster than what it was programmed on originally?
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A lot of old games are hard-coded to expect a certain processor speed. The old console had so many updates per second and the software is using that timer to control the speed of the game.
When that software is emulated that causes a problem - modern processors are a hundred times faster and will update (and play) the game 100x faster.
So the emulation community has two options:
1) completely redo the game code to accept any random update rate from a lightning-fast modern CPU
Or
2) artificiality limit the core emulation software to the original update speed of the console
Usually they go with option 2, which preserves the original code but also "preserves" any slowdowns or oddities caused by the limited resources of the original hardware.
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The Plague of Justinian (541 – 542 AD) was a pandemic that heavily afflicted the Byzantine empire during the reign of Justinan I; what measures were put in place to help those that were affected in some way by it?
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They buried the dead, and prayed.
Procopius' famous description of the plague gives a sense of its magnitude and horror:
"...at first the deaths \[in Constantinople\] were a little more than the normal, then the mortality rose still higher, and afterwards the tale of dead reached five thousand each day, and again it even came to ten thousand and still more than that."
In the face of such massive mortality, there was little that the imperial government could do. Justinian's only direct intervention was to ensure that the dead were buried. As Procopius says:
"\[The emperor\] therefore detailed soldiers from the palace and distributed money, commanding \[his secretary\] Theodorus to take charge of this work...\[Theodorus proceeded by\] giving out the emperor's money and by making further expenditures from his own purse, to bury the bodies which were not cared for."
Procopius goes on to describe the mass graves that the soldiers dug, and the desperate expedient of piling corpses in the towers of a fortress across the Golden Horn. John of Ephesus mentions that men were given substantial sums to haul away the dead, though it is unclear whether the imperial government was paying.
We know disappointingly little about the relief measures introduced after the plague. The Roman government frequently remitted (waived) taxes after natural disasters (earthquakes, etc.), and Marcus Aurelius is known to have excused outstanding debts to the government in the wake of the Antonine Plague. Justinian, however, seems to have insisted that taxes continue to be paid at the normal rates empire-wide, presumably because his finances (strained by his wars and building program) were in such dire straits.
Medical care, so far as it existed, was not an imperial responsibility. In the early imperial era, some Roman cities had salaried public doctors, whom any citizen could consult. Although a few Byzantine cities maintained these services, they tended to be discontinued as tax burdens mounted, and most had disappeared long before the plague. And of course, since the causes of the plague were not understood (Procopius blamed demons), there was little doctors could do for the sick. In terms of social security, the ball was in the church's court - and the church could only provide food and alms to those whose lost their families or livelihoods.
I talk in more detail about how the Greeks and Romans coped with earlier plagues in [this video](_URL_0_), which may be of interest.
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why do older generations seemingly look older than newer generations during the same age range?
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Seems to me better health practices less labor intensive jobs. Machines let us work smarter. Also I don't know anyone that actively pick axes a coal mine. Im sure people still mine with machines and unions for better working conditions. Less black lung I suppose. (Minecraft jokes aside)
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How "big" was the average Viking warrior? How would they compare to average people today? What about Roman or Spartan warriors?
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[Richard Steckel, a professor at Ohio State, did a study on the height of Northern Europeans from 900-1200](_URL_0_) and found the average height for men of 68.3 inches compared to 69+ today. This same group 'shrank' to 65.8 by the 1700s.
He attributes:
* A Little Ice Age hit about 1300 AD decreasing temperature 2-3 degrees which caused growing seasons to shrink which caused less food to be available. It also reduced the activity of this population.
* An increasing movement to cities increased the transmission of disease
His background is as an economist but I liked this quote:
> "Average height is a good way to measure the availability and consumption of basic necessities such as food, clothing, shelter, medical care and exposure to disease, Height is also sensitive to the degree of inequality between populations."
As famine and plague became more prevalent in the late Middle Ages, humans in Northern Europe didn't grow as tall as they had in previous centuries.
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At the peak of slavery in the continental United States, what percentage of the population would have owned one or more slaves?
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The answer to this question somewhat depends on what you mean by 'owned'. In the strict legal sense of the word, the 1860 census reported just shy of 395,000 slave owners living in the antebellum Southern United States, which represents approximately 3.2% of the population of the South in that period, or just 1.2% of the population of the total United States. Superficially, that seems like a very small figure that makes slave-holding a rare and marginal practice in white society - this is a contention often made by Confederate apologists and white supremacists. The reality is that figure dramatically understates the significance of slave holding in the United States in 1860.
First and foremost, the count of 395,000 is a count of *individual* slave owners - people, usually men, who are recorded as owning in law one or more slaves. That count does not consider how many individuals had direct access to, and benefited from, slave labour. On average throughout the South, 27% of free family units had at least one slave owner in them. Across the Lower South where the plantation economy was at its strongest, slave owners belonged to well over one-third of the proportion of families; in South Carolina and Mississippi, very nearly half of all free families owned at least one enslaved African American person, meaning that more than half of the white population *directly* benefited from slave labour. Although the vast majority of these slave owners were not plantation owners - most were small farmers - most slaves did live and work on plantations. If the head of a household owns a slave, it stands to reason their spouse, children, close friends and other close relatives all stand to directly benefit from slave labour.
This is to say nothing of people who benefited from slave labour despite not being in a slave owning family themselves. It was a widespread practice in the southern United States for slave owners to hire out the services of their forced labourers for a wage or fixed price (payable to the master not the slave), and in cities and towns enslaved people were employed in all manner of trades and public services that non-slaves benefited from. Although from the perspective of African American people plantation life and work were the normal condition of slavery, white slave owners and beneficiaries employed slave labour in every aspect of Southern life imaginable - in agriculture, in industry, in commercial enterprises, in artisan trades, in rubbish collection, in domestic service and so on. We must likewise consider those who were intimately involved in slave exploitation in the plantation or urban economy without necessarily being part of owning families: overseers, satellite farmers, slave traders and patrollers, doctors and preachers, etc etc.
Something else that must be emphasised is the extent to which slave ownership was a financially and economically privileged institution. The cost of purchasing even a single enslaved person was enormous; in the 1850s, you're looking at well over $1,000 to acquire a single male fieldhand. In terms of its purchasing power, $1,000 in 1855 is about $21,000 today; it's true value, accounting for differences in quantity and distribution of wealth, is closer to $390,000 (in other words having $1,000 in 1855 will buy you as much as $21,000 today, but having $1,000 in 1855 makes you about as wealthy relatively speaking as having $390,000 today does). Consider this account of a slave auction in Alabama in early 1854:
> Woman and small child, $1050; man aged 19, $950; man and wife aged 18 and 17, $2000; boy aged 14, $640; girl aged 10, $525: man aged 24, $860; boy aged 11, white, $585; boy aged 11, white, $625; woman aged 25, $900; man and little boy, aged 50, $1020; woman age 46, $395; man, with the gravel , aged 19, $700; man, perfect aged 40, $1600; woman 40, girl 8, $600; man aged 27, $1410; boy aged 12, $725; girl aged 4, $300; girl good looking, aged 14, $855; girl, a little blacker, aged 15, $845. [from *The Liberator*, "From the Car Leader", April 21, 1854]
^N.B.: ^this ^is ^from ^a ^radical ^abolitionist ^newspaper; ^two ^boys ^are ^referred ^to ^as ^'white' ^because ^they ^are ^lighter ^in ^skin, ^but ^they ^are ^still ^African ^American. ^It's ^a ^rhetorical ^tactic, ^drawing ^attention ^to ^the ^hypocrisy ^of ^Southern ^white ^racial ^ideology ^and ^to ^sexual ^abuse ^in ^slavery.
Even a little girl of just four years old cost $300 - almost $9,000 in terms of modern purchasing power, and much more in terms of relative wealth. The best possible workers, from whom an exploiter could gain immediate economic benefit, cost well in excess of $1,000, with prices consistently rising right up to the Civil War. This was not an institution that it was easy to just walk into even as a member of the white middle class; although it could be and usually was enormously profitable to invest in slavery, the upfront costs were not insignificant if you did not inherit slave labour. It is not remarkable that so few individual white Southerners owned slaves - it is perhaps remarkable that so many families did given the financial barriers. Slavery was an institution that brought with it not just the potential for enormous profit and the mitigation of one's own work load but also the prestige and social privilege of visible wealth.
For many non-slave holding white people, especially white men, one day being a slave owner was something to aspire to - owning slaves was a symbol that you'd"made it" in life. You had wealth, you had independence, you had security, you had prestige. Even lower-income white families who did not stand any realistic prospect at ever entering the slave owning classes still benefited from the privilege contemporary racial ideology bestowed on them, which automatically elevated white people above black people. Racial prejudice largely transcended boundaries of class, religion and gender, especially in the 19th century South.
By 1860, almost 4million of the South's 12million people were enslaved African Americans. In half a dozen states, the enslaved population made up well more than 40% of the total. This was an institution that was thoroughly entrenched in Southern society - it was not just a society with slaves, it was a *slave society*. Whilst comparatively few *individuals* owned slaves, a sizeable and substantial plurality of white *families* did; many, many more people benefited from access to slave labour without being slave holders, and many of those aspired themselves to one day be slave holders. So even though ownership in the legal sense was comparatively uncommon, family ownership was exceptionally prevalent and slavery itself was thoroughly embedded in Southern society and culture. Nor were those benefits reserved just for the South, either - there were many in the North who had benefited economically and socially from the fruits of slave labour, and Northern society remained deeply racially prejudiced in its own ways.
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how is it legal for companies to keep all of their money over seas to avoid paying taxes while their company is based in the united states?
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Because that's literally what US law says.
If a foreign subsidiary has earnings, taxes are due if the company doesn't reinvest the earnings overseas. Reinvestment literally means keeping money overseas and there are a number of investment categories (notably bonds) that allow companies to park foreign earnings.
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How come we haven't seen CPUs with three or more threads per core?
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Oh there are, just usually in server software. Sun has 8+ threads per core. These are a lot more beneficial in things like file servers. I had a client a few years ago running on the T2 (or T3?)?. It was running some advanced mathematical computations and they couldn't figure out why it ran incredibly slow. So much so that my 3 year old laptop (at the time) ran their computations faster than their "top of the line" server.
The problem became thread switching. When it served small pieces the thread switching wasn't as pronounced, but trying to do huge computational tasks the system was burdened by it.
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Will we ever be able to view what happens in other planets at a surface level with a powerful enough telescope?Especially planets that are earth-like/inhabitable.
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In theory, yes it's possible. But what do you mean by 'at a surface level'?
A group of astronomers recently published a [30 year roadmap for NASA missions](_URL_1_). In it, they talk about all the amazing science we think we can get in the next 30 years as long as Congress keeps funding us. (If you have time, you should skim the whole thing. It's really fascinating and written at a layperson level.)
They also include some really neat missions beyond the 30-year timeline that they call 'visionary', but that are possible with current technology if we had the money and time to develop the technologies further.
One of those 'visionary' missions they call the ExoEarth Mapper. They believe it's possible to get 30x30 pixel images of habitable Earth's, that [would look something like this](_URL_0_).
To do it would require a huge investment of resources / a way to get 6-m size telescopes into space much cheaper than we're doing it today. But it's not crazy to imagine this will become possible over time. It would also require space-based visible interferometry to work, which is currently an unproven technology, but in theory possible. We do have visible light interferometers on the ground, so then it's just a matter of setting them up in space in a grid hundreds of kilometers apart instead of the 10 meters apart or whatever we have on the ground...
So yes, there's hope that we can map out Earth-like exoplanets and get decent views of them. But given current funding situations and lack of support for space telescopes, I wouldn't bet on it before the year... 2060, just to throw out a number.
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am i wasting energy if the phone charger is connected to the socket but the phone is not connected?
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Yes, a lot of people like to say you should unplug it because it's wasting power, but on a side note, my dad and I were skeptical of how much power it was using, so we set up a meter to it and let it just sit there for like a week, we calculated it would be like 1-2 cents for the month
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What does a chameleon's field of vision look like when it's eyes are pointing in different directions?
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My brother has had vision problems all his life. His eyes work independently, i.e. he doesn't fuse the images from his eyes but, instead, has two entirely separate images. In elementary school, they asked him to look into a machine and tell them whether the ball was on or off the picnic table. He was very confused. He saw a picnic table with one eye and a black background with a red dot in the center with the other eye. He doesn't have 3D vision at all, and so games like ping-pong are more difficult for him than for people with normal vision. Interestingly, he currently is working with a doctor on eye exercises, trying to improve his situation. The exercises make him dizzy and nauseous. He often throws up. He isn't sure what he will see eventually but, whatever the final result, he knows he can't go back to seeing the way he used to see. Things have changed, even if he isn't seeing 3D yet.
When the Mars rovers first landed, I experimented with 3D photography using the red/cyan overlay method NASA used in some of their photographs. I was amazed at how many people could not see the 3D effect, even though I had good-quality red/cyan glasses for them to use. It would seem reasonable to explore unmerged images as a potential reason for their failure to see 3D.
All of my evidence is anecdotal, but, if you accept my brother's examples, then even some people do not have the merged, seamless whole. Extrapolating, I would not then be surprised if chameleons do not have it, either.
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for a disease that cause sores (chicken pox, hfm etc), what determines where the sores pop up?
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For each type of skin disease there are different patterns and different reasons for the patterns.
For viruses that infect nerve cells (like shingles, which is the chicken pox virus) the pattern comes out in [dermatomes](_URL_0_) or the pathway of the nerves that they infect.
For some infections, it depends on the point of contact of the infection or where the infection takes hold or where the pathogen migrates to.
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What kind of sexual pleasures did Roman emperors Tiberius and Caligula engage in that made them so notorious?
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Both Tiberius and Caligula were disliked by the social elite, who wrote the history books and biographies that we draw our information from. This means that our sources (and their sources!) are known to be hostile and should not be taken at face value.
The major sources for this period are Cassius Dio, Tacitus and Suetonius. The main source for this topic is Suetonius, a biographer and something of a gossip. He is not considered to be a particularly strong source, in part because his purpose was not to record history but to display and explain character. Still, Suetonius' book *The Twelve Caesars* is well worth reading, both for information (provided you are careful with it) and for pleasure. Take this as evidence of the kind of sexual pleasures Tiberius and Caligula were accused of, rather than of the kind of sexual pleasures they actually engaged in.
On Tiberius, he says:
> Being invited to dinner by Cestius Gallus, a lecherous old spendthrift whom Augustus had ignominiously removed from the Senate and whom he had himself reprimanded only a few days previously, Tiberius accepted on condition that the dinner should follow Gallus' usual routine, and that the waitresses should be naked. ... On retiring to Capreae he made himself a private sporting-house, where sexual extravagances were practiced for his secret pleasure. Bevies of girls and young men, whom he had collected from all over the Empire as adepts in unusual practices, and known as *spintriae*, would copulate before him in groups of three, to excite his waning passions. A number of small rooms were furnished with the most indecent pictures and statuary obtainable, also certain erotic manuals from Elephantis in Egypt; the inmates of the establishment would know from these exactly what was expected of them. He furthermore devised little nooks of lechery in the woods and glades of the island, and had boys and girls dressed up as Pans and nymphs prostituting themselves in front of caverns or grottoes so that the island was now openly and generally called 'Caprineum' [a play on the word for 'goat'].
> Some aspects of his criminal obscenity are almost too vile to discuss, much less believe. Imagine training little boys, whom he called his 'minnows', to chase him while he went swimming and get between his legs to lick and nibble him. Or letting babies not yet weaned from their mother's breast to such at his breast or groin - such a filthy old man he had become! Then there was a painting by Parrhasius, which had been bequeathed to him on condition that, if he did not like the subject, he could have 10,000 gold pieces instead. Tiberius not only preferred to keep the picture but hung it in his bedroom. It showed Atalanta performing fellatio with Meleager.
> The story goes that once, while sacrificing, he took an erotic fancy to the acolyte who carried the incense casket, and could hardly wait for the ceremony to end before hurrying him and his brother, the sacred trumpeter, out of the temple and indecently assaulting them both. When they jointly protested at this disgusting behaviour he had their legs broken.
> What nasty tricks he used to play on women, even those of high rank, is clearly seen in the case of Mallonia whom he summoned to his bed. She showed such an invincible repugnance to complying with his lusts that he set informers on her track and during her very trial continued to shout: 'Are you sorry?' Finally she left the court and went home; there she stabbed herself to death after a violent tirade against 'that filthy-mouthed, hairy, stinking old man'.
On Caligula:
> It was his habit to commit incest with each of his three sisters and, at large banquets when his wife reclined above him, placed them all in turn below him. They say that he ravished his sister Drusilla before he came of age: their grandmother Antonia, at whose house they were both staying, caught them in bed together. Later, he took Drusilla from her husband, the former Consul Lucius Cassius Longinus, openly treating her as his lawfully married wife ...
> It would be hard to say whether the way he got married, the way he dissolved his marriages, or the way he behaved as a husband was the more disgraceful. He attended the wedding ceremony of Gaius Piso and Livia Orestilla, but had the bride carried off to his own home. After a few days, however, he divorced her, and two years later banished her, suspecting that she had returned to Piso in the interval. According to one account he told Piso, who was reclining opposite him at the wedding feast: 'Hands off my wife!' and abducted her from the table at once; and announced the next day that he had taken a wife in the style of Romulus and Augustus. Then he suddenly sent for Lollia Paulina, wife of Gaius Memmius, a Governor of consular rank, from his province, because somebody has remarked that her grandmother was once a famous beauty; but soon discarded her, forbidding her ever again to sleep with another man. Caesonia was neither young nor beautiful, and had three daughters by a former husband, besides being recklessly extravagant and utterly promiscuous; yet he loved her with a passionate faithfulness ... For his friends he even paraded her naked; but would not allow her the dignified title of 'wife' until she had borne him a child, whereupon he announced the marriage and the birth simultaneously ...
> He had not the slightest regard for chastity, either his own or others', and was accused of homosexual relations, both active and passive, with Marcus Lepidus, also Mnester the comedian, and various foreign hostages; moreover a young man of consular family, Valerius Catullus, revealed publicly that he had buggered the Emperor, and quite worn himself out in the process. Besides incest with his sisters, and a notorious passion for the prostitute Pyrallis, he made advances to almost every woman of rank in Rome; after inviting a selection of them to dinner with their husbands he would slowly and carefully examine each in turn while they passed his couch, as a purchaser might assess the value of a slave, and even stretch out his hand and lift up the chin of any woman who kept her eyes modestly cast down. Then, whenever he felt so inclined, he would send for whoever pleased him best, and leave the banquet in her company. A little later he would return, showing obvious signs of what he had been about, and openly discuss his bed-fellow in detail, dwelling on her good and bad physical points and commenting on her sexual performance. To some of these unfortunates, he issued, and publicly registered, divorces in the names of their absent husbands.
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If the Earth was shrunken down to the size of a marble but still had the same mass, would it form a black hole? How much mass would a marble need to have to form a black hole?
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We don't exactly know how big a black hole is. The math says it has zero volume (a singularity), but we don't know what happens to the physics in these situations. What we do know is, given a certain amount of mass, how big the radius is of the sphere that encompasses the region from which light can't escape.
This radius is called the Schwarzschild radius and it is given by the expression 2 G M / c^2 (G = Gravitational constant, M = mass, c = speed of light). If the object is smaller than its Schwarzschild radius, then it's a black hole.
Plugging in the numbers for Earth gives a value of 8.8 mm. This is around the size of a large marble.
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What's the science behind Mozart helping babies develop and helping people study? Is it just Mozart, or all classical music?
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The idea that playing Mozart to babies will make them more intelligent is a myth, or at least not scientifically accepted. It seems to stem from a study in the 90's finding college students who had recently listened to Mozart outperformed a control group on a spatial reasoning task. Media misreporting turned this into Mozart makes babies smarter, and by playing into the fears of parents, companies have been making a fortune in Baby Mozart CDs or whatever.
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What Would Happen if The Solar storm of 1859 Happened in Modern Times?
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The fear mongering in this thread is set to 11. Humans survive. We would have police, we would have firefighters. Their tools would change but they would be there. Engineers would start fixing infrastructure. Without anything else to do we would have an enormous workforce that could be dedicated to fixing the problems. It would certainly be hard, some people would starve or freeze to death, but we would muddle through, like we always have.
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the suffixes after names in japanese (e.g. -chan, -kun, -san)
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-chan is for when you call someone cute, or younger people.
-kun is for friends, your buddies.
-san is for adults and general people you want to adress politely
It's only used when addressing someone directly, not for yourself. It's basically just a way of indicating your relation to the person.
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how do computer extensions work? ( .exe .inf .iso .bat, etc)
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For Windows, the file extensions tell the OS what type of data to expect in the file. It uses the extension to tell if the file is itself a program that it can run (.exe) or what program it should open when you double click on the file. For example if you have Microsoft Word installed, it knows to open .doc files in Word.
That's all the file extensions really do. You can change the file extension and that file will probably still work in the program the file was originally meant for. Conversely, the program associated with the new extension probably won't be able to make sense of the file and will tell you it couldn't open the file, or it will just appear as gibberish.
Different operating systems might have different rules about file extensions. I hear Linux doesn't actually use them to identify the file type, they're just there so the user can tell what type of file they are.
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Was Trial By Combat an actual thing in Medieval Europe? If so, how did really work and how was it regarded?
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I can't comment on it's frequency unfortunately because I haven't studied it in great depth but there is a very interesting account of one in Froissart's Chronicles (1322-1400) that is ample proof that it did exist.
In Froissart's account (you can read it in the Penguin edited edition if you want, I can get the page numbers for you if you're interested) he tells the story of a noblewoman who was raped by a local squire (worth noting here that in this time period a squire could easily be in his twenties, not necessarily a young boy) and reported this to her husband. It took some convincing but she got her husband to believe her that it had happened and he pursued legal action against the squire. Unfortunately it was basically the squire's word against the noblemans and no result could be reached. The Squire's lord was unwilling to punish him and after a few years of argument and accusation it was decided that the matter would be settled in a Trial by Combat. The nobleman and squire met in combat and the nobleman defeated and killed the squire (in the account it's clearly not an accidental killing either, he knocks the squire to the ground and stabs him with his dagger).
From Froissart's story you get the impression that this was very much an uncommon event. They settled on the Trial by Combat because nothing else could be agreed upon. I can't comment as to whether it was more common earlier in the Middle Ages. This is also based on my recollection from having read the account last year so there may be a few minor details wrong, I have the book on my shelf if you have any specific questions I could look it up.
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Are some languages actually "faster" than others or is it just an impression?
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Great article addressing just this question:
_URL_0_
["A tradeoff is operating between a syllable-based average information density and the rate of transmission of syllables," the researchers wrote. "A dense language will make use of fewer speech chunks than a sparser language for a given amount of semantic information." In other words, your ears aren't deceiving you: Spaniards really do sprint and Chinese really do stroll, but they will tell you the same story in the same span of time. ]
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Is there something inedible that is high in nutritional value, other than the fact that it's toxic?
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The first thing that comes to mind is pure [Ricin](_URL_0_). Being a protein, you could very easily digest it into its component amino acids.
If it weren't for the fact that it shuts off your ribosomes and kills every cell it gets its hands on in unsettlingly small doses.
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how does a relatively small transformer fire light up almost an entire city? also, why is it blue?
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Even a relatively small transformer draws a massive amount of power. The power supply is high voltage AC, which is arcing in the open air. Basically, the open air is acting as a fluorescent bulb. It's mostly light from nitrogen, which glows blue, like neon glows red.
It's not an unusual thing to have happen, but I've never seen it to quite this extent before.
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Were the Nazis aware that their policies were driving away many of the finest scientific minds of the time? Did the Allies actively encourage the resulting immigration? Had Germany been as far 'ahead' in physics before this as it seems? Was this typical in other scientific fields as well?
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Yes, the Nazis understood this. They generally did not care. The scientists they were driving away, in their minds, were not people they wanted. Either because they were in an undesirable category (Jews, Communists) or because they were, by definition, disloyal (after all, only a disloyal person would abandon one's own country if they had no other reason to leave, in this thinking). Whether anyone at the top lamented the brain drain, I don't know, but you have to understand that they knew that if they passed a law that said, for example, that Jews could not work as professors (as the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service did, one of the earliest Nazi laws passed), it would mean that you would lose a lot of Jewish professors. This is what corrosive ideologies do to people. It is not unique at all to the Nazis.
Were the Germans predominant in many fields? Definitely. German science was considered one of the pinnacles of modern science, along with British and French science. (The US, and USSR, were both "second-tier" scientific nations at this time.) They were world leaders in physics, mathematics, chemistry, and many other subjects. I wouldn't characterize them as "far ahead," because it implies a sort of teleology of science, but they were definitely "world leaders." Germany was one of the main places where young US scientists in these fields would go to get their PhDs, if they wanted to be considered world-class scientists (J. Robert Oppenheimer, later head of the US atomic bomb project, did his PhD at the University of Göttingen).
Were there _any_ high Nazi voices who complained about the brain drain effects of their policies? My brain is suggesting to me that at least one member of the high echelon (I am thinking Göring, for some reason) did complain about some aspects of it, but not in any major way. But I'm not finding a reference to that while looking over some of my standard sources. So I might be misattributing or misremembering. Either way, the answer is nobody was disturbed by it to make any real changes.
Did the Allies encourage the immigration? Disturbingly in retrospect, not really. The Americans were very hesitant to take in Jewish refugees, even scientists. The British were more enthusiastic but even they had limited resources for this. Eventually the value of these people were more appreciated, but finding meaningful work for these talented refugees was harder than you'd expect. Today we recognize that the German "brain drain" was to the advantage of the allies, but you'd be surprised how many people at the time were still fairly prejudiced and unwilling to realize how important that would be. Additionally, by the time the war began, German refugees were considered "enemy aliens" — they were technically citizens of an enemy country. While exceptions could be made, it took more work than you'd expect to get such people approved for not just government work, but even free travel within the United States. The US does not come of as exceptionally enlightened in this area.
Lastly, was physics uniquely affected? Not really, though we tend to focus on physics for two reasons. One is that the physics refugees in England and the US would have an immense influence on the policy direction of the atomic bomb project, and so there is some bitter irony there. The other is that there was a brief, ill-fated attempt by physicists within Nazi Germany to politicize modern physics (the "Deutsche Physik" movement), and get Heisenberg branded a "white Jew" for his advocacy of Einsteinian and quantum physics. This is often cited as a supreme example of Nazi foolishness. It is worth noting that in the latter case, the history is often incorrectly told. The Nazi Party was never very enthusiastic about the "Deutsche Physik" movement and very little came of it; it was a pet project of two cranky German Nobelists (Stark and Lenard) and very nearly ended up with Stark himself being sent to a concentration camp. It was not successful in any meaningful way; the harassment of Heisenberg ultimately backfired. (On this, see Walker, _Nazi Science_.)
There were other scientific fields in Germany that underwent ideological "purity tests" not totally unlikely that in physics. Physics is the case that stands out as most interesting because in principle physics does not involve things that one might associate with Nazi politics — you have to really strain to see Einstein's equations on relativity as having some kind of "Jewish" connection beyond the identity of their creator. Whereas biology, which was deeply connected to Nazi ideology, was wholly politicized. Chemistry, by comparison, worked to emphasize its apolitical and practical nature, which insulated it from such attacks. But as the Nazi government was totalizing in its reach, and believed ideology to be at the core of all operations, it was impossible to operate in any position of responsibility without being somewhat "politicized," even if it meant that you had to sign all official documents with "Heil Hitler" and other such slogans.
It should also be noted that some fields, notably medicine, "self-Nazified" — they internally organized themselves to be more appealing to the Nazis once they took power, in part because the non-Jewish practitioners found it convenient to suddenly exclude Jewish practitioners. (For more on this, and the case of biology, see Proctor's _Racial Hygiene_.) So one should not simply look at this as the Nazis imposing a force from outside: in the case of both physics and medicine, there was willing complicity from members of these communities who saw an advantage in it, and were in some cases ideological supporters themselves.
Two other things of importance: 1. In Germany, most of these professional fields (professors, medicine, etc.) were basically organs of the state anyway. Certainly German academia and research was state-sponsored or state-run in some way. So the Nazis could pass a law that said, "no Jews in the civil service" and that would also apply to universities (unlike in the US, where there are no federally-run universities to my knowledge, except maybe a small number of military universities). 2. One of the first things the Nazis did after taking power was to re-organize the state into funneled hierarchies that ultimately reported back to the Nazi high command. This "coordination" (_Gleichschaltung_) policy meant that basically every aspect of the German state and civil service ultimately became entirely tied to Nazi operation — there was no "independence" from it. In this general way, _all_ fields were Nazified, but as noted the impact of this on the professional or intellectual content of a field could vary. Fields like medicine "pre-coordinated" themselves, is a way you can think about them. (Again, Proctor has much on this and the _Gleichschaltung_ policy.)
To address your comment question — were they aggressively anti-intellectual or was this a side-effect — is a little trickier. The Nazis favored technology, for sure, and in principle favored science (as long as it agreed with their ideology). But they were also aggressively anti-intellectual in many ways, especially when it came to what they identified as cosmopolitan thinking, which they associated with Jewishness. Jeffrey Herf characterizes the dichtomy as relating to the 19th-century German distinction between Kultur (good things like Wagner and certain types of philosophy and literature) and Zivilization (which they associated with Weimar, Jewishness, and Bolsheviks). The former could be seen as good German "nationalist" virtues, the latter was seen as "internationalist" in nature, celebrating the accomplishments of other nations, having pretensions to being a "world citizen," and generally being aligned with things that the Nazis considered associated with Jews, impracticality, or ideologies that did not accord with Nazism. Kultur was earthy and populist; Zivilization was the sort of thing that Spengler thought was declining and needed to replaced with something else. (See Herf, _Reactionary Modernism_.)
So is this anti-intellectual? Not in the sense that we tend to associate with, say, American heartland politics, which currently associates nearly all higher education with "corruption" or "brainwashing" of some sort, and is oppositional to all art forms that are not aggressively commercial. The Nazi approach was not a suspicion of all "high" culture or higher learning. But it is a very specific, nationalist, reactionary approach to intellectual life (Herf calls it "reactionary modernism," and uses this to explain the contradiction that the Nazis could be simultaneously against and for the life of the mind). They definitely supported scientists — if they swore fealty to the state _and_ were useful to it.
(Our university is currently running into difficulties with the Trump travel ban, as a side note. Apparently philosophers from muslim countries are too dangerous to talk to in person, even if they are in non-muslim countries presently. Do the people who instituted this ban know that it is negatively affecting American academic life, among other things? Yes, they know. They do not care. I'll admit this is on my mind as I write this.)
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If I were a traveller in 13th century England. What would I eat on the road and how would I find a place to sleep.
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I hope you don't mind if I focus a little later? Account records for the travels of warden and other officials from Merton College, Oxford, exist from 1270, and G. H. Martin has a great article laying out the itineraries and purchases from some of the better recorded years (mostly fourteenth and fifteenth centuries).
There was typically some stocking up of provisions from the outset. In 1325, that meant fish, candles, ale, and spices; in 1330, cheese, candles, spices, and oats (probably for the horses). The spices, we find out later, were likely gifts for the royal officials and nobles being visited. One thing to keep in mind is that this is just things *purchased*. Vegetables grown in college gardens and perhaps grains/bread from grains grown on their outlying farmland would not appear in the accounts, as they did not have to be bought.
Our warden traveling in 1330 did not do a great job with his calculations, it seems, because he had to stop on the very first day to buy more oats and hay for the horses. On the second day, his party stopped partway through the journey to buy drinks. That night, they ate a simple meal and loaded up on provisions for the coming days: bread, ale, fish (herring), and more hay and oats for the horses.
The third night, they had a feast! Martin notes eel and flounder both on the menu, served alongside garlic and onion (now that they are far from Oxford gardens) and even a little bit of fruit. Oh, and wine.
Travel food would of course have had a strong class component; we're looking at fairly well-off people here. Looking at Crusades chronicles, there are references to knights being reduced to eating barley (bread), the peasants' grain. This suggests that peasants would continue their pattern of eating pea flour bread or barley bread, BUT knights were used to still consuming varieties of wheat flour bread even on (less arduous) travels.
The Merton account books also give a taste of some of the unexpected purchases necessary along the way: new saddles, new horseshoes, new spurs, vet care; alms for beggars or pilgrimage sites; new clothes or blankets if it rained too hard; and in 1325, repairs to the warden's sword. I would love to know the full story there!
As for staying overnight, inns (formal or casual) dotting the roads and cities were a common host for the Oxford travelers and others. The only reference I've personally seen to people sleeping in tents is outside Rome during jubilee-esque pilgrimage years, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen in the course of normal travel. Monasteries also often had guest houses or rooms.
The warden's party in 1330 additionally spent some nights at the manor houses of noble patrons of the university. They brought as gifts items like the spices mentioned above and others purchased along the way--almonds, sugar, ginger (the latter two generally being considered spices, but singled out in the records).
I hope this is good enough for your purposes!
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Does the size of a woman's breasts have any correlation with how much breastmilk she can produce?
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No, breast milk production is regulated by hormonal processes. Milk storage within the breast between feedings is slightly correlated with size. But breast make-up is more important. How much of the breast tissue is fat vs milk producing glands etc.
_URL_0_
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Is it possible that that big bangs are happening all the time, but REALLY far away from each other?
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It is certainly possible that big bangs occur elsewhere. It would probably be incorrect, however, to say that the big bangs happen very far apart. It might be true in an abstract sense, but you need to know that the big bang is NOT a large explosion IN space, but rather a fast expansion OF space itself.
Consider the following:
There are certain numbers in our universe that are very very precise with regard to our universe actually being habitable. If these numbers were changed ever-so-slightly, certain processes would not happen enough or happen too frequently, making our universe either too uneventful or too chaotic for something so complex as life ever to exist.
This leads to a theory that the reason there is a universe which can house life, is that in fact is just one of many universes in a multiverse where new universes are constantly being birthed by 'big bangs,' and thus life just showed up in the universe that it could actually form it.
Edit- Okay, as a physicist who puts time and effort into answering these questions, I find it disheartening when I get downvoted without knowing why. Could one of the people marking my post as trash please tell me why, so that I could improve upon my answer.
Edit2 - We'll I'm not negative anymore so I guess my answer was good enough =).
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Do sound canceling headphones function as hearing protection in extremely loud environments, such as near jet engines? If not, does the ambient noise 'stack' with the sound cancellation wave and cause more ear damage?
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Destructive interference, such as that found in ANC earphones, ~~will~~ can, in theory, completely cancel the soundwaves it interferes with, hence "destructive". The problem with super loud noises, however, is that they are beyond the capabilities of the headphones. They simply can't reproduce the right amplitude and frequency of sound needed to cancel the part of the sound wave that is going to harm your hearing. They might help, but they are far inferior to proper safety ear plugs.
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how does a company like mcdonald's make their food taste exactly the same on such a large scale?
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Highly controlled food quality, highly controlled cooking process, highly controlled preparation.
That's one of their big selling points as a restaurant. It doesn't matter where you go... the food is the same. Not necessarily good (for you or otherwise) but its the same. A safe bet if you are new to the area.
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why does most of the body bruise when struck, but the top of the head gets a hard lump?
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A bruise happens when you bleed inside your skin. If it is soft under the blood, then it will push down. As long as it is soft underneath, the blood has a place to go. So the bruise stays soft. If it is hard, because there is bone underneath, then it will push up. Skin can stretch, but only so much. So when skin can’t stretch anymore, the bruise will feel hard.
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